The Secret of Rover

by Rachel Wildavsky

  It was after one o’clock in the afternoon, and they were desperate.

  It had been almost eleven a.m. when they emerged from the apple truck in Chester’s yard. They had been wandering ever since, but although they had exhausted themselves, they had still not found Route 24.

  Worse still, they were attracting attention. After almost an hour of trying, they had succeeded in making their way out of the neighborhood where they had landed and into Hawthorne’s small downtown, where its stores and banks and gas stations were clustered. Since then, however, things had gone badly. Maddeningly, though they tried to avoid it, they kept returning to the same spots over and over again.

  They’d find themselves at a crossroads and randomly pick one of their two choices. When that failed, they’d have to retrace their steps to try the other. Sometimes they’d try roads that looked like they went in new directions, only to find that they had doubled back to someplace they’d already been.

  This had one important advantage: There were three public water fountains that they passed over and over again, and from which they drank every time. Their endlessly circular route was terribly dangerous, though. Hawthorne wasn’t a big town and at some point someone was bound to notice two unfamiliar kids in dirty clothes walking the same streets over and over again like homeless people.

  But they were loath to ask how to get to a road that everybody local was sure to know. As David said, they might as well wear sandwich boards reading strangers.

  Eventually, the inevitable happened. They crossed the street in front of Hawthorne’s biggest grocery store, where they’d already been three or four times. A car stopped to let them pass, and as it did so a head craned out the window to peer at them. Katie turned to look and her eyes made contact with the driver’s. With a chill of fear, she recognized a face she had already seen at least twice that morning.

  Katie looked casually away, being careful not to let her recognition register on her face. Under her breath she spoke urgently to her brother. “She’s noticed us. No”—Katie seized David’s hand to stop him from turning his head—“don’t look. But that woman in the car has noticed us. David, what are we going to do?”

  They arrived at the other side of the street and David turned resolutely toward the left, determined to behave as if he had a direction and a purpose. Behind them the intersection was clear. There was no traffic to block her way, but the woman in the car did not pass through it. She hung there with her motor idling. She was watching them.

  What David did then was simply brilliant: brilliantly conceived and brilliantly executed. A few yards away a boy stood expectantly on the corner, wearing a baseball uniform and carrying a glove. He looked as if he were waiting to be picked up for practice, and he looked about eight.

  He was not too young to talk to, but just young enough to be a little bit cowed by a boy and girl of twelve. He was perfect.

  “Dude, how’re you doing?” David sang out to the boy and strode up to him as easily as if he’d known him all his life. He held up his hand for a high five.

  Katie saw the child’s expression flicker uncertainly between do-I-know-you and happy-to-see-you. Then shyly—amazingly—the boy raised his arm and allowed David to slap his hand.

  “Who’re you playing?” David asked. He rested his hands on his knees and bent down slightly so his face was level with the younger boy’s.

  “Tigers,” came the soft reply.

  Behind them, the car that had been hovering moved on, apparently satisfied. Katie resumed breathing.

  “Well,” David was continuing, “go kill ’em. Listen, can you tell us how to get to Route 24? Which way do we walk from here?”

  “Sure,” said the boy, with evident relief. So that was what these unknown kids wanted. He began to point. “See that—”

  “Naw,” said David gently, “don’t point it. Just tell us. Which way?” If anybody was looking, he didn’t want to be seen getting directions.

  Fortunately, what the kid had to tell them wasn’t complicated and they repeated it until they had it.

  A car was slowing at the curb; stopping. His ride!

  “How far?” asked David, already starting to move off.

  The boy shrugged. “Couple miles, I guess,” he said, and reached for the car door.

  “Who was that?” The piercing notes of another child’s voice floated into the street as the car door opened. But David and Katie had already turned the corner and were gone.

  The boy had sent them in the right direction, but he had been totally wrong about how far they had to go. It took them an hour and a half to reach Route 24. By the time they got there, it was midafternoon and blazing hot.

  “That kid was right on the money,” said David cheerfully as they emerged at long last at a fast-moving road split by a double-yellow line.

  He was feeling good, thought Katie, because his idea had worked. She, on the other hand, was tired, sweaty, and once again, hungry. “He underestimated the distance just a little,” she retorted.

  “Chill, Katie. We’re there. It took longer than we thought—OK. But we made it.”

  “We didn’t ‘make it.’ We aren’t ‘there.’ ‘There’ is Melville. This is Route 24. We’re still a long way from Melville—we don’t even know how far away we are. David, I’m worried about the rest of our trip. I don’t see how we’re supposed to keep going.”

  “Because . . . ?”

  “It must be ninety degrees, David!”

  “We’ll rest for a while, and walk at night.”

  “Without food?”

  Wordlessly, he reached into his pocket and handed her his last box of crackers

  “David, be reasonable!”

  “We’ll steal more food—or buy it.” Between the ten dollars from Sanders and the driver’s four, he was feeling rich.

  “What if it’s thirty miles? What if it’s fifty?”

