Fuzzy Mud

by Louis Sachar

  Jonathan Fitzman: You have to understand. Mutations are bound to happen. But that’s no reason for everybody to get all freaked out. Normally when cell division occurs, the new organism is an exact copy of the original. But when there’s a mutation, that just means there’s a defect of some kind. For whatever reason, the copy isn’t exact. The defective organism usually cannot survive, and that’s the end of it. The rest of the ergies go on doing what they’ve been doing.

  Senator Haltings: But is it possible that an ergonym could have mutated in a way that made it capable of surviving in oxygen?

  Jonathan Fitzman: The odds of that happening are, like, a trillion to one.

  Senator Haltings: A trillion to one. Okay. Last time you were here, you testified that there are more than a quadrillion ergonyms in a gallon of Biolene. So, a quadrillion divided by a trillion equals a thousand. At a trillion-to-one odds, that would mean in every gallon of Biolene there are a thousand ergonyms that can live in the natural environment.

  Jonathan Fitzman: No, that’s not right. I’d already factored in the number of mutations when I said the odds were a trillion to one. You’re double multiplying.

  Senator Haltings: Let’s suppose someone spills a few drops of Biolene and all the normal ergonyms instantly go poof. But there might be one mutated ergonym that survives. Then thirty-six minutes later, it will make an exact copy of itself. We’ll have two ergies, both capable of living in oxygen. And thirty-six minutes after that, four. And after just one day, there’d be more than a billion of these oxygen-surviving ergonyms. And thirty-six minutes after that, a billion more.

  Donna Jones, Esq.: This is pure speculation. I think we can all agree that there has been no conclusive evidence of any connection between Biolene and the situation in Heath Cliff.

  Senator Haltings: What led you to the conclusion that you needed to keep the fuel tanks warm in winter?

  Donna Jones, Esq.: Mr. Fitzman simply wants to be sure that the people who drive Biolene-powered cars don’t have any difficulties.

  Jonathan Fitzman: You have to understand. I never wanted to hurt anyone.

  Senator Haltings: Unfortunately, a lot of people were hurt.

  A long line of cars stretched from the front of Woodridge Academy all the way out to Richmond Road, blocking traffic. Many of the mom and dad drivers had tears in their eyes. They hadn’t been told the names of the missing children, only that their own children were safe.

  At the front of the school, each car was met by a teacher who first verified the identity of the driver, and then went to the proper classroom and escorted the student to the car. These children were often caught off guard and embarrassed by their parents’ hugs and kisses.

  A uniformed officer kept watch.

  It was a slow process, and it had just gotten even slower. There was one car stopped in front of the school that hadn’t moved for a long time.

  The dad driver who had patiently waited in line so long, silently counting his blessings, had told the teacher who’d come to meet him that his name was John Walsh. He had shown her his driver’s license and said he was Marshall Walsh’s father. “He’s in the seventh grade.”

  The teacher had smiled at him and said she had known Marshall since he’d been in the fourth grade. “He’s a great kid.”

  Mr. Walsh waited. He watched as other cars pulled up behind him and in front of him. Parents and children were united. The cars drove off, and other cars took their places.

  Still, he waited, growing more anxious with each passing second. His hands gripped the steering wheel.

  Mrs. Thaxton’s voice resounded over the PA system, which could be heard outside as well as in the classrooms. “Marshall Walsh, please report to the office.”

  Mr. Walsh trembled.

  Mrs. Thaxton’s voice rang out a second time, sounding a bit more frantic. “Marshall Walsh, come to the office, now!”

  A little while later the teacher returned to Mr. Walsh’s car, not with Marshall but with a police officer.

  Tamaya was shaking as she took the juice box from her sack. Using her teeth, she tore the plastic wrapping away from the straw.

  Chad, still down on the ground like a wounded animal, rubbed his blistered hands over his arms to try to keep warm. “What are you doing?” he rasped.

  “Just hold on a sec,” said Tamaya. She had to concentrate very hard to keep her hands steady as she punctured the juice box with the pointy end of the straw.

