The Secret of Rover

by Rachel Wildavsky

  “Dumb of him to leave the truck open in this neighborhood,” whispered David.

  Katie did not reply. She was trying not to breathe. Whatever it was that the driver was delivering, it couldn’t take more than a moment or two to make the drop. After that he’d be back.

  Sure enough, there he was. They heard his heavy footsteps outside the truck. They listened as he wheeled the dolly back up the ramp and strapped it to the wall. Then he thudded back down the ramp, slid the ramp up, slammed the doors shut, scraped a bolt noisily into position, and clicked a lock.

  At the same moment, the lights went out, but David and Katie didn’t care. They were in.

  Footsteps clomped to the front of the truck and the driver’s door opened, and then it too slammed with a bang. With a jump the motor turned over and with a squeal the brake released. The great creature lurched into motion. Roaring, it lumbered out of the gas station, turned heavily onto the road, and slipped into the flowing stream of traffic. The children sat in pitch-darkness on a hard and rattling metal floor, but they could feel the vehicle swaying and gathering speed.

  They were locked inside a moving truck. In another moment they would be on the highway and rolling north.

  They could relax at last, but after so long a strain it would not be easy. Katie dropped her head onto her knees and tried to will her heart to stop pounding.

  From beside her she heard her brother hiss “Yes!” and felt rather than saw his fist pumping downward. “Kat!” David’s voice was tight with excitement.

  “What?”

  “Kat, we did it! We did it! This is so excellent! I just heard the driver, then I got the idea, and it worked!”

  “We hope.”

  “We know! It’s working right now, Kat! Every single second we’re a few feet closer to Uncle Alex!”

  “Shhh! What if the driver can hear us?”

  “He can’t!”

  “You don’t know that! And you need to calm down. We still have plenty of problems.”

  “Oh, I’m so glad I’m with you. You really cheer me up, you know that?”

  “You’d better pull out those flashlights you stole. We need to take a look at my map.”

  David was furious, but she could hear him fumbling in his pockets and then biting at the hard plastic that encased the flashlight. “Here—give me one,” she ordered. He thrust a hard, heavy package in her direction and she began to feel around the rim of it for an opening.

  “Good thing it comes with batteries,” she said, beginning to feel a little sorry that she’d been so negative.

  But David did not answer. She didn’t just get to make up. Not just like that.

  It was some time before their flashlights were ready to use. Hard as it was to unpack them—when they couldn’t see a thing—it was harder still to load them with batteries. For one thing, as soon as the flashlights came loose from their plastic, all four batteries spilled onto the floor and promptly rolled away. They had to crawl after them, feeling around on the floor in the dark. As soon as they found two they tried to load up one light so they could look for the others. But they couldn’t tell positive from negative, and kept getting confused about which ends they’d already tried to position in which directions. By the time they finally generated a thin beam of light they were sweating, dusty, exhausted, and once again thoroughly furious with each other.

  But the light itself was a great relief. They quickly found the remaining batteries and assembled the second flashlight much more rapidly than the first. For a few moments they simply sat, basking in the luxury of their newly made lights and trying to recover their tempers. But then . . .

  “We shouldn’t use up the batteries,” Katie remembered, flicking the switch on hers. “Let’s just check out the map, then we’ll turn both of them off.”

  “Why do you keep saying we need the map?” queried David, reluctantly conceding that she was right about not wasting the lights they had labored so hard to assemble. “We’re not the ones driving.”

  “Because he’s not going to take us all the way to Uncle Alex, is he?” responded Katie. “He’s only going to Yonkers. Then he’s going west—you told me so yourself. So we have to switch to another truck in Yonkers, and we’d better pick one that’s going the right way.”

  “I get it.” David’s voice was gloomy. How were they supposed to do that? This stowaway thing had been amazingly easy the first time, but that didn’t mean they could pull it off twice.

  “What time is it?” continued Katie, all business.

  David peered at his watch. “Eleven thirty.”

