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 upstairs 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.