Home Sweet Motel Page 4

  As you might’ve guessed, I really wasn’t looking forward to doing that job all by myself. It’s a lot of work. Plus, you have to hold your breath when you clean the tiles underwater. Chlorine stings my eyes.

  But with three friends lending a hand…

  Yep. I was having another one of my famous brainstorms.

  “So, guys,” I said to Pinky, Kip, and Porter, motioning for them to scoot over to the side of the pool, “don’t stare or anything, but see those three college dudes over there? The ones with all the muscles?”

  “Sure,” said Porter. “What about them?”

  “I heard them talking earlier.” I looked around to make sure no one was listening, and lowered my voice. “They’re not really in college. They’re Navy SEALs.”

  “SEALs?” blurted Pinky. “No way! That is so awesome.”

  “Shhh! Dial it down a notch. They’re only on a short break between secret missions. We don’t want to blow their cover.”

  “Sure, sure,” whispered Pinky.

  “What are they doing here?” whispered Porter.

  “Looking for guys our size.”

  “Really?” said Kip. “Why?”

  “Because they’re all too big.”

  “For what?”

  I looked around suspiciously again. “Certain stealthy underwater missions.”

  Pinky, Kip, and Porter looked at each other. Then they looked at me eagerly—the way puppy dogs do when they have no idea what you want them to do but they want to do it anyway.

  “Just look at the muscles on that one guy,” I said, nodding toward the college guy who looked like he was majoring in bodybuilding arts and sciences. “No way could he slip into a tight sewer pipe. He’s too wide. But guys our size? We could do it easy.”

  “And sewer pipes lead everywhere!” said Kip.

  “Sewer pipes and air-conditioning ducts,” added Porter. “Spies use them in the movies all the time.”

  “Those three SEALs are here on a scouting mission,” I told my friends.

  “They’re looking for baseball players?” asked Pinky.

  “No! Talented individuals of a certain size who can hold their breath and do stuff underwater.”

  “What kind of stuff?” asked Porter.

  “Tasks. Chores. Anything that requires stamina and a good pair of lungs.” I used my foot to slide my bucket full of scrubbing tools closer to the lip of the pool. “Maybe even scrubbing the sides of a swimming pool. It doesn’t really matter. If any of those guys see kids our size with potential, they’re supposed to radio their commanding officers immediately.”

  “Hey,” said Pinky, “what exactly are you doing with that bucket full of brushes, P.T.?”

  “Just another one of my chores,” I said with a sigh. “Mom told me I needed to, you know, dive in and scrub the sides of the pool sometime today, so—”

  “So you waited until the Navy SEALs got here?” said the Kipster, like he just figured out what I was up to.

  I shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “You think you’re the only one around here who wants to go on top-secret commando sewer missions with Navy SEALs?” Porter asked angrily.

  He reached up, grabbed a brush, and dove under the water.

  Pinky and Kip were right behind him.

  “Hey, you guys! You took all the brushes! No fair!”

  “Maybe the SEALs need a leaf skimmer, too.Show ’em what you’ve got, P.T.,” cracked Kip before plunging underwater.

  So my friends scrubbed the sides of the pool for me.

  I ambled over to ask the biggest muscleman for a little help.

  “Excuse me, sir. Do you know how to work a walkie-talkie?”

  “Well, duh.”

  “Can you show me?”

  The guy grabbed my radio and pressed the button.

  “Breaker, breaker, one-nine,” he said, cracking up his friends. “Do you have your ears on?”

  A voice crackled out of the speaker: “What? Who is this?” Grandpa. “Identify yourself. Over.”

  “Say you’re calling for P.T.”

  The college guy jabbed the talk button again. “I’m calling for P.T.”

  “Oh, I see him.” Grandpa waved at me from the window of his workshop. “Come on in, P.T. It’s lunchtime. Over.”

  That’s when my three friends bobbed up to the surface of the pool, proudly brandishing their brushes.

  They climbed out just in time to hear the muscular “Navy SEAL” send a very important radio transmission to his commanding officer: “Roger that, sir. Ten-four. Over and out.”

