Free The Great Circus Train Robbery by Nancy Means Wright Page A

now,” she said.
    “Careful of what?”
    “Of anything that might happen,” she said, thinking of the mustached man and Hackberry racing off like he was escaping a man with a big stick.
    “I can handle it,” Spence said, squaring his shoulders.
    “Tell me again how I was. Did I do good?” Tulip asked after Spence left. And Zoe realized there was one more tricky aspect to her job: To stroke Tulip’s ego.
    And trickiest of all: To ask her busy mom to sew up the ripped costume.
     

15
     

THINGS ARE BREAKING DOWN ALL OVER
     
    Spence hurried back to Hackberry’s school bus and rapped on the door.   When there was no response he rapped again. “Hackberry? I’ve got your train. Hackberry?”
    Still no reply, so he pushed open the door and went in. The place was even more of a mess than when they’d left: zigzagging rail cars, banana peels, socks and shirts in fallen heaps on the floor. Obviously the man lived alone, with no one, like Spence’s mom, to say, ‘Pick up your socks. Make your bed.’
    Spence envied the clown. He hated having to make his bed and pick up his socks. Though he did like his music corner clean. The cello was his baby: if it got dusty, it didn’t play right. Spence liked a deep mellow sound, like the soundtrack in a movie he’d seen with dawn coming up, spreading honey over the world.
    He heard a squealing sound behind the partition that separated living from sleeping space, and there was Sweet Gum, perched on the head piece of the antique single bed. At least it looked like an antique bed with its four bedposts. Underneath was an old wooden chest, or trunk; he started to open it, but then felt guilty. He wouldn’t want anyone opening the chest of drawers in his bedroom.
    Should he go looking for Hackberry? Was that part of his job? He was just a volunteer, but he hadn’t been voted most conscientious in his class for nothing. And he worried that Hackberry seemed so scared of the world. A girl in his class took medication for her moods, and one time she’d gone off the stuff and tried to swallow a bottle of her mother’s aspirin. Uh oh. Would Hackberry do that? What had frightened him so much out there during the rehearsal when there were no spectators?
    Except, of course, for the mustached man in the black tie who was probably the director. Spence thought of the substitute teacher who got so mad at one of the kids that he wrestled him to the floor and sat on him. Had Hackberry been sat on like that?
    Spence had no answers. He just wanted to find Zoe and go home. But when he left the sleeping area, the monkey leapt on his back and clung. It felt like a bookbag, full of fat textbooks. On the way out, Sweet Gum leaned over to snatch a banana from a bowl and nearly bowled him over. But he got his balance back, and together they descended the steps.
    The rehearsal was over, the outdoors flooded with performers, all laughing or juggling colored pins or throwing frisbees or sucking on bottles of soda pop—no tall man in black among them. He spotted Zoe walking behind Tulip, holding the back of her open costume. Then oops! A dwarf came running, rammed into the pair, and the costume billowed wide to reveal her underpants. Spence grinned. So did the dwarf, and ran off.
    “Little beast!” Tulip hollered. Then she laughed, stepped out of the torn costume, waved it in the air like a flag, and trotted up the steps of her RV.
    “Zoe!” Spence caught her just as she started up behind Tulip.
    “What are you doing with that monkey?” she asked, and he spilled out the tale of Hackberry’s disappearance.  “I think he shut the monkey in the bus and then took off somewhere.  Or someone else brought it back.”
    “Someone else? Who?”
    “That’s what we have to find out.”
    “That’s what you have to find out. Right now I’ve got my hands full. I’ve got to get Tulip’s costume fixed. Or make her a new one by Saturday. I have to go in and take her measurements.”
    “Big,” he said,