by B. B. Wurge
The next day was a vacation day for me and I stayed home from school. My father went to work as usual at six o’c lock. Most days he didn’t come home until evening, but this day he stomped in the front door in the late morning, his long shaggy arms wrapped around two large cardboard boxes full of papers. He dumped the boxes on the kitchen table and turned to me.
“Well,” he said, in a grim voice, “I quit my job.”
“You what?”
“Yes, I quit. I had enough. I told him so. I said it right out. I didn’t pussyfoot my words. Well, to be honest, I got fired at the same time that I quit. I mean, I shouted ‘I quit!’ just as my boss was shouting, ‘You’re fired!’ and you’d have to check the video to see who said what first. I think I was first. But he was mighty quick on the draw, so I don’t know. Photo finish, as they say. In any case, it all comes down to the same thing.” He pulled out a chair and sat, his enormous hairy bottom sagging off of the sides of the chair. He put his elbows on the table and his head in his hands, and looked at me gloomily.
“How come you quit?” I said, sitting down on the other side of the table and looking at him between the boxes of papers.
“Well, okay, it was like this. I had no trouble getting into the center. I have a card key, and the card reader doesn’t care what you look like so long as you have your card. I had just sat down and started on my work, when Clapton comes in and says, ‘Hi Car l,’ and he doesn’t think anything of it. And Snupplee he comes in and says, ‘Hi Carl,’ and goes right to work at his desk. Everything is just fine. Then after a while, Old Gordon Spork calls me into his office. And he says, ‘Carl, have a seat,’ and I knew that was a bad sign. Especially since I broke the chair sitting in it. ‘Carl,’ he says, ‘this kind of thing has gone on too long. It’s got to stop. We really loved your acid bomb, but—’ ”
“You built an acid bomb?” I said.
“Sure,” my dad said. “Not on purpose. It was kind of an accidental side effect, and not my main line of research.”
I was fascinated. I had never heard him talk so much about his work before. I didn’t even know any of the people he had just mentioned. “Isn’t it all supposed to be secret?” I said eagerly.
“Sure,” he said. “But I don’t work for them anymore, so I don’t care. We built an acid bomb. And the government loved it. They like anything that can melt people. They gave us a list of priorities a few years ago, and melting was up there with mangling, smashing, and boiling. Ugh. I tell you. But do they care for a really useful thing like this?” He pointed to his hairy chest. “Do they? Do you think they care?”
“Dad,” I said, “not to be negative, and I’m not criticizing, but what’s actually useful about it?”
My dad did a double take and looked at me. “That’s odd, that’s what old Spork said. I told him, ‘Come on, it’s right up you’re alley. It’s a disguise. It’s camouflage. Supposing a spy needs to go somewhere incognito.’ ”
“Um,” I said, “are you sure that being an orangutan would make the spy blend in better?”
“Ha!” my father said. He was getting agitated now, and he jumped to his feet and began pacing the room with a Boom Boom every time his foot hit the ground. I could hear the dishes rattling in the cabinets but none of them flew out and broke this time. “Ha! Spork said that, too! That smarmy old fool he says, ‘Well Carl, you sure blend in great. I bet nobody noticed a nine foot gorilla on the subway this morning, reading the New York Times.’ But, I mean, come on. First of all, I’m not a gorilla. And second, supposing a government spy needed to mingle with a society of subversive orangutans and get information from them? It could happen, right? And it’d be great for the witness protection program, too. But he didn’t see any of it. He just couldn’t see the utility of it. Some people have no imagination.”
“It’s okay dad,” I said. I was getting a little alarmed at his agitation. I didn’t want him to accidentally break our kitchen table now that he was so much stronger than he used to be. “Calm down. It’s the government’s loss, if they’re too silly to understand.”
“That’s exactly right, Jem!” he shouted, getting even more agitated. “You’re right! That’s what I thought, too. I said, ‘Spork,’ I said, ‘this is the crowning achievement of twenty years of work! Everything I’ve done here has led up to this! And if you don’t appreciate it, then I QUIT!’ And that’s when he yelled, ‘You’re FIRED!’ at the same time. But it might have had to do with my foot accidentally going through the wall into the next guy’s office.”
