by Gary Paulsen
He wasn't always right, not like Mudshark, but he was, after all, a parrot and he was correct often enough that word spread through the school of his superpowers. The more people talked about him, the more they believed in him. And when Harvey Blenderman guessed accurately that Darryl F. Fergesen would win the Kansas City cow-pie-throwing contest rubber-gloved hands down, Harvey gave credit to the parrot even though the bird hadn't said a word.
Everyone thought it was just a matter of time before the bird shot Mudshark down as the undisputed answer champion. As much as kids liked and admired Mudshark and had come to rely on him for help, they secretly agreed that having a psychic parrot living in their school library was far more interesting than having a know-it-all twelve-year-old.
All of this was on Mudshark's mind when the PA system crackled to life:
Will Mud … Lyle Williams please
report to the principal's office?
Immediately.
As he made his way to Mr. Wagner's office, a wave of doom and gloom swamped him. Any time a person was ordered to report to the principal immediately, bad news followed.
Mudshark was ushered past the school secretary—a thin, always-smiling woman of massive efficiency who basically ran the school—and into Mr. Wagner's office.
The principal genuinely believed that his job was simply getting out of the way to allow teachers to teach. He mostly dealt with problems in the cafeteria—like why ten percent of the milk was always one day past its expiration date, and why did so many children have so much trouble unwrapping the butter pats so that little bits of tinfoil stuck to the floor and had to be picked up piece by small, sticky, grubby, slippery, tiny little piece, and why, oh why did the cook insist on creating new recipes consisting of terrifying combinations (wasabi tuna noodle casserole spring rolls and chocolate potato pie, for example) that inevitably resulted in numerous parents griping to Mr. Wagner about their children's nausea?
And now, of course, erasers.
“Come in, Lyle, it's good to see you.” Mr. Wagner motioned to a chair opposite his desk. “How are things going?”
“Fine.” Mudshark waited.
“For some time now, I've heard that you are good at finding things.”
Mudshark nodded.
“I'm having trouble with something.” Mr. Wagner looked uncomfortable. Mudshark nodded encouragingly.
Mr. Wagner hesitated, took a deep breath and then blurted:
“Alltheerasersinschoolseemtohavebeenstolen.”
“I've noticed.”
“It's hard not to. Half the teachers have taken to using their shirttails to wipe off the board, which makes for some uncomfortable half-clothed moments in the classroom. Another half are swiping gym towels from the locker rooms, so now we've got showers full of wet kids but no towels. Then the other half of the faculty are asking for easels and enormous pads of paper to write on, which simply isn't in my budget. Then there's the half that just keeps writing over everything and have you seen that undecipherable layer of gobbledygook on the boards in the science wing?”
“That's four halves, sir.”
“It is?”
“Yes, but I see your point.”
“It seems a silly concern, I know, especially given the disastrous end to the recent Death Ball tournament and the still-lost gerbil and that weird parrot in the library and don't even get me started about the faculty washroom crisis, but I wonder if you could help me find the erasers.”
Mudshark smiled.
“Of course.”
Mudshark went home after school, thinking about the principal's request. As soon as he entered the house, his mother whizzed past him, thrusting a sticky Sara into his arms.
“Look, lovey, would you be a dear and watch the girls for me? I have to give a presentation at the library and your father is running late at the office. The girls are doing an art project so they shouldn't be any trouble for you while you wait for Dad to get home.”
Mudshark held Sara at arm's length and inventoried the damage: a piece of dog kibble was stuck in her hair, she had colored her entire right hand with purple marker and her shoes were not only mismatched but also on the wrong feet.
He looked out at the driveway and saw his mother hurrying toward the car, three tiny but perfect purple handprints on the seat of her crisp white suit skirt.
“Kara. Tara,” he bellowed. “Park. Now. Move.” He set Sara down and held her purple hand as they waited for the other girls to come tearing down the hall from the playroom. He noted that Kara had the shoes that matched Sara's, Tara's dress was on backward and inside out and both of them had also colored their right hands purple. They walked out to the garage and he loaded them in the red wagon for the five-block trip to the park behind his school.