  With this Katie hit a nerve, and she knew it. It could be either, or it could be twelve or it could be seventy. Their map had a key and, technically, they knew how to use it. But it was very hard to translate a tiny curved line on a piece of battered paper into actual distance, and they were both aware that a small error in doing so could mean many miles of hot pavement.

  As her brother hesitated, Katie pressed her advantage. She was in a miserable mood and she wanted him to feel as discouraged as she did. “How many miles can we walk in a day?” she demanded. “Ten? Fifteen? We have no idea. It’s not going to work, David.”

  “I’d like to point out that you picked this route.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “‘We can walk to Melville from 91!’” he mimicked cruelly.

  In a rage, Katie swung out her arm and hit him. He grabbed her wrist with one hand and her hair with the other. She opened her mouth to shout.

  But it was one thing to fight at home in their own house, with their parents standing by to break it up. It was another to fight by the side of the road in a strange place, where all they had was each other. At the same moment both of them seemed to realize how stupid they were being, and just as quickly as their fight had begun it stopped.

  For an instant Katie felt tears welling in her eyes. She really, really missed her mom and dad.

  “So what do you have in mind?” asked David, subdued.

  “Another truck,” said Katie.

  The thought was loathsome. “No,” he replied. “No more trucks.”

  She didn’t argue. She was suddenly exhausted. She didn’t want another truck either. It was great how far you could go when you had one, but the effort and the fear—she couldn’t go through that one more time.

  She needed to rest. Turning away from her brother, Katie waded into the tall grass at the side of the road where she would not be seen. Finding a small hollow, she dropped to the ground. “Let’s not do anything right now,” she said through the grassy screen around her.

  And they didn’t. The sun passed slowly across the sky and the cars passed swiftly alon
g the road. David watched the traffic whiz by. Katie watched the insects pursue their busy lives in the miniature world before her. There were scores of them, and they had homes, comrades, and purposes. For at least an hour as she and her brother sat, she almost envied them.

  Katie’s mind must have wandered far afield, because it returned with a start. Her brother had whistled.

  He hadn’t whistled for her, either. If he’d wanted to get her attention, a low hoot would have worked, but he’d made a sound that was loud and long and shrill. She peeked through the tall blades of grass. He was standing right by the edge of the road and frantically hailing an approaching car.

  What on earth . . . ?

  The car slowed and with a spray of gravel it braked to a stop just a few feet in front of David. It was a taxi.

  They had fourteen dollars, and it appeared that David had just hailed a cab to take them to Melville. But unless she wanted to argue with him in front of the driver, it was not possible to do anything but play along.

  Quickly Katie scrambled up and dusted off her shorts. David was already talking to the driver. She reached his side just in time to hear him offer a price.

  “Ten dollars,” said David. Ah, so he was saving some money to buy food.

  “Sorry, kid,” replied the driver. “You’re going to need three, four times that much. Cost you thirty or forty dollars to get to Melville from here.”

  David’s face fell. “Oh,” he said awkwardly.

  “Tell you what, though,” said the driver, eyeing them. “I can get you ten dollars closer than where you are. Hop in.”

  Any misgivings they might have had about spending so much of their money to cover only part of their distance vanished as soon as they entered the air-conditioned taxi. The cab was the lap of luxury. They were sitting on upholstered seats and except for their brief stop in the police station, it had been forever since they’d sat on anything but metal or concrete or dirt. And then, to be able to look out the windows and see the landscape fly by as they were whisked along at sixty miles per hour . . .

  It was only a regular taxi, but it felt like a rolling hotel as it dipped and swerved through the hilly country. Both of them knew they mustn’t let their faces betray their awe. In the rearview mirror the driver was peering at them. He was a burly man with thinning hair and a ruddy, fleshy face, and his small, sharp eyes were unmistakably curious. David’s guard began to rise.

  “Hey,” the man asked. “Where you kids from?”

  Both of them saw instantly that they should have worked out a story. Now, having no choice, David thought on his feet. “Hawthorne,” he said artlessly.

  “Whatcha doin’ in Melville?”

  “Friend of ours is there.”

  “Maybe I know him. What’s his name?”

  “Alex.” David’s failure to supply a last name hung conspicuously in the silent car, but he did not want to say any more. The children had no idea whether the people in Melville knew about their uncle Alex or what they thought of him if they did. Now was not the time to find out.

  “You were plannin’ to walk that far?” asked the driver after a pause.

  “Mom and Dad told us to walk, but we can ride. It’s my money.”

  “They told you to walk?”

  Man. That had been a mistake. He had gotten nervous, that was all. He had wanted to mention parents. He hadn’t wanted the driver to suspect that they were on their own. But one little mistake like that—one small slip of the tongue—could sink them.

  Alarmed, David did not reply. He turned his face out the window and they rode in silence. But Katie could see that in his rearview mirror their driver continued to scrutinize them.

  David was so busy reproaching himself for his stupidity—Mom and Dad told us to walk!—that he didn’t even notice how the taxi was eating up the miles. Minute after minute passed in agonized silence and still they flew up and down the winding hills of Route 24.

