by Tom Birdseye
So when Celina finished the first chapter and Patrick asked for still more, she thrust the book at him and said, “Your turn!”
Patrick jumped back as if Celina had pushed a rattlesnake in his face. He swung his arm in self-defense, knocking The Sword in the Stone into the dirt.
“Hey!” Celina said with a sudden frown. “That’s my book. Pick it up!”
Patrick’s eyes went cold, darting around as if he were a cornered animal. Before Celina could get out another word, he blurted out, “I’ve got to go!” and scrambled around her.
“Wait!” Celina yelled. “Where are you going? I thought you wanted to hear more? It’s your turn to read!”
Patrick jumped on his bike and raced down the alley, riding against the strong desert wind, rocks popping under his tires.
“What? … What did I say?” he heard Celina call after him. “WHAT DID I DO WRONG?”
Chapter 7
Friends
On Saturday, Paulette worked from 6:30 A.M. to 2:30 P.M., the breakfast and lunch shifts, instead of lunch and dinner. Patrick was up early to have breakfast with her before she left, stumbling sleepily into the kitchen and plopping onto his stool at the counter.
“You should be in bed, sleepyhead,” Paulette said and kissed him on the cheek.
Patrick yawned. “And miss orange juice?”
Paulette smiled and got the new bottle out of the refrigerator. She poured two glasses full, just short of the rim, then carefully raised hers. “Happy weekend,” she whispered.
Patrick raised his glass to click against Paulette’s, and they both took a big drink. “Mmmm,” Patrick murmured.
“I’ll say,” Paulette agreed.
Two pieces of toast popped up in the toaster. Paulette buttered them quickly and served them on one plate. She ate standing up, leaning against the counter. She did that a lot. Patrick always wished she would sit down. He’d only told her that once, though. She’d laughed and said that if she sat down, she might not be able to get back up. “And then what would I do?” Patrick had laughed, too, although they both knew it wasn’t really funny. Now he didn’t mention how his mother ate. She’d been up since 5:30, he was sure.
“Lunch at Lupita’s?” Paulette asked.
Patrick nodded, his mouth too full to talk. Lunch at the café on Saturdays. Then dinner at home together—tacos! That was the routine. He liked Saturdays. No school. Lunch and dinner with Paulette. Usually they walked over to the ice-cream store in the evening, too. One scoop of anything he wanted. His favorite was almond fudge.
“See you around noon, then,” Paulette said, finishing off her toast. She pushed the rest of her orange juice toward Patrick. “Think you can figure out something to do with this?”
Patrick grinned. “Probably.”
Paulette laughed. Then she was out the door.
Patrick watched a couple of cartoon shows, got bored, and wandered out toward The Kingdom. Maybe he’d try to finish the castle if he had enough cardboard, or if not, ride down to the grocery store and check the trash bin for some. He ducked into the oleander bushes to find Celina sitting at the small table, Pellinore by her side.
Patrick stopped, half in, half out. Then he saw The Sword in the Stone. He recognized the drawing on the cover. Celina had it open in front of her. She began to read before he could turn and run.
“Chapter two: A good while after that, when they—you remember, Patrick, it’s Kay and Wart out looking for the hawk, Cully—when they had been whistling and luring and following the disturbed hawk from tree to tree, Kay lost his temper.”
Celina stopped and looked up. “I thought you might like to hear some more.” She grinned sheepishly, then turned to Pellinore and patted him on the head. He raised his chin and closed his eyes as she stroked his fur. “I know I’m trespassing,” she said. She turned back to Patrick. “You’re not angry like Kay in the story … are you?”
Patrick didn’t answer. He wasn’t sure how he felt. A strange mix of emotions flickered back and forth through him—fear, a bit of anger, and at the same time curiosity.
Celina continued to look at him, waiting for an answer.
He remained silent.
She shrugged and began reading again, this time a little faster:
“Let him go then,” said Kay. “He’s no use anyway.”
“Oh, we couldn’t leave him,” cried Wart. “What would Hob say?”
