Journey to an 800 Number

by E. L. Konigsburg

  “Took the doctors hours and hours just to clean the flesh around where the hand was cut off,” the mother said.

  “If you can pack the cut-off part in ice after you put it in the plastic bag, that’s best.”

  “Have they found the guy who shoved her?” I asked.

  “Man or woman,” Sabrina said, “they haven’t found who did it. I was hoping you’d have some news.”

  “Sorry we can’t help you out,” Father said.

  I looked over at Father, and I realized that he really was sorry. He would have liked to have had some news of Renee to tell to this Sabrina and her mother.

  Sabrina’s mother said to her, “C’mon now, dear, you’d better eat up if we’re going to get to Dallas.” She looked over at Father and said, “We’re going to a convention in Dallas.”

  “So am I,” Father said.

  That was the first I heard about it. “What convention are we going to?” I asked.

  “Travel agents,” he answered.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “The Mideast Airlines have a big booth at the Convention Center, and they’ve hired Ahmed to be in the booth to attract people. Sort of a visual aid.”

  “You mean they’ve actually invited Ahmed indoors?” I asked.

  “It’s a convention center,” Father explained. “That’s like wide open spaces except that there’s a roof over it. You’ll be glad to know it’s air-conditioned.” Father turned to Sabrina and her mother and explained, “Ahmed is my camel.”

  The mother said to Sabrina, who was back to reading her paper, “Sabrina, dear, this gentleman, Mr… .”

  “Stubbs,” Father said. “Woodrow Stubbs and my son, Maximilian.”

  “Sabrina, Mr. Stubbs and his son have a camel. Now, isn’t that interesting? We’ve never met camel owners before.”

  “Owner,” I said.

  “What’s that, dear?” the mother asked. “It’s Maximilian, isn’t it?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m Lilly,” she said, “and this is my daughter, Sabrina.”

  Sabrina nodded, took another bite of toast, wiped her mouth and got up. She was not very tall, and she was as skinny as a ball point pen and as straight! Very fifth-graderish. She hitched up her jeans because she didn’t have any figure to help hold them up, and she pulled down on her jersey, and she wasn’t flattening anything underneath the jersey when she did. She was what you might call “going-on-pretty.” Except for her eyes, which were hazel and as wide as the CBS eye, and they were already pretty. Maybe beautiful. And her nose and her mouth fit under her eyes just right, not too big, and not too small, just right. And they were pretty. So were her teeth and her smile, when she did. Her hair was brown and nothing to brag about. “Is your camel here?” she asked.

  “In the parking lot,” Father answered.

  “We’ll look for him on our way out,” Lilly answered. Then Lilly tugged at the top of her pants suit the way that Sabrina had tugged at her jersey. Lilly’s movemens were like an instant replay of Sabrina’s—exactly alike but a little slower. The two of them looked like Lilly and Lilliputian.

  I don’t look anything at all like my father. He is, as I said, swarthy with black curly hair; his eyes are the color of tobacco stains. I have straight light brown hair and blue eyes. My father is hairy; I am not; my father is heavy-boned; I am not. And I think I am going to be tall; my father is average.

  “When you’re in Dallas, why don’t you stop by the Mideast Airlines booth and say hello to us,” Father said.

  Sabrina said, “In case you hear anything about Renee, we’ll be staying at the Fairmont.” She smoothed the clipping about the two-faced cat over her pants leg and followed her mother to the cashier’s desk.

  Father turned and watched until they were all the way out the door.

  When we got back to the truck, I found a note on my side of the cab. It said, “I like your camel. Sincerely, Sabrina.” I folded it up and put it in my hip pocket. I said to my father, “I didn’t know you were hired by an airline.”

  “Ahmed was.”

  “How much are they paying you?”

  “Two-fifty a day. From nine to nine.”

  “Two-fifty? You make more with two kiddy rides.”

  “That’s two hundred and fifty,” Father said.

  “That’s profitable,” I said. “Have you ever been in Dallas before?” I asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Does it have one of those restaurants on top of a tall building?”

