Kid vs. Squid

by Greg Van Eekhout

  “Burglar. Juvenile delinquent. The What-Is-It?? is gone.”

  Griswald said bad words of his own. I’d heard all of them before, but never in that combination.

  He conducted a full inspection of the museum and found nothing else missing. The Mustache Fish and Little Mister Fishy Pants and the cash box all remained in their proper places.

  With a frown, he scratched his beard. “Why steal the What-Is-It?? unless it’s valuable?” he muttered to himself. “Valuable or … important.” He looked more and more miserable as he thought about it. “If only I could remember …” It was only then that he noticed my bandaged foot. “Did you cut yourself on the glass?”

  I shook my head and told him how I’d chased the girl.

  Griswald whistled through his teeth. “That was foolhardy, Thatcher. Foolhardy, but very brave.”

  “It wasn’t brave. She was short and skinny. She was practically dressed in rags. I should have just called the cops.”

  But Griswald let out a bitter laugh. “Wouldn’t have done us any good, lad. It takes more than a break-in to spur the police into action around here. I don’t know what it would take.”

  I was cold and tired and my foot throbbed and I wanted to be back home in Phoenix. If Griswald didn’t want to report the burglary, fine. It wasn’t my business. It wasn’t my decapitated head.

  “I’m going back to bed,” I announced, and I returned to my hammock. Hanging there like exhausted laundry, I closed my eyes and tried not to listen to the air whispering through the pipes.

  Stupid pipes.

  Stupid air.

  I could have sworn they were saying “Flotsam.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Griswald stayed in the next morning, and he was still snoring when I woke up. Since he hadn’t left me a to-do list, I felt free to venture outside before dusting the devil fish and the snorkel dog. After giving Sinbad a blob of canned meat, I headed out the door.

  The boardwalk had come alive.

  A pair of little girls with pigtails led their mom into the candy shop and came out with pink plumes of cotton candy.

  Tattoo guns buzzed inside the tattoo parlor.

  “You smell that, son?” called a man from a popcorn cart. Chemical butter odors wafted on the air. “That’s the smell of the sea, and the sea says you need popcorn.”

  “Maybe later,” I muttered. “But let me ask you something. Why’d everybody suddenly show up today?”

  He was broad-shouldered, in a too-small T-shirt with a faded crown on the front. A beard of silver curls blended with the mane of hair spilling down his shoulders. His eyes were the color of coal, and they suddenly grew sharp and furious. I stepped back, wondering what I’d said to make him angry. But then his look softened. He seemed to get sleepy, and he blinked.

  “You smell that, son?”

  “The sea?”

  “It’s the smell of the sea, and the sea says you need popcorn.”

  “Didn’t we just have this conversation?”

  “You smell that, son?”

  “Ah, yes, the smell of repetition.”

  Stumbling along with my sore foot, I left him and his smell behind.

  A partially dismantled Ferris wheel stood farther down the boardwalk behind a plywood fence. Curious, I used an abandoned plastic paint pail for a boost and pulled myself up to peer at the wreck. It towered over a dry moat—maybe the former home of alligators or piranhas—that was now just a muddy trench. Buckets for riders dangled off the wheel like loose teeth. I didn’t think I’d be riding it anytime this summer.

  Next to the Ferris wheel, a train of roller-coaster cars ratcheted up the hill. The train wasn’t full, but the few passengers let out impressive screams as the cars swooshed down.

  Merchants arranged T-shirts and beach towels in front of their shops. A woman at the bike and skate rental pumped air into bicycle tires. Beeps and buzzers sounded from the arcade. A man on a bench threw seed at a mob of pigeons.

  Where had all these people suddenly come from?

  A girl approached me.

  “You look confused.”

  Solidly built, she stood a couple inches taller than me, with an FBI Academy baseball cap jammed over a head of tight black curls. Lively brown eyes stared from her dark brown face. I felt like I was being studied and judged.

  “It’s First Day,” she said, sweeping her hand over her head to indicate the entire boardwalk. “It happens like this every year. One day, ghost town, the next day, all this.”

  “The same day every year?” I asked.

