by Mark Dunn
“No, Wayne.”
“But Dad let me drive his Fairlane.”
“Yes. Around the parking lot at the supermarket.” “But Rodney! That’s exactly where we’re going! To the parking lot of Toland’s Supermarket!”
“Absolutely not, Wayne.” Rodney snatched the key chain out of his brother’s hand. “The Professor has enough to worry about without you demolishing his car.”
“Then I’m just going to sit in it.”
“Aunt Mildred is probably really hungry, Wayne. We have to get to the store.” Rodney pushed his brother out of the way so he could close the door to the Professor’s garage. He returned the Nash key chain back to its hook on the key rack.
“Did you see how the grillwork shined, Rodney? How do you get grillwork on a car to shine like that? Say, Rodney, have you ever seen so much shiny front grillwork on one car?”
“You think about cars too much, Wayne. We have a lot of other things to think about right now.”
Wayne nodded. He reached up and longingly touched the Nash key chain. Then he touched the two keys hanging from the chain, one of which would start the engine of his favorite car in the world—a car he wasn’t allowed to drive, even though he was now sixty-six-years old.
When Rodney and Wayne got to the supermarket, they noticed something strange. There was a small crowd of people gathered outside. Most of the men and women were either the same age that Rodney and Wayne now were, or a little older. One of the men looked like a grown-up version of Davy Rockwell, a boy in Rodney and Wayne’s class at school.
“Is that you, Davy?” asked Wayne.
“Yeah. Is that you, Rodney and Wayne?”
The brothers nodded. Wayne was about to comment on how
different they all looked, when Davy called out to the people around him, “Hey, lookit, everybody! It’s Rodney and Wayne. Hey guys, how come we went from being babies to this? What happened?”
“Yeah, what happened?” asked Sharon, a blond-haired girl in Rodney and Wayne’s class who now had streaks of white running through her hair.
Before either of the twins could answer, a boy named Virgil, who had been the president of the Eighth-Grade French Club and always liked to use a little French when possible, said, “So I’ll get to be a thirteen-year-old again soon, no? N’est pas, mon amis?” (“Is it not so, my friends?”)
Rodney didn’t want to tell everyone that it was on account of the Professor’s accident that over fifty years had been added to everyone’s ages. So he said, “The Professor is working on the problem. We are hopeful that things will be back to normal in no time.”
Then Rodney turned to Davy. “What are all these people doing out here? Is the store closed?”
“Kind of. It’s closed to anybody who needs to buy food for their really old family members.”
“What do you mean?” asked Rodney.
Before Davy could answer, a man holding a megaphone stepped up onto a wooden citrus crate. Everybody turned to look at him. The man looked about seventy-five or so. He also looked like Mr. Toland, Sr., the owner of the store.
“May I have your attention please! Quiet, please!” shouted the man through his megaphone. “For those of you who do not recognize me, I am Henry Toland, Jr. As you can see from this door, we had a break-in last night.” Mr. Toland, Jr. drew the attention of the crowd to the door in question with an exaggerated nod of his head. The door was not easy to miss. Its shattered pane of glass had been replaced by cardboard and duct tape. “We are still open for business, and you are free to enter, but you must know that there are certain items that are no longer in stock. You will not find them here and you will not be permitted to hound my store clerk Miss Choate about it. She has far too much to do, since all of my other clerks cannot make it in to work due to advanced age.”
A woman raised her hand. “Please give us that list of unavailable items if you would.”
“Yes. I have the list right here.” Mr. Toland, Jr., pulled a small piece of paper from his shirt pocket. He took a pair of eyeglasses out of a different pocket and put them on. He cleared his throat. “Oatmeal, Cream-of-Wheat, and other soft cereals.”
A collective gasp went up from the crowd.
“All Jell-O products. All gelatins of every kind. All custards and box puddings.”
“Even Tapioca?” asked a man in the back.
