Journey to an 800 Number (13 page)

“Have you ever been caught?”

“You’re the first.”

“Don’t you just hate never being yourself?”

“I am
always
myself. I know when I’m pretending. Pretending is perfecdy normal for me.” She looked at me with those eyes that looked like you could float an ocean liner in and then said, “It’s you, Maximilian Stubbs, who doesn’t know who you are.”

“I don’t know what makes you say that.”

“Your
HELLO
badge.”

“What do you mean? I don’t have a
HELLO
badge.”

“Yes you do. It’s always the same. It’s always the Fortnum crest on your blue blazer. It’s like you have to look at that to know who you are.”

“I do not.”

“Yes, you do.”

“I never pretend to be something I’m not. It even got me into trouble with a kid named Manuelo when we were in Tulsa.”

“Everyone pretends. Everyone with everyone some of the time and everyone with some people all of the time. Except freaks. They’re the only ones who can’t pretend. But I’ve told you that.”

“I don’t think Trina Rose pretends.”

“What do you call performing?”

“But that’s part of her. If it’s pretend, it’s real.”

Sabrina smiled. “Yes, it is.”

“Woody doesn’t pretend.”

“Yes, he does, Max. Woody is too real not to have some pretend about him.”

“What’s your real name?” I asked.

“Maybe it’s Pacsek,” she said. “And maybe it’s Stubbs.”

“You are infuriating,” I said.

It was 12:15. Sabrina got up and said, “Just call any eight hundred number. One of them is bound to be my mother.”

Then Sabrina left.

When I went back to Suite 1424, Trina Rose was still asleep. The first call from Mordred still had not come. I shook her gently and began the awakening process. It was a little early, but I wanted to talk to her.

After Trina Rose had had her second cup of coffee, I said, “I just saw Sabrina. She and her mother were at a convention of physical therapists.”

“Invite them up,” Trina Rose said. “I’d like to meet them.”

“They’ll be leaving in a few minutes,” I said. “I had a talk with Sabrina. I also had a talk with Father, and I want to know about when my mother was Sally Ghost.”

“That’s when I met her. She was this lost girl,
freaked out and scared. I had an old station wagon, and we teamed up and headed from San Francisco to New Mexico. Everyone said that there was good clean air outside Taos, and that’s where I took Sally Ghost.

“Woody took us in and gave us everything we needed: food and love and kindness. He gave that to everyone who crashed his place, but Sally Ghost was special to him from the minute we arrived. Everyone saw it. She became his pet.”

“Like Ahmed?”

“No. Much more than bloody Ahmed.”

“I know about them,” I said.

“Know what, Love?”

“Know that my mother was pregnant when they got married.”

“Do you know that now, Love?”

“Yes. I just found out. Last night.”

“That’s the kind of guy bloody ole Woody is. He married Sally Ghost and made her Mrs. Woodrow Stubbs. He was crazy about that girl, and he loved you like you was his very own. Just the way he did Sally Ghost.”

“What do you mean? He loved me like I was his very own? My mother was pregnant when they got married.”

“Yes. But not by him, Love. Not by him. Sally Ghost was pregnant when we arrived at the ranch. Didn’t he tell you that, Love?”

There was an air space in my throat that
swelled like a small balloon, and my heart developed sharp edges and began flipping like a match box bruising me inside. I swallowed that balloon and let it tamp down all the screaming that was inside of me. I did not cry.

“Didn’t you know that, Love?” Trina Rose asked.

“No,” I said, fighting that balloon that had risen again in my throat. “Then tell me, Trina Rose, who is my father?”

“Why, I’d say Woody is. Wouldn’t you, Love?”

I asked nothing more.

There were three more days before I was to fly back to Havemyer. I thought I might check out of Suite 1424 and move into the camper so that I could spend more time with Woody. But I decided against that. I decided instead to play it the same way as I had been, to keep up my Trina Rose Vegas routine, and that is what I did. There was no reason to worry Woody by letting him know what I knew. There were many questions to be asked, but I would ask them slowly, and I would start asking them in Pennsylvania. I would just enjoy being his son, Bo, even if I didn’t enjoy his camel.

On our last shopping trip, Trina Rose decided to buy Mother and Mr. Malatesta a wedding present. True to Trina Rose’s style, she bought them something huge that they wouldn’t use. She bought them
an electric wok and told me to take it back on the plane with me. It sat between Woody and me as we drove to the airport.

Woody was wearing his Pinocchio hat and the red scarf around his neck. I wore one of my cowboy shirts and my new boots and I had my blazer thrown over my lap. Woody pulled a clipping from his shirt pocket. “I found this in the paper today,” he said, handing it over to me.

The article was about the tallest man in the world, eight feet two inches. He had just died. He was known as the gentle giant.

I reached across the wok box and took it from him.

“Thought you might like to save it for Sabrina.”

“Thanks,” I said. I laid it on the wok box that was between us and folded it. When I picked it back up I saw printed on the wok carton:
ORDER REPLACEMENT OR ADDITIONAL PARTS. CALL
1-800-298-4520, 24
HOURS A DAY, INCLUDING SUNDAYS
.

“I don’t know if Sabrina collects dead freaks,” I said. “Besides, I don’t know how to get in touch with her.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me if she gets in touch with you,” he said. “She knows who you are.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think she thinks she does.”

