Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware, Page 4

  Nobody laughed. Katie was confused. “It was a joke,” said Katie’s mom. “About the Hunchback of Notre Dame. He had a hunched back. And he rang bells. He was a bell ringer.”

  “A bell ringer,” said Team Mom.

  “Ding, dong,” said Katie’s mother. “Don’t I know you from the PTA?”

  “No,” said Team Mom, “I am from Delaware.”

  “Oh, Delaware,” said Katie’s mother politely. “Huh. Delaware! That’s nice. Aren’t there a lot of… Don’t you have…” Katie’s mother tapped the steering wheel with her thumbs. “Wow, Delaware. Well, welcome! Nice to meet you!”

  Team Mom blew a stream of smoke into the Mulligan’s car. “I’m sure,” said Team Mom to Katie, “that we will meet again.”

  And with that, she walked away across the parking lot.

  13

  In the auditorium, things did not look good. Lily could barely stand to watch. Jasper was haggard, gray, his eyes red, his mouth open, his whole body sagging forward and swaying. Meanwhile, his opponent, #1, sat enthroned in his folding chair and radiated triumph.

  To Jasper, every second was agony.

  The round had started out well enough. Jasper, confronted by his enemy’s eyes, sank into the meditative half sleep he had learned at the secret mountaintop monastery during days wreathed in fog, paired off with a wrinkled gingko tree. The world faded like an illusion too dull to sustain. Jasper could distantly hear sounds, as if through water—the dropping of a pen, the thumping of the radiators—but everything seemed so far away that nothing, he felt, could touch him.

  But it was at that point that the eyes—the animal eyes in the human face—bit into his vision like fangs. Illegal mid-round eye substitution.

  Jasper faltered—snapped out of his trance—and saw #1, serpent-eyed, staring at him.

  He had maintained his control. But he could feel himself being mesmerized by that monster gaze, as he had once seen the giant cobras of Uttar Pradesh, swaying side to side, hypnotize their mammal prey—a brush-whiskered English High Commissioner of Trade—before striking.

  Jasper could not hold on much longer. His eyes were dry. The room flashed negative and positive. He struggled to re-achieve the trance that would allow him to sit out the round in serenity, withdrawn from the world.

  But the serpent eyes glared at him, demanding that he yield.

  He would not. He tried to straighten his back. He tried to steel himself for another minute. Just…, he thought, one minute… If I can make it one more minute… and then one minute after that… and then one minute after that…

  Jasper had never met anyone who could beat him at Stare-Eyes.

  Trembling, he gawked athletically. Seconds went by.

  It had been a half an hour. Everyone had fallen silent. People sat nervously in the stands. They folded and unfolded programs. Two girls cried into Dixie cups.

  No, things did not look good for Jasper and Pelt, there in the gym.

  And then, in the silence, Choate Brinsley put his hands together. People looked at him, startled.

  He began to chant: “J-Dash! J-Dash! J-Dash! J-Dash!”

  It was stupid, but someone took it up; and then someone else; and then a third. And soon the whole crowd had joined in, clapping together, calling out Jasper’s name.

  And because of them, Jasper remembered his town. He remembered community. He remembered that everyone was there not just to see him staring, but to be together, because people need to be with other people and dogs and elms—and Jasper felt the whole enthusiasm of the town of Pelt behind him, the hopes of the village mailman and butcher and tinker and the little toilet-paper peddler who wobbled up and down the streets on his sparkly bike, piping, “TP! TP! TP for sale!”

  And so Jasper, borne up on the wave of chanting, sat up again. He focused his gaze once again on the serpent eyes, the bleached face, the flat mouth before him. He surfed on the beat of the chant. He let it take him. He let things fade.

  He was going back into his trance. Once there, nothing would be able to dislodge him.

  The slitted eyes faded. Jasper floated free, in space. Time passed. All physical things were only shadows. Life was but a dream.

  Until suddenly, a scream knocked him—not a scream heard, but a scream felt.

  Someone—somewhere—was calling his name. Not a crowd. Someone miles away. Someone whose very life was in danger.

  Jasper! Jasper Dash!

  Someone needed him.

