The Secret Zadie Carried Past the Gate

I knew exactly which boys he meant. The Prewitt children, three of them, out past the tipple road. The youngest Coble girl, who’d started at the school that fall and came home every day with her shoes worn through at the heel because four miles is a long way for a child. Half the camp’s children walked that road, rain, shine, or the kind of Missouri ice that put men twice their size on their backs.

“You can’t just take company property, Bexley,” I told him, because somebody had to say the sensible thing out loud, even though I already knew from the set of his jaw that sensible wasn’t going to win.

“I’m not fixing to take it,” he said. “I’m fixing to save it before it gets thrown away. There’s a difference, even if the super wouldn’t see it that way.”

Here is where I need to be honest about my own part in this, because for years afterward people in Novinger liked to say it was all Bexley’s doing and I was only along for the ride, and that never sat right with me. The plan was mine. Bexley could fix the bicycles once he got his hands on them quiet, in our own shed, new tires and a fresh coat of paint that wasn’t Excelsior green. What neither of us could figure was how to get even one bicycle off company ground without somebody at the gate asking why the mechanic’s wife was leaving camp pushing an extra bike.

I was the one who thought of the sand.

The camp gate in those days had a single guard on duty from opening to dark, checking anybody who came or went with more than they’d arrived with, on account of a run of tool thefts the year before that had cost two men their jobs and put the whole camp under a cloud of suspicion for a good while. Copper wire had gone missing off a supply cart, then a set of good wrenches, and after that the company wasn’t taking chances with anybody’s bag or basket.