Snapdragon Alley
by Tom Lichtenberg
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 Tom Lichtenberg
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Sapphire and Alex
Sapphire was tall for her age, and strong. She was the terror of the fifth grade dodge ball class, but the star of the volleyball team. She was fearless, bold, and constantly in motion. At night she tossed and turned in her sleep and often wound up on the floor along with her blankets. Life for this girl was non-stop adventure, which is why her friend Alex liked to be around her, even if she didn't know when to stop, which could be a problem sometimes. You never knew what it was going to be next, but it was going to be something, that was for sure.
Alex was also ten, and it seemed like they'd known each other forever. They made an odd couple - he was shorter, thinner, and had long shaggy blond hair. From a distance he looked to be the girl and her the boy, with her height and her jet black hair cut short and straight. He was also quieter and by far the more cautious of the two. Alex liked to study things first, puzzle them out, come to an understanding and then mess around. With Sapphire it was jumping in with both feet first and only then considering the consequences.
Together they'd progressed from sandbox to mud puddles, creek walking and ice skating, tree climbing and skate boarding, and every good thing along the way. Now at ten years old they were ready to branch out, see the world, get out there and be life size, even if they weren't quite yet.
"Now's the time", Sapphire declared, and Alex agreed. They'd already decided on code names. She was to be known as Cipher, and he was to be Aleph. It was perfect. Code names first and then disguises and masks. Or maybe not. Cipher was still deciding about that. As for Aleph, he was poring over his collection of official city bus maps, one from each of the past nine years. He had the idea that if you're out to discover the world, a bus map is a decent place to begin.
Spring Hill Lake
Alex took to arranging his bus maps chronologically along his bedroom wall, at a height where he could study them carefully from his upper bunk, and where his little brother Argus could not easily get to them. This led to an endless fascination on the five-year-old's part. He would lie for hours in his lower bunk gazing up at the grids of tiny black lines and bolder red ones as if the secrets of the universe were embedded somewhere in there. Alex knew what all those lines represented, and he was certain they were the key to something more substantial - the way to most efficiently cover the territory.
Alex and Sapphire had different goals in mind for this adventure. Sapphire wanted to go everywhere, or rather, to have been everywhere, on every street. Alex wanted to see everything, to have seen everything, to know what things there were and where. He had a genius for memorization and a desire to fill up his brain cells with tidbits of random knowledge. Sapphire wanted notches on her belt. Her idea was to fan out from where they were, take it one neighborhood at a time, as if it were guerrilla warfare and the surrounding streets were the occupying army. Alex pointed out that this would make their travels that much longer each time. He proposed a more systematic solution; map it out and take the bus. Sapphire had to agree that made a lot more sense.
She had made a list of the streets she'd already been on, and it was a fairly long one. She had relatives in different parts of town, so she could claim substantial portions of those far-flung neighborhoods as conquests. Her list had three columns - the name of the street, a column for her own check marks, and a column for Alex. She figured it counted for both if even only one of them had been there. Alex wasn't so sure about that, but he decided to put off that discussion until later. Alex wanted a strategy. Part of the reason was financial. They would each have to buy a bus pass and that would cost money, so he wanted to make the best use of it.
As he stared at the maps on his wall, he tried to decide how to get it done. Should they cover the farthest regions first, so the job would get easier over time? Should they alternate between remote and distant areas, so they wouldn't get burned out? Should they tackle the safest neighborhoods first, saving the sketchier ones for when they were a little older and more experienced, or should they cross out the bad sections first, just to get them out of the way? He scanned the maps in order from the most recent to the oldest. They were largely the same. Spring Hill Lake was not a huge city, and it hadn't changed much in recent years. Alex didn't even know why he had nine years of bus maps on his wall, only that he liked to skip from one to the next, as if that would freshen his thinking. The bus routes had changed from time to time, it's true, and only the current map was actually useful, but they all gave him ideas. They made him wonder why the 22 no longer went through Skyport , but skirted around it, leaving that neighborhood to the 46 alone. Had demand diminished, and if so, why? Was Skyport not what it used to be?
And how come the 63 went all the way from the southwest to the northeast corner of the city? Was that efficient? That route hadn't changed at all over the nine years he knew about. Was it popular? Would it inconvenience too many people if it were disrupted in any way? He was building up legends about those routes. There once had been someone who could tell him, someone who had known all the answers - his Uncle Charlie, but Charlie wasn't around anymore. He'd been a bus driver, had even driven the 63 once. Alex wished that he could ask him, but all he had now to remember him by were these maps on the wall and some photographs.
