Swine Not? Page 3

  My dream woke me up. It was dark, but the blue glow of the TV screen upstairs lured me inside. Ellie and the kids were watching ESPN Sports Center, and I cuddled next to them while Ellie scratched my head. On the screen was the now-familiar face of Coach Boykin, but he was not coaching. He was seated behind a huge set of drums made to look like football helmets. The interviewer was not focusing on football but on the fact that B. A. Boykin also played in a local country band.

  “Not a bad drummer,” Ellie said, looking to all of us for some kind of approval of her date.

  None came.

  “Time for bed,” Ellie said. We all did as we were told. Tomorrow was going to be an interesting day, and we needed our rest.

  CHAPTER 7

  Down on the Farm

  RUMPY

  IF THE HUMMER painted to match the eye-popping blue colors of the Tennessee Titans wasn’t enough, it was what Coach B. A. Boykin was carrying in his hand that freaked us out the most. You would have thought that, on a first date, he would be holding flowers or a box of chocolates. But no, when he planted those boa constrictor–skin boots in our driveway and stepped away from the car, he was carrying a football — autographed to Ellie! Do you know the slang term for a football? A pigskin!!!

  The kids were standing next to Ellie and me on the porch. When prompted with a nudge from their mother, they walked forward to meet their guest. Syrup, who had been lying limp as a dishrag on Maple’s shoulder, suddenly sprang to life on all fours. The hair down her backbone stood up as she locked her cat radar on the man with the football. Then she catapulted from Maple’s shoulder to the nearby low-hanging branch of a pecan tree and didn’t stop climbing until she reached the highest limb.

  “You a Titans fan, hotshot?” the coach bellowed to Barley.

  “I’m a Red Bulls fan,” he replied.

  “Me, too. Used to mix the stuff with vodka back in my drinking days before I found my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.”

  Barley looked stunned by the coach’s first words to him, but the game had just begun.

  “I mean the soccer team in New York,” Barley told him.

  “Never heard of ’em,” Coach replied as he twirled the football in his bear-paw hand. “Know what we call those soccer-style kickers in the NFL?” He answered his own question. “Kangaroos!” His pronouncement was followed by an uncontrolled laugh. Then the six-foot-four man dressed all in black pointed his finger down the driveway and said, “Go long!”

  “Me?” Barley asked.

  “Yeah, you!” Coach shouted.

  Barley shot a glance at his mother. She smiled at Boykin and motioned Barley down the drive with a slight wave of her hand. Off Barley trotted toward the barn, looking back at the man with the ball.

  Barley has made known to me his feelings that football is a violent game played by men on growth hormones. He cares as much about football as he does about earthworms, but off he still went.

  The ball sailed from the coach’s hand, spiraling skyward. Barley calculated the trajectory of the falling pigskin and ran toward it.

  “Arms out in front of your body! . . . Extend those hands!” Coach bellowed.

  Barley tracked the ball, but his arms remained at his sides. He measured the rate of fall and positioned himself under the ball. Instead of following the coach’s instructions, he used his left foot and stopped the ball inches from the ground. Then he kicked it up so it landed on his head, then dropped it back to his foot, and with a powerful kick, he launched the pigskin in the opposite direction — over the picket fence and halfway up the hill, where it disappeared into the branches of an oak tree.

  “You’re supposed to catch it, son, not kick it!” Coach yelled out from up the driveway.

  “In Europe, they call soccer football!” Barley yelled back.

  Ellie met Barley halfway down the driveway. With a stern hand on his arm, she directed him to the fence. “That’s enough, mister. Go find Mr. Boykin’s ball,” she said in her strictest coaching voice — the one that signaled she meant business.

  “It’s a present, and you can call me B.A.,” Coach called out.

  Ellie hesitated, and then she answered, “Right.”

  At that moment, Sissy, the teenage babysitter, cruised up on her Vespa, and Ellie pointed her toward the kitchen. “Sissy, there is a quiche in the oven for supper. We are going to the movies, and I will be back at ten. Barley, you find that football. Maple, get the cat out of the tree, and then help your brother.”

