Freak the Mighty

by Rodman Philbrick

  So mostly I just vegetate in the basement and pick my navel, to quote Grim, Mr. Belly Button Lint himself.

  Freak changes all that. Each and every morning the little dude humps himself over and he bangs on the bulkhead, wonka-wonka-wonka, he may be small but he sure is noisy. “Get outta bed, you lazy beast! There are fair maidens to rescue! Dragons to slay!” which is what he says every single morning, exactly the same thing, until it’s like he’s this alarm clock and as soon as I hear the wonka-wonka-wonka of him beating the bulkhead, I know what’s coming next: fair maidens and dragons, and Freak with that wake-up-the-world grin of his, going, “Hurry up with the cereal, how can you eat that much, you big ox, come on, let’s do something,” he’s so full of eveready energy you can practically hear his brain humming, and he never can sit still.

  “Ants in the pants,” I say one morning when he’s ready to yank the cereal bowl off the table, he’s in such a hurry to do something, and he goes, “What?” and I go, “You must have ants in your pants,” and he gets this funny look and he goes, “That’s what the Fair Gwen always says, did she tell you to say that?” and I shake my head and finish the cereal real slow and Freak goes, “For your information there are two thousand two hundred and forty-seven known subspecies of hymenopteran insects, Latin name Formicidae, and none of them are in my pants.”

  Which cracks me up, even though I don’t understand a word he’s saying.

  “I propose a quest,” he says. “We shall journey far to the East and see what lies there.”

  By now I know what a quest is because Freak has explained the whole deal, how it started with King Arthur trying to keep all his knights busy by making them do things that proved how strong and brave and smart they were, or sometimes how totally numb, because how else can you explain dudes running around inside big clunky tin cans and praying all the time? Which I don’t mention to Freak because he’s very sensitive about knights and quests and secret meanings. Like how a dragon isn’t really just a big slimy fire-breathing monster, it’s a symbol of nature or something.

  “A dragon is fear of the natural world,” Freak says. “An archetype of the unknown.”

  I go, “What’s an archy-type?” and Freak sighs and shakes his head and reaches into his knapsack for his dictionary.

  This is true. He really does keep a dictionary in his knapsack, it’s his favorite book, and he pulls it out like Arnold Schwarzenegger pulling out a machine gun or something, that’s the fierce look he gets with a book in his hands.

  “Go on,” he says, making me take the book, “look it up.” And now I wish I hadn’t said anything about this archetype dude because I hate looking up stuff in his stupid dictionary.

  “Start with A,” he says.

  “I know that.”

  “A-R,” he says. “Just go along the A’s until you come to A-R.”

  Yeah, right. Easy for a genius to use the dictionary, since he already knows how to spell the words. And R’s never look like backward E’s to Freak, which is the way they look to me sometimes, unless I really squint and think about it.

  “Careful,” he says. “You’ll bite off your tongue and then we’ll have to waste the day at the emergency room, getting it reattached. Microsurgery is such a bore, didn’t anybody ever tell you that?”

  “Huh?” I say, but I do close my mouth so my tongue doesn’t stick out. I’m still looking in the dictionary for “archetype” and I’m looking for words that are underlined with red ink, because that’s what Freak does the first time he looks up a word, he makes a line under it, and you’d be amazed how many are underlined, there are whole pages like that, where he’s looked up every single word.

  Finally he spells out all the letters for me, and I find the stupid word.

  “There’s nothing about dragons here,” I say, squinting hard at the stuff under the word. “It just says ‘pattern.’ So what is it, a sewing type of thing?”

  Freak has this disgusted look and he takes the dictionary and he goes, “You’re hopeless. Pattern is the first definition. I was referring to the second definition, which is much more interesting. ‘A universal symbol or idea in the psyche, expressed in dreams or dreamlike images.’”

  Like that helps, right? I’m getting bored with the dictionary, so I pretend to understand and Freak finally gives up and he shakes his head and goes, “I don’t know why I bother. Dinosaurs had brains the size of peanuts and they ruled the earth for a hundred million years.”

