The Last of the Gullivers

by Carter Crocker

“It’s remarkable,” the man went on. “Think it might be for sale?”

  “No,” Jane told him. “My Dad loves this car.”

  “I can see why,” the man said, looking over the Hispano-Suiza. “Looks like it’s never been used, like it was just made.” The children said nothing. “I’d like to talk to your Dad about it.”

  “Okay,” said Michael and he moved to block the view of the rear seat.

  “Where is he?” the man wanted to know.

  “He’s. Inside. In there,” Jane pointed to the restaurant. “In the lavatory, I think.”

  The man in tweed nodded and said, “Yeah, maybe I’ll ask him about it.”

  A moment after he left, Phlopp called that the tire was patched. “You can fill it again,” Ickens said as Jane helped them into the car. Michael was adding air to the tire when the mechanic called to him from the service bay. “Tell your Dad I’m about ready. I’ll patch that tire in a minute.”

  “We have to go,” Jane whispered and grabbed the road map and went to stall the mechanic.

  Michael kept filling the tire, checking that the patch was holding.

  “We’re a little lost,” Jane told the mechanic in the bay, stalling, spreading the old map on the workbench. “Can you show us how to get to Ambridge?”

  A half-minute later, Michael had the tire filled and the car started. “Jane,” he called out. The man in tweed was coming from the restaurant. “Jane, let’s go!”

  “Hey, kids,” called the man. “I can’t find your father in there.”

  Jane ran from the bay and jumped in the car and they sped away, leaving the mechanic and tweedy man to wonder.

  They headed out of the little town, past a bronze statue of St. George and his Dragon. They were a mile down the road when Jane remembered, “The map, Michael, the map to Ambridge, I left it in the station!”

  “I know the way,” he said. “I was locked up there, remember?”

  “But the river, can you find that? We have to find the river to reach the sea.”

  Burton Topgallant happened to look up and happened to see two great birds, broad-winged, long-beaked, flying together far overhead. “Look there!” he cried. “Mr. Gulliver’s storks are coming home.”

  Michael saw the giant birds and knew they’d flown from Africa, from over the ocean. He watched their path, south to north, toward the next rolling mountain. “We need to go where they came from,” he told Jane. “Then we’ll find the sea.”

  The road lifted into a forest and small birds watched from telephone wires and the sun moved lower on the horizon.

  “Brother Ninneter . . .” Topgallant popped his head over the front seat. “Bit of a problem.” Michael and Jane saw a police car following on the rising, falling road.

  “Maybe they aren’t looking for us,” said Michael, turning at a roundabout to keep going south.

  But the police car turned, too, and followed.

  “They are,” said Jane. “They are, Michael.”

  There was a tractor ahead and he slowed to pass. “We have to get to Ambridge,” he said. “One way or other, we have to get them home.”

  Jane held the door handle tight and said, “See how fast it can go, Michael.”

  He pushed the pedal to the floor and Burton Topgallant went flying into the backseat. The old motor was awake now and remembering just how fast it could go—80, 85, 90 miles per hour. The faster it went, the more sure of the road it became. Farmland streamed by like rain from a cloud.

  The police tried to keep up, but the Hispano-Suiza was too much car. As he left the cops behind, Michael began to think they might make it after all.

  But it wasn’t long until they saw more police ahead, coming toward them from the north, east and west, a dozen sets of flashing lights speeding at them. The road was blocked and Michael had to let the big car slow.

  “Hold on,” he said, jerking through an open farm gate. He took the car across a field of fresh-plowed wheat. The Hispano-Suiza bounced over deep ruts and Lesser Lilliputians flew like kernels of popping corn.

  The police cars tried following, but couldn’t manage the rough field. The old car rode high and over the furrows, but all the dozen police were soon stuck fast in the dirt.

