Two Hot Dogs With Everything Page 3

  Molly had some reservations too.

  “Thirty miles is a long way. Do you really think we could make it?”

  “I guess we won't know unless we try,” said Danny.

  “Well, if we do it, we have to come up with a good cover story,” said Lucas. He was clearly coming around to the idea. It offered the possibility of trouble, and something inside him just couldn't resist. “And we'll have to meet somewhere secret so nobody sees us together. We can't just set off from the park.”

  Molly bit her nails.

  “So … let me get this straight,” she said slowly. “We're going to lie to all of our parents. We're going to meet at a secret location, then ride our bikes to a town we've never been to before using a map printed out off the Internet. Then we're going to somehow save the Boddlebrooks mansion from being torn down, even though we really don't have a plan or anything. Then we are going to ride all the way back home, all before our parents notice we're missing. Is that what you're proposing, Danny?”

  When you put it like that, it didn't sound like such a good idea, Danny thought. But he wasn't going to back down now.

  “Yeah. That's the plan,” he said.

  There was a long pause as Molly's and Danny's eyes met.

  “Well, I'm in!” she said with a smile.

  Secret Rendezvous

  At seven a.m. that Saturday, Danny, Molly, and Lucas met on Beatlechuck Street, about a quarter of a mile from Danny's apartment. It was a street that Danny hardly ever went to. It had a McDonald's, a gas station, and a car wash on it, but no residential buildings, and there were hardly any people on the street.

  Danny was riding his blue T-150 Alibaba Racer. It had once been his brother's, but it was still in pretty good shape. Molly's bike was a green Cannondale R300 Roadster that was a birthday present from her father, one of the many great presents Molly got when Mr. Fitch was feeling guilty about the divorce. It was so light you could lift it over your head with one hand. Danny figured it was probably worth about the same amount as Mr. Masterly's old Chevy.

  Lucas was riding a dented black contraption that looked like the bike the delivery guy from Mr. Chen's Chinese Takeout used. It was so old it seemed as if it might buckle under Lucas's weight at any time. Plus, it had a clunky metal basket in the front, the final indignity.

  This was going to be an interesting trip, Danny thought.

  Danny had the directions to West Bubble on a printout in his back pocket and a bottle of water in a backpack slung over his shoulder.

  He had snuck into the kitchen the night before and made three tuna-and-pineapple sandwiches. He wasn't sure how they would taste, but it was all he could find in the fridge. They were wrapped in tinfoil and crammed into the front pouch of his backpack, along with a bicycle repair kit that Molly had brought along.

  “Ready?” Danny asked, and Molly and Lucas nodded. The three were wearing Sluggers caps, and Danny had his Sid Canova T-shirt on as well.

  “I told my parents I was going to hang out at Molly's place,” said Lucas.

  “My mother thinks I'm with Danny all day,” said Molly.

  As Danny raced out of the apartment that morning, he had told his mother he was going swimming with his two friends. Lydia Gurkin had kissed him on the cheek and told him to have fun.

  On the ride to Beatlechuck Street, Danny thought about the story he'd told his mother. The lie had rolled off his tongue so much more easily than he'd thought it would. Sure, he had lied to his parents before, but mostly about little things. There was the time he'd used a painted Mexican platter his parents got on their honeymoon as first base and blamed it on Max when it broke. And the time he'd faked his father's signature and cut school to go to a baseball-card show and get Sid Canova's autograph. Then, of course, there was the time … Well, who had time for lists.

  But the fact was he'd never made up a lie like this. Not one involving leaving the city limits. Not one that could land him on one of those reality television shows about police tracking down runaways.

  Danny knew he was doing this for a good cause, and if things worked out as planned, his parents would never even know. Danny thought of Grandpa Ebenezer shivering in the bleachers in 1934, when the Sluggers were headed for a pennant until the first and only August blizzard in history dumped ten feet of snow on the Sluggers' Winning Streak Stadium and washed out the rest of the season. If he were still alive, Grandpa Ebenezer would understand what Danny was doing.

