Amphibian (28 page)

Bird stepped between me and Lyle and said, ‘Get lost, Lyle, or I'm going to use this on you,' and pulled out a little spray can that said
pepper
on it.

‘What's that, little Birdie boy, you think you can scare me with a little can of fruit spray?' said Lyle.

Bird took the cap off the bottle and held it up so Lyle could see it better. He said, ‘If I press down on this, Lyle, you'll get a face full of pepper that'll make you want to tear your eyes out.'

Lyle said, ‘Yeah, right,' and stepped so close to Bird that later he told me he could smell Lyle's breath and it reeked like rotting meat, likely from the kids he's eaten.

Bird held the can up level with Lyle's face and put his finger on the nozzle.

Lyle said, ‘You don't scare me, little birdie boy,' but his mouth twitched a little.

Bird pressed down a little more on the nozzle. ‘Try me, Lyle, just try me,' he said.

Lyle growled, ‘Where's your Try Me button, you little brown fucker?'

Bird said, ‘I mean it, Lyle. This will burn your eyes out.' He moved the bottle even closer to Lyle's face.

Lyle paused for a second and then he backed up and said, ‘I'll get you later, you little scumbag shithole,' and then he spat on the ground and walked off, likely looking for someone safer to bother.

I couldn't believe what Bird had just done. ‘Holy crap, Bird, thanks!' I said.

Bird just shrugged, but his eyes were bugging out and I could tell that he couldn't believe what he had just done either.

‘Where did you get that stuff, anyway?' I asked.

‘From my grandmother. I told her what Lyle did to you. I sure hope he doesn't tell Mrs. Wardman about it because I sure don't need another misbehaviour. And what the bleep's wrong with you, anyway, Mr. “I sure hope you never become a fucker”? Are you trying to get the crap beat out of you?'

‘Let's just hurry up and get rid of the evidence in case Lyle's on his way to Mrs. Wardman.'

Bird and I decided to bury the pepper spray in the gravel next to the apple tree. I stood in front of him to hide what he was doing while he dug the hole and put it in and covered it up. We agreed that if Lyle looked like he was going to hurt one of us, the other would run for the pepper spray and use it if he had to.

I don't think I'd have a problem doing that these days either. Things are changing now that I'm almost ten. So long, Mr. Nice Guy.

Today I mailed a letter to my dad. I wrote a little bit each day for over two weeks. It's four pages long. I followed my mom's advice and told him how it feels to hardly ever see him. I tried to say it in a nice way but in an honest way at the same time.

To write one part of my letter, I watched the evening news for a week. I did this so that I could find out about some of the horrible human-rights things that are happening right here in Canada. I'm thinking that if Dad knew about them, then maybe he would be interested in doing stories closer to home. I made a top-three list:

1. The murdering of Native women in the west of the country, which the police don't seem to do much about.

2. The fact that the Canadian government still allows asbestos to be sold to people in other countries – even though they know it kills. Isn't that just as bad as the melamine in foods from China that gets lots and lots of news stories?

3. Oil and gas companies being bullies with people who want them to stop ruining their land and making them sick.

Near the end of my letter I told Dad that Mom sometimes sees another man and that I can't help thinking about how that's not right. Every time I see her with him, I get angry. I told him that Mom says that she and he will never be back together. I asked him if he feels that way too. I just want his honest opinion. Then I drew him a few pictures of the creatures on Reull and explained what has been happening there.

I felt relieved to drop the letter in the mailbox, care of the news company he works for. My dad is coming home in a few weeks and I know my mom is going to make me talk with him about all that. She calls it ‘the big talk.' So I figure it's better that he knows some of it in advance so that he's prepared. I hate it when I'm not prepared for bad news.

Also, since my mother doesn't make much sense when she tries to explain it to me, I'm hoping that maybe my dad can tell me exactly how it is that a person can love someone one day and then not love them the next? I don't think any animals in the world do that. Maybe if humans were in a social group together and they all had to work really hard to get enough food to eat and keep them all alive, they would stay together. Maybe then they'd be like the other animals who really do mate for life, like the shingleback lizard, the Canadian goose and the grey wolf.

