Hokey Pokey (10 page)

The Snotsipper is speechless, entranced. The hokey
pokey floats before his eyes until someone jabs him. He comes to his senses, snatches it and walks off. A mob of tongues salivate at the sound of his teeth sinking into sweet ice.

“Grape,” says the next in line.

All is orderly. There is little noise, no fooling around. A sense that nonsense will not be tolerated pervades the crowd. Kids who a minute ago were squalling and brawling now stand quietly in line, awaiting their turn.

“Chocolate.”

“Watermelon.”

“Strawberry.”

Occasionally one of the youngest will say, “Do you have such-and-such?” The Hokey Pokey Man does not answer. He simply reaches for the bottle of such-and-such. There is no flavor he does not have.

“Licorice.”

“Bubble gum.”

“Jalapeño.”

Now and then a “Please” or “Thank you” is heard. Most say nothing. With older kids it simply is what it always is: high noon and the Hokey Pokey Man. Should they thank the sky for being blue? Younger ones are
struck speechless by the dazzle of the Man’s hands, the rainbow of syrup bottles, the castaneting clack of the ice scraper. By the time they reach the head of the line, they are too famished for words, too grateful for manners.

The population is served quickly. As the last of the patrons walk off, the Hokey Pokey Man mops his brow and pulls the towel over the great block of ice. The sun moves. From objects and bodies everywhere shadows begin to seep.

P
APER CUPS LITTER THE LANDSCAPE
, bleed flavors, darken the dust.

Jack walks.

He is empty.

When Scramjet went to the girl, a plug was pulled and everything inside him poured out. He is nothing but skin and a name. Maybe not even that. He wants to say it aloud—
Jack!
—to confirm his existence, but he cannot summon the strength to do so. He doesn’t bother to lift his shirt and check Dusty’s tattoo. He knows it’s gone.

He would call his Amigos, but there is only empty air where his Tarzan yell used to be.

Something is over. Something is finished. He knows this now. Whatever it is, it’s more than a tattoo, more than a bike. An incredible thought comes to him as he drags across the barren landscape. He has just suffered the greatest tragedy of his life. He has lost his beloved bike, his Scramjet, and to a girl—to
the
girl—no less. But even that is not the incredible thought. The incredible thought is this:
I don’t even care
.

At first, in the distance, it is merely a wrinkle in the heatshimmer, but it soon becomes the Hokey Pokey Man pushing his cart, going wherever it is he goes each day, one more element of Jack’s life draining away. The wheels of the cart waver in the shimmer.
No more hokey pokeys for me
, Jack thinks as he plods on, and so, when he looks up again, is surprised to find the distance shrinking. He can now hear the tinkle of the bottles, the crunch of the cart’s wheels. The Hokey Pokey Man has stopped. He seems to be waiting. He throws the towel off the block of ice, grabs the scraper. Jack looks around, sees no one else. Hears a voice, crusty: “Time’s flyin, Mr. Boy.”

Was that him? Did he speak? To me?

As Jack approaches, he sees the Hokey Pokey Man has already set to work. He dumps the hokey pokey into a cup, drenches it with generous slugs of Jack’s usual—root beer. As he hands Jack the square snowball, he does something he’s never done before: he looks at Jack. The stubbled face is as stony as ever, like The Kid’s, and yet somehow Jack feels himself washed over by something he can only perceive as a smile. The look lasts but a moment, and already the Hokey Pokey Man is slinging the towel over the ice and pushing off. Jack watches. He is mesmerized by the crunch and tinkle of the cart—a music he has never heard before—and now the unexpected, crusty voice: “Sayonara, kid.” And now, from somewhere beyond the sun, the whistle of a train.

D
USTY IS STOMPING ABOUT
, decapitating dandelion puffballs. When he spots a new one, he stomps over to it and kicks, sending fuzz flying. All the while muttering: “What’s goin on? … What’s goin on?” He no longer addresses himself to LaJo. He seeks answers from the great blue cosmos above, the ground below, the dandelions, as if kicking them will knock answers loose. His flung-off cap lies in the dust.

From afar they watched in stunned disbelief as Jack rode his violated Scramjet right up to the girl, handed it over to her and walked away. Dusty has been ranting ever since.

