Dodger for Sale (5 page)

I stepped out from behind a rock to face the sound of Dodger’s voice. “Wait a minute! What gold? What magic potions?”

Of course, he totally pegged me with a snowball, knocking me on my butt and giving me a massive nosebleed. The last thing I heard before I passed out was footsteps bounding toward me and Dodger shouting, “I win! I win! I—ooh, that doesn’t look good! Hey, Willie, guess what? Did you know blood makes blue snow look purple?”

I woke up flat on my back in the field, but all the snow was gone. Except for one last ball that Dodger had stuffed inside my hat to make an ice pack. He was holding the ice pack to the side of my nose with one hand, and arguing on a blue cell phone that he was holding in the other one.

I tried really hard not to gag on the mixture of blood and melting snow that was flowing down into my mouth. Dodger was having a
very
interesting conversation, and I didn’t want him to find out I was awake and stop talking. I could only hear his side of the discussion, with pauses in between, but it sounded like he was getting first aid tips—and talking about why Lasorda was selling the forest.

“Yes, I’m pressing the ice pack against his nose. Now what? Oh, he’s just going to wake up? Are you sure? Really? Dude, these humans sure are fragile!”

Then there was a pause as Dodger readjusted the ice pack. Suddenly I felt a push on my nose as Dodger responded to whatever he was hearing on the phone. It hurt.

“Wait, I can’t tell him that!” Dodger yelled into the phone. “He’ll think it’s, like, all his fault that the woods are being sold!”

“Well, we needed the disguise potion so I could go to school and be Willie!”

“YES, we needed the Tincture of Distraction, too. And the Essence of Belief. And the magic dust. So Willie could get elected president, of course!”

“And of
course
I knew the leprechauns would want to be paid. But the Great Lasorda didn’t tell me he didn’t have the gold to pay for them.”

“He said that?”

“He said
that
?”

“He said
THAT
? Dude, I swear, I had no idea. Man, Willie is going to be so sad if the Great Lasorda sells the woods. Maybe if I just go back to work for Lasorda, he might forget this whole thing. Or maybe he could, like, lend me to the leprechauns for a while. I mean, how long could it possibly take to work off a hundred thousand golden coins?”

Oh, no
, I thought. Dodger had worked for the Great Lasorda for thousands of years, until I had used a magical wish to ask for Dodger’s freedom. I didn’t want him to have to go back after all we had been through together. I sat up so suddenly that Dodger yanked his hand away from my nose and yelped. “Dodger,” I said, “you can’t go back to Lasorda. You just can’t!”

“But what about the forest? What about your big quest? We can’t just let the trees get chopped down and everything.”

“We’ll think of something. We always think of something. Right?”

Dodger gave me a crushing hug. Which made my nose start bleeding again. Meanwhile, Dodger’s phone fell on the frozen ground, and I could hear a faint voice coming from it:
Dodger, are you still there, present, accounted for?

“Dodger,” I said, “why didn’t you just tell me all this stuff? Why would Rodger know everything if
I
didn’t?” Rodger is Dodger’s brother, who still works for Lasorda. Rodger and Dodger look almost exactly alike, but you can tell who’s who when they speak. Rodger has a strange habit of talking in synonyms.

“Uh, can I call you back?” Dodger asked.

Sure, fine, A-OK, no problemo
, Rodger said.

Then Dodger hung up and looked at me. “Buddy,” he said, “I think I messed up.”

Then he explained everything to me. I had always thought Lasorda just made all of the magical potions Dodger had used in our adventures together, but apparently Lasorda had been buying them from a group of leprechauns that live in our forest. Dodger had been promising all along that he would pay Lasorda back, and now the leprechauns had started asking Lasorda for the gold.

Jeepers. This was a pretty complicated situation. “A hundred thousand gold pieces, huh?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Dodger replied. “Is that a lot?”

I sighed and patted him on the shoulder. My head hurt. “Let’s go home, okay?” I said. Then we trudged off through the woods, leaving a purple patch of blood in the blue snow.

“D
OES IT HURT A LOT?”
Lizzie asked me at lunch the next day.