“What will we do now?” I said.
“Now?” he said. “Oh, we’re okay. They let me take home all my important papers. All they cared about was that idiot acid bomb, and they couldn’t care less about my real work. It’s all here. I’ve already got the next project planned out.” He waved his huge hand at the boxes on the table. Peering into the nearest one, I saw a messy pile of drawings and scribbles. They looked like reproductions of Leonardo’s notebook pages. “That’s right,” he said, bounding over to the table and beginning to paw through the box. “It’s all here, Jem. I’ve been re-reading Folio 217A and I think that—”
“But Dad,” I said, “can you even get another job? I mean, what about an income, and that kind of thing?”
“An income?” he said, jumping backwards and staring at me, his hand cupped on his shaggy forehead. “I hadn’t thought of that. Good point. I suppose I can work at a gas station. My arms are so long, I could squeegee both sides of the windshield without walking around the car. Ha! Well, anyway, I was saying. . . .”
Just then the doorbell rang. Whoever was outside our apartment was very impatient and banged and kicked and kept up a racket, until my dad and I ran to the vestibule and yanked open the door.
Our landlord was standing in the corridor outside. He was a very small man, a thin and wrinkly man who looked like he had lived his life with so little humor that he had dried up into a kind of stick. His face was always sour, and it was especially sour now. “What’s going on here?” he shouted at me, since I had gotten to the door first. “The people under you think the ceiling’s about to cave in!”
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s just my dad jumping around. His feet are kind of—”
“Good God!” the landlord shouted, looking past me at my dad. “What’s that? No pets allowed! It’s in the lease! What’s a great filthy brute like that doing in one of my apartments?!”
“What do you mean, a filthy brute?” my dad said. He was already worked up about leaving his job, and I could see he was in an argumentative mood. “Who are you calling a brute?”
“It can talk?” the landlord shouted, bits of spit flying from his mouth in his agitation. “You got a circus ape in my building, and it’s jumping around knocking the lights off the ceiling below! How dare you!”
“That’s offensive and bigoted,” my dad shouted back, and his larger chest cavity gave him a huge voice that easily overpowered the landlord’s. “I’m your tenant.”
“You’re Carl Martin?” the landlord said. “You look different. What the heck do you look like that for?”
“It’s none of your business,” my dad said. “It’s a free country. I can turn myself into an orangutan if I want to. It’s a lifestyle choice.”
“A life style choice!” the landlord shrieked, his little body swelling up with rage. “A life style choice! Let me tell you where to put your lifestyle choice! I’m a moral man and I don’t allow lifestyle choices! It’s disgusting! I want you out of here. I know my rights! I’m giving you one week before I put a lock on the door and sell everything you own. I’m evicting you! I won’t have a filthy animal living in my building!”
He stormed out, and as he stomped away down the corridor I shouted after him, “My dad is not filthy, you filthy old dried up stick!” I was really angry.
We put everything we could in the wagon.
4
My dad staggered back into the kitchen and sank down into a chair. He put his face in h
is hands and groaned. “We’re ruined!” he said. “What’s wrong with these people? How can they all be so dull? If Leo ever saw a talking orangutan, do you think he’d have reacted like that? Do you? He’d have whipped out a notebook and sketched it! He’d have asked how he could get the same way himself.”
“It’s okay, Dad,” I said, putting my hand on his furry shoulder. “We’ll just go somewhere else.” I didn’t like to see him upset, so I tried to sound cheerful. But I thought that our problems were probably just beginning. “Dad,” I said, “is it too late to go make up with your boss, and get your job back, and turn yourself into a person again?”
“Not a chance,” he said. “It would take another ten years of research to get the reverse transformation. And what’s the excitement in that? It’s boring. It’s a re-tread. Anyway, the point is, old Spork is an idiot with a squishy tomato for a brain, and I’m not going back there for anything. No, you’re right Jem, we’ll just have to go somewhere else and make do the best we can.”
