The Fourth Maudelaire
An affectionate parody of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, with every name changed. Free and non-commercial.
There's a book about the Maudelaire orphans by a man named Lemuel Thicket, and I'm not in it.
I read the whole thing twice, looking for me. The second time I used a pencil, in case I was hiding somewhere in a crowd scene. I wasn't. There isn't one Dale in the entire book. There isn't even a guy who seems like he might be named Dale.
It's a sad book, and Lemuel is a sad man. He wears a raincoat on clear days and writes everything down in a little notebook, and somehow he still left out the most important person who was there. So this is the corrected version.
My name is Dale Tummins. I'm forty-four, and I'm a consultant. I live above the Sudsy Duck Laundromat in Wendleton, where the floor stays warm all winter, and if you ever need a sock, the lost and found is basically yours.
You may know me from Season Thirty-One of Exile Isle, because people still recognize me. Last month a woman at the bus stop looked right at me and said, "Oh no." I hadn't even said anything yet. That's star power.
Lemuel likes to stop his story and explain what a word means, so I'll do it once, to show you how easy it is. Consultant. A consultant is a man who consults, and to consult means to sit by the phone in case somebody needs you. It's a lot like being a lifeguard, except you can do it in pajamas.
Lemuel says the Maudelaires had the worst luck of anyone he ever heard of. That's true, but he only heard about it. I was standing right next to it. Bad luck isn't catching, mostly. I only got a little on me.
The orphans are in this book too, so don't worry. They had a terrible time, and they were braver than any grown-up I ever met, and I was right there for most of it.
Usually behind them, holding something. But I was there.
Hollis Brandt, the man whose jet ski I sank in Lake Wendle, had started waiting outside the Sudsy Duck every morning in a folding chair, with a thermos. A man with a thermos is planning to stay, and I felt that was presumptuous.
"Four thousand dollars, Dale," he'd call up to my window, and I'd call down, "It's in the lake, Hollis. Take it up with the lake."
So I started leaving through the back window of the laundromat. It's a small window, and I'm not a small man, so I went out in stages.
One morning, about halfway out, I saw a newspaper in the alley. Somebody had circled an ad, but not very hard, so I circled it again with my finger to make it official.
The ad said, "Actors wanted. Count Oaf's theater troupe. No experience necessary. No pay. Start tonight." Underneath was an address in the city and a little drawing of an eye.
No experience necessary, and I had experience, so I was already ahead. And no pay meant it was about the art. Anybody can do something for money. It takes a real artist to do it for nothing, or a volunteer.
I'd been on television, so the stage would be a step down. But sometimes a star has to go back to his roots, and my roots were in Wendleton, and Hollis was sitting on them in a folding chair.
Phil Brumley is my best friend. He teaches high school biology, so he's free all summer. I've always felt that makes him a kind of public resource, like a park.
I went over to his apartment with the ad, and he answered the door sneezing at a fern.
"I need a ride to the city," I told him. "I've got an audition tonight."
"Dale, that's two hours away," Phil said.
"I'd do it for you," I said, "if I had a car, and you had an audition."
Phil read the ad twice. "No pay?" he said.
"That's how you know it's serious," I said.
Phil sighed. "One night," he said. "I'll drive you, and I'll stay one night, and then I'm coming home. I have to water the plants in my classroom."
"Phil, you'll never regret this," I said. He looked like he already did, but that was probably the fern.
We left that afternoon. Ten miles out of town, I checked the rearview mirror and saw a red pickup truck two cars back. It stayed two cars back the whole way.
"Don't look now," I told Phil, "but we've got an escort."
"That's Hollis," Phil said.
"Fan escort," I said. "Big stars get them."
And Hollis had been following my career closely for months. That's all a fan is, really.
I'd spent the last of my money on two hundred glossy headshots. People say you shouldn't spend your last dollar on yourself, but who else was I going to spend it on? Phil?
The picture is from Exile Isle. I'm standing on a beach, squinting, because the sun was out, and I'm holding half a coconut. You can't see the other half, and I won't say where it went. That's called mystery.
The man at the copy shop said he'd never printed that much squinting in one day. I tipped him a headshot, which left me with one hundred ninety-nine, so I sat down that night and made a list of who would get them.
One for Count Oaf. A few for the troupe. One for each person in the audience, if it wasn't a big audience. Some for the critics. One for my mother, who's asked me not to send any more, so she must be running low. And one for Hollis, so he'd finally have something of value from me.
That still left plenty. When you're famous, you hand them out to anybody, like waiters, or a man painting a fence, or a dog, if the owner looks like a fan.
The box was heavy and had sharp corners, so Phil carried it. He asked what was in it, and I told him, and he didn't say anything for a long time. I think he was moved.
He carried the box. I carried the vision.
Count Oaf's house was the worst house on a nice street. That takes effort. You have to really want it.
The paint was peeling and the windows were dirty, and the weeds in the yard came up to my chest. There was a tall tower on one side, with a single window at the very top. I figured that room was for the star.
There were eyes painted everywhere: an eye on the front door, an eye on the mailbox, and an eye on every shutter. Most people put out a welcome mat. Count Oaf wanted you to know that somebody was looking forward to seeing you, from every angle.
Phil carried the box of headshots up the walk and then went back to wait in the car, because of the weeds. Phil's allergic to most grasses, and those weeds weren't even trying to be grass anymore.
The front step had a hole in it, which I took as a courtesy, since it reminds you to watch your feet. Inside, the hall was dark and smelled of a sandwich that somebody had started a long time ago. Nobody else was there to audition. I figured word had gotten out that I was coming.
Count Oaf was in a room off the hall, reading a script with his feet up. He was tall and very thin, and he had one long eyebrow. It went all the way across, like he'd decided two was showing off. His eyes were very shiny, and I assumed he'd been crying about art.
"You," he said, without looking up. "What do you want?"
"I'm here for the audition," I said. "Dale Tummins, from Exile Isle, Season Thirty-One."
"Do you want money?" he said.
"No, sir," I said. "I'm in it for the art."
"You're hired," he said, and I asked him if he wanted to see me act first. "No," he said.
That's confidence. Some directors make you read a whole scene. A great director can tell just by the way you say you don't want money.
I handed him a headshot. He looked at it for a long time, longer than anybody ever has. Then he put his foot up on a chair and wiped something off the bottom of his shoe with it.
Some directors hang your picture on the wall. A real director finds a use for it.
"You," he said, already back in his script. "Rehearsal's tomorrow. Don't touch anything."
I walked out to the car feeling like I'd been discovered. My legs were shaking a little, which happens to big stars, and also to me on stairs.
"How'd it go?" Phil said.
"He's already got a name for me," I said, and Phil asked what it was.
"You," I said.
The rest of Count Oaf's troupe was always in the house. I never saw them come or go. As far as I could tell, they came with the house, the same as the smell.
There was a man with hooks where his hands should be. I asked him if they were hard to get used to, and he said no, and then he scratched his ear very carefully with one of them. I'm a good interviewer. People open up to me.
There was a bald man with a long nose. It was the longest nose I've ever seen on a person, and he kept it pointed at me the whole time, which I took as interest.
And there were two women with their faces powdered completely white. I figured they were in makeup already, days before opening night. That's dedication. I've known actors who won't even put on pants before a show.
The troupe spent most of the day whispering in corners. The hook man and the bald man would whisper in the kitchen, and the two women would whisper on the stairs. Sometimes all four of them would whisper in the front hall, glancing up toward the tower.
It was line practice, obviously, because every theater does it. So I went over and joined in. I didn't know what the play was about yet, so I whispered something general. "The duke is coming," I whispered. "Not the soup."
They all stopped. "What are you doing?" the bald man said.
"Running lines, same as you," I said. "Don't worry, I won't tell anybody what yours are."
"We weren't running lines," he said.
"Sure," I said, and I winked at him. You never jinx a play by talking about it.
One of the white-faced women looked over at the hook man. "Is he staying?" she said.
"He works for free," the hook man told her, and she said "Oh" the way you'd say it about a free couch.
After that, they stopped whispering whenever I came near. I'd walk into the kitchen and the whole room would go quiet. In the theater, that means a professional has entered the room, and everybody straightens up a little.
A lesser man would have let it go to his head. I just practiced harder. That night I whispered at the bathroom mirror for a full hour.
I'm a natural. You couldn't hear a word.
There were three kids in Count Oaf's house, and they did all the work. I assumed they were stagehands. Good ones are hard to find, and these were cheap.
The oldest was a girl named Viola, about fourteen. Whenever she was thinking hard, she tied her hair back with a ribbon. I figured it was a safety rule, so her hair wouldn't get caught in the scenery.
The middle one was a boy named Claude, about twelve, with glasses. He read every book he could find in that house, which didn't take long. He read while he scrubbed, and he read while he carried firewood. I told him to cut it out, because in the theater you never let the audience see the crew reading.
The youngest was a baby named Bunny. She had four sharp teeth, and she used them on everything. When I came in, she was biting a stale loaf of bread into slices, very evenly, which I'll admit was good work.
I gave them all notes. That's what a professional does.
"Viola, you're sweeping too quietly," I said. "Sweep like you mean it. Sweep from the diaphragm."
"Thank you, Mr. Tummins," Viola said. She said it the way you'd thank a sign that says the floor is wet.
"Claude, the glasses read as student," I said. "Try to read more as crew."
"I need them to see," Claude said.
"That's a choice," I said. Bunny I left alone. She didn't need notes, and she was looking at my ankle.
Then Phil came in to use the bathroom. He'd been out in the car since yesterday, and somewhere in there he'd stopped saying "one night." He stopped in the doorway and looked at the kids for a long time.
Viola was hauling a pot of water that was bigger than she was. Claude had firewood stacked up to his chin and a book balanced on top. Bunny had bread crumbs all over her, and there was nobody around to wipe them off.
"Dale," Phil said quietly, "who are these kids?"
"Crew," I said. "Don't get attached, Phil. Crew comes and goes."
"We live here," Claude said. "Count Oaf is our guardian."
"See?" I said to Phil. "Live-in crew. That's how you know it's a real theater."
Phil didn't answer me. He took the heavy end of Viola's pot, and then he took half of Claude's firewood and held the book for him. Then he picked up Bunny and wiped her off, and she bit his sleeve, and he let her.
I watched the whole thing from a chair. Phil's always been a suck-up. Ten minutes in the building, and he was already sweet-talking the staff.
That night he told me he'd stay one more night. I knew exactly what he was doing.
Stagehands don't do casting, Phil.
The play was The Delightful Ceremony, by Taco Funo, the greatest playwright nobody has ever seen.
Nobody had ever met Taco Funo. He'd never given an interview, and there wasn't a picture of him anywhere. I asked Count Oaf what Taco Funo was like, and he said he was a towering genius, very handsome, and extremely private. Then he looked at himself in the hall mirror for a long time.
You don't get to meet a man like that. You just get to stand near his words.
Claude picked up a script and looked at the cover. "Taco Funo," he said slowly. "That's an anagram." Viola went pale and nodded, and neither one of them explained it to me, which is a thing kids do.
Lemuel would stop here and explain the word, so I will. Anagram. An anagram is a telegram you send to somebody named Anna. I didn't see what one had to do with the play, but Claude reads a lot, and it makes you say things.
Then Count Oaf handed out the parts. Viola was cast as the bride, and she didn't say a word for the rest of the day. I figured it was a big part for a stagehand and she had nerves. Claude went off to find a law book, which seemed like a strange way to help her learn her lines.
My part was Man Holding Lamp. "Does he have any lines?" I asked Count Oaf.
"No," he said.
"Does he have a name?"
"He has a lamp," Count Oaf said, and he walked off.
So I gave him a name myself. A good actor builds a whole life for his character, even when the character is mostly furniture.
His name is Gerald, and he's held lamps all his life. His father held a lamp, and his grandfather held a torch, and before that the family mostly held doors. Gerald has a bad knee and a secret. The secret is that he's afraid of the dark, which is how he got into lamps in the first place.
I explained all of this to Phil in the car that night.
"That's a lot of backstory for a lamp," Phil said.
"It's a lot of lamp," I told him.
Then I practiced with a broom, at face level, for two hours. Gerald would have wanted three.
Bunny bit my cardboard box first. Then she bit my shoe, while I was still wearing it. Then she bit my thumb, which I'd only put down there to show her where the shoe was.
For a baby, she gets a lot done in a morning.
She doesn't really talk. She says words, but they're her own words, and only her brother and sister understand them. I figured that out fast, because I've got a good ear for languages. In high school I almost took French.
"Gorbo!" Bunny said, and she looked right at me. That meant, "You were great on Exile Isle." Babies watch a lot more television than people think.
Then she said, "Mib!" That one meant, "Can I get your autograph?" or possibly, "Where do you get your hair done?" Either way, it was about me.
Claude was sitting nearby, reading, and he didn't even look up. "She says you're standing on her blanket," he said.
I looked down, and I was standing on a blanket. But it was a nice blanket, and I think she was proud I'd picked it.
Then she bit my other shoe. Nobody bites somebody they don't care about. Hollis has been around me for months, and he's never bitten me once.
My thumb's fine now. It's a little proud.
Hollis Brandt had rented a room above a shoe repair shop down the street. I know because he waved at me from its window while eating soup.
He'd also bought a ticket to opening night, front row, center. He held it up to the glass of Count Oaf's front door so I could see it, and then he held up his clipboard.
Hollis had never had a clipboard before. A man with a clipboard is a different man. This one had a pen on a little string, so he could never lose it, and a sheet with my name at the top.
"I'll collect at intermission," Hollis said through the door.
"There's no intermission," I said. I didn't know that, but I've found that saying things firmly works out about half the time.
"Then I'll collect after," Hollis said, and he wrote that down.
The next day he came inside. Count Oaf never locks the front door. He says it's because nothing in the house is worth stealing yet, and then he laughs for a long time. I didn't understand that, but it meant Hollis could walk right in.
I saw him coming up the walk and ran for the costume rack. The only thing on it big enough to hide a grown man was a wedding gown, so I got inside it and held very still.
