Chomp j-4 Page 6

  On another set, in Mexico, Derek had clumsily tripped over a tortoise and sprawled into a yucca plant. His face had swollen up like a puffer fish. For two weeks afterward, he had worn a veil and refused to go out in public.

  While shooting a program in Australia-a very expensive trip-Derek had ignored the local wrangler’s warnings and tried to tackle a wallaby, which he’d hoped to fry up as one of his televised campfire dinners. The result: five broken ribs, a torn Achilles tendon, sixteen stitches in his scalp and five days in the hospital.

  In each instance, filming had to be canceled and the expenses settled. Raven knew that if Expedition Survival! hadn’t been such a smash hit, Derek would have been booted off the show a long time ago.

  “Let’s get this over with,” she said to the director.

  He pressed the Play button on the DVD console. Thirty-three seconds later, he turned it off.

  Raven took a heavy breath. Derek sat bolt upright and goggle-eyed.

  “Well?” the director said.

  “That… was… bloody… brilliant!” Derek punched the air jubilantly with both fists. “I almost died, didn’t I? That vicious monster almost killed me!”

  Witnessing the scene all over again, even on a video disk, had left Raven a bit shaken.

  The director said, “Do you still want me to destroy it?”

  Derek roared. “Destroy it? Are you crazy, mate? This stuff is killer. This is genius. Am I right, Raven? Is this not the bomb?”

  “The bomb it is,” said Raven quietly.

  “That crazy redneck-did you see what he did?”

  “A total madman,” the director agreed.

  Derek lowered his voice. “Can you edit him out of the scene?”

  “No problem. Snip, snip.”

  “Excellent!”

  Raven said, “But he saved your life, Derek.”

  “And he shall be compensated handsomely.”

  With a hopeful smile, the director asked, “Does this mean I’m not fired?”

  “Fired? Ha!” Derek bounded from the bed and threw an arm around the man’s neck. “You, my friend, just got yourself a big fat raise.”

  As Wahoo and his father had predicted, Susan Cray knew exactly how much the family owed the bank for overdue mortgage payments: “Seven thousand nine hundred and twelve dollars and four cents.”

  “Don’t forget, I just sent ’em eight hundred bucks,” Mickey said.

  “Yes, honey, I already subtracted that.”

  “Oh.”

  “We’re also two months behind on your truck,” she said.

  “You sure about that?”

  “May I speak to Wahoo?”

  “He’s right here.” Mickey handed the phone to his son.

  “Sorry we woke you, Mom.”

  “How’s the job going?”

  “Not so great.”

  “What happened?”

  “Long story,” Wahoo said. Too long for an expensive overseas phone call. “How’s China?”

  “I’m homesick, big guy. Is your dad feeling okay? Tell the truth.”

  “Some days are better than others.”

  Susan Cray sighed. “He’s as stubborn as a darn mule. You keep an eye on him.”

  “I’m trying,” Wahoo said.

  Somebody knocked on the door and Mickey went to open it.

  “Let me talk to him again,” said Wahoo’s mother.

  “He’ll call you back, Mom-when it’s daytime over there, I promise.”

  Derek Badger and Raven Stark were standing in the living room. Wahoo said goodbye to his mother and set down the phone. Then he told his father to put away the fire extinguisher.

  “I’m serious, Pop.”

  “But they’re supposed to be gone!”

  Raven said, “We need to chat, Mr. Cray. Please?”

  “I don’t ‘chat.’ ” He pulled the trigger on the fire extinguisher, blasting a cloud of white vapor toward the ceiling. “Now get out!”

  “Knock it off,” said Wahoo.

  Derek puffed his chest. “Mate, there’s no need to be cranky. We come in peace.”

  It was hard to take the man seriously because he was dressed in a purple bathrobe and matching slippers. Mickey placed the fire extinguisher on the kitchen counter. Wahoo suggested that everybody sit down, which they did.

  Raven said, “Derek’s got something he wants to say.”

  “Imagine that.” Mickey was rubbing his temples.

  Derek leaned forward. “That wrestling scene with the alligator-”

  “Alice is her name.”

