Across
The
Largo
Book One: Seek Song
Mitchell Atkinson III
Copyright 2014 by Mitchell Atkinson
Table of Contents
Introduction
Esmeralda and Robert
Mr. Chandrasekhar
The Party
The Largo
Song
The Princess Switch
Yaris, Robert and Unfortunate News
Among the Phoon
The Mountain Pass
Under the Tower
Wane and the Ivory Turtle
The Songs of Ko
Fire in the Night
The Mother Turtle and the Return to Song
Home
Introduction
There is an old story. But then, old is in the eye of the beholder. To some it is an old story. To others it is moderately old. To some it is brand new.
The story is about a young scientist giving a lecture about the universe. He talks about the stars and planets, about gravity, about how the earth revolves around the sun, and so forth. He gives a beautiful presentation, and everyone claps even if they didn’t understand him at all.
After his talk, an old woman clutching a bone-white cane comes up to speak to him.
“That was a lovely speech,” the old woman says, “but everybody knows what supports the world. The universe rides on the back of a turtle.”
The scientist smiles. “Alright then, what’s under the turtle?”
The old woman smiles back. “Very clever, sonny, but it’s turtles all the way down.”
1. Esmeralda and Robert
Mr. Eldredge was droning on. He was up there at the board, scratching away, talking about who-knows-what: Christopher Columbus, the Pilgrims, or something else that happened a long time ago. All those squeaks and squawks dancing off of the chalkboard became an awful kind of music, causing certain members of the class to despair or to find distraction.
In principle, Esmeralda liked both school and history. The problem was the rhythm, the terribly irregular scraping across the board. It was all of the things that would run behind her eyes. You see, Esmeralda was twelve years old; and being twelve she had a great deal on her mind, all sorts of things to work out, like the world for instance—how it behaved, how it was shaped and what the powers were within. What was in the world that we ought to be concerned about, and what should we forget? She felt often that she was made of concerns and enquiries, that she was a breathing question and not just a girl. And these thoughts, wrapped up within her, worked their way around what was properly present and became the bright focus of her mind.
“Ms. Comstock!” Mr. Eldridge called out.
Esmeralda snapped to attention. “Yes, sir.”
“Can you please tell me your thoughts on the discussion before the class?”
Esmeralda looked inside herself for a moment. What has he been talking about? She had no idea. She looked up at the chalkboard; there was nothing on it. Hasn’t he been writing? Hadn’t I heard him scratching all over the board? Did he just erase it all? Esmeralda briefly considered the possibility that she had dreamed the sound of furiously scribbled chalk. She looked over the room into the great dark eyes of Mr. Eldredge. He was a very tall, thin man, grey at the temples, with a bushy, speckled beard. At moments like this, his black eyes pointed like lasers across the room and through the head of whatever student had drawn his ire. Esmeralda felt she had received more than her fair share of withering looks from him.
“Um,” Esmeralda said.
“Ms. Comstock, you have been staring at your desk, daydreaming, for the past twenty minutes. I don’t mind if you find my class boring. I’m sure a lot of children do. But I’m quite sick of you, you, sitting in my classroom with your head empty and your eyes half closed. Please afford me the courtesy of checking in every few minutes so you might know the subject we are studying.”
Esmeralda heard some snickering coming from the back of the room.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Eldredge,” Esmeralda said.
She really did feel sorry. It wasn’t that Esmeralda didn’t care and wanted to misbehave. There were just so many different things to think about.
“That was brutal,” Robert said as he and Esmeralda walked out of class.
“Yeah, I guess,” she answered. “He’s just being himself.”
“But, no one can blame you for spacing out in Eldredge’s class. He is pretty boring.”
“And at the same time terrifying,” Esmeralda said. “What were we supposed to be talking about anyway?”
Robert smirked. “Christopher Columbus and stuff. We’ve been doing it all week.”
“Yeah, Columbus,” Esmeralda said distantly.
