The Tunnel of Hugsy Goode (6 page)

"Not ever?" said Notesy. I could tell Notesy thought this was rough. She is the least contaminated of the Contamination girls, and I may drop calling her that. I'll tell Tornid to lay off of Notesy, that she's safe now. Not to hold his nose or shield his eyes when she comes our way. If I ever do see Tornid again.

How about our tunnel plans? He could dig somewhere and I could dig somewhere else, and we could meet underground if we charted the right course. But it's not as much fun to dig alone as with two.

Now. I still hadn't mailed my plan to the mayor because I didn't know whether it would take one or two or more stamps, and I wanted to show it to Jane Ives first, see how it struck her. So, one day I asked my mom ... she was in a good mood, having coffee in the kitchen with Bayberry, one of Mrs. Fabian's nicknames, who lowered her blue eyes when I came into the room ... I asked my mom if I could go over to Jane Ives's house a minute to look up something for school in her books.

I could hardly believe my ears. "Yes," my mom said. "Come back in half an hour. It's better than having you slam-banging up over our heads."

I went back up to my room and got my letter to the mayor, put it between the pages of a newspaper, and went out, not slamming the door in hopes of further reduction of repressions. I rang Jane's back doorbell.

She smiled. "Hey, Copin. Hello," she said. "I've sure missed you."

"Yeah..." I said.

Jane did not comment on the trouble I'd been in. We just picked up where we had left off ten days before. I carefully took my El plan out of the newspaper and showed it to her. It looked neat. Jane looked at the address, saw it was important, and washed her hands so they would not smell of onion.

"You're getting to be like John, writing letters to mayors and people," she said.

"Read it," I said.

She read it. She liked it. I could tell from her expression she really liked it. She was very enthusiastic. She said, "It's great! Why hasn't anyone ever thought of this plan before?"

"How many stamps do you think it will take to mail it?" I asked.

"Well," she said. "I don't know. I'll mail it for you. I have to go to the Post Office anyway."

"I'll pay you back for the stamps," I said. "And don't tell anyone, not anyone at all, about my El plan. It's just as
top secret
as the tunnel maps and plans."

"OK," she said, and poured me some tomato juice that I fixed up with the usual Worcestershire sauce and salt and everything available.

Then I sat down at the dining-room table and consulted my maps and labyrinths and tunnel charts, dusty from their ten days' vacation under the television. But I missed Tornid, my partner.

"Seen Tornid?" I asked Jane.

"Haven't laid eyes on him in days," she said.

"Well, Jane," I said, "when him and me get back to work and get the tunnel found, and if it does go on over to Myrtle ... sometimes I think it does ... and if the mayor
does
let the Feast Line be built, and galleries and restaurants in the stations, then maybe you and me and Tornid could go over there by way of tunnel on rainy days and have pizza or chow mein without your even getting your feet wet."

"That would be great," she said.

I started home. I was singing, "Oh, the good Myrtle Avenue Line..." but I stopped when I got close to home, not to remind the moms of that famous day and year.

Then ... knock me flat!

When I got home ... two pieces of news. One, I was going to be allowed out in the Alley again, but not out front. Two, Tornid was going to be allowed out, too, but not to play with me. Stunned at these tidings, I went back out and sat down on the curb. I didn't know what to do, release had been so sudden.

Then I went back in and got Tornid's copy of the mayor's letter. I put it in my pocket. If I had a chance, I'd slip it to him ... if he came out.

Then I went back out and stood in the Alley and felt lonesome. Then I measured myself against the Arps' tree to see if I'd grown an inch in the ten days. I couldn't tell. Without someone's help you don't get an accurate report. Then I zinged a rope on the pavement to see dust fly and hear the zing.

I looked for Tornid out of the corner of my eye. Though we couldn't play with each other, I could mouth my words to him. Him and me often practice mouthing our words, not saying them out loud so Contamination girls could hear them. We always know what the other is saying. It is one of the things we practice, like sometimes speaking our own secret language, words we have made up. We have made a dictionary of these secret words, and of the code we use when we spell words backward like
TRATS
. We have many devices of keeping our plans, mainly our tunnel plans, top secret. They are all under the television in Jane Ives's house.

