Journey to an 800 Number

by E. L. Konigsburg

  Father reached into his pocket for his hanky, and I pushed him back. “I’ll clean it off, Father,” I said. And I did. I turned the hose on, and sprayed the spit from the fellow’s shoe. It also wet his pants legs. It also wet his shirt, and the shoes, the pants and the shirts of four of the others. “Th-e-e-e-re you go,” I said. “All gone.”

  The first kid started toward me, and the five others were not far behind. I backed up toward the stall. Father untethered Ahmed, and instead of leading him toward our truck, he led him toward the center of the pack of boys. A camel is a loose, uneven assembly of parts; you never know which part will fuss or for how long. When a camel spits or when a camel kicks, it is a good idea to watch out. There is no telling whether something wet or something heavy will land. Ahmed began kicking. He kicked with all four legs in about twelve directions. It was impossible to escape from one side of him or the other. You could have found an area of quiet about a yard or so from his head, but he could spit that far. Or you could go to his rear, where I won’t mention what indelicate thing he could do. All in all, Ahmed cleared a pretty good bit of living space for himself. Those six guys went back to their car about as mad at Ahmed as Ahmed was mad at them. But the dumb beast had won. I wanted to stand outside and say something sarcastic that they would remember the rest of their lives, but Father pushed both me and Ahmed back into the booth. He locked his arms around me so that I couldn’t move. Before I could ask, I knew why. The guys revved up their car and came zooming in for us, and had we not been protected by the posts of the booth, they would have rammed us senseless or run right over us.

  We waited until we saw their car disappear down the highway before we emerged.

  “I would like to wash the truck, too,” Father said.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I suggested strongly.

  “All right,” Father said in an unhurried way, and in an unhurried way he loaded Ahmed back into the bed of the truck.

  I was shivering with rage. I took off my slicker and my boots and put on my blue blazer, which I had neatly folded on the seat of the cab. I began to feel a little more like myself.

  Father said, “There’s always one wise guy in a bunch of kids like that.”

  “One out of every six?” I asked.

  “I don’t know the exact percentages, but it seems to me there’s always one.”

  “Maybe they just don’t like camels.”

  “I guess you could understand that,” he said.

  “Tell me, where did you get Ahmed?”

  “Your mother and I were living in New Mexico, around Taos. I had a big old ranch house outside of town where people came and stayed awhile and then left. Some stayed for years. Couples. Odds and ends of people. We farmed. We made candles and sandals and sold them to tourists in the town of Taos. Anyway, one of the young men who came and stayed had a camel. The boy’s name was Lucky Blue, and the camel was Ahmed. After Lucky Blue had been with us about six months, he left. He left in the middle of the night with a young woman but not Ahmed. Lucky Blue and Dove. The girl he took away with him was Dove. Of course, those were probably not their real names. No one used a real name back then.”

  “When was this?”

  “Back in ‘sixty-eight, ‘sixty-nine.”

  “Well, I never did learn where Lucky Blue went or where he had gotten Ahmed. But I couldn’t neglect Ahmed or abandon him after Lucky Blue left.”

  “Was I born yet when Lucky Blue arrived?”

  “No. But you were when he left.”

  “Were you and Mother hippies?”

  “How do you know about hippies?”

  “Havemyer, Pennsylvania, is not the end of the world, Father. I can read. I know about hippies and flower children back in the sixties.”

  “To answer your question, I guess I would have to say that yes, you were a flower child and your mother was a hippie. A college drop-out, nice middle-class family. Have you ever met your mother’s folks?”

  “No. Mother told me they died in an automobile wreck the year you two got divorced.”

  “Oh.”

  “What about you. Were you a hippie?”

  “I don’t think so. I am considerably older than your mother. Twelve years older. I had been living in that big ranch house outside Taos for a long time before kids started coming in and crashing at my place. The house was mine. We sold it to buy the camper. I gave the rest of the money to your mother when we got divorced. I figured she’d need some money to go to junior college and get started in a more ordinary life.” He stared at the road as he drove. “I gess I’m not really a hippie. I guess you’d have to call me an eccentric.”