Robert and Esmeralda were very good friends. They had been so ever since the first grade when Robert offered to share his lunch with Esmeralda after she forgot hers at home. Robert was good for Esmeralda; she did not have many friends. He was a bit small, about an inch shorter than Esmeralda, had sandy brown hair and blue eyes. His parents were both lawyers, and, either because of their influence or Robert’s choice, he tended to dress something like a lawyer. He wore well-pressed slacks, blue or khaki, and usually a button-down dress shirt with a collar. The previous year, in sixth grade, he started to wear neckties to school, and every now and then a sport coat. But the outrageous verbal abuse he suffered from the other kids in class caused him to reconsider the ties. He went back to simply a collared shirt, buttoned all the way to the top, and the moderate abuse that came with that.
The pair headed over to their lockers. In seventh grade you got to pick your own locker instead of having them assigned to you like the fifth and sixth-graders did. Of course, Esmeralda and Robert chose lockers next to each other, so that they could talk between classes, conspiring and coordinating.
“Here comes Stacy Keenan,” Robert said.
Stacy Keenan was tall and blonde and very, very smiley when she wanted to be. She was a shining example of middle school royalty. Just about everybody loved or envied her. Just about everybody, but not Esmeralda.
“Nice going, Mesmeralda,” Stacy Keenan hissed as she walked by.
“You’ll get your comeuppance,” Robert said just quietly enough not to be heard.
“What is comeuppance?” Esmeralda screwed up her forehead.
“It’s comeuppance. Your just deserts.”
“Robert, geez, dessert?” Esmeralda said. “So, is it good?”
“It’s like ‘you’ll get yours.’ You know?” Robert shook his fist.
“Yeah, Robert, I know.”
After Mr. Eldredge’s history, came sixth period gym, and then everybody got to go home. Gym class was always a disaster for Robert. First of all, he had to wear gym clothes, crushing his spirits with their unashamed casualness. Also, the gym lockers were too small to fit hangers in, and he had to stuff his collared shirts and finely pressed slacks into the dingy aluminum rectangles; no matter how careful he was, they always got wrinkled. Added to that was the fact that Robert was no athlete, probably never would be. When he complained to Esmeralda about gym, he always said that it didn’t bother him that he wasn’t athletic; he didn’t want to be an athlete; he wasn’t interested in it. What bothered him was that the school was making him pretend to be an athlete when he knew that he wasn’t. He felt like a hypocrite. “It’s like somebody impersonating a police officer or a priest or something.”
It was Friday, and every Friday in gym class they played dodgeball. Esmeralda liked just about everything they did in gym. She liked using her body, becoming as fast as possible, moving through the air. The thing she never liked, no matter what game they were playing, was picking teams or, more exactly, having to be pic
ked for a team. It seemed like every week Stacy Keenan was one captain and Billy Moore or some other popular boy would be the other. They would pick teams, and, because no one really liked her, she would be picked last. If not picked last, she would be picked next to last because nobody wanted Robert on their team. So Esmeralda and Robert were almost always the last two people picked and had to be on different teams. Esmeralda thought that if she could play on Robert's team, she could maybe help him or at least comfort him when things went horribly, as they often did.
And so it went, like always. Stacy Keenan was one captain and Billy Moore, a very tall, black-haired boy with sharp green eyes, was the other. They got to stand in front of everyone and smile and look over them like they were fish in a market. Esmeralda, picked next to last, ended up going on Billy’s team. Robert went to Stacy’s.
The two groups lined up on the back wall of either side of the gym. Ms. Swearingen, the P.E. teacher, who was a very small woman but as tough as anyone you might meet, brought her great black whistle to her lips. She was always wearing brown clothes, and when she talked, the words came in hard snaps and barks like a drill sergeant in the army.
“And…go!” Ms. Swearingen said, right before sending the high scream of the whistle into the air.
