How I Became a Writer and Oggie Learned to Drive

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  Well, my heart sank when I heard that. It just sank down to its lowest level and lay there.

  “What if I’m really sick, which I think I am. I could stay home from school a few days until it blows over.”

  Raven shook her head. “It won’t work. Nothing blows over with the Cat Man. That’s how he gets everybody. He gives you a job, then he expects you to work for him. If you don’t come back, he’s real mad. Then he gets you like Tommy.”

  “Who’s Tommy? What did he do to Tommy?”

  “Got him picked up. Cat Man set him up. Tommy didn’t want to work for him anymore. Now he’s in juvenile correction.”

  All the time Raven’s talking, I’m trying to swallow, but my throat is kind of sore. When I hear about Tommy, it gets completely stuck. I can’t swallow, can’t talk. I never meant to get into any of this. All I ever wanted was to find Oggie’s wallet and give it back to him.

  “I guess I’ve got to go see Cat Man,” I whispered after a while.

  “You’ve got to.” Raven nodded. Suddenly, she looked happy. “Don’t feel bad. I’m in the same fix. Maybe now, with two of us, we’ll be able to figure something out.” I could see she was glad to have me on her side.

  “Has anyone ever gotten away from Cat Man?” I asked.

  “Not that I know of,” Raven said. She gave me this big grin. “But there’s always a first time.”

  We started sneaking around the back of the school, heading toward Washington Boulevard. The big cement playground was in our way. We crouched down behind a Dumpster to check it out. We didn’t want Ringo and Ralphie to catch us.

  “Listen,” Raven said. “This is what we’ll do. I’ll go first, slow and easy, and take a look around. When I get across, I’ll signal back if the coast is clear. Then it’s your turn.”

  The Argument

  NOBODY WAS AT 5446 when we went by. The back door was locked. A fierce wind was blowing, and it was colder than Alaska behind the house.

  “I thought you said he’d be here,” I said. I was starting to shiver.

  “He was. Something must’ve come up. It’s all right. I’ve got a key.”

  “You live around here?”

  “Down the street.”

  “You go to school around here?”

  “Over on Amstell Ave.”

  It wasn’t my school, but I knew some kids who went there. We compared notes. She was in the sixth grade like me, but one year older. They’d held her back when she moved up from Virginia with her mom a couple of years ago.

  “Where’s your dad?” I asked.

  “Still in Virginia,” she said.

  Something about the way she said that made me know what it meant. All of a sudden, I liked her a lot more.

  We went downstairs to the hangout. Nobody else was there. The big cellar room smelled bad when you first went in, but after a while you didn’t notice. Raven started picking up trash that was lying around, emptying ashtrays.

  “What a dump. Nobody picks up after themselves,” she said. “They’re kids, that’s why. The Night Riders look tough, but they’re a gang of dumb kids, really. They aren’t even thinking how Cat Man is using them. They just want the money.”

  “Then why are you in with them?” I asked.

  “I was stupid,” she said. “But now I’m working on it.”

  That really struck me. Here was this girl who was younger than everybody but she acted a lot older. I liked that about her. I felt that way, too. It seemed to me I had a wider perspective on life than most kids my age.

  Writers have that sometimes. They can look past the edges and see the bigger picture. I mean, that’s what writing is kind of all about, the bigger picture. Not that writers are smarter than other people. A lot of times they’re pretty bad in school. They just have another way of looking.

  “I want to be a writer,” I told Raven.

  “No kidding,” she said. “Are you writing anything now?”

  “Yes, I am,” I told her. The next thing I knew, I was telling her everything about The Mysterious Mole People, even that there was someone named Raven in it. I don’t know why, it just came pouring out. Somehow, I knew Raven wasn’t going to say anything to wreck it.

  I was right, too. She didn’t. She got really interested and started asking me questions about the Mole People’s beliefs, how long Amory Ellington and the Raven character were going to stay down there with them, what effect it would have on them—stuff I hadn’t thought too much about myself.