If I see Tornid out of the corner of my eye, I'll mouth real words, though, not made-up ones in case he's forgotten them in the ten days. I'll mouth, "Ya dumb cluck, ya..." so he'll know I don't hold it against him I'd gotten him in trouble. But ... no sign of the guy. He might have died and people keeping it from me.

Then, my sister, Star! She came along, always the bearer of bad tidings. You have to sort them out, what to believe, what not. She said, "I hear Tornid is never going to come out in the Alley again. If he can't play with you ... and he never can again ... then he's going to just plain stay in. I caught a glimpse of him in the window," she said. "His face was so ... white!"

Star wouldn't care if Tornid died. She'd be able to say I told you so to me till the end of my life. I hit the pavement with my rope, making it zing, and the dust flew up. And that was to show Star what was it to me. She walked off.

I thought, no wonder Tornid would rather stay in. If he couldn't play with me or even talk to me, and if I was out in the Alley, where was he going to be? The Alley isn't all that big to have non-speakers in it. Maybe I was selfish if I came out every day of the week and him feel he had to stay in. Maybe we should rig it up so's I'd be out, say Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and him be out Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. We could split Sundays ... me, morning, him afternoon, because he can't use Sunday morning because he goes to Sunday school, and I have to have Sunday second breakfast, usually sausage, at Jane's.

Then ... knock me flat!

There came Tornid ... walking slowly up the Alley. He looked bashful, and his shoulders were hunched over as though he thought all eyes were on him and he must shrink. I didn't know where to look or what to say, even in our silent mouthing-the-words language. I felt bashful, too. It's catching.

Anyway, out of the side of my mouth, I said menacingly, in plain straight-ahead English, "Get out of my sight, Tornid. Do you want to be incarsecrated again?"

"I won't be," he said. He looked at me straight on. He was still bashful, but he had spoken.

"How come?" I said.

"I dunno," he said. "They just said I can play with you in the Alley, or my house, or your house, or in Jane Ives's. That's all, not go anywhere. What's that you got there? Why's it so fancy? Is it about the tunnel? Another neat plan?"

"It's a neat plan, all right," I said. "But it's not about the tunnel. We get back on with that next."

I gave Tornid his copy of the El plan, which was named Cop. No. 2. "Read it," I said.

He just looked at it.

"Whatsa matter, cantcha read, ya dumb cluck?" I said. So we were friends like always and began to forget the ten days.

"I can only read my writing," Tornid said. "We're not up to this office business kind of writing in school yet."

"Listen, Torny old boy, old boy. This is a copy of a plan I have sent to the mayor. This is your own copy, your very own I made for you. I have the first draft of it that I made it up on," I said.

"Well, what does it say?" asked Tornid. "Is it very long?"

No contamination being around to eavesdrop, we climbed up the Arps' tree where the reading could be private. "Are you listening, Torny, old boy, old boy?"

"I'm paying attention," he said.

I read him the plan, addresses and all.

"Neat," he said.

"You're the co-author of this plan," I said. "Like you are the co-author of all my plans. Because you were with me the day I thought it up, the day of the famous ride."

Tornid laughed his crackly laugh. His eyes shone. "I never been a co-author before, not that I know of, anyway," he said. And he put his letter in his inside jacket pocket where it crinkled whenever he moved.

I looked at him solemnly. I said, "May this plan that I thought of that came out of that /‹famous journey, like the century plant that blooms but once in a century, blossom forth as beautifully and cancel out the disgrace of that day and year. How do you like that?" I asked. "I wrote those flowery words in an English essay last week for my English teacher, Miss Dinwiddie, a real neat teacher who wanted us to write something about what we'd been doing lately. Of course I didn't say it was a ride on the El ... no sirree ... I'm not letting anyone hear this plan until it is adopted by the landmarks association ... if it is. For the teacher, I put the ride underground instead, a subway, and my plan for that was there'd be one special subway train, which you'd never know whether you'd get it or not, that would never stop and it would go and go and go to the end of the line and farther, way way out in the country where there are woods and plants and rivers.... She gave me an A, she did. Did I get a compliment from my mom? Nope. But then I didn't show it to her."

