by Betsy Uhrig
He looked at me expectantly, like I might have a set of Jaws of Life in my back pocket.
“If I didn’t bring any soap, what makes you think—”
“I know you don’t have them. Only emergency personnel would. You’re going to have to call 911. Do you have your phone with you?”
Of course I had my phone with me. I had my phone with me in the same way I had pants on.
“We are not calling 911,” I said. “That’s for serious emergencies only. Believe me, I know.”
“Maybe we can flag down a police car,” Alvin suggested. “But we can’t wait too long. It’s raining. We’re getting wet.”
If you’re thinking that Alvin was being quite calm during this discussion, especially compared to me, you’re right. Alvin had been in tight spots before—figuratively and also literally. You would be amazed at the variety of places he’d gotten his head stuck over the years. He wasn’t afraid of much.
There was one thing he was afraid of, though. One thing he truly hated and feared. And unfortunately for us both, that very thing was about to enter the picture.
97
THE SKY HAD GOTTEN DARK, THE rain had gotten heavier, and a strong wind had decided that now was a good time to start blowing the rain sideways across the soccer field.
The rain plastered our hair to our heads and soaked our clothes. Meanwhile, Alvin’s storm drain was trying to do its thing but mostly failing. Dirty gutter water ran toward it, but instead of spilling into it, the water and its floating muck swirled around a big clog named Alvin. None of this was great.
Then we heard a loud rumbling noise.
“Was that a truck going by?” asked Alvin nervously. “I think that was a truck going by and hitting a pothole. Or a train? Do trains hit potholes?”
It wasn’t a truck or a train hitting a pothole. We both knew that the rumble was thunder. And that thunder would be accompanied by lightning. And that lightning was the one thing Alvin was afraid of.
With good reason. Lightning isn’t one of those irrational fears like, say, clowns. There are no red warning bars at the bottom of the TV when clowns are sighted in the area. No one tells you to take shelter immediately when you see a clown on the horizon. Lightning is a totally rational fear. I wasn’t a huge fan myself.
“I think it was a truck,” I lied. “Just concentrate on getting unstuck, okay? Remember what Dad always says: If you can get it in, you can get it out.”
He nodded, but then the sky lit up.
Crud on a cracker.
With that flash of lightning that definitely hadn’t come from a truck, Alvin lost his cool immediately and completely.
“Get me out of here. Nooooow!” he wailed, and he started struggling and thrashing and grabbing at me like he was drowning.
“Alvin,” I yelled over the thunder that followed the lightning flash, “you need to hold still. I think the rain will help loosen your legs, but you have to turn them to the side, okay? Can you do that?”
He nodded and his wet Gollum hands let go of my forearms.
“Good. Now, first turn your right leg. About ninety degrees.” Alvin liked things that could be expressed in degrees. “Got it? Okay. Relax your leg. Let it go limp. I’m going to gently, gently pull…”
I think I would have had that first leg out if one of those jaggedy lines of lightning that look like Zeus is angry hadn’t crackled down the sky at that moment. Alvin and I both yelled at the same time. Then my little brother looked up at me with his huge scared eyes and wailed, “Alex, you need to call 911. Now!”
98
I REALLY, REALLY DIDN’T WANT TO call 911. You already know that.
What you don’t know is why.
The reason I hated the idea of calling 911 was another story altogether, as I may have mentioned once or twice. A story that had nothing to do with this one.
Except, as Caroline would say, this story doesn’t make emotional sense without the other one. Because if you don’t know why I hated the idea of calling 911, you’re going to be thinking along the lines of: Why is this kid worried about making a simple phone call when his little brother is trapped in a storm drain amid dangerous and terrifying bolts of lightning?
So here’s the other story. You forced it out of me.
It happened when I was ten, back when I walked from place to place instead of running. I had just gotten my first cell phone, which was for emergencies only, my parents told me again and again. My dad, who has one of those label makers that only crazily organized people use, put a label on it that said FOR EMERGENCIES ONLY.
