Some of the Kinder Planets

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  In the new version, the Desperate Throng couldn’t find anybody to annihilate. Wonderland was deserted, or so it seemed. Then, suddenly, the whole deadly group was trapped. It was an elaborate trap, too, the best thing Tobias had ever thought of. They were led before her royal majesty the Queen of Hearts who rolled her eyes magnificently. “Sentence first — Verdict afterwards,” roared the queen, and then, despite the protesta­tions of Steele and company, her majesty roared again, “Off with their heads!” The next thing Ser­geant Steele and his surly crew knew, they were all just little boys in short pants being kissed awake by a bunch of nice sisters at a picnic.

  Peach loved it.

  It was his gift to her, but Tobias borrowed it back right away. “Just for a minute,” he promised.

  In the office he persuaded Ms. Rowanook of the orange hair to make a copy of both stories for the principal. Tobias left them in her mailbox with a note explaining who had written what. He said in the note that he wasn’t going to tell Ms. Knieppe about Peach writing the essay for him, but that if the principal needed to tell her, he would under­stand. As far as he could tell, Mrs. Armitage never did tell, either. Ms. Knieppe seemed altogether pleased with “The Summer of the Tiger.” She said it was just what she was looking for.

  She gave him a B+. After all, the assignment was a day late.

  The Clearing

  THE BOY stopped at the top of You-and-Me-Pal Hill and kicked off his skis. He leaned against a rock. The sun was high and the glare on the snow hurt his eyes. He hurt everywhere. But at least he was outside again, moving through the windless day, his skis breaking a new trail.

  He got his breath back. He couldn’t shake the dizziness but he settled into the middle of it, found somewhere there that wasn’t moving. Down the high meadow was Far-Enough Swamp, though he couldn’t see it through the cedar and balsam that hugged the reedy shore.

  “This is rich land,” his dad had said once. “Where else you gonna find a swamp with a fir collar?”

  The boy trained his eyes at a break in the trees. If this was a time-travel story, someone would come now. Maybe a Mohawk brave silently track­ing a white-tail deer. He was ready. He would jump out at the deer and scare it—herd it—back into the path of the brave’s arrow. It was a cold winter. The brave would be thankful. He might take the boy back home to meet his dad and mom.

  The boy watched and waited. Nothing.

  Rich land — what a joke. Solid granite with a rind of dirt only Pollyanna could call soil. Farmers had once tried to cultivate this area. Snow-rounded pyramids of rocks along die cedar fence lines tes­tified to their efforts; those and straggly apple orchards gone wild. But these meadows had been turned over to the hardier grasses—to juniper and thorn and prickly ash; to the fir trees that ringed Far-Enough Swamp.

  The boy took a deep breath of bright, cold air. It was minus ten degrees Celsius, but he took off his gloves. They were wet inside with sweat, like the sheets of the bed he had left behind, clammy and constricting.

  Where was his time-travel connection? In those stories the hero was always lonely, and he was lonely. The kid in a time-travel story was usually sick, too, and he was sick. For how long now, he didn’t care to recall.

  He started to shiver. Then he slipped back into his skis and shooshed down the meadow towards the gap in the trees that led to the swamp.

  On the swamp there were many tracks: brush wolf and fox and rabbit. No humans. He followed the path of two wolves who seemed to be going more or less his way.

  There was a wire fence property line right through the middle of the swamp. He climbed over it without taking off his skis. He imagined himself making an escape. He pushed himself hard, ducking invisible enemy fire, until the fence and his imaginary enemy were lost to view around a bend in the meandering waterway. Deeper and deeper he escaped into the silent forest, a graveyard of grey stumps and the spiny skeletons of trees.

  He was trespassing now. This was Ken Axelrod’s land and, after crossing the dyke, the Starkweath­ers, the Beresfords, the Strongs, the Frosts. But after that, he couldn’t say anymore where he was. There were no signs of civilization out here and, in his dizziness, the sun was no help — it seemed lost itself. The only thing he knew for sure was that he was heading away, his sick bed slipping farther and farther behind.