My nose had swollen up overnight, and people had been asking about it all morning. At home, I had made up an elaborate excuse about a branch falling off a tree and hitting me, but at school I was just telling everyone I had “run into something.” Unfortunately, I had a feeling my parents and sister hadn’t believed the excuse about the branch—and the last thing I needed was to give Amy a reason to snoop around even more than usual.

“Only when I breathe,” I said.

“Ha-ha. So, Willie, what are we going to tell the student council today? Do we have a plan for saving the forest or not?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “Why don’t we tell them we’re working on it? That’s what mayors and governors always say when they don’t have a good answer.”

“All right. But we will have to find something useful to do really soon. Otherwise, Dodger and everything else that lives in the forest will be in real trouble.”

Everything else that lives in the forest?
I thought.
Hmmm
… Maybe I would be able to come up with a plan after all. I just needed a little more time to think.

After school, at student council, Lizzie told the group that she and I had been doing research in order to save the forest. Some of the younger kids looked kind of impressed, but one third grader said, “Research? Isn’t that, like, reading? How is reading stuff going to help a forest?”

“Research isn’t just reading,” I said. “Sometimes you have to do science experiments, or go searching for information on the computer.”

“And sometimes you even have to find information out in the world,” Lizzie added.

“Like what?” Beeks said.

“Like the name of the person who’s selling the land,” Lizzie fired back.

“So, how does that matter?” Craig Flynn asked.

“Well, maybe we could convince the person not to sell the property,” Lizzie said.

“Or maybe we could find someone to buy the woods who would promise not to knock them down,” I added.

“Oh, really?” Beeks said. “Who in the world would want to do that? What good are a bunch of stupid old trees, anyway? It’s not like the trees
do
anything.”

Mrs. Starsky put her hand on Beeks’s shoulder and said, “A forest is more than a bunch of trees, James. It’s also a factory for making the oxygen we all breathe. Plus, it’s a home for thousands and thousands of different plants and animals.”

“Oh, and that’s another thing,” I said. “If we could find some kind of rare living thing in the forest, maybe we could convince the town that the woods have to be saved.”

“Good thinking, Willie,” Mrs. Starsky said.

Good thinking, Willie
, I could see Beeks mouthing with a smirk behind her back.

“Have you actually tried to find anything in there?” a fourth-grade girl asked.

“We went exploring in the woods yesterday, but we didn’t find anything that looked particularly rare,” Lizzie admitted.

“What if you had help?” a kindergartner asked. “My mom says I’m excellent at finding stuff. I mean, during the vacation, I found every single one of my Hanukkah presents. They were in my dad’s closet, behind his sneakers. That was a pretty good hiding place, because nobody wants to touch Dad’s sneakers, believe me. So anyway, I think I would be an excellent strange-creature hunter.”

All of the other little kids liked that. Instantly, we had a ton of volunteers to help us comb the forest for odd wildlife. Then Lizzie decided to sign kids up for other tasks, like writing letters to the town council and the newspapers, researching the history of the forest, and reading up on endangered local species. It was pretty cool. In about five minutes, we went from having to do everything all by ourselves to having our own workforce. In fact, the sign-ups went so well that soon there were only two people who hadn’t volunteered: James Beeks and Craig Flynn.

Lizzie went to work. “You know, James,” she said, “what we need now is someone who could be in charge of working with the town government on this. You’d be great for that job, with all of your political experience and all. Plus, I think you could really impress a lot of people by saving the forest. You’d be showing everyone what a true leader you are.”

“Oh, yeah? Like who?”

“Like … I don’t know … your dad?” Ooh, that was a good one. We knew from experience that James had a major issue with trying to impress his father.

“My dad has more important things to worry about than a bunch of trees.”

“Yes, but he would definitely be happy to see you taking charge of a major political operation … working with the town council and the mayor … getting big things done. Unless you’d rather have me give the job to someone else. I’d imagine there are plenty of fourth graders who could use this when they run for student council president next year.”

Beeks whispered a few words to Craig Flynn, who whispered back. They seemed to be arguing for a minute or so, but then they both nodded. “Fine,” James said. “We’ll do it. I’ll write the letters and make the phone calls, and Craig here can, um, bake cookies for the next town council meeting.”

