Chomp

FOUR

When his mother called from China, Wahoo was brushing his teeth.

He heard his dad say, “Susan, your boys are miserable! Please fly home!”

Wahoo spit out the toothpaste froth and ran to the living room. Mickey cupped a hand over the phone and whispered: “It’s eight in the morning in Shanghai-she’s finishing breakfast.”

“Can I talk with her?”

“Egg noodles again-she’s gonna overdose on carbs.”

“Please?” Wahoo said.

Mickey handed over the phone.

“So much drama,” Wahoo’s mom said to him. “For heaven’s sake, doesn’t your father ever give it a rest? You think I want to be here?”

“We took a big TV job. Actually he’s doing better.”

“But what about the headaches?”

“Gone, he says.”

“Keep a close watch on him,” Wahoo’s mother advised.

She asked about school. Wahoo said he thought he did okay on his finals.

“Even Spanish?”

“That was a killer,” he admitted.

“As long as you tried your best.”

“Miss you, Mom.”

“I miss you, too, big guy. This really sucks.”

Wahoo swallowed hard to keep his voice from cracking. He didn’t want her to know how bummed he felt because she was so far away. “I found your hotel on Google Earth,” he said. “Looks pretty sweet from the satellite.”

“Tell me about the TV thing,” she said.

“It’s real good money.”

“But is it a good job?”

“Yeah, awesome,” Wahoo said, thinking: When you’re broke, any job is a good job.

Mickey Cray piped up: “Hey, my turn. Give it here.”

Wahoo told his mother goodbye and went outside with a five-gallon bucket of cat food for the raccoons. He was the only kid in school whose father was a professional animal wrangler, and life in the Cray household definitely wasn’t routine. Still, despite his missing thumb, Wahoo was able to do most normal things. He’d taught himself to write, shoot baskets and throw a baseball with his left hand. He could even turn a clean three-sixty on his wakeboard, when his dad had time to take him out on the boat.

One normal thing that the Crays couldn’t do together was go on summer vacations. Mickey didn’t trust anybody else to take care of the animals. One time, when Wahoo’s aunt Rose had passed away, the whole family flew up to West Virginia for the funeral. Mickey had asked Donny Dander to look after the critters, which turned out to be an expensive mistake. The Crays were gone only three days, but during that short time two rare parrots escaped, a lemur caught the flu and Alice bit the tail off of a crocodile.

“Where’s the darned aspirin?” Mickey hollered from the house.

“On the kitchen counter next to the coffee machine,” Wahoo called back.

The raccoons were always excited to see him because Wahoo’s arrival meant it was mealtime. When he entered the enclosure, they clustered around him, chittering noisily and tugging with their hand-like paws at his pockets. He poured the cat chow equally into four separate dishes, one for each corner, so that the hungry animals would split up. Whenever they stayed in one group, vicious fighting would erupt over the food. So loud was the screeching and snarling that one time a neighbor had phoned the police because she feared a gruesome murder was taking place behind the Cray house.

Wahoo slipped out of the raccoon pen, padlocked the gate and began washing his hands with a garden hose.

“Don’t forget the soap, mate,” said a voice behind him.

Wahoo spun around and there stood Derek Badger. At his side was Raven Stark.

“Take me to your alligator,” Derek commanded.

“I’d better go get my dad.”

“Hurry, then. Chop-chop.”

Raven Stark spoke up. “Derek’s totally exhausted. He traveled all night from Paris.”

“A wretched flight,” said Derek. “Didn’t sleep a wink.”

Wahoo had no trouble believing it. The man’s eyelids were puffy, his pale cheeks were blotched and his hair-more orange than blond-was matted and oily. He wore black loafers with no socks, wrinkled white linen trousers and an untucked safari-style shirt that failed to hide his roundish belly. To Wahoo, Derek Badger looked more like a groggy tourist than a sturdy survivalist.

“I’m on a tight schedule,” he said, glancing at his wristwatch.

Wahoo ran to the house and returned with his father. Raven Stark handled the introductions. Mickey managed a smile as he shook Derek’s hand.

“We’re lookin’ forward to working with you,” Mickey said, which wasn’t exactly true but it sounded good.

Wahoo appreciated his father’s effort to be respectful. Staging a nature show for a network star like Derek was a big deal. If everything went smoothly, it might lead to more TV jobs.

“Let’s go see Alice, shall we?” said Raven Stark.

The gator was snoozing on the bank of the pond. Derek took one look at the huge reptile and said, “She’s perfect.” Then he turned to Raven Stark. “When can we move her?”