“Your nose is running,” says LaJo, who takes a seat on a home-plate-size rock.

Dusty wipes his nose with his shirtsleeve. Stomps, kicks. “Where did his tattoo go? … Why’s he acting like this? … Is this some kinda nightmare we’re in? … Is somebody playin a trick on us?” He faces the faceless sky, bellows:
“Huh?”

The sky does not reply, but LaJo does. “If you shut up for a minute, I’ll tell you.”

Dusty, who breathes befuddlement like others breathe air, has not really been expecting an answer to his questions, so he is surprised at LaJo’s remark. He is constantly surprised to find that LaJo seems to know more about life than he does. He turns, waits.

LaJo keeps him waiting. He often does this. LaJo picks up a pebble and tosses it idly. He spots a dandelion fuzzball. He rears back, honks and—
pthoo!
—fires a hocker. Misses. At last he says, “He’s leaving.” This is another thing LaJo does. His answers, when they finally come, are too short.

Dusty’s jaw drops, eyes bulge. He waits. Waits for more. When he realizes nothing more is coming, he screeches: “
Huh?
 …
What?
 … Waddaya mean
leaving
? … What’s
that
s’pose to mean?”

LaJo shrugs. “Leaving. Away. Gone. Vamoosed.”

Dusty stands there gaping, blinking.

A Newbie comes running, yelling, “LaJo!” It’s the red-haired runt LaJo got stuck with at Tattooer. The Newbie crashes into LaJo. “LaJo! C’mon! Let’s play! C’mon!” The kid is pulling so hard on LaJo’s hand his tiny butt is scraping the ground.

LaJo glances down, looks away. “No.”

The kid yammers on. “C’mon, LaJo! Play with me! Play! Play! Play!”

LaJo leans down. The kid stops pulling. He thinks LaJo is going to play. LaJo bends until his face is one inch from the kid’s. LaJo bellows: “Beat it!”

The force of LaJo’s voice knocks the runt onto his butt. His eyes are round as bike wheels. He gets up. He kicks LaJo in the shin and runs off. He does not cry.

The incident with the Newbie has barely dented Dusty’s brain. He stares at LaJo. He shakes his head with vigor. “No,” he says.

LaJo’s eyebrows arch. “No?”

“No.”

“No what?”

“Jack ain’t gone nowhere.”

LaJo shrugs. “Fine. He ain’t going nowhere.”

Dusty kicks more dandelions. He wheels. “So
where
, huh?
Where’s
he going?”

LaJo shrugs. “How should I know?”

Dusty turns, arms outstretched. “Where is there to go
to
? … This is it.… Where else
is
there?” He points to the sky. “The moon? Is that where he’s going? The moon?” LaJo is picking dirt from his fingernails. Dusty jutjaws. “So how do
you
know all this anyway? Huh? How do you know he’s going away?”

“I didn’t say
know
. You did. I just think it. It reminds me of something.”

“Reminds you? What’s it remind you of?”

LaJo lets out a long breath. “The Story.”

Dusty picks his cap up from the dust. He takes special care replacing it. He is vaguely pleased to find, on this crazy day, that his head remains atop his neck. “Story? What story?”

LaJo snorts, doesn’t bother to answer. It’s a dumb question, as even Dusty knows. Because there is only one story. The one that comes out of the walnut shells. Sometime before the end of the first day, every Newbie discovers more than a tattoo on his or her stomach. It’s pockets. Pants with pockets. And in the right front pocket of every pair of pants is half a walnut shell.

There are no instructions. There is only eternal instinct, two voiceless commands:

Never throw away your shell
.

At bedtime hold it to your ear
.

When they do, they hear The Story.

I
T IS A TALE OF
H
OKEY
P
OKEY
. Of The Kid. Of The Kid’s early days as a Newbie and a crybaby Snotsipper and his adventurous growth into a lisping Gappergum, an endlessly laughing Sillynilly, a Longspitter, a Groundhog Chaser and, finally, a Big Kid. By this time The Kid, like most Big Kids, no longer listened to The Story at night. But, as The Story goes,
he carried his walnut shell everywhere he went
.

