Billy and the Birdfrogs

by B. B. Wurge

  Billy and the Birdfrogs

  Billy and the Birdfrogs

  B. B. Wurge

  Illustrated by Billy

  Leapfrog Press

  Teaticket, Massachusetts

  Billy and the Birdfrogs © 2008 by B. B. Wurge

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American

  Copyright Conventions

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a data base

  or other retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopy,

  recording or otherwise, without the prior written

  permission of the publisher.

  Published in 2008 in the United States by

  Leapfrog Press LLC

  PO Box 2110

  Teaticket, MA 02536

  www.leapfrogpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed in the United States by

  Consortium Book Sales and Distribution

  St. Paul, Minnesota 55114

  www.cbsd.com

  First Edition

  E-ISBN: 978-0-9815148-4-0

  For Sebastian the Mighty

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 1

  We Are Sealed in the House

  I lived with my grandmother for the first nine years of my life. We lived in a townhouse in the middle of Manhattan. It was four stories tall, but very skinny. It always reminded me of a thin person in brown clothes, standing on the street corner with his hands in his pants pockets.

  When I was about four years old, my grandmother used a welding torch to seal off the basement door in the kitchen. I remember her kneeling and holding the bright blue spear of flame to the crack under the door. The doorframe and the door were both metal, and the flame melted them together. My grandmother wore a pair of flowered oven mittens and a facemask with darkened glass to protect her eyes. She couldn’t kneel on a rug because the rug might have caught on fire, so she had to kneel on the hard kitchen tile, which must have hurt her knees.

  When she was done she turned off the flame and took off the mask, and her fine white hair came loose and drifted around her head like a halo. Then she got up carefully from the floor, massaging her knees, and sat in a kitchen chair.

  “That’s done me in for the day, Billy,” she said. She looked tired but satisfied with her work, and she chuckled as she looked at the door. She had welded the crack entirely around the door, melted the hinges so that they could not open, and melted a stack of silver dollars over the place where the keyhole was.

  “Grandma,” I said, “how come we shouldn’t go down into the basement?”

  “It’s not to keep us from going down, Love,” she said.

  “Then what’s it for?” I said.

  “You’re too young to know about that,” she said. “I’ll tell you when you’re older.”

  “I’m four years old!” I said.

  My grandmother laughed good-naturedly. She was a wonderful grandmother, always laughing and hopping around in her slippers and bathrobe. She was a short woman with wrinkly, spotty skin, but underneath her skin she had very strong muscles. She had stubby fingers that looked like ten old dried-up orange kumquats stuck to the palms of her hands.

  About a year later she nailed shut the trap door leading into the attic. She stood on a stepladder and I handed the nails up to her, one by one. When she was done hammering she got down from the ladder and brushed the dust from her hands.

  “Nothing will be able to get in now, Grandma,” I said. I was five years old.

  “That’s precisely right,” she said, putting her hand on my head and smiling.

  A year after that, she nailed shut the street door of our house.

  First she took the enormous, old-fashioned clothes cabinet that was standing in the corner of her bedroom and lay it on the floor, face down. Then she pried off the wooden back of the cabinet with the claw end of a hammer. She carried this large piece of wood down the stairs. I had to help her by walking in front and warning her about the steps and turns in the staircase, because she couldn’t see while carrying such a large sheet of wood.

  She propped the sheet of wood against the inside of our front door and nailed it to the doorframe. It was a very thick piece of wood, so it was a very sturdy way to block up the door. If anybody opened the front door of our house from the outside, they would see only a blank piece of oak facing them with a brass clothes hook in the middle of it.

  “But Grandma,” I said, “how will we eat? How will we get our food, or anything?” I was six years old now.

  “Don’t you worry about that,” she said to me in a muffled voice; she was holding three nails in her mouth. She pointed to the wall beside the door to remind me about the letterbox.

  Most houses have a letterbox in the door. Our house had a letterbox in the wall just beside the door. It had a big slot, so that pretty big packages could get through. Even a four-inch-thick package could fit. But when I looked at it, I saw that my grandmother had locked it with a new padlock, so that we would have to open it with a key to let anything in. Not even a very small bug could have crawled through around the edges.

  “Can’t we get out at all?” I said.

  “It’s better not to, Love,” she said. “We’ll do fine.”

  “But . . . Grandma?” I said, completely baffled, looking up at her and spreading out my skinny arms. “How will we get anything, if we can’t go out shopping?”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said, chuckling. “We’ll order through the Internet. What century do you think we live in here?”

