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 were 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.
Not that Oggie was insanely happy or anything. He wasn’t. The real Disney World was as far off as it had ever been. We both knew we’d probably never get there.
We were living our double life again, going back and forth, back and forth. By this time, even Oggie had started to figure out that Mom and Dad had no idea of fixing things. He never talked about it, though. He kept up a good front. As far as anyone could tell, his main ambition in life was getting out of Mrs. Pinkerton’s and into first grade.
All this time, no one said one word to us about the new baby. To keep a lid on things, we didn’t let on that we knew. Cyndi kept getting bigger and bigger. She and Dad kept having more arguments. Where things were headed, we didn’t dare guess.
Finally, one afternoon when Oggie and I arrived at Saturn from school, Cyndi handed us a full bag of chips and told us to sit down, she had something to tell us.
“Your dad and I are breaking up,” she said.
She was wearing a huge pink blouse over her pants, and her stomach was sticking out a mile. Naturally, Oggie asked, “What about California?”
“Oh, I don’t plan to go anywhere,” Cyndi said. “I’m just moving up the street a little. You’ll be able to come see me anytime. I’m having a baby, did you know? She’ll be your little sister, sort of, and she’s coming really, really, really, really soon.”
Oggie and I didn’t know what to say to that. The big question was how we’d ever fit another planet into our schedule, but we didn’t mention it. We just sat and watched while Cyndi finished off the chips. We weren’t that hungry, anyway, so we didn’t mind.
There was only one thing that saved me during this whole madhouse period of time. My book.
Now that was about to change.
Late one night on Jupiter, while Oggie was outside at the curb driving the old heap (he was determined to keep in practice), I went in the bathroom and put the finishing touches on The Mysterious Mole People.
It was kind of strange to come to the end of that story. I’d been writing it for so long that when I got to the last sentence, I hated to give up. I’d come to really like Amory Ellington. The character Raven was a great person, too, and the Mysterious Mole People were still so mysterious. There was a lot I hadn’t uncovered about them.
I thought for a while I might make a sequel and just keep going forever. But stories need to end if they’re going to mean something. And writers need endings, too, or they might go nuts from writing about the same thing.
That night, after I wrote the last sentence of The Mysterious Mole People, I closed the spiral notebook and put it in a big manila envelope I’d bought at Wong’s. I took out another piece of paper and wrote a letter that said: “To the Editor … I am submitting this story to your company. Please contact me if you want to publish it. If you don’t want it, please send it back in the self-addressed, stamped envelope I’ve enclosed. It’s the only copy I have. Signed, James Archer Jones.”
I got out another manila envelope and wrote my own name and address on the outside, stuck a lot of stamps on it, folded it in half and put it in the first envelope with the notebook.
Then, on the first envelope, I wrote the name and address of the publishing company I’d picked out. I found the address in the front of a book I liked the looks of at the bookstore. It was a pretty famous company. I thought I might as well start at the top.
By the time Oggie came in, I was sticking on more stamps and writing my return address. He came over and kind of sucked in his breath.
“Did you finish?” he whispered.
I said I had.
“Are you going to mail it?”
Tomorrow, I said. I sealed up the envelope with The Mysterious Mole People inside.
“How long do you think it will take to hear back?”
I said I wasn’t sure. A couple of months at least.
“What are you going to do now?” he asked me.
Well, that was a terrible question, because I didn’t know. I hadn’t given it any thought. The end had come and I was unprepared. For a minute, the whole world went to pieces in front of my eyes.
I didn’t want to tell Oggie that, though. If you have a little brother, you know that you never want to tell him certain things, especially that you’re unprepared.
“Oh, I’ve got some ideas,” I said. “I’m tossing around a few thousand ideas. Well, maybe not a few thousand, but ten or twenty, anyway.”
“Like what?” Oggie said, giving me the hairy eyeball. I could see he wanted to know, right then, what story he was going to be listening to next.
“Well …” I was trying desperately to think. I was rifling through every part of my brain trying to come up with something. Anything!
“Actually, I was thinking of writing about a family” I told him finally. I wasn’t really thinking of that at all. I only said it to shut him up so he wouldn’t ask me anymore.
“A family?” Oggie said. “You mean, like ours?”
“Sure,” I said. “I could write a story about two kids whose parents were getting a divorce. So they have to orbit between these two homes they call Saturn and Jupiter. There is this gang in their neighborhood called the Night Riders, who they get dragged in with. One kid wants to be a writer and is trying to write a book. Even though he knows it will never get published in a million years, he sends it out to a publishing company at the end. The other kid wants to drive a car, but he knows he never will because he’s only six years old.”
Oggie looked at me.
“It’s a story about fighting back,” I explained to him, “about doing something amazing that no one believes you can do. Then you show them you can.”
“That sounds like us,” he said. “What’s the name of this story?”
Well, I didn’t have the slightest idea. I was just kidding around, really, but all of a sudden, out of the blue, or maybe out of the brown, I knew what I was going to call it.
“‘How I Became a Writer and Oggie Learned to Drive,’” I said.
“What?”
“‘How I Became a Writer and Oggie Learned to Drive.’ That’s the title.”
Oggie looked a little confused. “This is going to be a book?” he said. “If this is going to be a book, when are you going to start writing it?”
“Tomorrow,” I said.
And that’s what I did.