Billy and the Birdfrogs (6 page)

The father was slouching in his chair with his long spidery legs crossed. He was inspecting his fingernails and picking at them. Now and then he put a piece of picked-off fingernail in his mouth and chewed on it. He nodded without looking up at me, muttered, “Glad to meet you,” and kept on picking at his fingernails.

“Bobby,” Miss Pointy said in a dangerous voice, giving me a shake through her grip on my shoulder, “Aren’t you going to greet your new family?”

“Um,” I said, “How are you?”

“Bobby,” Miss Pointy said, pinching my shoulder even harder so that I wondered if her fingers would come together in the middle, “These are the Whingles. Are you going to greet them politely?”

“Um,” I said, looking desperately at Mrs. Whingle’s teeth because she was the only one smiling at me, “Um, how are you, Whingles?”

The boy and girl both started to giggle again. They were trying so hard not to laugh that they almost choked.

“Bobby,”
Miss Pointy said, gritting her teeth, but at that moment Mr. Earpicker interrupted.

“Right!” he shouted. “That’s enough! Look at how well they get along! Amazing! Pulls the old heart strings clean out of my chest! Rips ’em right out! Let’s sign the forms and get out of here.” He banged his fist on his desk. “We have a one-month return policy if the boy turns out to be defective. In that case, we’ll remediate him and send him off to another family.”

I didn’t know what “remediate” meant, but when he said it, Miss Pointy glared at me so fiercely that I knew it was something awful, and nobody would ever want it done to them, and I had better behave with the Whingles and not turn out to be defective.

The rest of what happened in Mr. Earpicker’s office was confusing to me because it involved a lot of legal terms that I didn’t know. We all gathered around the desk. First Mr. and Mrs. Whingle signed something, then I signed something, then everybody signed something. Then Mr. Earpicker got some more papers out of his desk and we signed those. Then he got even more papers out of another drawer and we signed those too. Then he jumped up and shook Mr. Whingle’s hand. Mr. Whingle, who was tall and skinny, had to bend down very far.

“Great!” Mr. Earpicker said, pumping Mr. Whingle’s hand up and down. “I’m so stoked! I really am! You have no idea what this means! Jubber thanks you!
I
thank you!”

Mr. Whingle didn’t say anything. He seemed surprised that his hand was being yanked up and down.

Mrs. Whingle bent down so that she was closer to Mr. Earpicker’s height and said, “We’re so happy.” She was smiling even harder than before. “We told you last week, we were ready to do anything to help him. Oh it was awful, what you told us. We’re so glad we rescued him.”

“You sure did,” Mr. Earpicker said. “You rescued him all right. Do you know, the old bat was cooking tennis balls for him? Ha ha! Tennis balls! Oh my God! We’re done, aren’t we? It’s all over now?” He flung away Mr. Whingle’s hand and ran back around his desk. Then he flounced down in his chair and banged his chin very hard on the top of the desk.

“Blast!” he shouted, grabbing his chin in both hands. “I hate that! Get them out of here, Pointy! We’re done with them! You can stay, Jubber. We have to talk about the next step.”

Chapter 10

The Whingles Don’t Believe Me

I still felt dazed and in a dream as we walked through the dim oily parking garage to the Whingles’ car. I couldn’t feel my feet walking. Mrs. Whingle was holding my hand, but I couldn’t feel that either. I could feel the dent in my shoulder where Miss Amelia Pointy had been grasping me, though. I was also shivering. I wasn’t dressed very warmly, and it was a cold fall evening.

We got into the car. I climbed into the back seat with the girl and the boy. Mr. Whingle drove, looking very irritated about the traffic, and Mrs. Whingle sat in the front seat beside him. I didn’t say anything for a long time, and the little boy started to giggle. He whispered to the girl, “I think he’s, like, stupid, or something. What do you think?”

