The Size of the Truth Page 6

  “It’s awful,” I said.

  Bartleby said, “Negative again. You’ll never age if you have a positive attitude and take regular mud baths. Trust me.”

  “But I want to age. I want to grow up,” I said.

  “Nonsense! What’s the good in it?” Bartleby asked.

  “Well, to begin with, if I grow up, I will probably be too big to fall into small holes. And I will also not make my parents feel disappointed in me.”

  Bartleby scratched his muddy beard with an equally muddy claw. He said, “If all you ever want to do in life is not disappoint people, well . . . where does that leave you, Sam?”

  I honestly couldn’t say where it left me. Bartleby was so annoying, though—especially when he made me think about things.

  “But I ruined their Thanksgiving. I probably ruined their lives by falling down here,” I said, starting to feel a little weepy under all my mud once again.

  “Listen—I’ll tell you a trick,” Bartleby said. “But you have to keep it secret.”

  “What trick?”

  “It’s about trying to not disappoint people.” When Bartleby said “not disappoint,” he made air quotes with his front claws. Then he went on. “What you really need to do is at the heart of any con game: You have to make people want to give you what you want to steal from them, without ever asking them for it.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “One day you will,” Bartleby said. “If other people are going to spend their lives trying to make you never fall into holes, and all you want to do is not disappoint them, trick them into handing over what you think they want to protect themselves from. Just like I did, when I made you ask me to prove I was a unicorn, when in fact I am the Armadillo of Thanksgiving Present. Ha ha!”

  I didn’t really get what Bartleby meant; I wouldn’t get it for a number of years, in fact. But just thinking about not falling into holes, and Mom and Dad trying to save me from every hole that could ever show up in my path, made me feel sad and helpless.

  “Guess how old I am,” Bartleby said.

  I looked at Bartleby’s muddy, vacuum-cleaner-shaped armadillo face.

  “Go on, guess,” Bartleby prodded.

  When I didn’t say anything to him, Bartleby began uttering a constant, rhythmic stream of “Guess . . . Guess . . . Guess . . .”

  Bartleby’s ability to annoy was tireless.

  After what seemed like an hour and a half of his endless “Guess . . . Guess . . . Guess . . .” I finally gave in.

  I had no idea how old armadillos could possibly be. I figured they lived as long as houseplants.

  “Two,” I guessed.

  Bartleby exploded in laughter. “Ha ha! Wrong! See? I told you, it’s the mud!” Then he stroked the side of his snout lovingly with a claw and said, “So youthful! So pretty!”

  If I could have folded my arms across my chest and rolled away from Bartleby, I would have. But I had to stay on my back in order to keep my face out of the mud I was lying in.

  “Well, how old are you, then?” I asked.

  “Eh. How would I know?” Bartleby said. “Besides, unicorns live forever. Anyhow, come on. There’s something else I want to show you down here.”

  Bartleby turned and receded inside his tunnel once again.

  I did not want to follow him.

  “Come on,” Bartleby said.

  I stayed.

  “Come on.”

  Nothing.

  “Follow me.”

  He waited, and after I did not respond, Bartleby said, “Follow me. Follow me. Follow me. Follow me.”

  I said nothing.

  “Follow me.”

  He was so annoying.

  “Follow me.”

  And, after I waited a few minutes in silence, from the mouth of Bartleby’s tunnel came his voice: “Sam?”

  “What?” I said.

  “Guess how old I am. Ha ha! Just kidding! Follow me.”

  “No. There are people up there who are trying to help me,” I said.

  Bartleby curled his body around and poked his muddy face at me.

  “Don’t worry. They’re going to take at least another whole day. Trust me—I saw what they’re doing. They’re digging a side tunnel.” And then Bartleby swept his front claw in a slow-motion diagonal karate chop and added, “On an angle.”

  Bartleby’s black armadillo eyes got wider when he said it.

  I didn’t care about any of that. There was only one thing that Bartleby said that stuck in my head. “I have to stay here a whole extra day?”

  “That’s why you should follow me!” Bartleby said. “I’ll get you back in time for everyone to feel like heroes.”

  “Wait. Have you been up there? On the outside?”