  “And I don’t collect eccentrics,” I mumbled.

  “What was that?”

  “Just repeating something I heard last night.”

  When we arrived at the Convention Center, we were directed to the loading entrance. Once there, our truck got in line and waited for some official to go over our papers to let us in. Father showed the man the contract he had from the Mideast Airlines. The man checked it over and gave us each a badge with a blue ribbon that said EXHIBITOR. He told us that would be our pass for getting on and off the floor.

  “Don’t you ever get to go in the front door any place?” I asked.

  “The camper,” he answered.

  “Only has one door,” I said.

  “Yes, it does,” Father answered.

  When we arrived at the loading platform, Father let down the gate of the truck and hoisted himself up to place the ramp from the back of the truck to the loading platform. Ahmed had emptied his bowels all over the back of the truck.

  “I’m glad to see that,” Father said.

  “Do you think there’s a market for it in Dallas?” I asked.

  “No,” Father answered. “It means that Ahmed won’t do it on the way to our booth. I’ll let you stay with Ahmed, and I’ll come back and clean it up.”

  “Do you expect Ahmed to do it right on the exhibition floor?”

  “Of course. Ahmed always does it.”

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  “What I always do about it. I sweep it up with a broom and a shovel, and I put it over there.” He pointed to the covered wooden box in a corner of the truck bed.

  “What’s in there?”

  “Just sand right now.”

  “Soon to be flavored with …”

  “Let’s go. We’re holding up the others.”

  With Ahmed spitting and gurgling, we joined the parade of strange creatures moving toward the exhibition hall.

  There was a man who was almost seven feet tall dressed in a turban and pantaloons and carrying a sword that adventure books call a scimitar. He headed toward the Air India Booth. There was a bearded midget dressed in short green pants; yes, a leprechaun. He went to the Irish Tourist Bureau. Three men in black tights lined up under a paper dragon that said Cathay Airways and snaked around the whole exhibition floor. There were men dressed as chefs who worked behind ovens advertising, “A Gourmet’s Tour of Italy Only $1299, New York Departure.” There were Indians: Peruvians, Mexicans, Zuni; Wagons: Conestoga, horse-drawn, stage coach; Towers: of London, the Eiffel, water; Carts: donkey and golf. Besides the three-man dragon weaving in and out, there was a young girl in pigtails and pink ribbons, an almost-bra and very short pants who skated around the floor all day. She carried a sign that said: “Venice, California, is where it’s really at.”

  “I don’t think her grammar is correct,” I said to Father.

  He smiled after her as she skated past. “Let’s just hope they notice the sign at all,” he said.

  “I wonder if the Mongolians will have an idiot in their booth?” I asked. Father gave me a look that told me not to repeat that remark.

  The representatives from Mideast Airlines were waiting for us at their booth. Now, there was swarthy, all right. They looked glad to see us. I guess that if you had just a plain booth, you felt pretty left out. They introduced themselves. One of them h
ad two gold teeth right in front. He produced a harness and saddle that were gorgeous. Part of the gear was a saddlebag made like a small Oriental rug. That rigging made even Ahmed look not-too-bad. Father saddled him up, admired him at length and then left to clean up the truck. After he left, one of the men handed me a burnoose and an Arabian headdress. “Please to put on,” he said. “We have also one for daddy. More authentic.”

  “What’s the matter? Haven’t you ever seen a blue-eyed Arab before?”

  “Is jacket,” he said, pointing to the Fortnum crest over my breast pocket. “Is very British, no?”

  “Very British,” I said.

  Father returned soon enough. We sat on an Oriental rug or walked around, never far from the booth. People came and picked up brochures about the airlines and asked questions about rates and routes and supersavers and safety. I made Father bring me lunch because I didn’t want to leave and miss Sabrina. She had not shown up all morning, and I did not intend to miss her when she did. I had a thing or two I wanted to show her, which was me in my striped burnoose. When Father arrived with my Big Mac, I pointed to my sandwich and said to the man from Mideast Airlines, “Very American. But the Japanese are going to miniaturize it and market it as the Mini-Mac. They’re developing the transistors for it now.”

