How did I get trapped in that worm hole? Was it the total eclipse of the sun that did it? That was cool, and I don't just mean the temperature drop! Was it the Great Glass Elevator, and the busy summer season associated with same? *shakes head* Whatever, I was gone, but now I'm back. If this were Narnia, a place I've read about, now would be the same instant I left, but it's not, it's later: muchlater. I do hope you'll forgive me. Onward!
Later that evening, Noah grilled Nora about the Chocolate Cows.
"What do you mean he has pastures below the Factory?"
"He has Factory below the Factory, and more below that. You can't imagine," answered Nora, fluffing her pillow.
"How is that possible?" Noah sat back. "What does he do for light?"
"He has lights. They're everywhere you can think of, but out of the way; you hardly notice most of them… The way you hardly notice the sun, and he says they're like the sun."
"Sun lamps? Willy has sun lamps? Can you imagine how much energy those take?" Noah's hands danced in the air, as though the energy he was imagining were moving them.
Her husband was becoming uncharacteristically animated, and Nora looked at him with concern. "Lights, dear, there're not lamps. Lamps sit on tables." Noah was sitting straighter, as if the electricity moving his hands were flowing through all of him. Nora's concern grew. "Are you all right, dear? How are you going to go to sleep, if you get all excited like this? Please don't worry about it. Willy has it all under control."
Having settled herself, Nora glanced Noah's way to see if he were inclined to take her advice, with her hand pausing on the switch of the lamp on the bedside table beside her to underscore her point about lamps. With a shrug, Noah nodded, and Nora went ahead.
"Good night, dear," she offered, in the now darkened room.
Half-heartedly returning the wish, Noah lay down. Silence reigned for a good five minutes before he popped up again.
"Where does he get the power from? To run them?"
Nora's voice was muffled by her pillow. "I'm sure I don't know, dear."
Noah thought of the generators it must take to provide it. "Didn't you ask him?"
"No, dear, I didn't. The cows were too adorable to worry about trifles. If you want to know so much, you ask him."
Accepting defeat, Noah, resigned himself to the idea of loose threads—wires?—tickling at his brain all night. "I'd do that, dear, if I ever ran into him. I work all day, and I'm not getting the impression he asked us here to become his dinner companions."
Nora laughed softly. "I'm not either, dear, but you can catch him when he takes Charlie to school."
Reviewing that development in his mind, Noah whistled softly through his teeth. Stories told by his father in the firelight turning into the man himself escorting their son to school ... it was more than a mind could take in. "Sure; sure I could," agreed Noah, doing his best to take it all in stride, the way Nora seemed to be. Tucking the coverlet under his chin, Noah settled again, murmuring his latest thought: "It's a topsy-turvy world we live in, my dear; a topsy-turvy world."
Next morning, Ahlia delivered a note telling Charlie to leave for school an hour earlier than his usual time. Charlie and family had scampered to make it so, and seeing Willy joining him not far from the Factory, Charlie was surprised at what he saw. Willy was surprised to see Noah tailing Charlie.
"Problems?"
Noah fiddled with the cap he'd taken off his head and now held in his hands. "Nora told me about the pastures. May I see them? May I see the machines that make them possible?"
"Um..." This wasn't what Willy was expecting. Territory issues maybe, but not this request. The cap in Noah's hand was in danger of becoming frayed. Willy answered. "No problemo, but it won't be today. This weekend."
Nodding as he heard the words, a grin lighting up his face, Noah took off, his cap slapped back into place. "Great," they heard him call out. "See ya then."
"That was fast!" said Willy, with a look of confusion. "Did he think I was going to change my mind if he stayed?"
Charlie had heard all of his father's plans and wants at breakfast, and with old news not interesting him, he moved on to new news, impatience making him bold.
"Willy!"
Such animation! "Charlie!"
"You look like yourself!"
"'Course I do," squeaked the man-of-the-hour, falling into step. "I am myself! I'm always myself. Aren't you?"
"But your hair—"
"Yes, my hair, my way," agreed Willy, "and yet, not my hat! Or my Nerds!" With a mischievous grin and a pat to his loosened locks, with a flip of his hand Willy dismissed Charlie's concerns and explained. "I heard a story yesterday. It was about you. In it, I heard that an interloper was pestering you, and so today, I've sent me, as pestering interlopers are not allowed. No, siree, Bob—not meaning my haircut—they're not!"
