Mudshark Read online

  ALSO BY GARY PAULSEN

  Alida's Song

  The Amazing Life of Birds

  The Beet Fields

  The Boy Who Owned the School

  The Brian Books: The River, Brian's Winter, Brian's Return, and Brian's Hunt

  Canyons

  Caught by the Sea: My Life on Boats

  The Cookcamp

  The Crossing

  Danger on Midnight River

  Dogsong

  Father Water, Mother Woods

  The Glass Cafè

  Guts: The True Stories Behind Hatchet and the Brian Books

  Harris and Me

  Hatchet

  The Haymeadow

  How Angel Peterson Got His Name

  The Island

  Lawn Boy

  The Legend of Bass Reeves

  Molly McGinty Has a Really Good Day

  The Monument

  My Life in Dog Years

  Nightjohn

  The Night the White Deer Died

  Puppies, Dogs, and Blue Northers

  The Quilt

  The Rifle

  Sarny: A Life Remembered

  The Schernoff Discoveries

  Soldier's Heart

  The Time Hackers

  The Transall Saga

  Tucket's Travels (The Tucket's West series, Books One through Five)

  The Voyage of the Frog

  The White Fox Chronicles

  The Winter Room

  Picture books, illustrated by Ruth Wright Paulsen: Canoe Days and Dogteam

  To Leo Lashock

  with gratitude

  This is the principal. Would the custodian please report to the faculty restroom with a plunger … no, wait … a shovel and a plunger? And has anybody seen the gerbil from room two oh six?

  The Mudshark was cool.

  Not because he said he was cool or knew he was or thought it. Not because he tried or even cared.

  He just was.

  Kind of tall, kind of thin, with a long face, brown eyes and hair and a quick smile that jumped out and went back. When he walked down a hall he didn't just walk, he seemed to move as a part of the hall. He'd suddenly appear out of nowhere, as if he'd always been there.

  Wasn't there.

  Then there.

  His real name was Lyle Williams and for most of his twelve-year-old life people had just called him Lyle.

  But one day, when he'd been playing Death Ball—a kind of soccer mixed with football and wrestling and rugby and mudfighting, a citywide, generations-old obsession that had been banned from school property because of, according to the principal, Certain Insurance Restrictions and Prohibitions Owing to Alarming Health Risks Stemming from the Inhalation and Ingestion of Copious Amounts of Mud—he'd been tripped. Everyone thought he was down for the count, flat on his back, covered in mud. Just then, a runner-kicker-wrestler-mudfighter came too close to him, streaking down-field with the ball, and one of Lyle's hands snaked out and caught the runner by an ankle.

  “So fast, it was like a mudshark,” Billy Crisper said later. He always watched the animal channel. “Mudsharks lie in the mud and when something comes by, they grab it so fast that even high-speed cameras can't catch it. I didn't even see his hand move, I didn't see so much as a blur.”

  After that game, no one called him Lyle.

  Mudshark's agility had been honed at home, courtesy of his triplet baby sisters—Kara, Sara and Tara. Once they started crawling, his father said that all heck broke loose, because nothing moves faster than a tiny, determined toddler heading toward a breakable or swallowable object. If Mudshark had only had one little sister or maybe even two, his reflexes wouldn't have been so keen, but living under the same roof as three mobile units at one time had increased his range of motion and speed exponentially.

  One night after dinner when they were about seven months old, the babies had been placed on a blanket on the floor and were playing with soft toys. Mudshark was doing his homework at the desk in the corner of the family room and his parents were watching the news and, frankly, dozing on the couch.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Mudshark saw a pink flash.

  His head whipped around. Two babies were sitting on the blanket, looking toward the door to the hallway. Two, but not three. His parents were half asleep and he didn't want to disturb them. As he leapt silently to his feet and took a step toward the door, he saw two pink streaks darting past him in the same direction. Mudshark reached out and grabbed both babies by the back of their overalls as they crawled after their more adventurous sister. He scooped them up and tucked one under each arm in one fell swoop, heading out of the room toward the rogue baby.

  Down the hall toward the kitchen, he saw a little rosebud-covered bottom (a quick glance at the faces he had clutched under his arms told him that Tara had made the first break) rounding the corner to the guest room. He took long strides toward her, Kara and Sara cooing at the jouncy ride. When he got to the guest room, he stared down at Tara, who had found one of the dog's squeezy toys and was happily gumming it (EEY-ah, EEY-ah …). Three babies, two arms.

  He shifted the two girls he was holding to his left side, sliding his arm through their overall straps as if he were slinging a backpack over his forearm. They hung there, gurgling, while he bent over and plucked Tara off the floor.

  Mudshark and his wriggling crew returned to the family room, where his parents slept peacefully, unaware that the triplets had discovered mobility.

  From that moment on, Mudshark did everything he could to anticipate their moves and keep them out of trouble. He stood guard between the triplets and electrical outlets (there had been a close call with Tara, a Barbie doll and a surge protector), the dog bowl (Sara was especially fond of kibble) and the cat box (Mudshark made a flying leap across the room the first time he saw Kara sitting next to the litter box, reaching a small hand toward the mysterious clumps she saw. He snatched her up before she connected). Yes, he owed his speed and attention to detail to Kara, Sara and Tara.