  He laughed, his gold teeth flashing, as in your basic adventure story.

  My father laughed, too, and said to one of the swarthies, “It’s a very clever boy I have.” He looked at me with what is called approval.

  Sabrina appeared around two. Lilly was carrying a shopping bag that said, “Go First Class. The First Class Travel Agency of Rahway, New Jersey.”

  “Well,” I said to Sabrina, as nonchalant as you please, “What’s new?”

  “How do you pronounce ts in Pinyin?” she asked.

  “What is Pinyin?”

  “The new Chinese spelling. Obviously, if you don’t know what Piny in is, you don’t know how to pronounce ts in it.”

  “I would say that’s obvious, yes.”

  “Why do you want to know how to pronounce it?”

  “Because of this.” She pulled a newspaper clipping out of her pocket. There was a picture of a tall girl and a man standing on a stool with a tape-measure. The caption said that the girl, who was sixteen years old, was seven feet, ten and a half inches tall, the world’s tallest woman. Her name was Tseng Chin-uen.

  “That’s Piny in all right,” I said. “What do you think of me?” I asked, letting my hand sweep down the length of my burnoose.

  “Eccentric,” she said. “Very.”

  “Not around here, it isn’t. Haven’t you seen what’s going on?”

  “We just arrived. Actually, not just. We stopped by El Al, the Israeli Airlines. They were serving chicken soup for lunch.”

  “How was it? Was it gourmet?”

  “It was authentic.”

  “But was it gourmet?”

  “If chicken soup is gourmet, it’s not authentic. Did you know that a recent study showed that chicken soup is good for the common cold?”

  “Even if you’re not Jewish?”

  “Even if you don’t have a cold.”

  “Do you have a banquet again tonight?” I asked.

  “As a matter of fact we do.”

  “Father and I have to stay here until nine, when the displays close up. Will your banquet be over by then?”

  “No, it will be in its middle,” Sabrina said. “Ahmed looks just grand. How can you not like a camel that looks like that?”

  “Borrowed finery,” I said. “Will you have a banquet tomorrow night, too?”

  “Yes. Big commercial conventions have a lot of banquets. Tomorrow night we’ve accepted an invitation to be the guests of the Spanish National Tourist Bureau. The Russian National Tourist Bureau is also having a banquet the same night, but everyone advised us that the food would be awful and the slide presentation would be all tombs and space shots. Spain, they say, is much sunnier.”

  “By the way, where is your mother’s travel agency?”

  “Lilly’s travel agency?”

  “Lilly, your mother.”

  Sabrina glanced over at her mother standing at the other end of the booth talking to Father.

  “Rahway,” she said, “Rahway, New Jersey.”

  “Is it First Glass?”

  “Of course it’s first class. Small, but first class. We always say that in Rahway to go first class, don’t go First Class, go Lilly.”

  “What’s the name of her place?”

  She paused, sucked in her breath, and said, “Tours de Lilly.”

  “Will you come to the Exhibition Hall tomorrow?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Mother wants me to go to some of the meetings with her. There are always so many meetings at a convention. So much to learn. All of our convention expenses are tax deductible, you know.”

  “Come by at noon tomorrow. I’ll have a Big Mac waiting for you.”

  “Let me ask Mother.”

  Sabrina went over to her mother and pulled her away from Father. They conferred in whispers. Once or twice Sabrina held her hand to the side of her mouth so that I couldn’t see her lips move. I saw Lilly looking over at me from time to time and nodding. Their conference seemed to me to take a long, long time. They seemed more like Watergate co-conspirators than like a daughter asking her mother for permission to have a Big Mac.

  “Tomorrow, twelve-thirty,” Sabrina said. Then she and her mother turned to leave. Lilly waved her hand, letting her fingers dance in the air.

