The Diamond War (6 page)

For a while he even thought of just not going himself. Of course he had said that he would be there. He’d written it down right there on the back of the paper. So not showing up would be breaking his word. But breaking his word to—whom? Who was the “whole bunch” of people who supposedly didn’t want those trees cut down? Some of them must be the other Pappas kids—Aurora and Ari. The Pappases were always doing crazy things. But that was hardly a whole bunch of people. Who else might be in on it?

And then there was another question. A more mysterious one. Whoever they were, how did they know about his idea to cut down a few trees at Dragoland? He hadn’t mentioned it to anyone except Bucky. And right after that Bucky had gone to town with his folks, so he couldn’t have told anyone. The whole thing was pretty mysterious.

Just as Carlos was about to give up and go inside, everything started happening at once. It started with a muffled thudding noise and a loud whisper that came from the Brockhurst side of the hedge. “Shhh,” the voice said. “Meet me out front.”

“Okay,” Carlos whispered back and started around to the front of the house. And then just as Bucky crawled out of a rhododendron bush in the Brockhursts’ front yard, a car drove into the circle. It was the Wongs’ Toyota. So suddenly the three PROs were together again—and just in the nick of time.

Carlos and Bucky dashed across the circle just as the Wongs’ car was pulling into their garage. Eddy was only halfway out of the backseat when they grabbed him and started dragging him down the driveway.

“Hey, what’s up?” he asked. “What’s going on?”

Carlos and Bucky were both talking at once. Bucky was babbling something about hatchets and Carlos kept saying something about a meeting. A meeting that was about to happen very soon and he, Eddy, was supposed to be there.

“Eddy! Carlos! Bucky!” It was Eddy’s dad calling. “Where are you boys going?”

Carlos turned loose of Eddy’s arm and went back to talk to Eddy’s dad. “We just need to talk to Eddy for a few minutes, Mr. Wong,” he said. “We won’t be long.”

Eddy’s dad looked at his watch. “All right, for just ten minutes,” he said. “But no more than that. No basketball tonight. You hear me, Eddy? No basketball.”

“No basketball, Mr. Wong,” Carlos called back. “We promise. We’re in a hurry too.” Bucky went on pulling Eddy by one arm while Carlos pushed from behind.

“Hey, what’s going on? Where are we going?” Eddy kept saying. “Stop shoving. If you guys don’t tell me where we’re going, I’m going to go home.”

But he wasn’t going to go home until Carlos and Bucky wanted him to because they were bigger than he was. Eddy Wong was as good an athlete as Bucky and Carlos. He just wasn’t as big.

“Come on, Eddy,” Carlos said. “We have to go to a meeting. A meeting about this great idea I was trying to tell you about this morning. Remember? About where we could have a baseball diamond?”

Suddenly Eddy quit struggling. Eddy really liked baseball. He was a good batter and he had a great arm, and being kind of short didn’t matter as much in baseball. Just once in a while Eddy would really like to play something where he could be the best.

“Yeah? Yeah?” he said. “What about a baseball diamond? And who are we meeting with?”

“Who?” Bucky said. “Yeah. That’s a good question.”

But by then they had climbed into and out of the Pit and were starting across the Weedpatch.

“I told you,” Eddy said to Carlos. “This place just isn’t big enough. Remember? Web measured it with his surveyor’s stuff.”

Eddy’s little brother, Webster Wong, who was only eight years old, knew how to do surveying because he happened to be a genius. “Remember,” Eddy went on, “Web measured it both ways and it’s just not big enough. That bunch of trees over there is right where first base ought to be. That bunch right over there where—” He stopped and stared. “Hey, look,” he said.

“Look at what? Bucky said. “I didn’t see anything.”

“Me neither,” Carlos said.

Eddy looked from Bucky to Carlos and back again. “Are you sure? I saw something kind of peeking out of that bunch of bamboo. Something like a face.”

“Oh yeah? Like whose face?” Bucky said.

“I don’t know. I didn’t see it well enough.”

“Well, it probably was one of the people we’re supposed to be meeting with. You know, about the baseball diamond thing.” Eddy still looked blank so Carlos started filling him in. “See, the thing is, I had this great idea about how we could chop down that whole grove over there. It wouldn’t be hard. It’s just bamboo and those little skinny trees. And then we could put first base right there and then the Weed-patch would be big enough. Wouldn’t it?”

