“Oh, no! What should we do?”
“Get out of here fast!” Raven said.
I heard Oggie suck in his breath.
“Oggie, open your door and get out. We’re all leaving through your door so they won’t see us,” Raven said. It was the first time I ever heard her sound really upset.
“Move!” Raven said. “RIGHT NOW!”
The next thing we knew, the car’s motor was turning on. We looked around and saw that Oggie had Cat Man’s keys in the ignition.
“What are you doing!” Raven screeched. “We have to get out of here!” She tried to reach across and stop him, but Oggie socked her hard in the arm.
“We ARE getting out of here,” he said. “Leave me alone!”
“You can’t drive!” Raven said.
“Yes, I can!” Oggie yelled. “Keep away or I’ll blow this horn!”
Raven fell back, and we watched in kind of a paralyzed state of terror while he disengaged the parking brake. Next, he put on the left-hand blinker. He took the shift out of park and put it into drive. He looked over his shoulder to see if anyone was coming and turned the wheel to the left. Then he stretched his leg way down under the dash, hit the accelerator with his foot, and came back up for a view out the windshield.
“Stay down!” he ordered. “We’re headed for some cops.”
We started off with a big lurch and began rolling down the street. In the nick of time, too, because three seconds later a loud yell came from behind us.
“Hey, you! Come back with that car!”
Raven and I looked back. There were Cat Man, Ralphie, and Ringo jumping up and down in the empty parking place, howling like three furious old coyotes. Immediately, about five cops were on them. The last we saw, they were throwing down their weapons and raising their hands high. No one noticed us. We cruised away, free and clear.
“Oggie, you’re a genius!” Raven cried. “Cat Man’s busted!”
Oggie didn’t answer. His teeth were chattering a little. I could see it was the yeeks trying to break through. He wasn’t letting them, though. He was fighting them back, concentrating every inch of himself on doing the job. He wasn’t tall enough to see out the Bonneville’s windshield AND reach the accelerator at the same time. So it was first one, then the other, one and the other, which gave our ride down the street a kind of hop and slide motion.
After a minute, he began to get the idea, though. His rhythm picked up, and we were sailing along at a good clip, probably five miles per hour at least. We went down one block and another, then one more.
“Okay,” Raven said. “That’s probably enough.”
“No, it isn’t,” Oggie said between his teeth. He was in the groove and didn’t want to stop. A car came up behind us and honked a few times. Oggie was driving more or less in the middle of the road, but soon he caught on that he was supposed to be on the right-hand side and moved over. The car flashed past.
After that, we came to a yield sign and a couple of red lights. They didn’t faze him, either. He knew his signals.
“How about it?” Raven pleaded. “We could pull in here.”
“No!” Oggie bellowed. To show her how well he was holding up, he put on some speed. He loosened up and began making nerve-racking comments, too.
“Don’t worry, I’ve been practicing at night when you can’t see very well, either,” he told us. And: “Keep down. Here come more cop cars!” Also: “There’s a Lincoln Continental headed straight for us!” And: “I could take this thing on the expressway if I had to.”
Raven and I were holding our breaths and closing our eyes whenever we came to an intersection. Every so often Oggie would look across at us for one split second and say, “I’m a good driver, aren’t I? Don’t you think I’m good?”
It was during one of these split seconds that we finally crashed. Not into anything big, just a bunch of tin garbage cans sitting on the curb. Garden Street was about to merge into the traffic circle at Route 1, and Oggie had been trying to come in for a landing to scope out the problem.
“That’s it!” Raven yelled. “I’m out of here!”
She wrenched open the door and leaped for her life. I followed. We ran around, threw open Oggie’s door, and pried his hands off the wheel before he could decide to go anywhere else.
“Let go!” we yelled. “We’re taking you home!”
He didn’t want to go at all. In his own mind, he’d just gotten started. All the time we were dragging him away, he was looking back wildly over his shoulder at Cat Man’s Pontiac Bonneville.
