On the Road Again Read online

  The pilots laughed. Then the flight attendant told us it was time to let the pilots do their job, which was to eat their dinner off a plastic tray.

  “Back already?” my mother asked. She looked as if she’d been sleeping.

  I plugged in my earphones. Spaceballs was playing. I love that movie. My brother didn’t want to watch it because he’d seen it already. So had I, at least seven times, but that didn’t bother me.

  “Why don’t you go for a walk?” my mother told him, yawning.

  He climbed out of his seat, crawled across my lap, made sure he stepped on my toes, then began running up and down the aisles. He sure made a lot of friends that way, especially with the flight attendants who were trying to push their carts. I concentrated on the movie and pretended he wasn’t my brother.

  I must have slept for a while, because when I opened my eyes, the movie was over and the plane was dark. Everyone was sleeping.

  That’s when my mother woke up with a start.

  “Where’s Max?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.” I yawned a couple of times. “You told him to go for a walk.”

  Suddenly she was worried. That’s just like her. First she tells my brother to take a walk, and when he does, she gets all nervous because she doesn’t know exactly where he is.

  She got up and started walking down the aisles. Then she tried the bathrooms – all of them.

  I know my brother better than that. He wouldn’t hide in a bathroom the size of a peanut. Especially not a stinky peanut.

  Next thing I knew, she was talking to one of the flight attendants. A minute later, there was a very loud announcement over the loudspeaker system that woke everyone up.

  “If anyone has seen a small boy with blond hair, holding a stuffed penguin, please inform the nearest flight attendant. His name is Max. The boy’s name, that is. Not the penguin’s.”

  I didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. After all, people can’t get lost in an airplane, can they? Max wasn’t about to open the door and go for a stroll, was he? He was probably just playing tricks on us, as usual.

  When my mother came back, she still looked worried. I could feel her trying to be logical, but not really succeeding.

  Suddenly I had an idea. I unplugged my earphones and put down my book and went to the first-class section of the plane with the big comfortable seats.

  A blanket was spread out on one of them. From under the blanket, a pink webbed foot was sticking out.

  A penguin foot.

  Under the blanket, Max was stretched out, sleeping away without a care in the world.

  I went back and told my mother, but she didn’t believe me. She had to go and see for herself.

  My father was sleeping. My brother was sleeping. It was my turn now.

  A short time later, I opened my eyes and looked out the window. The sunlight was blinding. Far below, I saw tiny purple and green and yellow squares. Those were fields, and the white dots in them were sheep. In the middle of the fields was a miniature pink castle with real turrets.

  In just a few hours, we had gone from night in Montreal to a bright sunny morning in France.

  I wondered where the night went. It could have fallen into one of those black holes in outer space that you hear about.

  Then I had the craziest thought. My mother had explained to me that tomorrow would come faster because we were flying to Europe. But let’s say that we kept on flying. Would we grow up sooner, since we were rushing so quickly into the future? I wondered if I could ever get back the hours I’d lost over the Atlantic Ocean, or whether they were gone forever.

  It was just like time travel in a science fiction story. I guess that was part of the “incredible adventure” my parents had promised.

  TWO

  A duck thief on the loose!

  As we crossed the old stone bridge into the village where we were going to live, the first thing we saw was a robbery. And it was happening in broad daylight.

  “Look!” Max pointed. “That guy has a duck under his coat.”

  Sure enough, a grizzled old man was climbing up from the riverbank below. He was trying to hide a large white duck under his long coat that looked totally out of place in summer. The duck didn’t like it under the man’s coat, so it would poke its head out every few seconds. And quack, very loudly.

  “Don’t look,” my mother told us. “And don’t point. I bet that man is stealing the duck from the river. I’m sure that’s illegal.”

  “Shouldn’t we call the police?” I asked.

  “Normally we would, but in a foreign country, sometimes it’s better to mind your own business until you get to know how things work,” my mother answered.

  “Anyway, the police probably steal ducks, too,” my father laughed.

  Duck-stealing police? What kind of place was this?

  The man passed us. He was looking straight ahead, and acting as if everyone walked around the village with ducks under their coats.

  The duck quacked again, twice as loud. All the ducks along the river quacked back. The man walked just a little bit faster, then disappeared into a narrow alley between two houses.

  The duck thief had made his getaway in plain sight!

  “I want a pet duck,” my brother said, looking down at the river. “They’re cute.”

  “He didn’t steal that duck for a pet,” I told him.

  Max looked at me. “Then why did he take it?”

  My mother shot me one of her warning looks. I decided I’d better keep quiet.

  The house we were going to live in that year stood on a tiny street just wide enough for one car to squeeze through. And not just any car. More like the one we had, a Renault 4L, a miniature station wagon that looked like a sardine can on wheels. There were no sidewalks, so when a car came down our street, it practically scratched the walls of our house. Which is why hardly any of the cars in the village had side-view mirrors.

