How I Became a Writer and Oggie Learned to Drive

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  “Hey, Oggie!” I whispered. “Oggie, wake up! Want to hear what happened when Amory and Alphonse went down the slurp hole?”

  Well, that was a joke. Waking up Oggie after he’s asleep is like trying to activate an Egyptian mummy. Every time I shook him, his eyelids would flutter for a second, then seal back down again.

  “Oggie! You’ve GOT TO WAKE UP!”

  Flutter, flutter, that was all.

  Usually, it wouldn’t matter. Even if I’m upset about something, I’ll get into bed and think about other things to bring myself back to normal. But this time I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t. My mind was going about a hundred and fifty miles an hour. I was hot and cold, mad and fed up, panicked and worried, everything all at once.

  Suddenly, a door flew open in my head. The Mysterious Mole People story burst in. WHAMMO! There it was, SCREAMING to be told, and me with nobody to tell it to! I was lying on my bed going crazy until I remembered an old spiral notebook left over from fourth-grade science that was in the bottom drawer of my desk. I jumped up and got it and ran in the closet.

  This closet happens to have a light that you can turn on and see what you’re doing, even with the door closed. I turned on the light, sat down on the floor, and started to write in the notebook.

  I wrote down everything I’d made up so far about Amory and Alphonse’s adventures. I wrote about them almost getting robbed of their last dollar, and seeing the flash of black fur, and finding the open slurp hole with the footholds going down, and even some other things I hadn’t thought of before. I wrote for three hours straight. No kidding. Three hours. At the least.

  That’s what happens with writers, in case you don’t know. They get some story on the brain and they can’t help themselves. It’s got to come out or they might jump off a bridge or something.

  That night I was blam-blam-blam like a machine gun, putting The Mysterious Mole People down on the page. I was sitting in that closet with my eyes on fire, writing like a madman until my hand practically dropped off. The circulation got stopped to my feet and they turned white. I had to pound them with a soccer shoe to keep them alive.

  It was great, though. The whole time I felt great. When I was too tired to sit up, I came out, got into bed, and went to sleep with a peaceful mind. Nothing was bothering me anymore. I was the happiest I’d been in a really long time.

  My Life Goes Crazy

  ABOUT A WEEK AFTER I started writing down The Mysterious Mole People, my life began to go crazy. I mean, it already was crazy, but it got worse. The first thing that happened was, Oggie got mugged. He asked for it, though. He walked home from Mrs. Pinkerton’s by himself.

  “Why didn’t you WAIT for me?” I yelled when I found him at Mom’s, locked out, of course. “You’re supposed to WAIT for me! Are you nuts? Are you stupid?”

  I was pretty upset. Where we used to live, in Ansley Park, it was okay for him to walk around, but not here. Not with Washington Boulevard a couple of blocks away and, just across it, the rotten part of Garden Street starting up. You never knew who might be coming into our neighborhood. I mean, even I, after a whole year of living around there, had to watch out for myself.

  Mom didn’t get home from work until 5:30, so I was the one that always picked up Oggie on my way back from school or nature photography or wherever I’d been.

  Sometimes he’d be at the DaSilvas’ house, but usually he was at Mrs. Pinkerton’s Nursery, where he went after kindergarten.

  Oggie didn’t like Mrs. Pinkerton’s. Mostly younger kids who hadn’t even been in kindergarten yet went there, so he thought it was beneath him. Lately, I guess, he’d started to hate it, but he had to keep going because it was halfway between Jupiter and Saturn. All the other afterschools were too far away for me to walk to.

  That day, when I went by to pick him up, Oggie wasn’t there. He’d snuck out on Mrs. Pinkerton.

  I told her not to worry. I knew where he’d go, straight to Jupiter, because that’s what our schedule was for that day. And I was right, he was there, kind of huddled up on the front step.

  “Archie, I got ROBBED!” he screeched when he saw me. He looked pretty shaken up. His nose was bleeding and his shirt was pulled out and twisted around as if somebody had yanked him hard.

  “They stole my wallet!”

  “Who did?”

