The Marsh King's Daughter(42)
My plan was simple:
Put on the pair of yellow rubber gloves I took from under my grandmother’s sink.
Use my knife to pry the hinge pins off the front door.
Open a can of something from the kitchen and build a fire in the woodstove to cook it because I liked hot canned food better than cold.
Leave the can in the middle of the living room with the dead mouse I brought from my grandparents’ woodpile inside it.
Put the door back on its hinges and leave.
The mouse was fresh, so I was counting on it stinking up the place enough that the next time anybody came in, the smell would be the first thing that would hit them. They’d find the can with the dead mouse inside and know that someone had broken in, but they wouldn’t know who because of the gloves. After I came up with the mouse-in-a-can idea, I figured I’d break into all of the cabins belonging to all of the families of all of the kids who were giving me trouble, and it would be my calling card. The police would think the breakins were random, but eventually my tormentors would figure out the connection and realize it was me. They wouldn’t be able to say anything without pointing the finger at themselves, however, which I thought was the best part of my plan.
But it turned out not everyone is as cheap as my grandfather was: the security stickers were real. I was sitting in a chair by the woodstove, looking through a stack of National Geographics to see if they had the one with the article about the Vikings while I waited for my beans to boil, when a sheriff’s car pulled up out front with its lights flashing. I could have ducked out the back—there wasn’t a sheriff on Earth who could catch me after I disappeared into the woods if I didn’t want to be caught—but the deputy who got out of the car was the same one who’d brought me back the last two times I’d run away, and we’d kind of developed a relationship.
“Don’t shoot!” I called as I came out the front door with my hands up, and we both laughed. The deputy made me put everything back the way I found it, then opened the car door like I was a movie star and he was my chauffeur. We traded hunting and fishing stories on the way home, and it was a lot of fun. I told him my father’s story about falling into the bear den like it had happened to me, and he was impressed. When I asked if he would be my boyfriend because we seemed to be getting along so well, he told me he was married and had two kids. I couldn’t see where that mattered, but he promised that it did.
The deputy took me to the police station. Apparently, breaking and entering was a more serious crime than running away. I was hoping he’d put me in the jail cell where my father was held so I could see what it was like, but he made me sit on a wooden bench in the hall while he called my grandparents. When my grandparents came, the deputy launched into a long lecture about how I was lucky the people who owned the cabin weren’t going to press charges, but they could have, and then I would have been in real trouble, and I needed to obey the law and respect people’s possessions so nothing like this ever happened again. I didn’t mind. He was only doing his job. But when he started going on about how I should think about what would happen to me if I didn’t stop behaving so recklessly, and asked if I wanted to end up in prison like my father, I was glad he wasn’t my boyfriend. I decided the first chance I got, I’d break into another cabin to spite him. Maybe his.
After that, my grandfather made me work in his store full-time. Till then, I’d been working three days a week. My grandparents ran a combination bait and bicycle shop in an old wooden building on Main Street sandwiched between a real estate office and the drugstore. The bicycles were lined up in the front of the store so you could see them if you were walking by, and the bait tanks and refrigerators full of worms and night crawlers were in the back. I used to think the reason my grandfather chose to sell bait and bicycles was that they both started with the letter B. Now I know a lot of businesses in the U.P. sell a combination of things you wouldn’t normally think would go together because it’s so hard to make a living selling only one. I do all right with jelly and jam, but that’s because a lot of my sales are made online.
My grandfather also said that because I was working full-time, I had to pay room and board. After that, if I wanted, I could save up the money that was left and buy a bicycle from him at cost. My grandfather had sold all the bikes and other things people sent me long before this, so I was glad to have the chance to get another one. He drew three columns on a piece of paper labeled Wholesale, Retail, and Net Profit and put numbers in them as examples to show how the retail business worked, which came in handy later when I started my own.
The bike I picked out was a Schwinn Frontier mountain bike in mirror blue. I liked that I could ride the bicycle both on the road and off. I know now there were better and more expensive bicycles my grandfather could have stocked, but nobody was going to make a living selling high-end bikes in the Upper Peninsula, even if they sold bait on the side.
Every time a customer came into the shop looking to buy a bike, I steered them away from mine. I didn’t know my grandfather could order another one like it if that one sold. I realize that after three years, most people would think I should have understood more about how the commercial system worked, but I’d like to see them try starting from zero and see how well they do. Even now I occasionally run up against things I don’t know. So when one of the boys from school bought the bike I’d been saving for, I figured it was over. I wheeled the bike out to his parents’ pickup, dropped the bike on the sidewalk without helping them load it like I was supposed to, and kept right on walking. I didn’t have any particular destination in mind; I only knew my grandfather had cheated me out of the bike I was saving to buy and I wasn’t going back.