“Yes. Tapioca and every other kind of box pudding. Also Postum. And Malt-o-meal. That goes under the heading of soft cereals. Let me see—oh, and all soft fruit that can be easily gummed.”
Another gasp. A different woman raised her hand.
“Yes, Miss Edwards?”
“But that leaves nothing for my mother to eat. She is now 104 and has no teeth!”
“I am sorry Miss Edwards, but it is out of my hands.”
“When will you get in more soft foods from the warehouse?”
“There are no more soft foods in the warehouse. They have also been taken, and no one knows when they will be replaced with a new shipment.”
Now Davy Rockwell raised his hand. “Excuse me, Mr. Toland, but what about the other stores around town? Do you know if they have soft foods in stock—foods that are easy on the digestion and if necessary may be gummed rather than chewed?”
“I have spoken with the managers and owners of the other food markets in town—or, rather, I have spoken with their sons and daughters who are now running their fathers’ stores, and I am told that each of those stores was also robbed last night. As I understand it, there is no more soft food available for purchase anywhere in the town of Pitcherville.”
Rodney and Wayne turned to each other and exchanged astonished looks. “What about Aunt Mildred? What will she eat?” said Wayne in a low voice.
“And the Professor too? And everyone else who will now require a soft and mushy diet?”
The two boys shook their heads worriedly. It was a sad state of affairs for a town without blenders.
(Pitcherville had no blenders in the year 1956. Craft Appliances had begun to sell them right after they came out in the 1930s, but then an accident involving an overly-curious, careless customer whose name is not important to this story—but who could easily be identified by a deficiency in the number of fingers on his right hand—motivated Mr. Craft to send all of his blenders back to their manufacturers and to order no more for the sake of other customer fingers.)
Davy Rockwell raised his hand again. “Can this really be true? Can it really be true that there is no soft food available for purchase anywhere in the town of Pitcherville?”
“Of course not! That is ridiculous!” Davy’s question was answered by a tall man, whom Rodney and Wayne could not quite see at that moment except for the back of his head, which had a prominent bald spot in the middle of it. “I know where there is plenty of food matching that description.”
“Let him through!” said a man.
“Yes, let him speak!” shouted a different man. “He knows where soft food can be had.”
The crowd parted so that the tall man and a shorter man standing beside him could move to the front. Mr. Toland, Jr. stepped down from his crate and offered it to the tall man.
“Get a load of that!” said Wayne under his breath. “It’s Jackie. And lookit! Lonnie’s right with him!”
“I’ll bet those two had something to do with all the robberies last night,” said Rodney.
“Hello, my good friends and neighbors,” said Jackie, speaking in a loud and overly-formal speech-giving voice. Maybe you don’t recognize me and my business partner here. So allow us to introduce ourselves. I am Jackie Stovall—yes, your ol’ friend Jackie Stovall. And this is Lonnie Rowe.”
“You mean the same Jackie Stovall and Lonnie Rowe who turned over my Fluffy’s doghouse?” shouted Sharon, bristling.
“The same Jackie and Lonnie who let all the air out of my father’s tires?” yelled Davy.
“N’est pas? N’est pas?” asked Virgil.
Jackie lowered his outstretch
ed palms to silence the murmurs of the small crowd of people glowering in front of him. “No, no, my friends, that was the old Jackie and Lonnie. Standing before you here today are the new Jackie and Lonnie. We have turned over a brand new leaf. For we are in the midst of a terrible crisis, ladies and gentlemen, and we must come together as one community.” Jackie joined all of his fingers together to show how a town of people could come together, provided that they all looked like fingers. “Someone, and we do not know who, has stolen all of the soft food that was for sale in the town of Pitcherville. A tragedy! An offense against nature! But I ask all of you on this dark day: will we stand idly by and allow the oldest of our citizens to starve? No, we most certainly will not!”
