Hokey Pokey (9 page)
Do it
.
I can’t
.
Do it
.
It’s not mine
.
Who cares? Climb on. Ride. No one will know
.
I might get hurt
.
You might get the ride of your lifetime. You’ll make history. They’ll make a statue of you on Scramjet. Put it next to The Kid
.
I’m scared
.
You will amaze everyone. Now they’ll be scared of you. Even Big Kids
.
I’m little
.
Not after you do it
.
I can’t
.
They broke Daffy. Do it for Daffy
.
I can’t
.
You are Destroyer of Worlds
.
I can’t reach the pedals
.
The chain will sing to you
.
I loved Daffy
.
Do it!
F
OCUS … FOCUS
…
She tries not to think of her aching shoulders. She tries not to think of her wet armpits and dry mouth. She focuses on the prize. Soon they will know what’s on the other side of the wall. She tries to picture it but finds that her thoughts dissolve like a lemon-lime hokey pokey on her tongue. No doubt it will be wonderful, but wonderful in what way? Will there be dazzle and spectacular things to see? Will it be the answer to a great mystery? Will it be wonderful in ways she cannot imagine? Is that the point? The prize? That
the first person to enter Forbidden Hut will have an experience that cannot even be imagined by those left outside?
She digs … digs …
“I
AM
D
ESTROYER OF
W
ORLDS
… I am Destroyer of Worlds …,” he whispers as he steps within the arc of the handlebar. And sees his problem at once: the saddle is too high—he needs a boost. And that’s not going to happen, as he’s alone out here on the bluff. The thought flitters in his brain:
Not that anybody would ever give me a boost
.
He looks about for something to step on—nothing but the berry thicket and a hole in the ground. Standing by the bike, the saddle head-high, he feels his littleness. Runt, the Daffy-killers called him. Well … maybe
for once runt is good. Maybe he doesn’t need a boost. Maybe he doesn’t even weigh enough to topple it over. Maybe he can just climb up onto this thing. Step on the pedal, step on the sprocket, lean into the top tube, swing a leg up and over. He’ll do it on the kickstand side, and the kickstand will hold
(Please!)
because …
he’s a runt
.
The kickstand’s silver toe pierces the red dust. He’s panting, as if he’s just finished a race. He feels weak, shaky. He can’t move.
Do it!
He curls his fingers around the top tube, loosely at first, now more firmly. He does not know whose pulse he’s feeling, his or Scramjet’s. With his right hand he grasps the back of the white fuzzy saddle. He lifts his left foot, places it gingerly upon the left-side pedal, waits … waits …
Do it!
He pushes himself off the ground until the pedal, the bike, the kickstand holds … holds … yes! Swings his right leg upward, catches the saddle on his knee-bend while shooting his right hand forward to the right grip, left hand to left grip, pulling, pulling up with his bent knee, pushing up with his hands … up … up … and
over! He’s in the saddle! Aboard Scramjet! Harold Peter Bitterman Jr. tall in the saddle on Scramjet the Magnificent! His feet dangle freely, pedals far below. His arms are stretched to the limit, elbows locked. He leans into the grips. He dares whisper, “Let’s go, boy.”
And feels a shudder in the withers.
“O
H NO
!”
Water comes gushing up from the bottom of the hole. Suddenly she’s knee-deep in it. She wallops the Hut’s wall with the spade. The red blade breaks off. “Crappo!” she yells, and pounds the broken handle upon the ground.
Ana Mae says, “Ace, shut up. Listen.”
She follows Ana Mae’s eyes back across the trees. “What?”
Ana Mae stands. “Hear that?”
At first there is only the soft, friendly chuckle of
the creek. Then, from the bluff, a scream. A little-kid scream.
Jubilee is up and out of the water hole. The little-kid scream is snipped, as if by scissors, by another sound, an inhuman sound, a sound they have never heard before and yet instinctively recognize.
Jubilee drops the handle. The girls gape at each other. “Hazel!”
They run.
T
HE CHAIN IS NOT SINGING
. The sound it makes cannot be described. It sets puppies and Newbies howling. Strangulated shrieks rise from deep in the loamy furrows of Doll Farm. Snugger pinkens. And Destroyer believes the sound is ripping him a third earhole between his eyes. He knows in this moment two things better than he has ever known anything:
1. He has made a
big
mistake.
