We began flinging the honey, amulets, and pamphlets back into their cartons. The manager came over to us. “Oh, no you don’t,” he snarled, grabbing onto J. P’s arm. “The cops are on their way, and you’re staying right here until they come. I’m going to have them make a search of those vans, and when they find that radio I’m going to see you locked up, the whole dirty bunch of you.” The crowd stayed to see what would happen.
“Take your niquids off me, fella,” J. P. said. He jerked loose, but the manager grabbed him again.
Now the Wiz stepped over. He was a good four inches taller than the manager and loomed over him. “You heard what the man said. Release that appendage from your clutch.”
The manager looked up at the Wiz, let go of J. P., and backed away, trying to figure out what to do. Suddenly, he dashed forward and began dumping over the cardboard cartons. At the same moment we heard the faint whine of a police siren in the distance. “Let’s get moving,” J. P. shouted. The Wiz made a lunge at the manager, who ran back into the store. We threw all of our stuff into the boxes and heaved it into the vans helter-skelter, the pamphlets flying, the jars of honey rolling around the floor. Then we jumped into our van. J. P. started the engine and began to drive across the parking lot, with the other van coming along behind us.
The police siren was a lot louder now. There was a low wall of concrete barriers across the front of the parking lot, with a couple of openings in it marked EXIT and ENTRANCE. J. P. raced toward the exit. Now I could see two police cars speeding along the road outside the shopping mall toward the entrance. We tore up toward the exit. Suddenly, the first police car swung into it, braked hard, and skidded sideways, blocking the exit. “Damn,” J. P. shouted. He swerved. The tires squealed, and then we rammed into the concrete barrier. I banged against the backseat and Ooma slid into me. The next thing I knew the hood was sprung up, there was a big crack in the windshield, and Gussie was holding her hand to her forehead.
The cops jumped out of their cars and ran toward us, unbuckling their holsters. “All of you, out,” they shouted. We climbed out. They frisked J. P. and Gussie, and I stood there beside the van, looking at it. The radiator was mashed in against the engine, and the right front wheel was ripped out at a funny angle. It didn’t look like we would ever drive that van again.
Now the manager of Madman Meyer’s came running up, shouting about his radio. So the cops searched the van, while the manager kept bouncing around and shouting, “Arrest them, arrest them, I want them booked, the whole bunch of them. The black guy threatened me. He used bodily harm on me.” I stood there worrying and wondering: Would they really put us in jail? Was the van ruined? What would happen to us now?
Of course, they found the radio right away. “Officer,” J. P. said, “I’m really very sorry about this. I’m afraid my little girl has some emotional problems. Kleptomania. We’ve taken her to specialists; we’ve had her hypnotized; we’ve tried everything. We’re desperate about it. Right now, we were headed for the Center for Disturbed Children in Trenton. You probably know about it. We hope they’ll be able to do something.”
To tell the truth, I was kind of ashamed of J. P. for telling such a story. I mean, if he was a great man, why did he have to stoop to stuff like that?
But the cops believed it—or at least they pretended they did and told us just to get out of their town. The manager went into a rage about that, but they told him that since he’d got his radio back, it wasn’t worth the trouble to book us. So we went free.
But our van was ruined. We unloaded all the stuff from it into the other van—the camp stove, the orange plastic cooler, the cartons of amulets, honey, and pamphlets, the sleeping bags. We jammed it all into the Wiz’s van and climbed in after it. With all that stuff in it, there was hardly any room for people, but J. P. and Trotsky squeezed into the front seat with the Wiz, and Gussie and Ooma and I squeezed ourselves in among the cartons and sleeping bags, and we drove away.
We were in a pretty big mess now. There wouldn’t be room for all six of us to sleep in one van, that was sure. As we drove out of town, the grown-ups talked about it. Even an old, beat-up, secondhand van would cost a couple of thousand dollars at least—and probably more. We didn’t have that kind of money, or anything like it, and no hope of getting it, either. Finally, they decided to head for a federal campground out in Pennsylvania that Trotsky knew about. It would be cheap and would have toilets and showers, and we could rig up some kind of shelter for some of us to sleep under out of a couple of tarpaulins we had. It seemed to me that things for us were getting worse and worse.
