Toadstool and the Dreamer, Chapter 7

Toadstool and the Dreamer, Chapter 6  (13+) In which the boys receive a little religion. #1781674 by Ben Simon

7.

In which the Dreamer demonstrates his skill as a driver

    We walked across the church parking lot as a few cars started to pull in, and again nobody really noticed a couple of kids sneaking out of church, though we did get a nasty stare from one old biddy.  Once we got around a small ditch, which seemed to exist to separate the church from the rest of the town, there was a sidewalk that ran into town and we started walking down it without saying much to each other.  It had gotten hotter and those clothes that Sister Mendenhall had given us weren't exactly designed for hot weather but the good thing was that the streets of Jennings were lined with shade trees, something we hadn't seen on the highways or back roads.  That gave us a little relief, but Toadstool was still limping along pretty slowly, and the more we went the more hurt he look.  In spite of everything, the thought began to poke around the back of my head that we'd just walked out on the best shot at getting home we were likely to run across, but there was no going back at that point, at least not in my mind.

    "So, what do you want to do now?"  I asked as I slowed up my walk a bit to let Toadstool catch up with me.

    "There's got to be a police station somewhere around here," he said, and he was already breathing a little heavy.

    "You want to go to the cops?"

    "Duh.  Yeah, I want to go to the cops.  It's their job to take care of stuff like this.  They'll call our moms no questions asked, and we'll probably be home by later today."

    Toadstool was usually the smart one in our crowd, but I knew better than to buy his "no questions asked" comment.  A couple of years earlier Pill had decided to take one of mom's spray paint cans and redecorate some of the street signs around our neighborhood, and even though it was obvious she was just a dumb kid, we spent all day the next day at the police station.  I really didn't feel like waiting in the police station for how many ever hours it would take for our moms to drive up all the way from Garen and I certainly didn't feel like answering questions from any cops. 

    "There's a Conoco station over there that looks like it's open," I said, pointing to the small, white gas station across the street and down the way a bit.  "Maybe they'll let us use the phone."

    "Yeah.  Because we've been having such good luck with that so far.  Let's just go to the police station."

    "Go ahead.  I'll be over there at the gas station waiting for mom to pick me up."

    With that, I ran across the street and headed down towards the gas station.  Toadstool let out kind of a frustrated grunt but couldn't do anything about me abandoning him and I figured by the time he caught up with me I'd have already made the phone call and our moms would be on their way. 

    The station was one of those little brick house stations they used to have with two pumps out front, one for regular and one for ethyl, a storefront window which showed off several types of small auto parts such as fan belts and Champion spark plugs, and a small wooden door that was propped open.  The inside was small, cramped and stuffy, with a counter to one side and a small fan directed towards it from the other side of the room which was supposed to stir up a breeze but mostly served to kick up the dust.  Behind the counter, reclining in a padded chair that had more than a few chunks of foam ripped out of it, was an old, pudgy guy wearing a black cap and a gray uniform shirt with the Conoco logo above one pocket and the name "Walt" above the other one.  By the way he moved when I walked in it looked like he normally didn't get customers at this time on a Sunday, particularly ones who weren't driving cars.

    "Excuse me, but, uhm, do you have a phone here?" I stammered, noticing that the guy was glaring at me in a none-too-friendly manner.

    "Yeah, I got a phone here," the old guy said, kind of gruffly mimicking me.

    "Yeah, well, me and my buddy are in trouble and we've got to use a phone."

    The old guy let out an annoyed sigh and, folding his arms, he leaned back in his chair.  "Everyone's got problems, boy."

    "Well, it's just a local call across town," I lied.  "It won't cost you a thing.  My buddy's hurt and we need to call my mom to pick him up."

    "You got five dollars?"

    "What?  No, I don't.  But my mom does and she'll pay you when she gets here."

    "That's not how things work here.  You come up to my pumps outside and want five dollars’ worth of gas you hand me the five dollars first, then I pump your gas.  If I don't get your money first you just might run off on me, that's how people are nowadays.  And if I let you use my phone you might call Peking, China for all I know, then run off leaving me with the phone bill.  You got five dollars I'll let you use my phone.  If not, get your keester out of my garage."

