The Slippery Map Read online

  More and more, Oyster wanted to go out there into the world, just for a quick exploration. But Sister Mary Many Pockets always reminded him of the dangers: thieves, slashers, looters, rioters, fire-eaters, evildoers, carjackers (Mrs. Fishback had taught her this term), gunslingers. The nuns had always been afraid of the outside world. For as long as he could remember, every Tuesday morning Sister Alice Self-Defense had been teaching all of the other nuns how to protect themselves in case of attack. Oyster didn’t want to be thieved or slashed or looted or rioted against; and more than that, he didn’t want to leave because Sister Mary Many Pockets would worry and fret and be swallowed up in sorrow (this is what she’d written to Oyster on her little slips of paper).

  On this eventful day, Oyster was looking out the window when he heard a commotion downstairs: excessive screeching and much bustling. He heard more screeching and bustling down the hall of bedrooms. And there was even more screeching and bustling overhead. Screeching and bustling usually were bad news for Oyster.

  This time, Sister Margaret of the Long Sighs and Withering Glare had twisted her ankle on one of his worm holes and had dragged herself into the parlor, gathering a nervous crowd along the way. At the same time, Sister Elizabeth Thick Glasses was suffering an attack of blurred vision, because Oyster had once again borrowed her eyedropper and she blindly staggered into her own locked door.

  Oyster had left his moth collection in the attic by accident, and Sister Clare of the Mighty Flyswatter, on annual attic reorganization duty, had knocked over its lid. She pulled out her mighty flyswatter and waved it madly at the cloud of moths that rose, but her specialty was flies and so the moths now roamed the nunnery in a cloud.

  There were so many uprisings that even the bird sitting in its nest on Oyster’s desk was rattled and launched itself into the air. Oyster was overjoyed and opened his bedroom door to let it out.

  Unfortunately, at exactly that moment, Mother Superior (who’d just dipped her fingers into the holy water and had been jolted by the sight of a small leaping frog—Oyster’s tadpole had finally matured!) was marching to find Oyster and was charged by the bird instead. Oyster watched the flapping bird and the flapping nun, and knew that he was doomed. He ran down a set of back stairs that led to the kitchen.

  The kitchen was empty except for Leatherbelly, who’d flopped on one side on the tile floor, his belly ballooning up. Oyster was a little afraid of Leatherbelly. Mrs. Fishback had taught Leatherbelly to growl at Oyster, from a smack on the nose and the command “Growl!” Leatherbelly would do his best. He’d growl, pant to catch his breath, and growl some more. Right now he just stared at Oyster with his big eyes, too lazy to growl without Mrs. Fishback around to smack his nose.

  Oyster could hear a herd of footsteps: nuns. How many of them? Well, I don’t know if you’ve ever listened to a herd of nuns before, but because of the rubber texture of the soles of their shoes, it’s impossible to guess how many might be coming at you at any one time. Even Oyster, who had much experience with nuns and the sound of their shoes, was at a loss.

  Shoving his shoulders to his ears, he quickly slipped into the broom closet. It was a very narrow broom closet, and broom closets are usually narrow. His head was surrounded by broom handles. The vacuum cleaner’s rectangular nose blocked his feet, its one lung packed tight with dirt. The little pistols of blue cleanser bottles pointed at him. The broom closet’s door, bloated from the heat, didn’t shut all the way. Through the crack, Oyster watched the kitchen fill with nuns. Sister Mary Many Pockets wasn’t among them. Whenever things looked bad for Oyster, he relied on Sister Mary Many Pockets to remind the nuns of how much they loved him. The first morning after Sister Mary Many Pockets had found Oyster, she’d brought him to the dining hall as if nothing was unusual. She fed him porridge. There he was, pinned to her chest like a hungry broach. And the nuns jockeyed for seats across from him, so that they could smile and gaze.

  Now the nuns formed a fuming circle around Mother Superior—her wimple and veil askew from all of her flapping. (Had the bird found its way out? Oyster wondered.)

  Mrs. Fishback stood next to her. She had meaty calves and a pomp of bleached hair. Leatherbelly waddled up. His belly was so big that it dragged on the ground. (The dragging of his belly had caused it to callous, which is how he’d come by his name.) Oyster could see Leatherbelly’s short tail. His purplish tongue was busy licking his own shiny black nose on his thin face. He seemed to be looking at the broom closet. Would he rat out Oyster? He could. Oyster knew. He could if he wanted to.

