Snapdragon Alley Page 2

  "This is not an adventure", she said, and he sadly nodded in agreement.

  "In fact", she continued, "this sucks."

  "Yup", said Alex.

  "Change of plans?" she asked.

  "Got to", Alex admitted. He'd kind of known this wasn't going to work.

  "Donuts?" she continued, and since they were standing right in from of Millie's Donuts, they agreed to go in and snag a few while they thought the matter over.

  Alex liked the plain old-fashioned. Sapphire, anything with jelly inside. It was typical, Alex thought, as he watched the purple goo spread down her chin. If it's messy enough, she can't resist!

  He had pulled the map out of his pocket and was using the blue and yellow highlighters together to mark down the half a dozen streets they'd bored through. It barely added a spot to the overall situation.

  "There is no way", Sapphire said, with her face full of crumbs, "that I am going to march down all those stupid streets with nothing and nobody on them. I don't care. What's the point?"

  "Because they're there?" Alex suggested.

  "I wish they weren't", she pronounced. "New rule. It has to have something on it, okay? Only streets with something on them."

  "Something being anything but houses?"

  "Or apartments".

  "Like a business?"

  "Any business at all."

  "Even if it's just a psychic?"

  "Especially if it's a psychic", Sapphire laughed. "Those we gotta do. If there's a psychic, we're going in, okay?"

  "But how do we know for sure?"

  "We can just look down 'em. We can be pretty sure, I think. No more dead-ends. No more 'courts' or 'places'. No more streets that curve around a little going nowhere. Let's use a different color to mark them out of bounds."

  "Red?"

  "Good idea. I'll bet we could just 'red out' a whole bunch of the city right now, just by looking at the squiggly lines".

  Alex looked it over and was pretty sure he agreed.

  "We can still cover all the neighborhoods", he said, "just not every house".

  "And we have to go into every kind of business at least once, okay?"

  "Even liquor stores? They'll throw us out."

  "Let 'em. We just have to go into one of them one time, and we'll make a list. We'll write down every kind of store we go into and how many times, but we only have to do each kind one time, okay?"

  "Okay", Alex nodded. He knew that when it came to rewriting all the rules, there was never any holding her back. She could always come up with more new rules per second than anyone.

  "Write down donuts", she ordered, as Alex pulled out the little blue notebook he always carried around.

  "We might need index cards", he muttered, as always preparing to organize.

  "We could do a whole bunch right now", Sapphire's eyes shone, as she looked out across the street at a whole row of little shops - "shoe repair, pizza, water ... what?" she guffawed, "there's a water store over there across the street. Oh man, we gotta go in there. We'll set a record for the most different kind of stupid", and then she was already out the door heading for the corner before Alex even knew that she'd stood up.

  The chase was on. Sapphire was determined to walk in and out of every business on the street, first on one side and then the other, and Alex did his best to keep up and keep notes too. Somehow she'd managed to shift the priorities again. They had started out doing streets, and now they were doing businesses. He never knew how she managed to switch contexts every time, and once she got started, there was no stopping her until she ran out of space or time or both. Fortunately for their feet, she was still following the original plan to head back the way they'd come on the bus, so it was just a matter of walking in and out of every shop on Martinsgate Avenue for the entire two miles. Alex was dutiful, but dragging by the end of it.

  Later, when he was glad to be home and resting on his bunk bed, he looked over his wall of maps again. He still had dreams of achieving his original plan, but with Sapphire it might not be possible. He couldn't even keep her on the same track for even a whole day.

  "I should have known better", he said to himself. "It was never going to happen".

  His eyes followed once again the line of the 63 Venezia, how it cut across the city in a diagonal zigzag from the southwest to the northeast, how it stayed the same from year to year to year, when all the other routes seemed to get adjusted and re-arranged. He decided he would take that bus, alone if he had to, all the way from end to the other and back.

  While he was dreaming of the 63, he didn't see his little brother come into the room and climb halfway up the bunk bed ladder. He didn't notice until Argus suddenly announced,

  "How come that one street disappeared?"