"I didn't make up any of that El plan," Tornid said. All Fabians have this streak of honesty.

"Nope. But you were with me, and I wouldn't have made it up if we hadn't gone. Right, Torny, old boy, old boy?"

"Right," he said.

The shackles on Tornid and me are untied now. Bygones, bygones. I can go to the library, to Mike's art store, and to school, except there isn't any school again right now. Strike ... on again. Tornid has to stay in the Alley, but we have the three best houses to go in plus, with special permission, the house of Mr. Orville Nagel, the man with all the lights and trains and signs and souvenirs of parts of bygone trolley cars. His house is a museum. I wish you could see it. Neat! Sometimes he blows an ancient steam whistle from an Erie Canal boat for us. Neat! It's his front doorbell.

Tornid and me are standing in his backyard. We still feel strange, trying to pick up life where it left off eleven days ago ... that would be seventy-seven days in the life of a cat, I'm told.

I said, "It's three days since Jane mailed the El plan. I haven't heard from the mayor yet."

"Maybe he lost it," said Tornid.

"Ya dumb cluck!" I said. "Mayors don't lose things. Jane Ives says he'll answer. And she should know! Says John Ives wrote the mayor once (he writes governors, senators, presidents, everybody all the time about anything that makes him rage), and it took the mayor two weeks to answer him. And he is a grownup. It always takes longer to answer a boy. I might not hear for a week, a month, a year...
¿Quién sabe?
"

"
Sabe,
" said Tornid.

I said, "Ya know how long it took me to answer that chain letter I got from that guy out in Kalamazoo, Mich. 82089? One week. I had to copy it ten times and send it to ten different guys so I will get one hundred or more letters in the mail—how do you like that? I sent you one. It all cost me sixty cents in stamps. But I did it. If I hadn't a done it, someone, the last one—name was Pete Calahan—he could have cast a gloom on me and everyone ahead of us on the list. Now the mayor ... he only has to write once, not ten times. Ya hear me?"

"Yeah," said Tornid, "I heard."

"One thing bugs me, though. Maybe I should have signed it 'Nicholas Carroll' not Copin. The postman has never heard of Copin. 'Whose that guy, Copin Carroll?' he might say to himself, and not leave the letter when the answer comes. If I see the postman, I'll tell him to watch out for a letter addressed to that guy, Copin Carroll ... say he's my cousin from Omaha visiting here a while."

"Cousin Copin! Ha-ha," said Tornid.

"So now, Tornid, old boy, old boy. Back to tunnel work," I said. "We have to find the under alley before summer comes and all of us go our different ways. The teachers' strike is a gift from heaven."

We hopped down into the hidey hole. Vines had grown thicker since we started Operation'T. (for tunnel) nearly two weeks ago. We were even more hidden now than then.

"I can't wait for the day when we'll find the main tunnel and then the cutoff one to the office under J.I.'s house," I said. I laughed. "We'll come out of it, find the trap door, or whatever kind of door it is, into her cellar, come up her cellar steps, smell the sausage from
that
side the kitchen door (we'll try to make it on a Sunday when she always has sausage), and say softly, not to scare her, 'Jane! Let us in. You went and locked the cellar door.' Hear her say, 'Why, Copin! Tornid! How'd you get down in my cellar when it's locked up tight?'

"Then I'd say, 'Stage 1 of Operation'T. has been finished. Next stage, finding where the passage from your cellar leads ... if it goes further than here ... connects up with small passageways to different houses ... is in the works.' Then, I'd invite her down to take a look around ... take a little jaunt to where we began ... right here at
TRATS
. So, back to work, ya lazy lug. The tools are OK. So, chip on, Torny, old boy, old boy, old boy. On to the tunnel! This tunnel exists all right. It's no pipe dream..."