  Bartleby paused for a moment. He looked from side to side, thinking. Then he said, “Of course I haven’t gone up there, Sam.”

  So I was convinced I’d caught Bartleby in a lie, which in retrospect was not much of an accomplishment, considering he never told the truth. “How else would you know they’re digging a side tunnel?” I asked.

  Bartleby added, “On an angle.”

  And again Bartleby did the slow-motion diagonal karate chop and widened his beady black eyes. Then he made a grimacing smile, baring his pointy little armadillo teeth.

  Bartleby turned his snout back into his tunnel and said, “Follow me.”

  I WILL NEVER NOT BE THE LITTLE BOY IN THE WELL

  This starts with a secret hideout.

  I followed Bartleby back into his network of tunnels.

  Up above, a well-digging crew had plotted out a method for excavating a rescue shaft—on an angle—that would intersect with my abandoned well just where I had been trapped, at the muddy bottom. Digging progressed very slowly.

  During the night, the story of Blue Creek’s “Boy in the Well” was told and retold on every news channel in the country. They used a photo of me as a three-year-old, swimming at a hotel pool in Austin, which was totally embarrassing because I was shirtless and had inflatable floaties on my biceps.

  That night, someone began selling PRAY FOR SAM shirts on the Internet.

  In less than twelve hours, my life in Blue Creek had been forever doomed, written out like the script of a movie I hadn’t yet seen.

  Up until that Thanksgiving Day when I played Spud with Karim and some neighborhood kids, when James Jenkins threw the ball higher than anyone thought he could throw it, Blue Creek was only known for a few reasonably forgettable things: my great-grandmother Lily Abernathy’s Grammy-winning gospel song, “I Will Walk with Him in the Garden of Blood”; Lily Putt’s Indoor-Outdoor Miniature Golf Course (with its bottomless root beer and black-light rock-’n’-roll indoor golf parties for teens every Friday and Saturday night); Colonel Jenkins’s Diner’s chicken-fried steak on a stick; and a moth-eaten stuffed two-headed calf that stood behind the counter at Blue Creek Feeds.

  Now Blue Creek would never not be the town at the epicenter of “Pray for Sam” and “The Little Boy in the Well.” Other parts of the country had relatively short memories when it came to such things, but small towns in Texas that stake a claim to fame never forget what it was that put them on the map.

  And as long as I lived in Blue Creek, Texas, I would never not be Sam Abernathy, the Little Boy in the Well, the floatie-wearing shirtless kid everyone was supposed to pray for.

  Thump.

  For a moment I thought Bartleby had run into Ethan Pixler’s coffin again, but this was a deeper, heavier sound.

  “Ah! Found it!” Bartleby said.

  Then came the distinctive squeak of a metal hinge, and the creaky complaint of an ancient door swinging open.

  “You’re not opening the coffin, are you?” I said.

  “Ha ha! No! It’s not a coffin; it’s a door! A door to a pot of gold! Come on, follow me!” Bartleby said.

  I followed Bartleby through a tiny arched doorway. It didn’t make any sense, really—what was a door
doing way down here, and why was it so small? The only thing a door like this might be used for would be cats, or maybe leprechauns. Or talking armadillos and four-year-old boys who were covered in mud.

  But once I’d passed through the doorway, I realized it wasn’t that small after all—that most of it was covered up by dirt, so Bartleby and I crawled through just the upper few inches of what was a regular-size doorway, into what turned out to be a regular-size room.

  I could even stand up in it.

  Well, I could try to stand up, but my legs were too wobbly and sore from me being trapped in the well, so I ended up sitting down on the dusty floor of a long-abandoned cellar.

  “Well? What do you think?” Bartleby asked.

  I didn’t really know what I was supposed to think. The place was old, dusty, and creepy. Tree roots hung like wild frizzy hair from the ceiling, and the floor was covered with a thick layer of ashy dust and cobwebs. There were two upended chairs, one of them missing two of its legs, a card table, a dresser with all the drawers pulled halfway out, and some empty mason jars scattered across the floor. In the middle of the room squatted an old iron stove, its chimney pipe disconnected and hanging down from the ceiling like a permanently astonished mouth saying, “Ooooooh!”

