by Betsy Byars
“My hand slipped.”
“It did not. You did it on purpose. If your hand had slipped, you would have gone honk, one time, like that, instead of—”
“Well, she didn’t look.” They drove the rest of the way to the laundromat in silence. Bingo got out with the basket of laundry and entered.
There was one lady putting bedspreads in the oversized dryer, but she gave him only a disinterested glance. She did not have the look of a lady who had recently lost a load of sheets.
Bingo went down the line of washers, opening the lids and peering inside. In the fourth washer he recognized Jamie’s sleepers, his father’s worn underwear, diapers, his own T-shirt.
With a cry of relief, he took out the twisted laundry and replaced it with the stranger’s twisted laundry.
With the basket on his hip, he rushed out the door and to the car.
“Go, Mom!” he cried as he slipped into the backseat and slammed the door.
She turned and looked at him. “You got the right laundry this time, Bingo?”
“Yes, Mom, yes! Go!”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes! Look! Here’s Dad’s old underwear. Here are the diapers. Here’s my SCUM T-shirt.”
“And you put the other laundry back?”
“Yes, go! Go!”
And with what seemed to Bingo incredible slowness, his mother stepped on the gas.
The One-Way Disaster
“THIS REMINDS ME OF being in high school,” Bingo’s mother said as she tore through an intersection.
“Mom, watch what you’re doing!”
“Frances Mimms and I used to trail Binkie Bambridge to see if he was two-timing her.”
“Mom, watch it!”
Bingo was genuinely alarmed. Suddenly it had become his mother who was determined to find Melissa. She was almost in a frenzy. Bingo began to believe the shock she had had was more serious than his.
Bingo’s brother had fallen asleep, but every time his mother took a corner too fast, he sucked on his pacifier as if he knew this careening was not ordinary behavior.
“Mom, can we go home, please?”
“I want to try one more street. They could have turned down Madison.” She applied the brakes. “I can’t turn, though! It’s one-way!”
“Mom, it is one-way our way,” he explained with patience.
“No, Monroe’s one-way our way. Madison’s—”
“Mom, look at the sign. Look—at—the—sign. And if you’re going to turn, you better get over in the other lane! Mom, now you’ve missed it.”
“I deliberately missed it because I am going to turn onto Monroe, which is one-way our way!”
“Mom!”
“Trust me.”
She made the turn, and they faced a solid line of oncoming cars. “Bingo, you were right,” she cried. “It is one-way. And the stupid idiots are not going to let me through.”
“Mom, we are the stupid idiots.”
“Well, what should I do? Back up?”
People began blowing their horns, and his mom—never one to miss an opportunity—blew back.
Jamie awoke, sensed the general air of panic, spit out his pacifier, and began to wail—exactly what Bingo himself felt like doing.
“See what’s wrong with the baby.”
“The same thing is wrong with Jamie that’s wrong with me—he doesn’t like sitting here facing the wrong way on a one-way street. Mom, what’s wrong with you? Let’s go home.”
“Well, there’s no reason for it to be one-way.” She leaned on the horn to show her displeasure.
“Mom, back into the K Mart parking lot if you can.”
“Watch for me.”
As she backed into the parking lot and stopped, she cried, “There they are, Bingo! We didn’t miss them after all! They’re in front of K Mart!”
Bingo poked Jamie’s pacifier back in his mouth.
“This is the most excitement I’ve had since the baby came, which gives you some idea of how dull my life has become.”
Bingo slumped down in the backseat.
“Maybe we should just sit here a minute until I calm down. Do you mind?”
“Not at all,” Bingo said.
“I can’t believe they made Monroe one-way. I never have been able to keep my presidents straight. So, where did they go?”
“Melissa and her friend? I don’t know. Mom, are you calm enough to go home now?”
“You’ve seen enough?”
“Yes.”
“You could run into K Mart. I could use extra diapers.”
“No.”
“Well, if you’re sure …”
She started the car.
To fill in the time, Bingo began to work on his latest problem. He wished he had paper so he could get it down while it was still fresh in his mind.
Problem #4. Unreliable Parent.
Suppose that you are in the car with a parent, and out the window you see a girl you love, and this girl will be in town for a short time and you don’t know where she is staying and this is your one chance to find out. You are desperate. Is there any point in asking your parent to follow this girl to her place of residence?
Bingo’s Answer: No! Particularly not if the parent has suffered a recent shock of some undisclosed nature that will lead her to honk the horn inappropriately and go the wrong way on one-way streets. The best plan is to get out of the car as soon as she brings it to a safe stop and follow on foot. That is what I wish I had done.
When he had completed this thought Bingo looked up. He found to his surprise that they were still in the parking lot. ,
In the front seat his mother was slumped down in a dejected way.
“Mom, aren’t we going home?”
“Eventually.”
“What’s wrong?”
She put her hands on the steering wheel. “Oh, I guess I’m stalling.”
“Stalling? What for? What do you mean?”
“I don’t want to go home.”
“But why not? Mom, you might as well tell me what the shock was.”
