Ignatius MacFarland, page 3
Mr. Andriasco told us once that there was some weird blend of mineral deposits in the dirt of the dead field that kept any plants from ever being able to grow there. I always felt sorry for that old farmer a hundred years ago who had pulled a total Ignatius MacFarland by convincing himself he could make a dusty field that had nothing growing in it into something good. I bet there was some other farmer in town who was a jerk like Frank Gutenkunitz who made as much fun of the dead field farmer as Frank made of me all the time. And so I guess I figured that if I could build my rocket in the dead field, maybe somehow I’d be helping that old farmer by turning his farm into a place where something good was finally going to happen.
And so Gary and Ivan and I dumped all the stuff from Ivan’s garage in the abandoned barn and got to work building a spaceship. I knew the spaceship had to be big enough for me to get inside. I’d also need room for supplies so that if I got up there and the aliens weren’t waiting for me, I wouldn’t die of starvation. Plus, I knew I had to have room for all the other stuff that would keep me alive in outer space, like oxygen tanks and computers and control panels that I had no idea how we were going to get.
We cut the bottoms out of two of the garbage cans and wired them onto the other garbage can so that they were stacked three high like the cardboard tube in a roll of paper towels. Then we took the big metal funnel and put it on top, so that the rocket had a pointy nose like all rockets are supposed to have. And then we took a bunch of old license plates that Ivan’s dad said he had found in a Dumpster behind the Department of Motor Vehicles and nailed and taped them together to make three fins for the bottom of the rocket. And then we made a door in the side of the garbage cans. After that, we took the boards and built a bunch of little shelves up in the top of the rocket so that I’d have places to put my supplies. And then we lifted the whole rocket onto a bunch of milk crates to get it up high enough off the ground for us to put the engine underneath it — the engine that would send the whole thing and me up into outer space.
After we did all this, we stood back to see just how great our spaceship looked.
Unfortunately, it didn’t look very great.
“It looks like something the Little Rascals would have made,” Gary said with a frown.
“I don’t think it’s gonna go into space,” said Ivan, who was still chewing on the same piece of beef jerky that he had been chewing on for the past four days. “I don’t think it’s gonna get two feet off the ground without falling apart.”
“Well,” I said, trying not to give in to the fact that Gary and Ivan were probably right, “there’s only one way to find out.”
They stared at me with worried looks as one of the fins fell off and the rocket tipped over.
6
COME FLY WITH ME
Gary stole all the fireworks out of the secret locker his brother kept in the tool shed behind his house and brought them over to the barn. There were tons of them — bottle rockets, firecrackers, roman candles, cherry bombs, sparklers, pinwheels — so many that Gary had to cram them all into the soapbox derby car his dad had made when he was a kid (when his dad was a kid, which was about four thousand years ago) and then pull the car behind him on his bike, which meant that everybody in our town saw him doing it because when’s the last time you saw a kid on a bike pulling a car behind him?
We then spent the next few days doing something that I now realize was totally dangerous and really idiotic, so the fact that I’m telling you about it doesn’t mean I think you should do it, too. I’m telling you because what we were doing was so dumb that you should put your hand on your heart and swear in front of a court of law that you’ll never do what I’m about to tell you Gary and Ivan and I did. Because I don’t want your getting killed to be my fault.
We sat around and carefully cut open all the fireworks and dumped the gunpowder out of them into this big empty paint can. By the time we had gone through all of them, the paint can was filled to the top with the highly explosive and totally dangerous gunpowder.
We then put the lid back on and attached the can upside down to the bottom of the rocket, using a ton of duct tape. I had made a hole in the lid and put one of the long fuses from the fireworks through it so that we could light the engine and then have enough time to get away from it in case huge, kid-burning flames shot out of it when the rocket lifted off. And it was then I realized that, good or not, we had actually done what I had set out to do.
We had made a rocket.
I was desperate to do the test flight right then and there, but it had taken us so long to make the engine that it was dark outside and Gary and Ivan had to go home. So we agreed that we would wait until after school the next day.
I could barely sleep that night, and when I did, I had tons of dreams about the rocket and going into space and all the alien worlds I was going to see and all the extraterrestrial friends I would be making soon. And the next day at school, I couldn’t hear anything that any of my teachers said because my head was filled with a million thoughts about how to make a bigger engine and how I would have to convince my cousin Ralph who’s been taking scuba diving classes to loan me his oxygen tank so that I’d have a way to breathe in the rocket before the aliens took me onto their spaceship.
And when I had to do my oral report on seeing a Shakespeare play, the only reason I got a halfway decent grade was because I had taken this really expensive old book of the complete works of Shakespeare off my dad’s special bookshelf without him knowing it and the teacher was so impressed with it that she didn’t realize my report was half as long as it should have been.
I knew that my dad would kill me if he found out I had borrowed his book, because he had always told me that if I was ever reading it and bent even one page, he’d send me off to boarding school and then force me to live with my Aunt Erma, who wasn’t even my real aunt. She was just someone my mom had gone to school with whom I had to call Aunt Erma because she wasn’t very attractive and was pretty old and hadn’t ever gotten married and so she wanted all the kids she knew to call her “aunt” since she didn’t have any kids of her own.
