Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron

by Jonathan Strahan

  Gold. I was holding a nugget of pure gold. It must have been worth … uh … well, a lot.

  “We knew all the good spots a long time before the Europeans came across the sea,” River Shoulders said calmly. “There’s another, just as large, when the work is done.”

  “What if I don’t take your case?” I asked him.

  He shrugged. “I try to find someone else. But word is that you can be trusted. I would prefer you.”

  I regarded River Shoulders for a moment. He wasn’t trying to intimidate me. It was a mark in his favor, because it wouldn’t have been difficult. In fact, I realized, he was going out of his way to avoid that very thing.

  “He’s your son,” I asked. “Why don’t you help him?”

  He gestured at himself and smiled slightly. “Maybe I would stand out a little in Chicago.”

  I snorted and nodded. “Maybe you would.”

  “So, wizard,” River Shoulders asked. “Will you help my son?”

  I pocketed the gold nugget and said, “One of these is enough. And yes. I will.”

  The next day I went to see the boy’s mother at a coffee shop on the north side of town.

  Dr. Helena Pounder was an impressive woman. She stood maybe six-four, and looked as though she might be able to bench-press more than I could. She wasn’t really pretty, but her square, open face looked honest, and her eyes were a sparkling shade of springtime green.

  When I came in, she rose to greet me and shook my hand. Her hands were an odd mix of soft skin and calluses—whatever she did for a living, she did it with tools in her hand.

  “River told me he’d hired you,” Dr. Pounder said. She gestured for me to sit, and we did.

  “Yeah,” I said. “He’s a persuasive guy.”

  Pounder let out a rueful chuckle and her eyes gleamed. “I suppose he is.”

  “Look,” I said. “I don’t want to get too personal, but …”

  “But how did I hook up with a Bigfoot?” she asked.

  I shrugged and tried to look pleasant.

  “I was at a dig site in Ontario—I’m an archaeologist—and I stayed a little too long in the autumn. The snows caught me there, a series of storms that lasted for more than a month. No one could get in to rescue me, and I couldn’t even call out on the radio to let them know I was still at the site.” She shook her head. “I fell sick and had no food. I might have died if someone hadn’t started leaving rabbits and fish in the night.”

  I smiled. “River Shoulders?”

  She nodded. “I started watching, every night. One night the storm cleared up at just the right moment, and I saw him there.” She shrugged. “We started talking. Things sort of went from there.”

  “So the two of you aren’t actually married, or …?”

  “Why does that matter?” she asked.

  I spread my hands in an apologetic gesture. “He paid me. You didn’t. It might have an effect on my decision process.”

  “Honest enough, aren’t you?” Pounder said. She eyed me for a moment and then nodded in something like approval. “We aren’t married. But suitors aren’t exactly knocking down my door—and I never saw much use for a husband anyway. River and I are comfortable with things as they are.”

  “Good for you,” I said. “Tell me about your son.”

  She reached into a messenger bag that hung on the back of her diner chair and passed me a five-by-seven photograph of a kid, maybe eight or nine years old. He wasn’t pretty, either, but his features had a kind of juvenile appeal, and his grin was as real and warm as sunlight.

  “His name is Irwin,” Pounder said, smiling down at the picture. “My angel.”

  Even tough, bouncer-looking supermoms have a soft spot for their kids, I guess. I nodded. “What seems to be the problem?”

  “Earlier this year,” she said, “he started coming home with injuries. Nothing serious—abrasions and bruises and scratches. But I suspect that the injuries were likely worse before the boy came home. Irwin heals very rapidly, and he’s never been sick: literally never, not a day in his life.”

  “You think someone is abusing him,” I said. “What did he say about it?”

  “He made excuses,” Pounder said. “They were obviously fictions, but that boy is at least as stubborn as his father, and he wouldn’t tell me where or how he’d been hurt.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  She frowned. “Ah?”

  “It’s another kid.”