  “What’s with this turtle, Alphonse?” she asked me.

  I said I wasn’t sure exactly. “In the beginning, I only put him in the story so Amory would have someone to talk to. But now they’ve gotten really close, like soul mates. Amory’s very worried about where he went.”

  “Where DID he go?” Raven asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. The strange thing was, I really didn’t.

  While we talked, I helped her clean up. It was a good way to look around. Since I was there, I thought I might as well keep an eye out for Oggie’s wallet. I was about to ask Raven if she’d seen it when we heard the sound of feet coming down the hall. Raven put a finger on her lips.

  Cat Man strolled in with some of the Night Riders. He was having an argument with two of them and didn’t look at us.

  These two were only about fourteen, but I’d noticed them before. They were big talkers who thought a lot of themselves. Whatever anyone said, they’d laugh and put the person down. They were the creeps who’d called Oggie and me “baby brothers” the time we ran into them on the sidewalk.

  This time, they had some new idea they wanted the gang to try. Cat Man didn’t like it. I guess he must have had trouble with these two before. He began swearing at them and they started cursing back. Finally, he got up and pushed one. The kid fell backward over a chair. He was lying on the floor with a bleeding head.

  “Get out,” Cat Man told him.

  “Hey, you got no call to do that, man,” the other kid said. “All we say is, there might be a better way. You’re thinking small. You could pick up this operation and go places.” It was obvious he was trying to make Cat Man look bad.

  “You pick yourself up and get out of here!” Cat Man yelled. He was red-hot.

  “Hey, you’re crazy, you know that?” the kid said. “The whole gang thinks it. Just nobody ever dares to say it to your face.”

  When I looked back at Cat Man, I saw how crazy he was. He had a knife. He must’ve been the guy Oggie saw with the blade in his belt, because it came out of nowhere. The kid with the bleeding head took one look and began to drag himself backward on the floor.

  “Okay, okay. We’re going,” he said, but the other guy wouldn’t back down.

  “So, now what? You’re going to kill us?” he asked Cat Man. “You’re going to kill us because we speak up with the truth? You ask anyone in this room; they all think the same. You aren’t using all your resources, man. I got contacts that could work with you.”

  “Could take my business, you mean.”

  “No, man, no. You got to get over that way of thinking.”

  The kid was going to say something else, but right then, Cat Man stepped forward and zipped him with the knife across the front of his shirt. The cut wasn’t that deep, but the kid screeched. He looked down at himself. A thin stripe of blood was coming through his shirt. He looked up, surprised.

  “Get out,” Cat Man said.

  The two kids ran for it. Suddenly they weren’t so tough anymore. The one on the floor got up like a rocket. They ran out the door and along the hall. You could hear their feet pounding up the stairs. Then it was really quiet. Cat Man looked around. Everybody in that room was scared stiff, not even breathing. He still had the knife out.

  “Anybody else got some bright idea for running this show?” Cat Man asked.

  Nobody said a word.

  I looked over at Raven. We’d both been pressed up against the wall the whole time. With one hand, she flashed me a hang-in-there sign. S
he didn’t look that worried. Maybe this happened all the time at 5446, who knows? For myself, I was going hot, going cold, going weak in the knees. I couldn’t tell if it was the sickness coming on stronger or I was just petrified.

  Cat Man laid his knife on the table and sat down in a chair. He sent a couple of guys out for coffee and donuts. When they came back, he talked privately to some of the gang at the table for a while. Then he called Raven and me over. He’d finally noticed we were there.

  “Hey, kid, where’ve you been all this time?” he asked me. “I was worried about you.” He sounded friendly, but I knew he was listening for my answer.

  “I got sick,” I lied. “This is my first day back.”

  Raven nodded to back me up.

  “Get lost, honey,” he told her. “I’m talking to the soccer star here.”

  He turned back to me and said, “Yeah, you don’t look so great. I thought it was something like that. I knew you were too smart to quit on me.”

