Instead of Three Wishes

by Megan Whalen Turner

  “You go get dressed and get ready for school, now. I’ll get breakfast started. Your clean pants are in the laundry basket in my room. Don’t wake your dad.” Leroy knew that nothing short of an earthquake would wake his father after an all-night shift. Otherwise he would have been more quiet killing the roaches.

  “And hurry, please,” Leroy’s mother went on. “I’d like you to leave early for school so that you can buy some more boric acid on the way.” Boric acid was the white powder that she sprinkled around the base of all the cabinets and underneath the fridge. It didn’t hurt people but was deadly to roaches and cheaper than Roach Motels or any of the insecticide sprays.

  Leroy liked going to the hardware store, but thinking of school brought a tight, cold feeling to his stomach. His mother must have known what an unhappy stomach looked like from the outside because she asked, “What’s the matter, Leroy? Are the older boys bothering you again?”

  “No,” said Leroy. “I got something from school I have to show you.” He walked up the hall to his room and came back with a piece of paper he had pulled from his schoolbag. It was a note from his teacher. At the bottom of the page there was a space for his mother to sign.

  Leroy and his mother sat at the kitchen table while she read the paper. He was still dressed in his bathrobe and pajamas and his school shoes with no socks. His ankles were cold.

  “Leroy,” his mother finally said, “this says that you were supposed to write a report about the life of your African ancestors and you wrote about Sweden and said that’s where your white missionary ancestor came from.”

  “If Curtis can say his ancestor was Shaka, king of the Zulus, how come I can’t have a white missionary?”

  “Because, Leroy, you were supposed to write about your African ancestors, people that you can be proud of, young man. Even if they were pig farmers and not kings of the Zulus.”

  “If I’m gonna write about ancestors I’m proud of, how come I don’t write about Grampa, who went to Oberlin College, or about my mother, who is a nurse, or about my dad? Aren’t I supposed to be proud of them?”

  “That’s flattering, Leroy, but you were assigned to write about your African ancestors. Your dad and I aren’t that old yet.”

  “But all the books in the public library are about white people from Sweden. Every year we’re supposed to write about African ancestors and every year there’s only the one book about Africa and everybody writes the same report and it’s really stupid. Why don’t they have any books about Africans if that’s what we’re supposed to write about?”

  Leroy’s mother put the paper on the table. “Well, Leroy, it’s because this used to be a community of people who came from Sweden. Back then the library had money to buy books, and they bought the books that the people who lived here wanted to read. Now the library doesn’t have any more money to buy books, even though the neighborhood has changed. That’s why we have a lot of people whose ancestors are African reading about life in Sweden instead.” She sighed.

  “But,” she went on, “there are books about Africa in the main library downtown, and that’s where we’ll go this Saturday. Your teacher says that your report was very inventive and well researched, even if it was on the wrong subject, so she’s going to let you write another one. I’ll write her a note that says we’ll go get some books on the right subject.”

  “Okay,” said Leroy as he watched his mother sign the paper. “But I’m gonna write about pig farmers, not about Shaka.”

  Riding his bike home from school that day, clutching a bag full of boric acid bottles, Leroy was cheerful. There had been a sale at the hardware store, and he had gotten twice as many bottles of boric acid as well as a box of Roach Motels thrown in free. Leroy’s head was still full of facts about Sweden and the north; they seemed appropriate as he bicycled through the snow, but he looked forward to a trip to the main library downtown. In addition to the books on Africa, he hoped to get The House of Dies Drear by Virginia Hamilton. The only copy in the school library had disappeared before he had a chance to read it.

  Ignoring the cold winter wind as it blew through his jacket, Leroy absentmindedly navigated around snowpiles and ice patches until he reached the alley behind his building. Disaster struck as he turned into his own backyard. He hit an ice patch he hadn’t seen and skidded across it. He might have recovered if one hand hadn’t been occupied with the paper bag. Without proper steering, the bicycle careened around the corner of the row of garages and struck a pile of bricks that had been left to one side of the sidewalk by the superintendent six months earlier. The bicycle stopped. Leroy didn’t. Still clutching the brown bag in his hands, he flew over the handlebars. The last thing he saw was the cloud-filled sky above him before he landed on his head in the snowbank on the other side of the brick pile.

