Copyright © 2020 by Tim Wynne-Jones

  Published in Canada and the USA in 2020 by Groundwood Books

  “The Journey to Ompah” was originally published in Like Father, Like Son?, edited by Tony Bradman (Kingfisher Books, 2006). “In a House Built Out of Dragonfly Wings” was originally published in Beyond the Rainbow Warrior, edited by Michael Morpurgo (Greenpeace & Pavilion Books, 1996). “Christmas with Auntie Annie Ping-Pong” was originally published in All in the Family: Stories that Hit Home, edited by Tony Bradman (A & C Black, 2008).

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press

  groundwoodbooks.com

  We gratefully acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Government of Canada.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: War at the Snow White Motel and other stories / Tim Wynne-Jones

  Other titles: Short stories. Selections

  Names: Wynne-Jones, Tim, author.

  Description: Includes 6 new and 3 previously published stories.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190155353 |

  Canadiana (ebook) 20190155361 | ISBN 9781773060477 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781773060484 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781773060491 (Kindle)

  Classification: LCC PS8595.Y59 A6 2020 | DDC jC813/.54—dc23

  Jacket and interior design by Michael Solomon

  Jacket art by Byron Eggenschwiler

  This book is for my writing amigos: Ken Oppel, Richard Scrimger and Arthur Slade. The next round’s on me, guys.

  Contents

  War at the Snow White Motel

  Ant and the Praying Mantis

  The Pledge

  The Journey to Ompah

  In a House Built out of Dragonfly Wings

  Jack

  The Stuffed Toy

  The Brotherhood of ­Interstellar Dirt

  Christmas with Auntie Annie Ping-Pong

  Afterword

  About the Author

  “When you get to the top of the mountain,

  keep climbing.”

  — Zen saying

  War at the Snow White Motel

  It’s August the fourth, 1964, and we’re spending the night at the Snow White Motel in Vermont. We’re on our way from Ottawa to Maine for a vacation. Dad’s gone into the office, which is through a bright red door in Snow White’s yellowy-gold dress. The top part of Snow White towers above the office. She’s wearing her black vest and puffy blue sleeves and that high white collar just like in the Disney movie, and she has her hands up to either side of her head in surprise, which is easy to understand. It would be pretty surprising having people coming in and out of your dress all day long.

  Dad’s taking a long time. I stare at the vacancy sign on the lawn. It’s Doc the Dwarf holding a wooden plaque, but there’s a little flap before the word “Vacancy.” I guess that behind that flap is the word “No.” So why is Dad taking so long? Maybe there’s a skill-testing question? You can’t stay at the motel unless you can name all the dwarfs. Maybe he needs my help?

  “Do you think Dad needs my help?” I ask Mum.

  “No, Rex, you just stay put,” she says.

  “I don’t know why Dad won’t let us get out,” says Annie Oakley. She’s drooping beside me and just as sweaty as I am.

  “It’s because of the highway,” says Mum.

  “It’s a pretty poky highway,” says Annie. “What does he think I’m going to do, run out in the middle of it?”

  “Yes, probably,” says Mum.

  “Which would make more room back here,” I say and get a pointy elbow right in the ribs.

  “Oww!”

  “I hope we get to stay in the Sleepy cabin,” says Flora Bella, yawning.

  “Will Snow White come and kiss us good night?” asks Rupert. He sounds a little scared. He’s kneeling on the front seat looking up at Snow White, who is smiling down on the parking lot. One of her fingers is missing at the first knuckle. There’s bird poop on her shoulder and the paint is peeling on her right cheek, which makes it look as if she’s got acne.

  Mum hugs Rupert. “I’m not sure,” she says. “But I certainly will.” Then she gives him a good tickle. She is so happy to be on holiday. I am, too, but I’m sure tired of being in this car on a hot August afternoon. We’ve been on the road since before it got light.

  There’s only the four of us kids, this time. My two older sisters stayed home because they have summer jobs. It’s sort of too bad, because Letitia would have loved this place. She kind of lives in a fairy tale, even though she’s sixteen. Always dreaming that someday her prince will come.

  “Is the prince in Snow White Charming or is that Cinderella’s guy?” I ask.

  “I think so,” says Mum.

  “Barf,” says Annie Oakley. She hates fairy tales and princesses and princes and … well, pretty well everything. Especially me.

  Finally, Dad comes out of the office holding up two keys attached to wooden dwarfs. Hooray!

  We tumble out of the car and Dad hands Annie a key. It’s Grumpy. Perfect.

  “You two will have to share a cabin,” he says to me and Annie. Not perfect.

  “What?” says Annie. She makes it sound like he just told us the cabin was a snake pit.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I say.

  “You can say that again,” says Annie. “But don’t!” She makes a fist at me.

  “Now, now, you two,” says Mum. “It’s just for one night.”

  My last night on Earth, I find myself thinking.

  * * *

  I sneeze as soon as I step through the doorway.

  “It’s not Sneezy,” says Annie Oakley. “You’re so stupid.”

  “Sorry,” I say.