    Needless to say, I was pretty ticked off at the old man, although I'm pretty sure I would've left him hanging with that bill.  I wanted to yell at him or to break something in his shop or something to get back at him, but to be truthful, I was pretty scared of him.  So I just left, and as I walked past his pumps Toadstool had just caught up to me.

    "Well?" he asked with a tone which let me know he already knew what had happened.

    "Shut up," I said without elaborating.

    "Well while you were in there getting nothing done I asked a guy walking down the street over there where the police station was.  He said it about twelve blocks down on the other end of town."

    "All right, I guess.  But I've got to do something first."

    With that, I jumped on the cable that rang the bell in the gas station three times and then headed down the street as fast as I could.  The old guy came to the door and, seeing that it was me and not a paying customer, started bellowing something in old man speak that I couldn't make out.  When he realized that I was pretty much out of earshot he unleashed the full force of his wrath on Toadstool, who hadn't done anything but who was, of course, the slower target.  To his credit Toadstool pretty much ignored him, but just limped past the gas station.

    Jennings, IL was one of those places where the entire town seemed to be built up along the main drag so that, even though the town was small, it seemed to go on forever.  Toadstool's guy had told him that the police station was twelve blocks down, but we figured that the guy was probably estimating the number of blocks and, if the police station was at the other end of town, it could be two or three miles down the road.  By that time those clothes I'd been given had started sticking to me pretty badly and, as it seemed to me that it was taking Toadstool an hour to walk two blocks, I was starting to lose my patience. 

    "C'mon, man," I whined, "if we keep walking like this it'll take all day for us to get to the police station."

    "Police station will still be there when we get there," Toadstool said between huffs and puffs.  "And I'm pretty sure they don't close."

    "It don't matter.  You're not that hurt, you could go a little faster."

    "Shut up, puke face.  I'm moving as fast as I can."

    "'I’m moving as fast as I can,'" I said, mocking him.  "Yeah, if you were a slug.  You sure your mom wasn't a slug?"

    "Shut up, I said."

    "Yeah, your dad married a slug and you popped out.  Only your dad stepped on her after you were born, so he had to marry your mom."

    "I'll kill you if you don't shut up."

    "Ooo, yeah, how're you gonna catch me?  Hope that I slip in some of your slug slime?"

    Now, generally I could've tortured Toadstool like that all day long, and in fact I had before.  But fate has a cruel way of offering bad opportunities at the wrong moments, and this was one moment when fate decided to have a laugh on me.  While we were crossing one of the side streets I noticed a pretty distracted young mom who'd obviously made an emergency trip to the store trying to remove some groceries and her kids from a Volkswagen Beetle.  Both of her kids were little, and while one was running around the car this way and that, the other one, which she was carrying while trying to carry a grocery bag in the other hand, was wailing away directly into her ear.  For her part, she was screaming at the kids and making more of a spectacle of herself than the kids were making of themselves.  Anyone in the area wouldn't be able to help but notice them, but as it was Sunday morning, nobody but me and Toadstool were around.  The thing caught my attention, though, was that as they climbed up some steps up to their small house and shut the door, in all that calamity, she had left her keys in the car.

    "Hey, hold on a minute," I said to Toadstool, forgetting that I'd just been taunting him.

    "What?"

    "Just stay here a minute."

    I snuck up to the car as best I could, ready to bolt if the door to the house suddenly opened.  I could still hear that mom yelling inside the house, though, and I figured it might be awhile before she noticed that she left her keys in the car.  Hiding behind the car, I snuck up to the driver's side window and peeked over it, and sure enough, those keys were still dangling in the ignition.  A plan began to formulate in my head and I ran over to Toadstool to let him know what I was thinking.

    "Want to get down to the police station a lot faster?"  I asked while running up to him.

    "Like how?" he asked with a cautious tone.

    "That car over there still has the keys in it.  We can take it down to the station and be there in no time flat."

    "Are you crazy?  You want to steal a car then go to the police station?"

    "I don't plan to steal it.  I'm just gonna borrow it."

