Hippomobile! Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Welcome to Nowhere

  Leatherbread and Goozlum

  Things Worth Knowing

  How Mr. Wolfeschlegelsteinhausen Became Grandpa Bert

  Rare and Exquisite

  Once Upon a Time

  “Let Me Call You Sweetheart”

  Empty as a Cookie Jar

  That Old Wymore Smell

  Looking for Something to Look At

  Confounded Onions

  A Dingsbums

  How to Yank a Doorknob

  Lady Metal

  The Cat’s Meow

  Now We’re Thinkin’!

  The Scribbles on the Wall

  Train Day

  Miles

  Sweet Voice

  Operation Beautification

  Our Palace

  A Light Flickers

  What a Difference a Day Makes

  Blue-Plate Special

  Say lah vee!

  Home of the Hippomobile

  About the Author

  Footnotes

  Clarion Books

  215 Park Avenue South

  New York, New York 10003

  Copyright © 2013 by Jeff Tapia

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  Clarion Books is an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  Map art by Andrew Glass

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Tapia, Jeff.

  Hippomobile! / by Jeff Tapia.

  pages cm

  Summary: Ten-year-old twins Jimmy and Stella start a campaign to save their dying small town by restoring the amazing hippomobile, an old-fashioned vehicle made out of a horse wagon.

  ISBN 978-0-547-99548-9 (hardcover)

  [1. City and town life—Fiction. 2. Vehicles—History—Fiction. 3. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 4. Twins—Fiction. 5. Old age—Fiction. 6. Humorous stories.] I. Title.

  PZ7.T16365Hi 2013

  [Fic]—dc23 2012041303

  eISBN 978-0-547-99550-2

  v1.1013

  For Agnes and Eva

  YOU AIN’T GONNA BELIEVE this, but it’s true. We’re the last two kids in town. In fact, we’re the only two kids in town. And what’s more, since we’re twins, it’s almost like there ain’t even two of us, even though there is. One of us is Jimmy and the other one is Stella, and we don’t look too much alike, like some twins do.1

  We live in the town of Wymore, and Wymore is so small you might as well not even try to find it on a map. The official population is only fifty-one, and that number drops down to forty-nine in the summertime when Pops is on the road and Mom is working what she calls the graveyard shift far off in another county, and we’re left here to live with our remaining forty-seven grandmas and grandpas.2

  Now, a long time back, Wymore had lots more people in it and a real train station where ladies in funny hats and gentlemen with long curly mustaches got off. There was also real stores where you could buy stuff, and even a shoe factory we’re gonna tell you about real soon. For now, we’ll just tell you that people used to travel right far to buy Gottfried Schuh’s Everlasting Shoes. And on account of how far they had to go to get here, some of them folks would stay overnight at the one hotel in town. Back then it was glamorous and shiny as spit and called the Stanley Hotel, until over time the S, the T, the L, and the E on the sign rusted and fell off. Then it became the Any Hotel.3 That’s where everybody in Wymore lives now, and seeing that there ain’t but twenty-five rooms, we’ve all got to squeeze together some and double up and just plain make do.

  Last summer we lived in Room #9 because we were nine years old back then. Meanwhile we’ve moved across the hall to Room #10, and you can probably guess how come. The mattresses are worse there, and the pillows are harder, and the floor squeaks more, and there’s no picture in the picture frame up between our two beds, but the screen in the window don’t let in no bugs, and now we can overlook the whole town square. Not that much ever happens down there, but if it does, we ain’t gonna miss it.

  The hotel has three floors, and we’re on the middle floor. And when it’s not too hot and muggy at night, we sometimes climb up on the roof and pitch a tent. The roof’s so flat that there ain’t no chance of us rolling off it in our sleep. But for the longest time, Mom used to get the all-overs4 about it because of how she was so scared of heights.5 And so we just didn’t bother to tell her when we went up there.

