Amos Gets Famous

by Gary Paulsen

  “Did you see that?” Amos asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “No, I mean did you see that? That little guy could slam-dunk a basketball.”

  “Let’s go.” Dunc slunk toward the house. Amos followed him until they stood beneath the open window.

  Amos jumped, but he couldn’t get close to reaching the sill. “Now what do we do?”

  Dunc studied the window. “I’ll have to stand on your shoulders.”

  “What do you mean, stand on my shoulders? Why can’t I stand on yours?”

  “If I stand on your shoulders, I should be able to reach the sill. If you stand on mine, you probably won’t. You’re shorter than I am.”

  Amos looked into Dunc’s eyes. “That’s crazy.”

  But Dunc was already pushing Amos into position. “Come on, give me a boost.” Amos shook his head, but he bent and cupped his hands. Dunc heaved himself up and put one foot on Amos’s shoulder, then the second.

  It wasn’t quite enough. “If I can just get a little more height—”

  “You just stuck your toe in my eye.”

  “Move a little to the left. I can reach the shutter but not the sill next to it.”

  Amos moved.

  “Just let me get a little closer.” Dunc stepped on the top of Amos’s head. His fingers gripped the edge of the sill. “Made it.”

  He bounced once on Amos’s head for momentum, then scrabbled his feet on the siding and up through the window. Then he reached down to help Amos up.

  Amos didn’t look happy. “Man, it’s going to take a week to get my hair clean again.”

  “At least we’re in, aren’t we?” Dunc took a flashlight out of his pocket. He flashed it once, then shut it off again.

  “Did you see a clock?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “I didn’t either. There’s a desk, a chair, a standing lamp, and a bookcase. This must be Mr. Hansen’s study.”

  “Did you see the little guy?”

  “No.”

  “Then he must be somewhere else. Let’s check Melissa’s room first.” They tiptoed across the floor.

  Just as Dunc reached for the knob, the door slowly began to open. The small man walked in, carrying a clock tucked under his arm.

  .5

  The man wore a black body suit, a face mask, and gloves. He dropped into a half-crouch, which made him seem about half as tall as the boys, and gave a low growl.

  Amos stuck his chest out and pushed Dunc to the side. “Melissa’s my girlfriend,” he said. “Let me be the hero.” He tried to grab the clock.

  Later Amos could not remember exactly what happened. He remembered touching the clock and the small man grabbing his wrist. He remembered looking at his feet and seeing the ceiling, walls, bathroom door, ceiling, walls, and bathroom door, and then a doorknob seemed to fly at him and hit him exactly in the middle of his forehead. After that things became hazy.

  When he came to, he was outside the study propped up against the wall, standing on his head. His face was mashed into the angle the wall made with the floor and his left hand and foot waved crazily at each other.

  “Try to be quiet,” Dunc whispered to him, seeing that he was conscious again.

  Amos fell over, climbed slowly to his feet, and shook his head.

  “Be quiet?” Amos said. “I’m tossed through the air like a beach ball, and you tell me to be quiet. Fine. Next time I’ll crash into the wall silently.”

  Dunc stood in front of the window of the study, his arms spread like a goalie trying to guard a net. The burglar was darting back and forth in front of him, dodging left and right. The clock was still under his arm. He was trying to slip by Dunc to get to the window.

  “Amos,” Dunc hissed, “help me!”

  “On my way.”

  Amos charged back into the room—or tried to charge. His shoes had come untied in the cartwheeling, and his feet now became hopelessly tangled in the laces. He just had time to think how much like a phone call this was all turning out to be as he sailed over the burglar, over Dunc’s shoulder, and out the window.

  At the last possible half second his hand caught the sill, and instead of flying clear through the window, his body straightened and described a perfect arc. He slammed backfirst against the outside of the house. He hit so hard, the snot flew out of his nose. He hung for a second by the one hand. Then his fingers loosened, and he dropped like a sack of garbage into the flower beds next to the wall.

