My One Hundred Adventures by Polly Horvath Page B

to kill. We stop now and then on our trek across town, sometimes on curbs to watch children who own toys and bikes and things playing sensible games. We stop in at the school playground until I see that it is dangerous. I can’t keep the four of them from breaking their necks all at once. Darvon runs up the slide. Dee Dee hangs on the teeter-totter and gets a splinter. I tell her we will show it to her mother later because I have nothing to remove it with. This makes her scream and cry. It is time to get walking again.
    And then finally we are on the other side of town, right at the edge, and here the town stops as if someone has drawn it along a line, and beyond is just blank paper. I wonder what it will be like to leave the sidewalk and go into the blankness. As we continue on, I imagine we are going into the twilight zone. Then I think, I am walking endlessly with four children and a baby, I
am
in the twilight zone. We head toward a small copse of trees and a road winding into meadows.
    â€œWhere’s the gold?” asks Darvon. I have forgotten all about that.
    That’s when I spy the trailer on the other side of the copse of trees. It is a different style from the Gourds’ or Madame Crenshaw’s garish purple one. This one is silver and bullet shaped. There is a card table set up on the grass next to it with chairs around it. The trailer has flower boxes in the windows so I know it is permanent. I begin to see that on the outskirts of our town there live a whole subset of people, all in trailers. As if these people have chosen to put themselves apart from the community. Not belonging but not wholly adrift either, the way barnacles can attach to sea turtles, not turtle but living nonetheless, organically connected. I suppose Ginny’s mother may see my mother that way but we are not trailer people. I don’t know what makes us different. It is more as if my mother is a light that the town would attach to if it could. But you cannot attach to light, it is amorphous, you can only be in it.
    â€œWhere’s the gold?” asks Darvon again.
    â€œThere,” I say, thoughtlessly because I am ruminating about these things, and I point at the silver trailer and then am immediately sorry because all four Ds run madly for it even though I don’t think any of them really cares about a pot of gold. I sigh. I will have to round them up before they trespass on the owner. However, I now know that all I need to do to get them out from underfoot is to point randomly in some direction and say “There.” I consider passing on this helpful tip to Mrs. Gourd but decide she’s too much of a stinker.
    The door to the trailer opens and all four Ds are struck dumb, which is a startling event in itself. Then I see why. Santa Claus has emerged. But it is not Santa, it is a short, fat man with lots of fluffy white hair and a long white beard, wearing a red T-shirt. He opens his mouth but there are no ho ho ho’s. You’d think someone who looked like that would feel oddly compelled. Instead he says, “That’s an awful lot of kids to babysit.”
    I don’t know how he knows I am babysitting and am not a Gourd myself and then in horror realize that maybe he thinks I am the Gourds’ older sibling babysitter, and I am about to set the record straight when Willie Mae begins to cry for the first time all day. I reach into the diaper bag for the bottle. The children scramble around the card table, which has a bowl of raspberries on it. They don’t even ask but just dig in. The man turns and goes into the trailer while I put a bottle in Willie Mae’s mouth.
    â€œDon’t eat those raspberries, they aren’t yours,” I hiss at the children, who ignore me.
    The man comes back out with a big box of toys, which he puts down by the trailer steps. Darvon spies it first and the four of them descend on it with whoops of joy. I don’t even bother telling them that