  Except for the hotel, there ain’t really anyplace left to go to in Wymore outside of Mabel’s Café. All the other places that used to be in Wymore are all closed down now. Like there used to be an appliance store and a flower shop and a bank, but they’re gone. And there used to be an auto parts store and a hardware store and a beauty salon, but they’re gone. And there used to be a furniture store and a drugstore and a haberdashery,6 but they’re gone. And there used to be a barbershop, but that’s gone too, although Grandpa Homer and Grandpa Virgil still have their barbershop duet.

  Sometimes we go and play in them old stores, though, especially in summer when days go by slower than a snail riding a turtle. The old furniture store is good for playing tag in on account of all the old busted tables and chairs you can jump over, and there’s a rusty stove at the appliance store that we can bake a dust-and-pebble pie in if we feel like. Sometimes we go to the old drugstore and cough and sneeze and take our temperature with a twig under our armpit and swallow medicine we make ourselves by rolling up little balls of yellow newspaper.7

  Robbing the old bank is another way to pass the time around here, but our play money is running low and there ain’t many grandmas and grandpas left who can stick ’em up, on account of how their arms just don’t move easy anymore. Sometimes we go to the haberdashery and dress up in old, too big, ugly clothes if Grandpa Bert lets us. And sometimes we just think about how nice it’d be to go swimming, but Wymore ain’t got a swimming pool. There ain’t even a swimming hole somewhere. The town is all dirt and dust and wind and no water.

  That leaves Mabel’s. The café is named after Grandma Mabel, and there ain’t no one around who can swing a wood spoon like her. And alls you gotta do is taste her checkerboards8 or her Bossy in a bowl9 or a slice of her Eve with a lid on,10 and you’ll be a customer for life, if not longer.

  Now, you might’ve noticed we ain’t said nothing about there being a school in Wymore. Well, you would’ve noticed right, because there ain’t one. There is an old school building one block off the town square, right next to the old oak tree everybody around here refers to as Old Tom Wood, but there just ain’t enough kids around here to fill up a school, and so it long since closed its doors. Think about it. How would you like having just two kids in your class and one of them being your sister and the other one being your brother?

  But that doesn’t mean we get to not go to school. We go five long days a week, nine long months a year, just like you do. In fact, this summer we even got homework. And pretty soon Mr. Buzzard will be coming through town every morning bright and early in his yellow pickup11 to collect us in front of Mabel’s. We sit out back in a wore-out tire with our bait cans12 in our laps, and he drives us over nine miles of back roads that give our bones a good rattling. School’s up in a place called McFall. That’s the big city around here, with the one traffic light and a general store.

  But we still got some time left to laze about up in Old Tom Wood and ruminate over all that happened this summer
. We know our teacher is gonna be asking us what we did, and we wanna be good and ready when she does. Because a summer like ours don’t happen but once in a blue moon, especially them six days that changed the course of our lives and the lives of everyone else here in Wymore on account of something called a hippomobile. And here’s the story the two of us wanna tell.

  IT ALL STARTED AT Mabel’s one morning earlier this summer. We can’t remember if it was a Monday or a Tuesday or a Friday, but it don’t make much difference anyhow because the days are all the same around here.

  We do know for sure it was morning, though, because we were sitting right across from each other in our favorite window booth1 over steaming plates of leatherbread and goozlum and crispy overland trout. And if you’re wondering what kinda food that is, alls it is, is pancakes, maple syrup, and bacon. But it tastes way better when you call it leatherbread and goozlum and overland trout, and if you ask us, you should take to calling it that yourselves.

  Anyway, we were busy filling our shirts, and Grandma Ida, the waitress at Mabel’s, came up to us and said, “You two sure do know how to play a mean knife and fork.” Which was her way of saying how hungry we ate. Then she asked us if we’d like another black cow.2

  “Yes, please, Grandma Ida,” we said.

  “Well, then, make use of them bibs3 of yours, and I’ll go milk Bessie.”

  So we wiped off our brown mustaches and then cleaned our plates until they shined so much they made you squint.

