Mudshark Read online

  Ms. Underdorf bought an armadillo from a man on a street corner who said he was a professional armadillo salesman from Texas. Since Ms. Underdorf believed in everybody, she took him at his word and happily brought the little armadillo to school, sleeping soundly, she thought, rolled up in wood shavings in the corner of its glass tank.

  She named it Sparky.

  Sparky the Amazing Armadillo.

  Ms. Underdorf spent long hours cooing soft words over Sparky's tank to help him have sweet dreams, because her research indicated that these particular armadillos were nocturnal. But when she asked the custodian about Sparky's nights, he said Sparky wasn't any more active in the evening hours, when the custodian was there to clean the library.

  Ms. Underdorf never noticed that she was the only person in school who paid any attention to Sparky; after a curious glance by the student population the week he arrived, no one ventured near his table. The explosion of crayfish had curbed their interest in animal behavior.

  After a while Ms. Underdorf became concerned because Sparky never unrolled and didn't even waken to eat the special lumps of insects she supplied weekly. Armadillos were supposed to love those lumps. One day, when this had been going on for about four weeks, Mudshark noticed that, although Sparky wasn't eating, the spider population of the library was incredibly well fed. He wandered over to Sparky's tank and watched a line of spiders drop in, wrap up Sparky's food and scramble up the sides of the glass tank, stolen dinner in tow.

  Mudshark took a close look at Sparky, reaching into the tank to nudge him. Mudshark's eyes widened in surprise.

  Mudshark waited until he and Ms. Underdorf were the only people in the library. Then he said carefully, “Uh, Ms. Underdorf. Did you notice that Sparky is … um … special?”

  “Of course he's special! Why, he's downright amazing; he was one of four identical babies born in his litter—all armadillos are born four at a time from one egg. Isn't that cunning?”

  “Uh, no. I mean yes, that's clever, very utilitarian, and my family has an appreciation of the multiple-birth phenomenon, as you well know, but what I was talking about, specifically, was that Sparky seems to have, well, it looks to me like a brass clasp is holding his stomach contents in place.”

  Ms. Underdorf peered intently at Sparky. Mudshark's nudge had flipped him on his side and out of the burrow of wood shavings.

  “Well, I'll be …,” she said. “Would you look at that! It's a purse! Sparky is actually a purse. Fine observation, Lyle.” She beamed proudly at Mudshark. And then she reached in, plucked Sparky out of the glass tank and snapped open the clasp. “Oh, look! A penny. This is my lucky day. Thank you, Lyle, for bringing this to my attention.” She smiled at Mudshark before taking Sparky to her office and unloading the contents of her old handbag into her new one.

  Although Ms. Underdorf was thrilled with her new purse, she still wanted interesting and educational creatures in the library for the betterment of her students.

  And so she bought a parrot.

  This is the principal. Would the custodian please report to the faculty restroom with a plastic shield, a hazardous waste suit and a large container of pepper spray? Also, whoever took the erasers out of room two oh two, please return them and refrain from removing erasers from two oh two in the future. Also refrain from taking erasers from two oh four. Thank you. Oh, and the gerbil was seen near the vice principal's office—she said it was “scurrying, very ratlike.” You should not try to pick it up if it is, indeed, a rat. I repeat: Refrain from picking up rats. Thank you.

  The parrot sat completely silent for the better part of a week—so still and quiet that Mudshark thought Ms. Underdorf might have bought it from the same man who sold her Sparky the Amazing Armadillo/kicky new everyday handbag.

  But after a week or so, the parrot burped, coughed, scratched a million empty birdseed shells onto the floor, emitted a sound that should have been accompanied by methane, looked at Ms. Underdorf and said:

  “Hey, babe, what's happening?”

  The parrot seemed to know that he lived in a library; he spoke in a near whisper. Gradually, people realized that he seemed to speak several different languages, or at least it sounded as if he did. Marly Lipinski, for some unknown reason, swore he was reciting off-color limericks in ancient Sanskrit. Of course nobody understood the language anyway, so it didn't matter how racy the poems were.