Little kids never tire of The Story. Every night they hear it for the first time. Every night they are both horrified and thrilled by the ending. For in the end The Kid announces:
I am going away
.

The Hokey Pokers in The Story do not understand.
Away to where?
they say.
To Great Plains? The Mountains?

Away from Hokey Pokey
, The Kid says.

They laugh.
No way!

Tomorrow I will be gone
, he says.

Tomorrow?
they say.
What’s tomorrow?

There is no answer. There is only a growing dread, a conviction that something must be done. For they love The Kid—from Newbies to Big Kids. They don’t want him to go. When The Kid is the caller, boys and girls dance the hokey pokey together:

And then The Kid says,
You will forget me
.

That does it.

So they trick him. They lure him out to Thousand Puddles, to stomp and splash.
One last time
, they say.
They tell him to lie down on the ground, they have a surprise for him. And then they attack him with tickles. No one, not even The Kid, can withstand a mass tickle attack. His laughter blows the fuzz off dandelions a half-mile away. But more important, he is helpless—and the attack goes into its second stage: mud. As The Kid helplessly howls, they cover him in puddle mud. They don’t stop until every inch of him is slathered in a thick coat of sludge. They back off and watch the mud dry and then harden in the sun. It happens quickly. They touch it. It’s like stone. The Kid, on his back, is pointing straight up at the sky. They haul him to an open spot between Tantrums and Hippodrome, a bare, dusty mini-desert inhabited only by hot-rodding trikers. They prop him up—and there he is today. The Kid. Pointing to who knows where. Some say he’s pointing to Forbidden Hut. Some say he’s the only one who knows how to get in. But now he’s not going anywhere.

Though little kids are horrified at the way The Story ends, at the same time they love it. It satisfies something deep inside them. If they had to use a word, they might say
delicious
. But in fact it sweetens them beyond the belly, beyond the reach even of the Hokey Pokey Man.

Big Kids know something little kids do not: The Story ends not with a period, but with a question mark. It’s as if there’s an ending beyond the ending, a suspicion that there’s more to The Story than the walnut shell is telling. The older you get, the closer you feel to the real ending—but you never quite get there. And so rumors fill in the blanks:

The walnut shell does finish The Story, but only after the listener falls asleep.

If you give the statue of The Kid a good whack, it will crack open and reveal a still-beating heart.

Under cover of darkness The Kid’s ghost oozes out of the statue and catches a ghost train out of Hokey Pokey.

The voice in the walnut shell belongs to your sleep monster.

Rumors and questions: kids suck the juice from them like syrup from a soaked hokey pokey. They fall asleep, some in favorite spots, some where they drop, shell in hand. Curiously, there is one question no one ever thinks to ask: How is it that when you wake up every morning, the walnut shell is back in your pocket?

D
USTY LAUGHS
, screeches. “It’s a
story
! It’s a
fairy tale
!”

LaJo shrugs. “Is it?”

Dusty is speechless. He looks around. There are no fuzzballs left to kick. “So what are you saying? Jack’s gonna turn into a
statue
?”

With his finger LaJo traces the letter
J
in the dust. “ ‘One day when he woke up things were different.’ ”

Dusty screeches.
“Huh?”

LaJo traces an
A
in the dust. “You heard me.”

Dusty did hear, and now, as he stares at LaJo, he remembers. He’s heard the words before, hundreds of times. He may no longer listen carefully to his shell
every night, but like every other Hokey Poker, he can recite The Story word for word. And there they are, at the start of The Kid’s last day:
One day when he woke up things were different
.

“So?” says Dusty.

LaJo ticks them off on his fingers. “So. Bike gone. Tattoo gone. Him crying. What we just saw with him and the girl. Different.”

Dusty swells defiantly. “Jack ain’t a story. Jack is Jack.”

LaJo traces a
C
in the dust. “ ‘Big Boy was gone.’ ”

Big Boy was gone too
.

Big Boy: The Kid’s bike. As precious to him as Scramjet was to Jack.

Dusty gapes, blinks, gushes half a laughball. “Aw, c’mon, man … that don’t mean—”

“ ‘The Kid was not himself.’ ”

It’s right there, in The Story. For the first time in his life it strikes Dusty that these are the most chilling words of all:
The Kid was not himself
.