The Last Notebook of Leonardo by B.B. Wurge Read Free Book Online Page A

if you went on foot. If those are feet. What are those? Darn if it don’t look like you have hands down there instead of feet. What’d you say your name was? You just pack up your tent there and sling it in the back, and we can all three squeeze in the truck easy. I don’t mind. You go ahead.”
    So Dad and I went back to our tent and took it down and packed it up, although mostly Dad did it. The snow was so deep that he couldn’t drag the wagon to the road. He picked it up and carried it over his head, hopping through the snow, and put the wagon down in the open back of the pickup truck. We had so much stuff that the truck settled down very deep on its springs. Dad tied the wagon down so that it wouldn’t roll around on the truck bed. Then we climbed in the front seat with Bill, me in the middle because I was the smallest, and Dad next to the window, all squished up, his head bent down and his stomach bulging out over the dashboard.
    â€œI never,” Bill said, starting up the engine and moving slowly along the road, plowing as he went. “You must be one strong Indian. I never did see anyone that could lift up a thing like that and sling it around so easy. You aught to be more careful so you
don’t rip your suit. That is some suit. I wish I had me one of those suits. I only got one suit and the cat’s been all over it so much it looks like about as hairy as yours. Ha ha! Well, I’m always trying to get that cat outside, but Gladys, that’s my wife, she’s always putting it back in the house. I puts her out, Gladys puts her in, till the cat she don’t show up no more and I figure she’s outside finally getting some healthy air and chasing a bird or something, and you know what? That darn cat’s got into my closet and is sleeping on my clothes! That’s where she’s got to. That is the laziest cat I ever did see. Well, unless it’s my cousin Danny’s cat. Let me tell you about that cat. One day we were. . . .”
    Dad and I sat quietly and let him talk on and on. He never took a break, and he never seemed to mind that we didn’t contribute anything to the conversation. After a while I didn’t even hear what he was saying. We got to Stockton after sundown, too late to visit the Indian museum. Bill pulled to the side of the road and Dad squeezed himself out of the front seat. He had been scrunched up inside for so long, about an hour and a half, that he could hardly stand up straight, and he was only about six and a half feet tall. He was so stiff that I had to help him untie our wagon. Then he was limbered up enough to lift it out of the truck and put it on the roadside. We said
goodbye to Bill and thanked him for the ride, and he wished us luck and drove away.
    â€œSee, Jem,” my dad said. “There’s a nice man, even if he does talk a lot. He didn’t mind that I’m an orangutan.”
    â€œMaybe he didn’t realize you were one,” I said.
    â€œHow could he not realize ?” Dad said. “Jem, your brain has frozen up in the cold.”
    Dad dragged our wagon just out of town, which wasn’t very far, because the town was only one or two streets. Then we set up our tent hidden in some trees and crawled inside to wait for the morning.

8
    The museum didn’t open until eleven in the morning. Dad stayed home in our tent working on the ship’s log. I thought I had deciphered everything useful in it, but he was systematic and wanted to write out a complete document in English. I decided to spend the morning looking around the town. I had lived my whole life in the city and had never seen anything like Stockton New York.
    The whole town was only one crossroads. One of the roads, the one we had come along, had only two lanes with hardly anybody driving on it. The other one was a gravel road with no street sign. One corner had a gas station and a store that went with the station. The store was called