Lizard Music (8 page)

“Sure,” I said.

“See you then. By the way, don’t miss the late movie—it’s a good one.” He was gone.

I checked the TV listings. The late movie was
Invasion of the Fat Men
. It did sound interesting. The bell rang again. It was Charlie.

“I almost forgot to tell you—bring a bathing suit, and a big plastic garbage bag, and some strong twine.” Then he was off again.

Bathing suit? Garbage bag? Twine? I didn’t understand any of this. I sat down again. The Roger Mudd show had already started. My pizza was cooling on the kitchen table. You can never trust a pizza until it is really good and cold. A pizza that only seems warm to the touch can still give a serious pizza burn. Hot pockets of molten cheese are lurking under the surface. The smart way to eat a pizza is to give it at least twenty minutes to cool off before you put your teeth into it. Some people never learn this. My sister, Leslie, for example—there’s no point in someone like her eating a pizza, because she’s always in pain after the first bite.

Roger Mudd was talking about the President—he had a cold, and had decided to stay indoors. I went to test my pizza. It seemed okay. Roger said that they were going to bring back the two-dollar bill. A poor news day, obviously. Sometimes they really have to stretch to fill up a half hour. Walter is really good at that. I remember when those guys went to the moon, Walter could talk for half an hour about nothing. I really miss him sometimes when he’s on vacation.

The news ended. I ate my pizza and watched a game show. It was the one where people get all dressed up in funny costumes and make fools of themselves. The ones in the funniest costumes get to be on the program and get asked easy questions, which half of them miss.

I rummaged around in the kitchen for some twine and a garbage bag. I found the things I needed and put them in a paper bag, along with some peanut butter sandwiches, and put the bag on the table near the front door, next to the stack of phony letters to Mom and Dad.

I got through another evening of prime-time television. I don’t know why all the good stuff isn’t on until late at night. I finished my model—all but the painting—and cleaned up the newspapers and stuff. I always paint models in the basement, because Mom says the smell of the paint lingers for days. I think it smells pretty good. I felt sort of bored and restless. I wanted the evening to be over so it would be night. I wanted it to be tomorrow so I could go with Charlie, wherever it was we were going.

Invasion of the Fat Men
was a good movie. In the movie, some scientists notice thousands of round things like meteorites descending to the earth, only they descend very slowly. People are watching through telescopes. As the round things get closer, people can see that they are not meteorites—they are fat men in sport coats, with checked trousers and two-tone shoes with rubber soles, and knitted neckties—and they are floating down to earth like big round snowflakes. There is a worldwide panic. It takes days for the fat men to float down.

When the fat men start alighting on earth, everyone has been a nervous wreck for days. Each fat man weighs about six hundred pounds, and there are millions and millions of them, so there’s no point in trying to resist them if they are unfriendly. The governments of the various countries just hope they can negotiate with them. All the presidents and kings and so forth are waiting for leaders of the fat men to contact them. They never do. They just start looking around for places to eat. They especially like hamburger stands and pizzerias and places like that. Most of the fat men from space go to California and New Jersey, because they have the most driveins, but the fat men are all over the world and still descending. It’s like a blizzard of fat men from space. No airplanes can fly because of the ones floating down, and no cars or trains or buses can go very far without getting snarled up in crowds of fat men from space strolling along eating Twinkies and chocolate Mallomars. The whole planet is covered with pizza crusts and hamburger wrappers. It is almost impossible to walk in the streets of the cities because of all the empty Dixie cups and crowds of fat men. The earth people can get nothing to eat but fruits and vegetables, lean meats and rye toast—the only things the fat men from space don’t eat. Civilization as we know it is coming to an end.

In the Rocky Mountains, in a secret underground laboratory, scientists bake a huge jelly doughnut. They use the last fifty million tons of sugar on earth that the fat men have not taken control of. Then they catapult the jelly doughnut into outer space, beyond the earth’s gravitational pull. The fat men notice the jelly doughnut and take off after it. The last scene is Newark, New Jersey, covered with popsicle sticks and empty cellophane wrappers from Devil Dogs. The people come out of their houses and watch the last of the fat men floating upward. Then someone says, “Do you suppose they’re gone for good?” and someone else says, “We must always be prepared. Never again shall earth be taken by surprise without an arsenal of jelly doughnuts.”

