by Paul Haven
Underneath the baseball player, handwritten in the same fancy script as on the study door, it said:
LONGEST-LASTING KOSMIC KRANBERRY—MANCHESTER E. BODDLEBROOKS'S 53RD EXCITING FLAVOR.
Danny's hands were shaking. A fifty-third flavor? Everyone knew Boddlebrooks had only made fifty-two kinds of gum.
He lifted the lid, and to his surprise, the box was filled with gum, packets and packets of the stuff, all good as new. Each packet had a cranberry-colored wrapper dotted with tiny constellations of silver stars— Orion's Belt, the Big Dipper, and even one that looked remarkably like a large bubble-gum tycoon.
Could this have been what Boddlebrooks was working on when he died? Danny wondered. He rifled through the box and started to carefully peel back one of the wrappers.
Bong! … Bong! … Bong!
Danny heard the faint chime of the grandfather clock in the study striking three. He remembered his friends, and Mr. Sycamore's angry eyeball. Now it really was time to go. They'd never get back to the city in time.
He quickly snatched three packets of gum and stuck them deep in his pocket, then raced through the darkened corridor to the closet door.
He took a quick peek through the keyhole to make sure the coast was clear, then crept out of the closet and slipped through the study door.
As he ran to join his friends, Danny tapped his fingers against the gum in his pocket.
The Return
Danny turned the key to the front door of his family's apartment at 6:23 p.m., nearly two and a half hours later than he had told his mother he would be home.
To be half an hour late was almost expected; an hour was cause for minor scolding. But Danny knew that his parents' panic buttons would have gone off at the ninety-minute mark. Phone calls would have been made to the Masterlys and Molly's mom. Cover stories would have unraveled.
In short, it would be all-out parental pandemonium.
Danny figured his mother and father would be somewhere between worried stiff and purple-faced with fire-breathing fury. He only hoped their anger would be tempered by the relief of seeing their little angel home safe and sound.
He was wrong.
“Daniel Gurkin! Is that you?” boomed his father's voice from the living room, even before the front door had thudded shut behind him. “Where have you been?!”
That was a bad sign. His father normally didn't get back from the campaign until after dark, even on weekends. Danny could hear his mother's voice all the way from the living room. That was an even worse sign.
“Get him in here, Harold,” Lydia Gurkin said. “I want to see that boy.”
Danny gulped. He tried to remember one of the cover stories he, Molly, and Lucas had thought up on the long bike ride home. Lucas suggested they pretend they had been trapped under a fallen tree in Quincy Park or had lost their short-term memories after being knocked on the head by a steel beam.
Molly had come up with a slightly better story involving a heroic effort to rescue a cat that had fallen down a manhole, but it still seemed a bit far-fetched: how to explain the grease-covered clothes, the wind-frazzled hair, the heap of metal that was now Lucas's bike?
Mr. and Mrs. Gurkin were sitting side by side on the living room couch, and Max was reclining in his favorite position in the easy chair across from them, silver earphones jutting out of each ear and a blank look on his face.
Danny looked at his father. He was definitely above a seven on the Fatherly Rage Richter scale.
“We've been scouring the neighborhood for you. Look at your poor mother! We were five minutes away from calling the police,” Harold Gurkin said, jabbing a finger at his watch.
Danny stared at the floor. He had to come up with something to say, and quickly. He considered Lucas's amnesia defense.
“Well, ah … you see, the thing is,” Danny said. His throat was dry.
“You have exactly one minute to explain yourself, young man,” Harold Gurkin said, rising to his feet and glaring down at Danny.
“Dad … Mom … I have a confession to make,” Danny began slowly. “I … ah … I didn't actually go swimming with Molly and Lucas today.”
“I don't want to know where you weren't! I want to know where you were!” Harold Gurkin shouted. “I've had Molly's mother and Mr. Masterly on the phone already. I've rung the pool. They haven't seen any of you kids all day, so where were you?”
“Daniel …,” Lydia Gurkin said. “I want some answers. No excuses. No tall tales. Answers!”