Once set free on the playground, the girls scattered, one to the sandbox, another to the gray plastic hippopotamus on its enormous spring and a third to the merry-go-round.
Mudshark sat on a bench facing the school building and eyeballed the girls as he let his mind drift, idly noticing a van pulling up to the back of the school. He came to attention when he saw a tall man carrying large, flat packages from the side door of the van to the basement door of the school. The man handled the packages carefully, one at a time, and lined them up near the door. After he'd unloaded six or seven packages, he started taking them down to the basement. The basement … the custodian …
“Don't!”
Mudshark looked over at his sisters, who were now all in the sandbox. They were each drawing with a stick, smoothing the sand down and patting the space in front of them flat before dragging the stick like a paintbrush through the sand to make lines. Tara was on her feet, waving her hands and shrieking at Kara and Sara.
“Don't wreck it! Don't wipe away my picture and draw over it!” She stomped on their pictures, and they all started crying.
Mudshark got up to deal with the girls. He looked toward the school, tipped his head and narrowed his eyes, thinking. Then he nodded and smiled. “Gotcha. I know what's been going on now.”
Just then the girls tackled him, sat on him and sprinkled him with sand.
This is the principal. Would the custodian please report to the faculty restroom with a Geiger counter, lead-lined gloves and smoked-lens goggles? Would whoever took all the erasers from all the rooms in the entire building please return them? Will the gerbil, if he's listening, please refrain from terrorizing Mr. Patterson? And Mr. Patterson, will you please stop carrying the tennis racket up and down the halls and dropping a backhand on anything that moves? Three parents have called complaining of waffle marks on their children's faces. Thank you.
Mudshark hesitated.
It was the next morning. Mudshark stood in front of a door in the basement of the school that he had never seen opened before. A door no student had ever passed through. He raised his hand and turned the knob.
Slowly, the door opened.
He peered inside.
“It's like a museum!”
This was the custodian's room, a small work space under the stairs. The walls were covered with posters of art and with actual paintings. Small sculptures stood on tables in the corners. The room glowed with light and color. As Mudshark leaned in, he heard classical music and recognized it from music-appreciation class: Pachelbel's Canon in D Major.
The custodian turned around, startled.
“Hey!” He smiled. “People don't usually come in here.”
“It's beautiful.”
“That's the idea. My name's Bill. Bill Wilson. And you're …?”
“Mudshark.”
“Ah! The Mudshark Detective Agency. I saw the sign. Glad you like it here. I have lots of paintings and posters at home, so I take some home, bring new ones in, keep things fresh. You can't have too much beauty…” He trailed off, serious for a moment, then smiled. “Ever.”
“Why don't you hang these in the hall, where everyone can see?”
“I think that how someone looks at art is mostly pri
vate. I don't feel it's fair to force other people to see things the way I see them. It's never right to force people …” Again, the serious look, then another smile. “…to do anything. Ever. Besides, it's safe here. The beauty.”
“Safe …,” Mudshark said.
Bill looked at him. “Safe is a very big deal to me.” He saw Mudshark's confusion. “You see … when I was eighteen, a college freshman, a war began and I felt I should help my country, so I joined the military and I was sent to fight. For two years, three months, twenty-one days and nine hours. I saw … terrible things. I did some of them myself.” He looked down at the floor, lost in his thoughts.
Mudshark gently cleared his throat to get Bill's attention. “Go on.”
“Anyway,” Bill went on, “when I got out of the service and came home, I wasn't the same. War changed me. I didn't want what I'd wanted before, college and a normal career and all that. I wanted something else.”
“Peace,” Mudshark guessed, and Bill nodded. “That makes sense.”
“The one thing I knew was that I wanted to live in a way that could never possibly hurt another person or creature. Where I could spend the rest of my life seeking beauty. And joy.