Eddy’s eyes lit up. “Yeah,” he said. “I think it would be. But those trees don’t belong to us. We might get in trouble.”

“Trouble, schmouble,” Bucky said. “Those trees don’t belong to anyone, except maybe the Dragomans. And they’re never here. They don’t even know the trees are there.”

Eddy nodded. “But what about this meeting then? What’s that all about?”

So Carlos told Eddy all about the note—and more or less what it said about a big bunch of people who didn’t want the trees cut down. He finished the story by saying, “But the really weird part is we don’t have any idea how these nerds, whoever they are, found out what we were planning to do. We didn’t tell anybody. Did we, Bucky?”

Just at that moment Eddy saw it again. “Look,” he yelled. “There it is again. Two of them this time. I saw two faces.” But Carlos and Bucky hadn’t looked soon enough.

“That does it,” Carlos said. “I’m going in there and find out who it is. You guys stay here to catch them when they run out.”

“Okay,” Bucky said. “I’ll stay right here and you go over that way, Eddy.” As Carlos headed for the grove Bucky crouched down like a football player getting ready for the snap. “I’m going to tackle the first thing that runs out of there,” he yelled. Carlos disappeared into the grove.

There was no path. Slender tree trunks crowded around him, and thick blobby clusters of leaves were everywhere. Leaves trailed across Carlos’s face, blocking his vision. He was trying to push them away from his face when suddenly he found himself in a small clearing no bigger than a room in a house. All around him dense stands of bamboo and young acacia trees made a solid green wall. Around the clearing, at the foot of the green wall, there was a kind of border of smooth white stones. The grass in the clearing was short and green, almost like a lawn. And right in the middle of the lawn there was something long and silvery. Long and silvery and—
alive
.

As Carlos stared in horror the long silvery thing raised its big oval head and pointed it right in his direction. It was a—
snake!
An absolutely humongous snake. Carlos yelled and smashed his way back through the green wall.

Bucky and Eddy were waiting for him just outside the grove. When he burst out through the bamboo Bucky said, “Hey, man. Where were you? What happened?”

“A snake,” Carlos started to yell, but for a moment nothing came out. Bucky and Eddy were staring at him strangely. He waved his arms, opened his mouth several times, made a squeaking noise, and then, tried again. “A snake,” he finally managed. “There’s this huge snake in there. About ten feet long.”

“Wow!” Bucky said. “A rattlesnake?”

“I d-d-don’t know,” Carlos stammered. “It was just big! Real big.”

Bucky started looking around, he picked up a stick, balanced it in his hand, and then threw it back down again. Then he turned suddenly and ran back toward the Pit. A minute later he came back carrying a shovel and a couple of big sticks. Handing the sticks to Carlos and Eddy, he yelled, “Come on, you dudes. Let’s go chop up that…”

Bucky’s voice trailed off in midsentence. “…snake,” he whispered. Then he gulped and said, “Oh, hi, Dad. I just had to come over here to tell Carlos something. I was coming right home. Here I come.”

Mr. Brockhurst was standing near the brick foundation at the back of the Pit. He didn’t look happy. And just at that moment a bell started ringing. The bell was the one that hung on the Wongs’ back porch, and when it rang it meant that Eddy and Web had better get home. Fast.

So that took care of both Eddy and Bucky. Carlos was left all alone just outside of the grove. For a moment he stood staring at the dense wall of quivering green leaves. He was remembering something. He was remembering that Carson Nicely had snakes. Big ones. And that Carson was Kate’s brother—and that Kate Nicely and Aurora Pappas were best friends. And of course the little Athena twerp was Aurora’s sister. It was all beginning to come together.

“Okay, you guys,” he shouted. “We’ll be back tomorrow with hatchets and chain saws and—and—with a snake-killing dog too.”

Actually he didn’t know if Lump would kill a snake. As far as he knew, Lump had never met one. But Carlos felt sure Lump
could
if he wanted to. He was certainly big enough. And of course there wasn’t really any chain saw. But it sounded good. “We’ll be back tomorrow for sure,” he yelled again.

He started to walk away but after a minute he turned around and walked backward. Nothing moved in the grove. “You asked for it,” he yelled. “This means war.”

F
ROM HER HIDING PLACE
in the clump of bamboo Kate Nicely watched Carlos Garcia as he finally stopped waving his arms and shouting about chain saws and snake-killing dogs and disappeared into the bushes that surrounded the Pit.

