The No-Good Nine

by John Bemelmans Marciano

  “I told you about the n-n-n-narwhal,” the Know-It-All said. “But none of you wanted to listen! You just wanted to talk about playing with toys and p-p-p-punching Santa!”

  “I still don’t know what a nar-wall even is!” the Hooligan said, making that two of us.

  “It’s a unicorn w-w-whale,” the Know-It-All said.

  “Hey, unicorns don’t exist!” the Rude said.

  “But narwhals do!” the Know-It-All said.

  “Magic ones?” the Cruel said.

  “But it’s all true!” the Know-It-All said. “It was in a m-m-m-magazine!”

  “And you think everything in a magazine is true?” the Cruel said. “If you do, then you’re the biggest dope of us all!”

  “Wait,” the Hooligan whispered to me. “Everything in a magazine isn’t true?”

  “Look, you had a chance to change the p-p-plan if you didn’t like it, but none of you wanted to even listen to it!” the Know-It-All said. “You were too busy trying to figure out if Frankenstein could b-b-b-beat up Dracula!”

  “Hey, don’t turn this around!” the Rude said.

  “Yeah! We should’ve known not to trust you from the minute you screwed up the boat schedule!” the Brat said. “We should’ve gone home then!”

  “Can everyone please stop?” Goody-Two-Shoes said. “Fighting isn’t going to help us. We have to start walking back to the city.”

  “And then what?” the Brat said, his face turning tomato-soup red. “Even if we survive, we don’t have any money left! That filthy rotten thief and her gold-toothed mother stole all my money!!”

  “I kept t-t-t-telling you we shouldn’t trust them,” the Know-It-All said. “I t-t-t-told you! But you wouldn’t l-l-listen! You never listen!”

  “NO ONE TALKS TO ME LIKE THAT!” the Brat said, and made a flying tackle of the Know-It-All.

  They both fell over in a heap in the snow.

  “You dirty rotten B-B-B-Brat!” the Know-It-All hollered. “Get off of me!”

  “FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT!” the Hooligan and the Rude chanted.

  It was sad to see the two of them going at it. First, because they were almost friends. Second, because neither of them knew how to throw a punch.

  I needed to stop it.

  “Break it up! Break it up!” I shouted, getting in the middle of it. Caught in the middle of it, that is.

  Because

  POW!

  right in my face.

  “OW! Stop it!” I said. Then another punch hit me. “OW! Stop it, you chumps! And learn how to aim a punch!”

  I started hitting back. What choice did I have?

  “You’re both jerks and it’s both of your faults!” I yelled, whaling at them with both fists.

  It felt good.

  Pretty soon, all our energy and anger was spent, and the three of us lay on the ground, huffing and puffing in the pounded-down snow.

  A long, sharp shadow came looming over us.

  It was the Cruel.

  “You three disgust me,” she said. “I’ve seen better fighting from the kindergarten girls at Saint Hedwig’s. But what really disgusts is me is that the only reason we are out here in the first place is that you three little boys didn’t get a present on Christmas and that made you sad in your warm, snug homes in fancy-schmancy Sewickley. Boo-hoo! So you decided to lead us poor Pittsburghers on your adventure to Santaland, with your plans”

  (She turned to the Know-It-All.)

  “and your money”

  (She turned to the Brat.)

  “and your dumb names and passwords!”

  (She turned to me.)

  “Our mistake was letting you three be in charge,” the Cruel said. “NOT! ANY! MORE!”

  None of the three of us said a word. She did, after all, kind of have a point. (Except about the names and passwords.)

  “I’m going this way,” the Cruel said, turning away from me. “If any of the rest of you want to survive, I suggest you come with me.”

  The Cruel began walking in the tracks that Mummy’s truck had left in the snow.

  “I’m with her!” the Rude said, following.

  “Me too!” the Hooligan said, right behind.

  And I sure wasn’t sticking around neither!

  “Y’know, I was never really with those other two guys,” I said. “And my home is really crappy!”