I stared out of the window and looked at the streets as we passed. My grandmother would have been hor
rified to know that I was outside
the house and
unprotected. Those streets could be full of birdfrogs. They were certainly full of people. I wasn’t used to the sight of so many people standing on street corners waiting to cross, cutting through the traffic on foot or on bicycles or on roller blades, walking fast everywhere in the cold air with their hands dug down into their pockets, or stopping to look at the great brightly lit window displays. Lights fluttered and loomed at me from everywhere; red tail lights, white headlights, yellow-orange streetlights that weren’t working right and were blinking on and off, traffic lights swinging overhead, three blazing spotlights where some workmen were fixing a part of the street. It was very confusing and began to give me a headache. Steam rose up from the gutters and the sidewalks. I could smell Chinese food as we drove past a block of Chinese restaurants, and a kind of old manky vegetable smell as we passed an open air market with wooden crates of fruits and vegetables, and a horrible gutter stink when we passed a row of blackened iron garbage dumpsters, and then the sweet, rich smell of roasted peanuts from a stand on the corner. The man who worked the stand was wearing knitted gloves with holes cut out for his fingers. None of these people knew about birdfrogs. They were all in danger. Maybe some of them even knew people who had disappeared and been eaten. But nobody cared. My grandmother had tried to tell them, but it hadn’t done any good.

For a few blocks we drove along Central Park. I saw a few people go in and out of the lit entrances. Then I saw something small whisk into the park through the black iron bars of the fence. I blinked and looked again, but it was gone. We stopped at a traffic light and I turned in my seat against the seat belt to stare hard at the spot, but there was nothing to see. It
might
have been a birdfrog. It was much too small to be a dog or a cat. It was even too small to be a squirrel, unless it was a very young squirrel. Nobody on the street seemed to have noticed. They walked right past the spot without looking. It was horrible.

Then suddenly I recognized the street we had pulled onto. My breath seemed to come short and I could feel all the parts of my body tingling. It was my own street, the street our house was on! I could see the house right in front of us, skinny and tall and brown, looking the same as it always used to, as if nothing was wrong. But it wasn’t our house anymore; it belonged to Mr. Jubber.

Mrs. Whingle, who was watching me closely in the rear view mirror, said, “Yes, Bobby, we live on the same street. We live all the way down at the far end of the row. See? This is our house. You’re almost back home again. We decided we would take you in be
cause, oh, poor boy, we met your grandmother a few times back before she became . . . well, you know, kind of odd. When the commissioner came to talk to us last week, we agreed right away, because we couldn’t see you get sent to strangers. It wouldn’t be right. Isn’t that so, Dan?”

Mr. Whingle was trying to park the car along the curb, but two other cars had been parked very close to each other and it was hard for him to get into the small space between. “What’s
so
,” he muttered, “is that these confounded
loonies
can’t park a car.”

When the car was finally parked, we all got out and went into the house. It was a shock to me because the inside of the house was built exactly like the inside of my grandmother’s house. All the houses in the row were identical. But the decorations and furniture were all different. The rug in the hallway had a bright yellow design with little hearts and candies pictured on it. My grandmother hated yellow. And she hated candies because she said they were bad for you.

We all sat down in the living room. There was a gigantic flat screen TV, and lots of DVDs lying in piles all around the floor. I almost stepped on a plastic army man that must have belonged to the little boy. Mr. Whingle sat down in a big squishy chair and started to read the newspaper right away. Mrs. Whingle sat down on the couch next to me, sitting very straight, with her hands folded in her lap, and smiled at me brightly. I didn’t know what to say to her, so I looked at the carpet and said nothing. The boy and the girl sat down side by side, crammed into one chair, and stared at me.

“Bobby,” Mrs. Whingle said, “would you like anything to eat or drink?”

“My name’s Billy,” I said.

The little boy and girl burst out sniggering. Mrs. Whingle turned on them with a shocked look and said, “No! Dennis! Candy! What are you laughing at?”

“But
Mom
,” the little boy said, with a snort of laughter, “he don’t even know his own name.”

“
Dennis!
” Mrs. Whingle said. “What did I tell you? You watch your grammar. You know how your teachers get mad at you. Now,” she said, turning back to me with her anxious smile in place again, “Bobby, you’re going to have a wonderful time here. I’m sure of it. I know that your grandmother . . . er . . . kept you inside a lot. But with us, you’re allowed to go outside any time during the day, as long as you stay out of the street. You might not be used to it at first, but I’m sure you’ll get to like it.”