Danny looked from his father to his mother and then back down at his sneakers.
Less than half an hour before, he, Molly, and Lucas had pulled over on the corner of Pikesmith Street and taken a solemn oath never to admit, even under intense interrogation, to having left the city limits.
Wild horses would not drag a confession out of them!
“We never would have done it if you'd had time for us!” Danny shouted. “I asked you to take us! I asked Mom! We asked Lucas's parents and Molly's father. Nobody would do it, so we had no choice!”
There was an excruciating silence, like the pause just before a roller coaster plunges down the steepest of drops.
“Danny Gurkin, did you … ? You didn't! Are you trying to tell me that you somehow went to the Boddlebrooks mansion? You kids went to West Bubble?” his father said in disbelief. “You didn't…. You wouldn't!”
“We did!” Danny said defiantly, stomping his foot. “We wanted to save the mansion and nobody would help us!”
“Did Lucas Masterly put you up to this?” Lydia Gurkin said.
“No,” Danny admitted. “It was my idea.”
“You took a bus to West Bubble?” Harold Gurkin shouted.
“Not exactly,” Danny replied.
Mr. Gurkin thought for a minute.
“You got the train?”
“Not exactly.”
There was a pause.
“You couldn't have … ah, I mean, you wouldn't possibly have— You kids didn't bike all the way out to West Bubble, did you?” his father shouted.
“Yes. That's just what we did,” Danny replied.
“You took your bikes on the highway?” his mother asked.
“Well, just a bit,” Danny replied.
“Oh … my … God!” she said, shaking her head slowly from side to side.
“I want you to go to your room and think about what you have done,” Mr. Gurkin said. “Your mother and I will decide what kind of punishment is appropriate.”
“How about hanging,” came a voice from the easy chair.
“Max!” snapped Mrs. Gurkin.
Danny shuffled back to his room and flopped on the bed.
That really hadn't gone well at all.
The Disappearance of Lou Smegny
On the night Manchester Boddlebrooks died, tumbling over like a giant walrus onto poor Lou Smegny, a young newspaper reporter standing in the clubhouse swore he heard the bubble-gum tycoon whisper three final words in the smothered shortstop's ear.
It was hard to make out what they were amid the gasps and screams of the clubhouse, even harder since Manchester's mouth was full of pretzel dough, but it sounded distinctly as if he whispered: “Chew it, Lou.”
A few Sluggers players who witnessed the episode said they saw Lou Smegny nod and mumble something back just before he lost consciousness under the enormous weight of the dead man.
But police investigators concluded that no conversation ever took place. They said Boddlebrooks was likely already dead before he hit the ground and certainly wouldn't have been able to formulate words with a chunk of pretzel caught in his throat. Plus, why would anybody say “Chew it, Lou” before he died?
It took a crew of ten men to lift the fallen bubble-gum tycoon off Smegny, who was then dragged out of the clubhouse and rushed to the hospital in a horse-drawn ambulance.
Smegny lay unconscious in the hospital for a week, his back broken and his body shattered. By the time he woke up, the reporter who had heard Boddlebrooks'
s final words had been reassigned to another story, and nobody was around to ask the injured shortstop what they had meant.
Not long after that, Smegny himself disappeared, checking out of the hospital on a stormy November night and limping onto a train heading north to Canada.
The nurse on duty on Lou Smegny's last night said the young ballplayer was so stooped over he could barely walk. He didn't look up once as he filled out the paperwork for his discharge. She pleaded with him to get back into bed, but he was a grown man and she could only watch as he hobbled out the front door.
For several years, the Sluggers tried to track down the unfortunate shortstop for old-timers' games and opening-day reunions. They took out newspaper ads and hired private investigators. But there was no record of him anywhere.
The club decided to dedicate one game a year to Smegny, hoping it might prompt him to show up again one day.
He never did, but to this day on Smegny Night, the Sluggers hand out seat-cushion dolls that look just like him. As they take their seats on top of the cushions, fans are told to think back on the fateful night when a much larger man fell over and crushed the real thing.
