The Devil Delivered and Other Tales Page 26

  “After im!” Grandma Matchie shouted and we broke into a sprintle. Rounding a corner we caught a last glimpse of One Armed Trapper as he plungered into a cave. The sound of bells filled my head until it felt like it was about to unplode, and things started getting dreamy like, as if I was being Hypnotized, like I saw in a movie once, when the blonde lady stopped screaking and skirking until all her clothes fell off.

  We reached the cave mouth and Grandma Matchie took my hand and in we went. It was pitch black for the first dozen tuddles or so then we could make out a faint glow ahead of us and we skuggled towards it.

  And before we knew it, we found ourselves standing in a chapel. There were pews carved out of solid rock, and a pulpit at the far end behind which stood a giant crayfish, old and gray-bearded. He held a Bible Delicately in his spincers.

  And to one side stood Leap Year, all chained up and her head Bowed in Defeat. One Armed Trapper stood near her, smiling warmly. “Ahh!” he squeaked in a high voice. “The bride herself!” And he laughed and bowed.

  We had paused at the edge of the long narrow aisle. I looked at Grandma Matchie and cried out. Her red dress had disappeared and now she wore a white wedding dress, and behind the veil her eyes were all dreamy and lost. Hypnotized!

  “Betrothed!” exclaimed One Armed Trapper. “Come to me at last! Oh joy! Joy!” And he did that little dance again and it made the old crayfish frown and push his spectacles back from his antennae.

  Red fire was burning on Leap Year’s shell and I could see new initials—bigger than all the rest—burning themselves into her back. She whailed Mournfully. The wedding bells rlang and rlang in the murky water and the red fire burnelled and burnelled, and Grandma Matchie began the slow march up the aisle as a hunchbacked carp with her gray hair in a bun started playing on an ancient organ.

  “A trap!” I screaked, stumblering after Grandma Matchie. “It was a trap!” But I couldn’t break her out of the spell.

  The old crayfish began reading the marriage vows and I whailed in Horror as Grandma Matchie and One Armed Trapper began repeating them. Lurchening forward, I stumblered over Sis, who was crouching against a pew, her eyes all crazy like.

  “It’s the fire o’ love!” she hisspered. “The Devil made it into a spell!”

  “What do you mean!”

  “It brings things back, dummy!”

  The vision of the frog flashed in my mind. I stared up the aisle. Already, One Armed Trapper was rolling up his sleeve, getting ready to punch Grandma Matchie’s arm. “Wait here! Try and slow em down!”

  And then I whirvilled and began to skuggle, out of the chapel, down the tunnel, out of the cave. And there, dim in the distance, burned that little red flame. The bells still rlang and I knew that when they stopped it would be too late, cosmic wind or no cosmic wind.

  I skuggled and skuggled, almost flying through the water. My heart pounded until it was louder than even the bells. The smoke from the woodstove was getting thicker, and it was getting harder and harder to see.

  I was almost at the bump of rock when a huge shadowy shape reared up in front of me and roarbelled. The sound hit me in a wave and I flew back, hippering the mud with a thump. All I could see through the smoke were two glowing slits, a hundred feet above me. They closed in, loombing right over my head.

  The loudest voice I’ve ever heard thundered down on me. “I WON’T TOLERATE THIS!”

  Scramblering to my feet I almost slipped as a rock rolled out from under me. Lurchening forward I grabbed it, and suddenized it wasn’t a rock at all. It was one of Mom’s loaves. Grunting, I raised it over my head and screeked: “Eat this!!” And then I threw it with all my strength right between its eyes.

  “YEOWWWWW!”

  Those eyes reared backwards, scranching tight so that everything went dark all of a sudden. I jampled forward, passing between two huge pillars that must have been its legs. And there, right in front of me was the bump of rock and the stove. I crampled madly.

  Above and behind me I heard another roar, and currents swept over me, almost tearing my grip from the rock. But then I was on my feet and the stove wasn’t more than five feet away, its flames licking eagerly at the grille. Springering forward I gave that stove the hardest kick I’ve ever given anything. The grille flew open as it torpled backwards, and the fire o’ love shot out in all directions, pouring out sparks as the stove rolled across the rock and plumged over the far side. The glow of the flame went out and I hurried to the edge just in time to see the stove disappear in the deep mud bottom.