  “All right,” Danny said, unfolding the map and pointing to a thin line that snaked off to the left of the city. “We can make it most of the way on the Sunshine Parkway, which starts over at Pikesmith Street.”

  Molly and Lucas huddled around the printout. Pikesmith was about twenty-five blocks away from where they were. It was hard to tell exactly because the map was kind of small and the ink was smudged.

  “The only really tough spot is after that because we're going to have to go for a few miles on the Harry Tinkleford Highway,” Danny said. “It's a really big highway, you know, with five lanes. But we only need to stay on it for three miles, and then we're nearly in West Bubble.”

  Danny looked at Molly and Lucas to see if he was losing them, but they seemed to be okay with the plan. Danny didn't want them to know that he was a tiny bit nervous about the highway part. He'd never seen anyone biking on the side of a highway before, let alone a trio of eleven-year-olds on a secret mission to save a baseball mansion. He could see that an outside observer, or, say, one of their parents, might think it was a stupid thing to do. They might even see it as something that merited being grounded … forever.

  If Danny's calculations were correct, it would take about three hours of solid riding to get to West Bubble, assuming they didn't get lost. That would leave them three hours to look around and still be able to get back by four o'clock.

  “Let's go!” said Lucas, and they put their fists together. Danny was also crossing his toes for good luck and silently repeating the words “West Bubble” in his brain. It just seemed like the thing to do.

  Lucas was the first to kick off, his bike wobbling from side to side as he built up speed. Molly and Danny took off after him.

  They pedaled through neighborhood streets buzzing with early-morning activity: a grocer stacking cucumbers and green peppers, a newspaper vendor cutting the string off a stack of fresh papers. Danny was beginning to get excited.

  Those first ten minutes were pure elation.

  The problems started during minute eleven.

  A Trip to the Country

  “Danny? Danny Gurkin! What are you kids up to so early in the morning?”

  They were stopped at a red light on Pembroke Street and the voice piercing the air like a gunshot was that of Mrs. Miliken, Danny's mom's aerobics instructor, who had just popped out of Leo's Bakery and was standing right behind them.

  Disaster! They were already spotted.

  Danny swiveled around on his bike and tried to smile, but his heart was in his stomach.

  “Oh, hey, Mrs. Miliken. Yeah, we're … ah, we're just off to the park,” he said.

  “Oh, lovely. But what an early start!” said Mrs. Miliken from behind a pair of oversized sunglasses. She was clutching a coffee. “I'm going to see your mom in class this afternoon.”

  Danny stared at Mrs. Miliken for about fifteen seconds before he managed a nervous grin.

  “Great,” he said.

  It seemed like forever until the light changed and the three rode off down the street.

  “Why did you say the park?” asked Molly when they got to Pikesmith Street. “I thought you told your mother we were going swimming.”

  “All right, not a good start,” Danny said. “I panicked.”

  The three followed a big green sign that pointed toward the Sunshine Parkway, and before long they were cruising up an on-ramp and onto the one-lane road.

  It only took a few minutes before the city started to melt away, and within half an hour, the road dropped off into a green valley
, then slowly began rising through the hills. Danny was struck by how much longer the hilly bits seemed when you were pedaling, and how you hardly noticed them at all when you were sitting in the back of your parents' car.

  After nearly an hour of riding, Danny's brow was soaked with sweat. He glanced in a small mirror he had strapped to his left handlebar. Molly was gliding along, but Lucas had fallen a hundred yards behind and his face was as red as a hot dog. He was pedaling away furiously on his deliveryman's bike, but it didn't seem to be going anywhere.

  Lucas was starting to get upset, cursing the bike, cursing the hill, and cursing Danny—and that was before the loud pop and the hollow clank.

  The chain on Lucas's bike had come completely off its chainwheel. Lucas jumped off and was now literally hopping up and down in anger. They were an hour from home and two hours from West Bubble.

  “Of all the stupid, pinhead, lame-o, dim-witted, backward, brain-dead ideas I've ever let you talk me into, this is the tops, Danny,” Lucas ranted as Danny and Molly cycled back to him. “And I've been a part of some pretty stupid ideas since I met you.”

