“You mean we’re humiliating ourselves in front of the entire neighborhood yet again,” complains Catalpa.
It’s true, the slackline has drawn kids like the tinkle of an ice cream truck. Even a cluster of old people with those sticks with claws at the bottom. A tiny boy hovers.
“Want a turn?” PopCorn asks him, with a gracious sweep of the hand like he’s Sir Walter Raleigh greeting Queen Elizabeth.
The child scampers along the rope as if it’s a streak of chalk.
“Now that’s what I’m talking about!” PopCorn starts clapping, so the sulking Lottery kids have to join in.
“I think it needs to be slacker,” says MaxiMum.
“Tighter,” says PapaDum, who’s just arrived. Oak crawls underneath the line, dribbling contentedly.
Sumac’s mood sinks at the sight of Grumps behind the newcomers. The old man parks himself on the farthest bench, as if he doesn’t know the Lotterys.
But the more ashamed of them he is, the better for Sumac’s secret plan….
She sidles over and sits on the bench, but not right beside him. “We do these kinds of bizarro things in public all the time.”
He shoots her a sidelong glance, and she squirms.
In the distance, PopCorn’s got his shirt off as he wrestles with the slackline. With his buzzed hair and his faded tats, he could almost strike you as scary if you didn’t know what a pussycat he is. “Did you know your son’s got eleven tattoos in total?” asks Sumac. “The four elements — that’s fire on the back of his neck, but most of the orange is sunburned off, and a crescent moon on his left knee, see? And the rising sun on his right one….”
“Saints preserve us,” murmurs Grumps.
This is working like a charm. “He has an arm sleeve on his right, that’s a Japanese koi morphing into a dragon. There’s — lots of hearts with the names of his ex-boyfriends in,” Sumac adds, stretching a point because actually there’s just one. “Oh, and that monster on PopCorn’s lower back, that’s about accepting his dark side. Betty Boop on his tummy, but she’s gone a bit shapeless, because apparently you should never put a tattoo anywhere that’s going to get baggy. Also, the black lines on his right calf are one of ?tzi’s tattoos. ?tzi’s a five-thousand-year-old mummy in the Alps with sixty-one tattoos.”
Grumps’s gummy eyes are wide, appalled.
Brian is at Sumac’s elbow. “What?” she asks impatiently.
The small hand uncurls just a little.
“It’s all dark in there.” Sumac pries her sister’s grubby fingers a little farther open. A wink of blue.
“I finded it in the sand but not for Gneiss Nilda,” says Brian. “I have it for me.”
Anything in the playground that isn’t somebody’s gets left on the memorial rock of Nilda, a girl from the nearby apartments who only lived to be two and a half. The rock is the kind called gneiss, which sounds like nice, so the kids all call her Gneiss Nilda.
“But maybe it his’s,” says Brian, nodding at their grandfather.
Sumac feels irritated and softened at the same time. “No — that was just — his brains aren’t actual marbles that he’s lost, remember,” she says in Brian’s ear, “they’re just like marbles.”
Brian shakes her head as if her big sister is being particularly stupid. “Better give it back.”
“But, Brian —”
She strokes the glass with one dirty finger, then edges past Sumac to Grumps. The neck emerging from the red cardboard truck looks so small. Please don’t let him bite her head off, thinks Sumac.
Brian holds out her hand flat with the marble on it.
Grumps picks it up. “Ah, a nice wee blue Swirly. When they’re that small they’re called peewees, really. I had any number of them. Commies, Toothpastes, Turtles, Oilies … one big boss Devil’s Eye. Couple of Bumblebees. Never cared for Opaques. Bloods were my favorite, or Green Ghosts.”
Sumac has never heard the man say so much at one time.
“Legendary, my collection was. Whatever happened to it?”
“You loseded them,” Brian reminds him.
Grumps revolves the little ball between his big flat fingers. “We used to trade. Or play Bools, where you try to smash the other boys’ taws.”
“This only one,” says Brian. “What you do with one?”
“There was a game called Poison with four holes…. Let’s keep it simple, start with one hole.”
“Too hard for a hole,” Brian objects.
“No, no, a hole in something else, for the marble to roll into. Here, this’ll do in a pinch,” says Grumps, picking a polystyrene cup out of the trash can and digging his fingernail into the rim.
He’s playing, thinks Sumac in disbelief. And with garbage!
*
By the next morning she’s wishing she never opened her mouth to Aspen. Honestly, if Aspen had been in on the plot to murder Julius Caesar, she’d have gathered the plotters on the wrong street on the wrong day, with kites instead of knives.