“Bake
cookies
?” Craig growled. “I’m too tough to bake cookies.”

“You know,” Lizzie said, “whoever bakes the cookies gets to eat as many as he wants when they’re done.”

“Oh, fine,” Craig said. “But don’t expect me to wear an apron or anything.”

Beeks smirked at him. “Nah. But maybe one of those cool white hats with the poofy part on top?”

And that was that. It looked like we had the student council on board in our fight to save the woods. I told all of the kids who were doing research that they should come to our next meeting with information, and then I adjourned the meeting. That means I got to bang the gavel again, which wasn’t as much fun as usual because the vibration running up my arm made my nose hurt.

Lizzie and I spent the week between meetings reading up on endangered and threatened animals in our state, hanging out with Dodger, and trying to keep Amy from driving us totally nuts. She followed us everywhere with lists of animals, names of wildlife protection organizations, and of course her trusty Sherlock Holmes tools. If you’ve never been stalked by a second grader who carries a magnifying glass and wears a checkered hat with earflaps, you just don’t know what you’re missing.

And you probably want to keep it that way.

Because Amy was around all the time, Dodger had to lay low. From what I could tell, he spent a lot of time in his lamp. From the occasional snippets of the Chimptopian national anthem that floated from the lamp at odd hours, I got the feeling he was also on the phone a lot. I hoped he was arguing with the Great Lasorda. I mean, I knew Lasorda was annoying and pushy, but I hadn’t thought he was the kind of guy who would sell the whole forest for so little reason.

Unless Lasorda was trying to threaten Dodger into going back to work for him. Or maybe he wanted to sell the forest so he could pay the leprechauns back, but take away their homes at the same time. That would be really, really sneaky. Jeepers. As soon as money is involved, life gets really complicated.

The day of the next meeting rolled around, and Lizzie and I decided to meet early before school to make one last check for forest creatures. Amy had told us that sometimes different species are visible at different times of day, and all of our other exploration visits had been in the afternoons. Lizzie had a list of animals to look for, along with a picture of each. There was a tiny mammal called the Least Shrew that looked kind of like a mouse with a long, pointy nose, a reptile called the Bog Turtle, and an amphibian called the Spotted Salamander. There was even something called a Flying Squirrel, which sounded kind of alarming. I didn’t mention it to Lizzie, but I had a feeling I might have to run away and hide if I saw one of those coming at me.

We were just about to step off the sidewalk and into the forest when Amy came bounding around the corner. “Can I go with you guys? Huh? Huh? I promise I won’t bother you at all. I’ll just help you look. I mean, six eyes are better than four, right? Unless your strangely invisible companion is meeting you here, too, in which case eight eyes are better than six.”

The worst thing about Amy’s constant snooping is how smart she is. Even though she couldn’t see Dodger, she somehow seemed to know that Lizzie and I had an unseen friend. Once she had even asked us whether we were hanging out with a blue orangutan, and I denied it. Which wasn’t exactly lying, since Dodger is a chimpanzee. But anyway, we couldn’t possibly bring her into the woods with us. What if she somehow found the Field of Dreams? Or spotted a leprechaun? Or kept up her nonstop talking and drove every animal in the forest into hiding?

“Amy, please go home,” I said. I really didn’t want to be mean, but there was just no way I was taking her in there.

“No,” she said. “We’re already halfway to school, and I don’t want to go home and take the bus. Plus, you need me.”

“Yeah, right,” I said.

“You totally do. Watch, I’ll ask you some questions to prove it. Where in the forest would you look for a Least Shrew?”

“Ummm …”

“See, told ya. And where would you find a Bog Turtle?”

“Uh, in a bog?”

“And what, exactly, is a bog?”

“I don’t know. Maybe we’ll just look for the turtle, and wherever we find it, that’s a bog.”

“All right, I just have one more question: Who bought the forest?”

“What are you talking about?” Lizzie and I both asked at once.

“I’m talking about
that
!” Amy exclaimed. She was pointing to the
FOR SALE
sign at the edge of the sidewalk. Someone had stapled a big red banner to the bottom, with just one word on it: