To Catch a Mermaid (2 page)

B
reakfast!” Halvor yelled from downstairs.

Halvor served breakfast in the Broom household at 7:10 each morning. Boom bumped on his bottom down the steep staircase that led to the first floor — an uncomfortable yet efficient way to travel. The usual odors floated from the kitchen — Halvor’s thick coffee that constantly percolated on the back burner of the potbelly stove, toasted rye bread, dark and crunchy and smothered in marmalade, and frying fish fillets. Never, ever, did Halvor make a normal breakfast. Boom longed for the cereal that was shaped like stars and drizzled with white frosting. Or the kind with tiny marshmallows that floated and turned the milk pale green. Halvor didn’t cook bacon or eggs or pancakes or oatmeal, like the rest of the world. Every morning he made fish and rye toast and coffee.

“Sit down,” Halvor barked as Boom entered. “Your fish is getting cold.”

Halvor was the family cook, hired right after Mrs. Broom’s disappearance. Mr. Broom had popped his head out of the attic to interview and hire Halvor. There wasn’t enough money to pay a salary, so in exchange for cooking the children’s meals, Halvor got a room in the garage, rent-free.

He was an old man, though Boom didn’t know how old. About grandfather age. He had a big belly that sometimes didn’t stay inside his shirt. He looked pregnant, but Boom knew that was impossible for males unless one were a sea horse. Halvor had a bald head, a bushy beard, hair growing out of his nose, and a slight Norwegian accent. “Where’s Mertyle?” he asked.

“Here I am,” Mertyle announced, glancing at the kitchen clock. “Sorry I’m late.”

“You can bet that Erik the Red was never late for breakfast,” Halvor said, adjusting his horned Viking helmet. He wore the helmet while cooking, to protect his scalp from flying grease. “Unless he was pillaging, for sure.” Halvor mentioned Erik the Red at least ten times a day. He was a proud direct descendant of the dreaded Viking warrior and he belonged to a club called the Sons of the Vikings. They held meetings every Friday night.

“What’s wrong with you this morning?” Halvor asked Mertyle as he slid a golden fillet onto her plate. Boom picked at his fish fillet, pushing the tiny white bones aside. He was so tired of picking through bones. Waffles don’t have bones. Waffles don’t have skin, either.

“I’ve got spots,” Mertyle announced, lifting her pajama legs.

“Yah, I see. Spots. Okay, eat your fish.”

Halvor was no dummy, but he never said to Mertyle,
I know you are faking these spots
or
I know you really don’t have nostril fungus.
He just patted her on the head and let her stay home. Mr. Broom didn’t seem to care either.

“Poor little Mertyle,” he’d say through the attic keyhole. “You certainly can’t go to school if you’ve got an ingrown toe hair. Stay inside, where it’s safe. Stay away from the wind. That twister will be back, mark my words.”

“Why don’t you make her go to school?” Boom complained to Halvor that morning. He pulled two white feathers from his hair, escapees from his goose-down quilt. Boom rarely brushed his hair, and thus, bits of stuff could often be found in it. His hair grew straight up, like brown grass. “She’s gonna flunk fourth grade.”

“She’s sick,” Halvor replied, putting two more slices of bread into the toaster. “She doesn’t feel well.” No one ever asked Boom if
he
felt well. No one ever asked how things were going at school, or if he needed any help with that huge report on nest-building techniques of red-throated sparrows. His mother would have asked. She would have helped him when he had tried to build a sample nest out of sawdust and spit.

“Mertyle’s nuts,” Boom muttered.

Halvor dipped a piece of raw fish into some batter and tossed it into the frying pan. “Are you a doctor?” he asked Boom.

“Well, no,” Boom replied, scraping chunks of marmalade off his toast. “But I can tell when someone’s nuts.” Boom had concluded that everyone in his family, except him, was nuts. He had even written a paper about it, but the teacher had given him a C minus with the comment, in red ink, that it wasn’t nice to call other people crazy.

“You should keep your nose out of other people’s business,” Halvor advised, wiping his hands on his checkered apron. “If someone had told Erik the Red he was nuts, he would have hacked off that person’s head, for sure.”

