The Tunnel of Hugsy Goode (8 page)

Next morning ... bad news ... there
was
school. Tornid and me raced out of the house before breakfast to see if we could see the raccoon. Everyone else came out, too. "I dreamt he was in my bed," said LLIB.

"That was me," said Danny, "in the bunk above you."

We didn't see the raccoon, so we had breakfast and went to school. I had to race to get there on time and slid into my seat like a baseball player sliding to base as the last bell rang. "Slide, Kelly, slide," said my teacher. And we commenced the day.

My mom had replied to the letter from P.S. 2 this way. She apologized for my attitude about social studies. Apologized, too, for writing a letter instead of coming in herself in person. Said she'd tried but could never get into the school on account of the strike. Said Nicholas (me) was apt to think he was a wit. Said she was trying to curb this streak ... we'd all work together ... etc. My mom showed me the letter, her eyes agleam with her own wit in it. The letter was mild compared to what she said to me! And her voice she uses!

Anyway, the teachers with their strikes have more to think about than me and my "wit," and I am forgotten or forgiven
¿quién sabe?
which. So in the'S.S. book, Mr. Lee is taking us up the Yangtze River again, a review of that dismal trek. It was hard the first time up the river, and it's worse today after a "Hard Day's Night" in Danny's bunk. It's still the month of May. If only we could get on to something else! But the teacher says we have finished everything for the year and from now on until the end of June we are just going to go over and over and over everything we have had. Yechh!

Don't worry. I had the sense to bring my four by six brown spiral notebook with me that I'm writing this book in. Tornid said he'd write a chapter. Well, that's fair because he is my partner. "I'll get my works done Sunday," he said. "That's my homeworks day."

When I got home, all Fabians were already there—their mom picks them up in the Pugeot (quite a carload)—and they all had their snacks in hand. Tornid's mom makes up the Fabian snacks early. She puts cookies, or sugar-coated cereal, or little sandwiches, some surprise, in little plastic bags, one for each and all identical in contents. It's like Halloween trick or treat every day for all Fabians. We're not even allowed out, our family isn't, for trick or treat on Halloween. "Can't eat all that trash," says my mom. "Spoil your teeth."

Tornid gave me a nudge, and we sat down under the tree house, LLIB and Lucy being up in it having snacks, even though they don't go to school yet. Tornid slipped me a sheet of yellow-lined paper with words on it. He had done his chapter in school like I had because his teacher had not come to school, and they were sharing teachers there. A smart girl he knows there had helped him with the spelling. I read it—his works.

THE RACCOON

A RACCOON LOOKET IN THE WINDOW. IT WAS NITE. WE WERE EATING DINNER. I HAD A DRUMSTICK. WE LOOKET AT IT. IT LOOKT AT WE. IT WENT AWAY. WE DONTE NO WHERE
IT CAME FROM WE DONTE KNOW WHERE IT WENT. THE GRILS DWONT NO ETHER BY TORNID FABIAN AGE
8.

"Very good," I said. "From now on we will call the Contamination girls
grils.
It will be our secret name for them."

"Right," said Tornid, and we turned to face the
grils
eying us with suspicion from the Fabian back stoop while eating their snacks ... Black-Eyes' snack already gone, Blue-Eyes still slowly eating hers.

Black-eyed
gril
had watched me reading Tornid's chap. Her black eyes were larger and rounder and more secret than ever. I closed my eyes ... so did Tornid ... to avoid Contamination. But she put aside her resolve never to speak to me again in her life (dinner, sleep-over, and the raccoon last night making her think that I might still be a guest in their house and had to be treated politely), and this
gril
said, "Nick. We know where the raccoon'z nezt iz."

(She is at a stage in life where she puts a "z" in a word where an "s" is supposed to be. It's her game and may have a meaning.)