  Katie realized this first, and with a start. “Where are we?” she asked abruptly, snapping out of her anxious daze. “How far have we gone?” She seized the back of the driver’s seat and pulled herself forward, searching for the meter that would tell them how many dollars’ worth they had traveled.

  The mileage counter read 000 and their fare showed as $000.00. The meter was turned off.

  “We only have ten dollars!” she cried, frightened. Where was he taking them?

  “I know that,” said the driver calmly. “Don’t worry. I can take you all the way there, and it won’t cost you more ’n ten. I’m going to Melville anyways, see? Picking up an old lady there, called for a ride. Easier to take you all the way there than to stop an’ put you out.”

  David and Katie shared a quick, uneasy glance.

  “Are you sure?” Katie asked.

  “Thanks,” added David stiffly, his mind frantically working. All the way to Melville for ten dollars! They’d be there! But something about this did not feel right. Maybe they were being kidnapped.

  Apparently not. Moments later they passed a road sign reading melville: 23 miles. And a little while after that came a sign advertising a Melville realtor, then one for a Melville diner, and then they were there. They were pulling into town. They had arrived.

  It was clear at a glance that this was an even tinier place than Hawthorne and that Route 24 was the road about which they’d been told, the one that went right through it. Their driver did not ask them where they wanted to get out. Instead, he rolled straight into the center of town. Then he pulled to a stop by what looked like the town square, set his brake, cut his motor, and shifted his bulky frame completely around in his seat to look both of them straight in the eyes.

  David had the money ready. “Thank—”

  “Now, you listen here,” said the driver, cutting him off. “You just listen to me.”

  David and Katie sat back, stunned.

  “That was a load of baloney you fed me, back there on the road. I know when I’m bein’ lied to. You two are a mess. Neither of you’s seen any mom or dad for a week.”

  “That’s not—”

  “Don’t interrupt me.”

  David fell silent.

  “Sum’pm’s going on with you two—sum’pm’s wrong. I don’t know what it is, but I don’t like it. Now. You want to tell me the truth, or what?”

  Neither of them said a word. They simply stared, terrified. The cabbie’s eyes were narrow and penetrating. A long silence hung in the car.

  The driver broke it. He sighed and turned back around to gaze once more out the windshield. “I ought to turn you in,” he said heavily. “I really ought to.”

  Katie and David stared at the back of his head and the rolls of flesh on his neck. Should they make a run for it? Katie’s mind frantically scrolled. She glanced out the window. The wide-open square, the little town—they’d never make it.

  “Tell you what I’m going to do,” said the driver, breaking into their thoughts. Slowly, his enormous hand reached for his glove compartment. A spasm of terror seized both children. They had come so far. Could it really end here, on the last leg of their long journey?

  But it did not end. Instead, the man opened the hatch and lifted out a stack of small printed cards fastened with a rubber band. With his thick, fleshy fingers he extracted one and held it out to David.

  “This here’s my card—you take it,” he ordered. After a slight hesitation David did. The driver lifted a fat finger and shook it at them. “If you need help with anything,” he said, “if anything happens to you that you don’t like—you call me. My name’s Mike; you can see it right there.

  “I’m not gonna get you in any trouble. I don’t want to know what you did. You need any help at all, you call me. Understand?”

  David, dumbfounded, said nothing.

  “Thank you,” replied Katie in a low voice. Her heart was still drumming in her chest.

  “I got kids myself,” the driver continued. “Course they’re all grown now, but once a parent, always a
parent. And I don’t like to see people your age in trouble. So you put that card in your pocket. No”—David had returned to his senses and was holding out his cash—“I’m not gonna take your money. I got a feeling you might need it.”

  “Really, it’s—”

  “Put it away. Now, anything else you want to say to me? No? Then out of the car.”

  “Thank you. Thank you very much, Mike,” said David, and he scrambled for the handle and tumbled out the door. Katie was right behind him. The taxi pulled forward, swiveled backward, and in a spray of gravel and a cloud of fumes pivoted around to head back up Route 24, the same way they’d come.

  David and Katie stood blinking, watching it go.

  “He’s going back toward Hawthorne,” said David, bewildered.

  “So much for the old lady in Melville,” said Katie.

  Worried and depressed, they wandered the streets of Melville.

  They knew they should be happy. They had made it, after all. It was just after four o’clock and they had arrived—in air-conditioned comfort, for free—at a place from which they really could walk to their uncle’s house.

  So they should be happy, but they were not. They could not decide whether to strike out to find their uncle, or try to find food instead.

  After three days without proper meals, their need for food had finally become urgent. For the first time since they had left home, they had nothing to eat. Apart from their map and their flashlights, their pockets were empty.

  They had fourteen dollars, but since that business with Mike they were afraid to use their money even to satisfy their hunger. Mike had noticed they were in trouble but had let them go. A cashier or a waitress might not.

  “You know what’s happening,” said Katie after they had strolled around for nearly an hour, kicking this matter to and fro in half whispers. “Because we can’t decide what to do, we’re getting the worst of both worlds. We’re not getting anything to eat and we’re making ourselves conspicuous anyway. We need a plan, David!”