  At last he saw something in the distance that was not dead, not stumps. A hockey rink in a clearing. Rag-tag nets; sticks, broken or intact, stuck in the snow bank like a rickety fence; a bench carved out of ice with an old pine plank on top. A frozen toque.

  Coming to the rink, the boy slipped out of his skis. He sat on the bench. He noticed the snow shovels. Suddenly, sick and tired as he was, an idea started ticking over in him.

  There was three or four centimetres of fresh snow on the rink. The boy pushed at the snow with his foot; it flew up like so many feathers. He started to shovel. The joke of it flowed like fresh blood to his aching muscles. He shovelled like a boy pos­sessed. He laughed a little to himself. He whistled.

  Then, just as suddenly, he stopped. Looking up, he saw someone in the trees at the swamp’s edge staring at him. He felt cold all over.

  “Hey,” the boy on the ridge called to him. “Hi.”

  Shaking, he dropped the shovel and ran for his skis. He fumbled with his binding. There was no such thing as time travel. There was only wishful thinking. This should not have happened.

  The boy was coming. “It’s all right,” he cried.

  But it wasn’t all right. The intruder Was stomping, sliding down the slope of the woods to the shoreline.

  The skier turned himself towards home. His tips crossed and he fell over hard, then clambered to his feet again.

  “Wait,” the intruder cried. “Don’t go.”

  But the skier pushed himself off, digging his ski pole tips through the downy snow into the ice itself. Heaving himself homeward, following his tracks.

  “Hey, I can help,” yelled the intruder, coming nearer, crossing the ice, slipping, recovering.

  But the skier was off. The other boy would never catch him now.

  “Come again,” the intruder called after him.

  BEN WATCHED until the skier was out of sight. He took over shovelling where the other boy had left off, stopping often and staring out across the swamp. The sun was sitting low behind the hills, casting long blue shadows. Sometimes he fancied he saw the boy far off, a lean shadow disentangling itself from those of dead trees.

  The wind picked up. Already the ski tracks were sifting over. Ben pushed the snow around in a desultory way. After a while he heard his father coming. He put his shoulder down and heaved snow manfully.

  “Yowzers!” said his father, with enough surprise in his voice that Ben laughed inside. “Good work, Ben.”

  “Ah, it was nothing,” said Ben, huffing it up a bit.

  “Pretty, industrious,” said his father. Ben thanked him. Out of the corner of his eye he caught his father scratching his head. “I came to give you a hand.”

  Ben stopped, sucked in a bucketful of frosty air. “I can handle it, Dad,” he said, leaning on his shovel.

  His father waited a minute more while Ben went on shovelling.

  “I’m sorry about the fight,” said his father. Ben scraped his shovel over the ice.

  “That’s okay,” he mumbled, without turning around.

  “It’s just that...” his father began, “... sometimes it’s as if you didn’t really move out here with us at all.”

  “That’s dumb!” Ben wanted to shout. “Where am I? Back home in the city? What choice does a twelve-year-old have but to be wherever his parents take him!” But he didn’t say a thing, because it would come out wrong and. ungrateful and the argument would start all over .again. And that would ruin the wonderful joke of this magically cleared rink.

  After some more minutes his father said, “It’l
l be dark soon,” and he headed back towards the woods, the path, the house. When he was out of sight, Ben surveyed what was left of the smooth blanket of snow on the ice and went to work with a vengeance. It was some creative shovelling he did. Then he went home hungry for supper and ready to make up properly.

  In the snow still left on the rink, he had written

  COME AGAIN

  Before the school bus the next morning he ran down from the house to check. His message was mostly gone. The rink was clear, but it appeared to be the work of the wind.