All the kids tore after the not-quite-soft-enough rubber balls lined along the center of the gym. Esmeralda ran, feeling wonderful and free. Her hair, pulled back into a ponytail, lifted off of the back of her neck and flapped in the wind. She enjoyed the warmth of her body pushing itself, always faster, across the ground.
The game went along well, at least for Esmeralda. Periodically, she would look across the gym and see Robert standing behind anyone who was taller than him, or clutching at his chest in fear, or pulling off his glasses and quickly wiping them clean of sweat with his t-shirt. Esmeralda, of course, would never dream of throwing anything at Robert. The idea of him being hit with a dodgeball filled her with anxiety. And it was interesting that, although Robert wasn’t an athlete—or at least he told Esmeralda he wasn’t and never would be—he rarely got hit by a dodgeball. Perhaps through fear of being hit he was given some temporary extra-normal powers, or possibly he had perfected the art of cowering behind tall people. In all of the games of dodgeball they played, Esmeralda saw him get tagged out two or three times at most. It so happened, unfortunately, that on this particular day and in this particular game of dodgeball, whatever hidden physical ability or gift for self-preservation that Robert possessed failed him.
Billy Moore, the black-haired captain of Esmeralda’s team, shot across the floor of the gym, dodged four or five well-placed red globes in a series of acrobatic feats, snatched up a stray ball and hurled it at such an incredible speed that the projectile could hardly be seen. It was a red streak across the gym, like a shooting star in an alien sky. Robert was hiding behind Sven, a very large boy whose father had come from Sweden to work at the chemical plant in town. The monumental speed with which Billy had hurled the ball would allow no one, no matter his or her quickness, to dodge it. Sven didn’t know the ball was flying right toward his chest. He didn’t notice it whatsoever. What he did notice at the perfect moment—for him—was that his shoe was untied; and as he bent over, serenely unaware of the peril that he was removing himself from, the ball streaked over Sven’s head and landed directly upon Robert’s right eye. Robert's glasses went flying, and it seemed to Esmeralda that his body was hurled just as far in another direction. He careened through the air, landed with an ugly thud, lifted up his head to look across the gym, and, just as he caught Esmeralda’s eyes, his head snapped back to the wood floor.
Ms. Swearingen blew her whistle. “Stop,” she screamed, running over to Robert.
As the sounds of the whistle, Ms. Swearingen’s voice, and the settling of the other kid’s feet died down, Esmeralda heard a new noise in the fresh quiet. It was Billy Moore.
He was laughing.
Esmeralda ran full blast at Billy Moore. The world was a thick red haze, and Billy was an ugly black spot in the middle of it; if there were anything she could do to erase that spot at that moment, Esmeralda would do it. She caught Billy by the shoulders and kicked his legs out from under him. She didn’t know it, but she was screaming at the time, not words or anything, just screaming. Billy fell over hard, and Esmeralda jumped onto him, trying to punch him in the face. Ms. Swearingen began blowing her whistle, running toward the scuffle. By the time she was able to pull Esmeralda off of Billy, he was pretty shaken and had a pretty fat lip.
Robert went to the nurse’s station; Esmeralda went to the principal’s office.
Luckily, for both of them, gym was the last class of the day. In Robert’s case, if you got all sweaty or if someone happened to hit you in the face with a dodgeball, you could go quickly home and shower or bandage yourself up. As for Esmeralda, she didn’t want to be at school; didn’t want to see Ms. Swearingen and her whistle, hear the droning of Mr. Eldredge, see Stacy Keenan and her huge smile, or look at Billy Moore, not even with his busted lip.
Robert’s parents usually didn’t get home until six or seven o’clock, and Esmeralda lived only a few blocks from the school. Robert would, nearly every day, walk home with Esmeralda, and his parents would pick him up there on their way from work.
When Robert met Esmeralda outside the school, after the final bell rang, he asked her if she wanted him to take the bus home instead of going to her house. “Should you face the music by yourself?”
“No way,” Esmeralda said. “You’re coming with me. I need your eye for evidence.”