Shout Out for the Fitzgerald-Trouts Read online

  Kimo knew the cabin would be locked, but he also knew that there was a little door cut into the back wall so that Wendell could go in and out as he pleased. He was happy to find that it had recently been widened to accommodate Wendell’s increasing girth. Kimo just might be able to fit through the hole.

  He got down on his knees and pushed the little door that hung from two hinges, then he put his hands together—like he was diving into water—and tucked his head between his arms. He shoved the front of his body, including his shoulders, through the opening. Now he was half in and half out. It occurred to him that if Johnny drove up at that moment, it would be hard to get loose quickly. He was likely to become a pig snack. The thought motivated him, and he pressed his hands against the floor, pulling himself forward while he wiggled his stomach and hips like a hula dancer. Slowly he hula-ed his way inside until he was lying flat in the middle of the kitchen floor, then he rolled over onto his back and jumped up to his feet like a gymnast.

  The little kitchen was just as he remembered it, except for a new picture that Johnny had hung over the stove. It was a photograph of Johnny grinning on the bow of his sailing canoe, the Mahina. He was covered in leis—up to his ears—and holding a trophy because, as Kimo now remembered, Johnny had been awarded a prize for having completed the world’s second-longest solo sea voyage. Beside Johnny stood Wendell.

  The photograph was a reminder that Johnny and the pig could arrive home at any time. Kimo had better hurry. He swung open the fridge, where he discovered that one whole shelf was stocked with cans of guava juice. My father sure likes guava juice, he thought, taking out one of the cans and pressing it to his forehead to cool himself off. He let himself snap open the can and take a big, delicious drink. Someday I’ll pay him back for this. And for these…he found himself grabbing a jar of almonds. Kimo really was quite hungry.

  Munching on the nuts, sipping the juice, he padded toward the living room to try to find a good place to leave the flyer, some place where his father couldn’t help but see it. Maybe the little desk in the cabin’s bedroom would be the best spot. Johnny would be sure to notice it there.

  Kimo ducked into the room and set his food down on the bookshelf. He took the flyer out of his pocket, unfolded it, smoothed it out, and placed it on top of Johnny’s desk, near his typewriter, thinking, he’s going to see this and he’s going to come to the track meet and I’m going to break the world record and everything is going to change. Even as he was thinking this, Kimo saw that one of the flyers was already tacked on the bulletin board in front of Johnny Trout’s desk. Yes, the very same flyer that Kimo had brought to leave on his father’s desk was already there. Which meant that Johnny Trout cared enough about Kimo’s track meet that he had kept the flyer and fastened it in a place where he would see it. Which meant that Johnny Trout wanted to be reminded of Kimo’s track meet. Which meant that Johnny Trout was planning to come! It was too good to be true. Kimo’s heart soared even as his ears registered the crunch of tires on gravel.

  He moved to the window and peered out in the front of the house, where Johnny was just pulling up in his truck. For a brief instant Kimo wondered if he should just step outside and say hello to his father. After all, Johnny was planning on coming to his track meet; why not just say hi now and invite him in person. But then Kimo thought he probably shouldn’t push his luck. Wendell didn’t like him and any confrontation between Kimo and the pig might turn Johnny against Kimo. It might convince Johnny not to come to the track meet after all.

  No, it was better to get out of there quickly and see his father on his own turf on Saturday. But he stood frozen, watching as Johnny opened the car door and stepped out, then held the door open for Wendell, who jumped out after him. Kimo did the math: the truck was approximately five strides from the front door, which meant that right about the moment when Johnny and the pig came through that door and entered the living room, Kimo would be coming through the door of the bedroom and entering the living room too. The pig would catch Kimo in the house unless Kimo could either stop time or move faster than the pig did.

  Without another thought, Kimo dove out the door of the bedroom, landing like a cat on all fours, then he tucked into a ball and rolled across the floor. It was something he’d seen a ninja do in a movie, and it worked. He was up on his feet, charging across the kitchen as he heard the front door open.

