Outside Looking In

by James Lincoln Collier

“Did you hear something?” J. P. said.

  I realized I couldn’t keep Ooma from going back to them, if she really wanted to. It wasn’t right; I was just being selfish. I decided that as soon as Gussie and J. P. left I’d let her go. But I didn’t want her giving me away. I rolled over on top of her. “Listen to me, Ooma,” I whispered in her ear. “If you’ll be quiet I’ll let you go in a minute.” She went on squirming, and I knew she was going to try to bite my hand. “Please, Ooma, shut up for a minute,” I whispered. “I promise I’ll let you go, and you can go back to J. P. and Gussie.”

  She kicked me. Just then I heard a voice outside say, “Excuse me, folks.” The rear doors to the truck slammed shut. Suddenly we were in the dark. I heard the sound of a bolt sliding and the snap of a lock. Ooma bit me, and I jerked my hand away from her mouth. “Damn you,” I said.

  “Help,” she shouted. The driver’s door opened and closed, and the motor started. I grabbed up the corner of a rug and pulled it over Ooma’s head. “Help,” she shouted. “I’m in here.” But her voice was pretty much muffled under the rug. The truck began to move. I heard the gears shift, and I knew we were picking up speed down the driveway. We stopped at the main street. Then came the sound of shifting again, and I knew we were headed along the main street of Janesboro. I had no idea where we were going, but it was away from J. P.

  I let Ooma up from under the rug. “Damn you, Fergy,” she shouted.

  I was afraid the driver would hear her. “Listen, calm down a minute.”

  “I’m not going to calm down, you pepperhead.”

  “If you don’t calm down, I’m going to put you under the rug again.”

  She didn’t say anything, but sat there in the dark breathing hard. “Look,” I said, “if you really want to go back to J. P. and Gussie, I’ll let you.”

  “They were right there. It’s too late now.”

  “No, it isn’t, I said. “This truck’ll stop somewhere soon to make its next delivery. We’ll get off there, and I’ll take you to a police station and they’ll find the motor home and tell J. P. where you are.”

  “I don’t believe you. How will they find it?”

  “They’ll radio around to the other cops. Some cop is bound to know where they are. We never had any shortage of cops hanging around us, did we?”

  She didn’t say anything. Then she said, “You better promise.”

  “I promise,” I said. I meant it, too. There wasn’t any point in trying to drag her along with me if she was going to fight me the whole time. I knew I ought to, for her own good, but it wouldn’t work.

  “You better not forget,” she said. She was still sore at me, but she quieted down and after a little while she lay down and went to sleep. I sat there on the rolls of rugs in the dark, thinking. I had no idea where the truck was going. It could be taking us west instead of east, and I’d have to start out all over again. The idea of that made me feel pretty gloomy. It had taken us an awful lot of trouble just to come as far as we had. But maybe once I left Ooma off, things might go smoother.

  So we went on and on. I began to wonder how long we’d been going, and what time it was, and suddenly I remembered that I still had that watch Ooma had stolen from the farmer in my pocket. I got a shock of guilt: I should have left it in the truck, regardless of Ooma’s feelings. But suddenly seeing J. P. in that shopping mall had made me forget all about it. I took it out of my pocket and tried to see it in the dark. Even though I felt guilty about it, it was nice to have a watch. I couldn’t see a thing, so I put it back in my pocket. We’d be stopping pretty soon, I figured. I was beginning to feel sleepy, too. We’d had an awful lot of excitement recently. I lay down on the rolls of carpet and fell asleep.

  After a while I woke up. I didn’t have any idea how long I’d been asleep. Ooma was moving around, like she was beginning to wake up, too. It was sort of cold in there now, and I shivered. Why would it be cold? It was May, and we were still out in Arkansas where it was usually hot that time of year. Was it raining? I listened, but I didn’t hear the sound of rain.

  Suddenly I realized that it must be night. The temperature dropped a lot at night in that part of the country. We’d slept a lot longer than I’d thought. It would have to be eight, nine o’clock for the temperature to have gone down that much. That kind of worried me. We’d been traveling for four or five hours. A truck could cover an awful lot of mileage in that time. What if we were headed out for California or up to Oregon or Washington?

