Читать книгу Heroes of Earth - Martin Berman-Gorvine - Страница 9

CHAPTER 4

It took a while for Arnold to find out about Alison’s strange adventure. First they had to help Dad put out the fire he’d started in the kitchen.

For a change, it was Arnold who first noticed what was going on, although that was only because Alison had gone out somewhere. If she’d been home making supper like she was supposed to, Dad wouldn’t have had the bright idea of trying to make French fries from scratch.

“This’ll be much healthier than McDonald’s!” he called out enthusiastically as he banged a frying pan onto the stove and started rummaging around for the cooking oil.

“Uh-huh,” said Arnold. He was in his room with the door shut and could barely hear Dad. Who’d have ever thought a spider plant could be so engrossing? Until now, he’d thought that the only plants that moved or did anything interesting were Venus fly-traps. Well, there were Mexican jumping beans too, but those didn’t count because they only moved on account of the little worm inside them. He’d got a Venus fly-trap for his eighth birthday, but it never did catch a fly or anything moving, and it closed very sluggishly on the flecks of hamburger meat and tuna fish Arnold fed it.

But this spider plant waved its leaves around as if it were an undersea plant caught in a steady current. Arnold tried poking it with a pencil, and the leaves ducked and then weaved themselves around it.

“Cool!” he murmured. He let go of his end of the pencil, which must have been one of Alison’s because the eraser end was all chewed up, and the plant continued to grasp onto it. Then Arnold smelled smoke. “Hey Dad, I think something’s burning!” he said.

Mom chimed in from her bedroom. “Jerry, check the stove!”

Dad didn’t respond to either of them. Must be absorbed in the newspaper like he was most nights. Arnold tried opening his bedroom door and repeating the warning, but Dad was busy yelling, “Can you believe what they’re pulling now! SCOD goons broke up a Bob Dylan concert last night! I mean, a lot of those fans are using walkers!”

“Dad, the stove—”

The front door banged open and Alison came running in. “Not again! Dad!” They had a frenzied couple of minutes, but this time there was no need to call the Fire Department because Alison had bought a fire extinguisher after the last time.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” Dad said as he grabbed another roll of paper towels to clean up the mess on the stove. “I wanted to give you a break. It’s not fair for you to have to make dinner every night.”

Shuffling footsteps announced Mom’s arrival in the kitchen. “Why don’t we go out to House of Siam?” she said with her best attempt at a smile.

“I’ll help you get dressed, Ray,” Dad said.

Mom knitted her brow. “Why can’t I just go as I am?”

Arnold flicked a glance at Alison, who was looking at him. Mom was wearing nothing but a nightgown with little blue cornflowers on it. As recently as September she would have been with it enough to notice that, but now… now Dad took her arm and led her back up their bedroom.

“Do you think she’s gonna have to go to a nursing home?” Arnold whispered.

Alison snapped her head back as if he’d slapped her. “No way! Dad will never let that happen!” She blinked several times and shook her finger at him. “Don’t even say that word around me, turd-breath!”

Dad came down the stairs clutching Mom’s elbow. She was dressed in a baggy maroon sweater and blue jeans, but at least she looked halfway normal.

“Going out on a weeknight! I bet you wish Dad burned dinner more often, don’t you?” she joked. Arnold forced a chuckle.

The restaurant was close enough to walk to, but then, so was just about everything in Chincoteague. Mr. Freed spotted them walking from the other side of the street and raised a dirty hand to wave at them.

“How you doing, groovy chick?”

With a small shock Arnold realized he was talking to Mom, who flirted right back. “Just about ready for Woodstock Nation, soon as I get my time machine, Barry.” He smiled vaguely and shuffled on his way. “We ought to get takeout for him. That poor man,” Mom said softly.

Dad winced. “Maybe we can save him some leftovers, Ray.” It was an old argument.

The mood brightened as soon as they got to the place and Dad spotted Mr. Nomura eating by himself and waved him over to join them. The guy was even shorter and older than Dad, but still had shiny black hair. Dad’s hair was bushy and starting to go gray at the tips and along his sideburns. Mom liked to joke that it added at least five centimeters to his height and made him “only a short little guy instead of a dwarf.”

Dad’s friend had been just about done with his meal, but he hung out while everyone ordered their meals and ate. Their loud joking around helped cover how quiet everyone else was.