A pretty good movie, I thought, if a little weird. The lizards appeared on schedule, but tonight the reception wasn’t very good. There were all those little dots jumping, like when there’s no signal coming from the station, and you could just make out the lizards behind the dots. The sound wasn’t too good either. It was just as well—I really needed to get to sleep at a decent hour if I wanted to be fresh for my adventure in the morning.

In the morning, I woke up early enough to take a shower. I hadn’t had time for one the past few days, and I was starting to get sort of grimy. I put on my bathing trunks under my clothes, picked up the bag with the lunch, twine, and so forth, picked up a forgery to mail, and went to the bus stop. I didn’t bother with breakfast, because I was planning to have something to eat at Shane Fergussen’s candy store.

I was sitting at the counter of Shane Fergussen’s candy store having a grape soda and a jelly doughnut for breakfast, when Charlie walked in.

“That looks good,” he said. “I’ll have the same, Shane.” I looked at my new $2.98 watch—it was 9:45. The bus from McDonaldsville had been crowded with commuters. “A grape soda and a jelly doughnut for my good friend Albrecht Dürer,” Shane Fergussen said.

“I thought your name was Charlie,” I said to the Chicken Man.

“—or Charlie for short,” Shane Fergussen said.

Charlie had a big bag with him. It was made out of some kind of rough cloth. “You’re a good swimmer, aren’t you Victor?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said.

“Do you like boats?”

I wasn’t sure—I had never actually been in a boat. I said I supposed I liked them.

“Fine, because we’re going for a boat ride today,” Charlie said. We paid Shane Fergussen and left the candy store. It was 9:58.

“What boat ride?” I asked.

“Out to the middle of Lake Mishagoo,” Charlie said.

Lake Mishagoo is this big lake that Hogboro is right next to. It’s not just some little pond. You can’t see to the other side of it, and it gets pretty choppy sometimes. Mishagoo is an Indian word. It means “lake-so-big-you-can’t-see-the-other-side.” That’s the sort of thing they teach us in school.

It was just a few blocks to the lake. Charlie was carrying the big bag over his shoulder. It looked heavy. He was wearing his hat, so I assumed that Claudia was under it. Charlie didn’t say anything; he just puffed along carrying the bag. When we came to an intersection, he’d set the bag down and wipe his face with a handkerchief.

“Do you want me to help you carry that?” I asked.

“The guide carries the bag,” Charlie said.

To get to the lake you cross a street, and there’s a little park. The park stretches along the lakefront, and in some places there are beaches. In between the beaches are stretches of rocks along the shore. We wound up on some rocks.

“The lake! The lake! We made it!” Charlie said. This struck me as weird—we’d only gone about eight blocks from Shane Fergussen’s candy store.

“Where’s the boat?” I asked.

“Wait,” Charlie said. Out of the big bag he dumped a big shapeless yellow thing. He spread the yellow thing out on the rocks. It was shaped sort of like a flat bathtub; it was made of something like rubber. Charlie found a valve and started blowing into it. It was one of those war surplus, blow-up life rafts. As it inflated, it looked more like an out-of-shape doughnut than a bathtub. The doughnut part was what got filled with air. There was a rubber floor, and Charlie dug a pair of collapsible oars out of the bag.

“Our yacht,” he said, when he had finished blowing it up.

“Where are we supposed to go in that thing?” I asked. I wasn’t too sure I wanted to ride in it. Charlie had set the little boat in the water, and it was bobbing around.

“Just hop in—I’ll tell you all about it on the way,” he said.

I hopped in. “Start telling me now, so we can go back to shore if I don’t like it.” Charlie had taken his hat off. Claudia was there all right. She spread her wings like the eagle on a half-dollar. Charlie was paddling with one of the collapsible oars.

“We are going to Invisible Island, over there!” He gestured with his oar.

“I don’t see any island,” I said.

“Hence the name,” Charlie said. “It’s there all right, and a very interesting island it is, too. Now grab an oar and do some work while I tell you about it. The guide doesn’t have to do
all
the work.” I grabbed an oar. Claudia had hopped off Charlie’s head and was standing in the front of the raft. She still had her wings spread out and her beak thrust forward, like a figurehead on an old-fashioned sailing ship.