  It was the cold that woke Leroy. Snow had slipped inside his collar and was melting there against his neck. Squinting his eyes against the bright sunlight, Leroy sat up and pulled himself out of the snowbank. Looking around him, he saw that the pile of bricks was gone. His apartment building was gone, and so was everything familiar. Leroy was in a forest of tall, thin trees that cast long and even thinner shadows across the unmarked snow.

  It took Leroy several moments to realize that he was not alone. Moving through the trees was a group of people covered in heavy furs. Most of the people looked to be not much taller than Leroy. The heavy furs covered them from top to toe. They wore fur caps, and when they lifted their feet from the snow, he saw that they each wore fur boots that reached up to their knees.

  Wow, Leroy thought, shivering in his winter jacket, these people know how to keep warm.

  As the group approached, Leroy saw that they all were men and seemed to be some sort of hunting party. Many of them carried spears, and an animal that Leroy thought might be a reindeer hung from a pole carried by two men.

  I’m dead, thought Leroy. I’ve died and gone to Sweden.

  The leader of the group greeted Leroy and introduced himself. Leroy was a little surprised to understand the man but responded politely.

  The man asked, “Are you an evil spirit?” He stared at Leroy and was obviously intrigued with the color of the boy’s skin. He and his men all had creamy white skin, with a red mark burned by the cold on each cheek.

  “No,” answered Leroy.

  “An incarnation of a god?”

  “No,” answered Leroy.

  “Then you are a hero?” This was almost a statement, not a question at all.

  Leroy thought about this. He knew that the only people who traveled in the legends of Sweden were heroes, spirits, or gods. He thought being a hero might provide an excuse for hanging out in a snowbank miles from nowhere.

  “Yeah, that’s me,” he said, “I’m a hero.”

  “Ah,” said the leader of the hunting party. “Of what are you bane?”

  Leroy was stumped for a moment. He realized that to be a hero, one had to have killed some wild animal or a monster. He thought.

  “Roaches,” he said. “I am Leroy Roachbane.” And he stood up and curled his arms like a wrestler as he said it.

  “Ahhh,” the men in the hunting party murmured, and nodded their heads, “roaches, roaches.”

  “What’s a roaches?” asked the leader. He was not obviously impressed with Leroy’s size. Standing up, Leroy was still waist-deep in snow.

  “Well,” said Leroy, thinking fast, “they’re about this tall.” He held up his hand to his chest. “And about twice as long. They have six legs and really hard skin called, um”—he searched for the word he’d learned the previous week in science class—“called an exoskeleton.”

  The hunters were looking suitably impressed. “And they have pincers,” Leroy added, “giant pincers on the front.” He held out his arms in front of him and waved them in an imitation.

  This was enough for the men. Several in the back shifted uneasily and murmured, “Pincers, pincers.” They looked around them as if one of these monsters might act
ually appear from behind one of the skinny trees. One stepped forward to whisper in the leader’s ear.

  “Would you like to come to dinner?” the leader asked Leroy.

  Leroy accepted the invitation, and after collecting his paper bag, he walked back to the lodge with the hunting party. On the way, he learned that he was in the land of King Wiglaff and that the leader of the hunting party’s name was Per. Per was the king’s second-in-command.

  As they walked, Leroy elaborated on his description. “Roaches are very dangerous,” he said. “They operate in packs and have been known to carry off several small children at a time.”

  “Really?” Per asked, horrified.

  Leroy nodded.

  He was in the process of describing his single-handed victory over seventeen of these monsters when they arrived at Wiglaff’s lodge.

