Authors: Rodman Philbrick
So out we go. It’s a habit by now, Freak riding up high on my shoulders and using
his little feet to steer me if I forget where we’re going. Not that we always know.
Freak likes to make things up as he goes along. You think you’re just walking down
this ordinary sidewalk and really you’re crossing this dangerous bridge, the kind
made of vines that hangs high up in the air over a deep canyon, and when Freak makes
it up it seems so real, you’re afraid to look down or you’ll get dizzy and fall off
the sidewalk.
“Don’t ever look down,” he says. “Just keep your eyes closed.” And then he puts his
hands over my eyes and tells me to keep walking straight. “One foot,” he says. “Now
the next.”
I’m fighting to keep my balance, and his hands are making me dizzy.
“One more step,” Freak says. “Steady. Steady. Now lift up your hoof — I mean your
foot.
There, we made it!” And he takes his hands away and I see we’ve crossed the street.
“Go East,” he says when I get to the end of the block. “That way, mighty steed! Yonder
lies the East!”
I go, “How do you know which way is East?” And then something is glinting in my eye
and Freak is showing me this little compass.
“The Official Cub Scout Compass?”
“That’s a clever disguise so you don’t know how valuable it is,” he says. “This is
actually a rare and valuable artifact passed down for generations. Lancelot used it,
so did Sir Gawain, and for a time the Black Knight kept it on a chain next to his
heart.”
I go, “So the Black Knight was a Cub Scout, huh?” and Freak laughs and says, “That
way. We go to the East on a secret mission.”
We walk for miles. Way beyond the pond and the playground and the school, and for
a while we’re going through this really ritzy neighborhood of big white houses and
blue swimming pools. Freak keeps saying stuff like, “That’s the Castle of Avarice,”
and, “Yonder lies the Bloated Moat,” and when we go under trees he’ll say, “Proceed
with caution,” or, “All clear,” depending on how low the branches come down.
“We must be East,” I say. “Have we got to yonder yet?” because my stupid feet are
getting sore, but Freak pats me on the head and says, “Yonder always lies over the
next horizon. You could look it up if you don’t believe me.”
“Oh, I believe you.”
On and on, block after block, through all these neighborhoods that Freak says are
really secret kingdoms. I’ll bet we’ve gone ten miles at least, because my legs think
it’s a hundred, and even as light as Freak is, he’s starting to feel heavy.
“We’re almost there,” he says. “Turn at the end of the block.”
“Where is it we’re going?”
“You’ll see,” he says, “and you
will
be amazed.”
Ahead there’s this busy intersection, cars whizzing by, and it all seems sort of familiar.
“Can we stop for a Coke?” I say. “Grim gave me a dollar, big deal, but we can split
it.”
Freak goes, “Then that shall be your reward, faithful steed — tinted sucrose and bubbles
of air. Onward! Onward to the Fortress!”
It turns out the Fortress looks like part of a hospital, which it is. The regular
hospital is around in front and there’s this new building added on out back. M
EDICAL
R
ESEARCH
, it says over the door, and I know because I made Freak spell it out.
“Does that mean they do experiments and stuff?”
Freak says, “Indeed they do.”
“What kind of experiments?” I ask.
“Can you keep a secret?” he says. “Do you swear on your honor?”
“Sure. On my honor.”
Freak is really excited, he’s shifting around
on my shoulders so much, I’m afraid he’ll fall off. “That’s not good enough,” he says.
“You need to swear by blood.”
“You mean like cut myself?”
“Well, no,” he says, and you can tell he’s thinking about it real hard. “An actual
incision is not necessary. It’s the same thing if you just spit on your hand.”
“Huh?”
“Saliva is like blood without the red,” he says. “Do as I say, spit in your hand.”
So I spit in my hand, just a little drop, but Freak says it doesn’t matter how much,
a single molecule would work, because it’s the principle of the thing. “Now put your
hand over your heart,” he says.