  The nuns were waiting for some kind of explanation. Oyster could hear the clicking of Sister Helen Quick Fingers’s knitting needles. Mother Superior was rattled. She raised her hands to get their attention, then scribbled on a piece of paper and handed that paper to Mrs. Fishback, who read it aloud:

  “Oyster is at it again, I know. But let’s be calm, sisters. Let’s remain steady. He’s just a boy, you know.” Mrs. Fishback stopped reading. She eyed the nuns and then turned to them and said, “If you ask me, a nunnery should be quiet. Imagine it here without the bother of that awful child! Imagine peace. You could have peace and live right, if you ask me. Aren’t you tired of that terrible boy? He shouldn’t be here! He should be sent off! It would be for his own good! It would be for your own good! Don’t you deserve that?” She looked the nuns up and down.

  Oyster could hear some of them harumphing in agreement. (The nuns couldn’t talk, but they could cough, sneeze, screech, and harumph—though they used their harumph judiciously.) Other nuns, though, were shaking their heads no, no, no. He could see Sister Alice Self-Defense with her arms folded across her chest. Sister Elizabeth Thick Glasses, her eyes magnified not only by her glasses but also by deep worry. What did Sister Bertha Nervous Lips think? What about Sister Augusta of the Elaborate Belches and Sister Patricia Tough-Pork? And Sister Theresa Raised on a Farm? And Sister Elouise of the Occasional Cigarette? Couldn’t he count on her? He heard Sister Margaret of the Long Sighs and Withering Glare sigh loudly and the continued anxious clicking of Sister Helen Quick Fingers, lost in a knitting frenzy.

  One of the head shakers, Sister Hilda Prone to Asthma, jotted down a note and handed it to Mrs. Fishback.

  Mrs. Fishback read it: “It would break Sister Mary’s heart if we all decided to send Oyster away!”

  Mrs. Fishback glared at Sister Hilda Prone to Asthma. She’d been beaten by kindness. Her face pruned, as if she’d swallowed castor oil and was waiting for it to take effect. Leatherbelly padded toward the closet, his nails clicking on the tile. He nudged the closet door with his squat nose.

  Luckily, the mini-TV had Mrs. Fishback’s attention. “Look!” she said. “The boy who disappeared!” She rushed to turn up the volume. Oyster squinted through the crack at the screen.

  Alvin Peterly was a chubby boy with a big smile, his name written on the screen under his wobbly chin. He was saying, “There was a ride through the air, swinging around. Then I was in a small room with little, weird-looking people, asking me questions. There were tubs of chocolates! And they didn’t want me to eat the chocolates, but I refused to answer any questions without the chocolates!”

  The interviewer shook his head sadly, as if poor Alvin Peterly had lost his poor mind during his Mysterious Temporary Disappearance. “There you have it,” he said wearily. “Reporting live from Arbutus.”

  Leatherbelly whined at the door and scratched it twice. Mrs. Fishback snatched him up, petting him fiercely. “If only Oyster R. Motel would disappear! Imagine! It would be beyond our control. Nobody’s fault. Poof! All of our troubles would be gone!”

  There was a silent heated moment. Were they all contemplating it? Oyster gone? They all seemed poised on this one moment. Oyster wanted to speak up for himself: Remember you once loved me? Remember? Oyster had been a miracle, really. He was born from a Dorsey’s Pickled Foods box, already wrapped in a Royal Motel towel, born right at the nunnery’s gate, a miracle just for the nuns. A miracle!

>   But it was clear that the nuns were no longer swayed by the miracle of Oyster R. Motel. They weren’t remembering how much they’d once loved him. It was clear that they were imagining peace. A world without the bother of awful Oyster up to no good. And from the depth of the silence, Oyster could only imagine that they were deciding that they liked the idea. And it made him feel so sad that he felt sick.

  Just then Sister Mary Many Pockets flew into the room. She was nervously cracking peanut shells, leaving a small trail of them in her wake. She looked under the table and raised her hands in flustered panic. Oyster knew that she was looking for him. He wished she wouldn’t! He was trying to be invisible, especially right now when the dust in the broom closet was getting to his nose. He had to sneeze. And, worse, Leatherbelly had wrenched his head out of Mrs. Fishback’s arms, and he was growling in the direction of the broom closet.

  “What do you want?” asked Mrs. Fishback.

  Sister Mary Money Pockets put out her hand, indicating Oyster’s height, indicating Oyster himself.

