The labors of hercules b.., p.1
The Labors of Hercules Beal, page 1
Dedication
For Margaret and Nathan
with a father’s love
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
3. The Nemean Lion
4. The Lernæan Hydra
5. The Ceryneian Hind
6. The Boar of Erymanthus
7. The Augean Stables
8. The Birds of Stymphalus
9. The Cretan Bull
10. The Mares of Diomedes
11. The Belt of Hippolyta
12. The Cattle of Geryon
13. The Golden Apples of the Hesperides
14. Cerberus
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
SOME THINGS I NEED TO TELL YOU here at the beginning. To get them out of the way.
Everyone has stuff to get out of the way. Right?
So here’s the first thing. My name is Hercules Beal.
I know. It’s a stupid name.
It was an especially stupid name until this year, when I got my Beal Family Growth Spurt. Before that, I was the kid who always got put in the front of the class picture because otherwise I’d disappear behind kids like Ty Malcolm, whose grandfather played defensive end in the NFL before he became a minister at the Second Baptist Church of New Bedford and passed all his Ginormous Genes down to Ty. And I was the kid who was always cast as the Cute Little Animal in every school play—like stupid Toto in our third grade performance of the stupid Wizard of Oz. (You can’t believe how long it took before Ty Malcolm stopped calling me “Toto.”)
So it’s a stupid name.
I get it.
But I didn’t choose it. So don’t blame me.
Blame . . . my parents. Or don’t. Really, it’s not even your business.
And just so you know, even Achilles says that my growth spurt has finally started, like it happened for him when he was twelve, too.
All right?
Here’s the second thing. This fall, I’m going to the Cape Cod Academy for Environmental Sciences instead of Truro Middle School—which is bad enough. But what’s worse is that my teacher will be a retired marine lieutenant colonel. In his summer welcome letter—his summer welcome letter, which you can bet he wrote only because some principal told him to—he said he hasn’t had any friends since junior high, so we shouldn’t expect him to be our friend either. What we should expect is that he’s going to be a super-tough teacher who doesn’t take any crap.
I’ll say it again: that was his welcome letter.
Oh boy oh boy.
Here’s the third thing to tell you, even though it happened more than a year ago. Almost a year and a half ago. It’s about parents. Hercules the Myth’s parents were Zeus—he was strong like my dad, who could lift mature maples into a pickup by himself—and Alcmene, who was beautiful and wise and who had dark eyes—like my mom. Those were Hercules’s parents.
I don’t have any. Now, I mean. Now I live with my brother, Achilles, who had to come back from his stupid Washington, DC, apartment to live with me after the Accident so we could keep the Beal Brothers Farm and Nursery going, even though he had to give up what he says was the best job in the whole freaking world because he used to travel the whole freaking world writing stories for Smithsonian Magazine and National Geographic. (The stories, by the way, are the part in those magazines that nobody buys the magazine because of.) He probably thinks that living back in Truro, Cape Cod, after living in Brussels and Sydney and Beijing and Barcelona and New Delhi and Cairo and Johannesburg, is like dying a little every day.
Which it isn’t, the jerkface.
I get that Truro may not be a town you’ve ever heard of. Tourists stick around Hyannis and Chatham and places where stupid gift shops live. Or if they want to go up to the end of the Cape, they drive to Provincetown and skip right through Truro without looking—probably because there aren’t any gift shops in Truro. But what the tourists don’t know, and what my brother probably doesn’t remember, is that Truro is the most beautiful place on the planet.
I know this is true.
Here’s how.
Every morning, I climb the Dune that lifts up from the scrub grass about a half mile from the Beal Brothers Farm and Nursery. I leave in the dark. I close the screen door so quietly that my brother doesn’t hear a thing. I pass the Rigbys’ house, where Elly lives. You always feel like ducking your head near their house because of the huge sugar maple that drops its branches low. Then I pass Mrs. Bontemps’s house—she was my fourth grade teacher and the school PE coach and a substitute principal for a year, and everyone knew she could fix any problem in the universe if she tried, and she never made jokes about my name like some people. Then I pass the Kerrs’ house. Mr. Kerr reconstructs barns all over New England, like our Big Barn at the Beal Brothers Farm and Nursery, and he has more tools than Ace Hardware. Then I pass the two summer people houses that used to get rented out all the time, except now only one does sometimes, and the other has a broken window and a huge hole in the roof and together they let more rain and snow and stray cats inside than you want to know about. Then I pass Mr. and Mrs. Neal’s house, which is a whole lot closer to the sea than any of the other houses, so close it looks like the waves could drench the back windows. I make sure I don’t look at this house, because the Neals hate every kid who has ever lived and you don’t want to catch their eye, especially in the dark. Then Mr. and Mrs. Gauch’s house, which has flower gardens that take up every millimillionth of their front and back yards. Then Mrs. Savage’s house. She’s a sculptor who puts her statues—who are all animals, including a huge hippo—on her front lawn for everyone to look at. I see her all the time in the mornings, wearing this torn UMass sweatshirt, polishing them up.
From there, it’s maybe another quarter mile of open beach and scrub grass to the Dune.
