Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware (26 page)

Lily detected a movement to her right. It was Team Mom, rising, her eye swollen shut from the fierce blows of haiku. Mom pulled her pistol out of the waistband of her tracksuit and pointed it up at Drgnan, Jasper, and Katie.

Lily quietly put her foot out and tripped her.

Team Mom fell sprawling on the stones. Monks stepped gingerly across her to reach the vaultapult. They were still firing themselves into the air. At this point, most of the gangsters were defeated.
Lily started to suspect that the monks just liked flying.

Now many of them who knew how to levitate were hovering around the fierce boxing match being fought in the sky between Dash, Mulligan, Pghlik, and Spandrel. The monks were in ranks and rows, floating in the clouds, watching, like a Renaissance painting of someone going to Heaven.

The three kids had seized on Bobby Spandrel's robotic arms and his robotic legs. They wouldn't let go. Bobby Spandrel couldn't shoot them, because they had control of his arms, and he couldn't shake them off.

“Let go!” he demanded. “Let go, so I can blow you to oblivion!”

“Nothing doing, you villain!” cried Jasper. “You might as well give up now. We've got you, Spandrel, like a dog and his master's sock!”

Bobby Spandrel fought—struggled—groaned—growled—shrugged—kicked—found himself pinned—

And so he detached his head.

Bobby Spandrel's body with the three kids still attached shot downward.

But his head stayed stuck on the blue sky.

“Farewell, Dash, and fall well! I flee to fight another day! Away!”

And with that, the silver globe bobbed upward, shot through the ranks of floating monks, and hurtled toward the moon.

Meanwhile, the three kids and Bobby Spandrel's empty body were caught by levitating monks. They were brought gently back to earth.

Everything was confusion. There were collapsed gangsters everywhere and monks in the air. There were monks on trampolines, their robes swishing around their legs. They looked like they were having a lot of fun.

The score, in case you've forgotten—I have—is like this:

Gangsters
: Beaten by the power of meekness, humility, and generosity.

Team Mom
: Knocked out by poetry and Lily.

Coach
: Stranded on a little cliff down in the volcano.

Stare-Eyes Team #4
: In the hospital in Dover.

Stare-Eyes Team #2, 3, 5, 7, 8
: Hanging in baskets over the flame-pits.

Stare-Eyes Team #1
: Hanging on to #5, who is hanging over the flame-pits.

Stare-Eyes Team #6
: Being used as an announcement board and a dispenser for after-dinner mints.

Bobby Spandrel
: Lost body. Head escapes to fight another day, ha ha!

Monks
: Full of joy and leaping.

And I think that should about do it. That's everyone. That's a wrap.

The battle was over. The monks had won.

That night there was a great feast in the monastery of Vbngoom, the Platter of Heaven.

Everyone got an extra plate of oak leaves and acorns. Lily, Katie, and Jasper got lentil stew—without sleeping potion.

Torches were lit on all the walls, and the few lightbulbs they had were switched on to celebrate their victory.

Now they could send monks out into the world to reclaim their statues and artifacts. They had lists of all the museums that had bought their stolen treasures. Some of the repo monks would be going to Pelt, to reclaim the three objects purchased illegally by Mr. Lecroix. They said they would take Lily, Katie, and Jasper back with them,
since Jasper's flying Gyroscopic Sky Suite was defunct.

The four friends—Katie, Jasper, Lily, and now Drgnan—stood on the walls of the monastery, looking out over the mountains. There were forests below them, and more distantly, fields, and the hazy lights of Wilmington to the north. Sky and earth were the color of powder. Jungles were a black, grizzled line. Darkness was falling.

“The day after tomorrow,” said Katie, “we'll be home. Soft beds. Hamburgers. Showers that don't have a goat in them.”

“There is not a goat in the shower here,” said Drgnan Pghlik, a little hurt. “That is an alpaca.”

“No,” said Katie, patting him on the wrist. “I'm talking about our hotel. It was a goat there.”

Suddenly Lily announced, “I don't want to go back.” She looked longingly at a statue of a many-armed hero on a kind of granite unicycle. A little embarrassed, she explained, “I just…I want to stay here and study all the ancient legends.” Now that she had said it, she felt silly, like Lisa Buldene, loving everything Delawarian—everything—with
a starry-eyed adoration. If Lisa Buldene hadn't turned out to be an eyeless, handless, footless interdimensional criminal.