  “Walk with me,” she said. Adjusting the backpack she wore slung over one shoulder, she started down the boardwalk toward the midway without waiting for any response from me. I followed.

  “Last year First Day happened in July,” she went on. “I heard it was late May the year before that, one of the earliest First Days ever, but I wasn’t there for it. I moved here a week before First Day last year.”

  “There wasn’t anyone here yesterday. Do the shop people and tattoo artists and everyone live in town?”

  “Some do, but not many. Most of the workers just sort of roll in on First Day, like flotsam on the waves.”

  That word again. The jellyfish boys had asked if I was flotsam. Was she friends with them? If so, I didn’t think I wanted to know her. But except for Griswald and his tabby cat, I’d had no one to talk to in weeks. So I kept walking with the girl.

  “Flotsam,” I said. “What does that word mean?”

  “You know, the floating wreckage of a ship. As opposed to jetsam, which is what gets tossed overboard to lighten the load during a storm.”

  Jetsam. Kind of like how my parents had tossed me to Griswald to lighten their load.

  As we continued along, merchants and snack vendors watched us go by. I didn’t like the way their eyes tracked us, not even bothering to hide the fact that they were staring. Maybe they were just hungry for our business.

  The girl offered her hand. “I’m Trudy McGee, by the way.”

  We shook. She had a strong grip. “I’m Thatch—”

  “Thatcher Hill,” she interrupted. “I know. You’re Griswald’s nephew.” And then, before I could say anything, she corrected herself. “Great-nephew, I mean. So, I heard you had some excitement at the museum last night.”

  “Guess word gets around fast in Los Huesos. Griswald said he wasn’t going to bother with a police report. He said the cops around here aren’t very motivated.”

  She smiled a little. “Some things get around fast. Other things don’t get around at all. Did the thief get anything good?”

  “Just the What-Is-It?? And before you ask, I don’t know what it is. Could be a genuine human head. Could be a mummified honeydew melon.”

  “That’s all he took? No cash? No valuables?”

  “Just that. And the thief was a she. About our age, I’d guess, or a little younger.”

  Trudy gave me a laser-focused look. “You saw her?”

  “Yeah,” I said, going on to describe my hot-foot pursuit.

  Trudy stopped at the rail overlooking the beach. I stood beside her. The tide was out, leaving the broad, debris-strewn beach exposed.

  “This is a very curious case of breaking and entering,” she said, more to herself than to me. “Not the typical burglar profile for Los Huesos. And taking something of little or no value? It doesn’t make sense. Unless,” Trudy added, turning to face me, “the What-Is-It?? does have value. You say you lost her on the beach?”

  “Yeah, in the rocks. Why are you so interested in the break-in?”

  “I’m a busybody,” she said, all business.

  She took off down a rickety set of wooden steps to the beach and moved briskly over rocks and sand. Limping on my sore foot, I struggled to keep up, navigating around piles of kelp until I caught up with her at the bird-poop-splattered rocks where I’d lost the girl-thief. Shallow waves smacked against them, even at low tide. Between two of the largest rocks was a narrow, half-submerged tunnel o
pening.

  “Ready to get wet?” Trudy asked.

  “What, you want to go in?”

  She looked at me, eyes wide in disbelief. “You don’t? The thief stole something from your own uncle.”

  “Great-uncle. And like I said, he didn’t even call the cops. Besides, all she made off with was some nasty piece of junk. One less thing for me to dust.”

  I thought she’d argue with me, but she just shrugged.

  “Okay, Thatcher. Nice meeting you. Maybe I’ll see you later.” With that, she removed her shoes and stowed them in her backpack before splashing into the foamy seawater.

  If she’d said it angrily, or snottily, I probably would have let her go. But she didn’t seem to care one way or the other if I went with her, as if none of this really concerned me, as if I was a bystander, free to involve myself in the mystery of the What-Is-It?? heist or not.

  I thought back to the jellyfish boys. They’d asked if I was flotsam.

  Somehow, I’d become involved in something.

