William S. and the Great Escape (4 page)

She sighed. And then, making it into a question, she added, “And buying our bus tickets to Gold Beach?”

“Well, maybe, maybe not.” William shrugged. “Who knows how much money it takes to buy four Greyhound Bus tickets all the way to Gold Beach?”

“You don't have enough money?” Jancy's voice was quivering dangerously.

“I probably have enough,” William said hastily. “You don't have to worry about that. What you do need to
worry about is how we can get all the way to the station before Big Ed starts looking for us. With Buddy in the wagon or not, it's going to take us quite a while to get to Crownfield.”

“Like how long do you think?” Jancy asked.

William shook his head. “Well, it's almost five miles. Five miles with two little kids and a lot of baggage. Who knows? Three or four hours?” Making a joke, he grinned and added, “Or maybe three or four days?”

At least he thought he was joking.

B
y the time William and Jancy climbed down from the hayloft and scooted, one at a time, across the barnyard, their planning was pretty well under way, and what each of them had to do for the rest of the day had been decided on. Jancy's assignment was to find something like suitcases or knapsacks or, if it came to that, old flour sacks. Anything that would hold her clothes as well as Buddy's and Trixie's, including jackets and shoes and some other pretty bulky stuff.

Since William already had all his stuff packed and ready to go, his first job was to pull the wagon across a few yards of overgrown ground without being noticed, and hide it under a big acacia bush right next to the highway. When that was accomplished, there was only one important thing left for him to do, and that was to take a long nap. That might not sound like a very important job, if you didn't stop to think about the fact that he was going to have to be wide-awake at three in the morning. The way he figured it, the only solution would be for
him to nap as long as he could during the afternoon and then, when night came, simply stay up and wide-awake until three a.m. Sounds simple enough, huh? Finding a place to take a daytime nap might not sound like a very difficult assignment, unless all your choices happened to be in Baggett territory, on a hot day in August.

To begin with, the attic was out. At midday in August, William's attic hang-out might make it easy to believe in hell as an actual location, but other than that, it didn't serve any useful purpose. As a place to nap, for instance, it was definitely out of the question, unless you didn't mind winding up medium-rare. After checking to see just how bad it was, William quickly decided to look elsewhere.

At first no other possibility came to mind. The hayloft in the barn was almost as hot as the attic, plus there was the hay-fever thing. But by using patience and persistence, William finally discovered a solution to his problem.

Far back in the cow barn/car cemetery were the remains of an ancient Cadillac that had long ago lost its wheels and motor, but the body was pretty much in one piece—a body that included a backseat in fairly good condition. The glass in a couple of windows was missing, but to an imaginative person that was only another advantage. After hanging a couple of dripping-wet gunnysacks over the broken windows, William stretched out in a watercooled Cadillac and slept until dinnertime.

After managing to get his hands on a little corned beef hash and a few slices of fried potatoes without being hassled too much by Gary and the twins, he went back to his Cadillac bedroom, rewet the gunnysacks, and slept until it was quite dark. It wasn't until after midnight, when the temperature had dropped quite a bit, that he made his way carefully and quietly to his attic hideout to gather up his belongings and stay wide-awake as he watched the hands of his no-longer-alarming clock creep silently toward three o'clock in the morning.

The noisy late-night hours crept by as usual, while the teenage Baggetts and their friends laughed and swore at the top of their lungs and tramped up and down the stairs. Around one the noise faded away to a few distant snores, and it wasn't until a good while after that, just as the hands touched twelve and three, that William started down, pulling his knapsack after him, hoping against hope that the extra weight wouldn't break the splintery rungs of the ladder and dump him and everything he owned on the floor with a noisy thump.

The rungs creaked but held together—another disaster safely avoided—and a few minutes later William was tiptoeing down the hall to the room Jancy shared with the little kids. Waking the two girls was quick and easy. All dressed except for their shoes, they were on their feet in a minute, wide-eyed and silent. Next was getting Buddy to the bathroom, which shouldn't make anyone
suspicious, since everybody knew that was William's regular middle-of-the-night chore. Except that tonight, if they happened to meet someone, there might have to be an explanation of why both he and Buddy were wearing their daytime clothes.

