The Mechanical Mind of John Coggin (7 page)

But, for John, the brightest wonder of all was the engine.

“Enlighten me as to how this functions,” said Boz, lifting up the hood. “Is it steam?”

“No, I read about this! It's called internal combustion,” John said excitedly, peering under the chassis. “It works through a little series of explosions. A spark hits the gasoline, that fires a reaction, that pushes the piston, that turns the crankshaft, that moves the wheels. You start her up by winding that handle and . . .”

Bwwurrpp!
A cloud of greasy smoke enveloped John's face.

“Ah, now I see.”

Boz leaped into the buggy seat and bounced a few times on the leather.

“I'm not sure if we should be doing this,” John said.

“Merely testing your theory,” Boz rejoined. He patted the hood. “Shall we determine if it runs?”

John was in agony. The juicy apple of temptation was dangling right there in front of him.

“What if they catch us?”

“Then we are caught.” Boz smiled. “But then again, what if they don't?”

That was enough for John. He scrambled into the buggy seat. Boz reached for the brake.

“Wait!” John grabbed his arm. “We're locked in, remember?”

“Immaterial, my dear boy.” Boz released the brake and the car lurched forward. “While loosening the boards, I
also took the liberty of emancipating the door hinges.”

BANG!
went the shed doors onto the ground.
Bumpety, bump
went the vehicle as they steamrollered over them. Down the hill they sped, faster and faster, picking up momentum with every push of the pistons.

Until they slid to a halt in a slippery patch of grass. The engine spluttered and died.

“Hmmm,” murmured Boz, jumping onto the ground and scratching his hair into stiff meringuelike peaks. “Perhaps a little less forward propulsion on initial expulsion.”

John scrambled into the driver's seat. Forget the risk. The initial run had made him the happiest he had been in weeks. He wasn't going to let a few bumps stand in the way of that.

“Death or glory, Boz! Crank her up!” he yelled, turning the wheels hard over right.

Boz cranked and, miraculously, the engine puttered to life again.

“Get in!”

In climbed Boz. Up came the brakes.

“We're free, Boz!” John cried. “We're free!”

I
T WAS THE
best of days; it was the best of engines.

Under the friendly heavens, the horizon was evenly divided into wispy corn and endless sky. Where the corn ended, the stubby bronze of wheat fields began. On those hard-packed farm roads, the mayor's baby galloped along with glee.

And John was in the driver's seat. It was as if he and the automobile spoke a secret language. He could hear the motor talking to him, chortling as it puttered down hills, whining a little on the tight bends. He pictured the crankshafts huffing and puffing, running around and around the cylinder like the frantic legs of Alligator Dan.

And that got him thinking. “Hey, Boz?”

Boz was leaning out over the road, plucking dandelions from the ditches.

“Boz!”

Boz placed half of his body in the vicinity of a seat.

“How did you find this?”

“Happenstance, my dear boy. Our comrade's shiny new ukulele alerted my suspicions to a game afoot. Now where, I asked myself, would a bottom-dwelling creature of limited imagination find the funds for such an instrument? I took it upon myself to discover the answer. Which, as you have observed, lay in some light security work.”

John stroked the leather cushion.

“She must be worth a fortune.”

“Tittle-tattle around town says that the mayor will unveil her at the Festival of the Future on the morrow. Show a little wheel, flash her pearly brights.”

On any other day, this information might have caused John to turn around and head straight back for the shed. But not today, not in a dream like this. Today he didn't give a flying patootie about the mayor or the festival or the ending of things. Today he was conqueror of the skies.

Right up until the point when he noticed the crimson leaves dangling from the trees and the starlings wheeling in gusts of black wings.

“‘Nothing gold can stay.'”

The memory of his father's voice pierced him to the marrow. Where had they been when his dad had said
this? In a room? At a window?

No . . . John remembered. They'd been sitting by the side of the old yellow house on the edge of the sky-blue sea. John must have been five. Five years old and gazing at the autumn storm.

“But you know what, John? It's mighty pretty while it lasts.”

For one brief moment, the sun had broken through the thickening clouds and a shaft of light had touched their faces. Then it was gone.

Like his house, like his sea, like his parents. Gone.

John turned to Boz, who was once again hanging off the side, his tongue panting like a golden retriever's.

“Boz!”

“Mmmm?”

“Boz. Could you please sit in one place?”

“But of course,” Boz tucked his feet up behind his head. “How can I be of assistance?”

“Where do you come from?”

“Like all mammalians, I come from the dust of the stars and the dregs of the ocean.”

“No, I mean, where were you born?”

Boz yanked on his hair. “'Fraid I can't remember.”

“You can't remember?”

“Well, I was very young at the time.”

“Have you always traveled?”

“Always! For I'll take the highway, and skip down the
byway, and I'll be a roamer forever.”