  Other than the incessant belching, the parrot fit right in to Ms. Underdorf's library. She didn't mind the burps or the potentially dirty words because they were, she announced, Proof of Life, and, after Sparky, that was good enough for her.

  When the bird had been in Ms. Underdorf's care for just over a month, Betty Crimper came in to the library and asked if anybody had seen her paper on how to make salve out of lard. She had been working on the project for quite a long time, buying pound blocks of lard at the grocery and mixing the lard with what she called “experimental chemicals.”

  Betty was always doing one experiment or another, looking for a Miracle Cure or Amazing Beauty Potion that would make her Rich and Famous, or at least Rich.

  She posted a sign on her locker reading: TEMPORARY HOME OF THE FUTURE BETTY CRIMPER RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT LABORATORY.

  And except for the time when she tried to bottle Odors to Repel and they had to close down the entire north end of the school after she dropped a small jar in the hall, her experiments hadn't been too dramatic. Betty had packed that jar full of something her cat had dragged in, which she had “cured” in the sun. As she watched the hazmat team herd the students out into the front yard, she'd made a careful note in her lab notebook:

  The curing process went on a bit too

  long, leading to surprising intensity.

  General population not ready for Odors

  to Repel; contact United States Marine

  Corps. Possible use as weapon?

  Her new lard salve, though, seemed to do little damage except to draw flies. This meant that the Death Ball players, who used Betty's salve as muscle balm, walked around in clouds of insects. The players' eyes watered uncontrollably when they used the stuff, but they swore that Betty's concoction was the best bruise medication they'd ever tried.

  Then came the day when she rushed into the library and cried, “Has anyone seen my lard recipe?”

  “Why don't you ask Mud—” somebody started to say, but before the sentence was finished the parrot belched, squawked and said:

  “Check the window ledge in the girls' rest-room.”

  Mudshark, who was there (of course, he was always in the library), turned to look at the parrot, frowned and then said to Betty, “He's right, you should go look.”

  So Betty found her paper on the ledge, where it had fallen out of her notebook when she washed her hands after science the day before. Betty had become compulsive about washing her hands after working in the lab following the Episode with the Itching Scabs.

  As curious as it was that a parrot should speak logically and not just mimic what he'd heard a person say, and that a mere bird could help somebody find something, the incident passed largely unnoticed by everyone other than Mudshark. He spent a good deal of the rest of the day gazing thoughtfully at the parrot. Later that same week, Clyde Damper was in the library and whispered that he'd lost a book. Before anyone could say, before anyone could even think Ask Mudshark, the parrot belched, squawked and said:

  “On the bench, by the coach's office.”

  Clyde, surprised, turned to Mudshark, who was observing the bird. Mudshark looked at Clyde, shrugged and said, “He's right.”

  Clyde found the book sitting right where the parrot, and Mudshark, had said it would be. Clyde had collected the previous day's attendance sheets from each teacher and taken them to the office earlier that morning and had dropped them all outside Coach's office, setting the book down while he gathered the papers from the floor.

  Twice now the bird had known where to find something even though it never left the library.
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  “I think,” Clyde said to his friends, “that bird is special. He has powers. Maybe … he's psychic.”

  By the end of the day the word was all over school.

  First: the parrot in the library was psychic.

  And second: the parrot could out-think Mudshark.

  This is the principal. Would the custodian please report to the faculty restroom with a long plank? And whoever took the erasers from room two oh eight, please return them. Seriously, a lot of erasers are missing. Please return them. Also please refrain from forming hunting parties to hunt the gerbil. He simply gets frightened and panics and I don't think any of us want to revisit the sound we heard when he ran up Mr. Patterson's pants leg, do we? Luckily the gerbil was not injured, although he escaped again, and Mr. Patterson will return to school day after tomorrow once he has regained his … composure. Thank you.