  I heard Ooma moving around. Suddenly she said, “Fergy?” pretty scared.

  “I’m right here,” I said. I felt for her, so she could take my hand.

  “Where are we?”

  “In a truck, remember?”

  “Oh,” she said. “I’m hungry.”

  “The truck’ll probably stop pretty soon.” But I wasn’t sure of that anymore. What if it was a long distance truck that would travel all night? But I didn’t want to say anything like that to Ooma. “Let’s go back to sleep,” I said. I unrolled a piece of carpet, and we snuggled down under it. The carpet was kind of stiff for a blanket, but it was pretty cozy and warm under it. After a minute, I heard Ooma breathing regularly. I wasn’t sleepy myself, and so I lay there worrying and waiting for the truck to stop. It didn’t. It just went on and on, and after a while I realized that we must be on some sort of a superhighway, because we didn’t ever stop for anything: If we’d been on an ordinary road, there’d have been red lights and stop signs and intersections. Wherever we were going, we’d come a long way from Janesboro. Finally I went to sleep.

  I woke up with a bang in my ears and sunlight pouring into the back of the truck. Ooma woke up at the same time. We both sat up in a hurry, blinking. In the square of daylight at the back of the truck, a young guy with a beard was staring in at us. “What the hell is this?” he said.

  We got up and crawled over the rolls of rugs to the rear of the truck. The driver went on staring in at us. “How many of you are there?” he said.

  We went on crawling. “Just us,” I said.

  Ooma yawned. “I’m hungry,” she said.

  “How’d you get in there?”

  We climbed over the carpet and dropped onto the ground. It was broad daylight. As close as I could figure, we’d traveled fifteen, sixteen hours. “Thanks for the lift,” I said.

  The driver grabbed my arm. “Hold it a sec, brother. You’re not going anywhere just yet.”

  “We didn’t steal anything,” I said. I remembered the watch and blushed a little. “We got in there by mistake, and you locked us in.”

  He was pretty suspicious. “Where’d you get in?”

  “Janesboro,” I said. “When you were parked behind the Sears.” I looked around. We were parked behind an old red-brick factory with a sign along the top saying ACME CARPET COMPANY. I could see other factories nearby, and in the distance some big apartment buildings. We were in some kind of big city. “What city is this?’’

  “Never mind that,” the driver said. “I want to know what you were doing in there.”

  I was beginning to feel pretty nervous. All along, I’d figured we’d climb out of the truck and off we’d go, but this guy sounded like he was about to call the cops. I didn’t want to tell him we were running away. “We just needed a ride, is all.”

  “Where were you running away from?”

  “We’re not running away,” I said. “We were visiting my aunt, and—”

  “Don’t give me your aunt,” he said. “I’ve been on the road too long. Where’d you come from? What’s your hometown?”

  “We don’t have any home,” I said.

  “Yes, we do,” Ooma said. “We have a motor home that’s almost new, with a TV and a stove and closets and everything.”

  The guy gave me a look. “That right?”

  “Yes,” I said. “We weren’t trying to steal anything.”

  He looked at us for a little while. Then he let go of my arm and said, “Okay, I guess you couldn’t have swiped a
two-hundred-pound roll of carpet. But, if you want my advice, you better go on home, You’re too young to be drifting around the country like this. You could get hurt. There are a lot of bad dudes out there who’d take advantage of kids like you. If it was me, I’d go on home. I don’t know what your folks did to you to make you run away, but you’d be better off putting up with it for a few years longer. Like I say, there are a lot of bad dudes out there.”

  “We’re not drifting around,” I said. “We’re going to visit our grandparents. But we still don’t know where we are.”

  He nodded his head. Then he said, “Well, I hope your grandfolks live somewhere around Washington, because that’s where you are.”

  “Washington?” My heart sank. We’d gone in entirely the wrong direction. We were three thousand miles from Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Where is this, Seattle?”

  He laughed. “No, not Washington State. Washington, D.C.”