  I went to join the guys.

  “Wow,” said Pinky. “Was he just talking to his boss?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  “Awesome,” said Kip. “We’re going to be super- secret sewer spies!”

  I grinned.

  You see how powerful a story can be?

  Sometimes, if you tell it just right, it’ll even do your chores for you.

  “I heard them say they have to check out some other motels,” I told the guys as the “Navy SEALs” and their friends drifted away from the pool. “But I think you guys definitely have a shot.”

  “Awesome!” said Pinky.

  “Yeah,” I said, pretending to be bummed, “for you three.”

  “You snooze, you lose,” said Porter, because he always says annoying stuff like that. Sometimes he even rhymes.

  “So,” said Pinky, probably feeling sorry for me, “you wanna go grab lunch? We saw the Johnny Meatballs food truck cruising Gulf Boulevard.”

  “No thanks,” I said. “I have to meet with my grandfather.” I gestured toward his workshop near the pool.

  I didn’t want to tell the guys the truth: I didn’t have any money for lunch, and I still needed to pass out towels and bottled water for the rest of the afternoon.

  “Grandpa and I are discussing what new attractions we should install.”

  “Frisbee golf!” said Kip. “I keep telling you, P.T., you guys could lay out an insane Frolf course on your property!”

  “I’ll mention it to Grandpa. And if you guys hear from the Navy…”

  “We won’t tell you!” said Pinky. “Because it’s supposed to be a top-secret operation!”

  I shot him a wink. “Exactly.”

  “Catch you later, P.T.,” said Porter as the three of them sloshed off in their wet bathing suits to go chase down the meatball truck.

  When I was sure they were gone, I went to the towel heap the college kids had left behind and picked up my walkie-talkie.

  “Grandpa? This is P.T. Do you, uh, have your ears on?”

  “Ten-four. Over.”

  “So, what’s for lunch? I’m starving. Over.”

  “Bologna and yellow mustard on white bread. Over.”

  “Again? Over.”

  “It’s soft, P.T. At my age, softness is a very important food feature. I have Cel-Ray soda, too. Over.”

  “I’ll take a sandwich. You can have my soda. Over.”

  At least the workshop was indoors. That meant it would be shady. Too bad it didn’t have air-conditioning.

  “If I wanted to live inside a refrigerator my whole life,” he’d say if I complained, “I’d be a hard-boiled egg!”

  Shirts sweat-glued to our backs, Grandpa and I sat down on wooden crates filled with dusty memorabilia. A cardboard shipping box was our table. Through the window, I could keep my eye on the swimming pool and the gurgling frog slide. I noticed that Grandpa was finished painting the toothy smile on his Hawaiian Happy-Stinky Fruit.

  Grandpa pulled a bologna sandwich wrapped in wax paper out of the crinkled brown paper grocery bag he toted his lunch in to the workshop every day. I think he’s the only guy alive who still uses wax paper instead of ziplock bags.

  I was so hungry that the sandwich—which turned into a bologna dough ball on the roof of my mouth—actually tasted pretty good.

  “Don’t tell your mother, but I bopped you a free Coke.”

  He hand
ed me a frosty glass bottle. Yep. At the Wonderland, we still have Coke in bottles, not cans. Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray, on the other hand, is like tuna fish. It only comes in cans.

  “We probably shouldn’t be taking free stuff from the vending machines anymore, Grandpa.”

  “Don’t worry so much, kiddo. We Wilkies are like cats. We always land on our feet.”

  “But the banker…”

  “Banker, schmanker. Don’t worry about it. When we beat Disney World and become the ‘Hottest Family Attraction in the Sunshine State,’ our money worries will be over.”

  “Awesome,” I said. “When, exactly, is the contest?”

  “Voting starts in June. Just in time for family vacation season. The winner will be announced in August.”

  “This is March.”

  “Yep. Only five more months to go!”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell Grandpa that August would be way too late.

  We didn’t have five months.

  We had less than four weeks.