  CHAPTER 4

  I took off my shoes, rolled up my jeans, and stepped into the churning, cold water. When I looked down I couldn’t see my feet. I thought about stingrays. Did they even have stingrays in this part of the world? I remembered hearing the best way to treat a stingray sting was to pee on it, but I couldn’t remember if that meant you were supposed to pee on the stingray or on where you got stung. You know you’re having a bad summer vacation when you’re trying to remember if you should pee on yourself.

  We paused at the tunnel opening in the rocks. Water soaked me up to my waist.

  “I can’t see anything,” I said. “It’s too dark.”

  “Got it covered,” Trudy said, taking a flashlight from her backpack.

  This wasn’t just any flashlight. Black steel with a textured barrel, it was a serious instrument. She switched it on and a sharp white beam lit the tunnel.

  “C’mon,” she said.

  I sloshed after her through the entrance. The ceiling of jagged rock dipped so low we had to bend over double to avoid scraping our heads. Mussels lined the walls, like thousands of crusty blackbird beaks. The moist air reeked of fish.

  The tunnel veered right and continued on, farther than I’d hoped, stretching beyond the reach of Trudy’s flashlight.

  “What are we looking for, exactly?” I asked her. “The girl’s secret thief headquarters?”

  “Indications,” Trudy said. “Signs.”

  A wave came in and pushed seawater into my face. I wondered how many unanswered postcards it would take for my parents to learn I’d drowned. With brine draining from my nose, I kept going.

  The tunnel ended in a slit between two rocks, just wide enough for Trudy and me to squeeze through one at a time. We came out in a cove surrounded by sandstone cliffs. On a lip of sand before us, a boat the size of a convenience store lay on its side. It might have been white once, but now it was mottled with rust and green algae.

  “So would you call that a boat or a ship?” I asked Trudy.

  “I’d call it awfully suspicious. Those cliffs are too steep and crumbly to climb, and anyone who tries to swim out of this cove is asking to get dashed against the rocks. Conclusion: there’s a good chance our thief is hiding inside.”

  I thought there was a good chance Trudy was the weirdest person I’d met in Los Huesos so far. And that included Griswald and the BMX guys.

  On the other hand, there was a chance she was right, and if I wasn’t going to have a bikini-girls kind of summer, I’d need some kind of adventure to make up for it.

  We splashed through pooled water and peered through a gap in the ship’s hull into the dark interior. Trudy shined her flashlight beam inside. I’d expected to see a jumble of nets and boaty things, all tossed about on their sides. But everything had been cleared off and neatly stacked against the interior hull. A set of sandy footprints, smaller than my own, led off deeper into the ship. We were on the right track.

  “Come on,” Trudy said, squeezing through the gap into the boat.

  The trail of footprints took us through what I guessed was the engine room, filled with pipes and machinery that had to be crawled over or ducked under, or, sometimes, knocked with my head. A lot of it was green with ocean muck and encrusted with barnacles.

  Trudy shoved her flashlight in her pocket and took a disposable camera from her backpack. As I poked the walls with my finger, she snapped off shots.

  “Careful where you aim that,” I said, blinking bright spots from my eyes. “What are you doing, anyway?”

  “Documenting for later analysis.”

  “Documenting for … ?”

  “Sorry. Me take pictures so me can look at later. Better?”

  “Yes, a little bit. How long do you think the wreck’s been here?”

  “It shouldn’t be here at all,” said Trudy. “A wreck this size ought to be listed in the historical records, and this one isn’t.”

  “You’re a history buff.” I’d heard of such people, but had never met one.

  “My mom owns the secondhand bookstore on Main Street. She bought it last year, complete with stock. The old owner left behind boxes of old maps and books about Los Huesos history. I’ve at least paged through most of them.”

  “History buff,” I said again, this time with more conviction.

  She peered at the wall with a powerful little magnifying glass. “History is a weapon that helps me understand Los Huesos. And I will use every weapon in my arsenal.”

  I actually liked the way Trudy talked. She reminded me of Batman.

  Which I guess made me Robin.

  Nobody wants to be Robin.

  Just then a hideous growl echoed through the cabin. It was like a force of nature, deep and low and gurgly and unlike any beast I could imagine.