  “Not as sorry as you’re going to be if you step across this line,” says Annie. She’s plucked a bunch of fake flowers from a vase on the windowsill and is placing them in a line splitting the room in half, with one twin bed on one side and one twin bed on the other. There aren’t many flowers. It’s not much of a wall. But when she finishes, she turns and glares at me.

  “What about the bathroom?” I ask.

  The door is right in the middle.

  “Good idea,” she says. “You can sleep in there!”

  “I just meant —”

  “I know what you meant,” she says and marches along the line of flowers, growling like a tiger in a cage who’d give anything to get out and eat me.

  I shake my head wearily and go sit on my bed. It’s got a Grumpy comforter on it. Meanwhile, Annie has grabbed her bathing suit from her suitcase and gone into the bathroom to change. She slams the door. There’s a little desk on my side of the room with a wooden chair. For just a moment I think of sticking the back of that chair under the bathroom doorknob, like they do in movies so that the person in the other room can’t get out. But Annie would get out, even if she had to knock the whole door down. And then it really would be my last night on Earth.

  * * *

  The swimming pool is shaped like a heart. No, wait — it’s an apple. Of course! The poisonous apple Snow took a bite of that sent her into a coma. Sort of weird, really, when you think about it. Who’d want to swim in a poisonous pool? No one by the look of it. The pool is empty. All that delicious coolness just lying there, sparkling in the late afternoon sun.

  There’s music coming from somewhere, Top 40 radio. Right now it’s “The Shoop Shoop Song.” There are a few people tanning on their towels or sitting in deck chairs, soaking up the sun. No one from my family other than Annie. She’s walking around the pool with her arms tight across her chest, glaring at the water as if it’s filled with alligators and she’s trying to decide which one she’s going to wrestle first.

  Poison or not, alligators or not, I’m hot and I want into that pool. I head straight for the diving board, take as big a bounce as I can off the end and cannonball into the water.

  Splash!

  I drift down into the blue coolness, my eyes wide open. Glug, glug, glug. There is only watery sunlight down here, as if the sun was a big yellow china ball that someone smashed into little shards and sprinkled on the blue tile floor. My goggles aren’t on tight enough and water seeps inside, so with a little kick off the bottom I drift to the surface.

  “Hey, you!”

  A voice booms above me. I grab the lip of the pool. I also grab a mouthful of water, which makes me cough and cough. There is a large pair of hairy feet planted right beside my hand. My vision is all swimmy as I look up through goggles full of water — way up, past a pair of Superman legs, a pair of yellow bathing trunks with palm trees on them, a chest big enough to pitch a tent on — to a face glaring down at me as if I am a toad and the only thing stopping him from squashing me is that he doesn’t have his toad-squashing boots on. Then I see the comic book in his hand. It’s sopping wet.

  “What
do you think you’re doing?” he shouts.

  I’m coughing up a lung. That’s what I’m doing! If I were smart, I’d let go of my hold, sink into the deep end and drown.

  Now another guy joins the first. They’re both teenagers, the first with a blond buzz cut and the other with squirrely black hair. They’re wearing shades and glaring at me. “The Shoop Shoop Song” has finished. In the background, Ray Orbison is singing “It’s Over.”

  “I asked you a question,” says Buzzcut.

  “You got a brain in your head?” says Squirrel.

  I cough up some more of the pool and Squirrel steps back as if I’m going to throw up on his feet. Meanwhile, Buzzcut squats down so he’s as near to me as he can get. He’s poised like he’s a catcher and my head is a fastball he’s going to whip to second base as soon as he gets his hands on it.

  “See this?” he says. He holds up the soaking comic book. It’s Strange Tales.

  Squirrel squats beside him. “He asked you if you saw what you did, brat.”

  I nod and gulp and Buzzcut swats me over the head with the soaking comic book. Once, twice, three times.

  “Did you stop to look what you was doing?” shouts Buzzcut. “You ever think about anyone but yourself? What are you, some kinda … some kinda depth charge?”

  It’s a lot of questions and he hasn’t stopped hitting me with the soggy comic. All I can do is avert my eyes and hunch my shoulders and take it, while little wet ragged bits of Captain America fall all around me.

  Slap, slap, slap!

  “Yeah,” says Squirrel, when Buzzcut finally stops to take a breath. “You got any idea what’s going on here?”

  No, I think. No idea at all. And that’s when I see what they can’t see: Annie Oakley sneaking up behind them. She glares at me not to look at her and so I look at Buzzcut and blurt out, “I’m sorry.”

  “As if my life ain’t bad enough,” says Buzzcut. “Jeez, Louise!”

  Meanwhile, Annie has slipped out of her yellow flip-flops and she’s raising her right foot. No, I want to shout but —

  Wham!

  I duck just in time, as Buzzcut goes barreling over my head into the pool.

  “What the —”

  And —

  Bam!

  Squirrel’s next.

  I don’t wait around to see what happens. I clamber out of the pool and take off toward the cabin named Grumpy. Then I stop and turn around.

  The guys are shouting, “No, no! Don’t! Don’t!”

  Annie’s standing right on the edge of the pool with their transistor radio in her hands, holding it high above the water. I’m fifty yards away but I swear I can see the evil gleam in her eyes. I turn and beat it back to the cabin while the Beatles sing “A Hard Day’s Night.”

