Henry and the Paper Route (7 page)

Henry and Beezus, who had been joined by Robert, worked hard every day after school and on Saturday. They were slowed
down somewhat by Ramona, who still insisted on going along with her wagon. Instead of a tail, she now wore a pair of her mother's old high-heeled shoes over her sandals so that she made clonking noises when she walked. Ribsy and Nosy romped along, too. Wagonload after wagonload of papers and magazines went into the Hugginses' garage. When the garage was knee-deep in paper, the children dumped their loads on the driveway. Each evening Mr. Huggins had to park his car closer to the street.

Once Mr. Capper, who was driving down the street, stopped his old convertible by the curb, and asked, “How's the advertising man?”

“Fine,” answered Henry, turning red to the tips of his ears. He did not feel that he looked businesslike at all, with a dog and a kitten romping beside him and Ramona
clonking along in her mother's high-heeled shoes.

One night Henry was awakened by gusts of rain blowing against the house. My papers! he thought. They'll be sopping. Then he went back to sleep. By morning the rain had subsided to a drizzle, and when Henry rushed out to inspect his papers, the whole world seemed soggy. The lawn was soggy, the leaves in the gutter were soggy, and the newspapers on top of his heap were soggiest of all.

“Henry,” said Mr. Huggins at breakfast, “hadn't you better stop collecting papers and start tying them up? You're going to have quite a job getting them all made up into bundles. And you still have to get them to school, you know.”

When the last name was crossed off the list, Henry, Robert, and Beezus, in their slickers and rain hats, started gathering the
soggy papers into bundles and tying them with twine. It was not nearly so much fun as collecting papers.

Mrs. Huggins went to the dime store to buy several balls of twine. When she returned she put on an old raincoat, tied a bandanna over her hair, and joined the boys and Beezus. “I hope we can get these tied up by the Fourth of July,” she remarked, and began to stack the soggy papers.

When Mr. Huggins came home from work, he looked the situation over, changed into an old pair of pants and a mackinaw he usually wore on fishing trips, and went to work. They stacked and tied and stacked and tied. Still the soggy papers stretched ahead of them down the driveway. Henry wished his advertisement had not been so successful.

Mrs. Huggins asked Robert and Beezus to stay for supper, because, she said, if they went home they might not come back.
After a hasty meal of string beans, salmon, corn, and applesauce, all out of cans, the five went back to work and tied bundles by the light of a bulb on the back porch. By the time Beezus's and Robert's mothers telephoned to say they had to come home, they had worked their way to the garage. Beezus and Robert did not seem sorry to leave.

Mrs. Huggins sat down on a bundle of papers. “I am too tired to pick up another
Reader's Digest
,” she said. “Or even a comic book.”

“I think we'd better call it a day,” said Mr. Huggins.

Henry sneezed.

“Any idea how you're going to get all these papers to school?” Mr. Huggins asked Friday night, as they knotted the twine on the last bundle.

Henry looked down and kicked at a pile of papers. “We can take some of them in
Beezus's wagon and I…Well, I sort of thought maybe you'd take some of them in the car.”

“Oh, you did,” said Mr. Huggins dryly.

On Saturday morning Mr. Huggins and Henry piled both the backseat of the car and the luggage compartment with bundles, which, as Henry found out, were heavier to lift than loose papers and magazines. When the back of the car began to sag, Mr. Huggins said they could not take any more that trip. They drove to Glenwood School, and there they unloaded the car near the auditorium, where the members of the P.T.A. were measuring bundles and recording the amount brought by each room. Mr. Huggins was not the only father helping out.

The second time Henry and his father loaded the car, the bundles seemed even heavier. Henry looked back at the remaining papers and wondered how many trips
they would have to make. Quite a few, he decided. Probably they would have to work all day. He felt tired and his muscles ached. He no longer cared about winning the paper drive. He only wanted to get rid of all that paper.

This time, as Henry and his father unloaded the car, they met Scooter with a bundle of papers he had brought to school in the basket of his bicycle.

“Hi, Scooter,” said Henry, because he did not want Scooter to go on being angry with him. “Say…there are still a lot of papers in our garage, if you would like a couple of bundles for your room.”

“No, thanks,” said Scooter coldly.

Well, that's that, thought Henry, disappointed that his peace offering had been rejected. Scooter was mad, and he was going to stay mad. Well, let him, if that was the way he felt. Henry had done his part in trying to
make up. It wasn't as though he hoped to fold Scooter's papers again. He was through hanging around.