The Artist Map
Sapphire's idea was to use highlighter pens to mark up all the streets that she and Alex had "done". Hers would be yellow. His would be blue. That way the ones they did together would be green. Alex smelled a contest and wasn't too big on that idea. Also, he didn't want any of his maps besmirched. He said he would think about it. In the meantime, Sapphire had pestered her dad into bringing home a bus map of her own so that she could get to work in secret, thinking she'd surprise her friend with a fancy presentation. The only problem was she wouldn't know all of his streets so her rendering would be incomplete, but as long as it had all of hers, she'd be happy enough. Her father had just brought home the map the night before, and Sapphire was hiding it in her jacket pocket.
So she sat there fidgeting in the Kirkham boys' bedroom, feeling giddy that she had a secret, and watching Argus watch his brother trace the bus routes with his finger. Sapphire didn't have any brothers or sisters, and had never wanted any, but she did enjoy this little one's company. Argus never said much, and she always wondered why that was. He had the biggest eyes and would sit there on his lower bunk bed half hidden in blankets, just staring and staring at the two bigger kids. Every now and then he'd mutter some word they couldn't understand, and that just made the boy seem even more mysterious to Sapphire. She had concluded that he was actually a cat in human disguise. She figured this was one of the cat's nine lives, that it had chosen to be a boy for life number five, for instance, and that sooner or later, poof! He'd go back to being a cat again.
"We could cover a lot of ground with the old 48", Alex said, showing Sapphire the way on the two year old map. He liked that one the best because of its color scheme, a sort of aqua for the regular routes, and rose for the expresses. Most of the other maps used a more traditional blue and red. This one also had bright green icons for city government buildings and museums, and the index was on the left instead of the right like all the other years. Alex believed that for one year they'd hired an artist to do the map, but he'd turned out to be a some kind of flake, and they'd chucked him at the end of the year and gone back to the same old bureaucrat they'd had before, a guy that Alex imagined to be a slimy looking beanpole by the name of Jimmy Grundling. Grundling was efficient, but had no taste. That's why Alex preferred the "artist map".
Sapphire didn't believe a word of it, and rolled her eyes whenever Alex brought it up, but Argus had absorbed the notion, and kept the idea in his mind that it was better to be an artist than a bureaucrat, even though he wasn't quite sure what either of those were. He just knew it had something to do with choosing colors.
"The 48 covers Westwind, Martinsgate, and Floridan", Alex was saying. "I've never been any of those places except once we went to Martinsgate when my Dad had to stop off at his office, and that was on 11th Street so I've been here, and here", and he traced the side streets where they'd parked and walked.
"How are we going to keep track?" Sapphire wanted to know, steering the conversation back to her master plan. Alex shrugged. Sapphire, who'd been scheming to do the highlight map entirely on her own and present it with a flourish in the future, was incapable of keeping a secret for even one hour, so she jumped up and yelled,
"Surprise!", and whipped her own new bus map out of her jacket and announced,
"We can use this one for the highlighters!!", and without waiting for Alex's response, she hurried over to his desk, where she spread out the map, pulled the highlighters from another pocket and then had to chase them as they rolled off the desk and spilled onto the floor. She fumbled for the blue one, came up triumphant and proceeded to trace the two blocks where Alex had said he'd been.
"It's a start", Sapphire concluded, and she felt that this was the moment when the adventure would finally begin. Alex sighed from his perch on the bunk and just watched as Sapphire found the yellow and started marking all of "her" streets, the ones she could remember at least, mostly around their neighborhood. All the time she did this she was pronouncing their names, followed by "gotcha" or "did ya", or "been there, done that" and laughing with a snort. After she'd performed several of these little acts, she called out to Alex to come down and help. She needed him to do his or at least tell her which ones were his so that she could mark them up. Alex hated to see a bus map being so abused but realized it was no use trying to contain any of Sapphire's enthusiasms at any time, and anyway, at least his own maps were now safe from her predations.
He climbed down, casually mentioned some street names, including a few obscure ones he knew that she'd have trouble finding by herself, so that finally she had to hand him the marker and let him do his own. Between them they had easily covered all of the immediate neighborhoods, and then there were the usual routes to shops and parks and malls. They also identified some downtown spots they knew they'd been to, but weren't sure exactly how they'd gotten there, so they just colored the places themselves. It wasn't long before they'd exhausted their recollections and stood back, a little dismayed at the smallness of their travels in relation to all the little black lines that remained unmarked.
