The Neddiad: How Neddie Took the Train, Went to Hollywood, and Saved Civilization

by Daniel Pinkwater

  "Well, here we are," my father said. "The Pacific Ocean."

  The Pacific Ocean!?! I had forgotten all about the Pacific Ocean! Los Angeles has an ocean!

  "It looks like Lake Michigan," my mother said.

  The Pacific Ocean! I was looking at the Pacific Ocean!

  "No, this is salty; Lake Michigan is fresh water," my father said.

  "And this is bigger, right?" my mother said.

  The Pacific Ocean! It's an ocean. It goes all the way to Asia. It's got Hawaii in it. It's got whales in it.

  "Sure," my father said. "An ocean is bigger than a lake."

  "Well, it's very nice," my mother said. "We'll have to come back sometime and spend the day." Sometimes I can understand why Eloise likes to pretend she's not related to them.

  When we got to the Hermione Hotel, Eloise was there, back from Hollywood High School. "Look, Neddie, you got two letters," she said.

  One was from Seamus Finn. It was on Brown-Sparrow Military Academy stationery. He said his father was in Canada, shooting a movie about Mounties, and Billy the Phantom Bellboy was with him. When his father got back we were all going to have lunch with him at the movie studio. Meanwhile, would I like to meet him at the Hitching Post on Hollywood Boulevard at nine A.M. on Saturday? He said I should bring at least a dollar.

  The other letter was from Melvin the shaman. It was on notepaper with kittens. Printed in pencil it said: Sandor Eucalyptus may be in Los Angeles. Be careful. Trust no one. Your friend, Melvin the Shaman.

  "I have decided to major in drama," Eloise said.

  CHAPTER 26

  Hitching Post

  I got to the Hitching Post movie theater at 8:50 A.M. Seamus was there. He was wearing my engineer's hat. I was wearing his cowboy hat. There was a huge mob of kids milling around on the sidewalk.

  "Neddie!" Seamus Finn said. "You showed up!"

  The kids who had bought their tickets were sort of surging up against the doors, which were locked. Seamus and I paid our thirty-five cents at the little box office, and surged too. When the doors were opened we sort of popped through and flowed into the lobby.

  The Hitching Post was pretty similar to the Julian. The same shuffling of feet, the same low rumble of lots of kids talking and hollering, the same smell of popcorn and cinnamon red-hot candy, the same feeling of popcorn and spitwads bouncing off your head in the dark. First they showed a Farmer Gray cartoon, then a Flip the Frog, and a Porky Pig. Next came the serials, an episode apiece of The Phantom Empire and The Fighting Devil Dogs—both excellent. The feature films were Wild Horse Valley with Bob Steele, and The Mask of Wu Shumai. This movie had a villian, Dr. Wu Shumai, who was a genius and a master criminal. He wanted to steal this valuable jade frog because whoever had it could control the ancient underground gods, and take over the whole planet. This was an extremely good movie, with lots of scary stuff in it. Dr. Wu Shumai doesn't get the frog, but he gets away, and at the end of the movie there's a close-up, and he's looking right into the camera. He says, "You have not heard the last of Dr. Wu Shumai," and then he laughs a crazy evil laugh, and the last thing you see are his eyes.

  When we came out of the Hitching Post, blinking in the sunlight, Seamus Finn said, "Let me show you the best place to get something to eat." He took me into a drugstore where a large root beer was a nickel and an order of french fries was fifteen cents. We shared the french fries, and put lots of catsup on them.

  "Lunch for two for a quarter," Seamus said. "Best deal in town."

  "That was a pretty good movie," I said. "Sort of reminded me of something."

  "You mean how Dr. Wu Shumai was trying to get the jade frog, like Sandor Eucalyptus tried to get your turtle?" Seamus asked. "I was thinking the same thing."

  "Do you think it's something like that? Do you think Sandor Eucalyptus is a master criminal and the turtle is some kind of magic?" I asked Seamus.

  "I don't see how it could be anything else," Seamus Finn said.

  "I got a letter from Melvin the shaman," I said. "He thinks Sandor Eucalyptus may be in Los Angeles. He said I should be careful and trust no one."

  "I wish my father and Billy the Phantom Bellboy would come back," Seamus Finn said. "We could use some help. Meanwhile, we'll just have to deal with Sandor Eucalyptus ourselves."

