Chomp

THREE

Derek Badger’s real name was Lee Bluepenny, and he had no training in biology, botany, geology or forestry. His background was purely show business.

As a young man he’d traveled the world with a popular Irish folk-dancing group until he broke a toe while rehearsing for a street parade in Montreal. As he waited in the hospital emergency room, he happened to meet a talent agent who had gotten ill from eating tainted oysters. The queasy talent agent thought Lee Bluepenny looked tough and handsome, and asked if he’d ever considered a career in television.

As soon as Lee Bluepenny’s dance injury healed, the agent arranged for him to fly to California and audition for a new reality show. The producers of Expedition Survival! loved Lee Bluepenny’s new Australian accent, which he had shamelessly copied from the late Steve Irwin, the legendary crocodile hunter. The producers also liked that Lee Bluepenny could swallow a live salamander without throwing up. What they didn’t particularly like was his name. Lee Bluepenny was okay for a jazz piano player or maybe an art dealer, they said, but it wasn’t rugged-sounding enough for someone who had to claw and gnaw his way out of the wilds every week.

After trying out a few different names-Erik Panther, Gus Wolverine, Chad Condor-the producers settled on Derek Badger, which was fine with Lee Bluepenny. He was so thrilled to be on television that he would have let them call him Danny the Dodo Bird.

Expedition Survival! got off to a rocky start. The first episode was staged in a jungle in the Philippine Islands, where the man now called Derek Badger was supposed to be lost and starving. Disaster struck on the second day, when Derek was bitten severely by a striped shrew rat that he was attempting to gobble for dinner. The rodent had appeared to be dead, but it was only napping. Derek’s punctured lips swelled up so badly from the bite that he looked like he was sucking on a football. A medical helicopter rushed him to Manila for rabies shots.

Eventually the rough spots in the show were smoothed out, and Expedition Survival! turned into a smash hit. It wasn’t long before Derek Badger was an international celebrity, and he quickly learned to act like one.

“How’s France?” Raven Stark asked when she called.

“Heaven,” he said. “The cheese here is fantastic.”

“I’m sure,” said Raven Stark, with a note of concern. Survivalists were supposed to be lean and fit, and one of her main responsibilities was to keep Derek from getting too flabby. It wasn’t easy-the man loved to eat, and cheese was high on his list.

“Did you find me a proper alligator?” he inquired.

“Yes, a beauty.” She could hear him chewing and smacking his lips.

“How big?”

“Twelve feet,” said Raven Stark.

“Brilliant!”

“And they’ve got a slightly smaller one you can tussle with.”

There was a pause on the other end that made Raven Stark uneasy.

Derek said, “But I don’t want to wrestle the small one. I want to wrestle the monster.”

It was exactly the response she had feared. “Too dangerous,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“We can chat about this later, Derek.”

“Indeed we will. What about a python? I told you I wanted a python.”

“The gentleman has offered us a very large Burmese, though it’s not tame.”

“Even better!” chortled Derek.

Raven Stark sighed to herself. She was accustomed to working around Derek’s enormous ego, but there were times when she felt like reminding him that he was basically a tap dancer, not a grizzled woodsman.

“Anything else that’s super-scary?” he asked.

“I noticed they had a large snapping turtle,” she said.

“How large?”

“Large enough to take off a hand.”

“Excellent,” Derek said. “Set up an underwater scene-I’m swimming along through the Everglades, minding my own business, when the hungry snapper charges out from under a log and drags me to the bottom of the lagoon.”

“Right. Except turtles don’t eat people.”

“How do you know?” Derek demanded.

“Call me when you land in Miami,” said Raven Stark.

Wahoo had an older sister named Julie who was finishing law school at the University of Florida in Gainesville. His father was secretly proud of her, but he wouldn’t let on.

“Just what the world needs-another darn lawyer,” he’d grumble.

“I love you, too, Dad,” Julie would say, and pinch his cheek.

