by Gary Paulsen
.8
“I knew you’d see it my way,” Amos said.
Dunc didn’t say anything.
“I just want to see if there are any pictures. After that you can have it.”
Dunc still didn’t say anything.
“Rats, no pictures. What kind of a book is this? Do you think we have time to read some before the burglar gets here?”
“Burglar?” A deep voice came from behind Amos’s shoulder, and he turned and dropped the book. “Did you say something about a burglar?” The policeman picked the book up and handed it to Amos. He didn’t look at the cover.
“Thank you,” Amos answered. His voice squeaked. He looked at the policeman’s name tag. OFFICER CLARK.
“Your voice changed,” said the policeman.
“Did it? I mean, it did.”
“He has a cold,” Dunc said.
“Yes, that’s it,” Amos said. “I have a cold. The school is so drafty.” He coughed and held the book behind his back.
“What’s this about a burglar?”
“Oh, nothing. We’re just talking about all the burglaries that have been going on.” Dunc shrugged. “You know, just talking. Kind of just—talking. About the burglaries. Talking.”
“What’s the book you’re reading?” The policeman asked.
“What book?”
“The one behind your back.”
Amos took the book out. “This? Uh … uh—”
Officer Clark glanced at the cover. He eyed Amos suspiciously. “What are two young boys doing reading a book like this?”
Amos said nothing. He suddenly realized that he was wearing a pair of pink sunglasses with flowers on them and holding a dirty book and looking up at a policeman and that he was a fugitive from justice, except that he thought of it as a FUGITIVE FROM JUSTICE, all in capitals, and his tongue had stuck to the roof of his mouth as if it were covered with Superglue.
“It’s research,” Dunc interrupted. “We have to do a paper on the evils of the world.”
“Yes. All the evil, so much evil.” Amos found his voice. “Lots of it out there, evil. Just about waist deep, evil. I never saw so much evil.”
Dunc pinched him, and he shut up. The policeman eyed them both suspiciously, but after what seemed like hours to the boys, he handed the book back to Amos. “You’d better put the book back and move on to another aisle, don’t you think?”
Amos and Dunc both nodded. They were still nodding while Officer Clark turned and left them standing there.
“That was close,” Dunc said. He took the book down, opened it, took out a piece of paper, and put his own piece of paper inside.
“What’s that?” Amos asked.
“Instructions telling the burglar to go to Melissa’s house and steal a toilet. Let’s go.”
“Already?”
“The burglar could be here any minute.”
“We have a few minutes, don’t we? I’d kind of like to look at that book.”
“There’s no time. Let’s go.”
On their way out, they passed the same short, roundly built man with long arms and coat and hat they had seen the first time. Dunc had his face behind Amos, and Amos had turned to say something, so they didn’t see him. The short man didn’t see their faces clearly, but he heard their voices, and he turned and watched their backs as they moved down the library steps and onto the sidewalk.
Then he made his way into the library and to the shelf with the book about early French erotica.
.9
“So tell me the plan again,” Amos whispered. They were in the bushes near Melissa’s house. It was dark, and they had been waiting for over two hours—long enough for Amos to lose his patience.
“You already know it.”
“I just want to be sure.”
“This is the last time,” Dunc said. “We hide here until the burglar goes inside. I run and call the police. The police arrive, and we tell them the reason we’re here is that we’re trying to warn Melissa. The burglar is arrested, and your name is cleared. Simple.”
“I hate that word.”
“What word?”
“Simple. You use it with everything, but nothing ever turns out to be that way.”
“Amos—”
“I hate it, too, when you say my name that way. ‘Amos.’ As if you’re talking to a lamp pole. You always say simple and it isn’t, and you say Amos when you really don’t expect …” He trailed off and turned.
In back of them, in the bushes, there was a rustling sound, and a small figure with long arms appeared. It walked with a rolling gait across the lawn and stopped below a different second-story window from the last time. With an easy jump the figure leaped up to hang from the windowsill by one arm. He used the other arm to reach up and open the window. Then easily he swung up and into the house.
“The burglar,” Dunc whispered. “He’s in.”
“Dunc …”
“I’ll go call the police.”
“Dunc …”
“You keep watch, and I’ll be right back.”
“Dunc …”
“What?”
“That’s Melissa’s room. The one he climbed into. That’s her room.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I come by here sometimes. Well, lots of times. It’s only twelve blocks out of my way in the opposite direction on the way to school, and I know it’s her room because I’ve seen her in the window. It’s about a hundred and thirty-six point four feet from the street to her room.”
Dunc stared at him. “ ‘About’?”
“Well, exactly. I used a tape measure one time when they were on vacation.”
Dunc shook his head. “That doesn’t change anything. He’s still in there, and I still have to run for the police.”
“No. There’s no time for the police. We have to get in there and save her.”