  TWELVE

  WELL, OF COURSE my promise that I’d send her back to J. P. and Gussie wasn’t any good anymore. I had to tell her that we were stuck now: The only choice we had was to try to get to Cambridge and find our grandparents. When we got there, I told her, they’d give us strawberry ice cream in ginger ale, and if she still wanted to go back to J. P. and Gussie, they’d be able to send her back because they had lots of money.

  Ooma wasn’t too happy about any of this, but she was pretty exhausted from everything that had happened and didn’t have the energy to start a fight with me. I could see that she wasn’t up to hitchhiking up to Cambridge, and I decided we would take a bus, if we had enough money. So we asked the way to the bus station. We had just about enough money for bus tickets, because Ooma could go half-fare.

  There was a little left over, so we had a big breakfast of hot dogs and Devil Dogs and Pepsi, and then we took the bus up to Boston.

  The food had put Ooma in a better spirit, and she liked the idea of zipping along in the bus up above the cars, looking at everything that went by. I knew that if she had a nap on the bus she’d be all right. But I was pretty nervous. What if our grandparents didn’t live in that big house anymore? What if they didn’t live in Cambridge? What if they were dead? There were an awful lot of things that could go wrong with my plan—that was for sure.

  We rode all morning and part of the afternoon straight up to New York. Ooma slept for a good while and woke up feeling more cheerful. I had put the watch on my wrist, and every once in a while I looked at it. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to know the time: I just liked looking at it, even though I was still kind of ashamed of myself for keeping it.

  We changed buses in New York and rode the rest of the afternoon up to Boston. When we got into the city, it was around six o’clock, just starting to get a little dark. We got off the bus in the Boston bus station. I was still scared, for what if we couldn’t find them and had no place to sleep? But I was excited, too, thinking about these people who had never seen us, and maybe we were going to be part of them. What would I say to them? I began to work up a little speech and memorize it.

  I didn’t dare spend any money on food, because we hardly had any left, but I got Ooma a soda and then went off to the phone booths to find a telephone book. I got the one for Cambridge and turned over the pages to find the name of Gordon E. Hamilton. My fingers were trembling and I felt shaky inside. It took me a while to find the name because I was nervous and passed right over it twice. But then I saw it—Gordon E. Hamilton, 11 Berkeley Street, Cambridge. I didn’t know if that was the big house that Gussie’d grown up in, but at least they were still living in Cambridge. Or he was, anyway.

  I memorized the address and got Ooma, and then we went to the information booth and found out how to take the subway nearest to Berkeley Street. We rode on the subway for a half hour, got out, and asked somebody the way. It was just a short walk, he said, around one corner, down that street, and around another corner. We followed the directions, and then we came to Berkeley Street. I looked down it, feeling funny. It was an awful nice street, with big houses and streetlights—including the same one that shone down on Gussie before I was born. I took a deep breath, grabbed Ooma’s hand, and we started down the street. It didn’t take a minute to come to their house. I knew it without checking the number, for there was a big porch along the front and lots of gardens here and there on the lawn. We stopped in front by the iron gate in the fence, and as we stood there the streetlight that used to shine in Gussie’s window suddenly came on. I figured that was a sign of good luck. “That’s the house,” I said. “Our grandparents are in there.”

  “Maybe they’ll hate us,” Ooma said.

  “No, they won’t,” I said. But how could I be sure? I took another deep breath, opened the gate, and we went up the walk and onto the porch. In the middle of the door, there was a big door knocker with a face like a lion. I knocked three times, good and loud.

  We waited. Nothing happened. We waited some more. Then the door opened. A young woman wearing a black dress and a white apron was standing there. She was too young to be our grandmother. I figured she was the maid. “Yes, can I help you?” she said.

  After rehearsing my speech for an hour, nothing would come out of my mouth. I coughed to get myself started. “Please tell Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton that their grandchildren are here.”

  The maid jerked back, and then her mouth opened wide. “Their grandchildren? I don’t think they have any grandchildren.”

  “Yes, they do,” I said. “Tell them we’re the children of Gussie and J. P. Wheeler.”