For most people, that was the end of Lou Smegny, but in fact, there was one final sighting of the shortstop. A group of Sluggers fans traveling to a hair-tonic convention in Canada on the night Smegny checked out of the hospital reported seeing the hobbled ballplayer sitting by himself in a darkened carriage on a northbound train.
“Hey, Lou,” one of the men shouted when he realized who it was. “Tough break, kid. But you'll get well again. You'll win another championship for the big bubble-gum tycoon in the sky.”
But Smegny didn't seem to hear the man, and he didn't look up when the gentleman tried to sell him a bottle of Extra-Potent Rhubarb Hair Tonic.
The shortstop just slouched in his seat and stared out the window, his eyes dancing in their sockets like pinballs.
A Change of Fortune
When Danny was nine years old, he threw a grapefruit at Max that ended up hurtling out the living room window into the street below, landing with a thud a few feet from an old lady who was out walking her dog. When the apartment doorbell rang a few minutes later, Harold Gurkin found himself face to face with a yapping Chihuahua covered in grapefruit pulp and a fist-waving grandmother promising to call the police.
Danny was grounded for a week.
At ten, Danny lost television privileges for a month for pretending to have a temperature by holding the thermometer up to a lightbulb by his bed when his mother wasn't looking. After a couple of days of school-less bliss, the plan came apart when he left the thermometer too long and it showed a fever of 107.
“You should be dead,” Mrs. Gurkin had said, concern vanishing from her face. “And you will be when I tell your father what you've been up to!”
That wasn't pretty, and there had been other incidents as well. Who could forget the Flaming Macaroni Fiasco, the Antique Chair Leg Disaster, or the Missing Chocolate Cake Conspiracy? And those were just in the last three months.
But Danny had never seen his parents this angry. What would the punishment be this time? Locked in his room with no television for a year? Dishwashing duty until the end of time? Maybe Max's suggestion— hanging—wouldn't be so bad. At least it would be quick!
Danny lay on his bed with his feet crossed against the wall, next to a yellowing newspaper front page that read SLUGGERS CLIMB OUT OF LAST PLACE!
He was still wearing the grease-covered EL SID T-shirt from the long journey, and his legs and arms ached. His head was throbbing from the sun, and his mouth was as dry as sandpaper.
He had never had a day go so right and so wrong all at once. It was hard to believe it had all happened. The long road trip. The Boddlebrooks mansion with its fifty-two spectacular bedrooms. Seymour Sycamore and his creepy wandering eye. The amazing study and the hidden passageway. The baseball-bat tower and the secret gum!
Danny reached into his pocket and pulled out the three packets of gum, turning them over in his fingers like a jeweler examining a diamond.
It was amazing to think that something from the Boddlebrooks mansion could actually exist in his room. But the gum was real, and the words still leapt off the packets.
“Longest-Lasting Kosmic Kranberry—Manchester E. Boddlebrooks's 53rd Exciting Flavor.”
In the rush to leave the mansion, Danny hadn't had time to tell Molly or Lucas what he had found. He could have said something to them during the trip home—and he almost did several times—but he kept quiet instead.
Maybe it was selfish, but Danny liked the idea of having a secret that only he and Manchester Boddle-brooks shared.
Danny ran his finger along the edge of one of the packets. He was dying to open the gum, but he kept telling himself he should resist. The antique packets were souvenirs of the greatest adventure he'd ever had. They were a part of Sluggers history. They were a bridge across time to Manchester Boddlebrooks himself!
“I will treasure them forever! I will never open them!” Danny said to himself, placing the gum on the bed beside him and nodding in admiration at his own restraint.
Danny hit the button on the clock radio by his bed, and the sounds of WBUB, the Sluggers station, filled the room. He always kept his radio tuned to WBUB. It was 7:35 and the game was just half an hour old, but the team was already down 2–0 to the Charleston Bruisers.
“That's what happens when you miss the first pitch,” Danny thought.
He grabbed the cordless phone by the side of the bed and punched in the first six digits of Molly's number, then hung up. He began dialing Lucas's number but chickened out again.
