I never had a brain until Freak came along and let me borrow his for a while, and that’s the truth, the whole truth. The unvanquished truth, is how Freak would say it, and for a long time it was him who did the talking. Except I had a way of saying things with my fists and my feet even before we became Freak the Mighty, slaying dragons and fools and walking high above the world.
Called me Kicker for a time — this was day care, the year Gram and Grim took me over — and I had a thing about booting anyone who dared to touch me. Because they were always trying to throw a hug on me, like it was a medicine I needed.
Gram and Grim, bless their pointed little heads, they’re my mother’s people, her parents, and they figured whoa! better put this little critter with other little critters his own age, maybe it will improve his temper.
Yeah, right! Instead, what happened, I invented games like kick-boxing and kick-knees and kick-faces and kick-teachers, and kick-the-other-little-day-care-critters, because I knew what a rotten lie that hug stuff was. Oh, I knew.
That’s when I got my first look at Freak, that year of the phony hugs. He didn’t look so different back then, we were all of us pretty small, right? But he wasn’t in the playroom with us every day, just now and then he’d show up. Looking sort of fierce, is how I remember him. Except later it was Freak himself who taught me that remembering is a great invention of the mind, and if you try hard enough you can remember anything, whether it really happened or not.
So maybe he wasn’t really all that fierce in day care, except I’m pretty sure he did hit a kid with his crutch once, whacked the little brat pretty good. And for some reason little Kicker never got around to kicking little Freak.
Maybe it was those crutches kept me from lashing out at him, man those crutches were cool. I wanted a pair for myself. And when little Freak showed up one day with these shiny braces strapped to his crooked legs, metal tubes right up to his hips, why those were even more cool than crutches.
“I’m Robot Man,” little Freak would go, making these weird robot noises as he humped himself around the playground. Rrr … rrrr … rrrr … like he had robot motors inside his legs, going rrrr … rrrr … rrrr, and this look, like don’t mess with me, man, maybe I got a laser cannon hidden inside these leg braces, smoke a hole right through you. No question, Freak was hooked on robots even back then, this little guy two feet tall, and already he knew what he wanted.
Then for a long time I never saw Freak anymore, one day he just never came back to day care, and the next thing I remember I’m like in the third grade or something and I catch a glimpse of this yellow-haired kid scowling at me from one of those cripple vans. Man, they were death-ray eyes, and I think, hey, that’s him, the robot boy, and it was like whoa! because I’d forgotten all about him, day care was a blank place in my head, and nobody had called me Kicker for a long time.
Mad Max they were calling me, or Max Factor, or this one butthead in L.D. class called me Maxi Pad, until I persuaded him otherwise. Gram and Grim always called me Maxwell, though, which is supposed to be my real name, and sometimes I hated that worst of all. Maxwell, ugh.
Grim out in the kitchen one night, after supper whispering to Gram had she noticed how much Maxwell was getting to look like Him? Which is the way he always talked about my father, who had married his dear departed daughter and produced, eek eek, Maxwell. Grim never says my father’s name, just Him, like his name is too scary to say.
It’s more than just the way Maxwell resembles him, Grim says that night in the kitchen, the boy is like him, we’d better watch out, you never know what he might do while we’re sleeping. Like his father did. And Gram right away shushes him and says don’t ever say that, because little pictures have big ears, which makes me run to the mirror to see if it is my big ears made me look like Him.
What a butthead, huh?
Well, I was a butthead, because like I said, I never had a brain until Freak moved down the street. The summer before eighth grade, right? That’s the summer I grew so fast that Grim said we’d best let the boy go barefoot, he’s exploding out of his shoes. That barefoot summer when I fell down a lot, and the weirdo robot boy with his white-yellow hair and his weird fierce eyes moved into the duplex down the block with his beautiful brown-haired mom, the Fair Gwen of Air.
Only a falling-down goon would think that was her real name, right?
Like I said.