  Sparks swarmelled off in all directions, and I knew the whole world was in a lot of trouble now that the fire o’ love had been freed. My face scrinching, I looked around for Satan Himself but he had disappeared. And just then, far off in the distance, I heard a Horrible scrum of Frustration, then a Shout of Triumph. Thunder shook the rock and I fell to my knees.

  We were saved!

  “Nothin’s over till I say so!”

  Standing on the shore, Grandma Matchie shook her head and glarmered down into the croonbling waves of Eaglenest Lake. “It’s just no good,” she muthered. “Ain’t nobody beat me afore. Ain’t nobody!”

  The sun was going down and stars appeared overhead. I threw more wood on the small fire, then glommered at her. “You shoulda punched him! That’s all you had to do. Punch him afore he punches you!”

  But Grandma Matchie shook her head. “It’s jus no good, Tyke.”

  “Bah!”

  Sis sneered at me so I sneered back, and that made me feel better. Glancing up, I asked Grandma Matchie, “So, what’re ya goin t’do, huh?”

  Abruptly she squared her shoulders. “I’m goin back down there, an that’s all there is to it!”

  “You can’t!” I screeked, jampling to my feet.

  “I gotta!” And with that she ran to where Leap Year lollered on a giant flat rock and climbed into the saddle. “We gotta finish what we started!” Crackling, they plunged back into the water.

  I kicked at the fire, and the sparks seemed to fly through the air forever, round and round. Sis stuck out her tongue at me but I ignored her, pacing back and forth and back and forth and dodging those crazy sparks.

  “Ow!” Sis cried, and I turned around.

  “What is it?”

  She didn’t say anything, but there was a strange gleemble in her eyes that I’d never seen there before and it made me frown.

  “You and Grandma Matchie saved me, Jock Junior,” she said in this weird soft voice, standing up and walking toward me, smiling.

  Suddenly I knew what had happened. “Get back!” I screeked. “Get away from me!” But I’d been cornered. The lake was behind me and there was no way on earth I was going in there. And Sis pounced like some Horrible Beast and trapped me in her arms and then she spotched my forehead with spit. With spit!

  The Spotch of a Horrible Beast:

  Oh sure! They call it kissing! Well, they can forget it as far as I’m concerned. Never again for Jock Junior!

  It’s just not fair. Everything gets so Grim and Serious, and things keep pushing the insides of my head around in helpless circles. I was pacing again but after a while I stopped and stared at the still, dimbled surface of the lake, and pretty soon it began to glow as if full of cosmic wind. It made me sick, and I bet you know what happened to my face too. That also makes me sick, and so does Sis. Everything makes me sick.

  I hate recesses, and that’s all there is to it. I used to think summer holidays were just one long recess, but it’s not true. I won’t let it! I’m gonna learn to tie flies like Dad, that’s what I’m gonna do.

  So I glarmed for a while at the glowing lake, then finally turned back to the fire and stokered it up with some of Mom’s loaves. Sis was humming and I wondered how long it would take before that spark wore off. And the fire burned redly, and it made me want to barf.

  That was the first week.

  LUNKER, WHERE ARE YOU BOUND?

  Every word of it’s true!

  J
ust because I’m only nine years old and just because I’m only four feet tall it doesn’t mean I can’t control my imagination! I tell the truth and Big Nose twisters my ear. I keep my eyes open and Big Nose sturffles my mouth with cotton. Well, almost!

  It’s not fair!

  I’d sure like to see Big Nose try and twister Grandma Matchie’s ear. Hah! She’d throw Big Nose in the lake just to see what kind of lubber she was.

  “The only kind,” Grandma Matchie’d conclude with a sniff. Me too.

  And it’s that same ear—the one that’s burning and itching right now—that I keep pressed to the earth to listen to all the whispering. Stories, a million stories! And all of them true! They have to be, don’t you see? The earth wouldn’t lie.