The thought of playing outside, unprotected, made me cringe and I felt that I had to explain. I blurted out, “Grandma nailed the door shut so that the birdfrogs wouldn’t get in at us.”

Her smile seemed to get a little more frozen and she exchanged a glance with her husband, who had looked up over the top of his newspaper. Candy and Dennis started to giggle even harder.

“I don’t want the birdfrogs to get me,” I said, anxiously. “They’re already in Central Park.”

“The birdfrogs won’t get you,” Mrs. Whingle said in a reassuring voice. “What are the birdfrogs, Bobby?”

“You wouldn’t know about them. They came from the basement. That’s why Grandma welded the basement door shut.”

Mr. Whingle dropped the newspaper in his lap and stared at me. “She welded the basement door shut?” he said.

“Oh yes,” I said. “To keep out the birdfrogs. They were coming out of the hole in the basement.”

“What hole?” he said, blankly.

I was starting to get uneasy. I could see why none of these people had heard about the birdfrogs. Only three people knew about them. My grandmother, who was dead; me; and the health commissioner, who thought they were three-foot-long rats. But shouldn’t everyone who lived on this block know about the really deep hole in the basement?

“
You
know,” I said, faintly, looking around at them. “The hole with the wooly mammoth in it.”

Mr. and Mrs. Whingle stared back at me blankly. The boy and girl were laughing so hard that they fell out of their chair.

Mrs. Whingle reached out her hand and put it very gently on my arm. “Did your grandmother tell you there was a hole in the basement?” she said, in a very kind voice.

“Of course she did,” I said, beginning to get angry and pulling my arm away. “Everybody knows about the hole. It was discovered when the row of houses got built, about thirteen years ago. And it goes down miles into the ground, and has wooly mammoths down it. Don’t you know? That’s what my mother was studying when she got killed by the wooly mammoth.”

“Holy cripes,” Mr. Whingle said softly to himself.

“Bobby,” Mrs. Whingle said, still in a very kind voice, “this building is much older than thirteen years. The man who sold it to us said it was an antique building from 1923.”

I was completely stumped by what she had just said. I had no idea how to respond. I felt like I had walked into a wall and knocked my breath out.

“Is it true?!” Dennis shouted between hiccups and peals of laughter. “That your grandma?! Cooked you tennis-ball soup every day?!”

His sister could hardly breathe from laughing so much. She was shrieking and kicking on the floor.

Mrs. Whingle gently squeezed my arm and said, “Bobby, your grandma was a very fine lady, I’m sure. She just made a few mistakes. We all do. Sometimes we believe things that aren’t true. It isn’t anybody’s fault. I’m sure she thought that there really was a hole in the basement that birdtoads came out of. But you don’t have to worry, Bobby, because there’s no such thing as a birdtoad. You’re safe here. You poor boy.” She shook her head and looked at me with her blue eyes huge and round and swimming in tears.

If she had come right out and told me that my grandma was crazy, then I would have gotten mad at her. I would have yelled at her and told her that it wasn’t true. I would have thought of seventeen different reasons why my grandma was right after all. I would have jumped up and stomped all over their stupid DVD collection. But because Mrs. Whingle was so gentle I found that I couldn’t get angry at her, and suddenly I wasn’t so sure of myself. I started to panic. My fantastic grandmother who had saved me from the birdfrogs and knew everything and figured out how to catapult the garbage into the dumpster, what if she was really crazy? What if there was no hole in the basement, no fossils, and no birdfrogs?

It was the worst moment of my life.

I must have looked horrible. I couldn’t breathe right. Tears were leaking out of my eyes and I felt dizzy. Mrs. Whingle put her hand over her mouth and said, “Oh, the poor boy’s in shock.”

Mr. Whingle barked out, “Put him to bed, before he faints. Look at the boy!”

Candy and Dennis stopped laughing and lifted their heads off the floor eagerly. “Oh!” Dennis shouted out. “Can I watch him faint? Can I, Mom?”

Mrs. Whingle led me to a bedroom. She said it was the guest bedroom but they were going to give it to me. A pair of bright yellow pajamas lay on the bed, and I put them on and got under the covers. It felt strange to lie down in a different bed. I couldn’t help feeling like I was too close to the ground. My old bed was on the fourth floor, but this one was only on the second floor.