  “Come on, boy.” Johnny was calling Wendell. “Come on…” There was a pause. “What’s the matter?”

  Wendell smells me, Kimo thought as he grabbed the handle of the back door and jerked it open. He hoped the pig was entering the house, not moving around outside it.

  “Come on, boy. Inside,” Johnny called again.

  Kimo couldn’t wait to find out whether the pig was headed in or staying out; he just had to run and hope. He jerked the door shut behind him and took off across the grass at a sprint, running for the cliff and the trail down to the water.

  Threatened by his speed, certain he was coming for their chicks, a cloud of furious lava gulls began to dive at him. Kimo waved his arms in the air, batting them away as he dodged down the rocky path. They really are ferocious parents, Kimo thought, then smiled to himself. Maybe my dad will be too, someday.

  It wasn’t until a few minutes later, on the beach, catching his breath, that Kimo realized he had left the flyer on the desk. Johnny would certainly be surprised to see two of them. Would he know that Kimo had left it? Would he be angry? Would he change his mind about coming to the meet? There was nothing Kimo could do but wonder as he pushed the kayak off the beach and began to paddle out of the cove.

  CHAPTER

  13

  In the days that followed his visit to Johnny Trout’s cabin, Kimo began to imagine what would happen if his father encountered his brother and sisters at the track meet. He knew how angry his siblings were with his father and he worried that they might confront Johnny and force him to leave before Kimo had a chance to break the record. If that happened, all Kimo’s hard work would be for nothing.

  So one night, as he and his siblings hiked up the mountain to the Castle, Kimo said, with as much nonchalance as he could muster, “Hey, um, anyway, you guys don’t have to come to my track meet.”

  “Of course we’re going,” said Kim, who was bouncing Penny on her shoulders, wondering when the little girl would ever walk or, at the very least, crawl.

  “Go, go,” said the baby.

  “But you don’t have to,” Kimo tried again.

  “We’re going,” said Pippa. “Duh.”

  “No,” Kimo said abruptly. “You’ll make me nervous if you come.”

  “We’ve never made you nervous before,” Kim pointed out. She knew that something strange was going on, so she tried to look Kimo in the eye, but he avoided her, saying, “I think you might jinx my performance.”

  “Jinx?” snarked Pippa, offended.

  “We’re good luck,” offered Toby.

  Kim again tried to catch Kimo’s eye, but he wouldn’t look at her, and she realized that he must have deliberately chosen to say all this as they were walking up the hill so that he didn’t have to look at any of them. So she turned around and walked backward, facing him. “You can’t be serious.”

  Kimo looked down at the ground. “I’m serious.”

  “Oh, come on,” Kim said, trying a light tone. “We can’t miss the big day. What if you break the record and we never see it?”

  “What if I don’t?” said Kimo. “I’ll always think I was jinxed.”

  “But you will break it,” said Toby, offering a vote of confidence.

  “My do it!” shouted the baby, another voice of enthusiasm.

  “You don’t know that,” Kimo said, then sighed. “Please, if you care about me, if you even like me, don’t come to the track meet.”

  “What if I don’t care about you or like you?” This was Pippa’s idea of a joke.
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br />   “Then you won’t want to be there anyway,” reasoned Kimo.

  “Good point,” said Pippa.

  They all lapsed into a silence that lasted until Kim began to chant, “Give a loud shout for Kimo Fitzgerald-Trout! He doesn’t give up. He doesn’t give in. He breaks the record, then breaks it again!” They all joined in and chanted until they reached the Castle.

  * * *

  —

  Over the next few days, Kim did not give up on the issue of going to the track meet. Over and over again she nudged Kimo about it. Didn’t he want to hear their cheering? Wouldn’t it help him? She reminded him that they just wanted to be there; they didn’t care if he broke the record or not. Over and over Kimo thought of his father coming to the track meet and insisted it would be unlucky to have his brother and sisters there. Finally, begrudgingly, they promised to stay away.