  The lodge was a long, low building about twenty feet wide by about forty feet long, built out of roughly arranged logs. Inside, a fire burned in a pit in the center of the main room. Per’s hunting party, after depositing their catch outside in the snow, gathered around the fire and shed most of their heavy furs. Per introduced Leroy to the king, explaining to Wiglaff that Leroy came from a distant land called ChicagoIllinoy, inhabited by giant monsters called roaches. After describing a roach, Per leaned forward to whisper something into his king’s ear. Wiglaff nodded and said to Leroy, “Welcome, would you like some dinner?”

  Dinner was a giant meal, with all of Wiglaff’s people crowded into the lodge. Leroy helped himself to a little roast reindeer as well as rabbit and a bird he didn’t recognize. In between mouthfuls, he retold his story of combat with seventeen roaches. He explained that it took him a while to work up to that many. He’d started with only two or three roaches at a time, he said.

  After dinner, the crowd called out for a man named Schoop. Schoop came forward with his harp and sang a number of songs about local heroes. The last song he sang was about Wiglaff himself and his prestigious lodge. In the song, the lodge was large enough to hold three hundred men, there were trophies on the paneled walls, and the fire pit could roast an entire reindeer easily. Leroy looked around. The room he was in was cramped, and it only had maybe a hundred people in it. He thought the song might be exaggerating about the size, but then he saw that there were no trophies at all on the walls.

  Wiglaff spoke when the song was over. “My nephew Per thinks that a hero of your size might be helpful against a scourge of small proportions.”

  Leroy wasn’t sure if he was being insulted, so he said nothing.

  Wiglaff gestured to his surroundings and said, “You do not find our lodge to be similar to that one in the song?”

  Leroy hemmed and hawed and finally admitted that it seemed a little different.

  “It is different,” said Wiglaff. “It is a different lodge.” He explained. “We had a lodge across the river from here. It was the beautiful lodge described in the song. It took us many years to build, but unfortunately we had to abandon it in the last few days. We haven’t been in this lodge long enough to get the trophies up on the wall, so it’s a little rustic yet.”

  “Why did you move?” Leroy asked.

  “It was infested,” Per said. “Something like your roaches, only very very small. There were thousands of them, though. They climbed all over everything. They were on the food and on the babies. I would wake up in the night and find them crawling across me.” Per shuddered. “It was awful.”

  “We thought,” began Wiglaff hesitantly, “that seeing as how you had so much experience with these giant roaches, maybe you could do something about all these little ones?”

  “What do you think?” asked Per.

  “Sure,” said Leroy, “I can handle it.”

  So he asked for a package of food that would last him a week and some furs to sleep on. Wiglaff and Per gave him directions to the old lodge, and he started off the next morning with his bag of Roach Motels and boric acid under his arm. He crossed a shallow river, stepping carefully on the stones set out just for that purpose. He climbed a snow-covered hill and found the lodge just on the other side.

  Wiglaff’s old lodge was significantly larger than his new one and quite a bit more impressive. The huge double doors at one end were covered with the carvings of forest animals and hunting parties. Leroy was afraid that they might be too heavy for him to move, but he pushed one, and it swung open easily. Inside, the fire pit in the central room looked large enough to roast several large reindeer at once. Leroy climbed down into the pit and built a fire using the flint and steel that Per had lent him. When the fire was burning brightly, he laid out more wood in a circle five feet across with an unburned space in the middle. In this space he put his food, knowing that it would be safe from roaches there.

  Then he walked around the walls of the lodge, pouring out a thin trail of boric acid. Next he set the Roach Motels in strategic places around the main room, and finally he settled down to wait until the roaches came out. He’d seen them running away when he’d entered the gloomy lodge. Now that the fire lit the interior he could see them more clearly skittering around the walls. He waited until quite a few had moved to the center of the room, then jumped on them, howling at the top of his lungs and stamping over and over and over.

  Wiglaff’s villagers, passing by the lodge, heard his howls and reported them to Wiglaff. They heard the same howls night and day for seven days as Leroy stamped and stamped, pausing only to eat, sleep a little, and empty out the Roach Motels. Finally, a week after he had entered the lodge, he opened the main doors. Outside he found Wiglaff and all his people waiting.

  “All over but the cleaning up,” Leroy called.

  The villagers cheered.