Me and Tornid automatically made anti-Contamination signs, held our breaths, closed eyes more tightly, covered ears. But she stuck it out. She said, "Look up there in Mizz Alderman'z tree. (Her house is the end one, next to—see map—T.N.F., and has a big maple tree. Half the trunk is in her yard and half in Fabian territory. Most of its branches hang high up over the Fabians' yard.) "Way up there, zee? You can zee a new nezt, large and blowzy, built in a hurry, frezz green grape leavez, even zquazz vinez, probably from the hidey hole, zome honeyzuckle dripping over the edgez ... up there ... in the top-moztfork..."

Me and Tornid opened one eye each—the eye farthest from black-eyed
gril
—and looked up. Sure enough. She was right. There was a huge untidy, hastily built nest up there. We made the certain sign we make that temporarily expels Contamination danger and opened both eyes and uncovered our ears, breathed also. Then we had a good view of the nest. The raccoon had taken branches from all sorts of bushes or vines in the Alley, and it was very pretty.

"Oh, I knew it was there," I said. "I saw it this morning. Me and Tornid saw it..."

Tornid forgot that he is supposed to agree with me always, come what, come may, and he said, "No, we dittent, Copin. Beatrice saw it first—the minute we got home from school she spotted it ... first." I stared at Tornid through my nonshatterable eyeglasses. He said, "...I think she did."

Black-eyed
gril
looked at Tornid with reproach in her non-see-through eyes. Blue-eyed
gril,
Izzy, sniffed. She shook her amber-colored ponytail—the way she was wearing her hair today—and both
grils
then joined LLIB and Lucy in the Fabian tree house where they—Blue-Eyes—could finish their snacks and watch the nest in hopes the raccoon would poke out his head or wave his striped tail.

Yechh! Me and Tornid couldn't get to our work in the hidey hole with
grils
in the tree house lookout. So we sat down under the raccoon's tree ourselves and became raccoon watchers, too. We didn't see him. Bird watchers watch and often there aren't any birds. To be a watcher of anything doesn't mean there always has to be any of that thing to be seen every minute; but you have to keep watching, in case. Then you say, "There it is!"

From the tree house came the words, "He'z probably azleep."

Black-eyed
gril
gave this information out to Blue-Eyes in a loud voice so I couldn't miss the message ... that she had gone to the library and that she had found out in a book that raccoons sleep in the daytime. So he probably was asleep now, true to the habits of his kind.

Yechh, I thought. Thinks she's the only one goes to libraries! Tornid and me, we go to the Grandby Library to look up something, get permission to study old copies of
Popular Mechanics,
dusty and tied up in the basement, so we can make models of antique cars like the Rio, and we don't brag or mention the fact when we are sitting in the tree house, and we look up, besides, why worms come out of the sidewalk after a rain ... yechh!

"Uh...
grils,
" I said to Tornid. "Forget them."

"Yeah..." said Tornid. "That's some nest that raccoon made up there, and he made it so fast..."

"Yeah..." I said. "Probably saw how we all liked being in a house, so he made himself one ... homesick, probably for his old house, wherever that was..."

Tornid said, "I wish he was our pet. He's neat."

The two
grils
came down by way of the slide and sauntered down the Alley toward where the Circle used to be to see if two new girls (we don't know their names and we don't know yet whether they are
grils
or not—probably are) were going to come out.

Lucy and LLIB wandered off, too, so me and Tornid had the Fabian yard to ourselves at last. We hopped into the hidey hole to get on with Operation'T. Summer would come and the breakthrough to the tunnel not made yet, what with all the interruptions—El trip, incarsecration, raccoon. There they are, listed in alphabetical and time-sequence order.

Down in the hidey hole ... knock me flat! Yesterday we had been digging and we'd made a lot of headway at the place named
TRATS
. Today ... I'm not kidding, the dug-out area was three times as large.

Tornid and me looked at each other. Who had made our crumbly place larger? Danny? LLIB? Had they been fussing with our tools? No, they were where we'd left them in the green rain-proof plastic wrapping. Had that sappy Bobo, the new dog of the Maloons, a digging type (he sure can make the dirt fly), had he been digging here?
Grils?