“Your father’s novel came back today.”
“His what?”
“His novel, Bingo, his novel! The novel he’s been working on for years. Bustin’ Lewis.”
“I didn’t even know he’d sent it to a publisher.”
“He didn’t want you to know. He was afraid you’d worry.”
“But maybe I could have helped him.”
“Maybe … He sent it in two weeks ago, Bingo, and he was so hopeful, and it’s already come back. They didn’t even have time to read it. I know they didn’t.”
“Maybe they liked it, Mom. They read it and liked it so much that they hurried to—”
She shook her head.
“They could have. I liked it.”
“If they had liked it, they would have written or phoned. They wouldn’t have sent it straight back.”
Bingo took in this hurtful truth in silence.
“Somebody told me one time,” his mother went on, “that the publishers have readers, and to save time the readers go through a manuscript and read every tenth page. Every tenth page! So maybe there would be nine perfect pages and then the tenth one would be—oh, I could just cry, Bingo.”
“Please don’t.”
There was a long, shaky pause.
“Well, if I am going to cry, I wish I’d go ahead and do it and get it out of my system.”
Bingo waited.
“Give me one more minute.”
“Sure.”
“I cry so seldom that it’s hard for me to cry, even when I really need to. I have to really make an effort.”
She kept her face forward.
“And I need to now.”
Bingo felt it would have taken no effort at all for him to burst into tears, but somebody in the family had to be dry-eyed.
“My problem is that I just cannot bear to see your father hurt. He’s such a wonderful man, Bingo, and I just—well, I’d rathe
r be hurt myself.”
The pacifier popped out of Jamie’s mouth, and Bingo poked it back in.
Finally his mother did what Bingo had been praying she would do. She looked at her watch.
“So. Your father probably got home at five. He’s now had thirty minutes to open the manuscript, read the letter, and absorb the disappointment. Do you think that’s enough time?”
“I don’t know. It probably wouldn’t be for me.”
“Well, we can’t sit here forever.”
“No, that’s true.”
She shoved the car into gear angrily. “Let’s go home.”
They drove home without speaking. As they turned onto the street his mother broke the silence.
“Now, Bingo, don’t let on that I told you.”
“I won’t.”
“Pretend you don’t even know he sent it off.”
“I will.”
“His car’s there. Oh, Bingo, I just can’t bear it. He knows.”
Rip Van Wentworth
BINGO WAS IN HIS room. He had spent a lot of time in his room since he and his mother had gotten home yesterday.
He had come out for supper and breakfast, and every time the phone rang to see if Melissa was calling, but each time he went right back into his room. This was to give his father, a chance to absorb his disappointment in privacy. Bingo understood the need for privacy, because he needed much more of it than he got.
So far his father had not finished absorbing, and each meal had been tedious. His mother kept saying things like, “Oh, Bingo, tell your dad who you saw in the store.”
“Melissa.”
“Who?” His father’s face would be blank, as if his entire personality had left him.
“Melissa.”
“Oh, Melissa. That’s nice.”
“Bingo! Tell your dad about the one-way street yesterday.”
“Dad, we went down a one-way street yesterday.”
“What?”
“A one-way street—the wrong way.”
“That’s nice.”
While Bingo was sitting in his room, listening for a sound of normalcy from his father that would signal that the absorption period was over at last, Bingo suddenly remembered something Wentworth had said.
Something about Melissa …
Bingo had to think back hard to get it word for word because so much had happened in the meantime.
“And I know something else about Melissa,” Wentworth had said, “but it’ll cost you.”
That was it exactly.
Bingo got up. Slowly he crossed to his window, bent, and looked out. He glanced across the lawn to Wentworth’s bedroom window.
This was the low point in a week filled with low points. This might even be the low point of his life. Bingo opened the window, crawled out, crossed the lawn, and stopped at Wentworth’s window.
He took a deep breath. He needed a lot of air because he was now in a place he had never thought he would be in his entire life. And he was doing the most alien thing he had ever done in his life.
But he had to do this. He had no other choice. He had to know what Wentworth knew about Melissa. It was more than a want, it was a burning desire, the kind he used to have so frequently.
He lifted his hand and knocked.
Wentworth’s face appeared in the window almost immediately.
“Who is it?”
Wentworth peered through the glass. Bingo knew Wentworth could see him, but Wentworth, out of cruelty, feigned temporary blindness.
“Me.”
“Me who?”
“Me Bingo.”
He cringed. He was starting to sound like a character in a Tarzan movie. “Bingo Brown,” he added with dignity.
“What are you doing out there?”
“I wanted to talk to you.”
“You want to talk to somebody, you come to the front door, you call them up on the phone. You don’t wake them up in the middle of the afternoon.”
“Wentworth, you’ve been knocking on my window for over a year now, and I have been very, very patient with you.”
“That’s what’s wrong with you, Worm Brain, you’re too patient. Somebody knocks at my window—I don’t want to talk to them, I shut the window.”
