by Henry Clark
“Gee Gee Pa” was Tom’s nickname for his great-grandfather. He and his sisters also had a nickname for their very strict mother—“Tiger Mom”—until Mrs. Xui sat them down and told them they must never, ever call her Tiger Mom, because tigers aren’t native to North America. They could, however, call her “Puma Ma.” That would be perfectly all right. So they called her Puma Ma, and Mrs. Xui seemed very happy with it.
Gee Gee Pa turned to me, smiled, and said, “We are the only Xuis in America.”
They were, as far as we knew, the only Xuis anywhere. Most Chinese people spell the name Xiu, but an immigration official had messed up the spelling when Gee Gee Pa had first come to America, and no one had ever bothered to fix it. Whether you spelled it Xiu or Xui, it was pronounced “Shewy,” to rhyme with “chewy.”
“And as the oldest Xui at this table, I will tell you that you must always show respect to your ancestors,” Gee Gee Pa said to Tom.
“That means he wants the last taco,” Tom explained, passing the platter.
After dinner Tom and I made a great show of sitting at the dining room table and quizzing each other with math questions. Mrs. Xui hummed happily to herself in the kitchen. It wasn’t until Tom was off what his mom called the “Study Clock,” and we were both in his room together, that I was finally able to tell him I was meeting a girl when the carnival closed.
“Protoplasmic!” he exclaimed. “She works at the carny?”
“Her mother is Madam Janus, the fortune-teller.” I told him everything, including how I’d seen Orlando Camlo in the crystal ball before I met him in person.
“So it’s just as well I’m not sleeping at home tonight,” I said. “This makes things easier. Which window do you normally sneak out of?”
I raised the window above Tom’s desk. He had a reputation for slipping out of his house after hours, especially when his mother’s Study Clock got to be too much for him. She constantly pushed math and science and music on him, ignoring the one subject he really liked, which was history. (“History?” I once heard her say. “There’s no future in it!”) And the things he liked to do to relax—video games, old movies, and graphic novels—she refused to have in the house. He came over to my place as often as he could, and we binged on all three.
“Not that one!” Tom said, stopping me as I fumbled with the window screen. “The one with the tree outside.” He nodded at the room’s other window. “Unless you want to land on your head! It’s only eight o’clock. It takes twenty minutes to get to the fairgrounds. We have time to plan this out.”
“We?” I asked.
“Of course. I have to go with you. This may be a trap. You need someone to watch your back! We should be dressed all in black.”
He tossed me a black sweatshirt. I shrugged into it, checked myself in the mirror, and discovered I had put it on inside out.
“Leave it that way, Bro! Everybody knows that’s good luck. And the inside’s not as faded!”
He found a sweatshirt for himself, which I vetoed—it had a picture of my favorite hip-hop artist, Kan Sa$s, on the front, which was way too attention-grabbing—so he tossed it aside and dug out a plain dark navy one. Then he rummaged around and came up with a flashlight. “The trick is to convince my mom we’ve gone to bed, and she won’t buy that any time before eight thirty. But I’ve got something that will help us plan our strategy. We’d be crazy not to try it before we left.” He pulled out the book he had gotten at the carnival. “Have you ever heard of the I-Ching?” he asked.
“No,” I admitted.
“It’s a real thing. You can look it up. It was invented in China over three thousand years ago. A lot of people think it’s a way of seeing the future. But Dr. Lao told me it’s more like a compass that points you in the right direction, as long as you read it right. I’ll show you how it works.”
I was more interested in getting out the window and tracking down treasure, but Tom was so enthusiastic, I didn’t want to bum him out. I did my best to pay attention.
He grabbed a notepad and a pencil stub from his desk and snatched a quarter from a jar of loose change, and we both sat with the book at the foot of his bed.
“Think of a question,” he said.
“That’s easy. ‘What will happen if we meet Frankie Camlo at the carnival tonight?’”
“Good! We both concentrate on that, and one of us flips the quarter. It’s your question, so you should flip.”