  The coach assisted her in the climb that was required to get into the Hummer. She looked lovely in her new Karen Wu dress — graceful and elegant beside the screaming colors of the hideous Hummer. As we watched Coach walk around to the driver’s side of the mammoth vehicle, he stared straight at me. I recognized that familiar look of disdain in his eyes and knew right away that he envisioned me only as the main ingredient in a BLT — not as a member of the family. Then he roared down the driveway, spraying pebbles on the lawn.

  The kids did as their mom asked and searched for the ball under the big oak tree at the edge of the woods, but with very little enthusiasm. Sissy called out from the house that supper was almost ready. That was all the excuse the twins needed to call off their search. They darted for the house, leaving me alone in the woods.

  It was hard not to follow them; I wanted a slice of quiche, too. But something made me stay, and it was not Ellie’s command that kept me searching. There was another reason I had to find that football, but I wasn’t sure what it was. Soon I would know the answer.

  CHAPTER 8

  Ghosts in the Trees

  RUMPY

  THINGS ARE very vertical in Vertigo, and I was never one of those pigs who liked to run off exploring and rooting around in the brush. Most of the time I left the eerie woods around the farm to the badgers, raccoons, and foxes that I would see darting at dusk across the open pastures to their hiding places. Barley had told me about the ancient Civil War trench that circled the hill behind the barn. He and his friends still occasionally found rusty minié balls and Confederate uniform buttons in the dirt. No, I didn’t like these woods at all. I could sense that a lot of humans had died here in that Civil War time. Still, I was determined to find the football, and sometimes a pig’s got to do what a pig’s got to do.

  I knew the ball was in one of three places — the trees, the trench, or the creek. The moment I started to climb up toward the tree where the ball had gone in, I was huffing and puffing. It was made worse by the scent of quiche baking. I blocked the aroma of grilled onions and bubbling cheese from my brain and hunted on.

  There was no sign of the ball in the trees above. That was good news, and I rummaged forward until I saw a berm snaking around the hill. It had to be the trench, and it would surely have stopped a ball from rolling down the hill.

  I felt the sadness of the loss that occurred here as soon as I stepped in the trench. The way I heard one of Barley’s friends tell it, in one afternoon’s battle, three Confederate generals and nine hundred boys were killed. They were buried by the woman who owned the land — and then she wrote a personal letter to the parents of each boy. Places of death are not popular in the animal world. During the French Revolution, there were so many executions that the smell of human blood sent animals fleeing.

  These woods were like that to me, and this trench still held a lot of the past. There surely were ghosts in the trees, and when the sun dipped behind the hill and nighttime came, it was a place I did not care to visit. I quickened my search along the trench but neither saw nor smelled the football.

  Strange thoughts often are strongest in strange places, and I began to think that if I could find the pigskin, it might be an omen that was meaningful in my search for my lost brother. Lukie and I were just babies in Mississippi when he left home for New York City. It took a long time for me to understand that his sense of adventure and exploring were early signs that he had special work to do. Mama told me he would be happy and thrive in New York — where people
really needed his help. And then I moved in with Ellie and Oliver in Greenwich Village, excited and hopeful that I would see Lukie one day. But instead I was whisked away to Tennessee, where I have been ever since. I never saw Lukie again, though I had picked up several “scent-mails” over the years, like those rogue radio signals that bounce off the atmosphere.

  Scent-mail, if you’re wondering, is the way communication has evolved in the world of pigs. I can’t speak for any other species, but we pigs can’t Google. We have no fingers, but our snouts are the numero uno search engines in the animal world. We are able to smell the breeze like nobody else. Not only can we find food but we can locate friends, family, and a whole lot more. Pigs have been sending scent-mails ever since we were loaded onto that overcrowded ark, which wasn’t exactly a Carnival cruise. But, like those radio signals and satellite-TV transmissions, scent-mails do have their limits.