  * * *

  “They’re going to kill you, you know.”

  I’m sitting on my bed, staring across the borderline of plastic flowers at my fourteen-year-old sister, who’s sitting on her bed scowling back at me.

  “Not if they know what’s good for them,” she says.

  “I don’t think they do,” I say.

  “That’s their problem,” she says.

  “That’s just it. Now it’s our problem, too.”

  She shrugs.

  “Are you really not one bit frightened?”

  She squinches up her face and it’s a bit of a giveaway. She is. But she’s not going to show it, let alone say it. I sigh and shake my head. This could end up being a really hard day’s night. “I sure hope they didn’t see which cabin we’re in.”

  She shrugs. “They try anything, they’ll wish they didn’t,” she says. But then she gets up and walks to the window over the desk and pokes open the curtain. She’s nervously clenching and unclenching the fist of her free hand. I don’t bother telling her she crossed into my half of the room.

  * * *

  The family heads out to a diner across the highway from Snow White. The diner is called Hansel and Gretel’s. We just follow the bread crumbs across the road.

  “Maybe there will be fattened-up little children to eat for dinner,” I say to baby Rupert.

  “I hope not,” he says.

  “Stop that, Rex,” says Mom. “What’s gotten into you?”

  I glance at Annie Oakley, who glares back at me.

  We don’t ever eat out except on holidays and I can have anything I want, so I order a cheeseburger, onion rings, fries and a large root beer. I can’t wait. I can already tell from the aroma of fat in Hansel and Gretel’s that it’s going to be a great dinner.

  And then suddenly it’s not.

  Out the window I see Buzzcut and Squirrel heading over from Snow White right toward the diner. Buzzcut’s got his hands deep in the pockets of his Bermudas and Squirrel’s talking to him, like he’s trying to cheer him up. Buzzcut sure looks like he needs cheering up.

  “Did you see —”

  But Annie pokes me in the ribs with her pointy elbow. I swallow my “Ow!” and glance her way. She saw them, all right.

  “They’ll have to climb over you to get at me,” she whispers, hot in my ear.

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” I say.

  The pretty blonde waitress who took our orders greets Buzzcut and Squirrel at the door. “Hi, Skip,” she says. “Hi, Baxter.” Her name, Penny, is embroidered onto a badge on her chest. Her hair is in a ponytail and her eyes are blue and she gives Skip a peck on the cheek. And as pretty as she is, even that doesn’t lighten his mood.

  I grab a menu and hide behind it as Penny leads them right past our table. Luckily, the menu is really big. Unluckily, it’s not big enough. Baxter steps on my foot as they pass.

  “Oh, sorry,” he says.

  I swallow my “Ow!” again. Maybe “Ow!” is all I’m going to get to eat tonight. When they’ve passed, I turn around in time to see Skip turn and scowl at Annie.

  “Don’t ogle, Rex,” says Mum.

  I turn back. Dad’s disappeared. His head, anyway. It’s behind the newspaper. Mum’s busy with the baby, Flora Bella is coloring the menu with crayon flowers and I don’t want to even look at Annie. So I end up reading the front page of the newspaper Dad’s hiding behind. I don’t read newspapers much, but the headlines grab my eye and before I know it, I’m reading everything.

  Then dinner comes and by now I’m kind of full. Full of worries about Skip and Baxter. Full of worries about the world.

  “What’s wrong with you, Soldier?” says Dad, spying my untouched plate.

  “Nothing,” I say and start eating just so he doesn’t ask any more questions. But my head is spinning over what I read. I turn around and Penny is sitting next to Skip in his booth, her hand resting tenderly on his arm. He looks sad and angry.

  Mum and Dad talk quietly between themselves. Well, Dad talks and Mum says, “Really?” And, “Oh, that must be terrible.” And, “I couldn’t bear that. Poor woman.” I don’t get much of what Dad says, because he’s mumbling from behind his paper, but I know what I’m going to do when we get back to Grumpy.

  Skip ends up leaving alone before his order even arrives, both hands shoved in his shorts as if there’s something important in there he doesn’t want to lose. I watch him cross the parking lot, then stop and glance back. Annie Oakley’s watching his every move. He shakes his head at her and points two fingers at his eyes and then at her. Not a good sign. Annie mumbles something threatening and returns to her dinner, slicing up her food as though it’s the enemy. I watch Skip head toward Snow White, open the red door and head into the office. Snow White throws up her arms in surprise. “Oh, my!” she seems to be saying.

  Baxter stays and ends up with two dinners. Every now and then, he looks up from his food and sneers at us. One time he slices his hand across his neck.

  “Uh-oh,” I mumble.

  Penny has to work, but she looks like she caught whatever it is that’s eating Skip. At one point I notice her leaning on another waitress’s shoulder, crying. Maybe she and Skip broke up. I hate to see her sad, but in one way that would be great. I could stay behind when my parents left tomorrow morning, and when I was eighteen, I could ask Penny out on a date. It’d be a long wait, but I’m a pretty patient person.