  “Here, grab on.” Dunc leaned quickly out the window. “I’ll pull you back in.”

  Amos stood, grabbed Dunc’s hand, and jumped as Dunc pulled. Amos flew back into the window and hit the burglar, who was still trying to get past Dunc to the window.

  Amos and the burglar went down in a heap, flopped, came up, crashed into a desk, took a floor lamp over, and broke a chair with a sound like a full-scale war, before coming to their feet.

  For part of a second everything stopped. The burglar stared at Amos and Dunc, while they stared at him. Then the burglar looked up at the ceiling.

  Footsteps.

  All the noise had awakened somebody.

  The burglar snarled one more time, and before Dunc could stop him, he dived over his shoulder out into the darkness with the clock under his arm, and he was gone.

  Just like that. Gone.

  “Oh, man.” Broken splinters from the chair were stuck in Amos’s shirt. He looked like a porcupine. “Where’d he go?”

  “Forget him. Let’s get out of here.”

  “Why did you let him get away?”

  Dunc’s mouth dropped open. “Why did I let him get away? What were you doing all this time?”

  “All right, if you want to argue, let’s argue. I—”

  “There’s no time for that now. We have to get out of here.” The footsteps came downstairs. Dunc climbed out the window and dropped to the ground. Amos followed him.

  As he hung from the windowsill, Amos saw a light come on in the study. A man the size of a small herd of buffalo squeezed through the door. His shoulders popped against the doorframe like a cork pulled from a bottle.

  Rocko.

  “What happens here?” Rocko had mastered football but not the English language.

  Amos didn’t stick around to answer him. He let go and landed in the flowers beneath the window. He and Dunc ran for the trees on the far side of the yard.

  Just before they disappeared into the darkness, Amos looked back over his shoulder. Melissa was leaning over the window and looking straight at him.

  It’s like Romeo and Juliet, he thought. And there she is, leaning over the balcony. I should say something poetic, something from Shakespeare about saving her life, and—

  Because he was looking back at Melissa, he didn’t see the rake that was lying near the front shrubbery with the tines pointed up. He stepped perfectly on them, and the rake handle whipped up and smashed him directly in the center of his face.

  What he said was in no way connected with Shakespeare.

  .6

  Amos was famous.

  Or something like Amos was close to famous.

  Melissa had gotten a fair look at him in the partial light from the streetlight, but she didn’t know it was Amos.

  She thought he was the burglar.

  And she had worked with the police artist and his Identi-Kit to come up with a picture of the supposed burglar, which now covered the top half of the front page of the paper under the headline:

  HAVE YOU SEEN THIS FACE?

  The story beneath the picture told anybody who has seen the face to tell the police, for a reward.

  Three things saved Amos. First, Melissa hadn’t seen him very well, and the picture barely matched Amos’s face—although there was something about the eyes, something about the corners of the eyes, that seemed to show something of Amos. The second thing that saved Amos was the rake handle. It had caught him slap across the middle of his face and had done a lot to temporarily rearrange his looks. The third thin
g was that Amos had fallen into the dirt and flowers below the windowsill, and his upper lip and the sides of his face had been smeared either with dirt or fertilizer—he hoped dirt.

  The picture in the paper had a moustache and sideburns.

  “We have to go back,” Dunc said.

  “Back where?” Amos was massaging his nose where the rake handle had caught him. It looked like a ripe plum. An overripe plum. They were sitting in Dunc’s room, where everything was neat and organized—unlike Amos’s room, where it was impossible to sit because everything wasn’t neat and organized. They had the newspaper spread on the bed next to them, the front-page picture looking up at Amos.

  “Back to Melissa’s house,” Dunc said. “We have to make the burglar come back there and catch him there to clear your name.”

  Amos shook his head. “Nobody will recognize me from that picture. I’d be the only boy in middle school with a dark moustache and sideburns if I looked like that.”

