Searching for Candlestick Park

by Peg Kehret

  Anywhere but here

  My mind galloped, trying to make plans. I knew I couldn’t just run away. It’s no good to run away from something. You have to run to something, or somewhere, or someone. But where could I go?

  While I packed a few clothes and as much food as I could carry, I went over my plan. I would go to Candlestick Park and find Dad. There were still three weeks of baseball season left; I could get to San Francisco in three weeks, even if I had to walk the whole way.

  OTHER PUFFIN BOOKS YOU MAY ENJOY

  Cracker Jackson Betsy Byars

  Earthquake Terror Peg Kehret

  Gentle Ben Walt Morey

  The Midnight Fox Betsy Byars

  My Side of the Mountain Jean Craighead George

  Nightmare Mountain Peg Kehret

  Winter Camp Kirkpatrick Hill

  Searching for

  Candlestick

  Park

  PEG KEHRET

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers,

  345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First published in the United States of America by Cobblehill Books,

  an affiliate of Dutton Children’s Books,

  a division of Penguin Books USA Inc., 1997

  Published by Puffin Books,

  a member of Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers, 1999

  Copyright © Peg Kehret, 1997

  All rights reserved

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE COBBLEHILL EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  Kehret, Peg.

  Searching for Candlestick Park / Peg Kehret. p. cm.

  Summary: Determined to find his father and relive their good times,

  twelve-year-old Spencer takes his cat, slips away from home in

  Seattle, and sets out for Candlestick Park.

  [1. Runaways—Fiction. 2. Cats—Fiction. 3. Fathers and sons—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.K2518Se 1997 97-11222 [Fic]—dc21 CIP AC

  Puffin Books ISBN: 978-1-101-66173-4

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that

  it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise

  circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover

  other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition

  including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  For Mary Showers,

  my book list partner and founding member

  of The Great Chicken Society

  Special thanks to:

  Erin Karp,

  my authority on bicycle routes;

  Govind Karki,

  for the personal tour of San Francisco;

  and to

  Pete and Molly,

  for demonstrating cat behavior.

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FORTEEN

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  I opened my eyes to darkness.

  Mama’s voice was low, and her hand shook my shoulder. “Spencer. Wake up!”

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “It’s two in the morning,” Mama said.

  I stuck my head under the pillow but Mama yanked the pillow right off again.

  “Why are you waking me up at two o’clock in the morning?”

  “You have to get up, Spencer. We’re moving.”

  “Moving! Where are we going?”

  “We’ll stay at May’s until we find a place. Hurry and pack your things.” She dropped some paper bags on my bed.

  “I’ll pack in the morning,” I said.

  “You’ll pack now. We need to be out of here before morning.”

  I sat up and looked around. In the light that leaked from the kitchen, I saw cardboard boxes and brown paper bags lining the hallway. Mama was serious. We really were moving out in the middle of the night.

  “How come?” I asked.

  “I don’t have the rent money,” Mama said. “I still owe for last month, and now it’s due again. And they’re coming tomorrow morning to repossess the car. We need to get moved before they take it.”

  Our being short of money wouldn’t make headlines; Mama and I are always short of money. Mama’s a waitress at Little Joe’s, where most of the customers are not big tippers. We had a car taken back once before, and twice our electricity was shut off, but this was the first time we ever had to move because we couldn’t pay the rent.

  “As soon as I get a job, I’ll pay part of the rent,” I said. I was nearly thirteen, and I had my application in at three grocery stores. Sometimes kids are paid to retrieve shopping carts from around the parking lot and return them to the store. Ten cents a cart.

  “We can’t wait for you to grow up and find work. We’re leaving here tonight.”

  “What about the furniture?” I asked.

  “It isn’t ours. Never has been. We rented this place already furnished; you know that.”

  I put on jeans and a T-shirt, and started stuffing the rest of my clothes in the paper bags. I could hear Mama in the kitchen, packing up her pans and the yellow dishes that used to belong to her mother.

  Aunt May lived in the south end of Seattle. We lived in the north end, fifteen miles away. I was pretty sure I couldn’t take the bus back here to school. I would have to go to school with my ten-year-old twin cousins, Buzz and Cissy, a prospect which did not thrill me.

  Buzz and Cissy won’t win any gold medals in the brains department and they scream and yell a lot, which gets on my nerves. Aunt May doesn’t seem to mind, probably because she screams and yells a lot, too. I don’t know if Buzz and Cissy’s father screamed and yelled. He and Aunt May got divorced before the twins were born, and I don’t remember him.

  “When you’re done in there, load your bags in the car,” Mama said.

  I picked up a sack of clothes and went out the kitchen door. The car was parked on the driveway that runs alongside the house; the back seat was already full of boxes. When I opened the trunk, the neighbor’s Doberman, Bosso, started to bark.