There’s a path of soft sand that goes up, and I climb barefoot since it’s a lot easier that way.
At the top, the wind is usually pretty high. It’s still mostly dark, and for a little while I stand with my back to everyone else on the whole freaking continent. Then I sit and watch.
The light starts to change. I begin to make out the ocean.
If I look west, I can see the night lights of Truro below me, and past them is the Bay, and way out on the other side of the Bay, that’s Plymouth, and then Duxbury north of that—each with a whole lot of lights on. When I look back east, I can watch the ocean getting lighter and lighter, and it’s easy to see the white on the waves now. And then more light, and more, and I know what’s coming, what’s coming, what’s coming, what’s finally coming . . .
And then it does. The sun shrugs over the edge of the globe, and the beams rush toward me through all that dark of space, and they hit me full on, like the lights of a pickup truck that . . . forget it.
Below me, on the west side of the Dune, it’s still dark except for the town lights, but on the east side the sand is all lit up. Mrs. Bontemps would probably say it’s like a symbol in a book—which she is always on the lookout for. I keep my back to the dark, and squint a little, and watch the sun come up quickly, and I know what’s going to happen really soon. The sun rises and rises, until just its bottom is still attached to the horizon, like a sticky caramel that can’t pull away.
And then it does, and the sun jumps into the sky, and everything is yellow and red and gold, and I whisper, “Morning, Mom,” and “Morning, Dad,” and the light is all around me now, so much of it that it finally spills over onto the west side of the Dune and fills the dark.
You can bet a whole lot that the dawn that comes to Truro is sweeter than anything you would ever see in stupid Brussels and Sydney and Beijing and Barcelona and New Delhi and Cairo and Johannesburg.
That’s what I do every morning when it isn’t terrible out—and sometimes, even when it is terrible out.
That’s how I know that Truro really is the most beautiful place on the planet.
Here’s the fourth thing to tell you, and I’m telling you this one so you don’t think I whine about everything, like my brother says I do.
I have a wicked cool dog.
And she came to me like this gift from who knows where—maybe because it’s been a pretty lousy year and a half since the Accident and the Universe owes me one.
Last spring, I asked Achilles about getting a pet, and he said he’d think about it, and I said how long would it take to think about it, and he said until after we got our vegetable garden planted, and I said we didn’t have a vegetable garden, and he said, “Now you’re catching on.”
Oh boy oh boy.
So we turned a whole plot over behind the South Greenhouse—and it was a lot of turning over—and we added a whole lot of manure—which you can probably imagine was no fun—and then my brother planted summer squash and brussels sprouts and purple cabbage. It would save on groceries, Achilles said, and be healthy for us too.
Double oh boy oh boy.
Do you even know anyone—anyone at all—who likes summer squash and brussels sprouts and purple cabbage?
Anyone?
And do you know how many summer squash grow from a single summer squash plant? Or how many brussels sprouts grow from a single brussels sprouts plant?
Lots.
And do you know how many good recipes there are for summer squash or brussels sprouts or purple cabbage?
None. Ze
So on the day after sixth grade graduation, when our vegetable garden was all planted, I asked my brother if we could get a border collie because border collies are smart and good and true and blue and it wasn’t like I was a kid anymore since I was now officially in middle school. Achilles looked up at me from behind the desk in the Front Building of the Beal Brothers Farm and Nursery, a pen in one hand, the other hand on top of a pile of forms and bills. He looked at me like I was a complete idiot. “I said a pet, not a whole dog.”
“That’s the pet I want.”
“Do you know how much a border collie costs?” he said.
“Maybe we could find one in a shelter.”
“A border collie is expensive. His license would be expensive. His food would be expensive. His vet bills would be really expensive. Do you know how much one heartworm pill costs? Twenty-five bucks. Every month. And who’s going to take care of him while you’re at school and I’m at the Farm and Nursery?”
“He could stay at the Nursery with—”
“No, he can’t.” My brother put down his pen. “How about a rabbit?”
“A rabbit?” I said.
“Uh-huh,” he said. “A rabbit would be a whole lot easier to take care of. And rabbits don’t need heartworm pills.”
“You can’t do anything with a stupid rabbit.”
“You could raise them to sell for food,” he said. “It could be part of the Beal Brothers Farm and Nursery operation.”
A long silence.
“And a rabbit would never pee in the house,” Achilles said.
I went outside.
A few days later, my brother drove home with a gray-and-brown rabbit in a cage and a red hutch in the back of the Beal Brothers Farm and Nursery pickup.
We set up the hutch beside the Big Barn.
When Elly Rigby saw the rabbit, she said, “What’s his name?”
“The rabbit came already named,” I said.
“So what’s his name?”
“I didn’t have anything to do with his name.”
“I get it. What’s his name?”
“Honey Bunny,” I said.
“Honey Bunny?” she said.
“Honey Bunny.”
“I think I’ll call him Sir Gawain,” Elly said.
That worked for a while. Every day Elly would come to feed Sir Gawain some carrots and to hold him and to stroke his gray and brown fur and to rub noses and coo his name and all that stuff. But one morning in July, Sir Gawain gave birth to twelve more gray-and-brown rabbits.