Checking to see that Charlie had an answering smile, and seeing he did, feeling the subject closed, Willy let his mischievous grin fade. He had good reason to think that an interloper—a real interloper—wasn't far in the offing. Libby had called at five in the morning with the news:
"I say, Willy, your father is going home today. I thought you'd want to know."
'Home? Home where?' Something sly crept in. 'Isn't he a lot of work?'
'Home work, my boy? Are you implying homework?'
Willy grinned, while wincing at the appellation. He'd not been sure Libby would get the joke, and with deference to age, he'd let the other slide. Libby had gotten it, and that was something.
'I say, Willy, sorry, old habits… Strictly speaking, Wilbur is work, but it's to his home he goes, and on your nickel. He's taking round-the-clock nursing care with him.'
The slightest of pauses. 'Do I care?'
'Clever, but this isn't a joke, Willy. I say, you know one of the nurses.'
'I do? I'm pretty sure I don't.'
Libby couldn't help a smile. 'Oh, but you do; the flowers you sent the nurse in question were well received: so well received, and so convincing, I might add, was your note, you've convinced her that she'll meet the genuine you, if she only makes herself available at your father's house, where she's sure you're sure to turn up.'
Pleased with himself, Libby waited through the ensuing deliberation.
'You mean Gertrude? Gertrude of the Night Guards? She's being a silly. 'Sides, she's already met the genuine me.'
'That's the one! Your father has assured Nurse Grimes that the implied promise of your note will indeed come to pass. I say, my dear Willy, she's taking vacation to do it. She's the night supervisor. And she doesn't know you were you. I say, do you see what you've done? Bother it, I'm picking up your syntax!'
Peals of laughter rang down the line. 'I'm an influence! Grimes? Her name is Grimes?' Laughing as hard as he was, Willy held the phone away from himself. Catching his breath, he put the parts back in place. 'Germs are her foe, and her name is Grimes? That's a grim grime crime!'
Libby was treated to another fit of giggles, followed by a tangent. Tension, he reflected: it had to go somewhere. Nonsense was as good a place as any.
'That means her initials are GG. Great glass, she's almost the GGE! 'Course she's not.' Willy paused, winding down, wondering if there were anything more he might want to say. Searching his mind, there was. 'Convey my condolences, and tell her to pay herself a lot. What of the Blob?'
'Felix? He hangs about. He wants dirt on you, and your Daddy dearest keeps promising it to him.'
'He's not my dearest daddy,' said Willy, mulling over what he was hearing as he hunched over his desk. He mulled his way right through the part where it was Libby's turn to talk—and Libby hadn't taken it—before he went on. 'Just think of all that disappointment, right around the corner, for both of them. Heck, for all three of them! There's not a speck of dirt anywhere around me,' Willy sniffed, 'and I wouldn't be caught dead at Dede's house. Byyeee! Thanks for the intel.'
Click! The sound of the handset, hitting its cradle.
"But that is your hat."
Charlie's assertion brought Willy back to now.
"It's not. It looks like it, but it's a coachman's hat. They're not as tall as a top hat. I thought we'd go early this morning, to avoid the crowds. If you told the kiddies that story yesterday, then the kiddies told…"
Looking skyward, with an accompanying hand gesture, though the dark glasses he wore hid them, Charlie could tell Willy could only be rolling his eyes. Charlie chimed in with, "Their parents," and Willy sighed.
"Yeah, them, last night, and they're gonna take an interest, and then they're gonna do some figuring, and I don't mean maths particularly, and then they're gonna get on the phone and natter away to their friends, and all that interest will mean the press will—"
"Did I say the wrong thing?"
Charlie looked nigh unto crushed, but Willy only laughed, and as if to tickle him, poked at Charlie's ribs with the top of his walking-stick.
"Nah, it was a great story, and I now look enough not like that guy to make that story possibly be true, which keeps you honest, and makes me seemingly concerned, which is good, cuz my 'seemingly-concerned' quotient in this town is gosh darn in the basement, and this might be just the thing to bring it up to the ground floor ... maybe."
Charlie walked along, digesting the hurried words. "Does your 'seemingly-concerned' quotient in this town really concern you?" he finally asked.
"Not in the least," laughed Willy, with a happy smile and jaunty thrust of his walking-stick. "But I never did show you where I met Terence, and I said I would, so if peace is what we want for that endeavor, this is our last chance."