  “It's not Danny's fault,” Molly objected. “You're the one riding a bike that should be in a museum!”

  “Oh, excuse me, Miss My-Father-Buys-Me-Everything,” shot back Lucas. “I'm so sorry that I don't have the latest state-of-the-art pedaling machine like you. I didn't know we were trying out for the Olympics.”

  “Keep that up and we can just leave you here, Doughboy,” said Molly with a scowl. That quieted Lucas down pretty quickly.

  “Do you think you can fix it, Molly?” Danny asked.

  Molly was good with bicycles, and it was her tool kit.

  “Oh, I can fix the bike,” said Molly.“ But Lucas will still be a loser.”

  She punctuated this insult by putting her hand on her forehead and making her thumb and index finger into the letter L.

  Lucas was glowering, but he realized he wasn't in a good position to make a comeback, so he just sulked as Molly turned the bike over and started working on the chain. It took about ten minutes for Molly and Danny to get the chain back on the chainwheel, pulling it on link by link.

  By the time they were done, their hands were black with grease, and Danny's Sid Canova shirt had a large black handprint on it. Molly turned the bike back over and pushed it toward Lucas without saying a word, then rode off.

  “What's eating her?” said Lucas as he got back on his bike.

  “I think maybe what you said about her father,” Danny said.

  It took them another half hour to reach the exit for the Harry Tinkleford Highway.

  Danny had known it was going to be big. But he hadn't factored in the cars and tractor-trailers whizzing by at sixty-five miles per hour in either direction. Or the choking exhaust fumes. Or the fact that the emergency lane had so many bumps and potholes that it made their teeth rattle and their behinds numb. It was like riding over a pile of bricks.

  This time it was Molly who was not coping well. She flinched every time a car whooshed by, and her face was a mask of deep concentration as she tried to keep her bike straight. It was so light and the wheels were so narrow that it took every pothole badly.

  “This is scary, Danny. What in the world were you thinking?” she yelled.

  Lucas's face contorted into a scowl whenever he ran over a pothole or hit a bump, which was every ten seconds or so.

  “Ouch! My butt is killing me,” he screamed.

  After five minutes, the ugly metal basket on Lucas's bike popped off. It looked as if the rest of the bike could fall apart at any second.

  Danny frowned. The trip was quickly becoming the kind of colossal mistake that your friends make fun of you for, for the rest of your life. When Lucas's chain popped off again, eliciting curses from both Molly and Lucas, Danny realized there was no point in going on.

  Danny got off his bike and threw it to the side of the road, smashing the rearview mirror. Typical, he thought. Bad luck.

  He felt like a loser. He felt like a Sluggers fan.

  “It's my fault,” said Danny as Molly cycled up to him. Lucas was pushing his bike, the chain scraping along on the road.

  “Darn right it is,” said Lucas.

  “I, ah, I'm sorry,” said Danny. “I didn't think it would be this hard.”

  “Um-hmm,” said Molly, rubbing her hands together. He'd never seen her look so stressed out.

  “I owe you guys a big apology,” he continued.

  “The biggest!” Lucas huffed. “And you owe my butt a separate apology.”

  Danny laughed, and so did Molly. Lucas could be pretty funny, especially when he didn't mean to be.

  Danny pulled the tuna-and-pineapple sandwiches out of his backpack and passed them around. They were smushed from the tool kit rattling around inside his bag, and some of the bits of pineapple had pushed their way through the soggy white bread.

  “Now, these, these are truly disgusting,” said Molly after taking a bite. “Did you come up with this combo on your own? I think we can safely say you're never going to be a chef.”

  “Or a navigator!” said Lucas.

  “Well, you guys can't say I never take you anyplace,” Danny joked. He was feeling a little better, and he also figured the best way out of the endless ribbing that was coming to him was to just admit he had made a stupid mistake.

  “I guess this is about the dumbest thing I ever thought of,” Danny said.

  Molly and Lucas just stood there without saying a word. It was hard to tell if they were still a little angry or just tired.

  “So I guess we should head back home, huh?” Danny said, and was surprised when Molly and Lucas broke out of their trance and looked at him in disbelief.

