Troublemakers (35 page)

D
id you ever feel your nose running and you wanted to wipe it, but you couldn’t? Most people do, sometime or other, but I’m different. I let it run.

   
They call me square. They say, “Smitty, you are a square. You are so square, you got corners!” This, they mean, indicates I am an oddball and had better shape up or ship out. So all right, so I’m a goof-off as far as they think. Maybe I do get a little sore at things that don’t matter, but if Underfeld hadn’t’a laid into me that day in the gym at school, nothing would have happened. The trouble is, I get aggravated so easy about little things, like not making the track team, that I’m no good at studies. This makes the teachers not care for me even a little. Besides, I won’t take their guff. But that thing with track. It broke me up really good.

   
There I was standing in the gym, wearing these dirty white gym shorts with a black stripe down the side. And old Underfeld, that’s the track coach, he comes up and says, “Whaddaya doin’, Smitty?”

   
Well, anyone with 20-40 eyesight coulda seen what I was doing. I was doing push-ups. “I’m doing push-ups,” I said. “Whaddaya think I’m doing? Raising artichokes?”

   
That was most certainly
not
the time to wise off to old Underfeld. I could see the steam pressure rising in the jerk’s manner, and next thing he blows up allover the joint: “Listen, you little punk! Don’t get so mouthy with me. In fact, I’m gonna tell you now, ‘cause I don’t want ya hangin’ around the gym or track no more: You just ain’t good enough. In a short sprint you got maybe a little guts, but when it comes to a long drag, fifty guys in this school give their right arms to be on the team beat you to the tape. I’m sorry. Get out!”

   
He is sorry. Like hell!

   
He is no more sorry than I am as I say, “Ta hell with you, you chowderhead, you got no more brains than these ignorant sprinters that will fall dead before they get to the tape.”

   
Underfeld looks at me like I had stuck him in the seat of his sweat pants with a fistful of pins and kind of gives a gasp. “What did you say?” he inquires, breathless like.

   
“I don’t mumble, do I?” I snapped.

   
“Get out of here! Get outta here!
Geddouddahere!”

   
He was making quite a fuss as I kicked out the door to the dressing rooms.

   
As I got dressed I gave the whole thing a good think. I was pretty sure that a couple of those stinkin’ teachers I had guffed had put wormhead Underfeld up to it. But what can a guy do? I’m just a kid, so says they. They got the cards stacked six ways from Culbertson, and that’s it.

   
I was pretty damned sore as I kicked out the front door. I decided to head for The Woods and try to get it off my mind. That I was cutting school did not bother me. My mother, maybe. But me? No. It was The Woods for me for the rest of the afternoon.

   
Those Woods. Something funny about them. D’ja ever notice, sometimes right in the middle of a big populated section they got a little stand of woods, real deep and shadowy, you can’t see too far into them? You try to figure out why someone hasn’t bought up the plot and put a house on it, or why they haven’t made it into a playground? Well, that’s what my Woods were.

   
They faced back on a street full of those cracker-box houses constructed by the government, the factory workers shouldn’t sleep on the curbs. On the other side, completely boxing them in, was a highway, running straight through to the big town. It isn’t really big, but it makes the small town seem not so small.

   
I used to cut school and go there to read. In the center is a place where everything has that sort of filtery light that seeps down between the tree branches, where there’s a big old tree that is strictly one all alone.

   
What I mean is that tree is great.
Big
thing, stretches and’s lost in the branches of the other trees, it’s so big. And the roots look like they were forced up out of the ground under pressure, so all’s you can see are these sweeping arcs of thick roots, all shiny and risen right out, forming a little bowl under the tree.

   
Reason I like it so much there, is that it’s quieter than anything, and you can feel it. The kind of quiet a library would like to have, but doesn’t. To cap all this, the rift in the branches is just big enough so sunlight streams right through and makes a great reading light. And when the sun moves out of that rift, I know it’s time to run for home. I make it in just enough time so that Mom doesn’t know I was cutting, and thinks I was in school all day.

   
So last week-I’d been going to The Woods off, on for about two years-I tagged over there, after that creep Underfeld told me I was his last possible choice for the track team. I had a copy of something or other, I don’t remember now, I was going to read.

   
I settled down with my rump stuck into that bowl in the roots, and my feet propped against some smaller rootlings. With that little scrubby plant growth that springs up around the bases of trees, it was pretty comfortable, so I started reading.

   
Next, you are not going to believe.

   
I’m sitting there reading, and suddenly I feel this pressure against the seat of my jeans. Next thing I know, I am tumbled over on my head and a trapdoor is opening up out of the ground. Yeah, a trapdoor disguised as solid earth.

   
Next, you will
really
not believe.

   
Up out of this hole comes-may I be struck by green lightning if I’m a liar-a gnome! Or maybe he was a elf or a sprite, or some such thing. All I know is that this gnome character is wearing a pair of pegged charcoal slacks, a spread-collar turquoise shirt, green suede loafers, a pork-pie hat with a circumference of maybe three feet, a long, dinky keychain (what the Hell kinda keys could a gnome have?), repulsive loud tie and sunglasses.

