Scurvy Goonda Read Online Free Page A

OF FAT on it, messing up the PERFECT piles that I MADE last night
.
    “Arrgh!” Ted roared at the road. But the road didn’t say anything back.
    Scurvy was riding on the bike’s handlebars, and Ted had to keep pushing his head down to see where he was going. But each time he took his hand off Scurvy’s head, the pirate would pop up and put his hands in the air, feeling free, and Ted had to lean far to the side to make sure that he didn’t veer off the road or go careening into traffic.
    “Stay down
, Scurvy,” said Ted.
    “Bicycles are
brilliant,”
said Scurvy, his long, dirty hair flapping behind him, whopping Ted in the face.
    “But I can’t see the road.”
    “I’ll be yer eyes, Ted-o-mine!”
    “Scurvy, please. I need my
own eyes.”
    “Nonsense! Ya haven’t spent a lifetime staring at tha horizon. Ya don’t know what true vision is. Wait… a pothole coming up, starboard!”
    Ted pulled on the handgrips, but he forgot which side was starboard, and then suddenly he was flying through the air, the gray asphalt beneath him and his brain firing off warning messages:
Pain coming! Try to fly!
The last thing Ted saw before he hit was Scurvy plummeting to the ground next to him.
    “YER RIGHT,” shouted Scurvy. “FROM NOW ON YA SHOULD BE YER OWN EYES!”
    Before Ted could respond, he smacked into the hard earth.

VII
    Each time Ted touched one of the freezing-cold packages of hot dogs or stacks of sliced bologna, his hands started to sting. Every part of his body was in pain—his elbows and knees were scraped, there were skid marks on his palms, he had a bump on his head, and he thought there might be a small pebble lodged way up his nostril.
    “I asked politely, I tried to push you out of the way, I told you I
couldn’t see,”
said Ted.
    “I tend tah lose my head when I feel tha wind through me hair,” said Scurvy, uncharacteristically disappointed with himself. He was dirty from the crash, curled in a corner of the meat aisle, sitting on some smoked-turkey cold cuts. There were long smears of dirt across the Lunchables boxes he had assaulted.
    “Yer upset with me,” said Scurvy.
    “
Yes, I’m upset
. If somebody sees me bleeding all over the meat aisle, I’m going to get in trouble.”
    “Then go to tha bathroom and get some Band-Aids. Or rub some mud into tha wounds.”
    “Mud won’t help.”
    The truth was Ted didn’t want to leave the meat aisle to get the first-aid kit because he was afraid of running into Jed. But he needed to tend to his oozier scrapes, so he grabbed a couple of empty cardboard cartons to make it look like he was doing
something
productive, and walked through a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY .
    The back of the store was packed with huge boxes filled with all the other products that would eventually make their way out to the unforgiving lights of the supermarket floor.
    In the midst of all these boxes was the Crusher.
    The Crusher was a giant vise that smashed whatever went into it into tiny cubes. Ted couldn’t fathom how something so massive had ever been transported into the supermarket in the first place. He imagined instead that the Crusher had stood in the same place for thousands of years, built by druids or ancient pagans who had worshiped the machine as a god. The Stop to Shop had to have been built
around
the Crusher.
    Ted tossed his empty cardboard boxes into the Crusher, put on a pair of protective goggles, and, with an enormous heave, pulled a long metal lever to turn on the machine. The Crusher roared to life and Ted jumped away like he always did, because the machine scared the heck out of him. Gears spun and levers creaked and Ted could almost hear the cardboard boxes screaming as they were smashed and compressed and obliterated out of their peaceful boxy existence.
    Such was the power of the Crusher.
    Ted popped a couple of aspirin and used the first-aid kit in the bathroom to smear his wounds with some sticky iodine. Meanwhile, Scurvy Goonda stared at