“I can drive it,” he kept yelling. “I did it by myself.”
“You did it all right,” I finally snapped at him. “You smashed up Cat Man’s car.”
“That doesn’t count,” Oggie yelled. “Parking doesn’t count.”
Alphonse
SOMEHOW, WE MADE IT home before Mom. We were happy, I can tell you. We were slapping Oggie on the back and giving each other high fives. If it wasn’t for Oggie, Cat Man would have been flying down the expressway right that minute, and who knows where we’d be—maybe locked in the trunk.
But then again, if it hadn’t been for Raven, Oggie never would have made it out of the Night Riders’ bathroom to drive at all. And if it hadn’t been for me, we wouldn’t have ended up beside Cat Man’s car. It was a joint operation and we all knew it, and that made things even better.
There was no time to really celebrate, though. We’d hardly been inside Jupiter for five minutes when the old heap pulled up at the curb and Mom got out.
Raven gave me a last high five and took off for home out the back door. Oggie and I leaped back into our ends of the couch. We pulled some blankets over ourselves and turned up the TV. Nobody could have known we’d been anywhere, doing anything, least of all escaping from a gang war on Garden Street.
I kept my eye on Oggie after Mom came in, though. I knew he’d want to tell her what happened, and I was sending him zippered mouth signs and clamped jaw signals to hold off. He did okay through dinner, but as bedtime got closer, I saw he was beginning to break down.
He was hyped by that time, overtired and cranky. He started making car noises on the couch. Then, he began pushing down on some imaginary accelerator under the blanket, clicking his tongue for turn signals, and bobbing up to look out the windshield.
Mom noticed. “I can see it’s time you went back to school,” she told him. “You can’t even sit still.”
“I know!” Oggie screeched. “And guess what I did this afternoon?”
“What?” Mom said.
“I drove! I drove a car. I drove it exactly, like, THIS!” He started making tremendous car noises and rounding corners on two wheels like a mad race-car driver.
A lot of people might have been worried by that. They might have decided to take a sudden hike to Alaska, or hit Oggie over the head with a claw-foot hammer.
Not me. I just smiled at him. I even nodded my head to kind of urge him on.
The reason was, I could see Mom didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. Oggie drive a car? She’d never believe it in a million years. For her, it was beyond imagination, outside of any ballpark she’d ever been in.
That’s one of the great things about little kids. Half the stuff they tell you is so far-out that when they finally get around to saying something real, nobody is in any shape to actually believe them.
It took about a half hour to quiet Oggie down. Then, just as Mom was beginning to hope for a little peace, Dad called. They got into one of their conversations where whatever one person says, it just makes the other person madder. From the sound of things, I guessed that Dad was finally taking the block off Cyndi’s little secret for the past six months.
“She’s having a WHAT?” Mom screeched.
“When?” she shouted.
“I can’t believe it,” she yelled. “I can’t believe you’re doing this to the children!”
It was kind of nerve-racking listening to all that, so I took Oggie upstai
rs and got him ready for bed. We could still hear Mom yelling through the bathroom door.
“What doesn’t Mom believe?” he asked me while I was trying to get his teeth brushed.
“Everything,” I said. “This whole mess.”
“You mean with her and Dad?”
“And Cyndi and California.”
Oggie rinsed out his mouth and said, “California’s going to be our little sister. Why don’t we just get a bigger house and all live together?”
“Sure,” I said. “And then we’ll fly to the moon.”
“The moon!” Oggie said. “Why should we go there?”
I put my hands over my eyes and shook my head. The sinking feeling that comes over me sometimes had just come over me again. It dropped me straight down onto some rocks.
I realized something.
Mom and Dad were never going to get back together.
I saw it, clear as clear. However I tried, I’d never change anything. It was out of my hands. Because if two people can’t even speak to each other on the phone without yelling at the top of their lungs, there’s nothing anyone can do to bring them back together.
