The Genius Files #4 (21 page)

Coke knew what the Alamo was. He just felt like giving his dad a hard time.

“The Alamo is
not
a rental car place!” his exasperated father replied. “It's an eighteenth-century mission church where the pivotal battle in the fight for the independence of Texas took place. Don't they teach you kids
anything
in school?”

“Texas is independent?” Pep asked.

Mrs. McDonald laughed. The Ferrari almost drove off the road.

“Look,” Dr. McDonald said, “in the early 1800s, Texas belonged to Mexico. The Texans fought a war for independence in 1836. There was a thirteen-day siege, and a few hundred Texans were badly outnumbered at the Alamo. Finally, fifteen hundred Mexican troops launched an assault and wiped them out. Guys like James Bowie, Davy Crockett, and William Travis died. And ever since that day, the Alamo has symbolized courage and sacrifice for the cause of liberty. You've heard the phrase ‘Remember the Alamo.' That was Sam Houston's battle cry when he defeated General Santa Anna a few weeks later. Texas became an independent republic and then joined the United States as the twenty-eighth state. Won't it be
interesting to go to the Alamo and see where this all happened?”

“I guess,” the twins mumbled, which, translated into the language of Teenager, means “No.”

“
Everybody
goes to the Alamo, Ben,” Mrs. McDonald said. “Do you want to be just another sheep following the herd?”

Dr. McDonald was getting progressively more steamed. Now he had to take guff from his wife too.

“Everybody goes to the Alamo because it's an important part of American history! It's a part of our democracy we all should know,” he said, a little too loud.

“Actually,” Mrs. McDonald said, “there's another place I'd like to go that's right near San Antonio.”

“Where?”

“You're just going to laugh.”

“We won't laugh, Mom,” promised Pep.

“The Toilet Seat Art Museum,” she said.

Everybody laughed.

“That's a joke, right, Bridge?” asked Dr. McDonald.

“No, it's not.”

“You gotta be kidding me,” Coke said. “There's a museum devoted to toilet seats?”

“It's not devoted to toilet seats,” Mrs. McDonald replied. “It's devoted to toilet seat
art
.”

Dr. McDonald had just about reached his limit.

“Another tourist trap?” he said. “Bridge, just because some guy collected a bunch of junk in his garage and calls it a museum doesn't mean we have to go
look
at it.”

“Oh, come on, Ben,” Mrs. McDonald said. “It will be great for
Amazing but True
.”

“How about we take a vote on it?” Coke suggested. “That's the way democracy works, right? What do you vote for, Dad, the Alamo or the toilet seat place?”

“The Alamo.”

“How about you, Mom?”

“The toilet seat art museum.”

“What about you, Pep?”

“The toilet seat art museum.”

“I vote for the toilet museum too,” Coke said. “That's three to one. Majority rules.
Woo-hoo!
We're going to look at toilet seats! Isn't democracy wonderful?”

Pep peeked at her father's face in the rearview mirror. It looked like he might have a seizure.

“Why can't we go to
both
places?” Pep suggested. “We can spend the morning at the toilet seat art museum and the afternoon at the Alamo. Everybody will be happy. Democracy is all about compromises, right?”

Dr. McDonald abruptly swerved the car and pulled off onto the shoulder of the highway. He took off his seat belt so he could turn around to address the whole family.

“Look,” he said, trying his best to remain calm. “I went along with the yo-yo museum and the Spam museum. I went to the mustard museum and the Waffle House museum. I even went with you to that stupid washing machine museum. But life is short. I'm
not
going to waste half a day looking at toilet seats. And that's
final
!”

“So much for your compromises,” Coke mumbled to his sister.

“How about this idea, Dad?” Pep suggested. “You drop the three of us off at the toilet seat art museum and then you can go visit the Alamo on your own. We can meet up later.”

Dr. McDonald thought it over. Part of him didn't like Pep's idea. They were a
family
. The whole idea of driving cross-country was to explore America
together
. If they were to split up and do separate things instead of working out their differences, it would be like Abraham Lincoln telling the Confederacy, “Okay, you guys can be your own country, and we'll be our own country.”

On the other hand, the Civil War had been a bloody mess. He had to admit that Pep's idea
was
a simple solution to the problem.

“Okay,” he agreed. “Just this one time.”

The museum just happened to be in Alamo Heights, a few miles north of San Antonio. Dr. McDonald took exit 159B and drove down Broadway Street almost all the way to Barney Smith's Toilet Seat Art Museum, which is so famous that Google Maps has it labeled. Go ahead and look it up if you don't believe me.

Mrs. McDonald grabbed her camera and computer case so she could file a report for
Amazing but True
.

“Have fun looking at the toilet seats!” Dr. McDonald hollered out the window before roaring off to the Alamo, in downtown San Antonio.

In fact, they
did
have fun. Starting in the 1980s, a retired plumber named Barney Smith began painting and engraving toilet seats. By 2010 he had over a thousand of them, carefully mounted in his garage.

“This is
way
more interesting than the Alamo,” Coke said as soon as they went inside.

He was only partly kidding. Barney Smith's Toilet Seat Art Museum was filled with paintings of dogs, Miss America, yellow jackets, and the map of Texas. Some of the seats depicted memories of Mr. Smith's life, like vacations, anniversaries, and his grandchildren. Some had a sporting theme—Super Bowls, Olympics—or world events such as the Holocaust or Desert Storm. Some of the seats were collages, with license plates, Scrabble tiles, or computer keyboards
glued to the surface. One seat had a piece of the Berlin Wall embedded in it.

The place was fascinating. Coke, Pep, and their mom could have spent the whole day there.