“You’re one good worker drone, Bruce!” Dad said. “I can’t believe they let you out of your cell long enough to get dinner!”

“Shuddup, you slacker!” Mr. Nomura said. They both cackled.

Pad Thai was Mom’s favorite thing, but she just toyed with her food and even offered Arnold some of the shrimp.

He held up his hand. “They taste like rubber to me, Mom, remember?”

“Oh, of course, it’s Alison who likes seafood. Seems like I forget everything these days,” Mom rasped.

Dad and Mr. Nomura were still having a grand old time and didn’t hear her, or at least they pretended not to, but Arnold looked at his plate, his enjoyment of the meal ruined. Why can’t I have a normal family, like everyone else?

As they walked home afterwards through the early dark Mom spotted Mr. Freed again, lurking around a leafless tree in the waterside park, and offered him her doggy bag full of barely-touched food. The smelly old hippie tried to pretend he didn’t want it but practically snatched the bag out of her hands. Dad opened his mouth only to shut it again when Mom elbowed him.

Arnold hung back, trying not to pay attention, but Sis was hanging back with him. Why can’t she leave me alone? Why can’t EVERYONE just leave me alone? He started to say something sarcastic but Alison talked over him. “Can you keep a secret, Arnold?”

This must be serious, if Sis was calling him by his real name and not turd-breath, stupid-head, nerd-face or one of her other usual terms of endearment. “Umm, sure,” he said.

“You’re gonna think I’m crazy.” With a heroic effort, Arnold managed not to say that he already did and just listened to the wild tale Alison spun. Could any of it possibly be true? It wouldn’t exactly be the first time she had pulled his leg. Take the time when he was seven and she was nine and she told him the word “gullible” wasn’t in the dictionary. Unlike most kids his age, he knew what the word meant, but to prove her wrong about the dictionary required him to go into Dad’s study to get the unabridged dictionary, which was too heavy for him to lift. When he asked Dad for help with it, Dad asked what he needed to look up, and when he told him Arnold discovered that people actually do roll around on the floor laughing. This prank had entered family legend.

So he eyed Alison warily. But she didn’t have a good poker face, and there was no trace of a smile on it. Her eyes kept darting back and forth as if she was excited and a little scared, but not as if she was about to enjoy a good laugh at his expense. He studied her face for a long moment, then nodded. But then he scowled and pinched the back of her hand.

“Ow! What was that for?”

“It’s no fair!”

“What’s no fair, for chrissakes?”

“You always get to do everything first! I wanna see that dragon, right now!”

“You’re the one who told me Gloria wanted to meet me, turd-breath. Anyhow, you’ll have to wait till morning. The school library is closed now.”

Arnold was about to say he was telling Dad, but for once his brain caught up with his mouth, and he followed her back into the house in sullen silence. Dad was already helping Mom up the stairs to their bedroom. Last month she’d had to go to the emergency room after she tripped at the top and ended up with a mild concussion.

“What was your buddy doing here in Chincoteague, anyhow?” she was asking Dad. “I thought he lived in those barracks outside the fence, over at Wallops Island.”

“Man does not live on ramen noodles alone, Ray,” Dad said.

Arnold had been to Mr. Nomura’s place once. The barracks had been cut into individual apartments with drywall, but the living room still felt barren even with several Japanese prints on the walls and framed family pictures on the end tables he’d scavenged at a yard sale in Salisbury. After Mr. Nomura beat him in three quick games of chess Arnold lost interest and wandered around daydreaming outside in a grassy square that had obviously been used for morning line-ups when the Navy ran the place. He respected the guy for not treating him like a kid, but it sucked to lose at one of the few things besides school that he was actually good at.

Now Arnold followed his parents up the stairs and shut his bedroom door behind him. Finishing his homework didn’t take long. Afterwards he played with the strangely lively spider plant and thought about Gloria. Could Alison be telling the truth? It seemed impossible, but so did a dancing plant. Maybe it was all for real!

* * * *

In the morning, when she shook him awake ten minutes early so he’d have extra time to get through security at school, Arnold jumped out of bed without protest.

Sis clutched her chest and staggered backward. “It—it cannot be! Stupid-head is getting up without having water poured all over him!”

