Hippomobile! (7 page)

“I do believe James is the name you're lookin' for,” Grandpa Bert said.

Jimmy smacked hisself on the forehead and said, “Oh, yeah, James.”

Then Grandpa Bert gave us the key along with two gumdrops.

“Thanks, Grandpa Bert!” And off we ran toward the Any before he asked us for the next five presidents.

When you walk into the lobby of the hotel, you'll find yourself in the coolest spot in all of Wymore. It's dark in there and has a tall ceiling, and the floor and walls are all made out of real marble. There ain't no better place to rest your cheek against on a hot day. We've been told that a long time ago there were people in uniforms and little red caps standing behind the reception desk just waiting to take care of you and carry your bags up to your room. And there was one guy whose only job was to run the elevator. That's right, our hotel even has an elevator, even though it ain't never worked since we've been alive. It looks like a small metal cage, and it's all locked up now, and it probably didn't play elevator music like elevators do today.
⁵

To go up, you gotta take the steps, and when you start walking up, it keeps getting hotter each step you take. The hallways are all dark and narrow, and the long strip of carpet laying there is as wore out as an old song. The wallpaper is peeling off worse than summer skin, and there's a smidgen of spookiness about everything, even for us at the age of ten. So to get to the roof, we always run up faster than Moody's goose and don't stop until we're on the top floor and in front of the door we gotta unlock. It ain't always easy to stick the key in the keyhole when you're jittering, but once we get it unlocked, we bust on through the door like wind through a tunnel and find ourselves on the roof and back in the light of day.

That's where we were now, high up above the town of Wymore. All the other buildings are only two stories, and so from the hotel roof you can see clear over them and straight out of town and all the way until the sky meets the prairie grass. The view is what some of our grandpas and grandmas call sublime beauty. We'd always just shrug our shoulders when they said something like that, but now that Mom was talking about leaving Wymore, we kinda understood what they were getting at.

We parked our biscuits on the rickety old table up there,
⁶
hoping it would hold us for another day, and stuck them gumdrops in our mouths and gazed down at the town square and set our minds to brainstorming. We kept right at it real hard and didn't let up none for what felt like an hour and must've been at least three minutes.

“Got any ideas yet, Jimmy James?”

“Uh-uh. You?”

“Not yet.”

Another at least two minutes went by.

“How 'bout now, Jimmy James?”

“Nope. You?”

“Uh-uh.”

And after one more minute, we had another conference.

“Jimmy James?”

“Don't ask.”

It just wasn't no use. Maybe you've noticed that too, how that you can't have a good brainstorm when you need it most. Alls we were getting for our efforts was dry goozles.
⁷
Plus our moods were turning worse than a burnt pot of whistleberries.
⁸
So it suited us just fine when we saw some commotion down in the square that took our minds off our problem.

Our grandpas were beginning to congregate in front of Grandpa Frank's old furniture store, and that could only mean one thing.

“Must be Train Day coming up, Jimmy James.”

“Sure looks that way, Stella.”

Now Train Day, you need to know, is the one day a week a coal train runs through town. It doesn't stop none—a train ain't stopped here in more than fifty years. But everybody gathers at the old train station to watch it pass by and hear it blow its whistle. And there warn't almost nothing in the world we wouldn't have liked more than to be able to ride on it someday.

Seeing that not much else ever goes on in Wymore, Train Day constitutes a true town highlight, maybe even its truest, and everybody makes the most of it. Just picture twenty-eight grandmas all with trucker hats that say
I ♥
TRAINS
and matching shirts that have
KEEP ON CHUGGIN
' written across the front.
⁹
The grandmas are responsible for organizing the picnic and decorating the station with streamers and making sure everybody has a little flag to hold and wave as the train goes by.

Our grandpas are in charge of hauling all the tables and chairs over to the train station.
¹⁰
And that's why they were there in front of the furniture store that morning, chewing on their timber and waiting for Grandpa Frank to show up and unlock his store.

“Here he comes now!” someone said.

And sure enough, Grandpa Frank was running up the street and putting on his second shoe and fastening his suspenders all at the same time. That was just like him because he was always late.

“Lying around too long on the mule's breakfast again, was you?”
¹¹
we heard one of our grandpas ask.

“My alarm clock must not be workin',” Grandpa Frank answered.

Our other grandpas pulled the pieces of timber out of their mouths and made a big show of throwing them on the ground.

“It ain't been workin' since February 2, 1974, Frank,” said Grandpa Chester.

“I know, I know,” Grandpa Frank said. “Time to think about replacin' the battery.”

Then he pulled out a key chain with more keys on it than a barn has flies. Somehow he found the right one on the first try and unlocked the door to his store, and all our grandpas filed in one after the other just like schoolchildren.

“Sure would be neat if the coal train broke down here in town one day,” one of us would always say when Train Day came. “Then we could at least climb up and take a look at it.”   

“Would be as neat as a pin. But you know it ain't gonna happen.”

We had to settle for the next best thing to riding the rails—standing there each week and counting the boxcars and hoppers as they rumbled by louder than buffalo. The most we'd ever counted was 132 of them, and that was just last summer.