  But Kim wasn’t able to keep her promise entirely. She had a science fair project to do, which had moved to the top of her to-do list (it was due several days before her speech on table manners), so she decided she would research the birds that lived in the mushimush trees in the school’s courtyard—and that way she would be there, at the school, researching, while Kimo was at the track attempting to break the island record.

  Now on the Saturday morning of the track meet, Kim lay in the grass beneath the trees; she was close enough to the track to hear the crowd gathering for the meet. Though she was looking up at the mushimush branches through a pair of binoculars and had her notebook open to her research, her mind was entirely on Kimo. I’m right here, she thought. And Kimo, my almost-twin, is just across the field. Soon he will be like one of these birds. He’ll be up in the air and he’ll either fly over the bar and break the record or he won’t.

  Kim felt that she had to be there—at the track—to see what happened, but she had promised to stay away. Then she realized that she held in her hands the perfect tool to do both: binoculars. What if she climbed one of the trees? What if she watched from there? Surely that wouldn’t be a jinx.

  * * *

  —

  Kimo could feel the ocean breeze on his face as he slowly turned the corner of the track. He was warming up as he always did, with a slow two-mile run that would be followed by a series of quicker sprints and then some stretches. As he ran, he took stock of the day’s conditions. It was hotter than he liked—he would have to have a few sips of water before his jump—but there was a breeze, and that was a good thing. A strong breeze off the ocean meant wind at his back during his sprint to the vault. That wind might just be the little extra push he needed to clear the fifteen-foot-and-two-inch mark that stood between him and the record.

  He could hear the car tires crunching in the school’s parking lot, and he could see people pouring across the field, through the gates, and up the stairs into the bleachers that lined the long side of the track. He tried not to look up into those stands, where many of the seats were already full and vendors were selling Uncle Ozo’s soda pop and salty fried clams served in rolled up cones of newspaper. They don’t usually sell clams at track meets, Kimo thought, and that’s when it occurred to him just what an island-wide event his record-breaking attempt had become. The thought of this excited Kimo. The crowds would be encouraging. Like the breeze, they would lift him up and over the high bar. He wondered if his father had arrived yet, but he decided not to check. There would be time later—after the track meet ended and before the big jump—to scan the bleachers for his father’s gnarled and bearded face. He picked up his pace and began the sprinting part of his warm-up.

  As he ran, he started to wish his brother and sisters were there to watch him. Boy, what he wouldn’t give to be able to see their smiling faces. He knew they were hurt that he’d told them not to come to the meet, but despite their hurt, that morning Kim had insisted on driving him to the school, and Pippa and Toby had decided to walk down the mountain to see him off. As they’d walked, they had chanted: “Give a loud shout for Kimo Fitzgerald-Trout! He doesn’t give up. He doesn’t give in. He breaks the record, then breaks it again!” When they got to the little green car, Pippa, Toby, and the baby had all given Kimo hugs and wished him luck. Then they waved as Kim had driven Kimo off to his date with destiny.

  * * *

  —

  What Kimo and Kim didn’t know was that on the way back uphill, Pippa had realized that she could do some scrimshaw-hunting on her own if she could just get Toby to stay at the Castle with the baby. So as soon as they got within sight of the leafy structure, she had said, with a practiced nonchalance, “I feel like taking a longer hike. You wanna come?”

  “Nope,” said Toby. Pippa had known this would be his response. Her younger brother could always be counted on to choose daydreaming over exercise. As she turned onto the path away from the Castle, Pippa offered to take Penny with her, but the baby was already trying to get off her shoulders.

  She was reaching for Toby, saying, “Mile.”

  “What’s she talking about?” Pippa asked.

  “Who knows?” said Toby, lifting the baby off Pippa and then, careful not to break the spider’s web, ducking through the Castle door.

  And so it was that while Kimo warmed up on the track and Kim watched him through the binoculars and Pippa scoured the mountain for another piece of scrimshaw, Toby found himself sitting in the moss, trying to teach Penny to crawl. “Crawl,” he said. “Come on, Penny, crawl.”