  I sat with two hamburgers, two fries and two shakes on my lap until the hamburgers were hard, the fries looked like they were coated with Vaseline, and the shakes looked like detergent foam after a batch of very dirty dishes. My feelings went from patience when she was fifteen minutes late, to impatience at thirty, to anger at an hour, to worry as suppertime came and went, and she still didn’t show up.

  Father said that there could be a hundred reasons why they didn’t come. He gave me some change and told me to try calling them at their hotel. I tried once, then twice and returned to our booth each time. I thought that my best chance of finding them in their room would be just before suppertime when they were getting dressed for their banquet. Since it is not easy to use a phone in a loose burnoose and turban, I left them in the booth and walked outside the display area to where the telephones were, for I was determined not to leave until I got them. I kept trying, and finally Lilly answered the phone. “Oh, Maxwell,” she said, “Sabrina was just asking me how we could get in touch with you. She’s been so worried. Let me put her on.”

  I heard mumblings as the two of them had a conference while a hand was held over the telephone’s mouthpiece. At last Sabrina was on the phone. She lost no time in apologizing. “Oh, Maximilian,” she said, “I’m so sorry that we couldn’t make it at twelve-thirty, but Mother had a very important business deal to discuss, and the man asked her to lunch, and he included me, and Mother felt it would look bad if I didn’t go with her because she had rather insisted that he include me. She wanted me with her as sort of a chaperone, if you know what I mean. Have you ever had to chaperone your father?”

  “Have I ever had to what?”

  “You know, be there so that someone won’t lay some heavy passes on your parent.”

  “No, I have never chaperoned my father, and—truth be told—I’ve never chaperoned my mother either.”

  “Maybe your mother, being more of a house-wife, doesn’t meet as many men as Lilly does being at conventions.”

  “My mother works. Not right now, of course, she’s on her honeymoon, but she worked up until the wedding.”

  “Your mother got remarried?”

  “Yes. She married F. Hugo Malatesta the First.”

  “The First? Are there others?”

  “Two and Three.”

  “If he’s a clone, that interests me.”

  “He’s not a clone. He’s a very rich man with a son who is the second F. Hugo, an
d a grandson, F. Hugo, who’s the third.”

  “Well, congratulations,” Sabrina said.

  “For what?”

  “For having a First stepfather.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Whatever you want it to mean.”

  “Will you be at the exhibition hall tomorrow?”

  “I have to check with Lilly.”

  “I think you ought to come. These people pay hundreds and hundreds of dollars rent to put on displays for your pleasure and education. I’ll introduce you to the dwarf who is playing a leprechaun.”

  “Okay, we’ll be there. But don’t count on me for lunch.”

  “The exhibits come down at two.”

  “See you tomorrow,” she said.

  I hung up and made my way back to the door into the exhibition floor, and the guard stopped me. I had left my badge pinned on my burnoose, and he would not allow me back in without it. I protested. I told him who I was, and he would not give in. I told him that I knew the names of the men at Mideast Airlines, that I knew the name of the camel-keeper and the name of the camel, but he would not give in.

  Then I saw Maurice, one of the men in black tights who wore the dragon costume for Cathay Airlines. He was on his way out of the exhibit hall for a smoke. I asked him to please ask Father to bring me my burnoose with my badge. He said he would. Maurice tucked his cigarettes in his jersey sleeve and headed back inside the exhibition hall. Maurice was nice, but he had the look of someone who is doing something he doesn’t want to do and who has been doing it a long time. The ninth-grade English teacher at Fortnum had more of that look than anyone else I’ve ever met. Maurice was a dancer by profession, and he said that he does gigs at conventions to earn his bread. A gig is a job, and he said he did gigs for the bread.

  I had also talked to the chicken soup lady at El Al. Her name was Arabella Simpson. She told me that she was a pastry chef but what with everyone in the world worried about cholesterol, she had to give up on pastries and go into chicken soup. Jake Stone, the man who built the model of the Eiffel Tower, had started out his life as a sculptor. And Brumba, the African Safaritours man, was an actor who also did gigs at conventions to earn his daily bread. Only Scotty Devlin, the leprechaun, always worked conventions or side shows.