  “Just the same—it’s an ax hanging over your head.” Dunc pointed at the picture. “It will follow you the rest of your life—it might wind up ruining your life.”

  “The rake almost ruined my life, and the burglar throwing me around almost ruined my life, and trying to learn to fly when I went through the window almost ruined my life, and slamming into the wall almost ruined my life.” Amos pointed to the paper. “That picture isn’t going to ruin my life.”

  “Melissa.”

  Amos stopped. “What?”

  “You have to go back because of Melissa—she needs you.”

  Amos sighed. “Dunc, she’s the one who turned me in to the police.”

  “She didn’t know it was you. She needs you to catch this guy and get the reward and be a hero.”

  “You’re nuts.”

  But his voice had weakened, and Dunc knew he had him.

  “The way I see it,” Dunc said, pushing the paper aside, “is we have to draw the burglar out.”

  “How are we going to do that? He’s holed up somewhere by now.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. It depends on how greedy Mr. Zipzoo is. He’s the one giving the orders.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “How does Mr. Zipzoo communicate with the burglar?” Dunc asked.

  “Through notes at the library.”

  “Right. So if we leave a note …”

  “So all we have to do is put a note in the nematode book telling the burglar to steal something from the Hansens tonight, right?”

  “Wrong.”

  “What do you mean, wrong?”

  “The next note doesn’t go in the nematode book. That’s what the numbers are for. They direct the burglar to the new book’s location.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “So the plan is to put a note in the right book telling the burglar to steal something from the Hansens after dark tonight. Now do I have it?”

  “Sort of. He can’t steal just anything. It has to be something that will take him a while to steal.”

  “Like what?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. I think we’ll have him steal the toilet bowl out of the bathroom.”

  Amos stared at him. “The toilet bowl?”

  “Sure. It’ll take him a long time to shut the water off and get the bowl up off the floor. Once he does, he won’t be able to run very fast because it’s so heavy.”

  “Good thinking.” Amos nodded. “Better yet, how about the refrigerator or the front steps? Or the whole house?”

  “Amos …”

  “Well, come on, Dunc. This is nuts—stealing toilets. You’re crazy.”

  “No, it’ll work. Trust me.”

  “Don’t say that—don’t say ‘trust me.’ The last time you said that, I wound up getting turned into a dog and had to fight my way out of a nest of pit bulls, and before that a parrot swore at me, and—”

  “Not this time. I promise.” Dunc stood up. “Come on, let’s head down to the library and work on these codes.”

  They were halfway to the door when Dunc stopped and turned. “You’d better wear a disguise.”

  “Why? Nobody will know me from that picture.”

  “It’s there, in the eyes—it looks like you there. Why don’t you wear sunglasses?”

  They tore the house apart and finally found a pair of sunglasses. Unfortunately, they belonged to Dunc’s little sister. They were pink with false molded plastic lashes that went up at the corners and had little flowers painted on the rims.

  “No,” Amos said. “I’d rather go to prison.”

  But Dunc explained that his eyes would give him away and that he wouldn’t be able to become a hero in jail and that nobody would know it was him and that they were on the third planet from the Sun and that the vernal equinox was due any day and that for every action there was an equal and opposite reaction and that all these things factored into the tangent of the two lines …

  Amos wore the glasses.

  .7

  Dunc opened the door of the library.

  Inside, people were huddled over books and newspapers. Dunc moved to the newspapers, looked through the ads, and found one with the same type of numbers. “Here it is—the code. Thirty, five, sixty-three, and the letter E.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything to me.” Amos looked around the library and shook his head, the glasses flashing in the light.

  “We have to figure out what the numbers on the note mean,” Dunc said. “Using the other set. What were they again?”

  “The numbers out of the paper the last time were fifteen, four, twenty, and the letter was P. Which doesn’t mean anything.”

  “I was up half the night thinking about that. It might be the Dewey Decimal code for a book, only split up.”

