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We're not lost/' Dr. Carmody insisted. "We just— don't know where we are."
Max's mother had had enough. "Oh, yes we do. Jack Carmody. We're nowhere! Now turn right around and we'll ask directions at the next farmhouse."
The problem was that, in the rain and mist, it was hard to see anything more than fifty feet away, let alone a farmhouse set well back from the road.
They had been wandering for about an hour when Max started looking at his watch. "It's
ten-thirty. We need to be in Chicago in three hours. Can we get there in three hours, Dad?"
"Oh, sure," Dr. Carmody blathered. "No problem."
"I think we've been driving around in circles," Maude observed bleakly.
Max was alarmed. "Why do you say that?"
She pointed. "We've passed that same cow twice before."
"How do you know it's the same one?" asked Dr. Carmody. "All cows look alike."
"She's scowling at me," the girl replied seriously.
"Maude has a hard life," Olivia explained.
Max glared at his best friend. "Have you been brainwashing her?"
"I told her the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," Maude said, defensively.
Suddenly, Dr. Carmody stomped on the brakes, and the Volvo lurched to a stop in a shower of slime and dirty water. Only their seat belts kept the passengers from sailing through the front windshield.
"Jack, are you crazy?" railed Mrs. Plunkett. "You're going to get us all killed!"
Max's father burst out of the car and ran up to an ancient dirt-covered sign. He popped the trunk and
went to work on the crusted mud with the ice scraper. After a few minutes of chipping and scrubbing, the long-lost message began to appear through the muck:
ROUTE 44—19 MILES —►
"The highway!" cried Max.
Filthy and sopping wet, his father jumped back behind the wheel and threw the car in gear. "Hang in there, kid! I told you we'd make it!"
As they jounced along the dirt road, the Volvo became the scene of the kind of mathematical calculations that normally took place only in physics labs. It was eleven o'clock. The Balsam auditorium was 240 miles away.
"Which means," Max concluded excitedly, "if we go eighty, we'll make it just in time for the two o'clock start!"
"You can't go eighty on a dirt road," Dr. Carmody called back from the driver's seat.
"You can't go eighty on any road," amended his ex-wife sternly.
"We can slow to fifty on the unpaved portion," Maude agreed, expertly crunching numbers in her
head, "if we bump it up to eighty-five once we hit the Interstate." At that moment, the Volvo's tires jumped from the rutted mud and stones onto a bumpy but paved two-lane farm route. "This is better. How fast can we go here?"
"At least seventy," put in Max.
"No!" stormed Ellen Plunkett. "We'll drive the speed limit and get there late, but in one piece."
"Come on, Ellen," coaxed Dr. Carmody. "This is a big day for Max. We've got a chance to make it!"
No sooner had the words crossed his lips than steam began billowing up from under the Volvo's hood. Dr. Carmody pulled over to the shoulder and rushed around to the front of the car. The hot blast burned his hands as he threw open the hood. "Yeow!"
"Jack, are you all right?" cried Max's mother in alarm.
"I'm fine, but the radiator isn't," her ex-husband moaned.
"It's fixable, right?" Max called out the window. "Can you fix it?"
His father drew a deep breath. "A mechanic can—in about three hours."
"No-o-o-o-o!!"
"Oh, boy." Mrs. Plunkett looked around. They were absolutely in the middle of nowhere. The only break in the trees and scrub—the only indication that the area was even inhabited—was a single faded sign:
COLDWATER 5 VAN WERT 41 CHICAGO 238
Olivia looked at Maude in awe. "You're right! Bad things really do happen to you!"
"To her ?" Max was practically hysterical. "To herl What about to me? Comedy is my whole life! I'm nothing without it! And finally, even though I live in a town where everybody thinks I stink and my dreams are stupid, I get a chance to prove myself! And where am I when my date with destiny rolls around? Freezing in the rain in a ditch outside Coldwater, Ohio!"
His parents exchanged an unhappy glance. Ellen Plunkett and Jack Carmody didn't agree on much. But it pained them to see their son so crestfallen. Even Maude had no comment. Then:
"Coldwater, Ohio?" Olivia repeated. "Isn't that the town where the manure spreader was invented?"