  Mother Superior shrugged. The other nuns glanced around the room guiltily. And Leatherbelly let out a knowing bark, but no one paid him any attention.

  “Maybe he’s disappeared!” said Mrs. Fishback, an insincere panic in her voice.

  Mother Superior pointed at the television. And there the broadcaster was, recapping the Awful MTDs.

  Sister Mary Many Pockets’s eyes grew wide. She popped some peanuts and shook her head.

  And Oyster was thinking, Maybe it would be a good thing to disappear. Alvin Peterly and the girl lost in the Hula Hoop and the kids who went missing in the tire swing—well, maybe they were lucky. Maybe they didn’t want to be where they were because maybe they weren’t wanted. Oyster thought, If I disappeared, I’d want to stay gone. And the nuns would regret that they ever wanted me to disappear.

  He suddenly felt a thick sadness in his throat. He turned away from the cracked door and the broom handles and the vacuum crowding in, the detergent pistols all aimed at his face.

  He leaned against the back of the broom closet. And then the wall gave.

  It opened to breezy, cool dark air, and Oyster had to lurch forward to keep from falling. One of the brooms that had been propped against the wall, the only broom with a green handle, immediately fell out into open air, endlessly spiraling.

  Oyster felt hard metal hit the backs of his legs. It disappeared and struck again, but this time he grabbed the curved edge of something made of polished metal. He started to slip again. He pushed the metal object away, but soon it was back, banging the backs of his knees, causing them to buckle. The curved metal edge now seemed more like the mouth of a large bucket. He felt like he was falling into the bucket, like it was trying to scoop him up against his will. He tilted back farther into the now seemingly endless broom closet toward the gusty air. He tried clawing his way back. His feet kicked out from beneath him as the bucket kept riding up. Finally he threw himself forward and kicked open the closet door. Brooms fell to the floor in a clatter, and while the rest of him was still being pulled into the gusty darkness, Oyster grabbed on to one broom, locked lengthwise across the broom closet’s door frame.

  All of the nuns turned to the closet and gawked at him. Leatherbelly looked up with his popping eyes. Cold, breezy air billowed into the kitchen. Oyster held on to the broom tightly. It was the only thing keeping him from being carried off by what he could now see by glancing over his shoulder was, in fact, a large silver bucket with fancy molding.

  Mrs. Fishback squeezed Leatherbelly to her chest, hugging him so tightly his eyes bulged even more than normal. “It’s that rotten boy!”

  Mother Superior gasped, her veil lifting in the chilly wind.

  Oyster stared at Sister Mary Many Pockets. “It’s going to take me!” he shouted, the windy dark whipping around his head, the bucket trying to scoop him up.

  Sister Mary Many Pockets ran to him. She grabbed the broom with one hand. With the other hand, she pulled a long bundle of rope from one of her many pockets.

  Sister Hilda Prone to Asthma grabbed the rope and tied it around Oyster’s waist. The other nuns picked up the rope and started pulling—a tug-of-war with the wind and the grasping bucket—Mother Superior as the anchor. They heaved all of their weight backward, squatting, the way they did when they had to ring the big bell in the belfry.

  The wind was strong, but the nuns were stronger. Oyster was inching forward, away from the blackness at the back of the broom closet. Sister Mary Many Pockets held tight, and soon Oyster couldn’t feel the bucket at all. Suddenly the back of the broom closet was there. His feet knocked against it, the gusty air stopped, and Oyster came tumbling out, landing in a heap of nuns, banging his tooth against the tile floor.

  Mrs. Fishback let out a huffy breath and glared at Sister Mary Many Pockets and Oyster. “Well, aren’t you lucky, Oyster.” She swatted Leatherbelly’s nose, and he growled and panted and growled.

  Oyster said, “I didn’t mean to. I wasn’t trying to cause trouble.” He turned to all of the nuns. “Remember when I was a baby? Remember?” And then Oyster finally let out his sneeze.

  Into the silence Mrs. Fishback said, “You’ve wrecked a tooth, stupid boy!”

  He ran the tip of his tongue over a new chip in his front tooth. He’d have to go to the dentist, wouldn’t he? Out into the world! The thought made him smile.

  Mother Superior sighed.