We went back to Honey Bunny.
But then, a miracle, and it all happened because this summer, my brother fell in love with a vampire.
You think I’m making this up, the vampire part. But I’m not.
She is definitely a vampire. Her name is Viola—already kind of a hint—and she wears only black except for her bright red lipstick, which she probably wears to hide what happens to her lips when she’s low on human blood. She has long black hair and long black fingernails and black toenails, sort of like a bird of prey—or maybe like the bat she can probably turn into.
And I have never—not once, not ever—seen any sunlight touch her. This is the biggest clue of all.
Viola the Vampire had been hanging around my brother (and yes, that’s a pun) for a couple of weeks when they came down to the shore to walk the beach and swim behind the Beal Brothers Farm and Nursery. Elly and I were on a blanket playing cribbage.
Viola the Vampire was holding a huge black umbrella so that daylight would never touch her.
What a surprise.
“What are you two doing?” said Achilles.
“Putting on a stage musical,” I said. “I thought we’d call it Nosferatu. You guys want to help? We’re trying to figure out who could play the lead.”
My brother stood next to me and leaned down really close. “It must be hard to be in sixth grade and still be a total jackass,” he said.
“I’m going into seventh grade,” I said, “and really, it’s not so hard to be a total jackass. I mean, look at you.”
My brother slipped the towel from around his neck, twirled it into a snake, and pulled it back to take off a strip of my skin somewhere, when—and you have to believe me, because I’m not making this up—this dog, this amazing beautiful brown-haired amber-eyed big-eared mutt of a dog came out from who knows where—maybe the sea?—and stood between us, her beautiful brown-and-white tail stiff at attention. She perched high on her toes and the hair on her neck rose, and she leaned down low and stared up at my brother.
She might have growled, but if she did, it was pretty quiet.
I am not making this up. I’m not.
I really think she might have come out of the sea.
“Honey Pie,” said Viola the Vampire.
“Honey Pie?” I said to my brother. “She calls you Honey Pie?”
“Shut up,” said Achilles.
The dog kept staring at my brother, and then she growled like she meant it. This time we all heard it.
Viola the Vampire took a step toward my brother, who took a step back toward her.
“Looks like you have a bodyguard,” said my brother.
“Looks like,” I said. I put my hand on the dog’s shoulder. It felt perfect.
“You keep up with this, you’re going to need it.”
“Keep up with what?” I said.
He looked at my dog.
“You’re going to have to find out who she belongs to.”
“Okay.”
“You have to call the shelter to see if anyone . . .”
“I get it. And if no one is missing her?”
He looked at my dog again. Then he nodded. “Okay, Hercules. Okay. If no one claims her, you got your dog. But you’re going to have to work afternoons to . . .”
“I get that too.”
“And if she even looks nasty at me, or Viola, or a single customer, or . . .”
“I’ll make sure she never, ever looks nasty at Viola or any of the customers.”
Achilles’s eyes closed to slits—probably because of the sunlight, since maybe Viola had already bitten him and he might slowly be turning into what she was. He looped the towel back around his neck and turned to walk down the shoreline. Viola the Vampire followed him. But my dog—my wonderful, amazing, perfect dog—came down from her perched toes, let the hair on her neck smooth out, turned to me, and grinned.
Really.
Then she dropped onto the edge of our blanket, put her head on her paws, looked at me once, looked at Elly once, and fell asleep.
“I think I have a dog,” I said.
Elly stroked the soft fur on the back of her neck. “Her name’s Mindy,” she said.
And that was how Mindy came into our lives.
That was a part of this summer that did not stink.
But there was still other stuff that stunk that I haven’t told you about—like this: When the Kerr family decided to move to Oregon, which is so far away it’s like somewhere close to Beijing, they sold the house to Mr. Moby, who was the bus driver for the Truro school district, and who moved in before the Kerrs had turned all the lights off. He had been trying to buy one of these houses for years, he told them.
From then on, the Truro Public School bus was parked in front of Mr. Moby’s house. You can probably guess what Mr. and Mrs. Neal thought about this.
Mr. Moby—and I really don’t mean to be a jerkface, but if I’m going to tell you what happened, I should at least try to tell the truth—Mr. Moby is evil. The first thing he did was to take down the gazebo behind the house, the gazebo where the Kerrs let Elly and me play cribbage when it was raining and where we used to record our wins on the center post, and where we finger painted in kindergarten and oil painted the summer before sixth grade, where we danced once and almost kissed. (Elly said it doesn’t count if you just rub noses—but since I’m trying to tell the truth, it was a little more than rubbing noses.)
But Mr. Moby didn’t care. I asked him if I could at least have the center post if he was going to take the gazebo down, but he said it would be too much trouble and he burned the whole thing to the ground.
That’s Mr. Moby.
So, I told you before that this fall I would be going to the Cape Cod Academy for Environmental Sciences. Here’s how that happened. My brother said, “You’re going to the Cape Cod Academy for Environmental Sciences.”