Turning down the next side street, Willy lapsed into silence, and by a circuitous route brought Charlie to the back of the school's property. There, Willy broke the silence Charlie hadn't disturbed during the walk.
"There's a fence? Since when?"
Chain link, hip-high on an adult, it was a fence of demarcation more than defense. "If you live on this side, how do you cut across to get to the building? Is there a gate?"
Charlie led the way down the sidewalk to the middle of the block.
"There's one here, but it's always locked. No one uses it. I don't know when they put the fence up. It's always been here."
"Nah-ah. Not all the way back here. Where are the trees? There were oak trees. Three of them, in a group, near that corner."
Charlie continued to lead as they walked to the far corner. "I remember those. I liked them. They were really big, and pretty, especially in the Fall, when their leaves were turning."
"And shady with their leaves on, Spring or Fall. There were always birds and squirrels to watch in their branches. And thick trunks to keep at your back…"
The wistful sincerity Charlie heard in Willy's voice left Charlie quiet. Not being the biggest kid at the school, or the brightest, or the anything else 'est', Charlie suspected he'd want the comfort of a trunk at his back, too, if anyone in school had bothered to take notice of him. But he was too unimportant for that; too not-long-for-this-world looking to bother with. The other kids left him alone, in the way the herd lets the weakest fall behind, to be culled by whatever proved that inch more callous than they were, or was it that inch more merciful? That Willy had felt that way… As they approached the corner, Charlie noted Willy falling further behind. He spoke softly so Willy would have to close the gap to hear him.
"One of the older kids got a rope and used it to climb to the first limb of the tallest one. His friends on the ground dared him to stand up on the limb. He did, and then he lost his balance and fell off. He broke his wrist and his arm, and dislocated his shoulder." It was working some; Willy was closer. "Everyone said he was lucky he didn't break his neck. They decided to cut down the trees, so the trees couldn't hurt anyone else. That was two years ago."
"The trees? The trees hurt that boy? They blamed the trees?"
Charlie nodded. The dark, square lenses of Willy's sunglasses bored into Charlie's eyes for a minute, before they cut away.
"The stumps are still there; they're close to the ground, but you can sorta see them from here."
I'm surprised they let them stay, thought Willy, but with sadness stealing over him like a pall, he couldn't find the heart to express his spite. They'd stopped walking, and Charlie was at a loss to know whether to keep on. Willy had tucked his walking-stick under his arm, holding it close against his side. A tug-of-war was at play, Charlie could sense that, and then it wasn't. With a rap, the tip of the walking-stick hit the concrete, and Willy closed the small gap to Charlie.
"Shall we view the cadavers, in that case? That center tree—the biggest one—was the one I was sitting under when Terence introduced himself."
Together, they walked to the place where the fence and the middle stump were closest to each other.
"Do you want to go in? We could go around."
A sharp glance at Charlie, and then: "Go around? Why would we? We could hop the fence. Look at it. It's a joke. Don't tell me the kids living on this side of the school don't hop it all the time."
Charlie hung his head. It was true. They did. Fingers finding their way to his lower lip, Willy studied the stump. It was flat, and weathered, cut close to the ground, and as smooth as a table. In a crevice, a tiny shoot poked from the hulk.
"Oh, look!" chirped Willy, his index finger now pointing. "A shoot! It'll grow again!"
"They cut those off," whispered Charlie, forlorn, feeling again that he'd done something wrong. "The stumps would be gone, they say, if they had the money to do it."
Willy heard the defeat in Charlie's voice, the self-blame. Charlie had done nothing wrong; it was this morning that was going wrong, bad news at every turn, and that was wrong, and that thought about what was wrong was wrong, too. News was what you made of it. The spies had taught Willy that. He'd never have found the Oompa-Loompas, a more loyal workforce than he could ever have imagined, had it not been for those spies. Willy straightened up a little, the motion casting off some of the sadness that weighted his shoulders. He knew his feeling bad was making Charlie feel bad, and it would be wrong of Willy not to make that right.
"I'm sorry I snapped at you. I know it was just a suggestion. I'd rather not go in." Both of Willy's hands were resting on his walking-stick, held at arm's length in front of him, near the oxidized metal piping that supported the chain link. "I want nothing further to do with a world that sacrifices so much to indulge in personal irresponsibility, or with the people who buy into that." Willy thought of the four brats on the tour. Their attitudes made more sense now, but didn't excuse them, any more than he excused the school for this. "Those trees were innocent bystanders, providing so much for so many, for years," Willy faltered for a moment, "decades, I'd say, and one boy's reckless carelessness shouldn't have been enough to sign their death warrants."