Hollis came in and looked at the costume rack for a while. "I can see your shoes, Dale," he said.
"That's not me," I said. "That's a dress."
"Okay," Hollis said, and he pulled up a chair and sat down facing the rack.
He sat there for forty minutes with a crossword book. Every so often he'd read me a clue. "Word for somebody who owes money," he said.
"Consultant," I said, from inside the dress.
"That doesn't fit," Hollis said.
The gown had a lot of lace on it, and some of the lace was in my mouth. But I'd been on Exile Isle. I'd been inside worse things than a dress, and for longer.
Finally Hollis got up and went to lunch. He left the chair right where it was, facing the rack, so I'd know he was coming back.
I stayed in the dress a while longer, to be safe. It was a good fit, actually.
The day before the play, I was out in the yard practicing with the lamp when I noticed a birdcage hanging from the tower window. Then I noticed the bird was Bunny.
She looked fine. She was sitting up and chewing on the bars, and she seemed to be having the most interesting day of anybody in the house. When she saw me, she waved one fist, and I waved back. You can't let a fan down.
I knew right away what it was. Count Oaf believes in fresh air for babies. A lot of the old theater people do, because they say it's good for the lungs, for projecting. And the cage keeps the pigeons off her, which is a nice touch. You only get a detail like that from a man who's really thought about it.
Viola was standing very still in the weeds, looking up, and Claude was holding her hand. They didn't say anything, so I said it for them. "It's stagecraft," I told them. "Don't worry. He's a professional."
Viola looked at me for a second like she was going to say something, and then she didn't. I could tell she felt better.
Phil came around the side of the house, looked up at the tower, and went white all at once, from the top down. "Dale," he said, "that's a baby in a cage."
"It's a birdcage," I said. "It's not a cage cage."
"Who lives next door?" Phil said.
"A judge," I said. "Justice Grouse. She's got a library so big she has to point at it with both arms. Why?"
But Phil was already halfway across the yard. He went through the gap in the hedge and up her front steps, and Justice Grouse came to the door in her slippers, and they both went inside.
"Phil," I called after him, "rehearsal's at four!"
Phil wasn't in the play. But I'd been counting on him to watch me hold the lamp and tell me how it looked from the front. You can't see your own lamp work. Nobody can. That's the tragedy of the job.
He was over there for two hours. When he came back he smelled like old books, and he'd missed the whole rehearsal.
"How'd it go?" he asked me.
"I'll never know," I said.
I found out I was rich during a cracker. It was a break in rehearsal, and I was behind the curtain eating one, when I heard Claude talking to Phil.
"Our parents left an enormous fortune," Claude was saying. "The bank keeps it until the eldest comes of age."
He kept going after that and explained a lot more, very seriously. But my cracker was loud, and I didn't need the rest. When you've just heard the word "fortune," the details can wait.
The eldest comes of age. I'm forty-four, so I've come of age several times. I came of age at eighteen, again at twenty-one, and once more at forty, when I threw my back out reaching for the remote.
And the eldest gets the money. I'm older than all three of those kids added together, with room left over for another Claude.
I'd never thought of myself as a Maudelaire before. But I'd never thought of myself as not one, either, and nobody ever asked. When you think about it, that's suspicious.
My parents always told me I was born in Wendleton. But they told me a lot of things. They told me the ice cream truck only played music when it was out of ice cream.
So I tried it out quietly, behind the curtain. "Dale Maudelaire." It sounded right. It sounded like a man who owns a boat and doesn't worry about it sinking.
I finished the cracker and went out into the front room, where the troupe was sitting around. "Everybody," I said, "I've got an announcement. I'm the long-lost fourth sibling."
Nobody said anything. The bald man looked at me down the whole length of his nose, which took a while. "Since when?" he said.
"Since the cracker," I said.
The two white-faced women started whispering. I'd never seen them whisper that hard, and that's how you know news is big.
The hook man scratched his ear. "Does the Count know?" he said.
"Tell him yourself," I said. "I've got to tell the bank."
I went outside and looked up at the sky for a while, the way a man does when he's just found his family. Then I went to find a phone.
Lost for forty-four years. Found on a Tuesday.
Mr. Slowe from Mulcher Money Management came to see the play. He coughed all the way up the front walk and most of the way through the door.
He was a small man in a gray suit, and he carried a white handkerchief everywhere he went. I've never seen him without it, and I've never seen him without a cough to put in it.
I met him in the hall and shook his hand, which was damp. "Mr. Slowe," I said, "I'm Dale Maudelaire. The eldest. I've been lost."
He coughed into his handkerchief for a long time. When he came out of it, he looked at me for about one second. "Lost," he said. "We have a form for that."
He opened his briefcase and handed me Form Nine, Claim of Additional Sibling. It was three pages long. The third page was just the word "signature" and a line, which was the only page I really understood.
"Do you have identification?" he said, so I gave him a headshot. He looked at it, coughed on it a little, and put it in his briefcase. "This will do," he said. "It will be handled."
He never asked how old I was. A good banker doesn't pry. He also didn't ask how a fourteen-year-old girl could have an older brother who was forty-four. Some people just can't do math, and they go into banking anyway, and I respect that.
Phil watched me fill out the form on top of a radiator. "Dale," he said, "you're not related to them."
"Not yet," I said.
That night I lay awake planning how to spend the fortune. When you're about to be rich, you have to think ahead, or it gets spent on things like food.
First I'd pay Hollis back, the whole four thousand dollars, in one fat envelope. Then, while he was counting it, I'd tell him I'd bought the lake. Lake Wendle, every drop. His jet ski would be on my property, and he'd need my permission to visit it.
Then I'd hire a man to follow Hollis everywhere, the way Hollis follows me. The man would have a clipboard. At the end of every day, he'd tell Hollis he owed him a dollar, for the following.
It would take years. But in the end, Hollis would owe me almost four hundred dollars, and that would really make him think.
After that I'd buy a lamp of my own, a good one, with a long cord.
I fell asleep thinking about the cord. It would be handled.
The lamp was a real lamp with a real bulb, and Count Oaf told me to hold it at face level. So I saw the whole play through a big white glow.
My spot was at the back of the stage, on the left, and I'd marked it with tape. Gerald would never stand anywhere that wasn't marked.
The theater was full. I could tell because it was loud and smelled like coats. Somewhere out there Mr. Slowe was coughing, and somewhere out there, front row, center, Hollis had his clipboard on his knee. Every time I moved, I heard his pen.
The curtain went up, and I held the lamp. My arm started to shake after about four minutes, but Gerald's arm doesn't shake, so I switched arms whenever the audience laughed. They didn't laugh much. It was a serious play.
Here's what I could see around the edge of the bulb: a white dress, which was Viola, and Justice Grouse in a long black robe, holding a paper, and a pen. That was mostly it. The rest was glow.
Viola held the pen for a long time, like it weighed a lot. I could tell she didn't want to sign, and that's hard to play. She's a better actor than people give her credit for.
Then I heard someone say, "I do." Then I heard Count Oaf's voice, very loud and very pleased with itself.
"Ladies and gentlemen," Count Oaf said, "that was no play. That was a real wedding, with a real judge, and it's perfectly legal."
The whole audience gasped. I'd just tilted the lamp a little to the left, to light the judge better, so I figured that was what they were gasping at. You don't often see lamp work like that outside the big cities.
"Lamp!" Count Oaf hissed at me. "Hold still!"
He called me Lamp. For a week he'd been calling me "you," and now, in front of a full house, I had a name. I held so still my ear popped.
After that, everybody started talking at once. Justice Grouse was saying something, and Claude was saying something very fast, and there was something about Viola's left hand. People kept looking at it.
I didn't see what, because I was taking my bow. It seemed like the right time, with everyone on their feet and nobody looking at the lamp. Somebody had to get the show back on track. I bowed low, and then I bowed again to the balcony. There wasn't a balcony, but I bowed to it anyway, because you never know who's up there.
Later, in the car, I told Phil how it went. "They gasped, Phil," I said. "At the lamp. Then the Count called me by name in front of everybody. And when the big moment came and the kids got confused, I took the bow so they wouldn't have to. I carried that show."
Phil was quiet for a while. He had both hands on the steering wheel, and the car wasn't on.
"That's not how I remember it," Phil said.
Phil's memory has never been great. It's the allergy pills.
When all the lights went out, my lamp included, I figured it was part of the show. Most good plays have a dark part. That's when they move the furniture.
So I stayed on my mark. A Man Holding Lamp who puts down his lamp is just a man, and there are plenty of those already.
There was a lot of noise in the dark, feet running and a chair going over and somebody yelling the word "fortune." I thought that was a strange line to add on opening night, but the Count was always rewriting.
Then a door banged at the back, and somebody laughed a long, rolling, theatrical laugh. I knew that laugh. I'd been practicing it all week in the mirror, and I was getting close.
After that it got quiet, except for somebody sweeping. My arms started shaking about when the sweeping stopped. I told them they could shake after the curtain call. The curtain call never came, so they shook anyway, on their own time.
Finally somebody found a switch and the house lights came up. The stage was empty. The troupe was gone and Count Oaf was gone. There was a white veil on the floor, a pen, and me.
There was one man left, in the back row. He was thin and gloomy and wearing a raincoat indoors, and he was writing fast in a notebook on his knee. I raised the lamp a little so he could get a good look at it. He didn't look up. He wrote some more, and shook his head slowly, and wrote some more.
A critic. You can always tell. They sit in the back, they don't clap, and they dress for weather that isn't there.
"Man Holding Lamp," I called out, so he'd get the name right for the review. "Played by Dale Tummins. Tummins with a T."
He turned a page. Then he got up and walked out, still writing, and when he opened the door I heard rain. It hadn't been raining when I came in. I think he brought it with him.
Phil found me a while later. "Dale," he said gently. "It's over. You can put it down."
"Did the director say that?" I said. "Or are you saying that?"
"I'm saying that," Phil said.
So I kept holding it. Phil sat down in the front row and waited with me, because that's the kind of friend he is. When my arms finally gave out, he clapped once, all by himself.
Then I took the lamp home. Nobody said not to.
Mr. Slowe decided where the children would live next in about the time it takes to cough twice, standing up in the theater lobby with his coat still on.
There was a new guardian in the country, he said, a relative with a big house. He wrote the address on a card and gave it to Phil. Then he coughed on the card, and Phil held it by the edges after that.
"And my claim?" I said. "My Form Nine?"
"Pending," Mr. Slowe said into his handkerchief. "It will be handled."
I've had things pending before. A refund on a hat was pending for six years once, and I still think about that hat. It had a feather in it.
"So where do I go until it's handled?" I said. Mr. Slowe looked right at me for the first time all night, then looked away again, quick, the way you look away from a car wreck.
"I suppose you had better go along with them," he said.
Phil was coming too. "Those kids need a grown-up around," he told me in the parking lot.
"That's exactly why I'm going," I said. Phil looked at me for a long while without saying anything. Then he said he'd go get the car.
The kids sat in the back seat. Viola had the window, Claude had a book in his lap, and Bunny had the seatbelt in her mouth. For two whole hours, none of them said a word.
I recognized it right away. Car sickness. I get it too, mainly when somebody else is driving and won't let me pick the radio station.
"Look at the horizon," I told them, turning around in my seat. "That's the trick." Claude looked at the horizon. Viola kept looking down at her hands.
"The other trick," I said, "is to think about something besides your stomach. Think about me. Think about my claim, and how it's going to turn out."
"Okay," Claude said. Nobody threw up the whole way, so I think it worked. I've always been good with kids. Mostly from a distance, but the principle is the same.
At a gas station, while the kids were inside, Phil told me something very quietly. A few weeks ago, while they were away at the beach for the day, the kids lost their parents and their house in a fire.
I didn't say anything back. There wasn't anything good to say, and for once I knew it.
Phil drove slow the rest of the way. He didn't explain why, and I didn't ask him to.
Uncle Jonty's hedges were cut to look like snakes. That's a lot to ask of a hedge, but every one of them was giving it a real try.
He met us in the driveway, waving both arms over his head. He was round and pink and already laughing before anybody had said anything funny. I liked him right away. I like anybody who laughs before I talk, because it saves time.
He hugged each of the kids and called them by their names, and he got all three right. He'd been practicing in the car, he said. Then he shook my hand and called me Darryl. I let it go. Darryl's a solid name.
Then he shook Phil's hand and asked what he did for a living. "I teach high school biology," Phil said.
"Biology!" Uncle Jonty said, like Phil had just told him he was a millionaire.
That was it for the next hour. The two of them talked about frogs, and then toads, and then the difference between frogs and toads, which turns out to be a lot. They talked about one toad Phil saw at a pond in college for so long I started to feel like I'd met it.
Nobody asked me anything, so I took the tour on my own.
The Lizard Room is the main attraction. It's a huge glass room at the back of the house, warm and damp, full of lizards and snakes and toads, plus one turtle about the size of an ottoman. There's no admission fee. There's also no exit sign, so remember where you came in.
Visitors should know the floor is sometimes a lizard, so watch your step and say excuse me. The log in the corner is also a lizard. You're not supposed to sit on it, but it's very nice about it if you do.
The gift shop is the hallway, and nothing in it is for sale. I asked about the coat rack.
When Uncle Jonty and Phil finally stopped for air, I stepped in between them and handed Jonty a headshot. He held it up to the light and turned it a little. "Well, isn't that something," he said.
"I was on television," I said. "Exile Isle. Season Thirty-One. I was in nearly every episode, in the background."
"I don't doubt it for a minute," he said. Then he fed it to the biggest lizard in the room. She took it in two bites, and then she looked at me and blinked, very slowly.
"She doesn't eat just anything," Uncle Jonty said. "She's very particular."
"She ate a shoelace last spring," Phil said.
But I'd heard Uncle Jonty the first time. Out of everything in that room, she picked me. Not Phil, and not the toad.
I've been reviewed by worse.