“Invisible Island is a volcanic island, fairly large, that has broken off from the bottom and floats around in Lake Mishagoo,” Charlie said. “It has been floating around for millions of years, but it never floats any closer to shore than fifteen or twenty miles. Just now it is rather close to Hogboro.”

“Why is it called Invisible?” I asked.

“Because it is invisible,” Charlie said. “You should have known that.”

“I should have,” I said. “Let me put it another way. Why is it invisible?”

“I was just coming to that,” Charlie said. “It’s fairly complicated. You see, Invisible Island has the quality of bending rays, such as rays of light. You know that light rays tend to travel in more or less straight lines, but they can be bent. Well, certain islands bend them a lot. If you look straight at Invisible Island, you don’t see the island, you see
around
the island, and you think you’re looking directly at whatever’s on the other side. Also, if you sail straight at the island, you will simply sail around it, thinking you’re going in a straight line. It isn’t easy to explain—there’s a book called
Mount Analogue
by René Daumal that tells all about it. Just take my word for it. We are paddling directly toward a very large island, bigger than the city of Hogboro, and it’s only about twelve miles off.”

“If you can’t see it, how do you know for sure?” I asked.

“I don’t,” Charlie said, “but Claudia does. Chickens have an uncanny sense of direction. The only problem is getting them to take you where you want to go.”

“Then Claudia is—” I started to say.

“That’s right, Claudia is navigating,” Charlie said.

“But if the island bends things so they go around it—” I got stuck.

Charlie helped me out. “It’s a force field—like an invisible wall.”

“Well then, how are we going to get onto the island?” I asked.

“We have a long way to paddle yet,” Charlie said. “How about a canoeing song to pass the time?” With that he began to sing some song about bright paddles and good comrades and stuff like that. He kept it up for about an hour. Claudia continued to point the way with her beak. I was getting into the rhythm of the paddling. I liked the little rubber boat and the feeling of being out on the lake. The water made a nice sound slapping the sides of the boat. Charlie paddled with a long sweeping motion. After a while he laid his oar across the little boat. “Lunch-time,” he said. I looked at my watch, 11:43. I got out my peanut butter sandwiches. Charlie and Claudia had brought tuna fish.

I hadn’t forgotten my question. “How do we get past the force field, or invisible barrier, or whatever it is?” I asked.

Charlie swallowed a mouthful of tuna fish sandwich. “Very easy—we go under it. That’s what the waterproof bag is for. We put our clothes in there, tie the bag to an ankle, and just swim under. Once we’re inside the barrier, it’s just a few hundred feet to the shore.”

“What about Claudia?” I asked. “Will she swim under the barrier too?”

“No, unfortunately Claudia gets sinus headaches from swimming underwater. Claudia will stay with the boat and wait for us to come back,” Charlie said.

“The lizards live on the island, right?” I asked.

“Right,” Charlie said. “The reason you’ve been getting the TV pictures lately is that the island has floated very close to shore, and the weather has been just right. Their TV signal bounces off low clouds and hits McDonaldsville and Hogboro.”

“Doesn’t the force field stop the TV signal?” I asked.

“It’s all around them, not over them,” Charlie said. “If it were on top of them, they wouldn’t get any sunlight. That stands to reason, doesn’t it?” I agreed that it did. It had been some time since I had wondered if Charlie were crazy. I spent most of the next couple of hours doing that, as we paddled along, following Claudia’s beak. I noticed that she would change direction every now and then, and Charlie would change the direction of the boat. I decided to say nothing about it.

Claudia started clucking and jumping up and down. Charlie threw out the anchor, which consisted of a sort of cloth bucket on a long cord. “This is it,” he said. We were in the middle of nowhere—we couldn’t even see the shore. Once in a while, when the boat bobbed up, I could see the tallest buildings in Hogboro. The rest of the time there was nothing but water in every direction.

“Let’s get our clothes off and into the garbage bag,” Charlie said. Claudia, who had been clucking and jumping and pointing her wings in one direction, was now clucking and jumping and pointing in another.