The Night I Flunked My Field Trip #5 (8 page)

I think Nick tried to say something, but all we could hear was the captain yelling. Collin and I tiptoed out of the bunk room and ran up the stairs.

It wasn't until we reached the deck and closed the hatch that we burst out laughing and high-fived each other about ten times.

FRANKIE SAW US LAUGHING LIKE IDIOTS and came over to see what was so funny.

“You look like you're having a good old time,” he said without his usual smile.

“We got even with McKelty,” I said to him. My sides were hurting from laughing so much. “You should have seen his face, Frankie. He stuck me with the captain's assistant job, and we stuck him right back. It was incredible, wasn't it, Collin?”

“This guy is hysterical,” Collin said, slapping me on the back. “I had a blast. And Nick McKelty is a Twinkie-loving fool.”

“Zip, can I talk to you for a minute?” Frankie said.

He grabbed me by the arm and practically yanked me over to the railing. “Man, am I glad to see you,” he said. “Luke Whitman is driving me nuts. That dude can't keep his finger out of his nose. I've got to get away from him. How about if you and me partner up. I'll talk the first mate into a change and I'll ditch Luke.”

I might as well tell you right here and now. I'm not proud of what I did next. But it's what really happened, so I have to be honest with you.

Frankie Townsend is my best friend. He has been ever since we were born. I should have wanted to partner up with him. But I didn't. Nothing against Frankie. It's just that I was having such a great time with Collin. And to be absolutely honest, it felt really good to have the guy everyone wanted to be friends with want to be with me. Collin Rich thought I was smart and funny. He thought I was a genius. Me, Hank Zipzer.

So I said no to my best friend.

“Listen, Frankie, I want to partner up,” I said, “but I already promised Collin I'd stay with him.”

“Collin?” said Frankie. “You promised Collin?”

“Yeah.”

“So let me get this straight. You and Collin are going to hang together?”

“Yeah, I promised him.”

“For the whole night?”

I didn't answer. Frankie gave me a cold stare. I couldn't blame him.

“So that means I'll just be with Luke Whitman and be covered in boogers from head to toe,” Frankie said.

I looked over at Collin. He was waiting for me. I turned back to Frankie.

“I want to hang with you, Frankie. Really I do.”

“Right,” said Frankie. “And my name is Bernice.”

He shook his head and walked away.

“EVERYTHING OKAY?” COLLIN ASKED.

“Yeah, fine,” I said. I knew Frankie was mad, and I didn't feel good about that. But what could I do?

We all gathered on deck while the galley crew handed out dinner. Each of us got a portion of gruel, which looked like thin oatmeal and tasted like paper and paste. They served it in wooden bowls and we ate it with a wooden spoon.

I took a bowl and handed one to Collin. I could see Frankie out of the corner of my eye. He was standing with Luke on the starboard side of the ship's deck. Or maybe it was the port side. I couldn't tell because it was too dark for me to see my pinky fingers.

While everyone ate, the first mate talked to us about our next shift.

“Excuse me, Mr. Mate,” Katie Sperling said, interrupting him. “But when do we get our real dinner?”

“This is your dinner,” answered Mr. Gladson. “And I would be grateful if I were you.”

“You've got to be kidding,” said Kim Paulson, letting the gruel drip off her spoon and back into the bowl.

“Tomorrow at daybreak, you'll get your ration of salt beef and ship's bread. Now that's a meal,” Mr. Gladson said. “For now, all you get is gruel.”

“But I saw some chicken downstairs. And fruit,” Ashley said. Good old fearless Ashley. Of course, she'd be the one to speak up.

“Aye, that's for the captain,” said Mr. Gladson. “You can't expect him to be eating gruel.”

“I don't see why not,” said Ashley. “We're eating it.”

“How dare you compare yourselves to the captain,” said Mr. Gladson, shaking his finger at her. “No more talk! Avast, matey.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” Ashley asked.

“It means stop it right now. No lowly sailor talks back to an officer on
The Pilgrim Spirit
.”

I could see Ashley getting mad. She was opening her mouth to answer when I saw Frankie reach out and say something to her. I bet you anything that he was telling her to take a deep breath in through her nose and let the anger out through her mouth. It seemed to be working, because Ash didn't say another word. Part of me wished I was over there with them. But the other part felt really proud to be standing there with Collin.

After we finished our gruel, the first mate handed out our next assignments. He told Katie Sperling and Hector Ruiz that they were on galley cleanup crew. He assigned Frankie and Luke to swab the decks. Then he came over to Collin and me.

“You two sailors were captain's assistants on the first shift. Correct?”

“Aye, aye, sir,” said Collin. “And I've never had so much fun in my life.”

Mr. Gladson seemed surprised. “That's not the usual reaction,” he said. “Captain tells me your successor, Mr. McKelty, is having a difficult time of it.”

I started to snicker, but stopped when Mr. Gladson shot me a look.

“Sorry to hear that, sir,” I said, trying to look serious. “He wanted that job so badly.”

“This shift, you two will be line handlers,” Mr. Gladson said. “You'll tie down the ship for the night. You know any knots?”

“No, sir,” I answered.

He handed me a book that had been tucked under his arm. It was called
One Hundred Most Useful Nautical Knots.
Oh, boy, I didn't like the sound of that. I had so much trouble just learning to tie my shoes. Tying a boat knot seemed impossible, let alone one hundred knots!

“Study this book,” said Mr. Gladson. “It's the first thing sailors read right after they learn to throw a clockwise hitch on a cleat.”

What I wanted to say was,
I have no idea what you're talking about.
But instead I said, “Will do, sir. Can't wait, sir.”