  "You don't think we should tell anyone? Like some adult?"

  "He said trust no one, didn't he? Remember, in the movie, the police chief and the professor were in Dr. Wu Shumai's power. If we tell an adult, how do we know it won't be like that?"

  Seamus had a point. Melvin the shaman had said to trust no one.

  "I think we might tell Sergeant Caleb," Seamus said. "Sergeant Caleb is in nobody's power."

  "Who's that?"

  "He's a guy at the school. Let's walk over there now. I'll show you around, and you'll meet him. Did you decide to enroll?"

  "Well, I think my father is willing to keep me out of school as long as I want—but he'd probably let me go if I asked. And my mother is all for me wearing a nice uniform and being polite. Let's look the place over."

  CHAPTER 27

  Old Pagoda

  While we walked, Seamus Finn told me about the Brown-Sparrow Military Academy.

  "One of our buildings is a six-hundred-year-old Japanese pagoda," he said. "It's the oldest building in California. These two brothers, the Hergeshleimers, were rich men who collected art from Asia. Around 1911 they decided to build a Japanese temple, a big one, to live in and keep all their art in. They brought lots of carpenters and sculptors and stonemasons from Japan and had the thing built right here in Hollywood—also all kinds of gardens, pools, and waterfalls. For good measure they had this actual fourteenth-century pagoda taken apart piece by piece and brought over here from Japan and put back together again.

  "For a while, Hergeshleimers' Oriental Gardens was a big attraction. People came to see it, and take pictures of it, and get married in it. But by and by the brothers got tired of it, or got interested in something else, or died, or something, and the place started to get run down. After a while, it was more or less abandoned. People came and stole most of the statues, and pried some of the carvings off the buildings. The gardens went wild, and the whole place was covered with weeds and rotting away.

  "Then these two retired movie actors, Brown and Sparrow, bought it, and turned it into a military school. They stuccoed over the main buildings and put up columns and sort of colonial doorways and windows, so it looked less like a Japanese temple and more like regular buildings such as you'd expect to find at a fancy private school. The old pagoda, however, survived pretty much intact, and looks like what it is. There's a classroom in it. Naturally, it's haunted like crazy. The Japanese ghosts are a whole different order of thing from ghosts like Billy the Phantom Bellboy and the ghosts around the Hermione Hotel. They don't just appear and fade away. They do a lot of wailing and screeching and gnashing of teeth and rushing at you. Anyway, that was what I was told. Nobody sees them much."

  CHAPTER 28

  Old School

  If you didn't know it had once been a Japanese temple, Brown-Sparrow Military Academy would look to you like some college in New England. But there were some little giveaways, like the ends of the roofs turning up, and one or two dragons partially visible through the ivy on the walls.

  The main gate had turned-up ends too, and was painted orange. Standing guard was a guy in a sharp, sharp, sharp marine uniform. Indian-looking guy, not tall, not short, not young, not old, not handsome, not ugly—just this guy in a crisp uniform with extra-good posture and white gloves.

  "That looks like Melvin the shaman!" I said to Seamus Finn.

  "It's Sergeant Caleb," Seamus Finn said. "He's the military guy in this school, and he knows everything. He was a real marine. The men teachers all have military titles and wear officers' uniforms, but they're just teachers. A lot of them were bit players in the movies—my father remembers some of them."

  Sergeant Caleb snapped to attention. "Finn,"
he said. It's all last names at Brown-Sparrow.

  "This is my friend Neddie Wentworthstein, Sergeant Caleb," Seamus said. "I'm going to show him around the school."

  Sergeant Caleb produced a clipboard and a pencil.

  "Write down your guest's name, Finn," he said.

  "Excuse me, Sergeant Caleb," I said. "I just have to mention this—you remind me strongly of an Indian shaman I met in Albuquerque, New Mexico."

  "You must mean Melvin—am I right?" Sergeant Caleb said.

  "So you know him!" I said.

  "Well, let's say the resemblance has been pointed out in the past," Sergeant Caleb said. "Enjoy your visit to Brown-Sparrow, Mr. Wentworthstein."

  "Thank you," I said.

  "If there's anything you need, feel free to call on me," Sergeant Caleb said."And take care of that turtle."

  As we walked away from the orange gate, I asked Seamus Finn, "How did he know about the turtle?"