“May I use your bathroom?” Mrs. McDonald asked the lady wearing a Barney Smith's Toilet Seat Art Museum T-shirt. “For some reason, this place makes me need to go.”

“I'm sorry,” the lady said, “but we don't have a bathroom.”

“You have a thousand toilet seats, but no bathroom?” said Mrs. McDonald. “It's kind of an emergency.”

“Okay, okay,” the lady said, pointing toward the back door of the house.

Mrs. McDonald handed Pep her computer case to hold. While she was gone, the twins continued looking at the vast collection of toilet seat art. That's when they noticed this:

Pep stared at it for a minute. It didn't make any sense.

“Excuse me,” she said to the lady, “but can you tell us what this means?”

The lady came closer to look at it.

“Hmmm,” she said, “that's odd. I've never seen this toilet seat before. It wasn't here yesterday. Somebody must have left it here just this morning.”

Coke and Pep looked at each other.

“It's a cipher,” Pep said ominously.

“Oh no,” he groaned. “Not another one. I give up.”

“Ye of little faith,” his sister said, reaching into her pocket for her little notepad and pen. “It's obviously not a transposition cipher. It's not a Caesar shift cipher. It's not an ogham or a pigpen. It's not a Vigènere.”

“A
what
?” Coke asked.

“Forget it, it doesn't matter.”

“It ends with a number,” Coke noted. “And it's the only number there. What could
that
mean?”

“The
2
was probably just put in there to throw us off the track,” Pep replied. “They do that sometimes, just to mess with your mind.”

The twins looked at the cipher for a few minutes. And then, finally, it wasn't Pep who broke out into a big smile. It was her brother.

“Wait a minute!” Coke said excitedly. “You're overthinking this. You're missing the forest for the trees.”

“What do you mean?”

“It's backward, you dope!” he told her.

Coke traced his finger around the message on the toilet seat in reverse order . . .

2PMTOMORROWLANDOFJOY

“Land of joy!” Coke exclaimed, spectacularly proud of himself. It was the first cipher he had ever cracked on his own.

“You're right!” Pep said, punching her brother on the shoulder. “But what does ‘land of joy' mean?”

“Google it,” Coke said.

Pep took her mother's computer out of its case and typed “Land of Joy” into the search box.

“What does it say?” Coke asked, leaning over to see the screen.

“Land of Joy is a Buddhist retreat community in England,” Pep said glumly.

Once again, they had received a cipher and solved it. And once again, it meant nothing. Disappointed, Pep scrawled the newest message at the bottom of her list:

1. I WILL MEET YOU IN LLANO ESTACADO

2. A PIECE OF THE BLARNEY STONE

3. HUB CITY

4. TEXAS RANGER

5. HOME OF THE CRICKET MASTER

6. 2 PM TOMORROW LAND OF JOY

What could any of that mean? What could those things possibly have in common?

You, dear reader, are about to find out.

T
he twins and their mom had to wait for a while, but eventually a candy-apple-red Ferrari roared into the driveway of Barney Smith's Toilet Seat Art Museum.

“You should have come with me to the Alamo,” Dr. McDonald shouted out the window. “It was
amazing
.”

“The toilet seat art was cool too, Dad,” Pep told him.

The family had dinner at a pizza restaurant on San Antonio's River Walk and topped it off with ice cream sundaes. Their stomachs were full, and, after a quick stop on Cesar E. Chavez Boulevard, so was the gas tank. It was eight o'clock. Mrs. McDonald pulled out
her guidebook to look up a nearby motel to spend the night.

“Y'know, I'm in a driving mood,” Dr. McDonald announced. “Why don't you guys just relax and watch the scenery? When I see a decent motel, I'll pull in.”

In the backseat, Coke scanned a magazine and Pep organized her growing collection of refrigerator magnets. She liked to look at them, and she had taken to carrying her favorites around in her pocket.

Maybe it was all the pizza and ice cream, but one by one Coke, Pep, and their mom dozed off. Dr. McDonald passed by several motels that had vacancy signs, but he didn't stop. It was so peaceful with the rest of the family sleeping. He didn't want to wake everybody up just so they could go back to sleep in a bed.

Besides, it was nice to have a little quiet for a change. It gave him time to think about his next book. The biography of President Hoover didn't look like it was going to work out. Neither did the book about Elvis Presley. He had to come up with another idea.

Soon summer and their cross-country trip would be over. It would be back to work teaching yawning freshmen about the causes of the Revolutionary War for the tenth year in a row. He wasn't looking forward to it. As the road unspooled before him, Dr. McDonald was lost in his thoughts. Dreams of seeing his name on the bestseller list danced in his head.

So he just kept driving west on I-10 from San Antonio. A detour at Comfort, Texas, forced him to take the smaller Route 87 North, which went through Brady, San Angelo, Big Spring, and Lamesa.

In this part of western Texas, there are no big cities, and some of the small towns didn't even have a stop sign. Just miles and miles of road. It was pitch-dark out and there were no streetlights. The only thing illuminating the pavement was the Ferrari's headlights. There wasn't another car around for miles.

“Don't mess with Texas, baby!” Dr. McDonald said to himself as the speedometer nosed past ninety miles per hour. The purr of the engine seemed to say
Thank you
. Signs warned of
STRONG CROSSWINDS
, but the Ferrari was designed to slice through the air like an arrow.

It wasn't until two o'clock in the morning that Dr. McDonald glanced at the odometer. He had driven nearly four hundred miles since leaving San Antonio. That's a
long
way to go without a bathroom break. Mrs. McDonald opened her eyes just in time to see a sign—L
UBBOCK
, 2
MILES
.