“I didn't want to go to college, but I still wanted an education. So I read like crazy—Plato and Aristotle and Shakespeare and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jane Austen and John Cheever and Dylan Thomas and Mark Twain and Hemingway—all kinds of poems and novels and plays. I traveled all over to go to museums and galleries so that I could look at paintings and sculpture—Rembrandt, Degas, Michelangelo, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Christo … I went to the ballet to see the choreography of Agnes de Mille and Balanchine; modern dance, too, Twyla Tharp and Merce Cunningham, and wacky new things at student festivals. I went to concerts—Mozart, Beethoven, Strauss, Vivaldi and Bach. New music, too, by young composers who were just starting out. I couldn't even list all that I studied. It was wonderful.”
“A great life,” Mudshark agreed.
“But still”—Bill frowned—“a person has to eat. And pay the electricity bill. And buy pants. I needed a job. But one where I could work in peace and still have time to keep up my studies. I tried jobs in hospitals, driving a bus, mowing lawns, painting houses, smoothing concrete … nothing really fit. Until one day I drove past the middle school. And I thought, hey! A custodian. Even the name made sense. I could be the custodian not just of the building but of the joyful things I'd found, too. It was perfect. Until…”
“The erasers.” Mudshark took a chance and jumped into the silence. “You took them. But how do they fit into all this?”
Bill sighed. “How'd you know it was me?”
“Logic,” Mudshark said. “You were the only person with access to all the rooms. But how come you did it?”
“It's kind of complicated.”
Silence, except for the sound of people walking by outside.
Bill hesitated. “I hate … no, that's too strong a word. Let's see … When beauty ends, it's just so sad and meaningless.”
Mudshark nodded.
“One day, a girl wrote something amazing on a blackboard when I was in the room setting up a new crayfish tank. I stopped and looked at the board. It was as vivid and … meaningful in its own way as any painting I'd ever seen in any museum. And then the teacher erased it.”
Bill took a deep breath. “It was … painful. To see it vanish. And I suppose it was wrong, but I thought, you know, if that eraser wasn't there, it wouldn't be so easy to wipe away.”
“What was erased?”
“She wrote, ‘I can hear the color green and taste the color blue.’”
“That was it?”
“It doesn't sound like much. But think of it! She can hear and taste colors—how incredible! And then the idea was gone, lost, and no one else can ever see it and wonder like I did. Another time, I watched some kids at the blackboard doing math together. They were so excited that they'd solved the problem—I hated to see that wiped away. So I took those erasers. And then I couldn't stop.”
“I see what you mean,” Mudshark said. He thought. “But … that's funny, though, 'cause I like looking at a clean blackboard. It's ready for anyone to draw or write anything. Like it's … waiting for a new idea and everything is possible.”
Bill nodded slowly. “Maybe you're right about that.”
Mudshark thought again. “And then,” he said, “people expect a blackboard to be erased. They don't mind. And erasing mistakes is good, because you can keep going, trying to find the solution. And, you know, solving things, that's kind of beautiful. Well, I think so anyway. I like figuring things out.”
Bill turned to put in a new CD and Mudshark noticed a small box on top of the speaker with a hole cut out like a little cave. A set of tiny whiskers poked out and he heard a soft scratching sound from within. Bill glanced at him.
Mudshark grinned. “I won't say anything to Mr. Patterson if you won't.”
“He likes the music,” Bill said. “I think it's soothing after his … misadventures on the run. I kept him here to fatten him up. He was half starved after being lost for so long. Sometimes he goes off exploring.” He chuckled. “Poor Mr. Patterson.”
“Oh, I don't know. I bet he kind of likes the excitement. Everybody noticed that Mr. Patterson was pretty bored with school after he came back from that wilderness camp last summer. Now he's all charged up.”
“He sure is. I had to rescue him from a vent this morning—his leg was stuck. This job is more interesting every day.”
“That's one way to look at this school.”
“So about the erasers,” Bill continued. “You make a good point. I never thought about it that way before. But I suppose you'll have to tell Mr. Wagner that I took them. I like my job and I'd hate to lose it because I stole some erasers. They have a zero-tolerance policy on theft in this school district.”
