away. Willie Mae, you've got to give me your recipe for these." She waved a beignet in the air over her head.
"Well, Essie, that's too bad. Is there anything I can do to help?" Biggie asked.
"Oh no, not a thing." Mrs. Moody got up and poured herself a fresh cup of coffee. "I was going to ask J.R. for one teensy favor though." She looked at me over her shoulder.
"What?" I asked.
"It's Prissy. I can't take her with me. Those children just run her ragged, all the time wanting to dress her up in doll clothes and push her around in that little toy stroller they've got. Prissy was a bundle of nerves the last time we visited them. I had to call up Doc Lasky over in Center Point to give her some pills to calm her down."
"Dr. Lasky's not a vet. He's a chiropractor— or an osteopath— something like that. Lonie Thedford said he did wonders for her last winter when she slipped and hurt her back."
"Oh, I know, Biggie. That man's got magic hands; everybody says so. But those pills he gave me sure did help Prissy. She calmed down real quick and slept for a day and a half, poor thing. She was just a wreck!"
To my way of thinking, Prissy is a nervous wreck all the time. She is a little white poodle, and all she ever does is run back and forth along her fence yapping at everybody who walks down the sidewalk. Even when she's asleep, she twitches and barks and makes running motions with her legs. My dog, Bingo, who is a mutt but ten times smarter than Prissy, is scared of her on account of she bit him once just because he was trying to get one little taste of the bone she was gnawing.
"I don't know," I said. "Booger and Bingo don't get along with her too good." The truth is, Booger can beat her up anytime he feels like it.
"Of course we'll take care of her," Biggie said. "J.R., you can keep her in that pen Rosebud built for Bingo when he was a puppy. When will you bring her over, Essie?"
"First thing tomorrow morning." Mrs. Moody stood up and brushed the powdered sugar off her blouse. "And I'll make it worth your while, J.R."
I remembered the last time she'd said that. I spent the whole afternoon raking up leaves in her yard, and she paid me with an old catcher's mitt that used to belong to Woodrow. It had a hole in the pocket with the stuffing coming out. I sighed, knowing there was no sense in arguing about it. Biggie's word is law in our house. I'd just have to find a way to keep Prissy in that pen and out of my hair most of the time. I nodded and went to the stove and held out my plate for another hot biegnet.
After breakfast, I rode my bike down to the vacant lot on the alley behind Handy's House of Hardware. It used to be a construction site on account of Mr. Handy was going to build a lumberyard there; but the bank wouldn't approve his loan, so now it's just this monster hole. Mr. Handy said us guys could build a dirt track out there as long as we didn't get hurt. When I got there, DeWayne Boggs, Arthur Handy, and Bruce Oterwald were dragging a huge piece of plywood from the back of the hardware store.
"Hey, J.R.," DeWayne said, dropping his end of the plywood, "looky here what we found."
"Cool," I said. "Does Mr. Handy know you've got that?"
"Yep," Arthur said.
"He gave it to us," Bruce put in. "See, it's warped in the middle, and the layers are coming apart at the corners on account of it got left out in the rain last week. We're gonna make a dirt bike ramp."
I pitched in and helped build the ramp. We laid it up against the side of the excavation, being careful to dig a trench and put rocks around the bottom edge so it wouldn't slide around. After it was set in place, we spent the rest of the morning racing our bikes up to the top. It felt great flying off the top of that old plywood, and it didn't hurt too much when we toppled down into the soft mud in the bottom of the hole. My bike and I were both pretty much of a mess when I rode into our