  As for those other two guys . . .

  “Come on,” Goody-Two-Shoes said to the Brat and the Know-It-All, still nursing their wounds on the ground. “The last one I want to take orders from is the Cruel, but we need to stick together. Whether we like it or not.”

  19. A LONG COLD WALK IN WHEREVER THE HECK THIS IS

  “Ouch!”

  The Brat stopped and lifted up the sole of his shoe.

  “I have a hole in my shoe,” he said. “A literal hole in the bottom of my shoe! It hurts!”

  “Stop whining, rich boy,” the Cruel said. “Just keep moving!”

  “You’re lucky you’re beautiful,” the Brat said. “Or everyone would hate you.”

  “I’m sure no one’s ever said that you are too beautiful to hate,” the Cruel said.

  The Rude sniggered. “That was a good one! Haw!”

  The Cruel wasn’t only picking on the Brat. She had been insulting all of us for hours. I think it was her idea of “motivation.”

  As for herself, she walked ramrod straight and didn’t seem to feel the cold or pain or hunger. Or anything whatsoever.

  Me, I felt everything. Cold, pain, hunger, and something else—something really uncomfortable. I began walking sort of bowlegged, and started to fall behind.

  “What’s wr-r-r-wrong with you?” the Know-It-All called back to me.

  “I just like looking at the landscape,” I said “Such beautiful . . . uhhhh . . . snow!”

  “Do you have to go to the bathroom?” the Know-It-All said. “Why don’t you just g-g-go?”

  “I can’t!” I said.

  “Haw-haw!” the Rude said. “The Liar has to take a crap!”

  “Oh, just do it and get it over with,” the Cruel said, rolling her eyes.

  I didn’t want to, but I had to, so I started to unbuckle my pants and

  “Go behind a tree, you idiot!” the Cruel yelled, pointing at the woods. “None of us want to watch!”

  I fast rushed off behind a pine, unzipping my pants along the way, and I squatted down and

  AHHHH!

  When I was done, though, I realized I hadn’t quite thought this through.

  “Hey!” I hollered. “What am I supposed to use to wipe?!”

  “The snow!” the Cruel hollered back.

  It was really cold.

  I had to run to catch back up with the others.

  We had gotten to what seemed like an actual road, rather than just tracks in the snow. This was a good thing, and we hoped that a car would come passing and pick us up. But that wasn’t happening.

  And now it was starting to get dark. The wind picked up, bringing a whole new level of cold with it.

  It was so miserable, no one was talking anymore. Except for the Rude, who always talked. It was like he couldn’t think unless it was out loud. He was wondering how everybody was doing back at his boardinghouse, the boxing gym, and the track. He started talking about each horse and how much grain they got, and what kind of hay. He didn’t care how many times the Cruel told him to shut up, he just kept on talking.

  He was explaining how he mucked out the horses’ stalls when he stopped and pointed up at the sky.

  “Hey,” he said. “What are those things?”

  We all stopped and tried to figure out what he was looking at.

  “You mean the stars?” the Know-It-All said.

  “Oh, wow,” the Rude said. “So that�
�s what stars look like!”

  “You’re k-k-kidding, right?”

  “I live in Pittsburgh,” the Rude said, shrugging. “We’re lucky if we see the sun!”

  “That one star-thingie is HUGE,” the Hooligan said, pointing at

  “The moon?” The Know-It-All couldn’t quite handle it. “Are you talking about the moon?”

  “Yeah, the moon-thingie!” the Hooligan said. “Y’know, I think it even moved. It had been over there, and now it’s over here!”

  “That’s what the m-m-moon does!”

  On the horizon now was something brighter than the stars and moon. Two things, in fact.

  Headlights.

  There was a vehicle, and it was headed right at us. Finally!

  We all jumped up and down screaming and waving for it to stop.

  “We’re saved!” Goody-Two-Shoes said.

  “If it stops,” the Cruel said.