  “Yes, Alice. The scene turned out fabulously, Mr. Cray. Perhaps the most extraordinary thirty-three seconds of footage in the history of Expedition Survival! ”

  “But you almost got drowned.”

  “Exactly! And the best part is it was real.”

  “You’re seriously gonna use that in your show?” Mickey asked, and right away Wahoo knew what his father was thinking.

  “Of course we intend to use it,” Raven said.

  “It’ll be all over YouTube the same night,” Derek added. “Trust me-we’re talking worldwide viral. Millions of hits!”

  Mickey’s eyes narrowed. “That means you’re gonna pay us the rest of the money, right?”

  Derek chuckled. “Not only are we going to pay you all of it, we’re hiring you to lead us into the Everglades to put the finishing touches on this masterpiece. What do you think of that?”

  Wahoo felt slightly queasy.

  “What do you need me for?” his father said to Derek. “You’re gonna fake the rest of it, same as you always do.”

  Derek didn’t seem even slightly insulted. He twirled the sash on his robe and said, “You’re the most fearless man I’ve ever met, Mr. Cray. With you guiding us on location, we won’t need to ‘fake’ anything.”

  “In our line of work,” Raven cut in, “it’s known as ‘re-creating’ events for the camera.”

  Wahoo spoke up. “He can’t go. He’s got another job lined up that starts tomorrow.”

  Mickey threw him a puzzled look. “What job?”

  “You know, Pop. That scorpion scene for the Rain Forest Channel.” Wahoo was hoping his dad would get the hint and play along. A swamp trip with Derek Badger promised nothing but trouble.

  Mickey scratched his head. “I don’t remember booking a scorpion gig.”

  “And even if you did,” Derek said with a wink, “will it pay you two thousand dollars a day for four days?”

  Wahoo was stunned. With that kind of money, they could cover what they owed on the house and the truck. His mother wouldn’t have to give a nickel of her China paycheck to the bank.

  “Hold on-what about the boy?” Wahoo’s father said to Derek. “He’s my right hand.”

  “Then make it twenty-five hundred-plus we’ll give him screen credit as ‘First Assistant Wrangler.’ ”

  Mickey stroked his chin. “Let me think on this.”

  Derek looked aggravated. “Are you serious? This is the opportunity of a lifetime.”

  Wahoo didn’t know whether he should be flattered or suspicious that Derek had agreed to put him on the payroll. Five hundred dollars a day was more money than he’d ever made on any job. He was also secretly excited at the idea of seeing his own name among the crew credits that would roll on the screen at the end of the broadcast.

  Yet while part of him wanted his dad to accept Derek’s offer, another part of him feared something bad would happen. The real Everglades was a very different place from the homemade marsh in the Crays’ backyard.

  Feeling torn, he excused himself from the meeting and jogged down to see about Alice. She was still pouting; only her black nostrils showed on the surface of the pool. Wahoo sat down on a plastic milk crate and watched a baby leopard frog hop across the lily pads.

  Soon a piece of pale, ragged cloth floated to the top of the water. Wahoo used the bamboo pole to retrieve it: Derek’s torn khaki shorts. Two large, hollow alligator incisors remained stuck
in the fabric.

  “You’ll grow new ones,” Wahoo said to Alice. The average gator went through three thousand teeth in a lifetime of chomping.

  “Yeah, she’ll be pretty as ever.” It was his father, who’d come up behind him. “And she knows it, too.”

  “What did you tell ’em, Pop?”

  “You mean the Dorkster?” Mickey Cray smiled. “He showed me the video. They put it on a disk.”

  “Come on. Did you take the job or not?”

  “They’re gonna cut me out of the gator scene. Make it look like an ‘escape’ instead of a rescue. One minute that knucklehead will be spinning like a propeller underwater, and next minute he’ll be lyin’ on the shore-as if he got free from Alice all by himself!” Mickey seemed more amused than upset. “You said it yourself: showbiz!”

  “You told them yes, didn’t you?”

  “Son, we seriously need the dough.”

  Wahoo couldn’t argue with that. He said, “After what happened today, maybe Derek learned his lesson.”

  “Sure. And maybe the raccoons will start their own lacrosse team.” Wahoo’s dad kicked the TV star’s shredded shorts into the cattails. “Now go fetch a chicken from the freezer. Let’s walk sweet old Alice back to her pen.”