Mertyle glared at Boom, angered by his disloyalty, but he believed he had only spoken the truth. It did absolutely no good to sit around the house and wait for someone to return who was never coming back. Besides, schoolwork had always been easy for Mertyle. She had never struggled with reading the way Boom had. She had the kind of brain that could get a scholarship for college, but no college would accept her if she flunked the fourth grade! Or if her brain turned to Jell-O from watching game shows all day long.

The coffee percolator whistled and gurgled as Halvor sharpened his fish-gutting knife against a special stone. Boom ate his meal as best he could, deboning and scraping and picking until he managed to find a few edible morsels. He needed energy for the tournament. He had made it to the final round because he was the best kicker at Fairweather Elementary.

Mertyle examined some toast crumbs with the magnifying glass. She carried it everywhere. Before being sucked away, Mrs. Broom had worked as a fingerprint expert, so the glass was an extra powerful lens. “Each crumb is like its own world,” Mertyle observed. “This one has a Grand Canyon, and this one has mountains.” She saw things through that glass that no one else could see. “This crumb has an entire aqueduct system.”

Yep. Completely crazy.

Boom loosened his bathrobe and wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead. While the rest of the house was ice-cold because there was no money for heat, the kitchen was balmy, thanks to the busy potbelly stove.

“You know, Halvor, on
Jeopardy!
last night . . .”

Boom groaned. Mertyle’s know-it-all voice was more grating than most know-it-all voices.

“. . . they had a category about Vikings.”

“Oh?” Halvor smiled proudly.

“Vikings didn’t actually wear horned helmets.”

Halvor’s face fell. “Of course they did.” He adjusted his helmet. “Everyone knows that, for sure.”

“No, they didn’t,” she insisted, moving her magnifying glass over a pile of fish bones. “It’s a myth. And the
Jeopardy!
people should know because they have a whole building full of researchers.”

Halvor folded his arms. He didn’t like it when anyone questioned his Viking knowledge. In fact, it made his lower lip tremble. He pointed to the counter where two books on Viking lore lay. “I read. I know. Those game show people don’t know because they aren’t direct Viking descendants. How else would Erik the Red protect his head from hot fish grease?” Before Mertyle could make a counterpoint, Halvor stuck a finger in the air. “That reminds me, we are almost out of fish.”

Could they be so lucky? Maybe that box of bow-tie pasta currently gathering dust in the pantry would find its way into a saucepan that night.

But Halvor pulled a ten-dollar bill out of the cookie jar and shoved it into Boom’s hand. “After school, stop at the market and buy some fish.”

That’s right. Send the errand boy, as usual. Mertyle had two perfectly good spot-covered legs, but she never had to go to the market to buy fish, or go to the drugstore to buy Halvor’s hemorrhoid cream.

“Why can’t I get something else?” Boom asked. “How about hamburger?”

“Hamburger will make you constipated. Get fish. Fresh fish. Get it right off the boat if you can. I don’t want fish that’s been sitting around on the dock. And I don’t want anything too expensive, because we’re running out of money. If your father doesn’t start painting again, we’re going to have to sell this house, for sure.”

“We can’t sell the house,” Mertyle cried, dropping the magnifying glass onto her pile of crumbs. “How will Mother find us if we move?”

Silence fell over the kitchen. Even the coffee percolator stalled.

Halvor put his wide, speckled hand over Mertyle’s spotted hand and gently squeezed. Poor Mertyle. When would she be able to face the truth?

The kitchen clock read 7:40. School started at eight. Boom asked to be excused, then ran upstairs to dress. He didn’t want to be late for school. The last time he was late, Principal Prunewallop took away his lunch recess privileges, and that couldn’t happen today because the tournament was scheduled for lunch recess.

Back downstairs, Boom put on his thin jacket. It provided little protection from the winter winds, but he owned nothing better. “Bring home Mertyle’s homework so she’ll get smart and her brain will stop farting,” Halvor told him, handing over a sack lunch that smelled fishy, as it always did. Boom stuffed the lunch into his backpack, eager to be on his way. “Don’t forget fresh fish,” Halvor yelled after him.

“Okay, okay,” Boom called back. But under his breath he made a wish that there would be no fish at the dock so he could bring home something else.