I knew I wasn’t supposed to take the book but I was so nervous that I’d get an F on my oral report that I figured anything I could do to raise my grade was a good thing. You know, in case my spaceship didn’t work and I was stuck here on Earth where things like good grades still counted.
As soon as the bell rang and school was over, I ran out the door so fast that anybody who saw me must have thought my pants were on fire. I got to the dead field so quickly that I ended up having to wait half an hour for Gary and Ivan.
“Thanks for getting here in such a timely fashion,” I said super sarcastically when they finally sauntered up holding huge Slurpees in their hands.
“I’m sort of nervous about this, Iggy,” said Gary. “What if something goes wrong?”
“You guys, nothing’s gonna go wrong,” I said, trying to get them as excited about this test flight as I was. “This is gonna be great!”
We had decided the previous day that we should try to make the rocket as heavy as it would be if I were inside it. So we found a couple of old cinder blocks in the barn that we stacked on the rocket’s floor. But it still didn’t seem like it was heavy enough. And that’s when I noticed my backpack, which was filled with all my schoolbooks.
“We can use this,” I said as I ran over to the rocket and climbed in. There was barely any room inside it because of the cinder blocks, and so I put my backpack up on one of the shelves we had built in the nose of the rocket.
I then jumped out and closed the door, taping it shut with several pieces of duct tape. Gary and Ivan walked up.
We all stared at the rocket.
“Um . . . what do we do now?” asked Ivan.
“We light the fuse and get far away from it,” I said as I pulled out the book of matches I had taken from my dad’s barbecue kit.
“Okay,” said Gary as he took off running to the barn. “You light it and I’ll get far away.”
“Yeah,” said Ivan, who took off after Gary so fast that he ended up getting to the barn ahead of him. “Good luck, Iggy!”
What a bunch of chickens, I thought. My new alien friends are gonna be way cooler than these guys.
I walked over to the rocket and knelt down to the engine’s fuse. I lit a match and, suddenly feeling really nervous and excited and worried and scared and happy, I reached out and lit the fuse. It took a few seconds to start burning, and for a minute I worried that I had put a bad one in. But then sparks flew off the fuse and it started slowly burning up toward the paint can engine.
I turned and ran as fast as I could toward the barn. And when I was almost there, I suddenly realized something.
Something terrible.
Dad’s Shakespeare book!
I stopped and saw Gary and Ivan giving me a look that showed they had no idea what I was doing. I then turned and ran as fast as I could back over to the rocket.
“IGGY!” I heard Gary yell. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!”
I was running so fast to get there before the fuse burned down to the engine that all I had time to do was wave my hand to tell Gary and Ivan I’d be right back. As I got closer, I saw that the fuse was still burning really slowly. And so I knew I had just enough time to do what I had to do.
I ran up to the rocket and pulled the tape off the door. I then threw the door open and got inside, reaching up to grab my backpack. I got a hold of it but when I pulled it, the shoulder straps got hooked on one of the nails that was holding the shelf in place. I tugged on it but couldn’t get it loose. And so I unzipped the bag and tried to dig my hand inside to find the Shakespeare book.
I have to be running out of time, I thought to myself, because even though it didn’t feel like I’d been in the rocket very long, sometimes time goes faster than you think when you get busy doing something. And so I had no idea how much more time I had but knew that I had to get out of that rocket right away, Dad’s book or no Dad’s book.
And that was when it happened.
KA-BOOOOOOOM!!!
7
THE BARN (OR LACK THEREOF)
Completely dazed and totally deaf from the explosion, I crawled out of the rocket. But only after I was able to push open the door, which wasn’t easy since the rocket had fallen over on its side, pinning the door shut. I had to rock back and forth to get the rocket to turn over, which I was sure was making Gary and Ivan crack up, seeing the spaceship rolling around like some kind of possessed toilet paper tube. When the door finally fell open, I was never so happy to breathe fresh air in my life. The inside of the rocket was filled with smoke that smelled like somebody had lit a box of pencils on fire, and my eyes were watering like crazy.
I tried to stand up but couldn’t. My legs felt like Jell-O and so all I could do was flop onto the ground and lie on my back, coughing and trying to see. I squinted over at the rocket, which didn’t look too good. The bottom was smoking like crazy and the explosion of the engine had blown the fins off. The places where we had used wires and duct tape to hold the garbage cans together were all busted open, and smoke was coming out of the cracks. My rocket now looked like a hot dog that somebody had left on the grill too long.
How embarrassing.
I immediately wished that I hadn’t done any of this rocket stuff and tried to figure how to get out of there without having to talk to Gary or Ivan, because I could just hear them saying “I told you so!” and “See, we said it wouldn’t work!” And if I had to hear them say that after almost getting killed by this stupid rocket we had just built, it was going to be as upsetting as the time I asked Susan Blesnick to the Spring Fling carnival and she said, “Ew, no way.”
I rolled over to see if they were coming but no one was there.