    "Yeah.  I don't think the cops'll see it that way."

    "The cops won't know.  We're just going to be in it a couple of minutes, just long enough to make it down to the other end of town.  Then we ditch it a block or two away and walk the rest of the way."

    "You're not that dumb, are you?  Even if that lady doesn't come out here and stop you right away or sees you and calls the cops, when's the last time you drove a car?  Let me answer that: never."

    "I have too driven, snot breath."

    "Yeah?  When?"

    "Last summer, when Derek was home.  We went out a few times in his Jeep and he taught me how to drive it.  Drove through most of the back roads around Garen."

    "Was it a stick or automatic?"

    "Stick, stupid.  What fun would a Jeep with automatic transmission be?"

    "Well, do whatever.  I don't think I can help you out if I wanted to."

    "Just meet me down the road a block.  But be ready to get in quick."

    "I ain't getting in that car."

    "Screw you, then.  See you down the road."

    I sneaked back down to where the Volkswagen was sitting, and sure enough the sound of that mom yelling could still be heard coming out of the house.  I took a quick look around to see if anybody might be standing around, but the whole street was pretty much dead.  Crouching behind the car like I did before, I pushed on the latch as quietly as I could, opened the door and scrambled in, closing the door only hard enough to where it barely caught.

    Now, in case you hadn't been paying attention, of course I was lying about driving.  Derek did own a Jeep, a rebuilt CJ-5, and while he'd had it while he was home the summer before, there was no way he'd ever let me drive the thing.  My cousin had let me steer his old Pathfinder while he controlled the gas and brakes when I was twelve or so, but, other than watching my mom and my brother and some of his friends drive, I had no other experience driving.  And, of course, that Volkswagen was a stick.

    Anyone smarter than me would've stopped right there.  If I'd have just gotten out of the car and admitted to Toadstool that I was in over my head nothing bad would've happened and we'd have gone our happy way down to the police station, no matter how long it took.  But, of course, I didn't want to be caught in a lie, even though Toadstool had already seen through it.  So, trying my best to remember what I'd seen my brother do, I pressed in the clutch and turned on the ignition, and of course, as soon as I let up the clutch, I killed it.  I did this several times and I started to panic, knowing that the lady who owned the thing would hear her car starting up at any moment and would come out after me at any moment.  I began random patterns of pushing in the clutch, brake and gas, praying that I could get the thing moving before the cops were called and I was hauled off.

    Then the worst thing happened.  By some weird stroke of luck, I succeeded to get the car moving.

    Now, something in the back of my mind had told me that one of the reasons I couldn't get the car to move was that I wasn't giving it enough gas, so when I released the clutch the last time, my right foot was holding the gas pedal to the floor.  Therefore, the car just didn't move forward, but lurched forward, like a cat who'd been woken by being stuck by a poker.  I couldn't control it, of course, but luck was with me enough that there were no cars in the general area.  My brain had suddenly frozen, though, and for the life of me I couldn't remember where the brake was or how to steer the darned thing.  It ended up that it really didn’t matter, because before I knew it I was off the street and in some poor person's yard and, even though I had finally found the brake at this point, the old maple tree in the front yard did a really good job of stopping the car for me.

    I hadn’t gotten the car out of first gear because that would require shifting, so the car was going slow enough to where I wasn't hurt when it slammed into that huge maple, though it crumpled that front end up pretty good.  Whatever else may have happened to it, or if anyone was home at that house, I didn't find out, because as soon as I got my bearings I had the door open and was running.  There was enough adrenaline rushing through me then that I don't know what I was thinking, I just had to run.  Like I said before, the whole town was built up along the main drag, and you didn't have to go more than four or five blocks before you hit woods, and all I knew at that point was that the woods offered some sort of sanctuary, even though I'm certain that any cops in that town would've known the woods around the town better than I did.  Anyway, I got to the end of the road and jumped over a ditch, then made my way through some weeds, moved a little bit through some trees, found a creek bed and crouched down under some brush, then sat there and waited for the chaos that I was sure was going to come.