  One of the dresser drawers was filled with buttons, nickels, and pennies. This turned out to be Bartleby’s “pot of gold,” which was obviously quite worthless. In another drawer I found some playing cards and a small poster that was printed by the Milam County Board of Health. The poster was all about keeping flies and mosquitos away from babies, and how you should never show off a baby to strangers if you want your baby to grow up and be happy.

  I figured when they printed the poster, they must not have had things like cable television and abandoned wells, and cameras on the end of rescue cables and so on.

  “Your pot of gold is a box of buttons and change, and now I suppose you’re going to tell me this is where we’ll find the Ghost of Thanksgiving Future,” I said.

  “Ha ha! Good one, Sam!” Bartleby shook his pointy head. “There’s a surprise, though! A surprise in your future—trust me! But your future is going to be a hungry one. Sorry to say I already ate all the food that was left in here. If it’s any consolation, it didn’t taste that good.”

  I didn’t really think I wanted food that was buried in an abandoned cellar anyway.

  And Bartleby went on, as usual. “Welcome to Ethan Pixler’s secret hideout! And I bet you’re wondering why Ethan Pixler needed a secret hideout. Well, it’s because Ethan Pixler was a bank robber, which explains the pot of gold, and the whole, you know—tchk!”

  And when Bartleby made the tchk! sound, he pulled an imaginary rope with his claw from the side of his neck and stuck his tongue out from the corner of his narrow mouth, dramatizing the end of Ethan Pixler’s bank robbery career for me.

  Bartleby cleared his throat and spit a wad of muddy armadillo saliva onto Ethan Pixler’s secret hideout’s floor. He said, “Well, I guess it’s not so secret now. You know about it, and so do I, and so do a few thousand of my friends, I suppose. But don’t tell anyone. The pot of gold belongs to me.”

  That was when I really suspected Bartleby was a delusional liar. The pot of gold was worthless, and there was no way Bartleby could possibly have thousands of friends. Or any, for that matter.

  “Judging by his loot, Ethan Pixler was not good at picking banks to rob, and judging by his coffin, Ethan Pixler wasn’t super good at secretly hiding, either,” I said.

  Bartleby nodded thoughtfully. “When it comes to choosing a secret hiding spot, you can only be wrong once.”

  But Bartleby apologized for the condition of Ethan Pixler’s secret hideout, and for the fact that we couldn’t play cards since the deck that had been left behind by Ethan Pixler’s gang only had forty-nine cards in it, and also because Bartleby’s claws made it too difficult for him to hold a hand of cards without me seeing what he had. And then Bartleby accused me of being a card cheater in waiting, and he got mad at me and said that he didn’t want to talk to me anymore, which would have been fine with me even though I knew there was nothing that could ever make Bartleby stop talking.

  Not ever.

  Because, naturally, Bartleby waved a crusty claw in the air and announced, “Aha! Right on time!”

  Of course, I had no idea what Bartleby was talking about, but almost as soon as he said it, something black and jiggling came floating down from the black mouth of the stove’s disconnected chimney pipe. It looked like a nervous cloud of smoke or something, and it was immediately followed by more floating blobs—more and more of them—until all around us, everywhere, the air in Ethan Pixler’s secret hideout was alive and buzzing with thousands and thousands of pairs of fluttering silky wings.

  The room was filling up with bats.

  “My friends! My friends! Ha ha! Isn’t this great?” Bartleby squealed. “I told you! I have thousands of friends! I have the biggest friends list in Texas! This is so great!”

  Bartleby fluttered his claws and hopped, dancelike, from hind foot to hind foot.

  I did not think it was great. In fact, to me, bats were about as appealing as flying snakes. Their wings rubbed noiselessly all over my muddy clothes and in my hair. I sank low against the floor of the hideout, nearly convinced that if I breathed too hard, I might actually inhale an entire living bat.

  Within minutes the tornado of bats stilled and every available inch of surface on the walls and ceiling of the hideout was covered by the tiny quivering creatures. And each one of the bats seemed to have its eyes pinned on Bartleby and me.

  “Is this the Little Boy in the Well?” the bats asked. They all spoke in the most absolutely disciplined chorus. Every one of them exact.