Mudshark thought. “He only asked me to find them. He never said he wanted to know who had taken them or why. If I put them back, I bet he won't care about who did it. He's got bigger stuff to deal with.”
“Yeah, the faculty restroom and that weird parrot in the library.” Bill laughed but then looked at Mudshark, who was scowling. “What's the matter?”
“The bird's got a really big mouth,” Mudshark said. “And he's not afraid to use it. You taking the erasers is just the kind of thing he would notice. I've got to stop him from figuring it out and telling the whole school! Fast.”
This is the principal. The area within fifteen feet of the door of the faculty restroom, defined by yellow warning tape, has been declared a hazardous material area. Do not enter this taped area, and when passing please refrain from looking directly at the bright light coming from beneath the door. Thank you. Oh, yes, and the gerbil has allegedly been cornered in the science lab room. Mr. Patterson will report specifics later. Thank you.
While Mudshark was wondering how he could return all the erasers without getting Bill in trouble or arousing any further suspicion, Helen Cartwright came to ask him to find her missing cat, Toby.
In Mudshark's opinion, Toby was more than a little mean. Mudshark had seen the scratches on Helen's arms. Toby was an ankle nipper, too. Mudshark couldn't help noticing that Toby's mood had become worse after Helen had turned twelve. He was no longer the apple of Helen's eye.
Helen, Mudshark knew from sitting near her in the cafeteria at lunch, liked to talk about boys and more boys and still more boys and who was a geek and who was not a geek and which lip gloss looked best when talking to boys.
Mudshark guessed that, in addition to being cranky, Toby was also bored out of his mind living with Helen. Mudshark was certainly bored out of his mind just sitting near her during lunch.
A bored cat, Mudshark knew, is a leaving cat.
Later that day, he was in the grocery store and saw Helen's neighbor Mrs. Downside. She was giving very specific instructions to the butcher about trimming the fat from a piece of sirloin. But Mudshark knew that Mrs. Downsid
e was a vegan, because when she'd broken her hip the winter before, Mudshark's mother had volunteered him to do her grocery shopping. He looked in Mrs. Downside's cart. Aha! Cat treats. From the looks of her new grocery shopping habits, Toby had found himself a new home. Mrs. Downside hadn't had any pets last winter.
Mudshark volunteered to help Mrs. Downside home with her groceries. When they got to her house, Mudshark sat on the front porch with her, drinking lemonade. He watched Toby eat sirloin that she hand-fed to him while he reclined on a purple satin cushion that had his new name, Mr. Cuddles, embroidered on it in gold letters. Then Mrs. Downside brushed Toby's coat with a soft-bristled brush.
“I special-ordered this from the Precious and Pampered Pet Web site for Mr. Cuddles. He enjoys a good brushing. Poor thing; he obviously never had a loving home before.”
“He's a really nice cat, Mrs. Downside.” Mudshark got up. “Thanks for the lemonade.”
“Thank you, Lyle, for helping me with my groceries,” she said, brushing the surprisingly docile Mr. Cuddles.
Mudshark trotted down the street to Helen's house to report his findings.
“You might get him back,” Mudshark told Helen, “but it would be an uphill fight to keep him. Mrs. Downside has time to sit with him, but you have school. You could bring him home by force, but the first time he got out … They seem like they belong together, actually; they were both bor—I mean, lonely.”
Helen nodded. “You know, Mudshark,” she said, “actually, I'm just as glad that he's found another home. I mean, I love him and all, but, well, have you noticed that he's kind of mean?” She absentmindedly patted the scratches on her arms. “But I need him for a science project that Betty Crimper and I are doing in lab tomorrow. She was working on building a better mousetrap. Or, wait, no, was it creating a new kind of catnip? I'm not very good at science and so I haven't really paid attention. Bringing Toby as a visual aid for our oral presentation was my only responsibility for the project we're doing tomorrow. Can you believe I had to get special permission from the principal to bring an animal onto school property? I mean, we had crayfish in every classroom and now a gerbil on the loose and that weird parrot in the library and … what is it?”