  Grandma Ida came back with a tray balanced high up over her head. She was one heckuva soup jockey4 all right, and everybody in Wymore appreciated her, us and Mom and Pops probably most of all. Because without Grandma Ida promising to keep a fine eye on us, Mom never could’ve taken that summer job she needed in order for us to make ends meet.5

  Last summer was the first summer she went away. The morning Mr. Buzzard came to drive her off, her faucets leaked something awful,6 and we almost had to roll up the bottoms of our pants. But we all got used to it over time, and Mom eventually stopped calling every hour to see how we was doing and whether we’d skinned a knee or got bit by a bug. So the day she left this summer wasn’t half as big a deal, but of course we’re ten now.

  Anyhow, Grandma Ida came back and served us our tall drinks and said, “We’re sure lucky with that ol’ gal. Ain’t many cows left will give you chocolate milk these days.”

  Grandma Ida always made that same joke, and we always smiled and said, “Thank you, Grandma Ida.” Because Pops says there ain’t nothing like a good pair of manners.

  “So what kinda trouble you two planning on getting into today?” Grandma Ida asked, and gave us a wink.

  And, in fact, we’d just been discussing that very same topic. We were figuring on climbing Old Tom Wood and then maybe seeing if Grandma Winnie would take us for a spin in her golf cart. All our grandmas and grandpas used golf carts to get around town, since there wasn’t no one left in Wymore to fix their cars once they broke down. And that’s how come there was so many clunkers rusting away on the square, their tires flat, their windows busted, and their fenders dropped clean off.

  “We ain’t sure, Grandma Ida. You got any ideas for us?” we asked.

  “Well, lemme think,” she said. And she rested her dishrag over her shoulder and looked up at the cracks in the ceiling and them two brown splotches that looked like a tricycle and a boat.7 Then she snapped her fingers and said, “I got it! Why don’t you do your homework?”

  And we said, “Aww, Grandma Ida!” And now you know we weren’t kidding about her keeping a fine eye on us.

  “I ain’t the one who assigned it to you,” she said. “And, besides, we’ve all had to go through it.”

  That was true enough. It was school tradition going all the way back to when our grandmas and grandpas were our age that kids starting the fifth grade had to memorize all the presidents over the summer. And not just the names, but they had to be in the right order, too. It was the perfect way to ruin your vacation worse than a dropped egg.

  “Can’t we do something else?” we asked. “We already learned the first two by heart.”

  “Who are they, then?” Grandma Ida set a hand on her hip like she could tell we were putting on the bluff.

  “George Washington and Tom Adams,” we said.

  Grandma Ida looked at the ceiling again and sighed something awful. “John Adams.”

  “Stella, I told you it wasn’t Tom!”

  “Maybe you did, Jimmy James. But you didn’t say it was John, neither.”

  We were on the verge of getting into it, but Grandma Ida pulled the fuse clean out of us when she said, “You know what, summer ain’t that far along just yet. Why don’t you go on over to the library instead and get yourselves a book and climb up Old Tom Wood and read for a while.”

  At last we found something we could all agree on.

  NOW, WE AIN’T SAID nothing about Wymore having a library. And it’s true, there ain’t one, at least not a real one. Alls there is, is a pile of books all jumbled up in some milk crates a few booths down, right there at Mabel’s. So when Grandma Ida suggested us to go to the library, alls we had to do was hop on down and slide into what we call the library booth.

  A long time ago, things were different. We’ve been told Wymore used to have an honest-to-goodness library with one whole room full of books and a magazine rack full of magazines telling you how to keep your house clean and other rotten news. You even got your own library card, and there was a real live librarian, our Grandma Henrietta, who kept telling you to hold your potato. That was her way of saying to hush it no matter how hushed you already was.