"We haven't been hardly anywhere", Sapphire moaned.
"We'll get there", Alex reassured her. "I mean, that's the plan, right?"
"I didn't know there were so many of them", she sighed.
Alex was thinking that probably most of those streets would not be very interesting, just houses mainly. Maybe it would count if they only turned the corner on those, and didn't have to go down them all the way. He doubted Sapphire would go for that. She would call it cheating, at least at first.
"Did you get your bus pass?" she asked, and Alex nodded. They'd had to work on their parents to let them use their allowance for that. Neither Alex's parents nor Sapphire's dad were happy with the idea, which they'd tried but failed to keep a secret. There were parts of the city that the parents had marked Forbidden, and forced the kids to agree.
"At least until we're older", they'd promised, which to them meant as early as the next day, because, after all, it was true that tomorrow they'd be older than they were today!
"Okay, then", Sapphire said. "Then we're off" and she was gone from the room in a flash, leaving Alex to fold up her map and put the highlighters in his own jacket pocket. Sapphire would never have remembered them until it was far too late.
By the time he got to the front door, she was already on the sidewalk, stamping her feet, and wondering why it was taking him so long. She was, as ever, ready for anything.
The 48 Martinsgate
To get to the 48 they had to walk three blocks, turn left, walk another two, and wait at the stop. There were no published schedules for the buses, not even online. You just had to know, and Alex had a pretty good idea about this one, because he'd been staking it out, doing research. It was a Monday, a holiday so they had no school, and on Holiday Mondays the 48 Martinsgate East ran approximately every twenty minutes after rush hour. Which twenty minutes was any body's guess. Sometimes it arrived around the 0, 20 and 40. Sometimes it was shifted by five or ten minutes either way. Alex had not yet determined a definitive pattern, if there was one.
Fortunately, when they got there, they could see that at least they hadn't just missed one. Several adults were also gathered at the stop, which was a good sign. The grownups were likelier to arrive on time. The ultimate good luck was when one of the adults whipped out a lighter and lit his cigarette. That was almost a guarantee that the bus was just around the corner, and indeed it was. Almost as soon as the guy took his first drag, the huge wheezing silver and green thing pulled around the block and headed towards them. The man muttered a curse and flicked his butt into the road, while Sapphire and Alex cheered and made faces imitating his disappointment.
It made Alex's day just to slide the bus pass through the slot and see the little light go green. He hardly ever got to "do the honors", as he called it when his mother let him. Usually he had to have exact change. Usually he didn't get to ride the bus at all. His mom and dad had no idea it was practically his favorite experience, though you think they might have guessed, from the maps, the posters, the toy buses he collected, his persistent questions about his father's late brother Charles and his employment, but no. Parents were hopelessly clueless, he decided, Sapphire's dad as well. He had the idea that she had some kind of learning disability, all because she hated sitting still.
That was going to be another problem, Alex foresaw. Getting Sapphire to sit still long enough, because buses are slow, and take a long time to get anywhere. Their plan that day was to go as far as Westwind, get off, and walk back, making a sort of maze around the major street, covering two full blocks on either side in a loop back pattern. Westwind was only about a twenty minute ride, while Martinsgate would be at least twice that. He'd have to gauge her persistence and maybe modulate his expectations. He smiled at his thought, at the opportunity to use the word "modulate". Alex loved his words.
Sapphire meanwhile was having no problem sitting still, because the scenery was changing every second. As long as things were new and changing, she could hang on in there, which was one of the reasons she had trouble turning off the television. It was as if they'd calculated her attention span right down to the millisecond - and that would be about right. Her new rule was, never turn the damn thing on. So far she'd gone four days with no TV and was extremely proud of herself.
The bus took off, stopped and started, turned some corners, or barreled down a main drag. She wasn't familiar with the route, and within a few minutes they were in a part of the city she had never seen before. It stunned her to realize that. Here she'd grown up practically a mile away and had never seen that corner grocery store, had never seen the funny bright pink Japanese vegetable stand, had never seen the broken clock on the antique lamp post in front of the now-shuttered hardware store, and she wondered what else she had never seen on that street. Someone might have told her about the life-size plastic horse statue that used to sit in front of that very hardware store, had sat there for more than three generations, had been the pride and joy of the family that had handed down the store from father to son until the realities of modern economics had broken it down for good. She would have loved that horse.
