Journey to an 800 Number

by E. L. Konigsburg

  I felt chilled again. I poured the rest of the beer down the drain and thought some hot tea would taste good, but it seemed like a lot of work to make it I turned the air-conditioner to OFF and still could not warm up. I climbed under the covers of the lower bunk and fell asleep on and off, half-waking only long enough to notice that the brazen light had softened and moved to the other side of the trailer, and then to notice that the trailer was dark. Finally, I was awakened by a sound. Father had returned. I sat up.

  “Hi,” Father said. “Did you get your letters written?”

  “My letters?”

  “Your correspondence.”

  “My correspondence. Oh.”

  “That’s all right. You were probably tired from your trip. I’ve got Ahmed fed and settled. Now, how about us, Max? Ready for dinner?”

  I said all right.

  So I got my blazer, and we went. Father drove around Smilax, and we didn’t speak very much. Smilax is mostly highways with quick-food chains, gas stations and motels and no houses more than one-story high. And the evening air, although not cool, at least moved. Or we moved, and it seemed to. Father pulled up at a cafeteria named Sweetbriar’s. We went through the line, and the things did look good. I took three more items than I could eat. I didn’t seem to have much appetite once I smelled the food up close. Father asked, “Don’t you like it, Max?”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “Mr. Malatesta took Mother and me to a restaurant on the top of the First Guaranty Bank Building in Philadelphia. If you walked around to look through each of the windows, you got a view of the whole city below. They had candles on every table and white tablecloths and napkins. Cloth, not paper. And the waiters wore tuxedos.” Father said nothing, but he looked interested, so I continued. “It’s a private club, and you have to wait on a waiting list and have people recommend you before you’re allowed to join. And even then you have to pay money, a thousand to join and some every month. That’s besides paying for the food.”

  “How was the food?” Father asked.

  “Excellent,” I answered. “Why?”

  “Oh,” Father said, “I heard that most times those restaurants on top of tall buildings have what you might call food with a view instead of food that tastes good.”

  “Just because you’ve never been and likely never will be is no reason to put them down.”

  “Nobody ought to put them down,” Father said, “because then they wouldn’t have anything at all to recommend them.”

  “Very funny,” I said.

  “If you don’t want your Jello, mind if I take it?” Father asked.

  I pushed it over toward him. He dipped his spoon in it and held it up where it wiggled in front of his eyes, then he ate it. He played that way with every spoonful. I didn’t say anything, and neither did he.

  We didn’t speak all the way back to the trailer park either. Father had opened the windows of the truck again, but I closed the one on my side. I felt cold. And my stomach was being unkind; it was rolling around like a maniac salami, pitching back and forth, even when the truck was stopped for a red light.

  The first time I threw up was against the front wheel of the truck just after Father arrived at the trailer park.

  Father led me toward the kitchen sink in case I was going to make a second deposit. He supported me and held my head. “You have a fever,” he said.

  “A fever?” I yelled. I put my hand on my forehead and said, “I’m burning up. I’ve caught some dread disease. I must have a hundred and six. Where’s your thermometer?”

  “No one gets a hundred and six fever. I don’t have a thermometer,” he said.

  “You don’t have a thermometer?” I asked. “How can you appreciate how sick I am? How will you know when to call a doctor?”

  “I think you have the flu.”

  “Isn’t that dread?” I asked.

  He touched my forehead with his lips. “I’d say you have about a hundred, a hundred and one,” he said.

  “Your mustache is probably insulating your lips from feeling the full heat,” I said.

  Father handed me two white pills. “Here, take these aspirins with a big glass of water and go lie down.”

  The lying down part sounded good. I did as he suggested. I remember Father reaching to the upper bunk and taking down a cover and covering me and putting his hand to my forehead again. Next I remember waking now and then to the sounds of music. I thought at the time that it was the TV; later when I was fully awake, I saw my father sitting in the kitchen area strumming a guitar. A grown man amusing himself with a guitar. He needed a shave. His mustache was ragged, and even from a distance I could see the hairs poking out of his nose.

  He saw me awaken. “Well, hello there,” he said.

  “Did you get the thermometer?” I asked.

  “Well, no,” he said. “Except to feed Ahmed, I haven’t left the trailer for two days.”

  “Ahmed,” I said, throwing myself back down on the bed. “Ahmed!” I repeated, putting as much disgust in my voice as I could manage. Then I realized what he had said. “Two days?” I asked.

  He smiled and nodded and strummed his guitar.

  “Do you mind telling me what I’ve been doing for the past two days?”

  He continued strumming and said, “You threw up a lot.”

  I waited for him to continue, but he didn’t. “What else?”

  “Not much. You slept. You moaned in your sleep. You peed in a bottle.” He strummed his guitar the whole time he said this making it like a folk song.

  “Did you call a doctor?”

  “No doctor did I call.” Strum, Strum.

  “Do you realize that I have lost two days of my life?”

  “Me, too.” Strum, Strum.

  “Can’t you tell me about them?”

  “You took liquids and you slept and you peed in a bottle.” Strum, Strum.

  “Lost,” I said. “Two whole days of my life lost,” I said to the ceiling.

