MY MOTHER SAID, I NEVER SHOULD, PLAY WITH THE GYPSIES IN THE WOOD

MY MOTHER SAID, I NEVER SHOULD, PLAY WITH THE GYPSIES IN THE WOOD

By Andrew Paul Grell

“Six moving vans on the street. A record.” Xanthippe, the eldest, was most likely to count things accurately. And she was the only one living on the cycloid-shaped street, aside from her Aunt and Uncle, who could pronounce her name properly.

“We were here first. We have dibs on the playground.”

“Dink, that’s not how we do. You old enough to know better. I give you a hard time when you came to climb on them monkey bars? Nah, I lifted you up, made sure you din’ fall. We got these nice houses, other folks can’t have them too?” Ephraim knew street rules better than any of the crew; knew them well enough to be glad they didn’t apply in this pop-up ‘hood. Matt Dinkowitz looked at his friend and offered a whispered “Sorry…”

“Let’s get back to the business at hand, shall we?” Xanthippe was trying to work out how to play stickball on the oddly curved road, and how they could keep score with no sewer manholes. And where they could get a steady supply of Spaldeens. Mop handles shouldn’t be a problem. The Gang of Eight had met that summer at a camp while their folks were helping build the houses. Zannies’ Uncle George called it sweatquity. He also said the big break they got was that he’d know where all the studs were.

“I’ve got it. Dink, that’s your house.” Eph sketched the street on a pad he always carried in a custom-sewn, oversize cargo pocket of his pants. The street starts flattening out right before your front yard. Zannie, after your yard, the road turns sharp. Now check this. There’s a dozen storm drains from Dink to Zannie. You could swing from Dink’s fence and the ball might could go all the way to Zannie’s fence. So every four storm drains is a the same as one sewer manhole lid.” Eph showed everyone the sketch.

“There’s one problem. If the ball goes over my fence, it’s in the woods.” Xanthippe’s warning stopped everyone cold. Each of the children had been firmly told by their respective grownups to never, ever, under any circumstances, go into the woods. They could play with matches rather than go into the woods. They could play in traffic rather than go into the woods. The Newtopia orientation people drilled it into the kids, there were stories of mutilated children and bodies burned beyond recognition. Snakes. Quicksand. On the bus from Camp Tadpole, some older-looking kids were talking about witches, hags, and Bigfoot. That was the stick. The carrot was that why would they need to go into the woods  anyway? Newtopia had a park with lots of trees, even a tree house. Zannie had poked Eph in the ribs while the suit was giving that speech.  Eph gave her a wink. They were both old enough to tell shit from shinola.

Pat, three months younger than Xanthippe, snapped everyone out of their fear.

“We should claim the woods. At least the slice of them behind our street. My cousin Phil is in law school in Baltimore. I’m going to call him tonight. He can tell us if we can or can’t go into our own woods. Did anyone see a sign that said ‘POSTED’ or “Trespassers will be shot, survivors will be prosecuted’?” A collective head shake from the gang. The moving vans started leaving, but strangely, they didn’t leave any people behind.

School hadn’t started yet, and the gang watched briefcase-laden grownups file out of houses and stroll to the end of the street to catch the slideway into “downtown,” and some roll out on bikes, most heading to the Cloud Station Modular Office Facility. Some to the few stores already open on Ailanthus Boulevard. Newtopia’s main drag hosted garden apartments, townhouse condos, a few apartment buildings, and empty shops waiting to be filled. The entire town was an anti-sprawl, affordable housing, alternative energy and transportation experiment. At least, that’s what the press releases say. What they don’t say is that the land was never, until Newt Gingpoor got involved, a possibility for development. Pat decided they should have their own school that morning.

“I spoke to Phil. He pulled some strings and got into some databases. Newtopia is on what’s called Dawes Act land. As near as Phil can tell, the act was billed as a way to integrate Native Americans into the general culture of the United States. Which meant taking away Indian land and moving European settlers in. The entire enterprise is supposed to be controlled by a government trust. The land Newtopia is on was never distributed due to not having access to a water supply. Newtopia is under the control of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. But here’s the funny thing. The woods are controlled by a joint trust of the Department of Agriculture and the National Science Foundation as a project titled ‘Efficacy of Subsistence Living.’ The Department of the interior is not involved.”

The little kids were getting bored, but Zannie and Eph were busy elbowing each other in the ribs. Kim went over to them to see what was going on.

“Eph smells a scam. He’s a scam detector. We’re being scammed. Uncle George had to sign a paper waiving their homestead rights and their rights to sue the development corporation. And also that nobody from a Newtopia home could go into the woods.”