  But it turned out there wasn’t much traffic, and I discovered why the very first day. In the middle of the street lay a fat old dog. Was it sleeping… or dead?

  I saw it twitch its ears once. Not dead.

  I wondered what would happen if a car came along, and I soon found out. The dog didn’t move a muscle. When the driver saw it, he didn’t bother honking his horn. He just stopped, backed up and drove away.

  If you were a dog, this was the town for you!

  The old lady from across the street opened her door and set down a bowl.

  “Linda!” she called. “Viens manger!”

  The dog — or Linda, I should say — slowly got up, yawned and shuffled over to the door, where she started gobbling down her lunch. What a tough life!

  “Her name is Linda?” my brother asked.

  “Yes. Linda means ‘pretty’ in Spanish,” said our neighbor, who was called Madame Mendes, judging from the name on her mailbox.

  Pretty? Linda was the ugliest dog I’d ever seen. She was fat and wrinkled and had large brownish liver spots.

  But she did make an excellent speed bump.

  I’m going to tell you a few things about our house, and I hope you’ll believe me.

  Our house was like nothing else I’d ever seen. The downstairs had an enormous fireplace big enough to park a car in. A sardine-can car, that is. A stone trough stood beside our dining table, and a round opening in the floor that had been closed with a concrete cover showed where a well had been.

  “In the old days, the animals lived on the ground floor,” my father explained. “The people got their water from their own well. They lived upstairs, and the heat rising from the animals helped keep them warm.”

  Later that winter, as I shivered under a hundred layers of blankets, I wished we had a few cows and horses downstairs to keep our house warm.
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  We ran up the enormous stone staircase that led to the two top floors. Everything was made out of stone, including the walls. The rooms were huge. The bathroom had a bathtub the size of a swimming pool. Once upon a time, a giant must have lived here.

  Behind the house was the jardin, as the French call it, but it was really just a tiny patch of ground with a scruffy old palm tree growing in the middle. There wasn’t even enough room to kick a soccer ball around.

  My brother and I went to the front of the house where our rooms were. We threw open the shutters. We knew how narrow the street was, but still, it was a little strange to look out the window and see right into the house across the way.

  And guess who was there? Madame Mendes. She and her husband were eating lunch. We could even see what they were having: fried fish. Two fishes each.

  Madame Mendes and her husband turned and waved.

  “I guess we’re going to get to know the neighbors pretty well,” my brother said, waving back.

  “I hope you like the smell of fried fish,” I told him, “since this is your room.”

  “How come I get the smaller one?”

  “Because you’re smaller. Why else?”

  We decided to go exploring. We left the house and quickly discovered that the village ended with our narrow street. We walked past a field with horses busy eating grass. Then we came to two cemeteries separated by a vineyard where fat purple grapes were growing. In front of the cemeteries were benches crowded with people.

  Everyone turned and stared at us.

  “I don’t know about this place,” my brother said. “I don’t think we’ll ever fit in here.”

  “How come?”

  “Look at them. Everybody’s really old.”

  He was right. Our parents were pretty old, but nothing like these people. They looked as if they were at least a hundred, though with old people it’s kind of hard to tell. I wondered if this was the line-up to get into the cemetery.

  “How come there are two cemeteries?” my brother wanted to know.

  There was only one way to find out. I walked up to one of the old ladies sitting on a bench.

  “Excuse me, but why are there two cemeteries right beside each other?”

  “What did you say there, young man?”

  The old woman leaned forward and cupped her hand to her ear. Either she was deaf, or she didn’t understand me. My father had told us that people in France might not understand our accent. Well, their accent was pretty hard to understand, too.

  “How come you’ve got two cemeteries here?” I shouted into the lady’s ear.

  The old woman yelled to an even older lady on the bench right next to her, “I can’t understand what this nice young man is saying.”

  “That’s because you’re as deaf as a doorknob,” the lady yelled back.

  I looked at my brother and tried not to laugh. Our parents had also warned us that we would have to be very polite in France. But I guess it depended on how old you were. The older you were, the ruder you could be.

  Finally, a red-faced man answered, “One cemetery is for the Catholics. The other is for the Protestants.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I see.”

  But I didn’t see at all. The two cemeteries seemed exactly the same to me.

  “But underneath it all, they’re friends again,” the man told us.

  I wondered what he meant. How could you be friends with someone under the ground?

  “That vineyard was planted here so they can drink together. Just because they’re dead doesn’t mean they can’t have a nice glass of red wine!” the man chortled.

  As he laughed, his face turned purple, the same color as the grapes. I bet he had drunk a bit of that nice red wine himself.

  That was one of the first things I learned about Celeriac, our speck-of-dust village. Wine was very important to the people here. Some of them even drank it for breakfast.