“Don't you want to see your mom and dad again?” Katie asked.

“Sure,” said Lily quietly. “Of course, yeah. But I've never been anyplace like this before.”

Jasper solemnly said, “It's a place like no other.” He admitted, “There are times, chaps, when back at home, I almost feel out of step with the present day. When I notice that the other lads on the Pelt Stare-Eyes team, for example, think I'm somehow…” He couldn't find the word. No one else wanted to say anything. Finally he said, “Quaint. Old-time. Despite the fact that I am clearly perched on the leading edge of future epochs, riding the ailerons of an age when man shall even fly to distant stars.” He gripped the parapet and said, “I know, Lily, Katie, that people laugh at me. I know sometimes behind my back, when I introduce my jetpack or my portable phone—”

“It was a great phone, Jasper,” said Katie. “Just a little big, based on what people are used
to these days. I mean, on wheels and all. With the speaking trumpet. And hard to get up steps.”

“My point is that at home, I am the butt of jokes.” He shook his head sadly. “See, I just said, ‘butt.' I shall never learn. At home, that would earn me the titters of the team. But here, no one laughs at me. Here, people think about life and death, and good and evil, and right and wrong. Here I feel more at home than in my home. And yet, I don't belong here, either.” He looked at Lily. “We don't belong.”

She frowned and nodded. She blew her hair out of her eyes.

Jasper said, “You can come back anytime you want, though, and visit.”

“I don't know about that,” said Lily. “You, um, you kind of made a special Delaware for us somehow. I'm not sure that Katie or I could find our way back to this one alone. I'm not sure it would be here.”

Katie said, “You might find less temples and brachiosauruses, and more hair parlors and J. P.
Bennigan's American Family Restaurants. And Laundromats. And the Halt'n'Buy.” She smiled at Jasper. “You have to realize, you find places that most people can't find. That's one thing that's so great about you.”

“Then we can all come back,” said Jasper. “I shall bring you back. And Lily, you can study the statues and the paintings. Katie, you can learn martial arts. Drgnan, I will challenge you to Scrabble.”

Drgnan Pghlik had watched this whole discussion with interest, but it was very foreign to him. He had not seen his true home since he was very small, when his village had been destroyed by a horde of barbarian gnomes seven or eight inches high, armed with teeny tiny little spears and itsy-bitsy broadswords. To him, therefore, Vbngoom would always be home, and he dreamed of going someday to see other American towns, like Pelt.

The four of them heard a deep, resounding moo. It was the ceremonial horns—horns so
long that they required one person to blow on them and two people farther along to support them on brackets atop their hats.

The notes from the horns rang out across the hidden valley, the peaks. They rang out loud and strong. They were filled with assurance that all was well in Vbngoom and that the next day would be just like this day, and yet would bring new things.

Below, in one of the courtyards, the monks were gathering for their rites of celebration. They murmured to one another, dressed in elaborate silken robes and complicated headgear. Behind them, the blue light from the flame-pits shone up from the crater and danced on the stone walls.

Jasper and Lily strolled over to watch the monks in their ceremony. Drgnan and Katie stayed where they were, looking out at the shining water that guarded New Castle County from the realm of New Jersey. Almost nothing could be seen now of hillock, vale, or Hackensack.

“You saved my life,” said Katie.

Drgnan shrugged. “When a stone drops, the ground catches it. And when the dirt falls, it lands on stone.”

“Yeah, but you're a lot nicer than dirt.”

“And you saved my life, too.” Drgnan smiled. “You should not miss seeing the dancing ceremony,” he said. “When we monks of Vbngoom dance, after a while, we levitate and float out over the valley. It is a very good sight.”

Katie smiled back at him. She said, “You know, I'm going to be kind of sorry to leave too.”

“It is strange,” said Drgnan Pghlik. “To you, the way we live here is unusual. You are interested by our tiger and our floating. To me, the town of Pelt, which Jasper has told me of, is interesting. I have never bowled. I have never water-skied.”

