Hippomobile!

by Jeff Tapia

  So we ran over to Mabel’s, and once we got the screen door open, we stumbled on through like tumbleweeds, ready to reveal our big surprise. But we noticed straight off that something was wrong. Sitting there at a table in the middle of the café was Grandma Mabel and Grandma Ida, and they never sat down on the job like that. Our other grandmas and grandpas were sitting around them like in a football huddle, and the TV weatherman report was turned off. In fact, the silence in the café ran so high it filled the cracks in the ceiling, and all the faces in there were as long as a rainy day. The only thing moving was the little fan up front on the lunch counter, rotating back and forth and making the pages of a menu flutter a bit in the breeze.

  Even so, our excitement was popping out of us like a cork, and we couldn’t help but shout, “Look what we found!”

  But nobody so much as raised an eyebrow.

  LATER THAT NIGHT WE were up in our beds, studying our long list of presidents. We couldn’t concentrate, though, and were really just waiting for Mom to call us like she did every night at dot nine o’clock and not a single second thereafter. Nine o’clock was right before we went to bed1 and right before Mom went to work. That graveyard shift of hers always sounded spooky to us, no matter how many times she said it wasn’t really a graveyard. Alls it was, was just a huge warehouse with conveyor belts that transported gazillions of packages. It was Mom’s job to stand there all night and sort them out. It didn’t sound like a bed of roses to us, but Mom didn’t complain none.

  “Let’s try it again, Jimmy James.”

  “I ain’t in the mood, Stella.”

  “I didn’t ask you your mood. George Washington.”

  “John Adams.”

  “Thomas Jefferson.”

  “. . .”

  “I’m waitin’.”

  “Did you say Thomas Jefferson?”

  “I did.”

  “I was afraid of that.”

  “Don’t you remember who comes next?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Me, neither. But at least we’re up to three now.”

  We stuck our lists back on our bulletin board and stared at the clock some more.

  Our hotel room only has one phone in it. When it rings and we both wanna talk, we have to share, so we often bump heads as we try to hear what Mom’s saying. She usually just says the same old stuff, like asking us if we brushed our teeth, even the ones way in the back, and if we combed our hair, and if we talked to our plates before meals,2 and if we were eating enough. Mom wouldn’t be Mom if she wasn’t worrying about something.

  That night everything was so different, though, that Mom didn’t even get around to asking none of her questions. We picked up the phone in the middle of the first ring and banged our heads together like two pool balls and shouted, “Mabel’s is closing!” without even saying howdy or nothing. That’s what all the long faces were all about earlier that day when we ran into the café like we had just discovered electricity.3

  We ain’t ever gonna forget that moment, neither. The way our grandmas and grandpas just turned their heads and stared at us or didn’t even bother turning their heads at all and just sat there stirring their cups of joe4 or chewing on timber5 or twirling a red checker on the table like Grandpa Milton was, or how Grandma Ida was twisting her dishrag around one of her fingers and Grandma Mabel was sitting there like a statue with her chef hat off.

  We could tell something was wrong—we just didn’t know what. We thought it might have something to do with the weather report. So we walked over quiet to our booth and slid on in and put The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing6 down next to the napkin dispenser and the greasy bottles of ketchup and mustard and the bottle of relish none of us ever touched. We were still antsy as a picnic but sat there all the same, just twiddling our thumbs and swatting at a fly that must’ve snuck its way in through the back kitchen door.7

  We were glad when Grandma Ida finally got up off her chair and walked over our way. We couldn’t wait to tell her the news. But it turned out she had news for us instead. She said, “You better order somethin’ real good because you ain’t gonna have many chances left.”

  That was strange talk coming from her. And we noticed she wasn’t cracking her gum like usual. That made us suspicious as a sheriff. “Whaddaya mean by that, Grandma Ida?” we asked.

  And Grandma Ida said, “Mabel’s is closing, kids. Come the end of summer.”