Wentworth closed the window, and Bingo stood without moving. A sudden breeze brought goosebumps to his bare arms. All month the weather had been seesawing between summer and winter, and now it had made up its mind. Leaves began raining from the trees.
Bingo turned and started back to his house. Through the rustle of falling leaves, he heard the window open behind him.
He didn’t turn around but he found himself taking smaller steps.
“So, I’m curious,” Wentworth said to Bingo’s back.
“Oh?” Bingo stopped in place and put his hands in his pockets. Bingo was very grateful for pockets. He never had anything of value to put in them, but his hands had spent their only really restful moments there. Like now, if his hands hadn’t been in his pockets, they would have been twitching nervously at his sides.
Wentworth continued. “What’d you want to see me about?”
“About something you said—”
Bingo still did not turn around.
“I say a lot of things.”
“This was yesterday afternoon when you came back out of the grocery store. You told me you’d seen Melissa.”
“I had seen her.”
“I know. And later you came over and knocked on my window”—Bingo threw this in as a reminder—“and I answered and you said you knew something about Melissa but it would cost me?”
“Yeah?”
“What’s the price?”
“The price is that you’ll owe me—like in the Mafia. You’ll owe me and you’ll owe me and then one day I’ll come up and say, ‘I’m collecting,’ and you’ll have to do whatever I say.”
“Forget it.”
“It wouldn’t be murder, Bingo, I wouldn’t ask you to rub somebody out.”
“Forget it!”
“Even though my history teacher is asking for it. He calls me Rip Van Wentworth because—he claims—I slept through his entire reading of the Declaration of Independence.”
“Forget it!”
Bingo started for home.
“Okay, okay, I must be getting soft, but I’ll tell you what you want to know.”
Bingo stopped. This time he turned. He waited, still suspicious. This could be another of Wentworth’s cruelties.
“I know where Melissa’s at. I know approximately where she’s at. I can take you there.”
“Where?”
“She’s at her cousin’s.”
“I didn’t know she had a cousin.”
“That was who was with her in the store—her cousin. Name’s Zelda Louise, but she gets mad if you don’t call her Weezie.”
“So is she here for a visit or what?”
“Nobody said, but I get the feeling she’s moving back.”
“Melissa’s moving back?”
“Well, maybe. Like I said, ‘Melissa, you moving back?’ And Zelda Louise gives me a look like that is not a good question to be asking. Her dad probably lost his job again.”
“I thought her dad had a good job in Bixby.”
“He did.”
“So what makes you think he lost it?”
“Nothing, Worm Brain, nothing. I’m giving you an opinion, like on the evening news.”
“He lost his job …” Bingo trailed off thoughtfully.
His heart clutched the news.
No wonder Melissa hadn’t called him, hadn’t written. She would naturally have wanted to spare him the hurt and—
But surely she knew by now that he would like nothing better than to help her over any hurt that life dealt her.
“You want to go over there?” Wentworth continued, getting ready to pull his camouflage T-shirt on over his head. He peered at Bingo through the neck opening.
“Where?”
“To the cousi
n’s, Worm Brain! To Zelda Louise’s.”
“Now?”
“No, Worm Brain, next Fourth of July.” Wentworth pulled on his shirt and ran his hands over his military haircut. “Yeah, now,” he said, shaking his head at Bingo’s stupidity. “Get your bike and I’ll meet you out front.”
Merrily We Burp Along
“BURP-BURP BURP BURP … burp-burp burp burp.” Billy Wentworth stopped his series of burps to ask, “So, what song is that the beginning of?”
“I don’t know,” Bingo admitted. In moments of frivolity he enjoyed body noises as much as anybody, but he was not feeling frivolous now.
“You gotta know. It’s a golden oldie. Wait, I’ll do it again.”
“Please don’t,” Bingo said. “I haven’t had any lunch and—”
“Burp-burp burp burp … Some of my burps come up better than others, but you get the picture.”
Bingo and Wentworth were pedaling slowly toward Weezie’s house. To pass the time, Wentworth was burp-singing popular hits.
“… burp-burp burp burp. I’ll give you one more hint. It’s by the Rolling Stones. I’ll do it again, and this is your last chance.”
“I won’t know it no matter how many times you do it.”
“You better know it. Like, it’s a game, Worm Brain. You gotta get the song or I don’t tell you whether to go right or left at the next corner.”
“Wentworth, I can’t concentrate.”
The reason that Bingo was unable to concentrate was that he was composing a problem, and it was a problem he was soon to face.
Problem #5. Seeing Long-Lost Girlfriend.
Suppose you are in love with a girl and suppose you have not seen this girl in a long time because events beyond your control have kept you apart. The last time you saw this girl, you did not attempt to embrace her because the two of you were in Health Supplies, and your arms wouldn’t work right. This time your arms probably won’t work right either and although there won’t be any health supplies to deter you, there will be someone present who would like it if your arms didn’t work right. Should you—
Bingo broke off. This was not like a problem, this was more like the rambling of an addled mind. And Bingo did not want to encourage such ramblings in his baby brother. Manfully, he broke off his thoughts.
