Dump Trucks and Dogsleds: I'm on My Way, Mom! Read online

Emily turned her head around and saw that Trigger’s tail was swishing along the back of her neck. As much as she likes animals, I don’t think she liked that much. We barely had room to breathe.

  “Can I make a suggestion?” I said. “Instead of standing BEHIND the horses or wedging in BETWEEN the horses, why don’t we sit ON the horses? I mean, isn’t that what people do?”

  I used the slats of the car like a ladder and was able to climb aboard Trigger. He didn’t seem to mind me sitting on him one bit. Emily handed Cheerio up to me, then did exactly as I had done, and climbed on the back of the horse next to me. I could see from his bridle that his name was Hopalong. The horse on the other side of me was named Silver.

  “Come on up, Dad. Silver is waiting for you.”

  And then . . . Stanley Zipzer, worker of crossword puzzles, programmer of computers, and all around couch potato, suddenly threw his leg over Silver’s back and jumped up on that horse like he was the Lone Ranger.

  “Hi ho, Silver,” he said. “Yee haw.”

  “Are you okay, Dad?”

  “I’m worried about your mother and the baby,” he said. “I just need to release a little pressure.”

  Then, out of the blue, he began to sing a big-time cowboy version of “Home on the Range.” I mean with yodeling and whooping and hollering and everything. In fact, he kept singing it all the way to Springfield. He must have had a lot of pressure to release.

  That, along with the nuzzle fest to end all nuzzle fests, made the next two hours on the train two of the more interesting hours in my life. Weird, but definitely interesting.

  Wait until I tell the new baby brother about this, I kept thinking. He’s going to want to go right back where he came from.

  CHAPTER 13

  TEN THINGS I WAS SURE TRIGGER WAS

  THINKING ABOUT US

  1. About that guy in the striped zebra pants . . . where are his other two legs?

  2. And those red, round things hanging off his hat, those are the smallest hairy apples I’ve ever seen.

  3. If that old guy doesn’t stop singing that song, I’m going to buck him through the door.

  4. Will somebody please tell this Hank kid to get his heels out of my side? My flanks are killing me.

  5. Oh, look. There’s a cow standing outside in the snow. “Hey, moo face, ever heard of a barn?”

  6. Hey . . . there’s a whole herd of them, standing around chewing their cud, freezing their hooves off. I feel sorry for them—just a bunch of horse wannabes.

  7. Aww, look at that cute, little carrot dog. He looks like he could use another nuzzle.

  8. Oh wait. The girl with the pig tails wants a nuzzle, too. Funny, she smells a little like an iguana.

  9. The old guy’s still singing. “Hey, Hopalong, let’s all turn around and stare at him. Maybe we can scare him into stopping.”

  10. I got an itch on my hind quarters. Hey kid, why don’t you make yourself useful and scratch it. Just my luck . . . he doesn’t understand horse.

  11. How much longer do I have to stay up here on this thing . . . my butt’s falling asleep. Oh, wait . . . that’s not Trigger’s thought . . . that’s mine.

  CHAPTER 14

  After about two hours in the horse car, we were more than ready to get off in Springfield. We said good-bye to Trigger and Hopalong and Silver, and I apologized to them for not having any carrots or apples. The best part was we managed to get off the train without the conductor seeing us, so I didn’t have to confess that I never got the tickets. Let’s keep it our secret, okay? I mean, if Emily knew a thing like that, she’d bring it up every day until I’m sixty.

  We headed through the empty station. No one was there. They must have all gone home to sit by the fireplace, and I couldn’t blame them. It was cold. And to make things even more uncomfortable, we were walking like we each had a barrel stuck between our legs. I felt muscles I didn’t even know were in my body. If I had to pick one word to describe my thighs, it would be like having a really bad headache in your legs . . . which is way more than one word, but I think makes an excellent point.

  So there we were, at the entrance to the train station in Springfield, Massachusetts. We looked out the glass front doors, and all we could see was a blanket of white. There wasn’t one detail of the landscape that you could recognize. There was one tall, pointy, white thing, which could either have been the church steeple, a flagpole, or a rocket launching pad. Now that I think about it, I’ve never heard of a rocket taking off from Massachusetts.

