Doctor Proctor's Fart Powder (2 page)

Luckily, it would be a while until Truls and Trym could christen Lisa with snow again, because the sun had long since melted it on Cannon Avenue, and now the sun was shining on the gardens, which were green and well groomed. All, that is, except for one. It was scraggly, drab, and unkempt, but was pleasant anyway because it had two pear trees and a small, crooked house that might possibly have been blue at one time and that was now missing a fair number of roof tiles—you could tell that much, anyway. The neighbors on Cannon Avenue rarely saw the man who lived there. Lisa had only met him a couple of times and he'd smiled and otherwise looked sort of like his yard—scraggly, drab, and unkempt.

“What's that?” grumbled the Commandant as the roar of a large engine disturbed the morning quiet. “Is that that darned Hummer of Mr. Trane's?”

His wife craned her neck and peered out the kitchen window. “No. It looks like a moving van.”

Lisa, who was generally a very well-behaved girl, got up from the table, without having finished what was on her plate or having been excused. She ran out onto the front steps. And it sure was. A moving van with the name
CRAZY-QUICK
written on its side was parked in front of the empty, yellow house that used to be her best friend's house. And movers were unloading cardboard boxes from the back. Lisa went down the stairs and over to the so-called apple tree in her yard by the fence to get a closer look. The men in coveralls were carrying furniture, lamps, and big, ugly pictures. Lisa noticed one of the movers showing the other a dented trumpet that was sitting on top of one of the cardboard boxes, and then they both laughed. But she couldn't see any sign of what she'd been hoping to see—dolls, small bicycles, a pair of short skis. And that could only mean that whoever
was moving in didn't have kids, at least no girls her age. Lisa sighed.

Just then she heard a voice.

“Hi!”

She looked around in surprise, but didn't see anyone.

“Hi there!”

She looked up at the tree her father said was an apple tree, but that no one had ever seen any apples on. And that now appeared to be talking.

“Not there,” the voice said. “Over here.”

Lisa stretched up on her tiptoes and peered down on the other side of the fence. And there was a little boy with red hair standing there. Well, not just red, actually, but bright red. And he wasn't just small, he was tiny. He had a tiny face with two tiny blue eyes and a tiny turned-up nose in between. The only things on his face that were big were the freckles.

“I'm Nilly,” he said. “What do you have to say about that?”

He was supposed to be named William, but the priest refused to give such a tiny boy such a long name. So Billy would have to do. But the ringer of church bells came up with a brilliant idea: a boy who was so tiny that he was
nearly
invisible should be called Nilly! The parents just sighed and said okay, and thus the bell ringer got his way.

Lisa asked, “What do I have to say about what?”

“About my being called Nilly. It's not exactly a common name.”

Lisa thought about it. “I don't know,” she said.

“Good.” The boy smiled. “It rhymes with ‘silly,' but let's just leave it at that. Deal?”

Lisa nodded.

The boy stuck his right index finger in his left ear. “And what's your name?”

“Lisa,” she said.

Nilly's index finger twisted back and forth as he watched her. Finally he pulled his finger out, looked at it, gave a satisfied nod, and rubbed it on his pants leg.

“Jeez, I can't think of anything interesting that rhymes with Lisa,” he said. “You're lucky.”

“Are you moving into Anna's house?”

“I don't know who Anna is, but we're moving into that yellow shack over there,” Nilly said, pointing over his shoulder with his thumb.

“Anna's my best friend,” Lisa said. “She moved to Sarpsborg.”

“Whoa, that's far,” Nilly said. “Especially since she's your best friend.”

“It is?” Lisa said. “Anna didn't think it was that far. She said I should just go south on the highway when I visit her.”

Nilly shook his head, looking gloomy. “South is right, but the question is if the highway even goes
that far. Sarpsborg is actually in the Southern Hemisphere.”

“The Southern what-i-sphere?” Lisa said, shocked.

“Hemisphere,” Nilly said. “That means it's on the other side of the world.”

“Whoa,” Lisa said, taken aback. After she thought about it a minute, she said, “Dad says that it's super warm in the south all year round, so I bet Anna can go swimming all the time now, whether it's summer or winter.”

“No way,” Nilly said. “Sarpsborg is so far south that it's practically at the South Pole. It's freezing. Penguins live on people's roofs down there.”

“You mean, it snows all year round in Sarpsborg?” Lisa asked.

Nilly nodded and Lisa shivered. Nilly pursed his lips together while at the same time pressing air out between them. It sounded like a fart. Lisa furrowed her brow, remembering how the twins had called her
Flatu-Lisa. “Are you trying to tease me?” she asked. “About my nickname?”

Nilly shook his head. “Nope, I'm practicing,” he said. “I play the trumpet. That means I have to practice all the time. Even when I don't have my trumpet.”

Lisa cocked her head to the side and looked at him. She wasn't really sure anymore if he was telling the truth.