Alex had seen it. It was there until only a couple of years before, and as the bus passed he remembered it and thought of telling Sapphire about it, but he could see that she was glued to the window and wouldn't have appreciated the interruption. He liked to see her like this. She had a half smile that indicated her most benign condition. He would never interrupt a smile like that.
A few minutes later he did have to tap her on the shoulder and tell her they were getting off at the next stop. She turned at him sharply and he thought that maybe she would fight it, but she'd agreed on the plan and simply nodded and pulled the rope to sound the bell. When the bus came squealing to the corner they jumped out of their seats and hopped down the stairs and out the back door.
Snapdragon Alley
Looking to the left and to the right, Sapphire and Alex couldn't make up their minds for a few minutes. There seemed to be no difference to the side streets - each one contained an array of single family homes with picket fences enclosing small front yards. None of them looked like adventure. Alex sighed, thinking maybe just peering down the way would count, and hoping his friend would go along with that, but his expectations were realistically low. She was not going to be deterred and was not ready, yet, to modify the rules.
"How about this one?" she proclaimed, gesturing at a street sign reading 'Poindexter'.
"Might as well", Alex agreed, and down the street they went. No one was on the sidewalks, though you might have expected to see some children playing outdoors. Inside a few of the homes they could see the televisions flickering, but every house was pretty much like the last. Some were pale blue, some beige, an occasional pink or yellow. Some had tiny porches. Most did not. There were about twenty houses to the block, and Alex and Sapphire dutifully wound their way around several of them, from Poindexter to Carter to Haymaker and Sansome, round and round through Glenwood Court and Glenwood Place, making sure to circle around the cul-de-sacs, until finally making their way back to Martinsgate Avenue, a few blocks from where the bus had dropped them off.
Sapphire looked at Alex. Alex looked at Sapphire.
"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".
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 expression 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.
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
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.
They watched as the bus made its turnaround and rode off back down Visitation. Everything was just as Alex had described; the long row of decrepit red row houses, the abandoned factory, and in between, the vacant lot where they thought Snapdragon Alley should have been. Argus led the way into the lot, picking his way around outcroppings of former foundation. Far off at the other end of the lot, they could see the bent figure of an old man carrying something like a vacuum cleaner around the lot. Sapphire pointed him out.
"Uh-oh", she said, "something crazy on aisle seven", and the other kids laughed. She kicked a few rocks and stuck her hands in her pockets. She looked at Alex, who didn't have to say 'told you' for her to know exactly what he was thinking. Argus was thoroughly enjoying himself, as he leaped from one spot to another, bending down, peering into crannies and under stones, pushing aside weeds, and generally acting like he was looking for something in particular.
"Find anything?" Alex called out.
"I think so", Argus declared, and he ran back holding up something green and shiny in his hand. It looked like an ornament, a tiny stained-glass dragonfly.
"Keep it for me?" Argus asked his brother, and ran back off. Alex put the little treasure in his pocket. He knew about Argus and his collections. Such things were terribly important to his brother.
Sapphire nudged him, and gestured toward the old man, who was now approaching them as rapidly as he could with his age and that heavy bit of equipment he was carrying. Alex could now see it was a metal detector.
"Hey, you kids", the old geezer shouted.
"Uh-oh", Sapphire said again. "Looks like trouble now."
The old man repeated that phrase every few steps until he finally got up close to them. Sapphire had thought he'd be one of those smelly homeless guys but it turned out he was a clean old man, dressed way out of date but neatly, clean-shaven. He didn't have a mean face but he was scowling.
"What are you kids doing here?" he asked. "This is private property".
"Nothing, sir", Alex volunteered.
"Are you looking for something?", Sapphire asked, as pleasantly as she could. "Maybe we could help you find it"
"No!" the old man shouted. "and no", he continued, answering the second question. He looked down around the ground where they were all standing, and shook his head.
"I'm never going to find it", he muttered. "Been looking for months."
"What is it?" Sapphire asked, but the old man just shook his head and didn't answer. Alex drew out the tiny glass artifact from his pocket and held it out to the man, reluctantly. He was hoping it wouldn't get snatched away, but the old man, after glancing at it, shook his head again.
"Nope. Not it", he murmured, "But thanks. Thank you for asking". He almost smiled, though he was trying as hard as he could not to.
Argus came running up, shouting.
"Alex! Sapphire! You're not going to believe it", and when he got up close to them he stopped and held out his hand. Resting in his palm was a small, thin copper ring.