Wahoo thought his sister was pretty cool, although he sometimes felt intimidated because she was so smart and funny and sociable. Wahoo was shy, and not as self-confident. Julie had always been a straight-A student while Wahoo wasn’t: his best-ever report card was two A’s, four B’s and a C (in algebra, naturally).

“Just do your best,” his mom would say. “That’s good enough for us.”

Mickey Cray never really took an interest in the children’s schoolwork because he was too busy with the animals.

“Put the old man on the phone,” Julie said when she called.

“He’s out working with the pythons,” Wahoo reported.

“It’s about the Expedition contract. I see problems.”

Wahoo always faxed the TV contracts to his sister for her to see, even though his father normally signed them without reading a word.

“What’s wrong, Jule?”

“Like, on page seven, it says the show ‘shall have unrestricted use of the designated wildlife specimens for the duration of the production period.’ That means they can do pretty much whatever they please with the animals-and they don’t need to ask Pop’s permission.”

“This is bad,” Wahoo said. He remembered what Raven Stark had said about Derek Badger wanting to wrestle one of the gators.

“Did the old man take any money yet?” Julie asked.

Wahoo told his sister about the eight-hundred-dollar deposit. She said Mickey could still get out of the deal if he returned the cash.

“Too late. He already spent it,” said Wahoo.

“On what-monkey chow?”

“The mortgage.”

“Ouch,” said Wahoo’s sister.

“We’re sort of broke, Jule. Ever since he got hurt, it’s been tough.”

“So that’s why Mom went to China. Now I get it.”

Wahoo didn’t want his sister to worry, so he tried to sound upbeat. “Pop’s been doing way better since we took this job.”

“Who is this Derek Badger character, anyway?”

“You’ve never seen the show?”

Julie chuckled. “I don’t even own a TV, little bro. All I do up here is crack the books.”

“Derek Badger is a survivalist guy,” Wahoo said. He explained the adventure format of the program.

His sister said, “Give me a break.”

“He’s huge, Jule.”

“Tell Dad what I said about the contract.”

“Do I have to?” Wahoo said.

He was only half kidding. He knew it would be his problem soon enough.

Mickey Cray was barefoot in the backyard with Beulah the python. He was admiring the markings on her skin-rich, chocolate-colored saddles on a sleek silvery background. Fourteen feet of raw muscle, and a brain the size of a marble.

Ever since he was a boy, Mickey had kept snakes for pets-green tree snakes, king snakes, rat snakes, water snakes, ring-necked snakes, garter snakes, even a few poisonous rattlers and moccasins. Mickey had caught them all. He still found them fascinating and mysterious.

Now the Everglades was overrun with foreign pythons that were eating the deer, birds, rabbits, even alligators-it was really a rough scene. The pythons weren’t supposed to be there; Southeast Asia was their natural home. So the U.S. government and the state of Florida had declared war on them.

Wahoo’s father understood why: the snakes were totally disrupting the balance of nature. A single adult Burmese could lay more than fifty eggs at a time. They were among the largest predators in the world, growing to a length of twenty feet, and at that size had no natural enemies. Even panthers avoided them.

Because of his knowledge and experience, Mickey Cray had been asked to go into the swamps and capture as many of the intruder reptiles as he could. The state was paying decent money, but Mickey said no. He knew that every python he caught would be euthanized, and he couldn’t bring himself to take part in that. He liked snakes too much. That was the problem.

He sat down on the ground near Beulah and she glided slowly in his direction. Her brick-sized head was elevated, the silky tongue flicking slowly.

Mickey grinned. “When’s the last time you got fed?”

Beulah responded by clamping down on Mickey’s left foot and throwing a meaty coil around both his legs.

“Easy, princess,” he said.

The python wrapped upward with another coil, and then another. Mickey quickly locked both arms in front of his chest to protect his lungs from being crushed, but he was out of shape and Beulah was extremely powerful.

“Wahoo!” he hollered. “Yo!”

“What?” called a voice from the house.

“Get your butt out here!”