“Don't you get tired of moving?”

“Never.” Boz paused. “Thinking of your own peculiar and particular circumstances, are we?”

John nodded.

“Ah, the ancestral dilemma. The striver versus the hiver, the rover versus the drover. It is a pretty pickle.” He patted John on the shoulder. “May I recommend that you save the worry for your next existence? Let life take the wheel for a while.”

Boz tipped his toe to his ear and jauntily began whistling “Turkey in the Straw.” John couldn't help but smile.

“Turkey in the straw, turkey in the hay,” replied the engine. Boz stopped whistling. John stopped smiling.

“Ahem, you didn't, by any propitious chance, sing?” asked Boz.

“No,” John replied, scanning the few deserted shacks alongside the fields. Nothing.

“Ah,” Boz said. “A figment of my imagination.”

He began to whistle again.

“Turkey in the straw, turkey in the hay,” twittered the engine. That did it. John jammed on the brakes and leaned over the back of the buggy seat.

“Page! You get out of there!” he shouted. Page crawled out of the luggage rack and stood on the road looking up at her brother. Her skin was flushed, but her eyes held no apology.

“Hello, Johnny.”

“What were you doing in there?”

“I wanted to come.”

“You're too little to be here.”

“I am not. I've grown two inches this summer. Lil measured me.”

“We're doing boy stuff!”

“Then pretend I'm a boy.”

“You're not a boy!”

A cough sounded from behind them. “Ahem. I don't wish to interrupt this blissful family reunion, but it appears we may have a more urgent matter on our metacarpi.”

Boz pointed to the road behind them. In the far-off distance, a pair of men on horses were approaching at pace.

“Who are they?”

“The identification of the portside gentleman escapes me, but I am rather afeared that the personage riding the bay mare and attired in the fetching white hat is the sheriff.”

“What?”

“So if I might suggest we continue our journey apace?”

John needed no further encouragement.

“Get in, Page!”

Page scrambled into the seat, the engine roared, and away they raced along the long unending road.

“Boz, where does this go?” shouted John.

“To market, to market,” Boz replied between the juddering of the wheels. The mayor's baby wasn't quite accustomed to being whipped into speeds of thirty-five miles per hour. “Into the belly of the beast. In, through, and out the other end.”

“Isn't there a side road we can take, somewhere with trees where we can get out and hide?”

Boz shook his head as the rest of the vehicle shook him.

“Not until we're past the town. But
nil desperandum
, my dear boy, we've got the jump on our eager bloodhounds.”

Jump was the right word for it, John thought desperately. The entire automobile was jittering and jabbering with the pace. Every hole and hoofprint registered as an electric jolt up the spine. The engine wailed in protest.

The outlines of Hayseed were rising rapidly in front of them. A barn, a house, a church. Toddlers stood in their front doors and gawked as the mayor's baby went clattering by. John held on to the wheel like grim death and kept his eyes fixed on the road. They just needed to make it past the town.

That was going to be easier said than done. The street was packed with preparations for the Festival of the Future. Wagons and horses and crates littered the road; men with bunting crowded the sidewalks.

“Vacate the viaducts!” Boz shouted as they shuddered
toward a trio of men laden with a wreath of orange chrysanthemums.
Squish
went the flowers under the wheel of the mayor's baby.

“Hang on to your boutonnieres, me hearties, takeoff is imminent!”

Up a ramp they went, onto the festival's temporary stage. Through a banner reading

Welcome to Hayseed, Town of the Future!

they tore. Down the steps they came, shuddering and groaning, but by the grace of the gods, still moving.

“By gimcrackedy gee!” laughed Boz, yanking the banner from his neck. “The mayor's got a corker on his hands! I'd lay you ten to one we'd give a two-ton hippopotamus a run for his money!”

John ignored him. He crouched low over the wheel, concentrating on the gap ahead. There was the end of the town, there was the giant grove of trees that would shield their escape. They could hide forever in that wood.

We're gonna make it, John thought. We're gonna make it.

“Johnny!” Page screamed.

“Quiet, Page!” he barked. “We're almost there!”

“But Johnny! It's Great-Aunt Beauregard!”

CRASH!
WENT THE
mayor's baby into an elaborate edible sculpture in the entrance of Hayseed's Fruit and Vegetable Emporium. A rainbow of zucchini and squash, green peppers and eggplant soared into the air. For a split second, a large, plump, glistening tomato hovered like Mars above John's head. Then . . .
SPLAT!
It exploded on his nose.

John plucked the seeds from his eyes and eyebrows. By some miracle of machinery, he'd managed to plow the vehicle into the deserted shop without damaging the passengers. His sister scrambled out of her seat.

“Quick, Johnny, behind the counter!”

Over the bench they flew. Boz was already there, his hair crowned with a ring of garlic.