Charlie kept his eyes on the ground—that was quite a speech for Willy—but Charlie agreed. There was nothing he could say that would bring the trees—the tree—back, so he said nothing. Willy's sigh was little more than a thought.
"I spent a lot of happy time sitting under that tree reading… Books can take you away to anywhere." Pivoting, Willy reached out to take Charlie's hand. "Come with me, dear Charlie. It's time we walk away from this hole where a tree should be."
His hand held in the soft palm of Willy's lambskin glove, Charlie, eyes momentarily widened, glanced at Willy, only to find Willy oblivious. Who knew where Willy was, or in what memory's spell he was lost. Was Willy thinking of the hole where his house had once stood? Content to let him be, Charlie didn't care. At the corner, a diesel truck went by, its muffler sounding like a tug boat.
"Heavens!" said Willy, dropping Charlie's hand. "Here already! Off you go. Don't take any wooden nickels."
Charlie laughed, and scampered into the school, one of the faculty making that possible by having opened the door he still held. "You're too early, young man!" Charlie ducked inside anyway. "You there!" Willy turned. "You're too early! Don't bring your child to school this early!"
"Not a problem," said Willy, about to point out that Charlie was not his child, so he couldn't be guilty of the named crime, but thinking better of that, he finished with his next thought: "I'll take him home. Charlie!"
"No, don't do that," came to cross reply. "Unless you live a block away, it's too late for that now. Just don't do it again."
"Early, late… I'll make a note to adjust time to your schedule ... relatively speaking that is," said Willy, sweeping off his hat and bowing slightly. The hat replaced, he turned on his heel, ending the exchange, and headed to the crossing where Mrs. Stemple was setting up shop.
"I should have let you take Home Ec, Willy," she simpered, moving to intercept him when she realized he planned to pass without speaking.
Darkest glasses swung her way, and looking into them she stepped back.
"Yes, you should have; it would have benefited you immeasurably, and now that we're both grown-up, you may call me Mr. Wonka. Toodles, Mrs. Stemple."
I do not own Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in any of its many forms, and there is no copyright infringement intended. Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed it, and thank you reviewers, favors and followers, oh, so much.
Sonny April: Thanks for your review. I too would have liked to see more of the book asides in the movie, but alas, audiences these days like their movies on the short side, or so the producers think, I guess. Perhaps it is a budget thing. Whatever, we can do it here, so more power to us. I hope to see an update on your story soon. Squirrela: Adaptability is the key to survival, and I wonder if Nora hasn't learned a little about that herself along the way. Where would the family be had she not been so proud, and accepted help before now? Thanks for your thoughts. A-Stranger-On-Earth: Your name reminds me of Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein, a book from which I garnered the concept of the 'fair witness'. It's a concept I use to this day. And thank you so much for complimenting my sense of humor. It's as dry as the Sahara at times, and looking for the oasis as they are, I think a lot of people miss it. :-D Thank you for reviewing.
Linkwonka88: A pleasure to hear from you! Willy and Charlie were talking in metaphor, with Willy or Charlie (depending on which one of them one asked) being the magnet, and the school children following after them (at a distance) being the iron filings attracted to the magnet. Think of the mines following the ship in Galaxy Quest. ;-) mattTheWriter072: Thanks for your review, it's great to hear from you. I see nothing wrong with chocolate milk at any time, and I wonder how long it will take for the Bucket family members to figure out that thinking outside the box like that is what Willy's Factory is all about. spice spice bby: What can I say? I appreciate your reviews to my story and many others in this category. Rock on!
Guest & A-Stranger-On-Earth: Well, Terence looks like the boy in the Halloween flashback, except decades older, and without the dreadlocks and pirate get-up. He's still as lean, and favors the Salvation Army in his dress. He's two years younger than Willy, and three inches taller. I wanted him to be black, because the man running the store in the 2005 movie is black, but the boy in that flashback is clearly white, with blue eyes. I had to settle for giving him the last name James, and name of the actor who played the storekeeper. I could have gone ahead and made Terence black anyway, but what kind of fan would I be, were I willingly to shred the canon to suit myself? That's not at all what fanfiction is about. Where the facts are clear, the facts are clear. Thanks again for your interest.