Soon enough our grandpas came back out of the furniture store. They were pulling and dragging and tugging old armchairs and rickety rockers and busted recliners and lopsided benches and three-footed ottomans and warped dining tables. And that wasn't even the hard part. Then they had to lift and hoist and boost and rear everything up onto their golf carts so they could drive it over to the train station two blocks south. Most times they left a trail of furniture behind them like bread crumbs through a forest. It was enough to make you bust your gut laughing. We also got to hear some good old-fashioned cursing, but we won't be including any of that here.

Anyhow, there we were, watching preparations for Train Day get under way and wiping sweat off our foreheads and swinging our feet, and sometimes Jimmy would give his tooth a wiggle. In other words, nothing special was going on. And yet it was at that moment when we were least expecting it that we got the brainstorm we'd gone up to the roof looking for. It went something like this:

“Jimmy James?”

“Ahgrhruallla?”
¹²

“Ain't it kinda funny?”

“Ain't what kinda funny?”

“Goin' through all this trouble just to watch a loud, dirty freight train go by?”

“I don't think so.”

“Why not?”

“Shoot, Stella. People are always lookin' for something to look at.”

“Like how do you mean?”

“Like remember what our teacher said about Paris? How everybody's always going there just to take a picture of the Evil Tower?”

“
Eiffel
, Jimmy James. Rhymes with ‘rifle.'”

“That could be, Stella. And what about that Leaning Tower of Pizza in Italy? Remember learning about that one?”

“Nope.”

“You don't?”

“I remember learning about the Leaning Tower of
Pisa
, Jimmy James. But I guess you're right.”

“Course I am. Like Pops says, ‘Ain't no use being wrong.'”

We went on back to doing nothing for a while, but then suddenly all four of our eyes got wide and sparkly as silver dollars, and we both said, “That's it!”

We knew right away what each of us was thinking. If everybody's always going all the way to Paris or to Italy just to look at some tower, why shouldn't at least some of them come to Wymore instead? First off, it's closer. Second off, there ain't no lines. And third off, ain't no one ever had their picture taken standing next to a hippomobile before.

Alls we figured we needed to do was to dust it off some, give it a squirt of oil, and get it up and running again.

 

 

 

 

WE BEE-LINED IT STRAIGHT
to Mabel's and direct into our booth. Grandma Ida must've saw our sweaty faces and read our minds because before we could even catch our breath, she said, “Two dog soups with hail, coming right up!” That may sound yucky, but it's really just ice water.

We were still breathing hard when she came and put down our drinks square in front of us. “Thanks, Grandma Ida,” we said, and started making the slurpy sounds that quench your thirst the best.

“Looks like you two have a fire to put out,” she said.

“We do,” we said, soon as we came up for air. “We're gonna save Mabel's!”

Grandma Ida stopped chewing her gum. “Come again, now?”

And we said, “You better go get Grandma Mabel for this.”

She hurried off and got her from the kitchen, and they both sat down across from us, and we said, “Listen close, 'cause here's our plan.” Then we talked about Paris, and we told them a thing or two about Italy, and we were careful to mention how tourists are always looking for a good place to eat. That perked up their ears, all right. And that's when we hit them with the hippomobile.

Grandma Ida sat there the whole time wiping little spots off the tabletop with her dishrag, like that made her concentrate more. Grandma Mabel wasn't moving a muscle. She kept her arms rested on the table. They were red from cooking and thick like logs, and we were always mesmerized by the blue anchor she had tattooed on her left forearm. And whereas Grandma Ida sometimes said, “Uh-huh” and “I see” and “All right,” Grandma Mabel remained silent as a fish.

After we finished talking, Grandma Ida wasn't chewing her gum, and that worried us a bit. But it was Grandma Mabel's reaction that threw us like a horseshoe. She was known to be tough as nails, and even though she still hadn't moved none, we saw she was crying so hard, it almost looked like she was making a pot of tear soup.

Grandma Ida said, “Mabel,” and put an arm around her.

But Grandma Mabel just said, “It's them confounded onions I was choppin'.” She got up and stomped back heavy through the swinging kitchen doors without another word.

We waited until them doors finished swinging, and then we leaned in over the table and asked Grandma Ida real quiet, “Did we say somethin' wrong?”

Grandma Ida just smiled and said, “Not at all, kids. In fact, I think you said somethin' right. Because if you ask me, it ain't such a bad idea you got there.”

That made us smile wide as a rainbow.

“Except for one thing.”

Our rainbows disappeared. “What's that?” we asked.

And Grandma Ida answered, “The hippomobile ain't never run in my lifetime. And as far as I know, not in any of your other grandparents' lifetimes, neither.”

“That ain't what Grandpa Homer and Grandpa Virgil told us once,” we said.

“You know better than to believe everything comin' outta them mouths of theirs.”

That gave us a bad case of the slumps, all right.

But then she said, “Of course, far as I know the Eiffel Tower don't run none, neither.”

That's when we remembered the letter and took it out of
The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing
. “Maybe this here could help us some,” we said.

Grandma Ida looked over the envelope a moment before pulling out the letter. She unfolded it and looked at it some in one direction, then turned it upside down and looked at it some in the other direction. “Where'd you get this here letter?”

“Found it yesterday stuck in this book.”

“You did, did ya?” Grandma Ida asked, and went back to sizing up that piece of paper awful close. She seemed to have something on her mind because we could just about hear the gears in her brain going
click
and
clank
.

Finally she said, “You know what? I think we better run this by Henrietta. She's the one person around here who just might be able to read this thing. Because if I ain't mistaken, it looks like it's from Gottfried Schuh.”