Mississippi River Blues (6 page)

With that, he stormed away into the woods, just as the school bell rang.

I turned to Frankie. “Well, that didn't go so good.”

“It could be worse than we think,” she said. “We still haven't found the scribble page. And what if Tom bolts out of his own story? What if he doesn't want to go on as a character? Where will that leave us?”

“Stuck in the adventures of nobody?” I said.

“Exactly!” she said. “We'll be up the creek. It'll be the worst thing that could happen. Worse than anything!”

“Or even worse!” I said.

“That's what I said!”

“Me, too!” I said.

We both gulped at the same time.

“We'd better find him!” I announced.

“We'd better!” said Frankie.

Together we ran into the woods. We hacked our way through that wilderness for what seemed like hours. Actually, it
was
hours. And along the way we managed to get lost three separate times. When we finally arrived at the spot described in the book, it was—as if you couldn't guess—midnight. Again!

The meeting spot, according to the book, was atop a small rocky bluff overlooking the wide, slow-moving river. It was quiet and peaceful there.

I breathed in the night air. “So, this is the big Mississippi River, eh?”

Frankie nodded. “The boys are planning to leave from here. I guess we're early.”

“Who goes there?” came a sudden growl from the woods. We jumped.

“Um … just us,” I said. “Who goes there?”

“Tom Sawyer, the Black Avenger of the Spanish Main!” said the first voice.

“And Huck Finn, the Red-handed!” said a second.

“Joe Harper, Terror of the Seas!” proclaimed a third.

“Name your own names!” boomed Tom.

“Frankie,” said Frankie.

“Devin,” said I.

There came a laugh from the woods, and the three boys broke through the bushes and stomped over to us.

“No, no,” said Huck. “We're pirates now. Pirates always take scary new names for their new lives!”

Frankie chewed her lip for a while, then smiled. “Okay, for my pirate self … I'll be Sea Princess.”

Tom spit out a chunk of ham he'd been nibbling, then started laughing. “Sea Princess? Pah!”

“Names must strike fear in others,” said Joe Harper.

Frankie thought about that. “Okay, how about … Sea Princess of Death?”

“Better,” said Tom. “Only change Sea to Creepy and Princess to Skeleton and I think you have something.”

Frankie grinned. “Creepy Skeleton of Death? I like it!”

It was my turn. “And I'll be … the Horrible Doom of the Gloomy Night of Treachery's Fearful Screaming Skull of Death … the First!”

A rousing cheer went up. “We love it! Let's set sail for our island!”

“Wait a second, we're actually going to an island?” I said. “I don't like islands. Islands mean water. Water means wetness. I hate getting wet.”

“But we got a ship!” said Huck. “Come on and see!”

The three boys tramped down to the water's edge.

I turned to Frankie. “How big is this ship?”

Frankie scanned the book. “It's not exactly a ship.”

“Boat, then. How big is the boat?”

“It's not a boat, either,” she said. “It's more like a, well, a raft.”

“A raft!” I gulped. “A raft is like a large cracker that you sit on and hope you can keep sitting on until you're on dry land again! I don't like rafts! I really don't!”

A few minutes later, we were all crouched on a badly leaking bunch of boards that Huck called “the ship.”

They had snitched it from someone's dock.

“It looks like a matzo,” said Frankie. “Holes and all.”

It sailed like one, too, with water splashing up through the planks and over the sides.

“Timmy the Sailor was very wrong about this,” I grumbled. “Boats are the opposite of fun, fun, fun.”

“Steady it is, sir!” yelled Joe, making our voyage sound even more official.

The raft drew beyond the middle of the river, and Tom and Huck “hit the oars,” which were just planks of wood. Hardly a word was said during the next hour or so as the raft passed by the village. Two or three glimmering lights showed where everybody was sleeping peacefully.

The Black Avenger (Tom) stood still with folded arms, looking his last upon the town.

“I was happy there once,” he proclaimed. “No more! I wish Becky Thatcher could see me now, on the wild sea, facing danger and death, going to my doom with a grin on my lips. Then she'd change her tune.…”

“To do that,” I said, “all you have to do is—”

“Devin!” Frankie practically screamed. “Stuff it!”

