Nickel Bay Nick

by Dean Pitchford

  I’ve never felt so mysterious in my life.

  At 8:20, I tuck Mr. Wells’s brown envelope under my sweater, pull on my new gloves and zip up my winter coat. At the bottom of the stairs that go from our apartment down to the back of the garage we live over, I pause to scope out my surroundings.

  All clear on the left?

  Check.

  All clear on the right?

  Check.

  I’m getting good at this spy stuff.

  I slide through our back fence and head down the alley to my first assignment as Nickel Bay Nick.

  Oh-one-oh-five, and I’m in Mr. Wells’s backyard. A quick dash and I’m up on the porch, punching the bell. Inside, Hoko answers the chimes with a racket of his own, and then Dr. Sakata is suddenly filling the doorway. As he lets me in, he glances quickly around the backyard to make sure nobody’s seen us.

  From another part of the house comes the sound of Hoko’s nails clicking as he races down stairs and gallops across wood floors, snarling and woofing on his way.

  “He’s coming!” I yell to Dr. Sakata. “Do something!”

  Maybe he can’t understand my words, but Dr. Sakata can’t miss the panic in my voice. He shouts, “Hoko! KO-ra!” and in the next room, the clicking stops as Hoko hits the brakes. Like a car skidding on a wet street, Hoko slides around the corner of the doorway and slams into Dr. Sakata’s leg. He looks up at me and, with his black tongue, he licks his chops as if to say, Next time, you’re mine.

  Dr. Sakata holds out a hand, and I pass him my coat and gloves. When he points to my shoes, I slip them off as well.

  “We’ve got our own special sign language going, huh?” I ask, but he doesn’t even blink before he’s striding down another hallway. I rush to keep up with him, slipping on the waxed wood in my socks as Hoko follows close behind. We turn into a whole new wing of the house, one that I’d never have guessed was here, and we pass a few closed doors before we enter what appears to be another office.

  Unlike the freaky living room, this place looks as modern as a command center at the Pentagon. At a steel table that runs down the middle of the room, Mr. Wells, surrounded by piles of papers and folders, is thumbing through a stack of file cards. I quickly look around for any clues to his life—family photographs, framed diplomas, stuff like that. The wall behind Mr. Wells is covered up by a map of the world, and gray file cabinets line the walls to the right and the left. Up high, around the perimeter of the room, twenty-four small clocks are arranged to show the time of day in cities all over the globe. But that’s about it, as far as decorations go.

  I pull the brown envelope from under my sweater and lay it on the desk in front of Mr. Wells. “Brought your stuff back.”

  Without looking up, he glances at his wristwatch. “What time have you got?”

  I check. “Eight thirty-one.”

  “Actually, it’s eight thirty-five. You’re late.”

  He hasn’t even said good morning yet, and already he’s giving me grief! “But I’ve got a Rolex,” I protest. “How can it be wrong?”

  “I’m going to guess that the clock by which you set your wristwatch is incorrect,” he answers. “Be sure to reset that clock this evening.” He rolls out from behind the desk and indicates the wall behind me. “Let’s get started, shall we?”

  I quickly reset my wristwatch and then turn around to face a huge cork bulletin board. In the center of it is a street map of Nickel Bay that’s stuck all over with green, red and white pins. A banner across the top of the corkboard reads OPERATION CHRISTMAS RESCUE.

  “Operation Christmas Rescue? Is that what we’re calling this?” I ask, and, yeah, maybe I sound a little sarcastic when I do.

  Mr. Wells ignores my question and instead asks one of his own. “Did you read the pages I sent home with you last evening?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you learn anything that you didn’t know before?”

  “I didn’t know Nickel Bay Nick is world-famous.”

  He nods. “Anything else?”

  I squint in concentration. “Oh! He makes three visits every year, always four days apart, and the last one’s always on Christmas Eve. Until this year.”

  For the first time ever, Mr. Wells looks at me with an expression that is almost admiring.

  “What?” I ask.

