Mississippi River Blues

by Tony Abbott

  Then the Widow Douglas got up and said that she meant to give Huck a home under her roof.

  “A home?” said Tom.

  “A roof?” said Huck.

  “Yes!” the woman prolaimed. “And Huck will be educated, too!”

  “Educated?” said Tom.

  “A roof?” said Huck.

  “Yes!” the widow said again. “And when I can spare the money, I will start you in business with nice clothes every day!”

  Tom laughed out loud. “But Huck doesn’t need any money—Huck’s rich!”

  Everyone thought this was a joke, so they laughed pleasantly, but when Tom raced out of the house and barged back in, struggling under the weight of the treasure sacks and spilling them out on the table, no one knew what to say.

  “Half’s Huck’s and half’s mine!” proclaimed Tom.

  It was cool. The look on Tom’s face was all about his friend. We could tell that he didn’t care so much about his own bag of money.

  When everyone had stopped gasping and oohing and aahing over the money, Mr. Jones counted it.

  The treasure amounted to the awesome sum of—

  “Twelve thousand dollars!” the Welshman said.

  Everyone gasped and oohed and aahed all over again.

  “Nice ending,” I said.

  “Nice ending, but …” said Frankie, holding up the last chapter between her fingers. “It’s not over yet. We still have five more pages.”

  “Gimme that book!” I said. “I wanna read!”

  I did read. It turns out that the treasure money was put in a bank and Tom and Huck got an allowance of a dollar a day, which, let me tell you, is more than I get more than a hundred and twenty-five years later!

  Judge Thatcher said that Tom could probably be a lawyer someday, or maybe a great soldier, or maybe both at the same time, since Tom could apparently do just about anything after saving Becky.

  Huck, of course, tried to slink away, but the Widow Douglas really wanted to take care of him and that’s what she did. Huck went to live in her house and went to school and wore clothes and everything. For three weeks, he did what he was told, then one day he turned up missing. Gone. Vanished. No Huck anywhere.

  The Widow Douglas and others hunted for him all over the place. They searched high and low and even dragged the river for his body, firing the cannon the way they had done for us when we hid on the island.

  But no. Huck was gone.

  “I can’t believe the author is going to end the story with Huck lost and maybe dead,” Frankie said, when we met on the dusty main street after the last searches turned up no Huck. “I always thought Huck would have his own book one day.”

  I was sad, too. I liked the rumply kid. “If the story’s almost over, I guess we’d better start searching for those zapper gates.”

  “Pssst!” We heard a sound over our shoulder and turned. There was Tom, in the shadow of a big old oak tree, crooking his finger at us, a little grin on his lips. “Up for a little adventure?” he said.

  Frankie and I looked at each other.

  “Well,” I said. “We do have a few pages left.…“

  She smiled. “It may be our last chance. Let’s do it!”

  Quietly, carefully, we followed Tom into the woods and came upon that old familiar junk heap.

  And there, in the middle of it, was Huck’s barrel.

  Not only that, there were two feet sticking out of it.

  “Huckie!” I yelped. We ran over and rolled the barrel over, and Huck came tumbling out with a laugh. He was wearing the same old rags he had cast off to become part of society. They seemed to suit him much better.

  We played for a bit, then Tom sucked in a breath and looked right at Huck. “You gotta come back to town.”

  “Don’t talk about it, Tom,” said his friend. “I’ve tried knives and forks and my fingers don’t like them. House-living just ain’t for old Huck Finn. He’s too wild for it.”

  “Well, life after a barrel has got to feel strange,” said Frankie.

  “Strange!” said Huck, his eyes wide. “The widow makes me get up at the same time every morning! She makes me wash my face like it’s never been washed before, and I hate a clean face—”

  “Muff Potter lives!” I said.

  “Plus, she won’t let me sleep in the woodshed!” Huck went on. “Not to mention that them clothes are out to smother me to death! And shoes—phooey!”