  “Two chickens, Pop. She earned it.”

  NINE

  That evening, they drove down to Florida City and stocked up at the Walmart: sodas, Gatorades, bug spray, sunblock, coffee, bacon, powdered eggs, granola bars, Pringles, frozen hot dogs, black beans, matches and first-aid supplies, including a bottle of five hundred aspirins for Mickey.

  When they got to the register, Wahoo slipped ahead of his father and paid for the supplies with cash.

  Mickey eyed him warily. “Where’d you get that money?”

  “Robbed a bank,” Wahoo said. Actually his mother had left three hundred dollars inside an envelope in his sock drawer, for emergencies.

  Mickey said, “Don’t be such a wise bleep.”

  “Okay, I didn’t rob a bank. I won the lottery.”

  “I’m warning you.”

  “Here, grab a couple of these bags,” Wahoo said. He’d promised his mom he wouldn’t tell his dad about the cash in the drawer.

  They were loading the provisions into the back of the pickup truck when Wahoo heard someone call, “Wait up!”

  He turned around and saw Tuna Gordon, a girl from school. She had curly ginger hair and was small for her age, but she wasn’t shy. Wahoo didn’t know her well, although she had caught his attention in biology class because she knew the Latin names of all the local snakes and lizards.

  “I need a ride,” Tuna said. She wore a camo weather jacket, blue jeans and bright green flip-flops. Her canvas tote bag looked as if it weighed more than she did.

  “This a friend of yours?” Mickey asked Wahoo.

  “She’s in my biology class.”

  “Algebra, too,” said Tuna.

  Wahoo’s father was looking at the tote bag. “Which way are you headin’, hon?”

  “Anywhere,” she said. “Wherever you guys are going.”

  When she stepped closer, they saw she had a black eye.

  “Who did that to you?” Mickey asked.

  “I fell down the stairs.”

  “Baloney.”

  “Then never mind,” Tuna said, and turned to walk away.

  “Hold on.” Wahoo motioned her to come back. He didn’t know what to say or how to act. Who in the world would hit a girl? he wondered.

  His father asked Tuna where she lived. She pointed toward a dented old Winnebago at the far end of the parking lot.

  “Okay, but where do you keep it?” Mickey asked.

  “Right there.”

  “You live at the Walmart?”

  “They let motor homes stay for free,” Tuna explained. “We got electric and water, everything we need. It’s not so awful.”

  Mickey’s father shook his head. “If you like campin’ in a parking lot.”

  Wahoo knew Tuna was telling the truth. In fifth grade he’d met a boy who had spent a whole summer with his family towing a Gulf Stream trailer from one Walmart store to another, all the way from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, to Portland, Oregon.

  “What really happened to your eye?” Wahoo asked.

  “I told you. I fell down.”

  Mickey said, “That’s bull. Somebody slugged her.”

  Tuna’s cheeks turned red. Wahoo was shocked that his father would say it aloud and embarrassed for Tuna that it was probably true.

  Mickey bent down and whispered, “Was it your old man?”

  Tuna pulled away. “So what if it was?”

  “Has he been drinkin’ tonight?”

  Her eyes welled up. “Every damn night,” she said quietly.

  “Where’s your mom?” Wahoo asked.

  Tuna covered up a sniffle. “Up north with my grandma.”

  Mickey Cray was staring darkly across the parking lot at the Winnebago, and Wahoo knew he was considering paying Mr. Gordon a visit. Such a confrontation could only end badly, with police cars and ambulances. Wahoo’s father had absolutely no use for creeps who beat on small animals, especially kids.

  “You’re coming with us,” Wahoo said to Tuna, “on a real camping trip.”

  Her eyes brightened. “Seriously?”

  “We’re heading out to the Everglades for a few days.”

  “Sweet.”

  Mickey said, “I’ll be right back,” and started striding toward the camper where Tuna’s father was drinking.

  Wahoo ran up and cut in front of him. “No, don’t.”

  “He’s got a gun,” Tuna said, “by the way.”

  Mickey frowned. “Then somebody better take it away from him.”