  Wiglaff came forward, and Leroy led him into the lodge. He explained where he had kept his food and showed the king other ways to keep his food free of roaches. He also explained the purpose of the boric acid and told Wiglaff to see that it remained undisturbed. He gave Wiglaff the unopened bottles and replaced the empties in the paper bag.

  “If you do these things,” Leroy instructed, “keep the food safe and leave the boric acid, then the roaches won’t ever come back.”

  “Never?” said Wiglaff, surprised.

  “Never,” Leroy insisted.

  “That’s powerful magic,” said Per, who had followed his king into the lodge.

  As they stepped to the double doors, Wiglaff commanded half his people to begin cleaning out the lodge and the other half to prepare a dinner fit for a hero. Turning to Leroy, he said, “What a feast we will have in your honor!”

  Leroy waved to the villagers from the double doors and started down the stairs. Thinking of the feast to come, he missed his step, slid on a patch of ice, and landed on his head in the snow at the bottom of the lodge steps.

  Leroy was cold. Snow was melting inside his collar, and he could hear someone calling. He opened his eyes. The gray sky above him was blocked by Mrs. Hansen’s anxious face. She had seen him from her window and hurried down the back stairs.

  “Leroy, honey, are you all right?”

  “Uh, yeah sure, Mrs. Hansen, I’m fine. I’ve been in prehistoric Sweden.” He started to tell her the whole story, but she cut him off.

  “Honey, let’s get you upstairs and get an ice pack on your head. We can call your mom, and you can tell her where you’ve been.”

  So Leroy wobbled up the stairs, and Mrs. Hansen took him into her apartment and sat him on the sofa with a bag of ice. She called his mother at work, and she came home to see if Leroy needed X rays.

  All the time his mama poked at his head and looked in his eyes, Leroy tried to explain that he’d been to Sweden and saved the lodge and that he was Leroy Roachbane.

  His mama said, “Yes, Leroy,” and asked him to add six and nine. She finally decided that he probably hadn’t killed himself, but he should spend the rest of the day in bed.

  “But, Mama, the boric acid…” Leroy tried to explain.

  “Don’t worry ab
out that, Leroy,” said his mother. “I’ll go outside and get it after you’re in bed.”

  She did go downstairs and found the paper bag wet from the snow. Inside were the boric acid bottles. But they were all empty. There was no sign of the Roach Motels.

  Factory

  On his last night in the government-sponsored orphanage, John climbed to the top floor of the building to look out at the world. The city he lived in was huge. It stretched from horizon to horizon, and on an overcast night, like this one, the tallest buildings disappeared into the rain clouds that were swollen with the reflected orange of the streetlights below. Many blocks away, John could see the Gerwinks-Primary Factory, where he would begin work the next day. It was the largest of the factory buildings. It stretched for more than nine city blocks and was lit twenty-four hours a day by arc lights that were shocking white in contrast to the cheaper yellow streetlights that glowed on all sides. Work went on around the clock at Gerwinks-Primary. All employees were expected to be on call for emergency shifts. John watched what he could see of the bustling activity and wondered if he, too, would soon be hard at work in the middle of the nights. He wondered if there was any way to know, from the inside of the building, if the sun was shining or not.

  There was a subtle change in the night sky overhead. The view of the world, and Gerwinks-Primary, was cut off by sheets of rain rolling down the windowpane. John went to bed.

  The next morning he and seven other potential employees were waiting in the factory yard for the shift foreman. When the foreman arrived, he waved them into a small office without trying to compete with the noise of men and machines. Once inside the office, with the door closed, he introduced himself and explained the conditions of employment at G-P.

  “You all will be on probation until you test out. Psych profiles have placed you in these jobs, but psych profiles and the government computers aren’t infallible. People who can’t get along in their jobs can expect to be fired. In the meantime, the factory will assign you a sleeping cubicle, and a food schedule, and will supply one uniform appropriate to your employment. Each of you will be assigned to a senior employee to be trained. John, you’ll be with me. I know as much about the high cranes as anybody. Let’s get started.”