  HELP! JASPER DASH, I NEED YOUR HELP! the voice rang out within him.

  Thinking—But who?— Jasper blinked and looked around.

  He seemed to be in a room with people shouting and booing and hissing. He couldn’t remember who they were or imagine why they seemed angry, or why the fellow sitting across from him might look so smug.

  Someone, somewhere, needed Jasper Dash. He rose and gave a mighty cry.

  Then he remembered he was in the gymnasium of Pelt High.

  And he had just blinked. And he had just lost the game to Delaware.

  14

  Jasper Dash’s house was the only one on the street with a hangar and a missile silo. The other houses were ranch style, meaning flat. They had basketball hoops in their driveways and drum kits in their two-car garages. Jasper’s house had walls of block glass and panels of metal, curved stucco corners, and huge, white, saucer-shaped decks, below which wild hedges grew.

  After the game, Lily went to Jasper’s house for lunch to console him. Katie rode her bike over to meet them there. She no longer was thinking about Choate’s meanness. She was thinking about stolen artifacts.

  Lunch wasn’t ready, so Mrs. Dash sent them out to walk in the woods until the macaroni was cooked. It would take a while to cook. The Dashes had a microwave, but it didn’t work very well. Jasper had invented it himself years before. It was so old and primitive that when it was on, you could actually see the atoms bouncing around inside like the numbered Ping-Pong balls in the state lottery.

  Having set the table, the three put on their coats and set out behind the house along the broad, leafy trails where Jasper had, a lifetime ago, zipped along on his first vehicle, the Astonishing Gasoline Velocipede. They walked past hillock and swamp.

  It was autumn. The leaves were brown or off.

  The three of them walked along in a line. Their breath came out in steam. “Don’t worry, Jasper,” said Katie. “There’s nothing you could have done.”

  “I let my team down,” said Jasper. “I wanted to show them that I could be one of them, though I may dress differently. Inflatably. And instead, why, Katie, I lost the game for them.”

  “First of all, you didn’t lose the game for them,” said Katie. “Everyone lost their own round. And second of all, I have to say, I don’t think Choate Brinsley is so great, anyway. It’s okay to let him down.”

  Lily kicked up leaves with her toe and said, “Jasper, it sounds like the Delaware team cheated somehow.”

  “Illegal mid-round eye substitution,” said Jasper, shaking his head. “Completely unnerving. This league has gone to the dogs.”

  Lily asked, “What do you mean when you say Number One’s eyes were different?”

  “Like a cat’s eyes. You know what a cat’s eyes look like?”

  “No,” said Katie. “Because my cat is so completely lazy. I’ve never seen her eyes actually open.”

  “Which?” said Lily. “Trish?”

  “She didn’t move for a week. Dad thought she was dead. We were about to bury her when someone noticed the chicken was missing from the counter.”

  “Maybe,” interrupted Jasper firmly, “his eyes were more like a snake’s.”

  “That’s the only pet lazier than a cat,” said Katie. “They move once a month.”

  “You don’t think it was your vision playing tricks on you?” said Lily.

  “I am afraid not,” said Jasper. “Choate saw it too.”

  “Choate,” muttered Katie, more to herself than to anyone else.

&n
bsp; “Katie, you said that you saw something, too?” asked Lily.

  “Hold, chums,” said Jasper, putting up his hand. “There’s one more detail. When I was in my trance, someone called out to me. Through ESP. Someone, somewhere, needs help.”

  “Who?” asked Lily.

  “That I don’t know,” said Jasper. “I just know that they somehow reached me on the astral plane.”

  “You should just get a cell phone,” said Katie. “Or inventorate one.”

  “There is something sinister going on,” Jasper mused.

  “Yeah,” said Katie. “I’ve got to tell you about the van.”

  They turned a corner onto a broad, rutted track softened by moss and fallen pine needles. They walked down an avenue of ancient concrete bunkers built into the hillside, covered with grass and spruce trees and birches. The doors were massive and rusted shut. They had not been opened for many years.* Katie narrated the story of her going out to sit on the gymnasium steps and what she had seen there: the mysterious deal between Mr. Lecroix and Team Mom.