  Alex sat up and looked at where his brother was pointing on the artist map - way up in the farthest northeast corner of the city, where the 63 Venezia came to an end, and Alex saw it, and saw it for the first time, although he must have looked at that map for a million hours, that the 63 had indeed changed, once, and only once, during that one year of the artist map. It went one block further than it ever did before or after. That one block was a very small street which seemed to come to a sudden end just shy of the city line, and the map had the street's name spelled out in the tiniest of print. Alex had to grab a magnifying glass and press his face up against the wall to make out the words, 'Snapdragon Alley'.

  He looked down at Argus, who was still perched halfway up the ladder.

  "I don't know", Alex said. "But I'm sure going to find out".

  Chapter Six - The 63 Venezia

  The following Saturday, Alex took off bright and early, before anyone else was awake, before anyone else could ask him what he was up to. He didn't want to have to make any explanations or get anyone's permission. All week long he'd been thinking about the 63 Venezia. He knew he'd have to take the 46 Hopland first to get to the beginning of the line, and the 46 did not run very often, especially on weekends. It was about a ten block walk just to get to the 46 stop, and he was there by seven fifteen. Seven fifteen on a Saturday, he reminded himself. He didn't think he'd ever even been awake that early before on a Saturday, except maybe on a Christmas once.

  It was chilly and he'd forgotten to bring a warm enough jacket, so he stood there on the sidewalk shivering, and thinking about the mission. His mission, not Sapphire's latest, which had rapidly evolved from visiting one of every kind of store to visiting each and every store to visiting only weird and stupid stores to leaving cryptic notes in stupid stores, alerting people to their own stupidity for even being there. This latest plan led Sapphire on an all-night cryptic note writing binge, in which she became The Masked Revealer. In this guise she penned small colored index cards with messages such as "Ever wonder where your life went?igned The Cipher", and "It's not too late to do something better with your day, signed The Cipher". These she planned to randomly distribute in gifty boutiques, wine shops, the hat shop she couldn't believe even existed (who the heck wears hats? she'd blurted out to the dismay of the shopkeeper), and the place that sold only heart-shaped objects. They had discovered these delights on the day they took the 16 Visola to the upscale Mizzerine district.

  That was all a lot of fun, but exhausting, and Alex was all Sapphired-out, as he liked to put it. She wasn't interested in his 'quest for the end of the line', as she put it. At least she wasn't interested yet. With Sapphire, everything was only a matter of time and mood.

  Argus had wanted to come with him, had begged him even, and Alex had promised to consider it, but knew there was no way he would be able to talk his parents into it. They barely let him take Argus to the playground down the street! Mister and Mrs. Kirkham were certainly well-meaning, but as fearful and paranoid as any parent of their time, and since they were hardly ever around to do stuff with the kids, the kids ended up not going anywhere, mostly. This had led Alex to become so restless that he couldn't bear it anymore. It began with the bus maps, but they were only the expre
ssion of his yearning. As soon as he became old enough, and he'd hammered out a deal that the magic number was ten, he was going to go places, and so he did. He just hadn't worked his little brother into the deal yet.

  So he was alone on Saturday morning when he took the 46 to the southwest corner of the city, and waited there at 39th and Pine for the 63 Venezia. He didn't have to wait there very long. When it came, he flashed his pass and took the seat right behind the driver, a dark-haired, blue-capped man who could have been thirty or fifty. Alex couldn't tell. He'd said good morning but the driver had only grunted.

  "I tried to get him to talk", Alex said to Argus later that day, when the two of them were alone in the kitchen eating cookies and drinking root beer. "But he wasn't one to talk. That's exactly what he told me. Look kid, I'm not one to talk". Alex laughed at his own imitation of the gruff and surly driver.

  "I told him our Uncle Charlie used to drive this route. I told him, but he said he never heard of any Charlie Kirkham or any other Kirkham as a matter of fact."

  "Did you ask him about the street?" Argus wanted to know.

  "Yeah, I did." Alex said, "I didn't know how to bring it up at first, without sounding goofy, you know. So I said my Uncle Charlie told me that the route had only changed once in all the years since the very first 63, and you know what he said?"

