The Tunnel of Hugsy Goode (25 page)

The next voice said, "Are we all here?"

That was the voice of Bayberry Fabian. The little lights and the voices were coming nearer. Tornid's mom was in front, the
grils
on each side of her, LLIB and Danny on each side of Tornid's dad. Then my dad holding Holly's hand, and my mom with all the rest of us except Branch, the baby. Who was minding him? I wondered. Maybe Lucy's mom, she has claustrophobia. My mom had her cow horn and suddenly blew a blast on it. It was enough to shatter your eardrums. She wanted to make the little ones feel at home, but instead it scared some and Holly cried. At least my mom and Tornid's mom didn't whistle their piercing whistles. When eardrums began to open up and people to recover, Danny or Star or Steve would write something on Tornid's and my—no—Hugsy Goode's tunnel wall. LLIB wrote LLIB. So that was where the
HA-HA'S
had come from, not from some smoogman or somebody.

Can you beat that? Writing words like that on our tunnel wall with the person we named it for crouching beside us right now and with a sprained ankle besides, also a bruised head. Yechh! Tornid and me had to get the upper hand again of the affair of the tunnel. They'd gone and spoiled all the fun of Tornid's and my surprise, these ... these ... invaders had!

Now, the troupe had gotten down to the throne, pausing only long enough to write their
HA-HA'S
. I got more and more boiling mad. All this was just the opposite of my plan. I had wanted to show them the tunnel, and now they had invaded it. I had planned to deliver Hugsy Goode to them alive and well, also the Minny. Now they had that, and they had all spoiled everything. I could even hear what they were saying in this glooming that used to belong only to Tornid and me—and now Hugsy, of course.

I heard Contamination Blue-Eyes say she must sit a minute, she was feeling faint, she wished she hadn't come. Even the mini had not been worth that much to her—she could have saved towel wrappers again and gotten another mini next year. She asked couldn't they all get out now, or someone get her a glass of water. And she slid into the Throne of Hugsy the Goode. In old books they would have said "swoon," but this is not an old book, this book is of now.

The sight of Contamination
gril
Blue-Eyes swooning in the Throne of Hugsy Goode made me madder than ever. So I bellowed with all my might, "Don't sit in that chair!"

The effect was electric. Blue-Eyes leaped up as though she had sat on a porcupine, swoon forgotten. Bayberry Fabian said, "Lights out!"

Then I said in a sepulchral voice, as though my words were being spoken by bones, "Who wrote the
HA-HA'S
on my wall? Who wrote the
HA-HA
by my head? Where's the rest of me?"

"That's not Jimmy Mannikin," said LLIB. "He's a good guy. He doesn't scare people."

"Whoo-oo?" I said. I was happy because I was in charge of the tunnel again.

No one answered. Just a bunch of whispers coming from up there by the throne. Hugsy Goode realized he was caught in the middle of some sort of Alley feud. He whispered, "This is better than the game of Meece when I was a kid in the old days of the Circle in the Alley."

"Hey, you all down there!" Hugsy Goode himself spoke, suddenly, in a normal Hugsy Goode voice, not sepulchral, not bone tones.

No one answered him. We heard, "Get behind me and Latona." The dramatic voice of Tornid's mom. "Or behind the chair."

We flashed Tornid's pale light down there and saw them all crouching. The moms still had their garb on, so they shielded lots of people behind their skirts. Then Bayberry said, "Come out. Come out wherever you are!" Then she said, "Now! Everybody! Lights on! Get ready to charge!"

We stepped out into the main tunnel. We were not scared any longer. They all turned on their lights. Right on us. What a crowd, Jane Ives, too! You would think we were on television or something. Maybe that's what Hugsy thought. He said one day last spring at college he was on television—some guys wanted to know about the generation gap. And now he said, in case it were television, "Thank you, thank you all, for this unusual and spectacular welcome back to my old haunts in the Alley. I have enjoyed almost every minute of it." He stood up straight, forgetting the ceiling. "Ouch!" he said. Our tall dads kept forgetting to stoop, too, and the three of them kept rubbing their heads.

