Avery McShane

by Greg Lyons

  ‘Ahoy the fort,’ yelled Billy. ‘We come in peace.’

  ‘And bearing gifts for the birthday boy,’ chimed in Todd, who was carrying a shoebox under his thick arm.

  Todd sat cross-legged on the floor, scratching at the little scabs on the backs of his legs from when he got shot with the rock salt. Billy was next to him flipping through the unripped pages of a brand new issue of Iron Man that had come in the mail. He had a big black-and-blue shiner around his left eye, but the swelling had gone down. They had set the shoebox with my birthday gift on the floor in front of where I was sitting, and were acting all casual and offhand-ish.

  ‘So do you want me to open it now?’ I said. ‘Or wait until I open all the presents at the party?’

  ‘Oh, whatever you want,’ said Billy without looking up from Iron Man.

  ‘Up to you,’ said Todd. He was looking at the scab he’d just picked, and I knew he was trying to decide whether to eat it or not. It was salted, so it would probably taste better than most.

  ‘OK, I’ll just open it up now,’ I said.

  Neither one of them looked up when I reached out to pull the top off the shoebox. I hesitated a moment. Something was up, I thought. They were acting pretty strange. But my curiosity got the better of me, so I went on ahead and opened up the box. When I saw it I let out a good imitation of one of Billy’s girly screams, and it was exactly what they’d hoped for. All of a sudden they were laughing like crazy and congratulating each other. That’s because the first thing I saw in the box was a snake with dark black eyes and sharp fangs all coiled up and ready to sink its poisonous fangs into my hand. I had already jumped back and scrambled away like a madman to get away from the killer reptile, when I realised that the snake looked a little odd. My buddies were laughing so hard that they both had tears running down their cheeks. I looked back into the box, this time from a safe distance, and saw what they’d done. It wasn’t a snake at all. It was one of those monster worms and they had painted on eyes and a mouth with a magic marker, and had glued on two small fang-shaped pieces of paper coming out of the fake mouth. They’d even gone so far as to draw in a little red at the tips of the fangs to make it look like blood.

  Now it was my turn to laugh. They had gotten me fair and square.

  ‘Oh, now that was a good one,’ I said. ‘I should’ve known you guys wouldn’t get near a real snake, much less put it in a shoebox.’

  ‘It was hard to paint it up,’ laughed Billy. ‘It kept squirming.’

  ‘There’s more,’ said Todd, wiping the tears from his cheeks. ‘Check it out.’

  First thing I did was put the worm snake in an empty cardboard box. We’d fix up something for him later, with dirt in it, like we had for the first one. I looked back in the box, a little more cautiously this time, to see what else they had in store for me. The next gift was especially cool. It was the pair of silver spurs that the gang had taken from the dead guy on the concrete slab.

  ‘Capitán Gómez gave us permission,’ said Billy. ‘He said that the dead guy would have wanted to give them to you for solving the mystery of how he got killed.’

  Turns out that Gustavo Muñoz, the dead guy, was killed by Lieutenant Sánchez. Gustavo had been out in El Monte riding his horse around, and when he saw the farmhouse he decided to go and see if he could get a job there and make a little spare change before the annual cattle round-up. When no one answered the front door he had gone around the back to the barn because he’d heard the sounds of a saw coming from inside it. With all the noise from the sawing, Pablo Malo hadn’t heard Muñoz walk up. But Muñoz had seen Malo pulling out the little sacks of diamonds and pretty quickly put the pieces together. He skedaddled out of there straight to the police station in Campo Mata. Problem was that Lieutenant Sánchez was the first person he saw when he got there. Sánchez got Muñoz to go back with him to the farmhouse and that’s where he shot him. We knew all of this because Guillermo Santos had sung like a bird after he woke up in jail. With Sánchez under guard in the clinic and Pablo Malo dead, the fat man didn’t have to worry about what they’d do to him. He told the police everything.