  It did stop. But that was the scariest thing of all.

  Because it was a truck. And on its side, it read:

  MUMMY RUMMY’S HOME-BAKED YUMMIES

  20. SURPRISE!

  Had Mummy changed her mind and decided she did want to come back and kill us?

  I probably should’ve run the other way—we all should have—but instead we just stood there like a bunch of lambs waiting for the farmer to get his ax.

  The driver’s-side door opened. I held my breath . . .

  . . . and I let it out.

  It was not Mummy who stepped out of the truck.

  It was the tramp-girl!

  “YOU!” the Brat shouted.

  “Are all of you O.K.?” she said.

  “Like you care!” the Brat yelled, throwing another fire-engine-red fit. “Thief! How dare you steal my money! If you weren’t a girl, I’d knock your block off!”

  “That,” the Cruel said, “is not a problem I have.”

  She stepped in front of the Brat and

  PUNCH!

  socked the tramp-girl right in the kisser.

  That looked like it hurt.

  The girl put her hands to her nose. When she took them away, it was bleeding.

  “I deserve that,” she said.

  “Can we please just stop with all the violence!” Goody-Two-Shoes said, pushing the Cruel away.

  She then went up to the tramp-girl to see if she was all right, and asked, “Why are you here?”

  But before she could open her mouth, the Brat said, “Mummy must’ve sent her! How else could she have escaped! There’s no way she could have lifted up the trapdoor with my chest on top of it.”

  “I didn’t have to,” the tramp-girl said. “Mummy did the same thing to me once before, so I went and took the nails out of one of the floorboards in case she ever tried it again. I escaped after you left and stole her other truck.”

  “So your mother doesn’t know you’re here?” Goody said.

  “If she did, she’d kill me. Actually kill me,” the tramp-girl said. “And she’s not my mother. Not my real one, anyway.”

  “Well, if she didn’t send you,” the Cruel said, “then why did you come looking for us?”

  Pearl reached into her pocket and grabbed something to hold out for all of us to see.

  A lump of coal.

  “I’m a Naughty Lister,” she said. “And I want to play with the toys of that tabarnouche Santa, too!”

  21. AND THEN THERE WERE EIGHT

  It was another long ride.

  The Brat was sore at everybody and everything. He was mad at all his money being gone, mad at his precious hair being cut, mad about getting driven around by the thief-girl—even if she was saving our lives—and mad about the Cruel now being in charge. She even got to sit shotgun!

  “Girls up front,” the Cruel said. “Boys in the back.”

  While the truck rumbled along, us boys in the back discussed whether or not we thought the tramp-girl was on the level or if this was just another trick.

  “But what would she trick us for?” I said. We didn’t have any more money, and what possible gain could she get from saving our lives?

  The facts, however, didn’t matter to the Brat. All he wanted was to go back to Mummy’s shack to get his chest of silver, even though the whole reason the tramp-girl had left it there was so Mummy wouldn’t come chasing after her—and us—looking for it.

  Up front, a far more interesting conversation was taking place. The tramp-girl was telling the Cruel and Goody how she wound up with Mummy.

  (I know I wasn’t there to hear it. But I’ve listened to the story so many times since, it’s as if I was there.)

  It went like this:

  A few weeks after she was born, the tramp-girl’s parents died from the Spanish flu and she got sent to live with her grandparents, who then got dead too. After that, she got passed around from aunt to uncle to cousin to ever more distant relatives until she just started getting left with total strangers. Her luck hit rock bottom the day she was dumped with Mummy.

  At every stop, she had to work to earn her keep. At first, the jobs were honest: potato farming, fur trapping, cod fishing, pearl diving, chestnut roasting, shoe cobbling, trapeze flying, elephant training—you name it, she did it. And then came the less honest professions: pickpocketing, lockpicking, safecracking, and—with Mummy—stealing, smuggling, and scamming.

  Not that she had a choice. “Not if I wanted food or a place to sleep.”