  “The Night Riders. They got all my money. Fifty-three dollars and twenty-nine cents. And my library card.”

  “Fifty-three dollars!” I couldn’t believe he had that much money in his wallet. I would have said twenty-five bucks, tops. I guess Dad must have been giving him more on the side.

  “You can get a new library card,” I said. “What’s with your nose?”

  “They pushed me,” Oggie said. He started to cry. I found a napkin in his lunch box and mopped him up. The nose wasn’t that bad. I straightened out his shirt and tucked it back in.

  “Those badheads. Why don’t they stick to their own rotten street,” I said. Secretly, I was glad it wasn’t a lot worse. I mean, a six-year-old kid carrying around fifty bucks? He could probably have got killed.

  Oggie looked at me with watery eyes. “You were wrong, Archie,” he said. “The Night Riders do their stuff in daytime, too.”

  “So, what happened?”

  “I was counting my money. They came up and made me walk down an alley. Then they grabbed my wallet and pushed me headfirst on the ground.”

  “Those creeps. Don’t worry about it, okay? Just wait for me next time. And don’t count your money in public! That was nuts!”

  Oggie nodded. He stopped crying, and we mopped up his nose again. Then he said, “Archie, can you get my wallet back?”

  I looked at him. “Are you crazy? Those guys play rough. We don’t want to mess with them.”

  “When I tell Mom, I bet she’ll call the cops.”

  I went sort of white all over when he said that.

  “No, she won’t, Oggie,” I said. “I’m sorry to tell you, she won’t, because you’re not going to tell her. You CAN’T tell her.”

  “Why not? She’d be mad?”

  “Worse than that. Dad would have to hear what happened. She’d have to tell him.”

  Mom isn’t the type that puts a block on anything. She’s an out-front person who believes in the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth no matter what, which she’s told me about a million times. You have to admire that in her. And I do admire it, honest I do, but sometimes it’s not the smartest way to handle things.

  “So what if she tells?” Oggie asked.

  “Dad will get mad. He’ll get furious that it happened while she was at work. He’ll probably tell his lawyer that she’s unfit to take care of us. Then she’ll have to fight back and tell her lawyer about Cyndi living with him. They’ll end up in court and we’ll be in a mess, you know what I mean?”

  Oggie knew. We’d been in court like that a couple of times after Dad moved out. Oggie hates it in court. He has the yeeks the whole time.

  “Listen, the best thing is not to tell,” I said. “I mean, you’re okay, right? You’ll live. If Mrs. Pinkerton says anything, I’ll explain to Mom it was no big deal. You were just around the corner waiting for me.”

  “But what about my wallet!” Oggie screeched. “What about ALL MY MONEY!”

  His face started to pucker up again. I knew I had to say something fast. Mom was going to be home in about five minutes. One look at him like this and we’d be cooked.

  “Shut off the sprinklers. I’ll get your wallet.”

  “You will?” He was pretty surprised.

  “I will if you don’t tell Mom.”

  “Do you promise you’ll get it back?”

  “I promise.”

  “Okay,” Oggie said, kind of breathless. Or maybe I was breathless, it was hard to tell. This was the Night Riders we were talking about, not some Little League operation.

  “How will you get it?” Oggie asked after a minute.

  “I don’t know.”<
br />
  “They might beat you up.”

  “They might.”

  “One guy has a knife,” Oggie whispered. “It was stuck in his belt.”

  “So? I’ll get one, too,” I said. I wanted to let him know I wasn’t kidding around.

  Oggie stared at me and I stared back at him as if we couldn’t believe we were having this conversation.

  Then Mom came.

  Everything had happened so fast, I hadn’t even had time to get out my key and let us in the door. Oggie and I stood on the doorstep and watched her drive up in the old heap. It’s a 1990 Plymouth four-door, really that she bought to get to work, but she calls it the old heap. There’s a bash in the back end from where somebody rammed her at a red light. She didn’t care if the trunk opened or not, so she used the insurance money to get some drapes for the apartment.

  Mom parked and got out of the car real slow. You could tell she was dragging from her day at work. She came through the chain fence, looked up at us, and stopped dead.