  “Time flies when you’re having fun,” Father sang. Then he laid down his guitar and came over to my bunk. He sat on the edge and laid his hand on my forehead and then ran his hand slowly down my face. Then he rested the back of his hand under my chin. “Welcome back, Bo,” he said.

  “Name’s Max,” I said. “Maximilian.”

  It was not until the middle of the week that I had any appetite or energy. I woke up one morning and instead of finding Father rattling around or reading or strumming his guitar, I found a note Scotch-taped to the refrigerator door. Half door. The note said: Ahmed and I are at summer school fair. Back about four.

  That suited me just fine. Now I would have time to put my thoughts in order. The five days since I had arrived had had no nights, no days, just long sleeps interrupted by crazy dreams (really crazy). I decided that first I would walk around the trailer park and get some fresh air and exercise.

  I left the trailer door unlocked because I didn’t know where Father kept the key and besides there was nothing in the trailer worth taking—except, perhaps, Father’s guitar, which wasn’t even a Martin or a Guild. I decided to solve that problem by taking the guitar with me as I got my fresh air and exercise.

  The minute that I opened the door, the hot air hit me like someone had dropped a hood over my head. But I was determined. If men could fight for the Alamo in Texas, I certainly could walk around a trailer park carrying a guitar that wasn’t even a Martin or a Guild.

  It was not easy, but I managed to walk in one direction for fifteen minutes and then start back. Except that I got lost. To an untrained eye every third trailer looks alike, and when I thought that I was going to collapse, I finally knocked on a door to ask directions. No one answered. I had to go to four trailers before I found one lady-of-the-house at home. She had a small baby and was actually nursing the baby when she answered the door. I had never seen anything like that in my life, and I must say that it didn’t give me a very high opinion of the trailer park class of people. To nurse a baby as if it were
the most natural thing in the world.

  I guess the woman was asking me for the second or maybe the third time, “What do you want?”

  I asked her if she could please direct me to the trailer of Woodrow Stubbs.

  She thought a minute and then said, “Haven’t heard of him.”

  I hated to say it, but I knew that I must. “The camel-driver,” I said.

  “Oh. Ahmed’s daddy,” she said.

  “No, mine.”

  “Well, yes.” She smiled.

  “He lives in the transient section.”

  “Transient?”

  “The people who keep their wheels and hook up by the week.” She then gave me directions, and I thanked her and left, and her kid never disattached itself the whole time.

  Her directions were pretty good because I followed them and got back. I noticed that the transient section where my father lived was not as nice as the non-transient. The trailers were smaller and there were no pretty flower or vegetable gardens around them. It wasn’t until I got back and hung up Father’s guitar and was lying on the bed that I realized that I had no idea where Ahmed stayed. I didn’t care. I was exhausted, and I fell asleep until Father woke me.

  “Hey, Max,” he was saying, “how about let’s go out for a while? We’ll stop for a bit to eat. The fresh air will do you good.”

  “I don’t think there is a pint of fresh air in all of Smilax,” I said.

  “Yeah, it’s pretty humid. I was scheduled to start working my way north, but we got held up.”

  “We got held up. I got held up. I got sick.”

  “Yes, it’s been too bad. I had to cancel two bookings, and today I could only make one instead of two. I had to drive Ahmed.”

  “Don’t you always drive Ahmed to where you’re going?”

  “He hadn’t had any exercise for days, so I drove him to the kindergarten.”

  “You mean you rode Ahmed?”

  Father nodded.

  “You mean you rode a camel through the streets of town?”

  “I guess people have been riding camels longer than they’ve been riding cars. Longer than horses, even.”

  “You must look pretty silly,” I said.

  “Maybe I do. But besides giving Ahmed his exercise, it’s good advertising.” Father stood up. “I know a good place for us to eat tonight. We’ll celebrate our last night in Smilax at Mom’s Ranch Kitchen. They have something close to home-cooking. How about it, Max? Do you think we can push off tomorrow? I figure we’ll stop in Dallas tomorrow night.”

  I told him that I was ready. I had seen all I want to see of Smilax, Texas, for the rest of my life.

  2

  It was still dark when I heard Father get up. I watched him wash and shave and waited to see if he would cut the hairs out of his nose and ears. He did. He sat at the edge of my bed after he was finished, and he shook me. He spoke very softly, “I’m going to drive over to Ahmed’s now. I have to get him into the truck before I hook on the camper. Do you want to get dressed and see him or do you want to sleep some more?”

  “Sleep,” I said.

  It wasn’t easy to sleep. There were the sounds of Father driving off, then returning, and the sounds of the camper being hitched to the truck. Finally, there was a tug at the camper and the sounds of Ahmed gurgling and bawling like a retarded cow. The whole process must not have taken too much time because before it was even light, we were well out on the highway. I could feel the uninterrupted roll of the wheels. I decided to get up.

  I looked out the front window of the camper and there I saw Ahmed’s behind, his tail swinging before my eyes. The rear end of a camel is a sight only a camel of the opposite sex, only a camel of the opposite sex in heat, could find exciting. A camel has got to be the ugliest beast ever assembled. Even dinosaurs, which didn’t work out at all, had a certain dignity. They may have been bulky, and they may have been dumb, but they weren’t dumb looking. Ahmed’s behind was—among other things—bald.

