“You were right. He told me never to come out here, ON PAIN OF DEATH,” Peter imitated his grandfather’s booming voice, then squinted. “Or was that the door under the stairs?”
“Yeah, well, he was maaaa-AAAAD when I blew up the watermelons. Jeez, you would think he could spare a couple.”
“The weird thing is, he doesn’t eat any of it.”
“What?!”
“Yeah. My mom told me she got in trouble when she was a kid for picking some tomatoes. She said she thinks that a bunch of hobos keep the garden and eat it all up.”
“Hobos?”
“Homeless guys who ride trains.”
“Oh, bums,” Dill nodded. “I don’t know, man. I guess the stuff I saw could’ve been a hobo, but…it was a messed-up hobo, then.”
“So you don’t see it all the time?”
“Naw…only once in awhile, mostly in the summer and the fall…weird shapes out here at night, and plants moving around ‘n stuff.”
“That’s why you lit the fire?”
“Actually, it really was an accident,” Dill admitted. “It was the fall, everything in the garden was dry and kind of dead, but the watermelons weren’t all gone yet. I couldn’t find a flashlight, so I took my dad’s zippo lighter and I was out there lookin’ around when somethin’, I don’t know what, scared the bejeezus out of me. I dropped the lighter and ran, and the next thing I know, the watermelons are exploding and the fire trucks are all racin’ up the street. Your grandfather about screamed his head off outside of my house. A cop came and talked to my parents, and I told him what had happened, and then he yelled at me and then he left. I thought my dad was going to whip me good, but he just laughed and told me anything that made that old fart mad made him happy, and nothing else happened to me. I just can’t let your granddad see me out here, that’s all.” Dill scoffed. “Getting’ mad at me…he’s a big hippo crib.”
Peter cocked his head to the side. “A what?”
Grandfather looked far more like a scarecrow than a hippopotamus, and Peter had no idea where the baby bed part came from.
“A hippo crib. A guy who says ‘No, you’re bad for starting a fire,’ and then he goes and starts a fire himself.”
“A hypocrite,” Peter suggested.
“Yeah, that’s what I said. The very next night he’s out with his truck and he rolls some big thing off the back onto the ground and lights it on fire till it’s all burned up. Hippo crib,” Dill muttered bitterly.
“I wonder why he did – ”
“Hey, shhh – did you see that?”
Peter peered out into the darkness, into the green stalks and vines barely visible in the starlight. “I don’t see anything.”
“Wait.”
There was a rustling somewhere out in the middle part of the garden, maybe fifty feet inside the corn. The leaves shook a little.
Peter gulped. “It was the wind.”
Dill licked his finger and held it up. “There isn’t any wind.”
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Copyright © 2008 Darren Pillsbury. All rights reserved.
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