I did and—
“Tails!” declared Tom. “That means we draw this.”
“A line with a break in the middle is called a yin line,” he explained. “Any time you flip tails, you draw a yin. Toss again.”
I tossed, and it was tails again.
“The second line is always drawn above the first. So now we have something that looks like this.”
“We’re making something like what’s on your shirt,” I said, seeing the connection. Tom nodded.
I flipped the coin again. This time it was heads.
“Heads means we draw a yang line!” he said excitedly, as if he had just discovered a gold nugget in his aquarium gravel. “They’re unbroken lines. It goes on top of the first two. We’re halfway there.”
“We need a total of six lines?”
“We’re making a hexagram. Hex means ‘six.’”
“Like… a hexagon is a six-sided figure,” I said, pleased with myself. The meetings of the E=Mc Squad hadn’t been a total waste.
I flipped the quarter three more times.
Tails, heads, tails.
Yin, yang, yin.
Tom drew them in the order I flipped them, one above the other over the first three, until we had this:
“Now what?” I asked.
“Now we look it up and find out the answer to our question.” Tom opened the book to the back, where there was an index. “There are only sixty-four possible hexagrams,” he said, running his finger down a series of the six-lined figures printed along the side of the page. “Each one has a name, along with some advice that goes with it. Here we go! This is hexagram thirty-nine. Page one twenty-four.”
He flipped to the center of the book.
“The answer to our question, ‘What will happen if we meet up with whatshername,’ is—”
He blinked and his head shot back. He turned the book in my direction so I could see.
“—TROUBLE!”
I snatched the book from him. At the top of the page was a hexagram identical to the one we had drawn, except that the book’s artist had owned a ruler. Beneath it were these words:
HEXAGRAM 39
TROUBLE.
OBSTRUCTIONS AND DIFFICULTIES.
A CHALLENGE TO BE OVERCOME.
WATCH YOUR BACK; YOU MAY HAVE TO RETREAT IN THAT DIRECTION.
THAT WHICH DOES NOT KILL YOU WILL PROBABLY TRY HARDER NEXT TIME.
“Who wrote this stuff?” I asked.
“An unknown sage during the Zhou dynasty, three thousand years ago,” said Tom, reading the information off the back of the book. “I think sage means ‘wise person.’ This ‘modernized, reader-friendly’ version is by Richard K. Philips, who, it says, spent two weeks on vacation in Beijing in 2013.”
“So he’s an expert?”
“I guess.”
“Do we take it seriously?”
Tom shrugged. “You think we should bring nunchuks?” he asked.
“You have nunchuks?”
“That pair I showed you.”
“What? The ones you made when you were six?” He had made them from a couple of cardboard paper-towel tubes. They did make a cool ponk! noise when you hit something with them. “You really think we’ll need them?”
“It says Trouble!” Tom tapped the hexagram. “Maybe she’s going to kidnap you and take you away with the carnival. Or maybe the treasure is guarded by anacondas!”
“It’s just a bunch of lines,” I reminded him.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “And what’s cool about them is they’re either broken or u
nbroken. The I-Ching is binary code, like computers use.”
“Yeah?” I said, unimpressed. “It looks more like Morse code to me. You know, the dashes and dots?”
In social studies, we had learned about Samuel Morse and his telegraph. The teacher had shown us Morse code on the Smart Board and given us printouts with a coded message to solve for homework.
“What?” said Tom. “Oh. Yeah. A little. If you pretend each unbroken line is a dash, and each half of a broken line is a dot…”
He trailed off, scowling at the hexagram. I glanced at the clock. It was almost eight thirty. We would have to leave soon. Heading for something that might be Trouble, with a capital T. I opened the window with the tree on the outside and removed the screen. I was happy to see a hefty branch within a foot of the sill. I rattled the screen impatiently, to get Tom’s attention.
“Fiduciary!” he sputtered.
“What?”
“The Trouble hexagram. Look at it!”
He shoved it under my nose. It hadn’t changed since the last time I saw it.