  It shouldn't have bothered Mudshark, shouldn't have rattled his cool, this parrot.

  Life, after all, wasn't about out-thinking birds. But it annoyed him a little. Mudshark had gotten used to being the go-to guy in school, and he didn't want to share that position with a bird. Especially a burping bird.

  He had a bigger issue than the parrot, though: Something was going on at school, something strange, and he couldn't put his finger on just what felt … wrong. As he did with any new thing he wanted to understand, he settled back and waited for his thoughts to become clear.

  While waiting, he went to school, watched the season-ending Death Ball play-offs, ate dinner with his parents and broke up a food fight among his sisters.

  The girls were separated from each other at the dinner table—Mom, Dad and Mudshark each took charge of one, playing one-on-one defense with the triplets, much like the Death Ball championship team. The physical separation kept the girls from grabbing each other, eating off each other's plates or complaining about the fairness of portion sizes. But instead they used the distance between them to toss food at each other. Mudshark never missed a bite as he raised a hand to snag a dinner roll that Tara had hurled at Sara or to right the glass of milk that Kara had tipped when she flung a pork chop at Tara.

  His mother and father didn't seem to notice the food flying across the table—they were engrossed in a discussion of library funding. So Mudshark was left to contain the damage.

  After dinner, he rested up by working on his bicycle. Mudshark had learned that a bike is the most efficient way to use human energy to move the body forward. He spent many hours improving his bike's efficiency—lubricating the bearings, cleaning and oiling the chain, perfecting his pedaling technique so that one push on a level street would move him forty yards.

  And all the time, he waited.

  Waited for the knowledge he needed to figure out what was going on at school.

  Mudshark was sitting in the back of a study room the next morning, letting the uneasy thoughts rumble around in his mind, when he saw Emily Davidson pull her gym uniform out of her backpack and swipe it across the blackboard, where she was working on math problems with her study group.

  Erasers.

  There it was.

  Erasers.

  Every day more erasers were missing, and although it had seemed like a prank, like the free-range gerbil, somehow Mudshark knew there was more to it; something important was happening with the stolen erasers.

  He solved two more thought events while he kept thinking about erasers.

  First, Willamena Carson had lost her mind, or rather her brain, and asked Mudshark to find it. Willamena was a perfectly normal twelve-year-old girl who was forever losing her brain. She had decided a few months back that she was destined to be a doctor, and somewhere along the way, she had acquired a model of a human skull, which she studied constantly. At least everybody hoped it was a model. Nobody wanted to think that a twelve-year-old girl with a bouncy black ponytail would run around school carrying a real human skull.

  Willamena carried the skull in a bowling bag everywhere she went, and when she had nothing else to do, she would pull it out and examine it. The top could be lifted off, and a plastic model of a brain was nestled inside.

  “It's plastic,” Willamena told everyone, her pony-tail bouncing. “If it was real, it would get all runny. Decomposition is bad for brains.”

  Willamena's brain often fell out of the skull as she made her way through the day, and it turned up in some strange places. The back of a police car, the front pew of the Methodist church, an aisle seat at the movies and the Dumpster to the rear of the Juicy Burger stand had all been graced with Willamena's lost brain. Mudshark always figured out a logical reason: her uncle was a police officer and she had ridden in his squad car, she had gone to the Methodist church with a friend during a weekend sleepover, she'd gone to the movies with her grandmother, and she had been looking near the Dumpster for rats to photograph for a science project.

  Most recently, Mudshark had told her she would find her brain bobbing in the shallow end of the town pool, where it was terrifying some little kids who'd heard it was a man-eating brain fish. Willamena had taken her skull swimming in the deep end and had not seen her brain fall out, but Mudshark had heard the children screaming from the bicycle repair shop across the street.

  The second thought event was when Kyle Robertson made his father's brand-new, only-one-day-old car disappear.

