Wrapped in Rain(27)
I didn't understand it at the time, but Katie came alive perched on that bench. It would be a mistake to say she had total control of the piano. She didn't, but she didn't want it either. Katie found someplace in the middle-as if she knew it needed her and she needed it. An even measure of give-and-take. She would play and it would sing. And she was content with that. I often thought that if Katie's heart could speak, it would sound like a piano.
The three of us tore off the back porch. I didn't look back to see if Miss Ella was watching, but I didn't need to. When it came to God, I had my questions-although I never voiced them-but I never doubted Miss Ella. She was watching, all right.
In his "renovation," Rex had added a back porch that looked like something out of a Roman villa. Rather than a simple step or two leading from the back door to the backyard like most homes had, Rex had built more than forty cascading limestone steps framed with marble columns. At the top of the steps were granite benches and fountains springing up out of fishes' mouths, seagulls' wings, and stone trumpets of larger-than-life statues. And smack in the center of all this stood a ridiculously stupid statue of himself sitting atop his best Tennessee Walker. Across his lap rested a perfect bronze match of his favorite Greener.
Rex had it commissioned when his potbelly was in the mature stage, but rather than suffer the embarrassment of the truth, he pointed to his gut and told the sculptor, "If you want your money, I'd better not find this in that statue." The day it was finished, Rex strutted around it and handed the man his money, then went inside to pour himself another drink. While the crystal tinkled with ice, Mutt and I, with Katie as lookout, took a bottle of her mom's fingernail polish and painted the horse's hooves and nose bright red and then added glitter for effect. It didn't take Rex long to find it, and it took even less time before he ordered Miss Ella to get to cleaning.
That's when I stopped being stupid. I didn't like the picture of Miss Ella on her knees, cleaning that horse's feet and face when I had painted them. So I grabbed a wire pad and me, Mutt, Katie, and Miss Ella started scrubbing. While the glitter peeled off in flakes and that horse's snout began glowing like Rudolph's nose, we laughed and smiled, and I figured right then and there that I had to find another way to get back at Rex.
When the three of us cut off the back porch, we ran by fit-and-trim Rex, who hadn't looked that way a day in his life since he was old enough to drink the hard stuff. We each ran by the horse, rubbed his nose for good luck, and started skipping down the steps.
I turned and watched Mutt swat at the horse with his sword and Katie float around it on her toes. While they slew horse and rider, I yelled, "Last one to the quarry has to do a belly flop!"
Just under the horse, Mutt turned and yelled, "Thank you, Miss Ella," and made a final stab at the horse. She nodded and started rinsing something in her hands. When Mutt passed me, he was getting it for all it was worth and fighting with the eye patch to keep it from falling down over his eye. Katie danced around the horse, smiled, curtsied, said, "Thank you," to Miss Ella in the window, and then jumped down the steps, flapping her wings.
The three of us chased each other across the lawn, through the barn, and into the peach orchard that sloped down the hill behind the barn. I was the fastest, but Mutt was close behind and Katie was a fleet footed little girl who never painted her toenails. Both had a good head start on me, but I passed them midway there. We'd have made three-quarters of a really good relay team. We rounded the bottom of the orchard and made the last stretch for the rock quarry a quarter mile away. The sun was dancing across the hay that had grown to my shoulders and needed cutting. By the time I reached the pine trees, I had forty yards on Mutt and even more on Katie, but I really didn't mind the belly flop, so I jumped behind a clump of green, stretched out next to a fallen pine tree, caught my breath, and peered through the grapevines as Mutt flew by. He sounded like a freight train, and his arms were waving wildly back and forth as he willed his legs faster.
Next came Katie. I jumped out from behind the bush, screamed, "Ahhhh!" and scared her so badly that she slapped me with an open hand and kept running for the quarry, saying, "Tucker Mason, you almost made me pee myself." The slap spun me sideways and tumbled me into a sappy pine tree while Katie danced down the trail, paying no attention to me.
Having reached the water first, Mutt ran his hands through both loops of the zip line and launched himself off the sixty-foot-high ledge and into the quarry. And no, it never really took Mutt very long to get used to jumping off that rock. Mutt was fearless, and his only complaint was that it wasn't high enough nor the zip line long enough.
The cables started up top from a platform and ended down in the quarry almost a hundred yards away. They dropped quickly out of the platform and then leveled out over the water, coming to an end on the other side of the quarry. When Rex finished gutting the earth and pulled out of the quarry, he left the lines intact. They sat dormant for about ten years until I found them one day while hunting trouble. Mose had checked to make sure they still worked and then hung two zips-kind of like bicycle handlebars that rolled on a really tight cable.
To us, the quarry was another remnant of Rex's insatiable appetite. He dug down until the geologists told him it was tapped out. Like the people he met, Rex used it, sucked the life out of it, and then left a gaping hole. Rex and that granite were a lot alike: stone cold and could crush you.