Chomp

SIX

Wahoo sat at the kitchen table, tapping the keypad of a calculator. His father was stretched out on the sofa. Outside, the rain poured down and the yard was turning to mud. The taping of Expedition Survival! had been suspended until the weather cleared.

“How much do we owe the bank?” Wahoo asked.

Mickey Cray grunted. “I don’t recall.”

“I bet Mom knows.”

“Down to the penny.” Mickey sat up. “Hey, let’s call her.”

“We can’t, Pop. She said once a week, remember?” Wahoo would have loved to hear his mother’s voice, but she’d warned about phoning too often. “It costs, like, ten bucks a minute,” he reminded his dad. “Plus, it’s the middle of the night in Shanghai.”

“Put that stupid calculator away,” Mickey said sourly. “Let me deal with the bleeping bank.”

Wahoo’s mom, who hated to hear cussing, made his father put a dollar in the cookie jar every time he said a bad word. Consequently, Mickey had trained himself to use “bleep” or “bleeping” instead. He’d gotten the idea from watching reality police shows, which replaced the criminals’ profanity with electronic toots.

Wahoo said, “I’m not trying to be nosy, Pop.”

He had a friend at school whose parents had lost their house to the bank because they couldn’t make the mortgage payments. Now the whole family was crammed into a small apartment in Naranja. Wahoo knew his mother was determined not to let that happen to them-that’s why she’d taken the job in China.

Still, he worried.

“Relax, would ya? We’ll be okay,” Mickey said.

Clutching the TV remote, he lay back down. He flipped through the channels until he found a show called When Animals Go Bonkers. The first segment featured a crazed Canada goose attacking a garbage truck. Mickey didn’t even crack a smile; his thoughts were a million miles away.

Wahoo was troubled to see his father acting so listless and distracted. He grabbed a weather jacket and walked outside.

Rain always made the animals sleepy, so the backyard was peaceful. The TV crew had stowed its equipment and gone to lunch. Only the hum of Derek Badger’s humongous motor coach could be heard over the patter of raindrops. As Wahoo passed by the vehicle, he looked through a side window and saw Derek standing with Raven Stark in front of a mirror. With a tissue she was dabbing makeup on his nose, undoubtedly trying to conceal the button-sized turtle bite. Wahoo smiled to himself and kept walking.

Alice the alligator was floating serenely in the faux Everglades pond. It was three times as large as a regular backyard swimming pool and twice as deep. Mickey Cray and two friends had dug out the hole and poured the gunite themselves. Wahoo, who was only five at the time, had taken a turn with the shovel, too.

“Hey, girl,” he said to Alice. He waved to her with his thumb-less hand, a private joke.

Every year, the new kids at school would stare at Wahoo’s knobby scar and ask what had happened. Initially they wouldn’t believe the story, then they’d want to hear all the gory details. His classmates were always amazed when he told them he hadn’t felt any pain at first.

In truth, Wahoo hadn’t even realized anything was wrong until Paulette, the girl he’d been trying to impress, shrieked and keeled over. Only then had Wahoo looked down at his hand and seen the empty, bloody socket where a perfectly good thumb had been attached.

He’d wrapped the nub with his sweatshirt and dashed for the house, leaving Alice munching happily on the chicken and unseen appetizer. By the time the ambulance had arrived, Wahoo was in a world of hurt.

He never saw Paulette again. Her parents moved her to a private school where the boys came from normal homes and kept hamsters or goldfish as pets, not giant flesh-eating reptiles. Wahoo understood completely.

Yet he wouldn’t have traded his childhood for anybody else’s.

He said goodbye to Alice and went to check on the injured young bobcat, which was still acting skittish. His dad trudged past, hatless in the downpour, and pointed toward the gator pond. Wahoo sat down and tried speaking softly to the wild cat, which eyed him with uncertainty.

When the rain finally let up, someone in the motor coach began blasting the ridiculously loud air horn; it sounded like a Mississippi tugboat. Then the door of the big bus banged open, and a familiar voice yelled: “Get a move on, mates! La siesta is over!”

Wahoo rose and said, “Showtime.”

The bobcat, showing good sense, scooted up the telephone pole.

While Raven Stark was applying makeup to his wounded nose, Derek Badger asked, “Are snapping turtles edible?”

“Not that particular turtle, no.”

“But what a fabulous campfire scene-cooking it up over a bed of hot coals. I could use the snapper’s shell as a soup kettle!”

“Mr. Cray would never agree,” Raven said. “Now hold still.”

Derek frowned. “So what am I supposed to eat to survive? For the show, I mean.”

“The script calls for bullfrogs and crawdads.”

“What else? I want something truly disgusting.”

“Centipedes,” said Raven. “Florida has some seriously vile centipedes.”

“But we already did centipedes-down in South Africa, remember?”

Raven consulted her Everglades research notes. “Wild mushrooms, lichens, cabbage palms-”

Derek groaned. “Boooor-ing. What about an opossum?”

“They’re too cute. We’ll get angry letters.”

“Opossums aren’t cute. They’re ugly as the devil!”