“Have you noticed, my dear boy, that we seem to
spend a disproportionate amount of our leisure time in sequestration?”

“Shhh!”

“I don't give a flying fig for your piddly festival!” blared a depressingly familiar voice. “I want my property back!”

There was an odd creaking noise, like the gasp of a dehydrated water wheel. On his hands and knees, John crawled to the far end of the counter and peeked around.

There was his Great-Aunt Beauregard, in all her vole-coated, slab-faced glory. Her dress was irreproachable, her posture impeccable, and her expression one of righteous fury. Thanks to a grisly hawk perched on the edge of her sunbonnet, she towered over the man in the white cowboy hat beside her.

Overall, she looked pretty good for a woman strapped to an upright gurney.

John dropped behind the counter in panic.

And there was Page, disappearing into the floor.

Boz put his left finger to his lips and pointed with his right finger toward the hole. Then he too vanished.

Swift and silent, John followed, grabbing hold of the rope handle and pulling the trapdoor shut as he went.

The root cellar smelled of rat urine, but it was relatively safe. For the moment.

“Johnny.” Page's voice tickled his ear. “What are we going to do?”

John pinched her to be quiet.

Clomp, rumble, clomp, rumble.
The vibrations from above sent a shower of dirt trickling through a knothole in the floorboards. Cautiously, John peered through it.

The man in the white hat had pushed Great-Aunt Beauregard farther into the room and was now down on his knees, fishing turnips out from the wheels of the mayor's baby.

“They're not in there, you dolt-headed dimwit! They're not anywhere in this room!”

Great-Aunt Beauregard's eyes roamed toward the floor. John ducked reflexively.

“Look, lady,” a voice drawled. “If you hadn't insisted on holding me up, I would've had your kids safely in hand. As it is, I've got a guard posted on the front door and my men on the alert. We got 'em locked up tight. It'd be a lot easier if you weren't here to help.”

John risked another glance through the knothole. The two figures had faced off like heavyweight boxers.

“It's not my fault some fool of a surveyor didn't know how to orient a road sign!” his great-aunt rejoined. “As it is, I'm in remarkable condition for a woman who fell into a bog and disconnected my peritonia! Do you realize I was forced to spend three months in traction before I was able to leave Pludgett and trace that thing they call Boz? You're lucky that I have the strength to address you.”

The sheriff didn't look like he thought himself particularly lucky.

“Okay, then
I'll
search the store,” he countered. “And you stay with the guard outside.”

“Fine!” Great-Aunt Beauregard replied. “But remember, my great-niece and -nephew are unwilling accessories in this automotive debacle. Your job is to release the Coggins into my custody and prosecute their carrot-topped kidnapper to the full extent of the law.”

“Don't tell me my job, lady!”

“And don't think I won't be reporting your insolence to the mayor!”

Another burst of dirt exploded through the knothole. The stomp and rumble faded into silence.

“Johnny!” Page hissed, yanking at his shirt. “They're going to find us!”

John shook her off.

“I know!” he hissed back. “Boz?”

A comet of red flashed amid the gloom at the back of the cellar.

“Boz, wait!”

The two siblings chased the comet to a flight of stairs, emerging in a passageway between the store and an outbuilding.

“Boz!”

Boz paused halfway up a fence.

“Where are you going?” John demanded.

“I'm afraid the time has come, the optimist said, to wish you a fond farewell. I have an appointment
in Lombardo with a chiropodist, and it may require a thorough reconfiguration of the kidneys. Do look me up if you're ever in the area.”

And with that, he was off along the rooftops.

“Where's he going?” asked Page.

“He's running away.”

“He's leaving us?”

“Seems so.” John watched the last of Boz's locks vanish over an outhouse. Somehow he wasn't particularly surprised.

“What do we do?”

A piercing whistle filled the air.

“It's the acrobat from the circus! The kidnapper!”

“After him!”

“Now, Page!”

Grabbing his sister by the hand, John streaked to the end of the passageway and, once again, cautiously peered around the corner.

Like a spring river in flood, the entire town appeared to be surging past the sunlit gap. Tightening his grip even further, John dragged Page up the side street and toward the crowd.

The town was a maelstrom. Drunks, dogs, and teens were seeping out of every door, swelling the wave of pursuers. There was a rush of hooves and barks and shouts and feet, all concentrated toward the end of town. Apparently Boz's stealthy escape hadn't gone exactly as planned.

“Quick!” John said to his sister. Fighting against the tide of pursuers, he headed for the closest hitching post. Seizing the only horse left available—a bay mare—he pushed Page onto the saddle and jumped up behind her. With a yank of the reins, he charged down the road from which they had come.

When he looked back at Hayseed, the town had been drained of every drop of human life save one. A lone, lonely figure standing stiff as a palace guard outside the vegetable emporium. His practically apoplectic and completely immobile great-aunt.