Uh-oh.
Ollie hoped the man wouldn’t think he was a can.
Can Man pushed his cart right up to him and stared at the toy for longer than Ollie thought was okay. He’s gonna stomp me for sure.
Then the Can Man said, “You need some cover, little man. It’s raining too hard for the likes of you.” The man began to pull on one of his trash bags till he peeled off a piece that was the size of a Kleenex. Picking Ollie up, Can Man tenderly wrapped the piece of trash bag over Ollie’s head and shoulders like a tiny poncho.
“Somebody lost you, little man,” said Can Man with gentle concern. “And they will come lookin’ for you, and they probably don’t want you all squishy.”
Ollie was relieved—it didn’t seem like Can Man thought he was a can. He studied Can Man’s face while he finished making the poncho. It was an older face. Older than Billy’s parents’, for sure. But Ollie liked it. The deep creases and wrinkles around the eyes and mouth had a sad but friendly look. Kind of like an old toy.
Can Man gave Ollie’s poncho a final satisfied tug. He stared at Ollie for the longest time, the creases on his face deepening. Rain trickled down onto Ollie. The expression on Can Man’s face was bewildering. It wasn’t sad, really, or angry, but something Ollie had never seen before. It was like many feelings mixed together. Time seemed to stand completely still. Only the rain fell. Can Man’s face was like a statue’s now, but his eyes were very alive. It was like he was seeing past Ollie. Into another time. Ollie suddenly thought, Maybe he’s remembering. Maybe he had a toy like me. Can Man finally stirred and wiped the dripping water from Ollie’s eyes and face. He placed him back on the ground against a streetlight, bending Ollie’s legs so that he could sit down without tipping over, making sure the poncho covered him entirely.
“Whoever lost you, they’ll come lookin’, ” Can Man said assuredly. Then he stood and smiled a big jack-o’-lantern smile before turning. He gave his cart a push and began to make his way down the wet, rainy street.
Ollie watched till he could no longer see him. He liked Can Man, he decided. He made him feel hopeful again.
21
Tracks. . . . . .
The Creeps were on the hunt. The Super Creep spied the dog tracks first, crossing at the exact spot where the Ollie tracks stopped. He picked at one of the imprints.
“A midsize Ruff,” he determined. “Likely what the Humes call a ‘Retrieve Err.’ ” He could see the trail quite clearly as it veered from the grass to the curb and then down the asphalt of the street. “Follow the Pup!” he shouted.
The very same Creeps who had stolen Ollie were the Creeps most in trouble for his escape, and since they knew his world better than the other Creeps, they were in charge of tracking him. They had a small army with them, perhaps fifty Creeps in all. They scurried along the trail of the dog that had snapped up Ollie. The rain and the storm didn’t bother them at all, for they enjoyed few things more than tracking a runaway Fave.
They hadn’t lost one yet.
22
A Pal Can
As he sat hunched under his new poncho, Ollie worried. He worried that if Billy came out looking for him like that Can Man said he would, he’d get in trouble. Billy’s parents were really strict about going out in the rain during a thunderstorm. And if Billy was looking for him, he prob’ly had to do it in secret, and if he did it in secret, that meant running away. And that was really, really, really illegal. At the same time, Ollie wanted to be found. I wanna tell Billy all my huge A-venture secret scary Dark Carnival Tunnel of Lost Toys Danger Kid crime wave stuff, he was thinking when his thoughts were interrupted by a light metallic tapping sound coming from behind the streetlight. He looked over, and there stood a tin can hitting itself rather purposefully against the metal base of the pole. It was obviously trying to get Ollie’s attention.
“Were you hiding from the Can Man?” asked Ollie.
The can bent slightly at the middle and back up again, as if nodding.
“I guess that makes sense,” said Ollie, “if you don’t want to get smushed.”
The can nodded again, making a crumply sound as it bent. This is a can who could be a friend, Ollie thought. At that very instant the clatter of a thousand bits of metal rose up over the gentle drumming of the rain. The can began to shake. Ollie glanced around; he knew it had to be the Creeps. What else could it be? He spun back to the can.