  “That’s correct,” he murmurs before continuing. “Now, it’s too late to send greeting cards or secretly deliver Christmas gifts, so we’re going to have to get creative if we hope to deliver the usual forty-five Nickel Bay Bucks in time.”

  Pulling on a pair of white cotton gloves, he unzips a small canvas bag in his lap, pulls out a stack of crisp green bills and runs a thumb across the edges. “Four thousand five hundred dollars,” he announces as they flip past. When I feel the breeze on my face, I gulp. I’ve never seen so much money. Not up close.

  Mr. Wells replaces the cash and removes his gloves before turning back to the map. “In keeping with tradition, between now and January sixth, Nickel Bay Nick will perform three missions.” From a pocket he pulls what looks like a silver lipstick tube. When he twists it, a long metal wand telescopes out. “As you can see,” he says, tapping on the bulletin board with the pointer, “I’ve assigned a color to each mission—red, green and white.”

  “Christmas colors,” I note.

  “Exactly,” he says crisply. “Today, we will commence with the Red Mission.”

  I stand on tiptoe to study the cluster of red-headed pins stuck into the map. “Looks like they’re all downtown.”

  “Very observant,” he says as he spins his chair and returns to the steel table. He points at the empty chair across from him. “You may sit.”

  Once I do, he slides a writing tablet and a pen over to me. Down the left-hand margin of the tablet he has written FIRST, SECOND, THIRD, FOURTH. He holds up a wall calendar, and with his pointer, he whacks each day as he mentions it.

  “Yesterday, as you will remember, was the first day of Christmas.”

  Whack! He hits December 26.

  “Today is the second day . . .”

  Whack!

  “. . . which I will use to explain the Red Mission. Tomorrow, on the third day of Christmas . . .”

  Whack!

  “. . . we will lay the groundwork and make all preparations for you to make the first distribution on December twenty-ninth . . .”

  Whack! Whack!

  “. . . the fourth day of Christmas. Nickel Bay Nick’s return. Any questions so far?”

  “Yeah,” I say, wrinkling my nose. “Could you please stop smacking that stick around? It’s really irritating, and it’s kind of insulting.”

  My bluntness seems to catch him by surprise.

  “Oh.” He collapses the pointer down into its tube.

  “And one more thing?” I figure that while I have him off balance, why not shoot for the moon? “Can you please not talk to me like I’m a subhuman life-form? I may be a problem kid, but I’m not a stupid one.”

  Mr. Wells looks at me a long time before he twists his neck as if he were working out a crick.

  “Fair enough, Sam,” he says. “Let’s begin.”

  • • •

  The morning flies by. At noon, the desktop between us is covered with fifteen advertisements that Mr. Wells and I have clipped from the sales pages of the Nickel Bay News. Each ad is from a different store, and each one is for a different, everyday product that’s been drastically marked down for post-Christmas clearance. Toothpaste. Shoe polish. A pack of playing cards. Stuff like that.

  “According to my research,” Mr. Wells explains, “these items are among the most likely to be purchased when they go on sale.”

  We’ve labeled each ad with Post-its numbered from one to fifteen, and on a map of Nickel Bay, we’ve assigned each number to a store where that ad’s produ
ct is sold.

  “So talk me through this,” Mr. Wells says. “Tomorrow, how will you start?”

  I push back my sleeves and point to a spot on the map. “I guess I’m going to pick up item number one—the box of women’s hair dye—in store number one, which is . . . Colodner’s Drugstore.”

  “Correct.”

  I look up. “Can I ask you something?”

  He nods.

  “Is there any particular reason I’m starting at Colodner’s?”

  Mr. Wells looks puzzled. “Why would there be?”

  If he doesn’t know, I’m not going to tell him, but I once got arrested at Colodner’s. Until Mr. Colodner wised up and put in surveillance cameras, his store was where Jaxon and Ivy and I used to “shop” for all of our back-to-school supplies. Then one day, after slipping a three-ring binder under my jacket, I turned around to find Mr. Colodner with a cop at his side. I haven’t been back since.

  I fake a smile for Mr. Wells. “Nope, no reason,” I say quickly as I walk my fingers across the map. “Then, for item number two—a package of four double-A batteries—I cross the street to store number two. Hopkins Hardware.”

