CHAPTER
10
In the days that followed, the Fitzgerald-Trout children were drawn further and further into their own private pursuits. After school, Kimo would stay at the track to practice pole vaulting and Kim would drive Pippa, Toby, and Penny back to Mount Muldoon. Once they were home, Pippa would head off, saying that she wanted to pick guavas or go for a swim, and Kim would check her to-do list, which now consisted only of her own homework. Top of the list was practicing her speech on table manners. She had been given practice techniques by Mr. Petty, one of which was to bite down on a pencil as she loudly enunciated the words she had written and memorized. “Good manners at the table are important…” With the pencil between her teeth, this sounded like “Goot mayonnaise adda tabe ill arr imprudent.” As she practiced, she paced the Castle. If she noticed the piles of dirty clothes that meant it was time to do laundry, she ignored them. The problem was that everyone else ignored them too.
* * *
—
Toby spent his afternoons in his “room” with Penny, who had chosen him as her favorite babysitter. He knew Penny preferred him because she now associated him with the ride in the limousine and up in the elevator and the entertaining afternoon she’d spent in the office of Baby Loves eating as much baby food as she wanted, but he didn’t tell this to the others. He was glad to be the favorite older sibling of the moment and enjoyed entertaining Penny by swinging from the vines in his room or playing the bongo drums that Mr. Knuckles had given him. Sometimes he tried to teach the baby to crawl, demonstrating how to move forward on his feet and hands, then sitting back and waiting for the baby to imitate him. “Crawl,” he would say. “Come on, Penny, crawl.” But the baby never did.
After a while he would stop these lessons and just lie back in the moss and daydream. He watched the breeze ruffle the sailcloth roof and the bees buzzing in the orchids that grew from the stone walls of the Castle. He told Penny stories about Tobyworld, a kingdom ruled by a boy and his pet goldfish. There were no cities or streets in Tobyworld, there were only forests and beaches. “In Tobyworld,” he told the baby, “I can swim with Goldie, only swimming is like flying because you can breathe under water.” If the baby was confused by these stories, she didn’t let on. She smiled and drooled and sometimes shouted, “Up!”—which meant she wanted Toby to lie on his back and use his feet to fly her in the air. So maybe she did understand.
While Penny was flying, and Toby was daydreaming, and Pippa was treasure hunting, and Kim was pacing and pronouncing with the pencil between her teeth, Kimo was back at the school track, practicing his vaulting. His PE teacher, and now track coach, Ms. Bonicle, was convinced her star athlete would soon be breaking the island record. There was a meet coming up, and Ms. Bonicle hoped to draw a crowd big enough to inspire Kimo to soar up and up and up and over that fifteen-foot-and-two-inch mark.
She had put an announcement in the school newspaper:
COME SEE WINDWARD SCHOOL’S
VERY OWN KIMO FITZGERALD-TROUT
AS HE ATTEMPTS TO BREAK THE
ISLAND RECORD FOR POLE VAULTING
WHERE: WINDWARD SCHOOL
WHEN: SATURDAY, JANUARY 23
DURING THE TRACK MEET.
RAIN OR SHINE.
Ms. Bonicle had photocopied the announcement and hung the flyers all over the school, and even in places in town—the library, the city hall, the post office—so that all day long, no matter where he was, any time Kimo turned a corner, he saw another one. After a day spent reading those flyers, Kimo arrived at the track inspired, thrilled to work hard.
Mrs. Bonicle had him running two miles and then doing dozens and dozens of sprints and many pull-ups, push-ups, and sit-ups before he even picked up the pole. After that “warm-up,” there was the actual pole vaulting—or, as Mrs. Bonicle put it, “Swish, swish, pop, zow-wee!” These were the sounds she told Kimo that he should hear in his head as he was doing each vault. The swish was the sound of his legs sprinting down the track taking his seventeen strides, the pop was the moment he planted the pole on the ground, and the zow-wee was the sound he was supposed to hear when he flipped upside down and twisted himself over the bar. Swish, swish, pop, zow-wee! Swish, swish, pop, zow-wee! Swish, swish, pop, zow-wee! Just when he thought if he heard those sounds in his head one more time, his muscles would give up entirely, Ms. Bonicle would tell him it was time to stop. But practice wasn’t over, oh no. Now it was time to lift weights. Kim had once called Kimo “Mega Muscles,” and it was fitting: he lifted the weights Ms. Bonicle demanded with the ferocious intensity of a circus strongman. Practice, practice, practice, he said to himself as he lifted. He thought those words were the punchline to an old joke, but he didn’t know what the joke was. He only knew that if the entire school came to the track meet and he knocked the bar off instead of clearing it, the joke would be on him.
