Donald E. Westlake
Philip
To Sean and Steven,
before they outgrow it.
Philip lived in a huge apartment house. It was taller than a spaceship and wider than a movie theater and it had more windows than you could count if you counted all day.
Out in front of this apartment house there was one skinny tree and a long canopy and a large doorman named Mister Neep. Mister Neep wore a bright blue uniform with shiny buttons on it. He also wore a bright blue hat with gold trim of which he was very proud.
All along the block there were other apartment houses just like the one Philip lived in. Way down at the corner there was a board fence around a deep hole in the ground. Big machines and husky men were building a brand new apartment house there.
Standing in front of the apartment houses were doormen just like Mister Neep, except that none of them were quite as big or quite as shiny as Mister Neep.
Philip liked Mister Neep because he was the biggest and shiniest doorman on the whole block.
The apartment where Philip and his mother and father lived was on the seventh floor. There was a big living room. There was a kitchen with a little corner where the family ate breakfast. There was a bathroom with white tiles. There was a large bedroom where Philip’s mother and father slept. And there was a not-quite-so-large bedroom where Philip slept.
And besides all this there was a terrace, which was like a front porch way up on the side of the building. From the terrace Philip could see lots of other buildings in the city, all of them full of apartments very much like his.
On the kitchen wall, there was a round thing called a speaker, which Mister Neep used when he wanted to tell Philip’s mother something. One day, as Philip sat at the kitchen table licking out a bowl, there was a buzzing noise from the speaker. That was Mister Neep’s signal.
Philip’s mother went over to the speaker and said, “Yes, Mister Neep?”
Mister Neep’s voice said, “There’s a package down here, just delivered.”
Philip’s mother said, “What sort of package, Mister Neep?”
Mister Neep said, “It’s a package for Philip. Has his name on it. I daresay it’s a present.”
Philip said, “I heard that.”
“Trust you,” said his mother. To Mister Neep she said, “We’ll be right down.”
Philip and his mother rode down in the elevator. There by the front door stood Mister Neep, with the package in his hands.
“Do you suppose,” Mister Neep said to Philip, “do you suppose you could carry this package upstairs yourself?”
“Sure I could,” said Philip.
So Mister Neep handed him the package. It was much heavier than Philip expected. He and his mother went back upstairs.
“You’d better open it on the kitchen table,” Philip’s mother said, “so we won’t have a mess anywhere.”
Philip opened the package completely by himself. It took longer than he had thought it would. When he had it open at last he discovered that inside the package there was... a truck. A very large, a very beautiful, a very complicated truck. It had batteries in it, and it had lots of space for carrying things, and it had a big scoop on the top that could reach down and pick up a whole gob of dirt and dump it into the back of the truck, and it had a button you could push to make the back of the truck lift up and dump the dirt out again.
It was the most beautiful and useful truck Philip had ever seen.
There was a card in the package with the truck. Philip’s mother picked it up and read it. She said, “Oh! It’s from your Uncle Fred.”
Philip said, “Who’s he?”
“He’s a man who used to be in college with your father. He visited here one time when you were still a baby. I guess you wouldn’t remember him.”
“I guess not,” said Philip.
He didn’t worry about it. He knew the world was full of people named Uncle This and Aunt That, grown-ups who seemed to know him even though he didn’t know them and who weren’t really his uncles and aunts at all. And, every once in a while, one of these make-believe uncles or aunts would give Philip a present.
Like this dump truck, which happened to be the first dump truck Philip had ever owned. He’d seen dump trucks, of course, on television and down at the corner where men were digging for the new apartment house, but up until now he’d never actually owned a dump truck for himself.
Philip took his dump truck into the living room and put it down on the floor. He pushed the button that started it and it ran across the rug and stopped at the sofa. He pushed the other button and the scoop made pick-up motions. Then he got some blocks and put them in the truck. He pushed the last button and the back of the truck lifted up and the blocks slid out onto the rug.
The truck worked all right, but somehow Philip wasn’t pleased.
He did it all again. He made the truck move, and stop, and dump blocks out. He made the scoop move.
But something was wrong. And Philip knew what it was.
Dirt.
The main point about a dump truck, it’s supposed to carry dirt. You put it down on the ground, and the scoop picks up big mouthfuls of dirt and fills up the truck, and then you push the button and the truck drives across the yard to where you want to move the dirt, and then you push the other button and the back of the truck lifts up and all the dirt slides out. That’s what a dump truck does.
What Philip needed was some dirt.
But there just isn’t very much dirt around an apartment house. There’s dust, especially under the beds and in the backs of the closets, but that never gets deep enough to dig in. And what else is there? Outside, the ground is all covered with cement and asphalt and cobblestones. Inside, the ground is all covered with wooden floors and tile and rugs.
Still, Philip now had himself a dump truck, and he did want to operate that dump truck, right away. The problem was to find some dirt.
Philip went back to the kitchen. He said to his mother, “Mom, where can I find some dirt?”
“Some what?” his mother asked.
“Some dirt. To dig in, with this dump truck here.”
“Oh, dirt! Well, I’ll tell you what. This Sunday, we’ll all go over to the park, you and your father and I, and you can play with your new truck there, how’s that?”
“Yes, but what about right now?” Philip said.
“Philip, I have a million things to do right now.”
Philip walked around the kitchen with the dump truck in his arms. “I sure wish I could find some dirt,” he said.
His mother said, “The next time we visit Grandma you can take the truck along with you. She’s got plenty of dirt around her house.”
“I sure wish I could find some dirt right now,” said Philip.
“You go on out of the kitchen,” his mother told him. “I’m busy.”
So Philip walked around and around the apartment, carrying the dump truck in his arms. He walked from the kitchen to the living room, and from the living room to his bedroom, and from his bedroom to his parents’ bedroom, and...
...he saw the window box. In the window. In his parents’ bedroom.
In the winter, the window box was always full of snow. In the spring, it was always full of seeds. In the summer, it was always full of flowers. But now it was autumn, and there was nothing in the window box but dirt.