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.”
“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.