I put my hand over my heart.
“Now swear on your heart that the data you are about to receive will be divulged to
no one.”
“I swear.”
Freak bends down and he’s got his hand cupped around my ear and he’s whispering: “Inside
the research building is a secret laboratory called The Experimental Bionics Unit.
The unit’s mission is to develop a new form of bionic robot for human modification.”
“What’s that?” I say.
“Shhh! Speak of this to no one, but at some future time as yet undetermined, I will
enter that lab and become the first bionically improved human.”
“I still don’t know what it means,” I say. “Bionics. And please don’t make me look
it up in the dictionary.”
“Bionics,” Freak says. “That’s the science of designing replacement parts for the
human body.”
“You mean like mechanical arms and legs?”
“That’s ancient history,” Freak says. “The Bionics Unit is building a whole new body
just my size.”
“Yeah? What’ll it look like? A robot?”
“A human robot,” Freak says. “Also it will look a lot like me, only enlarged and improved.”
“Yeah, right,” I say. “Let’s go home, my feet are tired.”
Freak tugs hard at my hair. “True!” he says, with his voice getting high and excited.
“I’ve been in there, in the special unit! I have to go every few months for tests.
They’ve taken my measurements, analyzed my blood and metabolic rates. They’ve monitored
my cardiac rhythms and my respiratory functions. I’ve already been X-rayed and CAT-scanned
and sonogrammed. They’re fitting me for a bionic transplant, I’m going to be the first.”
I can tell he really means it. This isn’t a pretend quest, or making houses into castles
or swimming pools into moats. This is why we came here, so Freak could show me where
he’s been. The place is important to him. I understand this much, even if I still
don’t understand
about bionics or what it means to be a human robot.
“Will it hurt?” I ask. “Getting your parts replaced?”
Freak doesn’t answer for a while and then he says in his stern, smart voice, “Sure
it will hurt. But so what? Pain is just a state of mind. You can think your way out
of anything, even pain.”
I’m pretty worried about the whole deal, and I go, “But why do you want to be the
first? Can’t someone else be first? Isn’t it dangerous?”
“Life is dangerous,” Freak says, and you can tell he’s thought a lot about this. After
a while he kicks me with his little feet and says, “Home.”
One thing that happened over the summer, I grew even more.
Grim takes a look at me one day and he goes, “All that walking you do, it must be
stretching out your legs. And carrying poor Kevin around, that seems to be putting
real muscle on you.”
“He’s not that heavy. And anyhow it’s not fair everybody always says ‘Poor Kevin,’
just because he didn’t grow.”
Grim gives me this long, sorrowful look and then he clears his throat and says, “You’re
quite right, he
is
a rather remarkable boy.”
“He’s memorized almost the whole dictionary. You can ask him anything and he knows
what it means.”
“You don’t say,” Grim says, and he has this smug look like maybe Freak is lying and
a total goon like me would never get it, and I want to tell him he’s wrong about Freak
and the dic
tionary, but instead I just shut my face and go down under.
Grim, he’s okay sometimes, like when Tony D. chased us into the pond, but most of
the time he thinks he knows everything, which he doesn’t. And if you don’t believe
me, look under “grim” in the dictionary, it sure doesn’t say “a smart grown-up.” No
way.
So I’m hanging out down under, listening to some of my thrash tapes on the fake Walkman
I got last Christmas, when Freak pops up on the side of my bed. Because of the headphones
and the volume being pumped up to mega-decibel I never hear him come in, he’s just
suddenly
there
, like whoa! and I’ll bet I jumped about a foot.
Freak rolls his eyes and goes, “Ah, music, how it calms the savage beast.”
“How’d you get here?”
“Would you believe teleportation? No? Then I came down through the bulkhead door like
always. And like always, I have a quest in mind.”
Right away I go, “My feet hurt.”
“We don’t have to leave the neighborhood.”