  "Uh-uh", Argus mumbled through a mouthful of chocolate.

  "He said it ain't never changed, boy, not even once. Long as the 63 has been around it's been the same damn thing, day in and day out, month after month and year after year. They tell me, he said, they tell me it's the only route of its kind, like it's some kind of treasure. You should hear the old-timers talk, he said. Every other route, they tinker with, they tell me, but the 63, don't nobody got the balls to touch that thing".

  At this both Alex and Argus started giggling and snorting root beer all over the table.

  "He really said balls?" Argus choked.

  "Don't nobody got the balls, that's what he said. I asked him why was that and he said something about how the route was some kind of sacred cow. I don't know what that means. Politics, he said. It was all about the powers that be. I didn't know what he was talking about but I told him that Uncle Charlie said it changed one time - I was lying of course. Uncle Charlie never told us that. We just saw it on the map, right? I told him he said it used to go another block at the other end." The driver just laughed at me, and said

  "I don't know no Uncle Charlie", the driver told me, "but you just sit back and see for yourself. This bus is going to go as far as it can. There ain't no 'nother block. You'll see"

  "After that he wouldn't talk to me anymore, and people started getting on the bus, pretty soon it was filling up so I sat back and watched the road. The 63 goes a long way, Argus, all the way through the city. I've never seen so much of Spring Hill Lake before. It goes through nice parts, really nice parts, and bad parts, really bad parts, then you're downtown and then you're out again, and through some more bad parts, some not so bad, and then you're at the end. The driver made an announcement about it so I got off."

  "And what did you see?" asked Argus, who was all attention now.

  "Nothing", Alex said. "It was like the driver told me. There is no other block. At the end of the line there's a vacant lot, a big one, like there used to be something there but way way long ago, because it's nothing but a field of weeds and broken cement. I poked around for a bit but there was nothing to see. On one side there's a row of old houses, all of them looking like they used to be painted red, once upon a time, with white stairway railings coming down along stone steps, all chipped and worn. On the other side there's nothing but what used to be a factory or a warehouse, but it's now just a wall of graffiti and broken glass,"

  Argus sat quietly, thinking, as Alex paused to take a long, slow drink. He was forming the picture in his mind, seeing everything his brother was describing to him, and he seemed to almost be there. He looked to Alex like he often did, in a trance, in another place and time. Alex used to wonder if his brother was retarded - until the little bugger suddenly started reading chapter books one day when he was only three. Then he wondered if he was a genius! By now he'd gotten used to it. Argus was "unusual". That's how Alex would describe him to his friends, with pride.

  "I want to go", said Argus.

  "It's like I told you", Alex replied. "There's nothing there. I waited for the next 63 bus back. This time the driver was a lady and she right away told me not to bother her. No talking to the driver. So I didn't even get to ask if she knew Uncle Charlie, and I think she might have, because it looked like she'd been driving for a long time, not like the first driver, who told me he'd been on the wheels for eighteen months, three weeks and two days, as if he was counting up to some magic number when it would all be over."

  "Eighteen months isn't long enough", Argus said. "He wouldn't have known about the route".

  "He said the old-timers told him".

  "They were lying to him", Argus declared. "They don't want anyone to know."

  "Know what?" Alex asked.

  "About the route", Argus said, "about why it changed, and why it changed back"

  Alex just shook his head. Let the kid play make-believe, he thought. The reality is, he told himself, the reality is that reality is.

  Chapter Seven - The 46 Hopland

  The next time Sapphire came over, Alex was determined not to tell her anything about his little trip, but she was the one who pulled out the marked-out map and noticed the blue line extending all the way across the city along the 63 bus line.

  "When did you do that?" she asked.

  "Last weekend", Alex had to admit. Sapphire absorbed the information quietly, calculating in her mind exactly when that had been possible, including the fact that he had gone without her. She didn't ask him why, but just grunted a little and asked him if he'd seen anything interesting.

  "Some of the neighborhoods looked okay", he volunteered, trying to decide whether he should pretend he'd really just been scouting the line for points of interest.

