Billy and the Birdfrogs (4 page)

She nodded her head gravely. “I can’t tell for sure,
but I think so. Where else did those little old ladies go?”

“You should call the mayor,” I said at once. “You should tell somebody. This is awful!”

“Awful it is,” my grandmother said, “but I don’t think the mayor would believe me.” She scowled. The pouches and wrinkles under her eyes deepened. “I don’t have a very good working relationship with the mayor. He’s a friend of the housing commissioner’s, Waldo Earpicker, and neither of them likes me very much. I don’t like them either, if it comes to that.”

“But we have to tell somebody, Grandma,” I insisted. “We can’t just let birdfrogs take over New York, without telling somebody about it!”

“I tried,” my grandmother said. “I really did. I called the health commissioner, who deals with problems like rats in the sewers. I called him first thing this morning and told him that I saw some three-footed rats in the park. Because, you know, they might be rats. They aren’t necessarily frogs or birds. I don’t really know what they are. But he just said, ‘Lady, I’ll put it on the list. I got an eight-foot alligator and a ten-foot giant tarantula and three broken sewer lines, and they’re all higher up on the list than a rat, no matter how big he is.’”

“He didn’t believe you!”

“I don’t think he did. But he put it on his list, I’m pretty sure, because I could hear him typing while I was on the phone. I told him very clearly, ‘the rat wasn’t three-
foot-long
, it was three-
footed
,’ but I don’t know if he wrote that part down.”

“Then what are we going to do, Grandma?” I was staring at her anxiously, but she smiled and reached out a hand to pat my knee reassuringly.

“We’re going to live nice and safe in our own house, Love. There’s nothing to worry about. I don’t know what will happen to the rest of the city, but maybe the health commissioner will get to that part of his list eventually. That’s all we can hope for. And now,” she said, “it’s late, and it’s long past time for you to go to bed.”

That night, after I got into my pajamas and lay in bed, I thought about all the new things I had learned. One thought came back to my mind over and over: the image of those birdlike or froglike creatures crawling out of the horrible hole in the basement. Were we really safe from them? I imagined hundreds of them pouring out of the hole. My bedroom was on the fourth floor. My grandmother had left the fourth-floor windows unfixed, and mine was open a few inches to the cool night air. If those creatures could climb up that long, long shaft in the ground, couldn’t they climb up the side of the building and get in my window?

Chapter 6

We Live in Hiding

For t
hree years, it seemed like my grandmother was right and we would be okay. We lived in our house and never went outside. I liked my grandmother so much that I didn’t mind being with her every day and having nobody else to talk to, and she liked living with me too. She said that it was the most fun she had ever had.

Our house, as I said before, was four stories tall, not counting the basement or the attic, which we couldn’t get into anymore. But it was a very skinny house, so it wasn’t as big as you might think. Here are the rooms in our house:

On the first floor we had two rooms, the kitchen and the living room. We ate all our meals in the kitchen, and sat on the couch in the living room every evening and told each other stories. Mostly my grandmother told me stories about when she was a stunt pilot for an air show in Montana.

On the second floor we had two rooms. One was a storage room where we put all our extra canned food. The second one was a schoolroom for me. My grandmother said I had to be properly homeschooled. This room had a desk and a computer with a high-speed Internet connection, and a bookshelf with lots of books. In addition to all the studying I had to do, we would also spend at least half an hour every day sitting together in front of the computer, shopping. I had to work the computer, because my grandmother’s eyes weren’t so good anymore and she couldn’t see what she was typing.

The third floor contained my grandmother’s bedroom and a bathroom next to the bedroom. She washed our laundry by hand in her bathtub, because the electric washing machine and dryer were sealed up in the basement. She said that she had accidentally left her favorite blouse in the dryer, but it was too late to get it now and it would just have to stay down there forever, unless the birdfrogs had already taken it for their own purposes.

My bedroom and bathroom were on the fourth floor.

This was all the space we had to live in, but it was enough. For exercise we used to run up and down the stairs. After a while I could run up and down all four stories in twelve seconds. My grandmother timed me with her watch. She stood on the first floor at the foot of the stairs, and timed from the moment my foot left the bottom step to the moment it touched the bottom step again. Then I timed my grandmother, and she took thirty-three seconds. She said that in her prime she could have done it in half of my time, but she was getting old now and couldn’t go as fast.