A woman started to clap her hands in support of what Jackie had just said but was so strongly frowned upon by the people standing around her that she immediately stopped. You see, most of the people standing around the woman had been victims of Jackie and Lonnie’s pranks and other acts of youthful vandalism, and were not yet convinced that the two had actually turned over a brand new leaf.
“So here is what Lonnie and I will do. Because we predicted that this thing might happen and prepared for it—because we had— had—now, what is the word?
“Head lice?” snickered someone in the crowd.
“No,” said Jackie, glowering at the person.
“Foresight?” offered someone else.
“Yes, foresight. Because we had the foresight, Lonnie and me, to scrape together as much money as we could to spend the last several months buying up a large quantity of soft food—food which is now sitting safe and sound in a secret location—because we have done this, ladies and gentlemen, we can now stand before you and reach out a helping hand.” Jackie reached out his hand to show how easy it was to do such a thing. “We have searched our souls, friends and neighbors, and decided that we have no right to keep that soft food to ourselves. No sir, we do not. So we will be rationing it out to all of those in need.”
“How much do you plan to take us for?” called out the man who had said “head lice.”
“Take you for?” Jackie seemed greatly offended by the question. He placed his hand on his chest to emphasize how offended and hurt and generally taken aback he was by such rudeness. “Perhaps you won’t believe me, but I don’t intend to charge you a single penny. Why? I will tell you why. Because we will use the barter system. I will give you, say a cup of Cream-of-Wheat, in exchange for something that you give me. Now, for example, I have made a bargain with my very own father, the Mayor. He has no teeth. He had teeth—false teeth, that is—but someone, regrettably, has stolen them from him.” Jackie shook his head dolefully over how such a terrible thing could happen.
“It is also regrettable that my father is now confined to his bed and can no longer carry out his duties as mayor. Nor is there anything in the house that he and my poor mother can eat. It is a most difficult situation however you look at it.
“Now, friends and neighbors, I will show all of you how this works: I will take my poor, bedridden and toothless father a cup of Malt-o-Meal. In exchange for this, he will make me, his son, the new mayor of the town of Pitcherville.”
There rose up another collective gasp from the crowd. One man shouted, “Outrage!”
“Who said that?” asked Jackie, craning his head to look around. “Whoever said that will not be doing business with me. No soft cereal, no custard, not even a squishy over-ripe plum! Now, once I have gotten myself settled into the mayor’s office at City Hall, you may all begin to form a line outside my door. I will open my door promptly at eight o’clock tomorrow morning to see the first people in the line. My deputy, Mr. Rowe, will dispense the foodstuffs after we have come to our individual agreements. I assure you all that no one will go hungry in this town, not while I am the mayor! Good day, my good friends and neighbors and bon—bon—what is the word?”
“Voyage?” asked a woman in the crowd.
“No, no. The other word. The food word.”
“Appetit,” offered Virgil confidently.
“Yes, bon appetit to you all.”
With that, Jackie stepped down from the speaking crate and departed, along with his newly appointed deputy Lonnie.
A stunned silence followed, and then a soft, whispered exchange or two, and in no time at all a big noisy, earnest and fearful buzz.
“I do not want my mother to starve in her bed!” said one woman. “I’ll give the man anything he asks for.”
“What else can we do?” said her companion.
“He certainly has us over a barrel,” said Davy Rockwell, shaking his head despondently. “I have to feed all of my grandparents. I have a grandfather who must now be nearly 130 years old! He wasn’t eating solid food even before all of this happened. I’m going over to the mayor’s office right now. I want to be first in line when he opens his door tomorrow. Goodbye, boys. It was good to see you again.”
Davy hurried off. There were others who, probably thinking the same thing, hurried off in the very same direction.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
In which Officer Wall delivers bad news and Rodney and Wayne learn what is in their father’s secret cellar
When Rodney and Wayne explained the situation to the Professor, the old man said, “That’s extortion! It’s monstrous! That bully-boy intends to be an outright dictator!”