  So out we go. It’s a habit by now, Freak riding up high on my shoulders and using his little feet to steer me if I forget where we’re going. Not that we always know. Freak likes to make things up as he goes along. You think you’re just walking down this ordinary sidewalk and really you’re crossing this dangerous bridge, the kind made of vines that hangs high up in the air over a deep canyon, and when Freak makes it up it seems so real, you’re afraid to look down or you’ll get dizzy and fall off the sidewalk.

  “Don’t ever look down,” he says. “Just keep your eyes closed.” And then he puts his hands over my eyes and tells me to keep walking straight. “One foot,” he says. “Now the next.”

  I’m fighting to keep my balance, and his hands are making me dizzy.

  “One more step,” Freak says. “Steady. Steady. Now lift up your hoof — I mean your foot. There, we made it!” And he takes his hands away and I see we’ve crossed the street.

  “Go East,” he says when I get to the end of the block. “That way, mighty steed! Yonder lies the East!”

  I go, “How do you know which way is East?” And then something is glinting in my eye and Freak is showing me this little compass.

  “The Official Cub Scout Compass?”

  “That’s a clever disguise so you don’t know how valuable it is,” he says. “This is actually a rare and valuable artifact passed down for generations. Lancelot used it, so did Sir Gawain, and for a time the Black Knight kept it on a chain next to his heart.”

  I go, “So the Black Knight was a Cub Scout, huh?” and Freak laughs and says, “That way. We go to the East on a secret mission.”

  We walk for miles. Way beyond the pond and the playground and the school, and for a while we’re going through this really ritzy neighborhood of big white houses and blue swimming pools. Freak keeps saying stuff like, “That’s the Castle of Avarice,” and, “Yonder lies the Bloated Moat,” and when we go under trees he’ll say, “Proceed with caution,” or, “All clear,” depending on how low the branches come down.

  “We must be East,” I say. “Have we got to yonder yet?” because my stupid feet are getting sore, but Freak pats me on the head and says, “Yonder always lies over the next horizon. You could look it up if you don’t believe me.”

  “Oh, I believe you.”

  On and on, block after block, through all these neighborhoods that Freak says are really secret kingdoms. I’ll bet we’ve gone ten miles at least, because my legs think it’s a hundred, and even as light as Freak is, he’s starting to feel heavy.

  “We’re almost there,” he says. “Turn at the end of the block.”

  “Where is it we’re going?”

  “You’ll see,” he says, “and you will be amazed.”

  Ahead there’s this busy intersection, cars whizzing by, and it all seems sort of familiar.

  “Can we stop for a Coke?” I say. “Grim gave me a dollar, big deal, but we can split it.”

  Freak goes, “Then that shall be your reward, faithful steed — tinted sucrose and bubbles of air. Onward! Onward to the Fortress!”

  It turns out the Fortress looks like part of a hospital, which it is. The regular hospital is around in front and there’s this new building added on out back. MEDICAL RESEARCH, it says over the door, and I know because I made Freak spell it out.

  “Does that mean they do experiments and stuff?”

  Freak says, “Indeed they do.”

  “What kind of experiments?” I ask.

  “Can you keep a secret?” he says. “Do yo
u swear on your honor?”

  “Sure. On my honor.”

  Freak is really excited, he’s shifting around on my shoulders so much, I’m afraid he’ll fall off. “That’s not good enough,” he says. “You need to swear by blood.”

  “You mean like cut myself?”

  “Well, no,” he says, and you can tell he’s thinking about it real hard. “An actual incision is not necessary. It’s the same thing if you just spit on your hand.”

  “Huh?”

  “Saliva is like blood without the red,” he says. “Do as I say, spit in your hand.”

  So I spit in my hand, just a little drop, but Freak says it doesn’t matter how much, a single molecule would work, because it’s the principle of the thing. “Now put your hand over your heart,” he says.

  I put my hand over my heart.

  “Now swear on your heart that the data you are about to receive will be divulged to no one.”