  “Probably does.”

  “Is the Fairmont a tall building?”

  “Pretty tall.”

  “Do you suppose it has a restaurant?”

  “Might have. We’ll plug into our trailer park and clean ourselves up and go on over.”

  “Do you have a jacket and a necktie?” I asked.

  “Somewhere I think I do.”

  “And I don’t think they require a hat,” I said.

  We had to tether and feed Ahmed before we went to the campground community showers to get a real good soaking shower. Father took time to trim the hairs in his nose and ears. We got to the Fairmont right around seven-thirty, which I thought was late for supper, but which seemed to be rush hour there. They had a restaurant, with linen napkins and candles on the lobby floor. The head waiter asked us if we had a reservation, and we said no, and he said that he was terribly sorry but that he couldn’t let us in. He mentioned that there was a convention of travel agents headquartered there, and they were booked solid. He told us to try the coffee shop on the opposite side of the lobby.

  As we passed the hotel registration desk, I was wondering if I should mention to Father that maybe we ought to stop by to say hello to Sabrina and Lilly, but I didn’t say anything because the thought came to me that I didn’t know their last name, and I couldn’t tell anyone at the desk who it was I wanted to say hello to. I looked over at Father and thought that maybe it would be better if we went to some McDonald’s or some other place where a camel-keeper, even without a Pinocchio hat, looked more at home.

  As we approached the elevators, I saw one open, and who should get out but Sabrina? She looked as if she didn’t know whether or not to say hello. I thought that she didn’t recognize me in my blue blazer with the Fortnum School crest on the breast pocket. She looked different, too. Her hair was curled and she had on a long dress and on her—you should excuse the expression—breast was a tag that said: HELLO. I’m Sabrina Pacsek. The Sabrina Pacsek was handwritten; the rest was printed.

  “Well, hi there,” I said.

  She looked at me and said, “Oh, hello.”

  “Remember me,” I said. “The restaurant this morning.” I pointed to Father. “He has the camel you like.”

  “Oh, yes,” Sabrina said. “What are you doing here? I thought I saw the camel’s truck hitched to a house trailer.”

  “You did,” I answered.

  “We came here to eat. Father and I are connoisseurs of fine food. We enjoy eating at the better establishments whenever we arrive in a city that has one.”

  “So you’re both gourmets,” she said, studying Father. I could tell that she knew that he wasn’t.

  “We like good food,” Father said.

  Sabrina said, “I hope you’ll excuse me. Mother is expecting me. There was a mix-up with our convention registration. Mother is at the convention desk straightening it out now.”

  Father said, “We’ll go with you. I’d like to say hello to Lilly.”

  Sabrina started to protest, but Father put a hand between her shoulder blades and steered her around. Around the corner was Lilly, bending over a row of tables that had a long felt cover over them. Lilly was talking to a man who sat behind a stack of folders, and a woman who sat behind a stack of envelopes. She was saying, “That’s perfectly all right, Mr. Hogarth. Mistakes do happen.”

  The woman behind the stack of envelopes had a pair of eyeglasses on a chain. She put them on, looked through their bottoms and examined the HELLO badge
she handed Lilly. “How do you pronounce your name?” She asked.

  “Pah-check,” Lilly answered, pinning the badge just north of her bosom. “It’s Czechoslovakian.”

  “Well, Mrs. Pacsek, I’m glad you had that letter.”

  “So am I. Sabrina, my daughter, is … Oh! here she is now.”

  Sabrina had edged her way over to her mother’s side. “Mother,” she said, “look who I ran into in the elevator.”

  Lilly turned toward us, smiled and said, “How delightful!” She said to the woman with the glasses on a chain, “Please excuse us. Some old friends have arrived.”

  “How nice that your daughter will have someone her own age to keep her company.”

  “Why, yes,” Lilly said, turning around and fitting herself between Father and me. She reached an arm across each of our backs. “Let’s go in to the opening reception and toast our reunion.”