  As the sun began to set in Vertigo, I had my head down and my snout to the ground, sniffing for clues. I was thinking more than smelling when — wham! — the scent of the ball was in the leaves. I was on the trail. I spun around and thrashed at the earth with my hooves, sniffing for more. It took only a few seconds, and I had it again. I charged like a wild boar in the direction the scent was leading me.

  I was out of the trench and back in the woods when I ran full steam into a big boulder in the middle of a field. It knocked me for a loop. The next thing I knew, my short legs flew out from under me, and I was squealing and rolling uncontrollably down the hill and into the creek. I lay there, out of breath and motionless, the whole world spinning, but somehow, through all the confusion, I could still smell leather. When I managed to stand up, the final rays of the sun were lighting up a patch of the creek, and there, sitting among the river rocks, was that pigskin.

  The aches and pains of my tumble immediately disappeared, and I raced to it with joy. I grabbed the laces in my teeth and hurried home.

  I did not take the football to Barley and Maple but hid it in the back of the barn, where I had stashed a few more treasures. A girl has to have some good-luck charms, you know. Anyway, despite the way the football came to me and the original horror I had felt when I first saw it, I now realized it actually was a sign. It had been punted into my life by the ghosts in the trees to remind me of someone I had lost a long time ago and hopefully would find again. That night, before I went to bed, a shooting star streaked across the Tennessee sky. I made an instant wish. Little did I know that my wish would be granted the next day.

  CHAPTER 9

  Uprooted Like Truffles

  BARLEY

  WHEN I WOKE up, I was thinking about that kick. I did hit it perfectly, and a football is much harder to kick because of its shape. I lay in bed, daydreaming that it was a sideline shot in the Major League Soccer finals for the Red Bulls.

  Mom wasn’t in the kitchen when I came back to reality and breakfast. Instead, a note was on the kitchen table. “Don’t worry about that ball” was all she had written.

  “Something tells me the date didn’t go too well,” Maple said as she shuffled into the kitchen.

  “Did you talk to her this morning?” I asked.

  “Didn’t have to.” She started to make a smoothie.

  I poured myself a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios and checked my computer home page for the soccer scores. Madrid had won, and Meacham had scored two goals. The Red Bulls were idle. Maple sipped her smoothie and thumbed through the latest issue of Allure, which had a picture of Karen Wu on the cover. As we finished breakfast, we heard Sissy in the driveway. She told us Mom would be back for dinner.

  Rumpy and I took off to the park to play soccer, and Maple went to the library nearby. But that afternoon, it was Mom, not Sissy, who picked us all up. She was very quiet on the ride home, but when we turned in to the driveway — where the skid marks from B. A. Boykin’s Hummer were still visible — Mom turned off the car. She took a deep breath and said, “I’ve been suspended as the Moccasins coach by the league.”

  “I told you that would happen,” Maple said. “It’s because you’re a woman.”

  “What a rotten day, Mom,” I added, although her suspension didn’t surprise me. “By that note you left this morning, we figured you may not have been treated like Cinderella at the ball last night, either.”

  “You’re right. It was a terrible evening. He took me for a steak and a war movie. I’m thinking of going vegan after that. And I guess I should tell you the rest,” Mom said before I could offer my condolences.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You’ve been traded. Uprooted like truffles,” she said.

  “How could I be traded? It’s a kids’ league.”

  “It all came to me last night when Rambo dropped me off. I just think we’re done with Vertigo. And then this morning, I got the call saying they’ve suspended me as coach, and I took it as a sign.”

  “Which leaves us exactly where?” Maple asked.

  “We are moving to New York,” she said flatly, looking straight ahead.

  We all sat in silence, and then Rumpy suddenly jumped out the backseat window and started twirling in a circle in the driveway, chasing her tail. We all knew this was how she showed delight, but this time she was spinning like a whirling dervish.