Are you paying attention here? Because you don’t even know yet how we got to be Freak the Mighty. Which was pretty cool, even if I do say so myself.
That summer, let’s see, I’m still living in the basement, my own private down under, in the little room Grim built for me there. Glued up this cheap paneling, right? It sort of buckles away from the concrete cellar walls, a regular ripple effect, but do I complain about the crummy paneling, or the rug that smells like low tide? I do not. Because I like it in the down under, got the place all to myself and no fear of Gram sticking her head in the door and saying Maxwell dear, what are you doing?
Not that I ever do much of anything. Grim has it fixed in his head I’m at a dangerous age and they need to keep me under observation. Like I might make bombs or start a fire. Or whack out the local pets with my trusty slingshot or whatever — except I never had a slingshot, it was Grim who had one when he was my age. The proof is right there in the family photo album. You can see this blurry little miniature Grim with no front teeth, grinning at the camera and yanking back on this prehistoric slingshot. Good for whacking mastodons, probably. “Just proper targets,” Grim says, closing up the photo album, end of discussion. Like, oops, better hide the evidence. Don’t want to give the dangerous boy any ideas.
Not that I have any ideas. My brain is vacant, okay? I’m just this critter hiding out in the basement, drooling in my comic books or whatever. All right, I never actually drool, but you get the picture.
Anyhow, this is the first day of July, already counting down for the Fourth and wondering where can I get an M80, which is supposed to have the explosive power of a quarter stick of dynamite or something, and when it goes off your heart thuds to a stop for a microsecond, wham. Which is probably what Grim is afraid of, eek eek, Maxwell armed with dynamite.
So finally I get bored in the down under and I’m hanging out in the so-called back yard, your basic chunk of chain-link heaven. Grim keeps this crummy little mower in the shed, but what’s the point of mowing dirt, right? Okay, I’m out there messing around and that’s when I see the moving van. Not your mainstream, nationwide, brand-name mover, either, just some cheapo local outfit. These big bearded dudes in their sweaty undershirts lugging stuff into the duplex half that’s been vacant since last Christmas, when the dope fiend who lived there finally got busted.
At first I’m thinking the dope fiend is back, he’s out of jail or whatever, and he’s moving his stuff back in. Then I see the Fair Gwen. Not that I knew her name, that was a little while later. At first she’s a glimpse, caught her going between the van and the front door, talking to the beards. I’m thinking, hey I know her, and then I’m thinking, no way, butthead, no way you’d know a female that beautiful.
Because she looks like some kind of movie star. Wearing these old jeans and a baggy T-shirt, and her long hair is tied back and she’s probably sweating, but she still looks like a movie star. Like she has this glow, a secret spotlight that follows her around and makes her eyes light up.
And I’m thinking, well this improves the old neighborhood. You’re thinking, yeah right, the goon is barely out of seventh grade, who does he think he is? All I’m saying, the Fair Gwen had star quality, and even a total moron can see it. And the reason she looked familiar is, I must have seen her bringing Freak to day care, way back in the dark ages, because the next thing I notice is this crippled-up yellow-haired midget kid strutting around the sidewalk, giving orders to the beards.
He’s going: “Hey you, Doofus! Yeah, you with the hairy face, take it easy with that box. That box contains a computer, you know what a computer is?”
I can’t believe it. By then I’m sneaking along the street to see what’s going on, and there’s this weird-looking little dude, he’s got a normal-sized head, but the rest of him is shorter than a yardstick and kind of twisted in a way that means he can’t stand up straight and makes his chest puff out, and he’s waving his crutches around and yelling up at the movers.
“Hey, Gwen,” one of the beards says, “can’t you give this kid a pill or something? He’s driving us nuts.”
So Gwen comes out of the house and pushes the hair out of her big brown eyes and she goes, “Kevin, go play in the back yard, okay?”
“But my computer.”
“Your computer is fine. Leave the men alone. They’ll be done soon and then we can have lunch.”