  That was all she said, too, because her jaw started to quiver and her nose started to twitch and then tears rolled down her cheeks, just like always happened whenever she served a dish with raw onions.

  And we said, “Mabel’s is what?” Because she might just as well have told us that snow was in the forecast or one of our grandpas had grown a ponytail.

  She took the dishrag off her shoulder and blew her nose in it and stuffed it in her apron pocket and sat down at our booth and talked turkey to us. And the only thing we were able to say the whole time was, “Yeah, but . . .” Like when she said that Mabel’s just didn’t do enough business, we said, “Yeah, but . . .” And when she said that it ain’t no use and that they’d seen this day coming from miles away, we said, “Yeah, but . . .” The only time we didn’t say “Yeah, but . . .” was when she left to go get us each a belch water8 and a bucket of mud.9

  Nine hours later, up in our room and in our PJs, we still couldn’t believe it. Then the phone sprang to life and it was Mom calling.

  “Mabel’s is closing!” we shouted.

  And Mom said, “I know.”

  “What? How could you know? You’re not even here.”

  And that’s how we found out that she and Pops knew, and everybody in Wymore knew, and they all had been discussing the matter for quite some time without ever bothering to tell us.

  Well, that didn’t sit square with us, and so we asked, “Why didn’t you tell us nothing, Mom?”

  “Anything,” Mom corrected us. Then she said, “We didn’t want to worry you about things you have no control over.”

  No control over . . . ? Well, we’d show her! Though at the time, alls we managed to say was, “Yeah, but . . . Where we gonna eat, then?”

  That was when things turned serious and grave and made us feel that “serious and grave” should’ve been in that list of good diction in The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing.

  Because Mom said, “In McFall.”

  And we said, “McFall? Is Mr. Buzzard gonna be driving us to McFall three times a day just so we can get our grub?”

  And Mom said, “Well, no . . .”

  “Then how are we gonna get there? By boat?”

  Mom finally spit out the bone. “We’ll just have to move there, is how.”

  Well, that was the straw that busted the hayloft. There was no way we were gonna move away from Wymore and Mabel’s and Old Tom Wood and our room at the Any Hotel and the roof up on top and all the dust down in the square. And so instead of saying, “Yeah, but . . . ,” we found some dogged determination and said, “You can pack up and move to your big city if you want to, but we sure ain’t!”

  We thought we had her good and cornered because we knew how hard it was for her to be away from us even for the summer. But she just up and laughed. Laughed! And she didn’t even say nothing about us saying “ain’t.” Instead she called us what she always called us when she thought we were being cute. “Honey pies,” she said, “how about we talk about this tomorrow? I have to go to work now.”

  That’s where our conversation stopped at. We didn’t even get a chance to tell her about The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing and the letter about the hippomobile we’d found stuck in the book. Mom sent us a good-night kiss over the phone, and we sent her one back, even though we didn’t feel much like it. But we were a little afraid that we might not sleep so good if we didn’t.

  So we hung up the phone, and it was just the two of us again alone in Room #10. We didn’t give a care about presidents no more, that’s for sure. In fact, we were
so thunderstruck that we didn’t say nothing else at all. We just hit the light switch and climbed up into our beds. It would’ve been a good night to take our sleeping bags and go sleep up out on the roof, but now we didn’t feel like enjoying nothing. Anyway, you needed a key to get up on the roof, and it was already too late to go ask Grandpa Bert up in Room #33 for it. He kept it on a string around his neck.

  On any normal night, we’d both of us drop right off into a deep slumber after a day of getting wore out playing in the hot summer sun. But that night there was so much fidgeting going on in our beds that it sounded like the box springs were performing a concert. And then one of us coughed and the other one of us sneezed. Finally the burden of bad news got so great that we broke the silence.

  “Jimmy James?”

  “Yeah, Stella?”

  “You awake?”

  “Might be. You?”

  “Yeah. I think I might be too.”

