Ignatius MacFarland (12 page)

The super tall guy walked over and looked me up and down, then looked back at Karen like he was surprised that another person from our frequency was now in his world. He exchanged a look with his flying buddies and then turned back and held out his hand to me.

“Hello,” he said in a really soft and quiet voice. “My name is Herfta.”

As surprised as I was to hear him speak English, I tried to act cool and so grabbed his hand to give it a good firm shake, the way my dad always said you should shake somebody’s hand. “Nobody likes shaking hands with a wet noodle,” he used to say. He obviously hadn’t shaken hands with Herfta. “Hi, I’m Ig —”

CRUNCH!

“YEOUWWW!!!” Herfta screamed in a loud, high-pitched voice that almost sounded like a cat getting its tail stepped on. Herfta’s hand was about as strong as a piece of Kleenex and it snapped in my hand like a sheet of balsa wood.

“IGGY!” yelled Karen as Herfta jumped around, shaking his hand and putting it between his knees the way you do when you hit your thumb with a hammer, while the other flying people swarmed around him to make sure he was all right. “WHY’D YOU DO THAT?”

“Do
what?!
” I shrieked back, completely freaked out that I had just broken the hand of some being from another frequency. “I shook his hand like he wanted me to! What was I supposed to do?!”

“They don’t shake hands here!” she yelled as if I was the biggest moron to ever walk the planet. “You were just supposed to press your palm up against his.”

“HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT?!” I said, my voice cracking.

“You didn’t give me a chance to tell you!” she said as she went over to Herfta and inspected his wounded hand.

“You had, like, a whole half hour while we were running!” I yelled. “You couldn’t have said, ‘Hey, I’m going to introduce you to some flying people in a few minutes and when I do, make sure you don’t shake their hands because you’ll crush them like a bunch of twigs’?”

Herfta looked at me as the other flying people tried to repair his hand. His voice sounded like he was still in a lot of pain. “I’m assuming that . . . what you did . . . isn’t an act of aggression . . . where you’re from,” he said, sounding a bit like a constipated guy sitting on the toilet trying to take a poo.

“Um, no, sir,” I said, still surprised that he spoke English so well. “It’s something nice you do when you first meet someone. Didn’t Karen ever shake hands with anybody here?”

“No,” she said in a majorly sarcastic way. “I, unlike you, don’t just assume because we do something in our world that everybody else in the universe does the same thing.”

“I was trying to be nice!”

“Yeah,” she said, her eyes looking at Herfta’s smashed hand and then back at me. “Great work.”

Man, there were so many times when I wanted to put a spider down the back of her shirt. Except in this frequency it was probably some kind of compliment or something.

Karen and Herfta
puh
ed and
pah
ed for a little while longer, then Herfta gestured to another flying guy and motioned up at the treetops with his hurt hand and suddenly a huge wooden bowl-type thing dropped down out of the trees and thumped loudly onto the ground behind me, making me jump. There was a rope attached to it that was used to lift it up and down to the treetops.

“Okay, hand crusher,” Karen said, motioning her head toward the wooden bowl. “Get in. They said they’ll let you into their city, even though you just wounded their leader.”

“But I didn’t . . . I . . .” I tried to defend myself again but realized it was just a big waste of breath. I simply sighed the way you do when your mom accuses you of eating something that the dog actually ate, and then climbed into the wooden bowl with Karen.

I looked to see if the cat was around so I could bring it with me but the second we were in the bowl, we were pulled up into the air so fast that I thought I was either going to barf or my pants were going to fall down from the G-force. I looked and saw Herfta and his flying companions speeding next to our wooden elevator, flying straight up into the air, hardly even moving their wings. A couple of the flying people gave me sort of dirty looks as we were zooming up toward the treetops but I was too freaked out to really do anything about it. I guess they had the right to be mad at me since I did crush their leader’s hand, even though it was his fault for holding it out to me without letting me know that he was made out of the equivalent of pipe cleaners and fragile glassware and other super breakable stuff.