The voice of my mom now. "That sounds like Hugh Goode."

"Oh, yes," said my dad. "His mother ... Gladys ... did phone. Remember?"

"Oh, my gawd, I sway-er!" said Tornid's mom. This was an expression she picked up in Vermont last summer, and it was not, in their family, considered swearing ... just a folk saying.

Now, what do you know about that? Hugsy Goode really thought I had planned this royal reception in the tunnel in honor of his homecoming to the Alley! "Nick—I mean Copin," he said, "you could write the mayor and have this place made into a landmark. I've never seen a tunnel alley under a real Alley before, and I've seen many campuses, and some have an alley—but none as good as this one. So, thank you, thank you all," he said to the throng at the throne.

The mayor himself could not have spoken with more polish, and here Hugsy was, a college boy with a bruised head. He deserved having the tunnel named after him and also the chair. It's nice to have been the one to think up a great thing like this tunnel, and fine to be able to make a good speech to say thank you when honored.

Then everybody swarmed toward us. "Nicholas! Explain," said my mom.

I didn't know where to begin, so said nothing. But Hugsy was warming up to the whole thing. He hobbled to his chair named after him, saw his name written over it in psychedelic chalk, sat in it since it had his name over it, didn't mind the
HA-HA
written over his name, said jesters through the ages have done that, said he was in dramatics at school and enjoyed playing the part of king of the under alley. He usually was given the part of an old man in a boat ... at school.

"This is better than off-off Broadway plays," he said, and lounged on his throne with his long left leg over the arm, to rest it.

Holly came up to Hugsy Goode and said, "It is Halloween. We are all ghosts."

Lucy, who is always exact, said, "Ghosts—but not in ghost costumes."

Hugsy Goode stood up a moment, waved my shillelagh—I hope he doesn't forget to give it back to me in the end—and said, "I dub you all knights and ladies of the under alley," and sat back down again.

"Well, boys, where does this all go?" asked Bayberry Fabian, her voice cracking a little the way Tornid's does sometimes.

"We'll show you," I said.

So, now at last, my dream come true—me and Tornid to lead an expedition of upper-Alley people through maze and tunnel to where me and Tornid know it goes. Hugsy Goode said he would stay on his throne because of his sprained ankle, that he had made the journey once already. "It's better than Disneyland," he said, "where things come out at you. And there are enough of you to scatter smoogmen to right and to left, nose them out of their dens, chase them and create chaos among their numbers."

"He should come back and live here," I whispered to Tornid. "The Alley would never be tame again."

"Yeah," said Tornid.

Leaving Hugsy on his throne—he said he might as well forget Paterson—with LLIB to keep him company, because he was too tired to go and wanted to stay with a king anyway, me and Tornid led off, my mom generously lending me her big flashlight. My mom and Bayberry sang. It was too bad we didn't have candles—it would have been prettier. But the flashlights cast a warm glow anyway. It was a friendly under alley, now. The moms borrowed our psychedelic chalk and wrote the names of all the children on their foreheads so they would not get lost.

Contamination Blue-Eyes had made a good recovery from her swoon. She had a spare mini tape for her recorder in her coveralls, and she taped us all as we strolled up the under alley, a record of the first group sing-in of the tunnel. It may be in the Grandby Library someday. If not, it should be. The moms sang songs like "Listen to the mocking bird, tweet, tweet," "If a body meet a body coming through the rye," and other songs suitable for the occasion. Then Bayberry sang, to please me and Tornid, finders of the under alley, "It's a long day's night." Not my mom, though, not even on this historic occasion would she sing Beatle. Yechh!