  "He went to Snapdragon Alley!" Argus suddenly piped up from beneath his blankets. Sapphire was startled for a moment. As usual, she hadn't even known the little guy was in the room. He had almost perfected his invisibility routine.

  "Where's that?" Sapphire inquired.

  "It's the street that disappeared", Argus said again. Sapphire looked up at Alex.

  "What is he talking about?" she asked. Alex shrugged. He didn't want to talk about it, but Argus wouldn't let it go.

  "It's only on the artist map", the little boy announced, leaping out from under the covers and climbing halfway up the ladder. He stretched out as far as he could and pointed. Sapphire got up from the desk chair and came over. She was tall enough to see the top of the maps easily.

  "Where?" she couldn't tell what Argus was pointing at.

  "I'll show you", Alex said, and leaned over his bed and tapped the map at the very end of the 63 Venezia.

  "Now it's here", he said, "and now it isn't", pointing at the next map on the wall. "And it wasn't on any other maps before either. But it's just a vacant lot. Must have been a misprint or something."

  "A misprint with a name on it?"

  Sapphire was dubious. She could barely make out the tiny font, but she was shaking her head.

  "A vacant lot? That doesn't sound right."

  "It was two years ago", Alex said. "Maybe they had some plan to make it a real street, so they put it on the map, but then the plan fell through."

  "That makes more sense", Sapphire agreed. "I could check with my dad". Her father was on the city's planning board. He knew about all sorts of projects that never happened.

  Sapphire being Sapphire, she was out of the room and down the hall before anyone knew it, on the phone, calling her dad. It didn't occur to her that he might be in a meeting, that he might be busy, that he might not be available. She was determined and was going to do whatever it took. Her father's assistant didn't
even bother trying to put her off. She'd come to know the futility of that, so she just patched the girl straight through, and her father had no choice but to answer her questions, keeping his business partners waiting there in his office, tapping their feet.

  A few minutes later she was back, triumphant.

  "Check it out!" she proclaimed. "There was never any such thing as Snapdragon Alley. My father says that vacant lot used to be an apartment building, a crummy project that was torn down a long time ago because of health concerns, and there's never been anything done with the property since. No plans, no nothing. He says the owner of the lot refuses to sell at any price. Nobody even knows the guy, he just has a mailbox and every time someone asks him about it he sends a postcard in reply with one word on it - NEVER. My dad says it's something of a legend around City Hall, but he never heard the term Snapdragon Alley. I told him about the bus map and he said it must have just been some kind of mistake."

  "I guess so", Alex said, disappointed. He was hoping his idea that there was had been a plan was going to turn out right.

  "I want to go anyway", Argus said.

  "Yeah", Sapphire agreed, "We've got to."

  "There's nothing there", Alex protested.

  "I don't care", Sapphire replied. "We're going."

  And that was that. Alex tried to say that his parents would never let him take Argus all the way across town, but Sapphire assured him that if they lied and said they were taking him to the playground, no one would ever know the difference, and that's how Alex found himself saying what Sapphire told him to say and doing what Sapphire told him to do, pretty much like any other day, and before he knew it the three of them had collected whatever spare change they could find around Alex's room and headed out the door ("just going to the playground, Mom!") and were on the 46 Hopland, and on their way

  Chapter Eight - The Old Geez

  Sapphire liked a lot of the neighborhoods they passed through on their way across town, and asked Alex to remember the place with the old soda fountain, and the barber shop with the Christmas tree in the window all year long, and the tanning salon she thought was a hoot, and any number of other shops and streets that kept Alex busy making notes in his notebook. In the meantime, Argus was just in heaven, his face pressed up against the window, his eyes radiating pure joy. Even his ears were humming with the beautiful sounds of the bus wheels grinding, and the back doors creaking open, and the squealing of the brakes as they came to many halts. The trip could not have been too long, as far as he was concerned, but finally they did arrive at the end of the line, and the three kids tumbled out onto the dirty sidewalk at the corner of Visitation and Cogswell.