“GARY?” I yelled. “IVAN?”
Nothing.
What a couple of jerks, I thought. They’re probably laughing so hard that they aren’t even able to answer me.
“GARY? IVAN? C’MON, YOU GUYS! HELP ME TAKE THE ROCKET BACK TO THE BARN!”
The last thing I wanted was for Frank Gutenkunitz and his cretin friends to have heard the explosion and then ride over and see my rocket. If I had thought it was bad when Frank found out that my mom had made me take a ballet class at the YMCA when I was five, this would be about ten thousand times worse.
Nobody answered. My ears continued to ring.
“FINE! I’LL DO IT MYSELF!” I said, trying to make them feel guilty.
I started to drag the rocket, but the top came off in my hands.
“ALL RIGHT, FINE! LET’S LEAVE THE STUPID THING HERE! I DON’T CARE.”
I took the bottom of my shirt and tried to wipe the water and smoke out of my eyes. It was driving me crazy not to be able to see anything. For all I knew, the entire school could have been standing around the dead field watching me.
When I looked up and was finally able to focus, I tried to see if I could spot Gary and Ivan in front of the barn and quickly noticed one small problem — I couldn’t see the barn.
I looked behind me. Then I looked to the left. Then I looked to the right. And finally I turned around in a complete circle.
The barn was gone.
And so were Gary and Ivan.
There was nothing except the field and the trees surrounding it.
Maybe the explosion had destroyed the barn. Maybe the barn got blown away with Gary and Ivan inside. Did I just kill Gary and Ivan? And the barn? I tried to find the spot where the barn used to be, but there was nothing. No debris, no Gary, and no Ivan.
I think I’d better go home and tell my parents about this, I said to myself.
And so I headed out of the field.
8
A REALLY BAD SUIT OF ARMOR
I couldn’t get out of the field.
I don’t mean I couldn’t walk or anything like that. I mean I couldn’t find the path we always took through the trees.
It wasn’t there. And there were more trees than usual. And the trees weren’t the trees that had been there before. I mean, they kinda looked like the trees that had always been there but they weren’t the same ones. These trees had round leaves with red and blue veins on them, and the branches were really fat and short, with bark that was pointy and jagged, like the trees were covered with teeth. And they were twice as tall and twice as fat as regular trees and way closer together. Most of the trees were so close that I couldn’t see any way to squeeze between them, especially since they were covered with all those pointy thorns.
I’m not going to tell you how many times while I was seeing all this weird stuff I wondered if I was going crazy or if I had a concussion or if I was dead. I kept asking myself if this was heaven or the other hot place downstairs (because, after all, I had gotten Gary to steal and lie to his brother).
I took out my cell phone, figuring that if I could just talk to my mom then maybe everything would go back to normal. But there was no signal. I tried dialing a few different numbers but nothing went through. Great, I thought. The only reason my parents let me have a cell phone was for emergencies. Well, this pretty much qualified as an emergency. Stupid phone company.
I saw a shadow on the ground about ten feet away from me. It looked like it was from a big bird in the sky above the field. I looked up to see if it was going to be something as weird as the trees and plants I was seeing and quickly realized it was even weirder than I could have imagined. Because it wasn’t a bird.
It was a girl.
She was hovering about thirty feet above me, watching me. As soon as I looked up at her, I saw her body flinch, as if she hadn’t expected me to notice her. And just like that, she flew away. But my brain took a picture of the flying girl that made it feel like I had just been staring at her for an hour.
She looked like she was about my age, with long hair that was almost white. She seemed really pretty, but it was hard to tell because there was something strange-looking about her, like she was made out of powder or silk or something. I know that’s a pretty weird description, but it’s true.
Her arms and legs were longer than most people’s, and the way they floated around her made it look like she was underwater. Her wings weren’t like the wings on a bird. They were more like two long, skinny bedsheets that floated like ghosts. Everything about her was more like air and clouds than skin and muscles and bones. She sure didn’t look like any girl I had ever seen before, especially not any of the girls that lived around my neighborhood.
After she had flown away, I started running around the edge of the field, looking for any gap in the trees that I could squeeze through without shredding myself like a wedge of Parmesan cheese on a grater. But there were no gaps big enough. There were several places that were almost big enough, but whenever I tried to get through, the teeth on the trees would be just close enough to grab my shirt and scrape my arms and ears. I was trapped.
I looked over and saw my sad-looking rocket lying on its side in the middle of the field and got an idea. I ran over and started jumping up and down on it, trying to flatten the garbage cans.
When they were almost flat, I stood them back up and squeezed myself and my backpack inside. The garbage cans were now just thin enough for me to push my way sideways through the trees. Or at least thin enough for me to try to push through. And trying was better than doing nothing, at that point.
Wearing the cans, I started walking over to the trees, which wasn’t easy because I barely had room to move my legs. It was like when you’re in the bathroom and you’ve done a number two but then you see there’s no toilet paper and so you have to try to walk to the cabinet to get another roll while your pants are down around your ankles. Well, this was like having your pants wrapped all around your body.