  “Precisely,” Mr. Wells declares. “And if you simply follow the sequence of numbers on the map, you’ll never waste a step. Once you’re done with your route, what do you do with the items you’ve collected?”

  “I bring them all back here, and then, I guess, we stick Nickel Bay Bucks into them?”

  “So far, so good. You’ll need this.” He slides a white letter-size envelope across the table to me. I open it to find a stack of paper money—ones, fives and tens—and rolling around at the bottom of the envelope is a bunch of coins.

  “What’s this for?”

  “That is exactly as much cash as you will need to purchase all these items tomorrow.”

  “Wait a second!” I blurt out. “I’m supposed to buy all these things?”

  “How did you think you were going to get them out of the stores?” Mr. Wells asks.

  “I thought I was going to . . . y’know . . .” I pretend to pick up an imaginary object and slip it into my pocket.

  Mr. Wells wrinkles his brow. “You think I’d ask you to steal?”

  “Well, you’re the one who said you needed a thief!”

  “But I’m not going to have you shoplift on Day One of the Red Mission!” he insists. “What if you got caught? Operation Christmas Rescue would have to be scrapped.”

  I sulk for a moment. “Well, what do you need a thief for, then?”

  “Ah.” Mr. Wells holds up a finger. “I need a thief for the day after tomorrow.”

  “December twenty-ninth?”

  “Exactly. The fourth day of Christmas is when you will retrace the route we have plotted today and return everything where you got it. Same exact shelf. Same exact position. That will take the cunning and concentration of a thief. Are you up to the challenge?”

  I scowl and shrug. “We’ll see, won’t we?”

  Mr. Wells keeps ignoring all the attitude I’m tossing his way, and we work through the rest of my assignment in agonizing detail.

  At one o’clock—according to my Rolex—Dr. Sakata serves us each a bowl of really good tomato soup and a chicken salad sandwich. He and Mr. Wells talk for a few minutes in that language I don’t understand, and then Dr. Sakata leaves us to eat in silence. Looking down the table at the mounds of notes and cards and clippings, I suddenly feel overwhelmed by the task ahead of me.

  “It’s not the job you imagined, is it?” Mr. Wells asks, and I look across to find him studying me.

  “Hardly,” I say. “I thought that, y’know, being Nickel Bay Nick, all I’d have to do is run around town, giving away money. But this . . .” I jerk a thumb at the clutter around us. “All this mapping and memorizing, this is worse than being in school.”

  “Keeping a secret is very tough work,” he says, and returns to his lunch.

  I’m getting so warm from the soup that I pull my sweater over my head and toss it aside. Mr. Wells looks at me, and his eyes narrow.

  “That object around your neck,” he says, pointing to his own throat. “I haven’t noticed it before.”

  “Oh, this?” I rub the little stone carving between two fingers. “Maybe cuz it’s always been under my sweater.”

  “Is there a story behind it?” he asks.

  “Yeah,” I say. “It’s a long one, though.”

  Mr. Wells spreads his arms wide. “I’ve got all the time in the world.”

  “Well, okay.” I finish my last spoonful of soup and take a deep breath.

  “D’you ever hear about the big fire that burned down the Nickel Bay Furniture Works?”

  “I heard it was horrible,” Mr. Wells says. “But I also heard that there was one particularly heroic firefighter. Saved a dozen lives, if I remember correctly?”

  I nod. “That was my dad.”

  Mr. Wells blinks in surprise. “Dwight? Really?”

  “Yeah. Anyway, because of that, he got written up in papers all over the country. He even got interviewed on the Today show. I was three and a half at the time, so I really had no idea how famous my dad was, if only for a few weeks.

  “Then the bad news started. After the factory closed, people started leaving town to look for other work and more businesses shut down. So the town of Nickel Bay cut the fire department’s budget, and Dad lost his job. Six months later, when the doctors found out I’d need a new heart, the same reporters who wrote about Dad’s bravery wrote stories about me. Y’know, things like, ‘Hero’s Child Needs Heart!’

