Wise Acres

by Dale E. Basye

  Marlo held the briefcase in front of her with both hands, like a shield. A hollow, slashing rhythm pounded up through the soles of her feet. A howl—stifled as if by a suffocating pillow of dirt—bayed below.

  “How—” Marlo muttered with confusion.

  The ground shuddered beneath her feet. Cookie, Lani, and perhaps Dale E. Basye—Marlo couldn’t be sure—let rent piercing, girlish screams. The floor of the clearing opened up in a lacerating gash of mud and dirt. Lani Zanotti fell into the ground as the dirt floor collapsed beneath her. A brawny, hairy arm snatched her by the leg.

  “Wolf!” Marlo screamed as she scrambled forward, hoping to snatch Lani by the wrist.

  The snarling How-Wolf dragged Lani kicking and screaming into the open ground until, abruptly, with a deep, painful silence, the girl went limp. Marlo peered down fearfully into the freshly dug tunnel. Lani was nothing more than a two-dimensional heap of words, a label affixed to an empty, girl-shaped jar, its former contents having evaporated into nothing.

  Marlo’s arms and face were slashed by branches, but the palpitating fear numbing her body pushed back the pain. She heard snapping twigs behind her, poking through the frantic chug of her own panting.

  Is that the How-Wolf? Marlo thought, her mind racing as fast as her body. The thing that got Lani?

  Marlo burst through a snarl of bright green trees.

  “Aaaaarrrgghhh!!” she cried as she shot past the rim of the jungle and into an enormous crater. Marlo tumbled down the craggy edge of the pit, grunting and gagging on grit until she landed painfully at the bottom. She slammed the back of her head on a small boulder.

  Dale E. Basye and Mack Hoover were there, too, dazed and bemused as they rubbed their stinging knees and elbows. Cookie toppled down into the pit on top of Marlo.

  “What happened?” Cookie moaned.

  “I’d explain it to you,” Marlo grunted, “but I’m all out of puppets and crayons. Now get off me!”

  Miss Parker and the rest of Team Two came tumbling down into the crater.

  A thick brown cloud, like a huge pool of spilled chocolate milkshake, coagulated above.

  “This can’t be good,” Hadley mumbled, her blue eyes peering out through a gap in her hair.

  The clouds above seemed to rattle, as if a group of Greek gods were getting ready to roll a gargantuan game of Yahtzee. Suddenly, a small boulder fell from the sky.

  “Watch out!” Miss Parker screamed as the rock plummeted down upon Ahmed.

  Dale E. Basye and Roget ran to the boulder and, with a heave, rolled it off Ahmed … but it was too late. He, like the others before him, had been drained of life and reduced to a flat pile of words describing his head, torso, arms, and legs in the simplest of terms.

  “Amen … Ahmed,” Dale E. Basye muttered sadly.

  Hadley snuffled behind her hair. Flossie put her arm around the weeping girl as the children and teachers stared at the flattened boy-shaped collection of words. Dale E. Basye noticed writing etched onto the side of the boulder.

  He knelt down and read the engraving. “ ‘Two antennas got married. The ceremony wasn’t much but the reception was excellent.’ ”

  Marlo groaned. Her hands balled into furious fists, she stomped the ground with frustration. “What is that?! Some kind of stupid joke?!”

  Miss Parker swallowed. “Even worse,” she said, her voice flat with unleavened dread. “A pun.”

  Marlo glared at the churning mud-brown cloud above. “Puns,” she said with disgust. “I thought they were bad enough on the Surface, when I was alive. But the underworld is lousy with them … probably ’cause they’re the lowest form of humor, right?”

  Dale E. Basye bristled at the notion of puns pervading the underworld, more specifically, his underworld of Heck. He sort of had a love-hate relationship with punning: he loved it and his critics hated it.

  Another boulder spat down from the sky like a leaden loogie.

  “Watch out!” Miss Parker yelled. The boulder fell only a few feet away from Flossie. She read the engraving on the side.

  “ ‘Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly, but when they lit afire in the craft, it sank, proving once again that you can’t have your kayak and heat it, too.…’ ”

  The children groaned.

  “It’s like someone is pun-ishing us,” Bree muttered.