I sat there in the bathroom with my hands over my eyes and the last little bit of hope I’d saved up drained out of me.
Oggie was staring at me. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Why do you look like that?”
“The truth just hit me,” I told him through my hands.
“What truth?” he asked.
“The truth that was there the whole time but I didn’t want to see it.”
Oggie kept staring. He didn’t know what I was talking about, which was just as well. He’d find out soon enough.
Finally I got ahold of myself and looked up at him.
“Listen,” I said, “how about some underground Mole activity? A sad thing has happened to Amory Ellington, you know.”
“It has?”
“Yup. He’s had a serious blow in his life.”
“Oh, no!” Oggie said. He ran and got into bed and lay down fast with Bunny.
You might think with all the real-life action going on in the last few days, our story of The Mysterious Mole People had taken a backseat.
Well, it hadn’t at all. Oggie and I were still hot on it. Not only that, but because of being home sick and having time on my hands, I’d been writing a lot more in the spiral notebook. It was almost full. The story was coming to an end.
Where we were was:
Amory Ellington and Raven had escaped from the Mole People’s prison and, disguised as Mole People, had traveled incognito all over their underworld kingdom.
They saw volcanos from the inside out. They saw cities that were buried and forgotten. They saw the amazing slurp-hole dumps where the parking lots and shopping malls and all of Disney World had been sent for recycling.
Some of Disney World was still in one piece (Oggie was glad to hear), especially the giant water chutes, which even the Mysterious Mole People couldn’t bring themselves to destroy. The chutes were too much fun. Raven and Amory spent a couple of weeks sliding down them into a giant underground lake.
After this, they got serious and studied the Mysterious Mole People’s operations—their beliefs and habits, their ways of living underground. Raven taught Amory the secret Mole language and, pretending to be Mole People, they made a lot of Mole friends and connections.
When, at last, they threw off their disguises—which Raven had constructed with fake black fur and a pair of nose masks—the Mysterious Mole People, who had very dim eyesight, were surprised but no longer afraid of their visitors. They swore Amory and Raven into Mole society as blood relatives for ever after.
There was only one sadness. That night, I revealed it to Oggie as gently as I could.
The old turtle, Alphonse, was lost.
“LOST!” Oggie said. He looked very upset. “Did the Mysterious Mole People make him into turtle soup?”
“No, they’d never kidnapped him after all. It turned out that Mole People love and revere turtles for their ancient reptilian ancestry.”
“Well, what happened to him? Did he go back up to the human world?”
“That’s the bad thing. Nobody knows. Amory came home, but Alphonse never did.”
“That’s terrible!” Oggie said. He looked about ready to cry. “Didn’t Amory keep searching for him after he went home?”
“He did,” I said. “He still is. Amory Ellington becomes famous, you know, when he gets home.”
“He does?”
“Yes. He reports on the Mysterious Mole People in Science Magazine and writes articles about their amazing world. Scientists begin to communicate with them. Humans begin to see their point of view. Parking lots are outlawed, and throwing trash becomes a federal offense. Whole forests start to get saved. A lot more attention is paid to the poor, too, and to the little guys of the world who need watching out for. It’s a big revolution, all due to Amory and Raven.”
Oggie lay back and sighed. “But …,” he said. He knew what was coming.
“Yes, but … there will always be a dark shadow over Amory’s heart because of his lost friend. He never tells anyone, but in private, he’s sad.”
“Forever?” asked Oggie.
“Yes.”
We sat in awful silence for a while.
Something you get to know if you’re a writer is, there always needs to be a little tragedy at the end of a good story. You can’t just end one hundred percent happily, because life isn’t like that. It wouldn’t be real.
Everybody has a shadow in their heart about something. Everybody has a sad secret they can’t tell. By making Amory have one, I was showing Oggie that he wasn’t alone in the world of sadnesses. Oggie wasn’t the only one who’d have to deal with bad stuff in his life.