  And before we could do much about it, she had one of her hands between each pair of shoulder blades and was pushing Father and me toward a large room that opened off the lobby. She let the pressure off my back as soon as we got inside the entrance to the room. She said to Sabrina, “It’ll be an open bar, dear. You can fetch you and Maximilian a Coke. Mr. Stubbs and I will meet you back by this door about five minutes before the banquet.”

  The light in the room was not too good, but even before Sabrina returned with our Cokes, I noticed that we were the only two non-adults in the room. And I noticed something else that I mentioned to Sabrina. “Why does everyone except you and your mother have his name badge printed instead of written by hand?”

  “That was the mix-up over the registration,” she said. “They had forgotten to put badges in our Conference Kits, so we had to write ours by hand.”

  We sat down at one of the small tables that they had set up along the back edge of the room. “Heard anything more about Renee?” I asked.

  “No. There wasn’t anything in the Dallas paper about her. But there was one thing worth clipping.”

  “What was that?”

  “About this five-year-old girl who died an old woman.”

  “How can a five-year-old die an old woman?”

  “A disease called Cockayne Syndrome made her age at the rate of fifteen years for every year she lived.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “You better. I have the clipping in our room. C-O-C-K-A-Y-N-E Syndrome. There’s no known cure. Actually she died of the chicken pox for which there is also no known cure. But people don’t usually die of chicken pox. It’s just that when you have Cockayne’s Syndrome you can’t fight off a simple childhood disease like the chicken pox because although she was only a child, she was about …” She started counting her fingers.”… about …”

  “Seventy-five years old.”

  “You good at math?” she asked.

  “Not bad,” I answered.

  “Where did you get the camel?”

  “I didn’t get it. It’s my father’s.”

  “Where did he get it?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “How can you not know?”

  “I think he had it before I was born.”

  “Haven’t you ever asked?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Why?”

  “My mother and father are divorced.”

  “Aren’t everybody’s?”

  “But I live with my mother. This is the first time—ever—that I’ve stayed with my father. Except, of course, for the time before they divorced, and I hadn’t even started school then.”

  “Where do you live usually?”

  “Havemyer, Pennsylvania. It’s near Philadelphia. I’m going to go to Fortnum School in the fall. That’s a private school. College prep.”

  “I’ve been to a convention in Philadelphia.”

  “Did you go to the restaurant on the First Guaranty Bank Building? It’s a private club.”

  “No. Mother and I actually avoid those restaurants. The view is good, but not the food. Food-with-a-view. Besides, we had all the banquets and luncheons of municipal employees to attend.”

  “Municipal employees? I thought your mother is a travel agent. This is a convention of travel agents.”

  “My father was a municipal employee.”

  “I thought your mother and father are divorced.”

  “Now they are,” she said. “Hungry?” she asked.

  I admitted that I was.

  She led the way across the room to where there was a long table set up with hors d’oeuvres and bowls of pretzels and nuts. We helped ourselves generously. I saw Father and Lilly talking to a small group of people. Father still did not look as if he belonged. Most of the men wore colored sports jackets. There appeared to be a lot of pink plaid. The women ran to rhinestone eyeglasses and bright blue chiffon, and three-fourths of them looked as if they had gone to the same beauty parlor. There were enough nests of curls on top of enough heads to make a bird sanctuary. Lilly, too, had one. She hadn’t had one at the restaurant.

  “Did your mother go to the beauty parlor?” I asked.

  Sabrina glanced up at Lilly and popped a cracker into her mouth and licked her forefinger and her thumb as daintily as if it were good manners. “It’s one of her wigs.”

  “One of them?”

  “Yep. She carries a supply. When we arrive at a convention, she reads the kind of people they are and puts on a fitting head.” She looked over the crowd.

  “She was right. Lilly always is. That is her once-a-week-and-spray-it-in-place hairdo. Very common among convention wives. Lilly likes to blend in with the crowd.”

  I wondered if my father could. I wondered if my father even realized that he didn’t.