  “Okay, hold out your hand.”

  She placed the juice box in his hand and felt a rush of revulsion as his fingers touched hers.

  She wiped her fingers on her skirt as she watched him fumble with the straw, and then stick it between his swollen lips.

  Chad sucked up all the juice, and continued to suck until the sides of the box collapsed inward.

  “You want a sandwich?” she offered.

  She removed the lid from the plastic container. It was peanut butter and jelly, with the crusts removed. She thought about what Mrs. Latherly had said, and almost laughed. Gee, I hope you’re not allergic, she thought.

  He sprang at her. She gasped as one hand slammed into her neck. His other hand grabbed her shoulder. She stumbled backward as he ripped the lunch sack from her hand.

  The sandwich fell to the dirt.

  Chad sat back down. He groped around inside the sack and pulled out a granola bar.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” she told him. “I was giving it to you.”

  He tore off the wrapping, then ate the bar in three bites.

  “You’re going to choke if you’re not careful,” she warned.

  “I know who you are,” he said as he chewed the last of the bar. “You’re Tamaya, Marshall’s little friend.”

  “So? I never said I wasn’t.”

  “You did this,” he accused. “I’ve been thinking of all the things I’d do to you if I ever saw you again, and here you are.”

  Tamaya bit her lip. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know the mud would make you blind. Anyway, you shouldn’t have been beating up Marshall. And you said you were going to beat me up next.”

  “Don’t think I wouldn’t,” said Chad. “Just because you’re a girl.”

  “The mud hurt me too,” Tamaya told him. “My hand and arm are all covered in blisters, and maybe my face too, I don’t know. There’s something really bad in that mud.”

  He took several deep, struggled breaths. “Is anyone else looking for me?” he asked. “Do they even know I’m gone?”

  “The whole school knows. Everyone thinks you joined a motorcycle gang or something.”

  He made a noise that could have been a laugh.

  Tamaya looked at the sandwich lying on the ground between them. She wanted to pick it up but was afraid to get too close to him.

  “The whole time I’ve been out here,” he said, “I’ve just kept thinking, No one knows, no one cares. Over and over in my head. No one knows. No one cares.”

  “Well, your parents have to know,” she pointed out.

  “Maybe.”

  “Like when you didn’t show up for dinner. Or at bedtime?”

  “Yeah, right,” Chad said. “Maybe when they came to tuck me in and read me a bedtime story.” He made that same distorted laughing sound again, which quickly degenerated into a retching cough.

  Tamaya worried he was going to throw up.

  The coughing stopped, and Chad took several short quick breaths. “What else you got in here?” he asked, holding up her lunch sack.

  “My sandwich is on the ground,” she told him. “I’ll get it for you, if you promise not to jump at me again.”

  He said nothing.

  She cautiously moved closer, keeping her eyes on him. The two halves had been sliced diagonally. She bent over and quickly picked up one half and then the other.

  He remained where he was.

  She shook off the dirt the best she could. “Okay, I’m going to hand it to you now. You don’t have to grab it
.”

  She held out one half of the sandwich. He reached up, then grabbed her by the wrist, hard.

  She didn’t make a sound.

  He twisted her wrist as he took the half sandwich from her.

  “Why are you so mean?” she asked.

  He took a bite, and then another without finishing the first. As he continued to chew, she could tell he was having trouble swallowing.

  “Sorry there’s nothing more to drink,” she said. “There’s some sliced fruit in the sack.”

  He dug around in her lunch sack and got the plastic container. He grimaced as he swallowed the last of his mouthful. “This?”

  She watched him fumble with the lid.

  “You’re going to spill it!” she warned, and quickly stepped up and took it from him.

  He let her.

  She removed the lid and handed it back to him. “Apples and pears.”

  He ate a slice of fruit, savoring its wetness. He took another bite of the sandwich, smaller this time, then another slice of fruit.

