The Tunnel of Hugsy Goode (13 page)

But you can't say Hugsy put the idea of bones in our heads.
The Brooklyn Eagle
gets the credit for that idea. It told about those children that found those forty skeletons in the rubble of those ancient homes they tore down in Brooklyn Heights before they got around to proclaiming that part of the city a landmark—a landmark like we hope this tunnel will be, and the Alley and the Myrtle Avenue El will be. Haven't heard from the mayor
yet!
What's the matter with him, I wonder.

"Tornid," I said. "If we find bones, let's not act surprised. Let's not say, 'Yikes,' let's not run."

"Let's just say, 'Hurray!'" said Tornid.

We started down the alley under the Alley slowly, cautiously. Quiet? Wow! Sometimes we felt a vibration.

"Not an earthquake," I whispered.

"No," Tornid whispered.

"Trucks above tearing down Larrabee," I whispered.

"Yes," he whispered.

It was spooky down here, and we were whispering like Holly in the presence of grownups.

"Hey," I whispered. "Why are we whispering? From now on, when I have to whisper something, I'm going to say it, not whisper it."

"Me, too," whispered Tornid, not wanting to be the first to hear his voice.

My flashlight cast a long bright beam into the glooming. We were in the neat six feet high, three feet wide tunnel under what on top is the top of the T of the Alley. After seventy-eight steps, as it is above anyway, we should be under the Alley in back of Billy Maloon's house where there is the drain the kids stuff their things into. There, there must be another bend going up the long end of the T of the Alley. From it, we hoped to find an ell leading under Jane Ives's house and to her pit or office, the main one for business, as I had drawn it. I still hoped for a crawling, narrow type of passage there. But everything doesn't have to be exactly as I had drawn it. There are bound to be some surprises...

Suddenly Tornid whispered, "What's that?"

"What's what?" I asked, still whispering, too.

"That," whispered Tornid. "That, up there, straight ahead?"

Tornid has better eyesight than me, doesn't have to wear glasses, not even for reading. So he spots things faster. "Looks like a chair," he said.

I spotted it, too. "'Tis a chair!" I said.

There, where we figured must be under Billy Maloon's back fence, there was a chair, facing itself up the vertical line of the T, if the tunnel alley was a T-shaped one, like the Alley above.

We stood still.

The chair was vacant, as far as we could tell, nothing visible anyway. But it looked as though it expected a sitter. We kept our lights on it and studied it. In all my plans, I had never drawn a chair, a human chair.

"Who do you think it's waiting for?" I asked Tornid, still whispering.

"I dun-
no
," whispered Tornid.

We took one more step forward. Nothing happened. Cautiously, step by step, we made our way to the chair.

"Maybe it's waiting for us?" said Tornid.

"You mean ... some sort of trap?" I asked.

"Maybe..." said Tornid.

Tornid and me were puzzled. Here we'd been thinking about lost rivers, mazes, the Minotaur, bones and skeletons. Instead here was a human chair. It was a straight-backed chair with wooden arms and legs and rungs, and it had some kind of needlework on its faded red velvet seat. It faced up the under alley just the way Billy Maloon's house above did. It looked like a throne, vacant, waiting for a king.

It also looked kind of like the chair in Connie Ives's house named the Uncle Ham chair. Lots of chairs in Connie Ives's house have names. You can sit in some of the named chairs, the Uncle Ham chair for one, the Lincoln rocker for another. But not the George Washington chair. "Don't sit in that chair (the George Washington chair)," is one of the few don'ts of the Ives's house.

Since this chair in the tunnel looked like the Uncle Ham chair at the Ives's, one of the sitting-allowed chairs, we decided to sit in it, come what, come may. Tornid sat first. This was fair since he saw it first. No one said, "Don't sit in that chair."

I sat next.

The chair bugged me. It was the only piece of furniture down here, so far anyway. Usually there's no furniture in a tunnel that I ever heard of. I had sat down carefully, not to break it. Some dust blew out, but the chair didn't wobble. It was in good shape, just as good shape as the Uncle Ham chair in the home of Connie Ives, where some dust blows out, too.

I crossed my legs. I asked Tornid, "What shall we name this chair? It looks like the Uncle Ham chair. Should we name it the Uncle Ham, Junior, chair? There's a man by that name in the family of Connie Ives as well as a just plain Uncle Ham."

We were speaking out loud now, not whispering, because a chair makes you feel you are in a parlor, not a tunnel. "I dun-
no
..." said Tornid. "I'll think."

I began to feel more and more at home, having this real chair to sit in that no one said not to sit in. If I had been a grown man and had a cigar, I would have smoked it. But, I reminded myself, it's not a good idea to feel too safe. I might be sitting on some invisible person, some smoogman, dust smoogman, maybe. "Keep on guard" is my motto in Alley above and alley below.

I shone my flashlight to my right. The beams reached the end, the wall at the end of the T.N.F. passageway. I shone it to my left. The beams reached the end there, too, another wall outside the Bernadettes' house above, the other end of the top of the T. Then I cast my beams far ahead, and they did not reach any end where we hoped a Circle might be. Too bad we couldn't string little electric lights up and down so we could see the whole of the under-alley T at once.

So far, except for the unexpected pleasure of a chair to sit on, all was according to my maps and plans. I felt for my map. There might be a pickpocket smoogman who'd already gotten a hold of it. But it was safe, and I drew a small square on it meaning chair, where the chair was.

"Copin," Tornid said. "This chair looks like a chair I saw in Maine once. They said, in that family where it was, that it was a beadle's chair."

"That's what we'll name it, then," I said. "The Beatles' chair."

"I said 'beadle,' not 'Beatle,'" said Tornid.