  Pounder blinked. “How …”

  “I have the advantage over you and your husband, inasmuch as I have actually been a grade-school boy before,” I said. “If he snitches about it to the teachers or to you, he’ll probably have to deal with retributive friction from his classmates. He won’t be cool. He’ll be a snitching, tattling pariah.”

  Pounder sat back in her seat, frowning. “I’m … hardly a master of social skills. I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  I shrugged. “On the other hand, you clearly aren’t the sort to sit around wringing her hands, either.”

  Pounder snorted and gave me a brief, real smile.

  “So,” I went on, “when he started coming home hurt, what did you do about it?”

  “I started escorting him to school and picking him up the moment class let out. That’s been for the past two months—he hasn’t had any more injuries. But I have to go to a conference tomorrow morning and—”

  “You want someone to keep an eye on him.”

  “That, yes,” she said. “But I also want you to find out who has been trying to hurt him.”

  I arched an eyebrow. “How am I supposed to do that?”

  “I used River’s financial advisor to pull some strings. You’re expected to arrive at the school tomorrow morning to begin work as the school janitor.”

  I blinked. “Wait. Bigfoot has a financial advisor? Who? Like, Nessie?”

  “Don’t be a child,” she said. “The human tribes assist the Forest People by providing an interface. River’s folk give financial, medical, and educational aid in return. It works.”

  My imagination provided me with an image of River Shoulders standing in front of a children’s music class, his huge fingers waving a baton that had been reduced to a matchstick by his enormity.

  Sometimes my head is like an Etch A Sketch. I shook it a little, and the image went away.

  “Right,” I said. “It might be difficult to get you something actionable.”

  Pounder’s eyes almost seemed to turn a green-tinged shade of gold, and her voice became quiet and hard. “I am not interested in courts,” she said. “I only care about my son.”

  Yikes.

  Bigfoot Irwin had himself one formidable mama bear. If it turned out that I was right and he was having issues with another child, that could cause problems. People can overreact to things when their kids get involved. I might have to be careful with how much truth got doled out to Dr. Pounder.

  Nothing’s ever simple, is it?

  The school was called the Madison Academy, and it was a private elementary and middle school on the north side of town. Whatever strings River Shoulders had pulled, they were good ones. I ambled in the next morning, went into the administrative office, and was greeted with the enthusiasm of a cloister of diabetics meeting their insulin delivery truck. Their sanitation engineer had abruptly departed for a Hawaiian vacation, and they needed a temporary replacement.

  So I wound up wearing a pair of coveralls that were too short in the arms, too short in the legs, and too short in the crotch, with the name “Norm” stenciled on the left breast. I was shown to my office, which was a closet with a tiny desk and several shelves stacked with cleaning supplies of the usual sort.

  It could have been worse. The stencil could have read “Freddie.”

  So I started engineering sanitation. One kid threw up, and another started a paint fight with his friend in the art room. The office paged me on an old intercom system that ran throughout the halls and had an outlet in the closet when they n
eeded something in particular, but by ten I was clear of the child-created havoc and dealing with the standard human havoc, emptying trash cans, sweeping floors and halls, and generally cleaning up. As I did, going from classroom to classroom to take care of any full trash cans, I kept an eye out for Bigfoot Irwin.

  I spotted him by lunchtime, and I took my meal at a table set aside for faculty and staff in one corner of the cafeteria as the kids ate.

  Bigfoot Irwin was one of the tallest boys in sight, and he hadn’t even hit puberty yet. He was all skin and bones—and I recognized something else about him at once. He was a loner.

  He didn’t look like an unpleasant kid or anything, but he carried himself in a fashion that suggested that he was apart from the other children; not aloof, simply separate. His expression was distracted, and his mind was clearly a million miles away. He had a double-sized lunch and a paperback book crowding his tray, and he headed for one end of a lunch table. He sat down, opened the book with one hand, and started eating with the other, reading as he went.

  The trouble seemed obvious. A group of five or six boys occupied the other end of his lunch table, and they leaned their heads closer together and started muttering to one another and casting covert glances at Irwin.