  As if it wasn’t bad enough to be stuck in a train station with no trains in the middle of a giant, and I mean humongous, blizzard, Emily picked that moment to totally flip out.

  “I’m starving,” she said. “My stomach is growling like a lion and I can’t take it anymore. I need energy to move forward.”

  “No problem, Emily. I happen to have a turkey and Swiss on rye, with extra mayo, just the way you like it,” I offered.

  “Really, Hank?”

  “No, of course not really. Do you see a sandwich shop that happens to be open? No. But I do have right here in my pocket three gummy bears and a cherry lifesaver. Okay, they have frozen together into a sculpture but it would be my pleasure to let you have them.”

  I held out the gummy mess in my mitten and shoved it in Emily’s direction. She was not grateful.

  Oh no. I thought I saw those tears brimming up in her beady eyes again.

  “You start to cry and those tears are going to freeze to your cheek,” I warned her. “And if that happens, then we’ll have to . . . well, you don’t even want to know what the next steps are.”

  At that very moment, my dad let out a sound I’ve never heard before. If a voice could jump up and down with excitement, that’s what his throat was doing. Poor Cheerio. The sound made his ears stand at attention, and it was so cold in that station, they never flopped down again.

  “Look!” my father finally managed to say.

  He pointed through the door of the train station to the road beyond. Coming toward us were two yellow circles, giving off an eerie kind of light in the snowy mist. Either it was a man-eating monster alien looking for fresh families to devour, or it was a truck. Knowing that it was too cold for any sane man-eating monster alien to be out and about, I decided it had to be a truck. “We’re not alone!” my dad croaked out.

  Without saying another word to each other, we all raced through the door.

  The lights kept getting closer. We waved our arms like maniacs to make sure they wouldn’t miss us. Or hit us.

  “It’s slowing down,” I tried to say through my chattering teeth. “They see us!”

  Cheerio buried his face in my parka. I think his little teeth were chattering, too.

  As the truck slid to a stop right next to us, we were able to see the letters on the side of it. It said, “Krinkle Krispy Doughnuts, New England’s Dunkin’ Best.”

  “You see, I am a good person,” Emily said. “They stopped just for me, to bring me doughnuts.”

  “You’re nuts,” I said to her. “You think this truck is cruising around in the snow, looking for hungry reptile lovers?”

  “Maybe,” said Emily, unwilling to lose her ridiculous argument. “Anyway, I’m going to eat everything in that whole truck.”

  “Could you just save Dad and me one?” I asked. “And maybe a doughnut hole for Cheerio.”

  Emily was so out of control with hunger that she didn’t even wait for the driver to roll down the window. She jumped up on the running board and started pounding on the door. When the door opened and the driver stuck his head out, Emily took one look at him, screamed at the top of her lungs, and fell backward in the snow.

  He was half man, half dragon. Or at least, that’s the way he looked. His entire face was painted red, except for the area around his eyes, which was green with fish scales. His fingernails were silver and pointed and when he smiled, his teeth were as yellow as the lights on his truck.

  I didn’t know what this dragon m
an was doing driving on a totally empty road in a blizzard, but I did know one thing. He didn’t seem like the type of guy who would hand out free doughnuts.

  CHAPTER 15

  Emily sprang to her feet, pivoted like an NBA player, and took off into the snow, screaming, “Run for your life!”

  When I looked over at the guy, he seemed to be smiling in a warm, friendly kind of way. And when Cheerio stuck his nose out of my parka and looked at him, his tail started to wag. Cheerio has a very good sense about people. When he likes you, you’re usually an okay kind of person. Except for our pizza delivery guy. I don’t know what it is about him, but every time we open the door for him, Cheerio takes his attack dog position and barks like a German shepherd. No offense to Cheerio, but he’s not too scary even when he’s trying his hardest.