I was walking home from school when I noticed a car following me slowly. I knew about stranger danger, and a slow-following car was definitely a warning sign.
I started to run, and I kept running until I got to a busy street and had to wait for a walk signal. The car that had been following me passed through the intersection and pulled over to the curb ahead.
I was only ten, remember, so the things I thought and did weren’t perfectly logical.
I saw the car pull over, figured some kidnappers were lying in wait for me, and panicked. Instead of turning around or crossing the street, I got out my phone for emergencies only and I called 911.
“I think someone’s trying to kidnap me,” I told the operator.
She said a squad car was right around the corner. What seemed like hours went by, and I was close to wetting my pants with fear that the kidnappers were going to lose patience and jump out of their Kidnapper Car to grab me. But I stayed put, because that’s what the 911 lady had told me to do.
Then a police car pulled up. The officers got out and asked if I was the kid who’d called 911. I said I was, and I’m sure I sounded truly scared when I described the Kidnapper Car and its suspicious movements. They were patient and nice to me and said they would check it out.
The officers went over and talked to whoever was in the car. It looked more like a chat than an arrest going down. Then one of them came back to me. And she didn’t seem nearly as patient and nice on her return.
“Is your name Alex Harmon?” she asked me.
I said it was.
“And is that your backpack?”
“What?”
“Is that your backpack you’re carrying? The one on your back,” she clarified when I continued to look baffled.
I took it off and studied it. It wasn’t my backpack. It only looked like mine. “Um, no. I guess not.”
She stuck out a hand, and I gave her the backpack that didn’t belong to me. “Wait here,” she said. She took the backpack over to the Kidnapper Car and handed it inside. Then whoever was inside the car handed her a very similar backpack—mine.
99
THE KIDNAPPER CAR BELONGED TO Caleb A.’s mother. Caleb A. had a backpack like mine, which I had taken by accident when I left school. Mrs. A. had been following me slowly because she didn’t want to freak me out by yelling at me from her car.
All a big misunderstanding.
Which would have been fine, except that the police officers seemed to think I needed a lecture about identifying one’s personal property correctly and differentiating between dangerous cars and classmates’ mothers’ cars.
I could feel the red heat crawling up my neck and face as they spoke to me in their official voices. I could feel a pit opening up in my stomach. I stared at the real, working guns in holsters on their belts and the handcuffs and all the other equipment they had available. I was terrified they were going to arrest me. By the time they were done talking, I had stopped listening and was almost in tears. I had never felt so guilty in my life—including the time I bit Alvin’s neck and made him bleed during my vampire phase.
I put my backpack on when they had driven off, and I ran all the way home.
I never told my parents or any of my friends what had happened. I felt too guilty and too stupid and I was afraid I might cry if I tried to talk about it. I worried for weeks that the police were going to call or show up at our house and rat me
out to my parents. I was also so jumpy whenever I sensed a car following me that I started running everywhere. No one could sneak up on me if I was already running. And even after I stopped feeling jumpy, I kept running. It felt natural by then, even good. Plus, it was a lot faster than walking.
So that’s two backstories for the price of one: the story of why I hated everything to do with 911, and the story of why I ran everywhere. Psychologically complex I was not. Scarred for life, though, was a real possibility.
100
I HOPE MY EARLY EXPERIENCE WITH calling for help explains what I did next. Which was not dial 911 and get professional aid in removing Alvin from the storm drain. I was terrified that if I did, a pair of police officers—maybe even the same ones from before—would arrive with siren wailing and then tell us off for trespassing on a government grate. I pictured them writing down our names, saying, See you juvenile delinquents in court, and peeling out toward a real emergency. Maybe chucking a bottle of liquid soap at us if they were feeling generous.
So instead of calling 911, I said to Alvin, “I have an idea. Take your shoes off. Then we can wiggle your legs out without them.”
“That won’t work,” said Alvin. “It’s not my feet that are stuck, it’s my legs. I think I’ve had a growth spurt in my legs since I put them in there.”