  “What’s wrong?” she cried out. “Archie, what’s happened? Why are you standing out here?”

  “Hi, Mom, nothing’s wrong!” I called back. “We just got home, that’s why we’re here.”

  “We’re waiting for you, that’s all,” Oggie called.

  “Oh, thank God!” Mom cried out. “I was sure something terrible must have happened.”

  She ran up the steps and hugged Oggie and put her hand on my shoulder.

  “James Archer Jones, are you sure nothing’s wrong?” she asked, looking into my eyes.

  “Not a thing,” I lied. “What would be wrong?”

  She was relieved, I could see it. I could feel her lift up, as if a weight was thrown off her. She even laughed.

  “I didn’t used to be such a worrier, did I?” she asked me. “I must be getting a thin skin!” She took out her key to let us in.

  She was still laughing in the downstairs hall and when we went upstairs to the apartment. I was happy, too. It might seem bad to some people to tell a lie like that, but I knew I’d made the right decision. We had enough going on in our family already without everyone being set up to get even madder at each other than they already were.

  The Hold-Up

  FOR THE NEXT WEEK, every free minute there was, I tried to think of some plan for getting Oggie’s money back. The money was the least of it, too. I had to find that red leather wallet that Dad gave him. Oggie was in bad shape without it. He kept his promise and didn’t tell Mom, but as the week went on, I could see he was hurting. He was like a ship with a leak, slowly going down.

  “Where is it? When are you going to get it?” he’d ask me when no one was around.

  “Keep a lid on. It takes a while to arrange these things,” I’d tell him.

  I didn’t want to go up against the Night Riders for anything. I kept praying the wallet would turn up in a trash bin on the street, or that somebody might find it empty somewhere and give it back. It shows how desperate I was for ideas.

  In the middle of all this, Monday night rolled around on Saturn, and Cyndi had one of her little fits. That’s what she called them, “one of my little fits.” She sent me down to Wong’s Market to get her cigarettes.

  Mom made Dad quit smoking a long time ago. Dad kept telling Cyndi to quit, too, which she was trying to do. But every week or so these fits would come on and she’d have to have a cigarette. She’d call in an order when Dad wasn’t there and tell me to go pick it up in a brown paper bag.

  It’s against the law for a kid to buy cigarettes, but Cyndi had it fixed with Mr. Wong, the store owner, that I wasn’t actually buying them. She’d pay for them later. I was just the dumb delivery kid who didn’t even know what I was delivering, supposedly.

  “Archie, honeybun? There’s this teeny, tiny little package waiting down at Wong’s that I most desperately, desperately, desperately need. Will you be an angel-pie and get it for me? It’s our deep, deep dark secret. Don’t tell anyone, now! Off you go, sweetie. Watch out crossing the street!”

  The way Cyndi talked made you feel as if someone was pouring glue on your brain. You’d end up staring at her mouth and waiting for it to stop moving.

  It was about 9:30 P.M. when I got to the food store. The minute I walked in, I knew something was wrong. A bunch of Night Riders was in there in their eagle-snake jackets. They didn’t have their usual act going, though. They were huddled together, staring over at Mr. Wong, who was standing behind the cash register with his hands kind of frozen down at his sides.

  The second I walked through the door, everyone wheeled around and looked at me. That’s when I saw the guy in the Blue Hawks cap. He was standing behind Mr. Wong, pointing a big gray gun at his ribs.

  “Hi, kid. Just stop where you are,” the guy said in the most ordinary voice you can imagine. He even sounded polite.

  I stopped dead. The door swung closed in back of me with a thud. Everything went silent.

  The Night Riders were holed up in the bread aisle. About five of them were there. You could see this had nothing to do with them. They didn’t dare move an inch. After they checked me out, they put their eyes back on the hold-up man as if he was God Almighty himself, which I guess he kind of was right at that moment.

  “Now you can open up,” the guy said to Mr. Wong. He meant the cash register.

  Mr. Wong raised his hands real slow, hit a few keys, and the cash drawer slid open.

  “Take it out,” the hold-up man said, still in his quiet, polite voice. He meant the money.