  Sabrina asked me if I’d had enough to eat, and I told her that I had. “The hors d’oeuvres are usually better than the banquet,” she said.

  “You sound like you go to a lot of conventions.”

  “It’s a way of life,” she answered.

  We were back at the row of tables against the wall. We found an empty one. Empty except that there were six glasses on it and a puddle under each. Sabrina stacked them together and carried them to another empty table, took a napkin and wiped up the sweat rings and dumped that napkin on top of the stack of glasses. “Sit,” she invited. I did. “I’m going to go to exhibit hall tomorrow just to see your camel.”

  “My father’s camel.”

  “What’s its name?”

  “Ahmed.”

  “I would appreciate your finding out how your father got him.”

  “Are you going to write my father up in your collection of freaks?” I asked.

  I thought she would immediately say no, but she didn’t. She thought a minute and said, “I don’t think so. It will depend on the facts.”

  “What facts?”

  “The facts of the case, of course.”

  “Could you please explain what you mean by that?”

  “A freak is a freak despite what he does. An eccentric may do outlandish things, but he has a choice. I don’t collect eccentrics. They interest me, but I don’t collect them.”

  “Maybe someone has been doing something eccentric for so long that he can’t help himself doing it. Maybe it’s no longer a question of choice. Maybe it’s a question of compulsion. Like maybe someone has a compulsion to collect freaks and can’t help herself anymore.”

  “Not the same thing.”

  Father and Lilly were coming toward us, and Sabrina said, “I’ll see you tomorrow.” She left me there with a hundred things more I wanted to say but with time for only a polite good-night. Father said good-night, too.

  “Did you have a nice visit with Sabrina?” Father asked.

  “She’s better company than Ahmed.” Father raised his eyebrows but did not look hurt.

  “Did you have a nice visit with Lilly?”

  “That woman sure knows how to laugh,” Father said. “She must have pronounced her name a hundred times. Nobody knew how to
pronounce it. She just made a joke of having to repeat it.”

  “You would think that if she’s a travel agent, at least one other travel agent would have known her,” I said.

  “Maybe she’s new to the business,” Father said.

  “Maybe she is.”

  “Are you very hungry?” Father asked.

  “Not very.”

  “Me neither. What say we just pop into Sonesta’s and have a bowl of chili?”

  “I’d prefer something even less than that,” I said. The travel agents had taken the edge off my appetite, and it had not cost us a cent.

  The next morning Father and I got up at five a.m. and put on boots and rain slickers and went to a car wash halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth. It was one of those do-it-yourself places where they supply power hoses and vacuums. Before we could take Ahmed to the Convention Center, we had to hose him down.

  We pulled the truck into one stall, and we jumped out of the cab and put the planks down so that Ahmed could be led into another stall. Camels spit when they’re mad. Ahmed spit. We tethered him to a post. Camels kick when they’re mad. Ahmed kicked. I don’t think there is any animal alive, including the rhinoceros, that has less class than a camel.

  Father said, “Don’t vacuum him. There’ll be too much hair clogging up the machine and it will burn the motor out.”

  We hosed Ahmed down, and as much as you can tell from the look of a camel, I guess he liked it. He always looked sleepy. Father was cooing to Ahmed, ready to lead him out of the stall, when a carload of kids pulled into a booth two down from ours. The first one to notice Ahmed told the others, and they came over to our booth six abreast.

  “Hey, Pop,” one said to Father, “how many miles to a gallon?”

  You could tell that Father had been asked the question before. He said, “Can get speeds up to ten miles an hour for only a gallon of feed. Under ideal conditions.”

  “No pit stops or shit stops, eh?” the kid said, walking toward us.

  Another one of them started toward Ahmed; that one reached out his hand and said, “Is your nose ticklish?”

  Father said, “I wouldn’t try that if I were you.” The boy kept on coming, and Ahmed spit. It landed with a plop on top of his sneaker. It was a king-sized hawker that dripped down the toe of his shoe. The kid looked down and said, “You better clean that off, old man. Nobody’s camel is allowed to spit on me.”