Katie thought about this. “You know what? You should see if you could come back with us the day after tomorrow, when the monks take us to Pelt so they can get their stuff back
from the museum.” She tensed her fingers on the stone railing, toggling them back and forth. Not looking at Drgnan Pghlik at all, just looking out into the night, Katie asked him, “Would you…um…You know, there's a dance at the school this weekend. I, you know, I kind of wanted to go with this one guy, but, um, it turns out he can't go? Because he…”

Drgnan waited, listening closely.

“Because he broke both his legs. Under a. Um. Dog. And so, maybe you could, you know. You could. Yeah. Go with me.”

Drgnan Pghlik cast his eyes down shyly. “I would embarrass you,” he said. “And you will want to be at the side of your friend with the broken legs.”

“You wouldn't embarrass me,” said Katie. “Not at all.”

“I would,” said Drgnan Pghlik. “I cannot do the dances of the other states. I can do only the dances of Delaware. And as I have said, when we monks dance, we levitate, so you and I would be
spinning around in the air, whirling together off the ground, over the heads of everyone else.”

“Flying?”

“You have seen me drift away from the ground.”

“Flying dancing?”

“Yes.”

Katie swallowed and turned toward him. “Yeah,” she said, her eyes a little hungry. “That…the flying while dancing? That wouldn't be so much of a problem.”

“What about your broken-legs friend? Do you not need to apply heat to his knees and feed him ices from a spoon?”

“I lied. There was just this guy I liked. I thought he was cool. But I was never going to go with him to the dance. He doesn't even know I exist.”

Drgnan Pghlik mused, “But do you exist? Do I? Perhaps both of us are merely a passing dream in the mind of—”

Katie clapped her hand over his mouth. “You
know?” she said. “Sometimes a girl just wants a guy to be the silent, mysterious type.”

Under her palm, she could feel him smiling.

I could tell you now how they left the gangsters, all tied up, down in a village where the authorities would find them, stacked like cordwood. I could tell you how the monastery was blotted out with fog and how if someone had sought it again, they wouldn't have been able to find it, for it was no longer where it had been.

I could whisk us several days into the future, and I could tell you how Jasper, Katie, Lily, and Drgnan Pghlik all set off in the gang's white van, along the broken, unused highway; I could tell you whether the trip was uneventful, with the monks driving, listening to techno, while the four kids sat in the back playing Travel Scrabble without vowels, or whether there were tremendous adventures yet to come before they made it home to Pelt. I could tell you whether or not Mr. Lecroix from the Pelt Museum was imprisoned for buying stolen artifacts, or how
the school dance went, and whether Katie and Drgnan Pghlik actually did whirl above the room to everyone's amazement; and I could tell you whether Choate was impressed, and gaped up from below, and how happy Lily was for her friend, because Lily thought Drgnan was the nicest person she'd ever met, and one of the most beautiful boys she'd ever seen—in fact, standing by the fruit punch bowl, she found herself even wishing that—

But instead, I would like to go back and end this book with the monks of Vbngoom dancing in their courtyard, because I wish sometimes that I were among them, and if I write about it, it will be like I was there.

Up on the wall, the three kids watched the ceremonial dance—Drgnan having run down to take his place among his brethren. In rows and columns, robed men turned and stomped. They felt the impact of their heels on worn stone, and at every step, their bodies were lighter.

Lily, Jasper, and Katie saw the dazzling patterns
below them shift and shake. The ceremonial horns blew—a sound more resonant and strong than any Lily had ever heard—and the monks of Delaware stomped and stomped in praise, in thanks for the day, in thanks for the night, in thanks for each other, for their order, their brotherhood, their ways.

And is it not right, always and everywhere to give thanks? For D E L A W A R E has been given unto us, all of us—the realm of our hopes, the land of our dreams and distortions. Each of us hides our own private Delaware lost in the gray jungle-tangle of our brains. No one else can know its depths and its byways. No one else can know the height of its towers, the secrets of its tides and pools. There will always be lost lagoons to find there, and ruins almost hidden by the sand. There will always be monsters of great beauty and good men with ugly frowns. The forests are dark, but lights bob among the branches. You are at home there, more at home than anyplace else, and yet you will never go there in your life. Their legends are yours. The
pirates sail around the cape, a crew of skeletons in the rigging. Milkmaids run down mountain passes, dragging kites behind them. Wizards crack their backs after long days of chalk and incantation while above the crowded bazaars, over the golden temples, against the setting sun, around the ruddy minarets, the pterodactyls call out a long farewell.