  “Wait up, Emily,” I called after her. “Maybe this guy can help us.” I looked over at my dad, who was checking the guy out pretty carefully.

  “What do you say, Dad?”

  “Let me speak to him,” my dad said. “I believe this man is some kind of stage performer.”

  “Good afternoon, sir,” my dad said to the dragon guy. “We have an emergency here, and we’re in need of your assistance. We have to get to New York City. Are you, by any chance, going in that direction?”

  “Ni hao,” the man said to my dad.

  “I can’t believe this,” Emily said, coming out from behind the bus stop where she had been hiding. “We stopped the only person in all of Massachusetts who doesn’t speak English.” Then she did a very un-Emily like thing. Cupping her hands around her mouth, she started to yell.

  “Help! Help!” she cried. “Is there a translator around who just happens to speak Chinese?”

  “I do,” I said.

  “This is no time to joke around, Hank.”

  “I’m not joking. The guy said hello. Ni hao means ‘hello.’”

  “You speak Chinese?” she asked, her mouth hanging open.

  “Well not the whole language. Ashley taught me to say hello, and also wo hen gao xin, which means ‘I am happy.’”

  When the dragon man heard me say that, he flashed me a really friendly smile and said, “Ni leng ma?”

  Unfortunately, that wasn’t a phrase Ashley taught me, so I just smiled and nodded as if I understood. He smiled and nodded right back at me. He was a nice guy, and whatever it was I agreed to seemed to please him.

  “Since this man doesn’t understand our language,” my dad said, “I am going to use the universal language of the body. Watch how this is done, kids. First I wave my hands in the air to get his attention.”

  My dad stood by the window of the truck and waved his hands around like he was erasing an imaginary blackboard. The man must have thought this was fun, because he started doing exactly the same thing. Then he turned around and said something to someone in the back of the truck. All of a sudden, the two back doors of the van flew open and at least nine men and women in dragon makeup and colorful silk robes came flying out. They formed a semi-circle around us and all started erasing the same imaginary blackboard.

  Cheerio thought this was tremendously fun, and started thrashing his tail with happiness. With every wag, he flipped snow up in the air. Thank goodness I had my thick parka on, because without it, his tail thrashing would have made my rib area completely black and blue.

  The blackboard erasing dance went on for a long time.

  “Dad, this is getting mind-bogglingly weird,” I whispered.

  “I’m feeling no danger signal whatsoever,” my dad said. “These people are clearly a traveling circus troop of some kind. We just have to communicate our need to them.”

  With that, my dad stepped forward, took a bow, and went into a pantomime that I can only describe as a hippopotamus trying to do ballet. Remember, he was wearing his zebra-striped ski pants and his red and white hat with the pom-poms, so his look was pretty eccentric to begin with. Add in some of his hippo moves, and his pantomime became one of the stranger sights anyone could ever hope to see.

  “Me,” my dad said, pointing to himself and kind of pounding on his chest.

  “And my children,” he said, grabbing Emily and me and pointing to us like we were bear cubs in a zoo.

  “And our family dog,” he pointed to Cheerio and made a barking sound that set off a barking fit in Cheerio.

  “We all have to get to my wife,” he said, pulling off his ski glove and pointing to his wedding ring.

  It wasn’t working. All ten of the acrobats were doing exactly what our dad was doing—pounding on their chest, patting us on the head, and pointing to their ring finger, whether they had a wedding ring or not.

  In any other circumstance, this game of charades might have been a lot of fun, but we were way too cold for fun. We were sounding like a symphony of chattering teeth out there. This was definitely not the right temperature for a game of charades.

  “Excuse me, Dad. Maybe I can speed this up a bit,” I said.

  Without waiting for his answer, I handed Cheerio to Emily, stepped in front of good old Stanley, and did what I considered to be an excellent pantomime of someone driving a truck. I even shifted gears, just to make sure they got the point.

  “Can you drive us to New York?” I said, continuing to mime driving the truck.

  Nine of the acrobats imitated me, laughing and shifting and steering up a storm, which by the way, we were already in. However, the driver and I made contact, and by that, I mean brain-to-brain contact. He understood me. I could almost see the light go on in his head.