  Vice Principal Carroll’s voice pierced the drone of cricket chirps and humming tuning forks.

  “In modern-day word-fare, some jibes strike as unfunny.

  At least—in the pit—you shan’t find them unpunny!”

  “That’s it!” Marlo exclaimed. “This place is a Punishment Pit!”

  Two more boulders dropped from the sky. Hadley narrowly dodged one as it impacted—it was so close to her that she was pelted hard with grit.

  “ ‘Did you hear about the optometrist who fell into a lens grinder and made a spectacle of himself?’ ” she said, reading the side of one boulder.

  Mack read the other. “ ‘Did you hear about the butcher who backed into his meat grinder and got a little behind in his work?’ ”

  A great, reverberating rattle—like stone thunder—boomed from above.

  “Heads up, everybody!” Marlo yelled. “They’re dropping fast and flurrious now!”

  A half-dozen boulders dropped from the thick, seething cloud.

  “I give my dead batteries away free of charge.”

  “I forgot how to throw a boomerang but then it came back to me.”

  “What’s the definition of a will? (Come on, it’s a dead giveaway!)”

  “Watch out!” Cookie screamed as a hailstorm of boulders rained down upon them. Marlo tried to scrabble up the side of the crater, but it was too steep and the dirt too crumbly. The briefcase handcuffed to her wrist slapped her on the forehead. Marlo struggled to free her wrist.

  “Stupid … thing,” she grumbled before giving up. Three boulders dropped into the pit, shaking the crater and starting tiny avalanches of dirt and rock.

  “We can’t climb out,” Flossie said as she rolled back down the side of the pit, unable to get a firm purchase on the grit wall.

  Another boulder fell right next to Marlo, rolling across her foot.

  “Oww!”

  “A vulture boards an airplane, carrying two dead squirrels. The stewardess looks at him and says, ‘I’m sorry, only one carrion allowed per passenger.’ ”

  Hadley groaned as two boulders fell on either side of her.

  “How do you tickle a rich girl? Say ‘Gucci Gucci Gucci!’ ”

  “I bet my butcher a hundred bucks that he couldn’t reach the meat off the top shelf. He refused, saying that the steaks were too high.”

  Bree tried to scramble up out of the pit but fell flat on her back in a cloud of upturned dust.

  “What do we do?!” she cried hopelessly.

  Mack Hoover shrugged. “I’ll probably just wait for all of you to be flattened, then climb on top of you,” the boy replied matter-of-factly.

  Marlo shot Mack a look so withering that, had he been a flower, he would have instantly lost all of his petals.

  “That’s awful!” she shrieked as a fresh volley of punishment rained down from above. “Hey, what do Mack and a vacuum cleaner have in common? They’re both Hoovers that suck!”

  The boy began to slowly lift from the ground, up and out of the pit, until he was deposited—safe and sound—ten feet from the edge. Marlo’s dark violet eyes ignited with sudden understanding.

  “That’s it!” Marlo shrieked as another boulder fell down from the cloud, smashing one of its quarry kin into pebbles. “We have to make puns out of each other—then we can float out of the pit just like Mack!”

  A fresh peal of thunder boomed overhead. A cloudburst of boulders erupted.

  “Aaaaa​arrrr​rnnnn​ggghh​h!” Flossie groaned as she struggled to free herself from between two heavy pun-stones. The chocolate-brown storm cloud darkened directly over her, ready to birth another deadly litter
of boulder babies. Marlo bit her lip in concentration.

  “Um … why do dentists love Miss Blackwell so much? Because she Flossies after every meal,” Marlo yelled.

  Flossie slowly rose from the boulder-strewn floor of the pit.

  “My leg!” she screamed. “I can’t feel it!”

  Dale E. Basye rolled away the stone that had been pinning her down. Dangling beneath the girl, replacing her left leg, was a flat pillar of words.

  Flossie floated safely to the top of the Pun-ishment Pit as the dark brown cloud rattled like phlegm in an old man’s chest. She leaned against the exposed roots of a tree, whimpering, as she caressed her literalized leg.

  Marlo zigzagged across the rocky floor of the pit as she dodged another volley of falling boulders. She locked eyes on Hadley.

  “Okay … uh … Why was the diner so angry when Hadley lost her finger making his French fries? Because he was, er … fed-Upfling!”

