Invasion of the Road Weenies (6 page)

As soon as I got my breath back, I ran toward town. The closest place I could stop for help was the fire station. They organized a search. Everyone tried their best. All they ever found was his rod. There was no line left on the reel.

I stayed away for a month, but I knew I had to go back. And I knew it had to be at night. I stood by the water, thinking about what had happened. There's only one way I can explain it to myself. While Wally was fishing for bass, something down there was fishing for Wally. And, just like Wally wasn't mean or evil, maybe whatever got him wasn't
mean or evil, either. Maybe he was caught because he belonged down there. I was thinking about this, and wondering whether it was a crazy idea, when I saw him.

At first, I thought it was a trick of the moonlight, but then I knew it was real. He was under the water, looking up, pressing his hands against the surface like it was glass or a mirror. He opened his mouth and spoke.

No sound came out, but I could tell what he was saying. “Join me.”

I almost ran. But in my heart, I knew that if I ran, I'd be running for the rest of my life. So I waited. It might have been minutes. It might have been hours. Time didn't exist on the water that night. I waited until Wally sank back down. Or maybe he faded. I'm not sure which it was. Either way, he was gone. I stood there until the sun began to rise above the woods, thinking about Wally. I thought about Wally, and fishing, and life. Then I left.

I fish a lot now. I guess it's my way of keeping his memory alive. Sometimes, when I'm near water, I still hear him calling.

D
ad's going to kill
me. I can't believe I did it. It was so stupid. But it was an accident. I was running out of the house, late for basketball practice, when I remembered that they were showing
Frankenstein
on cable. So I threw in a tape and set the VCR. It wasn't until I got home and checked the tape that I saw what I'd done. I could feel all the blood drain from my skin as I held the tape in my hand and read the label—
YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, SUMMER VACATION
, followed by the date.

I'd just taped over one of Dad's vacation videos. This was serious. Dad spent just about every minute of our vacations with the video camera in his hands. He'd gotten the camera before I was born. I think he was the only parent in the neighborhood who hadn't gone digital. It was a big old thing, and he lugged it everywhere we went. It was almost like he didn't even know whether he'd had a fun vacation until he looked at the videos. Nothing was real for him until he saw it on television.

And now I'd wiped out Yellowstone Park.

There was no way I could hide it from him. He looked at the tapes all the time. He was always going through them and making special tapes by combining clips from lots of vacations. He'd been working on a state park tape for a couple weeks. He didn't even do it on the computer. He used a couple VCRs he'd hooked together.

My best chance was to tell him the news when he was in a good mood. Mom was making lasagna tonight, so I figured Dad would be stuffed and happy after dinner.

“Dad, I had an accident,” I told him as he burped and pushed his plate away.

“What kind of accident, Ricky?” he asked, glancing toward me like he was about to go to sleep.

“One of your tapes . . .”

His eyes shot open. “Which tape?”

“Yellowstone,” I said, my voice dropping to just above a whisper.

“Yellowstone?” Dad frowned. “I'd love to go there some day. But I don't have any tapes of it.”

“But we went there back in . . .” I stopped and tried to remember. I could have sworn we'd been there, but now I couldn't find a single memory.

“Help your mother with the dishes,” Dad said.

“Sure.” I might have been puzzled, but more than that, I was relieved. I wasn't going to get punished.

The next day, I erased Williamsburg. I'd had a rotten time on that vacation. I had some sort of stomach virus. All I wanted to do was throw up, and Mom kept dragging me
around to look at candle makers and all this other colonial stuff.

As soon as I started recording over the tape, the memory began to fade. It was as if the bad experience had never happened.

“Dad?” I asked at dinner that night.

“Yes?”

“Have you ever wanted to go to Williamsburg?”

Dad nodded. “I'd love to go there some time. Maybe we can fit it in next year. What do you think?”

“Sounds great.” As I finished my meal, I started searching my mind for my worst memories. It didn't take long to come up with the next candidate.

In third grade, I'd been forced to be an owl in our class play. I don't like talking in front of other people. Especially when I had to end each sentence with, “Whooo, whooo.” Even worse, I had to do my talking in an owl costume Mom made. And costumes are not Mom's best thing. I looked like a combination of a feather duster and something that had been run over in the road.

I forgot my lines. I tripped walking onto the stage. And Tara Keller pushed me real hard as we were walking off.

Dad had it all on tape. He was so proud of it, he played it for all the relatives every Thanksgiving.

I didn't even bother to wait until Dad was at work. I went and found the tape labeled
RICKY
—
SCHOOL PLAY
and popped it into the VCR. I pressed record and sat back, knowing that the worst experience in my life was about to become less than a memory.

“Has anyone seen a tape labeled SCHOOL PLAY?” Dad called from the next room.

I froze for an instant, but then relaxed. It didn't matter. Even if he was looking for it, he'd forget all about it once I taped over it. He couldn't look for something that he'd forgotten about.

“Haven't seen it,” I said.

Dad walked in and shook his head. “I have to find it. It's not just the play. I was putting together a special tape. It's all about you. It starts with the video I made when you were born. I was right there in the hospital with my camera.”

I dove for the VCR and jabbed my finger at the STOP button.

“That's odd,”
the man said. “Who left the VCR on?” He looked around the empty living room.

“What did you say?” his wife asked from the kitchen.

“Nothing.” The man turned off the recorder, then went back to reading his newspaper. Sometimes, he wondered whether he should buy a video camera, but without any kids to take pictures of, there didn't seem to be much point in getting one.

B
eing the older sister
was not a job I would have picked if I'd been given a choice. I had to walk the dog, change the cat litter, clean the fishbowl, and help with the chores, while my baby brother got to lie around drinking milk, chewing cookies, and basically doing nothing useful. Chuck was six months old. I mean, he was sort of cute, and babies can be fun, but he got all the attention while I got all the work.