After Ms. Bonicle released him from his training session, Kimo would have to get home on his own. He used the mile-and-a-half jog to the foot of Mount Muldoon as a “warm-down” from his workout. He loved the time alone and the feeling of having worked hard. He didn’t know what to call the last part of the journey when he climbed up the mountain to the Castle. He was beyond warming down at that point; he was just exhausted, and he usually arrived just as the sun was setting and his siblings were starting to make dinner. Of course, he helped with that too.
His practice was so hard that one night, by the time they were eating, he barely had the energy necessary to chase his peas from his plate onto his spoon. All he could hear in his head was swish, swish, pop, zow-wee! He sat eating in utter silence. Kim was quiet that night too. She had a vocabulary quiz the following day and was flipping through flashcards while she ate, saying each of the vocabulary words under her breath, then testing herself on the spelling: “Millennium. M-I-L-L-E-N-N-I-U-M.”
Pippa was plopped on the ground near the fireplace, thinking through her mental map of the mountain. She was picturing the spot around the waterfall where she’d first searched and the wide area of hard-packed dirt where she’d found the prints. She’d been back there several times in daylight to look for more scrimshaw, and she knew just how much ground she’d covered. “I should walk down from there to the other side of Gasper’s Gulch,” she was saying to herself, when suddenly a pea hit her right in the eye. “Hey.” She looked up at Toby, who she knew was responsible. He had his wrist cocked and was launching peas at Kimo and Kim too.
“Throwing food is bad table manners,” Kim said.
“Say you’re sorry.” Pippa fired one of her peas at him.
Toby ducked the pea. “I’m not gonna say I’m sorry. Something’s wrong with you guys.”
“Nothing’s wrong with us,” said Pippa. “Something’s wrong with YOU.”
“Nuh-uh,” said Toby. “Penny thinks so too.”
He looked down at the baby, who shouted, “My do it,” then grabbed her foot and put it in her mouth.
“The way you’re acting,” Toby continued. “Whispering to yourselves, and…what’s that word? Muttering. Yeah, muttering. You’d think some kind of weird bug bit you and turned you all into zombies.”
“Do zombies mutter?” asked Pippa. “Because in the zombie literature I’ve read, that is not one of their characteristics.”
“They act crazy,” said Toby. “And you guys are acting crazy, like you’ve been…you know,” he was searching for the word, and then he found it, “possessed.”
“If you had the homework I have,” said Kim, feeling a strange pride at the thought of all her hard work, “you’d feel possessed.”
“If you had the workouts I have,” said Kimo, feeling a similar contented pride, “well, you would be possessed. There wouldn’t be anything in your brain except swish, swish, pop, zow-wee!”
“I have no idea what that means,” said Pippa, who wasn’t about to confess to being possessed by
treasure hunting.
“We’re just happy being busy,” said Kim.
“Busy being happy,” said Kimo.
“Both,” said Pippa.
“And I’m just reminding you,” said Toby, “we used to joke around and now…it’s like…we’re all…” He trailed off, shrugging and tossing the rest of his peas into his mouth. He got to his feet and lifted the baby onto his hip. “Forget it,” he said, starting toward his corner of the Castle.
“Boy,” said Pippa. “What’s wrong with him?”
Kim shrugged and ignored Toby’s outburst. “I’ve got to practice my speech. Pippa, will you do the dishes?” She had come to rely on Pippa to volunteer for this duty.
“Sure,” said Pippa. “I could use the walk.” Pippa got up and began to collect the dirty dishes. She was already thinking about just how far she would search that night. She hadn’t found another piece of scrimshaw since the piece with the whale on it, but her enthusiasm for hunting was unabated.