On the other hand, she was stronger than I was and could lift more weight. For another kind of exercise, we used to pile canned goods into a sack and tie a rope to the sack. We would stand at the top of the four flights of stairs, lean over the wooden railing, and pull up the sack hand-over-hand from the ground floor. Then we would bring the sack into my bathroom and put it on the scale, to check how much weight we had lifted. I could lift about half of my own weight. More than that and I might have gone flying over the railing. My grandmother had a technique in which she braced her feet between the vertical poles that held up the railing. That way, she was anchored, and she could lift up weights that were even heavier than she was. She could lift up two hundred pounds. I could see the muscles bulging under her faded blue bathrobe. But she wouldn’t try anything heavier than that, because she was afraid the wooden railing might break from under her.

Everything we bought on the Internet was delivered to us by UPS. When we heard someone knocking on the door, we had to call through the door and ask what they wanted, and if it was the UPS man we would unlock the letter flap and he would push the packages through our specially wide letter slot. We had to be careful to order only things that could get through the letter slot. For example, we had to buy milk in quarts instead of half gallons. Once we had to ask the UPS man to open up a package and hand in some kitchen items one at a time. He was nice and did it for us, but I think he was confused.

The biggest problem we had was getting rid of our garbage. Two people make a lot of garbage, and it has to go somewhere. I heard my grandmother shouting on the phone to the Commissioner of Garbage Pickup, who didn’t seem to want his workers collecting our garbage one item at a time through the letterbox. For a few months we shut the garbage up in the storeroom on the second floor, but it smelled awful and the smell was getting into the rest of the house. Besides, it wouldn’t take very many months to fill up that entire room, floor to ceiling. We had to find a different solution.

My grandmother, of course, thought of one. She was a fantastic grandmother. The window in my bedroom was the only window in the house that did not face toward the street. Instead, it faced toward the back of the building. If you looked out of the window you saw an alley between two buildings, paved over with asphalt and full of old broken rusty bicycles and broken bottles. There was a dumpster in the alley, against the wall of the opposite building. It was very far away. At first I didn’t understand how we could throw an entire heavy bag of garbage that far. But my grandmother rigged up a catapult made out of an ironing board and twenty linked pairs of elastic underpants. We would load the catapult with a bag of garbage, pull back the ironing board, and then let go. The garbage bag would fly out of the window right across the alley, smack into the brick wall of the opposite building, and then fall straight down into the dumpster. It worked beautifully, and it was lots of fun too. Sometimes the bag would explode when it hit the opposite wall, and my grandmother and I would cheer and clap our hands. Once a week, a crew of garbage men came and emptied the dumpster.

That is how we lived for three wonderful years.

Then, when I was nine, my grandmother got a letter in the mail and everything changed.

We were in the living room when she opened it. I was sitting in a big cushioned chair with my feet tucked under me, one of my schoolbooks open on the arm of the chair. My grandmother was sitting on the couch with her feet up on a stool. She ripped open the envelope, and as she read the letter her face got whiter and whiter and the spots on her old skin showed up more and more clearly. I could see that it was an official-looking letter, printed on special paper, with a round seal pressed into the top corner.

Finally she put the letter down and looked at me.

“What is it?” I said. “Grandma, what’s in the letter?”

“It’s probably nothing,” she said. “But it looks like I’ll have to leave the house tomorrow. I’ve been summoned.”

“Summoned where?” I said. “We didn’t do anything wrong, did we?”

“I don’t think so, Billy, but I don’t know. I’ve been summoned to the Office of Social Services, in City Hall. It. . . . It has to do with you. They want to discuss your home environment. I’ll have to convince them that you’re being properly treated or they’ll send you to a real school and . . . and. . . .”

“They won’t take me away, will they?” I said. I was terrified.

“They can’t,” my grandmother said, fiercely. “It’s perfectly legal to homeschool a child. They can’t take you away.”

Chapter 7

Grandma Doesn’t Come Back

The next morning, my grandmother and I pulled out all the nails around the door and took off the big piece of wood. It was scary but also very exciting to see the door again, and to know that the street was just through that door. I had seen the street every day through our windows, but I hadn’t seen it up close for three years.