  I started to laugh, then Mom joined in, and Maple wasn’t far behind. It was infectious, and we were all laughing and whooping like hyenas at the zoo.

  “The House of Wu!” is all Maple said between fits of laughter.

  “The House of Wu,” Mom echoed, nodding her head.

  “The home of the Red Bulls!” I was jumping up and down in my seat.

  The laughing fit continued until suddenly a loud thud came from behind us. We looked around to see Rumpy on her back with all four legs poking up into the air. I didn’t know pigs could faint, but ours apparently had.

  CHAPTER 10

  Start Spreading the News

  RUMPY

  OINK! OINK! Start spreading the news! We were going to New York!

  I guess I spun all the blood out of my head when I heard that my wish was being granted. The whole next week, the farm was a beehive. Ellie had a few more surprises up her sleeve. She had accepted a job as pastry chef at Flutbein’s Hotel, one of the top restaurants in New York. The job came with a three-bedroom apartment on the hotel roof that overlooked Central Park.

  Even Oliver had come through. Ellie’s only concern was how to get the twins into a good school on such short notice. As it turned out, Oliver knew the headmaster at the prestigious New York Barton Academy, and he somehow got the kids enrolled. Not only was Barton a great school but it was located just a few blocks from the hotel.

  The only one who seemed uninterested in the whole buzz of activity was Syrup. As long as she could drape herself around Maple’s shoulders and be transported like Cleopatra, she seemed content to watch us pack.

  After working all day, we would gather around the computer at night, looking at Web sites about the new school, our new home, soccer clubs, museums, and all the other fun things that you could find only in New York. Barley and Maple even looked up petting zoos and animal parks for me, and I scanned the photos, hoping to get lucky and find a picture of Lukie. That didn’t happen, but at least in New York I would be a thousand miles closer to finding my brother.

  THE NIGHT before we left, we invited our friends and neighbors for a picnic and a soccer game at Pancake Park. We played our last game as the moon rose over the hills of Vertigo. As the game ended, an unusually cool breeze sprang out of the north, and I began sniffing away, picking up strange scents from afar.

  “You ready to start playing a little goalie in Central Park, Rumpy?” Barley asked.

  I did a twirl and poked the ball with my snout in his direction. He sent a quick shot back at me, and I blocked it instantly.

  “That is as happy as I think I have ever seen her,” he said to Maple and his mom.

  What a dear boy. He thought I was happy because I blocked his shot. He
had no idea about the real source of my joy.

  Now the ghosts in the trees didn’t seem so threatening. The winds of change were sweeping us away from Vertigo to the island of Manhattan, where, somewhere among the millions of people and animals, my long-lost brother was waiting to be found.

  That night, at Pancake Park, I could see that Barley and Maple and Ellie felt a little sad to be saying good-bye to our friends, and we all savored the memories of our time on the farm. But Ellie’s sudden decision to move seemed to be the right one. The piles of boxes stacked on the front porch said it all. We were ready to go. I assumed that in the morning, the movers would come and load our belongings into a van, and we would pile into Ellie’s Jeep and head north to our new home.

  I assumed wrong.

  CHAPTER 11

  Family Week

  BARLEY

  WHEN THE Winnebago pulled into our driveway, my first horrified thought was that Coach Boykin was back and ready to take Mom to a tailgate party. I was even more stunned when Dad popped out of the driver’s seat and said, “Anybody need a lift to New York City?” I didn’t even know he could drive.

  I have a feeling that Mom called him and told him our move to New York might be a good opportunity for him to spend time with Maple and me and help with the trip. To his credit, Dad jumped right in.

  As we loaded the mobile home, I filled him in on my soccer stories, past and present. He, of course, told me he had a big deal almost sold to the Fox Network. This was going to be his big break. At the end of our trip, he was heading back to Iceland to do research. Believe me, I had heard that one before. When Dad was in the chips, everybody took the ride, but when he was down on his luck, we didn’t hear from him for months. I was glad our move and his good luck had coincided.