IT WAS THE best of days; it was the best of engines.
Under the friendly heavens, the horizon was evenly divided into wispy corn and endless sky. Where the corn ended, the stubby bronze of wheat fields began. On those hard-packed farm roads, the mayor’s baby galloped along with glee.
And John was in the driver’s seat. It was as if he and the automobile spoke a secret language. He could hear the motor talking to him, chortling as it puttered down hills, whining a little on the tight bends. He pictured the crankshafts huffing and puffing, running around and around the cylinder like the frantic legs of Alligator Dan.
And that got him thinking. “Hey, Boz?”
Boz was leaning out over the road, plucking dandelions from the ditches.
“Boz!”
Boz placed half of his body in the vicinity of a seat.
“How did you find this?”
“Happenstance, my dear boy. Our comrade’s shiny new ukulele alerted my suspicions to a game afoot. Now where, I asked myself, would a bottom-dwelling creature of limited imagination find the funds for such an instrument? I took it upon myself to discover the answer. Which, as you have observed, lay in some light security work.”
John stroked the leather cushion.
“She must be worth a fortune.”
“Tittle-tattle around town says that the mayor will unveil her at the Festival of the Future on the morrow. Show a little wheel, flash her pearly brights.”
On any other day, this information might have caused John to turn around and head straight back for the shed. But not today, not in a dream like this. Today he didn’t give a flying patootie about the mayor or the festival or the ending of things. Today he was conqueror of the skies.
Right up until the point when he noticed the crimson leaves dangling from the trees and the starlings wheeling in gusts of black wings.
“‘Nothing gold can stay.’”
The memory of his father’s voice pierced him to the marrow. Where had they been when his dad had said this? In a room? At a window?
No . . . John remembered. They’d been sitting by the side of the old yellow house on the edge of the sky-blue sea. John must have been five. Five years old and gazing at the autumn storm.
“But you know what, John? It’s mighty pretty while it lasts.”
For one brief moment, the sun had broken through the thickening clouds and a shaft of light had touched their faces. Then it was gone.
Like his house, like his sea, like his parents. Gone.
John turned to Boz, who was once again hanging off the side, his tongue panting like a golden retriever’s.
“Boz!”
“Mmmm?”
“Boz. Could you please sit in one place?”
“But of course,” Boz tucked his feet up behind his head. “How can I be of assistance?”
“Where do you come from?”
“Like all mammalians, I come from the dust of the stars and the dregs of the ocean.”
“No, I mean, where were you born?”
Boz yanked on his hair. “’Fraid I can’t remember.”
“You can’t remember?”
“Well, I was very young at the time.”
“Have you always traveled?”
“Always! For I’ll take the highway, and skip down the byway, and I’ll be a roamer forever.”
“Don’t you get tired of moving?”
“Never.” Boz paused. “Thinking of your own peculiar and particular circumstances, are we?”
John nodded.
“Ah, the ancestral dilemma. The striver versus the hiver, the rover versus the drover. It is a pretty pickle.” He patted John on the shoulder. “May I recommend that you save the worry for your next existence? Let life take the wheel for a while.”
Boz tipped his toe to his ear and jauntily began whistling “Turkey in the Straw.” John couldn’t help but smile.
“Turkey in the straw, turkey in the hay,” replied the engine. Boz stopped whistling. John stopped smiling.
“Ahem, you didn’t, by any propitious chance, sing?” asked Boz.
“No,” John replied, scanning the few deserted shacks alongside the fields. Nothing.
“Ah,” Boz said. “A figment of my imagination.”
He began to whistle again.
“Turkey in the straw, turkey in the hay,” twittered the engine. That did it. John jammed on the brakes and leaned over the back of the buggy seat.
“Page! You get out of there!” he shouted. Page crawled out of the luggage rack and stood on the road looking up at her brother. Her skin was flushed, but her eyes held no apology.
“Hello, Johnny.”
“What were you doing in there?”
“I wanted to come.”
“You’re too little to be here.”
“I am not. I’ve grown two inches this summer. Lil measured me.”
“We’re doing boy stuff!”
“Then pretend I’m a boy.”
“You’re not a boy!”
A cough sounded from behind them. “Ahem. I don’t wish to interrupt this blissful family reunion, but it appears we may have a more urgent matter on our metacarpi.”
Boz pointed to the road behind them. In the far-off distance, a pair of men on horses were approaching at pace.
“Who are they?”
“The identification of the portside gentleman escapes me, but I am rather afeared that the personage riding the bay mare and attired in the fetching white hat is the sheriff.”
“What?”
“So if I might suggest we continue our journey apace?”
John needed no further encouragement.
“Get in, Page!”
Page scrambled into the seat, the engine roared, and away they raced along the long unending road.
“Boz, where does this go?” shouted John.
“To market, to market,” Boz replied between the juddering of the wheels. The mayor’s baby wasn’t quite accustomed to being whipped into speeds of thirty-five miles per hour. “Into the belly of the beast. In, through, and out the other end.”
“Isn’t there a side road we can take, somewhere with trees where we can get out and hide?”
Boz shook his head as the rest of the vehicle shook him.
“Not until we’re past the town. But nil desperandum, my dear boy, we’ve got the jump on our eager bloodhounds.”
Jump was the right word for it, John thought desperately. The entire automobile was jittering and jabbering with the pace. Every hole and hoofprint registered as an electric jolt up the spine. The engine wailed in protest.
The outlines of Hayseed were rising rapidly in front of them. A barn, a house, a church. Toddlers stood in their front doors and gawked as the mayor’s baby went clattering by. John held on to the wheel like grim death and kept his eyes fixed on the road. They just needed to make it past the town.
That was going to be easier said than done. The street was packed with preparations for the Festival of the Future. Wagons and horses and crates littered the road; men with bunting crowded the sidewalks.
“Vacate the viaducts!” Boz shouted as they shuddered toward a trio of men laden with a wreath of orange chrysanthemums. Squish went the flowers under the wheel of the mayor’s baby.
“Hang on to your boutonnieres, me hearties, takeoff is imminent!”
Up a ramp they went, onto the festival’s temporary stage. Through a banner reading
Welcome to Hayseed, Town of the Future!
they tore. Down the steps they came, shuddering and groaning, but by the grace of the gods, still moving.
“By gimcrackedy gee!” laughed Boz, yanking the banner from his neck. “The mayor’s got a corker on his hands! I’d lay you ten to one we’d give a two-ton hippopotamus a run for his money!”
John ignored him. He crouched low over the wheel, concentrating on the gap ahead. There was the end of the town, there was the giant grove of trees that would shield their escape. They could hide forever in that wood.
We’re gonna make it, John thought. We’re gonna make it.
“Johnny!” Page screamed.
“Quiet, Page!” he barked. “We’re almost there!”
“But Johnny! It’s Great-Aunt Beauregard!”