"Well, 'Beatle' is more up to date," I said. "And, so far, there hasn't been a chair named for them, not even in Jane Ives's house, where they name chairs and like the Beatles." I began to whistle softly "A long day's night," the chair made me feel that much at home in the tunnel.

"Long day's night," said Tornid. "That's what it is down here all right. Good place for raccoons," he said.

"And us," I said, feeling more and more nonchalant.

Tornid was standing beside me. I was sitting. His arm was on the arm of the chair. I felt like a king. The chair felt like my throne. "An artist should paint us here," I said. We stayed in this pose for a while, but there weren't any artists around to paint us, and no one with a camera either. Then an idea came to me.

"I think we should name this chair the
Throne of Hugsy Goode,
" I said, "not the Beatles' chair. All this alley tunnel, all we find in it is because of the ESP of Hugsy Goode."

So I wrote that name above the chair in psychedelic chalk.

"Can I write something somewhere on the wall with my chalk?" asked Tornid.

"Oh, sure," I said.

I poked around in front of the chair with my shillelagh. It hit something metal. It was a drain. "Hah!" I said. "That architect that planned this tunnel, he allowed for everything. That's where the lost river lost itself. The tunnel builder allowed for seepage."

"Ah," said Tornid.

I flashed my light straight up. There was a gurgling sound up there—from the drain, of course, outside the gate of Billy Maloon. Naturally the Alley drain couldn't be seen, and the sky couldn't be seen, or the tunnel would have been discovered long ago. The drain on top had to drain off to somewhere else ... to the pipes under Larrabee, not to down here ... or the alley tunnel could not have been kept secret all these years.

"Ah, yes," I said. "But time now, Tornid, old boy, old boy, to continue with the questing..."

"Can I sit a minute again before we go?" Tornid asked. "In the Throne of King Hugsy the Goode, now that it's named?"

"Sure," I said.

Tornid sat down. Then ... I'm not kidding—it's enough to make the gooseflesh rise even now ... we heard the words,
DON'T SIT IN THAT CHAIR!

Tornid leaped up. We both leaped down the alley into the glooming toward T.N.F., home base. My flashlight was askew, and it cast beams anywhere except straight ahead. We knocked into the wall at the end of the main tunnel and got bruised. We were glad we knew to turn right into the narrow passageway of T.N.F. to get back to our entrance into the hidey hole. There was the pale light from the world above slanting on the wall opposite our hole. What a relief! Escape was possible.

Our strings and threads were all tangled around our arms and legs, but somehow we got out. Tornid climbed on my shoulders and hoisted himself the rest of the way up the heavy rope. I then hoisted myself up the rope, muttering charm words "...taeb ti, taeb ti..." to keep things behind me from grabbing me and sucking me back, whoever or whatever those things might be that said those creepy words,
DON'T SIT IN THAT CHAIR!

Tornid was shaking as badly as the day of the expedition to Myrtle Avenue when his dad took him by the hand and said not one word. I was shaking, too. We climbed up into the tree house to let our shakes subside. Nothing seemed to have followed us out, so after a while we began to shake less.

"Who could have said those words,
DON'T SIT IN THAT CHAIR
?" I asked.

"I dunno..." said Tornid. "The raccoon, maybe?" He gave his crackly little laugh that meant the remark could be taken as a joke or for real, however it struck me.

I said, "I've heard of a talking dog. But I never heard of a talking raccoon."

"He's a sport raccoon, though," said Tornid.

I said, "Yeah. But I don't think it was Racky."

"No, he wouldn't know how to speak English anyway," said Tornid. "If he did speak, he'd probably speak Raccoonese."

"How do you say, 'Don't sit in that chair!' in Raccoonese?" I asked.

Well, we began to laugh. After terror, and you find yourself safe, still alive and not hurt—intact, in fact—you have to have a laughing jag. We began to untangle our string and wind up the threads. We thought the whole thing over. Then we grew shivery again. We had not thought up the words. They were not on our map. They were real. Yikes!

Would we have the courage to go back down in the Tunnel of Hugsy Goode again?

French words, those are—
Courage, mon ami.
I don't know much French, just
ooh la la, oui,
and
au revoir.
Also this expression, "
Courage, mon ami,
" which I learned from my Contamination sister Star, who is taking up the language. And, brother! When I say "taking it up," I mean taking it up, and it is
ooh la la
every second. Oh yes, and also
Fermez la bouche,
which means in plain English, "Shut up!"

So now, Contamination Star not being around to correct the pronunciation (
courage
rhymes, in French, with garage), I spoke these French words to Tornid, and I translated them for him. "They mean," I said, "Courage, my friend."

These rallying words made Tornid laugh. He even slid down the slide from the tree house, walked to the hidey hole and back, to show how effective they were. Then he climbed back up for more
courage.

I replenished the supply. "
Courage, mon ami,
" I said. I know I sounded exactly French because I sounded like Star. We laughed and we laughed, still reacting to our terror at the words we'd heard a few minutes ago in the underground town—if it had a chair in it, it must be some sort of town.

Two of the
grils
—they were the two stranger ones—were playing jump rope outside Billy Maloon's gate where the water drain is. The names of these two stranger
grils
are Marlene and Charlene. I have watched them from the Arps' tree. They don't count in Alley life yet—as far as Tornid and me go, anyway. We don't see them, they don't see us. They are agreeable about doing most of the turning when other
grils
jump rope with them. They have deadpan faces, chew gum, look blank, try not to make a false move. They sound like all
grils
saying jump-rope chants—I've heard they've brought some new ones to the Alley. I haven't heard these yet. Me and Tornid are too busy with our plans.