“What can we do about it, Professor?” asked Rodney. “You and Aunt Mildred will have to eat.”
“You must be resourceful, boys. Doesn’t your great aunt do a little canning? What has she put up from last year?”
“Some green beans and squash.”
“Nothing soft and squishy and not too acidic or too seedy?
Seeds are never good for the tracts of old people.”
“We’ll find out,” said Rodney. “Also, there is still a little oatmeal in her cupboard. And we noticed a box of pudding mix in your pantry.”
“Is it Tapioca? I love Tapioca.”
‘I don’t remember.”
“Well, there is enough food around—if we do a thorough job of scrounging—to feed your great aunt and me for the next two days—perhaps even three or four if we each take small bites. And in the meantime, we must work as hard as we are able to finish the new Age Altertron. Now go down and complete your inventory and then, if there is time left, I would not mind some hot pudding.”
Rodney and Wayne completed their inventory and cooked some pudding and then worked through the night on the first phase of construction for the new machine. The Professor sat in an arm chair not too far from the work area, wrapped in a blanket to keep away the chill, consulting his calculations and his diagrams and shouting out instructions in his increasingly raspy voice: “Tighten that bolt! Excellent! The red wire and now the green wire! Now why is there no charge in that auxiliary battery? I wonder what has happened to the multi-volt charger? Can you find the thermionic triode pentode? What have I done with it? Think, Russell, think! And why have I reversed the electrostatic charge? Would someone please tell me that? Ah, there is our oddleg caliper. Gizmo had been sleeping on it!”
The Professor also took time to explain the mechanics and physics of the Age Altertron II so that Rodney and Wayne would have a better understanding of what they were doing. “When we age, boys, the cells in our bodies decay and die. Conversely, if a man were to grow incrementally younger, there would be a rebirth of cellular tissue within his body. Now this is what the Age Altertron does: depending on whether you wish it to age a man or give him sudden youth, the machine sends signals throughout a prescribed area—in our case, the town of Pitcherville—that either destroy the components of human cellular growth or stimulate them. The pulse of the signal is multiplied exponentially to create a nearly instantaneous result. Now did you understand any of that?”
“A little,” said Wayne sheepishly. By morning the boys were exhausted but proud of all they had accomplished. The Professor was equally proud of his two apprentices and how hard they had
worked. “I was afraid that we would be unable to recover from the damage that I did last night,” the boys’ scientific mentor said with a crusty voice, “but this is a most admirable start. I wish that there were some way I could repay you two for all the good work you are doing.”
“You’ve repaid us enough with everything you’ve done for this town over the last year, Professor,” said Rodney.
Becky, who had come by to bring egg-and-olive sandwiches to Rodney and Wayne, nodded in agreement.
“But there is nothing that I can do, specifically, for you kids?”
“Well, now that you mention it,” said Wayne, grinning mischievously, “you could let me take your Nash out for a spin.”
“What is that, Wayne? I didn’t hear you.”
Wayne was about to repeat his request with more volume when he was interrupted by a knock at the door. Becky jumped up to answer it. “Hello, Officer Wall. Won’t you come in?”
Officer Wall, who now had the wrinkled face of a man in his eighties, hobbled into the laboratory using a cane. He was no longer wearing his policeman’s uniform. “Good morning, Professor. Good morning, Rodney, Wayne, Becky.”
“Are we being too loud?” asked Wayne.
“No, no. You are well within the noise limit. I have come to tell you something I believe you should know.”
“Please sit down, Officer,” said Rodney. Together he and Wayne helped the slow-moving officer down onto a bench.
“Ah. That feels good. It is a long walk from City Hall. I no longer have my patrol car, you see.”
“Why is that?” asked Wayne.
“It doesn’t belong to me anymore. I have been fired—no, I believe that the proper word is ‘retired.’ I have been purposefully ‘retired’ from the police force.”
“But why?”