“Can I call you ‘Tinny’? I think we need to toddle, Tinny!” he said urgently. Tinny twonked the metal pull tab on his top and motioned for Ollie to follow him.
They bounded into the bushes and began their escape.
Ollie glanced back quickly to see how close the Creeps were. They were too close—they were already swarming around the base of the lamppost. Super Creep was circling past, his tiny headlamp flicking this way and that as he examined the trail of the Can Man.
“Which way? Whichy way is the plush?” the Super Creep asked, giggling. Creeps galore, all equipped with tiny lamps or flashlights, scanned every crevice of the curb and street nearby.
Tinny, being nearly weightless, could move much faster than Ollie. He was able to bounce and tumble and roll through yards and between houses and over fences with a dexterity that the soggy, weighted-down Ollie could only envy. But Tinny urged Ollie on with unfailing patience, twonking his can top whenever Ollie’s energy began to flag.
“Sorry, Tinny, I was pretty good at escaping before I got squishy,” Ollie huffed. They managed to stay ahead of the Creeps, but not by much. By now, Ollie’s poncho was torn and tattered; it hung like a pathetic Halloween costume. He was so splattered with mud, so flecked with bits of grass and thorny sticks that he was nearly unrecognizable.
This, however, proved to be useful camouflage. More than once, he and Tinny easily hid while a pack of Creeps ran right past them, for by this time Ollie looked more like a clump of muddy trash than a toy.
Finally, the rain all but stopped. And the wind quit blowing. The thunder and lightning seemed farther away but still too close not to startle. The air had an eerie stillness to it. Every sound Ollie and Tinny made seemed as loud as the snap of a firecracker. Ollie just hoped that the Creeps weren’t gaining on them.
It was during an in-between-thunderclaps quiet time that Ollie thought he heard something familiar. A sad sound. Like crying. He wasn’t sure, but it seemed to be coming from under the big pointy hat boy statue thing. Even with his ears clogged with mud, there was something in the whimper that was unmistakable.
“Billy!” Ollie gasped, stumbling forward. As he did, the grass and weeds underneath the boy statue began to sparkle with tiny lights. Ollie froze. Was it the Creeps? He slipped down to his knees in the slick mud of what appeared to be an old road. No, those weren’t Creeps. Those were fireflies. Tinny bounced along beside him, not making a sound. The whimpering quieted with the rhythmic blinking of the tiny firefly lights. Now Ollie could see that it was Billy; he recognized his backpack.
“Billy!” he shouted, getting back up and running as best as he could toward his boy, but the mud was so deep and dense.
Billy peered out from under the statue. He tried to turn on his flashlight light saber. It flickered to life for just long enough. The light fanned out and found Ollie almost instantly.
“It’s me, Billy!” cried the toy. But then everything went crazy. There was thunder and lightning, and Ollie was knocked down, and the fireflies scattered, and all Ollie could hear was Billy screaming, “No! No! No!” as the Creep army overwhelmed them.
23
The Junkyard of Forgotten Friends
It had been a ghastly and horrifying attack. And it had happened so fast. Billy had seen Ollie and was yelling like he didn’t even know that Ollie was his favorite. Then Ollie was grabbed by more Creeps than he could count—they were laughing and screeching like crazy evil babies. Then suddenly, Ollie was jerked so hard, he thought his eyes would pop off. And he was tumbling, over and over in the air. He spiraled over a bank of bu
shes and then down into a ditch, deep in the trees.
That was where Ollie lay now, floating facedown in the rush of water that swelled the ditch because of the storm. He drifted along, occasionally bumping up against a rock or a branch, which made him bob and shift.
Billy had thrown him. Why? Why would his boy throw him away? It was a question that overwhelmed Ollie. His toy mind couldn’t find a way to make sense of it, and so he stopped thinking altogether. He stopped thinking, and drifted, drifted, until he washed onto the muddy banks of an old junkyard.
A junkyard is a sad but wondrous place, a place of memories and times long gone, filled with pieces and parts of lives that have moved on. And when these broken and forgotten things are tossed away, they become junk. And they end up here—in this yard as they call it, this yard of junk.