  I got dressed and sat looking out the back window where the view was all interstate instead of inter-hind-legs.

  We stopped in the parking lot of a gas station/restaurant. I got out of the camper and Father got out of the truck cab. We met at the truck bed alongside Ahmed. Father was patting Ahmed and whispering words of comfort that sounded like “good boy” and “ni-i-i-ce fella.”

  “He’s bald as a kumquat,” I said.

  “It’s summer. Camels shed in the summer. Two summers ago I was at this town in north Florida and there was a young woman who was a weaver. She came way out to the west end of town to see me when she found out that I was there.”

  “How did she find out?” I asked. “Did she live downwind of his litter box?”

  “I was written up in the paper.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure,” Father said. “On a slow news day, they put me in the local news.”

  “On the comic page?” I asked.

  “Usually on the first page of the second section. That’s where the local news is. Sometimes in the feature section.”

  “What do you do with them? The articles, I mean.”

  “I read them, of course.”

  “What do you do with them after you read them?”

  “I wrap the garbage in them. Just as I do with all the other newspapers. Can’t save too much when you live in a camper. Well, anyway, back in Florida two summers ago there was this woman weaver and she came out to see me to ask me if she could brush down Ahmed and collect his hair. She was making some kind of weaving. She had a black poodle and she was saving his hair, too, and she wanted to make a pattern in tan and black. She came every day and gathered up Ahmed’s hair, and since the summer had begun, he was shedding and she got bushels of hair. I never did see her work, but I venture to say it was more tan than black.”

  “What did she make with it?”

  “It was to be a wall hanging, she said.”

  “That’s a relief.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought she was weaving something to wear.”

  “When you consider how much a camel’s hair sweater costs, or you realize that the second best artists’ brushes are made of camel’s hair, you would now that camel’s hair is nothing to sneeze at.”

  “Unless you’re allergic,” I said.

  “Very good,” Father said. “You are a clever boy.” He looked over at me and grabbed my shoulder in that sort of hug of approval that he had.

  We were at a cafeteria again. This one was sectioned off so that one side was for professional truck drivers. We went to the civilian side. After filling our trays, I picked out a booth that was across the aisle from a mother and daughter. The daughter looked fifth-graderish. I knew they were mother and daughter because they looked like the petite and queen-sized versions of the same product, except that the mother was dressed in a pants suit and had her hair pulled back with a scarf and the daughter was dressed in jeans with her hair hanging loose all around and falling over the table.

  After we sat down, I jabbed my thumb in their direction and said to Father, “You could probably weave that into a room-sized rug unless she eats it with her eggs.”

  The girl was holding a fork in midair and reading the paper while her mother was eating with the best possible manners. “Sabrina,” the mother said, “you better finish up if we’re going to make Dallas before evening.”

  Without looking up, Sabrina said, “Would you hand me the scissors, please?”

  The mother reached into her pocketbook and took out a small pair of scissors, “Find something for your collection, dear?” she asked.

  “A two-faced cat,” the girl answered. She cut something out of the paper and handed the scissors back to her mother. “It’s got a picture. Two faces. One head. It eats with both mouths.” She held up the clipping.

  “Very nice, dear,” the mother said.

  “I still can’t find out anything about Renee,” the girl said.

  “Well, dear, sometimes no
news is good news.”

  “I’ll have to check again in Dallas. Sometimes these small towns put only the national news and the local gossip in their papers.” The girl then looked over toward us and said, “Excuse me.”

  I was so busy pretending that I wasn’t listening that I kept digging right into my hash browns.

  Father said, “Yes?”

  The girl said to him, “Have you heard any news about Renee, the girl who had her hand cut off by a New York subway and the doctors sewed it back on?”

  “Can’t say that I have,” Father answered. “Maybe my son has.”

  I had rested my fork somewhere in midair, and my mouth was open—not for food but for astonishment. I hoped that everyone thought food.

  Father said, “Max, have you read anything lately about Renee, the girl who had her hand cut off by a New York subway and the doctors sewed it back on?”

  I said, “I have not only not heard anything lately, I haven’t heard anything firstly.”

  “Renee is a very talented flute player from New York City who went to a special high school for talented children …”

  The mother nodded and said, “The High School for Music and Art.”

  “You have to be very talented just to be allowed to go to school there. It’s free if you live in New York.”

  The mother nodded and said, “They have dancers and musicians and artists. Of course they’re all artists, but I mean, painters. They are all very talented. They come from all over the city.”

  “That’s why they have to ride the subway. And Renee was just a few weeks away from graduating when someone pushed her off the subway platform and the train ran over her hand and cut it off, and a subway guard put the hand in a plastic bag and rushed it to the hospital right along with Renee, and the doctors sewed her hand back on.”

  “An eleven-hour operation,” the mother said, nodding again.

  “No one knows if she can ever play the flute again. But you should always remember to put any part that’s cut off—even if it’s just a finger—into a plastic bag and take it to the hospital with you.”