  Michael drove over one field and through the next, until a stone wall stopped them. The town of Ambridge was just beyond. The car stopped with a sudden lurch and a shudder, its motor dead. Michael found an old wheelbarrow and they piled the giant ship model in. The Lesser Lilliputians walked as fast as their small legs let them and they set off, leaving the car behind in the field.

  Night was falling as they reached the village, its streets full of music and dancers, a fair, a festival, like they used to have in Moss-on-Stone. Michael and Jane found a wrecked rusted shopping cart and loaded most of the Lesser Lilliputians into it, covering them with an old sheet. The rest rode in the wheelbarrow with the ship model.

  There were police officers everywhere, but the children lost themselves in the celebration—a talent of Michael’s—and the cops never saw them. The smell of warm food was almost too much for the Little Ones; still they listened to Jane and stayed out of view.

  Down a block more, Jane saw the canal sparkling with moonlight. They found the place where the longboats were docked for the night and Michael went to the closed rental office. Once, these narrow boats had carried merchandise up and down the small canals that connected the country; now they carried only tourists. Michael read the trip rates: five pounds for an hour, fifteen for half a day, thirty for the full.

  “I don’t have that much,” Jane told him quietly.

  But he wasn’t worried. “You wait here,” he said to her. “I’ll take care of it.” There was a small gift shop by the longboats, also closed for the night, and Jane huddled the Lesser Lilliputians under its wide sheltering eaves.

  Michael went back to the village, wandering its crowded streets until he found the old coin shop he remembered from another day. It was shut, locked, but lights still glowed from a second floor room where the owner lived. The boy hammered the door with his fists, rattling the door on its hinges, until the bald young man came to open it.

  “I’m closed, come back in the morning.”

  But Michael put his arm in the door before the man could shut it. “I’m sorry, but I need—”

  “Go away or I’ll call the police!”

  “Can you tell me what this is worth?” And he opened his hand and held out the coin Lem had given him, that first day at Fenn’s market.

  When the dealer saw it, he let the boy in and locked the store tight behind them. “Where’d you get this?”

  “It was given to me,” Michael told him. “Is it worth something?”

  The young coin dealer nodded. “This is from India, kid, an 1841 Mohur,” he said, looking at it through his glass. “Lion and palm, with the error here, on Victoria. The cast is off-center. There, you see? Didn’t you ever look at it twice? A small dent on the reverse, otherwise perfect. This coin is worth two thousands pounds, easily. With the right collectors bidding, it might go for three times that.”

  “Would you buy it?” asked Michael.

  “Kid, I don’t have that kind of money. You need to get this to a city and a good auction house.”

  “You can have it for fifty pounds,” the boy said.

  But the dealer gave him back the coin. “I won’t do that. This thing could be worth a hundred times more.”

  Michael set it on the counter. “All I need is fifty.”

  The young man shook his head, saying, “No, no, no,” again and again.

  Michael begged, “It’s really important. I don’t care what it’s worth. All I need is fifty pounds. You can have it for fifty.”

  The dealer kept shaking his head, even as he unlocked the cash drawer in his dark oaken desk. “H
ere,” he sighed, “this is a down payment, and that’s all it is. You come back, kid, and we’ll sell the coin together.”

  Michael thanked him and went.

  As he hurried back to the canal, he passed a dim, dingy pub where a stubbly-faced man sat smoking and drinking by the front window. The man looked up and saw the little boy through the haze and knew him.

  “Hold on now,” the taxi driver said to himself.

  Michael went into the village fair to find food. He walked the loud, busy streets, past a volunteer band and a troupe of morris dancers, kid-rides, vendors in tents, the whole place crazy with sound and light. He wished his own village were like this, full of music, full of life. He stopped at the street stalls and filled three sacks with food.

  Back by the river, he emptied the bags and they all had a feast of fish cakes and pizza fingers, sausages and pasties.

  The Lesser Lilliputians were humbled and grateful for all the boy had done to help them. “I don’t see how we’ll repay you for this,” said Topgallant.