The snake was chewing on Mickey’s foot as if it were a rabbit. He knew better than to struggle, for that would only cause Beulah to tighten her grip.

Wahoo came running. When he saw what the python was doing to his father, he yelled, “Don’t move!”

“Oh, that’s a good one,” Mickey gasped. “I was thinking of dancing a jig.”

“What the heck happened?”

“You forgot to feed her is what happened.”

“No way! She ate last week, I swear, Pop.”

“What did you give her-a cup of yogurt? Look at the poor girl, she’s starving!”

Wahoo suspected his dad might be right-adult pythons often went weeks between meals. Maybe he had forgotten to feed her.

“Get the bleeping bourbon,” Mickey said, “and make it fast.” He was already gulping for air.

Wahoo ran back to the house and grabbed a bottle of liquor that his dad kept around for such emergencies. Pythons are equipped with rows of long, curved teeth that cannot be easily pried from their prey. The fastest way to make them let go is to pour something hot or obnoxious into their mouths.

Snakes don’t have taste buds on their tongues like people do, so it wasn’t the flavor of bourbon that Beulah hated. It was the sting. Wahoo got on his knees and sorted through the muscular coils until he located the toothy end of the creature, which had already swallowed half of his father’s foot.

“You didn’t even wear your boots?” Wahoo said.

Mickey grunted. “Get on with it already.”

Wahoo uncapped the liquor bottle and dribbled the brown liquid directly down Beulah’s throat. Within seconds the python began to twitch. Then she hissed loudly, unhooked her chompers and spit. Mickey purposely remained limp while Wahoo began unwinding the massive reptile.

Beulah didn’t put up a struggle; she’d lost all interest in making a meal of Wahoo’s father. The alcohol in the bourbon was highly irritating, and she kept opening and closing her mouth in distaste.

It took a few minutes for Mickey to catch his breath and for the circulation to return to his legs. He was able to hop along beside Wahoo as they lugged the big snake back to her tank. Then they went inside to take care of Mickey’s foot, which looked like a purple pincushion.

“Promise you fed her? Tell the truth, son.”

Wahoo felt awful. “I must have forgot.”

“Springtime is when they get active and really start chowing down. I’ve only told you about a hundred times.” With a groan, Mickey sprawled on the couch.

“Dad, I’m really sorry.”

“Soon as we’re done here, you go fetch her a couple of big fat chickens from the freezer. And nuke ’em good in the microwave, okay? Pythons don’t like Popsicles.”

“Yes, sir.”

Wahoo emptied a tube of antiseptic ointment on his father’s foot, and with a butter knife he spread the goop over all the puncture holes. There were too many to count. Pythons weren’t poisonous, but a bite could cause a nasty infection.

“I’m sorry,” Wahoo said again. “I really messed up.”

“Enough already. Everybody makes mistakes,” his dad told him. “Heck, I shouldn’t have been playin’ with a snake that size, like she was a fuzzy little poodle.”

“Hold still, Pop.”

Mickey stared up at the ceiling. “Look, I know this ain’t exactly a normal life for a kid your age.”

“Don’t start again,” Wahoo said.

“No, I mean it,” Mickey went on. “What would I do without you and your mom? I’m lucky she stuck around all these years.”

“Yes, you are. Where’s the gauze?”

Wahoo waited until his dad’s wounds were bandaged before telling him what Julie had said about the Expedition Survival! contract.

“I knew the guy was trouble,” Mickey muttered.

“So what do we do now?”

“Our job, son. We do our job.” Mickey levered himself up, swinging his puffy, snake-bitten foot up on the coffee table. “I don’t care what their stupid paperwork says-I’m the only one in charge of my animals. Mr. Dork Badger can go fly a kite.”

“It’s Derek Badger.”

“Ha! You think it matters to these critters what his stupid name is?”

“No, Pop.”

“Know what Beulah would say? ‘All you stupid humans taste the same!’ ”

Wahoo found himself wondering if that was really true.