The Neddiad Page 6

We pulled up outside the Hermione Hotel. "Look at that!" Aaron Finn said. "Six hours and twenty-seven minutes! And remember, we stopped for gas, and hamburgers, and there was that delay in Barstow when the burros were standing around in the road. I think we made excellent time!"

  The Hermione Hotel was a big white building, covered with stucco and eight stories tall. Stucco is this stuff that looks like oatmeal. Aaron Finn explained that the Hermione was the fancy place to live in the days of silent movies. Rudolph Valentino and a lot of other big movie stars used to live there. It wasn't a regular hotel where you check in for a night or two, or for a week's vacation. Instead of just rooms, it was all apartments, with kitchens—and people lived there for weeks, or months, or all the time. My family was cooking supper when we arrived.

  "Whoop!" my mother screamed when she saw Billy the Phantom Bellboy. "It's another one! Roger! Call the management! Tell them they have to move us again!"

  "The first apartment they put us in had ghosts," my sister, Eloise, explained. "So they moved us to this one."

  "This is Billy," I said. "He's with us."

  "He may not stay here!" my mother said. "Mr. Ghost ... Billy, you may not haunt this apartment!"

  "We're just delivering Neddie," Aaron Finn said. "Billy will be leaving with us."

  "This place is just full of ghosts," Billy said. "I can tell. Just chock full. It's the ghostiest place I ever saw, living or dead."

  Now my sister screamed. "Aaron Finn! I mean, Mr. Finn! Oh! It's such an honor to meet you! I..." and then my sister fainted. She actually fainted. She sank to the carpet. I looked at Seamus Finn.

  "Happens all the time," he said.

  "I never knew Eloise was such a movie fan," I said. Eloise was sort of writhing around on the carpet, moaning softly.

  "We're just about to sit down to dinner," my father said, stepping over Eloise and shaking hands with Aaron Finn. "Won't you join us?"

  "Well, the truth is, we filled up on fifteen-cent hamburgers a while ago," Aaron Finn said. "But we'll keep you company, if we may."

  "I'd like to have a sniff of what you're cooking," Billy the Phantom Bellboy said. "Is that meatloaf?" It was the right thing to say. My mother was proud of her meatloaf.

  "I'm sorry if I was rude just now," she said to Billy. "The ghost in the first apartment they gave us moaned and wailed so."

  "I hate that," Billy the Phantom Bellboy said. "Your mashed potatoes smell delicious."

  "I have a bottle of fig wine I bought at the Hollywood Ranch Market," my father said. "And cold root beer for the young men. Are you sure you wouldn't like some meatloaf?"

  While my family ate, I looked around at the apartment. Everything in it came from around 1927. It was all normal-looking, but a little bit different. The stove and refrigerator weren't like any I had seen, and the knives and forks and dishes were just a little different too. The furniture and lamps had a funny, unfamiliar look.

  Aaron and Seamus Finn and Billy the Phantom Bellboy told my family about our adventures, except for Sandor Eucalyptus, and jumping out of airplanes, and Melvin the shaman. They stuck to seeing the Grand Canyon and driving on Route 66. Of course, they couldn't leave out ghosts in the Monte Vista Hotel, because Billy was sitting right there. Billy told some stories about haunting people and said he was happy to be visiting Los Angeles.

  Aaron Finn asked if the parakeets were adjusting to their new home nicely. Eloise, who had gotten over her faint, said she thought they seemed to be. My mother told about our trip on the Super Chief, and wondered if Aaron Finn had ever met the Marsh Brothers.

  "Mr. Finn, I wonder if you could advise us about schools for the children," my father said.

  "Well, I understand the city high schools are excellent, and I am certain Miss Eloise will do very well," Aaron Finn said. Eloise blushed over her mashed potatoes.

  "But for Neddie here, I suggest you look into the Brown-Sparrow Military Academy, which my own son, Seamus, attends."

  "Seamus is a very polite boy," my mother said.

  "They teach us to be polite at Brown-Sparrow, Ma'am," Seamus said. "And also to take care of our clothes, and be neat and tidy."

  "Seamus plays the bassoon in the junior band," Aaron Finn said. "And last year he received a medal for English grammar."

  "I imagine the uniforms are very smart," my mother said.

  "They were created by one of the finest costume designers in Hollywood," Aaron Finn said.

  "Oh, Roger!" my mother said. "Wouldn't it be nice if Neddie was very polite, and had a smart uniform? Let's send him to Brown-Sparrow!" Seamus Finn and I looked at each other.

  "I think we should certainly look into it," my father said.

  CHAPTER 21

  Getting Settled

  Aaron Finn, Seamus, and Billy the Phantom Bellboy said goodbye. Seamus told me he hoped I would be coming to Brown-Sparrow. I was sorry to see my friends leave. We'd been through a lot together.

  I was shown my bedroom, which was actually a sort of sun porch, with big windows all around, stucco walls, a cement floor painted dark green, a bed, a wicker chair, and a wicker desk. Wicker is ... I don't know what wicker is—it looks like long noodles woven together. It's the sort of furniture they used to have on porches, especially back in the 1920s. It was an okay room, I thought.

  Then the floor began to shake, and the glasses and cups rattled in the kitchen cupboard.

  "It's an earthquake," Eloise said. "We've had two before this. We're used to them already."

  "Tomorrow we'll go around looking things over and continuing to get settled in," my father said. "And I think we should have lunch ... guess where?"

  "Eat in the hat?" I asked.

  "Eat in the hat," my father said.

  CHAPTER 22

  Looking Around

  "I demand you enroll me in an accredited high school this very morning," Eloise said.

  "Don't you want to go with us and look at Los Angeles?" my father said. "What's the difference if you start school a few days or a week or two later? Neddie is going to have a good time driving around in the keen yellow Cadillac I rented, eating in hats and seeing the sights. Don't you want to come too?"

  "I do not want to get behind in my work," Eloise said. "Besides, it is the law that you have to send your children to school. I do not want to go driving around with you people like the grapes of wrath. I want you to take me to Hollywood High School and sign me up at once."

  When Eloise makes up her mind, her mind is made up. There's little to be gained by trying to argue with her. So we finished our Grape-Nuts of wrath, and our first stop of the day was at Hollywood High, where Eloise was duly enrolled, and we left her there. Then we rolled off in the yellow Cadillac, which was not as grand as Aaron Finn's Packard, but it came close. This was my first look at Los Angeles, and there was plenty to look at.

  It's not possible to sum up a big city—especially a city that's a couple hundred years old and made up of all kinds of things, natural and man-made, and contains all kinds of people—in a few words. But if I had to sum up my first impression of Los Angeles in a few words, I would say it's a perfect combination of glamorous and crummy.

  First of all, it's got palm trees, which are strange-looking, and the more you look at them, the more you realize how strange-looking they are. Then there are the buildings—you see an ordinary house, then right next to it a very elaborate house, maybe with towers and turrets and balconies—right next to that is a place that sells tires, or shoes, or lawn furniture, completely square and normal-looking, but with a huge sign that rotates. Then you see nice mountains in the distance, or a beautiful garden—then a house that is shaped like a milk bottle—probably it was a store that sold dairy products when it was built, but now someone lives in it. A little way down the street will be an apartment house that looks like an Arabian palace. Then a sweet little cottage. Then a house shaped like a mushroom, with polka dots. And then a real, genuine, hundreds-of-thousands-of-years-old water hole, with a lifelike, but fake, st
atue of a real, but extinct, animal in the act of drowning in the middle of it. (That's the La Brea Tar Pits—I'll tell more about it later.) You get the idea—the rules of reality are always getting bent, or at least dented.

  My father had a theory about the houses. He said it was all because of stucco. This is how they build a house in Los Angeles. We saw some houses being built this way—first they build a frame out of wood, in the usual way. Then they staple heavy black roofing paper onto the frame. Next, they staple chicken wire on top of the roofing paper—that's to hold the stucco. Stucco is a kind of goo, sort of like cement. They glop it on the outside, and they glop it on the inside. It hardens up, and—bing!—the house is done!

  Now here's my father's theory. When you're building things that way, it won't be long before someone says, "Hey! I can make this thing any shape I want! Look, I can make the whole house look like a giant pickle!"

  Which is why you see things like the hot dog stand that looks like a hot dog on a bun, or a restaurant shaped like a hat, which was our destination as it got to be noon.

  CHAPTER 23

  Exploring

  The thing about eating in the hat, about eating in a restaurant shaped like a hat, is ... it's a restaurant. Shaped like a hat, of course. But once you get over that, it's just a restaurant. My cheeseburger was very good, and my mother and father had them too, and liked them—and some of the people eating there were probably movie stars, though we didn't recognize any of them. I have to say, it didn't measure up to the Lagarto Chamuscado, and I felt a little let down. Not so my father. He just loved it. He was happy as a clam. He was joyous. He was smiling from ear to ear the whole time. He was over the moon. He was tickled pink. He was eating in the hat.

  After lunch we did more touring. We parked the car and took a walk. We saw Hollywood and Vine, which is famous. Why it is famous I cannot say. It is an intersection. Hollywood Boulevard meets Vine Street. There's a traffic light. There's a drugstore. There are people walking around. Some of them are tourists—they are the ones taking pictures of Hollywood and Vine.

  We walked along Hollywood Boulevard, which was mildly interesting. There were stores, movie theaters, hotels, restaurants. Then we came to Grauman's Chinese Theatre. That was interesting. It was this big building looking like a Chinese palace or temple. It was very fancy. There was a sort of courtyard in front, where movie stars had pressed their hands, or feet, or hands and feet, in wet cement, and scratched their names. We walked around looking for the hand- and footprints of movie stars we liked. And we bought some popcorn at the little store to one side of the courtyard. The thing I liked about Grauman's Chinese Theatre was that with all the fancy you could buy a ticket at regular prices and go in and see a movie.

  We crossed Hollywood Boulevard and walked back along the other side. We found the Hitching Post, the movie theater Seamus Finn had told me about. It looked good—it had wagon wheels outside. I thought maybe I would go over to Brown-Sparrow Military Academy before long and see Seamus. Maybe I could meet him at the Hitching Post on Saturday morning.

  Then we came upon the greatest store in the world. We went in and looked around. This store was brilliant. It was a big store, and in the back it had magic tricks—not just little ones, but big professional ones involving mummy cases, and Chinese cabinets, and all kinds of shiny equipment with gold paint and lots of colors. This reminded me of Seamus Finn again, who was a member of a magicians' club. I thought he must know about this store—probably bought tricks here. I knew a couple of simple card tricks, but I was no magician. Looking at all the neat equipment, I thought maybe I might learn a little more.

  The middle part of the store was all model airplane kits! Here was something I knew about. I am pretty good at building models. They had some pretty fancy big models hanging on strings from the ceiling. And besides model airplanes, they had model ships and trains. There was a model of a clipper ship, the Flying Cloud, all built and finished, with complicated rigging made out of thread. And they sold the kit to build it. $9.95. It looked like it would take a year. Pretty nice ship, though.

  In the front part of the store, in glass cases, they sold a variety of things anybody would want— harmonicas, switchblade knives in all sizes, and big chrome-plated rings with Indian heads and skulls with rubies for eyes, all with lots of sharp corners, so if anyone got slugged by someone wearing one, it would hurt. As I said, the greatest store in the world.

  Oh, they also sold jokes. My father loves jokes. He bought a flower you wear in your buttonhole, with a thin tube that connects to a rubber bulb full of water you keep in your pocket. You invite someone to smell your flower, and when he bends close to smell it, you squeeze the bulb and the flower squirts him. A good idea, but the flower was completely fake-looking, a red rose made of plastic. Anybody would see what was coming. I pretended I was a regular citizen and sniffed the flower, and let my father squirt me. He thought it was great. I was pretty sure I was the only one he would catch with that thing. He asked me if I saw anything I wanted. I told him I needed to come back and think about that. There were too many choices—and I needed to decide if I was going to be a magician, the builder of the biggest ship model ever, or a knife-carrying, harmonica-playing practical joker.

  CHAPTER 24

  Real Exploring

  We wandered around some more and then took to the Cadillac again, drove up and down streets aimlessly, and then came upon the La Brea Tar Pits. I knew right away that it was the greatest thing in Los Angeles.

  My parents didn't get it. They didn't see what I saw. This is what they saw: some ponds—little ponds, puddles, practically—with wire fences around them, three or four not-real-good statues of big weird-looking extinct animals, grass, some little signs telling what happened here 400,000 years ago, a cement building that looked like a garage, no people. If you looked at the surface of the ponds, you'd see bubbles coming up slowly, and if you walked on the grass, you might get tar on your shoes where the stuff was bubbling up. My mother got tar on her shoes and wanted to leave. My father said the statue of the drowning mammoth was okay, but he wouldn't mind leaving.

  "Please, I want to stay here. I want to read the signs," I said.

  "We'll go across the street and explore that big drugstore," my father said. "Don't fall in a tar pit."

  It isn't tar. Everyone calls it tar, but it's really natural asphalt. The Indians used it to waterproof their canoes, and the Spanish settlers used it to seal their roofs. "La Brea" in Spanish means "the tar," so "The La Brea Tar Pits" means "the the tar tar pits."

  What happened was, volcanic pressure forced petroleum up through cracks in the earth, and sand—the petroleum sort of rotted, and that's how it turned into black, sticky, gooey asphalt. These water holes formed, with water on top and asphalt on the bottom. In the winter, the asphalt was hard and everything was normal, but in the summer it warmed up and got soft and gooey.

  Animals came and drank from the water holes. Now, picture this—a mastodon comes to drink. There's a bunch of wolves lurking in the underbrush. They come after the mastodon. Ordinarily, he'd try to break for open country, but there are wolves coming from all directions, so he runs out into the middle of the water hole. The wolves pile in after him. He's fighting and struggling, and the wolves are splashing around, trying to get hold of him. And then they realize they're all stuck in the goo, and sinking. They die. The asphalt slowly dissolves all their soft parts and preserves their bones, which float around, slowly, for 100,000 years. Some of them bubble up to the top, and around the year 1915 scientists discover them and start dragging them out. They get thousands and thousands of skeletons of extinct animals.

  No dinosaurs, because all this started in the Pleistocene epoch, after the dinosaurs were gone. But plenty of other stuff.

  The animal they found most of was the dire wolf, which was as big as the biggest modern wolf, and stronger, with serious teeth. The paleontologists pulled thousands of dire wolves out of the tar pits, which suggests to me that eithe
r there were lots and lots of them or they weren't too bright.

  American lions, larger than the modern African kind, may have been smarter—not so many of them turned up as fossils. But the saber-tooth cat, or saber-toothed tiger, was another animal that couldn't remember not to jump into the water holes. Second greatest number of these found. Extinct, of course.

  Other animals they found included mammoths, giant sloths, giant bears, camels (not very many—must have been smart), ancient bison, a kind of primitive horse, birds, reptiles, and turtles, it said on the sign.

  It was very exciting to think that these water holes were just the same when ice age animals lived and died in the very place where I stood. Under my feet there were mammoths and mastodons, bears bigger than a grizzly, huge sloths, lions and wolves. It was as though they had just now been alive. The bubbles that rose from the tar might contain the last breath of some creature not seen on earth for 100,000 years. There had been humans here too. One of the signs told about La Brea Woman, the only human found in the tar pits. She lived 9,000 years ago, and is the oldest female human ever found. She was one of the ancestors of the Indian people who lived here later. La Brea Woman didn't fall into the tar pits by accident. She was murdered. Someone had knocked her on the head.

  I felt in my pocket for my stone turtle. It felt warm. I was getting a feeling something like the way I felt that time in the Indian Building, only this feeling was wilder, and a little scary.

  CHAPTER 25

  Letters

  "Look, we got you a book about the La Brea Tar Pits at the drugstore," my father said.

  Great! Just what I wanted. I knew I was going to come back to this place lots of times. I wanted to know all about it. I didn't pay much attention to where we drove next. I was in the back seat of the Cadillac, reading about the Pleistocene. My mother annoyed me by insisting that the fossils in the tar pits were there as a result of the flood in the Bible. My father said that there was a joke going around during the ice age that Los Angeles was the tar pit of the nation.