  Kyle had wanted to be a magician his entire life. Every waking moment of every day, he studied books on magic and—most important—on the art of misdirection. This means making the audience focus on the wrong thing so it fails to see how the magician pulls off the trick.

  Kyle had had early successes with making various things disappear and reappear—notably his neighbor Helen Cartwright's huge cat, Toby. Toby finally got fed up with being disappeared and started to perform a lobotomy on Kyle, so Kyle moved on to things that didn't hiss and spray pee: his sisters' favorite dolls, clothing, bicycles, coins, school lunches, books, a gym teacher's whistle and clipboard, three and a half lockers and, once, a watermelon and a large potato.

  Kyle soon tired of these easy bits of magic and went looking for bigger and better feats of misdirection, searching for the major, the truly giant accomplishment, and was frustrated, until…

  Until his father bought a new car.

  Kyle's father had spent hours going over consumer guides and dragging his family from one car dealership to the next to test-drive every make and model in the region before finally picking the exact car that he wanted, the car of his dreams, the car that would get the best mileage per gallon with the least upkeep and maintenance and the strongest, most ironclad, waterproof, consumer-friendly warranty.

  Kyle promptly disappeared the car.

  Disappeared it too well. Even he couldn't find it.

  This was, clearly, the most successful act of magical misdirection Kyle had ever done, or probably would do for the rest of his life, which, according to his angry father, might be very short indeed if he did not produce the car.

  Now.

  So Kyle, talking fast, called Mudshark and begged him to come over. Mudshark found the car, as good as new, around the corner and down the block. Mudshark was kind enough not to give away the secret of Kyle's trick, which was actually not misdirection at all but an unlucky combination of his attempting the trick with the help of (1) his sixteen-year-old cousin (or, as Kyle referred to her, “my lovely assistant Kimmie”), who drove off in the car and forgot where she'd parked it, and (2) Kyle's dad's spare set of keys, which would no longer be kept on a peg by the back door after what soon became known in Kyle's house as That Darnfool Magic Nonsense with My Brand-new Car That I'd Hardly Driven Yet.

  “See?” Kyle told his father. “It was never really gone in the first place. It was all just sleight of hand—”

  “If you ever do it again,” his father said, “I will direct my hand to a part of your anatomy so hard you won't sit down for three months.”

  “Yes, Dad.” Kyle sounded meek, even though he was secretly wonderin
g what he could possibly do to top this one.

  And Mudshark went back to his thinking, which was more and more centered around one word:

  Erasers.

  This is the principal. Would the custodian please report to the faculty restroom with a large drum of disinfectant and a personal flotation device? Also, would whoever took the erasers from room two oh nine please return them? This holds true for all the other erasers, all sixty-five currently missing. Would whoever took them please refrain from taking any more and return all the missing ones to the appropriate rooms at once? There is nothing new to report about the gerbil except that he is still somewhere in the building. Will Mud … Lyle Williams please report to the principal's office? Immediately.

  While one part of Mudshark's mind was working on erasers, another part was trying to figure out the parrot.

  Most of the school had come to believe in the power and knowledge of the bird. Soon after the parrot's first successful solution, faculty and staff started asking him for winning lottery numbers, students begged for predictions on upcoming grades and answers to the chemistry midterm, most of the Death Ball players wanted to know the results of sporting events—including a cow-pie-throwing contest in Kansas City—and the custodian quietly whispered a request about where to find true love.

  The library was rapidly becoming the most popular room in the school, a fact that pleased Ms. Underdorf no end. Kids came in and pretended to look for a book, always on a subject that took them near the parrot's cage. Then they would sidle up to the bird and whisper a question.

  The parrot would sit, eyes closed, as if pretending that no one was there.

  The bird never answered questions about lottery tickets or test answers or sports teams or even true love, but when someone wanted to find a lost item, he would emit the now-famous belch, squawk and reveal where the object could be found.