Sometimes junk can be an old rocking chair whose cushions are threadbare from being sat on so often, whose arms have snapped from being leaned on again and again, whose runners are worn thin from rocking generations of babies and sick children in the middle of the night.
Junk can be a banged-up old trumpet that used to play dulcet melodies but somehow got separated from its owner.
Junk can be an old typewriter used by a writer for years and years, and when the typewriter was found in the attic after the writer died, it was thrown out because almost nobody uses typewriters anymore.
Junk can be a thing called a Victrola—a beautifully carved wooden box that magically played music long before anybody ever dreamed about listening to song on devices small enough to fit in the palm of a hand.
This is where Ollie had ended up—with things broken, forgotten, tossed away. He lay there on the shore, so bloated with water, not only couldn’t he move, he looked more like a wad of wet socks than a toy. This small muddy bank of land seemed the last place in the world where Ollie would ever be found.
But found he was, by four unlikely allies: Lefty, a left-handed work glove that walked on its worn fingers; Topper, a bottle opener with a sharp metal blade and a double handle that acted as legs as it teetered along; Reeler, an old, battered fishing reel that had plenty of line still twined on it, and finally, Brushes, an old, fraying paintbrush with lots of energy.
Junkyard junk looked after its own. And so it was with the Junkyard Gang. They always welcomed newcomers to this final home. After a bit of cautious observation, they determined that this soggy mass of stitchery was not a simple tangle of socks, but a toy in need of help.
Ollie dangled limply from the fishing line as they reeled him up away from the water. They hung him by the comfort of their campfire in a cove of junk at the edge of the yard. Taking off his tattered poncho, they began untangling his arms and legs, trying to wake him up. But Ollie just slumped, his head down, not a sign of life coming from him.
Ollie, however, was awake. Sort of. He heard things, but his mind was so numb, he didn’t feel anything yet. He knew he was ashore. And wet. And had been found. But he felt forgotten.
Forgotten was a nothing way to feel. Forgotten was what had happened to the toys at Zozo’s. And now it was happening to Ollie.
As he sat drying among this Junkyard Gang, he felt the nothing of forgotten so deeply that he didn’t know how to talk anymore.
* * *
As they waited for the newcomer to dry out, the Junkyard Gang sat around the fire and told one another stories of the day when they were used, when they “belonged to.”
“I belonged to Mr. Gregory J. Johnson and his wife, Rebecca,” squeaked a rocking chair. “She always sat on me. On their porch. Every day. Especially at sunset. It was lovely.”
“I belonged to Randolf Everet alliwell,” typed Keys, a typewriter whose H was broken. “ e was a writer of mystery stories. e wrote a undred and fifteen stories wit me. Sometimes, I guessed t e mystery before it finis ed, w ich was very t rilling for me.”
They had told these stories to each other countless times, and they knew them by heart. Yet they never tired of the tellings. It was their ritual, their way of remembering what they were and why they had been. It saved them from feeling forgotten.
“I was, ya know, a pet rock,” said Pet Rock. “The kids Pam and Dirk picked me out. Which was very satisfying. Being picked. They glued the plastic eyes on me right there at the store place. I traveled a lot. Car trips, mostly. Arizona. California. The parking lot at Disneyland. Then one day they lost interest. I gathered dust for, I dunno, years. Then the mom tossed me.”
Reeler the fishing reel’s turn was next. He always went after Pet Rock. “The old man caught a jillion fish with me,” he said. “Pike. Perch. Catfish. Trout. Bass. We caught a bass, on my oath, six feet long. Weighed a hundred and twenty-eight pounds.”
The others groaned in disbelief. They always groaned in disbelief.
“No, really!” protested Reeler.
“Every time you tell that story, the fish gets bigger by a foot,” said Clocker, who then wound herself up and began to tell her story. “I couldn’t exaggerate. I had to be precise. The Templeton family relied on me for the time. For twenty-six years. I saw the kids grow up. And move away. All the comings and goings. All the holidays and sad days. Then Mr. and Mrs. Templeton became old. Then they were gone. And so was I.”
Clocker’s story always made the others grow quiet and thoughtful. But it was Clocker’s story that brought Ollie back.