Arnold aimed a kick at her and missed. She stuck her tongue out at him and ran out the door so she wouldn’t have to stand in line with him, which suited him just fine. Still, she had put his bowl of oatmeal with sliced bananas and milk out on the kitchen table for him (for a while, “Banana-Man” had threatened to displace “Gross-Fart” as his nickname at school). Arnold slurped up his breakfast, dribbling oats and milk on his T-shirt in his haste, grabbed his jacket and pounded out the door, not even grunting goodbye to Dad the way he usually did.

On an ordinary morning he would have been early enough to beat the rush at the security checkpoint, but a lot of other families had had the same thought as Alison and he ended up smack in the middle of the line.

Madison was right in front of him, and she put out her hand and shoved him in the chest. “Not so close, spaz.” Her sidekick Kayleigh put her hand over her mouth and giggled. In front of them, Darla Murray, who wore braces and was sometimes almost nice to him, told them to lay off.

“Gonna make us, metal-mouth?” Madison said, and Kayleigh giggled again.

God, Arnold hated them. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Matt’s buddy Jared Nichols was behind him and kept pinching his legs and arms while he had to pretend not to notice.

“Hey Grosssssss-fart, try not to stink up the changing room for us, okay?” he hissed. In case that wasn’t humiliating enough, Madison heard and started snickering. Just ignore them, Arnold told himself. I’m on my way to another planet. Another whole planet! Maybe there, being a nerd will actually be cool! Because it sure isn’t here. But ignoring was awfully hard, especially when Jared gave him a hard shove just as he reached the guards at the entrance. He fell against the huge, perspiring bulk of Mr. Ramsey, who had been fired as a deputy sheriff but found full employment in the schools.

Mr. Ramsey scowled and pushed Arnold away. “Sorry, I tripped,” he muttered.

“Bubba, you can do clumsy here,” Mr. Ramsey said. Arnold followed the tall, skinny guard into the boys’ “changing room,” a windowless box that had once been a supply closet. Everything had been removed from the room, including the dangling, bare light bulb, and fluorescents had been installed, along with a roundish, black bulge just below the ceiling that Arnold presumed was a video camera.

He undressed under the guard’s bored gaze, shoving his tattered jockey shorts under his other clothes for fear Bubba would make the same kind of remarks Matt and Jared and some of the other boys did in the locker room. Bubba snapped on a pair of green rubber gloves and quickly patted Arnold down. He tried to stand still and pretend it didn’t bother him. After all, little kids didn’t get strip searched, so this did prove he was grown up, didn’t it?

A grunt from Bubba let Arnold know he could get dressed again. He picked up his book-bag and put it through a wide slot in the wall, onto a conveyor belt for atomic analysis. This technology, a gift of the High Ones, posed no risk of radiation exposure, unlike old-fashioned human-invented X-ray machines. He wished the High Ones had some way of making the stuff in his backpack shrink temporarily so it wouldn’t be such a struggle to shove it through that slot every morning. Walking out the door, he reached out his right hand to grab it by the strap, when a long-fingered, hairy-backed hand came down on his wrist.

“Not so fast, chief,” Bubba said. “I got to go through your bag.”

“But it was just scanned,” Arnold pointed out. “That machine can pinpoint anything hazardous down to an angstrom across—one ten-billionth of a meter.”

Bubba’s head bobbed up and down as if his neck was loose—Arnold thought of dinosaurs. The guard sniffed and rubbed his upper lip with his forefinger. It looked like he was trying to grow a mustache. “Got to go through your bag, chief.”

“But the machine is always good enough. You never go through bags by hand!”

“Come on, chief, you’re holding up the line.”

Arnold’s knees began to tremble. Being strip searched was embarrassing and uncomfortable, but when it came right down to it he could always pretend he was somewhere else, doing something else. He despised his runty, clumsy, ears-sticking-out, pale little body that everyone else made fun of, anyway. But the stuff hidden among the chaos in his binder—that was where he really lived. Where the real Sir Arnold, Warrior Prince, lived and had adventures drawn in pencil and written down in a furtive, blocky hand. Where he rode out every day to rescue Princess Hailee from the endless series of threats she was helpless to escape from—fire-breathing dragons, bone-crushing trolls, tentacled creatures almost too terrible to draw in all their horror. And she knew how to express her gratitude to her gallant Sir Arnold, did Princess Hailee.

If anyone else got a glimpse of that, he was dead. So he stuck out his chin—his pasty, pointy, pimple-bedecked chin—and said to Bubba, “No, you can’t go through my bag.”

On such tiny acts of defiance, fate sometimes turns.