  Later that evening, while we were sitting in the kitchen over a spaghetti dinner, I asked her anxiously what kind of awful thing was going to get us if we didn’t have all the doors sealed off. She looked at me thoughtfully for a long time before answering.

  Chapter 2

  My Grandmother Explains

  We were sitting on opposite sides of the tiny kitchen table, my grandmother in a chair with lots of cushions and pillows and a hand-knitted blanket pulled around her, and me in a chair that was slightly too tall for me so that my feet didn’t quite reach the floor.

  The kitchen was full of the delicious, rich smell of my grandmother’s cooking. She had boiled a huge pot of spaghetti and cooked another huge pot of sauce. It was a thick, red sauce made from tomato paste and ground pork and tennis balls.

  You may think that this recipe sounds crazy, but there was a reason for it. My grandmother was a very rational person, and there was always a reason for everything she did. You have to understand that, if you want to understand the story that I am telling you. She always put tennis balls into the sauce. After they were first put in, the tennis balls would float on top. But after hours and hours of slow cooking and stirring, when the tennis balls sank out
of sight—when she poked the last one down with a spoon and it didn’t come floating back up again—then the sauce was ready to eat. We didn’t eat the tennis balls, of course. She said that she had tried other kinds of balls, but they never worked as well as tennis balls. The cabinets over the kitchen sink were full of tubes and tubes of vacuum-packed tennis balls.

  On this particular evening, after we had finished our spaghetti, she patted her mouth with her napkin and looked at me for a long time, thoughtfully. “Billy,” she said to me, putting the napkin back on the table, “we live in a dangerous world. Far more dangerous than anyone usually admits. Don’t you believe what you see in the news.”

  I never watched the news, so I didn’t mind being told to mistrust it.

  “Do you know what happened to your mother?” she said.

  “You never told me, Grandma,” I said. We never talked about my mother. I knew what she looked like: a picture of her stood in a small frame on my Grandmother’s dressing table. In the picture she had blonde curly hair and a thin, pretty face. Her eyes looked friendly because of the slight wrinkles at the corners, but they were also very piercing as if all her intelligence were shooting out of her eyes and focusing on whatever she was looking at. That is almost all I knew about my mother. As far as I could remember, I had always lived with my Grandmother. My mother didn’t mean much to me yet, and I almost never thought about her.

  “She was a wonderful person,” my grandmother said. “But she took risks. Terrible risks.”

  “What happened to her?” I said.

  “She was killed,” my grandmother said, “by a wooly mammoth.”

  “Grandma!” I said. “That’s impossible!”

  “I’m telling you, it’s true.”

  “You’re playing a joke on me! Wooly mammoths died out millions of years ago. And they ate plants, anyway.”

  “Very smart,” she said, but she was not smiling. She looked serious. “A bull usually only eats plants, but it can still kill you. All it has to do is stick you with its horns, or step on you.”

  “But Grandma, a bull isn’t extinct. A person could get killed by a bull, but not by a wooly mammoth.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” she said. “Your mother was a paleontologist. She used to study dinosaur bones. Now, this is what happened. About ten years ago, some workmen were digging out the basement of a new building, right around here. They had huge machines that dug out the main hole, and then men went into the hole and dug out the corners with shovels and pick axes. One day, while a crew was in this enormous pit digging, one of the men suddenly disappeared. He had broken through into a hidden cave that went straight down, through the rock, into the ground. The other workmen could hear him calling for help, faintly, as if he was far away, and when they shined their flashlights down the hole, they couldn’t see him. All they could see was darkness.”

  “This is awful, Grandma,” I said. “Did the poor man ever get out?”

  “He did, Love, he did. The workmen threw down a long rope, with a flashlight tied to the end of it so that the man could see it in the dark. They lowered it down and down, and they kept having to tie on new lengths of rope, because the shaft of this hole was incredibly deep. Finally they could hear, very faintly, the man shouting up at them, ‘I got it! Pull!’ And they pulled. They pulled him out and saved him, although he was horribly scraped and bruised. When he got out, as he lay on the ground resting and waiting for the ambulance, he told them that he hadn’t even got to the bottom of the hole. He had managed to stop himself by pressing against the sides, or else he would have just kept on going and going, who knows how deep. To China, maybe.”

  “Grandma, that really is impossible. That’s just an expression. You can’t really go to China through a hole in the ground.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” she said, smiling at me. “You would end up in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Japan. You would have to dig a hole in San Francisco to end up in China.”

  “Now you’re making fun of me,” I said, laughing. “Tell me what happened next. Did the man say anything else?”

