The Tunnel of Hugsy Goode (2 page)

"Right, Torny, old boy, old boy?" I said to my pal. Tornid and me were sitting on the curb of where the Circle used to be.

"Right," said Tornid.

He has ESP and knows my thoughts.

Tornid and all the Fabians—pets, dogs, fish, birds—live in the important house in the Alley where Hugsy Goode used to live, the guy who said there might be an alley under the Alley. This house has a hidey hole under the dining-room windows, and the hidey hole has two windows of its own that look down into the Fabian cellar. You can't see in or out of those windows, though, because they are covered with squash vines that Hugsy Goode planted long ago. The whole hidey hole is covered with these vines, and if you are down there under the thicket and don't rustle the vines, no one knows you're there.

It's lucky that my pal Tornid and all his family were the ones who passed the stiff specifications of Grandby College and were allowed to occupy this particular house. Because its hidey hole is where Tornid and me think up ideas about the under alley. Then we go over to Jane Ives's house, draw up the maps and plans, sometimes labyrinths, and store them under Jane's television.

Jane Ives is Connie Ives's mother. I call her "Jane." Tornid calls her "Mrs. Ives." It's the custom in our house to call most mothers and fathers by their first names. In Tornid's, it's the otherwise custom—call them "Mr." or "Mrs."

Tornid and me go over to Jane's kitchen to get warm, to talk, to have a snack, maybe, and then to draw at the dining-room table. She lets us keep our things—paper and plans and things, a ruler—under the television set, rarely, if ever, looked at in the home of Connie Ives. Only if there is a historic event. Then they look. Jane doesn't even know, never even heard of Bob Dylan ... who he is. She does like the Beatles, though, unlike my mom who can't stand them. Jane lets me play my Beatle record on her record player.... I'm the only non-member of the Ives's household that may turn on her stereo ... the only one. I wish someone would tell my mom that. And my dad. Jane knows about the tunnel, is in on the secret of our aliases, is sworn to secrecy.

At the front of the book I put one of the tunnel maps I drew, and I'll explain it here, so keep your finger on it.

The Alley on top is shaped like a capital T and always will be shaped that way even though the Circle, the best part of the Alley, has been removed—none of us can get over that—I don't care if I do harp. Tornid and me figure that the tunnel under the Alley will be shaped like a T, too, with offshoots, minor passages leading to various pits, and with a Circle, still intact—we hope—at the end.

Examine the chart. Find the main entrances or exits, whichever you want to call them, for the tour of the tunnel. First: there is the entrance through, we think, Tornid's hidey hole, marked T.N.F. for Tornid Nubsy Fabian. Next, under my house, the first house on Story Street, there is a pit, marked C.N.C. for Copin Nubsy Carroll. This pit is an office or a rendezvous with bunks stacked up to sleep in.

Come back to the main tunnel. Stop off for a while under the house of LLIB's friend, Lucy Crane (marked L.C.), where there is another office, we think, for food, or a place to rehearse plays or make plans to outwit smoogmen, if any, in the tunnel. Then proceed to the end of the top of the T, the opposite end from the Fabians' house and marked K.O. for "Keep Out." Stay there a while anyway if you want to study the Top Secret business that goes on there. Then come out and crawl—in most places we think the tunnel is wide and high enough to walk in, six feet high, three feet wide; but in others, it is a crawling tunnel, not to have monotony—so next you have to crawl through the bypass to the office—it might be a gallery—under Bully Vardeer's house, marked B.V. He is the artist of the Alley, paints everyone, and his house in the Alley is opposite us Carrolls.

Then come back from that office marked B.V., crawl back, that is, to the main tunnel and to the place under Billy Maloon's house (B.M. on the map). Above the tunnel here, there is a rain drain. This drain is always clogged up and creates floods outside the back stoops of the houses that face Larrabee Street, especially the Fabians' house, which is at the lowest part of the Alley. Of course the drain does not drain down into the tunnel. If it did ... brother! Everybody would know about the tunnel then, be able to see down, see what was going on, and where would be the sense of the tunnel then?

Back to the map again. In the tunnel, from where the drain is on top, in the middle of the top part of the T, and in the main stand-up part of the T of the tunnel, you can look up the long end of the T to, we hope, the under-alley Circle. First, though, to the right, there will be a cutoff leading to the most important
TOP SECRET OFFICE
of the tunnel, under Jane Ives's house, marked J.I. The main business
of
all the businesses is conducted here, we think. What that business is—that is what we hope to find out. As fast as we are certain of any fact we'll pass it along to you. We have to consider why the tunnel is here at all—we have a dozen theories, new ones every day—and find out if it is used now, why and by whom ... or what?

Opposite J.I.'s house there is another pit for mechanical equipment ... shaped, perhaps, like an old trolley car. It is under the house of Orville Nagel, an expert on old train whistles and signs and a collector of trophies from torn-down els and retired subway trains. Let's hope the Myrtle Avenue El will never be torn down and be the next to have a bit of it, a sign or a signal, just wind up in this neat man's house. He has red lights and green lights in his house at his front door ... go ... stop. His pit underneath is marked O.N., and when the tunnel is discovered, he will be a great help to fix it up for tours. We figure his pit is used for signaling and computing and sending top secret messages to the other pits. Then there is, at the end of the Alley, the pit marked K.S.—for Katy Starr—perhaps a library or a candy shop ... a school, maybe ... or a restaurant, a motel.