  “Stay out of it, Pop. She’s safe now.” Wahoo unclenched his father’s right hand and pressed a twenty-dollar bill into it.

  “What the bleep is this for?”

  “Now that we’ve got company, we’ll need more food for the trip,” Wahoo said. He looked over at Tuna. “You like Coke or Mountain Dew?”

  “Anything’s good,” she said.

  Wahoo gave his father another five bucks. “Mountain Dew it is.”

  Mickey shoved the cash in his pocket and muttered, “You two wait in the pickup.” Then he trudged back toward the Walmart. Wahoo kept an eye on him, to make sure he didn’t make a detour to Mr. Gordon’s RV.

  Once they were seated in the truck, Tuna said, “Look, I don’t want to mess up your vacation.”

  “It’s not a vacation. It’s a job,” said Wahoo.

  “What kinda job?”

  When he told her, she didn’t believe him.***

  Swaddled in his fluffy purple robe, Derek Badger watched the replay of the alligator scene over and over.

  “Crikey, this is golden,” he murmured.

  Raven Stark sat beside the director at a small dining counter in Derek’s motor coach. A map of the Everglades was spread in front of them.

  “Have you arranged for a chopper yet?” Derek called from his bed.

  “It’s on my list,” Raven said patiently.

  Derek loved using helicopters to shoot high aerial scenes of himself traipsing through the bush, making it appear as if he were all alone. The key was to find a place where there were no obvious signs of human habitation. Fortunately, the Everglades covered a vast region, and much of it was remote.

  “Where’s the new script?” Derek demanded.

  “The writers are still working on it,” the director said.

  “I want fresh pages by tomorrow morning. Understood?”

  The pages were being rewritten to put the gator “attack” at the very end of the show. Because the scene was so brief, it would be shown several times in slow motion and dragged out to fill the last ten minutes of the program.

  For the earlier part of the show, the director would need other videotaped segments-Derek hacking his way through the saw grass, building a campsite and, of course, cooking some poor
luckless creature for supper.

  “What about using your face-to-face with the snapping turtle?” the director asked. “It’s really not so bad-”

  “I told you to erase that!” Derek exploded.

  “All right. Consider it done,” the director said, although he had no intention of destroying the turtle tape. The nose-nipping scene would be digitally added to a secret DVD of Derek’s spectacular blunders that would be played on a giant flat screen when the crew of Expedition Survival! held its annual end-of-the-season party, which Derek never attended because he considered himself too important. The DVD was always the high point of the evening-even Raven had found herself weeping with laughter.

  She wasn’t laughing now, scanning the map of the Everglades.

  At first the Miccosukee tribe had agreed to let Expedition Survival! base its operations at one of its settlements along the Tamiami Trail. Unfortunately, Raven had just been informed by a tribal lawyer that Mr. Badger and his crew were no longer welcome.

  “Because of the incident involving the Navajos,” the attorney had explained stiffly. “We found out about it on the Internet.”

  Raven had grimaced at the memory.

  Derek had been doing a cave-camping scene in New Mexico when he’d brainlessly decided to use an ancient Navajo prayer pipe to scratch an itch on his back. The sacred relic had snapped into three pieces, greatly upsetting the tribal leaders. Derek had been ordered to depart the reservation and never return.

  Now, on the eve of the Everglades taping, Raven was scrambling to find a new place to use as a headquarters.

  The director tapped a place on the map. “What about here, down in Flamingo?”

  Raven frowned. “That’s in the national park.”

  “So what? Call ’em.”

  “I think we’re on some sort of blacklist.”

  “You’re joking,” the director said. “Because of what happened at Yellowstone? Geez, that was three, four years ago.”

  “Not my fault!” Derek protested from the folds of his robe. “I didn’t know it was a bloody eagle nest.”

  That wasn’t true. Everyone on the set had warned him it was an eagle nest. Before climbing the old cottonwood, he’d strapped on his Helmet Cam, thereby making sure that the whole idiotic crime had been recorded. A park ranger who’d arrived during the fiasco retrieved the eagle egg as soon as Derek descended from the tree, depriving the survivalist of a tasty breakfast omelet and possibly a prison term.