Billy and the Birdfrogs (13 page)

“You! You runaway! You worthless Smarty Pants! Change Billy? That cable came back up again all smashed and cut and covered with—”

“Come on, Mom,” my mother said, tugging and pushing and trying frantically to get her head back. “It wasn’t my fault. I always bring a snack down with me, and when those rocks fell they smashed the jar. My jar of catsup yogurt. I had it in a pickle jar. I’m sorry I ruined your pickle jar.”

“Is that what it was?” my grandmother said, still roaring. “Catsup yogurt? I thought the little baloney bits were parts of your fingers.”

“Mom, stop being disgusting. Come on, I wasn’t gone that long, was I? And I need to order this equipment. Can’t you decapitate me some other time? Let go!”

“Not until you tell me who that boy is!” my grandmother shouted.

“Mom, this is a joke, right? That’s not Billy. Billy’s upstairs in my bedroom, in his crib.”

“Oh yeah? Go look,” my grandmother shouted, suddenly letting go.

My mother felt around her neck to make sure it was still the right shape and length. “All right, Mom, all right, let’s go look. But this had better not take too long.”

She got up, but before she left the room she looked at me very closely and very curiously. I felt like her eyes were boring into me. My heart was racing, and I couldn’t help grinning at her.

We went upstairs, my mother first, my grandmother second, and me last, and we reached the fourth floor. I realized that my bedroom must have once been my mother’s. She stopped in the doorway, stared in, and then turned to us and said, “This is some gigantic joke. Who’s that man in the bed?”

My grandmother and I scrambled up the last few steps and ran to the door to look in. Mr. Jubber was stretched out on the mattress, fully clothed and snoring gently. His hands were folded together on his chest, moving up and down with each breath. Two empty wine bottles lay on the floor beside him.

“Holy birdfrogs!” my grandmother said, jumping back from the door. “Who the heck’s that?”

“That’s Mr. Jubber,” I said. I didn’t understand how he could sleep so peacefully through all of our shouting, but maybe the two bottles of wine had made him especially tired. His round and puffy face had a slightly puzzled expression, as if, even while he was asleep, he still couldn’t get rid of his worries. “He’s been living here,” I explained. “He’s Mr. Earpicker’s friend. I don’t think he likes Mr. Earpicker very much, but they’re in business together. I mean, Mr. Earpicker takes care of his money.”

“And who,” my mother said, looking intently at me, “who exactly are you?”

I started to grin like a maniac. I couldn’t stop it. I could feel all the smile muscles in my face working very hard as if they had come to a decision of their own. “I’m...”

Suddenly we heard the front door of the house crash open. Footsteps came trampling in. Not just a few footsteps; it sounded like a dozen people in steel boots charging into the house. “Quick, down the basement!” someone shouted. It was Mr. Earpicker’s voice. “We’ll get the little rat this time!” We could hear the footsteps trampling into the kitchen and down the basement stairs.

Chapter 23

Mr. Earpicker and Miss Pointy Are Entangled in Their Own Net

We ran down the stairs to see what had happened. The front door of the house was standing open and we could see five police cars parked outside. The policemen must have all followed Mr. Earpicker into the basement. We could hear them shouting and talking below us. We went into the kitchen, through the jagged hole in the wall, and down the basement stairs. Nobody was in the first basement room. They were all in the second room, the room with the hole, and we could hear Mr. Earpicker shouting.

“Blast that little bird-brained idiot! I want him out of my house! Before he ruins any more of my potato peelers! I say we throw grenades down the hole! Then we can go down with a bucket and scrape him off the walls, and take the bucket to jail! Don’t you stock grenades in your squad cars? What good are you guys anyway? Let’s get this over with! It’s taking too long! Pointy, as soon as that boy sticks out his head, we’ll throw the net over him. Don’t let him get away!”

I stepped through the door and suddenly everyone went silent. They stared at me. The room was crowded with ten policemen, Mr. Earpicker, and Miss Pointy. Mr. Earpicker and Miss Pointy were untangling a large net made out of thick, knotted rope, but they had stopped moving and were now frozen with their hands tangled in the net, their eyes fixed on me.

Then Mr. Earpicker jumped in the air and shouted, “Oh my God! Look at that! There he is! He snuck out of the hole when we weren’t looking! And now he’s back! The twerp!”