Amos turned to run for the house and promptly stepped on the rake, which was lying in exactly the same place that it had been lying last time. The handle came up as it had before, perfectly, and caught him vertically exactly between the eyes. The damage might not have been so bad except that he was still wearing the pink sunglasses and the glasses were driven solidly into his forehead, while the side pieces slammed back and into his temples. It was about like having a vise close instantly on his head, and he stopped dead, his mind blown completely blank.
Dunc moved around him. “Come on, Amos. You’re right. Let’s get in there.”
Amos nodded. “In there.”
Dunc stopped next to the wall below the window.
Amos walked toward him, a half-smile on his face.
“Come on.” Dunc grabbed him and jerked him up against the wall, turned him to face outward, climbed up his front side by stepping in on Amos’s belt, which pulled his pants halfway down, then on his shoulders and head and up to grab the sill. Amos stood smiling peacefully the whole time.
Dunc clambered into the window, reached back and down, and caught Amos by the back of his T-shirt. With a heave he pulled Amos up backward into the room. Amos stood in the darkened room, smiling quietly to himself, his pants around his knees.
Melissa slept quietly not six feet from him. Amos had no idea she was there.
He had no ideas at all. The inside of his mind was totally blank.
.10
Time has a way of being elastic. Candy goes like lightning, and a math test can take a whole lifetime, and the time that Amos stood smiling in Melissa’s room could have been two minutes or two weeks. It didn’t matter.
Amos was unconscious.
His eyes were open, but they didn’t focus. They stared out and out and out, and he was smiling, but it meant nothing, just a reflexive lift of the sides of his mouth.
Dunc, on the other hand, was acutely aware of where he was and what was happening.
He looked around the darkened room, heard Melissa’s even breathing, and saw her form in the shadows. He did not see the burglar, but he could see lig
ht from a nightlight in the hall coming through the partially opened door of Melissa’s room, and he guessed that the burglar had gone into the hallway.
The house was silent.
Dunc started for the door, then realized Amos wasn’t following him. He turned to see him apparently staring at Melissa.
“Come on!” he whispered, and grabbed Amos by the hand, jerked him out of the room and into the hallway. “You can stare at her later.”
Amos followed happily, his feet trudging automatically.
It was just as well that Amos was unconscious. If he had known what was coming at him, there was a fair chance the shock would have come close to killing him.
In silence the boys entered the hallway. Dunc looked left and right, saw a glimmer of movement in a door to the right, and held out his hand to stop Amos. He put his mouth near Amos’s ear and whispered softly, “You wait here. Guard Melissa, and I’ll try to find the burglar. Got it?”
Amos smiled vacantly and moved his head in what Dunc took to be a nod. Dunc moved off to the right down the hallway, while Amos stood near the door.
It was precisely then that a horrendous sound of cracking porcelain and splashing water came from the bathroom. The sound was barely over when the door across from Melissa’s opened, and a huge frame filled the opening.
Rocko.
“What happens?” he said. His voice sounded like a speaker inside a steel barrel. “What happens bad?”
His eyes were like the ends of two rifle barrels, little holes of darkness swiveling to find whatever had caused the noise.
And he saw Amos.
Standing next to Melissa’s door with an idiotic smile on his face.
It was still possible for Amos to have emerged safely, except that at the same instant that Rocko saw Amos, a small form came boiling out of the bathroom carrying a toilet on its shoulder. The burglar came out just as Dunc came in, knocking Dunc down and tripping him. Here timing became critically important.
Melissa’s brother could have handled one surprise fairly well, even one and a half, but two things happening at once confused Rocko.
And a confused Rocko was a bewildered Rocko.
And a bewildered Rocko instantly became an angered Rocko.
There was Amos standing by Melissa’s door with a vacant smile on his face.
Trained by years of football and violence, Rocko grabbed the only weapon that was available to him and threw it at the burglar with the toilet.
He snaked one huge paw around Amos’s neck, picked him cleanly up off the floor, and threw him at the burglar like a spear.
Amos spiraled once, lined up neatly on the target, and with the force of a bullet he jammed headfirst into the open end of the toilet on the burglar’s shoulder.
The burglar stopped momentarily and tried to pull Amos out of the toilet. When he found that impossible, he changed the load so he could carry Amos more or less straight up and leaped through the open door to Melissa’s room with both the toilet and Amos on his shoulder. All the noise had awakened Melissa just in time to see the burglar and Amos flying through her room toward the window.
Dunc dodged around Rocko and ran into Melissa’s room just in time to see the burglar dive through the window, still carrying both the toilet and Amos, whose head was still jammed into the toilet.
“What …?” Melissa sat up in the bed.
Dunc paused with his hand on the window. “It’s all right. This is all just a dream.”
“Oh.” Melissa nodded and lay back and closed her eyes just as Rocko barged into the room like an angry rhino. Dunc took one look at Rocko coming, saw death in his eyes, and dived full-length out the window. He landed on the ground just in time to see Amos disappearing into the hedges, his head still jammed in the toilet and the burglar carrying both of them easily.
“Don’t worry, Amos!” Dunc yelled. “I’m coming!”
Which he meant to do, hoped to do, wanted to do—wanted to run and save his friend.