“Learn the basic knots,” he said. “Bowline, square knot, figure eights, cleat hitch. When you've got that down, use a hitch to tie the mooring lines on the starboard side to the two cleats on the dock.”

“Will do, sir.”

“Which knot should we use, sir?” Collin asked.

“Whatever feels the most secure,” Mr. Gladson said.

He started to walk away, and then he stopped to face us again. “By the way, gentlemen. If you complete this assignment, you'll get the line handlers certificate of merit. Captain will give it to you himself. Good luck.”

“Let's get busy,” Collin said after Mr. Gladson had left. “It'd be fun to show that captain we're not the losers he thinks we are.”

Collin and I went up to the front of the boat. Collin picked up some coiled ropes and lugged them over to us. I looked out on the water and for the first time, really noticed where we were. The Brooklyn Bridge stretched across the river right near us. I know it's just a bridge, but, boy, is it a beautiful thing to look at. It's like a shiny, steel spiderweb without the spider, strung with lights. If I turned and looked out into the harbor, I could see the Statue of Liberty. She was all lit up too. She looked a whole lot better in person than on Principal Love's cheek, I'll tell you that.

“Earth to Hank,” Collin said, tapping me on the shoulder. “Mooring lines. Cleats. Knots. Sound familiar?”

I guess my mind had wandered off. It likes to do that.

“Do you have any idea what exactly we're supposed to do?” I asked Collin, snapping to attention.

“Not really. But we can figure it out.”

He looked out onto the dock and thought for a minute. He pointed to a big wedge-shaped metal thing sticking up from the dock. A fat rope was tied around it, holding the boat in place while it bobbed in the water.

“I'll bet that metal thing is a cleat,” he said. “Do you agree, Hank?”

“Couldn't agree more,” I said.

Collin picked up two loose ropes that were coiled up on the deck near us.

“These must be the mooring lines,” he said. “What do you think, Hank?”

“I have to say yes to that,” I said. “They look like mooring lines to me. Indeed they do.”

Collin took a flashlight out of his pocket and shined it onto the dock. We could see two smaller metal things jutting up behind the big one.

“I'll bet those are the two cleats he wants us to tie the boat onto,” Collin said. “What do you think, Hank?”

“I think that I'm in total agreement.”

“Do you know how to tie any knots?” Collin asked me.

“Nope, but we have this book.
One Hundred Most Useful Nautical Knots.
Sounds like a thriller.”

“Let's get started,” Collin said. “How hard can it be to learn how to tie a knot?”

I flipped open the book. When I looked inside, it was my worst nightmare. No, worse than my worst nightmare. It was my worst nightmare having a nightmare. It was ugly—page after page of diagrams and instructions. There were drawings of right hands and left hands pulling pieces of rope inside and outside of loops. I couldn't tell what was what. The letters and pictures started to move around on the page, just like always. Tadpoles swimming in a pond.

How hard can it be to learn how to tie a knot?

FRANKIE, ASHLEY, AND I HAVE a magic act called Magik 3. Frankie is the magician, and we're the assistants. There's this one trick Frankie does where he cuts a rope in two pieces and drops it into a top hat. He waves a magic wand over the hat and says,
“Zengawii,”
which is his magic word he learned in Zimbabwe. When he pulls the rope out of the hat, it's back in one piece!

As I sat there with the book
One Hundred Most Useful Nautical Knots
in front of me, I wished I knew a magic word that would make the stupid rope I was staring at tie itself into a knot.

“Zengawii!” I muttered, giving the coiled rope a kick. Nothing happened.

“What'd you say?” asked Collin.

“I said
Zengawii,
which in Zimbabwe means
why did they make these dumb directions so complicated?”

Collin laughed. “We'll get it, buddy. Just read me the steps.”

We were trying to tie a hitch, which is the kind of knot you use to tie a boat to the dock. You'd think that would be easy enough. But noooooo! Turns out there are cleat hitches and clove hitches and rolling hitches and half hitches and other kinds of hitches you never even dreamed of.

We decided to try a cleat hitch. It sounded so right. I looked it up in the table of contents and opened the book to page 97. So far, so good. There were about twenty little complicated diagrams. They were mostly hands with arrows that showed how the hands
would
move if they
could
move. Next to each diagram was a sentence describing what the picture was supposed to be showing you.

I tried to read the first few sentences to myself before I read them out loud to Collin. Every other word was one I couldn't read or pronounce. Like
tension
and
taut
and
counterclockwise.
I knew if I tried to read those directions out loud, I would stumble all over myself and sound totally dumb. I had two choices. I could either confess to Collin that I had a reading problem or I could talk my way out of this.

Guess which one I chose?

“Tell you what,” I said to Collin, trying to make it seem like a gigantic light had just gone on in my head. “You read the directions and I'll do the rope-tying.”

“Why?” he asked. That was a good question.

“Because,” I answered. That was a stupid answer.

I didn't wait for him to tell me that, though. I just handed the book to him really fast. He shrugged and took the book.

From the corner of my eye, I could see Katie Sperling and Kim Paulson looking at us. They were on watch at the stern of the ship, but the person they were watching was Collin. He kept his face in the book, concentrating on the diagrams. I thought it was amazing that he never seemed to notice that girls looked at him all the time.

Mr. Lingg strolled by and smiled at us.

“You boys need any help?” he asked. “I got a Boy Scout badge for rope-tying when I was a kid.”

I wanted to say pull up a chair, Mr. Lingg, and help us figure this mess out. But, instead, I heard my voice say, “We're doing fine. No problem here.”

I hate it when my voice speaks without asking me first. Mr. Lingg passed by us and headed over to Katie and Kim.

“Okay, I think I got it,” Collin said, looking up from the book. “Step Number One.”