  “When I finally had the operation, it got reported everywhere. Mom even came back to see me and gave a few interviews. But she had a job singing on a riverboat outside St. Louis, so she had to leave before she could visit the hospital.”

  “Is that when she sent you the Rolex?” Mr. Wells asks.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Even though you were too small to wear it and too young to tell time?”

  “It was her way of apologizing, okay?” I say, feeling a little defensive.

  Mr. Wells holds up his hands. “Whatever you say.”

  “Anyway,” I continue, “my hospital room was flooded with all kinds of heart gifts . . . heart-shaped candies and heart-shaped balloons and pajamas and T-shirts with hearts on them, and—”

  “Okay.” Mr. Wells smiles. “I get the idea.”

  “Dad donated most of that stuff to other kids in the hospital, and one of the only gifts he kept was a wooden box with this inside it, hanging from a leather cord.” I squint at my pendant. “There was no card, Dad said, so we never knew who it came from. Or what it was supposed to be. We thought it looked like a monkey, but we were never sure. Dad says I used to swing it back and forth and stare at it for hours, but then I got over it and stuck it in my sock drawer.

  “I didn’t think about it again until the day my third-grade class took a field trip to an art museum upstate. I happened to look into a room we were marching past, and I saw a stone statue as tall as me, exactly like my carving. I got yelled at for breaking out of line, but I had to get a closer look. And before my teacher dragged me off, I read the card next to the statue that told how Hanuman was a god of India with the head of a monkey and the body of a man.”

  “Oh, that’s Hanuman, is it?” Mr. Wells asks, leaning forward for a closer look. “Hmm. So it is.”

  “You know about Hanuman?”

  “Of course. I once lived in India. He’s very popular there.”

  “Anyway, when I got home from the museum that day, I pulled this pendant out and told Dad how I’d learned that Hanuman is a monkey and a man. ‘Do you believe it?’ I said. ‘He’s two creatures in one body. Like me!’”

  “Hold on,” Mr. Wells says. “You thought of yourself as two creatures in one body?”

&nbs
p; “I still do.”

  “Explain, please.”

  “Well, after my operation, nobody would ever answer when I asked where my heart came from, so I never knew anything about this . . . thing I’ve got living inside me,” I say, thumping my chest. “Over time, my imagination filled in the blanks, and I started having these awesome dreams. Like, there was one where I had the strength of ten men because I’d received the heart of a lion. In another one, I got the heart of a dolphin, so I could swim under any ocean on the planet.

  “I told Dad that if anyone would understand what it’s like to be two creatures in one body, it would be Hanuman. So that day, he tied this around my neck. And I’ve been wearing it ever since.”

  “You know, millions of people in India wear carvings like yours in the belief that Hanuman will protect them,” Mr. Wells says. “Like a guardian angel.”

  “And does he?” I ask. “Protect them?”

  “You fell from my roof onto my front lawn, and yet here you are.” He shrugs. “What do you think?”

  • • •

  After Dr. Sakata clears our lunch plates, we spend the afternoon rehearsing. First, Mr. Wells makes me memorize the exact order of the stores I’ll visit tomorrow as well as the item I’m supposed to buy in each one. Then I have to walk around the room, stopping every few feet, pretending to make a purchase and announcing stuff like, “At Veckens Stationery, I buy the box of twenty letter-size white envelopes on sale for two dollars and nineteen cents.” Boring, right?

  “Why can’t I just take my notes with me?” I ask after the third rehearsal.

  “Because you don’t want to . . . what?”

  His words come back to me. “Attract attention,” I mumble.

  “Exactly!” he practically shouts. “You want to be a spy? Think like one.”

  Before I can give him any grief, he plunges ahead. “Now, let’s discuss your wardrobe. Everything you wear,” he warns me, “must be in drab colors. Nothing flashy. Nothing that anyone might notice.”

  He cautions me to avoid salesclerks who know me. “Most of these stores still have temporary holiday cashiers, so be sure to buy your items at their registers. And do not make conversation!” He pounds a fist. “I don’t want anyone to have any memory of you.”