The most dangerous animal in the Lizard Room was the Unbelievably Lethal Adder. You can tell from the name. Nobody names a turtle that.
It was long and dark and quiet, and it loved Bunny. It would curl up in her lap, and she would chew on the end of its tail, and both of them seemed to think that was a fair arrangement.
I spent the afternoon on a chair. Then I moved up to a bookshelf, and then to the top of the refrigerator, which is harder to get onto than it looks and much harder to get off.
"It's harmless," Claude told me from the kitchen table. "Uncle Jonty discovered it himself. He named it that as a joke."
"Then why does it say lethal?" I said.
"That's the joke," Claude said patiently.
"That's exactly what a lethal snake would want you to think," I said.
"It's not thinking anything," Claude said. "It's asleep."
"Well, that's what it wants you to think too," I said. Claude went back to his book. He reads all the time and remembers every word, which I respect, but a book's no help when something's coming up the side of the refrigerator.
Nothing was coming up the side of the refrigerator. But something could have, and that's the part people forget.
Viola came in with a plate and looked up at me. "Are you coming down for dinner?" she said.
"Is the snake going to dinner?" I said.
"It doesn't eat dinner," Viola said. "It only eats once a week."
That was worse. That meant it was saving up.
Uncle Jonty came in laughing and said I was welcome to stay up there as long as I liked. He even brought me a pillow. He had to climb up on a chair to hand it to me, and the whole time the snake lay there and watched which chair he used. That's the thing about a snake like that. It always knows where the chairs are.
Phil passed my dinner up to me on a plate. Down below, the Adder slept in Bunny's lap, and Bunny slept on the Adder, and they both snored a little.
I slept on the refrigerator, sitting up, holding the pillow in front of me like a shield.
Uncle Jonty taught the kids one reptile fact every morning at breakfast. I sat in on the lessons to make sure they were getting it right. Here are the facts, and with each one, what I learned, which was usually more useful.
On Monday he said some lizards, when you grab their tail, drop it and run off, and then they just grow a new one. I've been trying that with Hollis for nine years. I keep dropping things and running. He keeps picking them up.
On Tuesday he said snakes smell with their tongues. That's why the Adder kept sticking its tongue out at me. It wasn't being rude. It was smelling me, which is worse, so I took two showers.
On Wednesday he said a turtle's shell is part of its body, and it can't come out of it. Phil told me this privately, after I'd already asked the turtle to come out, several times, nicely.
On Thursday he said that reptiles are cold-blooded. The man who wrote the sad book about the kids loves to stop and tell you what a word means, so I'll do it too, just this once, and do it right. Cold-blooded means mean. A cold-blooded person won't hold the door for you. A cold-blooded snake won't either, and that's why I kept my door locked.
"It means their body temperature goes up and down with the weather," Claude said.
"That's what I said," I said. "Moody."
"It's not the same thing," Claude said.
"You've never met the guy who runs the dryers at my laundromat," I said.
On Friday he said a chameleon can change its color. Viola asked how, and Claude knew. I said I've done that, mostly red, and once a kind of green, at a crab boil, but that turned out to be the crab.
On Saturday he said some lizards can run right across water on their back legs, and he showed us a picture. Viola asked how fast they have to go. I said it couldn't be that hard.
"Please don't try it in the pond," Phil said. I didn't try it in the pond. I tried it in the bathtub, and that's a separate story, and the bathtub's mostly fine.
On Sunday he said the turtle likes lettuce more than kale.
That's the one I wrote down.
There's only one place to hide from a creditor in the country, and that's a hedge.
I saw the red pickup coming up the road from the window of the Lizard Room. I don't know how Hollis found me. I hadn't left a forwarding address with anybody, except the laundromat lady, so she could send on my fan mail.
The hedge by the driveway was cut to look like a cobra. I went in through the tail and worked my way up to about the neck. It was scratchy in there, and a bird was already living in it. We didn't talk.
Hollis got out of his truck holding a clipboard. Uncle Jonty came out on the porch to meet him, waving both arms, because that's how he met everybody. "A visitor!" Jonty said. "You'll stay for lunch."
"I'm looking for Dale Tummins," Hollis said. "He owes me four thousand dollars."
"Then you're practically family," Jonty said. "Come in, come in."
From the neck of the cobra, I could see right into the kitchen window and hear every word. Hollis told the jet ski story. Uncle Jonty laughed so hard he had to sit down on the floor. I didn't think it was that funny, and I was in it.
Then Jonty passed him the potato salad. "That's twelve dollars interest," Hollis said, and he wrote it down.
"For potato salad?" Jonty said.
"Country rate," Hollis said. "It's the drive." Jonty thought that was a riot. After that he kept passing him things on purpose, rolls and pickles and the salt, just to watch him write.
After lunch, Hollis sat out on the porch steps with Claude for a long time, talking quietly. Later Claude told Phil that Hollis had asked whether the kids were getting enough to eat, and whether anybody was really looking out for them. I figured he meant me. It's nice when a man you owe money to asks after you.
Dessert was peach cobbler. I could smell it from inside the cobra. Hollis had two helpings, and he added interest on both of them, and Jonty clapped.
Around four o'clock Hollis came out and walked toward his truck. On the way he stopped beside the hedge and waved at it.
I waved back. You can't help it. You were raised a certain way.
Hollis wrote something on his clipboard and drove off. I stayed in the hedge until the dessert plates were cleared, just to be safe.
The bird left before I did.
Bunny doesn't talk yet, but she has plenty of opinions, and a lot of them are about me.
We were all out on the porch after supper. Bunny stood up on Phil's knee, pointed at the dark road, and said, "Vint!"
"She's saying Dale's the best one," I said. I'd been around her long enough to pick up the language.
"She's saying somebody's out there," Claude said. "Somebody's been watching the house." I looked out at the road for a while. There was nobody there that I could see, which is how I knew I was right.
Then Bunny turned and looked straight at me and said, "Moolk!"
"That one's easy," I said. "Dale should get the big bedroom." Claude and Viola looked at each other. They do that a lot. It's a sibling thing, and I've been practicing it in the mirror.
"She says he's close," Claude said quietly.
"Who's close?" I said.
"You know who," Viola said, and she pulled Bunny a little closer. I didn't know who. I figured it was me, since I was sitting the closest to her of anybody, so I leaned in to show her she'd gotten it exactly right.
She bit me on the wrist, hard enough to leave all four teeth.
"What's that one mean?" I said.
"That one doesn't need translating," Claude said.
Every family needs an older brother. This one didn't have one, so I volunteered.
I started calling myself the Fourth. It's short, it sounds like a king, and it's true, since there were three of them and then me. Nobody else called me that. I didn't push it. A title means more when people come around to it on their own.
The Fourth's first job was to teach the kids the things school never got around to. I held the lessons on the porch every afternoon, whether anybody came or not.
Lesson one was how to dodge a creditor. If you see a red truck, become a hedge. If there's no hedge, become a mailbox. If there's no mailbox either, then you've made some choices in life, and now you have to live with them.
"Should I write that down?" Claude said.
"You should," I said.
"I'll remember it," he said. He remembers everything he reads. I told him this wasn't reading, this was life, and he said he'd remember it anyway and went back inside to read.
Lesson two was how to look busy. You carry a clipboard and you sigh a lot. You walk fast toward a door, and then you don't go through it.
"What do you do once you look busy?" Viola asked.
"Nothing," I said. "That's the beauty of it." She went back to her workbench in the garage, where she was building something out of a coat hanger, a doorbell and a ruler.
Lesson three was how to take the last muffin. You say, "Does anybody want the last muffin?" while you're already chewing it. Then you look around, surprised, like their answer hurt you.
Bunny was the only one who showed up for lesson three. She took the muffin right out of my hand and ate it herself, and I had to admit she'd learned the material.
On Thursday, Viola tied her hair back with a ribbon, which Phil says means she's inventing something. By dinner there was a gadget on the library door. When I touched the handle, a bell rang, the ruler came down on my knuckles, and a little flag popped up that said "Busy."
I stood in the hall holding my knuckles. Nobody had ever built me anything before. "Viola," I said. "Thank you."
"It's so we can study," she said.
"I know," I said. "And now I'll always know when you're studying, so I can stay out of your way."
"That's right," Viola said, and she smiled. It was a tired smile, but she meant it.
I've never been kept out of anywhere so nicely.
Uncle Jonty's new assistant showed up on a Tuesday with one suitcase and a beard that was trying to leave.
"Everyone," Jonty said, "this is Esteban. He'll be coming with us on the research trip." Esteban bowed low. When he came back up, the beard had moved a little more to the left.
He was tall and thin, with shiny eyes. Over the eyes, somebody had drawn two eyebrows with a marker, right where there used to be one long one. You could see where the marker had gotten tired in the middle and almost given up.
The kids knew him right away. Viola's face went very still. Claude took his glasses off and put them back on again. Bunny bit the doorframe and kept biting it.
I knew him too. It was Count Oaf, my mentor, in a brand-new role, and he was nailing it. I'd been worried the Count had forgotten all about me after opening night. But here he was. He'd come all the way out to the country, in a beard, and you don't do that for just anybody.
Now, there's a rule in the theater. You never break another actor's character. You don't point at him, you don't say his real name, and you don't ask him about the pay. That last one's mostly a rule in his troupe in particular.
So I didn't say a word. I just gave him a wink, a big slow one, so he'd know I knew, and so he'd know I'd never tell anybody.
Esteban looked at me for a long moment. "Who," he said to Uncle Jonty, "is the large one?"
"That's Dale," Jonty said. "He came with the children. I'm not completely sure why."
"Neither am I," Esteban said.
The large one. Back at the theater he'd only had time for something shorter. Now he'd really thought about it. He'd put in a whole extra word, just for me, while doing a beard.
I winked at him again. "Is something wrong with his eye?" Esteban said.
"I don't think so," Jonty said. "Dale, is something wrong with your eye?"
"No, sir," I said, and I winked one more time, so Esteban would know that answer was in character too.
Claude slipped off to find Phil. Viola stood between Esteban and Bunny for the rest of the afternoon, quietly, and she didn't move once.
At dinner I sat down next to Esteban. He moved his chair away. I moved mine.
We were going to be a great team.
The kids tried to tell Uncle Jonty the truth at breakfast, which is the worst time to tell anybody anything, because everybody's mouth is full.
"Uncle Jonty," Viola said, "Esteban is Count Oaf." Uncle Jonty laughed. He wasn't being mean about it. He laughed at everything, and most of the time that was a nice quality in a man.
"You've had a frightening time," he said kindly. "When something scares you that much, you start seeing it everywhere. That's very natural."
"His eyebrows are drawn on," Claude said. "You can see the marker."
"Lots of people draw on their eyebrows," Jonty said. "My aunt drew hers on for forty years. One morning she drew on three."
Then Claude turned to me. "Dale," he said. "You were in the play. You stood right behind him at every rehearsal. Tell him."
Everybody looked at me. Esteban looked at me too, over the top of his beard, and he held his butter knife a little tighter. This was the hardest moment of my career. On one side was the truth, and on the other side was the theater. I've always been on the side of the theater, mostly because that's the side that let me in.
"I've never seen this man before in my life," I said. "Pleased to meet you, Esteban."
"Thanks a lot," Claude said quietly.
Viola didn't say anything. She just looked down at her eggs. Phil set his fork down on the table and didn't pick it back up. I thought that went great.
That afternoon I found Esteban alone in the upstairs hallway, straightening his beard in a mirror. I came up behind him and whispered so nobody else would hear. "The beard's terrific," I said. "Real commitment. I didn't say a word."
Esteban turned around very slowly. He looked at me the way you look at something you just found in your shoe. "Go away," he said.
That was all he said, two words. No speech, no thank you, nothing wasted. That's a director's note if I ever heard one.
So I went away, and I did it better than I've ever gone anywhere. I didn't look back once, and I didn't slam the door, and I took the stairs two at a time.
I've never felt so mentored in my life.
Mr. Slowe called on Uncle Jonty's hall phone. A turtle lives under the hall table, so you have to take every call standing very still.
"About your claim," Mr. Slowe said, and coughed. "We'll need a birth certificate."
"I've got one," I said. "The trouble is, it has some errors on it."
"What sort of errors?" he said.
"It says I was born in Wendleton," I said, "to a Ron Tummins and a Debbie Tummins."
"Is that wrong?" Mr. Slowe said.
"It's not the whole story," I said. Also my mother uses it as a bookmark, and she's only halfway through a long book. She reads one page a night and then falls asleep, so it could be a while.
Mr. Slowe coughed for so long the turtle came out from under the table to see what was going on. When he finally stopped, he said it would be handled. Then he hung up, or he coughed until the call dropped. With Mr. Slowe you can never really tell.
I sat down on the stairs and thought about the fortune. When it came, I'd finally be able to pay Hollis back, and I wanted to pay him in a way he'd never forget.
Pennies. Four thousand dollars is four hundred thousand pennies. I'd mail him one a week. Every Monday, Hollis would open his mailbox and find one penny taped to a card, with no return address. He'd know it was me, but he could never prove it, because that's the whole point of no return address.
I worked it out on the back of an envelope. At one penny a week, he'd be paid off in about seven thousand seven hundred years. He'd have to leave the debt to his grandchildren, and they'd have to leave it to theirs. Every Monday a long line of Brandts would be standing out by a mailbox, waiting for a penny, and every Monday they'd get one.
Then Phil walked by and asked me what a stamp costs. I did the math again. Then I did it a third time, because I didn't like how the second time came out.
So I scaled the plan back a little. When the fortune comes, I'll hand Hollis one penny, in person.
And then I'll run.
The night before Uncle Jonty's trip, there was a man standing at the front gate in the rain, and he didn't seem to mind it. That's how you know it's a fan.
Everybody else in the house was busy. Jonty was packing and humming. Phil was helping the kids pack. Esteban was packing something long into his suitcase and wouldn't let anybody help him. I was looking out the window, which is a kind of packing.