“Well,” Kim said, “There’s really nothing we can do about it. Except go back where we came from. I don’t know about you guys, but I bet the rats are still in our old place, just waiting for us.” Eph and Zannie stopped elbowing started saying ‘hmmm…’ a lot. Mack came out of her house with Spoticus, a stunning black and white Rat Terrier who collected a one pet toll from each gang member and then went off to find a fence to pee on.

“Hey, Mack!” Zannie shouted, eyes ablaze with a great idea. “Can Spoticus fetch?”

“Can Spoticus fetch?  Does the Pope poop in the woods? Does it rain in Indianapolis in the summertime? Watch this.” Mack aimed five houses down and tossed the ball. The marvelous canine specimen solved the differential equation that got him under the ball before anyone saw him move.

“Great. We have a ball retriever. Let’s play some stickball,” Xanthippe commanded. “Everybody go scrounge your house, grab anything anywhere near being a Spaldeen. And if we can’t look for the witches in the Woods, at least we have some broomsticks. There’s no proper walls, so I guess we’ll do slow-pitch.”

The gang wound up doing a not-keeping-score two-hour practice to feel out Ephraim’s curved Elysian field of dreams. Naturally, one wise-cracker wanted a shirts and skins game; Mack turned red as their Spaldeens when Kim explained it to her. They tried out some fungo at-bats, which seemed to reach farther than pitched balls. Everything was fine until it wasn’t: Someone had tossed a big-size Superball into the collection, and once hit, it sailed right over Xanthippe’s house. Spoticus, as usual, went on a recovery mission but crashed into the fence. Undeterred, he started undermining the barrier, Mack screaming for him to “Sit! Stay! Spoticus touch!” He wound up on the other side of the fence, and did touch Mack’s fingers through the barrier. He looked at the stickball players and then looked at the open field. He did the famous Rattie brow-furrow, so human looking, and stayed as close as possible to his people.

“What is that?” Dink asked. Mack was hyperventilating; there was a red dot on one of the dog’s white splotches. A moving red dot. 

“Grab ya sticks! Dig! Dig!” Eph didn’t want to take a chance that it was just someone playing with a laser pointer. Kim was small enough to get through the hole the gang was able to clear; a slice of salami enticed the pooch to get back on the right side. Which may have become the wrong side - the red dot took turns showing up on each of the friends’ faces. Dink, seemingly hip to lasers, or, possibly, advanced munitions, triangulated the source of the beam, a second story window in one of the houses visited by the moving vans that showed up yesterday.

“Take me with you. I wanna go. What's the plan? When is H-Hour?” The voice ceased and the window closed. Thirty seconds later, the enthusiastic pointer of lasers descended a sliding pond built into the side of the house. The resident was a good-looking kid but had a club-foot. Apparently, slowing down was not a symptom of the condition. “Chumley Muldoon. Of the County Cork Muldoons,” he introduced himself, shaking hands all around, escorted by Xanthippe doing the niceties. “First we take Newtopia, then we take the woods? Is that the plan?”

“You all by your lonesome, Chum?” Eph asked, surreptitiously vetting the newjack.

“Dad’s in the lab, making the best vertical farm in the world. A clam chowder farm, he’s calling it. Mom’s caught the last bus from the coast, I hope. I probably have two days of minimal supervision. So let’s get a move on! You guys notice that all the kids on the block are within about three years of each other? Is that demographically possible? Dad, and that would be Zebulon Muldoon, says there’s something funny going on here. But we got priced out in the city, him on an adjunct’s pay and Mum a bit of a homebody. Now he has a lab and isn’t responsible for snot-noses. O-Six-Thirty tomorrow, troops. Now we know how easy it is to get past the fence, we have duty to explore. Bring what you can grab, we have no idea what defenses the Bigfoots and Witches have. Or is that Bigfeets?”

The gang gave him a good looking-over and a consensus formed that action was better than no action. 

A poultry shears, a telescopic sight from a parent’s rifle, four garden spades, lunch, rope, three Swiss Army knives, one of them original, everyone’s bike helmets, presumably to be armored, and, of course, the stickball “bats.” Chumley distributed the load and Dink and Eph started digging while they waited for parents to “make like trees and leave.” Once they were all safely through, Eph, who had experience crossing 110^th Street from the darker precincts of Central Park, had everyone go belly down through the high grass until they reached the tree line. The big Rattie charged in first and disappeared. Mack whistled for him and he came back soaking wet. They could hear running water but couldn’t see it.