  “What are you talking about?” said Molly. “Home? You're not getting out of this that easily.”

  Lucas was even more resolved.

  “I'm going to need surgery on my butt after today,” he said, his face so close to Danny's that their noses almost touched. “I'm not going through that for nothing. We're going to get to that mansion if it's the last thing we do.”

  West Bubble

  The town of West Bubble sat on the western tip of Ball Four Sound, just across the bay from East Bubble. There was no place in the middle called simply Bubble, which Danny thought was strange. The towns had been known as West Rock and East Rock before Manchester and Skidmore Boddlebrooks arrived and folks decided to change the names.

  When Manchester Boddlebrooks moved to West Rock shortly after he came to America in 1881, he wasn't a bubble-gum tycoon yet, and he didn't weigh three hundred pounds. Some people say his name wasn't even Manchester back then, and he spoke English with a thick accent that nobody could place.

  As his fortune and his waistline grew, Manchester's past became the stuff of newspaper speculation and high-society whispers. Some said he was born Barkos Benzoulous in a tiny Greek fishing village, and only got the idea to call himself Manchester when he saw the word written on the side of a ship. Others said he was of noble blood and a direct descendant of the great medieval king Charlemagne, who was also on the heavy side. One story had it that Manchester and Skidmore were orphaned by Ukrainian circus performers after a freak accident involving an elephant they thought they could teach to swing on the trapeze.

  Whenever anyone asked Manchester directly, he would scratch his chin and pretend he couldn't remember.

  “It was a long time ago,” he would say. “Have a stick of gum.”

  Young Manchester's first job in West Rock was as a groundskeeper at the town park, where he saw his first game of baseball and quickly developed a love for the sport. In the evenings, he would go back to the small apartment he shared with Skidmore and work on his gum inventions. Back then, it was nearly impossible to blow a bubble with the chewing gum on the market—a sticky concoction called Tasty Tooth Wax made from the sap of a sapodilla tree. It was not a big hit. It tasted a bit like soggy cardboard.

  Manchester knew he could mak
e a better gum, and he would work late into the night, boiling down raspberries and peaches and other fruits for his recipes. Skidmore thought his brother was crazy, and the racket he produced in the kitchen each night made it impossible to sleep.

  “What did we come to this country for? To make fruit syrup in the middle of the night?” Skidmore would ask impatiently, usually at around three a.m. The only time Skidmore tried one of Manchester's concoctions his face broke out in puffy red blotches and he missed three days of work. It almost brought the brothers to blows.

  But Manchester kept experimenting, and when he found a secret technique to make his gum more rubbery so that you could blow bubbles with it, he started selling the chewy treats at West Rock's only grocery store, E. L. Macau's Fine Foods. The gum cost a penny a pack, and it sold out in a single afternoon. The next day's batch was gone in an hour. By the third day a line snaked around the block. Mr. Macau was begging Manchester to make more.

  And that's how it all started.

  Within a month, Manchester was no longer cutting the grass at the West Rock park. He had hired a speech instructor to make him sound more American, a chef to prepare his prodigious meals, and a tailor to stitch together the gleaming white three-piece suits that would become his trademark. A year later, his company, Manchester Mastications, Inc., was churning out a million packs of gum a day, with a fleet of one thousand horsemen on hand to rush the new product far and wide.

  By the time Manchester built his enormous mansion on the outskirts of what had become West Bubble, he was the most powerful person in town. The profits from Manchester Mastications had paid for everything from the town hall to the West Bubble Zoo. There were scholarships (and of course free gum) for the brightest West Bubble schoolchildren, and town fairs and a theater for the adults.

  Above all, there were the parties.

  In the 107 years following Manchester's sudden death, nobody in West Bubble had thrown a party that could hold a candle to his. The whole town would turn out for Manchester's parties, joined by the most famous entertainers, sportsmen, and politicians of the day. West Bubble filled to the brim with fancy horse-drawn carriages, each pulling up at the Boddlebrooks mansion laden with gifts for the host. Manchester always joined his guests at midnight, steering his enormous bubble-shaped hot-air balloon into the backyard as fireworks lit up the sky.