“What about it?”
“What you said. Morse code. Morse would be read from the top, left to right, like written English. Let’s say that top line is two dots.”
“Okay. So?”
“A single dot is Morse code for the letter E.”
“So two dots would be two Es,” I said. “What word begins with two Es? Eek? Eel? As in, ‘Eek! I stepped on an eel’?”
“Maybe only one letter is an E. The first letter. Then that’s followed by a dot, a dash, and another dot. Dot-dash-dot is Morse for the letter R.”
“Wait a minute. Are you trying to tell me you’ve memorized the Morse code?”
He looked sheepish.
“Well, yeah. A little. Puma Ma made me. She makes me memorize a lot of stuff. I’m hoping she never finds out about the periodic table of the elements. And I probably don’t know Morse perfectly; I should cross-check, just to be sure.”
He got up and rummaged in his schoolbag, pulling out the social studies homework with the complete Morse code on it. He flattened out the page next to his drawing of the thirty-ninth hexagram.
Next to the Trouble hexagram, he wrote:
“Right after the Morse for the letter R,” he said, “there’s half of a yin line and a full yang, which you could think of as a dot and a dash, Morse code for the letter A. Then there’s two broken lines—two yins—which, I think it’s obvious, should be read as three dots—making the letter S—and a final dot, which would be a final E.”
He finished writing. I looked over his shoulder.
“That’s really weird,” Tom said, shaking his head like he couldn’t believe it. “The I-Ching hexagram for Trouble contains a hidden message in Morse code—the word erase! What do you do with trouble? You try to erase it! That is one ubiquitous coincidence!”
“You just told me this I-Ching thing is three thousand years old,” I said. “Morse code was invented”—I searched my memory for the date we learned in social studies, and I was amazed when I found it—“in the 1830s. That’s less than two hundred years ago. There can’t be Morse code in the I-Ching; Morse hadn’t been invented yet!”
“That’s what’s so weird about it. And you’re the one who discovered it!”
“Me?”
“You’re the one who said it looked like Morse.” He flipped through the pages of If You Have an I-Ching—Scratch! and got a worried look on his face. “I wonder if any of the other hexagrams…”
“Lights out, boys!” Mrs. Xui called from the hall as she walked past. It was eight thirty. Tom had a ridiculously early bedtime, but then, the whole family got up at five every morning.
Tom tucked the Morse code page and his pencil into the I-Ching book, folded the thin book in half, and jammed it in his back pocket. He stepped into the hall and said his good-nights, and five minutes later we were on our way to the fairgrounds.
By ten to nine we were at the entrance to Camlo’s Traveling Wonder Show. The carnival was emptying out, but everything, including the parking area, was still brightly lit. We found a bale of straw where we had a good view of the main gate and sat down to wait.
“You really think Frankie Camlo can’t be trusted?” I asked Tom.
He shrugged. “Most people looking for treasure are pirates.”
“But she said it was some sort of family treasure.”
“So? Pirates can have families.”
A bunch of noisy older kids clustered around a battered green convertible noticed us, and one of them started walking over. As he got closer, I realized it was Lenny Killbreath, the kid who had been messing with my dad.
I remembered the I-Ching’s prediction of trouble.
“Well,” I said quietly to myself, “that didn’t take long.”
CHAPTER 4
The Camlo Shagbolt
You’re Crazy Brody’s kid, aren’t you?”
Lenny towered over me, even though I had jumped to my feet at his approach.
“You are,” he sneered, answering his own question. “I seen you around. Why aren’t you dressed like a Pilgrim?”
“Why should I be dressed like a Pilgrim?” I asked. “Just because you’re a turkey?”
Lenny grabbed me by the collar and hauled me into the air, until we were eye to eye. Tom jumped up, shouting “You let him go, you stupid cacophony!” Then he pulled something from his pocket and whacked Lenny across the leg with it. There was a hollow ponk! and Tom’s cardboard nunchuks promptly fell apart. Lenny ignored him.