  I winced. I knew where this was going. I’d seen it before, when it had been me with the book and the lunch tray.

  Two of the boys stood up, and they looked enough alike to make me think that they either had been born very close together or else were fraternal twins. They both had messy, sandy brown hair, long, narrow faces, and pointed chins. They looked like they might have been a year or two ahead of Irwin, though they were both shorter than the lanky boy.

  They split, moving down either side of the table toward Irwin, their footsteps silent. I hunched my shoulders and watched them out of the corner of my eye. Whatever they were up to, it wouldn’t be lethal, not right here in front of half the school, and it might be possible to learn something about the pair by watching them in action.

  They moved together, though not perfectly in synch. It reminded me of a movie I’d seen in high school about juvenile lions learning to hunt together. One of the kids, wearing a black baseball cap, leaned over the table and casually swatted the book out of Irwin’s hands. Irwin started and turned toward him, lifting his hands into a vague, confused-looking defensive posture.

  As he did, the second kid, in a red sweatshirt, casually drove a finger down onto the edge of Irwin’s dining tray. It flipped up, spilling food and drink all over Irwin.

  A bowl broke, silverware rattled, and the whole tray clattered down. Irwin sat there looking stunned while the two bullies cruised right on by, as casual as can be. They were already fifteen feet away when the other children in the dining hall had zeroed in on the sound and reacted to the mess with a round of applause and catcalls.

  “Pounder!” snarled a voice, and I looked up to see a man in a white visor, sweatpants, and a T-shirt come marching in from the hallway outside the cafeteria. “Pounder, what is this mess?”

  Irwin blinked owlishly at the barrel-chested man and shook his head. “I …” He glanced after the two retreating bullies and then around the cafeteria. “I guess … I accidentally knocked my tray over, Coach Pete.”

  Coach Pete scowled and folded his arms. “If this was the first time this had happened, I wouldn’t think anything of it. But how many times has your tray ended up on the floor, Pounder?”

  Irwin looked down. “This would be five, sir.”

  “Yes it would,” said Coach Pete. He picked up the paperback Irwin had been reading. “If your head wasn’t in these trashy science fiction books all the time, maybe you’d be able to feed yourself without making a mess.”

  “Yes, sir,” Irwin said.

  “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” Coach Pete said, looking at the book. “That’s stupid. You can’t hitchhike onto a spaceship.”

  “No, sir,” Irwin said.

  “Detention,” Coach Pete said. “Report to me after school.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Coach Pete slapped the paperback against his leg, scowled at Irwin—and then abruptly looked up at me. “What?” he demanded.

  “I was just wondering. You don’t, by any chance, have a Vogon in your family tree?”

  Coach Pete eyed me, his chest swelling in what an anthropologist might call a threat display. It might have been impressive if I hadn’t been talking to River Shoulders the night before. “That a joke?”

  “That depends on how much poetry you write,” I said.

  At this Coach Pete looked confused. He clearly didn’t like feeling that way, which seemed a shame, since I suspected he spent a lot of time doing it. Irwin’s eyes widened and he darted a quick look at me. His mouth twitched, but the kid kept himself from smiling or laughing—which was fairly impressive in a boy his age.

  Coach Pete glowered at me, pointed a finger as if it might have been a gun, and said, “You tend to your own business.”

  I held up both hands in a gesture of mild acceptance. I rolled my eyes as soon as Coach Pete turned his back, drawing another quiver of restraint from Irwin.

  “Pick this up,” Coach Pete said to Irwin, and gestured at the spilled lunch on the floor. Then he turned and stomped away, taking Irwin’s paperback with him. The two kids who had been giving Irwin grief had made their way back to their original seats, meanwhile, and were at the far end of the table, looking smug.

  I pushed my lunch away and got up from the table. I went over to Irwin’s side and knelt down to help him clean up his mess. I picked up the tray, slid it to a point between us, and said, “Just stack it up here.”