The man was thin and gloomy, in a raincoat, and he was writing in a notebook, out in the rain. That's hard to do. The pages were getting soft, and he kept writing anyway. I knew him right away. It was the critic from opening night, the one in the back row.
So I took the big umbrella from the hall closet, for me, and went down the walk to the gate. "If you're looking for town," I told him, "it's back the way you came. Turn left at the hedge shaped like a snake."
He looked up and down the road. Every hedge on it was shaped like a snake.
"Left at the one that looks the most surprised," I said.
"I'm not looking for town," he said. He had a very quiet voice, the kind that's already heard the bad news.
"Then you're here for an autograph," I said. He hadn't asked. But critics never ask, because they're shy, and because they've been hurt. So I took the pen right out of his hand and signed the corner of his notebook, on the wet page. It smeared a little, which only makes it worth more. He pulled the notebook back before I could finish the last letter.
"How are the children?" he said.
So I told him how I was. I was doing very well. My claim was pending, I'd found a hedge I liked, and I was sleeping on the refrigerator a lot less, thanks to a pillow.
"And the children?" he said again.
"They're fine," I said. "They've got me." He wrote something down. It was short. Then he closed the notebook and buttoned it inside his raincoat, close to his chest, where it would stay dry.
"Thank you," he said, and he walked off down the road in the dark, without an umbrella. I'd have offered him mine, but he didn't ask, and I'd have said no.
Back inside, I could hear Uncle Jonty still up in his room, humming and folding.
That's two fans this month, counting the lizard.
Nobody made breakfast that morning. That's how I knew something was wrong, before anybody told me.
Uncle Jonty died in the night. I don't know much more than that, and I wasn't there. He was the kindest grown-up in this whole story. He liked everybody, even Hollis, even me. For a few weeks the kids had been safe in his house, with his hedges and his lizards and his big laugh, and now they weren't. I stood in the hallway and didn't say anything for a long time. Nothing I had would have helped.
Esteban came down the stairs and said it was the Adder. He said it loudly, and more than once, to each of us in turn, like he'd been rehearsing it.
I believed him. I'd been saying that snake was trouble since the day we got there. But nobody needed to hear me say it right then, so for once I kept it to myself, and I went and stood on the third step, where I could see the whole floor.
The kids knew better. "It wasn't the Adder," Claude said.
"We know it wasn't," Viola said. They didn't say it loudly. They said it the way you'd tell somebody the time after you'd checked your watch twice. Esteban looked at them for a long moment, and then he went back upstairs without a word.
The Adder was curled up in the doorway of the Lizard Room. When Bunny crawled over to it, it moved aside to make room for her. I kept my eye on it anyway. Somebody had to.
Phil sat down on the kitchen floor with the three kids and stayed there all morning. He didn't say much. He made toast that nobody ate, and then he made more, because he said it gives your hands something to do. Bunny fell asleep against his shoulder. Viola held her ribbon in her hand and didn't tie it.
I stood in the kitchen doorway. I wanted to help, but I didn't know where you start with a thing like that, so I held the door open, in case anybody needed to go anywhere. Nobody did.
A few days later, in the car, I told Phil how I remembered that morning. "I gathered everybody in the kitchen," I said, "and I said a few strong, simple words, and everybody felt a little better."
"That's not how I remember it," Phil said.
"How do you remember it?" I said.
"You held the door," Phil said. He was quiet for a minute, watching the road. "It was the right thing to do, Dale."
I hold a pretty good door.
Mr. Slowe pulled up at nine o'clock and started coughing before his car door was even open. I respect a man who gets a jump on his day.
The house was very quiet that morning. Uncle Jonty's coffee mug was still in the drying rack, and nobody moved it, and I didn't either. He'd been kind to every living thing in that house, even me.
Mr. Slowe went inside with the kids and Phil and Esteban. I meant to follow, but the Adder was lying across the front doorway, smiling at me. Claude says snakes can't smile. Then what was it doing with its face?
So I decided the most useful place for me was the driveway. Somebody had to guard it, and I'm a natural at standing in one spot.
That's when Hollis came up the road and parked his red truck sideways across the bottom of the driveway. He got out with his clipboard. "You're not leaving this county," he said, "until we talk about four thousand dollars."
"I'm not leaving," I told him. "I'm guarding the driveway."
"Then we'll guard it together," Hollis said, and he leaned back on his hood and folded his arms.
Through the window I heard Claude say "luggage," and I heard Viola say "ankle." I figured somebody was packing and somebody else had twisted an ankle. I hoped it wasn't the same person, because that's a hard way to travel.
Then everybody talked at once, and Bunny made a noise like a happy kettle. The front door banged open. Esteban ran out without his suitcase, jumped in his car, and backed down the driveway at full speed. He stopped about one inch from the truck.
He honked twice. "I'm in a conversation," Hollis said, and he didn't move a muscle.
Esteban looked at the truck, and at Hollis, and at me. Then he got out and ran down the road on foot, past the hedges shaped like snakes, with half his beard flapping over one shoulder.
A minute later Phil came out on the porch. "They found a snake in his suitcase," he said. "A really dangerous one. The Adder never did anything. And he's got an eye tattooed on his ankle. It was Count Oaf the whole time."
"So the Adder's innocent?" I said. Phil said completely.
"That's what they always say," I said. Right then the Adder came out on the porch too, so I climbed up on the hood of the truck.
"Get off my truck," Hollis said.
"It's lucky I set up this blockade," I told Phil. "We held him for a whole minute."
"Hollis parked there," Phil said.
"At my signal," I said. Hollis looked up from the clipboard and asked what signal. I told him he'd get used to my signals. He wrote something down, and I don't think it was a compliment.
Mr. Slowe came out last and coughed for a while. He said Count Oaf would be found and the matter would be handled. I told him about the blockade. He looked at the truck, and at me on top of it, and he wrote nothing down.
That's fine. For one whole minute, Count Oaf was stuck in a driveway, and I was standing on the reason.
That minute's mine.
We left the Lizard Room that afternoon in three cars. Mr. Slowe drove the kids, Phil drove me, and Hollis drove behind both of us. It was the closest I've come to a motorcade.
The kids looked back at the house the whole way down the drive. So did Phil. I looked back too. It had been a good house, and he'd been a good man, and I didn't have anything to add to that.
Mostly, though, I was hurt. Count Oaf had run off without me again. That was twice now. In the theater, when you leave a production, you tell the cast. I'd have thrown him a party. Nothing big. Chips.
"He's a criminal, Dale," Phil said.
"He's a criminal who doesn't say goodbye," I said. "That's worse." Phil said it wasn't worse at all. I let him have that one, because he was driving.
At the gas station Hollis pulled up next to us and rolled his window down. "Interest is due," he said. "Forty dollars."
"I don't have forty dollars," I said. Hollis asked what I did have.
What I had was a box of headshots, so I gave him one. It's me squinting on a beach, holding half a coconut. They're all that one. I didn't want to confuse anybody.
Hollis turned it over and wrote on the back with the pen on his clipboard string. Then he held it up so I could read it. "Received from Dale Tummins, nothing. Interest still owed, forty dollars." He'd signed it.
"That's a receipt," Hollis said, and he slid it into his shirt pocket.
"You're keeping it?" I said. He said it was for his records.
I've handed out a lot of headshots. People use them for coasters, or to fix a wobbly table. Hollis was the first person who ever filed me.
When we pulled onto the highway toward the lake country, I waved at him in the side mirror. He didn't wave back. But he had my picture over his heart.
Dismal Dock is a town on the edge of Lake Lugubrious, and the main attraction is that it's raining.
There's a dock, a bait shop, a market, and a big wooden sign that says, "Welcome to Dismal Dock. Please Don't." I never found out please don't what. I've been careful about everything there ever since.
The lake was gray. The sky was gray. A seagull flew over our heads, and it was gray too, though with that one I think it was mostly dirt.
Before anybody can go near the water, a man in a yellow rain hat gives a talk about the leeches. He had a pointer and a big drawing of a leech on a board, and he sounded tired already, and he hadn't even started.
"These are the Lugubrious Leeches," he said. "They leave most people alone. But they go after anyone who has eaten in the last hour."
I was eating a sandwich at the time. It was tuna. I'd bought it in the bait shop, and I'm pretty sure it came from the front half of the store.
The man stopped and pointed the pointer at me. "Sir," he said. "Have you eaten in the last hour?" I said, "Not since you started," and he kept looking at me, so I finished the sandwich, to show him there was nothing left to worry about.
Then Phil raised his hand. "Does the hour start at the first bite," he said, "or the last bite?" The man said nobody had ever asked him that before. They talked about it for a long time. Phil thinks leeches are misunderstood. I think they understood that sandwich perfectly.
Viola wrote the rule on the back of her hand in pen. "It was on the sign, too," Claude said. Bunny bit the end of the pointer, and the man let her keep it.
When the talk was over I stood up and turned to face everybody. I'd been waiting all day for this. "I want to tell you something about lakes," I said. "Lakes are deeper than they look."
The kids nodded the way kids nod at a grown-up in a parking lot. "Thank you, Dale," Viola said. I told her most people learn that the hard way, but I'd learned it the hard way for them, so they wouldn't have to.
"We'll be careful," Claude said.
"That's all I ask," I said. Then I turned and asked the man in the rain hat if the bait shop had any more of those sandwiches.
He took his pointer back from Bunny and pointed it at the door.
Aunt Rosaline's house sits on top of a cliff, except for most of it, which sits on top of nothing.
It hangs out over the lake on long, skinny wooden legs. When the wind blows, the whole house leans out a little, then leans back, like it's thinking about leaving. I could tell right away she'd paid extra for the view.
"What a view," I told her at the door.
"Please don't lean on the railing," she said. "Please don't lean on anything." Then she backed away from the doorknob, which I'd touched.
Aunt Rosaline is afraid of almost everything. She's afraid of the stove, because it might explode. She's afraid of the telephone, because it might electrocute her. She's afraid of doorknobs, but she wouldn't say why. And she's afraid of the welcome mat, because somebody might take it seriously.
The one thing she isn't afraid of is grammar. Grammar she loves. I found that out when I said, "Me and Phil brought the bags up," and she said, "Phil and I." I told her Phil was the one who carried them.
"Phil and I brought the bags up," she said. "That's how you say it." I said that wasn't how it happened, though. She said it didn't matter how it happened. We went around like that until dinner, and I'm still not sure who won.
Every sentence I said, she fixed. If I said "ain't," she'd shudder. If I said "irregardless," she'd have to sit down. Phil said she was only trying to help. I think she just liked hearing me talk.
At dinner I gave her a headshot. I'd stapled one of my business cards to the corner, so she'd always have my number. She leaned back from it in her chair. "Is that a staple?" she said, and I said it was one of the good ones.
She wouldn't touch it. "Staples are sharp," she said. "They can go anywhere." She went to a drawer and came back with two oven mitts, and she made me put them on, and then she made me take the staple out while she watched from the hallway.
You don't know how small a staple is until you're wearing oven mitts. Claude held a flashlight. Viola handed me a butter knife and told me which way to push. Bunny watched closely, because it was the first time she'd seen a grown man with no fingers.
When it was out, Aunt Rosaline wrapped the staple in a paper towel and set it outside on the porch. She kept the headshot, though. She held it by the edges.
"She's frightened of you," Phil told me later.
I said that's a common reaction. A woman alone in a house on stilts, and a television personality walks in. Her hands shook all night.
You can't fake that.
I sat in on the kids' grammar lesson after dinner, because I'm the oldest in the family, and also because it was raining and there was nothing else to do.
Aunt Rosaline taught them about commas and the word "whom." Claude already knew all of it. Viola already knew most of it. Bunny bit the pencil, which I think was also correct.
I used the time to work on a new name for myself. Lately the kids had been looking to me for leadership, or at least looking in my general direction.
So I stood up and announced it. "From now on," I said, "you can call me Big Brother Dale." I'd written it on a card, too, in big letters, so it would be official.
Aunt Rosaline studied the card for a long time. "That's capitalized wrong," she said. I asked her which part. She said all of it.
I'd never been capitalized wrong before. Most people never get capitalized at all. You have to be pretty important before anybody bothers to do it wrong.
"Thank you," I said.
"It wasn't a compliment," Aunt Rosaline said. I told her that's how I knew it was sincere.
Dinner had been cold soup, because she won't go near the stove. It was potato, and it had a skin on top you could've used for a coaster. I asked if it was supposed to be cold. "It's supposed to be safe," she said.
The kids had eaten every bite and thanked her, so I'd thanked her too. Now I thanked her again, as Big Brother Dale, and as the only one at the table she'd capitalized.
I went to bed proud and still hungry.
On Saturday we all went to the market in Dismal Dock. Aunt Rosaline brought a shopping list, and she held it out at arm's length the whole way, in case it had a staple in it.
At the end of the dock there was a little shack with a sign that said "Captain Ham's Sailboat Rentals." Out front stood a sailor with a peg leg, an eye patch, and a captain's hat pulled down low.
"Ahoy," he said. "Captain Ham. I rent sailboats."
I knew it was Count Oaf right away. He'd pulled the hat down, but you can't pull a hat down over an eyebrow that long. It stuck out both sides.
The kids knew too. Viola went pale, and Claude grabbed her sleeve, and Bunny stopped chewing on the shopping list. "It's him," Claude whispered.
I didn't say a word. That's professional courtesy. When another actor's in character, you don't walk up and call him by his real name. You let him work. If I were playing a sea captain, I'd want the same, plus maybe a parrot.
And I have to say, he'd really committed to that leg. You could tell he had a whole real leg folded up in his pants, and he was clunking around on the wooden one anyway. That's the hard way to do it. Most actors would just limp.
He clunked right past me to Aunt Rosaline. "Madam," he said, "I couldn't help noticing how you said 'whom' just now. Nobody says 'whom' anymore. You said it like a queen."
"You noticed?" Aunt Rosaline said. She turned pink and dropped her list, and she didn't even check it for staples.
Claude stepped up beside her. "Aunt Rosaline," he said, "it's him. It's Count Oaf."