By this time I’m hunkering along in front of the place, trying to maintain a casual attitude, except like I said my feet are going wild that year and I keep tripping over everything. Cracks in the sidewalk, ants on the sidewalk, shadows, anything.
Then the strange little dude jerks himself around and catches sight of me and he lifts a crutch and points it up at my heart and he goes, “Identify yourself, earthling.”
I’m busy keeping my feet from tripping and don’t get it that he means me.
“I said identify yourself, earthling, or suffer the consequences.”
I’m like, what? And before I can decide whether or not to tell him my name, or which name, because by now I recognize him as the weird little robot kid from day care and maybe he remembers me as Kicker, anyhow before I can say a word he pulls the trigger on the crutch and makes a weapon noise, and he goes, “Then die, earthling, die!”
I motor out of there without saying a word. Because I’m pretty sure he really means it. The way he points that crutch is only part of it. You have to see the look in his eye. Man, that little dude really hates me.
He wants me to die.
Okay, back to the down under, right? My room in the basement. Scuttle into your dim hole in the ground, Maxwell dear. Big goon like you, growing about an inch a day, and this midget kid, this crippled little humanoid, he actually scared you. Not the kind of scare that makes your knee bones feel like water, more the kind of scare where you go whoa! I don’t understand this, I don’t get it, what’s going on?
Like calling me “earthling.” Which by itself is pretty weird, right? I already mentioned a few of the names I’ve been called, but until the robot boy showed up, nobody had ever called me earthling, and so I’m lying on my mattress there in the great down under, and it comes to me that he’s right, I am an earthling, we’re all of us earthlings, but we don’t call each other earthling. No need. Because it’s the same thing that in this country we’re all Americans, but we don’t go around to people and say, “Excuse me, American, can you tell me how to get to the nearest 7 Eleven?”
So I’m thinking about that for a while, lying there in the cellar dark, and pretty soon the down under starts to get small, like the walls are shrinking, and I go up to the bulkhead stairs into the back yard and find a place where I can check it out.
There’s this one scraggly tree behind the little freak’s house, right? Like a stick in the ground with a few wimped-out branches. And there he is, hardly any bigger now than he was in day care, and he’s standing there waving his crutch up at the tree.
I kind of slide over to the chain-link fence, get a better angle on the scene. What’s he doing whacking at that crummy tree? Trying to jump up and hit this branch with his little crutch, and he’s mad, hopping mad. Only he can’t really jump, he just makes this jumping kind of motion. His feet never leave the ground.
Then what he does, he throws down the crutch and he gets down on his hands and knees and crawls back to his house. If you didn’t know, you would think he was like a kindergarten creeper who forgot how to walk, he’s that small. And he crawls real good, better than he can walk. Before you know it, he’s dragging this wagon out from under the steps.
Rusty red thing, one of those old American Flyer models. Anyhow, the little freak is tugging it backwards, a few inches at a time. Chugging along until he gets that little wagon under the tree. Next thing he picks up his crutch and he climbs in the wagon and he stands up and he’s whacking at the tree again.
By now I’ve figured out that there’s something stuck up in the branches and he wants to get it down. This small, bright-colored thing, looks like a piece of folded paper. Whatever it is, that paper thing, he wants it real bad, but even with the wagon there’s no way he can reach it. No way.
So I go over there to his back yard, trying to be really quiet, but I’m no good at sneaking up, not with these humongous feet, and he turns and faces me with that crutch raised up like he’s ready to hit a grand slam on my head.
He wants to say something, you can tell that much, but he’s so mad, he’s all huffed up and the noise he makes, it could be from a dog or something, and he sounds like he can hardly breathe.
What I do, I keep out of range of that crutch and just reach up and pick the paper thing right out of the tree. Except it’s not a paper thing. It’s a plastic bird, light as a feather. I have to hold it real careful or it might break, that’s how flimsy it is.
I go, “You want this back or what?”
The little freak is staring at me bug-eyed, and he goes, “Oh, it talks.”