SSSSSS-WUMP! As fast as we took off, we stopped even faster. I guess they were used to people stopping that fast because I flew up and hit my head against a really soft padded piece of something that didn’t hurt. I’d hate to have been the person who made them first realize that super-fast-bowl-flying-up-at-top-speed plus extremely-sudden-stop equals person-in-wooden-bowl-smashing-his-or-her-head. Because without that padded thing my head would have felt a lot like Herfta’s hand did at that moment.

I looked down from the padded thingamajig and stared out in front of me. Stretched out before me was an entire city built onto the tops of the trees. From the ground I had thought that the tree houses were going to be sort of like tree houses were back home, all rickety and small, like the one Gary’s dad built for him in their backyard. That tree house was so junky that once when we were trying to have a sleepover in it, the floor broke and Ivan — who had made us zip him all the way up in his “cocoon” bag so that only his face was showing — fell through and ended up draped over a big branch looking like a huge worm that somebody had dropped on a stick.

The tree buildings up here were like real buildings, except that they were really tall and crazy-looking. Every building had a roof that came to some kind of point at the top, sort of like steeples on churches, except that these points were really thin and tall, like huge skinny ice-cream cones or knitting needles.

There were tons of different heights and sizes of buildings and they seemed to go on for half a mile. They all had openings with little perches and gangplanks sticking out like tiny landing strips that the flying people were using to come in and out of the buildings like bees going in and out of hives. And all the buildings were decorated with sticks and branches that had been twisted and woven into big curvy shapes that looked like the edges of these lace placemat thingies my grandma had all over her house. Grandma called them
doilies
but that just seems like the kind of word that can get a twelve-year-old boy beaten up if he even thinks about saying it.

Karen caused all kinds of commotion once we were up there,
puh
ing and
pah
ing and passing around my Shakespeare book to some other flying people, both men and women, who were almost as tall as Herfta. They would occasionally speak in English when it seemed like Karen didn’t know how to say something in flying-people language. It became clear pretty fast that these tall ones were the leaders of the treetop city. After Karen stopped talking to them, they all went off to discuss whatever she had told them about me and my Shakespeare book.

“What’s up?” I said as I walked up next to her.

“I’m trying to convince them to do something about Mr. Arthur,” she said, sounding a bit impatient. “The Puhluvians are really cool people but they sort of don’t care about anything that happens on the ground. They’re kind of snobby that way. It comes from living in treetops for so long.”

“How’d you learn to speak their language?”

“They taught me.” She shrugged as if I should have been able to figure that out without asking.

“But they speak English. You didn’t have to learn their language.”

“Yeah, and I didn’t have to save you, either, but I did,” she said, sounding like she was once again getting upset with me. “It’s called being interested in things and wanting to expand my horizons. Try it sometime.”

Before I could make some sarcastic comment that I hadn’t yet thought of at that moment, I suddenly got the weird feeling that somebody was watching me. I don’t know how I could tell that somebody’s eyes were focused on me because it wasn’t like they were touching me or standing where I could see them. It was just more like a hunch, like when you suddenly get a feeling that the phone might ring and then it does.

I turned and saw a face looking at me from behind one of the twisty stick decorations. And I immediately knew who it was.

It was the flying girl I saw when I first arrived.

The second she saw me look at her she pulled her face back out of sight. I was going to follow her but right then Herfta and the tall people came back up to Karen.

“
Fwuh puh
,” Herfta said to Karen, with a nod.

“Excellent,” said Karen, giving me a nod.

I nodded back, having no idea what I was nodding about, as I heard a bunch of loud horns blast out all over the treetop city.

Something was about to happen.

18

“IDIOTS!”

I was in a football stadium once when my dad took Gary and Ivan and me to see a monster truck rally. None of us were really into monster trucks but for some reason my dad thought it would be a fun thing to do. It wasn’t bad, either, until this giant drag-racing tractor spun its huge tires in some mud down at our end of the stadium and sprayed us with tons of oily sludge that smelled like gasoline. We had to leave soon after that because Ivan started to feel sick and we all knew he could throw up at the drop of a hat. (He threw up at our house once when my mom put a piece of pecan pie with a hair on it in front of him, even though it was her hair and she washed her hair every day. Ivan never ate at our house again after that.)