That was ridiculous, of course, but so was my idea about his shoes. Which I persisted with because I was frantic and desperate. “Just do what I say and push them off!”
“I can’t,” Alvin said. “I’m too stuck to maneuver properly.”
I went into angry-Dad mode, quiet and fake calm. I lay down on the grate next to Alvin and reached into the storm drain. My face was down with the swirling muck around Alvin’s butt. And also with Alvin’s butt. I managed to grab hold of one of his soggy sneakers and yank it off. I brought it out in triumph and set it down by the grate. Then I went back for the next one.
As my arm was groping around in there, Alvin started wiggling, and I heard his other shoe plop into the water below.
“There,” he said. “I got the second one off. Can we go now?”
But Alvin’s wiggling had pulled my dangling arm farther into the drain. My arm was wedged between the grate and the curb along with his legs. I struggled and tugged and twisted, which only skinned my elbow and lodged the arm more firmly.
There were three Harmon limbs hanging above the dark water, and in that situation is there anyone who wouldn’t have wondered if there was such a thing as storm-drain sharks? I was about to ask Alvin if sharks were strictly saltwater fish, when he said, “You know those stories about people getting exotic pets like piranhas or maybe alligators and then dumping them in the sewer when they get too big or possibly aggressive, and—”
“Nope,” I said.
We sat/lay there getting rained on for a few minutes, thinking our own thoughts. Mine were about storm-drain predators. I’m guessing Alvin’s were as well. A car appeared, and we both yelled for help at whoever was driving, but the car only sprayed water over us as it sped by.
“Why would someone just drive past two kids obviously trapped in a storm drain?” I asked Alvin.
He peered out from under my T-shirt, where he was trying to take shelter. “Maybe they thought we were playing here. Maybe they thought we were having fun.”
“Do I look like I’m having fun?”
“I mean,” said Alvin, “you do look pretty funny….”
101
I COULDN’T HAVE CALLED 911 IF I’d wanted to with my arm stuck in the storm drain. Trying to use my phone in this position guaranteed that the phone would end up in the depths with Alvin’s sneaker. Panic was beginning to make a nest for itself in my lower stomach.
It got even worse when I noticed a large rodent scampering toward us.
Maybe storm-drain sharks were impossible, but sewer rats sure weren’t. Here was a giant sewer rat in the flesh, and here were two boys blocking the entrance to its home. Although, would a sewer rat live in a storm drain? What was the difference between a sewer and a storm drain, exactly? Where was Javier the walking Wikipedia when I needed him?
“Alvin—” I began quietly, but he cut me off.
“We’re saved!” he cried. “Look, Alex! Marcello is coming to rescue us! Yay for brave Marcello!”
The sewer rat was Marcello, and he was barreling toward us, yapping up his own storm. He slowed as he got close. He trotted over to Alvin and started licking any exposed parts he could get his tongue on.
“Marcello,” said Alvin, hugging the wet, smelly dog, “we’re trapped in here. Go get help, boy!”
Marcello finished coating Alvin with slobber and jammed his nose into my armpit. It was cold and wet, and I jerked my arm reflexively, freeing it from the storm drain. I sat up and rubbed my sore elbow.
“See, Alex?” said Alvin. “He’s a rescue dog, aren’t you, Marcello! He’s our hero. Good, good dog, Marcello! Now, go get help, good boy!”
It’s possible that Marcello’s yapping was meant as encouragement, or even instructions. But it didn’t help. And neither did what Marcello chose to do next. Which was get me back for all the times I’d disrespected him by stepping over him on the sidewalk. All the times I’d ignored his pestering as I ran. All the times I’d called him a little rat-dog to his little rat-face.
He raised a leg and peed down my back as I sat on the sewer grate. Then he yapped a final yap for good measure, picked up Alvin’s sneaker, and tore off with it in the direction of home.