2. It’s too late to do anything about it.
The yellow beast is going so fast he feels his butt rising, his legs trailing in the wind. He is flat-out now,
his stomach over the saddle, only his hands in touch with the bike. He is a superhero flying, swinging this way and that as the bike races past Stuff, nips the
DON’T
sign. Hippodrome, The Kid are blurs. Grass-sitters scatter at Cartoons. Destroyer sees Playground coming up, and now his stomach flops onto the saddle—Scramjet is slowing down. The indescribable noise becomes a whine, now a whispery whistle. The bike canters among the swings and comes to a stop. Destroyer is draped over the saddle, fingers frozen around the grips, too terrified to move. Suddenly the bike rears on its hind wheel and deposits him onto the ground as neatly as a truck-dumped load.
H
IS HEART LEAPS
!
Scramjet is coming toward them and it’s not the girl aboard. It’s a little kid, flying flat-out Superman-style from the handlegrips. Scramjet is making a noise that would split the moon, but it’s music to Jack’s ears.
He stands stunned with his Amigos as Superkid and Scramjet go by in a flash of yellow, two legs and a string of pom-poms.
“It’s that little runt creep,” Dusty shouts over the noise.
They watch as Scramjet barrels, veers, tilts, gallops
through Hokey Pokey, sometimes losing sight except for the yellow cloud of dust. Jack wonders how in the world the kid got the bike from the girl, but he’s too happy to wonder for long. When they see the bike finally slowing down in Playground, they head over there. They laugh as the bike rears and dumps the runt.
A crowd has already gathered. It parts as Jack and his boys come through to backslaps and hearty greetings: “Hey, Jack! … Hey, Jack!” Scramjet appears to be at rest, but Jack knows better. He feels the energy coming off the violated flanks. He knows if he touches the tires, they will be hot and hard as rock and pulsing. He knows you can take the bike out of the herd but you can’t take the herd out of the bike. He knows his high-strung steed, after a fast ride, needs no one and no thing, and that’s why it stands straight though the kickstand is up.
Dusty bestrides the dumped kid. “Runt,” he sneers. “Wha’d you
think
would happen?”
“Lay off,” says LaJo, a rare lilt in his voice. “He did us a favor. Give him a medal.”
The runt, his terror thawing like a hokey pokey at high noon, begins to shake and sob and crawls away on hands and knees. A boyvoice calls: “It’s yours, Jack! Take it back!”
Someone else picks up the call—“Take it back, Jack!”—and now there’s a chant of mobbed boyvoices:
“TAKE IT BACK, JACK!”
“TAKE IT BACK, JACK!”
“TAKE IT BACK, JACK!”
Jack trades a look with his Amigos, grins: as if he had anything else in mind. Dusty and LaJo back off, respecting Jack’s moment.
Jack approaches his bike. He’s torn between laughing (for joy) and crying (at the paint job, which, he can see up close now, is sloppy, as if done by a Snotsipper). Joy wins, but he keeps the laugh inside.
For starters, he rips off the pom-pom tail and pink ribbons. The mob cheers. The rest of the atrocities—the pink grips, the saddle fuzz, the paint job, the name—can wait. He leans into the bar, whispers “Scramjet,” and believes he hears it whisperwhinny back: “Jack.” He mounts. Feels all the tension of the morning drain out of him. Thinks:
I’m home
. His swallow double-clutches. Until today he had not known he could be so emotional. No pedal push is needed—Scramjet moves. The mob parts in reverent silence. There is only the soft crunch of tire rolling over ground and the distant tootle of Hippodrome.
He guides Scramjet out of Playground. He is in no
hurry. There will be time for fast. For now he is content to canter, to gratefully reclaim his bike, his world, himself. Jailhouse … Tattooer … Cartoons … on they roll. With every passing Hokey Pokey feature, he recovers another piece of his life. Trucks … Tantrums … Everywhere kids stop what they’re doing and watch. The occasional Snotsipper or Sillynilly blurts “Hey, Jack!” while the oldest kids, shocked at the pairing of girl bike and boy rider, stand mutely and wonder uneasily about themselves.
Beyond Tantrums, Mitchell now appears to have uncovered all the petrified remains of the fossil mega-bike. Bikasaurus, Mitchell is calling it. He’s got the frame together and is trying to fit a wheel. A couple of Snotsippers sit on their haunches nearby, rapt.