"A washer?" Alex asked.
"Good find", Sapphire said sarcastically, but the old man dropped his machine and stepped over to the little boy and nearly yelled,
"Let me see that!".
Argus took a step backward, but composed himself and kept his hand out steadily and let the old man bend over it and examine the ring.
"May I?" asked the old man gingerly, and Argus nodded. He took the ring from the boy and held it up to the sky. It sparkled as he turned in a circle, and then, holding the ring with his thumb and index finger on the top and bottom, he seemed to be aiming it at a spot on the abandoned factory wall.
"It's no use", he said, after a few moments. "If only Charlie was here. Charlie would know what to do."
"Charlie?" Alex gasped.
"Charlie Kirkham", the old man said. "That guy knew all about the magic stuff".
Mason Henry
"Charlie Kirkham was my uncle, our uncle!" Alex cried out.
"Yeah", said Argus, although he could barely remember Uncle Charlie, who'd vanished into thin air two years before and was since presumed dead. Alex alone was certain that Charlie was still alive, though of course he could never explain why he had this feeling, or where Charlie might have gone or why. He had all sorts of theories about the mystery - a secret life, a hidden treasure, a criminal flight - but nothing that really fit with the actual man, who was a fairly simple, regular guy; a bus driver, a bowler, a handyman, a casual sports gambler, a boy who never quite grew up into his six foot two, two hundred twenty pound body.
Charlie's older brother Robert, Alex and Argus' father, had a long list of disapprovals when it came to his younger sibling. Charlie was never smart enough, or bold enough, or disciplined, strong-willed, or ambitious enough - the traits that Robert had in over-abundance and the only ones he valued. Alex used to chuckle when his dad complained that Charlie didn't have any drive - after all, he drove a bus all day! What more could his father want?
Alex's mother, Mary, was sure that Charlie had gotten in trouble with his gambling, had met up with some "bad characters" who had "made an end of him". She had watched way too many crime shows on TV. She tried not to mention the man, "so as not to upset the children", but when she did it was with a sigh and to expect his corpse to come floating down the Wetford River any day.
But Alex believed his Uncle Charlie when he told him he never gambled serious money, because he never had any, just a few lousy bucks here and there on the Sea Dragons football team. There was another side of Charlie that maybe only Alex had ever seen, and only rarely, when during a long lazy game of catch, Charlie would start chattering about things he'd seen that no one knew about, things he couldn't talk about, things that nobody would believe.
"I'd believe you", Alex reassured him, and Charlie smiled and nodded.
"I believe you'd believe me", he laughed.
"So tell me", Alex pleaded.
"Another time", said Charlie, and so it happened the same way the few times the subject came up, but that promised other time never came. One morning Charlie Kirkham boarded his bus for the last time. He drove to the end of the line, walked off the bus, and was never seen again.
"My Uncle Charlie disappeared", Alex told the old man, "do you know where he is?"
"I wish I did", the old man replied. "I really wish I did". He shook his head sadly.
"The last time I saw your Uncle", he continued, "was right about where we're standing now".
"But I'm forgetting my manners", he said. "Here I am talking with the nephews and niece of Charlie Kirkham and we haven't even been properly introduced"
"Actually", Sapphire spoke up, "I'm no relation, just a friend. Sapphire."
"Sapphire!" the old man said, "what an extraordinary name, and what a perfect fit! Indeed. Mason Henry, that's me", and he held out his hand and shook Sapphire's.
"Alex Kirkham, and my brother Argus", said Alex.
"I'm Argus", said the little one, pointlessly.
"Very pleased and honored to meet you both", said Mason Henry, shaking their hands in turn.
"What were you trying to do with that ring?" Sapphire asked, "and what did you mean about magic?"
Aha", said Mister Henry, "right to the point. Yes, of course. That must have seemed awfully strange. You probably think I'm off my rocker", he chuckled. "But just you wait. Just wait. When you hear the rest, you'll really think I am! But why are we standing out here in this empty lot. Come along, my house is just over there, at the edge of the field, the last house in the row. Would you like some milk? I probably don't have any. But I have soda. Do you like soda? What do kids drink anyway? I have no idea. I haven't talked to an actual child in years!"
They followed Henry to his house, one of the worn-down structures that lined the left side of what must have been Snapdragon Alley, although the sign on that narrow street read Trent Blvd.
"Hardly a boulevard", Sapphire commented as they crossed it. The street was barely more than a ditch.