Making do turned out to be difficult. My dad tried to rent another apartment, but when he showed up at a realtor’s office they panicked and shooed him out the door. He sent me instead, but I was so young that they didn’t take me seriously. He tried to get a job, and he did pretty well over the telephone, but every time he showed up for an interview he got rejected. Not even a gas station would hire him. He came very close at one body shop, showing off his long arms and explaining about the squeegee. The mechanics who worked there were impressed, but the boss thought it was too risky. “Fact is,” the boss said, “it’s against regulations. Sure, I could do with a big monkey to lift the engines onto the service rack, but what do you think the inspectors’d say if they saw me working a monkey? It’s illegal. It’s cruelty. I’d get shut down. Sorry, no can do.” He even tried to get a job at the Bronx Zoo, because he thought they might have a use for someone in his condition. But that was the biggest disaster of all. He almost got shot with a tranquilizer dart when he knocked at the zoo’s front office, and he had to run home double quick to escape the zookeepers.
Everything was a no go, and our final week was disappearing from under us. On the evening before the eviction, my dad and I sat at the kitchen table eating our last supper and trying to figure out what to do. We were desperate.
“I could buy a tent,” I said, “and we could camp in Central Park.”
“It’s twenty below!” my dad said. “It’s snowing like crazy! We can’t camp out, we’d freeze to death.” He tossed a quarter of a head of cabbage into his mouth and swallowed it whole.
“Mountain climbers do it all the time,” I said, dipping a chicken finger in mustard sauce and eating it. “They get the right equipment, and they go camping out on the top of Mount Everest for weeks at a time and cook food over a gas fire, and it’s real fun. Dad, what else can we do?”
“You got me,” he said. “You sure got me there. Maybe that’s all we can do. We can travel up the state, camping as we go.”
Right away I began to feel better. The disaster didn’t seem so disastrous suddenly. It seemed like we could have a lot of fun; and I wouldn’t have to go to school, of course. “I bet EMS is still open,” I said eagerly. “They have a Christmas sale. I could go right now and get supplies. Give me your credit card, Dad, and I’ll go do it!”
I could see him thinking hard about it, chewing on an apple or two that he had put whole into his mouth. The more he thought about it, the less worried he looked. All week he had looked anxious, and his gray leathery face had folded up into wrinkles around the eyes, and now I saw the wrinkles smoothing out. Finally he produced a gigantic belch that made the long hairs around his mouth whiffle in a breeze, and he looked at me and said, “Jem, you’re right. That’s the only thing we can do. After a while, after we travel around, maybe we’ll find somewhere nice and settle down. But you better go quick before they close!” He knew he couldn’t go with me, because he couldn’t go into a store without inciting a riot.
Here is what I bought: A six-man mountaineering tent. I figured my dad was about the size of five and a half men, and I made up the other half. Two kerosene stoves. Six canisters of kerosene. A deluxe artic survival suit for a small person about my size. It was the kind of suit that you inflated with an air pump, and it bulged out around you and kept you warm even if you got dipped in liquid nitrogen. The picture on the tag showed two people, one of them in a deluxe arctic survival suit and one of them in an ordinary suit, both of them being dipped in liquid nitrogen. The survival suit guy came out smiling, and the other guy came out crunchy. None of the suits would have fit my dad, so I bought a deluxe artic survival quilt that I figured he could wrap around himself if he needed it. Special snow traction boots for both of us. A hammer for hammering in the tent pegs. Rope to tie our supplies together. And an enormous metal wagon, about ten feet long and five feet wide, to put everything in. The store clerks were happy because they made a great sale. I was a good customer, so they didn’t worry that I was only a kid. I told them that my father was a mountain climber and I was buying supplies for an expedition we were going on together. Which was exactly the truth. The whole lot was incredibly expensive, but we didn’t have a problem with money. My dad had lots of money in his bank account.