All day Henry and his father worked, lifting, loading, unloading, stacking, while Mrs. Huggins stayed at school and measured bundles for the P.T.A. Henry was more tired than he had ever been before, but he knew better than to complain. “Maybe we could save some papers for next year's drive,” he suggested to his mother, after delivering still another bundle at the school.

“Oh, no, you can't,” said Mrs. Huggins promptly, even though she was busy measuring a stack of papers.

Henry stood looking at the piles of paper that had been collected by the boys and girls of Glenwood School. And more was arriving every minute. He had never before seen so much paper in one place in his whole life. Just about every kind of magazine in the
whole United States was piled there. And newspapers! Stacks and stacks of papers. And every one of those papers had been delivered to someone's house by a boy—some other boy.

When Henry and his father had delivered their last bundle to the school yard, and another member of the P.T.A. had relieved Mrs. Huggins of her yardstick, the Huggins family drove wearily home. “I hope our room won,” said Henry, without much spirit, “or at least beat old Scooter's room.” He decided he was too tired to go back to school later in the afternoon to find out who had won. He could wait until Monday to find out. Right now he did not even want to think about paper.

Monday evening at dinner, Henry, who had completely recovered from the paper drive, announced to his mother and father, “Well, our room won! I knew we would all
the time. We get the six dollars to spend any way we want, except we can't decide how to spend it. And you know what? We beat old Scooter's room by over a thousand inches!”

“And did you get to see the movie?” Mr. Huggins asked.

“We sure did,” said Henry. “A cartoon and a nature movie. Of course the movie was pretty educational, but it was good just the same. There was a family of bears in it.”

“I worked hard on the paper drive,” said Mrs. Huggins. “I would like to see a movie with a family of bears in it, too.”

Suddenly Henry felt ashamed. Now that he stopped to think about it, his mother and father had worked hard on the paper drive—almost as hard as he had worked. “Thanks for helping,” he said, sorry that he had not thanked them sooner. “Even if you didn't get in on the prize.” Poor Mom and Dad! They really got the worst of it.

Henry decided that when the next paper drive came around—and that would not be for another year—he would not advertise. That had been too successful. If there happened to be some old papers lying around the house, he would tie them up and take them to school; but right now he felt that he had had enough of paper drives to last a long, long time and he was sure that his mother and father felt the same way. Anyway, next year he hoped somehow, someway, to be too busy doing something
important
to spend a lot of time going around the neighborhood with a wagon and Ramona clonking along behind.

“I guess we'll have to supply our own prize,” said Mr. Huggins. “What do you say we stack the dishes and go to the movies? I noticed there was a Western on at the Hollywood, and there might be a family of bears in it.”

“Oh, boy!” exclaimed Henry. “Even if it's a school night?”

“Sure,” answered Mr. Huggins. “This is a special occasion. We won the paper drive, didn't we?”

N
ot long after the paper drive, a day arrived that Henry had been looking forward to for a long, long time. That day was Henry's eleventh birthday. This year his birthday fell on Saturday, so it was extra special. Mrs. Huggins invited eight boys from Henry's class for lunch, and Henry received three flashlights (it didn't matter—a boy could always find a use for another flashlight),
two packages of stamps to add to his collection, one model airplane kit, and two puzzles. After a lunch of tamales, milk, and a green salad because Mrs. Huggins thought boys should eat vegetables, and an orange ice-cream cake with eleven candles set in whipped cream frosting, the boys entertained themselves by practicing artificial respiration on one another. Then, after Mrs. Huggins had cleared off the table, she drove them to the neighborhood theater, where they saw seventeen Bugs Bunny cartoons, one right after the other.

Henry enjoyed every minute of his birthday. He laughed when Bugs Bunny was Robin Hood, outwitting the Sheriff of Nottingham. He howled when Bugs Bunny escaped from the hunter who wanted to make him into rabbit stew. He shouted when Bugs Bunny switched places with a circus ringmaster who was trying to make
him dive off a high diving board into a bucket of water. And all the time Henry was thinking, I am eleven years old now, old enough to have a paper route—if I could get one.

The boys walked home from the movie, and when Henry and Robert, who lived near each other, came to the house the Pumphreys had lived in, they saw furniture being carried into the house from a moving van. Naturally they stopped to watch. Henry was a little disappointed because the furniture of the new neighbors was not more interesting. They owned the usual things—beds, chairs, a stove, a television set.

“Hey, look!” exclaimed Robert, pointing. “A bike!”

“A boy's bike!” added Henry in excitement. “I wonder what grade he's in.”

“Maybe he'll be in our room,” said Robert. “It was a regular-sized bike.”