  The baby didn’t move, but she repeated, “Quall,” and let loose a long string of drool from her mouth.

  “Like this,” said Toby, getting down on all fours and showing the baby how to do it.

  “Looks like fun,” a woman’s voice said from somewhere near the Castle door. Toby, whose back was to the door, noticed that Penny was smiling.

  “Wimo,” the baby said, informing Toby with a single word just who was standing in the doorway. Clarice. But how did she know where to find him? Then Toby remembered in a flash that the last time he’d seen Clarice, he had told her where they lived.

  “I’ve got an idea,” Clarice was saying. She was wearing high heels and leaning up against the stone doorway, feeling around for something in her purse.

  How did she get up the mountain in those stupid shoes? Toby wondered, but what he said was, “Yeah? What?”

  Clarice didn’t answer for a moment. She was busy trying to find the thing in her purse, peering down into the bag. It looked to Toby like whatever her idea was, she thought it might be buried next to her wallet and lipstick. At last, Clarice found what she was looking for and pulled it out: a nail file. She leaned back and began to file her nails. So now Toby knew Clarice wasn’t even trying to break the island record for longest fingernails; she was, in fact, purposefully shortening her nails. For some reason this annoyed the boy, and he blurted out, “Well, what? Just say it already.”

  “This place you’re living in.” Clarice was taking her time. “I can see the appeal. It’s spacious and well-situated. Good view. But the truth is, it could use some work. You need furniture and window-panes, not to mention a roof and a floor.”

  “Who says?” Toby was defensive. He liked the Castle just the way it was. But Clarice wouldn’t understand that. She was wearing high heels that were sinking down into the moss. Anyone wearing shoes on moss would never understand the charm of a house where trees grew through open windows.

  Clarice must have picked up on this because now she said, “Maybe you like it this way, but even so, there must be things that you want to make it better…”

  Toby shrugged indifferently, but he couldn’t help thinking about the things he did want. To start with, he’d like a wall around his room with a door cut into it. That would make his space entirely his. And now that he thought about it, his brother and sisters probably wanted things too. He knew Kim had been talking nonstop about table manners and how if they were ever going to learn any, they needed to have a r
eal table. And Pippa talked constantly about how she wanted a proper way to hang her knickknack shelf on the Castle’s stone walls (it now hung from the branch of a tree). And hadn’t Kimo just the other day said that it would be nice to have a chin-up bar? “Maybe there are things,” Toby admitted.

  “I knew it,” Clarice said with a smile, that tight-lipped smile that made her look like a snake. “That’s why I’m here. If you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.”

  Toby looked at her fingernails and understood that that was why she was filing them down. “I don’t care how short your nails are,” he said. “I don’t want to be scratched.”

  This made Clarice laugh. “It’s a figure of speech,” she said. “I wouldn’t really scratch you. I just mean, if I help you make this place better, then you’ll help me, right?”

  “Help you how?”

  “I’d like to take Penny.”

  “And take pictures of her, like you did last time? And make an advertisement?” Toby was not going to be fooled by this woman again.

  “Oh, you saw that,” Clarice said.

  “Yup.” Toby had his arms crossed over his chest angrily. “You should have been honest with me. You said it was a contest, but it wasn’t. You just bought me a lot of food while you took those pictures of Penny for your baby magazine.”

  “You’re right.” Clarice put away the nail file. “I should have been honest with you. And that’s why I’m being honest now. If you let me take Penny to do another advertising shoot, then I’ll pay you enough money to fix up this place.”

  “Let me think about it,” said Toby. He noticed for the first time that Clarice had broken the spiderweb which hung in the doorway. Toby and his siblings had always ducked under it as a sign of respect to the spider, but Clarice hadn’t done that; she’d just shoved right through it and destroyed the spider’s home. She was a thoughtless person. Something Toby wasn’t going to be. “I need to talk to my brother and my sisters,” he said.