But the campground turned out to be a kind of nice place. It was all woods along the edge of a big lake. There were campsites carved out of the woods in such a way that every family of campers was screened off from the others. I wondered if I would have a chance to go fishing in the lake. Back on the old commune, we used to fish in our lake a lot. Trotsky was good at it, and she used to take me out in an old rowboat we had and show me how to put grasshoppers on a hook and how to cast the line out to where the fish might be. I hoped we could go out on the lake, if we could find a boat, and fish, if we could find something to fish with. I liked the idea of catching fish and eating them for supper.
We made a shelter out of a tarpaulin and set some of the cartons of honey and pamphlets around for chairs. We made a little fireplace out of stone, built a fire, and roasted potatoes in it, which was all we had for food. It was kind of nice sitting around that campfire roasting potatoes. I smelled the wood smoke from the fire and thought of those kids playing football. I kind of squashed the potato around in my mouth so it would seem like mashed potatoes.
After dinner I asked Trotsky if she would take me fishing. She said, “Let’s go down to the lake and look over the lay of the land. Maybe there’ll be a boat lying around loose somewhere.”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to get involved with stealing things again so soon, Trotsky believed in J. P.’s ideas and thought it was right to steal. She was stocky and wore her hair short and had glasses. Her big thing was junk sculpture. She knew how to weld and liked to make sculptures by welding junk together—hubcaps and bicycle wheels and pieces of chain and anything else she could find. Back on the old commune, you had to be careful about leaving your stuff around when she got into a welding mood, or the next thing you knew, your jackknife or your compass would be welded to her sculpture. Traveling around the way we were, she didn’t get much chance to sculpt anything, but she collected things in case she did get the chance. Her and the Wiz’s van was always rattling with hubcaps and bicycle wheels. The noise drove the Wiz crazy, and sometimes when it was Trotsky’s turn to drive he would slip the rear doors open as the van was going along and shove some of the stuff out.
So Trotsky and I found a path through the woods and walked down to the lake. The sun was just setting behind the woods across the lake to our left, and the sky and the woods and the lake were all smeared with red. “It’s mighty pretty, isn’t it, Fergy,” Trotsky said. She put her hand up to shield her eyes and began looking along the shoreline for any signs of a boat.
I tried to think of something to say that would take her mind off stealing. “What do you think we’re going to do about getting another van?”
She shrugged. “J. P. and the Wiz will figure out something,” she said.
I knew what that meant. “Trotsky, I wish we didn’t have to steal so much. We’re liable to get in an awful lot of trouble.”
“We just have to be more careful,” she said. “Ooma hasn’t got any sense. Whenever she sees something she wants, she just takes it. She’s got to learn that the world isn’t made that way. You can’t have everything you want when you want it. She has to learn to postpone gratification, wait for the right moment before she leaps.” She pointed along the shoreline. “That looks like a boat pulled up over there.”
“It isn’t only getting caught,” I said. “I just don’t like stealing.”
Trotsky gave me a funny look.
“What stealing?” she said. “We’re just reclaiming what’s rightfully ours. Don’t you ever listen to anything your father says, Fergy?”
“I know all about that,” I said. “I’ve heard it a thousand times. I just can’t get myself to agree with it.”
She gave a sigh and patted me on the back. “Confronting a crisis of faith, eh, fella? Well, don’t worry about it. It’s all part of growing up. Give it a little time, and you’ll begin to see the justice of it.”
