Free Journey to an 800 Number by E.L. Konigsburg Page A

put his guitar down and said, “Come here, Bo.” I hesitated. He repeated, “Come here.” I did.
    He put one arm around me and then the other. “Do you know what? I would like to be on that cruise, too. I would like to be going first class. And do you know why? Not because it’s something I want to get in practice for but because I’d like to watch those people. It would be like watching people from another country. And then ever afterwards, I’d know that I had seen something up close that I’d never seen before.” He pushed me away from him, just a little way. Our eyes were on the same level. He said, “Let me ask you this, Bo. Do you think you could visit with me, with Ahmed, as I would visit that cruise? Like a foreigner? Watching the customs and saying, ‘Oh, that’s strange. Oh, that’s new’—but remembering that you’re a visitor, and visitors don’t set the customs; they observe them. Do you think you could do that?”
    “Sure. I could do that,” I said. “But you’re asking me to try to be something I’m not.”
    “How do you know that Mr. Malatesta isn’t asking the same thing?”
    I thought about that awhile before I realized that I didn’t really know what Mr. Malatesta wasasking. Father pulled me toward him. It was a hug.
    “I’ll do it,” I said. He tightened his hold on me. “There’s just one thing more I want to say.”
    “What’s that?”
    “I’m really sorry about Manuelo.”
    “I know, Bo. I know you are. You probably will be for a long time.”
    “And I really don’t like camels.”
    “That’s two things, Bo; that’s two things.”
    We went to bed, and I felt ready to be a stowaway in Father’s summer. I even felt a little anxious to.

4
    Our next stop was Oakes’ Dude Ranch outside Denver. We took two days getting there. Father’s strength was at about three-fourths, and remembering how the disease had wiped me out, I could tell that he was pushing it, so I made up a few extra hunger pangs and a few extra calls of nature that I described as urgent. Father never suspected what I was doing and never got impatient with me for doing it.
    Father said that I would like Oakes. It was a big place where conventions brought people by the busload for an evening’s or an afternoon’s entertainment. They had a big ranch meal with steaks grilled on the outdoor grills. In the evening some of the ranch hands would sing around a campfire. And the people would ride horses. Father had been bringing Ahmed for the past five years because being that there were more Eastern city folk at these conventions than almost anything else, they felt awkward about riding horses. But since no one knew how to ride a camel and everyone lookedawkward doing it, Ahmed had been a big hit, and they had invited Father back year after year. We would be eating with the conventioneers, he said. Gave them a better feeling to be eating with the ranch hands. They thought it was more authentic, and it gave them a chance to talk to someone who didn’t do the same daily things they did. The ranch hands all doubled at waiting tables plus something else: like singing or helping people on the horses or doing rope tricks.
    “Conventions are funny things, Bo,” he said. Father had taken to calling me Bo all the time now, and I hardly reminded him about it anymore. Actually, I had altogether stopped reminding him.
    “Conventions are a way of life,” he said.
    Sabrina had said the same thing.
    “Everyone comes together united by something. They’re all doctors or they’re all doctors of cancer or they’re all doctors of cancer of the pancreas. Or the liver or the esophagus. But, here’s the funny thing about the people. I’ve never seen them at their meetings, but they never talk about what it is that unites them when they’re not at a meeting. Houses. They talk a lot about houses and the cost of them. And the stock market. And the cost of stocks. That’s what they talk about mainly: what things