“Bobby,” Miss Pointy said, smiling at me in a ferocious way, her eyes glittering, “you have been
dysfunctional
. We’re going to have to
remediate
you.”

“And then,” Mr. Earpicker screamed, “we’ll drop you from the fourth floor! We’ll rub your nose on a cheese grater! We’ll. . . .”

As he shouted, he jumped up and down and made violent movements with his hands. He was getting himself and Miss Pointy more and more tangled in the rope net.

I wasn’t afraid of them anymore, of course. I stood quietly and smiled politely.

“What’s he smiling at?” Mr. Earpicker shouted. “What did he do, rattle his brains on a stone down there? He’s an idiot! His head’s empty! It’s full of tennis balls! Look at him stand there, grinning like a doofus! He’s. . . .”

The room went silent again. My grandmother had just walked in behind me and put her hand on my shoulder.

Mr. Earpicker’s face turned purple and then white. Miss Pointy let out a shriek. The two of them began to back away.

“You’re dead!” Mr. Earpicker gibbered. “I saw you! You were splattered. You were squelched. You were flattened! You can’t be alive again! It’s my house, I tell you, not yours! I’m about to sell it at 200% margin! You only got it because that lousy bone-digging daughter of yours, who did us all the favor of getting killed eight years ago. . . .”

He went silent for a third time. My mother had just walked in the room and stood beside me, putting her hand on my other shoulder.

Mr. Earpicker began to tremble. He looked like a marionette that someone was shaking violently. His arms and his legs shook and his face turned the gray color of the cement floor.

He and Miss Pointy backed away, step by step, until he stumbled against the cement rim of the hole. He lost his balance. He tried to stick out a hand to stop himself from falling, but both of his arms were tangled up in the net. Miss Pointy, who was just as tangled in the same net, lost her balance too. They struggled for a moment with their eyes popping and their arms wrapped up like two giant moths in a spider web, and then they fell over backward down the hole. Mr. Earpicker fell first and dragged Miss Pointy after him.

I could hear his voice trailing down the hole. “Blast! I hate this! Pointy, do something! Catch hold of something! Ow! My hands are all tied up! How deep is this thing anyway? What are we going to do? Oh my God! This is unbelievable! Somebody do something!”

When his voice had faded away, my grandmother turned to the policemen. “Can I help you?” she said.

“Ma’am,” the head policeman said, “we’re responding to a breaking-and-entering. Apparently the perpetrator has been hiding down that sewer access port for two days. We’ve been called in to extricate the suspect.”

“I’m terribly sorry,” my grandmother said firmly, “it’s all a misunderstanding. There’s no need for you. You can go now. I’m sure you have more important work to do.”

“Right, Ma’am,” the policeman said, nodding curtly. “Thank you, Ma’am.” He looked into the black mouth of the hole. He was very professional and showed almost nothing of his private feelings, but I was pretty sure I saw a flicker of relief cross his face. I don’t think he wanted to climb down that hole. “All right, men, let’s get out of this!” he shouted, and the ten policemen trampled out of the room and up the basement stairs with a thunderous sound. A moment later we could hear their squad cars starting up and driving away down the street.

We were all alone now. Just the three of us were left in the room.

My mother turned to look at me. Her eyes, as always, were like two bright blue swords gleaming with intelligence and sharpness, but now they were also full of amazement and love and pride. “You’re the one who saved us,” she said. “You climbed down with that rope and got us out. It’s really you, isn’t it? You’re really Billy?”

“Yes, Mother,” I said.

Even though I had only just met my mother fifteen minutes ago, she didn’t seem like a stranger. She seemed like someone I had known all my life. For a moment we seemed to be a little shy of each other. Then, at exactly the same time, we threw our arms around each other.

Chapter 24

What Happened Afterward

Over the next few months my mother typed up her notes and wrote a book on
Gorilla minimus
. It was hundreds of pages long, complete with sketches and diagrams of the many things she had found out. She had even learned how to talk to them, which was very difficult because they spoke in thick Brooklyn accents. Also, they were very shy and hard to get to know. They trusted my mother, but only because she had lived for so long right among them, eating their food, watching their behavior, and participating in their city council meetings.

The book isn’t published yet. My mother says that when it comes out, lots of other people will try to pester the birdfrogs. To protect them, she wrote in the book that the hole leading to them is in southern Madagascar.