“I’m going to do homework,” said Kimo, shuffling toward his corner of the Castle. He had some math to do but was looking forward to dreams of pole vaulting. Halfway across the space, he thought of something and turned back. “Tobes isn’t wrong, you know? We haven’t done much together, not since we found this place.”
Kim scowled but couldn’t disagree. “How about we plan something for this weekend?”
From his corner of the Castle, in his room full of piles of dirty laundry, Toby had heard everything. “How ’bout we go to the laundromat?” he asked.
* * *
—
That Sunday, the Fitzgerald-Trouts piled into the car and headed out of the Muldoon Park Parking Lot in the direction of Mr. Knuckles’s laundromat. The plan was to do all the laundry while they watched TV with Mr. Knuckles and ate the free chocolate bars that came out of his broken vending machine. (If they were lucky, Asha might be there with some day-old doughnuts too.)
As they turned onto the road that ran around the island, they all experienced the happy lift that comes from that first glimpse of the ocean. Seagulls rode the air beside them. Kim pressed the gas and the car struggled forward, gasping and rattling in an unhappy way that made Kimo crank the volume on the radio.
On their left was the open ocean; on their right, a sugarcane field. Everywhere else was a big sky so blue that it was startling. The first song they heard on the radio was a new hit by Toby’s favorite band, The Incomplete Omelets. The song’s lyrics were both catchy and confusing (the Fitzgerald-Trouts’ favorite combination): “You don’t have to act like you don’t need me, you don’t have to sing like you don’t need me, you don’t have to dance like you don’t need me, but I love it when you do.”
Pippa, who thought she knew something about romance, shook her head, mystified. “If they’re in love, why does he like it when she doesn’t need him? I mean, Mr. Knuckles doesn’t want Asha to dance or sing or act like she doesn’t need him.”
“Maybe he does,” said Kimo. “Maybe he wants her to be free and happy.” He had his arm out the window and was letting his hand ride up and down on the currents of wind as the little car did its best on the hilly road.
“That’s not how love works,” said Pippa. “Maybe when he says, ‘but I love it when you do,’ he means, ‘I love it when you do need me.’”
“Quiet,” hissed Toby, who was tapping on the seat in front of him like it was a drum.
“What makes you think it’s a song about romance?” asked Kim. She was looking at the baby in the rearview mirror, noticing how contented Penny looked. “Maybe it’s about a dad who’s looking at his kid and thinking how great it is that the kid can do things on her own.”
“No way,” said Pippa. “It’s a love song.”
“Shhh,” said Toby. “Stop ruining it.” The chorus came on and they all chimed in, including the baby, whose version was nothing but the words, “You doe, you doe, you doe,” over and over. Sitting in the front seats, Kim and Kimo glanced at each other and smiled. When they turned their eyes back to the road, they saw the strangest sight. The car was headed down a little hill, and at the bottom where the road narrowed and the beach nearly touched the edge of the sugarcane field there was—on the beach side—a giant pool of something brown and sludgy. But what?
“Chocolate,” said Kim.
“Chocolate,” said Kimo.
“Chocolate,” said Pippa.
“Poop,” said Toby.
“Chocolate or poop?” asked Kim. “Let’s go see.” At the bottom of the hill, she pulled over to the shoulder of the road and brought the car to a stop. They all clambered out. Looking both ways, they crossed the street, then scrambled down a small incline and found themselves at the edge of the dark, thick lake. If it was chocolate, it was a dream come true. If it was poop…well, yuck.
“Only one way to find out,” said Toby. “Smell it.”
“You smell it,” Pippa countered.
“I’m holding the baby,” said Kim, bowing out.
So it was good-natured Kimo who knelt down and drew in a deep breath, motioning the scent toward his nostrils with a wave of his hand. He didn’t say anything. Instead, he picked up a stick and, like a scientist studying an alien life-form, he poked at the mysterious substance. Then he must have thought it wasn’t poop because he scooped up a little bit in his right hand and rubbed it between his fingers. When he was satisfied with his conclusion, he stood up, looked at the others, and solemnly pronounced, “Mud.” All at once, the Fitzgerald-Trouts let out a whoop of joy. Mud! What could be better than a pond of mud?