  She shut the door. We waited. Nothing happened. We waited some more. I looked at my watch so as to get some idea of how long we would wait. Then I saw one of the curtains in the window along the porch move a little, and part of a face with gray hair was there. The curtain dropped back in place. “I’m scared,” said Ooma. “Let’s go.”

  “No,” I said. “They won’t hate us.”

  The door opened partway. A man was standing there. He had gray hair and glasses and was wearing a brown sweater over a shirt and necktie. He looked at us for a minute, not saying anything. We just looked back. Then he said, “Please come in.”

  “Wipe your feet, Ooma,” I whispered.

  She was pretty scared of going into such a fancy house, and she wiped her feet carefully on the mat. Then we went into a little hall, where there were a couple of little tables, a fancy mirror, and some pictures of hound dogs chasing foxes over a fence. Our grandfather shut the door. We followed him down the hall into the living room. It was the fanciest living room I’d ever been in. There was a fireplace and big glass doors at the back looking out onto a terrace and gardens; and two sofas with red and gold cloth and ornaments carved into the back; and a couple of Oriental rugs; and little tables and chairs here and there; and on the walls, pictures of old-fashioned-looking people who I figured were our ancestors. I could smell roast beef cooking. I wondered if Ooma and I could really live in a place like this. It was too fancy. I figured I could learn to be fancy, but I wasn’t sure Ooma could: She’d want to jump on the sofas and put her feet on the tables.

  A woman with white hair in kind of a cloud around her head was sitting on one of the sofas. There was knitting on the cushion beside her and a little glass of something brown on a small table in front of her. The glass sparkled in the light. Beside the glass was a little glass bell. Ooma and I stood in the middle of the room, looking around. Our grandfather stood behind us. Our grandmother didn’t move. She didn’t say anything. She just looked at us.

  “What do you think, Margaret?” our grandfather said.

  “I don’t know what to think. I’m in a state of shock.” She picked up the sparkling glass and sipped from it.

  “Do you think the girl resembles Augusta?” he said.

  She tipped her head a little. “I think she might,” she said. “But we’re being rude, Gordon. Our guests have probably had a long trip. Please sit down, children.”

  I felt pretty funny—excited and nerv
ous, happy to be there but not sure I belonged. “We’re kind of dirty,” I said.

  “Gussie and J. P. let me be dirty,” Ooma said.

  I wished Ooma knew how to keep her mouth shut, but I didn’t say anything. Our grandmother laughed. “That’s all right. Why don’t you sit on that sofa there, so I can get a look at you? You must understand that we’re a bit surprised.” She sipped at the glass again. “Have you had your suppers?”

  “We had stuff in New York awhile ago.”

  “You have had a long trip,” she said.

  “I’m hungry as hell,” Ooma said.

  “Ooma,” I said. “I’m sorry, but she swears.”

  Our grandmother laughed. Now our grandfather sat down in a big chair and stretched his legs out in front of him in a comfortable way. “They don’t sound like criminals,” he said.

  Our grandmother picked up the little glass bell and rang it. In a minute the maid came in. “There will be two more for dinner, Sheila,” she said.

  Now our grandfather said, “You must understand we’re rather flabbergasted. Tell us all about it. To begin with, what are your names?”

  I felt sort of embarrassed. “My name’s Fergy. That’s short for Fergus. And her name’s Ooma.”

  “It means filled with sweetness and light,” Ooma said.

  Grandmother laughed again. “It’s rather pretty. Are you really filled with sweetness and light, Ooma?”

  Ooma looked confused, and I was afraid she was going to say something wrong or curse. But she just nodded and put her thumb in her mouth.

  “She’s okay,” I said, “but sometimes she gets a little wild.”

  They didn’t say anything. Then our grandfather said, “I see. Now tell me, where do you live?”

  So I told him about everything—the old commune and J. P.’s journals; and traveling around in the van and selling honey; and how I was worried about growing up dumb and wanting to go to school and be on teams and things; and stealing the motor home; and all the rest of it. All the while, our grandparents listened and nodded and here and there asked little questions to make sure they understood it all; and when I got finished they sat looking at each other.