  But what happened was the library started falling apart, just like lots of places here in Wymore. The front door came off its hinges, and then the windows stopped opening because the building went crooked, and after that red bricks began popping out of the walls like buttons off a shirt. Then the ceiling began sagging like an old mattress, and whoever was in the library at the time grabbed their canes and ran out as fast as their bones could carry them.

  Most of the books got lost in the rubble when the library caved in for good. But the few that remained got hauled off in milk crates and taken over to Mabel’s. And them were the ones we were picking through now.

  The problem was, by that time we’d darn near read the whole lot of them. Plus there were some books we didn’t want to read at all. Because take our word for it, you could find some peculiar-sounding books in them milk crates. Like one is called Lectures on the True, the Beautiful, and the Good, and that has to be just about the very last thing any kid is ever gonna wanna read about. But lucky for us there’s some good ones in them crates too. One of our favorites is The Rover Twins and the Gigantic Waterfall, and that’s because it’s so dang hot and dry in Wymore that not even the water fountain outside Mabel’s works no more.1 We’ll read our favorite books over and over, either sitting up in Old Tom Wood’s comfy branches or laying on our beds back at the hotel when the day’s too dusty and you can’t hardly see nothing at all outdoors, let alone read.

  So we were excited as a cat-and-mouse show when our hands grabbed hold of a book we swore we ain’t ever seen before. It was called The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing and was about as thick as one of Grandma Mabel’s triple-decker mousetraps2 and chock-full of all kinds of stuff you never knew you could ever know. So we couldn’t get out the door quick enough.

  Grandma Ida saw us and yelled, “Be back in time for lunch!”

  She didn’t have to tell us that. Because we knew she was serving zeppelins in a cloud, which in Wymore is sausages and mashed potatoes, and we wouldn’t miss them for nothing in the world.

  BY NOW YOU’RE PROBABLY wondering how come we keep calling everybody Grandpa This and Grandma That and how anybody could ever have forty-seven grandparents. So we better be up-front with you now before we get to the exciting part where we tell you what we found in The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing.

  They ain�
�t really our real grandparents.1 We just call them Grandpa This and Grandma That because they’re all old and have either gray hair or no hair at all. And since we’re the only two kids in Wymore, and Mom and Pops ain’t even in Wymore during the summer, every person we come across is either gonna be a grandma or a grandpa.

  But here’s how we began calling them as such. It all started quite some time ago with Grandpa Bert and his last name, Wolfeschlegelsteinhausen, which ached our tongues every time we tried to say it. One hot and dusty day, we were outside of what used to be the post office2 playing mailman, where one of us was the mailman and the other one of us was the barking dog. That was when Grandpa Bert cruised up in his golf cart quiet as a one-handed clap.

  Grandpa Bert is the one who used to own the haberdashery. His clothes were a bit old-fashioned, and we liked the deep pockets they had because they often contained a treat or two for us. Grandpa Bert got off his golf cart and pulled out a couple of jawbreakers. We said, or at least tried to say, “Thanks, Mr. Wolfeschlegelsteinhausen.” At that time he wasn’t Grandpa Bert yet, although we’re getting to that part right now.

  His name must’ve come out in all the wrong order because he smiled and said, “You know what?”

  And we said, “What, Mr. um . . . ?”

  And he said, “Why don’t you just call me Grandpa from now on. It’ll be easier on all of us.”

  We liked that idea a lot, and we waved and called out, “Bye, Grandpa!” and jammed our jawbreakers in between our cheeks and gums as he slowly vanished in a cloud of dust. And that was that. At least we thought that was that.

  What happened next was that the other old folks in town heard about how Bert Wolfeschlegelsteinhausen was now going by Grandpa, and for some reason that really rode their britches.3 It seems that they all wanted a piece of the grandma-and-grandpa pie. And soon, one by one, when they thought no one else was looking, they started coming up to us and pinching our cheeks and bending down toward us as best they could and saying, “Why don’tcha just call me Grandma from now on?” Or, “Wouldn’t it be funner to just call me Grandpa instead of Mr. Snuggerud?”4 And so on and so on.