  Big Nose forbids whispering:

  It’s a rule. No hisispering, no passing notes, no tellonging tales. It all has to do with respect, she says. You have to respect Certain Things, she says with fire and brimstone. Things like Bigness, chalkboards and rulers, fire and brimstone. And of course Big Nose’s Unwillingness to Tolerate any Precociousness.

  And it doesn’t end there, either. Just think about your last recess. Everbody’s playing soccer. It’s a mob of scrumming kids chasing a ball around in the snow. And you’re leaning there, watching everything from the goalpost, getting numberled with the horror of it all. And they rabble all over the place, and their faces are set in gothic grimaces and nobody tolerates anything. After all, Big Nose is standing there at the edge of the field, and she has a big brass bell in her hand and I bet she’s just waiting for someone to step out of line. Then, Whammo! And we’re not talking wedding bells here, either.

  Play within the lines, goalie gets the ball, penalty shot, all that stupid stuff. As if standing around between two goalposts is hard. As if keeping the ball out is hard. Dum. All you have to do is tie a string ankle-high from one post to the other and not a single ball will roll in. They can try and kick it high all they want. They couldn’t get it between the posts if their lives depended on it.

  Their lives depended on it:

  That was my mistake. My big mistake. I should’ve known by looking at those pinchered faces as they chased the ball around. Grandma Matchie says it’s an art to recognize a lynch mob when you see one, even in this day and age.

  And worst of all, Big Nose was right up there, leading the pack, her bell waving about at the end of her arm as if her hand had turned to brass.

  So there you are, Attila and her Huns are charging down on you all because the ball bounced back from the string while you were hanging from the crossbar. Just because something didn’t look quite right about it. Just because their lives depended on that ball crossing that line or not crossing that line in a Manner Deemed Proper. In a manner you could Respect.

  Nobody respects a string tied between two posts, I guess.

  And I almost got away. Almost over the fence when Big Nose’s hand—the flesh one, not the brass one—grabbled my ankle. They spizzled and snargled like wolves but kept their distance because Big Nose was there. You know, there’s only one reason I can figure for why she didn’t brain me: skulls find brass bells Intolerable.

  So I got sent to jail, doing hard time, cleaning the chalk dust from the bushes and pulling the hairballs out from between the broom’s straw. It was a strict school. Hairballs not allowed.

  The mysterious world inside a broom:

  You get to exploring, just sitting there on Big Nose’s desk, putting all the hairballs into a careful pile and storing them away in her drawer beside the bruisbled apple she forgot to take home.

  Gloria Feeb’s apple, a present from Gloria Feeb’s house delivered by Gloria Feeb herself. I hate Gloria Feeb.

  Pushing the apple far into the back of the drawer, I closed it and began picking out all the other things inside that broom. Pieces of crayon with chewbled ends—the purple ones were Margaret Pukeshank’s for sure. She loved eating purple crayons and her teeth were always purple. Willy Dortmund liked the green ones but I found only the discarded paper wrapping from those. Willy was fat because he never let anything go to waste that couldn’t be eaten first. Amy Greenfeet was a connoisseur—only yellow crayons were good enough for her, what with her pointy nose and plaid pencil case and all. Me, it didn’t matter what color they were. I tried them all. Thing is, after a while they all get to tasting the same. Paper, of course, was another matter.

  And then there were bits of eraser and chewing gum—though sometimes it was hard to tell them apart except for the smell. I think the real reason why the school has to buy new stuff every year is because we eat everything we can lay our hands on.

  The best part about a broom is the straw itself. You’d think they’d glue it in, but if you shake the broom long enough and hard enough the straw fallers out and just keeps on fallering out, covering Big Nose’s desk and all her notes and all over the floor. If I ate straw I could live for years on just one broom. This broom.

  But when you think about it, they probably buy new brooms every year too. I’d have to ask Willy about that.

  Well, the broom was clean, and all the chalk from the brushes was no longer on the brushes and I could make neat footprints all over the floor. All that was left was feeding the fish.

  Fish always know when they’re the only thing left:

  You can tell by the way their mouths glape. They’ve got nothing left to say and even if they did they wouldn’t tell you. They’re like that.