“Sure you will, stupid,” she whispered. Then she raised her voice and said, “He’s just bluffing, Carson. He’s just trying to scare us. Carson! Carson?” There was no answer and nothing moved in the Unicorn’s Grove clearing. Both Carson and Slinky had disappeared.

It wasn’t until Kate had searched the grove thoroughly and pushed her way back out into the open that she saw him—a small dumpy figure marching off toward home with about ten feet of boa constrictor wrapped around his neck. She could tell he was angry. Carson Nicely didn’t get mad easily but when he did—look out!

“Carson,” she called. “Carson. Come back here.” She ran after him but even when she caught up he just kept on stomping and glaring straight ahead.

“Look, Carson,” she said. “I wouldn’t have let them hurt Slinky.”

“They were going to chop him,” Carson said. “With a shovel. You didn’t tell me Slinky might get chopped.”

They were almost to the sidewalk, with Carson still stomping and glaring, when they suddenly ran into all the rest of the council—Aurora, Ari and Athena Pappas, and Susie Garcia—on their way to the meeting. On their way to a meeting that hadn’t happened and now probably never would. The four of them stopped to stare at Carson as he stomped past with Slinky wrapped around his shoulders.

“Oooh. Look at Slinky,” Athena said.

“Yikes!” Susie squealed. “Stay away from me. Stay away from me with that thing, Carson Nicely.”

“What happened?” Ari said. He twisted his fanny pack around and started to pull out a notebook.

Kate sighed. She waited until Carson and Slinky had disappeared across Castle Court and the other kids had stopped staring after him before she sighed again and began to explain. “…I just had this—well, I guess it was a dumb idea about how to get rid of the PROs.” She looked at Aurora. “I just remembered all of a sudden about the way Carlos kind of freaked out that day when Matt brought that little old garter snake to school. Remember?” Kate made a scared face and jumped back like Carlos had done when he saw the snake. “Remember that, Aurora?”

Aurora nodded.

“Well,” Kate went on, “I suddenly thought that if he saw Slinky in the grove he might just, well, you know, kind of lose interest in the whole project. So I got Carson to bring him over here. But it didn’t work the way I wanted it to. Old Brockhurst got this shovel and started yelling about chopping Slinky up. And I guess he might have done it too, except his father showed up really angry. I mean, he looked
mad
. But Carson heard what Brockhurst was yelling about chopping Slinky and it really freaked him out. He’s crazy about that dumb snake.”

Ari was writing something in his notebook. “How do you spell
freaked
?” he asked Kate.

“F-r-e…,” Kate started—and then stopped and glared. “Look, Ari,” she said. “This isn’t a newspaper story. This is real life. And we have a real-life problem. Like, those creeps are going to come back here tomorrow with saws and axes and—”

“I thought we were going to have a meeting,” Aurora said in her soft breathy voice. “I thought we were going to try to talk to them about ecology and the environment and about how the…” She stopped and shrugged. “Well, I guess not.”

“Yeah,” Kate said. “I
double
guess not. Not if you were thinking of trying to tell them about the…” She looked around and lowered her voice and mouthed, “the unicorn.”

But Athena had very good ears. “The what?” she said. “The unicorn? You said unicorn. I heard you. What about the unicorn?”

“Shhh,” Aurora said to Athena. “I’ll tell you about it later.” Then she said to Kate, “So there’s not going to be a meeting then?”

Kate nodded ruefully. She felt bad about ruining the meeting, even if it wouldn’t have worked. “It probably wouldn’t have done any good anyway,” she said.

“Yeah,” Susie said. “I told you so. I said it was no use talking to those guys.”

Ari stopped writing in his notebook. “So,” he said, “what’s going to happen next?”

Kate looked at Aurora. She wanted to ask about the spell but didn’t know if she should. But Aurora guessed. “No,” she said. “I can’t get it back. I had this mysterious feeling about something that was going to happen. Something about…” She stopped and looked at Athena.

“About me,” Athena said proudly.

Aurora nodded. “But the feeling’s gone now. I’ve been trying and trying, but I can’t get it back.” She shook her head slowly, her gray eyes dark with despair. “I just can’t.”

“Look,” Kate said. “Don’t worry about it. We can handle those crummy nerds. We’ll make them wish they never heard of our grove or the Weedpatch. Or baseball. We’ll make them wish they never even heard of baseball.”

Susie jumped around shadowboxing the empty air. “Yeah,” she said. “And Dove bars. I’m going to make them wish they never heard of Dove bars too.”