FIVE
THE NEXT DAY it was kind of windy and rainy, and the rain blew in under the shelter we’d made out of tarps. We had to put the cartons back in the van and sit inside there all day. J. P. said he was going to go someplace and think the situation through, and the rest of us should tell each other stories to keep our spirits up, the way the Indians did. So the Wiz told a philosophical story about the death of Socrates, which made Ooma fidget. And Trotsky told a story about fighting in a revolution in South America, which was pretty exciting. And then Ooma told a story about a little princess who had two stereos and a pony and a color TV and her own van with a big bed in it just for herself. Ooma’s story wasn’t very good because nothing happened in it; it was just about the things that the little princess had.
All the time that Ooma was telling her story I was trying to think up one I could tell. For a long time I couldn’t think of anything. Then I remembered a story I’d read in a book once about a boy who’d gone to some private school in England and had an emblem on his jacket and solved a murder and got famous for it.
Then it was Gussie’s turn, and Ooma begged her to tell about when she was a little girl in that big house in Cambridge. So she told us about the shining silver and glistening glasses, and the maid serving the meals; about the gardener who came once a week to help her mother with the flowers; and about going to flower shows with her mother, where there would be so many beautiful flowers with such lovely smells that Gussie used to think that that was what heaven would be like; and about sitting in the big window seat in the upstairs hall on rainy Saturday mornings when her riding lesson was canceled and reading her favorite books all morning—The Five Children and It and The Secret Garden and The Borrowers. She was always having lessons, she said, so one of the nicest times for her was when she didn’t have anything planned to do and could just be by herself and do what she wanted to do, like listen to the rain and read.
When she got finished I noticed that both Trotsky and the Wiz were staring at her. “It sounds to me like you miss all that, Gussie,” Trotsky said.
“Of course I don’t,” Gussie snapped. “The kids like hearing about it, is all.”
“Are you sure?” Trotsky said.
“Trotsky, the kids have a right to know about their own grandparents,” Gussie said. “It’s hard enough for them that they’re not allowed to see them.”
“Well, in any case,” the Wiz said, trying to smooth the argument over, “I don’t think it’s necessarily a sound policy for the children to be given pretty pictures of so materialistic a way of life.”
“Oh, Wiz,” Gussie said. “Don’t make such a big thing out of it. I don’t think any of us would mind a little more materialism right now.”
“Don’t let it get you down, Gussie,” Trotsky said. “J. P. will come up with something.”
“Let’s drop the subject,” Gussie said. She looked kind of grim, which wasn’t like her. She was right about one thing, though. I certainly would have liked to meet my grandparents. I was pretty curious about them, and so was Ooma. I mean, that richness and stuff got Ooma excited. For me, it wasn’t so much the richness but the whole idea of a normal life—living in a house and eating regular food and taking showers all the time and stuff like that. I thought that it would be nice to visit our grandparents and be part of that for a while.
After that we played cards, only the six of diamonds and the jack of clubs were missing, so we couldn’t play right. Finally, toward the end of the day it stopped raining and the sun came out a little, although it was still chilly. We got out of the van and stretched and ran around a little. Trotsky made a fire, and we took the cartons out of the van and sat on them around the fire; and just about the time that the fire was going well J. P. came back.
He sat down on a carton, sort of frowning and pulling at his mustache with one hand and poking a stick in the fire with the other, to make the sparks fly up. Nobody said anything; we knew that he was thinking something through. We talked in low tones so as not to bother his thinking. Finally, he cleared his throat, and we all stopped talking.
“I met some people,” he said. He pointed with the stick into the woods. “They’re camped over there. They’re retired school teachers, maybe sixty-five. They’re named Clappers, and they have a huge motor home. They spend all their time traveling. Spend a week here, a month there. He likes to fish, so they go where there are lakes a lot. New England in the summer; Florida, the Southwest in the winter, You should see the motor home they have—three-burner stove, refrigerator, table, bunks for four, wall-to-wall carpet, color TV. The works.” He didn’t say anything for a minute, and then he said, “I think we should get to know them.” He looked at me. “Fergy, they’ve got a little rowboat they carry on the roof. Maybe you could get him to take you fishing.”
I didn’t like the idea of just asking a stranger to take me out in his boat. “I don’t have a fishing rod or anything.”