  “Ahhhhhhhhhhh,” he said. Then he said something which sounded a lot like “New York.” Okay, it sounded kind of like New York. Well, at least a little bit like it.

  “See, Dad, they’re going to New York,” I said.

  The driver got a big smile on his face, and started to mime something back at me. Using his thumb, he jerked it toward the back of the truck, which could only mean one thing.

  GET IN.

  You didn’t have to ask me twice.

  “They’re going to give us a ride,” I said to my dad and Emily. “Come on.”

  Before we could even move, three of the acrobats grabbed our hands and led us to the back of the truck. Another one gently took Cheerio from Emily’s arms and carried him. Cheerio liked the guy immediately, and started licking his face. I noticed that he got a little of the guy’s green makeup on his tongue, giving him a slightly iguana look. He was a whole lot cuter than Katherine.

  The other acrobats clustered around, as if to protect us or keep us warm. The driver got out of the car and came up to us. He pointed at himself.

  “Chin,” he said.

  I thought maybe he wanted to learn English.

  “No,” I said, pointing at my chin. “This is a chin.”

  He shook his head back at me, and pointed to himself again.

  “Chin,” he repeated.

  “Chin,” I said, pointing to my chin.

  “You are such a moron, Hank,” Emily said. “His name is Chin. Can’t you see that’s what he’s telling you?”

  I hate it when Emily’s right, but I had to admit, my brain had kind of misfired on that one.

  “Oooohhhh,” I said to him. “Ni hao, Mr. Chin.”

  He smiled, then gestured us into the back of the truck. He went right to work, clearing off the snow that had accumulated on the windshield during our mime-a-thon.

  When we looked in the back door of the van, the first thing out of Emily’s mouth was, “No way.”

  “Yes, way,” I said. “Get in.”

  “There’s no way the nine of them and the three of us and Cheerio will fit inside there,” she said. “It’s simple math, Hank.”

  “First of all, Emily, math is never simple. And second of all, be quiet and get in.”

  “Stop bickering, kids,” my dad said. “Mr. Chin and his troop are being kind, so let’s not air our dirty family laundry in front of them.”

  I don’t know what a bunch of dirty
socks and boxers had to do with our situation, but Emily and I could tell from my dad’s tone of voice that he meant business. So we cut our argument short and started to climb inside the back of the mini-truck. But just before we could get in, a surprising thing happened. I mean, extremely surprising.

  One of the acrobats tapped me on the shoulder and motioned for me to step aside. Then, he did a back flip right by me, and catapulted himself into the van. Once inside, he got on his hands and knees and scrunched himself up against the front seat where the driver was getting into his seat. Then he whistled, and three more acrobats somersaulted by us and landed inside the truck. They also got on their hands and knees and scrunched into a row on either side of the first guy.

  “What do you think is going on?” Emily asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “but they’re so good, they could charge admission.”

  With that, the first guy whistled again and two of the women acrobats whizzed by us, jumping into the van and flipping on the backs of the four guys who were crouched inside.

  “Look at that,” I said. “They’re making a human pyramid.”

  “Great, Hank,” Emily said. “And while they’re horsing around, I’ve just become a human icicle.”

  “They’re not horsing around, Emily, they’re . . .”

  Before I was able to finish that sentence, the next two acrobats, who were smaller than the others, somersaulted by us into the van. They folded themselves up into a very compact shape and sat down on either side of the pyramid. I’m not sure what happened to their arms and legs, but they somehow folded up next to them like Papa Pete’s old coffee table.

  One acrobat was left standing next to us. I wondered what he was going to do, but I didn’t have to wonder long.

  Whoosh! He zoomed by me, jumped into the truck, and sat down cross-legged in between the two coffee tables. Then he grabbed one leg and put it behind his ear. But wait, that’s not all. He grabbed his other leg, and put it behind the other ear. And if that wasn’t enough, he took each of his arms and threaded them through the holes his legs created.

  And there he was, a human pretzel.