  “We just need to drum up a little extra business is all,” said Grandpa. “Fill all the rooms.”

  “Okay. But how?”

  “Well, back in the day, I used to put on my red-striped jacket, grab my megaphone, and work Gulf Boulevard like a carnival barker. Oh, I had some good patter, P.T. Good patter…”

  “We could do it again,” said Grandpa. “We already have the steak. All we need is a little sizzle.”

  “Huh?”

  “We have all the bigger-than-life characters. We have a rocket ship and a giant dinosaur. We just have to turn them into something bigger than molded fiberglass and paint.”

  “And, uh, how do we do that?”

  “P.T., tell me: what makes Walt Disney World so special?”

  “Um, everything?”

  “Nope, nope, nope. It’s the stories. Why do kids want to meet all those Disney princesses at the castle? Because they know their fairy tales backward and forward before their families even pull into the parking lot. Pirates of the Caribbean? That ride tells such a great story they turned it into four different movies.”

  “But we don’t have those kinds of attractions. We just have a bunch of statues.”

  “So? If you didn’t know him from his cartoons, what’s Mickey Mouse except a large rodent who likes to dress up in human clothes? Dino, the dinosaur out front? I used to tell folks he was the sole survivor of a prehistoric ice age. That he fell asleep in an arctic glacier, thawed out during the heat wave of 1963, and made his way down to Milwaukee because—little-known fact—dinosaurs love bratwurst! He also had a hankering for cheese. ‘Gouda cheese, not the bad-a stuff.’ That line always earned me a few chuckles.”

  “A dinosaur who crawled out of his glacier so he could head down to Milwaukee for sausage and cheese?”

  “Exactly! See, I wanted to tie my story in with the Morty D. Mouse statue out back. Since I bought that statue from a gourmet cheese shop outside Sheboygan, Morty already had the cheese wedge and the sausage link.”

  “That’s ridiculous, Grandpa.”

  “No, P.T., it’s fun. You stage that kind of silliness down here in Florida, and—bingo—you just created a little ‘fun in the sun,’ which is exactly what all those folks getting off the airplanes in Orlando and Tampa are looking for. The wonders and marvels they just can’t find in the cold gray slush of everyday life.”

  Grandpa put down his sandwich and soda. He rummaged in a box and found a faded comic book–style brochure with Dino on the cover.

  “Tourists from Wisconsin? They loved hearing about Dino and the cheese. They could relate.”

  “What about everybody else?”

  Grandpa sighed. “They just wanted to have some fun. See their kids smile. And, at the very end of my spiel, when I hit the play button on my eight-track tape deck and Dino roared? Everybody screamed like they were on a roller coaster.”

  Grandpa laughed, remembering it all. That made me smile.

  When he was all laughed out, he belched up another cloud of Cel-Ray salad gas.

  “Of course,” he said, rubbing his face, “no one wants to hear my corny old stories anymore.”

  “But it used to work?”

  “Like a hot knife through presliced butter. Because everybody needs a little wonder in their lives, P.T. That’s why vacations were invented. To give us room for amazement!”

  I was smiling up until Grandpa used the word “room.”

  It made me remember how many of ours were empty.

  Grandpa’s speech made me wonder (pun intended): would his corny old stunts still work?

  Were people still hungry for marvels and stories and wonders to behold—stuff they didn’t have back home because they were too busy going to school or working or raising a family?

  If Grandpa’s stories were a little out of date, could I come up with some funny new ones?

  I checked my watch. Our lunch break was almost over. It was time for a crazy new idea.

  “You have your walkie-talkie, right, Grandpa?”

  “Sure.”

  “And you can see the pool…”

  “I hope so. It’s right out the window, P.T.”

  “Can you do a good frog voice?”

  “You mean like dis?” He sounded like a frog from New Yawk.

  “Perfect. Go to channel three on your walkie-talkie. We may not want Mom listening in on this.”

  We both twisted our channel knobs.