I tucked the clipping into the breast pocket of my Fortnum blazer and put my blazer on top of the wok box. I lifted both of them up and shifted
them to my other side. Then I slid over, closer to Woody. He lifted an arm from the steering wheel and pulled me to him, and I rested against him as we drove to the airport.

here’s a glimpse at the latest
extraordinary novel
from two-time Newbery
Medalist
e.l. konigsburg

The Mysterious Edge
of the Heroic World

I
N THE LATE AFTERNOON ON THE SECOND
F
RIDAY IN
September, Amedeo Kaplan stepped down from the school bus into a cloud of winged insects. He waved his hand in front of his face only to find that the flies silently landed on the back of his hand and stayed there. They didn’t budge, and they didn’t bite. They were as lazy as the afternoon. Amedeo looked closely. They were not lazy. They were preoccupied. They were coupling, mating on the wing, and when they landed, they stayed connected, end to end. They were shameless. He waved his hands and shook his arms, but nothing could interrupt them.

He stopped, unhooked his backpack, and laid it on the sidewalk. Fascinated by their silence and persistence, he
knelt down to watch them. Close examination revealed an elongated body covered with black wings; end to end, they were no longer than half an inch. The heads were red, the size of a pin. There was a longer one and a shorter one, and from what he remembered of nature studies, their size determined their sex—or vice versa.

The flies covered his arms like body hair. He started scraping them off his arms and was startled to hear a voice behind him say, “Lovebugs.”

He turned around and recognized William Wilcox.

William (!) Wilcox (!).

For the first time in his life Amedeo was dealing with being the new kid in school, the new kid in town, and finding out that neither made him special. Quite the opposite. Being new was generic at Lancaster Middle School. The school itself didn’t start until sixth grade, so every single one of his fellow sixth graders was a new kid in school, and being new was also common because St. Malo was home to a lot of navy families, so for some of the kids at Lancaster Middle School, this was the third time they were the new kid in town. The navy seemed to move families to any town that had water nearby—a river, a lake, a pond, or even high humidity—so coming from a famous port city like New York added nothing to his interest quotient.

Amedeo was beginning to think that he had been conscripted into AA. Aloners Anonymous. No one at Lancaster Middle School knew or cared that he was new, that he was from New York, that he was Amedeo Kaplan.

But now William (!) Wilcox (!) had noticed him.

William Wilcox was anything but anonymous. He was not so much alone as aloof. In a school as variegated as an argyle sock, William Wilcox was not part of the pattern. Blond though he was, he was a dark thread on the edge. He was all edges. He had a self-assurance that inspired awe or fear or both.

Everyone seemed to know who William Wilcox was and that he had a story.

Sometime after William Wilcox’s father died, his mother got into the business of managing estate sales. She took charge of selling off the contents of houses of people who had died or who were moving or downsizing or had some other need to dispossess themselves of the things they owned. She was paid a commission on every item that was sold. It was a good business for someone like Mrs. Wilcox, who had no money to invest in inventory but who had the time and the talent to learn a trade. Mrs. Wilcox was fortunate that two antique dealers,
Bertram Grover and Ray Porterfield, took her under their wings and started her on a career path.

From the start, William worked side by side with his mother.

In their first major estate sale, the Birchfields’, Mrs. Wilcox found a four-panel silk screen wrapped in an old blanket in the back of a bedroom closet. It was slightly faded but had no tears or stains, and she could tell immediately that it had been had painted a very long time ago. She priced the screen reasonably at one hundred twenty five dollars but could not interest anyone in buying it. Her instincts told her it was something fine, so when she was finishing the sale and still couldn’t find a buyer, she deducted the full price from her sales commission and took the screen home, put it up in front of the sofa in their living room, and studied it. Each of the four panels told part of the story of how women washed and wove silk. The more she studied and researched, the more she became convinced that the screen was not only very fine but rare.

On the weekend following the Birchfield sale, she and William packed the screen into the family station wagon and tried selling it to antique shops all over St. Malo. When she could not interest anyone in buying it, she and William took to the road, and on several consecutive weekends, they stopped at antique shops in
towns along the interstate, both to the north and south of St. Malo.

They could not find a buyer.

Without his mother’s knowing, William took photos of the screen and secretly carried them with him when his sixth-grade class took a spring trip to Washington, D.C. As his classmates were touring the National Air and Space Museum, William stole away to the Freer Gallery of Art, part of the Smithsonian that specializes in Asian art and antiquities.

Once there, William approached the receptionist’s desk and asked to see the curator in charge of ancient Chinese art. The woman behind the desk asked, “Now, what business would you be having with the curator of Chinese art?” When William realized that the woman was not taking him seriously, he took out the photographs he had of the screen and lined them up at the edge of the desk so that they faced her. William could tell that the woman behind the desk had no idea what she was seeing, let alone the value of it. She tried stalling him by saying that the curatorial staff was quite busy. William knew that he did not have much time before his sixth-grade class would miss him. He coolly assessed the situation: He was a sixth grader with no credentials, little time, and an enormous need. He squared his shoulders and thickened his Southern
accent to heavy sweet cream and said, “Back to home, we have a expression, ma’am.”

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Why, back to home we always say that there’s some folk who don’t know that they’re through the swinging doors of opportunity until they’ve got swat on their backside.”

William waited.

It may have been because he returned each of her cold stares with cool dignity, or it may simply have been the quiet assurance in his voice coupled with his courtly manners that made it happen, but the receptionist picked up the phone and called the curator, a Mrs. Fortinbras.

William showed Mrs. Fortinbras the photographs, and Mrs. Fortinbras was not at all dismissive. She said that the photographs—crude as they were—made it difficult to tell enough about the screen. But they did show that it might be
interesting.
She suggested that William bring the screen itself to Washington so that she could arrange to have it examined by her staff.

When school was out for the summer, William convinced his mother to pack up the screen again and drive to Washington, D.C., and have Mrs. Fortinbras and her staff at the Freer give it a good look.