“Lisa, you have to brush your teeth before you go to school,” she heard a voice rumble. It was her dad, who'd put on his blue Commandant's uniform and was waddling toward the door with his big belly. “The ship with the gunpowder for our cannons arrived from Shanghai this morning, so I'll be home late. You be a good girl today.”

“Yes, Dad,” said Lisa, who was always good. She knew it was a special day when the gunpowder arrived. It had sailed halfway around the world and
had to be handled very carefully and respectfully, since it was used to fire off Akershus Fortress's Big and Almost World-Famous Royal Salute on May seventeenth, Norway's Independence Day.

“Dad,” Lisa called to him. “Did you know that Sarpsborg is in the Southern … uh, Hemisphere?”

The Commandant stopped, looking puzzled. “Says who?”

“Nilly.”

“Who's that?”

She pointed. “Nill …,” she started, but stopped suddenly when she discovered that she was pointing at a stretch of Cannon Avenue where there was only Cannon Avenue and absolutely no sign of Nilly.

Seasick Goats

WHEN NILLY HEARD Lisa's dad, the Commandant, tell her she had to go to school, he remembered he was supposed to go to school himself. Wherever it might be. And if he was fast, maybe he would have time to eat breakfast, find his backpack, and if absolutely necessary, brush his teeth and still tag along
with someone who knew the way to his new school.

He squeaked between the moving guys' legs and into the house. And there, in a cardboard box in the hallway, he saw his trumpet. He exhaled in relief, snatched it up, and clutched it to his chest. Nilly and his sister and mom had arrived with the first load of stuff the night before, and the only thing he'd been worried about was whether the movers would forget the box with his trumpet in it.

He cautiously placed his lips against the mouthpiece.

“A trumpet should be kissed. Like a woman,” his grandfather had always said. Nilly had never kissed a woman in his whole life, at least not like that, not right on the mouth. And truth be told, he hoped he wouldn't have to either. He pressed the air into the trumpet. It bleated like a seasick goat. There aren't many people who've heard a seasick goat bleat, but that's exactly what it sounded like.

Nilly heard someone banging on the wall and knew it was his mom, who hadn't gotten up yet. “Not now, Nilly!” she yelled. “It's eight a.m. We're sleeping.”

She pretty much always said “we,” even if she was alone in her bedroom: “We're going to bed now” and “We're going to make ourselves a cup of coffee.” As if Dad weren't gone at all, as if she still had him in there—stored in a little box, and every once in a while when Nilly wasn't there, she would take him out. A tiny miniature Dad who looked like the Dad Nilly had seen in pictures. Miniature meant that something was really small, and it made sense that of all people, Nilly would have a miniature dad, since Nilly was the smallest boy Nilly had ever seen.

He went down to the kitchen and fixed himself some breakfast. Even though they'd just moved in the day before, he found everything he needed, because they'd moved so many times, he knew pretty much where his mom would put stuff. The plates in the
cupboard on the left, the silverware in the top drawer, and the bread in the drawer below that. He was about to sink his teeth into a thick slice of bread with salami on top when it was snatched out of his hands.

“How you doing, dwarf?” Eva asked, sinking her teeth exactly where Nilly had been planning to sink his teeth. Eva was Nilly's sister. She was fifteen and when she wasn't bored, she was mad. “Did you know that the pit bull is the world's dumbest dog?” Nilly asked. “It's so dumb that when it takes food from the dwarf poodle, which happens to be the world's smartest dog, it doesn't get that it's been tricked.”

“Shut up,” Eva said.

But Nilly didn't shut up. “When the dwarf poodle knows the pit bull smells bread and salami and she's coming to take it away from him, he usually smears slime from elephant snails on the bottom of the slice of bread.”

“Elephant snails?” Eva scoffed, eyeing him with
suspicion. Unfortunately for her, Nilly read books and thus knew quite a few things she didn't know, so his sister could never be totally sure if what he was saying was a Nilly invention or something from one of those old books of their grandfather's. For example, this might be something from the book Nilly read the most, a thick, dusty one called
Animals You Wish Didn't Exist.

“Haven't you ever seen an elephant snail?” Nilly yelled. “All you have to do is look out the window—there's a ton of them in the lawn. Big, ooky ones. When you squish them between two books, something oozes out of them that looks like the yellowish green snot that runs out of the noses of people who have grade-three Beijing influenza. There's no snot worse than authentic third-degree Beijing snot. Well, apart from elephant snail slime, that is.”

“If you lie anymore, you're going to go to hell,” Eva said, sneaking a quick peek at the bottom of the slice of bread.

Nilly hopped down from the chair. “Fine with me, as long as they have a band there,” he said, “and I get to play the trumpet.”

“You're never going to get to play in any band!” Eva yelled after him. “No one wants a trumpet player who's so small, he doesn't even come up to the top of the bass drum. No band has uniforms that small!”

Nilly put on the itty-bitty shoes that were sitting in the hallway and went out onto the front steps, stood at attention, pressed his lips together, placed them against the trumpet, and blew a tune his grandfather had taught him. It was called “Morning Reveille” and was designed to wake up sleepyheads.