I killed the TV and got ready to turn in at eight o’clock for the first time since forever. But I was planning on rising early. Soonest begun, soonest done, my mother used to say. Sometimes I couldn’t exactly remember what she looked like without checking her picture, but I could remember all her little sayings. The mind is a weird machine.
I locked up, but not because I was afraid of Polley. He probably knew where I lived, but he had two broken hands and I had his gun. He was also without money and ID. My guess was that he was already hitching to what he called “Chi,” where he’d try to turn those four gold pellets into cash. If he was able to sell them at all, I thought he’d get no more than twenty cents on the dollar, and that was all right with me. Awesome sauce. Every time I started to feel sorry for him, or guilty about what I’d done, I thought of him pressing the barrel of his little gun against the back of my head and telling me not to turn around, it wouldn’t be smart. I was glad I didn’t kill him, though. There was that.
I examined myself closely in the mirror as I brushed my teeth. I thought I looked the same as ever, which was sort of amazing after everything that had happened. I rinsed out my mouth, turned, and saw Radar sitting in the bathroom doorway. I bent and ruffled the fur at the sides of her face. “You want to go on an adventure tomorrow, girl?”
She thumped her tail, then went into the guestroom and lay down at the foot of my bed. I double-checked my alarm to make sure it was set for five AM, then turned off the light. I expected it would take me a long time to go to sleep after the day’s rollercoaster ride, but I started to drift almost at once.
I asked myself if I was really going to risk my life and certainly get into a shitload of trouble, both with my dad and at school, for an old dog who’d already had—in canine years—a hell of a good run. The answer seemed to be yes, but that wasn’t all. It was the wonder of the thing, the mystery of it. I had found another world, for Christ’s sake. I wanted to see the city with the green towers and find out if it really was Oz, only with a terrible monster—Gogmagog—at its heart instead of a humbug projecting his voice from behind a curtain. I wanted to find the sundial and see if it actually did what Mr. Bowditch said it did. And you have to remember I was seventeen, a prime age for both adventuring and foolish decisions.
But yeah, mostly it was the dog. I loved her, you see, and I didn’t want to let her go.
I rolled over on my side and went to sleep.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN Calling Andy. Radar Decides. Stew. Googir.
1
Rades seemed surprised that we were getting up in the dark, but she was willing to eat her breakfast （three more pills buried in it） and walk up the hill to Number 1. The Richland house was dark. I went upstairs to the safe, strapped on the .45, and tied it down. With Polley’s .22 auto in my backpack, that made me a regular Two-Gun Sam. There were some empty spaghetti sauce jars in the pantry. I filled two with dry Orijen dog food, screwed the lids on tight, wrapped them in a dishtowel, and put them in my pack beneath a tee-shirt and a pair of underwear （Never leave on a trip without clean undershorts was another of my mom’s sayings）。 To this I added a dozen cans of King Oscar sardines （for which I’d gotten a taste）， a sleeve of crackers, a few pecan sandies （only a few because I’d been nibbling on them）， and a handful of Perky Jerky sticks. Also the two remaining Cokes from the fridge. I also tossed my wallet in my pack so I could put the long-barreled flashlight into my back pocket, as before.
You could say these were extremely thin supplies for what might be a round trip of as much as a hundred miles, and of course you’d be right, but my backpack was only so big and besides, the shoe-woman had offered to stand me a meal. Perhaps she could even add to my supplies. Otherwise I’d just have to forage, an idea that filled me with both anxiety and excitement.
The thing that troubled me the most was the padlock on the shed door. I thought if the shed was locked, nobody would bother about it. If it wasn’t, somebody might check it out, and concealing the top of the well with piles of old magazines was mighty thin camouflage. I’d gone to sleep with this Agatha Christie–type problem unsolved but had woken up with what seemed to me to be a good answer. Not only would the shed be locked from the outside, there would be someone else to say I’d taken Radar to Chicago in hopes of a miracle cure.
Andy Chen was the solution.
I waited until seven o’clock to call him, thinking that by then he’d be up and getting ready for school, but after four rings I was pretty sure my call was going to voicemail. I was thinking out the message I’d leave when he answered, sounding impatient and a little out of breath.