  “Good. We got in here just after eleven, so that means right about now”—she snapped open her map and pointed at one precise spot—“I figure we’re probably here.”

  David hunched over Katie’s finger, which was positioned about halfway between Washington DC and Baltimore, Maryland, on Interstate 95. For a moment her eyes wandered north. “There,” she said, and—moving her finger north and slightly east—she deposited it squarely on Interstate 91. “That’s the road we want. I-91 goes straight up through New York State to the border with Vermont—see? And it goes through Yonkers. So after we get off, we just have to find a truck that’s headed for I-91 north.”

  “But Yonkers is big,” said David, dismay in his voice. “Just because we’re in Yonkers doesn’t mean we’ll be anywhere near I-91.”

  “I told you we still had problems,” she retorted with gloomy satisfaction, beginning to fold up the map. “But at least now we know what our problems are.”

  “I can tell you my problem,” said David, looking worried. “Or it isn’t a problem yet, but I think it’s going to be. At some point I’m going to have to go to the bathroom.”

  “Well, you can’t do it here,” cried Katie, alarmed. “It stinks enough as it is.”

  She was right about that. It was summer, after all. The temperature in the truck must be hovering around ninety degrees, and the air was dusty, humid, and dank. Turning their traveling car into a toilet would not improve matters.

  “Well, I’m not that desperate,” replied David, miffed. “I can wait. Thanks for your support, though,” he added sarcastically.

  “We’ll be getting out very soon,” urged Katie.

  “Let’s not talk about it,” said David. “What we need to do now is get some food.”

  Both of them were very hungry. It had been daylight when they last ate, and in their haste to board the truck they had left the bag containing the remaining sandwiches on the floor at the gas station. They had both been nibbling on chocolate until they were sick of it, and anyway, there was little of that left.

  Fortunately, they now found themselves in a truck full of groceries. So David was right. This was an opportunity they could not pass up.

  They soon discovered, though, that turning packaged groceries into food was very hard to do. For one thing, everything was stacked so high and sealed so well that it would not be easy to get through to the contents of any box. And for another, it turned out that relatively few groceries amounted to anything they’d actually want to eat.

  Once again both flashlights were on as they cruised the aisles of their rolling grocery store, searching for foods that did not need cooking and looked as if they could plausibly be extracted from their packages.

  “‘All-Purpose Flour,’” read David, shining his light on the side of a shrink-wrapped crate and running his hands over the plastic that enclosed it. “‘Two-Ply Paper Towels.’ ‘Powdered Dishwasher Detergent.’”

  “Shhh!” said Katie from the other side of the truck. Why did David never remember to keep it down? She peered yet more closely at the label before her. Canned soups. Those would be hopeless. Salad dressing. Who would have thought there’d be nothing to eat in a truck full of food?

  Katie heard a barfing noise from David. “What?” she asked.

  “Dog biscuits.”

  “Actually—”

  “I’m not that desperate!”

  Sighing,
Katie turned down the next aisle, waving her flashlight listlessly at the boxes that lined it. Her heart leaped. “David!”

  He scurried to her side, and triumphantly she pointed her light squarely at the middlemost box in the wall of cartons on her left.

  THE CHEESY SNACK! announced the only side of the box that they could see.

  “Sweet!” said David, pouncing on the carton.

  “What are they?” whispered Katie.

  “I don’t care,” he answered. “Let’s get ’em open.”

  They quickly decided that it would be easier to tear a hole in the side of the box and pull out the snacks—whatever they were—than to pull the box out of its stack and open it the right way. But “easier” wasn’t the same as “easy.”

  Cardboard, it turned out, was nearly as unbreakable as wood. So instead of punching through the box, they had to tear off the tape that sealed the carton around the edges and open it at the seam. This resulted in numerous paper cuts and broken nails. And as if their bruised and bleeding fingertips were not aggravation enough, they had to wage the whole struggle in a tight, narrow space, with flashlights wedged under their arms, in a hot, unventilated, moving truck.