How can anyone be sure about
grils?
While pretending they have no interest in anything we do, they probably, all the while, are dying to know exactly what Tornid's and my business is. While humming, seeming to be paying no attention to us, they probably are always taking us in, studying us, absorbing our ideas, because we have the best ones, to pass off as theirs.

Probably black-eyed
gril
had guessed, or perhaps even stolen, one of our tunnel plans from under Jane Ives's dusty television while incarsecration was going on. She probably wanted to be the first to set foot in the famous tunnel (we should name it after Hugsy Goode when we do discover it—all tunnels have names), the tunnel of the alley under the Alley, and then plant a
gril
flag there before we can plant ours. Black-eyed
gril
has to be the first to know everything. Now she wants a tunnel scoop. Yechh! Put it in the P.S. 2 paper.

"Tornid," I said. "If it
was
a
gril
that was down here digging next to
TRATS
, we have to jump out, run six times up and six times down the Alley to get the Contamination off ... perhaps even take a bath..."

"Oh, no ... not me," said Tornid. "No bath. It's not bath time, yet.... Hey..." he said.

"What?" I said.

"I bet it was the raccoon.... Hey, yeah ... last night or this morning while we were at school..."

"Of course, ya cluck!" I said. "It was the raccoon. Had a very busy night, building a home and digging our diggings."

After I had implied that I'd had that raccoon idea first, I looked at Tornid through the lower part of my glasses and pursed my lips together. I said, "You may get to be a Rapid Advancement boy, like the
grils
are R.A. girls, when you get bigger ... you have so much ESP."

Tornid laughed his funny husky laugh.

"There's more of a mystery here than we'd thought, Tornid," I said. "You don't get raccoons doing unusual things, digging around a place named
TRATS
where there is probably an opening into a lost tunnel. Perhaps he, being a raccoon ... raccoons are famous for their curiosity—your zizter (I imitated black-eyed
gril
) told uz that—well, he may already know more about this tunnel than you and me put together with all our ESP thrown in. Or, he may be a something—a smoogman—in disguise. On a mission from below, maybe, to find out who, or what, is chipping into the T.N.F. office that we hope is down there."

So we began to dig, claw, and chip away furiously with our hands, shillelaghs, ice picks—all our tools—spurred on by this unexpected helping hand of the raccoon's, be he friend or be he smoogman foe. We longed for the breakthrough. "Where are Nicky and Timmy now?" the moms would say. "Over at Myrtle Avenue again?" they'd say. "Never fear, moms. We'll never do that again. Where we are, there's no rule against it," we'd say. "Down in the tunnel of Hugsy Goode, moms, the alley under the Alley. If Alley above is allowed, then so is alley below," we'd say.

Tornid and me laughed very hard at the idea of the funny times lying ahead. But we're not down there yet, and there's plenty to do. We should be nocturnal like raccoons—we'd be down there by morning.

Just then Tornid's dad came to their back stoop and called in his perfectly ordinary plain-speaking voice, the way he always does, as though his children can hear him though nowhere in sight, "Billy! Danny! Timmy! Come get your hair cut." He cuts everybody's hair, the
grils',
too. My mom does ours. The moms have hair-cutting shears they share, one of the good tools bought at Job Lots.

We got out of the hidey hole in a hurry before LLIB and Danny or anyone else could see us. "Try and save some food," I told Tornid. "Tomorrow is T.N.F. day, and we may need food. Ah ... tomorrow! Nothing to be scared of, Torny, old boy, old boy ... nothing coming at us ... I hope..."

"No Minotaur," said Tornid, laughing

His mom is reading the Greek myths to them all before bed ... they always read at least an hour, all the Fabians, the mom or the dad reads out loud ... all on the big bed in the front bedroom. Now it's Theseus, and Tornid has gotten our maze plans and tunnel plans all mixed up with the labyrinth on Crete where Theseus sought the Minotaur. Tornid worries for fear that, once down there, if the tunnel really turns out to be a complicated labyrinth instead, we'll never be able to get out.