“You know what would be a good idea?” said Henry eagerly, as the two boys started toward home. “Maybe the three of us—you and me and this new fellow—could get a bunch of wire and stuff and rig up a telephone system. Of course, to connect it with his house, we would have to string the wires over some fences and through some trees, but I bet it would work.”

“Hey, that's a swell idea!” agreed Robert enthusiastically. “We could phone each other any time we wanted to.”

“Sure,” said Henry. “It would be our own private line. I bet we can find some books at the library that would tell us how to do it.”

“I wonder when we will get to meet him,” remarked Robert.

“Soon, I hope,” answered Henry. “It's going to be fun having a new boy around.”

On Sunday Henry found several excuses to ride his bicycle past the new boy's house,
but he saw no one. Monday, after school, he noticed curtains at the windows, but still he did not see a boy. When Henry got home he had nothing special to do, so he tied a piece of cellophane to the end of a string and dragged it across the rug for Nosy to pounce on while he wondered what the new boy would be like. Nosy, as Mr. Huggins had predicted, was rapidly growing up to be a cat. Right now he was too big to be a kitten, but still not quite big enough to be a cat. Nosy crouched, lashed his tail, and pounced. With the cellophane in his claws, he rolled over on his back and kicked at his prey with his hind feet, while Ribsy lay watching the game.

The telephone rang and Mrs. Huggins answered it. “Hello?” Henry heard his mother say. “Oh, hello, Eva.” Eva, Henry knew, was Scooter's mother. Mrs. McCarthy and Mrs. Huggins often had long, boring
conversations over the phone.

“Oh, dear,” Henry heard his mother say. “That's too bad.”

What's too bad? wondered Henry idly, as he took the cellophane away from Nosy and held it up for the little cat, or big kitten, to jump for.

“I'm glad Henry has been through that already,” said Mrs. Huggins.

Now what could I have been through, Henry asked himself, but he could not think of anything he had been through except kindergarten and the first four grades, and he did not think his mother and Mrs. McCarthy would be talking about anything like that.

“I wouldn't worry, Eva. It wasn't too bad,” said Mrs. Huggins. “But then, of course, Scooter is older.”

Maybe Scooter is older than I am, thought Henry, jerking the cellophane free
from Nosy's claws, but I am eleven years old now.

“Oh, well, you know how boys are,” said Mrs. Huggins.

Henry's interest in the conversation increased. If his mother started talking about how boys were, she might say something he would like to hear. He stopped twirling the cellophane and sat down to listen.

Mrs. Huggins laughed again. “I think that is too funny for words,” she said.

Henry became impatient. He hoped it was not something he had done that was too funny for words. He didn't want people laughing at him.

Mrs. Huggins listened for a long time. Finally she said, “I don't know, Eva. I think he's a little young.”

Who's a little young for what? Henry was growing more and more impatient. If his mother was talking about his being too
young for something, she was probably saying he could not do something he would like to do. Somehow, the things his parents
thought he was not old enough to do were always the things he wanted to do most of all. On the chance that his mother was talking about him, Henry went into the kitchen and said in a loud whisper, “I am
not
too young.”

Mrs. Huggins motioned him away and went on talking. “But Eva, for one thing, they weigh so much on Sunday.”

This baffled Henry. Why wouldn't a thing weigh the same on Sunday as it did on weekdays? His mother's conversation didn't make sense. People certainly did not weigh more on Sunday, unless they ate a lot of apple pie or something. Hey, wait a minute, he thought suddenly. Newspapers! Newspapers weighed more on Sunday! Maybe—no, it couldn't be—yes, it could! His mother must be talking about his delivering papers. No, that couldn't be what she was talking about. Scooter was still mad at
him, because of the paper drive.

“Mom,” Henry whispered urgently.

Mrs. Huggins put her hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone. “Henry,” she said, “I'm trying to carry on a conversation. Please stop interrupting.”

“But Mom—”

Mrs. Huggins gave Henry a look that told him she meant what she said.

“Aw…” muttered Henry and went back into the living room, where he picked up Nosy and rubbed the fur on the sides of the kitten's little black face, while he hung on every word his mother said.

“All right, Eva,” said Mrs. Huggins at last. “He's been dying to for weeks.” But Mrs. Huggins did not hang up. “And by the way, Eva,” she went on, “I am in charge of the refreshment committee of the P.T.A. this year and I wondered if you knew of a bakery…”

Henry groaned loud enough for his mother to hear, but she paid no attention. “…that makes a good inexpensive cake. I thought if we bought a big flat cake and had it iced and decorated with a few rosebuds—oh, no, not a rosebud for every member of the P.T.A.; that would be too expensive—but just enough rosebuds to make it look pretty until we cut it—”

Rosebuds for the P.T.A.! At a time like this! Henry drove his fist into a cushion to work off some of his impatience. When Mrs. Huggins at last ended the conversation, Henry dropped Nosy and sprang to his feet. “What did she want, Mom? What did she want?”