  “The jam is homemade,” she said, filling the silence. “From real strawberries. It has less sugar than the kind you get in the store. My mom made it.”

  She didn’t know why she was telling him this. She felt stupid.

  “It’s good,” Chad said, to her surprise.

  When he finished his half sandwich, she gave him the other half. “Can you see at all?” she asked.

  “Only up real close, like just before I smack into something. I can tell something’s there, then, bam!” He made the same laughing noise.

  He ate a small bite of the sandwich, followed by a slice of pear.

  “You must have been really cold,” she said. “Did you sleep at all?”

  “Who are you, my mother?”

  “Sorry for caring,” she said.

  “I bet you and your family have dinner together every night, don’t you?”

  It was more of an accusation than a question. She answered anyway. “Just me and my mom. If she’s not working too late. My parents are divorced. I don’t have any brothers or sisters. My dad lives in Philadelphia.”

  “Does she read you bedtime stories too?” he asked.

  Another accusation.

  “Sometimes we take turns reading to each other. She likes to keep up with what I’m doing at school.”

  She waited for him to say something, to mock her, but he didn’t say anything.

  He ate the last slice of fruit, then licked the bottom of the container, trying to get every last drop of liquid.

  He let her take the empty sack from him. She gathered up the containers and bits of trash and put them all back inside the sack. She was no litterbug.

  “No one knows, no one cares,” Chad muttered.

  2 × 4,194,304 = 8,388,608

  2 × 8,388,608 = 16,777,216

  Marshall banged a stick against one tree, then another, as he wandered aimlessly through the woods. He broke the stick in half and flung the halves in opposite directions.

  He didn’t know why he did that. He didn’t know why he did anything anymore.

  He didn’t know why he hadn’t told Mrs. Thaxton the truth. He didn’t know why he’d snuck out of school. He didn’t know why he’d returned to the woods.

  It certainly wasn’t to look for Tamaya. If she wanted to go searching for Chad, that was her problem!

  Mostly, he’d just needed to get away. Away from Mrs. Thaxton. Away from his teachers. Away from everybody. If he could have gotten away from himself, he would have done that too.

  Nothing made sense anymore. Tamaya should have been glad that Chad wasn’t in school. And Mrs. Thaxton acted like Chad was some kind of star pupil. “Did anyone see Chad yesterday? Did you talk to him? What did he say? Where was he going?”

  He was going to beat me up, Marshall thought, kicking leaves. That’s where he was going!

  What was he supposed to do, meet Chad on Richmond Road so he could get the snot beat out of him? Would that have made everybody happy?

  He kicked a rock, then walked quickly after it, picked it up, and threw it as far as he could.

  “Chad’s been picking on Marshall all year,” Andy had said. “For no reason.”

  They all knew—Andy, Laura, Cody, everybody. So why didn’t anyone do anything? Why hadn’t they stuck up for him? Why had they let Chad make his life so miserable, day after day after day?

  But that wasn’t the real question, and he knew it. The real question was this: Why hadn’t he stuck up for himself?

  And he knew the answer to that too. Because he was a coward, like Chad had said. “A thumb-sucking coward!”

  If Laura thought Chad was mean, then what did she think of Marshall? Nothing. He was just a bug that Chad stepped on.

  He thought about the way Tamaya used to look up to him, like he was her hero. Some hero. When it came down to it, she was the one who had protected him. She’d smashed the mud into Chad’s face. And now she was out searching for Chad, because he had been too scared to tell Mrs. Thaxton the truth.

  He wondered if Tamaya could possibly be right about the mud. It didn’t seem possible. Somebody would have put up a warning sign or something. She’d probably just touched some weird kind of poison ivy.

  He stopped. Just ahead, some kind of animal was crouched atop a dead tree trunk, ready to pounce.

  Keeping his eye on it, he slowly bent down and picked up a rock.

  The sun, shining through the treetops, caused a crisscross of shadows and light over the creature, making it difficult to tell exactly what it was. Possibly a raccoon, or maybe a badger, he thought, although he wasn’t sure he knew exactly what a badger looked like. It appeared to be snarling.