  “As soon as it’s light,” Michael told him, “we’ll finish the journey.”

  But even as he said this, a man was stumbling down the dock toward them, with a hollow thumping of planks. The Little Ones hid, quickly, expertly. Michael and Jane couldn’t see who it was in the dark.

  “Knew that was you.” The stubble-faced man stepped into a pool of moonlight. “The two little runaways.” It was the taxi driver.

  Jane and Michael were stuck where they were and had nowhere to run: there was only one way off the dock and the man stood blocking it.

  “We don’t want any trouble,” Michael told him. “Just get away from us.”

  “Tough kid,” the driver laughed. “What’re you, ten?”

  “Twelve,” said Michael. “How much do you want to go away?”

  “Ha. More’n you got,” the man said, slurred.

  “Would you go and forget you saw us . . . for fifty pounds?”

  “Like y’got that,” he laughed.

  Michael pulled out the notes and showed him. “Here. Take it. All we want is to be left alone.”

  “For fifty pounds, might jus’ do that.”

  Michael held out the money and said, “Now go.”

  The stubbly man laughed and said nothing more, but grabbed the money and left them, stumbling and fumbling and mumbling back up the dock. They watched till darkness took him. “He might still turn us in,” said Jane. “He might take the money and still go to the cops.”

  “Not him,” Michael told her. “He’s like Freddie. He’ll go back to the pub.”

  And the man did. He went back to the pub and didn’t leave till it closed. By then, he’d forgotten all about the children.

  “Now we don’t have any money,” said Jane. “Where do we go from here?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  THE LONGBOAT

  That coin was worth a lot,” Michael told her and showed her another wad of money. “The man in the shop gave me a hundred for it and said there’d be more. We still have enough.”

  They settled under the eaves and they slept.

  The sun rose slowly that next dawn and the canal mist didn’t burn away. A family of moorhen pattered to the water and a trout gulped a meal from the once-still surface. Over where the longboats were docked, Jane woke to see the booking agent opening his stall. She nudged Michael. “C’mon,” she whispered. “It’s time.”

  Jane went to the clerk, who was getting his forms ready, and asked about renting a boat.

  “Five pounds for an hour,” he said.

  “Okay,” she said and, “we’ll take a full day,” and she put thirty pounds on the counter.

  The man looked up from his work. “And where would Mum and Dad be, love?”

  “They’re divorced,” she said as she opened her rucksack behind her back, and Thudd Ickens slipped out. “My Dad’s over there,” and she waved, that-way-somewhere.

  The booking agent stepped around his stand and began setting out a large signboard and Ickens ran off, unseen, the other way.

  “He sent me with the money,” Jane said and showed him the notes again. “Thirty pounds. It’s all here. We want to rent a boat for the whole day.”

  “That’s good, that’s fine. But I’m not going to rent to a little girl, am I?”

  “Why not?” She was stalling now, giving Ickens time to grab the key.

  “It’s against what we call the law, love.”

  “But I have the money, see? Right here.” She picked up the notes and waved them once again. “Thirty pounds.”

  The little acrobat was shimmying up an electric wire, tightroping across a coat-rack to reach the box that held the boat keys.

  “Yes, love, I saw,” said the agent. “But I still need a real grown-up with real grown-up identification, y’understand?”

  Jane saw Thudd Ickens, the key slung over his shoulder, as he crawled into the rucksack. “Well, okay. I’ll get Dad then,” she told the agent.

  “Yeah, you do that.”

  She left the money on the counter and ran away.

  “Hold on—! Don’t leave this here—! Hey—!”

  But she was gone.

  “Kids,” the man sighed to himself.

  A hundred feet away, at the water’s edge, Michael found the longboat to match the key number. The agent had wandered up to the village, for coffee. Jane kept watch as Michael hurried the Lesser Lilliputians aboard, all one hundred ninety-two of them. Last of all, they loaded the giant ship model onto the stern.