  ‘Thanks, guys,’ I said. ‘I think we should keep them here at the hideout. I’ll hammer in a nail by the holsters and hang these next to them.’

  The last thing in the shoebox was a worn-out, dog-eared Mad magazine. It was only one, and it wouldn’t replace all the others Pablo Malo had stolen from us, but it was a start and it made me feel like everything would soon be back to normal at the tree house.

  ‘These are the best gifts,’ I said.

  I slid the magazine under my stack of Thor comic books.

  ‘Hey, guess what I found out?’ I said. ‘Turns out there’s a big cayman in Mata Pond.’

  ‘No way,’ replied a worried Billy. ‘You’re just joshing us.’

  ‘Nope, Dad saw it when he was looking for his golf ball on number eight. It came after him, so my dad had to take a drop ball, and Mr Slater ended up winning their match by one stroke. Beat my dad for the first time ever.’

  ‘Holy bat caves!’ cried Billy. ‘You mean we’ve been swimming in there and pulling out golf balls for years, and there’s been a gator there the whole time?’

  ‘Yep, it’s a fact.’

  The sun was just starting to set on the horizon, and the lighting from the tiki torches was taking over from the disappearing sunlight. Most everybody was there now at the party. My girlfriend Denise was sitting at the picnic table next to mine talking to her twin sister. They looked over at me sitting by myself and Cathy whispered something in Denise’s ear and they both started giggling. Whatever was so funny obviously had to do with me. I tried not to turn red-faced, but I was never any good at hiding a blush, at least not when it came to girls.

  Todd was over at the barbecue pit standing next to my dad, who was turning over hamburgers and hot dogs with a big pair of tongs. When my dad wasn’t looking Todd snatched up one of those hot dogs and ran away, tossing the burning hot wiener from one hand to the other to keep from singeing himself. Mati ran after him, barking out his demand for a piece of the action. Billy had gone back into the house to change the music, and there wasn’t much suspense about which song he was going to put on. Sure enough it was Tex Ritter, every young cowboy’s favourite singer. The sounds of Blood on the Saddle poured out of the open doors and window of the house. It was a sad song about a cowboy who gets shot in a gunfight and dies, and it made me think again about that gaucho that Sánchez had killed. He had looked like a nice guy, someone I would have gotten along with just fine. He had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, just like a cowboy on a cattle drive getting caught in a sudden stampede and trampled to a pulp.

  I saw Nelly walking over to my table with a plate full of food she’d put together for me. She had come back the day before from her time off, and while she still wasn’t herself, she did seem a mite better than last week. At least she was talking to me instead of throwing hot pans into the sink and crying all the time. She came up beside me and set the paper plate on the table in front of me.

  ‘Gracias, Nelly,’ I said. ‘I surely am hungry.’

  ‘De nada,’ she replied.

  Instead of walking away, she just stood there next to me, looking me straight in the eye. To my horror I saw her eyes fill up with tears and then they started to drip down her cheeks. Oh no, I thought, not again. What is it with grown-ups?

  ‘Gracias, Avery,’ she said in Spanish, ‘for catching the man who killed my brother.’

  Her brother? Gustavo Muñoz was her brother? Was that what my parents didn’t want to tell me?

  Well, that certainly explained a lot – at least about her crying and all – but it didn’t help me figure out what to say next. I hadn’t told anyone what happened at Pablo Malo’s farm, most especially Mom and Dad. We had each gone home that morning as if nothing had happened, as if we’d just gotten tired of spending the night at each other’s houses. For sure my parents asked me why I had scratches on my ar
ms and why my clothes were so muddy and wet, but I told them that we’d been out in El Monte, which was not technically speaking a lie. Far as I could tell they believed me, because I didn’t get grounded. And neither did Billy or Todd. Billy’s parents fussed a bit about his shiner and swollen eye, and they threatened to keep him away from Todd, who they suspected of being the one who had smacked him. But the dust cleared soon enough and everything had gone back to normal.