  OVER THE next few days it warmed up. Then it froze. Then it snowed a whole night. Then the sun shone hot. It was a winter spell set on killing a swamp skating rink. But Ben’s father wasn’t the kind of man who gave up on a pet project easily. He and Ben tried to keep the surface smooth, mostly for Ben’s sisters. Ben liked hockey, but he hadn’t really gotten to know anyone much since they’d moved to the valley and playing hockey by yourself was—well, you could only score the win­ning goal in the final game of the Stanley Cup so many times before the thrill wore off. But whether he used the rink or not, he and his father would come down, often in the chill of the night, and fill buckets with water from a hole to spread as best they could—”Smoother, Ben, smoother”—under the icy moon.

  Ben would always have his eye open for the stranger. He would look up suddenly across the swamp.

  “Did you hear that?” he would say.

  “You’re a jumpy customer,” his father would answer, not listening long enough or hard enough, shaking his head and chuckling to himself.

  Ben asked on the school bus who the kid might be. It gave him something to talk about.

  The weather heated up unseasonably. The top of the rink in the clearing thawed, then froze again from the top down, leaving a sandwich of water between the new ice and the thick grey ice below.

  That was the first time Ben saw the mayfly wrig­glers. The water nymphs swam up through cracks in the thick ice and got themselves stuck in the watery sandwich. Having escaped from the winter dark at the bottom of the pond, they swam like crazy black writing in the sunlight. They were stuck there. They were not alone. Ben saw a black splotch under the new ice. He was just wondering how a puck had got there when the splotch moved.

  “Look at this!” he cried.

  “Bullfrog tadpole,” said his dad. “It’ll die there, unless it finds its way back down. Shouldn’t have been so nosy.”

  Ben wanted to watch it, but the new ice wasn’t very thick, and his father didn’t want him to go through and wreck the surface. They went up for dinner with the tadpole, big as a puck, in Ben’s

  head. It swam around just under his skull, wanting out.

  That night the moon was full again. And whether it was the moon or the trapped tadpole or just life, Ben and his folks got into another fight.

  Ben wasn’t ever sure how these things happened. He was usually reading an Archie comic at the time or rearranging his baseball card collection. The argument was always over something he had said or hadn’t done or had implied or had complained about.

  In his room, with a slammed door separating him from the family, Ben opened his journal to the last page where he kept his fight record.

  Mom

  Dad

  xxxxxx

  xxxxxxxx

  He added a new X to Mom’s column. She was catching up to Dad. He could still hear her pound­ing about downstairs, her voice raised for him to hear, door or no door.

  He never got hit, but the words were big and noisy, like God yelling at Moses: words that blew your ears off.

  Reaching for his baseball dictionary, Ben flipped to “earned run average.”

  earned run average n. (ERA) A pitcher’s statistics representing the average number of runs legitimately scored from his deliveries per full nine-inning game (27 outs).

  HE TRIED to figure out his earned fight average n. (EFA). Earned — how did you determine that? What was average? What made a fight legitimate? Did he ever win any?

  Ben messed with his pen on some scrap paper while his heart turned around in his chest like a dog looking for some place to settle down. Then he started to draw: a guy sliding into second just under the ball; just under the sweeping hand “of the second baseman. Safe. When spring started again, there would be baseball. If he could just make it through this endless winter to baseball...

  He turned the pages in the journal to the entry he had written about the Phantom Shoveller. He had painted a little comic strip in watercolours. In the picture Ben cried after the shoveller, “Come back, come back, .I’ve still got the driveway to do!” Now he noticed the date on the page. It had been the day of the last full moon.

  His dad suddenly opened the door, and Ben slammed the journal shut. Later he wasn’t quite sure why the “apology he tried to make resulted in another yelling match and another slammed door. He sat on his bed for a long time, trying to figure out whether this was actually a new fight for which he should reward his father with an X, raising his EFA, or whether this was.just the same fight he had been having with his mom and into which his dad had entered, kind of like a reliever in the late innings of a game.