  I went to the clothes rack and grabbed his faded red-striped jacket. I rummaged around a little and found Grandpa’s old bullhorn and straw hat. It was two sizes too big and wobbly on my head, but it would work.

  “P.T.?” Grandpa asked with the old twinkle back in his eyes. “What exactly are we going to do?”

  “It’s sizzle time!”

  Grandpa put fresh batteries into the megaphone.

  I pressed the talk button.

  It squealed with feedback.

  When nobody was looking (okay, there were only about eight people hanging out around the pool, and most of them were napping or flapping their water wings), I hid my walkie-talkie inside the mouth of the frog slide.

  Once everything was in place, I nodded to Grandpa, who was watching from his workshop window.

  He nodded back.

  I clicked on the bullhorn and started babbling.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, this is your pool attendant, P. T. Wilkie, speaking. Welcome to the Wonderland, the most amazing motel on Florida’s Gulf coast. Home to marvels to behold and stories to be told! No, I’m not talking about my grandfather or even Cheeseball the cat. I’m talking about Freddy the Frog.”

  I gestured grandly to the gurgling waterslide.

  “Now, I couldn’t help but notice that earlier today, some of you kids were brave enough to actually climb inside Freddy’s mouth and slide down his slippery tongue. How many of you did that?”

  The five kids gawking up at me from the shallow end of the pool all raised their hands.

  “And I’m gonna do it again,” said a boy.

  “You are?” I said through the megaphone so Grandpa could hear me. “Well, Freddy, what do you think about that?”

  Grandpa, ever the showman, picked up on his cue.

  “You try it, kiddo,” grumbled a voice from inside the frog, “and I might have to eat youse.”

  The kid’s eyes opened wide.

  “Now, Freddy,” I said, “that’s not nice. These children are our guests.”

  “I know, I know. But I ain’t had no breakfast this mornin’. And guests taste better than flies.”

  A girl in a pink bathing suit padded around the edge of the pool and propped her hands on her hips.

  “Is that frog really talking?”

  “I think he’s really talking,” I said.

  “I think I’m really talking, too!” snapped Grandpa.

  I handed the megaphone to the little girl. “You’re not real,” she shouted at the frog.

  “Oh, y
es I am,” crackled Grandpa through the walkie-talkie. “I’m green, ain’t I?”

  I took back my megaphone.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, Freddy here is what marine biologists call a talking sea frog. Yes, he may seem a little stiff, but that’s because talking sea frogs don’t move around much once the sun is up. If they stay perfectly still, they think nobody can see them.”

  “I’m blending in here,” said Grandpa. “Disappearing amidst the flora and fauna.”

  “Freddy hopped out of the ocean because he likes to drink swimming-pool water. It tastes a lot better than the salt water in the ocean, which, as you might imagine, can be very salty.”

  “That’s right,” said Grandpa in his gravelly frog voice. “I prefer this water right here. So don’t pee in the pool. I ain’t interested in drinking lemonade! By the way, kid, I love your pink bathing suit.”

  Now the girl’s father was up, laughing and aiming his cell phone at the scene.

  “You can see my bathing suit?” the girl said with a gasp.

  “Of course I can,” said Freddy the Frog. “Why do you think I have such big eyes? So I can see stuff.”

  “How many fingers am I holding up?”

  “Two.”

  “Nuh-uh. This is three.”

  “I know. Two fingers and one thumb.”

  Everybody around the pool cracked up.

  “So, Freddy,” I say, “what’s your favorite year?”

  “Leap year, of course,” answered Grandpa, because he’s the one who taught me that corny joke in the first place. “And do you know why I like to go to the mall?”

  “No, Freddy. Why?”

  “I like to go hopping. You know what I order every time I go to Burger King?”

  “No,” I said, playing along. (I think Grandpa might’ve memorized a frog joke book back in the day.)

  “French flies and a diet croak.”

  We did this back-and-forth bit for maybe five minutes. The kids laughed their heads off.

  The parents were smiling, happy to see their kids having so much (you guessed it) fun in the sun.

  “Excuse me,” one of the fathers said to me.