Amphibian (11 page)

I said, ‘But where would you hide them on such short notice?' And he said he would just put them in some other kid's pocket. I told him to put them in Lyle's. But then I told Bird that flakes of his skin would be in the mittens and that the skin would be his
DNA
and not Lyle's. He said, ‘Oh.' I think Bird has decided to take his chances.

Today Bird didn't try getting more than three books away from the line because he wasn't himself. He was worrying about taking his misbehaviour form home to his parents. His father said that the next time he got one, he would be in big, big trouble. Bird said that usually means that he won't get to play his Game Boy for a whole week and sometimes that means no
TV
too. But usually it just means no Game Boy because when there's a no-
TV
rule, Bird follows his mother around the house talking until his mother tells him he can watch
TV.
She said to Bird's father that when Bird does something bad, she shouldn't be punished too.

I told Bird that I can't watch my favourite programs and I didn't even get a misbehaviour form. I just worry too much about animals going extinct and the earth being ruined.

He said, ‘You got punished just for worrying about stuff?'

And I said, ‘Yes.'

He said, ‘That's too weird!'

And I said, ‘Tell that to my mother.'

Bird and I have been talking a lot about Cuddles. When we first met him in that aquarium, Bird thought it was pretty cool to have a pet frog. But then I asked him how he'd feel if he were stuck in an aquarium with a bunch of ugly faces staring in at him. I told him about how pets aren't really pets if they don't want to be with you and how sad Cuddles must be to be here on the other side of the world from where his species is. I told him how frogs are disappearing off the face of the earth and how we need to free Cuddles and put him back in his natural environment in Australia. Now Bird agrees.

We have been trying to think up a plan. We don't have all the details worked out yet but it goes something like this: at the end of a school day, I pretend to zipper my jacket right by Cuddles' aquarium while Bird goes up to Mrs. Wardman and asks questions to distract her. Then I reach in, grab him and put him in my pocket and take him home. What to do next is the difficult part – what do we do with Cuddles after we rescue him? One idea is to give him to my dad to take with him to Australia. But the problem is, my dad is in Scotland right now. When he comes home next, I don't know where he's going – and neither does he because he can't predict what bad thing will happen and where. He's prepared for just about any bad thing, though, because he has taken hostile-environment courses. Come to think of it, kids like me should take those courses too.

So then we thought about mailing Cuddles back to Australia, but who would we get to let him out of his box when he got there? And would it take too long? I read that some desert frogs can live months and sometimes years without food and water, but I can't find that information on White's tree frogs. Another worry is that he would be bounced around too much in the package. I saw on
TV
that shaking a baby too much can burst blood vessels in its
brain and give it shaken baby syndrome. Is there shaken frog syndrome?

We got a chance to answer some of these questions after lunch today when we had a technology class. We got to use the computers and Bird is my computer buddy. We were supposed to be looking up information on hurricanes for our science project, but when Mr. Sears wasn't looking, I typed in
frog rescue
on the internet. I found a site called the Frog and Tadpole Rescue Group, which is a group of people in Australia who save frogs. Sometimes frogs are mistakenly packed in food crates and building-supply boxes and shipped to other parts of Australia. If you find a frog in your bananas or fruit salad, you call the frog team and they rescue him.

I was almost finished reading the first page when Bird whispered, ‘Hurry! Get off the frog site – here comes Mr. Sears!'

So I wrote down the phone number really quickly and then Bird clicked the backwards arrow twice so that we were back on the hurricane page.

Mr. Sears stopped at our computer and said, ‘How are you boys doing?'

And Bird said, ‘Those hurricanes can be really big, eh, Mr. Sears?'

And Mr. Sears said, ‘What else have you learned so far?'

And Bird said, ‘They're very windy.'

Mr. Sears said, ‘Boys, I suggest you read some more.' Then he walked on to the next computer buddies.

Bird said, ‘Phew, that was a close one!'

And I said, ‘Hurricanes are windy? Geez, Bird, of course they're windy – they're hurricanes!' But then I told Bird thanks because he had saved us from getting a misbehaviour, or at least a growling.

