Read Online Whirligig by Paul Fleischman - Free Book Online Page B

teacher lives forever through his students.’ These are my father’s favorite words.”
    Brent suddenly thought back to Miss Gill, the mediator in Chicago, and her saying that the effects of an act traveled far beyond one’s knowledge. He knew she’d meant harmful acts, like his. He saw now that the same could be said of good deeds, such as a teacher’s years of inspiring. Everything we did—good, bad, and indifferent—sent a wave rolling out of sight. He wondered what his own accounting, generations later, would look like.
    They ate lunch, watched a marimba duo and a sword swallower in Balboa Park, sampled the museums of photography and model railroading, then spent two hours in the natural history museum. Brent had never known anyone his age who went to museums voluntarily. He was strictly Emil’s sidekick. Afterward, however, while exploring downtown, he asserted himself and abruptly entered a music store they were passing. He could still hear the concertina’s merry burbling in his head. Ten minutes later he walked out with a harmonica and an instruction book. He’d try his hand at making his own music.
    Dinner at the hostel was a boisterous affair, conducted in several languages. He and Emil had bought some frozen enchiladas, which they heated in the kitchen’s overburdened microwave. It seemed strange to Brent to see men carefully mincing garlic and sautéing vegetables. He was a stranger to the stove. Nor did the dinner conversation at this table resemble anything heard in his house. Mixed in with descriptions of Sea World and the beach were long discussions of world affairs, sometimes in raised voices. Brent was surprised at how much the other guests both knew and cared. Politics had never come up at home. Brent listened unobtrusively as diners and topics came and went. Finally, he slipped out himself.
    The concertina player was nowhere about. The house seemed much emptier without him. Brent observed travelers writing postcards, recalled that he’d bought some, and realized he had no one he wanted to send them to. He was a planet on which there was no other life as yet. Then he felt the harmonica in his pocket and thought to himself, Let there be music.
    He chose the back lawn, more private than the rockers on the front porch. He read the booklet’s introduction (“The instrument you hold is a full orchestra in miniature…”), stared at the photo marked Figure 1-A, snorted at the player’s jacket and cuff links, read three times the detailed instructions (“Raise your harmonica. Now moisten your lips. Fill your lungs, then partially exhale…”), set the instrument to his mouth, and produced his first note (“Congratulations…”). By the fading light, then by flashlight, he pored over Lesson One, trying to find C at the fourth hole without looking, tripping over the C scale’s quirky pattern, laboring with scant success to get a single note instead of two. He put it away, discouraged, glaring at the words Play Instantly! on the booklet. He turned off the flashlight. He tilted his head, found the summer triangle, a familiar face to him now, and felt better.
    In the morning he found a paperback copy of Two Years Before the Mast by his bed, with Emil’s address written on the bookmark. He’d left very early according to the clerk. Brent looked as though he were leaving as well, tramping out the front door with his pack on his back after breakfast. Feeling a fraud, he walked three blocks, turned to the right, walked four more, and came to a park he’d glimpsed the day before. Here he could work on his whirligig undetected by the other guests.
    He claimed a picnic table, laid out his tools like a surgeon, and flipped through his book. He made up his mind to vault ahead from the simplest style he’d built in Washington and decided on the spouting whale, operated by a propeller and rods. The book’s previous