  Sister Mary Many Pockets looked at Oyster and his chipped tooth. Oyster looked at her flushed face cupped by its wimple. She pulled a few peanuts from one of her many pockets and mouthed his name, Oyster R. Motel. Then she shook her head, and Oyster could feel her saying, You scared me, Oyster. Sometimes it was like this; her heart could speak to his. She pulled a tissue from one of her pockets. She closed her wet eyes and pressed them.

  Then there was a flurry of motion in the air over their heads. Sister Mary Many Pockets, Oyster, Mother Superior, Mrs. Fishback, all of the nuns, and Leatherbelly, too, looked up to see a flock of moths led by a scrawny bird skitter and bump through the kitchen—in one door and out through another.

  CHAPTER 2

  AN UNSLIPPERY MAP OF LITTLE USE

  Oyster sat in the passenger seat of the nunnery van so that, as Mrs. Fishback put it, she “could keep an eye on him.” The problem was that Oyster wasn’t very tall, and his seat belt, batted by the wind through the open window, was either flapping around his face or choking him. It didn’t help matters that Mrs. Fishback drove madly while applying a thick coat of lipstick, circling her mouth. She didn’t wear a seat belt at all. She careened over lanes, hollering at the other drivers. Leatherbelly dug his nails into her white polyester pants, his rump with its narrow tail skidding first one way and then the other over the vinyl seat.

  As Mrs. Fishback bullied her way across town, she talked about Leatherbelly’s own appointment to have his teeth looked at by the dentist—on the cheap, a two-for-one special. “He’s the one who needs dental work! Look at my little prince. His poor, little, crooked smile. Who cares if Oyster R. Motel has a chipped tooth? Leatherbelly is the one who brings great joy into the world, aren’t you, baby?”

  Oyster ignored her as best as he could. He was trying to concentrate on the view. He only got these little wisps of the real world once or twice a year, and it didn’t seem fair that the seat belt was in the way. He was only getting to see bits, little snapshots. The trucks let out exhaust clouds, tipping the caps from their tall pipes, like music from the chapel organ. Ships moaned in the harbor, where he saw bits of the paddleboats and the bright, looming Domino Sugar sign. Buses barreled and then stopped and then barreled again. Oyster was wide-eyed, drinking it all in as fast as he could.

  Oyster was most disappointed that he didn’t see any children. It was the rampant fear of the Awful MTDs. The All-Talk All-the-Time AM station’s announcer on Mrs. Fishback’s radio was reporting closings due to the Awful MTDs: Bible camps, Girl Scout outings, Camp Waterloo, Camp Ipshano
oka, all closed. Day-care centers too: Shining Star, Tiny Tots. Sports were canceled due to a girl’s disappearance into a soccer goal. And because a boy had slipped into the top of a tunnel slide at a public pool and hadn’t come out the bottom for two hours, public pools were shut down too.

  Since the incident in the broom closet, Oyster was now fearful of the Awful MTDs too. He’d woken up feeling strange and still did: buzzy in his limbs, a little stunned. His mind kept replaying the gusty air, the darkness, the metal bucket trying to scoop him up and take him away. When he closed his eyes, sometimes he saw the chubby face of Alvin Peterly talking to the reporter about the ride through the darkness and the little room of odd people and the tubs of chocolates. Was it true? Sister Mary Many Pockets was so afraid of losing Oyster that she’d wanted to come to the dentist to hold his hand. But Mother Superior had put her on candle-snuffing duty after morning prayers.

  Oyster knew the nuns were all a-dither about the incident in the broom closet. They all seemed to be shaking their heads, their brows knotted up, their breaths huffy. What to do? they seemed to be saying to themselves, to one another. What to do?

  And what would they do? Oyster wanted to know. Would they send him off? Probably, Oyster thought. It was too much, wasn’t it? Too much to have a boy in the house, especially one who caused so very much trouble.

  Oyster’s mind was going in every different direction. He was jangled. The world was bigger than it had been the day before. He’d always wanted to get out and see it, but now the world didn’t begin or end just where he thought it had. (Even ordinary broom closets didn’t begin or end just where he thought they had.)

  And so it was harder to believe that he was born from a Dorsey’s Pickled Foods box at the nunnery gate. Well, he had known that all along, hadn’t he? He’d had parents. Of course he’d had parents. No one is really born from a box. His parents still existed in Oyster’s imagination, even though they were fuzzy. Someone had wrapped him in the towel and put him there and carried him to the nunnery gate. But the thing that was hardest for Oyster to contemplate was the question Why? He didn’t like the answers he came up with, so he tried hard not to think of that question.