But maybe I've got it all wrong. Maybe humans aren't animals who mate for life. Maybe they're more like the mate-for-a-season animals.

I know what my mom thinks about her and Dad, but I also need to know what Dad thinks. If his and Mom's season is up, I need to know that for absolute sure.

This morning just as Mom and I were about to go to swimming lessons, the phone rang. It was Caroline calling to ask us to please come help with a toad rescue taking place in the wetlands – the very same wetlands that now has a big road right through it, the one where Julius's law firm is trying to stop further development. She said that hundreds and hundreds of toads are trying to get across the road to their mating grounds on the other side but are being squished by cars.

My mom said going was up to me but that I'd miss my swimming lesson. I got my rubber boots on right away. Then I remembered that when I told Bird about cleaning up the amphibian park, he said that he would have liked to help too and why didn't I call him? So I asked my mom if we could pick Bird up on our way.

When Mom, Bird and I were almost to where other cars were stopped along the road, I couldn't believe my eyes. I was sure I was having a daymare. At first it looked like hundreds of small rocks on the road. But when we got closer, I could see that some of them were hopping and some of them were just twitching about a
little. When Mom stopped the car and we got out, I saw the horrible, terrible, awful truth: hundreds of toads lying dead on the road. Toads lying with their bodies flattened and their eyes bulging out. Toads with their insides squeezed out of splits in their skin. For about half a kilometre all you could see was dead bodies and hundreds of other moving, jumping, hopping, frantic bodies.

Bird and Mom and I stood and looked at the scene of life, halflife, death and dying. It reminded me of the victim-impact letter I wrote for the frog. For another few moments, nobody said a word – which was really unusual for Bird who always, always has something to say. As I counted up the dead bodies just in the metre in front of me, I got a skinny feeling all inside my chest and I felt like I couldn't breathe. My mom came over to stand beside me and rubbed my back.

Then Bird said, ‘If I toad you once, I toad you a thousand times – you can't build a road right over top of a migration path.'

I laughed without meaning to and that forced the air back into my lungs.

‘Well, Phin,' said Bird, ‘let's go save some toads.'

We went over to where Caroline was passing out buckets and shoeboxes to about thirty people all gathered around her. I saw Beth and she gave me a wave. I also recognized some of the other people who were at the amphibian park last week.

Caroline was telling everyone to try to grab the toads as gently as possible and to please, please watch out for traffic. Luckily, from where we were we could see cars coming from about a kilometre away.

Bird and Mom and I got to work. Because there were just so many of them, it was easy to catch the toads, but you really needed both hands, which made it hard to hold on to a bucket at the same time. So we worked out a strategy. My mom held the bucket and Bird and I filled it up. Each time we had a bucket almost full, Mom ran it across the road and dumped the toads safely out.

The really horrible thing was watching the toads we couldn't save get run over. That's because every so often, we had to let cars pass through and they would squish everything in their way. It was
super, to-infinity hard to stay still and not run out and try to save the toads that were still moving. Most people mouthed
sorry
as they were driving through and I think they really were. But some people just pretended like nothing bad was happening and one man even rolled down his window and shouted, ‘Get a life, you bunch of nutballs!' Bird gave him the finger as he drove away, but Mom told him he shouldn't do that.

Caroline came over to stand with Bird and Mom and me as we let cars through. ‘Sorry about that, boys. I hope that didn't upset you. Some people are pretty rude.'

‘Heck no,' said Bird. ‘Kids like Lyle call us a lot worse than that at school, don't they, Phin?'

I nodded my head and my mother fake-smiled.

‘Yeah, unfortunately
nutballs
is pretty mild compared to the goings-on on the playground,' my mom told Caroline.

‘Okay,' said Bird, with his head hanging sideways, his eyes rolled back in his head and his tongue hanging out, ‘let's all of us nutballs get those toads off the road!'

So we all got back to work. As we rescued dozens and dozens of toads, we noticed more and more people showing up to help. They came in ones and twos and in whole families! There must have been almost a hundred of us nutball humans there by the end of the morning. When I saw how we were all working together to save the toads, I got a toad in my throat.

That guy should have shouted, ‘Give a life!' because that's what we did. Lots and lots and lots of them.