  ‘Capitán Gómez told me everything that you did,’ continued Nelly. ‘That the policía from Anaco found my brother’s murderer tied up and his guns on the kitchen counter. He said that you are a hero and very brave.’

  I started blushing again, but I still couldn’t get a word out. Nelly smiled at me through her tears.

  ‘He asked me if Billy and Todd could give you my brother’s silver spurs,’ she went on, ‘and I told him they could. You will think about him when you look at them, yes? He was a good man, a good gaucho and the best brother in the world.’

  The words finally started to come out.

  ‘I’m so sorry that your brother died, Nelly,’ I said. ‘Thank you for giving me his spurs. Every time I look at them I’ll think about your brother, about him up there somewhere riding horses and rounding up cattle.’

  ‘He is with God in heaven,’ she said.

  Nelly walked away and I never heard her talk about her brother again. I sat there alone just staring at my food. It was a funny thing, but I was starting to understand why people of different ages cry about different things. When you’re young you cry if someone takes your toy or when you fall and scrape your knee, but adults don’t often cry about those kinds of things. An adult cries when someone close to them dies, which I was starting to understand, or when someone gives them something, which I still didn’t totally understand. So I figured that I must have been getting close to becoming an adult because I knew that I would feel sad for Nelly every time I saw those silver spurs, and that I might even cry.

  The party was over and there was only one tiki torch still lit in the grassy field behind my house, and that’s where I was. I had promised Mom that I’d be coming in soon, but I just wanted to sit in the fresh air for a bit before calling it a night. The stars were out and I saw Venus and Mars and Orion’s Belt. The half-moon was low on the horizon, on its way to take a dip in the distant Pacific Ocean with the sun. I looked out across the field and saw the bumpy black outline of the tops of the tall trees of El Monte against the background of the dark blue sky. I looked down below the treetops and saw the faint outline of the barbed wire fence dimly lit by the yellow light of the solitary tiki torch that I was sitting under. It took me a long moment to accept what I saw next.

  She was there, at the edge of the jungle, where the path to the hideout began. Loca stood there, a motionless ghost in the night, her red eyes boring into mine. I blinked to clear the apparition from my mind, and when I opened my eyes again, she was gone.

  THE END

  If you loved Avery’s awesome adventure,

  don’t let it stop here!

  Visit www.averymcshane.blogspot.com

  for more on Avery and the gang!

  Get to know Greg with this cool Q & A

  Who is your favourite villain in a book?

  Long John Silver, of course. He made Treasure Island click. Likeable and murderous at the same time – I liked him, then I didn’t, then I thought maybe he’d come around, and then he didn’t.

  If you could be a character from a book who would you be?

  This is cheating, because the novelization came after the movies, but I would be Indiana Jones. I haven’t even read the books, but I know from the movies that he’s who I’d want to be. I know for a fact that if I had it to do all over again, I’d be an archaeologist and I’d explore for things in remote places where adventures were bound to happen.

  If you could recommend just one book for everyone to read what would it be?

  That is a tough one. If just one, for people of any age, I would have to go with The Lord of the Rings.

  Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin, New York and Sydney

  First published in Great Britain in March 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  This electronic edition published in March 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP

  Text copyright © Greg Lyons 2012

  Map copyright © Fred van Deelen 2012

  The moral rights of the author and illustrator have been asserted

  All rights reserved

  You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise

  make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means

  (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying,

  printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the

  publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication

  may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

  Quote on pv: excerpt from a letter to an unidentified correspondent,

  signed, ‘Yours truly, Samuel L. Clemens’ and ‘Mark Twain’.

  Grateful acknowledgement is made to the University of California Press

  for permission to include this excerpt from Newly Recovered Letters, Part One

  (unpublished manuscripts) by Mark Twain, edited by Victor Fischer et al

  © 2010 by the Mark Twain Foundation.

  Reprinted by permission of the University of California Press

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9781408816837

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