The Hole in the Wall - Lisa Rowe Fraustino [71]
And she walked very calmly out without looking back. Pa kept screaming and yelling behind us as we all scurried to follow her lead. I felt like a duckling following my mother. But suddenly she turned around and very calmly retraced her steps, saying, “Oops! Forgot the chickens. Just ignore the howling lunatic while we gather them up. He’s made his own bed.”
Well, that was like saying, “Just ignore the pizza until you finish your math.” I looked straight at Pa. His desperate eyes locked onto mine as he bellowed, “Blankety-blank, son, help me! Please!” And like old Celery the adrified chicken, I was magnetized. I walked toward him, my hands held out.
“That’s my boy,” he said. “Just let me pull myself up with my arms across your shoulders, and you can drag me home.”
But that wasn’t good enough. “No, Pa. We have to finish massaging your legs now so you can walk.” And I got down to work below the knees. I leaned over to concentrate on what I was doing so I wouldn’t have to see his face. He looked . . . not like himself. He was humbled and ashamed.
“Sebby? What are you doing?” Ma crawled from behind the shelves with a struggling hen. “Oh . . .”
When she saw what was going on, she melted like mozzarella. She knelt at Pa’s feet to join the massage, saying, “Don’t you dare make me sorry I did this, Craig Daniels.”
“Oh . . . kay,” he whispered, then swallowed hard and looked at the wall. I knew what he was doing, though, because I was trying not to do the same thing. But a couple of hot tears dripped onto his legs anyway. I rubbed them in fast.
Jed and Barbie each claimed a thigh. We’d been at it for a couple of minutes when the whole gore started to tremble. We felt it in the floor, and we felt it in Pa.
20
“We have to get out of here now,” Jed cried. “Pa, can you walk?”
Pa grunted and flexed his ankle. His toes wiggled. His thigh muscles twitched. Sweat popped out over his eyebrows. “I can’t bend my knees,” he said. “You’re gonna hafta help me.”
We got him to the truck. Ma took the keys from Jed. “You kids ride in the back,” she said in her “no buts” voice. We all knew she wanted to talk to Pa alone. Which was fine by me. I didn’t know what to say to him now anyway. It was all so weird.
“As soon as we get home,” said Jed as the truck took off, “you two have to help me take down the plywood I nailed up to block our tunnel. Pa and I have to get to that adrium vein—”
“No, Jed!” said Barbie. “Wait until after the explosion. What if the tunnels collapse when you’re back there?”
The two of them kept talking, but I couldn’t concentrate on words. The ground alongside the rib road was actually heaving all around. I felt seasick, bouncing around in the truck bed. Ma had the pedal to the metal, and we were practically flying over the bumps. Even so, I was terrified that we wouldn’t get out of the gore in time. We still hadn’t even left the rib road, and we had a long stretch of the Gash still to go. On and on we lurched, and then I heard that noise. That same wind-chime ringing musical noise that had filled my head when I flopped the pebble around in the sunlight, when it wobbled away in the cavern—and when I got too close to the egg painting in Boots Odum’s workshop. Oh, man, if I was hearing that again, something big was about to happen.
“Do you hear something?” I said, grabbing Barbie’s arm.
“It’s the adrium,” Jed said, not sounding pleased. “It makes that sound when it moves.”
“When it moves?” That freaked me out. The sound was getting louder.
“Well, when certain isotopes of certain chirality—oh, never mind. I don’t really understand it myself. Stan calls it the music of the spheres. But anyway, nothing good ever comes after you hear it, I can tell you that.”
As if I wasn’t scared enough already. We prayed for our