  I bet you think fish are dumb. Well, most of them are, I guess. Like the one in Big Nose’s room. Just looking at it, I could see that its brain was wivening away. It’d been there too long, a prisoner under the shadow of Big Nose’s big nose.

  Even when I stuckled my head into the water and tried talking to it, it just swambled away and hid behind a rock. But after ten minutes or so it got used to me and came out for a closer look, glaping, glaping, glaping. I glaped back.

  And I was just about to say something when I saw a blur come through the door. It screamed blurthily and grew really big really fast. “Hide!” I yelled at the fish, who duckered into a plastic castle and peered out from one of the towers.

  “Jlog Jlunlior!” I heard Big Nose yell. “Glet—” Hands grabbed my shoulders. “—lout—” I struggled, but she began pulling my head from the water. “—thlis—” And then I was out, water spraying everywhere. “—MINUTE!”

  “I wasn’t doin nothin!”

  “Jock Junior! Do you think I will tolerate this!?”

  Well, the answer to that was obvious. “Probably not,” I said, lowering my head and watching the drops hitting the floor.

  “Probably? PROBABLY!?”

  “Jock Junior simply refuses to control his imagination”:

  That’s not even true! I can control it just fine! It wasn’t me who jampled to crazy conclusions, was it? Was it?

  So there was Dad, and there was Mom, and there behind that big desk was the principal, who was all ears as Big Nose ran off at the mouth about all the things she Misunderstood.

  “… And he had the gall to tell me he was talking with that goldfish!” Big Nose said in fruxasperation. “I’m completely fruxasperated!” See! “I mean, a goldfish!”

  Turning to Dad I explained, “That was my mistake. Goldfish can’t talk. I should’ve known better—”

  “I should think so!”

  “Goldfish aren’t like other fish. And of course you can’t keep pike and muskie in aquariums cause they’d never stop complaining and it would disturble the class—”

  Big Nose jumped to her feet. “Aaaaghh!”

  I’ve never seen her so red. Redder even than a boiled crayfish with its eyes bugging out in all directions. I started to get real worried when she clatched the sides of her head and began running in circles.

  “You shouldn’t get so mad,” I said as calm as I could. “It just makes you intolerable.”

  “Aaaggghh!”

  The meaning of Aaaggghh:

  Well, what could Dad and Mom say
? They knew all about talking fish and they didn’t even have imaginations! All they could do was sit there and help Big Nose drink down her medicine.

  And the principal sat there frowning and gromering, drumbling his desk and cluhearing his throat and looking at his paperweight, which wasn’t very big and a gull full of buckshot would’ve done the job much better. I vowed to give him one as a present for graduating me. Grandma Matchie would be proud of that!

  “And that assignment!” Big Nose cried, her hands pressed against his cheeks. “My Lord!”

  My heart sank. Back to that again, eh? I knew right then I was finished. Turning to Dad I pleaded, “Summer vacation at the lake. I wrote it just like it happened and—”

  And. It’s a funny word, isn’t it? I mean, everything follows naturally, doesn’t it? It shows up everywhere, and there’s nothing you can do about it. See? The whole world turned into “And” right then. And Dad’s eyes bulgered, and Mom jippled out of her chair, her bum hitting the floor with a bathump. And Dad’s cheeks bulgered, and Mom started repeating “Oh my, oh my oh my—” And Dad’s head bulgered and I started getting real worried.

  And, finally, when I could take it no more, I leapt to my feet and screamed: “It’s all true!”

  The point where you just can’t take it no more and you scream: “It’s all true!”

  It was the second week of summer vacation at Rat Portage Lake. Dad had given up the art of fishing and was putting together his new Jacuzzi in between bellowing at the ceiling and tearing at the instruction manual.

  Mom finished sweepening up the forest trail out back and came in for a breather. “My! But that was dirty!” she breathed, wipering invisible sweat from her brow and leaning on her broom.

  “Gothic in heaven, woman! You know the roof needs fixin—but off you go without a damn thought for anyone else! What happens if it rains and water leaks down on your daughter’s forehead? What happens then, eh? She’s sleepin away and it’s drip, drip, drip! Pretty soon she’s droolin and chanterin communist slogans!” He glared up from the pile of cedar planks. “What then, eh?”