“Henry, when I am talking on the telephone I don't like to be interrupted,” said Mrs. Huggins.

“OK, Mom,” agreed Henry hastily. “But what did she want?”

“Scooter has come down with the chicken pox,” began Mrs. Huggins.

“Old Scoot has the chicken pox?” exclaimed Henry, as if he could not believe it. “In the seventh grade? Why, I had that when I was a little kid!” Well, what do you know, thought Henry. For once he was ahead of Scooter on something.

“Yes, he has the chicken pox,” Mrs. Huggins went on, “and he wants you to take his route until he can go back to school.”

“
Scooter
wants
me
to take
his
route?” This was too much for Henry to believe. If his mother had said Mrs. McCarthy had wanted him to take the route, he could believe it—but not Scooter.

“Yes. It seems that he was embarrassed to ask you himself, because of some sort of disagreement you two had.” Mrs. Huggins looked amused as she spoke. “And so he asked his mother to phone me about it. He
wants you to take his route, because he knows you can do it, but he is afraid you are mad at him.”

Maybe Henry had been mad at Scooter, but now that Scooter was sure Henry could do a good job delivering papers, the whole quarrel suddenly seemed unimportant. Just a silly argument a long time ago. “Me? Mad at Scooter?” Henry said, as if he had never heard of such a thing. “When do I start?”

“Today,” said his mother. “You'd better go over to Scooter's house and get the route book right now.”

Henry had his hand on the doorknob before his mother had finished speaking. “Say, Mom, how long does chicken pox last?” he asked.

“About two weeks, at Scooter's age,” answered Mrs. Huggins.

Two weeks! Two whole weeks of delivering papers. And he was eleven years old
besides! Henry did not take time to walk down the front steps. He jumped.

The other boys had already begun to fold papers by the time Henry had picked up Scooter's route book and canvas bag and joined them. “Hi,” said Henry briefly. “Mr. Capper, I'm taking Scooter's route while he has the chicken pox.” Henry found the bundle of papers and began to count them.

“We haven't seen you around for a long time,” said Mr. Capper. “Think you can handle it all right?”

“I'm sure I can,” answered Henry, and hesitated. “Uh…Mr. Capper, I am eleven years old now.” Mr. Capper grinned.

“No kidding?” asked Chuck, one of the carriers who went to high school. “Are you really eleven?”

“Sure,” boasted Henry. “You didn't think I was going to stay ten all my life, did you?”

“If he's eleven,” said Chuck to Mr.
Capper, “maybe he could take over my route.”

Henry paused in his paper folding long enough to look questioningly at the older boy. “What for?” he asked, suspecting a joke.

“I want to go out for basketball practice in a couple of weeks,” explained Chuck.

Satisfied that Chuck was not teasing him, Henry looked expectantly at Mr. Capper, who only smiled and said, “We'll see.”

Mr. Capper hadn't made any promises, thought Henry, as he stuffed the last
Journal
into the bag, but he did not think he had anything to worry about. He knew he could handle the route and that Mr. Capper knew he wanted it. Feeling that this time there was nothing to stand in his way, Henry set off to deliver the papers with a light heart.

Henry finished the route by five-thirty and decided to go home by way of the Pumphrey house. He might catch a glimpse
of the new boy. Sure enough, on the driveway beside the house a strange boy was unpacking a carton that was filled with coils of wire, batteries, and what looked like radio tubes. He was about Henry's age, or maybe a year older—a tall, thin boy, slightly stooped, who wore glasses.

Henry rode partway up the driveway. “Hi,” he said, eager to be friendly. “You the new boy?”

“Yup,” answered the boy.

Henry felt this did not tell him much. He studied the new boy a moment and decided that he probably was not much of a ballplayer. That did not matter; there were plenty of boys in the neighborhood who did play ball. “My name is Henry Huggins,” Henry said. “I live on the other side of the block, on Klickitat Street.”

The boy was so busy untangling some copper wire that he did not bother to
answer. Henry felt the conversation was getting no place. This was not the way he had pictured making friends with his new neighbor. Then an old fat dog wandered out
of the backyard. He looked something like a fox terrier, only bigger and tougher, as if he might be part bulldog. Henry brightened. Boys always liked to talk about their dogs. “What's your dog's name?” he asked.