  Whatever it was, since it was out during the day, it might be rabid.

  He rolled the rock over in his hand. “Hey!” he shouted at it.

  It didn’t move.

  He threw the rock toward it, hoping to scare it away. The rock bounced off the tree trunk, and the animal still didn’t move.

  Marshall picked up another rock and took a few steps closer. “Go away!” he shouted, then took a few more steps.

  Maybe it wasn’t snarling.

  He boldly took another step.

  Maybe it wasn’t alive.

  He moved closer.

  Maybe it wasn’t an animal at all but just somebody’s mud-soaked sweater.

  He almost laughed. Now I’m even afraid of sweaters!

  Beneath the mud, he could see the maroon color and the partially obscured words Virtue and Valor.

  He realized whose sweater it was.

  On the other side of the tree trunk was a large puddle of dark mud covered in a fuzzy scum. He saw a mud-covered sneaker and a rolled-up white sock, also splattered with the mud.

  The sock did it.

  Something wrenched inside him. All his feelings of shame, self-pity, and self-hatred vanished. He was no longer thinking about himself at all.

  “This is really bad,” he said aloud.

  Tamaya held one end of a long stick, and Chad trailed behind, holding the other. “I’m ducking under a branch,” she announced, then crouched down, lower than necessary for her, but she had to watch out for him too.

  The stick was about six feet long, thicker at Chad’s end, with a slight bend in the middle. Tamaya had broken a bunch of twigs off it, but a few of the nubs still remained. She held the cloth sack between her hand and the stick to keep it from rubbing against her blisters.

  Somehow, she’d have to get him across the gully. She thought about trying to go around it, but then she might never find her way back to school. Her best chance was to try to retrace her steps exactly.

  “I just am,” Chad said. “I don’t know why. I just know I am.”

  She had no idea what he was talking about. “You are what?”

  “You asked me why I was so mean. I’m just saying, it’s not like I don’t know it.”

  Tamaya had never expected him to actually answer that question. “Well
, if you know you’re mean,” she said, “then why don’t you just stop being that way?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re not being mean to me now.”

  “I could. I could just pull the stick from you and hit you with it, even if I couldn’t see you. You’d probably scream, and I’d be able to tell where you were. The more you screamed, the more I’d hit you.”

  “I wouldn’t scream. I’d sneak away.”

  “I’d still probably hit you with it a few times anyway.”

  “Probably,” Tamaya agreed. It was an odd conversation, she realized, but he didn’t sound angry, and she didn’t feel scared. “But then you’d be left out here, all alone and lost again.”

  “I know. It doesn’t make sense. But that’s the kind of dumb stuff I do.”

  Tamaya thought about what he’d said earlier, about thinking that nobody had noticed when he hadn’t come home. “You have any brothers or sisters?” she asked.

  “Two sisters and a brother.”

  “So they would have noticed when you didn’t come home?”

  “They’re perfect,” he said, not answering her question. “Good grades, never get in trouble. I’m the only bad one.”

  Tamaya wanted to tell him that wasn’t true, but it was hard to think of something good to say about him. “No one’s all bad,” she said at last. “The kids at school like you.”

  “That’s just because I’m different. I’m not smart like the rest of you. Half the time I don’t get what people are saying. It’s like everyone’s talking a foreign language. The only reason I go to your school is to keep from going to jail. And it’s costing my parents lots of money. That’s all they care about. How much money I’m costing them.”

  Tamaya wondered if he really would go to jail or if that was another one of his exaggerated stories, like the crazy hermit and his pet wolves.

  “Sometimes I don’t get home until real late,” he said. “No one notices. Or if they do, they don’t care.”

  “Where do you go?” she asked.

  “Here in the woods. I climb up as high as I can climb, and then just look down at the world. I bring some wood, and hammer it into the trees to make steps. I climb a little ways up, then nail a couple of boards to the tree, and then climb up on them and nail more boards. I always want to get higher.”