"True enough", said Mason Henry, "but then again I once saw a dirt road curving through the middle of a vast sugar beet field that was called John F. Kennedy Boulevard. We're at least a little more modest here."
The inside of the house was as dilapidated as the outside, containing two old dusty and overstuffed chairs in the front room with their stuffing leaking out, and a rickety aluminum table in the kitchen, with two folding chairs beside it.
"Sorry there's no good place to sit", the old man said, rummaging through the fridge for a few cans of Coke.
"It's okay", said Alex, who was really kind of shocked at the dirt and disorder all around. This was decay of a kind he had never experienced before.
"It's just me here now", Mason Henry continued. "Henrietta's been gone about two years now."
Sapphire and Alex exchanged glances, warning each other not to laugh at the idea of a Henrietta Henry. Brief nods assured each other they wouldn't.
"That's too bad", said Argus. "I'll bet you miss her".
Once Again Alex was struck by the fact that his little brother, barely out of diapers as far as he was concerned, always seemed to say exactly the right thing at the right time.
Alex and Sapphire picked up the folding chairs and everyone moved into the front room, where they sat in a half-circle around the big picture window that overlooked the vacant lot. Mason Henry gestured out the window.
"It's all still there", he said mysteriously. "I believe it. Can't see it, but I believe it."
"What's all still there?" Sapphire asked.
"Snapdragon Alley", Mason Henry replied. Alex nearly choked on his drink. He was certain that none of them had mentioned that name until now.
The Spot
"I don't understand", said Alex. "There was a Snapdragon Alley on the bus map two years ago. Before then it was never there, and since then it's never been either."
"It was on a map?" Mason Henry seemed genuinely surprised. "That might be the strangest thing of all. On a map?"
"Well, why wouldn't it be?" Sapphire wanted to know, "if it was a street and it was there, then why shouldn't it be on a map?"
"Well, considering it's not really a street", Mason Henry murmured, "and the little fact that it's not strictly what you might call 'there' ..." his voice trailed off.
"Now I'm even more confused", said Alex. "Either something is or it isn't. Either it's there or it's not."
"How to explain", Henry began, "how indeed to explain." He rubbed his chin and started out the window again.
"It's yours!" Argus suddenly spoke up. "That land out there is yours."
"Yes, it is", said Mason Henry. "It really belonged to Henrietta, but I suppose it's all mine now"
"You're the one who won't sell", Sapphire put it. "My father works for the city and he told me about it."
"Never!" flashed the old man angrily. "I'll never sell and I'll make sure they never get their grubby paws on it too. If only I could make sure, that is." He paused, and then quietly said, "One thing happeneth to them all ..."
"But why?" Alex asked
"Because of Snapdragon Alley", Argus quietly told him.
"Did you ever hear of The Spot?" Mason Henry looked at all three of the children in turn.
"Depends", Sapphire replied. "Is it a nightclub?"
"No, no, no", Mason Henry said, "it's a place, a magical place, you might say, in this world but not only in this world, in other worlds as well, and at the same time. It's a crossroads, a junction, an intersection where realities meet"
"Like parallel universes?" Alex had read his share of science fiction.
"Not quite", said Mason Henry. "There is only one universe."
"Other dimensions?" Sapphire asked. She had read exactly the same books as Alex.
"Facets, you might say", the old man shrugged. "More like facets. When you think dimensions you think direction and shape. It's not quite that. It's a vantage point, a view. If you look the right way, at the right time, you can see it, all of it, very clearly and very much right there", and again he pointed out the window.
"So the ring", Argus said softly, and then more loudly he added, "can you tell us what it looks like?"
"In a way, my dear boy", beamed Mason Henry, and he gave Alex a look signaling his great impression of the little one.
"The way Henrietta saw it, you would think it's nothing special, not really. Just a little housing development. Cute little houses, with lawns and picket fences. Maybe a dozen or so. A little park in the middle with a playground for the children. The road itself is more of a path - Snapdragon Alley, that is. No cars on it. No parking. Odd thing, that."
Mason Henry was silent for a moment.
"But then again", he continued, "the way Charlie saw it was nothing like that at all. He said it was like a big open warehouse, all windows all around and no doors you could see, just all green glass and filled with plants and creatures he could not describe.”
"Were there any people in there?" Alex asked. He was thinking, how can anybody live in a place that isn't even there, or at least isn't visible. Are the people invisible too? Did they all just vanish like Uncle Charlie? Is he one of them? Is he still there?
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