  Hadley levitated slowly in the air, maddeningly slow, wobbling back and forth, as if Fate itself were weighing the merits of Marlo’s terrible pun. Marlo ran beneath Hadley and tried to shove her to safety.

  “Sorry,” Marlo apologized as her briefcase smacked the girl in the head. “I Hadley my doubts about that one.”

  Hadley finally landed a few feet away from Flossie by the edge of the crater.

  Dale E. Basye noticed Bree Martinet, her thick curly hair dusted with dirt, quivering beside a boulder.

  “Why was the indecisive director so upset after Bree auditioned for Hamlet?” he yelled against the rumble of rock above. “He didn’t know whether to Bree, or not to Bree!”

  Bree was hoisted up by invisible arms and deposited just beyond the edge of the pit.

  Marlo stumbled toward Lavena Duckworth, who, though silent, managed to vividly convey her terror with her amazingly expressive face.

  “What’s a Duckworth?” Marlo gasped as a falling boulder sent up a cloud of choking grit. “Depends on the market value!”

  Lavena was whisked away to safety. Dale E. Basye dodged a pair of rolling boulders and fell on his hands and knees in a pocket of sharp gravel. Annabelle Graham was hiding beneath a trio of semi-pulverized stones. Dirty sweat ran down the hollow of her neck in muddy trickles.

  “Um … let’s see,” Dale E. Basye murmured, never one for working under pressure. “Why did Mr. and Mrs. Graham name their daughter Annabelle? Because she takes a toll on everyone around her. Get it? Like a bell.”

  The plain, stocky girl slowly rose from the ground in jerky fits and starts. Marlo rolled her eyes at Mr. Basye.

  “Bra-freakin’-vo!” she said, clapping slowly.

  “Hey,” Dale E. Basye replied brusquely. “It was better than fed-Upfling!”

  Marlo shook her head and crawled along the ground through a pile of fallen boulders. Roget Marx Peters was balled up in a makeshift igloo.

  “Why is Roget such a terrible long-distance runner?” Marlo said. “Because he always Peters out!”

  Roget was pulled out of the stone shelter and heaved up into the air, where he landed next to Mack Hoover.

  Dale E. Basye saw Miss Parker trying to scale a stack of fractured rock. The cocoa-colored cloud looming above the oblivious teacher deepened in color until it was a bubbling pool of black coffee. The seething cloud unleashed another mass of boulders. Dale E. Basye yelled at the sky through cupped hands.

  “Why did Dorothy fail her driver’s test? She was a terrible Parker!”

  The woman was yanked up into the air and cast to the side of the pit. The stack of rock that she had stood on only seconds before was pounded into cobblestones and gravel. The cloud rumbled like a giant blender full of marbles. Miss Parker crawled to the side of the Punishment Pit on her elbows.

  “Why were Mr. Basye’s parents so sad upon first laying eyes on their son?” she yelled. “Because they’d have to see his face on a ‘Dale E.’ basis!”

  The man was snatched into the air and thrown alongside Miss Parker.

  “Thank you,” he gasped. “I was nearly punnelled.…”

  In the pit, Marlo and Cookie—each zigzagging through the rain of tumbling rocks—ran smack into each other.

  “Oooofff!” they gasped, falling to the ground as the brooding cloud above swelled and thickened. “Watch where you’re—”

  A boulder landed in between them with a massive, ground-quaking thud.

  “A tribe of cannibals caught and ate a saint sent to them as a missionary. Moments later, the cannibals became violently sick, since—as they say—you can’t keep a good man down.”

  Cookie and Marlo groaned.

  “Okay, Cookie,” Marlo said, her face stinging with upturned grit. “Let’s pun each other out of here, on the count of three.…”

  “How do I know you’ll do it?” Cookie asked suspiciously.

  “Well, because if I don’t, we’ll both be down here alone, flattened by falling joke-rocks,” Marlo explained. “That’s how you’ll know … okay?”

  Cookie nodded grudgingly. “Okay …”

  “Now one, two … three!”

  Marlo and Cookie shouted over each other against the thunder of cascading boulders.

  “What’s Transylvania’s favorite snack food for kids?! Cookie Youngblood!”