  “He did, yes. He said that on the way up, with the flashlight, he could see the walls of the shaft that he had fallen down. They were rough and full of points of rock, and in places the walls sparkled with minerals. And here and there he saw the most fantastic bones, half sticking out of the walls. Huge bones. He thought they were the bones of some giant person who must have fallen down the shaft a long time ago. Except that the shaft was too narrow for a giant person.”

  “Were they wooly mammoth bones, Grandma?”

  “Some of them were,” she said. “The city called in your mother to investigate them.”

  “Oh no. I think I know what happened next.”

  “Do you?” she said, giving me a piercing look. She paused to drink some of her hot tea, then put the cup back on the table.

  Chapter 3

  My Mother Finds T29

  In the pause while my Grandmother drank her tea, I could hear traffic in the street outside. The city was never quiet. Our street was being repaired, and big rusty iron sheets had been laid on the street to cover up a hole that the street people were digging down to the sewer. Every time a car drove over the iron sheets, it made a booming sound that ended in a clunk like a gigantic sledgehammer. That sound went on all night long, muffled inside our house. I didn’t mind it. Whenever I woke up in the middle of the night I would listen for that booming clunk, and then I would know that everything was okay and the world was the same as it always was. But it was strange now to think we would never go outside and see the street again.

  I looked at the window and suddenly noticed that the bottom of the window frame had nails sticking out of it. My grandmother had nailed the window shut. In our row of houses, all the first floor windows were protected by iron bars bolted to the outside of the window casings. Since nobody could possibly get in anyway, I did not understand why the windows had to be nailed shut.

  My grandmother saw where I was looking. “I left the ones on the fourth floor,” she said reassuringly. “We can still open them and get some air.”

  “But why, Grandma?” I was completely baffled. “What can possibly get in?”

  “I’m coming to that,” she said. “But it’s a long story. I’m sorry, it’s my fault. I should have told you years ago, but I thought you were too young.

  “Your mother, as I said, was called in by the city to investigate the bones. She worked at a university in the city, you know, and was a very smart woman. She went to the construction site with her team of helpers. They hooked a cable to a belt around her waist, and they lowered her down the hole with a winch. She was an expert at this kind of thing. She was wearing a miner’s hat with a bright light fixed to the front of it, and she was holding a metal pick that was tied to her wrist by a loop of string, so that if she accidentally dropped it, it would stay with her. It was for picking at rock, but also by hitting the cable with the side of the pick she could communicate with her helpers up above. Two hits meant to stop lowering her, three hits meant to start lowering again, and four hits meant to pull her back up again.

  “She went down so far that her helpers could hardly believe it. They had to pay out so much cable that they were afraid they would run out. But finally they got the signal to stop. Then for an hour your mother stayed down there, and if anyone put his ear to the hole on top, he would hear very faintly, echoing and distorted from all that distance, a scraping and tapping sound, and now and then your mother’s voice saying, ‘Oh! Wow! My God! Holy Hadrosaurs!’ Finally your mother gave the signal to pull her back up again.”

  “What did she find, Grandma?”

  “Well, Love, she was very excited when she got back up. Her face was grimy and her hair was full of rock dust and her fingers were raw from scraping at rock that she had loosened with h
er metal pick. She was talking excitedly, telling everyone what she had seen, even before they had gotten her all the way to the top of the hole. She said that the hole was a natural formation. Water must have seeped down for millions of years and dissolved the rock, hollowing out a long vertical tunnel, like a chimney. And the walls of the chimney were full of extinct animals. Not every bit of the walls. Just an extinct animal here, and a dozen or so feet later, an extinct animal there. But the chimney was so deep that there were twenty, thirty, maybe more skeletons. Some were just little ones. She pulled one out of her back pocket, a lump of rock that had a mouse skeleton in it.”

  “A mouse skeleton?” I said. “But those aren’t extinct. How can she have found a mouse skeleton?”

  “I don’t know, Billy, I’m no expert. Your mother would have explained it. I think maybe mice have been around for a while. But it wasn’t just mice. She saw the two teeth of a saber-toothed tiger sticking out of the rock wall, like curved swords. When the construction worker first fell down the hole, he must have whacked against them.”

  “Ouch!”

  “Yes, that must have hurt. And she saw a gigantic sloth. Six, seven feet tall. All turned to bones. And an extinct kind of camel.”

  “A camel in New York City, Grandma?”

  “It sounds incredible, but that’s what she said, and I believe her. I think maybe the camel lived here before the municipality. But the best of all was a wooly mammoth skeleton. It was hundreds of feet down. It was one of the deepest skeletons that she found.”