Man Trip
Authors: Graham Salisbury
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2012 by Graham Salisbury
Jacket art and interior illustrations copyright © 2012 by Jacqueline Rogers
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Wendy Lamb Books, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Salisbury, Graham.
Calvin Coconut : man trip / by Graham Salisbury; illustrated by Jacqueline Rogers. —
1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Fourth-grader Calvin flies from Oahu to the big island of Hawaii to go
on a deep-sea fishing trip with Ledward, his mother’s boyfriend, and learns
to appreciate other living creatures—especially one enormous marlin.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89797-9
[1. Big game fishing—Fiction. 2. Fishing—Fiction. 3. Human-animal relationships—
Fiction. 4. Family life—Hawaii—Fiction. 5. Hawaii—Fiction.]
I. Rogers, Jacqueline, ill. II. Title. III. Title: Man trip.
PZ7.S15225Cadm 2012
[Fic]—dc23
2011010959
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment
and celebrates the right to read.
v3.1
E
very time my mom calls me her little man of the house, I slip out the back door and run down to my friend Julio’s. “Man of the house” means: “Time to clean your room,” or “Take out the garbage,” or worst of all, “Cut the grass.”
This time it was the grass.
I glanced at the door. Mom hooked her finger into the collar of my T-shirt. “Oh no you don’t. You’ve let that grass grow far too long. You need to cut it. Now.”
Dang.
“Aw, come on, Mom, I hate that job.”
“We all have to do things we don’t like. Now, I filled the gas can at the service station. You have everything you need to get that old lawn mower started. Bye.”
I hung my head and made a big show of how hard this was for me. I mean, jeese, I could have been at the beach. “You’re killing me, Mom.”
She pointed her finger. “Go.”
I went out to the garage.
Actually, cutting the grass wasn’t hard. It was just disgusting.
Who wanted to go out there and shred
bufos? Bufos are toads, big fat juicy ones. And when the grass got long they came up from the river and dug down into it to sleep. Unless you got down on your hands and knees to look for them, you couldn’t see where they were. But the lawn mower could, and it spat shredded bufo guts all over my feet, every time.