   
Now maybe you would be too stoned to move, or not believe your eyes, and let a thing like that rock you permanently. But I got a good habit of believing what I see-especially when it’s in Technicolor-and besides, more out of reflex than anything else, I grabs.

   
I’d read some Grimm-type fairy tales, and I know the fable about how if you grab a gnome or a elf, he’ll give you what you want, so like I said, I grabs.

   
I snatch this little character, right around his turquoise collar.

   
“Hold, man!” says the gnome. “What kinda bit is this? I don’t dig this
at
all! Unhand me, Daddy-O!”

   
“No chance,” I answer, kind of in a daze, still not quite sure this is happening to me. “I want a bag of gold or something.”

   
The gnome looks outraged for a second, then he gives a kind of a half laugh and says, “Ho, Diz, you got the wrong cat for this caper. You’re comin’ on this gig too far and slow! Maybe a fourth-year gnome could hip this gold bit, but me, I’m a party-boy. Flunked outta my Alma Mammy first year. No matriculation-no magiculation! Readin’ me, laddy-buck?”

   
“Uh, yeah, I guess,” I ventured, slowly. “You mean you can’t give me a bag of gold like in the fairy tale?”

   
“Fairy tale, schmerry tale. Maybe one ersatz Korean peso, Max, but that is definitely
it.
That is where magic and I parts company. In short,
nein,
man.”

   
“Hmmm,” I hmmmed, tightening my grip a little, he shouldn’t get ideas I was letting him get away.

   
I thought a big think for a minute, then I said, “How come you flunked out of school?”

   
I thought I detected a note of belligerence in the gnome’s voice when he answered, “How would you dig this class stuff, man? Go to class today, go to class tomorrow, yattata-yattata-yat from all these squared-up old codgers what think they are professors? Man, there is so much more else to be doing of note! Real nervous-type stuff like playin’ with a jazz combo we got up near campus. You ain’t never heard such music!” He appeared to just be starting. “We got a guy on the sackbut what is the coolest. And on dulcimer there is a little troll what can not only send you-but bring you back. And on topa’ all this...”

   
I cut him short, “How about the usual three wishes business? Anything to that?”

   
“I can take a swing at it, man, but like I says, I’m nowhere when it comes to magicking. I’m not the most, if that’s the least. Might be a bit sloppy, but I can take a whirl, Earl.”

   
I thought again for a second and then nodded: ‘.Okay,” setting him down on the turf, but not yet letting loose his collar, “but no funny business. Just a straight commercial proposition. Three wishes, with no strings, for your freedom.”

   
“Three?”
He was incredulous. “Man,
one
is about all this power pack can stand at this late date. No, it would seem that one is my limit, guy. Be taking it or leaving it.”

   
“All right, then,
one.
But no legal loopholes. Let’s do it all honest and above-board magic. Deal?”

   
“Reet!” says he, and races off into The Woods somewhere when I let loose.

   
I figured he was gone for good, and while I’m waiting, I start to think back on the events of the last few minutes. This is something woulda made Ripley go outta business. The gnome, I figure, is overdue, and so I begin rationalizing why he didn’t come back and finally arrive at the conclusion that there is no honor among gnomes. Besides, he had a shifty look to him when he said there would be no tricks in the magic.

   
But he comes back in a minute, his keychain damn near tripping him up, he’s so loaded down with stuff and paraphernalia. Real weird lookin’ items, too.

   
“Copped ‘em from the lab over at the U.,” he explains, waving a hand at the untidy pile of stuff. “Well, here goes. Remember, there may be more of a mess than is usual with an experienced practitioner, but I’m strictly a goony-bird in this biz, Jack.”

   
“Hey, wait a minute with this magic stuff...” I began, but he waved me off impatiently, and began manipulating his implements.

   
So he starts drawing a star-like thing on the ground, pouring some stinkin’ stuff into a cauldron, mixing it up, muttering some gibberish that I could swear had “Oo-bop-shebam” and “Oo-shooby-dooby” in there somewhere, and a lot of other.

   
Pretty soon he comes over, sprinkles some powder on me, and I sneeze, almost blowing him over.

   
“Gesundheit,” he mutters, staring at me nastily.

   
He sprinkles some more powder on me, mutters something that sounded like, “By the sacred ring-finger of The Great Gods Bird and Prez, man, hip this kid to what he craveth. Go, go, go, man!

   
“Now,” he inquires, around a bag in which he is rattling what sounds like bones, “whaddaya want?”

   
I had been thinking it out, in between incantations, and I had decided what I wanted: “Make me so’s I can run faster than anyone in the school, willya.” I figured then Underfeld would
have
to take me on the team.

   
The little gnome nods as if he understands, and starts runnin’ around and around outside this star-like thing, in ever-decreasing circles, faster n’ faster, till I can hardly make him out.

   
Then he slows down and stops, puffing away like crazy, mumbles something about, “Gotta layoff them clover stems,” and so saying throws this pink powder on me, yelling as loud as he can, “FRACTURED!” Up goes a puff of pink smoke and what looks like a side-show magician’s magnesium flare, and the next thing I know, he and the stuff is gone, and I’m all alone in The Woods.