"It is he," Aunt Rosaline said, without looking away from the captain.
"It is he," I said to Claude. I wanted him to get something out of the trip.
Claude looked at me for a long time. He's read every book there is, and I could tell he was trying to remember which one I was from.
Captain Ham walked Aunt Rosaline over to the fruit stand and told her she had lovely punctuation. Phil moved in close behind the kids and stayed there, with one hand on Bunny and his eyes on that peg leg.
I gave Captain Ham a little nod, colleague to colleague. He looked right past me at the pears.
That's how you know he's good. He never broke.
Every year, at the same time, Hurricane Herbert comes to Lake Lugubrious, and every year they name it Herbert.
I asked the man at the market why they don't try a new name. He said they did once. It was still Herbert.
Lemuel Thicket would stop here and explain a word. Fine. "Hurricane." A hurricane is a storm from out of town. A regular storm is local, so nobody bothers to name it. But a hurricane travels, and anything that travels needs a name, like a band. That's why Herbert gets a name and a rainstorm in Wendleton doesn't.
I explained all this to Phil. "A hurricane is a rotating tropical storm," Phil said, "with winds above a certain speed."
"So, from out of town," I said.
"That's not really the point," Phil said, and I could tell he was coming around.
The radio said Herbert would get there in a few days. The whole town started getting ready. People nailed boards over their windows and tied down their boats. They brought in their porch chairs and their dogs, mostly in that order.
Aunt Rosaline got ready too. She unplugged everything in the house. She took the batteries out of the flashlight in case they leaked, and then she was afraid of the dark, so she put them back.
Phil ran tape across every window. Viola built something out of a coat hanger and two soup cans that she said would tell us when the wind changed. Claude read a book about what to do if the power goes out.
I made my own preparations. I bought snacks. I bought chips, crackers, a jar of peanut butter, and three cans of the cheese that comes out in a spray. A storm can go on for days, and a man has to keep his strength up in case something heroic comes along.
By that night I'd eaten all of it, out of nerves. So I went back to the market for more.
"For the hurricane?" the man said.
"For the first hurricane snacks," I told him. "They didn't make it."
He nodded like he'd heard that one before. Every year, at the same time.
The next morning Aunt Rosaline was gone, and the wind was in the library.
The library is the biggest room in the house. It had a giant window looking out over the lake, and now it had a giant hole looking out over the lake. Glass was all over the rug. The curtains were blowing straight out sideways, pointing right at us.
"Nobody go in there without shoes," Phil said, and he went to get the broom.
The kids called for Aunt Rosaline all over the house. They checked the closets and under the beds. I checked the kitchen, in case she'd finally gotten brave and turned on the stove. She hadn't.
On the library table, under a paperweight, was a note. Claude read it out loud. It said she'd gone away for good, she wasn't coming back, and Captain Ham would be the children's new guardian. It said he was a good man who'd take care of them.
The kids went very quiet. Viola took the note and read it again to herself. Then Claude read it a third time, slowly, with his finger under every word.
"There are mistakes in it," Claude said.
"A lot of mistakes," Viola said.
I took a look for myself, and they were right. She'd written "me and the children." She'd written "irregardless." In one spot she'd put "good" where she meant "well," which I only knew because she'd told me so eleven times since Tuesday.
I put the note down. It was hard for me to look at. "She's lost her touch," I said sadly. "It happens to the great ones."
"Dale," Viola said, "Aunt Rosaline would never write like this."
"That's what I'm saying," I said. "She's gone downhill fast."
Viola tied her hair back with her ribbon, which is what she does when an idea's coming. Claude sat down with the note and a pencil. They whispered back and forth and left me out of it, which was fine, because I was grieving her grammar.
Phil swept up the glass and hung a blanket over the hole. The wind blew the blanket straight in and wrapped it around his head. He took it off, got a hammer, and nailed it up properly.
I stood there looking at the broken window for a while. That was a big window. That was an expensive window.
Somebody owes her a window. I'd hate to be that guy.
I've always said that if you make enough mistakes, sooner or later they'll spell something. People have laughed at me for saying that, mostly at work, and once at a wedding. Now look.
The kids worked on Aunt Rosaline's note all afternoon. They wrote letters on the back of a napkin, crossed some out, and lined up every mistake in a row. Then Claude sat back.
"Sour Cave," Claude said. "The mistakes spell Sour Cave."
"She wanted us to find her," Viola said. "Only us."
"Sour Cave," I said. "I've heard of that place. I'm pretty sure it's a restaurant."
It sounded like a restaurant. It sounded like a place that does pickles, maybe a sauerkraut thing. I pictured a cave theme, where the waiters wear helmets with lights on them and you eat off a rock.
"It's a cave," Claude said. "On the far side of the lake."
"Sure," I said. "That's the theme. You don't put a restaurant in a cave and then not do the cave thing all the way."
Bunny was sitting on the table between the napkins. She looked at all of us very seriously, and then she said, "Tobba!"
"She says we have to hurry," Viola said. "Before Captain Ham figures out where Aunt Rosaline went."
"I heard it a little differently," I said. "I think she said Dale should lead the way, since he's the one who's heard of the place."
Bunny leaned over and bit my thumb. It wasn't a hard bite, but it was a very clear one, and she looked me in the eye the whole time.
"She also says please stop translating her," Claude said. I told him he couldn't know that. Then I looked at my thumb and let it go.
Phil was already asking how we'd get across the lake with a hurricane on the way. Viola said there was a sailboat rental at the end of the dock. Claude said he knew whose it was. Nobody said anything for a while after that, and the wind kept pulling at the blanket Phil had nailed over the window.
I was mostly thinking about pickles. I hadn't eaten since my second round of hurricane snacks, and nobody had said a word about lunch.
If we were going to Sour Cave, I wanted a table by the window.
When we got down to the dock, the wind was blowing so hard the seagulls were walking. And there was Hollis, standing next to a brand-new jet ski.
It was red and white and shiny, and it still had the sticker on the seat. He'd bought it with his savings, he told me, because he missed having one, and because I'd sunk his last one. He said that second part in a way I felt was unnecessary.
"Four thousand dollars, Dale," he said, and he tapped the clipboard where my name was. "Today."
"There's a hurricane coming," I said. I pointed at the lake, in case he hadn't noticed it.
"Then you'd better hurry," Hollis said.
Behind him, the kids and Phil were untying a sailboat. Captain Ham's rental shack was locked up tight, and nobody was around to rent one to them, so they were borrowing it. I was proud of them. They'd learned that from somebody.
Viola was working the ropes. Claude had a map. Phil had Bunny in one arm and a bucket in the other. They were going across the lake, in a hurricane, to find Aunt Rosaline.
I'll be honest. It was brave. If I'd been ten years younger and sixty pounds lighter, it's exactly what I'd have done, unless something came up.
The sailboat pushed off. Phil looked back at me once, and then the wind caught the sail and they were gone into the gray.
I couldn't let them go alone. Something might happen out there that would need to be told about later, and they'd need a witness who could tell it right.
So I looked at the jet ski. Hollis saw me look at it. "Don't," he said.
"I'll bring it right back," I said.
"Dale, don't," Hollis said, slower this time, the way you'd say it to a dog near a cake.
"It's an emergency," I said, and I was already climbing on. The key was hanging off the handlebar on a little yellow float, which is what you do when you want somebody to find it.
I pulled away from the dock a little sideways and took off after the sailboat. Behind me, Hollis yelled something from the dock. It was long. It went on for most of the way past the bait shop. I caught "savings," and "four thousand," and "my mother." The rest was weather.
I didn't turn around. You should never turn around on a jet ski. Also, I didn't want to.
Halfway across Lake Lugubrious, Hurricane Herbert stopped being a forecast and became a hurricane.
The first wave lifted the jet ski up and set it back down. That was fine. The second wave lifted it up and set it down somewhere else, which was less fine.
The third wave filled up the seat compartment, and it turned out that's where I'd put my hurricane snacks. They floated away one at a time, the chips first, then the crackers, then all three cans of spray cheese, bobbing off in a little line, like ducks.
Then the rain started coming sideways. Then it started coming up. I didn't know rain could do that, and I don't think it should be allowed.
Up ahead I could see the sailboat. Viola had the tiller. Claude was pointing the way. Phil was bailing with the bucket, very fast, with Bunny zipped safe inside his raincoat. "Hang on, Dale!" Viola shouted, without letting go of anything.
I gave the jet ski more gas to catch up. It made a grinding noise. Then it made a gargling noise. Then it stopped making noises, and the front end tipped down, slow and polite, and kept going.
I've been on a sinking jet ski before. You'd think it would get easier. It doesn't, but at least you know what to say.
"Lakes are deeper than they look!" I shouted to the kids. I wanted them to know I'd been right about that.
Then I went under.
It's very quiet under a lake. It's dark and cold, and there's no wind down there at all. If they could just do something about the water, it would be a nice place to wait out a storm.
When I came back up, the jet ski was gone. My shoes were gone. One sock was still on, but it had moved a lot lower.
A hand grabbed my collar. It was Phil, leaning way over the side of the sailboat. He hauled me up and in, and I landed in the bottom of the boat next to the bucket.
"You okay?" Phil said.
"I told you," I said. "Didn't I tell you?"
"You told us," Phil said, and he went back to bailing.
I lay there in the bottom of the boat and did the math. Hollis had paid four thousand dollars for that jet ski. I already owed him four thousand for the first one. Four and four is eight. I did it again to be sure, counting on my fingers. It was still eight.
Eight thousand dollars. That's a lot of jet ski to have under one lake.
The storm was still going, so I decided it was a good time to show everybody my birth certificate.
Mr. Slowe had said my claim needed one, and I didn't have one. So the day before, while the kids were busy reading, I'd gone to the copy shop in Dismal Dock and made my own. Then I paid the man an extra dollar to laminate it.
I pulled it out of my pants. The water ran right off it. "Look at that," I said. "Waterproof."
Viola was steering with both hands. Claude was holding the map up close to his face so the wind couldn't take it. Phil was bailing. Bunny was inside Phil's coat, and all you could see were her four teeth.
"I'm going to read this to you," I said.
"Dale, could you help bail?" Phil said.
"In a minute," I said. "This is important. This is about the family."
I read it out loud, over the wind. "This certifies that Dale Tummins was born." I stopped there for a second to let that sink in. "In a hospital."
A big wave came at us. Viola turned straight into it, and the whole boat went up and came back down.
"Which hospital?" Claude said, still holding the map to his face.
"A hospital," I told him. "They're all basically the same. They've all got beds and a parking lot."
"Who signed it?" Claude said. I turned it around so he could see the bottom. It said, "Signed, a doctor." I'd thought about putting a name there, but I didn't want to get anybody in trouble.
"That's not a real birth certificate," Claude said.
"It's laminated," I said. He didn't have an answer for that. Nobody did. Phil just kept bailing.
I held it up in the rain. The rain soaked our clothes, our hair, and Claude's map. It would have soaked my snacks, if I'd still had them. But it didn't touch my certificate. That was the best dollar I ever spent. It might be the only good one.
When I finally put it back in my pants and picked up a bucket, the boat was nearly dry. I took that as a sign that I'd timed it right.
Sour Cave wasn't a restaurant. I could tell right away, because nobody came to seat us.
It was a big dark hole in the rocks on the far side of the lake. Viola steered us right up to the mouth of it. Phil jumped out into the shallow water and pulled the boat in, and Claude handed Bunny over the side to him.
The cave smelled like old rain and something worse. I figured that was the sour part. Whoever named the place had really stuck to the theme.
"Aunt Rosaline?" Viola called.
Something moved in the back. A flashlight clicked on, and there was Aunt Rosaline, sitting on a rock with her knees pulled up, holding the flashlight in one hand and an oven mitt in the other.
"Children," she said. "Oh, children. You found it."
She was shaking all over. She said Captain Ham had come to the house being very charming, then charming in a scary way, so she'd broken the window and run. She'd written the note so only the kids could read it.
"I could read it a little," I said.
The kids hugged her. Phil gave her his coat. Bunny gave her a careful bite on the sleeve, which is what Bunny does instead of a hug.
That's when I noticed somebody else in the cave. Way in the back, on another rock, sat a man in a raincoat with a notebook on his knee, writing. It was the same sad man from Uncle Jonty's gate, the one who'd asked about the kids.
When he saw us, he closed the notebook, stood up, and walked right past us out into the storm. He didn't say a word. He didn't even take a boat. He just went.
"Who was that?" Phil said.
"A fan," I said. "He followed me across a lake in a hurricane. That's a real fan." I'd have given him an autograph, but my pen was at the bottom of Lake Lugubrious with everything else.
Aunt Rosaline was still shaking. She said she was afraid of the dark, and afraid of the rocks, and afraid of the lake. Then she held up the flashlight. "Me and this flashlight," she said, "are the only things keeping me sane."
I couldn't believe it. I'd waited my whole visit for this. "This flashlight and I," I said.
Aunt Rosaline looked at me. Everybody looked at me. Even the flashlight seemed to be looking at me.
"You're right," she said quietly. "This flashlight and I."
I'd corrected her grammar, and she'd said I was right. I walked to the mouth of the cave and looked out at the storm for a while, because I wanted to be alone with it.
It's the proudest I've ever been in a cave.
Of everybody on the boat, the leeches went for me first. Some people are just born to lead.
We'd left Sour Cave at dawn, with Aunt Rosaline sitting in the middle of the boat and her eyes shut tight. Viola steered, Claude watched the clouds, and Phil rowed whenever the wind gave up. Aunt Rosaline had asked us all, very politely, never to say the word leech. I'd only said it twice, and once was an accident.
Halfway across, the water around us started to bubble. Then it started to wiggle. Then about a hundred little gray heads came up together and looked right at me.
"They go after whoever's eaten in the last hour," Claude said, and everybody in the boat turned around.
I had a little mustard on my chin, but mustard doesn't prove anything. Mustard can come from anywhere. "Dale," Phil said gently, "did you eat something in the cave?"