  “Mr. Lecroix,” said Jasper. “I know that name.”

  “But here’s the weirdest treasure in the van,” said Katie. “A model of some kind. It was of a building, like a fortress or something. Everything else she showed him was made out of gold and silver and coral. This was made out of cardboard.”

  Jasper stopped in his tracks. “And it had spoons on the roof.”

  “Yeah!” said Katie. “Plastic spoons! And you knew, how?”

  Jasper gazed into the spruce. He said nothing.

  He turned around and started marching back to the house.

  “What’s going on?” Lily called to him, running after.

  “This is big. This is very big.” Jasper frowned. “And I remember now who Lecroix is. Everything falls into place.”

  “Who is he?” asked Katie.

  “Ernest Lecroix is the director of the Pelt Museum. I once went there to donate artifacts from Venus and ancient Greece.”

  “I didn’t know there were things from you in the Pelt Museum,” said Katie. “That’s cool.”

  “There are not things from me,” said Jasper. “Why, Mr. Lecroix did not believe that I had been to Venus or to ancient Greece. He rejected my donations, using as an excuse that he wished to stand by the museum’s proud concentration on traditional butter-churning techniques.”

  “How did you know about the spoons?” said Lily. “What’s going on, Jasper?”

  “What does all this mean?” asked Katie.

  Jasper stopped in his tracks and turned to them. “It means, my friends, gather up your khakis and pith helmets. We are going, chums, to Delaware.”

  15

  “I’ve been to Delaware,” said Katie. “My uncle Brad worked there as a door-to-door knife salesman.”

  Lily was lost. She didn’t see how any of this added up.

  Jasper, however, was adamant. “We’ll take the Gyroscopic Sky Suite,”* he said.

  He was anxious and moody. He wouldn’t look at Katie or Lily. He stared into the sumac and the tangled, gray grass.

  Then he sighed and began speaking. “For almost a year, I studied the ancient arts of meditation at a secret monastery in the mountains,” he said.

  “We know,” said Katie. “It’s in Jasper Dash and His Vertiginous Propeller Suit.”

  Lily corrected softly, “I think it’s Jasper Dash and the Sponge-Cake of Zama.” And to Jasper she said, “You went to Tibet.”

  Jasper’s mouth was thin. “It was not,” he admitted, “precisely Tibet.” He sighed, and the autumn wind blew a lock of his fair hair across his forehead. “It was, in fact, in the ancient, eldritch mountains of Delaware.”

  Katie and Lily exchanged a Look.

  “The mountains,” said Katie. “Of Delaware.”

  Jasper, gazing off into the dark and knitted hemlocks around them, whispered, “The path was long, through the jungle. That way was not easy going, chums. Once I left the borders of Maryland, every moment was a struggle. Wounded by a panther, hunted by diamond smugglers, knotted up with cobras, with no hope of finding the lost temple I sought, I passed out unconscious in my hiding place in the roots of a baobab tree.

  “I awoke to find myself swaying in a stretcher, being carried through a courtyard at the top of the world. I was in the monastery of Vbngoom, the Platter of Heaven. The monks who carried me were strong as oxen, yet gentle as—”

  “Jasper,” said Katie, “there are no mountains in Delaware.”

  “Their heads were shaved, and they wore robes of forest green. Some wore helmets or they—”

  “Water slides,” Katie said. “There are water slides in Delaware. Putt-putt golf. Shoe outlets. Stores that sell drums and electric guitars. But no mountains.”

  “For almost a year, I remained there hidden in the fastness of Vbngoom, wandering its courtyards and cloisters. I studied and spent hours in silence, staring into the eyes of the monastery tiger. I spent whole days smelling a single jasmine flower. I laughed; I did not speak. With another novice, soon my friend, Drgnan Pghlik, I learned the ways of martial arts and stillness.”

  “You learned the ways of nutcase,” said Katie. “Are you sure you didn’t spend an hour facedown in your custard? And have to be revived in a clean, white place?”

  “Jasper,” said Lily, “what does this have to do with the Stare-Eyes team cheating?”

  “Because the cardboard model Katie saw—the building with the plastic spoons on the turrets—that is a sacred object. That is the only known model of the lost monastery of Vbngoom.”