  Another minute later, Michael had the motor running and Jane untied the lines. They drifted into the canal, clumsily banging other boats, as she stood at the bow and called directions.

  The booking clerk was still gone and didn’t see, but a lone fisherman, with a long Buddha gaze, watched from the opposite embankment. Jane smiled and waved shyly as they hit a few more boats.

  The fisherman nodded. “Everything all right over there?”

  “My Dad,” said Jane, “he’s—he’s not so great with boats.”

  “There are bigger sins than that,” the fisherman said.

  At last they were clear, in the middle of the waterway, and on their awkward way. The longboat cruised drunkenly down the old canal, sideswiping pilings and trees. Jane and the Lilliputians held on tight. “Michael, is this the best you can do?”

  “I never drove one of these,” was the answer from the cabin.

  Jane had to look away when they nearly ran down a Snow Goose. A willow drooped to the water and the reeds were overgrown and the longboat plowed on through it all. Soon, Michael got them back in open water and they picked up speed.

  It wasn’t long before Jane saw another canal boat ahead, loaded with early-morning sightseers, its captain eyeing the boat headed toward him at a dangerous clip.

  “Watch your course!” came his far-off call. “Easy, easy there!”

  “To your left, Michael, your left!” Jane called.

  The longboat turned straight for the other boat, full-speed.

  “Hove her to, man! Now, now!”

  “Your other left!” Jane called to Michael and at the last impossible second, he steered them away—too late for a clean pass—and they went crunching down the side of the tour boat, two hulls crying out as the wood rubbed together. “Sorry,” Jane said as they passed, and again, “sorry.”

  The tour captain was furious, trying to kick the other boat clear. “Who’s your captain?!”

  Jane shrugged and shyly said, “My Dad.”

  “Let me see him, now!”

  Michael only pushed the engine harder, speeding away. But as they passed, the tour captain got a glimpse of the young boy at the helm.

  And he grabbed for the wireless.

  T
wenty minutes later, they heard a siren. It was the Marine Patrol now, steering an expert course around and between other boats on the river. The children saw two policemen in it, and a large dark figure besides. Michael knew it was Horace Ackerby, Chief Magistrate for Moss-on-Stone. There was no mistaking that giant.

  The river here felt the ocean tide, and it was going out fast. The longboat was flying along, pushed by its engine and pulled by the ebbing sea. But the Marine Patrol was moving quickly, too, closer and closer.

  “They’re coming, Michael. They’re going to catch us.”

  The boy could see the other officer, Stanley Ford. When the call had first come in from the tour captain, that the children had been seen in the river near Ambridge, he and the Magistrate had left immediately.

  “Don’t let them get away from us,” said Ackerby.

  “Not a chance,” the pilot told him.

  Michael tried to coax the longboat faster, but the engine had no more to give. He wasn’t watching the quick-dropping water and ran onto a sandbar. There was loud grinding and they were all thrown from their feet, Michael, Jane, the Lesser Lilliputians.

  “What was that?” cried Jane.

  “Don’t know,” Michael said, gunning the engine again and again. But the longboat was stuck tight in the mud.

  “Looks like the end of your journey,” the officer called to Michael.

  But the boy knew it wasn’t. Deep in his pocket was a crumbled and singed piece of paper: No journey has an end, it said. The Marine Patrol thumped the longboat’s stern.

  “I’m really sorry,” Michael quietly told Jane, “for getting you into this mess.”

  “Don’t be,” she told him. “It was fun.”

  Stanley Ford was helping the children onto the police cruiser when the Magistrate saw something downriver. “Wait a minute,” he said. “What’s that thing?”

  “What’s what thing, sir?” Ford asked.

  “There, out in the river.” He pointed and the other officers looked. “What is it?”

  Far down the broad river, a ship the size of a sofa was sailing away, all sails unfurled.