Without a word to the Junkyard Gang as they launched into their next story, he lowered himself down from the rope that held him near the warmth of the fire and picked up a shard of broken glass that lay on the ground. He moved slowly, as if still heavy with water, but he was, in fact, almost dry—just a little damp deep within his stuffing.
It wasn’t until Ollie began to dig that the Junkyard Gang noticed he had roused. They quietly gathered around, wondering what he could be doing. He looked so crumpled and sad as he dragged the glass shard through the loose, mossy dirt again and again, making a gash.
Lefty spoke first. “What’s your name, Plush?” he asked.
“I’m Topper,” added the bottle opener. “We found you and brought you here.”
“Reeled you in, as it were,” Reeler said.
But Ollie did not answer. He just kept digging. Clocker gestured for the others to be quiet. She had seen so much; she understood that quiet sometimes said more than talking ever could. Then the old clock motioned for Lefty to go to the newcomer.
Lefty approached carefully, not wanting to startle the toy whose digging had become more purposeful and measured. It had an almost clock-like beat. One . . . two . . . dig . . . One . . . two . . . dig. With every downward strike of his shard-of-glass shovel, the bell in his chest would make a quiet ring.
The hole widened and deepened, and Ollie stayed focused on it and nothing else. Lefty very gently placed his thumb on Ollie’s shoulder and kept it there.
The effect was almost immediate. Ollie froze, his arms dropping by his sides. His breathing sounded deep and exhausted. Lefty stayed as still as Ollie, his finger never leaving the toy’s shoulder. Finally, he quietly asked again, “What’s your name, Plush?”
It took a moment, but this time there came an answer. His voice was clear, but when he said his name, it was almost as if it were a question. “Ollie?” Then he lifted his head and looked directly at Lefty. “I belong . . .” But he trailed off and looked away again.
Clocker shuffled a little closer. “The hole you’re digging, Ollie— What is it for?”
Ollie raised his head once more.
“To forget,” he answered. He placed his patchpaw to his chest. “To forget this.” He pressed against his bell, a single faint chime sounding.
“I can take it out,” he explained. “It’s a pretend heart. It doesn’t do anything. Not really. It’s just an old bell. It’s just pretend.” And for a mournful moment Ollie felt a surge of hate at the idea of pretend. “It’s fake! It’s phony! It isn’t real! It’s just pretend!”
Again, Clocker knew to say nothing.
/> “But hearing it . . . ,” Ollie went on. “I don’t want to hear it anymore. If I don’t hear it, then maybe I’ll forget.” Ollie looked into the hole. Then he looked at the others for a long time, his shoulders sagging. “I can’t forget,” Ollie said at last. “I guess I’ll never ever be able to.”
They were junk; they understood.
In the distance they could hear a frantic metallic plucking sound. Ting! Ting! Ting!
Ollie whirled around.
Ting! Ting! Ting! Ting!
Tinny? he wondered. Then, “TINNY!”
The little can bounced into the center of them. He was jumping up and down and ping-ponging off the different Junkyard Gang members, flicking his pull tab so feverishly he sounded like he was sending some kind of crazy Morse code.
“Ting-ta-ting-ting-ting. TaTaTaTaTa ting-ting-ta-ting.”
Ollie was superglad to see his friend, but he had no idea what Tinny was trying to tell him.
“I speak Can,” said Topper. He listened closely, trying to grasp the rat-a-tat-tat of Tinny’s message.
“W at’s e saying?!” typed Keys.
“Gimme a sec. I’m trying,” said Topper. “Okay. Something about a kid, a Hume named Bilky.”
Bilky? “No, it’s Billy!” Ollie corrected. “Billy! He’s my kid! Is he okay, Tinny?!”
Topper grew increasingly grim as Tinny began ting-ing again. “He’s in trouble,” Topper said at last. “Big trouble.”
“Where is he?” Ollie demanded, jumping up.
“Ting-ting-ting ting-ting-ting.”
Ollie felt frantic. “What’s he saying? What’s he saying!”
“I’m tryin’ . . . the . . . old carnival! The one that caved in!” Topper turned to the others. “Zozo’s got him,” he said ominously.