  We got out of our beds and tiptoed over to the window and tried not to step on the floorboards that made the loudest creaks. They creaked so loud that our grandparents in the other rooms would hear them, and then they’d know we were up and about and they’d tap on the wall with their walking sticks to tell us to get back to bed.10

  But that night we made it to the window silent as a prayer and knelt down at it and put our noses up to the screen. It had an old dusty air smell to it that we loved. It smelled just like Wymore itself. And believe us when we say that there ain’t no rose ever smelled that good to us.

  It was already as dark as a frown outside. The square was almost all dark, on account of that only one streetlamp still worked anymore. All the June bugs in town congregated there, even though it was July. We watched them bouncing off the light and listened to the cicadas making their music, and for a while we didn’t say nothing to each other. We both knew what we were thinking, and what we were thinking about was the place we called home and that we sure didn’t wanna leave it for nothing in the world. Thoughts like them are best for thinking and are a lot harder to talk about using real words, even if you’re just talking to your twin. And so when we did finally say something, it was about all kinds of other stuff just to avoid talking about what we really wanted to be talking about.

  “Jimmy James?”

  “Yeah, Stella?”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Um . . . What state you think Pops is driving through right now?”

  “You know I ain’t no good in geometry.”

  “You mean geology?”

  “Yeah, geology.”

  “Jimmy James?”

  “Yeah, Stella?”

  “Um . . . You think it’ll be hot tomorrow?”

  “I reckon.”

  “Say, what are you doin’ with your mouth the whole time?”

  “Wigglin’ my tooth.”

  “You got a wiggler? I didn’t think we had none left.”

  “Wouldn’t be wigglin’ it if I didn’t.”

  “And you ain’t told me?”

  “Just happened today. When we jumped off Old Tom Wood and I banged it.”

  “Which one is it?”

  “This one right here.”

  “Well, yank it and stick it under your pillow.”

  “That’s what I’m tryin’. But it ain’t comin’ out.”

  “Gimme a try, then.”

  But for all the wiggling we did on it, it was stuck in there like a corn in a cob. We wanted to put it under Jimmy’s pillow and see how much we’d get for it,11 but we could tell we wasn’t gonna get it out with our fingers.

  “Wasn’t there a chapter in The Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing with tricks on how to pull a tooth?”

  “I think you’re right, Jimmy James.”

  That rose our spirits an inch, and we agreed we’d look it up the next morning. But before we got back into bed, we took one more big deep smell out of the window screen.

  “Jimmy James?”

  “Yeah, Stella?”

  “I ain’t leavin’ Wymore.”

  “If you ain’t leavin’, I sure ain’t leavin’.”

  “Then we’re gonna have to figure out a way to stay, ain’t we?”

  “Maybe we can say I gotta go to the dentist.”

  “That ain’t no good, Jimmy James.”

  “Why not?”

  “There ain’t no dentist in Wymore.”

  “What’s your idea, then?”

  “I ain’t got one yet. But if we use some dogged determination I bet we can think one up.”

  WANTING TO FIGURE OUT a way to stay in Wymore sounded good the night before, but when you wake up the next day and it’s morning and the sun’s shining you in the eyes and giving you the sun grins,1 and you’re down in the middle of the town square kicking dust around, and you don’t see nothing but closed stores and empty buildings and rusty cars all around you, then it don’t look so easy as it sounds.

  We’d just come out of Mabel’s after each having a Battle Creek in a bowl,2 and Jimmy was chomping on a carrot because Secret Trick #1 in The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing on how to work out a loose tooth was by biting into something hard. The suggestions the book gave was a carrot, a radish, a turnip, a beet, and something called a rutabaga. With choices like that, that’s how come Jimmy picked a carrot. Grandma Ida was a bit surprised to hear he wanted one, but she didn’t ask us no questions, and we didn’t feel like offering any explanations. We were just in one of them moods for having a secret that only us and the Tooth Fairy knew about.

  “That carrot doing you any good?”