  Oh, and she always got a new name wherever she went. She had been called Louisa and Marie and Josephine and Luc—“Which isn’t even a girl’s name!”—and a half dozen other ones before Mummy started calling her Pearl.

  “I always hated that name,” she said.

  “Then why did Mummy call you that?”

  “Because I hated it.”

  After a couple of hours, we arrived at our destination: a fishing shack on a lake.

  “Where’s the lake?” the Rude said after we got let out.

  The thief-girl pointed down.

  “We just drove in on it,” she said.

  “Really?” the Rude said, looking down. “Aces!”

  “Can’t M-M-M-Mummy find you here?” the Know-It-All said. “Find u-u-u-us here?”

  “No,” she said. “She doesn’t know about this place. It belonged to one of my uncles. He used to take me ice fishing here until one warm spring day when the ice cracked and he fell in. It was too bad. I liked that uncle.”

  “It’s not very safe to be related to you, is it?” the Cruel said.

  Inside the hut, it was freezing, so we scavenged for any wood we could find. The Hooligan took an old chair by the back and smashed it against the wall.

  “Hey, I wanted to sit there!” the Rude said.

  “Too late, twerp.”

  The Cruel pulled up a floorboard and fed that to the potbelly stove, too.

  Finally,

  WARMTH!

  “And f-f-food!”

  The Know-It-All had raided the cupboards and found some moldy old cheese that he melted in a pot. The Brat turned up his nose at it, but I wasn’t too proud. I stuck a fork in it, pulled out a long, gooey string, and sucked it up.

  As we ate, Pearl-not-Pearl told us that if we wanted to get to the coast of Labrador—to the lighthouse—we couldn’t take a ship or a train or a car.

  “There is only one way this time of year,” she said. “Dogsleds.”

  “Dogsleds!” the Rude said. “I love dogs.”

  “Where are we going to get d-d-dogsleds?” the Know-It-All said.

  “And coats,” the Hooligan said. “I’m half-frozen to death.”

  “I have another uncle—Claude—who owns a trading post,” she said. “It’s not far. We can go first thing in the morning and buy the dogs from him. And coats.”

  “W
ith what money?” the Brat said. “Thanks to you, we don’t have any!”

  “No, but we have the truck. And the bottles of booze,” she said. “Around here, that counts as money.”

  “And why should we trust you?” the Brat said.

  “Because you have no choice. Not if you want to go to Santa’s,” she said.

  “Huddle up, No-Good Ninesters!” I said. The Cruel rolled her eyes at me, but we all gathered and whispered so Pearl-not-Pearl couldn’t hear.

  The Brat was not in favor of the new plan, but the rest of us were. For one thing, what choice did we have? And for another—DOGSLEDS!

  “But if we’re gonna do this,” I said, “she has to be a member.”

  The Cruel had us take a vote. It came out six to one.

  “O.K.,” she said to the tramp-girl. “We’re in. And so are you.”

  She smiled.

  “But if you’re going to join our group,” I said, “you need a No-Good Name.”

  “How about the THIEF!” the Brat said, still grumpy that his one vote couldn’t overrule everyone else’s anymore.

  “That’s fine by me,” she said. “It’s as good as any other name I’ve ever had.”

  “It’s settled, then. You are now officially the Thief!” I said. Then I took out my own piece of coal and smudged a big 9 on her forehead. (Nice touch, right?) “Full-fledged member of the No-Good Nine!”

  “But aren’t we eight?” the Thief said.

  “Which is only one away from nine!!” I said. “We’re almost there!”

  One for nine, and nine for one!

  * * *

  • • •

  Meanwhile . . .

  Did you forget about the Vainglorious and my archenemy? The two of them had only just arrived in Quebec.

  About that:

  I am beginning to understand why the No-Good Nine wanted to leave Glorious behind.

  The entire trip, he has been looking out the window of the train. I thought that he really liked looking at the scenery but now I realize that he only looks at himself in the reflection of the glass.