  “Where was Marlo sent to live after her parents died? In a Fauster home!”

  The two girls seized each other by the hand and floated out of the Pun-ishment Pit. They collapsed in a heap by the other children. Marlo and Cookie noticed their clasped hands and quickly pulled away. Their hands resembled gophers darting down their respective holes at the screech of a hawk. The churning cloud of jostling rock evaporated back to nothing.

  Miss Parker groaned as she hobbled over to Flossie, who was rocking back and forth, staring miserably at her leg.

  “Does it hurt?” she asked.

  “No,” the girl replied wretchedly. “Not exactly. It just feels so … flat. Not like my leg, but like someone talking about my leg …”

  Miss Parker helped the girl to her foot.

  “Let’s go while you at least have a leg to stand on.…”

  25 · DERANGED AND

  REARRANGED

  TEAM TWO–WHAT WAS left of them, anyway—straggled through a sparsely treed wood. Marlo and the others tromped across the patchy shredded-paper grove in silence, still a little pun-shy after nearly calling it “quips” in the Pun-ishment Pit. The woods ended suddenly at a peculiar, shimmering shanty. The oversized shack looked as if it had been assembled with thick, twinkling smoke. Outside of the hovel was a large rag, with pieces of ham and tuna resting on top of it.

  “Um … that’s random,” Marlo said against the pervasive metallic chirping and subsonic hum.

  Annabelle squinted down at the rag, screwed up her face with concentration, then glanced up at the billowing bungalow.

  “Anagram Hut,” the girl declared as she wiped away a clot of dried sweat and dirt from the corner of her eye.

  “Huh?” Mack said between clenched jaws.

  “Rag, ham, tuna … you scramble the letters and get ‘Anagram Hut,’ ” Annabelle replied, as if it were as glaringly obvious as a pimple on the tip of your nose.

  Miss Parker studied the girl. “Annabelle Graham … Anagram.”

  “Of course,” Marlo interjected. “You should go first. Your amazing, rearranging word-brain will be able to lead us through.”

  Annabelle nodded and opened the door. It was strangely heavy, considering that it appeared to be made of smoke. Miss Parker, Dale E. Basye, and the children entered the hut. After they passed through the entrance, the doorway slid frantically along the wall and up onto the ceiling, until it disappeared altogether. The children felt around for the entrance but it was gone. The walls were impenetrable. Not smoke at all.

  The Anagram Hut was furnished with an assortment of puzzling objects, such as a belt lying in the middle of the room.

  Marlo approached it. Then something invisible slammed against her shins. />
  “Oww!” she yelped. “There’s something here.…”

  Annabelle squatted on the ground like a police detective investigating a crime scene. “A belt. Table. ‘A belt’ is an anagram for ‘table.’ ”

  Next to the belt was a palm plant. Annabelle stood up to examine it.

  “Hmm … palm,” she muttered. “Oh, duh. Lamp.”

  Lavena rolled her eyes at Cookie and twirled her finger by her temple. Marlo scowled at the two girls.

  “Hey, I don’t see you two Einsteins solving your way out of this place … and I’ve met Einstein. So I know.”

  Lavena mouthed “whatever” as Annabelle continued her sweep of the hut. Next to the belt, on the floor, was a hairy case.

  “Hairy case … easy chair,” she muttered. Hiding beside the hairy case/easy chair were two tiny creatures—like small ogres—slamming into each other repeatedly before falling to the floor with clumsy ineptitude.

  “Oafs … sofa.”

  Above them—floating near the ceiling—was a small car, running in neutral, with, of all things, a chicken on top of it.

  Annabelle gazed up in wonder. “Car … idle … hen … oh, right: chandelier.”

  Next to the far wall was another small car, with a tiny pointy-eared creature inside eating what looked like a pie. A long wire draped with dangling pieces of food led away from the car.

  “Hmm … food wire. Firewood. So this must be …”

  Mack Hoover stepped toward the food.

  “Man … the closer I get to the stuff, the angrier I get!” he said, gritting his teeth.

  Annabelle rubbed her chin. “Hmm … hate. Heat. So this car with the elf and pie … car elf pie … fireplace! Of course! Everything in here is like a normal room, only all of the letters are jumbled, making them something else!”