“You tell that crazy father of yours,” Lenny hissed, lowering me to my feet without letting go of my collar, “this town doesn’t need any loony weirdos living here! Tell him he should move his sorry jerk family someplace else!”
He twisted my collar so tightly I couldn’t breathe.
“Lenny! C’mon!” shouted one of his cronies from across the lot. “Beer’s gettin’ warm!”
He turned me loose.
“You just deliver that message to your dad for me!”
He started to walk away, and I lunged after him. Tom grabbed me around the waist and pulled me back.
“He’s twice your size!” he whispered. “We need better nunchuks!”
Lenny joined his buddies and they piled into the car. One of them must have won a large pink poodle and had to hold it overhead before they could all fit. The car backed up, the tires squealed, and they sped away.
“Bilious!” Tom cursed, and sat back down. He tugged on my pant leg until I joined him. “You’re not going to let that astrolabe get to you, are you? We have better things to think about.”
I nodded, but I was still seething inside. Tom started flipping his quarter and drawing I-Ching lines in the dirt with a stick.
I pulled my cell out of my pocket and stared at it. I wanted to call my father and apologize for yelling at him. He didn’t deserve that from his own son, especially when there were strangers saying such stupid things about him. But then I started thinking about how he had brought it on himself, and I started getting angry all over again.
He had begun dressing up around the house a few years ago; one night he came to the dinner table wearing cowboy clothes. They were the sort of clothes cowboys were still wearing, so my mother and I just assumed he was about to tell us we were going on a vacation to a dude ranch (in which case I would’ve been happier if he had been wearing Mickey Mouse ears). But dessert came and went without any vacation announcements, and the next day he mowed the front lawn dressed as a court jester. Whenever he stopped to empty the grass catcher, the bells on his hat jingled. From then on, he wore the clothing of other times as often as he did his own. More frequently, in fact.
I wasn’t ready to speak to my dad. I tucked the phone back in my pocket.
“I don’t believe this!” Tom muttered.
“What?”
“Look!”
Tom had drawn a new hexagram in the dirt.
“I wanted to know how I’m going to do o
n next week’s math test—whether I’ll do well enough to make Puma Ma happy. I flipped the coin six times and got the fifty-fifth hexagram, which is called Abundance!”
He seemed distressed, and I couldn’t figure out why.
“So, that’s good,” I assured him. “Abundance means ‘a lot.’ It’s saying you’ll ace the test. Maybe ace-plus it!”
“That’s not the point. Once I got the hexagram, I checked to see if there was a Morse code message hidden in it.”
“And?”
He scribbled in the dirt with his stick. “Three dots, that’s an S; a dot and two dashes, that’s a W; a single dot is an E; another single dot is another E; and a single dash, that’s a T!”
“The fifty-fifth hexagram, which for thousands of years has meant ‘abundance,’ contains the Morse code for sweet!” Tom sounded like he might explode.
“Well,” I said reasonably. “If you’ve got an abundance—a whole lot of stuff—that’s sweet, isn’t it?”
“Yes! Of course it is! That’s the problem! Not only is there a Morse code message, but the message relates directly to what the hexagram is about! The odds against that are astronomical! It’s impossible! There’s something supernatural going on here! Let’s do another one and see what happens!”
Carnival lights started dimming, and the Ferris wheel came to a halt. Music from most of the rides stopped, leaving a lone song playing from the midway. I recognized “Hello Goodbye” by the Beatles.
“We’re both going to concentrate on the same question,” Tom informed me. “You flip the coin this time.”
“Is this really all that important to you?” I said, jumping to my feet. “I think maybe we should stop sitting here and go into the carnival. Frankie’s not here. What if something happened to her? Maybe somebody else is after the treasure, and they’ve got her tied up or something.”
“Or maybe she went to the bathroom,” Tom replied. “It’s only two minutes past nine. She said she’d meet you at the entrance. Let’s do this. If she’s not here by the time we’re done, we’ll go looking for her.”