I give him the bird-thing. “What is it, like a model airplane or something?”
You can tell he’s real happy to have the bird-thing back, and his face isn’t quite so fierce. He sits down in the wagon, and he goes, “This is an ornithopter. An ornithopter is defined as an experimental device propelled by flapping wings. Or you could say that an ornithopter is just a big word for mechanical bird.”
That’s how he talked, like right out of a dictionary. So smart you can hardly believe it. While he’s talking he’s winding up the bird-thing. There’s this elastic band inside, and he goes, “Observe and be amazed, earthling,” and then he lets it go, and you know what? I am amazed, because it does fly just like a little bird, flitting up and down and around, higher than I can reach.
I chase after the thing until it boinks against the scrawny tree trunk and I bring it back to him and he winds it up again and makes it fly. We keep doing that, it must be for almost an hour, until finally the elastic breaks. I figure that’s it, end of ornithopter, but he says something like, “All mechanical objects require periodic maintenance. We’ll schedule installation of a new propulsion unit as soon as the Fair Gwen of Air gets a replacement.”
Even though I’m not sure what he means, I go, “That’s cool.”
“You live around here, earthling?”
“Over there.” I point out the house. “In the down under.”
He goes, “What?” and I figure it’s easier to show him than explain all about Gram and Grim and the room in the cellar, so I pick up the handle to the American Flyer wagon and I tow him over.
It’s really easy, he doesn’t weigh much and I’m pretty sure I remember looking back and seeing him sitting up in the wagon happy as can be, like he’s really enjoying the ride and not embarrassed to have me pulling him around.
But like Freak says later in this book, you can remember anything, whether it happened or not. All I’m really sure of is he never hit me with that crutch.
Freak’s not in my room for ten minutes before he sets me straight on the Fair Gwen. He’s able to hump down the steps by himself, except it makes him sort of out of breath, you can hear him wheezing or I guess you’d call it panting, like a dog does on a hot day. He gets into my room and I close the bulkhead door, and he goes, “Cool. You get to live down here all by yourself?”
“I eat upstairs with Grim and Gram.”
Freak works himself up onto the foot of my bed and uses a pillow to make himself comfortable. It’s pretty dim down here, only the daylight from one basement window, but it catches him just right and makes his eyes shine. “Gram must be your grandmother,” he says. “Grim would be, I suppose, a sobriquet for your grandfather, based on his demeanor.”
I go, “Huh?”
Freak grins and pushes back his yellow hair, and he goes, “Pardon my vocabulary. Sobriquet means ‘nickname,’ and demeanor means ‘expression.’ I merely postulated that you call your grandfather ‘Grim’ because he’s grim. Postulate means —”
“I know,” I say. Which is a lie, except I can guess what he means, figure it out that way. “So how come you call your mom ‘Fair Gwen of Air,’ is that a nickname?”
Freak is shaking his head. I can see he’s trying not to let on that he’s laughing inside. “Guinevere,” he finally says, catching his breath. “The Fair Guinevere, from the legend of King Arthur. You know about King Arthur, right?”
I shrug. The only King Arthur I know is the brand of flour Gram uses, and if I say that I’ll really sound like a butthead.
He goes, “My mom’s name is Gwen, so sometimes I call her the Fair Guinevere or the Fair Gwen. King Arthur was the first king of England, way back when there were still dragons and monsters in the world. Arthur was this wimpy little kid, an orphan, and there was this magic sword stuck in a big stone, okay? The old king had died, and whoever could pull the sword from the stone proved he was the next king. All these big tough dudes came from all over to yank at the sword and they couldn’t budge it. One day this wimpy little kid tried it when nobody was looking and the sword slipped out like it was stuck in butter.”
“So he was the king, this little kid?”
Freak nods, he’s really into this story, and he’s making shapes in the air with his hands. This is the first time for me, hearing Freak really talk, and right away I know one thing: When he’s talking, you can’t take your eyes off of him. His hands are moving, and it’s like he’s really seeing it, this story about an old king.