  That made sense, I suppose, because growing grapes was what most people in the village did for a living.

  Next, our explorations led us to the center of the village. Actually, our noses led us there, because we smelled the open-air market before we saw it. Boy, did they eat some strange things in this place!

  First, I spotted a mean-looking swordfish, sword and all, displayed on a bed of bloody ice. But the fish-seller had more than just fish. There were all sorts of seashells, the kind you might collect on the beach, but you’d never think of eating whatever lives inside.

  He also had some strange sea-insects called cigales de mer that were still alive. They looked like creatures from outer space with their long antennae. Their sharp claws waved at me, as if warning me to stay away. But a lady stepped up and bought every last one of them. She dropped them into her straw shopping basket, where they immediately started making plans to escape.

  Next to the fish-seller was a lady who sold cheeses. Very moldy cheeses. You couldn’t miss her. You just had to take a deep breath! Phew!

  One man had rabbits hanging by their feet, with the fur still on them. Another guy wearing a straw hat was giving away free slices of sausage.

  Of course my brother made a beeline in his direction.

  “Bon appétit!” the man said, and he cut a slice of sausage for him with a very sharp knife.

  My brother munched away, then asked for another one.

  “You like it, do you?”

  “Uh-huh,” Max said with his mouth full.

  “It’s donkey sausage,” the man told him. “Grade A, the very best. From donkeys I raised myself.”

  My brother turned red. Then green. Then he swallowed hard.

  “Hee-haw, hee-haw!” I brayed into his ear.

  He chased me down the street. But it was pretty hard to run on a street crowded with people. We stopped in front of a stall that had dead pigs trussed up for everyone to admire.

  “Those pigs are making faces at us,” my brother claimed.

  “Imagine if someone sliced you open from your bellybutton to your throat,” I told him. “You’d make a face, too.”

  A half-dozen cooked pig heads were lined up on the counter. They all had their tongues out, like dogs on a hot day.

  “Look,” I said. “It’s the Celeriac welcome committee.”

  Past the market was a little square with a fountain and two cafés facing each other from opposite sides of the street. The cafés were filled with men standing at the bar, and they were all shouting at the same time. I thought they were getting ready to have a big fight, but it turned out they were just discussing the weather and the latest soccer game.

  In the middle of the square stood a man who was directing traffic. There was only one problem. There weren’t any cars, since the street was closed for the open-air market. And if there had been cars, the drivers would not have known which way to go.

  That’s because the man, who was standing on one leg in the middle of the street, was moving his arms in all directions at once. First he pointed one way, then the other, like a weathervane on a windy day. Sometimes he pointed straight up to the sky!

  “Hey, Roger-Roger!” someone shouted to him from inside the café. “You forgot to change our calendar!”

  Just like that, the man stopped his policeman imitation. He marched into the café with a very serious look on his face. Then he went behind the bar and pulled off a page from the calendar hanging on the wall. Everyone applauded, and he bowed.

  Were they making fun of him? Or was this just normal life in our new village?

  Roger-Roger marched out of the café and back into the street. He looked happy, as if he’d just accomplished a very important mission. Then he started directing traffic again.

  I found out later that Roger-Roger got his name because he repeated everything twice, and that he’d been
tearing off the pages of the café’s calendar forever. That was his job in the village.

  What a strange place this Celeriac was! I was beginning to wonder if there were any normal people here, doing normal things. I guess I’d just have to wait and see.

  THREE

  How to have fun in France

  It turned out that we arrived just in time for the end-of-summer celebrations. That’s the most important time of the year in a little village like Celeriac. All the villages have a celebration, and the goal is to do the craziest things possible, so that everyone has something to talk about all year, until the next celebration.

  I should know. It happened right on our street.

  One day, a truck pulled into the square by our house and started unloading metal barricades. You know, those metal fences with the ends that lock together.

  By that time, my brother and I had met some of the other kids in the village. It turned out that there were young people in Celeriac after all. Not everybody spent their days on a stone bench by the cemetery, watching Linda the snoring speed bump sleeping in the sun.

  The kids would meet on the square in front of the church, right near our house. It was the best spot in Celeriac, with giant plane trees that kept the place nice and shady. Most of the families in our part of the village came from North Africa. The kids’ mothers all wore scarves on their heads. Every evening before dinner, the women would watch their kids play soccer. The goal was the front door of the church. If you shot the ball past the goalie, through the open door and into the church, you scored.

  I was pretty surprised the first time I saw that happen. I know that Muslims don’t go to church. They go to a mosque. But no one else in the village seemed to go to church either. And no one minded if we used its open door as a goal.

  I became friends with two guys who played soccer, Rachid and Ahmed. When school began, we would be in the same class. I asked them about the barricades.

  “That’s for the bulls,” Rachid said. “So they don’t go where they’re not supposed to.”