  Irwin gave me a quick, shy glance from beneath his mussed hair, and started plucking up fallen bits of lunch. His hands were almost comically large compared to the rest of him, but his fingers were quick and dexterous. After a few seconds he asked, “You’ve read the Hitchhiker’s Guide?”

  “Forty-two times,” I said.

  He smiled and then ducked his head again. “No one else here likes it.”

  “Well, it’s not for everyone, is it?” I asked. “Personally, I’ve always wondered if Adams might not be a front man for a particularly talented dolphin. Which I think would make the book loads funnier.”

  Irwin let out a quick bark of laughter and then hunched his shoulders and kept cleaning up. His shoulders shook.

  “Those two boys give you trouble a lot?” I asked.

  Irwin’s hands stopped moving for a second. Then he started up again. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I’ve been you before,” I said. “The kid who liked reading books about aliens and goblins and knights and explorers at lunch, and in class, and during recess. I didn’t care much about sports. And I got picked on a lot.”

  “They don’t pick on me,” Irwin said quickly. “It’s just … just what guys do. They give me a hard time. It’s in fun.”

  “And it doesn’t make you angry,” I said. “Not even a little.”

  His hands slowed down, and his face turned thoughtful. “Sometimes,” he said quietly. “When they spoil my broccoli.”

  I blinked. “Broccoli?”

  “I love broccoli,” Irwin said, looking up at me, his expression serious.

  “Kid,” I said, smiling, “no one loves broccoli. No one even likes broccoli. All the grown-ups just agree to lie about it so that we can make kids eat it, in vengeance for what our parents did to us.”

  “Well, I love broccoli,” Irwin said, his jaw set.

  “Hunh,” I said. “Guess I’ve seen something new today.” We finished and I said, “Go get some more lunch. I’ll take care of this.”

  “Thank you,” he said soberly. “Um, Norm.”

  I grunted, nodded to him, tossed the dropped food, and returned the tray. Then I sat back down at the corner table with my lunch and watched Irwin and his tormentors from the corner of my eye. The two bullies never took their eyes off Irwin, even while talking and joking with their group.<
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  I recognized that behavior, though I’d never seen it in a child before; only in hunting cats, vampires, and sundry monsters.

  The two kids were predators.

  Young and inexperienced, maybe. But predators.

  For the first time, I thought that Bigfoot Irwin might be in real trouble.

  I went back to my own tray and wolfed down the “food” on it. I wanted to keep a closer eye on Irwin.

  Being a wizard is all about being prepared. Well, that and magic, obviously. While I could do a few things in a hurry, most magic takes long moments or hours to arrange, and that means you have to know what’s coming. I’d brought a few things with me, but I needed more information before I could act decisively on the kid’s behalf.

  I kept track of Irwin after he left the cafeteria. It wasn’t hard. His face was down, his eyes on his book, and even though he was one of the younger kids in the school, he stood out, tall and gangly. I contrived to go past his classroom several times in the next hour. It was trig, which I knew, except I’d been doing it in high school.

  Irwin was the youngest kid in the class. He was also evidently the smartest. He never looked up from his book. Several times the teacher tried to catch him out, asking him questions. Irwin put his finger on the place in his book, glanced up at the blackboard, and answered them with barely a pause. I found myself grinning.

  Next I tracked down Irwin’s tormentors. They weren’t hard to find, either, since they both sat in the chairs closest to the exit, as though they couldn’t wait to go off and be delinquent the instant school was out. They sat in class with impatient, sullen expressions. They looked like they were in the grip of agonizing boredom, but they didn’t seem to be preparing to murder a teacher or anything.

  I had a hunch that something about Irwin was drawing a predatory reaction from those two kids. And Coach Vogon had arrived on the scene pretty damned quickly—too much so for coincidence, maybe.

  “Maybe Bigfoot Irwin isn’t the only scion at this school,” I muttered to myself.

  And maybe I wasn’t the only one looking out for the interests of a child born with one foot in this world and one in another.