The cat was meowing, the moon was bright, the stars were twinkling, and Little Hobbin sailed up into the sky, right over the patient old moon’s nose, all night long.
“Mama, when will you put wheels on my bed?” Niner had asked.
“When you’re all better, Little Hobbin!” Mama answered. “When you’re all better!” and she laughed.
Early in the mornings, first thing, Mama always went off to work. To earn money at Fisher and Frost, in the factory. There was a horn there, and it blew morning, noon, and night. It sounded just like the horn on the big ships.
Niner would lay in his bed, the one without wheels, and out the window he would watch the light creep up into the sky. Then the horn blew, the big ship’s horn at Fisher and Frost. It blew Niner right out to sea on a great big steamer bound for Australia. Then it blew again, and soon after Mama was hugging Niner in her arms, so happy to be with her Little Hobbin again.
Mama had always smelled a little like fish. Like fish and salt water. And she always said it came from earning money.
“MONEY,” COSMOS SAYS SUDDENLY. “We need money, Niner! You can’t get to the sea without money. You’ll be in this city forever if you’ve got no money. Eating rotten bananas and rummaging around in garbage cans the rest of your life.”
“Oh, man, I wanna go to the sea!” Niner says. “I’ll do anything to get there.”
“Even walk on your hands?”
“Even walk on my hands!”
“You’re a nutjob!” says Cosmos, laughing to himself. “I once knew a dog just like you, black and little, and he was always waggin’ his tail.”
For a little while, it’s quiet again. Only the river murmuring as it flows by, and the factory horn at Fisher and Frost blowing faintly in the distance.
“What was it actually like when you were little?” Niner asks.
“Dunno,” says Cosmos. “Can’t remember. I was never little.”
“But everyone was little once,” says Niner.
Cosmos thinks it over.
“Maybe you’re right. But I don’t know much no more.”
“So tell me . . .”
Cosmos wrinkles his forehead and squints his eyes, as if he were trying to make out something far away, on the other side of the river. Then he pushes his red baseball cap back toward his neck and says:
“There was a high hedge, when I was little . . . it was real thick, so thick you couldn’t see through it. I would walk along it on my way to old Sadie’s. Sadie owned the stand on the corner. She always had a white smock on, and she always had time. She was at least a hundred years old, and she looked like a shriveled old turtle. But she had the best raspberry suckers I’ve ever tasted. And I got my name from her too. She always called me Cosmos, ’cause supposedly I was like a seaman she’d once known. He’d sailed around the world and was called Cap’n Cosmos. ‘You’re his spittin’ image, Cosmos! Here, have a sucker. But just suck it, no biting!’ old Sadie would say.”
Niner watches Cosmos as he talks, and he sees a smile starting to spread over Cosmos’s face. The kind of smile that starts in the eyes and creeps down over the nose to the lips, until suddenly, Cosmos is beaming like the sun.
Now he’s Cosmos of the sunny face.
And Niner says, “Go on, Cosmos, tell me more. Tell me what was behind the high hedge!”
“What was behind the hedge?”
Cosmos hesitates, thinking it over. He bites his lower lip, and for a moment Niner is afraid that Cosmos won’t tell him anymore. But then Cosmos takes a deep breath and says:
“You want to know what was behind the high hedge? I warn you, that ain’t for sissies! That’s where the forbidden park was, see,” says Cosmos. “That’s where the Fisher and Frost people lived in a mansion. The mansion was as big as a castle, and it had at least thirty rooms, a swimming pool, a sauna, and a marble terrace. And in the evenings the forbidden park was patrolled by two dogs, huge as calves they were, foaming at the mouth, and always the pair of them together. Old Sadie remembered how one time the dogs had torn a child right to pieces. First they bit ’im to death, and then tore him up. ‘Don’t ever go in there, Cosmos!’ old Sadie always said. ‘Promise me that! Don’t ever go in there!’
“The forbidden park was so forbidden that the others shook in their boots just thinking about it. But I was Cosmos, I had the name of a seaman, and I wasn’t afraid of nothin’ or nobody. Especially not some stupid forbidden park belonging to Fisher and Frost,” says Cosmos.
“There!” And he rolls his sleeve up to show Niner an ugly wide scar.
“I conquered the dogs,” whispers Cosmos. “They were foaming at the mouth, and there were two of them, huge as calves! One bit me right there. The other came from behind.”
“But . . . but, how’d you do it?” asks Niner.
“Hypnosis!” says Cosmos. “Simple hypnosis. ’Course, you gotta know how! You have to pin them. You have to look ’em right in the eye, without blinking. You can’t show fear. You keep that in mind, Niner. The most important thing is, you can’t show fear! If you show no fear, the dogs will start wimpering, and then they’ll tuck in their tails and let go. It’s true!”
“And then?” asks Niner.
“What do you mean, and then?”
“What happened next, when you were little?”
“Nothing happened next,” says Cosmos. “Old Sadie died, and with her went the raspberry suckers. Anyway . . . forget about it! I was never little!”
With that a shadow falls over his sunny face. And he pulls the red baseball cap down and becomes the old Cosmos again.
A flock of crows flies over the river. It looks like a black cloud. The crows shriek and clamor and flutter up again before settling to sleep over in the trees. The driftwood fires have burned down.
“Come on,” says Cosmos, “it’s getting cold. We gotta go!”
He stands up, grabs his two plastic bags, and climbs up the embankment. Niner follows behind him. Past the others.
Red Elsa lies rolled up in a torn sleeping bag. Bald Pete mutters to himself, and the harmonica has dropped out of Harmonica Johnny’s hand.
A silver crescent moon hangs in the sky above the riverbank. The white houses look dead. Only the lights of the alarm systems glow like red eyes above the terraces. A blanket of darkness has fallen over the city.
Cosmos takes long steps. Away from the houses, up into the city proper.
But it takes a while before they come to a neighborhood with any life to it. There, mothers are setting tables behind bright windowpanes, and children sit in clean pajamas, fresh from their baths, drinking warm milk.
As Niner stares in, he thinks of Mama, which makes him really sad.
“Don’t you go looking in there,” says Cosmos. “They’re on the other side. If you turned their power off they’d die of hunger. They don’t know nothin’. Nothin’ at all! Hey, old pal!” Cosmos nudges Niner in the ribs. “We own the street! We own the night! We own the sea!” And then he wiggles his ears and makes faces until Niner has no choice but to laugh.
“Well, there you go! And now we’ll be wanting that five-star hotel!”
AND COSMOS AND NINER head off looking for a condemned building with a ripped-up mattress, perhaps even a bed frame.
“You never can tell beforehand,” explains Cosmos. “A condemned