The reason I bring up that football stadium is because when we followed Herfta and the other city leaders to the far edge of the tree building and rounded the corner and stepped out onto a big ornate platform that overlooked the rest of the treetop city, there was suddenly a huge football stadium filled with flying people, thousands of them, stretched out before us. Only there was no stadium. The flying people were hovering midair in the shape of a huge oval arena, like someone had pulled the stadium out from under them but left them floating in place. It was a pretty amazing sight and since they were all in perfect formation around the official-looking platform we were standing on, I had to assume this was what they did whenever Herfta and the other leaders wanted to talk to them.

Herfta stepped out to the front of the platform and raised his hands in the air and suddenly the entire floating stadium of flying people starting going
fup fup fup
in unison. They all did it in that super quiet breathy way that I was discovering flying people always talked in, but when thousands of people do it all at the same time, it’s amazing how loud it can get.

Herfta kept his arms up in the air and turned slowly back and forth so that every side of the stadium could see him and I started to feel like he was milking it way too long. He even used his hands to sort of signal people to keep chanting for him. Yes, this included the hand that he made such a big deal out of me hurting, which now seemed to be causing him no pain at all as he used to wave for them to keep
fup
ing
at him.

Finally, he put his palms out to make them stop and then he started
puh
ing and
pah
ing in a really quiet voice. I had to figure that flying people have super powerful ears because nobody yelled “Speak up!” or even looked like they were having a hard time hearing him. They just flapped their wings silently and listened to Herfta, who went on for about five minutes.

As he talked, he kept pointing at Karen and then at me and then finally he pointed at the Shakespeare book that Karen was holding. At one point, I saw all the flying people suddenly look at each other and make faces that seemed to indicate they were thinking
Huh, that’s interesting
about whatever Herfta had just said. Then, Herfta finally turned to Karen and signaled for her to come up to the front of the platform.

Karen stepped up and I suddenly got this really nervous feeling in my stomach, as if it were me stepping up to talk to the stadium of people. I had never liked having to give presentations or read out loud in front of the class or even do show-and-tell when I was little. To see all the faces of my classmates who didn’t really like me staring and waiting for me to say something that they had already decided wouldn’t be interesting was sort of more than my fragile ego could take. I preferred to just stay in my seat and act like I wasn’t really even in the room in those situations, since whenever my classmates
did
notice me they tended to be mean to me. And so seeing Karen about to talk to so many thousands of people just made me want to throw up.

As you can tell, I’ve got “issues,” as the school psychiatrist calls them.

Karen held up the Shakespeare book and started talking in the puh-pah language. She really spoke well and I was pretty in awe of her for being so good at it. Whenever I hear somebody who normally speaks English speaking a foreign language I get majorly impressed. Like, I have a cousin who is really good at French — so good that she has a French boyfriend who barely speaks English — and whenever I heard her talking to him I felt like she was a genius or something.

I took a beginning Spanish class last semester and after four months all I could say was “Hello” and “Where’s the library?” and one day when we ate at a Mexican restaurant I asked the waiter where the library was and he started laughing really hard and told my mom that I had just said something super dirty. So Karen was impressing the heck out of me, since this flying-people language was about as weird as it gets.

She went on for about fifteen minutes and was pretty passionate about what she was saying. She later told me she was letting them know all about how I had come to this frequency the same way she and Mr. Arthur had, and that the book I had brought with me proved Mr. Arthur had passed off
Hamlet
and all the other stuff he said he wrote as his own when in fact he was simply stealing the best ideas and creative stuff that had been done in our world by other people. She said it was up to them to help her rebel against Mr. Arthur and rally all the other creatures in Lesterville to rise up against him and free themselves from his egomaniacal tyranny, or something like that.