By this time we had gotten back to Passageway J.I., opposite which is Speciman A—the bone. I held up my hand for silence. (I may get a job as a guide someday in some park somewhere—it's fun explaining things.) "This," I said, "is where the skeleton, or the piece of it, is. The
grils
drew back in horror. They had not noticed Bone first time up ... just saw my picture of his head and had drawn
HA-HA
over it. They said they would never have written
HA-HA
over it or over anything if they had realized what an important tunnel this was.

Feeling brave with all the moms and dads around, and with the guy who thought up the tunnel in the first place sitting down there on his throne, I gave the bone a big tug and it came out of the silt and I held it up, and it was a long, long bone.

"Hm-m-m," said John Ives, who had arrived home from his conference just in time for the descent. John is a learned man, but he did not recognize the bone. "I am not an archaeologist," he said, "just a professor of English...and experts will have to do the real ferreting out of what bone this bone is. Too bad Professor Starr isn't here ... he'd know." So we placed the bone carefully back under its psychedelic head for future scrutiny by an expert.

And he said, John Ives said, that he would ask the people at the Museum of Natural History to take a look at it, put it in one or another of their cases, identify it with name and place of discovery. Mrs. Stuart, who was born in Brooklyn and grew up here, said she thought the bone should go to the Brooklyn Museum or Historical Society. It was found in Brooklyn and belonged here, though preferably not so near the under alley of
her
house. It was spooky having it right here, and she was glad she had not known about it all the years she lived here until this minute and her children grown now and off at college—so apt to have nightmares about it.

What a stream of learned men would be coming down to Tornid's and my tunnel to look at the bone! Right here's where I could be a boy tunnel guide, not at some faraway park, I and my pal, Tornid, guides of the Tunnel of Hugsy Goode.

Next we went on up to the Circle. Even though the Alley people had seen it, they wanted to see it again and reminisce about the one that used to be on top. Then we came back and turned into the narrow J.I. passageway.

"Creepy..." said Bayberry Fabian, and Blue-Eyes stuck right close to her to protect her.

"Now, we are under Jane Ives's house," I said. I gave Jane a grin. I couldn't help but feel proud. All those maps and mazes and plans, tunnel plans, drawn there, in her house, come true.

She said, "Copin. It's fantastic! Exactly as you and Tornid drew it. Exactly! Once I thought I heard you down here. I heard weird sounds. Were you? Was it you?"

I just gave her a wink ... she couldn't see it, though—it was too dark—so I said, "It was us."

Then on we went through Passageway J.I. amidst constant exclamations..."To think you had the courage to come through here, all by yourselves," and other gratifying words of praise, to which Tornid and me, though the terror of our first trips down was well remembered, just said, "Shucks, it was nothing."

When we reached the door marked
MEMORIAL HALL,
"Well, I'll be durned," said Tornid's mom.

"It doesn't mean a hall in memory of the guys the skeleton-maker made into skeletons," Tornid explained to reassure his mom. "It just means Memorial Hall where we go to the students' plays and dance concerts. You been there often."

"I thought we were going to end up in the river," said Jane Ives. "Some of your plans showed that that might happen."

"It doesn't, though," I said. "Tornid and me've been through that door and the next door, too. The next door is a door into the library. We tried to get Hugsy out that way. But somebody had locked it. And I dropped the key somewhere, so now we can't get in."

"Mercy!" said Bayberry.

So we proceeded back through Passageway J.I. and, singing, re-entered the main tunnel. Hugsy Goode and LLIB were glad to see us, and we all went back to T.N.F. and
TRATS
, and climbed out through the hole, big ones boosting little ones who didn't want to come out. They wanted to sleep down there, and Holly cried.

So there we all were then, in the Fabians' backyard, and Hugsy couldn't believe the peach tree was the one he had planted from a peach pit. But it was. The light from Billy Maloon's back stoop, a powerful beam, lighted up Tornid's garden, and we could see all of us and take count. No one was left behind, so the moms and the dads said they should block up the hole right now so little ones could not fall through it the way Hugsy Goode, a six-foot-three man in college, already had. But Tornid and me said, "We can't. Racky is still down there."