LITMIR.BIZ

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resembling this stuff in New York. Historically speaking, the Eastern seaboard predates the West Coast by over 200 years. Everything worthwhile in the East must have been grabbed up ages ago. Why these iron spikes from the Union Pacific Railroad alone are worth a fortune.”

      Needless to say, Pop planned to take all his junk to New York with him for “redesign and reconstruction” and Mom had sweetly assented to this. She wasn’t really in a position to object. She had a few things to lug East herself—her loom (very handy for weaving rugs and carpets and the like), her dyeing vats and wax-melting pots for hand-blocking and batik-making (which Mrs. Hinkle had once rather witchily referred to as her “cauldrons”), an old harpsichord, an old harp, an old zither, and a few other broken-down musical instruments that she had been collecting over the years and was forever promising to put into “proper playing order.”

      “Doesn’t matter, though,” Inez remarked breezily when I pointed out how loaded we would be on the trip East. “Think, just think Sara love, of all the space we’ll be saving by not taking any cooking pots with us at all.” (She was wrong there. I wasn’t going anywhere without my hamburger grill.) “Oh, I tell you baby, eating food in its natural state beats all, from every possible point of view. Just give that a think.”

      And sure enough, a few minutes later Inez and Drew sank down cross-legged on the living-room floor and ate their dinner—raw chopped meat sprinkled with raw chopped onions, and, on top of that, two gloppy raw egg yolks!

      Meantime, Toby got in from late session at the high school. I started to tell him the news, but he already knew. He’d heard about it late that morning before leaving for school—which explained why no one had told me. I left for school at eight o’clock, and Drew had only gotten the letter and phoned Mom at around ten.

      I fried the D-burgers, and Toby and I sat down to eat at the kitchen table. Toby kept shaking his head back and forth as he ate. Oh, he liked the D-burgers all right. It was the moving to New York that had him upset.

      “Can’t do,” Toby said. “Felipe and I discussed it and we’re still going on this digging expedition to Mexico this summer.”

      “You mean you’re not coming East with us?”

      “That’s right,” Toby said. And I knew from looking into his eyes, which are the darkest possible brown without being actually black, and at the set of his jaw, which is “pronounced” even when he’s asleep, that he really meant it.

      Even if Toby is my brother, I have to admit that he isn’t the least bit handsome. He isn’t even good-looking. But he’s what I would call really great to look at. He has sort of craggy features with a slightly crooked nose and a slightly crooked mouth, a face that’s both rough and tender all at the same time. His hair is wavy and brown, and he wears it kind of low on his forehead and full all around but not really long.

      I can tell that girls are crazy about him because all the time I keep getting more and more girlfriends, even some of the stuck-up ones from Pine Ridge Drive who suddenly start developing an interest in looms and zithers and junk sculpture just as an excuse to hang around our place and keep an eye out for Toby.

      “Oh well,” I said resignedly, “I guess you’ll get your way. Pop’s pretty sympathetic to archaeology and Mexico and all that stuff.”

      Toby nodded and I realized he was caring just a little bit about my having to go it alone with Inez and Drew to New York.

      “Sorry kid,” he said, grabbing another D-burger. “I’ll sure miss your cooking, but I like it fine here in California. In the fall I’ll probably move in with Felipe’s family and finish out my last year of high school out here instead of making still another switch.”

      So that meant Toby would be trading my cooking for Mrs. Gonzaga’s. Felipe’s mother was a good cook all right—if you liked Mexican food. Which Toby did. Which I didn’t.

      Still I couldn’t blame Toby. He’d already had enough gypsying around to last anyone else a lifetime. Because he was five years older than I was, Inez and Drew had really lugged him all over—Peru, on a special two-year expedition to try to uncover an ancient Inca secret that it turned out even the ancient Incas didn’t have the answer to; Thailand, so Drew could write a doctoral thesis on the hill tribes who smeared lipstick all over their cheeks instead of on their lips and whose children all smoked pipes; Albania, where Drew wanted to study the inheritance customs of the Ghegs and the Tosks.

      It sure had made a mess of Toby’s education, and if he wasn’t a natural-born genius he’d have been in fourth grade at age 16-going-on-17 instead of in his junior year in high school.

      During most of the Mayberry travels I either wasn’t born yet or got left behind with Pop’s Aunt Minna in Crestview, Ohio. Now that was a nice normal place, Crestview. In some ways Aunt Minna was a more pleasant version of Mrs. Hinkle and with a much nicer house. All sunshiny smiles, starched white curtains, milk and fresh doughnuts every afternoon after school, and roast chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy on Sunday—that was Aunt Minna.

      Inez didn’t exactly approve of Aunt Minna. “A narrow-minded old fuddy-duddy,” Inez called her, “who’ll hand the child creature comforts while lulling her mind to sleep and instilling all sorts of prejudices.”

      Aunt Minna was pretty straight I guess. Just a nice older lady who watched television a lot and went to church suppers and had never traveled farther than Columbus (Ohio—not Christopher). But sometimes I got homesick for her and for Crestview after Inez and Drew and Toby came back from that last trip (to a Greek island called Astypalaia where Pop was making a survey of life styles among the sponge fishermen) and we set up house in California.

      “So when will I ever see you again?” I said to Toby, leaning forward with both elbows on the table and my woebegone face between my palms. “I mean after we leave here, which is like two weeks from now.”

      Toby grinned that crooked little grin of his that makes you love him and hate him at the exact same moment. “Oh, don’t worry,” he said, getting up from the table and hitching up his Levi’s. “I’ll see ya around.” He gave me a sort of mock punch on the chin—for love, I guess.

      Just at that moment Mom exclaimed from the living room, “They’re here!”

      I got up and ran to the kitchen windows, which like all the windows in our house had no curtains or shades or blinds on them because Inez said windows were to SEE through. But all I saw out in the yard was a big, old open truck painted dirty yellow and filthy white that belonged to the Pine Ridge Township sanitation department.

      “Hey, what do you know,” I remarked to Toby who was already out of the room, “Pop’s giving up his junk after all.”

      But the two figures that jumped down from the cab of the truck weren’t garbage men at all. They were friends of Drew—beards, sandals, Levi’s, the usual bit. In no time at all, Pop was out there with them and they were all three heaving the disassembled junk into the back of the truck.

      Inez was standing at the living-room window, gazing out at the scene with complete rapture and murmuring over and over again, “Marvelous, marvelous, marvelous.”

      “He’s getting rid of it after all, huh?” I said, going over to watch alongside her.

      “Rid?” she said absently, “rid? Oh no, baby, no, that stuffs all going with us.” And she seemed so happy she crouched down and put her arm around my shoulders and hugged me.

      “With us?”

      “Uh huh.”

      “In that?”

      “Uh huh.”

      “In a garbage truck?”

      “Uh huh.”

      “We’re going to drive across the United States, to New York, in a garbage truck?”

      “Uh huh. Got it cheap as dirt from the township. They’re putting in a whole new fleet. With enclosed bodies and interior

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