  “Everybody does it that way,” said Tom.

  “I ain’t everybody,” Huck growled. “I’m me.”

  He went on and on for about an hour, then summed up by saying, “Tom, I wouldn’t be in this mess if it hadn’t been for that money. So you just take my share and give me a nickel sometimes and I’ll be happy. But I ain’t going back. I like the river and the woods and my barrel and that’s where I’m staying. You go and live that way. I can’t.”

  Tom slumped his shoulders as if he were losing his best friend, which I guess he was. Then that twinkly look came into his eye again. “Looky here, Huck. Being rich isn’t going to keep me from turning robber like we said.”

  Huck looked at him warily. “A robber? You sure?”

  “No kidding,” said Tom. “The robber life is the one for me. I’m going to have the greatest gang. But we can’t let you into the gang if you aren’t respectable ….”

  Huck made a noise. “But I was a pirate.”

  “That’s different,” said Tom, nearly scoffing. “A robber is much more high-toned than a pirate is. You need to be high up in the nobility to be a proper robber.”

  Huck was silent for some time, lovingly touching the rim of his barrel house, mulling over what Tom had said.

  “Well,” he said finally, “I’ll go back to the widow for a month to see if I can stand it, but you have to let me belong to the gang, Tom.”

  Tom leaped for joy. “We’ll get the boys together and have the initiation tonight—at midnight!”

  “Yay!” I said, jumping up and down. “The fun continues! I’ll be Devin the Masked One, or Count Devin, the Prince of Thieves, or maybe Devin the …”

  “Devin?” said Frankie.

  I turned.

  She was pointing to the woods beyond Tom and Huck.

  And there it was, a blue flickering light shining through the bushes behind Huck’s barrel.

  The zapper gates were calling us.

  Chapter 19

  I was totally bummed. “Mrs. Figglehopper’s zapper gates, already? Is it time to go back so soon? We’re just getting started. I want to be a robber. Come to think of it, I’ve always wanted to be one! It’s not fair.”

  “Hey, it’s not,” said Frankie. “I want to rob and pillage with Tom and Huck, too. But it seems like the end of the story. For us, at least.”

  We turned to the guys for maybe the last time.

  “… all the pact-making has got to be done at midnight,” Tom was saying. “In the lonesomest, awfulest place you can find—”

  “Maybe a haunted house?” suggested Huck.

  “The hauntedest!” Tom said. “And you’ve got to swear on a coffin and sign it with blood—”

  “More blood,” said Frankie. Then she sighed. “Yeah, I guess it’s time to get back to the real world.”

  “Back to our busy, overbooked lives,” I said.

  “Right,” she said. “Let’s zap ourselves.”

  I nodded. “Bye, Tom Sawyer! Bye, Huck Finn!”

  Just then, a cool breeze fluttered through the hot woods. The sun was blazing overhead and streaming light down through the leafy trees, but it was comfy and nice in Huck’s yard as he and Tom kept making plans.

  I breathed it all in. It felt good and slow and carefree and I liked it. It was summertime for Tom and Huck, and it would always be that way in this book.

  “So long, guys,” Frankie said at last.

  They turned and waved to us as we leaped together into the pulsing blue light of the library zapper gates.

  KKKKKK! The whole world o
f green leaves went bright blue. Then everything went dark for a split second, and we found ourselves hurtling over each other in a mess of arms and legs and fluttering pages until—thud!—we hit the wall of the library workroom at the exact moment we left it.

  The door squeaked, and Mrs. Figglehopper entered. “Devin … Frankie … you … er … why are you two on the floor?”

  We bolted up.

  “We … um … like the way the floor smells!” said Frankie.

  The librarian gave us a strange look. “I see. Anyway, time’s up, I’m afraid. Your test with Mr. Wexler begins in one minute. I’m sorry you didn’t have much time to look at The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Sometime you really ought to read it—”

  “Again,” I whispered to Frankie.

  “Excuse me?” said Mrs. Figglehopper.