  Sweat rolled in rivulets down Katie’s sides, and her cuticles stung as she jammed her dirty fingers into the gap they were painfully trying to open along the side of the box.

  “David,” she gasped, “we don’t need snacks; we need drinks.”

  “That’s next,” he grunted.

  With a wrench the side of the box came free, exposing a wall of blue and orange cracker boxes.

  “Yes!” Both children lunged. Their flashlights clattered to the floor, flinging wild beams everywhere as they pulled out armfuls of boxes and retreated with their booty to the wide center aisle of the truck.

  David dropped to the floor and ripped the top off of one of the boxes, letting the others tumble in a heap about him. He was just tearing at the foil packet inside when Katie suddenly said, “David! Don’t.”

  He stopped, staring up at her in bewilderment. “What?” he said. “I’m starving, Kat!”

  “What time is it?” she demanded.

  He looked at his watch, his irritation increasing. “It’s twelve twenty. It’s after midnight, Katie! I think we last ate at, what? Six? I’m incredibly hungry!”

  “I know; I am too. But listen, David. We’ve been in this truck for an hour and fifteen minutes. It took us over an hour—OK, some of that time was for the flashlights—it took us about an hour to get these crackers.”

  “So?” Defiant, David ripped the foil, but he did not eat.

  “So it could take us at least that long to find something to drink.”

  “Get to the point!”

  “I am, if you’d just listen! David, we have to find drinks! Who knows what’ll be in our next truck? The next truck could be carrying . . . lightbulbs, I don’t know; or furniture, or toilets—”

  “Don’t say that!”

  Katie simply stared.

  “Don’t say ‘toilet’! Katie, I can’t drink anything!”

  “Oh, I forgot. Sorry . . . although in that case,” she continued, “you shouldn’t eat crackers at all. Look at the box. They’re going to make you even thirstier than you already are.”

  The box was emblazoned with a banner that screamed: THE CHEESIEST EVER! David chucked it across the aisle, defeated and miserable. She was right, of course.

  “Why’d you have to say ‘toilet’?” he repeated, disconsolate. “Now I feel even worse.”

  “Sorry,” she said again. “But we do have to look for drinks and we’d better find them before we start eating ‘The Cheesy Snack.’”

  David glared at her back as she plunged yet again down one of the narrow canyons between the walls of cartons. But before long she heard him sigh and rise to his feet to join her search.

  This time they looked for a very, very long while. Eventually they had read and rejected every label at eye level. That left boxes they could only examine by crouching uncomfortably in the dust, or, worse, by climbing. “How are we going to unpack these drinks if they turn out to be up near the ceiling?” Katie demanded as she clung to the crevices in her cardboard wall, peering at a very high label.

  David did not answer. Soon after, though, she heard him utter a muffled cry.

  “What?” With the back of her hand, Katie wiped the sweat that poured down into her eyes. Her face was gritty with dust.

  “I said, got it!” shouted David. He had long ago stopped worrying whether the driver would hear him.

  David had found juice boxes. They were packed, as Katie had feared, at the very top of a towering wall of boxes. And they were obviously intended for very young children. Even their crate had cartoon characters all over it.

  But by this time they would practically have drunk mouthwash. And as luck would have it, the position of the box turned out to be an advantage. “Geronimo!” called David, and shoved it to the floor. It was heavy with liquid and fell with a thud. The box’s cardboard seams split on impact, and it took only a moment’s work for Katie and David to rip it wide open, exposing the gaudy, cellophane-wrapped flats of juice within.

  “Thank you, thank you!” cried Katie, tearing one open. With trembling, exhausted fingers she peeled the wrapper from one tiny straw and jabbed it into the box. Her exertions had left her so weak that she could barely pierce the foil. But as soon as she did so, she inhaled the contents in a single slurp. The juice was sweet and sticky and as hot as she was, but it was liquid and it was delicious.