  "He knows about everything. I told you," Seamus Finn said.

  The first thing I noticed about Brown-Sparrow was that it was fairly deserted. Now and then we saw a kid or two, mostly high schoolers, nobody around our age. The kids we saw were polite and said hello or smiled, but there was no one Seamus appeared to know very well.

  "What's the deal? Where are all the kids?" I asked.

  "Cadets. You have to call them cadets," Seamus Finn said. "It's the weekend. Most of the kids go home to their parents', unless their parents are too far away."

  "Like yours."

  "Well, my father is always off shooting a movie somewhere," Seamus Finn said. "And my mother lives in the East. I see her for a while in the summer, and sometimes she comes here."

  "So you get lonely," I said.

  "Sometimes another cadet invites me home for the weekend, but usually they just want to spend a lot of time alone with their families, so it's not very often. Probably, if you came here, you'd be a day cadet."

  "Day cadet?"

  "Not stay here at night. I mean, the Hermione is so close. You could walk here in less than ten minutes," Seamus said.

  "And you could come and hang out with my family, weekends," I said. "We could explore the old hotel, maybe see the ghosts, and there's a pool. When I lived in Chicago, there were kids over all the time."

  "I think you should be a day cadet," Seamus Finn said. "The dorm isn't that much fun. They make you clean your room constantly, and they tell you when to go to sleep, and you can't go to the kitchen and fix a snack like normal people."

  "Sometimes my father and I have cornflakes late at night," I said.

  "My father too," Seamus said.

  The Brown-Sparrow Military Academy was a far cry from the Louis B. Nettelhorst School. It looked like a fancy private school such as you might see in the movies, and it was—a fancy private school, and also in the movies. Seamus told me that studios would come and do location shots from time to time. Some of the movie stars' kids who went there had been known to watch their movie star parents acting right outside their classroom windows.

  Seamus showed me the classrooms, which were weirdly small—only ten or twelve cadets in a class. He showed me the dorm rooms, which were weirdly clean and neat. There was the ancient pagoda, of course, in one corner of the parade ground. It was impressive. We peeked inside, but no Japanese ghosts rushed at us. There was a big gym, and a big indoor swimming pool, and the mess hall where everybody ate—it was big and fancy.

  "How's the food here?" I asked.

  "What do you care? You'd only be eating lunch here. You like Spam?" Seamus Finn asked.

  "I don't think I've ever had Spam," I said.

  "We have it often," Seamus Finn said.

  "Speaking of such things," I said, "would you care to come back to the Hermione for supper?"

  "Without making arrangements first?" Seamus Finn asked. "Without asking? Would it be all right?"

  "Oh, it will be fine," I said. "I bring people home all the time. Besides, my parents like you. They'll be happy to see you."

  "I'll tell Sergeant Caleb I'm going to be at your house," Seamus said. "Saturday is a Spam night."

  CHAPTER 29

  Family Life

  Lettuce and tomato salad, hamburgers, mashed potatoes, spinach, and hot rolls. From the way Seamus Finn carried on, you'd have thought it was caviar and lobsters. He even got all excited, and clapped his hands, over the cherry Jell-O with green grapes in it for dessert.

  "I thought something light for dessert, because we might stop for ice cream after the movies," my mother said. "I thought we'd all go to the movies. Of course, Seamus, you are welcome to come with us. What time do you have to be back at the school?"

  "I have to be in my room and in bed with the lights out at nine, ma'am," Seamus said. My mother loved when he called her ma'am. "Unless I was to stay overnight, of course."

  "We'd be happy to have you stay, Seamus," my father said. "But I suppose we would need official permission from your father."

  "Oh, my father has already informed the school that I am allowed to spend weekends with you, sir," Seamus Finn said. "And I told Sergeant Caleb this was where I would be."

  "Your father told the school?" my father asked.

  "Yes, he says you are the finest people he has ever met, and he trusts you completely," Seamus Finn said.

  "I could make up the chaise longue on Neddie's porch as a bed," my mother said. "I think Seamus would be quite comfortable there."

  "Let's look at the newspaper and see what movies are playing," my father said.

  "Waffles for breakfast tomorrow," I whispered to Seamus.

  Seamus Finn helped my mother clear the table and offered to dry the dishes. He was now a complete hit with her. She kissed him on the head.