He certainly got all of my attention the first time he talked. I was walking past his crib when he looked up at me with that toothless, wet grin and said, “Hey, sis, what's new?”

I was a bit less articulate with my reply. I think I said, “Huh?”

Chuck bounced and squealed a bit, then said, “Relax—you look like you just saw a ghost.”

I managed to reply with a full sentence. “You can talk.”

Chuck shrugged. “That appears to be the case.”

I suddenly saw my whole future flash past my eyes. I'd be the sister of the amazing talking baby. No one would ever know anything else about me. Chuck would become famous, and I'd end up answering his fan mail and taking his phone messages. “Look, Chuck, you really don't want people to know you can talk. You'll never get any peace. Your life won't be any fun at all.”

He raised a pudgy hand, stopping me from listing all the reasons why he should keep his mouth shut. “I'm way ahead of you, sis. I don't want fame. I just want to enjoy myself. I think I understand your viewpoint on all of this. We should be able to make a mutually agreeable deal.”

“A deal?”

“Sure. You do whatever I ask, and I'll keep my mouth shut. Deal?”

I was about to say no, but I realized that it wasn't such a bad offer. How much could he ask? It was better than becoming the sister of the talking baby. “All right. You've got a deal.”

It wasn't all that bad. It was more work than I expected, but I could handle it. Mostly, Chuck wanted me to read to him or make his favorite foods. On the positive side, Mom and Dad were thrilled to see how much time I was spending with my baby brother. I figured that it would put a crimp in my life for a year or two, but it would end when Chuck got old enough that his talking wasn't unusual. After that, I'd be finished.

I was just resting from a long session of swinging Chuck upside down. He loved that game, but it really tired me out.
So, I put him in his crib and dropped down on the couch. I hoped he'd take a nap. That's when I got most of my free time.

As I sprawled out on the couch, Mittens, my cat, came walking into the room. She hopped up on my lap, looked at me with those green eyes of hers, and said, “We have to talk.”

“Huh?”

“You, me, and Sparks,” Mittens said. She looked over toward the door. Sparks, my dog, trotted into the room, too.

“We don't want much,” Sparks said. “I'm sure we can reach a mutually agreeable deal.”

I sank farther down on the couch. My eyes fell on the goldfish. Her mouth was moving. “Not you, too,” I said.

She nodded. A bubble slipped from her mouth. It rose to the surface and popped, spilling out the word, “Yup.”

I
think I was
eight or nine when I first started walking with my eyes closed. That was a couple years ago. In the beginning, I'd just take a step or two. I'd try to guess how far I was from something—like a stop sign or a fence. I'd walk up to a sign and reach out, trying to predict when my fingers would touch it. After a while, I got really good at it. Then I started going farther. I'd walk down the block, making my way from one corner to the next. I knew exactly where I was at every step. It was almost like my mind was seeing for me.

Even though I was pretty sure I knew what was in front of me, it took a long while before I could relax and really trust myself not to walk into something. Eventually, the fear vanished.

I started crossing the street. We live deep inside a development, and there isn't much traffic. Still, I kept my ears open, just in case there was a car or a bike or something.

I went farther and farther.

At first, I figured it would only work as long as I was
headed toward the last thing I saw. I'd stare ahead, burning everything into my memory. Then I'd close my eyes and walk. But one day, right in the middle of my straight path down the road, I turned a corner. I was able to keep going. I still knew where I was and what was ahead of me.

I started trying that about a month ago.

And a month ago, I started to notice something else. In the beginning, it was almost too small to catch my attention. I think the very first time I realized anything was happening, it was with a street sign. I'd seen the sign a thousand times:
BELVIDERE BOULEVARD.
When I opened my eyes to look at it, the letters had changed slightly. They were just a little wider.

At first, I thought it was my imagination. But I started to notice other changes. The color of a stop sign was a bit darker than I remembered. The initials carved in the bark of a tree seemed a bit deeper. All the changes were small.

The farther I went on any walk, the greater the changes became. If I went one block, nothing noticeable happened. But if I traveled a long way, the world definitely was different when I opened my eyes.

I started going even farther. I walked all the way around the block where I lived. My house had been made of red brick. When I opened my eyes, my house was covered with green siding.

I wondered if things would go back if I went the other way around the block. But that didn't happen. The siding didn't change.

Inside, I found that I didn't have a little sister anymore. I
had a brother. I don't know whether that happened after my first or second trip around the block. But it was nice having a brother.

I decided to try walking all the way across town. When I reached the sign that read
WELCOME TO FERNVALE
, I opened my eyes. Then I turned and walked back home the normal way.

I still had a brother—that hadn't changed. Except he had seven toes on his left foot, which was kind of cool. And I guess I had rich parents. The house was bigger. There were all kinds of nice flowers in front, and huge trees filled with apples in back. It looked like a wonderful place to live.

I enjoyed my new life for a couple of days, but the urge to walk was too strong to resist. I set out this time for the big one—all the way to the edge of town and back to the house with my eyes closed. It was easy for me now—as easy as breathing. I couldn't wait to see the wonderful changes.

I went as far as the welcome sign. I reached out and touched it, feeling the spots where the paint was chipping, but I didn't open my eyes. I turned and started back. I got to my house with no trouble and reached out to touch the fence in front. As my hands brushed against the rusted metal, my eyes flew open. I hadn't meant to open them yet.

I wish I'd kept them closed.

The house was small and old and broken down. There was nothing in the yard but dead grass and weeds. I ran inside. Three kids—my three younger sisters—sat crying on the floor with their backs to me.

Had I gone too far? I needed to change things right away. I shut my eyes.

I
tried
to shut my eyes.

They wouldn't close.