102
MAYBE IT WAS ALVIN’S NEWFOUND HOPE that Marcello was headed home to yap out our exact dilemma and location to his owners: “What, Marcello? Our cute neighbor Alvin is stuck in a storm drain over by the soccer field? And he needs liquid soap? On our way!” Or maybe it was the cool rain making his legs smaller and slipperier. We’ll never know, but as Alvin watched Marcello “go for help,” he calmed down enough to cooperate as I carefully turned his legs to the side and worked them out of the storm drain.
Meanwhile, the lightning flashes and thunderclaps were getting closer together, which meant the storm was getting closer to us. And there we were, out on the edge of a flat field with no shelter in sight. Lightning bait, in other words. Alvin kept trying to cover his ears and eyes at the same time, but the poor kid only had two hands.
I looked around for something, anything, to get inside or under or even near: a shed or an overturned wheelbarrow or a cardboard box. I wasn’t feeling picky. But there was nothing.
“I wanna go hooome!” Alvin yelled after a particularly loud boom of thunder.
“Okay, okay,” I said. “We’re going to have to run for it.”
“I can’t run without sneakers!”
“Of course you can.”
“You need to carry me!”
Crud on a cracker with a side of creamed crud.
“I’ll piggyback you, okay?” It wasn’t a great plan, and I wasn’t going to be able to run very fast with my soaking-wet brother on my back, but this seemed like the only option.
Then I realized that the houses backing up to the far end of the field were on Javier’s street. We were closer to Javier’s house than we were to our own. Javier would take us in. Javier would give us shelter. We could call Dad from there, and he would come pick us up, and our nightmare would be over.
I had Alvin on my back and was running toward the safety of Javier’s house when I remembered that his family was at the beach. There would be no one there to take us in and give us shelter. I kept going in that direction, though, thinking that maybe they’d left the garage open, or if not, we could huddle on the porch. Then I thought of something else.
The Old Weintraub Place. It was even closer than Javier’s.
I realized as soon as I’d had that brain wave that not only had I foolishly left home without any liquid soap or Jaws of Life, but I’d also left without the key to the Old Weintraub Place.
My burdened running slowed, then sped up when a pretty much simultaneous
flash of lightning and clap of thunder put a new spring in my step. At which point I recalled something Marta had said about the lock on the back door of the Old Weintraub Place being broken. “You just have to push a little,” she’d said.
I could do that.
103
LOCAL BOY HEROICALLY CARRIES BROTHER THROUGH STORM TO SAFETY is the headline that never appeared in the town paper. Because no one saw us as we (well, I) ran across that field like something was after us. Maybe Zeus, with a big bucket of lightning bolts. No one was stupid enough to be out there except me and my brother.
At one point, my passenger pulled on my hair like a rein and called into my ear, “Alex, stop!”
“Ow! No! We’re running for our lives here, in case you haven’t noticed!”
“But Marcello. What about Marcello? We won’t be there when he gets back with the team of rescuers.”
I pretended I was too busy running to answer, but there was no way Marcello was dashing back to the storm drain at the head of a pack of rescuers. If I knew Marcello—and I did—he was at home now, in his cozy doggy bed in the bay window, happily chewing Alvin’s sneaker to pieces.
I dumped Alvin on the grass when we reached the Weintraub yard and said, “We’re going in here.”
“The Old Weintraub Place?” he asked as we went up the back steps. Which proved that Javier was wrong, and everyone did call it that. “We can’t go in here. That’s trespassing.”
“It’s taking shelter,” I said as I pushed on the door. Which didn’t budge. “It’s just to get out of the storm. We’ll call Dad from here. We won’t touch a thing.”
I pushed harder, and the door continued not to budge. Had someone fixed it since Marta had been here last? I wasn’t sure when that was. It was also possible, though, that Marta’s idea of pushing “a little” wasn’t the same as mine. I put my shoulder to the door and shoved. Sure enough, it opened, and I stumbled into the dim kitchen. Alvin practically trampled me to get inside. Then he turned and slammed the door shut for good measure.