What if Molly and Lucas already knew that he had broken under interrogation? What would they think of him? What would they do to him?
Come to think of it, Danny dreaded the prospect of ever seeing his friends again. Of course, it probably wouldn't be an issue since they were all going to be grounded for the next twenty-five to thirty years.
“We move to the bottom of the fifth inning, and as usual, these Sluggers just can't catch a break. They're down three–nothing with just two hits between them. Another miserable performance,” said the Sluggers' radio announcer Marv Maxwell.
Danny picked up the gum again, his eyes focusing on the intricate bubble-gum-tycoon constellation.
“Oh, I'll just open one pack,” Danny decided. He could save the other two for posterity.
He tore back the end of one of the packets and found eight sticks of gum inside, each covered in thin white paper. He pulled out a stick and unwrapped it slowly, the tangy smell of concentrated cranberries filling his nose.
Danny had been so excited about finding the secret gum that he had completely forgotten one important fact.
He hated cranberries!
He hated them more than liver. He hated them more than Brussels sprouts. He hated them more than anchovies. Come to think of it, he hated them more than Max, though that was a close call.
When Danny was in the third grade, he'd had to write a school paper about his least favorite food, and he'd picked the cranberry.
He'd learned, among other things, that the first cranberries had sprung up about ten thousand years before and only grew in the smelliest marshlands of prehistoric North America. The marshes were so damp and putrid that they sent the dinosaurs running for cover, which was saying something because the dinosaurs probably didn't smell like roses themselves.
Over thousands of years, all sorts of tiny insects and bugs and other disgusting creatures got trapped and died in the marshlands, and through some awful miracle, the first cranberry vines popped up out of all that mess.
Never had a food that had taken so much effort to create tasted so awful, Danny thought.
That the cranberry became part of Thanksgiving dinner, to be consumed every year by countless families until the end of time, was clearly a sick joke played on the Pilgrims by the Native Americans. At least, that was what Danny had written in his paper. He'd
gotten a C.
“Well, Marv, we have mercifully reached the bottom of the ninth inning, and with the Sluggers down four–nothing, there's little doubt about the outcome,” said the team's other radio announcer, Chad Carson. “I know I've said this many times before, but I think this just might be a new low for the Sluggers. They look like they've all been run through a car wash or something. There's no energy there!”
First up for the Sluggers was a rookie named Sam Slasky, who had struck out seventeen times in a row, just two shy of the big-league record.
“Oooh … high and outside,” Marv Maxwell said. “Hey, but did you see that? Slasky didn't swing at it. That's a rare moment.”
“Rare is right,” Danny thought. Slasky was by far the Sluggers' dumbest hitter. He would swing at anything, and opposing pitchers knew it, so they never threw him any good pitches to hit. Once he'd even struck out between innings! Danny couldn't remember the last time Slasky had drawn a walk.
“Ball four!” Carson said with surprise. “Slasky is walking to first base!”
Danny fiddled with the bright red stick of gum in his hand. He couldn't not see what it tasted like, but the thought of eating century-old cranberries filled him with dread.
“Oh, what have I got to lose,” Danny thought. “Anything made by Manchester Boddlebrooks can't be that bad!”
He held his nose, opened his mouth, and started chewing. It was a mistake! The gum was so tart it forced him to suck in his cheeks. Worse, it had a strange fizz to it, bursting in little pops of cranberry revulsion on the tip of his tongue.
“And Chuck Sidewinder lines a sharp single to center!” Marv Maxwell yelled. “Sakes alive, Chad! Slasky is rounding second and going all the way to third base! Ladies and gentlemen, I kid you not. The Sluggers have men on first and third with nobody out. How about that?”
“Yes!” Danny shouted, punching his fist in the air. This was getting good. He heard his father and Max pounding against the sofa in the next room.
Danny was tempted to run out and join the others, but he stopped himself. He wouldn't give them the satisfaction! Anyway, whatever he was doing in his bedroom prison cell was working, so maybe it was better this way.