Pippa took the plunge first, barreling into the murky stuff and screaming, “I’m the Creature from the Black Lagoon.” Toby ran toward her and then executed a pirouette, falling backwards into the deep pudding. Kimo just belly-flopped down, holding his hands in front of his face so he wouldn’t get any in his eyes, and Kim, who was still carrying Penny, waded out and dug a hand into it, squeezing a big gob between her fingers. Soon they were all up to their necks. They passed the baby around, watching her giggling with glee as her toes and feet and then legs and knees were dipped in, like a dyed Easter egg.
Have you ever been in a bubble bath? That’s what this was like, a giant bubble bath, only instead of soft, clean white bubbles, the Fitzgerald-Trouts frolicked in smooth, brown, squoozable, squinchable mud. They dipped their heads back into it and covered their hair and then molded their locks into strange and inspired styles. They smeared it on their faces like warriors and then they mud wrestled. They lay backward and moved their arms and legs in wide arcs, making mud angels. Like a comedian from an old black-and-white movie, Toby kept pretending to slip and fall face-first into it. Once, when he lifted himself out, Pippa looked at him—he was absolutely slathered in dark mud—and she said, as if they were in some kind of fancy restaurant and he had a crumb on his lip, “Uh, Tobes, you’ve got a little something on your face.” This made everyone crack up.
As fun as all of this mud bathing was, the greatest part came when they climbed out of the mud hole and stood in the sun. The mud hardened on them like ceramic armor, which they could crack off their bodies in big chunks. “The way a crab sheds its shell,” said Pippa.
“A crab’s shell comes off all in one piece,” said Kim, who had been studying invertebrates in science class and felt pleased to remember what she’d learned.
Once the mud was cracked off and lying in pieces around them, they found that they were covered in dry, itchy dirt. “Too bad I can’t put myself in one of Mr. Knuckles’s washing machines,” said Kimo, and even as the words were coming out, inspiration hit. He ran from the mud pond across the sand and straight down to the edge of the ocean, then he dove out into an oncoming wave. As the wave washed over him, he left a wide brown streak in the middle of it—like a signature.
“That’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,” Toby enthused, running after Kimo. Soon th
ey were all in the ocean, laughing and splashing and washing off the mud. Then of course they had to do it all over again: the mud bath, the hairstyles, the face paint, the wrestling, the angels, the cracking dirt-armor, and the race into the waves, where they left long brown swirls. What a glorious morning!
They emerged from the ocean a couple of hours later, dripping saltwater. They stood in the hot sun and they all knew—at once—that they’d had just enough. They were ready to get going.
Tired, happy, their eyes rimmed with salt, they blinked and looked at each other. The mud might have come off their skin, but their clothes were a deep, dark brown.
“Good thing we’re going to a laundromat,” said Kim, and with that they headed away from the beach and back to the car.
CHAPTER
11
The first thing Kimo saw when they walked into the laundromat was one of the track-meet flyers pinned up over by the cash register, where Mr. Knuckles stood unrolling tubes of quarters and putting them into his cash drawer so he could make change for his customers. “Geez,” said Kimo shyly. “Why’d you put that up?”
“Proud of you,” Mr. Knuckles said.
“I haven’t done anything yet,” said Kimo.
“You will,” said Mr. Knuckles. “You gonna crack dat record!”
This vote of confidence from Mr. Knuckles had the opposite effect on Kimo. Suddenly he felt nervous. What if he didn’t break the record? What would Mr. Knuckles think of him then? “You’re not coming to the meet, are you?”
“Sure,” said Mr. Knuckles. “Yup. You a good kid, Kimo.” The Fitzgerald-Trouts—all of them except for the baby—turned their heads and stared at Mr. Knuckles. In all the years they’d known him, he had never said anything like this. It was the kind of thing that a grown-up said, and Mr. Knuckles had never seemed much like a grown-up. Yes, he had tattoos. Yes, he owned an apartment and a business. But he had always acted like one of them. A friend, a buddy. He watched TV with them. He ate chocolate bars with them. He told jokes. And now here he was calling Kimo “a good kid.”
Shout Out for the Fitzgerald-Trouts Page 9