I put the frog-rescue phone number in my shirt pocket. I am going to call them. I am hoping they will have some ideas about how to save Cuddles.

My mother and I drove to my Grammie's first thing this morning. My grandmother lives in the country an hour away from my house. There's a real forest in her backyard and she lives only five minutes away from a river and only fifteen minutes away from the ocean. She lives in a perfect place – except that she's not very far away from an oil refinery that blasts pollution into the air twenty-four hours a day every day. This is something that Grammie is upset about. Because she used to work as a biologist, she gets on the news a lot to talk about it. Lung cancer killed my grandfather and he didn't even smoke.

On the way to Grammie's, I counted all the graveyards I could see. Last time I counted twenty-eight, and I told my mother I wanted to break that record. I asked if she could please slow down when we went through the villages.

‘Phin, do you really think there have been more graveyards added since the last time we visited Grammie?'

‘No, but I may have missed some last time.'

‘Oh, okay, keep your eyes open, you don't want to miss those dead people.'

I watched really closely and then when I was up to a count of eighteen, I spotted one in behind a church that looked like an ordinary house that I don't think I saw last time. I was starting to feel like I might break my old record.

‘Mom, I just saw one I didn't see before!'

‘That's wonderful, Phin. How many dead people do you think are in there?'

‘There look to be about fifty gravestones. But sometimes there is just one gravestone for more than one person. So there's no way of knowing for sure – unless we dig up the whole graveyard.'

‘The answer is all of them. They're all dead, silly!' And then she laughed. That was a good joke.

My mom laughs a lot. I like watching animals laugh on
TV.
When chimps play and chase each other, they pant laugh and their faces look a lot like human faces laughing. When a gorilla tickles another gorilla, the one who's being tickled makes a laughing face.
Dogs make that face too. And rats chirp when they play and it sounds like giggling. When the scientists on the show tickled the rats, they chirped happily and wanted to be tickled some more. But other scientists still think that only humans can laugh. I think that's because the animals they're keeping in their cages for experiments are not laughing – not one little bit.

By the time I got to Grammie's, I had spotted thirty graveyards, which broke my record.

When we got to Grammie's, she grabbed me and hugged me. She smells like the lavender she grows in the summer because she makes oils and lotions and bath balls from it. Last summer I helped her cut off all the lavender and hang it upside down in her garden shed. Then a few weeks after that I helped her make the bath balls. We broke up the lavender flowers into smaller pieces and then we mixed up sea salt in a blender and added baking soda, cornstarch and eggs and then the lavender. Then we made the mixture into balls and baked them in the oven. When you put a lavender ball in the bathtub, it dissolves and little bits of lavender float around. It smells really good, like my grandmother did when she hugged me.

We all went into Grammie's kitchen and talked and had some tea and biscuits. Mostly my mom doesn't let me drink tea, but when we're at Grammie's she does. I chose lemon ginger tea and put lots of honey in it to make it sweet.

When Mom went to my grandfather's den to make some important calls, Grammie asked to see what I'd been doing on Reull. I ran out to the car and got my box and showed her. She loved my story of the Ozie and the Oster. We talked about how plants, like the Ozie, actually help clean the earth.

Grammie knows a lot about plants because that's what she used to study when she worked as a biologist. She says the work she did then is the reason she's now an organic gardener. She found out things like that dogs whose owners use pesticides are
more likely to die of bladder cancer. So to get rid of bugs like aphids, she just sprays them off with the garden hose on full blast instead of using poisons. She said that once they're on the ground, they often can't crawl back up.

I looked up aphids in my bug books and learned that aphids can be of the winged kind or the unwinged kind. The kind that are in the garden are usually unwinged, but if a plant gets too crowded, all of a sudden winged aphids start to be born and they fly off to other plants.

I mentioned that to my grandmother and it was something she didn't know about aphids – and she knows a lot about bugs and plants. I felt happy to tell her something she didn't know. She said, ‘Well, soon humans had better start producing the winged variety too.' She was making a joke, but I think it was only a half-joke.