    I'm not sure how long I waited in that creek bed.  I'm going to say that it was a good hour, maybe longer.  It sure seemed longer.  I was certain that at any moment I would hear the sounds of squad cars at the end of the street and cops milling about on a manhunt, maybe they'd have dogs, maybe they'd have a bullhorn.  My mind told me to move deeper into the woods while I had a chance, but I couldn't convince my body to move.  My heart was beating like a trip-hammer and I could hear myself panting, with little sobbing bursts coming with the panting.  I listened as best I could over the sound of myself but I couldn't hear anything other than the woods and the occasional rustle of the trees.  Finally I'd composed myself a bit and I decided it couldn't stay in that creek bed forever, and besides my butt was getting wet from sitting in the mud.  I moved the brush aside and peeked up over the creek, then crouched down to the front of the woods.  I didn't see any cops at the end of the road, only Toadstool, standing there and looking kind of confused and stupid.

    "Toadstool," I whispered as loud as I could, which was dumb if you think about it, because if Toadstool could hear me then anybody who'd be searching for me could hear me, too.

    I knew he heard me because he started looking around trying to figure out where I was.  I had to whisper his name out two more times before he figured out which direction I was in, then he slowly made his way over the ditch and through the weeds towards me.

    "Where are the cops?" I asked when he finally got to me.

    "Back at the station, as far as I can tell.  Way to drive, by the way.  Your head is filled with nothing but one big fart, ain't it?"

    "Shut up.  Are they looking for me, are they coming back?"

    "I don't know.  Maybe.  I don't think they know to look for you, though."

    "What?  Why?"

    "You were way down the block before that mom poked her head out the door and noticed that her car was gone.  She stood there screaming and yelling for a minute, then ran down the street when she heard the car run into that tree.  You got real lucky, by the way.  I heard one of the cops say that the guy who lives in that house is on vacation up in Michigan and won't be back until next week.  And by the time that lady got there you were gone.  You must've hopped out of the car the second it ran into the tree."

    "Nobody saw me?"

    "Not that I noticed.  The cops started knocking on the doors around the neighborhood which is when I walked up the block and around the corner.  I don't think they noticed me at all."

    "You don't think they did.  You don't know."

    "I don't know and I don't care.  I ought to turn your butt in.  I'd probably get a big reward for it and have them help me get home."

    "You're an accomplice.  I'll tell them you helped me plan it."

    "My word against yours.  But I ain't going to do it.  Not as long as you promise to go to the police station with me."

    "That's stupid.  What if they are looking for me?'

    "They'll go easy on you.  You're a kid.  Besides, you can claim that you suffer from natural stupidity.  I'll be your witness."

    "Screw you, barf breath.  I'm gonna get in real trouble here."

    "Nobody saw you.  I'm pretty sure of it.  But, if you want to play it safe, I guess we can take our time.  We can wait a couple of hours before we go to the police station, then only I'll go in.  When our moms come here and the cops release me I'll just tell them where you are."

    "Yeah, well, while we're waiting we can't stay here."

    "I doubt if you want to go into town, either.  So what do you want to do?"

    "I don't know," I said, sitting in the weeds to think for a bit.  "If we stay along these woods here we can still go towards the cop station, it's just kind of a roundabout way to do it.  But I'd guess we'd see no cops while we're in the woods."

    "I don't know if my leg is going to hold up. . ."

    "I said we could take our time, okay.  I'm giving you that one.  You can take your thirty to forty rest stops along the way and you won't hear one complaint from me."

    Toadstool stood there for a moment considering, and you would've thought that someone with his brains would've come up with a better alternative.  I've got to believe that at any moment that weekend Toadstool could've left me where I was and he would've made out better than me.  Of course, it was because of him that we got in Gerd Franklin's car in the first place, so I'm thinking that there was some guilt he was feeling.  Anyway, after all his considering, he finally said, "Well, I guess that's the best we can do."

    With that I got up, and, looking around carefully to make sure Toadstool wasn't lying about the cops, we made our way along the woods behind the town of Jennings, IL. 

Toadstool and the Dreamer, Chapter 8  (13+) In which the boys find themselves up a tree. #1836523 by Ben Simon