THE PLANS I HAD for that evening, after Oggie conked out, were pretty simple. They were to find out about this baby that Cyndi had supposedly been talking about. I went downstairs and hung around with Dad. He lets me stay up late because he knows Mom makes me go to bed at ten.
That’s one good thing about living double the way Oggie and I do. Whatever one parent says you can’t do, the other will probably let you if you handle it right. To them, it’s like a competition. Each one tries to be the best so you’ll want to be at their place more. Not that you actually ARE at anyone’s place more—that’s set by the judge in court—but you’ll WANT to be. It’s pretty stupid when you think about it.
Anyway, that night I went down and lurked around. I was hoping Cyndi would feel sick again and make a remark. Or Dad would ask her how she was and she’d give him a look, anything to send me a clue. I mean, I’d been trying for weeks to find out more, and so far there’d been nothing. I was beginning to think Oggie had dreamed the whole thing up.
“So, Archie. How’re things going at school?” Dad asked me.
He asks me that about a hundred times a week. Well, maybe not a hundred, but enough to get on my nerves. He doesn’t mean to, it’s just that he can’t think of anything else to say. He has a lot on his mind, like all these bozos at work that are trying to outmaneuver him and take over his territory. He can’t always remember what we talked about last. To him, my life probably looks like a day at the beach.
“Everything’s great,” I said.
I always say that, even though it usually isn’t. The main reason is, I’m not that spectacular at taking tests. I get nervous and forget things, even if I stay up all night studying. So my grades aren’t exactly top percentile.
“Well, good. Good for you,” Dad said. “And did you make the soccer team this year?”
“No, I didn’t, remember?” I said. “They picked Randy Collins over me. That was about a month ago. I’m taking nature photography instead.”
“Nature photography!” Dad is about the last person on earth who’d ever be interested in something like that.
“Yeah. Remember I showed you those photos of the turtle I took? The box turtle that was over at the pond in Grant Park? Mom has them now.”
“Oh, yeah. I guess I forgot.”
“And I did that report on how turtles are descended from an ancient reptilian line? How they outlived dinosaurs and will probably outlive us?”
“Us?”
“Well, human beings.”
“Oh. Yeah. It slipped my mind.”
“That’s okay. You can’t remember everything.”
There was silence for a while, then Dad said to Cyndi, “What happened at your appointment today?”
My antenna went up. I thought maybe she’d gone to a doctor about this baby, but it turned out she only went to see about a job that she didn’t get hired for anyway.
Cyndi does short-term secretarial work.
She told me once that she didn’t like to get tied down to any one job. I guess she probably noticed that working was one of the things Mom got into too much. Too much for Dad, I mean. He didn’t even want her to be part-time.
Personally, I always thought it was okay that Mom worked. She’s the kind of person that needs to get out and do things.
About a year ago, she started full-time with this company that does people’s taxes. Now she’s a total fiend on the IRS. Her friends are always calling up to ask what they’re allowed to deduct. Her big joke is you can deduct everything but the kitchen sink once you know how. Actually she said you can deduct the kitchen sink, too, but it’s got to be in your workspace.
Dad and Cyndi went out on the porch for another beer. I was getting pretty tired, but I flicked on the TV and pretended I wasn’t listening to them.
After a while, I heard Cyndi say, “It’s my decision. I’ve got to make up my own mind.”
Dad said something I couldn’t hear, and then Cyndi said, “Well, what would we do with Archie and Oggie if we did?”
The TV had a shoot-out right then and drowned out Dad’s answer. I couldn’t hear anything except machine guns mowing people down. Then everybody on the program was bending over this completely mutilated Mexican drug lord in dead silence, and I heard Cyndi say,
“Well, it matters to me!” She sounded mad.
“They won’t mind,” Dad said. “They know the score. When the divorce comes through, I think we should go ahead and do it. We’ll set a date and just do it.”
After this, the phone rang. It was for Dad, a guy from his company, I guess, because Dad started talking about bozos and somebody who got the ax. He went on for about an hour until I couldn’t stay awake anymore. I went up to bed, and there was Oggie sound asleep. I wondered what he would think about the idea of Dad and Cyndi getting married so they could have the baby which was what that discussion downstairs was all about, I knew.
The more I looked at Oggie, the more I was sure he wouldn’t like it any more than me. It was a bad idea. We didn’t need another baby in our family. What we needed was to get back together and take better care of the people that were already born.
“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.