  "Roger," she said, "I think on Monday we should talk to the people at Brown-Sparrow. You'd like to go to school with Seamus, wouldn't you, Neddie?"

  "You know, Mrs. Wentworthstein, there would be a considerable savings if Neddie went to Brown-Sparrow as a day cadet," Seamus Finn said. "You live so conveniently nearby. And though I love the school, I have to say, the dorms are a little depressing."

  "They are? Well, you are welcome to stay with us whenever you like," my mother said.

  Seamus gave me the thumbs-up sign.

  When you go out at night in Los Angeles you always see these white beams of light—searchlights aimed up at the sky. They have them when a new movie opens, or a supermarket, or a gas station, or for no reason in particular. You can always see three or four somewhere in the distance, moving around.

  We drove out to the Cathay Circle Theater, which had two searchlights outside. It was another fancy movie house, not as spectacular as Grauman's Chinese, but still impressive. We saw Romance on the High Seas, a comedy with lots of music, and The Sword of Caravaggio, starring guess who. Even though his father was in it, Seamus said he had never seen the movie. Or he might have just been being polite. He was working the politeness for all he was worth—with results. It had gotten him what my parents still believed were unlimited weekend sleepovers. I knew he was moving in full-time. This was fine with me. I had always wished I had a brother instead of Eloise. Eloise, surprisingly, appeared to like Seamus too. She actually noticed him, and spoke to him. She had never paid the least attention to any friend of mine, or, most of the time, me.

  The movies, the third and fourth feature-length ones we'd seen that day, not counting the serials and cartoons at the Hitching Post and the Bugs Bunny at the Cathay Circle, were fairly good. Aaron Finn did some pretty nice fencing in The Sword of Caravaggio, and the other movie had Doris Day, who is a good singer. After the movies we went to one of those places where you eat in your car, and had hot fudge sundaes.

  CHAPTER 30

  I'm a Cadet

  My uniform cost $450! Two shirts, two pairs of wool serge pants with a black stripe up the sides, a dress uniform jacket, an overseas cap for daily wear, a garrison cap for wear with the dress uniform, an official Brown-Sparrow Windbreak
er, a wool topcoat, a black necktie with built-in permanent knot, a web belt with brass Brown-Sparrow buckle. Also brass collar insignia that spelled out BSMA for wear with the shirts, brass lapel insignia for the dress uniform jacket, two spelling out BS and two with the school mascot, a little sparrow, a brass cap badge, and a brass shield for the garrison cap. The shirts had brass buttons with the little sparrow on them. Shoes we had to buy in a store—military-style five-eyelet oxfords (with Wentworthstein military-grade shoelaces, of course). All the clothing was made to order by the school tailor, who had a shop right on the premises for making uniforms, doing repairs, cleaning, and pressing. Along with my uniform, I got a little booklet with instructions for taking care of everything, diagrams showing exactly where to pin the insignia, and a Blitz cloth for polishing the buttons, badges, and buckle. My father said it was the best-made suit of clothes he had ever seen, and ought to be for all that money.

  While my uniform was being made, I spent my time in the school library, taking tests. I took four days of tests. These tests were fun—they were designed to find out how smart I was, how much I knew, and what grade I should be in. Various lady teachers and librarians brought me the tests, explained the tests, timed me, told me when to stop writing, collected the tests, and took them away to score. In between, I was free to read anything I wanted. I read a novel about a boy who went to a prep school and wanted to be a football hero at Yale, a book about reptiles and amphibians of California, with special attention to turtles, and a book all about etiquette and good manners. I paid a lot of attention to that book. I figured the more polite I could make myself, the better I would do in my new school.

  Lunchtimes, I would walk to the mess hall and eat with the two librarians, Mrs. Coburn and Mrs. Steele. Every cadet had an assigned place to eat at a table with the same other cadets at every meal—and I hadn't been assigned one yet. In the afternoons, Cadet Sergeant Winkler, a high school kid, took me to the parade ground when no one was using it and taught me how to march, salute, and do the manual of arms. The manual of arms is all the things you do with a fake rifle, and I learned right-shoulder arms, left-shoulder arms, order arms, and things like that. I had to do everything snappily and crisply. I am not a snappy or crisp person by nature, but Cadet Sergeant Winkler was a good teacher, and yelled at me a lot. It was fun, in a way.