  She grabbed a second box. “You’re torturing me,” said her brother bitterly, watching her.

  “Just start filling your pockets,” she said, scuttling down the aisle to where they’d left the crackers. “But wait!”

  “What now?”

  “Let’s just pick this stuff up,” said Katie. “Because he might stop. And if we leave it in the middle of the aisle, he’ll freak the minute he opens the door, and then he’ll find us.”

  This was a good point. They filled their pockets to bulging with drinks and snacks and shoved aside the goods they’d unpacked as inconspicuously as possible.

  Then they turned off their flashlights to save batteries, sat down in the aisle, and waited.

  One o’clock became one thirty. One thirty became two o’clock.

  David, unable to bear it, peed in the back left corner of the truck. The stench embarrassed him and added to their troubles. He waited for Katie to say something mean, but to his surprise she said nothing about it. She knew he’d had no choice. Besides, if this continued for much longer, she would be in the same position.

  David drained three juices boxes, practically in a single swallow.

  Two o’clock became two thirty and two thirty became three, and still they rumbled forward.

  “Kat,” said David eventually.

  “Mmm.” Katie was leaning against a wall of boxes with her knees up and her arms tight around them. It was plain from her voice that she was growing drowsy.

  “Kat, should we have some kind of plan? For Yonkers, I mean.”

  “Plan?” Katie must be very drowsy indeed, not to perk up at that word. Usually she had a plan for everything. Katie was the kind of girl who diagrammed her homework.

  “Yes, plan,” he said irritably. “Like, when this thing stops, how do we get out of here without being seen? And where do we go after that? What if there’s no other truck? What if we’re in the middle of nowhere?”

  “We can’t plan it, David,” she said. “Because of all that—of what you just said. We don’t know enough. We have to take our chances—that’s all. Now”—she broke off in a yawn—“now leave me alone. I’m really tired.”

  And she rested her chin on her knees and closed her eyes.

  But David stared into the dark. So they were both worried about Yonkers. Great! He could feel the road rumbling beneath them, and that part was good. It was excellent to be covering so much ground. But eventually the truck would st
op, and the back would open, and then all bets would be off.

  He shifted uncomfortably. It was dark and very hot. But eventually, that rumbling road had the hypnotic effect that continuous motion always does, and like his sister, he slept.

  “Back!”

  They awoke with a start to the sound of a voice seemingly right beside their ears.

  Both children sat bolt upright. Their truck had stopped moving and now it began inching backward, emitting a monotonous beep.

  “Keep it comin’,” the voice continued. “Back . . . back . . .”

  It was still coal black inside the truck, but they did not need a light to know that wherever it was they had been heading, they had now arrived. Someone was maneuvering their driver into a parking space.

  “Stop!” called whoever it was. “You’re good!”

  It was weird to be so close to this voice and yet so invisible to its owner. They were separated by only a thin sheet of metal and could hear him as if he were right there.

  “Hide!” Katie whispered. They had fallen asleep in the main center aisle of the truck. Now they hustled toward the back, struggling to hurry and be silent at the same time. David dove into the last row on the right and Katie slid in behind him. No sooner were they in position than the driver cut the motor and they heard the wheeze of the giant brakes locking the vehicle into place.

  After so many hours with the roar of the motor filling their ears, the silence seemed deafening. To move anywhere on the rattling metal floor had just become impossible. Whether or not they had chosen the best spot to hide, they would now have to stay where they were.

  It stank in the rear of the truck and the smell reminded Katie of all that had happened the night before. By now she needed a bathroom too.

  They could hear the driver call, “Which way to the dock?”

  “Around to the right,” replied the man on the ground. And then they heard the driver get out and walk away. There was nothing to do but wait until he came back.

  In the meantime, they were surrounded by a terrifying number and variety of voices. Men and a few women, too, were calling out to one another and on either side they could hear the noisy panting of other great trucks idling. The fumes of diesel oil were nauseating.