A Nose for Adventure by Richard Scrimger Page A

out of the way, to make room forFrieda. She sits uncomfortably, with her legs splayed out. She hangs on tight to the sides of the wagon.
    Bird is frowning. “You’ll be wantin’ a lift uptown,” he says. “A cab, maybe.”
    “Maybe,” I say.
    “Be expensive.” Frieda coughs, and opens her mouth, but before she can say anything, Bird continues. “I don’t got much money,” he says. “What I got is
things
. Cabs don’t take things. They want money. I can’t give you much.”
    Frieda shuts her mouth tight.
    “You know, I never been uptown,” says Bird. His eyes are faraway again.
    –
Today is Wishday. Come with us
, says Norbert.
    Around the corner of the alley, we find a big bottle of water. The seal is unbroken. Drops of condensation bead on the clear plastic sides of the bottle. Bottled water, resting there, waiting for us. Just like Bird’s wagon.
    Everyone takes a drink. I pour some water into a metal dish from the wagon. The dish smells of oil, but Sally laps thirstily. Now I can’t believe how hungry I am. I must have been hungry all along, but I didn’t pay any attention to it. If your hair is on fire, you don’t care that you’re running down Main Street in your underwear. Once the fire is out, you feel embarrassed.
    I’m walking beside the wagon, helping Frieda to stay in. I offered to pull, but Bird wouldn’t let me. “My wagon,” he said.
    We come around the next corner and onto the street. Is there a picnic waiting there, just for us? There is not. What there is is a minivan, with New Jersey licence plates and a flat front tire. Inside the van is a woman with her head in her hands. We crowd around her window. Sally jumps up and down. “Can we help?” I ask.
    The lady is wearing a kerchief and sunglasses. She takes one look at us and screams.

With a jack that he finds in his wagon-load of scrap metal, Bird has the tire off the van in no time flat – ha-ha – and the spare – the little one, like a baby tire – out from under the back. Frieda hands him tools.
    The street we’re on has potholes and manholes and hoardings. Also stores with roll-down shutters, people walking in a hurry, seagulls eating trash. Two bridges take up a lot of the sky. One of them floats in the air, looking like it’s going to take off any minute. In the distance, more people, bigger buildings. It’s a hard busy landscape, even with the floating bridge. Not a tree, not a shrub, not a blade of grass.
    “Where are we?” I ask Bird.
    “Home,” he answers, tightening bolts.
    “Do you know where we are, Norbert?”
    –
This is still Earth, isn’t it? The sign over there says
MARKET STREET .
    “Really?” I was kind of hoping it would be another famous road, like Broadway or Fifth Avenue. There’s a Market Street in Cobourg, right behind Victoria Hall. You can get pretty good sausage there on Saturday mornings, when the farmers sell from the backs of their pickup trucks. Good vegetables too, my mom says, but who cares about vegetables? The best brussels sprouts in the world are still pretty bad.
    “Do you know Market Street?” I ask Frieda.
    She shrugs. “Lower East Side, isn’t it?” she says. “I’ve never been down here before.”
    Bird smiles. “I never been anywhere else.”
    The lady in the van is warming up to us. She waves at us from time to time. When the spare tire is on, and the bolts are tightened, she drives away, still waving. I’m obscurely disappointed. Frieda is cast down too. Bird seems philosophical, picking up the handle to the wagon, stepping forward.
    Norbert is not philosophical.
    –
That’s the thanks we get?
    I can’t resist. “We?” I say. “What did you do?”
    –
hope she runs over broken glass
, he says, as the van turns a corner.
Or giant spikes. I hope she runs over spikes and pops all her tires at once. I hope she gets a speeding ticket. I’ve never seen such narrow selfishness. She’s from New
Jersey, isn’t she? Typical I could tell the moment I saw