  “I swear.”

  Freak bends down and he’s got his hand cupped around my ear and he’s whispering: “Inside the research building is a secret laboratory called The Experimental Bionics Unit. The unit’s mission is to develop a new form of bionic robot for human modification.”

  “What’s that?” I say.

  “Shhh! Speak of this to no one, but at some future time as yet undetermined, I will enter that lab and become the first bionically improved human.”

  “I still don’t know what it means,” I say. “Bionics. And please don’t make me look it up in the dictionary.”

  “Bionics,” Freak says. “That’s the science of designing replacement parts for the human body.”

  “You mean like mechanical arms and legs?”

  “That’s ancient history,” Freak says. “The Bionics Unit is building a whole new body just my size.”

  “Yeah? What’ll it look like? A robot?”

  “A human robot,” Freak says. “Also it will look a lot like me, only enlarged and improved.”

  “Yeah, right,” I say. “Let’s go home, my feet are tired.”

  Freak tugs hard at my hair. “True!” he says, with his voice getting high and excited. “I’ve been in there, in the special unit! I have to go every few months for tests. They’ve taken my measurements, analyzed my blood and metabolic rates. They’ve monitored my cardiac rhythms and my respiratory functions. I’ve already been X-rayed and CAT-scanned and sonogrammed. They’re fitting me for a bionic transplant, I’m going to be the first.”

  I can tell he really means it. This isn’t a pretend quest, or making houses into castles or swimming pools into moats. This is why we came here, so Freak could show me where he’s been. The place is important to him. I understand this much, even if I still don’t understand about bionics or what it means to be a human robot.

  “Will it hurt?” I ask. “Getting your parts replaced?”

  Freak doesn’t answer for a while and then he says in his stern, smart voice, “Sure it will hurt. But so what? Pain is just a state of mind. You can think your way out of anything, even pain.”

  I’m pretty worried about the whole deal, and I go, “But why do you want to be the first? Can’t someone else be first? Isn’t it dangerous?”

  “Life is dangerous,” Freak says, and you can tell he’s thought a lot about this. After a while he kicks me with his little feet and says, “Home.”

  One thing that happened over the summer, I grew even more.

  Grim takes a look at me one day and he goes, “All that walking you do, it must be stretching out your legs. And carrying poor Kevin around, that seems to be putting real muscle on you.”

  “He’s not that heavy. And anyhow it’s not fair everybody always says ‘Poor Kevin,’ just because he didn’t grow.”

  Grim gives me this long, sorrowful look and then he clears his throat and says, “You’re quite right, he is a rather remarkable boy.”

  “He’s memorized almost the whole dictionary. You can ask him anything and he knows what it means.”

  “You don’t say,” Grim says, and he has this smug look like maybe Freak is lying and a total goon like me would never get it, and I want to tell him he’s wrong about Freak and the dictionary, but instead I just shut my face and go down under.

  Grim, he’s okay sometimes, like when Tony D. chased us into the pond, but most of the time he thinks he knows everything, which he doesn’t. And if you don’t believe me, look under “grim” in the dictionary, it sure doesn’t say “a smart grown-up.” No way.

  So I’m hanging out down under, listening to some of my thrash tapes on the fake Walkman I got last Christmas, when Freak pops up on the side of my bed. Because of the headphones and the volume being pumped up to mega-decibel I never hear him come in, he’s just suddenly there, like whoa! and I’ll bet I jumped about a foot.

  Freak rolls his eyes and goes, “Ah, music, how it calms the savage beast.”

  “How’d you get here?”

  “Would you believe teleportation? No? Then I came down through the bulkhead door like always. And like always, I have a quest in mind.”

  Right away I go, “My feet hurt.”

  “We don’t have to leave the neighborhood.”

  “Cool. What kind of quest is this?”

  Freak grins. “A treasure hunt. Except we don’t really have to hunt because I already know where the treasure is.”

  “Where?”

  “Underground,” he says. “Specifically, in the sewer.”