Chapter Three:

Winger

B
oom stepped off the sagging front porch and hurried across the big dirt circle. Fog hovered above the trees. The cold March air stung his nostrils. He kicked the walkway gate with his foot. It swung open, hanging from a single rusty hinge. He kicked it again. Then he stomped a dande-lion seed ball with his secondhand sneaker. No one else had dandelion seed balls in their yard in March. Even though it was winter and most plants slept beneath the cold ground, dandelions grew between the cracks in the paved walk way that led from Boom’s house to the street. In fact, dandelions suffocated the lawn, filled the forgotten window boxes, and had even taken root in the mailbox.

The yellow weeds had appeared right after the twister. Boom figured the seeds had been kidnapped by the swirling wind and deposited in their yard — come from some distant land where dandelions grew all year long. All the hacking and pulling in the world couldn’t get rid of those stubborn transplants. It was bad enough having the smallest house on Fairweather Island, worse still to have one plagued by unsightly dandelions. Mertyle picked the ones that grew within arm’s reach of the front door and put them in empty marmalade jars. Close inspection almost always revealed dandelion seeds in Boom’s hair.

The only place the dandelions did not grow was in the big dirt circle.

Boom kicked the gate shut. It snapped free of the hinge and crashed onto the walkway. He shrugged his shoulders. It didn’t really matter since the entire place was falling apart. Paint peeled off the house, gutters dangled dangerously, and duct tape held three windows in place. No longer did cherry red geraniums line the walkway, or bluejays chatter around overflowing bird feeders. No longer did polka-dot skirts or lacy underpants hang from the clothesline. When people passed by the periwinkle blue house at the end of Prosperity Street, they often stopped to gawk and shake their heads.

“That’s the house where Mrs. Broom, a very nice person indeed, was sucked away by a tornado,” they’d say.

“How terribly sad.”

“Go away,” Boom would yell from his bedroom window. He hated people staring. He wanted to kick people who stared.

Boom stepped onto the sidewalk and proceeded to kick things all the way up Prosperity Street — rocks, a Styrofoam coffee cup, even a growling dog who bit at his shoelaces. Kicking was the only thing Boom had going for him. He wasn’t a genius, he wasn’t graced with dashing good looks or a magnetic personality. But Boomerang Winslow Broom had been born with a better-than-average right kicking foot, slightly larger than his left foot and slightly thicker. A thing of beauty.

He paid no attention to the scenery on either side of the street, for it was the same old street he had walked along his entire life. And because he had never lived in a smog-filled city or a featureless development, he did not fully appreciate the picturesque quality of the stone houses that he passed, each painted in soft colors like sea-foam green, glazed apricot, and banana cream yellow — like candy chips on cupcakes. Most of the houses on Fairweather Island were made of stone because it stood up to the winter winds and the salty spray.

“Hey, Boom.” His best friend, Winger, ran from his house and joined Boom on the sidewalk. Winger’s full name was Victor Emmanuel Wingingham, so obviously he preferred Winger.

He handed Boom a Pop-Tart — blueberry with blue frosting. He always brought goodies for Boom because he had eaten at Boom’s house many times since Halvor’s arrival, so he knew what his friend was forced to consume. Boom shoved half the pastry into his mouth. He kicked an apple that must have fallen from someone’s grocery bag, because all the apple trees were bare. He tried to savor the sweet blueberry filling — tried to let it linger on his tongue, but hunger overcame him. Who would have thought a simple rectangle of pastry and jam could taste so good?

“Are you ready?” Winger asked.

“Oh yeah, I’m ready,” Boom proclaimed, spraying crumbs. The final game in the Kick the Ball Against the Wall Tournament was only a few hours away. Boom loved the game, but so did his archenemy, Hurley Mump. Hurley was last year’s school champion, only because Boom had come down with chicken pox during the final week of games. Not fake Mertyle-drawn pox but the real thing that made his skin feel like flea food. But this would be Boom’s championship year. So what if he didn’t have professional kicking shoes like Hurley had, the kind those famous athletes wore? So what if he felt hungry most days, picking at a piece of smoked fish for lunch while Hurley chowed down on thick-cut turkey and cream-filled cupcakes? So what if everything in the universe seemed to always work against him? He had practiced all year and he had the best kicking foot in school. Today, 12:05, right after lunch. Boom vs. Hurley. Today was Boom’s day!