• • • • •

The birdfrogs really had stolen my grandmother’s kitchen knives. My mother asked them, and they told her all about it. When they first came up out of the hole they were naturally curious about people, and did some Web surfing to find out what we were like. When they found the Web page on how to cook a person, they were horrified and thought that humans must be awful animals that ate each other all the time. They took away my grandmother’s knives so that she wouldn’t be able to cut me up. They also borrowed my grandmother’s digital camera to take pictures of the Christo exhibit in Central Park. But the birdfrog who was holding the camera got mugged and the camera was stolen, so they were never able to give it back.

• • • • •

According to the birdfrogs, Mr. Earpicker and Miss Pointy fell all the way down to the big glowing cavern. A birdfrog saw them land in a heap, still tangled up in the net. When the two people spotted the birdfrog they were so frightened that they ran screaming and hopping and struggling down one of the tunnels and nobody ever saw them again. The tunnels go for hundreds of miles and even the birdfrogs don’t have a complete map. They are probably still down there, running around and trying to get their arms free of the rope net. My grandmother says that as long as they find enough cave funguses to eat, they’ll be able to stay alive.

• • • • •

Mr. Earpicker had stolen all of Mr. Jubber’s money and hidden it in secret bank accounts. There was nothing Mr. Jubber could do. He couldn’t get it back.

Since he had nowhere else to go, no money, and no job, he stayed in our house. At night, he slept on the living room couch. During the day, he was our secretary. Every new skeleton that we brought out of the hole had to be labeled, photographed, and described in writing, and all the papers and photos had to be put in a file and arranged in order in a big file cabinet. That was Mr. Jubber’s job. He seemed to like it. He said that when you are rich, everyone wants to take your money away and so you are always worried about it. But now that he was poor, he had nothing to worry about. He did look more cheerful and he stopped drinking whole bottles of wine.

• • • • •

I didn’t have to go to school. Everyone at the Department of Social Services turned out to be very nice and helpful, and none of them minded my home schooling. Miss Pointy had never worked for them after all. She had worked for the Office of Misinformation.

When I wasn’t doing schoolwork I helped my mother with her expeditions. We installed a metal ladder in the hole and went down once a week. My mother usually climbed all the way down to study the birdfrogs. She had gotten to be good friends with them. As for me, I was more interested in the extinct skeletons, so my mother handed over to me that part of the work. I was in charge of digging them out of the rock and hauling them up, one bone at a time. Right now I am working on T29, and have gotten out all of his tailbones and most of the bones of his left front foot. So I am making very good progress. Next, I am going to work on the saber-toothed tiger.

• • • • •

The Whingles had been nice to me in their own way, especially Mrs. Whingle, so I wanted to be nice to them in return. I invited them to come over and help dig out the wooly mammoth. When I knocked on the door, Mrs. Whingle opened it and was very surprised to see me. She thought I had run away and had only just come back, so she wanted to bring me inside at once and put me to bed again. But then she saw my grandmother standing on the doorstep next to me, and she fainted. We carried her inside, sat her on her living room couch, and when she woke up we explained the situation to her.

Now, Candy and Dennis come over every day after school to help dig out fossilized bones. They still giggle all the time, but my grandmother says that it is okay. She says that if you are going to have a bad habit, then giggling is a good one to have. They seem to like me better now that they know I’m not crazy.

Sometimes other children from the same row of houses also come over to help with the dinosaur bones. They don’t bother coming to our front door; they just run through the attic and get directly into our house. We never close the attic door. We never lock the front door, and we keep all the windows open all the time, even in the middle of winter. It is nice to live in a house where nothing is locked.

• • • • •

Once a month we have a huge dinner. Nine people sit around the table in our kitchen: Mr. and Mrs. Whingle, Dennis and Candy Whingle, Mr. Jubber, my grandmother, my mother, and me. That adds up to eight people. The ninth is a young birdfrog named Jerry who is less shy than the others, and who comes to visit us. He has to sit on the tabletop because he is too small to sit on a chair. We give him a dessert plate with a slice of banana dipped in chocolate. He also likes strawberries in chocolate. The rest of us eat spaghetti covered in my grandmother’s delicious sauce, cooked with tennis balls.

But we don’t eat the tennis balls.