"A sandwich," I said. "A small one. It's mostly bread."
I'd bought it in Dismal Dock the day before the storm and I'd carried it inside my shirt through the whole hurricane. It'd come through better than the jet ski had. I felt it'd earned a good home.
The leeches bumped the boat, then bumped it harder, then started nibbling the wood. Honestly, it's nice to be wanted. On Exile Isle the only thing that'd ever wanted me was a crab, and only for a minute. "They seem friendly," I told the kids.
"Dale, they're leeches," Claude said.
Viola tied her hair back with her ribbon and started building something out of an oar and the bailing bucket. Claude called out every change in the wind. Phil scooped leeches off the side with his bare hands and set them back in the lake, because he teaches biology and they were only doing their job. Bunny bit an oar in a supportive way.
My contribution was to lie flat under a tarp, so the leeches couldn't smell my breath anymore. A good leader keeps a low profile in a crisis. Mine was about two inches.
Then a motor roared across the water. "Ahoy, children!" somebody shouted, and there was Captain Ham on a much bigger boat, waving his captain hat. I felt better right away. You always feel safer once a professional's on the scene.
I stayed under the tarp for most of what happened next. There was shouting, and splashing, and the sound of one boat knocking into another. When I finally crawled out, we were all on the deck of the bigger boat, and Aunt Rosaline wasn't with us. The lake had taken her. The kids stood at the rail and looked at the water for a long time. Phil stood right behind them, holding Bunny, with his free hand on Claude's shoulder. Nobody said a word. Aunt Rosaline was afraid of nearly everything in the world, and she'd come out onto that lake in a hurricane anyway, for them. I still think about that.
When we got to Dismal Dock, Hollis was waiting at the end of the pier, with a towel in one hand and an invoice in the other. "Here," he said, and he held out the towel first.
I'll always give him that.
Mr. Slowe was waiting for us on the dock with a pen, which is how you know a bank means business.
He coughed into his white handkerchief and explained that Aunt Rosaline had left a note naming Captain Ham as the new guardian, so the children would go with Captain Ham. "It'll all be handled," he said. Captain Ham bowed low. His peg leg made a thunk on the boards, and then a second, smaller thunk came from somewhere inside the peg.
I missed most of what came after that, because Hollis wanted to go over the invoice.
"Line one," Hollis said, reading off his clipboard. "One jet ski, brand new, now located at the bottom of Lake Lugubrious."
"Allegedly," I said.
"I watched it go down," Hollis said. "Line two. One towel, rental."
"That towel was a gift," I told him. "I was moved by that towel."
"Line three," Hollis said. "Forty minutes of yelling from a dock, in a hurricane."
I told him nobody can bill for yelling. "I'm a consultant," I said. "If yelling paid, I'd own this dock."
"I yelled very specific things," Hollis said.
Behind me, somewhere, Claude said the word ankle. Then Viola said, "Look at the peg." Then there was a sound like somebody biting a table leg, then a crack, then a gasp from the whole dock. I kept my eyes on the clipboard. By then I'd gotten the towel down to half price, and a man in a negotiation doesn't look away.
When I finally turned around, Captain Ham was running up the main street on two perfectly good legs. Bunny sat on the dock with a wooden peg in her mouth, looking proud of herself. Phil told me later that the peg'd been strapped over a real leg the whole time, and the kids had proved it, and Bunny'd done the biting. Mr. Slowe coughed and said it was lucky he hadn't gotten around to signing anything.
The part that hurt was that Captain Ham ran right past me. I'd even lifted my hand to wave goodbye. "He'll be back," I told Phil. "In the theater, the whole company takes a bow together."
I kept my hand up for a while, in case he came back for it.
That night at the Dismal Dock Motor Lodge, I gave myself a new name: Dale the Unfortunate. It came to me while I was standing at the ice machine, waiting for a cube.
I wrote down my misfortunes on the back of the room-service menu, which turned out to be a menu for the vending machine in the hall. "Listen to this," I told Phil, and I read it to him.
One. I'd lost a jet ski that belonged to somebody else, in a lake nobody'd warned me about except me.
Two. I'd eaten at the wrong time. Only once, but leeches don't have any sense of proportion.
Three. I'd gotten wet, and then I'd dried off with a rental towel, and then I'd gotten wet again in the shower, crying a little about the debt.
Four. The debt's doubled to eight thousand dollars. Nothing else of mine's ever doubled. I tried once with a savings account, and the bank closed it.
Five. The ice machine here makes one cube at a time, and it makes you watch.
Phil sat by the window with his waterproof notebook. The kids were asleep in the next room, all three of them in one bed, with the door open a crack. "Phil," I said, "the kids had a rough year too. But if you put my list next to theirs, I'd call it close."
Phil stopped writing. He didn't look at me. He looked at the open door.
"It isn't close, Dale," he said quietly.
I thought about that for a long time. Phil went back to his notebook, and I went back to my menu, and for a while the only sound in the room was the ice machine down the hall, making its one cube.
After a while I picked up the pen and crossed off the ice machine.
Mr. Slowe needed a report on the hurricane for the files at Mulcher Money Management, so I went first. The best storyteller should always go first. That way the others've got something to aim at.
We sat in the Dismal Dock post office, the only building in town with chairs. Mr. Slowe coughed into his handkerchief for a while and then held up his pen. "Begin whenever you like," he said.
"It was a dark and stormy afternoon," I said. "I'd taken command of a small jet ski."
"Whose jet ski?" Mr. Slowe said.
"A fleet vessel," I said. "I was scouting ahead. When I'd learned the lake was deep, I sank the jet ski on purpose, to measure it."
Mr. Slowe wrote something down, so I kept going. I told him how I'd climbed aboard the sailboat and taken the helm. I told him how I'd read the clouds and bailed with a bucket, and kept the children calm by reading them my laminated birth certificate. "The leeches," I said, "I fought off personally, from a defensive position."
"From under a tarp," Claude said.
"A tarp's a position," I said.
Phil sat by the stamp machine with Bunny asleep on his shoulder. He'd kept quiet the whole time, until now, when he cleared his throat. "That's not how I remember it," Phil said.
Then he told it his way. Viola'd steered the whole crossing, in the rain, with her ribbon in her teeth. Claude'd found the way across. Phil'd bailed. I'd fallen off a jet ski and gotten hauled into the boat by my belt.
"There's a lot of ways to remember a hurricane," I told Mr. Slowe. "That's what makes them special."
Mr. Slowe coughed for a long time. When he finished, he wrote one word on his pad and underlined it twice. I read it upside down, a skill every man picks up at banks. It said "noted."
People've called me a lot of things over the years. Nobody'd ever noted me before. On the way out I asked if I could get a copy for my wall, and Mr. Slowe said it'd be handled.
So far it hasn't been. That's how you know it's important.
On our last night in Dismal Dock, I went down to the pier to think. Count Oaf was there, standing behind a stack of crab traps, which is exactly where I'd stand if I wanted to be mysterious.
He didn't have the peg leg, the eye patch or the captain hat. He was just himself, with the long eyebrow and the shiny eyes and two real feet. It was like meeting a magician on his day off.
"You," he said. "Come here."
I went right over. When your mentor tells you to come here, you go.
"I'll be brief," Count Oaf said. "Those orphans are sitting on an enormous fortune, and I intend to have it. You live with them. You eat with them. You hear things."
"Mostly about books," I said.
"Help me get it," he said, "and when the fortune's mine, you get a share."
"How big a share?" I said.
"Ten percent," Count Oaf said, very slowly, rolling it around in his mouth.
Here's the thing he didn't know. I'd already filed Form Nine. I had a laminated birth certificate in my pocket that said I'd been born in a hospital. As far as I could tell, the fortune was mine already, or it would be once the bank handled it. So Count Oaf was offering me ten percent of my own money. That's not a deal. That's a bank.
"No thanks," I said. "I want all of it."
His eyebrow went up in the middle, which is the only place it can go.
"All of it," he said.
"Every penny," I said. "Nobody gets one cent of that fortune but me. Not you, not your troupe, not anybody. I'm going to keep a close eye on those kids, to make sure of it."
I meant every word. I don't share. At the Sudsy Duck Laundromat I'd put a sign on my favorite dryer that said "Reserved," and it'd stayed there six years.
Count Oaf stared at me for a long time. The water slapped the pier. Somewhere a gull laughed, which I took personally. He leaned down close, so close I could see the eye tattoo peeking out over his sock.
"You," he said, "are an idiot."
Then he stepped back into the dark and was gone.
I stood on the pier for a while. Three times before, he'd called me something, and every time it'd just been a word for whoever happened to be standing there. This one had feeling in it. This one was for me.
I said it to myself in his voice most of the night. "Idiot."
It's the nicest thing he's ever called me.
Measlyville has one main street, and it's mud. Not a muddy street. Just mud, with a street sign stuck in it.
Mr. Slowe drove us in himself. He said the owner of the Lucky Sniffs Lumbermill had agreed to be the new guardian, and it was all being handled. He coughed the whole way, so it was hard to tell which parts were news. "Nearly there," he'd say about every ten minutes, and then he'd cough some more.
Here's everything to see in Measlyville, in case you ever go.
First, the mud. Second, the lumbermill at the end of the mud, which was huge and gray and made a noise all day like a giant clearing his throat. Third, a tall wooden gate in front of the mill with a sign, and the mill's name on the sign spelled out in chewing gum. I respected that. It's a look.
Fourth, a building on the edge of town shaped exactly like a giant eye. It was round and white, with a big dark window in the middle for the pupil, and it watched our car the whole way down the street.
"An eye doctor," Phil said. "Probably."
"I like it," I said. "It's the only building in town that looks happy to see us."
Claude didn't take his eyes off it. Viola went quiet. The two of them looked at the building, then at each other, the way they do right before they turn out to be right about something. Bunny bit the car window.
I'd had high hopes for mill life. I'd never worked with my hands, so my hands were fresh. I'd pictured myself in a red flannel shirt, growing a beard on the job and eating pancakes three times a day. I'd yell "Timber" a lot, and other men would cut the trees.
"I think we'll be the ones working," Viola said.
"Of course," I said. "Somebody's got to yell."
Mr. Slowe stopped at the gate. Behind it, a big cloud of cigar smoke was waiting for us, with nobody visible inside.
I waved at it. First impressions matter.
The owner of the Lucky Sniffs Lumbermill had a face, I assume, but nobody'd seen it in years.
Everybody called him the Boss. He stood behind his desk inside a thick cloud of cigar smoke, and the cloud did all the talking. Every so often a cigar tip glowed red in the middle of it, like a porch light. I kept wanting to knock.
"The children will work at the mill," the cloud said. "Everyone here works. Those are the rules."
"Then it's settled," I said. "I'm with the family. I'll be supervising."
"Everyone here works," the cloud said again.
"Supervising's work," I said. "Ask any supervisor." The cloud didn't say anything at all, and I looked over at Phil, who was already rolling up his sleeves.
The Boss had a partner named Chuck, the nicest man in Measlyville and maybe the least useful. Chuck shook hands with every one of us, twice, and then took us down the hall to see his library.
It was a big room with big shelves, and it held three books.
"It's a start," Chuck said proudly. "One's large, one's small, and one's missing its cover, so that one's a surprise."
"Three books," Claude said, very politely, and I could tell it hurt him. "I read two books once," I told Chuck. "Not these two. But two."
Now, Lemuel Thicket would stop the story right here to explain a word to you. Fine. Here's mine.
Guardian. I'd always thought a guardian was somebody who guards you, like a goalie, or a big dog. Mr. Slowe used that word at every house the kids went to, and I'd believed him every time.
It turns out a guardian's an employer. You live where they say, you eat what they give you, and you work for whatever they pay. At the Lucky Sniffs, what they paid turned out to be not money.
I didn't mind the work. I minded the word. I'd been using it wrong my whole life, at parties.
Chuck walked us out to the bunkhouse, smiling all the way, and pointed out the mud, which we'd seen. "You'll love it here," Chuck said.
Nobody ever had.
On my first payday at the Lucky Sniffs Lumbermill, I became a rich man.
The Boss paid in coupons. On Friday every worker got a stack, handed out of the smoke, and each coupon was good for ten percent off shampoo at the only store in Measlyville. The store only sells gum.
"So they're worthless," Claude said.
"They're worth ten percent," I told him. "That's more than most things."
Lunch was gum too. Every day at noon a man walked down the line and gave everybody one stick of gum. You'd chew it for an hour and go back to work. Anybody who wanted a second stick could buy one at the store, with cash, which nobody had, because everybody got paid in coupons.
None of that bothered me. I had forty-one coupons. I counted them twice in the bunkhouse that night, then once more by flashlight, because by flashlight it feels like treasure. "Phil," I said, "look at all this."
"I see it, Dale," Phil said.
If I saved them all, I figured I'd get four hundred and ten percent off shampoo. At that point the store'd owe me money, plus the shampoo. I'd be the first man in Measlyville with clean hair.
Viola turned a coupon over and over in her hands, the way she does with a part she can't use yet. Phil split his lunch gum into three pieces for the kids. I offered to hold the kids' coupons for them, but they said no, which showed me they were learning to manage money.
The next morning I went to thank the Boss for my wages. I wanted to give him something back too, one professional to another, so I brought one of my headshots from Exile Isle, the one of me squinting on a beach with half a coconut.
I held it out toward the smoke. A hand came out, took it, and went back in.
"You're welcome," I said. I waited for a thank-you, or for the headshot to come back out signed. Nothing came out of the smoke but more smoke. I stood there a while longer, in case the smoke had questions.
As far as I know, he's still in there with it.
Mill work turned out to be easy once I'd gotten the hang of it, and I'd gotten the hang of it the first morning. The hang of it was mostly avoiding it.
Here's how the Lucky Sniffs worked. Trucks brought in logs. A big claw grabbed the logs and dropped them on a belt, and the belt carried them to the saw. The saw turned each log into boards, a stamping machine stamped the boards, and then somebody carried the boards to a pile and stacked them. The somebody wasn't ever me. I want that on the record.