  16

  Jasper explained more details of the situation to them over macaroni and cheese. The food was nice and hot after the chilly outdoors. Mrs. Dash, her hair a perfect bell, sat on a stool, reading a gardening magazine.

  Jasper could barely chew, in his excitement. He said, “All of the objects you saw in the back of the van, Katie—they were all prized by the monks. They should be sitting in the temple at Vbngoom. They must have been stolen.” Jasper tapped his fork on his plate. “I believe I have deduced what is going on.”

  Lily and Katie paid close attention.

  “The Delaware Stare-Eyes team,” said Jasper, “is just a ruse. A front. They are actually smugglers— art thieves. There is at the moment a big market for sacred artifacts smuggled out of countries and sold to museums. This, indeed, is the Stare-Eyes team’s real game. Somehow, they have stolen these sacred objects from Vbngoom. Then, disguised as an athletic team, they sneak the stolen antiquities across the border from Delaware. They sell them illegally to museums like Pelt’s.”

  “How do you know?” asked Lily.

  “Several reasons. The theory fits with the conversation Katie overheard. Second, the monks of Vbngoom would never allow those treasures to leave their walls. Somebody must be there plundering their monastery. Third, I believe that the so-called Delaware Stare-Eyes champions win their dastardly victories by tapping into the ancient power of the monastery. And, fourth, last, and finally, I believe that the person calling me for help when I was entranced was none other than my long-lost friend, Brother Drgnan Pghlik.”

  “Honey,” said Mrs. Dash from across the kitchen, “you’re not going back to Delaware, are you?”

  “Could you tell him,” said Katie, “that there are no mountains?”

  Jasper rose. “Mother,” he said. “I must return. I must again cross the bleak and blasted border of New Jersey. There is no other way. It shall not be for long this time.” He went and embraced her.

  Katie and Lily put down their forks. Mrs. Dash was always lonely. Desperately lonely. She had lived for years in this crumbling house of the future and had raised Jasper completely by herself, Jasper’s father being a beam of highly concentrated information emitted from the region of the Horsehead Nebula.

  Jasper and his mother held on to each other. “Oh, Jas. Jas,” she said, and she started to cry, cradling the back of his head. “Last time, you were gone for so long.” />
  “My friend is in need,” said Jasper.

  She closed her eyes, kissed the top of his head, and whispered, resigned, “Someone always is.”

  “Will you be okay?” he asked.

  She nodded. “I always am. I have my committee meetings. Tomorrow is the benefit dinner for the Save the Chameleon Fund. The Decentville Zoo thinks their chameleons are either dead, missing, or plaid.”

  “We won’t be long,” said Jasper. “Just a few days. We’ll take the Gyroscopic Sky Suite.”

  “And your woolen socks,” said Mrs. Dash. “It gets cold up in those mountains.”

  At the word mountains, Katie picked up her fork and threw it down again.

  And so, our heroes were off to Delaware.

  Now they are at their homes, packing. Lights from passing cars slide across their bedroom walls. They have their suitcases open and are zipping up their sponge-bags. Lily and Katie are slightly at a loss as to what clothes to bring.

  But before I move the scene of this gripping tale to the Blue Hen State, I need to make a couple of things clear.

  Occasionally, an author will go away on a vacation for a week somewhere—someplace where the food is spicy and he doesn’t recognize all the fruit—and he’ll have a really great time, and the culture will seem very exotic, and once he gets home to Ohio, or Minnesota, or Maine, he’ll decide to write a novel about it all. He’ll base the book on his one meager week staying at a Hilton Hotel a mile outside of the city he’s describing and his reading of a few library books with names like The Jewel in the Dagger, orSiberian Uplift, orA Cornish Country Autumn, or Time/Life’s The Glory of Slurbostan.

  And so, instead of the book being written by someone who has lived there by the side of the ruins described and has spent their life eating those little crunchy fried things, you get a book by someone who really only has a cartoon idea of what a place is like, a bungled pantomime of information about customs and foods and wacky clothes and music. There are many books of that kind, written by people who have barely traveled to the destination they write about. You can’t trust them.