The Mouse and the Motorcycle - Beverly Cleary [1]
After Matt had gone, closing the door behind him, Mr. Gridley said, “I need a rest before dinner. Four hundred miles of driving and that mountain traffic! It was too much.”
“And if we are going to stay for a weekend I had better unpack,” said Mrs. Gridley. “At least I’ll have a chance to do some drip-drying.”
Alone in Room 215 and unaware that he was being watched, the boy began to explore. He got down on his hands and knees and looked under the bed. He leaned out the open window as far as he could and greedily inhaled deep breaths of pine-scented air. He turned the hot and cold water on and off in the washbasin and slipped one of the small bars of paper-wrapped soap into his pocket. Under the window he discovered a knothole in the pine wall down by the floor and, squatting, poked his finger into the hole. When he felt nothing inside he lost interest.
Next Keith opened his suitcase and took out an apple and several small cars—a sedan, a sports car, and an ambulance about six inches long, and a red motorcycle half the length of the cars—which he dropped on the striped bedspread before he bit into the apple. He ate the apple noisily in big chomping bites, and then laid the core on the bedside table between the lamp and the telephone.
Keith began to play, running his cars up and down the bedspread, pretending that the stripes on the spread were highways and making noises with his mouth—vroom vroom for the sports car, wh-e-e wh-e-e for the ambulance, and pb-pb-b-b-b for the motorcycle, up and down the stripes.
Once Keith stopped suddenly and looked quickly around the room as if he expected to see something or someone, but when he saw nothing unusual he returned to his cars. Vroom vroom. Bang! Crash! The sports car hit the sedan and rolled over off the highway stripe. Pb-pb-b-b-b. The motorcycle came roaring to the scene of the crash.
“Keith,” his mother called from the next room. “Time to get washed for dinner.”
“OK.” Keith parked his cars in a straight line on the bedside table beside the telephone, where they looked like a row of real cars only much, much smaller.
The first thing Mrs. Gridley noticed when she and Mr. Gridley came into the room was the apple core on the table. She dropped it with a thunk into the metal wastebasket beside the table as she gave several quick little sniffs of the air and said, looking perplexed, “I don’t care what the bellboy said. I’m sure this hotel has mice.”
“I hope so,” muttered Keith.
2
The Motorcycle
Except for one terrifying moment when the boy had poked his finger through the mousehole, a hungry young mouse named Ralph eagerly watched everything that went on in Room 215. At first he was disappointed at the size of the boy who was to occupy the room. A little child, preferably two or even three children, would have been better. Little messy children were always considerate about leaving crumbs on the carpet. Oh well, at least these people did not have a dog. If there was one thing Ralph disliked, it was a snoopy dog.
Next Ralph felt hopeful. Medium-sized boys could almost always be counted on to leave a sticky candy bar wrapper on the floor or a bag of peanuts on the bedside table, where Ralph could reach them by climbing up the telephone cord. With a boy this size, the food, though not apt to be plentiful, was almost sure to be of good quality.
The third emotion felt by Ralph was joy when the boy laid the apple core by the telephone. This was followed by despair when the mother dropped the core into the metal wastebasket. Ralph knew that anything at the bottom of a metal wastebasket was lost to a mouse forever.
A mouse lives not by crumbs alone and so Ralph experienced still another emotion; this time food was not the cause of it. Ralph was eager, excited, curious, and impatient all at once. The emotion was so strong it made him forget his empty stomach. It was caused by those little cars, especially