“It’s my hawk, not Hob’s,” exclaimed Kay furiously. “What does it matter what Hob says. He is my servant.”
“I don’t like Kay,” Patrick interrupted. Curiosity had gotten the best of him, pushing fear and anger aside. He edged the rest of the way into The Kingdom and sat down cross-legged in the dirt.
Celina nodded her agreement. “Yeah, Kay’s kind of a jerk some of the time.”
Patrick scowled. “He doesn’t even care about his hawk, and talks mean about Hob, too. I hate it when people act like they’re better than somebody else.” He reached over and retrieved a knight that had fallen off the orange-crate shelves, putting it back in front of the cardboard castle. “Paulette—she’s my mom—says people sometimes treat her like a servant at the restaurant. It really gets to her, but she has to keep smiling and get them what they want, anyway. I wouldn’t. I hate it when people talk to me like that.”
Celina frowned. “Like that Andy kid. He’s been saying mean things to me at school.”
Patrick’s mouth tightened. His eyes flashed. Andy had been in a bad mood a lot lately. One of the kids at school said Andy’s dad was in jail. Still, that was no excuse for being mean. “In the story, does Kay always get away with giving Wart a hard time?” Patrick asked.
Celina looked back at her book, searching the page. “I guess there’s only one way to find out,” she said with a smile.
And she began again, this time with even more drama in her voice, acting out the book as much as reading it. Like the wonderful wizard Merlyn, who soon appeared in the story, Celina wove the words of The Sword in the Stone into a spell around Patrick, enveloping him as he sat on the dirt hideaway floor.
They got all the way to page forty-one and the end of chapter three—where Patrick was delighted to find that Merlyn and the talking owl, Archimedes, were going back to the castle with Wart—before Celina’s voice gave out.
“I can’t read any more,” she gasped dramatically, holding her throat and slumping over onto the table.
A moment of panic seized Patrick. Would she ask him to read again like she had the day before?
She didn’t. Instead she just sat back up, laughed, and marked their place using a twig for a bookmark. She looked around The Kingdom, then put The Sword in the Stone on the orange-crate shelf, leaning it up against the cardboard-castle gate. “The perfect place for it, don’t you think?”
Patrick grinned and nodded, almost giddy with relief. He’d been able to enjoy a book, actually sit back and enjoy a story, without everything closing in. It made him feel … he didn’t know what, crazy, happy, silly, goofy, to have done that. It made him want to get up and do something wild and fun. This girl named Celina Ortiz from next door was all right. She congratulated him when he did well in soccer. She had trouble with Andy, just like he did. And she played good chess. Despite her weirdness, he liked her. She was … well, sort of a friend. It had been so long since he’d had a friend. What should they do, two friends together?
“Hey!” Patrick almost shouted. Suddenly, he knew. “Let’s ride our bikes down to the river and go exploring!”
Chapter 8
The Questing Beast
Down the alley they rode, then along Nathan Avenue, stopping only for the light on Verde Road, weaving around manhole covers, going fast, Patrick even riding with no hands. Pellinore ran alongside them, trying to keep up, his short legs a blur of motion.
Celina laughed, and Patrick laughed, too. The sun seemed less intense, the temperature just right. The heat wave must have broken. It was going to be a perfect day. In no time th
ey were at the river, looking out over a wide trough of dry sand, rocks, and scattered creosote bushes.
“My dad thinks it’s crazy to call this a river,” Celina said. “He says it should be called a wash, or better yet, an arroyo.” Her tongue fluttered over arroyo, shifting from English into perfect Spanish without the slightest hesitation.
Patrick looked at Celina, startled that he had forgotten about her brown skin, silky black hair, dark eyes, and her Mexican name, Celina Ortiz. He went to Dewey Elementary with lots of kids like Celina—Ramon, Leah, Carlos, Maria—but he’d never really gotten to know them outside of school. He knew how some people were about those who came from Mexico, or whose relatives had. Some people sneered and called them wetbacks, as if they’d all swum illegally across the Rio Grande into the country, as if they were less human than everybody else. He’d seen the looks in some people’s eyes. Andy was like that on bad mood days, and wouldn’t choose them for his team on the playground, even if they played well. Patrick didn’t feel that way, though. Paulette said people were people; nothing else mattered. She was right. It didn’t matter. Celina was Celina. Celina was his … yeah, his friend.