  “You mean like 154.20?”

  “Yeah. Let’s go check it out.”

  They hurried back toward the aisles.

  “This could be kind of fun,” Amos said.

  Dunc ignored him. “Here’s the one hundreds. Follow me.”

  A moment later Amos stopped. “You’re wrong, Dunc.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because here’s 154.20. It’s a book about achieving higher consciousness.”

  “Hm.” Dunc tapped his chin. He thought hard.

  “Don’t overdo it, Dunc.”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “There’s smoke coming out of your ears.”

  “If you don’t let me think, I’m not going to be able to help you. You’ll be on the run the rest of your life.”

  “All right, I’m sorry. Go ahead and think. Can’t even take a joke.”

  Dunc snapped his fingers. “I have it!”

  “Have what?”

  “Follow me.” Dunc led Amos back toward the newspaper section. He stopped at the first bookshelf.

  “What was the first number?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Start counting bookshelves.” Amos followed Dunc as he strode away from the newspapers. He stopped at shelf number fifteen.

  “What was the second number?”

  “Four.” Dunc counted down four shelves from the top.

  “What was the third number?”

  “Twenty.” Dunc counted books in from the end of the shelf. When he reached the twentieth book, he stopped and sighed.

  “What’s the book?”

  “All About Bears. I’m wrong.” He collapsed back against the shelf behind him. “How could that be? It just isn’t possible.” It was hard on Dunc to be wrong, and he chewed his lower lip. Someday, Amos thought, he’ll chew that lip off.

  “I guess we’ll have to find some way of smuggling you out of the city,” Dunc said.

  “Dunc …”

  “Maybe we can find a cabin up north in the woods you can hide in. You’ll have to snare rabbits for food. Do you know how to snare?”

  “Dunc …”

  “It doesn’t matter. The police will catch us before we get there anyway.”r />
  “Dunc, if you were a very small man, wouldn’t you start counting at the bottom shelf?”

  Dunc smiled. “Could it be—” They hurried to the end of the aisle and started over.

  “We’re still wrong,” Dunc said. “Twenty books in is The Wonderful World of Leeches.”

  “But we’re close. Parasitic Nematodes is only three more books.”

  “It’s not close enough. If we put the fake note in the wrong book, we’re no better off than we were when we started.”

  “I suppose it’s impossible to be accurate with people checking books out and the librarian reshelving them all the time.” Amos scratched his head. “Wait a minute. What about the letter?”

  “The letter?”

  “The P.” Amos snapped his fingers. “I got it. Mr. Zipzoo put that on the end in case the numbers didn’t come out quite light. P—Parasitic Nematodes. Get it?”

  Dunc smiled again. “Why are you so smart today?”

  “It must be the pressure of being a fugitive from justice.” Amos took the glasses off for a moment, but a man reading the paper, looking at the front page, seemed to stare at him for too long, and he put them back on. “Let’s find the book for the next burglary.”

  Thirty aisles in, five rows up, sixty-three books from the end. Dunc stopped and stared at Amos.

  “What?” Amos asked.

  “The book’s called Early French Erotica of the Nineteen Thirties.”

  Amos’s mouth dropped open. “Erotica? Does that mean dirty stories?”

  “That’s exactly what it means.”

  “My mom and dad would kill me if they knew I looked at a book like that.”

  “Mine too,” Dunc said.

  They stared at the book.

  “Still,” Amos said, “it’s for a good cause.”

  Dunc nodded. “It’s not as if we’d normally look at a book like this. We have to. I certainly don’t want to.”

  “Me either.”

  “Right. Let me see it.” They both reached at the same time.

  “I grabbed it first, Dunc. Let go.”

  “No, you didn’t. I did. You can see it after I’m done. I—”

  Dunc stopped in midsentence. His hands dropped to his sides. A policeman had just stepped into the aisle behind Amos and was staring at them.