  He gave me the eye, as if he really didn’t think that at all. The next second, he flashed his big smile. He was one scary dude.

  “You up to a job?” he asked. “I got one that just came in. No sweat.”

  “Okay,” I kind of chirped. It was the last thing I wanted.

  “You sure? You don’t sound like you’re sure.”

  “I’m sure,” I told him, loud and clear. I didn’t want him guessing how spooked I was.

  Cat Man smiled again.

  “It’s like I’ve been telling people ever since I saw you drop that punk in Wong’s. You’ve got potential, kid. You’re a creative thinker.”

  That really surprised me. I am?

  “You got it up here.” Cat Man pointed to my forehead. “You can handle yourself. Stick around and you’ll find out how good things can get.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. I didn’t believe him for a minute, but on the other hand, I kind of liked the idea that I had potential.

  I wished Raven could’ve heard what he said, but she was watching some gang members look up addresses in a telephone book. She didn’t have the same status as everybody else in the Night Riders. You could see she wasn’t respected. It didn’t seem to bother her, though. One thing I was noticing about Raven, she was a pretty cool customer in her own right.

  When I had the information about the job and was ready to leave, I looked over at her again.

  “Bye,” I called.

  “See you around,” she answered without even glancing up. It was a good act. Nobody would ever guess we had anything special going with each other. We did, though. Raven and I had joined forces.

  Riding High

  I KNOW I SHOULDN’T HAVE felt so set up by what Cat Man said, but I was. It had been a long time since anyone told me anything good about myself. To hear I had potential and was a creative thinker, well, even if the guy who said it was a maniac who’d just sliced somebody with a knife, it was about the best thing I could hear right then in my life.

  All I could think was maybe I did have potential after all. It was just that regular people, like everybody else in my life, hadn’t noticed it yet.

  The job Cat Man gave me was easy. It was over on my side of Washington Boulevard again, in the opposite direction from where the cop had seen me before. I had to look out for a black Volvo four-door this time.

  I was nervous, but everything went down much better than before. No traffic, nobody watching. I got there early again and while I waited, I peeked inside the brown paper bag. Two credit cards and a gold wristwatch were in there. I didn’t want to think where they came from.

  Finally, the Volvo showed up. A woman was driving. She could have been somebody’s mother. She smiled when she handed me her paper bag, and I smiled back. That’s how good I was feeling, to dare to smile back, kind of carefree, as if nothing unusual was happening at all.

  Right then was when I crossed back over the line with Cat Man and decided to work for him again. I can’t say exactly what changed me, maybe a combination of Cat Man thinking I was so great and getting to know Raven. Whatever, I thought I’d just hang in a little longer, one or two more jobs, and try to get some of Oggie’s stolen money back. I completely forgot how I’d sworn off Garden Street. All of a sudden, Garden Street didn’t look so bad.

  I rode back to 5446, handed the bag to Cat Man, picked up my ten bucks and biked over to get Oggie.

  “You are going to be really happy soon, because I’m getting your money,” I boasted to him while we walked to Saturn. “A few more days and I’ll have it. I might even have your wallet.”

  I looked over, expecting him to say something, but he didn’t. He had on his gray, ex-Pinkerton look, only worse than usual.

  “Hey, didn’t you hear me?”

  He nodded a little.

  “But you don’t believe it?”

  “I don’t feel so good,” Oggie said. “I feel dizzy.” He knelt down all of a sudden in the middle of the sidewalk. I dumped my bike and got down beside him.

  “Are you okay? What’s wrong?”

  He didn’t want to say. Finally I got it out of him.

  “A kid hit me. On the playground at school. With a big rock. Here.” He pointed to the back of his head.

  I couldn’t see anything at first. Oggie has a ton of hair back there. I lifted some up. A huge bloody place was underneath. All the hair around it was matted down and dark with blood. It was sickening just to look at.

  “Oh, Oggie. We’ve got to get you home.”