  Nobody came to kiss him goodnight. He didn’t change into his pyjamas. He didn’t turn out his light. He stomped, boiling mad, downstairs and made himself some toast just after his parents had put the girls to bed. He made several trips to the bathroom. In short, he gave them every opportunity to crab at him some more, so that he could stumble through a real apology. Then everyone could make up and get the whole thing out of the way, and he could get to sleep. Instead, they left him to stew in his own juices.

  Finally he heard them in the bathroom preparing for bed. Surely now they would notice his light. The door was wide open.

  They didn’t. He heard them turn out their own lights without so much as looking in on him.

  They were treating him as if he were gone. As if maybe they had left him back in the city.

  Ben flicked out his own bedside light and sat, arms crossed tight on “his chest, breathing heavily in the dark. But it was not really dark; there was a full moon. It was almost bright enough to read by. Bright enough to leave by.

  He was as quiet as a mouse until he was out of the house and then he slammed the door good and loud. Just one more slammed door in a night of slammed doors.

  He was halfway to the clearing before he realized where he was heading. He had never been out in the woods so late—not alone, at least. Once the family had skated under the full moon with a bunch of neighbours, and even his sisters had stayed up until almost midnight. But on that occasion the bright night had been filled with chatter and hot chocolate, and he had not heard the noise the night makes all on its own. In the dead of winter, that noise is Silence.

  Silence was something he had never heard in the city, It was a Silence to fill the wildness of the east­ern forest; a silence as tall as the pines, as wide and as deep as the swampland. It filled him with an urgent longing.

  He stood among the trees on the shore looking out at the shining rink. He waited for his father to come tromping through the brush after him. “Ben, Ben, this is ridiculous!” Then he could hurl himself at his father’s chest and into his arms. But his father didn’t come, and the Silence grew around him.

  Then, because he had to do something to occupy his runaway mind, he slithered down the snowy bank to the swamp and walked quickly out across the clearing to the rink. There was a wind out there he had not felt in the shelter of the trees. It was a sound, anyway, almost soothing.

  It took some time to locate the huge tadpole. On his knees to better spread out his weight, Ben watched it for several moments fearing that it was already dead, perhaps frozen into place, for the night had turned cold. Then it moved, squirming slowly but too stupid
cold to look for the hole through which it had slipped into this place between places.

  “Yes!” said Ben, and in a flash he was on his feet again and searching for his father’s axe. He brought the axe down hard on the new ice — once, twice, three times—before finally cracking it. That woke the tadpole up!

  “It’s for your own good,” said Ben.

  The tadpole didn’t swim far. It was trapped every which way, in the last pool of unfrozen water, a pool no more than a metre in diameter.

  Ben whacked some more. Each whack sounded like a gunshot. Finally, with one last, mighty swing — Splat!—water sprayed up at him. He had broken through. He chipped away the chunks of sur­face ice, brought over the coffee can that his father used as a small bucket, and attempted to catch the frantic prisoner. He had made several dives at it, and his cuffs were getting pretty wet, when some­one spoke.

  “You gonna destroy the whole rink?”

  For one wild, midnight second, Ben thought it was the tadpole. Then he swung around so fast that the bottom half of him slid into the pond.

  There, just behind him, stood the phantom skier.

  “The rink,” said the boy. “You destroying it?”

  “No,” said Ben. “There’s this tadpole.” He clambered up, shaking his cold, damp leg to get some of the water off it. The boy approached him cautiously. Ben backed off a little. The boy bent down and looked into the hole. Ben saw the sweat stand out on his cheek and forehead, saw that he was shivering badly.

  The stranger bent down. “Can you catch him?” he said.

  Ben dropped to his wet knees beside the boy and picked up the coffee can. The stranger leaned back on his haunches, watching as Ben lowered the can into the shallow icy pond, quite suddenly an expert at the moonlight capturing of trapped tadpoles. In one deft swoop he swooshed the can out of the pond, triumphant. The two boys peered into it together and then ventured to look at each other.