  Mr. Wong began to take bills out of the drawer. There were a lot. Without even being asked, he lifted up the drawer and took out more money from underneath. He gathered the bills into a neat stack in one hand, then he stopped and waited to be told what to do next.

  “Please pass it to me,” the hold-up man said, like he was asking for the salt.

  Mr. Wong handed over the stack.

  The hold-up man stuffed the bills in his jacket pocket with one hand and, with his other, brought the gun up so it was pointing into the side of Mr. Wong’s head. Nobody breathed when he did that. We were like frozen meat.

  “Now I’m leaving,” the hold-up man said. “If anyone moves, I’ll shoot you, so don’t move. Stand exactly where you are.”

  He looked over at the gang in the bread aisle. “Okay?” he asked.

  “Sure thing,” one of them said. “You’re in charge, man.”

  “Okay with you?” the hold-up man said to me.

  “Okay,” I said.

  The hold-up man nodded. He took the gun away from Mr. Wong’s head and came out slowly from the counter. He pointed the gun at the Night Riders as he passed by the bread aisle. He didn’t look at me. He sped up and went for the door.

  I’m not sure what happened next, except that suddenly I felt a foot knock up against my foot and all at once the hold-up man was tripping and falling down against the door, which swung open in front of him. I guess it hadn’t been closed as tight as it looked.

  The hold-up man crashed down on his stomach through the door and the gun flew out of his hand and landed right beside me. With no trouble at all, I bent down and picked it up. I put my finger on the trigger and pointed it at the hold-up man.

  “Stay exactly where you are or I’ll shoot you,” I said.

  Nobody else in the store moved. I think for a second they thought I meant them, too.

  “Can somebody please call the police?” I asked.

  “Blessed mother,” Mr. Wong gasped. “Holy smoke, you got him!”

  The Night Riders still hadn’t moved. They were staring at me. Finally, one of them said,

  “Hey, nice footwork, kid! How’d you do that?”

  Another one let loose a kind of whistle. They came out of the bread aisle and walked over to where Mr. Wong was calling 911. One Rider came and stood beside me and looked down at the hold-up man.

  “I don’t believe this,” he said. You could tell he really didn’t, too.

  The hold-up
man stayed down flat on his stomach. He didn’t try to look around, but just in case I said,

  “I’m still pointing this gun at you.” I tried to sound calm and polite about it, like him. It seemed more professional.

  The cops came in about five minutes. There are always a bunch of police cruisers riding up and down Washington Boulevard at night, keeping an eye on the Garden Street side. One cop told me to lay my gun down in the middle of the floor and go stand with Mr. Wong and the Night Riders. Another cop went over and picked up the gun.

  They put handcuff’s on the hold-up man, patted him down, and found the money, which they counted and handed back to Mr. Wong. Then they took the guy to a patrol car with flashing blue lights at the curb.

  A crowd of people was out there, craning their necks to find out what had happened. The cops told them to go on about their business. Then a plainclothes cop came in and interviewed Mr. Wong and the Night Riders and me, and we all told him the sequence of events about ten times. Finally the Riders said they had to go, and left. The hold-up man’s Blue Hawks cap was lying on the floor. I picked it up and put it on. Nobody even noticed.

  “Can you call my house and say where I am?” I asked Mr. Wong. “I only came down here to pick up a package for Cyndi. She’ll kind of be wondering why I haven’t come back.”

  I was careful to say “a package” instead of “cigarettes” so Mr. Wong wouldn’t get in trouble with the cops. I think he appreciated that, because he gave me a look.

  “You’re a hero, kid,” the plainclothes cop said.

  “He sure is,” Mr. Wong said in his Chinese accent. “Quick like fox, he trip that guy up. I never saw something like this!”

  “Listen, kid. Don’t try that stunt again,” the cop warned me. “People have been shot dead for less.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t,” I told him. “I’m not even sure how it happened.”

  “Very humble, too,” Mr. Wong said, nodding at me. He handed me the bag for Cyndi. “Go home now. I call your house. You come one Saturday, have lunch here, okay? Anything you want. I pay.”