  I sat him on my bike and wheeled him along as fast as I could. We’d been going to Saturn, but we changed direction and headed for Jupiter. Cyndi wasn’t always around in the late afternoon. I could count on Mom being there at 5:30.

  “Hold on to me,” I kept saying. “Just hold on tight.” Oggie did. But when we were about halfway there, his eyes started to fill up with tears and the yeeks came on. He began to shiver all over.

  “What is it?” I cried. “Does it hurt? What’s the matter?”

  He couldn’t say anything. His throat was closed up. Then he got his voice back and said, “Archie? Is it all right if I tell Mom? This time, I really want to tell Mom.”

  The way he said it made me feel like a skunk. I could see what a toll it had taken on him not to tell her before, when he got mugged.

  “Of course you can tell her,” I said. “She might have to take you to the doctor. How come you didn’t tell Mrs. Pinkerton? You should’ve gone to the school nurse.”

  “I went in the bathroom,” Oggie said. “I tried to fix it myself.”

  “But that’s crazy! How could you fix something like this? You probably need stitches. Didn’t you know it was bad?”

  “It felt bad,” Oggie said in a quivery voice. “I knew it was bad. I wanted to tell, but I thought you’d be mad, so I went in the bathroom and tried to fix it myself.”

  Under Surveillance

  FOR THE NEXT THREE days, Oggie stayed home from school and I stayed with him. He had eight stitches in his head. Half his hair was shaved off, and a big patch of gauze was over the back of his head. Mom put him on the end of the couch with a blanket and told him to stay there.

  “You look like an alien,” I told him.

  “So do you,” he said back.

  He was right, I did. When Mom and I got back from taking him to the emergency room that night, whatever bug I’d been coming down with caught up with me. For three days I was on the other end of the couch, sneezing and coughing and running a fever.

  Mom kept on going to work, but she called about forty-five thousand times to see how we were. Well, maybe not forty-five thousand, but a lot more than she needed to. She had the lady next door coming over to check on us. She must have told Dad to keep an eye on us, too, because he called up once from the road.

  “So, Oggie,” Dad said. “I heard some kids hit you with a rock. They won’t get away with it, will they?”

  “They already DID get away with it,” Oggie said.

  “I know, b
ut usually, I mean. You don’t let people at school push you around, do you?”

  “Not usually,” Oggie said. “I just go in the clos—”

  “HEY, DAD!” I screeched. “Somebody’s at the door. We’ve got to hang up!”

  We hung up fast, before Dad could hear what Oggie was going to say.

  “Listen,” I said when we were back on the couch. “You don’t have to bring up going in the closet all the time.”

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “Because it doesn’t sound that great. In fact, it sounds pretty lame, as if you aren’t standing up for your rights.”

  Oggie stared at me. “What’s wrong with the closet?” he asked. “YOU go in there all the time.” He must have been noticing where I went at night when I couldn’t sleep.

  “That’s different,” I said. “As you know, I’m attempting to write a book.”

  “Well, I’m attempting things, too,” Oggie said, sticking out his chin. “The closet is where I attempt them the best.”

  We were into the third day of sitting on the couch when, about three o’clock in the afternoon, a car with a loose tailpipe began gunning up and down the street outside. It rattled by four or five times.

  Then the phone rang, and when I picked up, nobody was there. I could hear someone breathing on the other end, but they wouldn’t speak. Five minutes later, the phone rang again and the same thing happened. I left the receiver off the hook after that.

  I started going to the window to look out. I couldn’t see anything, but I had an eerie feeling somebody was out there. After the phone calls, I thought it might be Ralphie and Ringo looking for me like before.

  “What’s wrong?” Oggie asked. He was watching TV.

  “Nothing.” I didn’t want to scare him.

  I kept looking out the window. Pretty soon, I saw a shadow dart down the alley that’s across from our house. Then somebody’s head was peeking around the corner, looking up at our window. It was a girl’s head that had very short hair.

  “Raven!” I yelled.