  “Naw. You want it?”

  “No thanks. My teeth ain’t wiggly.”

  Jimmy stuffed it in his back pocket, and we spent some time throwing pebbles at the old broke-down cars and trying to figure a plan to stay in Wymore.

  “Stella?”

  “Yeah, Jimmy James?”

  “You know how Mom’s got heightophobia, right?”

  “You mean acrophobia?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So what?”

  “Well, why don’t we say we got McFallophobia?”

  “They ain’t gonna buy that, Jimmy James.”

  “How about traffic lightophobia?”

  “They ain’t gonna buy that even less.”

  “Well, at least I’m sayin’ somethin’.”

  After a while, we decided to go up onto the roof of the Any Hotel because that’s where we sometimes got our good ideas at.3 We walked over to get the key from Grandpa Bert, who like usual was out sweeping the sidewalk with his wood broom. We almost couldn’t see him on account of all the dust he was whirling up.

  “Good morning, Grandpa Bert,” we said.

  He stopped his chores and leaned on his broom and shaded his eyes and looked up at the sky and said, “Looks like it’s gonna be another scorcher.” Which was how people in Wymore often greeted each other, instead of just saying plain-old “Howdy!”

  Just to be nice, we inquired about the forecast4 before asking for the key to the roof.

  “Just don’t stay up there too long. You’ll dry out like raisins on a day like this.”

  We said we wasn’t gonna, and Grandpa Bert started taking the key off from around his neck. Before he handed it over, he asked us, “First name me the first five presidents.”

  So word was out about our homework, but lucky for us we now knew the first three good as our back pocket. While we were getting dressed that morning, we’d discovered that president number four and president number five both had the same first name, but we didn’t remember what it was.

  “I do believe James is the name you’re lookin’ for,” Grandpa Bert said.

  Jimmy smacked hisself on the forehead and said, “Oh, yeah, James.”

  Then Grandpa Bert gave us the key along with two gumdrops.

  “Thanks, Grandpa Bert!” And off we ran toward the Any before he asked us for the next five presidents.

  When you walk into the l
obby of the hotel, you’ll find yourself in the coolest spot in all of Wymore. It’s dark in there and has a tall ceiling, and the floor and walls are all made out of real marble. There ain’t no better place to rest your cheek against on a hot day. We’ve been told that a long time ago there were people in uniforms and little red caps standing behind the reception desk just waiting to take care of you and carry your bags up to your room. And there was one guy whose only job was to run the elevator. That’s right, our hotel even has an elevator, even though it ain’t never worked since we’ve been alive. It looks like a small metal cage, and it’s all locked up now, and it probably didn’t play elevator music like elevators do today.5

  To go up, you gotta take the steps, and when you start walking up, it keeps getting hotter each step you take. The hallways are all dark and narrow, and the long strip of carpet laying there is as wore out as an old song. The wallpaper is peeling off worse than summer skin, and there’s a smidgen of spookiness about everything, even for us at the age of ten. So to get to the roof, we always run up faster than Moody’s goose and don’t stop until we’re on the top floor and in front of the door we gotta unlock. It ain’t always easy to stick the key in the keyhole when you’re jittering, but once we get it unlocked, we bust on through the door like wind through a tunnel and find ourselves on the roof and back in the light of day.

  That’s where we were now, high up above the town of Wymore. All the other buildings are only two stories, and so from the hotel roof you can see clear over them and straight out of town and all the way until the sky meets the prairie grass. The view is what some of our grandpas and grandmas call sublime beauty. We’d always just shrug our shoulders when they said something like that, but now that Mom was talking about leaving Wymore, we kinda understood what they were getting at.

  We parked our biscuits on the rickety old table up there,6 hoping it would hold us for another day, and stuck them gumdrops in our mouths and gazed down at the town square and set our minds to brainstorming. We kept right at it real hard and didn’t let up none for what felt like an hour and must’ve been at least three minutes.