  “Yeah, right,” I say and sit back down on the bed. Freak is looking at me sideways and I can tell he’s not telling me everything, which he almost never does, not all at once.

  “Truth,” he says. “The treasure is hidden in a storm drain. This has been confirmed by visual observation.”

  “Treasure in a storm drain? You mean like gold and diamonds kind of stuff?”

  “Possibly,” he says, acting mysterious. “Anything is possible.”

  The deal is, we have to wait until night, so no one can see us messing with the storm drain. Not just night, Freak says, we need to do it at exactly three in the morning.

  “Optimum darkness occurs at oh-three-hundred hours,” he says, looking at the new watch his mom gave him, the kind that tells you what time it is in Tokyo, just in case you’re wondering. “We must dress in black and cover our faces with soot.”

  For the next couple of hours we try to find soot, but it turns out you need a fireplace for soot, or at least a chimney, so Freak finally decides that my idea about using regular dirt will have to do.

  “I’ve got black dungarees,” I say, “but no black shirts. Can I just wear a dirty shirt?”

  Freak makes a face and says, “What a disgusting idea. Don’t worry about the shirt, I’ll get you one. Can you manage black socks?”

  You ever notice how long it takes for things to happen when you know they’re supposed to happen? My fake Walkman has a built-in alarm, and I set it for two in the morning and wear the headphones to bed, but before you can wake up you have to fall asleep, and I never do fall asleep because I keep waiting for the alarm to go off. Which is, I know, typical butthead behavior.

  I’m lying awake in the dark on a hot summer night and I’m thinking, Treasure in the sewer? What kind of quest is this, huh? Is Freak completely making this up or what?

  Meanwhile there’s this cricket making this creaky cricket noise that normally is okay, except when you’re trying to fall asleep then it’s not okay, and you want a big can of Raid, send it to Disney World or insect heaven or wherever it is that dead crickets go.

  Question: How come Freak knows about this stuff in the storm drain?

  Question: How come we have to put dirt on our faces?

  Question: How come three in the morning?

  Question: How long do crickets live?

  Finally I give up on the first three and work on the cricket problem, but the little critter is pretty clever, it stops cricketing whenever I get too close and I never do find it and squash it with my shoe, which
I swear I am ready to do, even if crickets are supposed to be harmless.

  And then after almost forever it gets to be two-thirty and I figure that’s close enough, I’ll go up and wait under Freak’s window like I promised.

  There’s no moon, the sky is dark and empty, and the back yards are so lonesome it feels creepy and exciting — the truth is, I’ve never been out alone at this time of night.

  I only fall down a couple of times, which isn’t bad considering how hard it is to see. When I get to Freak’s bedroom window, he’s waiting for me.

  “You sound like a car wreck,” he says. “Here, you better put on this shirt so you don’t glow in the dark.”

  Out of the window he hands me this silly-feeling shirt.

  “Hey wait a minute, this is your mom’s blouse!”

  “It’s black,” he says. “That’s what counts. The camouflage factor.”

  “Forget it,” I say and give him back the Fair Gwen’s blouse.

  Freak sighs. “Okay,” he says. “Roll around on the ground and darken yourself.”

  That’s easy, and better than wearing some dumb blouse. “What about you?” I ask, when I’m covered with dirt, enough so I want to sneeze.

  Freak goes, “Beware the Force, earthling,” and he stands up in the window and I can see he’s got a Darth Vader costume on, except he’s not wearing the mask part. He opens the window all the way and I lift him out and put him on my shoulders.

  He goes, “Pledge to me your fealty,” and I say, “Huh?” and he says, “Never mind, there’s no time to look up ‘fealty.’ Just promise you’ll do what I say.”

  “I promise.”

  “Go to the end of the block,” he orders. “Attempt to conceal us in the shadows.”

  That’s easy, because the street is one big shadow. It’s so dark I can hardly see my feet, or maybe I got some dirt in my eyes, but the point is no one sees us because there’s no one to see us. You’d never know anybody lived here, let alone a whole blockful of people, it’s like we’re on an empty planet or something.