  “Ha ha!” Bartleby laughed and waved his front claws. He attempted to clap, but armadillo arms being what they are, they produced only a feeble kind of click! click! sound.

  “Yes! This is Sam Abernathy, Pray for Sam, the Little Boy in the Well!” Bartleby said.

  “He doesn’t look like his picture. This one’s chubby, and dirty,” the bats, who had obviously seen me on television, said.

  I didn’t really know what I looked like, but I was aware that I was completely covered in mud, and also a bit bigger than three-year-old Sam Abernathy. But I was definitely not chubby.

  “I am not chubby!” I argued.

  “You are very chubby,” the bats replied. “Especially compared with the picture of the boy who had the orange balloons on his arms.”

  I knew a few things about bats, living in the region of Texas where Blue Creek was, but I never knew bats paid attention to cable television. Or that they talked.

  “And why do the bats all say exactly the same thing, at exactly the same time?” I whispered to Bartleby.

  “Ha ha! Yes! They’re social animals,” Bartleby said. And when he said “social animals” he made air quotes with his hooked front claws and widened his eyes, which was Bartleby’s default expression for dramatic emphasis. “They’re just like human beings. Ha ha! They all say exactly the same thing, without even thinking about it, at exactly the same time! Ha ha!”

  A few more straggler bats squeezed out from the chimney pipe and wedged themselves into place between the others on the walls, or hung themselves by their little feet from the roots sticking out of the ceiling.

  But one thing I did know about bats is that they always went back to their home when the sun came up.

  It was the morning of my second day in the well, and people would be working at getting me out. I needed to get back to my place—what if Dad and Mom were trying to talk to me?

  I climbed up the wall of dirt that lay blocking most of the doorway and stuck my head into the small passageway where Bartleby and I had entered Ethan Pixler’s secret hideout.

  “Hey! Where are you going?” Bartleby said.

  “Hey! Where are you going?” echoed the ten thousand bats in the hideout.

  “It’s morning,”
I said. “I have to get back. What if they think something happened to me?”

  I squeezed my way through the tiny doorway, and Bartleby said, “I’m pretty sure everyone in the world knows something happened to you, Sam.”

  And the bats said, “Everyone in the world knows.”

  I pulled myself back through Bartleby’s tunnel in the direction of the well.

  Bartleby called after me, “Sam? Wait a second. Sam?”

  “Wait a second, Sam,” said the thousands of bats.

  And ahead of me I could hear my father’s voice echoing through the metallic buzz of the speaker on the rescue cable that had been inserted into the opening of the well. He said, “Sam? Are you awake, sweetie? We’re almost there, buddy. Hang in there. Sam? Sam? Can you hear me?”

  “Sam? Can you hear me?” said the bats.

  EIGHTH GRADE

  MY AFTER-SCHOOL HOMEWORK BUDDY

  This starts a few weeks after the dance, at Colonel Jenkins’s Diner.

  When the first progress marks were assigned at Dick Dowling Middle School, Mom and Dad announced they would reward me by taking us all out to dinner. I was getting straight As (except for PE, where I had a B, along with a comment that accused me of talking too much). The problem is that “out to dinner” to me means going somewhere that does not serve chicken-fried steak on a stick (with a plastic half-cup container of gravylike substance to dip it in).

  And while I did momentarily fantasize about salade Niçoise, given that we lived in Blue Creek I realistically understood deep down what “going out” would actually involve, which meant only one thing: Colonel Jenkins’s.

  The diner smelled like floor wax and the interior of an old school bus. Everything was plastic—the tables, the booths, even the cutlery you were given with your meal, which had to be ordered and picked up (something that was completely barbaric, if you ask me) at the plastic counter. There was also quite probably a high plastic content in the food Kenny Jenkins served at his diner too. Every newspaper column from Kenny Jenkins’s Cook’s Riot! had been clipped from the Hill Country Yodeler, matted, framed, and hung on the walls. When we went inside, I scanned the frames for the column about my hamburgers but couldn’t find it. I did see the almost shrinelike display of the entire front page from the Yodeler from seven years ago—the one with the banner headline: