Chomp j-4 Read online

  Wahoo spit out the toothpaste froth and ran to the living room. Mickey cupped a hand over the phone and whispered: “It’s eight in the morning in Shanghai-she’s finishing breakfast.”

  “Can I talk with her?”

  “Egg noodles again-she’s gonna overdose on carbs.”

  “Please?” Wahoo said.

  Mickey handed over the phone.

  “So much drama,” Wahoo’s mom said to him. “For heaven’s sake, doesn’t your father ever give it a rest? You think I want to be here?”

  “We took a big TV job. Actually he’s doing better.”

  “But what about the headaches?”

  “Gone, he says.”

  “Keep a close watch on him,” Wahoo’s mother advised.

  She asked about school. Wahoo said he thought he did okay on his finals.

  “Even Spanish?”

  “That was a killer,” he admitted.

  “As long as you tried your best.”

  “Miss you, Mom.”

  “I miss you, too, big guy. This really sucks.”

  Wahoo swallowed hard to keep his voice from cracking. He didn’t want her to know how bummed he felt because she was so far away. “I found your hotel on Google Earth,” he said. “Looks pretty sweet from the satellite.”

  “Tell me about the TV thing,” she said.

  “It’s real good money.”

  “But is it a good job?”

  “Yeah, awesome,” Wahoo said, thinking: When you’re broke, any job is a good job.

  Mickey Cray piped up: “Hey, my turn. Give it here.”

  Wahoo told his mother goodbye and went outside with a five-gallon bucket of cat food for the raccoons. He was the only kid in school whose father was a professional animal wrangler, and life in the Cray household definitely wasn’t routine. Still, despite his missing thumb, Wahoo was able to do most normal things. He’d taught himself to write, shoot baskets and throw a baseball with his left hand. He could even turn a clean three-sixty on his wakeboard, when his dad had time to take him out on the boat.

  One normal thing that the Crays couldn’t do together was go on summer vacations. Mickey didn’t trust anybody else to take care of the animals. One time, when Wahoo’s aunt Rose had passed away, the whole family flew up to West Virginia for the funeral. Mickey had asked Donny Dander to look after the critters, which turned out to be an expensive mistake. The Crays were gone only three days, but during that short time two rare parrots escaped, a lemur caught the flu and Alice bit the tail off of a crocodile.

  “Where’s the darned aspirin?” Mickey hollered from the house.

  “On the kitchen counter next to the coffee machine,” Wahoo called back.

  The raccoons were always excited to see him because Wahoo’s arrival meant it was mealtime. When he entered the enclosure, they clustered around him, chittering noisily and tugging with their hand-like paws at his pockets. He poured the cat chow equally into four separate dishes, one for each corner, so that the hungry animals would split up. Whenever they stayed in one group, vicious fighting would erupt over the food. So loud was the screeching and snarling that one time a neighbor had phoned the police because she feared a gruesome murder was taking place behind the Cray house.

  Wahoo slipped out of the raccoon pen, padlocked the gate and began washing his hands with a garden hose.

  “Don’t forget the soap, mate,” said a voice behind him.

  Wahoo spun around and there stood Derek Badger. At his side was Raven Stark.

  “Take me to your alligator,” Derek commanded.

  “I’d better go get my dad.”

  “Hurry, then. Chop-chop.”

  Raven Stark spoke up. “Derek’s totally exhausted. He traveled all night from Paris.”

  “A wretched flight,” said Derek. “Didn’t sleep a wink.”

  Wahoo had no trouble believing it. The man’s eyelids were puffy, his pale cheeks were blotched and his hair-more orange than blond-was matted and oily. He wore black loafers with no socks, wrinkled white linen trousers and an untucked safari-style shirt that failed to hide his roundish belly. To Wahoo, Derek Badger looked more like a groggy tourist than a sturdy survivalist.

  “I’m on a tight schedule,” he said, glancing at his wristwatch.

  Wahoo ran to the house and returned with his father. Raven Stark handled the introductions. Mickey managed a smile as he shook Derek’s hand.

  “We’re lookin’ forward to working with you,” Mickey said, which wasn’t exactly true but it sounded good.

  Wahoo appreciated his father’s effort to be respectful. Staging a nature show for a network star like Derek was a big deal. If everything went smoothly, it might lead to more TV jobs.

  “Let’s go see Alice, shall we?” said Raven Stark.

  The gator was snoozing on the bank of the pond. Derek took one look at the huge reptile and said, “She’s perfect.” Then he turned to Raven Stark. “When can we move her?”

  “Move her?” Mickey asked.

  Raven Stark said, “We’re going to be shooting on location out by the Tamiami Trail.”

  Wahoo thought: Here we go.

  “She weighs six hundred and twenty pounds,” his father said.

  Derek chuckled. “No worries, mate. We’ll hire a crane and a truck.”

  Mickey Cray stepped close to Derek. “Alice doesn’t travel,” he said. “You want Alice? Shoot the scene here.”

  Years earlier, Wahoo’s father had constructed a small but convincing Everglades set at one end of the property. There was a lush pool ten feet deep, complete with pickerelweed and water lilies, for staging underwater scenes.

  Derek didn’t want to hear about it. “Save your pretty little lake for an air-freshener commercial.”

  Mickey said, “If it’s good enough for Disney, it’s plenty good enough for you, mate.”

  Wahoo worried that his father would say or do something so insulting that he’d lose the Expedition Survival! job even before it got started.

  Raven Stark edged between the men. “What about the smaller gators?”

  “They fit in the back of my pickup,” said Wahoo’s father. “They travel fine.”

  Derek looked down at Alice, who was still asleep. “She’s the only one I want,” he declared.

  Then he turned and stalked off.

  In a stiff tone, Raven Stark said, “Mr. Cray, you signed a contract.”

  “Which I intend to use as toilet paper-”

  Wahoo cut in with a bluff: “Our lawyer looked at the contract. She said it won’t stick.”

  Julie wasn’t really a lawyer yet, but it wouldn’t be long.

  “Good luck finding another tame gator like Alice,” Mickey said.

  Raven Stark bristled. “We paid you a deposit, remember? Eight hundred dollars.”

  “Good luck finding that, too.”

  Wahoo volunteered to show the fake Everglades set to Derek so he could see for himself how authentic it looked. Raven walked to the car to get him, but she returned alone.

  “He’s on the phone,” she reported soberly, “with our producers in California.”

  Mickey mumbled something sarcastic under his breath and headed back to the house.

  “Look, we can still make this work,” Wahoo said to Raven.

  “Not if your father insists on being difficult.”

  “I’ll deal with Pop, okay?”

  “You’re only a kid, no offense.”

  Wahoo tried to remain polite. “I’m his kid. He listens to me.”

  “And you guys need the money, right?” Raven looked around at the pens and cages. “It’s got to be expensive, keeping all these animals. This would be a nice payday for your family, no?”

  Wahoo felt his throat tighten. “Tell Mr. Badger we’re on.”

  Raven was smiling. “How old are you, Wahoo?”

  “Old enough to get it done,” he said.

  Back at the house, he found his father lying on the couch with an ice pack over his forehead.

/>   Wahoo sat down beside him. “Pop, this show is really important.”

  “So’s Alice.” Mickey reached for the TV remote. “Hey, look what I TiVo’d the other night.”

  He touched a button and an episode of Expedition Survival! came on the screen-Derek Badger, roaming a rainy jungle in Costa Rica. A teaser at the beginning showed the star sleeping in a hammock made of vines while a fat hairy spider crawled up his bare arm.

  Wahoo’s father shook a scarred finger at the TV. “Five bucks says he kills that thing and fries it up for dinner!”

  “I’m not taking that bet.”

  “You know there’s a cameraman standing two feet away with a can of Raid, ready to blast that poor, pitiful tarantula.”

  “It’s showbiz,” said Wahoo.

  “The guy’s such a tool!”

  “I know, Pop, but we need the work.”

  They watched the program for a little while longer. Sure enough, Derek Badger pretended to awaken just before the creeping spider reached his neck. Then he knocked it away and stomped it with a boot. He didn’t fry the flattened victim, though; he grilled it over a small fire, all the time smacking his wormy lips and yammering about how he’d narrowly escaped a horrible, painful death.

  However, Wahoo and his father knew something that most faithful viewers of Expedition Survival! didn’t know-that tarantulas almost never bite people. When they do, the sting is no worse than a bumblebee’s.

  Grumbling in disgust, Mickey Cray switched off the TV and tossed the remote onto the coffee table. “The other shows we’ve done, even the lame ones, were all about the wildlife,” he said, “but this is just about him.”

  Wahoo didn’t like the idea of working for Derek Badger any more than his father did. “Pop, we’ve got bills to pay,” he said. “Alice needs to eat, right?”

  “Okay, but Alice doesn’t travel. And that’s final.”

  “Fine, Alice doesn’t travel,” said Wahoo. “But you’ve gotta admit, it would’ve been fun watching those bozos try to haul her out of the pond.”

  Mickey Cray laughed. “Oh yeah.”

  FIVE

  Although she would never say it aloud, Raven Stark believed she was grossly underpaid. Her job title was “senior production assistant,” but in reality she was also a babysitter, nurse, chauffeur, bartender, courier, valet, personal groomer and amateur psychologist.

  Derek Badger was a handful.

  “We’re late,” she said, knocking once more on the door of his hotel suite.

  There was still no response, so she used the plastic key card. Derek wasn’t inside the room; he was standing on the balcony, overlooking a golf course.

  Raven said, “For heaven’s sake, put on some clothes.”

  The star of Expedition Survival! was clad only in tartan boxer shorts and a pair of black knee-high socks. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

  “I refuse to work with that ignorant redneck,” he said, meaning Mickey Cray.

  “People are staring, Derek. Let’s go inside.”

  “Are you telling me that’s the only humongous alligator available in South Florida, which is the humongous alligator capital of the world?”

  Raven was quite familiar with Derek’s tantrums. “This particular specimen happens to be perfect for what we need.”

  “Perfect how?” he whined.

  “Time to put on your pants. Let’s go.”

  The script for Derek’s Everglades adventure called for him to swim beside a huge gator, which required renting one that would tolerate Derek’s nonsense and resist the urge to bite off his fool head. Mickey Cray’s son had assured Raven that Alice had never purposely hurt anybody (he’d again blamed himself for the thumb removal), and that the reptile was accustomed to the noisy presence of camera crews.

  “But we can’t stage our biggest scene in some nitwit’s backyard,” Derek complained in the car, traveling to the Crays’ house.

  Raven assured him that the family’s Everglades set didn’t look like a backyard. “It looks like a real-life swamp. You’ll be impressed.”

  Derek sniffed. “No, they’ll be impressed when they see me jump that monster gator.”

  “Not happening. The insurance company says no way.”

  “They said the same thing about the cobra dance, but I did it anyway.”

  Thanks for reminding me, thought Raven.

  They had been shooting an Expedition Survival! in Cambodia when Derek decided to play snake charmer with a spitting cobra that had been rented from a local handler named Mr. Na. When Mr. Na saw what Derek was doing, he leaped between Derek and the dangerous reptile just as it released a jet of deadly poison. A few drops landed in Mr. Na’s hair, and as a precaution he rushed off to take a shower. Upon returning to the set of Expedition Survival! Mr. Na was dismayed to learn that Derek had chopped up his pet snake with a rusty machete and eaten it for supper in the program’s final scene.

  “The Crays won’t let you lay a finger on Alice,” Raven said.

  Derek chuckled to himself. “We shall see about that. What sort of people would name a dumb old alligator Alice?”

  “The sort of people who treat it like one of the family.”

  “Hillbillies,” Derek said. “Did you bring extra cash?”

  The crew of the television program arrived early to set up. With amazement the cameramen and lighting technicians watched Mickey Cray lead Alice from her enclosure to the swamp-like Everglades set at the other end of the property. Swishing her thick armored tail for balance, the huge gator trailed Mickey like a puppy. He was carrying a plump thawed chicken under each arm, so Alice would have followed him anywhere.

  Wahoo was busy tending the crippled bobcat, trying to coax it to eat. The poor thing was limping in circles around the new pen, still frazzled by the long truck ride from Highlands County. Every now and then the cat would scrabble up and down an old telephone pole that Mickey had planted for that very purpose. Still, it took Wahoo almost an hour to get the animal calm enough to nibble from a dish.

  He arrived on the Everglades set just as Derek Badger was emerging from the air-conditioned motor coach that served as a dressing room. The vehicle was jet-black and as big as a Greyhound bus. Derek wore crisply pressed khaki shorts, a matching safari shirt and hiking boots splattered with wet oatmeal to look like mud.

  “What a poser,” Mickey said.

  “Chill out, Pop.”

  “Don’t we have some fire ants?”

  “That’s enough.”

  A rumpled assistant in orange sneakers and a corduroy vest began spraying something on Derek Badger’s arms and legs. Wahoo assumed it was insect repellent until the man in the vest told Derek to shut his eyes and then misted his face.

  “What is that stuff?” Wahoo asked Raven Stark.

  “Spray-on tan,” she said matter-of-factly.

  Wahoo thought that even a showbiz survivalist should have a real tan, but evidently nothing about Derek Badger was real. The star went back to the motor coach to await his bronze glow while the TV crew snacked on donuts and bagels. Wahoo helped his father trim a patch of saw grass to clear space for one of the three cameras that would be filming the water scenes.

  “How’s Alice?” Wahoo asked.

  “Pigged out and happy,” said his dad.

  The well-fed gator was resting at the bottom of the brackish lagoon. Every now and then a pair of bubbles would float to the surface, betraying the location of the animal’s nose.

  “Where’s the gun?” Raven asked Mickey Cray.

  “Oh, relax.” He lifted his T-shirt to reveal the butt of a pistol that he was carrying on his waist. The contract with Expedition Survival! required Mickey to keep a firearm with him, in case something went wrong and one of the critters attacked.

  “It’s a. 45,” Mickey said. “Feel better?”

  Raven went to retrieve Derek while Wahoo fetched the snapping turtle that would be featured in the first segment. Even though the turtle was bulky, Wahoo carried it at arm’s length from h
is body. The snapper had a long, flexible neck and was lightning quick on the strike.

  “Doesn’t this one have a name?” Derek asked snidely. “How about Timmy the Terrible Turtle?”

  Wahoo ignored him. He set the craggy reptile down beside the pool and backed out of the scene. The director, a shaggy-bearded guy, yelled, “We’re rolling!”

  Immediately Derek knelt down and positioned his glossy face beside the turtle’s, although he wasn’t nearly as close as the camera made it appear. Breathlessly he began reciting the lines he had memorized from his script:

  “These snapping turtles are one of the most ferocious predators in the Everglades! They’re camouflaged to look exactly like a mossy rock, and their sharp, powerful jaws unlock to reveal a juicy, worm-like tongue, which they deviously wiggle as bait-”

  Derek abruptly halted and said, “Cut!” He motioned impatiently to Mickey Cray. “We definitely need to see Timmy’s tongue.”

  “His name’s not Timmy,” said Wahoo’s father, “and I can’t make him open his yap if he doesn’t want to.”

  “Then what are we paying you for?”

  “Mainly to keep you out of the emergency room.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Wahoo quickly stepped forward. “Mr. Badger, the turtle only wiggles his tongue underwater, when he’s hungry.”

  “That’s just great.” Derek looked over at Raven. “I had a bad feeling about this whole operation-didn’t I tell you?”

  Wahoo’s dad said, “You wanna see the inside of his mouth?” He broke a thin branch off a pine tree, stripped away the sprigs and handed it to the TV star. “Try this.”

  Raven grew concerned. “Derek, you be careful.”

  “Yes, Mum!” He laughed and got down on his knees again, this time a bit closer to the turtle. As soon as the cameras started rolling, he used the sharp end of the branch to poke at the pointy snout of the reptile, which shut its eyes and drew itself into its shell.

  “C’mon, Terrible Timmy,” Derek cooed, “say aaahhhh.”

  Wahoo knew he had to do something fast. Quietly he moved behind the cameraman nearest to Derek and made a pushing motion with both hands, a signal to back off. Either Derek didn’t see him, or pretended not to.