Just before supper, my uncle John got home from work. When he saw me, he said, ‘Hey, little man, long time, no see.' He messed up my hair and said that I'd grown a foot. He says that every time he sees me because when I was three I looked down to see if I had actually grown another foot. He still talks about that, which is kind of irritating.

Uncle John works at a factory that makes potato chips. Sometimes the equipment doesn't work right and makes weird-looking chips. He brought home one that is shaped like the Loch Ness monster and another one that looks like a bus. He has another that he says looks like something I'll see when I get older, but he won't tell me what. He framed those three chips and hung them on his bedroom wall.

My mother says Uncle John needs to get a life.

At supper we had yellow beans, and I hate yellow beans. We also had carrots, and I hate carrots. My mother said to have three bites of each.

I said, ‘Should I eat my carrots with my eyes open or with them closed?'

And she said, ‘Why do you ask?'

‘Because you say carrots are good for your eyes and I'm wondering if that's only when you keep them closed since they look so disgusting.'

‘Phin, I don't care if you eat them with your eyes opened or closed, standing on your feet or standing on your head, just eat them.'

So I ate three bites of them but I made sure to pick the smallest pieces. They lunged down my throat like they were alive, which made me almost barf. I washed them down with organic milk, which is all Grammie buys because she's upset about commercial farmers using hormones in their feed for cows. And she doesn't like it when farmers use artificial insemination. That's when the farmer instead of the bull makes the cow pregnant.

After supper I sat at the dining room table and made some Reull animals. I drew the Digging Robin, which has a red or blue head. He crawls, has two small claws for digging and spikes to make tunnels. He also has a very sharp beak and a stabber on the end of his tail to break up rock as he digs. The problem for the Digging Robin is that his habitat has started to be taken over more and more by the Gorachs. The Gorachs are 90 percent liquid and 10 percent solids and when they move around they drip poison wherever they go. The Gorachs have been covering everything up with their cities, and they say that they are the supreme rulers of all of Reull. The Digging Robins have fewer and fewer places to dig and to live and they are worried. But there's a plan, and they're almost ready to put it into action.

I slept on Granddad's side of the bed last night. Even though I really wanted to sleep with Grammie, it made me miss him right in the pit of my stomach.

‘Do you still smell Granddad on his pillow?' I asked Grammie as I was going to bed.

‘Yes, but it's fading,' said Grammie.

‘Do you still miss him a lot?' I asked.

‘Every day,' said my grandmother. Then she sat in her rocking chair and brushed her long white hair, staring out her window at her garden, still all covered in snow.

I wanted to say more about Granddad but from the look on my grandmother's face, there are some things that are just too sad to say all at once. There needs to be spaces between – spaces to absorb some of the sadness, like a sponge.

I changed the subject. I told Grammie about my super-humungous problem of Mom not letting me watch the Green Channel. She asked me why I thought Mom did this and I said, ‘She says it's because it makes me worried.'

‘Are you worried?'

‘Sometimes.'

Grammie didn't say anything. She didn't tell me I shouldn't be worried like Mom and Dr. Barrett tell me.

I told Grammie I was still worried about Cuddles. Her face said, ‘I understand,' and then she said, ‘Oh, that's a shame.' She didn't tell me that frogs aren't worth worrying about.

Instead Grammie told me that frogs are like the canaries that miners used to bring into the mine shaft with them. That's because frogs breathe with their lungs but also through their skin. This means they're more sensitive to toxins than other animals are.

I'm starting to think that maybe instead of a general zoologist, I'll specialize and be a herpetologist. They're scientists who study amphibians and reptiles. They have found lots and lots of frogs with missing legs, extra legs, legs that stick out from the body at weird places, legs that are webbed together with extra skin and legs that split into two halfway down. They have also found frogs with missing eyes and a one-eyed frog that has a second eye growing inside his throat. I haven't seen anything like that at the amphibian park near where I live but I once saw a frog missing the legs on one side of his body.