  “Um … nothing,” said Frankie.

  She handed Mrs. Figglehopper the treasure. I mean, the book. “Here you go,” she said.

  Just before we left, Mrs. Figglehopper looked at the book, then flipped through it to the last page. She studied it for a second, glanced at us in a strange way, then smiled this tiny, odd smile to herself.

  As we headed down the hall to class, Frankie turned to me. “I’m still not sure about Mrs. Figglehopper and her weird zapper gates. Do you think she knows about how they take us into books?”

  I shrugged. “It is weird how she keeps them around. Maybe someday we’ll find out for sure what she knows. If we ever have to read a book again.”

  “Something tells me we probably will,” said Frankie.

  When we got to class, Mr. Wexler had a huge smile on his face. “Just in time!” he boomed, his eyes blazing. “Prepare to dazzle me with your knowledge of a book I read five times when I was your age! Challenge me!”

  He put the test paper down on our desks.

  Frankie and I sat down and took the test.

  It was awesome. I wrote more words than I thought I ever knew. Whole sentences of them. All about how the author, Mark Twain, was writing about what it was like to grow up on the banks of the Mississippi River and about friendship and the stuff friends did together. And also about summer and what it felt like a long time ago, with all the clean air and the woods and playing in the sun and not having so many worries.

  I wrote about how the book was really about what it means to be a kid. The way we think and feel and how we want to do something really, really bad, then we get tired of it and move on to something else. How we’re afraid sometimes, but how we get through it, anyhow.

  I thought the book was also about friendship—how Tom liked Becky and Huck—and about how it makes you want to do things for your friends.

  Sort of like me and Frankie, I guess.

  I aced the test. Frankie did, too.

  I could tell by the fish-eye look Mr. Wexler gave us when he glanced at our tests that we did really well on it.

  I’m sure he couldn’t figure out how we could possibly know so much about any book, let alone one of his all-time favorites.

  But we’ll never tell.

  FROM THE DESK OF

  IRENE M. FIGGLEHOPPER, LIBRARIAN

  Dear Reader:

  Did you know that Mark Twain is really the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens? Well, it is. Born in 1835, Sam grew up in the little town of Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi River.

  As a young man, Sam was a printer’s apprentice, a newspaperman, a traveler, a gold prospector, and finally a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi.

  During the 1860s, he began writing travel articles and humorous stories, some of which made fun of local people. To write more freely, he chose a pen name taken from his days of piloting steamboats. “Mark twain” was the call that announced to the pilot that the river was “twain,” or two fathoms deep (a fathom is six feet).

  Over the next few years, Mark’s reputation as a humorist grew. But it wasn’t until The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published in 1876 that he was recognized as one of America’s greatest writers for the way he captured how children really feel and think and talk.

  How did he do it? He went back to his own boyhood.

  “Most of the adventures recorded in this book really occurred” Twain says in a preface. “Huck Finn is drawn from life; Tom Sawyer, also, but not from an individual; he is a combination of the characteristics of three boys whom I knew.” We know, however, that Twain himself was the most important model for Tom.

  And Frankie will like that Huck did indeed get his own book. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is felt by many to be Twain’s greatest work.

  During his lifetime, Twain was considered America’s finest comic writer. He is still revered today for the same reason. By the time he died in 1910, he had written many books, but his most famous will always be the adventures of Tom and Huck on the banks of the Mississippi.

  I must stop now. I hear a noise in the workroom.

  Until then, toodle-oo! See you where the books are!

  I. M. Figglehopper

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Cracked Classics series

  Chapter 1

  “Everyone ready for our field trip?” my English teacher, Mr. Wexler, chirped. “All right, then. Let’s go!”

  “This is a field trip?” a voice hissed in my ear. “I don’t call this a field trip. Devin, do you call this a field trip? Because, if you ask me, I don’t call this a field trip!”

