Mister Boots by Carol Emshwiller

while, it’s either cry or giggle. Finally it stops.
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    When I go back and check that room again, it looks as if our father has had a fit in there. Even what was hanging in the closet is on the floor. I hear a lot of thumping and scraping, and I see right away where the secret hiding place is. There’s a trapdoor in the ceiling of the closet. Our father is up there cursing. I’ve heard the wranglers next door say lots of things. I was hoping to learn more words, but our father doesn’t say anything I haven’t heard already.
    Of course my first thought is to close the hatch and lock him up up there, but the hatch is on the closet floor and I can’t figure out how to do it.
    My second thought is that Mother would never have gone up there, so our money can’t be up there. I mean, Mother never even went in that room that I know of. If she had, she’d have cleaned it up a long time ago.
    Our father throws down an oblong box. Dust flies up when it hits the floor, and it gets even more broken than it already is. You can see where it used to be red with gold designs, but the colors are almost all worn off. The lid is just barely hanging on, and there’s something odd about the bottom, as if there’s two bottoms. Then he jumps down, carrying a smaller, square box as worn out as the bigger one, and it looks to have two bottoms, too, and one’s a mirror. The money has got to be someplace like that, a secret extra bottom.
    â€œSo where is it?” our father says. He’s dusty and sweaty and streaked with dirt.
    â€œWell, it’s not up there.”
    â€œI know that.” He looks at me like he knows I’m guilty—like it’s always got to be me. So then I start thinking it’s got to be me, too. I’m the one who does all the bad things around here. Except I don’t know where anything is, money or brandy or anything. The trouble is I say I know. “Buried in the yard,” I say, “in the nice soft dirt of the vegetable garden. Seventh carrot.”
    Our father gets his face up real close to mine. He smells of fat-man sweat and cigars. I turn away because of that, so then his hot sloppy whisper gets right inside my ear. “And you’re the one who’s going to dig it up.”
    I twist away and run. I get to the field next door, grab a fence post, vault the barbed wire, jump on Rusty, and gallop off.
    Our father’s horse is right there by the door, all cinched up and ready. I’m just riding a pony. He’s going to catch me, and we’re going to be out here all alone. But I keep on, and when I get to my tree, I don’t get off, I just reach up and grab the first branch as we gallop by and start climbing. I’m thinking how good I am at things like this and how no fat man can get me. But our father does exactly the same thing. I thought he was too big and soft for that. Then I think if I get high enough, the branches will be small and our father will fall.
    â€œWhere there’s a will there’s a way,” our father says.
    Oh, for heaven’s sake, I’ve heard Mother say the same thing, too often, though mostly she said, “Well begun is half done,” and of course most of all, “A stitch in time . . .” I’ve heard Mister Boots say the same sorts of things, except Boots’s were odder, as if a horse had made them up all by himself. Like, “When we want enough, we get a little.” I’m sick of all those things.
    I thought my tree would save me by breaking itself. It’s not easy getting water way out here. I thought it would do something for me for a change. I know this is exactly the kind of thinking Mother didn’t want me to do when she told me to be scientific, but I thought it anyway.
    Some branches do break, but not enough. Our father grabs me by the ankle in no time and pulls me down to him. Even before we’re on the ground, he twists my arm up behind