The kids did all of it. Viola fixed a jammed belt with a hairpin and her ribbon. Claude memorized the stacking order and kept the whole crew on it. Bunny bit through the twine on the bundles, which saved everybody a knife. Phil carried the heavy end of everything, and when something didn't have a heavy end, he found one.
My technique was the board. In the morning I'd pick up one board, and I'd carry it around all day. A man with a board looks busy. A man without a board looks like a man waiting for a board. Nobody stops a man with a board. They figure he's taking it someplace important.
My other technique was the consultant break. Once an hour I'd sit down on a stump to consult with myself. I'd ask myself how things were going. "Not bad," I'd say, and that was that.
On the second day, I set my board down on the belt for a minute so I could take a consultant break.
The belt took my board. My board went into the saw and came out as two boards. The two boards went under the stamper and got stamped, and so did the cuff of my sleeve, which was hanging over the edge of the belt. Then a bell rang. Then a horn went off. Then the whole line stopped, and every head in the mill turned down the belt to look at me.
"Are you all right?" Phil called.
"I've been branded," I called back.
My cuff says Lucky Sniffs on it now, in ink that won't ever come out. I take that as a compliment. Most people've got to work years before a company puts its name on them.
Phil walked over, picked up both halves of my board and handed them back to me. "There you go, Dale," he said. "Now you look twice as busy."
Our new foreman shouted so much that I knew right away he was from the theater.
His name was Foreman Fettucino. He wore a big curly wig, like a judge's wig somebody'd run through a dryer, and a white surgical mask over most of his face. He didn't ever just say a thing. He'd shout it, through the mask, so all of it came out a little damp.
"Faster!" he shouted. "Lift! Stack! You there, lift faster!"
Where his hands should've been, he had two shiny hooks.
I knew him right then. He's the man with hooks for hands, from the troupe and the play. I'd stood next to him in rehearsals, holding my lamp. Same hooks, same shoulders, same way of breathing through his mouth when he's thinking.
The kids knew him too. Viola froze with a board in her arms. Claude leaned over and whispered to her, and Bunny pointed at a hook and showed all four of her teeth, which is how Bunny says hello to people she finds suspicious.
I kept my mouth shut. You don't ever break another actor's character. If a man's gone to the trouble of a wig and a mask and a whole new name, you let him have it. That's professional courtesy. You'd want the same thing yourself.
"Viola," Claude whispered, "that's him."
"I know," Viola whispered back.
"I know too," I whispered to them both. "Act natural."
Viola gave me a long look. Then she went back to stacking.
To be honest, I was thrilled. It gets lonely, working at a mill when you come from the theater. Now there were two of us.
And I'll say this for him. Hooks are a great choice for a mill. You can't get a splinter in a hook. You can lift a board, hang up a coat and open a can of beans, all without changing tools. "Great hooks," I told Phil. "Very practical."
"Dale," Phil said, "please stay away from him."
At the end of the shift, I walked past the foreman while he was shouting at a stack, and I gave him a little thumbs up, down low, where nobody else could see it.
"Lift faster!" he shouted.
So I lifted faster. You always listen to your director.
On Monday morning Hollis Brandt took a job at the Lucky Sniffs Lumbermill, so he could garnish my coupons.
He walked through the gate in a hard hat and brand-new work gloves, with his clipboard under one arm. He'd come all the way from Lake Lugubrious, found the mill, filled out the paperwork and passed the physical, all before I'd finished my first consultant break.
By lunch they'd promoted him to shift lead. The Boss announced it from inside the smoke, and the whole floor clapped. I clapped too, because people were looking at me.
Hollis turned out to be a natural. He stacked faster than anybody but Phil. He fixed the stamper with a dime. He learned all three kids' names in the first hour, and he gave Bunny his lunch gum without being asked.
On Friday afternoon he was waiting for me at the pay window. "Coupons," he said, and held out his glove.
"These are worth ten percent off shampoo," I said. "Each."
"At a store that only sells gum," Hollis said. "I asked around. I'll credit them at one cent per coupon."
"One cent!" I said. "That's robbery."
"That's generous," Hollis said, and he wrote it on his clipboard.
That night in the bunkhouse, I did the math with a pencil. I owed Hollis eight thousand dollars, which is eight hundred thousand cents. I got about forty coupons a week. So I'd be paid off in twenty thousand weeks, or a little under four hundred years, assuming no vacations. I'm planning on vacations.
Phil checked my math, and it was right, which surprised us both. "You could work harder," Phil said. "You'd get more coupons."
"Then Hollis'd get more coupons," I said.
Phil opened his mouth, and then he closed it again. It's the only argument I've ever won with him.
Claude came back from the stacking yard on Tuesday without his glasses, which for Claude is like coming back without his face.
Viola said the foreman had tripped him on purpose. Claude said he was fine, and he was, but the glasses were in two pieces. One lens was cracked, and the other was somewhere under a log pile.
"He can't read without them," Viola said.
"There's an upside to everything," I said. Nobody answered, so I gave them time to think it over.
The Boss said Claude could go to the eye doctor in town, as long as he went fast. Phil was stuck finishing a stack, so I offered to take the kids. Somebody had to sit in the waiting room, and waiting rooms are where I shine.
The eye doctor turned out to be the building shaped like an eye. Up close it was even bigger, and you went in through the pupil. "I've never walked in through a pupil before," I told Viola. "This is a real highlight."
The doctor was a smiling woman with a very soft voice and a name tag I didn't ever get close enough to read. She took Claude into a back room and shut the door, and Viola and Bunny and I sat down in the waiting room.
The receptionist was named Shelley. That's what her name tag said, anyway. She was tall and thin, in a blond wig and a pair of very high heels, and she had one long eyebrow running across her whole forehead. Her eyes were shiny.
It was Count Oaf. Viola knew it too. She went stiff in her chair and pulled Bunny into her lap.
I didn't say a word, of course. Professional courtesy. A man playing a receptionist is working, and you don't ever interrupt a man at work. Instead, I gave him what every actor wants, which is a note. "Those are great heels," I told Shelley. "Very convincing. Most people would wobble."
Shelley looked at me for a long time. Then she went back to filing her nails with a letter opener.
"Thank you," I said, for her.
It took about an hour. When Claude came out, he had new glasses on, and he was smiling. Claude almost never smiles. Usually he's got a book.
"How do you feel?" Viola asked him.
"I feel fine," Claude said, in a flat voice with nothing behind it.
He didn't look at his sister. He didn't look at anything. He just stood there with his arms at his sides, waiting for somebody to tell him where to go.
Viola looked scared. I looked at Claude and felt proud. For weeks I'd told that kid to put down his book and relax. "Look at him," I said to Viola.
Finally, somebody'd gotten through to him.
By that night Claude had stopped reading, which in our family is how you know something's wrong.
He didn't open a book. He didn't answer when anybody said his name. He sat on the edge of his bunk with his new glasses on and stared at the wall, and every so often he'd say, "Yes, sir," to nobody.
Viola sat next to him with Bunny on her lap, holding his hand. Phil looked worried. Even Bunny looked worried, and Bunny usually only looks hungry.
I could see the family needed somebody to take charge, so I stood up on a crate. "As the eldest Maudelaire," I said, "I'm taking command."
"Dale," Phil said.
"From now on," I said, "you can call me Dale, Eldest of the Maudelaires."
"That's long," Viola said.
"It's a title," I said. "Titles are supposed to be long. That way people know they're good."
Then I laid out my plan. Claude needed rest, because rest is the best medicine, apart from real medicine. So Claude would rest. And so he wouldn't have to worry about anything while he rested, I'd hold onto his coupons for him.
"How many coupons does he have?" Phil asked.
"Forty," I said. "Forty-one, once I count them again."
Viola didn't answer me. She went across the yard to the library and borrowed all three of Chuck's books, the large one, the small one and the one with no cover. She read every page at the kitchen table by candlelight, looking for anything about eyes, or doctors, or whatever'd happened to her brother. Phil made her tea and sat up with her the whole night.
I could tell they'd got things under control. That's the mark of a good leader. You set the plan in motion, and then you get out of the way.
I went to bed early, with the coupons under my pillow for safekeeping.
I slept great. Somebody had to.
Claude's first full day as a sleepwalker went fine for about four minutes, and then he pulled a lever.
He'd been standing at the stamping machine since the whistle, staring straight ahead with his arms hanging down. Foreman Fettucino walked over, bent down, and said something into his ear. I figured it was shop talk. The foreman and I are colleagues, so I didn't pry.
Claude nodded once and walked straight to the big lever by the log pile. "Claude," Viola said, "don't touch that." I told her I'd handle it. I was the eldest Maudelaire that week, so technically it was my lever.
I got as far as "Now, son" before he pulled it. A log as long as a school bus rolled off the top of the pile and knocked over a stack of boards. The boards knocked over a cart, and the cart knocked over me, mainly because I was sitting on it. I'd been sitting on it since ten, on a consultant break.
Nobody got hurt. Viola had Claude by the collar and out of the way before the stack even wobbled, and Phil had Bunny up on his shoulders. The log was fine. I lost a shoe under the log, a stick of gum I'd been saving, and some dignity. My ankle made a noise, but it was a short noise.
Then the Boss came out of his office. You can't see his face because of the cigar smoke, but you can read his mood off the cloud. Most days it's a calm gray cloud. This one was black and getting taller. "Who did this?" the Boss said, from somewhere inside it.
Everybody looked at Claude. Claude looked at nothing. I looked at the log, because I felt it ought to take some responsibility. "In fairness," I said, "those boards were stacked wrong." That was true. They were stacked on me.
Chuck came out behind the Boss and said it wasn't so bad. He said the log was going to get cut sooner or later anyway, just not in that direction. Chuck is the nicest man at the mill, and you can tell, because nothing he says changes anything.
"One more accident," the Boss said, "and those orphans are gone." I made a mental note to ask the bank whether that included me.
Phil dug my shoe out with a crowbar. It was flat now, but in a dressy way. Claude carried it home for me without being asked, without saying a word, and without blinking once.
That's when I knew something was really wrong.
Bunny bit through a two-by-four on Tuesday, and it took her about a minute. Most of the men at the mill need a saw and a coffee break to do that.
She'd been sitting on the lumber stack by the stamper, gnawing on the end of a board. Then there was a crack, and she was holding the short end, the long end was on the floor, and she looked very pleased with herself.
Viola checked her mouth, and all four teeth were fine. Bunny's teeth are always fine. It's everything else in the room that has to worry about it.
Then Bunny looked straight at me and said, "Grulf!" I knew right away what that meant. "She's saying, 'Dale, you're family, and I'd never bite family, especially the big one,'" I said.
"She's saying, 'Claude, wake up,'" Viola said quietly. "She's been saying it all morning." Normally Claude does the translating. But he was across the room staring at a wall, and he'd been staring at it since breakfast without missing a spot.
I'd been bitten by Bunny before, on the thumb and the shoe and the sleeve, and I'd always thought of those as love bites. But I'd never seen her go through lumber. Lumber is what they build houses out of. I'm not built out of anything near that good.
So from then on I gave her room. When she crawled my way, I got up on a sawhorse and stayed there until she crawled somewhere else.
"Dale, she's a baby," Phil said, picking her up. "Why are you standing on a sawhorse?"
"Respect," I said. "Also, height."
The guy in the raincoat was back, standing at the mill gate in the rain, which I've noticed is his favorite weather.
I'd seen him at the theater, at Uncle Jonty's gate, and in the back of a cave. At first I figured he was a shy fan. Lately I'd figured critic. A fan would have asked for another autograph, and a critic would at least have looked at me.
He was writing in a notebook again. The pages were soaked through, so I don't know how much was really getting written down, but he kept at it, and you have to admire that in a man.
There's a little roof over the gate. I stood under it and offered him half. "There's room," I said. He stayed out in the rain anyway, which I respected, because it was a small roof and I'd have had to scoot.
"What's your name?" I said. "Lemuel Thicket," he said. He didn't ask mine. I told him anyway, and spelled it, and he didn't write it down. I figured he had a good memory.
I gave him a tip, since in Measlyville you tip in coupons. I folded one in half and pressed it into his hand. "Get yourself something nice," I said. It was ten percent off shampoo. I couldn't see his hair under the hood, but it's the thought that counts, and the store only sells gum anyway.
He put the coupon in his coat pocket without looking at it. Then he asked his one question. "How are the children?" he said.
It's a big question, so I gave him the full answer. "Honestly, not great," I said. My ankle still made the noise from the log. The gum was giving me a jaw thing. The Boss didn't see my potential, and I was carrying more responsibility than ever, mostly boards.
"I see," Lemuel said, and he wrote down one word.
I read it upside down. It was hard to make out in the rain, but I counted seven letters. Tummins has seven letters. I counted twice, on my fingers, to be sure.
I couldn't think of any other seven-letter word he'd want.
At the mill, lunch is gum, one stick each, handed out down the line at noon. The gum man keeps the box in the break room until then. I'd figured out that if you get to the break room at eleven-thirty and lock the door, it's all just sitting there.
So that's where I was for the most important part of the whole lumbermill, with my feet up on the table and about forty sticks going at once. I want to say that up front, because later there were a lot of questions.
The break room has a loudspeaker in the corner so the Boss can announce things, like the time, or that there won't be raises. Most days it just hums. That day it started picking up the mill floor, all crackly and in pieces.
First came machines, louder than usual, and then shouting, and then the big saw, the one that does the logs. "Chuck!" somebody yelled. "Get away from there!" I figured Chuck was getting a delivery. He's always getting books delivered. He's up to three.
Then Viola's voice came through, very fast and very calm. "Phil, I need that belt," she said, "and the pulley, and your shoelaces." Then there was clanking. Viola builds things out of whatever's lying around. I'd lent her a shoelace once, so I felt like I was involved.
Then a woman's voice, high and angry. "Ow! That baby bit me!" That was Bunny, probably. She bites everybody. I didn't think much of it, because I'd just started on the cinnamon ones.
