The Not-so-Jolly Roger

Table of Contents

 

A drop of sweat rolled off my nose and fell down toward the singing pirate. It landed right on his hat. I closed my eyes and held my breath.

He stood up, looked all around, and said, “Just us three, lads. Guard our secret well. Har, har, har.” And then he turned to go.

That’s when the fly decided to land on Fred’s nose.

Fred wrinkled his nose, blinked, and shook his head.

The fly flew.

Fred’s Mets cap slid right off his head, spinning down, down, down, until it landed with an awful
plop
right at the toe of the pirate’s big, black boot.

He froze. He looked at the hat. Then he looked slowly up, up, up the trunk of my tree. Our eyes met and my heart went as numb as my foot. The black pirate growled,
“Arrrrrrrgh,”
and grinned a crazy smile. I swear I saw his eyes flashing red.

Then he pulled out two pistols, aimed, and fired.

Special thanks to the Brooklyn Public Library

 

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Registered Offices: Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

 

First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,
a division of Penguin Books USA Inc., 1991
Published by Puffin Books, 1993
This edition published by Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2006

 

Text copyright © Jon Scieszka, 1991

Illustrations copyright © Lane Smith, 1991

 

All rights reserved

 

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE PREVIOUS PUFFIN BOOKS EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Scieszka, Jon.
The Not-so-jolly Roger / by Jon Scieszka; illustrated by Lane Smith.
p. cm.—(The Time warp trio)
Summary: Once again, three friends are sent back in time by a magic book
and they find themselves prisoners of the evil pirate Blackbeard.

eISBN : 978-1-101-07767-2

[1. Time travel—Fiction. 2. Blackbeard, d. 1718—Fiction. 3. Pirates—Fiction.
4. Humorous stories.] I. Smith, Lane, ill. II. Title. III. Series.
IV Series: Scieszka, Jon. Time warp trio.
PZ7.S41267No 1993 [Fic]—dc20 92-44485 CIP AC

 

 

The Time Warp Trio ® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

 

 

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any
responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

For Jake

I thought you said you read The Book,” said Sam.

I looked over at Sam and Fred swaying in the tops of the two coconut trees next to mine. We were thirty feet above the ground. I grabbed my tree tighter. “I did,” I said weakly. I closed my eyes so I couldn’t see just how far up we were.

“Well, what happened this time, Mr. Magic?” asked Fred. “We didn’t even open The Book! We were just goofing around in your room. Now we’re making like monkeys in the tops of some trees on a deserted island.”

“Maybe it was something you said,” said Sam.

Waves crashed on the beach. I smelled the salt air. I opened one eye to look at Sam and Fred. Sam’s glasses hung from one ear. Fred’s Mets cap was twisted backward. They did kind of look like monkeys hugging coconuts. If I hadn’t been so scared, I would have laughed.

“I said I read The Book. I didn’t say I understood it.” “Oh, great,” said Sam, trying to hang on to his coconut and fix his glasses at the same time. “So you’re telling us you don’t know where we are?” I looked out at the long stretch of blue ocean. The hot sun hung high in the blue sky. I tried to guess what time it might be. “Where we are? I don’t even know
when
we are.”

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!”
screamed Sam.

A red and blue parrot flew by and screeched back.

“We’re lost,” moaned Sam. “Shipwrecked. Castaways. Robinson Crusoes in time and space. We have no idea where or when we are.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!”

“Get a grip,” said Fred. “I wished for buried treasure.
The
Book sent us here.” Fred started to climb down his tree. “It doesn’t take Einstein to figure it out. Somewhere around here there’s buried treasure.”

“We are going to die,” said Sam. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Because where there’s buried treasure, there’s pirates. We are dead meat. Shark food.”

“Well, look at the bright side,” said Fred. “If you’re dead, you won’t have to go to school Monday.”

Sam gave his glasses a push. “Ha. Ha. Ha. You’re so funny, I forgot to laugh.”

Fred started to slide down the tree trunk. “What’s the big deal? We find the treasure, dig it up, Joe says the hocus-pocus stuff, and we go back home millionaires.”

“Well ...” I said.

“What’s this ‘well?’ ” said Sam. “I don’t like the sound of this ‘well.’ ”

“Well,
The
Book says there are a lot of ways to travel in time,” I said. “But the only way to get back to our time is to find the person who has
The
Book in this time.”

“But what about the All-Purpose Time Warper Spell?” said Fred.

I shook my head. “It only works going backward. We have to find
The
Book to get home.”

Sam knocked his head on the nearest coconut. “Oh, fine. That’s just fine. I mean, that should be easy. Thanks to lame-brain treasure hunter here, there aren’t that many people to ask for
The Book.
Let’s see... we could ask this coconut. We could ask that sea gull. We could ask the ocean. We could ask the ... oh, no.”

“What’s an ono?” I asked.

Sam pointed out to the ocean.

We could just see the front of a sailing ship appearing from around the edge of the island.

“Hey, it looks like a ship,” said Fred.

“Three guesses what kind of ship, Einstein,” said Sam. “And the first two don’t count.”

We clutched our trees and watched the front of the ship turn into what looked like a huge wooden ocean liner. Except this ocean liner had cannons. And it was flying a flag from its mast—a black flag with a white skull. “Oh, no,” said Fred.

He went back up the tree. Fast.

While the pirates drop anchor and load their rowboat, maybe I should back up and explain how we three guys happened to find ourselves up in the coconut trees and in big trouble two hundred and seventy-five years before our time. It was just a week after the last time we travelled through time. And that was more than a thousand years before this time, which is a later time if you’re just reading this for the first time in your own time, which ... oh, forget it. Let me start one more time.

Last week (my time), I got a birthday present from my uncle Joe. Uncle Joe is a magician. He gave me a book. It had strange silver writing on the front that said
The Book.
When Fred opened
The Book,
it transported my two best friends (Fred and Sam) and me to King Arthur’s time. We met a bunch of knights, a dragon, a giant, and stuff like that. But you can read about that some other time.