I stuffed it.

The raft leaked plenty, but we soon plowed into the island and tumbled off onto mostly dry land. Our voyage had lasted almost two hours.

It was the middle of the night.

Tom and Huck dragged the mast and sail up onto land and made it part of the tent where we were going to spend the night.

Frankie looked at me. “Are we really going to do this? Sleep out here on this island?”

“The missing page might be hidden here,” I said. “Plus we're all deathy and skeletony now, so who cares about bugs and snakes and cold weather and hunger and bugs, right?”

“Right,” she said, gulping. “We're tough, right?”

“Very tough. Sort of.”

That's Frankie and me.

Very tough, sort-of pirates.

Chapter 11

In less time than it takes for Mr. Wexler to pop a quiz, Huck fixed up a hammock more secure and comfortable than any you could get from an L.L.Bean catalog.

He grinned as he did the same for each of us.

“You know, Frankie,” I said, “I'm deciding that Huck is one very cool dude. This hammock is first-rate.”

“As long as it keeps me off the ground,” she said.

Meanwhile, Tom and Joe were getting the first-ever official pirate fire going. We all jammed around it to warm the food and our hands.

I looked around. “Okay, we've sailed the pirate ship, we've landed on the island, what else do pirates do?”

Huck laughed. “Do? Well they … and they … plus there's … hey, I don't know. What
do
pirates do?”

Frankie raised her hand, since she had the book. “It actually says right here. Pirates attack ships, and burn them, get the money and bury it in awful places on their island where ghosts and spirits watch over it, and if they have spare time, they make people walk the plank.”

“Good words,” said Huck. “But I guess pirates do mostly bad things.”

We all sat around the fire, thinking of all those bad things. Tom spoke unexpectedly. “I don't like that we snatched food from Aunt Polly,” he said.

Huck made a noise in his throat, then wagged his head. “Or the raft we took. Maybe that wasn't right, either. Let's take a vow saying we won't steal again.”

“We'll be the first pirates not to steal!” said Joe.

Everybody liked that idea.

Soon, all the other pirates and I, exhausted from our voyage and swinging more and more slowly in our customized, Huck-made hammocks, fell asleep.

When I woke up, I had nearly forgotten where I was. The early morning was cool and gray, and the woods were mostly quiet around us. It was so different from waking up to my noisy alarm clock at home.

Not a tree stirred over my hammock. Dewdrops hung on the leaves and in the grass below. The fire was out, but a thin blue wreath of smoke coiled up from the ashes and into the air. It was very peaceful. I liked it.

“Going swimming!” Tom yelped suddenly, and Huck and Joe bolted up with big grins. In a flash, all three pirate boys raced off to the water on the far side of the island where we wouldn't be seen by any villagers who might be out for a morning boat ride.

Frankie flipped out of her hammock. “Okay, Dev, if the page is here, we'd better hurry and look for it before we leave the island and this part of the story ends.”

Together, we covered every inch of the island. There were hanging vines, clearings in the trees that burned from the hot sun right above us, and swampy areas where our shoes got stuck.

That was loads of fun.

Searching the place didn't take us very long, because the island wasn't that big. We didn't find a signed page from an old book, but we did see something else.

It was Frankie who spotted it first.

“A boat,” she said, pointing to the river.

I peered out from behind the rock I was looking under. There was a little steam ferryboat about a mile below the village, drifting with the current. The deck was crowded with people. Then a big jet of white smoke burst from the ferryboat's side—
poom!

It was a cannon, blasting a shot straight up the river.

“They're up to something,” said Frankie.

“Hey, Tom!” I called. “Huck! Joe! Come here!”

The three boys came running out of the woods. They were dressed in leaves and branches and vines, fresh from playing jungle pirates.

“What are they doing out there?” Frankie asked. “They're firing over the water at nothing.”

And as we watched—
poom! poom!
—the cannon started blasting again.

“I know!” exclaimed Tom. “Somebody's drowned!”