I was showing myself, too, I guess. I got up, found a tissue, and blew my nose.
“Don’t worry, Archie. Amory will find Alphonse, I know it,” Oggie said.
“He will?”
“Yes. Alphonse is still alive. He had something reptilian to do, so he went off. He’ll be back.”
“How do you know?” I asked. I was interested that Oggie had suddenly decided to take over the story. He’d never done that before. He’d always left it to me.
“Because Amory is his blood friend,” Oggie said. “They crossed blood, remember? When someone is your blood friend, you can never give up hope.”
I nodded. I don’t know what gave Oggie the idea of all this. He seemed determined to believe it, though, so I let him go ahead.
For myself, I had the blackest feeling about Alphonse. I’d been having this feeling for a while, too. I just hadn’t wanted to admit it. Recently, when I looked up at the photos on my closet wall, I saw they were plain old photos of a box turtle. Alphonse wasn’t there watching over me anymore.
In my mind, Alphonse was dead, gone forever. I was the one who had made him up, but that didn’t matter. I couldn’t bring him back. I couldn’t change anything. It was out of my hands. Alphonse’s terrible lostness was the truth in that story, that’s why. Deep down underneath, I knew it was the truth.
The Last Chapter
WHATEVER OGGIE DID TO Cat Man’s car when he smashed it into the garbage cans, Cat Man never took revenge. The reason was, from that day on, he was in jail.
First he was getting charged with selling stolen jewelry and credit cards.
Then he was being brought to trial in court.
Then he was being convicted since all the gang members, even Ralphie and Ringo, testified against him to save their own necks. Cat Man deserved it, though. According to Raven, he’d already double-crossed and set up every one of them, and taken most of the money, too.
The Night Riders weren’t a problem for us after that day, either. Their gang was busted up. You didn’t see them slouching around on street corners, making sarcastic comments and grabbing little kids’ wallets.
Most of them went to juvenile detention. When they got out of that, they wer
e under orders to go back to school and work honest jobs and report to their parole officers. That was fine with us. Our whole neighborhood was glad to be rid of those creeps.
The only gang member that didn’t get caught was Raven.
She believed it was because she was a girl.
“None of those punks ever considered me one of them,” she told me, “so nobody bothered to tell the cops I was there. If I wasn’t so happy I’d be insulted. They didn’t remember to tell about you, either, Archie. To the Night Riders, you were just a little wimp from across Washington Boulevard.”
“THAT’S what they said? How could they say THAT,” I yelled.
This was a couple of weeks after the gang was demolished. Raven and I had been hanging around together in the afternoons. I’d invited her to my free lunch down at Wong’s Market. Mr. Wong paid for everything, and gave us free magazines, too.
“They didn’t have to say it,” Raven informed me. “Anyone could see it. You were nothing to the Night Riders. Less than me, probably.”
“What about Cat Man? He told me I was a creative thinker. He said I had potential.”
“Oh, that.” Raven looked at me. “You believed that garbage? The only reason he said it was to get you to work for him. You came from across Washington Boulevard. He wanted to do business over there. The Night Riders stuck out too much on those streets, but you looked the part, really clean-cut and dumb. He figured you wouldn’t get picked up so quick.”
This was a big blow to my ego, I can tell you. In almost no time, I was back to ground zero in school. I got a 48 on a math test even wearing the hold-up man’s cap, which shows the sick state my professionalism was in.
Oggie, meanwhile, was on an upswing.
He had his red leather wallet with the twenty bucks in it from my Garden Street jobs.
He had his big victory of driving down Garden Street—even if he couldn’t tell anybody and nobody believed him when he did.
Over the next month or so, Mom and I noticed that he didn’t need Bunny One so much to go sleep on Jupiter anymore. Over on Saturn, it looked like Bunny Two might be getting the ax as well.
How I Became a Writer and Oggie Learned to Drive Page 9