  “Hey, Bosso,” I whispered. “It’s only me.” Bosso looks and sounds fierce but he knows me and always wags his stumpy tail when I talk to him through the fence.

  An hour after Mama woke me up, everything was packed and loaded into the car. While Mama took milk and eggs out of the refrigerator, I looked for Foxey.

  I couldn’t find him. I went through the house, looking under the beds and behind the furniture, in all the places he’s ever hidden. No Foxey.

  I always make sure he’s in at night; usually he sleeps on my bed. He must have slipped out when Mama started loading the car.

  I went into the backyard.

  “Here, Foxey,” I called. “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.”

  “Quiet!” Mama said. “Do you
want to wake up the whole neighborhood?”

  “I can’t find Foxey.”

  Mama put her bag of food in the car. “Let’s go,” she said.

  “We can’t leave without Foxey,” I said. “I’ll go out behind the garage and call him.” My mouth felt dry. What if Foxey didn’t come? I started toward the old garage that sits at the back of the property.

  Mama rolled down her window. “Get in the car. We’re leaving.”

  I knew Mama meant business about going right away. But I couldn’t move out and leave Foxey behind. I just couldn’t!

  Foxey was a tiny kitten when I got him, three years ago. He has reddish brown fur and a bushy tail. I spent a long time choosing exactly the right name.

  No matter what went wrong in my life, and there had been plenty in the last couple of years, I could always count on Foxey to be glad to see me. When I had the flu, he jumped on my bed and purred. When I got a D in science because I refused to cut up a dead rat in class, Mama yelled and said I would never amount to a hill of beans, but Foxey jumped in my lap and kneaded his claws in and out, and I knew he would love me if I got all Ds.

  Every night I saved part of my dinner for him and he rubbed against my legs while I put it in his dish.

  “You go on,” I told Mama. “I’ll stay until I find Foxey and then I’ll take the bus to Aunt May’s.”

  “We can’t stay any longer because of that cat,” Mama said. “May is waiting up to let us in and it’s already later than I told her it would be.”

  I made one last desperate try. “Here, Foxey,” I called. “Kitty, kitty, kitty.”

  Mama started the engine. “Get in this car,” she said. “Now.”

  I knew that tone of voice. I got in.

  “If you make me leave Foxey behind,” I said, “I’ll never forgive you. He won’t know why I’m not here to take care of him. He’ll starve to death.”

  “No, he won’t. He’s a good mouser.”

  “You could have told me sooner,” I said. “I would have shut Foxey in the bathroom while we loaded the car.”

  “I had other things to worry about besides that fool cat.” She backed out of the driveway. “You probably couldn’t keep a cat at May’s house anyway. Cissy has a lot of allergies.”

  The truth is, Mama never liked Foxey much. She only let me keep him after I begged and cried and swore I’d always take care of him myself. I did, too. I fed him and combed him every day. Each month, I spent part of my lawn-mowing money on a new catnip mouse, the good kind from the pet store. Foxey loved his catnip mice.

  I had bought him a cat collar, too, the stretchy kind that he could get out of if it ever got caught on something. I attached an identification tag with our phone number on it in case he ever got lost. That number won’t help now, I realized. We don’t live here anymore.

  “Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to do,” Mama said.

  As we drove away from the house, I rolled down my window and looked back, still hoping to see a reddish brown cat with a bushy tail.

  “Mrs. Ryan will probably adopt him,” Mama said. “She likes cats.”

  I didn’t answer. Mrs. Ryan lived next door. Her cat and Foxey sometimes fought with each other.

  Mama kept talking. “You’ll be busy at a new school, making new friends. Before you know it, you’ll forget all about him.”

  She was wrong there. I knew I wouldn’t forget Foxey. I would never forget Foxey. I would come back by myself and look for him. I would take the bus from Aunt May’s house every day until I found Foxey and took him with me.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  I sneaked away the next night.

  Aunt May’s house is small, so the only place for me to sleep was on the couch. I waited until I was sure Mama and Aunt May and Buzz and Cissy were asleep. Then I got up and put on my clothes.

  I took along one of the cardboard boxes that Mama had packed dishes in. I thought Foxey could ride in the box on the way back.

  The buses don’t run as often at night; I had to wait half an hour. It was spooky standing there alone so late at night but I was determined to go after Foxey.

  It was nearly midnight when I got off the bus. As I walked toward our old house, I was surprised to see lights on in the house and a truck parked in the driveway. Had someone moved in already? If so, I hoped they hadn’t let Foxey inside. He always went to the kitchen door and meowed when he wanted to go in. What if the new people had let him in? What if they thought he was going to be their cat? What if he was in there now? The curtains were closed so I couldn’t see inside.

  I walked quietly down the driveway, past the side of the house, into the backyard.

  “Here, Foxey,” I whispered. “Here, Foxey.”

  When I got to the back side of the house, I could see in. Two men were painting the kitchen. I wondered if they were the landlords that Mama owed the money to.