“Cool. What kind of quest is this?”
Freak grins. “A treasure hunt. Except we don’t really have to hunt because I already
know where the treasure is.”
“Where?”
“Underground,” he says. “Specifically, in the sewer.”
“Yeah, right,” I say and sit back down on the bed. Freak is looking at me sideways
and I
can tell he’s not telling me everything, which he almost never does, not all at once.
“Truth,” he says. “The treasure is hidden in a storm drain. This has been confirmed
by visual observation.”
“Treasure in a storm drain? You mean like gold and diamonds kind of stuff?”
“Possibly,” he says, acting mysterious. “Anything is possible.”
The deal is, we have to wait until night, so no one can see us messing with the storm
drain. Not just night, Freak says, we need to do it at exactly three in the morning.
“Optimum darkness occurs at oh-three-hundred hours,” he says, looking at the new watch
his mom gave him, the kind that tells you what time it is in Tokyo, just in case you’re
wondering. “We must dress in black and cover our faces with soot.”
For the next couple of hours we try to find soot, but it turns out you need a fireplace
for soot, or at least a chimney, so Freak finally decides that my idea about using
regular dirt will have to do.
“I’ve got black dungarees,” I say, “but no black shirts. Can I just wear a dirty shirt?”
Freak makes a face and says, “What a
disgusting
idea. Don’t worry about the shirt, I’ll get you one. Can you manage black socks?”
You ever notice how long it takes for things to happen when you know they’re
supposed
to
happen? My fake Walkman has a built-in alarm, and I set it for two in the morning
and wear the headphones to bed, but before you can wake up you have to fall asleep,
and I never
do
fall asleep because I keep waiting for the alarm to go off. Which is, I know, typical
butthead behavior.
I’m lying awake in the dark on a hot summer night and I’m thinking,
Treasure in the sewer? What kind of quest is this, huh? Is Freak completely making
this up or what?
Meanwhile there’s this cricket making this creaky cricket noise that normally is okay,
except when you’re trying to fall asleep then it’s
not
okay, and you want a big can of Raid, send it to Disney World or insect heaven or
wherever it is that dead crickets go.
Question: How come Freak knows about this stuff in the storm drain?
Question: How come we have to put dirt on our faces?
Question: How come three in the morning?
Question: How long do crickets live?
Finally I give up on the first three and work on the cricket problem, but the little
critter is pretty clever, it stops cricketing whenever I get too close and I never
do
find it and squash it with my shoe, which I swear I am ready to do, even if crickets
are supposed to be harmless.
And then after almost forever it gets to be two-thirty and I figure that’s close enough,
I’ll go up and wait under Freak’s window like I promised.
There’s no moon, the sky is dark and empty, and the back yards are so lonesome it
feels creepy and exciting — the truth is, I’ve never been out alone at this time of
night.
I only fall down a couple of times, which isn’t bad considering how hard it is to
see. When I get to Freak’s bedroom window, he’s waiting for me.
“You sound like a car wreck,” he says. “Here, you better put on this shirt so you
don’t glow in the dark.”
Out of the window he hands me this silly-feeling shirt.
“Hey wait a minute, this is your mom’s blouse!”
“It’s black,” he says. “That’s what counts. The camouflage factor.”
“Forget it,” I say and give him back the Fair Gwen’s blouse.
Freak sighs. “Okay,” he says. “Roll around on the ground and darken yourself.”
That’s easy, and better than wearing some dumb blouse. “What about you?” I ask, when
I’m covered with dirt, enough so I want to sneeze.
Freak goes, “Beware the Force, earthling,” and he stands up in the window and I can
see he’s got a Darth Vader costume on, except he’s not wearing the mask part. He opens
the window all the way and I lift him out and put him on my shoulders.
He goes, “Pledge to me your fealty,” and I say,
“Huh?” and he says, “Never mind, there’s no time to look up ‘fealty.’ Just promise
you’ll do what I say.”