“I’m sure he’s got extra stuff,” J. P. said. “There’s no harm in asking. Just get friendly with him.”
Well, it seemed kind of funny to me to make friends with somebody so you could ask them to take you fishing, especially when you would have to borrow hooks and line from them. But I liked the idea of going fishing, and I figured if we became friends with them, maybe he would ask me to go out with him.
But we had to get some money before we did anything, and the next day we left Ooma and Gussie in the campsite to watch the stuff we were keeping under the canvas shelter and the rest of us went into a nearby town and worked a couple of shopping malls. We picked up nearly fifty bucks. J. P. decided we needed something to lift our spirits, so he spent most of the money on a couple of big steaks, some French fries, and a bottle of wine for the grown-ups. We got back to the campsite and made a fire, and then J. P. told me and Ooma to go over to visit the people he’d met and see if they would lend us mustard for the steaks.
I didn’t like borrowing any more than I did stealing. “Maybe they won’t have any,” I said.
Ooma grabbed my sleeve. “Come on, Fergy,” she said. “I want to see their big motor home.”
“You better not swipe anything.”
“I won’t. I just want to see it.”
There was a path through the woods leading from our campsite to theirs. We went along it. It was about five o’clock, and the sun streamed down through the trees. Squirrels and chipmunks darted along through the leaves on the ground and scooted up trees when they saw us coming. Birds were twittering, too. It was pretty nice being there, and I wondered if we’d be able to stay for a while. Especially if I got a chance to go fishing.
It only took us a couple of minutes to get to the motor home. It was parked in a clearing in the woods just the way our van was. It was something, all right. It looked as big as a freight car. There was a little folding table under the awning, a couple of chairs around the table, and sitting on one of the chairs was Mr. Clappers. He was wearing old khakis, glasses, and he had a twist of white hair that kind of stuck up from his head like a twirl of whipped cream. A fishing rod was lying on the ground next to him. The reel was in pieces on the table in front of him. He was picking up the pieces one at a time and wiping them with a rag and some oil.
When we came out of the woods he looked up and smiled. “Hello,” he said.
“Hi,” I said. “Mr. Clappers?”
“That’s me,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Fergy Wheeler,” I said. “My father—”
He didn’t pay any
attention to what I was saying, but looked at Ooma. “And who are you?”
Ooma stared at him, but she didn’t say anything.
“She doesn’t have very good manners,” I said. “She’s sort of wild.” I nudged her. “Tell him your name.”
“Ooma,” she said.
“That’s an unusual name.”
I thought it was nice of him not to say that it was weird. “It’s an Indian name,” I said.
“What sort of Indians?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Some Indian language that the Wiz knows about. It’s supposed to mean ‘filled with sweetness and light.’ ”
Mr. Clappers set down the piece of reel he was oiling and examined Ooma. “Are you really filled with sweetness and light?”
“No,” she said. “That’s a load of crap. I’m always getting into trouble.”
He went on looking at her, like she was an interesting problem that he wanted to puzzle out. “Yes, I can imagine that,” he said. “What kind of trouble do you get into, mostly?”
“I rob stuff,” she said.
I turned red. I wished she hadn’t said that. Mr. Clappers seemed like he might like us and maybe take me fishing. “Ooma—”
“Is that true, Fergy?”
“I guess so,” I said. “She doesn’t mean anything by it. She just can’t help herself.”
“Oh?” He leaned back and put his hands behind his head. I figured that being as he was retired he had plenty of time to puzzle things like Ooma out. “What kind of things do you steal, Ooma?”
Ooma gave me a confused look. She wasn’t used to anybody being so calm about her stealing. She looked back at Mr. Clappers. “I don’t know,” she said.
“It isn’t usually much,” I lied. “Clark Bars. Stuff like that.”
“I took this big radio a couple of days ago,” she said. “It was this big.”
I wished she could keep her mouth shut. “She only takes stuff like that sometimes.”
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