  I couldn’t see the floor, so I didn’t know if Foxey was inside.

  “Kitty, kitty, kitty,” I said.

  Bosso barked.

  When Foxey didn’t come, I decided to look in the garage. I pulled the garage door partway open.

  “Here, Foxey.”

  From inside the garage, I heard, “Meow.”

  “Come, Foxey. Come on, you silly old cat.” I peered into the darkness but I couldn’t see him.

  Because I was concentrating on Foxey, I didn’t hear the back door of the house open.

  “Hey! What are you doing out there?” The man’s voice boomed out behind me.

  I whirled around just as the porch light went on. The man stood on the porch step, looking at me.

  I should have closed the garage door and told him who I was and what I wanted. Instead, I panicked. All I could think of was to get Foxey and beat it out of there as fast as I could.

  I ducked inside the garage.

  “I’m warning you!” the man yelled. “Get out of there.”

  Bosso barked louder and leaped against the fence.

  I put my box on the floor, and flattened myself against the garage wall. Beads of sweat popped out on my upper lip.

  I heard a soft thud as Foxey jumped down from the rafters. I knew the yelling had scared him. He tried to run out the door but I saw him in time and scooped him up.

  “We called the cops,” the man yelled.

  The cops! I would be arrested for trespassing and get put in jail and Mama would be so mad she’d refuse to bail me out. I had to get out of there before the cops came. I decided to make a run for it.

  I held Foxey tight against my chest and dashed out of the garage. I didn’t stop to pick up the cardboard box.

  The man started down the steps toward me.

  I lunged sideways, reached over the top of the fence, and unlatched the gate. Bosso came snarling through, headed toward the man. Quickly, the man ran inside and slammed the door. Bosso followed him up the steps and stood at the top, barking.

  I raced down the driveway, clutching Foxey. I didn’t even look where I was going. I just ran. My feet pounded down the concrete driveway, then angled across the grass, and ran down the sidewalk.

  Foxey’s toenails dug into my shoulder but I couldn’t stop. The cops would be there any second.

  I wondered if the man had stayed inside or if he went straight through the house and out the front door. Maybe he was chasing me. I didn’t look back to find out.

  I ran.

  When I got to the corner where the bus comes, I crouched behind a large, leafy bush, where I wouldn’t be seen by any cars going past. If the landlord was looking for me, or if the cops came by, they wouldn’t notice me there.

  As I watched for the bus, I quickly regretted leaving the box behind; it was almost impossible to make Foxey stay with me. Bosso’s barking had panicked him and now his cat brain had only one thought: ESCAPE!

  He squirmed in my lap. He attempted to climb over my shoulder. He stuck his head under my arm and tried to squeeze through. I thought the bus would never come.


  When it did, the driver wouldn’t let me on. As I stepped off the curb, he said, “No animals allowed. Sorry.”

  “But I have to get home,” I said, “and Foxey won’t hurt anything. I’ll hold him the whole time.”

  “Sorry, kid,” the bus driver said. “Unless it’s a Seeing-Eye dog, I’m not allowed to let an animal on the bus. I would lose my job.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut tight. “It’s a Seeing-Eye cat,” I said. “I’m blind and I’m participating in a special experiment with Seeing-Eye cats.”

  I heard the bus driver chuckle. Then I heard the bus door close.

  As I opened my eyes, the bus pulled away from the curb.

  Now what was I going to do? I couldn’t walk all the way to Aunt May’s house. And I sure couldn’t afford a taxi.

  I looked at the bus schedule on the signpost; it was half an hour until the next bus. That gave me plenty of time to think of a plan, and to get Foxey calmed down.

  While I waited, I broke three-foot-long branches off the bush. By the time the bus arrived, I was ready.

  As soon as I saw the bus approaching, I stuffed Foxey under my shirt. He made quite a lump. I pressed my left arm against my shirt to keep Foxey from squirming out. I laid the branches across the lump and held the stem ends with my left hand.

  Luckily, it wasn’t the same driver. This one gave me an odd look, as I dropped my quarters into the container and then folded my right arm across the branches, pushing them against my shirt.

  “My mother makes dried flower arrangements,” I said.

  I walked quickly to the back of the bus and sat down. The driver watched me in the rearview mirror but he didn’t say anything. I clutched Foxey close and hoped he wouldn’t meow.

  By the time I got to Aunt May’s house, I was glad to put Foxey on the floor. My chest was covered with scratches. It wasn’t Foxey’s fault, though. He was scared. He had never ridden a bus before; it was noisy and he couldn’t see where he was. Besides, he was hungry.

  I cut up a hot dog and gave it to Foxey. While he ate, I put my pajamas on, and then I carried him to the living room. When I laid on the couch, he curled close beside me. The last thing I heard before I fell asleep was Foxey’s purring.