“Move her?” Mickey asked.

Raven Stark said, “We’re going to be shooting on location out by the Tamiami Trail.”

Wahoo thought: Here we go.

“She weighs six hundred and twenty pounds,” his father said.

Derek chuckled. “No worries, mate. We’ll hire a crane and a truck.”

Mickey Cray stepped close to Derek. “Alice doesn’t travel,” he said. “You want Alice? Shoot the scene here.”

Years earlier, Wahoo’s father had constructed a small but convincing Everglades set at one end of the property. There was a lush pool ten feet deep, complete with pickerelweed and water lilies, for staging underwater scenes.

Derek didn’t want to hear about it. “Save your pretty little lake for an air-freshener commercial.”

Mickey said, “If it’s good enough for Disney, it’s plenty good enough for you, mate.”

Wahoo worried that his father would say or do something so insulting that he’d lose the Expedition Survival! job even before it got started.

Raven Stark edged between the men. “What about the smaller gators?”

“They fit in the back of my pickup,” said Wahoo’s father. “They travel fine.”

Derek looked down at Alice, who was still asleep. “She’s the only one I want,” he declared.

Then he turned and stalked off.

In a stiff tone, Raven Stark said, “Mr. Cray, you signed a contract.”

“Which I intend to use as toilet paper-”

Wahoo cut in with a bluff: “Our lawyer looked at the contract. She said it won’t stick.”

Julie wasn’t really a lawyer yet, but it wouldn’t be long.

“Good luck finding another tame gator like Alice,” Mickey said.

Raven Stark bristled. “We paid you a deposit, remember? Eight hundred dollars.”

“Good luck finding that, too.”

Wahoo volunteered to show the fake Everglades set to Derek so he could see for himself how authentic it looked. Raven walked to the car to get him, but she returned alone.

“He’s on the phone,” she reported soberly, “with our producers in California.”

Mickey mumbled something sarcastic under his breath and headed back to the house.

“Look, we can still make this work,” Wahoo said to Raven.

“Not if your father insists on being difficult.”

“I’ll deal with Pop, okay?”

“You’re only a kid, no offense.”

Wahoo tried to remain polite. “I’m his kid. He listens to me.”

“And you guys need the money, right?” Raven looked around at the pens and cages. “It’s got to be expensive, keeping all these animals. This would be a nice payday for your family, no?”

Wahoo felt his throat tighten. “Tell Mr. Badger we’re on.”

Raven was smiling. “How old are you, Wahoo?”

“Old enough to get it done,” he said.

Back at the house, he found his father lying on the couch with an ice pack over his forehead.

Wahoo sat down beside him. “Pop, this show is really important.”

“So’s Alice.” Mickey reached for the TV remote. “Hey, look what I TiVo’d the other night.”

He touched a button and an episode of Expedition Survival! came on the screen-Derek Badger, roaming a rainy jungle in Costa Rica. A teaser at the beginning showed the star sleeping in a hammock made of vines while a fat hairy spider crawled up his bare arm.

Wahoo’s father shook a scarred finger at the TV. “Five bucks says he kills that thing and fries it up for dinner!”

“I’m not taking that bet.”

“You know there’s a cameraman standing two feet away with a can of Raid, ready to blast that poor, pitiful tarantula.”

“It’s showbiz,” said Wahoo.

“The guy’s such a tool!”

“I know, Pop, but we need the work.”

They watched the program for a little while longer. Sure enough, Derek Badger pretended to awaken just before the creeping spider reached his neck. Then he knocked it away and stomped it with a boot. He didn’t fry the flattened victim, though; he grilled it over a small fire, all the time smacking his wormy lips and yammering about how he’d narrowly escaped a horrible, painful death.

However, Wahoo and his father knew something that most faithful viewers of Expedition Survival! didn’t know-that tarantulas almost never bite people. When they do, the sting is no worse than a bumblebee’s.

Grumbling in disgust, Mickey Cray switched off the TV and tossed the remote onto the coffee table. “The other shows we’ve done, even the lame ones, were all about the wildlife,” he said, “but this is just about him.”

Wahoo didn’t like the idea of working for Derek Badger any more than his father did. “Pop, we’ve got bills to pay,” he said. “Alice needs to eat, right?”

“Okay, but Alice doesn’t travel. And that’s final.”

“Fine, Alice doesn’t travel,” said Wahoo. “But you’ve gotta admit, it would’ve been fun watching those bozos try to haul her out of the pond.”

Mickey Cray laughed. “Oh yeah.”