Again their luck held, no Baggetts in the bathroom. But then came getting everyone downstairs, out the front door, across the front porch, and down the short path that led to the highway. That looked to be a much bigger production.

Deciding that turning on the light on the stairs was less dangerous than feeling their way down in complete darkness, William walked Buddy as far as the light switch before they all started downstairs. Jancy went first, staggering under the weight of William's heavy knapsack. Right behind her, Trixie carried a stuffed pillowcase under one arm and an equally fat flour sack under the other, every now and then making a soft squeaking noise like a halfway stifled scream. And in third—and fourth— place was Buddy, being supported, pushed along, and hoisted up and down by William. And every time Trixie gasped, or Buddy mumbled, or a floorboard squeaked, William felt a quiver run up his backbone as he imagined shuffling footsteps right behind him, and a loud voice demanding to know what the hell they thought they were doing.

The front door opened with an alarming squeak,
and closed with an even louder clunk, as the staggering procession made its way across the dangerously decrepit veranda, stumbled down the front steps, and shuffled slowly along the path to the highway.

Fortunately the night was cloudless, but the half-full moon gave barely enough light to distinguish the open road from the underbrush on either side. Once out on the tarmac, still warm and sticky from the day's heat, William's breath came a little easier, but not much. The Old Westbrook Highway wasn't a very busy road, especially at three o'clock in the morning, but even one passing car would be too many. It didn't seem likely that any driver catching sight of four overloaded kids staggering down the dark road at such an hour could be counted on to mind their own business and go right on by.

But even though their pace was frustratingly slow, not a single car appeared before they had covered the few yards to the big acacia bush and the red wagon's hiding place. Once there, Jancy managed to keep Buddy upright while William loaded the knapsack and the flour sack. Next came Buddy himself.

It wasn't easy. Buddy was a pretty solid four-year-old, and it took both William and Jancy to lift him onto the load and prop him up into an almost sitting position with the overstuffed pillowcase. After that it was a little easier. With William pulling, and Jancy and Trixie pushing and
propping up Buddy, they started down the dark road.

They had been on their way for about an hour, and maybe for a mile or even two, when the crisis William had been expecting started to happen. At first there was only the sound—a faint hum that swiftly became a roar. A car was coming, and although it probably wasn't a Baggett, since it was coming from the wrong direction, it was still dangerous. It wouldn't be safe for them to be seen by anyone.

Grabbing Buddy and pulling him out of the wagon, and telling Jancy and Trixie to bring the wagon, William headed into the dark shadows beside the road. He didn't get far. A few steps past the edge of the pavement he ran blindly into a wall of stiff prickly bushes. Trying to support Buddy with one hand while he pushed his way into the undergrowth with the other, William only succeeded in dropping Buddy and falling on top of him. And then Buddy started to cry and William was shouting to the girls to “Get the wagon off the road and lie down flat.”

The girls did what he told them to, and a few seconds later the car roared past without even slowing down. William got to his feet, brushing dirt and bits of dry leaves off himself and a loudly wailing Buddy.

It took awhile, maybe five or ten minutes, before Buddy calmed down enough to listen to their explanations. William tried first. “Hey, Buddy,” he said, trying to sound cheerful and enthusiastic. “We're taking a walk—a nice,
long walk. Only you get to ride in the wagon. See the nice wagon, Buddy?”

Buddy gulped, sobbed, and cried louder. And then Trixie said, “We're going back to where we used to live. Remember how good everything was at Auntie's house, Buddy? That's where we're going.”

Buddy was still wailing.

It was Jancy who thought of calling it a game. “We're playing a game, Buddy,” she told him. It's a game about finding our way in the dark.” She leaned closer and took Buddy's face between her hands. “It's a game about walking in the dark.”

Buddy gulped, swallowed hard, gulped again, and asked, “A game?”