  It was my stomach.

  “Sorry,” I whispered. “I skipped breakfast.”

  Trudy dug in her backpack and handed me a little plastic sandwich bag. It contained a sugar-glazed doughnut. “Eat it before your stomach gives us away.”

  I accepted the doughnut and looked upon Trudy with a little bit of awe. I couldn’t help but be impressed with her. Even Batman didn’t carry doughnuts.

  After making the doughnut disappear in three bites, I wiped my sugary fingers on my pants and continued on with Trudy.

  The footprints came up to a closed hatch, and now I got nervous. There’s something unsettling about opening closed doors without knowing what’s on the other side. But that’s what we’d come here to do. I bent down and pushed open the hatch cover.

  We crawled through into a cramped compartment, barely more than a closet, with a closed door on the other side. Mouthwatering smells of garlic and ginger and hot spices wafted over me. The walls were lined with shelves bearing bags of shrimp chips and flounder jerky, as well as jars containing fish the size of pocket combs, little squids and octopuses, and other, odder, pale creatures that looked as if they’d been dredged up from the same place as the exhibits in Griswald’s museum.

  “Somebody spends a lot of time here,” Trudy whispered. “Clearly, we’ve discovered our criminal’s secret lair.”

  And from the sounds of slurping I could hear coming from the other side of another narrow door, someone was home. I’d had enough skulking about. Through the door I went, and into a small galley with a sink, stove, and cupboards. Sitting at a table, drinking soup from a Thermos cup, was the thief from the night before. The What-Is-It?? rested at her elbow beside salt and pepper shakers.

  “Hey!” I shouted, rushing into the galley. “That’s my … thing!” I lunged for the What-Is-It??, startling the girl, but she recovered quickly. Grabbing the box and tucking it under her arm, she slid away from the table. The blade of a knife glinted in her hand.

  “Back off, land-dweller,” she hissed.

  I couldn’t place her accent. French? Chinese? Minnesotan? I’m not good with accents. Anyway, I was more focused on her knife.

  Trudy flipped open
a notebook. She clicked a pen. “Your name, permanent address, and legal guardian, please?”

  “Attempt to wrest the head from me and I’ll gut you, girl,” snarled the thief.

  Trudy wrote something down and said, “You can try.”

  The thief only smiled.

  Things were getting a little crazy, what with the snarling and the threats and the knife. I wanted the What-Is-It?? back, but I wasn’t sure a potential head-in-a-box was worth all this.

  Hoping to relieve the tension in the room, I cleared my throat and tried to think of a good distracting knock-knock joke.

  Then, behind me, someone else coughed. Not Trudy, not the girl-thief. This was a wet, shlurpy cough. “Ah, it’s the museum boy and the bookstore girl and Shoal the Flotsam,” a familiar voice said. “Give us the box, or we will kill you.”

  The BMX boys weren’t wearing their bandannas and sunglasses like they had on the beach, so I saw the white, oozy flesh of their faces. I saw their shiny black eyes, no bigger than dimes. Where their mouths should have been were puckered seams. It was as if they’d been interrupted while morphing from human to jellyfish.

  One of the jellies rushed me, his bare hands the color of snot.

  “Don’t let them touch you!” Shoal screamed.

  Before I could react, she jumped up on the table and used it as a launching pad to hurl herself at the jellies. She howled like a rabid cat, and the jellies ducked and dodged, trying to avoid her slicing knife. The small space became an insane riot of flying fists and elbows and sharp objects. A jelly dove at me, and Shoal was there again, warding him off with slashing motions of her knife.

  “Leave the land-dwellers alone,” she said in a commanding voice. Unfortunately, in the crowded confines, her blade was just as much a threat to me as it was to the jelly, and I came within an inch of losing an ear. But at least she was trying to defend me.

  I caught a glimpse of Trudy from the corner of my eye. She faced off with the other jelly, brandishing her flashlight like a mighty club. I made a mental note: next time I went poking my nose into danger, I would come better prepared with a weapon of some kind and maybe some batarangs.