They roll on toward The Kid. They pass beneath the great stone arm: it seems a blessing. He sees Gorilla Hill in the distance. He hears again the girl’s demonic scream, as surely embedded in his brain as any fossil in the ground. He knows the only way to disinter that scream is to cancel it with a downhill ride of his own. He’s about to rein toward the Hill when Scramjet veers sharply to the right. Must have gone over a stone. Jack tugs on the left grip and a funny thing happens: nothing.
The handlebar doesn’t move; the front wheel maintains its course. Jack tugs harder—again, nothing. Jack looks down. Chain, sprocket, steering column—all seem in order.
This time Jack tugs with both hands, wrenches hard, actually, but the bike stubbornly refuses to budge. He leans in the saddle, whispers, “Hey, boy, what’s up?”
That girl
, he thinks. She’s done something to his bike, bunged it up somehow, and now it won’t turn.
Just for the heck of it, Jack presses on the pedal. Nothing happens. He presses hard. Tromps. The bike keeps its steady, unhurried pace. It seems to be heading for the bluff. Alarm comes as a quick nip between the shoulders. He squeezes the brakes—nothing. And suddenly knows:
I’m not driving it—it’s driving me
.
Once again he feels the day falling apart. Dreading yet unable to stop himself, he pulls up his shirt and dares to look: Dusty’s felt-tip tattoo has already faded to a faint gray smear. An enormous sadness comes over him. His mouth feels furry. In the shimmering, shadowless distance he sees two figures running his way.…
A
NA
M
AE IS FIRST TO SEE
. “Look!”
They stop.
Jubilee squints under her cap brim. “You think?”
“Yeah. It’s him.”
“What’s he doing?”
“He’s coming this way.”
“I can see that, dummy.
Why?
”
They stand in the dust. Bike and rider are coming slowly.
“Maybe he doesn’t know it’s you,” says Ana Mae.
“Maybe he does,” says Jubilee. “I should’ve brought that shovel.”
“He’s alone,” says Ana Mae. “We’re two.”
There seems nothing else to do, nowhere else to go. They stand, wait, wait.
Slowly bike and rider emerge from the heatshimmer.
“He’s not pedaling,” Jubilee says.
Now they hear the soft tire crunch. Now they see his face. Jubilee is surprised. It is not the face she expected. Her fisted fingers uncurl.
The bike stops directly in front of her. The boy seems in shock, as if he’s just awakened in a strange place. He does not look at her. She sees that the handlegrip ribbons and the pom-pom tail are gone. Otherwise, Hazel looks the same. It occurs to Jubilee that the boy and bike might stay there all day. All she knows for sure is that the next move is not hers. At last the boy drops a foot to the ground, swings the other leg over, dismounts. He looks at her now. All she sees in his eyes is sadness, a sadness as big as the sky. He does not put the kickstand down; he simply releases the bike. As it falls, she instinctively reaches out, catches it by a grip. When she looks up, he’s walking away, and in the distance she hears the familiar
wooguh! wooguh!
of the red rubber cart horn and the excited cries that fly across Hokey Pokey every day at high noon: “He’s here! … He’s here!”
I
N THE SKY
the sun has stopped directly over The Kid. In all of Hokey Pokey only The Kid’s arm casts a shadow.
The Hokey Pokey Man gives the red rubber bladder another squeeze:
wooguh! wooguh!
Kids are running from all directions, many already shouting:
“Cherry!”
“Root beer!”
“Black cherry!”
“Grape!”
The Hokey Pokey Man mops his brow with a large red handkerchief, stuffs it back in the bib pocket of his
white overalls. A white stubble of whiskers covers his face. A bright green beret tops his head.
A great block of ice sits in the bed of the white hand-pushed cart. It is flanked on three sides by all the colors of the world: bottled syrup in every flavor a kid could desire. With a flourish he sweeps a striped towel from the ice, jerks the scraper from its well and gruffs, “First up.”
A boy Snotsipper steps up, barks “Orange.” Immediately the Hokey Pokey Man sets to work. Leaning forward, with a grunt that is more form than necessity, he pushes the scraper three times along the length of the ice block, which gleams in the sun like a diamond. The teeth that shave the ice feed slush into the square metal bowl. The left hand plucks a white cone-shaped paper cup from a tall stack. A tap to settle the slush, the bowl hatch swings open and deposited into the cup is a perfectly square snowball—a hokey pokey. The right hand returns the scraper to the well, reaches for the orange bottle of syrup. A multitude of eyes gawk as the upturned bottle delivers one … two … three … four … five squirts—and long squirts they are—into the slush, blushing it into such pure essence that it virtually cries out:
Orange!