“Kim, can you handle a knife? Notch every tenth tree and spray it with a number. Better than breadcrumbs, I’m guessing.” Xanthippe was slowly getting used to responsibility. “Dink, can you climb a tree? While carrying the spotting scope? We’re going to need to know what we’re heading for. No, wait.” Zannie cut of some of the nylon climbing rope, passed it through the scope mount and made a lanyard for Dink. That got him moving. 

“I can climb anything,” he bragged, not very convincingly. Eph came over and took some of Chumley’s load. Spoticus instinctively fell into a flank guard position two feet behind and to Mack’s left, and suddenly they were a patrol with a mission objective. Until, 23 tree-notches later, the arrow hit the tree Kim had just marked.

“Dink! Report!” The gang’s spotter shimmied up as high as he could get.

“Teepees. Geez, I’m looking at teepees. Maybe they’re wigwams. What’s the difference, anyway? There’s a fire pit, I think they’re…”

Spoticus picked it up first. The teepee people were cooking a bear.

Chumley caught up and, of course, immediately wanted to keep going. “There’s a there, there. We’ve got something worth going to.”

“Except, you know, for the getting shot at.”

“Prolly a misfire, Zan. Who knows what these people have and what it is they want that we have.”

Mack interrupted with a little ditty. “My mother said, I never should, play with the Gypsies in the Wood.” Three more of the crew knew some of the words; they made it through “hair shan’t curl” and petered out at getting hit in the head with the teapot lid.

“Look at what you’re saying, Chum. We get gentrified out of where we live, and we wind up in Nowheresville. Now you want to go and do the same thing to these folks.” There was a piercing shriek that gave everyone the shakes and set the dog to barking.   Mack, from Central Florida, pegged it right away as a Turkey Hawk, mostly harmless. She kept her companion on a short leash. Until the faces came out of the trees.

“Seth?” Nobody could not recognize Seth’s ears no matter how much face paint he had applied. They were like those of the short aliens on one of those other Star Trek spin-offs, Farengies, maybe. Eph had met Seth three years ago at a Scout camp for urban kids; they both had made Eagle Scout and never quite gave it up.

“Eph. Long time.” The inner New York and inner Milwaukee scouts took a long gander at each other, broken by Seth inviting them to the “village.”

“So what’s the deal? You seem to be a science project on the Government books.”

“That’s right. Efficacy of subsistence something or other. They want to see how well people can survive when it all comes crashing down. We’re Eagle Scouts, Senior Girl Scouts, and the native skills preservation group folks. We rotate in and out every three months and grab a semester here and there, all on the government teat. When we’ve done each season twice, we’re qualified to teach how to live off the land and not die. Pretty good gig. Except for the scam.

“Scam? I’m supposed to be the scam detector, you should remember that from when we busted that creepy scout master.”

“Take a look at this, my brother from another mother.” The just-missing being hip heartland teenager took Ephraim down to the Misohoney River. “Here’s the mouse trap. The river is part of a six-state water compact that doesn’t include the state we’re in now. But we’re subsistence. We can do anything. If we catch a 9-inch bass, we can cook it and eat it without risking a fine. See that paddle wheel in the river? It’s pumping water and powering whatever emergency stuff we have that needs juice. The Badlands Power and Light utility owns the rights to make electricity from that water. But us? We’re subsistence. We can do anything. Ever see anything like this before? Dug-out canoe technology. That water is pumped up the tower, over the rise in the woods, and down into Newtopia. For which Gingpoor and the Newtopia Corporation ‘grant’ our little fake-native village with a little folding money. Newtopia will get bigger, more people will move in, everyone will prosper, and then BAM! Six states are going to notice all that water going missing. You’ll be low and dry and Gingpoor walks away with the money.”

“I guess the monster is not in the woods, huh?”

“Yeah? Let me introduce you to our flow-rate engineer. Nephie! Get over here, ya big  clod!”  Kim had been staring at the tall girl; she had the most outlying humerus to radius arm ratio and the flattest head she had ever seen. Then she looked down at the engineer’s feet.

“Really? It can’t be.”

“Well, no, of course it can’t be,” she answered in a gravelly voice. “But strange things happen when you get more than three sigma out from the mean. I can come in handy. I mean, aside from keeping the water moving.”

“Nephie? I’m Kim. Ever heard of stickball? I have a felling this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship”

Eagle Scouts, as a rule, are always polite. “We’re about to have lunch. Anyone care for roast bear and roots and tubers salad?”