Patrick smiled at Celina, then looked back at the dry gully and shrugged. “It has water in it some of the time, like after a storm. It’s a river then, right?”
Celina shook her head. “Dad says rivers have to have water in them all the time to be called rivers. He looked it up in the dictionary.” She laughed. “Mom says where else but the desert do you get to see what’s underneath a river? She thinks it’s neat that you can see the bottom so much of the year. She says Dad is too picky. She says that’s what you get when you marry a history teacher.”
Patrick stared. “Your dad teaches history?”
Celina nodded. “Yep. World history, especially about how Europeans came to North and South America, and what they did to it. And Mom teaches literature—you know, all about books. She loves poetry the best. They both teach at the university.”
“You mean they’re …”
“Professors, both of them,” Celina said.
Patrick couldn’t believe it. Professors? He had never met a real professor before. He’d just heard Paulette talk about them as if they were special, and had imagined that they all were old men who wore sports jackets and smoked pipes. He had always thought that they lived in those nice old houses by Hughes Park. But here was this girl telling him that the brown-skinned man and woman he’d seen dressed in blue jeans and T-shirts, sweating as they unloaded the moving van, speaking Spanish, living next door to him, were professors at the University of Arizona.
Celina pushed her hair back behind her ears. “My dad is the first person in his family to get his doctorate. He studied in Europe. So did Mom. That’s where we’ve been living until now—in Spain.”
Living in Spain! Good grief! Patrick had seen a show on Spain once on TV. That was all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. “Spain?” he asked. “Really?”
“Yeah,” Celina said with a shrug, as though having lived in Spain was no big deal. “But Dad grew up in that house beside you. When Grandma died he wanted to come back to Arizona and live in it again. He said he missed the saguaro in the backyard, buying fresh tamales by the dozen, talking to his old friends. Mom, too. She grew up just an hour away, over in Benson. They met at the university when they were eighteen. It was great when they both got jobs there. The only problem has been finding a place for all of their books.” She laughed. “You should see ’em all. We’ve got tons. Mountains!”
Patrick tried to imagine it—the Ortiz family surrounded by books. Tons of them. Mountains! He nodded as though it all made sense, as though this story were normal, that lots of kids in the neighborhood lived that way. But it didn’t really make sense. No one he had ever known had parents like that, books like that.
“Can we go down there?” Celina asked, pointing into the dry wash.
Patrick was glad for a change of subject. The desert was something he felt comfortable with. He knew it. He bet he could even teach the daughter of two professors a thing or two about it. “Sure,” he said, “let’s go!”
They parked their bikes behind a clump of mesquite trees, then ran down the rocky bank onto the soft, sandy bottom. “Arroyo,” Celina said over and over, almost singing the word. Patrick found himself singing it, too, quietly trying to mimic the way it rolled off Celina’s tongue. The sound of car traffic on the nearby bridge mixed with the singing and the sound of the cicada bugs, and faded away.
Patrick took deep breaths of air and twisted his feet in the sand with each step, bouncing from one foot to the other, a kind of dance. He sang a little louder, not afraid that Celina might hear. “Arroyo. Arroyo.” Celina sang back. “Arroyo. Arroyo.” She threw a stick for Pellinore to fetch, tossing it as far ahead as she could. The small dog ran after it, kicking up sand as he sprinted for his prize, and disappeared around a clump of creosote bushes. His high-pitched barking brought Celina and Patrick on the run.
Pellinore was barking at a lizard sunning itself on a large rock. “Wow!” Celina shouted. “It looks just like a dragon. Almost like the Questing Beast!” She grabbed Pellinore by the collar, holding him back. “Leave it alone, will you. Sit! Sit!”
Pellinore didn’t sit. He lunged at the lizard and continued to bark.