  But the way he moved wasn't why Mudshark was cool.

  And it wasn't his clothes. Sometimes his outfit fit in with the way everybody else dressed and sometimes it didn't. Once, he wore a green wool sweater that had a yellow leather diamond stamped with the head of a poodle in the middle of the chest. It was as ugly as broken teeth chewing rotten meat, but by the end of the day everybody in school wished they had a green wool sweater with a yellow leather diamond and a poodle on it, too.

  That's how cool Mudshark was.

  It didn't matter to Mudshark what they called him or that he wasn't allowed to play Death Ball anymore because of how badly he'd frightened the other players with his fast moves (Death Ball was not known to require cunning or quickness, just the brute force and raw grit necessary to last the four quarters of, as parents and other adults shudderingly referred to it, That Game). Mudshark knew cool wasn't in how you moved or a name or clothes or whether or not you were asked to play on anyone's team.

  It was all in the way your thoughts ran through your mind, the way you managed the flow of electrical charges jumping from one brain cell to another to form ideas.

  That's what makes somebody who they are. And that's why Mudshark was so cool.

  He thought.

  While everyone else was hanging out or goofing off or playing video games or listening to music or watching TV or walking down the hallway in a funk or texting each other or surfing the Net, he was observing the people and objects and sights and scenes around him.

  Thinking.

  Once, when he was just five and a half years old, he went up to his mother and said:

  “Mom, I think all the time.”

  “About what?”

  “Everything.” Deep breath, let it out, sigh.

  “Wha
t are you thinking about right now?”

  “Fingernails grow exactly four times faster than toenails, but it's not like we need toenails because we don't even use them for scratching and did you know that an octopus doesn't even have toenails…” He sighed again, and as he turned to walk away, he said, “It makes a man think.”

  He also read all the time. His mother was the lead research coordinator at the public library, and from the time he was very tiny, she'd brought him to work with her, setting him on the floor behind her desk with a stack of books she'd absentmindedly pulled from the nearest shelf—never picture books or easy readers, but books on astronomy and astrophysics and the history of democracy and the rise and fall of ancient civilizations. He'd learned to read before he went to kindergarten and was always carrying two or three books with him. He only had to read a page once to be able to quote from it word for word.

  As he grew older, his memory became better because of the way he learned to pay attention to every sight, smell, taste and sound every minute of every day. As with any skill, practice made him more proficient, and over time, he'd developed a nearly photographic memory.

  Eventually people noticed his knack for quoting obscure facts and remembering tiny details, and when a kid at school had a question or problem, someone would say “Ask Mudshark.”

  “Hey, Mudshark,” Markie McCorkin said, “I lost my homework!”

  And Mudshark remembered him sitting by the steps in front of the school where two small kids had been playing with a ball, a yellow ball, that they'd thrown in the bushes back of where Markie sat. One of them had accidentally kicked Markie's orange folder so that his homework papers, held together with a red paper clip, fell out of the folder while he was telling Todd DeClouet about the new tires on his bicycle and how well they gripped in dirt, although not as well as he'd thought they might.

  And Markie ran to the front bushes and sure enough, his homework was there. Exactly where Mudshark had said it would be.

  Annie Shaw had unfortunately eaten the Anchovy—Grape Jelly Turnover Surprise in the cafeteria and asked Mudshark what to do.

  He told her she needed to lie quietly until the spins stopped and that she should go to the school nurse right this very minute because the nurse's car insurance payments had been reduced since she never drove over eleven miles an hour, and she would be in such a good mood that she'd give Annie a pass to miss class, even though she usually held the passes back like they were made of gold. Her gold. From her teeth.

  And Mudshark knew all this because he had overheard the nurse on the phone and seen her car insurance papers on her desk when he'd given her his updated immunization record.

  He also knew that there was serious talk about the cook being sent to a Quiet Place for an Indeterminate Time if her recipes didn't start becoming less … creative. The nurse was alarmed. Every day there was a line of pale and shaky students sitting in her waiting room, clutching small pails and groaning.

  The cool thing about Mudshark was that he not only had information, he knew how to use it.

  One day he came back to his locker to discover that somebody had taped a sign to it:

  THE MUDSHARK DETECTIVE AGENCY

  Problems solved and

  items found

  He smiled and straightened the sign so it was perfectly level.

  This is the principal. Would the custodian please report to the cafeteria with a shovel and a bucket and some extra-strength, reinforced garbage bags? And would those people late for assembly refrain from being late in the future? And if you see the gerbil, would you please try to herd it toward room two oh six?

  One of the Death Ball players was a boy named Risdon Risdon. His first and last name were the same, it was said, because his father had also played a lot of Death Ball when he was young and had gotten too used to hearing every call repeated.

  Risdon Risdon lost his right shoe while walking down the hallway and had continued walking for quite some time before discovering that (a) he didn't have a shoe and (b) he had no idea where he was going in the first place.

  Hard-core Death Ball players were always losing articles of apparel and getting lost because they didn't pay much attention to anything besides the game. But Risdon Risdon was a legend in his own time because he had once failed to find the cafeteria while both double doors were open and people were yelling at him as he walked past.