Jancy nodded.

Buddy wiped his tearful face with both hands and looked around. “A game in the dark?” he asked.

“Yes, in the dark,” Jancy said. “That makes it more fun. We have to walk a long way in the dark to find a surprise. Only you get to ride all the way there in the wagon, and then maybe you'll be the one who gets the surprise.”

Buddy wiped his face again before he nodded and said, “And I get to ride in the wagon.”

Jancy knew how to handle little kids. A few minutes later they were back on the road.

But there was still a long way to go.

T
hey had walked for another mile or so—with William pulling the wagon, the girls pushing, and supporting Buddy who had gone back to sleep and was swaying limply from side to side—before it happened again. But this time the faint hum of a distant motor came from behind them—from back in the direction of the Baggett farmhouse.

Imagining a pickup truck full of angry Baggetts bearing down on them, William hastily lifted Buddy out of the wagon and staggered off the road, down a steep slope, and into the deeper darkness under a tree. Behind him the girls followed, dragging the lurching, tilting wagon. The noise built up to a menacing roar— nearer and louder, nearer and louder—and went on by. Silence—except for a three-way sigh of relief.

They had started to scramble back up the slope when William heard Jancy gasp. “What is it? What happened?” he asked.

“It's gone,” Jancy wailed. “I can't find it. The wheel is gone.”

There followed a general scramble up and down the slope with a now half-awake Buddy trying to help, stumbling around as he demanded over and over again, “What are we looking for, Jancy? Are we still playing the game? If I find it, do I get to keep it?”

It was William who found the wheel at last in the deep shadows under the tree, but then there was the problem of putting it back on the wagon. Fortunately, Jancy, the natural-born mechanic, had packed a screwdriver and a pair of pliers in with her underwear, so eventually the wheel was reattached and they were back on the road.

But it had all been very time-consuming. Looking to the east, William could see that the sky was changing from deep black to a shimmering silvery gray, and not far ahead they could see a scattering of lights. Morning was on its way, they had reached the outskirts of Crownfield, and the going-to-work traffic was beginning to build up.

By the time they reached the first turnoff on the outskirts of town, they had had to scramble out of sight three more times. “It's no good,” Jancy said. “We're spending more time hiding than we are going toward town. What shall we do, William?”

He looked around, and came to a quick decision. “We'll turn off here,” he told her. “That way we can get to town by going down Gardenia Street. It's a
little longer that way, but it should be quieter. People who live on Gardenia probably don't get up as early as farmers do.”

Gardenia Street was where a lot of nice houses had been built back in the good old days before the Depression. Old houses that, for the most part, had wide yards and big trees. It was a street where, just as William had predicted, not many lights were on that early in the morning.

At first their new route seemed to be working fine. The wagon moved more easily on sidewalks than on the bumpy highway shoulder, and a few streetlights were still on, making it possible now and then to actually see where they were going. Buddy was nearly awake, enough to sit up without being propped, and Jancy and Trixie were walking a few steps behind. They had been making good time for several minutes when Trixie suddenly began to squeal. One frantic squeal after another.

Dropping the wagon tongue, William whirled around in time to see something huge and black emerging from a gap in a high hedge and rushing toward Jancy and Trixie in great bounding leaps. Something inside William's head yelled at him,
Do something! Quick, do something!
He clearly heard those exact words, but nothing that told him what that something ought to be.

He had grabbed up his knapsack and was getting ready to swing it, heavy
Shakespearean
lump and all, and
both Trixie and Buddy were gasping and squealing, when Jancy started walking toward the bulgy black monster, holding out her hands.

“Nice doggy,” she was saying. “Come, nice doggy. Come.”

When William's brain calmed down enough to quit telling him they were all about to be eaten alive, he could see that Jancy was right. It was only a dog, and apparently a pretty friendly one. Enormous, and in the semidarkness enough to scare anybody, but sure enough, friendly. Dropping the knapsack, William went back to join Jancy and be covered with sloppy but obviously welcoming kisses.