Patrick wasn’t nearly as excited as either Celina or her dog. “It’s just a chuckwalla,” he said calmly, feeling proud that he knew something the daughter of two professors didn’t. “I’ve seen bunches of them.”
Celina bounced up and down on her toes, still holding onto Pellinore’s collar. “Really? Bunches?”
Patrick nodded. “Yeah, but I like gila monsters or just about any decent-sized snake better. When it’s still this hot, they usually don’t come out until night, though.” It felt good to be the expert. He hoped Celina would comment on his knowledge of the desert.
She didn’t, though. She was too caught up in the sight of the chuckwalla, its dry, scaly skin hanging in loose folds along its sides, its beady eyes watching them so intently.
“Can we catch it and take it back? It could be our own Questing Beast. Wouldn’t that be great? Can you catch it, Patrick? Can you? Can you?”
Patrick shrugged. “Sure,” he said, “I can catch it. No problem.”
But as soon as he lunged for the chuckwalla, it scurried back into a crevice and inflated itself with air. The loose folds of skin on its sides stretched tight across its body and against the rocks, wedging it in. Patrick tugged on its tail, then tugged harder.
“Not so hard!” Celina said. “Won’t its tail break off?”
“That’s whiptails and zebra lizards, not chuck-wallas,” Patrick grunted, working one hand in to grab the chuckwalla by the neck. It hissed, twisting around, and tried to bite his finger. He jerked his hand away. “They do get mad, though.” He reached in again, getting hold of its neck this time, while increasing the pulling pressure on its tail. He grunted, then gave an extra tug.
The chuckwalla came loose all at once, sending Patrick staggering back. He struggled to get his balance, then held the angry, wriggling lizard up in the air. “Got it!” he yelled.
Pellinore barked.
“Yay!” Celina shouted. “Our Questing Beast. Can I hold it?”
“Sure, just be careful,” Patrick said. He handed the lizard to her. “Hold it behind the neck, just like I’m doing.”
Celina reached out, eyes dancing with delight, and took the chuckwalla. “I dub you our Questing Beast!” she said with a big grin. “You’re just perfect!”
Then, before Patrick could do anything to stop her, she rubbed her nose affectionately against the chuckwalla’s—a big mistake.
Chapter 9
DON’T WORRY?
The chuckwalla bit hard into the end of Celina’s nose. She fell back yelling. “Get it off! Get it off! ¡Quita me lo!”
Pellinore snarled and barked, kicking up sand and lunging at the lizard’s tail. He ended up with
Celina’s shirtsleeve instead. Celina rolled around in the sand. “No, Pellinore! Patrick! Patrick, get them both off!”
Patrick pushed Pellinore aside. He grabbed the chuckwalla and pulled.
Celina let out a sharp yelp. “Don’t!”
Patrick let up, but the chuckwalla didn’t, its jaws still clamped tight.
“Get it off! Please!” Celina pleaded, her voice starting to quiver. “Please get it off! It’s probably poisonous, or I’ll bleed to death. I’m going to die!”
Pellinore started to whine. Patrick examined Celina’s nose and shook his head. “Its teeth haven’t even broken the skin. There’s no blood. Besides, it’s gila monsters that are poisonous. Chuckwallas aren’t. Don’t worry.”
Celina glared at him. “DON’T WORRY?” She was screaming now. “THERE’S A LIZARD BITING MY NOSE, STUPID!”
Patrick sat back as if pushed by the force of the word. Stupid. She knew. Her voice had sounded just like his father’s. He felt a momentary rush of panic.
But just as quickly as Celina had gotten angry, she started to cry. “Do something. Please.”
The quick change in Celina snapped Patrick out of his fear. He looked around, eyes darting, until he spotted a good-sized stick that had lodged up against a bush in a summer flood. He rushed over and picked it up, then ran back to Celina, who was carefully sitting up, holding the chuckwalla with one hand. Tears streaked her cheeks. Patrick grabbed the chuckwalla’s tail, raised the stick, and started to give the lizard a hard whack.