“Not everyone thinks so.” Raven Stark had recently visited FAO Schwarz, a very famous toy store in New York City, where she’d noticed a whole shelf of hand puppets that were made to look like smiling, pink-nosed opossums. They were fairly adorable.

“How about maggots?” she asked Derek. “We can dig up plenty of maggots.”

“But they’re rather small, aren’t they? How many would I have to eat?”

“All depends.” Sometimes Derek needed a dozen tries to get the campfire dinner scene just right. “I should think no more than a pound or so,” Raven speculated.

“A slam dunk,” he said gaily.

“You do know we’re talking about fly larvae, right?”

He leaned closer to the mirror and started brushing his hair. “Speaking of food, who’s doing our catering? Please tell me it’s Candy and Anabelle.”

Although loyal viewers of Expedition Survival! never would have guessed, Derek Badger dined like a king during his televised survival missions. No matter how remote the jungle setting, his contract required sumptuous five-star menus: steak, lamb, lobster, sockeye salmon, homemade pasta, pheasant or venison, accompanied by fresh garden vegetables and of course an array of rich, artery-clogging desserts.

Naturally, these feasts were consumed off camera, so as not to spoil the illusion of hardship.

“Candy and Anabelle are on a job in Argentina,” Raven Stark said, knowing her boss would be miffed. “We’re using Leticia Oxford’s outfit.”

“Not again! That fool nearly poisoned me,” Derek cried. “Remember that dreadful Brie?”

There had been an incident, two years earlier, involving a wheel of spoiled cheese. In Leticia Oxford’s defense, the temperature that day in the Guyanese rain forest had reached 107 degrees, and the supply of ice had been limited.

“It’s Bear Grylls, isn’t it?” Derek whined, referring to one of his rival TV survivalists. “I’ll bet that’s who Candy and Anabelle are catering. Tell the truth, Raven. Are they cooking for that little twerp?”

“The rain’s stopped.”

Derek cocked his head to listen. “Well, so it has.”

“Alice awaits,” Raven said.

“Yes, in all her glory.” He put down the hairbrush and inspected his turtle-nipped nose once more in the mirror. Then he mashed the horn on the steering wheel, flung open the door of the motor coach and hollered, “Get a move on, mates. La siesta is over!”***

The first time Mickey Cray got chomped, he was only four years old.

His mom (Wahoo’s future grandmother) was sweeping the patio when she let out a yell. Mickey ran outside and found her waving a broom at a small garter snake, which he promptly snatched up by the tail. The frightened reptile twisted around and sank its sharp little nippers into Mickey’s tender wrist.

He stood there, staring in wonderment. It was just about the coolest thing he’d ever seen.

From that day on, Mickey Cray was fascinated with creatures small and large, furry and scaly. He spent every minute of his spare time in the woods and wetlands, chasing after snakes, chameleons, turtles, toads, eels, even baby gators. If it slithered, scampered or hopped, Mickey would grab for it.

As a result, he frequently got bitten. That wasn’t his favorite part of the outdoor experience, but the pain was nothing, really, compared to the fun he was having. Rare was the evening when he rode his bicycle home with no fresh puncture wounds or bloody spots on his jeans. His parents knew better than to ask about the squirming pillowcase he’d be carrying, as long as he remembered to lock whatever creature it held in the utility room.

Mickey’s family had hoped his passion for wildlife was just a youthful phase, but he never outgrew it. His mother and father were amazed when he met a bright and seemingly normal young woman who didn’t mind his motley collection of animals, and they were even more amazed when she agreed to marry him.

But that was Susan-she was amazing, period.

Mickey missed her like crazy, and she was 8,297 miles away. Wahoo had gone on the Internet and computed the distance, which had turned out to be depressing for both of them.

Not only did Mickey have a heavy heart, he was fighting another skull-splitting headache.

“The Curse of the Iguana,” he muttered to himself, slouched in the rain.

The falling droplets dimpled the brackish pool. Two fat bubbles appeared, and Alice rose slowly. Only her plank-sized snout and knuckled brow broke the surface.

“You’re lookin’ good,” Wahoo’s father said to the gator. “Heck, you always look good.”

In his world, Alice was a much bigger star than Derek Badger. Mickey had found her when he was a teenager and she was practically a hatchling, so she was as close to being tame as any ravenous, pea-brained dinosaur could be. Female alligators rarely grew so huge in the wild, but Mickey fed his favored specimen generously, and often.

“We’ll be out of your hair tomorrow,” he said to Alice, who hovered motionless and unblinking. “This TV guy, he’s a royal bonehead. Just roll with it, okay?”

Wahoo’s father sometimes held one-sided conversations with the animals, but he wasn’t a whack job; he never imagined that they could actually talk back. They all came to know his voice, though. Of that he was certain.

Finally the rain stopped and Mickey straightened up, dripping like a dog. Alice sank slowly toward the depths of the pool.

An air horn blew, and then a man hollered something about a siesta. The words were hard to make out, but the Australian accent was unmistakable.

“Mr. Dork Badger,” Wahoo’s father said to himself.

Then, to his favorite reptile, now at the bottom of the pond: “Don’t worry, princess. He tries anything funny, I’ll personally bite his head off.”