It was a cold fall day and my grandmother put on her black wool coat and a pair of gloves.

“Don’t you worry,” she said to me. “I’ll be back in a few hours at the most. We’re low on tomato paste, so I might as well stop at the store while I’m out. If I’m not home by lunch, you can heat up some spaghetti sauce. Use the can of tennis balls that’s already open. Do you know, Billy,” she added, “I half suspect that old Waldo Earpicker is trying some silly shenanigan to get me out of this house. He always regretted having to give it to us.”

She put her gloved hand on the top of my head affectionately, and then opened the door and left. I caught a glimpse of the street, bright and cold, with a few old newspapers and autumn leaves blowing around, and then she closed the door behind her.

“Billy,” she said, calling through the door. “Don’t open up for anybody. Remember, I have my own key.”

I watched her from the window as she walked down the street and turned a corner. Then I settled down to wait for her to get back. You might think it was a little thing to be in the house by myself for a few hours, especially since I was now nine years old. But for the past few years we had been together continuously. Even if I was upstairs on the fourth floor reading a novel in bed, and she was on the ground floor watching TV in the living room, I knew she was there and she knew I was there, and we had a kind of connection. It was like one of those cables she had told me about, hooked onto your belt so that you could get lowered down into the shaft in the ground. We had a cable connecting us. It was an invisible cable, but it was there. Now that she was out of the house, the cable wasn’t there anymore, and I felt like I might fall any second. I didn’t feel safe.

I did some schoolwork that lasted me for about two hours. But my grandmother hadn’t come back yet, and that worried me. I wondered if something had gone wrong. I sat by the window of the schoolroom and watched the street. Several times I saw someone turn the corner and come into view. Some of those people were about the right size and wore the right kind of black wool coat. But each time that my hopes would get up, I would see that it wasn’t the right person, and I would feel even worse than before.

Grandma, I thought, where are you?

By lunchtime, I decided I better go downstairs to the kitchen and heat up some spaghetti sauce. I took the enormous steel pot of cold sauce from the refrigerator. It was more than half full and very heavy, so I had to carry it carefully with two hands and hoist it up onto the stove. Then I turned on the stove. I had to stand on a kitchen chair to look into the pot and stir it. It had about five used up, soggy tennis balls in it already. I looked in the cabinet above the sink and found a lot of unopened cans of tennis balls, and one can that was already opened and half-empty. I tipped out the three remaining balls and dropped them into the sauce, one at a time, and they made a sound like “splot, splot, splot,” and made three little craters. I pretended that they were meteors hitting the surface of an alien planet. The sauce was thick and congealed, because it was cold.

Then I went back to the refrigerator and got out a plastic bowl of cooked spaghetti. It was left over from yesterday. I put a big iron pan on the stove, next to the pot of sauce, and dumped in the spaghetti. It came out in one big tangled-up knot.

I tried to do everything right, so that when my grandmother came back she would be able to eat with me. But when the tennis balls had sunk down to the bottom of the sauce, and everything was ready, she had not come home yet. I divided up the spaghetti onto two plates, ladled sauce onto them, and put them at our usual places at the table. I set out knives and forks, and a glass of water for her and a glass of milk for me. Then I sat down and tried to eat, but I wasn’t hungry. I didn’t know what to do. I poked at the spaghetti with my fork, twisted it around a few times, and ate about two mouthfuls. Finally I gave up trying to eat. I scraped the plates of spaghetti into the big plastic bowl and put it back into the refrigerator. I had to leave the pot of sauce on the stove because it was too hot for me to pick up. It had to cool first.

By the middle of the afternoon I was very worried. She had been away for five hours and had not even called me to tell me why she was delayed. I was sure something was wrong. I did my exercises, but I was a lot slower going up and down the stairs than usual. I couldn’t put a lot of energy into it.

When dinnertime came, I couldn’t think about eating at all. I felt as though the spaghetti I had eaten for lunch had turned into live worms in my stomach. I knew I should eat something or I would feel a lot worse, so I ate two slices of bread and drank a glass of milk. Then I sat on the foot of the stairs with my elbows on my knees and my face in my hands, and looked miserably at the front door of the house. The evening light was disappearing, but I didn’t bother to turn on a lamp.