  I’m Devin Bundy. The person hissing in my ear was my-very-best-friend-despite-the-fact-that-she’s-a-girl, Frankie Lang. We’re in the sixth grade at Palmdale Middle School, and at the moment we were following Mr. Wexler and the rest of our class on a field trip.

  Down the hall and around the corner.

  To the school library.

  “This is definitely stretching the definition of field trip,” I replied to Frankie as we tramped past the main office. “I see no fields, because we are totally inside. And I usually reserve the word ‘trip’ for something that involves a bus with a bathroom. But then, I didn’t hear Mr. Wexler even talking about a trip because I was working on another project.”

  Frankie frowned at me. “What other project?”

  “A dream I was having. I dreamed that I was sleeping in class and having a dream about sleeping in class.”

  She nodded. “Devin, you’ve had that dream before.”

  “It’s one of my favorites,” I said.

  Now, there’s something you need to know about Frankie and me. People say that the only way to succeed in life is to develop your talents. So we have.

  Frankie is really amazing at staring into space.

  My own specialty is dozing in class.

  Hey, it’s what we do well.

  What we don’t do well is read. We test pretty low on the whole book-reading thing. Of course, Mr. Wexler wants to help us do better. He’s sure we have great potential.

  “Everyone—here we are!” Mr. Wexler said excitedly as we reached the library entrance.

  Frankie was so disappointed, her hair drooped.

  “I bet Mrs. Figglehopper is behind this whole field-trip thing,” she said. “She’ll probably pop out from behind a book and make us read something!”

  Mrs. Figglehopper is the not-too-ordinary librarian of Palmdale Middle School. She always wears long, flowery dresses. Her gray hair is tied up in a tight knob at the back of her head. And she’s severely nutty about old books. You know the kind of books I mean. People call them classics.

  Mrs. Figglehopper and Mr. Wexler are like the one-two punch of reading. He assigns fat old books, and her library has loads of copies of them.

  But that isn’t the only thing about our teacher and our librarian. Because of stuff we’ve done, and some stuff we haven’t done, Mr. Wexler has sentenced us to work in Mrs. Figglehopper’s library workroom a couple of times.

  And let me tell you something. The weirdest things happen in that library workroom.

  As we stood outside the library, Frankie and I glanced at ea
ch other. I could tell from the look in her eye that we were both remembering some of those weird things.

  “Zapper gates,” whispered Frankie.

  “Zapper gates,” I whispered back to her.

  The zapper gates are what Mrs. Figglehopper calls an old set of security gates that she keeps in the workroom. They’re the kind of gates that are supposed to go zzzt-zzzt! when you take a book through them that hasn’t been checked out right.

  The librarian has told us, like, a thousand times that those gates are broken and that someday she’ll get them repaired to work right again.

  Except that the gates aren’t exactly broken.

  One day, Frankie and I found out that those gates can sizzle and fizzle and spark and flicker and drop you right into a book.

  Yes! Into a book! Right there with all the characters and places and story and everything!

  The first time it happened, Frankie and I were fighting over a book. It fell through the gates, light exploded everywhere, and the wall behind the gates cracked open.

  When we went through, we ended up right smack at the beginning of the book. Our only way home was to follow the characters all the way to the end of the story.

  We almost didn’t believe it had actually happened. Except that we got our best grades ever when we got tested on the books we fell into. And you can’t take our grades away. They’re part of our permanent record.

  Mr. Wexler snapped his fingers, said, “Enter!” and we pushed through the library’s double doors into the main room. It was filled with study carrels and tables and lots and lots of bookshelves, each one jammed with—guess what?—books.

  I felt an uncontrollable urge to yawn.

  “Devin,” said Mr. Wexler, “if you can get your head out of that fog you’re in, you might learn something fun!”

  I stifled the yawn, but I knew it would come back.

  “Good,” said our teacher. “Mrs. Figglehopper has prepared for us a special display of beautiful books from many different countries around the world—England, India, China, Japan, France … ah!”