But he took one running step, and his foot came down on the same rake, lying in exactly the same place it had been lying for days, and the handle came up with the force of a bat, caught him vertically across the forehead, and seemed to make every streetlight in town light up in his brain. He went down like somebody dropping a bag full of sand.
“Amos—” he said, and then he said nothing.
.11
The first thing Amos heard was the sound of gurgling.
A little water—or at least later he hoped it had been water, wished it had been water, convinced himself that it had been water—was still in the toilet and seemed to be sloshing around the top of his head.
He was moving.
For a moment that was all he could realize. He had been unconscious when everything had happened—had had no recollection of even going into Melissa’s house, let alone encountering Rocko, the burglar, or the toilet. He remembered nothing that happened after the rake hit him.
He heard gurgling, and he was moving in some way he did not understand, and for a few minutes that was enough.
Then it came to him that it was dark. Not just dark from night, but really dark. He couldn’t see anything.
Something was stuck on his head.
He tried to reach up and feel the object, but something else kept his arms pinned to his side. No, not something else—someone else.
Ah, yes, he thought. I’m being carried by somebody. There is something jammed on my head, and I’m being carried by somebody. It all makes perfect sense.
He fought to bring his memory back, but he could remember nothing after taking a step and the rake handle catching him.
All right, he thought. Stick with what you know. I’m being carried by somebody, and there’s something stuck on my head.
Maybe it’s Dunc.
“Dunc?” he said, or tried to say. The toilet made it impossible to form words correctly. It came out more like gunk. “Dunc?”
He heard the sound of an engine, and then he felt himself thrown into the back of a vehicle, headfirst, with whatever it was still stuck on his head.
“Oh, no, Carley—you’ve done it again.”
It was a man’s voice, low and even, as if the man were working to control being upset.
“This makes the fourth time in four months.”
There was a sound without words, a kind of ooooh-ooooh.
I’ve heard that before, Amos thought. I’ve heard that sound before. Somewhere—where? Ooooh-ooooh. Oh yes, now I remember.
The zoo.
The monkey at the zoo. A chimp—what was her name? Kissing Gertie or something.
Again he catalogued what he knew. He was in the back of a vehicle that had started to move with something stuck on his head, and he wasn’t alone—he was with a man and what might be a chimpanzee.
“I just wish you’d stick to your instructions a little less and think for yourself once in a while.”
“Oooohhhh.”
“I don’t care how bad you feel. You were told to get the toilet.”
“Oooohhh, ooohhh.”
“I know you got the toilet, but you also got a little extra, didn’t you?”
“Ooohhh.”
“Yes. You grabbed a person with the toilet.”
“Ooooooooo.”
“You’d better be sorry. And you’d also better be thinking of what we’re going to do with him.”
Correction, Amos thought. I’m sitting in a moving vehicle with a man and a monkey, and the man is talking to the monkey. Worse, he is asking the monkey for advice.
It had to be the burglar.
This thought burned across his thinking. What else could it all have meant?
Correction number two, he thought. I’m sitting in a vehicle with the burglar, who has somehow gotten a monkey to carry me away from Melissa’s house with something stuck on my head even though he, the burglar, didn’t want me, and he, the monkey, did want me.
His brain flopped and stopped thinking.
Too muc
h, he thought. Too much thinking.
He lay back and felt the vehicle turn a corner once, then again.
Amos reached up to feel the object on his head, to see how tight it was, to see if it could be removed. But as soon as he moved his arms, rough-textured hands grabbed his wrists and held them at his sides.
“Don’t you hurt him, Carley—remember the last time and how messy it was when you hurt someone.”
Amos felt the pressure lessen but remain firm.
He wiggled his eyebrows. Whatever had his head was cold, hard, and wet and jammed tightly, but he found that wiggling his eyebrows and forehead seemed to make the object pinch less.
He wiggled more.
It gave more, and he worked his eyebrows and forehead as hard as he could, and finally he felt his head come loose and move slightly out of the hole into which it was jammed.
The vehicle suddenly slowed, turned left, slowed still more, and stopped. The engine died.
“All right, Carley—you carried him in, you carry him out. And for Pete’s sake, keep the toilet on his head. We don’t want him to see anything.”
Toilet? I’m stuck in a toilet?
The same coarse hands grabbed him by the sides and lifted him gently out of the vehicle, balanced the toilet on his head, and stood him on the ground, still holding his arms.
“Watch out,” the man said to Amos. “We’re going down the outside basement steps. Just move slowly.”
How’d I get stuck in a toilet?
.12
Amos felt the steps in front of his feet, and he let the monkey help him down. Then there was a short flat piece, two steps, and he heard a door open, and then four more steps, and the monkey stopped him.
“Winston, what in heaven’s name are you doing with a boy with a toilet on his head?”
“I’m following your instructions, Mr. Waylon. I went to the library and found the message where you left it. You clearly said to steal a toilet from the same address as before.”
“I most certainly did not.”
“You did.”
“I did not.”
“Here’s the note—read it.”