Fiddledee got Bird good. That's what my grandfather would say if he were alive. He'd say, ‘She got ya good, didn't she, Bird?' Or he might have said, ‘Well, Bird, now that's a fine how-do-ya-do.'

Fiddledee didn't mean it, she just got too excited. Bird was running around the living room with a piece of yarn and she was chasing him. Then when he all of a sudden stopped running and plunked down on the couch, she jumped up on him after the yarn that was dangling out of his hand. That's when she scratched his wrist and it started to bleed a little.

Bird yelled, ‘Ow! Ow! OW!' and danced around the room holding his arm. Once he even said the F word, but under his breath.

I asked him to let me look at it and it looked pretty nasty. It even dripped some of his
DNA
on the floor. After he'd wiped it off with a cloth, I told him I had a way of making it feel better and he said okay and held out his arm. I went and got a washable marker and when he saw it, he got a little suspicious and jerked his arm back.

I said, ‘Bird, just trust me. I know what I'm doing.'

And he said, ‘All right, Phin, but if you hurt me more, you owe me big time.
Big
time.'

I said, ‘Okay,' and circled the cat scratch.

Bird said, ‘What the crap are you doing, Phin?' and I told him those were the boundaries for the pain that would knock against the lines and in a few minutes wear itself out and be gone. That's what my grandmother did for me once when I fell and scraped my knee and it worked. Bird rolled his eyes at me, but guess what? It worked. In a few minutes, Bird said the pain was completely gone.

I told Bird that it's a good thing he feels pain because if he didn't he'd keep doing stuff that damaged his tissues and bones and stuff. Some animals including humans have a weird condition where they don't feel pain and they end up in pretty bad shape, sometimes dead.

I wish I could draw pain boundaries for other animals too – like the bull I once saw on a show who was being castrated with a big rubber band. He was lying on his side and moaning. But when someone walked over to the fence, he jumped up and behaved like he wasn't in pain. Then when the person left, he lay back down on the ground and moaned and moaned. When I saw that, it was like someone grabbed me on the inside. But that's a different kind of pain.

If I imagine the pain mark on earth right now at this moment, it's humongous and deep red and ugly and is spread out over the entire earth. If I zoom in in my imagination, like you can on Google Earth, I see the pain mark in my very own city and it's also red raw.

But now I'm thinking that maybe one way to draw pain boundaries is to do work for animals – like what my mom and Bird and I have been doing in the amphibian park and in the wetlands. I'm super, to-infinity happy about this because I thought I'd have to wait until I was an adult before I could start my work saving animals.

So now in my mind I'm imagining the edges of the pain mark in my city as a little less red – even a bit pinkish.

After lunch hour, Lyle came in with a swollen lip and blood on his cheek.

Mrs. Wardman said, ‘Lyle, for the love of Pete, what happened to you?'

Lyle just shrugged.

‘Did someone hit you?'

Lyle just shrugged again.

‘Lyle, please go down to Mr. Legacie's office and explain to him what happened,' said Mrs. Wardman.

‘I have nothing to say,' said Lyle.

‘Please just go,' said Mrs. Wardman.

Lyle got up out of his seat and left. The funny thing is that he did it without arguing or sneering or laughing or anything. It was not at all like Lyle. Since I had told Bird about the big kid's offer a few weeks ago, Bird turned around in his seat and looked back at me. I raised my eyebrows and shrugged. This was way weird.

After Lyle had left, Mrs. Wardman said, ‘Anybody know anything about this?'

Nobody said a thing.

‘Okay,' said Mrs. Wardman, ‘get out your language arts Duo-Tangs and write a descriptive paragraph using as many adjectives as you can, like we discussed yesterday.'

I got out my Duo-Tang. I thought about what I could write. Last time we did this I wrote a whole paragraph on how it feels for a person to scrape his fingernails across a big, dry, chalky blackboard. The time before I wrote about how it feels for a person to listen to
that. I used tons of adjectives like: dry, scratchy, high-pitched, excruciating, annoying. I had a list of other annoying topics for language arts, like how it feels to have lice crawling on your scalp and laying nits and the symptoms of pinworm. Today, though, I felt like giving Mrs. Wardman a break, so I wrote about the toad rescue instead.