Robbie Forgotten

16

It had been a few days since the party went off. The kids didn't have any time to play, although they were almost constantly outside. There was a lot of work to be done around town to repair the damage that Robbie had left them.

They patched sports equipment and tied nets back together on the sports field. They toiled endlessly in the community garden and replanted their sportscandy. The kids did what they could to make it up to Bessie for her soiled laundry and torn up yard, and they served as extra yard hands to Milford, whose whole hands were bandaged by the end of it from trying to nail the fence back together.

Sportacus was there too, helping everyone as much as he could. He swept up debris and hefted heavy bags of seeds for the garden and handled the wheelbarrow as they carried out damaged junk and in fresh replacement parts. He did his best to do good, when all the while he'd been too late to stop something bad.

The kids had been excitable that first evening when Sportacus finally arrived on the scene. They clamored over each other so many questions and grievances to their hero, asking where he'd been, how Robbie had somehow gotten back his memory and had made a mess of the town, and how could this have happened? What were they to do? Sportacus couldn't give an answer to anything. He couldn't explain what had happened, to them or himself.

In time the questions stopped on their own. Answers wouldn't fix the town. They weren't happy about all of the manual labor they were stuck doing but none of the kids went so far as to speak against the town's resident villain either. As the days went on they barely said a word about Robbie at all, not to blame him or demand his involvement in the cleanup, not to criticize his rage or begrudge him his spiteful response. In spite of it all, there was no anger to be found in any of them.

No one saw Robbie the rest of that week. But Robbie saw all of them, and Sportacus knew it. For every day that passed Sportacus caught glimpses of something out of the corner of his eye, something darting in and out of sight just on his periphery, always watching them. It was the bug-eyed crown of a rusty old periscope.

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The billboard on the edge of town didn't look inviting when Sportacus approached it. Someone had nailed two boards across the center of it in a big X as though to deter anyone from investigating the vinyl obstruction. Sportacus walked around to the back and climbed the metal steps directly to reach the miniature silo hidden in the shadow of the sign.

Sportacus paced around the silo one time, eyeing it up and down. He flexed his hands into and out of fists and shook out his wrists. He raised a hand to pull the lid open but stopped just shy of taking hold and dropped his arm. The elf rolled his shoulders and blew some air out through his lips for one last rallying effort. He knocked on the metal rim.

"Hello?" Sportacus called over the reverberation of his knocking. He stopped and let the echo fade. There was no movement, no answer. He tried to knock again a bit harder. "Robbie, are you in there?"

Sportacus tried knocking on different parts of the disguised entrance, rapping on the top of the hatch or down around the curvature of the silo. Just when he was about ready to give up on his house call something finally happened.

"Would you knock it off with that insufferable banging?" Robbie barked from behind him. Sportacus spun around... but the purple suited man wasn't there. He stared at the empty space for a moment before looking around until he figured it out. Jutting out from behind the billboard was the ever present periscope.

"Hello, Robbie," Sportacus said, giving as polite a greeting as one could give to an inanimate object. He stepped towards the spy device but stopped when it dipped away from him, almost vanishing behind the billboard. Once it saw that he had stilled it returned to its original position.