I had to drag that wagon all the way home, and it nearly dislocated my arms it was so heavy. I couldn’t bring it inside, and I couldn’t leave it on the sidewalk outside because a lot of people in New York would have liked to nick that tent. It was a nice tent. So I rang our bell and waited for my dad to come out. He was very excited when he saw all the things I had bought. I could tell that the spark of adventure had gotten into him, and he wasn’t gloomy anymore. He was his usual self again.
“Jem, it’s fantastic!” he said, throwing his arms up over his head and laughing. “It’s perfect! You did a great job. That wagon’s big enough to fit a lot more stuff. I’ll go bring down the important things, and we’ll have to leave the rest behind. You wait here.”
He brought down his two boxes of da Vinci papers, and two kitchen chairs, and the kitchen table, and a wooden drawer full of drinking glasses and plates and forks and knives and things like that, and piles of clothes and pillows and blankets, and a radio, and the salt and pepper shakers, and sixty-seven books from the library, and cooking pans, and an electric fan in case we ever got too hot somewhere that had an electric outlet, and a blender that was broken but he thought maybe he could fix someday, and a nice wooden bird feeder that had never been used and was still in its package, and a box of powdered laundry detergent so we could wash our clothes, and a big plastic garbage can to wash our clothes in, and toilet paper and bath towels and shampoo, and the shower curtain, even though it was getting a little yellow from soap, but it might come in handy if we ever settled down somewhere nice, and last of all, carried delicately all by itself, his framed picture of Leonardo as an old man, all hairy and lined and with slightly crazy eyes, wrapped up in plastic food wrap to keep out the damp.
I had never seen my dad at work before. Even though his hands were three times larger than a normal person’s, they zipped around here and there at high speed and it seemed like he had about a million fingers. He tied everything together with ropes and made it fit into the wagon neat and square like a puzzle. Then he tied our tent fabric over the top of the pile to keep off the snow. He was done in a minute and a half. The wagon was stacked up about ten feet tall, taller than he was, and I was worried at first that it was too heavy. But he grabbed hold of the handle and tugged, and wheeled it along the sidewalk just fine. He didn’t seem to notice the weight. It was nothing to him. Maybe he could have lifted up the whole thing in his arms if he had wanted to.
I walked beside him. I was happy now, and so was he. Somebody said, “Hey, look at all those Christmas presents those people bought!” and a little girl pulled on her mother’s sleeve and said, “Mummy, is that a real monkey?” and her mother hushed her up and said, “Don’t point, Spongella, it’s rude,” and a l
ittle boy turned to his daddy and said, “Hey Pop! Look at the funny Santa!” And the truth was, my dad was like Santa, and our wagon was piled up with Christmas toys, because we were starting out on the most exciting adventure I could imagine. And if that wasn’t Christmas, I didn’t know what was.
“Where do we go first, Dad?” I said.
“Well, Jem,” my father said, “what say we turn left up there at 34th and hit Starbucks?”
That’s what we did. My dad waited outside with the wagon and I bought us three large steaming hot chocolates, one for me and two for him. My dad couldn’t digest milk very well anymore, so I had to get two Soy No Whip Hot Chocs for him. Then we sat on the curb next to the wagon and drank our hot chocolates under the lamp light, with snow falling on our heads. My dad gave a huge loud slurp at the drink in his right hand, and then a slurp at the drink in his left hand, his lips vibrating against each other, and then he leaned back against the side of our wagon and said, “Ahhhhh, Jem, this is the life. I tell you. Who would have thought it, two weeks ago? Goes to show, doesn’t it?”
Hot chocolate.
5
“We might have a long night of walking, Jem,” my dad said, sipping at his chocolate. “We should try to get out of the city as fast as possible. I don’t like the way people keep looking at us. Once we get into the countryside we can go easier.”
“Are we going anywhere in particular?” I asked.
“That’s an important question,” my dad said. “I want to head north of the city and explore around. It’s important for my next project.”
“Uh oh,” I said. “I hope you’re not going to turn me into anything.”
“Don’t be silly. I hope I’m turning you into a creative and imaginative person. The next project will be a wonderful and amazing adventure, Jem. I always wanted to visit the final resting place of Leonardo.”