“Arthur’s magical sword is called Excalibur, and the Fair Guinevere is this pretty girl who becomes his queen. ‘Fair’ in those days meant the same as ‘beautiful’ does now. Anyhow, Arthur got bored just sitting around, so he invited all the knights of England to come live in the castle. They all ate supper at this round table, which is why they were called the Knights of the Round Table. Every now and then King Arthur would send them off on a special secret mission, which in the old days they called a ‘quest.’ They had to slay dragons and monsters and evil knights. I assume you know what a knight wears into battle?”
I think so, but I like hearing Freak talk, so I go, “Better tell me,” and that’s when I find out why he’s so interested in some clanky old knights.
Because Freak really lights up and he goes, “The knights were like the first human version of robots. They wore this metal armor to protect them and make them invincible. When I get my stuff unpacked I’ll show you the pictures. It’s pretty amazing, really, that hundreds of years before they had computers they were already attempting to exceed the design limitations of the human body.”
I go, “Huh?” and Freak sort of chuckles to himself, like he expected me to go “Huh?” and he says, “The design limitations of the human body. You know, like we’re not bullet-proof and we can’t crush rocks with our bare hands, and if we touch a hot stove we get burned. King Arthur wanted to improve his men, so he made them armor-plated. Then he programmed them to go out and do these quests, slay the dragons and so on, which is sort of how they program robots right now.”
I go, “I thought there weren’t any real robots. Just in the movies.”
Boy does that make his eyes blaze. Like whoa! talk about laser beams! He’s like fuming, so upset he can hardly talk.
Finally he gets control of himself and he goes, “I suppose I must make allowances for your ignorance. On the subject of robots you are clearly misinformed. Robots are not just in the movies. Robotics, the science of designing and building functional robots, is a huge industry. There are thousands of robot units presently in use. Millions of them. They don’t look like the robots you see in movies, of course, because they’re designed according to function. Many robotic devices are in fact sophisticated assembly units, machines that put together cars and trucks and computers. For instance, the space shuttle has a robot arm.”
“Right,” I say. “I saw that on TV.”
Freak sighs and rolls his eyes. “Ah, yes,” he says. “Television, the opiate of the massives.”
For about the eleventh time I go, “Huh?”
“Opiate, a drug,” he says. “Massive, that means large and heavy. Thus television is the drug of fat heads. Opiate of the massives.”
“You don’t have a TV?”
“Of course I have a television,” he says. “How else could I watch Star Trek? Matter of fact, I watch tons of tube, but I also read tons of books so I can figure out what’s true and what’s fake, which isn’t always easy. Books are like truth serum — if you don’t read, you can’t figure out what’s real.”
This time I don’t say huh because then I might have to explain how I’m an L.D., and reading books is the last thing I want to do, right after trimming my toenails with a lawn mower, gargling nails, and eating worms for breakfast. Of course Freak has probably already guessed I’m a learning disabled, because he’s had a look around my room and it isn’t exactly the public library.
“I’ll lend you some of my books,” he says.
“Cool,” I say, like it’s just what I’ve been waiting for, another chance to prove I’m a butthead.
Then we both hear it at the same time, this voice calling his name and sounding real worried.
“The Fair Gwen,” he says. “I gotta beam out of here.”
I go up and open the bulkhead door and his mother is in the back yard and she’s looking at the little red wagon. She catches sight of me coming up out of the down under and it’s like somebody shot her. Like she’s scared out of her mind. “Kevin?” she says. “I’m looking for a little boy.”
Freak is huffing and puffing as he humps himself up the steps, and the Fair Gwen grabs Freak and puts him in the wagon and I swear, she almost runs home, like if she doesn’t get away quick something really bad is going to happen. Freak is in the wagon and he’s trying to look back at me, trying to shrug his shoulders and let me know he doesn’t understand what got into the Fair Gwen, but I know.
It’s pretty simple, really. She’s scared of me.