The TollTaker

Sometimes the dues cannot be endured... Excerpt from The TollTaker


Chapter 1



“Because Bobby, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles.”

God! I’d hated that saying. It had been her answer for everything. Well, Bobby, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. Because, Bobby, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. You know, Bobby, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. I was eight years old, my whole life in disarray, and it was all because of some stupid, goddamn, fucking, broken cookie.

“But I didn’t wanna move. I hate it here. I hate it!” I plopped down in the kitchen chair and folded my arms across my chest.

Mom was kneeling amongst a city of unpacked boxes, with her head buried in the cabinet under the sink.

“Bobby, don’t start,” she warned. The small space under the cabinet muffled her voice.

“But I do! It’s no fun here. I don’t like it.”

She pulled a strand of chestnut hair out of her eye. “You haven’t even given it a chance. We just got here.”

“But why did we-”

“Because it was time we moved out of Grammy and Pawpaw’s. It’s time we moved out on our own.”

Liar! Liar, liar, LIAR! The words screamed in my head. It was because of Ni-ick. Nick Ma-don-na. The jerk who helped us move-right downstairs from him!

I may not have understood what an ulterior motive was, but I sure as hell knew he had some reason other than just being a nice guy.

“Did you see all the trees behind the apartment? You know, there’s a creek behind us, too. Why don’t you go out and play?”

I turned and trudged out the door. It was no use. We were already moved, and when you’re only eight years old you’ve got nothing to say about what happens in your life because . . .

Because that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

“I’m going to order a pizza in about an hour,” Mom called after me. “Don’t go too far.”

Don’t go too far. Did you see all the trees? And there’s a lovely creek, just don’t go too far. What does she expect me to do? Sit in the yard and look? Hey, maybe when the pizza comes we can set it on the table and just sit around and smell it.

Why, oh why did we ever have to move?

I’ve tossed the sequence of events that occurred during the summer of ‘73 around in my head for the past twenty-seven years. Maybe if my dad hadn’t been drafted when I was four, maybe if we hadn’t moved, maybe if I had stood up to Rudy and Bruce, then maybe I would have never ended up in that storm drain. . . .

Maybe when ifs and ands are pots and pans the whole world’ll be a kitchen. Ultimately, I suppose it wouldn’t have made any difference, and do you know why? Because that was how the cookie crumbled.

My dad was drafted, Mom and I did just move, I didn’t stand up to Rudy and Bruce, and I did end up in that storm drain, alone, the only one willing to fight to keep my father alive.

I firmly shut the door (slamming it would have been pushing my luck) behind me, and paused in the open alcove overlooking the street.

Our alcove had two doors. The one on the right belonged to Mom and me, and the one in the back of the four-foot recess led upstairs to Nick Madonna’s apartment directly above ours. The building we lived in contained eight two-bedroom apartments. Beside our alcove was another alcove with two apartments that were mirror images of Nick’s and ours. The four apartments on the other side of the building mirrored these four.

I stepped down on the platform that gave access to the four apartments on my side, and paused again before climbing down the stairs and crossing the raised concrete walkway that led to the sidewalk.

I wandered behind the building to the backyard. The yard stretched about fifty feet beyond the building before dropping down a fifteen-foot slope into a wooded lot. The lot butted up against a large grass field over to the left, and extended to the right for about a tenth of a mile. Somewhere through those trees was the Wingalot Creek, which bordered the suburban Philadelphia subdivision of Greenlawn.

I forgot my anger as I clambered down the steep slope of rock, dirt, and broken chunks of cement that had evidently been used to fill the land the apartment building rested on, and I entered the woods. It was a climbing paradise that would have been the envy of any eight-year-old. Towering trees, some fallen, some standing, created a veritable jungle. Spats of sunlight leaked through the green canopy overhead and blazed brightly on the floor of soft, damp, dead leaves. I scampered quickly across the bole of one fallen tree, and I embarked upon a journey to discover the creek.

The trees were spaced generously, and after about a hundred feet into the wooded lot, I saw a gap in the trunks that I identified as the creek. I hurried forward. It was about twenty to twenty-five feet across with a depth of maybe three feet in the deepest spots. A well-worn path paralleled the bank on either side. The cool water, the damp earth, and the shade of the leafy canopy felt better than air-conditioning. Even though the water held a greenish hue, it looked cool and inviting.