“That's it,” said Huck. “They done that last summer when Bill Turner got drowned. They shoot a cannon over the water, and that makes the water roil all up and the drowned person comes floating up to the surface.”

“Sounds scientific,” I said.

“It's very,” Huck agreed.

“I wonder who drowned,” said Joe Harper.

Frankie thought about that, frowning for a while. Then her eyes grew big. “Wait a second! I know who's drowned!”

“Who?” asked Tom.

“It's us!” she cried.

Instantly, the three boys grinned.

“They think we've drowned!” yelped Huck. “They'll cry now for sure. And us? We're heroes!”

Tom cheered and whooped for a while, then stopped. He had a strange look on his face. So did Joe, actually.

I had the book, but I didn't need to read it to know what was going on with the pirates. One look at Tom's face—and Joe's, too—and I knew they were thinking about people back home who probably weren't having much fun at the idea of the boys being dead.

Only Huck kept on grinning through every cannon blast. I knew that was because he had no family of his own.

“Maybe we should go back.” Joe said.

“Never!” said Tom abruptly, probably trying to hide his own feelings. “That's just being chicken! Aren't you the Terror of the Seas, a great pirate who laughs at death?”

“Sure I am,” Joe insisted. “I'm the biggest death-laugher ever. Ha … ha … ha … See?”

“Then that's that,” said Tom. “Tomorrow, we search for treasure!”

After that, we all went back to camp and threw ourselves down, talking rough-and-tough pirate talk. But long before nightfall, the talk lost its rough-and-toughness. Tom and Joe went silent first. Then Huck.

They were sleeping.

When I looked over at Frankie, she was snoring softly with the book snuggled under her head as her pillow.

“Okay, then. Sleep for me, too,” I murmured.

I closed my eyes and started to drift off, thinking about the pillows on my bed at home and how soft they were, when I heard a noise from around the campfire.

Popping my lids open, I saw Tom tiptoe off through the trees and break into a run in the direction of the river.

Chapter 12

I shifted into sneaky mode and followed Tom. Not only was I in the real dark but because Frankie had the book, I was in the dark about what was going to happen. Still, I figured that the story probably headed Tom's way, so I went.

He waded into the river and swam across at the narrowest point, not far from the village.

Of course, I got wet, too. I hated that.

Once ashore, Tom flew along from one alley to another, and pretty soon I caught sight of that very high, very long, very white fence Frankie and I had helped paint.

I chuckled to myself. “So, the Black Avenger isn't so tough, after all. He's gone home to visit his aunt Polly.”

Tom edged over to the back door and slipped inside. I waited a minute, then did the same. Inside, he hid himself in the shadows, and I hid, watching him. There was talking coming from a lit room in the front of the house.

“He wasn't bad,” Aunt Polly was saying, “only mischievous. He never meant any harm, and he was the best-hearted boy that ever … ever … was—”

I heard her begin to cry.

“It was the same with my Joe!” said Mrs. Harper. “Always full of devilment, but just as unselfish and kind as he could be.”

She started to cry, too.

So did Tom. I guess seeing his aunt and Mrs. Harper break down was too much for him. He was about to crash into the room, when Mrs. Harper said something that made him stop.

“If the bodies are still missing by Sunday, we're going to have the funerals that morning.”

Tom froze in the shadows while everybody wailed to think about funerals for their little boys, and even one for Huck, who was nobody's little boy.

Finally, Aunt Polly knelt down in the lamplight and prayed for Tom, and he pulled back into the shadows and went still.

After a while, Mrs. Harper went home, Aunt Polly went to bed, and the house was quiet. I saw Tom tiptoe into his aunt's room. He had a note all written out on a strip of bark. He took it out and reached over to her nightstand, but then he stopped, took it back, and gave his aunt a kiss. Then, just before he slid out, I slid out.

As he started away from the house, I jumped in front of him. “Why didn't you wake her up?” I asked.

“Devin?” he gasped. “What—did you follow me?”

“Yeah,” I said. “And I think you should tell your poor Aunt Polly that you're alive. She was crying so hard!”