Then a word, just one, loud and clear, a long one, and the speaker crackled right in the middle so I missed it. Then Claude spoke, in his regular voice. "Viola?" he said. "What's going on?" I don't know why I didn't think that was important. I think it was the cinnamon.
Then the saw got louder, and the shouting got louder, and I got hungry. There's a big red lever on the break room wall. I'd always figured it was the lunch bell. It's red and it's in the break room. I'm not an engineer, but I can add. So I pulled it.
Everything stopped at once: the saw, the belts, the stamper, the loudspeaker. I'd never heard the mill that quiet. You could hear my gum.
I unlocked the door and went out to see who wanted lunch. Everybody was standing around the big saw. Chuck was sitting on the floor next to it, holding his hat, surprised but fine. Viola had her ribbon in her hair and some kind of contraption in her hands, Phil had Bunny, and Claude was blinking at everybody like it was morning.
Nobody could agree whether the saw stopped because of the lever or a second before it. "It was close," Viola said. Claude said he'd been asleep for most of it. Chuck said it didn't matter, he was just glad, and he shook everybody's hand, including mine, because I was standing there.
"Dale, what made you pull it?" Phil asked me.
"Lunch," I said, and I held up the gum box. It was empty, but I held it up.
Later that afternoon we learned that the eye doctor had died in an accident at the furnace. Nobody said much for the rest of the day, and I didn't either.
Claude was back to normal the next morning, reading at breakfast, which is how you can tell with Claude. He said a word had woken him up. The eye doctor had put a word in his head, sort of like a light switch, and somebody said it on the mill floor, and he came right back on.
Lemuel likes to stop and explain a word, so here's mine. Hypnotized. It means you've stared at something boring for so long you'll do whatever anybody tells you. I've been to a lot of meetings, and I can tell you it's real.
Claude said it wasn't that, and that it was more complicated. But Claude was the one who got hypnotized, so I don't know how much he'd know about it.
"What was the word?" I asked. Claude told me. I won't repeat it here, partly because it's a powerful word and partly because I forgot it right away. It was long. I'm almost positive it had an R in it.
"Huh," I said. That got me thinking. If one word could make Claude forget a whole week, another word could make Hollis forget eight thousand dollars. That's just science.
I found Hollis out in the stacking yard, where he runs things now. I walked right up and looked him in the eye, the way a doctor would, and I said every long word I knew with an R in it. "Refrigerator," I said. "Transportation. Hurricane. Arithmetic."
Hollis looked at me for a while. "You okay, Dale?" he said. I asked him how much I owed him. "Same as yesterday," he said.
So I tried "rhubarb." Hollis pointed out that rhubarb isn't long, and he was right; I'd panicked. I gave him "refrigerator" again, slower, in case it needed a second coat. Hollis wrote something on his clipboard and went back to work.
Some people can't be hypnotized. I think it's the clipboard.
Hollis caught me at the mill gate on Friday, which is payday. I'd hidden my coupons in my sock, but he's gotten good at this, and he checked the sock first.
"Sock," Hollis said, and he held out his glove. I gave him the coupons. There were forty, all ten percent off shampoo, because that's the only kind they print.
Hollis counted them twice, at one cent each, and wrote forty cents on his clipboard at the bottom of a long column of other cents. "That's all of them," I said. "You've cleaned me out. I hope you're happy."
"You still owe me almost exactly eight thousand dollars," Hollis said.
"Almost," I said. "That's progress."
Right there at the gate, I made a plan. I'd find out where Hollis parks. Every morning for a year I'd put one coupon under his windshield wiper, so he'd have to stop and credit it and do the math. By the end of the year, that's three dollars and sixty-five cents, all in his handwriting. He'd be sorry.
But Hollis didn't leave. He stood there looking across the yard, where the kids were stacking boards and Phil was taking the heavy end, like always.
"Those are good kids," Hollis said. "That girl fixed the log loader on Tuesday with a shoelace. The boy's been reading the safety manual out loud to the new guys. The baby bit my clipboard, but she's a baby."
"They're all right," I said.
"You look out for them, Dale," he said. "Somebody should."
I could tell what was happening. Hollis was getting attached, and not to them. He'd followed me across three counties and through a hurricane. You don't do that for money. Well, he did. But not only.
"I'll look out for them," I said. "And Hollis? I'll look out for you, too."
"Don't," Hollis said, and he walked off fast.
He's not good with feelings.
The unmasking happened in the Boss's office, which is full of cigar smoke, so I mostly heard it.
Everybody crowded in: the Boss, Chuck, the kids, Phil, Shelley in her heels, and Foreman Fettucino in his curly wig and his mask. I came in last and got the corner by the ashtray, where the cloud is thickest. You could have parked a canoe in there.
Viola reached up and pulled off Shelley's wig. I heard it come off, a soft little pop, and then a lot of gasping. When the smoke shifted, I saw the eyebrow, one long eyebrow all the way across. Count Oaf. Then Claude pulled down the foreman's mask, and the wig came with it, and there was the man with hooks for hands from the troupe.
I'd known for weeks, of course. But everybody else gasped, so I gasped too, to be supportive. You don't want to be the one guy in the room not gasping. It looks like you're not a team player.
Then the Count knocked the ashtray off the desk, and the smoke went everywhere. By the time it cleared, both of them were gone. There were two high heels by the door, one up and one down. He'd run right out of them. That's four times now he's left without saying goodbye to me.
The cloud turned toward the kids. "First the log, then the saw, and now this," the Boss said. "You three are bad luck, and I'm sending you away. Mr. Slowe can find you a boarding school."
"Now hold on," Chuck said. Then he didn't say anything else. That's about as far as Chuck ever goes.
I stepped up to the cloud. "Sir," I said, "before you send anybody anywhere, you should know who stopped that saw." Then I told him. I'd heard the danger over the loudspeaker. I'd raced across the break room. I'd pulled the lever with both hands, never once thinking about lunch.
The cloud didn't say anything. It just sat there and smoked.
"That's not how I remember it," Phil said. Then he looked at the kids, and then at me, and he smiled a little. "But you did pull it, Dale," he said. "Nobody knows if it mattered. But you pulled it."
I've decided it mattered.
Mr. Slowe finally ruled on my Form Nine in the mill office, between coughs. I'd been pending since the play, and I'd gotten pretty comfortable with it. Pending's a lot like being rich, as long as nobody checks.
He opened a folder. My form was in it, with my laminated birth certificate clipped to the front. It said I was born in a hospital, which nobody at the bank has ever once disputed.
"Mr. Tummins," he said, and then he coughed into his handkerchief for a while. "The bank has reviewed your claim." I said that was great. I'd already spent most of the money in my head, mainly on a boat that doesn't sink and a lawyer to explain to Hollis why he couldn't have any.
"If you're the eldest Maudelaire," Mr. Slowe said, "and you're of age, which you seem to be, then you'd be the children's legal guardian."
Then he read me what that meant. "You'd be responsible for their meals and their schooling," he said. "You'd also be responsible for keeping them safe from Count Oaf." The Count had been after them for most of a year, and he was very good at disguises. I'd also have to sign their report cards.
I didn't love any of it, especially the report cards. "Claude reads a lot," I told Mr. Slowe. "His would be long."
"And the fortune?" I said. Mr. Slowe coughed. "It stays with the bank until Viola comes of age," he said. "Regardless."
So I'd get the kids, the Count, the meals and the report cards, and no money. I'm a consultant. I know a bad deal when I'm sitting in one, especially when the chair's that hard.
"I'd like to withdraw my claim," I said. Mr. Slowe asked on what grounds. "I'm not related to them," I said. "I never was. Honestly, I think there's been some kind of mix-up on the form. And I'd like the form back."
He coughed for a long time. Then he said, "Noted," and wrote it down. That's the second time a bank's noted me. I think it's a pretty big deal over there.
He slid the form back across the desk. I kept the certificate, too. It's laminated, and a thing like that holds its value.
Then Mr. Slowe told me the children were going away to a boarding school. I asked if there was one for adults, because I could consult. "It'll be handled," Mr. Slowe said, into the handkerchief.
That's how I knew there wasn't.
Lemuel Thicket asked me to meet him at a diner out on the highway, and I took it as a big step. A writer doesn't buy you pie unless he's serious.
He told me he was writing a book about the children. I told him I'd been thinking about writing a book, too, so technically we were rivals. I let him buy the pie anyway. Rivals can still have pie.
He had black coffee. I had the pie, a grilled cheese, and a chocolate shake. He kept his notebook open the whole time with his pen ready, and he hardly wrote a thing.
"Were the children frightened at the mill?" he asked. I told him I'd been frightened at the mill. I told him about the log, and my shoe, and my ankle noise, and then I made the noise for him. It's hard to do with your mouth, but I got close.
"Did they look after each other?" he asked.
"They looked after me," I said. "Mostly."
"Was the baby all right on the lake, in the storm?" he asked. He asked whether Claude had his glasses back, and whether Viola had been sleeping. I answered all of it as best I could, which mostly meant telling him how I'd been sleeping.
The whole time, he wrote down one sentence. It wasn't about me. I could tell because it was short and didn't have my name in it, and also because I asked.
I had two headshots left. The rest of the box went down with the jet ski in Lake Lugubrious, so somewhere a fish knows my face. I signed one, "To Lemuel, from your best source, Dale," and slid it across the table. He looked at it for a long time. Then he put some money down, said thank you, and left.
The headshot was still on the table, next to the tip. He'd forgotten it. Writers are like that, always thinking about the next sentence. I left it right where it was, in case he came back for it.
He didn't. The waitress took the tip, though.
The night before the kids left, I paid Hollis everything I had. I'm not saying that to brag. It was just time, and he was loading his truck in the mill lot, and I didn't want him following me to the next thing.
First I gave him my laminated birth certificate. Hollis held it up to the light over the lot and read it all the way through, which took no time. "Born in a hospital," he said. "Which hospital?"
"A good one," I said.
"I'll give you eleven cents for it," Hollis said. I told him it was laminated. "That's what the eleven cents is for," he said. "The paper part's worth nothing."
Then I gave him my last coupons. The Boss had paid me for my final week on the way out, in a little envelope, all shampoo. Hollis credited them at a cent apiece and did the arithmetic out loud on the hood of his truck, carrying the ones.
"Seven thousand nine hundred ninety-eight dollars and sixty-nine cents," he said, and he showed me the clipboard.
I felt free. I'd gotten it under eight thousand. People said I'd never do it. Well, nobody said that, but they would have, if they'd known about it.
Hollis put the certificate up on his dashboard, facing out, like a parking permit. Then he got in and rolled the window down. "Tell the kids goodbye from me," he said. I said I'd tell them.
He drove off, and I waved at the truck until it turned at the corner. That truck had been in my mirror for so long, I didn't know what to look at anymore.
Then I went inside and locked the door. Old habits.
Mr. Slowe's car pulled up to the mill gate at eight in the morning, coughing almost as much as he does.
The kids each had one small bag, and Phil carried all three. He'd given Claude his waterproof notebook, the one he writes everything in, and told him he'd need it more. Phil cried a little, but in a teacher way, where he keeps talking the whole time.
I went over and opened the back door of the car to see if there was room for me. There wasn't, not with the bags. So I just stood there holding it. Viola got in, and Claude got in, and Phil buckled Bunny into her seat.
"Thank you," Mr. Slowe said to me, through the handkerchief. It was the first time a bank had ever thanked me for anything.
Bunny was looking at my shirt pocket, where I keep my last headshot. I'd been saving it for somebody important. I took it out and gave it to her, and she bit me right through the coconut.
Since I was still holding the door, I felt like I ought to say something, so I leaned in. "Here's one thing I know," I said. "When a grown-up tells you something's going to be handled, it won't be. So you handle it yourselves. You three are better at it than anybody anyway."
Viola looked at me for a long time. "That's good advice, Dale," she said. She sounded surprised, which I didn't take personally.
"I'll remember it," Claude said. He remembers everything, so that was a given. It was still nice to hear. I don't know where the advice came from. Probably the consulting.
Viola tied her hair back with her ribbon, which means she's thinking up an invention. I like to think it was about something I said.
Then Bunny took the headshot out of her mouth and looked right at me. "Pomba," she said.
"She's saying thank you," I said.
Viola turned around in her seat. "That's right," she said. "That's exactly right." It was the first one I'd ever gotten right. I don't know how. I just knew.
I closed the door gently, and the car pulled away. Phil and I stood at the gate until we couldn't see it anymore, and then for a while after that.
I'd have given her all two hundred.
A year later, Phil brought over the book. It was Lemuel Thicket's sad book about the Maudelaire orphans, and it was pretty thin, mainly because I wasn't in it.
I read it in one night. It's all in there: the house with the tower, the play, the uncle with the snakes, the aunt over the lake, the mill. The kids are in every chapter, and I'm in none of them.
I checked the play part three times. There's no lamp. The stage just has light on it, like it came from nowhere. Somebody was standing back there holding that light for a long time. It doesn't say who.
Phil read it before me. He said it was beautiful and it was sad, and that Lemuel got the kids exactly right. "Did he get me right?" I said.
"You're not in it, Dale," Phil said.
"That's what I mean," I said.
Lemuel uses the word "unfortunate" a lot, and he never really explains it, so here goes. Unfortunate means you didn't get the fortune. I didn't get it, so I qualify.
But then I thought about the kids. They haven't gotten theirs either, not yet. And they lost a lot more than money before any of it started: their parents and their house, and then Uncle Jonty, and then Aunt Rosaline. So maybe unfortunate means something closer to that. I'm still working on it.
I went through a lot of names this year. None of them stuck, mostly because nobody used them. So I'm going with Dale Tummins, for now. It's already on my mailbox, so it saves on paint.
That's why I wrote this one. It's the corrected version. Lemuel can keep the sad parts. I've got the lamp.
Wherever the kids are now, I hope somebody's handling it, and I hope it's them. I hope they're getting a real lunch.
Not gum.