Grammy and Pawpaw didn’t have a creek near their house, I thought. It could be fun here. . . .

No! It didn’t matter, and I made up my mind right then. I didn’t want to live there, and I wasn’t ever going to like it.

Well, maybe when Dad got home I would.

Dad had been drafted in March of 1969. He was supposed to have been classified as a 3-A because he was married and had a child, but in March his notice came back anyway. He reported to Fort Dix in the beginning of April, completed sixteen weeks of basic training, and then came home for a few weeks before shipping out for good. In June of the following year, Mom was notified that he was missing-in-action. He and another man had gone down a tunnel to clear it of any V.C. They went in without a radio for fear a sudden transmission could give them away, and neither one came back out. Reinforcements were called and the tunnel revealed miles of subterranean passages and chambers. Neither Dad nor his partner had been found.

None of us wanted to really believe Dad was dead, but after two years with no word, Mom started to get a little too friendly with Nick. After Nixon announced the conclusion of Operation Homecoming and the return of the last of the U.S. troops from Vietnam this past March, Mom became even friendlier with Nick. So friendly that now we lived downstairs from him.

But in spite of more than 591 prisoners of war returning, 2,500 were still missing. Dad was one of them. But he was going to come home. I knew he was. And things would change once Dad got home.

I turned left on the path and followed the creek upstream. Along the creek, the wooded lot and the field were separated by a small grove of young sycamores, and just past that I came to the storm drain.

The cement tunnel was four feet in diameter, and its mouth was backed with a slab of weather-bleached concrete. In the bottom of the tunnel, a small stream of water about an inch and a half deep spilled out of the mouth and into a three-foot-deep concrete channel. The water ran about twenty feet down the channel and emptied into the creek.

I jumped into the channel and peered inside the entrance. A cool draft gently brushed my face. The sides faded into black after about twenty feet, and I wondered: What was beyond the darkness?

Maybe it led to the center of the earth? Or maybe it led to a secret hideout like the Bat Cave. I heard that if you dug all the way down into the center of the earth you would end up in China. I’d seen Bugs Bunny do it once, and even though I knew he was a cartoon, I wondered if it couldn’t be done. Maybe the tunnel could lead to Vietnam? Maybe it led all the way to Cu Chi? Maybe I could go find Dad myself.

I ducked my head and took two steps inside, half standing, half crouching. This was a real tunnel I could enter. I had always gazed with fascination at the steel grates covering storm drains along the streets. Ever since I learned my dad crawled down into tunnels in Nam, I had wanted to do the same. Now here I was. There was no steel grate to prevent me from entering this one.

My heart picked up several beats and I wetted my dry lips with my tongue. Did I dare go any farther? I could hear the drip of water reverberating in the concrete tunnel until it sounded like someone beating on a steel plate with a rock. I felt like Jacques Cousteau exploring the unknown.

“Hello?” lo lo lo lo

“Hey!” hey hey hey hey

I strained to see what was beyond the darkness. It almost looked as if something was there, a shape moving in the dark, just beyond the light. It wasn’t anything I saw as much as felt. It was like I saw with my mind instead of with my eyes. I wanted to run.

“Don’t be a baby,” I murmured to myself.

I was eight. I didn’t even believe in Santa Claus anymore. I knew there were no boogie monsters hiding under the bed at night. There were no dragons hiding in my closet.

I took five steps.

The darkness crept closer, my breath came quicker, and my stomach felt like a nest of squirming, fuzzy caterpillars.

I said hello again, this time much more hesitantly. The tunnel whispered the last syllable back to me.

The dripping water was louder now, and the buzz of locusts, the singing of birds, the squawking of squirrels was gone. Only the dripping of water, like the clanging of metal plates, remained. I thought of my dad in some North Vietnamese prison, huddled in the dark, eating spiders for dinner, and I knew I had to push on. What could there be in this tunnel anyway? Monsters? No way! Not a chance. I couldn’t believe in that crap anymore. Partially crouched with my feet straddling the water, I stretched my arms out until my hands touched the concrete walls, and I waddled ten feet deeper....