So far, all this is just guess work. It's a neat time of year to begin our questing ... early in May. Days are long., There's no school. We can stay out later than usual without my mom blowing the cow horn, her newest noisemaker, for me to come in, or yelling, "Nick!" like the crack of a whip.

Now you have the lay of the land. Tornid and me are sitting on the big trash can outside of my yard waiting for a chance to collect tools ... pick, shovel, whatever might come in handy ... and get into Tornid's hidey hole to begin our excavations for the lost tunnel of the Alley. All the houses that face onto Larrabee Street have hidey holes. Tornid's is the best one and is historic, having been used as a jail in olden Alley days by the kids in charge then. Right now, we can't get past our moms who are hee-heeing and chewing the fat ("spewing" might be a better word) at the picnic table in our backyard, it being a lovely balmy day and the ninth of May.

We put the finishing touches on the shillelaghs we had carved for ourselves out of strong branches that tree trimmers had cut off the big tree in Billy Maloon's yard. I put my initials C.N.C. on mine with a jackknife, Tornid put T.N.F. on his. We spit on them and polished them with sand and they were smooth. They are to be our staffs in the under alley.

"Why don't they go in?" I asked Tornid in disgust. "We have work to do."

"I dunno," said Tornid. "They like to talk." And he spit on his shillelagh.

At last, to throw the moms off the track so we could start on Operation Tunnel, I said in a very loud voice to Tornid, "So long. See ya." I gave him a wink that meant stand by in his yard and get whatever tools he could out of his cellar and hide them in the hidey hole while I tried to collect mine.

He gave me a wink, too, and said, "Bye. See ya."

I tore past the moms and up the stoop to the kitchen. My mom caught me up short. "Well-ll?" she said. I put on the brakes. "What are you up to now?" she said.

I kept my cool. "Social studies," I said as quick as a flash, forgetting there wasn't any school anyway.

This simple reply started the moms off on a new tack, and they didn't hear me go down into the cellar by way of the kitchen. I quietly assembled some tools ... a small shovel, a small ax, a trowel, various chipping tools. That's one good thing about my mom. She has every possible tool ... you name it, she has it. Even an adze.

Then, at last, it seemed the moms were breaking it up. I watched them through a crack in the bulkhead of the cellar door that opens up on the garden by the picnic table. At the same moment that Tornid's mom went out the back gate which squeaks and my mom came into our kitchen, I opened the bulkhead as quietly as I could and hid my tools under our honeysuckle, making sure the coast was clear. It was. Then I whistled softly, "It was a long day's night" (me and Tornid's usual signal), and I heard him whistle back. De dum-de dum dum dum-m. He came to my fence. I handed my tools over to him. We moved them all to the hidey hole and hid them under the squash vines.

"All set?" I said.

"All set," he said.

We adjourned temporarily to the tree house in the Fabians' yard to get the lay of the land, make sure we were not being watched. This was study time for some. School or not, we all had to keep up, and it was piano lesson time for Contamination Black-Eyes. She is the worst, the very worst, about not letting our least little move go unnoticed. Then, innocently (hah!) she brings it up when it will count the most, in front of a mom. She says, "Timmy. What were you and Nicky (that's us, remember) doing with shovels and things ... where were you going with them? You know Mommy and Daddy don't like you to take the shovel out of the cellar ... there's no snow to shovel ... unless you ask. Did you ask?"

I said all that to Tornid.

"I know," he said gloomily, hating to have to say this about one of his very own sisters.

Well, luckily that Contamination girl was having her piano lesson. She takes from Lucy's mother, named Cornelia Crane, and was in there now; you could see the two of them through their dining-room windows in the house next door—Mrs. Crane and Contamination Black-Eyes, sitting side by side at the piano, arching their necks, bending their shoulders, like true musicians do. Every Fabian, except LLIB who is too little, takes piano from Lucy's mom, one of the nice moms. Lucy herself is too little to qualify for "contamination." There was no sign of the rest of the Contamination tribe.

This tree house of the Fabians is not a real tree house made out of boards and nails and constructed in a big tree. Couldn't be. The only tree in the Fabians' yard is a peach tree Hugsy Goode planted when he lived here, and it's in blossom now. This tree house is a bought metal tree house on top of high metal poles, and it has a red and white striped tin canopy over it to keep rain out. It has a ladder to get up onto it and a slide to slide down from it. It's a neat place to give shows and circuses on, or to just plain sit and think, or to watch what's going on. LLIB and Lucy often give a circus on it and have their lunch there, even in the rain.

Anyway, right now, nothing was going on anywhere that we could see, which was good for us. Because what was about to be going on was going to be done by us ... Tornid Nubsy Fabian and Copin Nubsy Carroll ... at the start of historic excavations.

We slid down the slide, hurried to the hidey hole, lowered ourselves into it, checked our apparatus, felt the walls. They were made of brick, dark red brick, like the houses, and were covered with dried vine roots and twining thicker branches. The wall behind us was just plain wall, as were the walls to our left and right. But the wall toward the dining room had the two small cellar windows above the Fabians' washtubs that looked out on the hidey hole. But they were so dirty and vine-covered we felt safe from snooping eyes, those of the Contamination girls, especially, who otherwise might watch us from the cellar while we worked.

We trailed some more of the squash vines over the windows and felt really out of sight.

The wall we were most interested in was the one to our left under the kitchen. We felt all along this wall to see if there was a door, a trap door, maybe, gone unnoticed all these years. There wasn't. With a piece of chalk I drew a large circle on this wall where I supposed the best place to begin the chipping should be, at the very bottom of the hidey hole.