  Somehow, though, Risdon Risdon knew enough to go looking for Mudshark in the library, where so many important things happened.

  Mudshark looked up from his book in surprise as Risdon Risdon limped over to him. It was of course nothing short of astonishing that Risdon Risdon was in the library in the first place, considering that Death Ball players spent all their free time during the school day in the cafeteria hunched over notebooks, tinkering with the brackets for the play-offs and carb-loading for strength and endurance.

  Risdon Risdon glared down at his feet and bellowed, “Yo, Mud! My shoe is not here. On my right foot, dude. It escaped or something. Got any idea what happened to it? 'Cause I can't go to practice without both shoes.”

  Mudshark knew that Risdon Risdon's shoe was by locker seventy-four on the right side of the hallway, where Mudshark had seen it flop, toe in to the wall, after third period when Risdon Risdon had become mesmerized by the sight of Amanda Gatto's gleaming hair and had tripped.

  Risdon Risdon shuffled off to retrieve his shoe and, he hoped, catch another glimpse of Amanda and her shiny hair while the rest of the students in the library murmured quietly among themselves that Mudshark had a sixth sense or a third eye.

  This is the principal. Would the custodian please bring a rag and a strainer and a set of tongs to the faculty restroom? And would whoever drew the picture of George Washington on the sidewalk with chalk please refrain from drawing that particular picture? George Washington, the Father of Our Country, did not wear shorts, have tattoos and chest hair, or smoke cigars. At least I don't think he did. And also refrain from startling the gerbil. When frightened, he reverts to a wild state and looks for a burrow to hide in, and since there are no burrows in the school building he will seek any dark hole. Thank you.

  Somewhere Up There, the higher levels of school administration decided that every classroom should have a live science project. Word came down asking for suggestions. A few were downright frightening, but the letter that received the most attention and prompted the subsequent hiring of a child psychologist whose job it was to visit classrooms throughout the district looking for Potential Cries for Help from Disaffected Youth read, “Body parts could be gathered from city morgues and, using duct tape and the clever manipulation of electricity, a human being could be manufactured.”

  The school board ultimately decided: crayfish.

  Packages of fertilized crayfish eggs arrived at Mudshark's school. They were placed in tanks of water so the crayfish would hatch and grow and young people could then understand the Miracle of Life as seen through the cycle of: boy crayfish meets girl crayfish, and then …

  It turned out that the main lesson crayfish had to teach was Reproduction and Multiplication of a Species because crayfish are really good at making babies. Pretty soon the classrooms at Mudshark's school were full of glass tanks, teeming with the Miracle of Life—two hundred sixty-five thousand, three hundred and seventeen miracles, to be exact.

  The custodian was constantly trying to fit new tanks into the rooms, and everyone hoped that he was garnering huge overtime pay for the weekend and school vacation visits he made to clean the tanks and feed the crayfish, lest they die—which they would, an unfortunate and reeking discovery made immediately following the first three-day weekend of the school year.

  So much Life made everyone nervous.

  Kids got edgy. They moved their desks together in the center of the room. The teachers moved their desks in, too, and everyone huddled together, warily eyeing the numerous glass tanks that soon surrounded them, lining the walls of each and every classroom.

&nbs
p; The custodian was looking haggard, since he had no time off.

  So while it might be said that the Crayfish Project was not a spectacular success—indeed, some teachers needed therapy after the horror of disposing of thousands of dead and decaying crayfish—there were some benefits.

  Young people did learn a lot about the Inevitable Cycle of Life, which was sure to help them as they matured and got jobs as bankers and lawyers and car engine designers, then planned the sizes of their own families and immediately had their house pets spayed or neutered. There were also many new recipes for crayfish gumbo on the Internet.

  One of the more interesting and long-lasting side effects of the crayfish experiment was that the librarian, Ms. Underdorf, decided to turn her library into a small, personal zoo.

  There are many ways to describe Ms. Underdorf.

  She was brilliant and joyous and she believed—probably correctly—that libraries contain the answers to all things, to everything, and that if you can't find the information you seek in the library, then such information probably does not exist in this or any parallel universe now or ever to be known.

  She was thoughtful and kind and she always believed the best of everybody. She was, above all else, a master librarian and knew where to find any book on any subject in the shortest possible time.

  And she was wonderfully unhinged. So when the School Administration Science Experiment Directive came down about crayfish, she embraced it with an enthusiasm any educational administrator would have found rewarding.

  If a couple of crayfish were good, she thought, looking around at all the empty space in her library that suddenly seemed to cry out for cages and aquariums and terrariums, then other examples of more exotic living creatures would be better.

  And so the Amazing Armadillo.

  This is the principal. Would the custodian please report to the faculty restroom with a large stick, safety goggles and a respirator mask? And would whoever took the erasers from room two oh three please return them and refrain from removing erasers in the future? Also, while it is loose, and in spite of what I said in the last announcement, the gerbil is not, per se, a wild animal and will not, repeat, will not attack. So please refrain from screaming or otherwise panicking should you see said gerbil.