“I promise.”
“Go to the end of the block,” he orders. “Attempt to conceal us in the shadows.”
That’s easy, because the street is one big shadow. It’s so dark I can hardly see my
feet, or maybe I got some dirt in my eyes, but the point is no one sees us because
there’s no one to see us. You’d never know anybody lived here, let alone a whole blockful
of people, it’s like we’re on an empty planet or something.
“Was the real Darth Vader as tall as this?” Freak asks, from where he’s riding high
up on my shoulders.
“I thought it was just a movie.”
“You know what I mean. What’s that!”
“That” is a cat that runs out from under my feet so out-of-nowhere sudden that my
heart goes
wham
.
“Was it a black cat?” Freak wants to know.
“Too dark to tell,” I say. “Are we almost there?”
Finally I figure out it’s hard to see because the Darth Vader cape is hanging in my
eyes, but by then we’re at the end of the block and the storm drain is right there
by the curb.
“See if you can pull it open,” Freak says. He’s standing with his arms folded, and
the expression on his face — well, he really
does
look like a pint-sized Darth Vader.
I hook my hands in the storm drain grate and give it a heave but nothing happens.
“I can’t budge it.”
“Try again,” he says with his arms folded, like he’s a lord of the universe.
I try again and it’s like the grate is Super Glued or something. No way can I pull
it up. Freak is tugging at my leg and he goes, “Option Two is now in effect.”
He reaches inside his little cape. Out comes a flashlight, one of those small kinds
that look sort of like a cigarette lighter, and also a spool of kite string.
“I devised a special retrieval device,” Freak says.
“Looks like a bent paper clip on a string,” I say, and Freak tells me to shut up and
follow orders.
“You hold the string,” he says, and then he gets down on his knees and shines the
little flashlight through the grate. “Can you see it?” he asks. “Can you?”
I look, but it’s hard to see anything and it smells like something died in the storm
drain, which come to think of it, it probably did. Rats or worse.
“Down there,” Freak says. “The beam is hitting it right now.”
“That? That’s just a piece of junk.”
“Wrong,” Freak says, real fierce. “It
looks
like a piece of junk. It may very well contain
fabulous wealth. Drop the line down and see if you can hook it.”
I’m thinking, boy, what a butthead, rolling in the dirt for this little Darth Vader
so he can play pretend games in the middle of the night, but I do what he asks, I
drop the hook down, and much to my surprise, it actually hooks into something and
when I pull up on the kite string I can see what it is.
“A purse,” I say. “Looks like a grotty old purse.”
“Careful,” Freak says. “Pull it up to the grate so I can grab the strap.”
I bring it up an inch at a time, and Darth — excuse me, Freak — manages to get his
small hand down through the grate and grab hold of the soggy old purse and then he
almost drops it. I yank up on the kite string and we both manage to squeeze the slimy
purse up through the bars.
“Whew! Mission accomplished,” Freak says.
The old purse is torn and wet, and I don’t want to touch it unless I have gloves on.
“Gross,” I say. “Somebody must have flushed this down a toilet.”
“No way,” Freak says. “I saw one of Tony D.’s punks stuff it down there yesterday
morning.”
“Yeah? They must have stole it.”
“No doubt,” Freak says, and he opens the clasp and points his little light inside
the purse.
By now I know there isn’t going to be any
treasure, but still this is pretty cool, recovering stuff that Blade’s gang ripped
off from some little old lady or whatever.
“A wallet,” Freak says, and he flips open this cheap-looking wallet, the kind that’s
made to hold credit cards.
There’s no money inside, but there is a plastic ID card, and on the plastic card is
a lady’s name.
“Loretta Lee,” Freak says. “I’ll bet you anything she’s a damsel in distress.”
Which, as it turns out, is almost true. The real deal is that she’s a damsel who
causes
distress. Which we find out the very next day.