by Gary Paulsen
OTHER YEARLING BOOKS YOU WILL ENJOY:
THE COOKCAMP, Gary Paulsen
THE BOY WHO OWNED THE SCHOOL, Gary Paulsen
THE VOYAGE OF THE FROG, Gary Paulsen
HOW TO EAT FRIED WORMS, Thomas Rockwell
HOW TO FIGHT A GIRL, Thomas Rockwell
HOW TO GET FABULOUSLY RICH, Thomas Rockwell
MAKE LIKE A TREE AND LEAVE, Paula Danziger
EVERYONE ELSE’S PARENTS SAID YES, Paula Danziger
RAT TEETH, Patricia Reilly Giff
MATTHEW JACKSON MEETS THE WALL, Patricia Reilly Giff
YEARLING BOOKS/YOUNG YEARLINGS/YEARLING CLASSICS are designed especially to entertain and enlighten young people. Patricia Reilly Giff, consultant to this series, received her bachelor’s degree from Marymount College and a master’s degree in history from St. John’s University. She holds a Professional Diploma in Reading and a Doctorate of Humane Letters from Hofstra University. She was a teacher and reading consultant for many years, and is the author of numerous books for young readers.
For a complete listing of all Yearling titles,
write to Dell Readers Service,
P.O. Box 1045, South Holland, IL 60473.
Published by
Dell Publishing
a division of
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
666 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York 10103
Copyright © 1993 by Gary Paulsen
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law.
The trademark Yearling® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
The trademark Dell® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
eISBN: 978-0-307-80375-7
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Other Yearling Books You Will Enjoy
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
•1
Amos Binder held the two test tubes up to the light. “Yellow and blue,” he said. “If I mix them, I should get green.”
Dunc Culpepper, Amos’s best friend for life, looked up from a newspaper he had spread on Amos’s bed. They were in Amos’s room, which always looked like a disaster area—unlike Dunc’s room, which was always neat. Dunc put the paper down. “I don’t think that’s what your parents had in mind when they gave you the chemistry set—making colors.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your grades in science. I was here the day your dad said they were in the toilet. They gave you the set so you could understand science, not play color games.”
“Melissa,” Amos said.
“What?”
“Melissa. She likes colors.”
Amos would have died for Melissa Hansen, thought the sun rose and set on Melissa Hansen, thought his very heart beat and would always beat for Melissa Hansen. Melissa Hansen didn’t know he was alive.
“What are you talking about?” Dunc put the paper down in the only clear spot on the bed—between a half-finished model dinosaur and an almost-used piece of pizza. “What do you mean Melissa likes colors?”
“I overheard Janey Halverson tell Rebecca Bisgaard that she heard Janice Blitzer talking to her brother—you know, the one they call Garbage Can because of how he eats, except not to his face because he can unscrew your head …”
“Amos.”
“… and she said, Janice to Garbage Can, that she heard her best friend tell her other best friend that she knew Melissa Hansen liked to wear colorful clothes.”
Dunc waited, but Amos didn’t say anything more.
“That’s it?” Dunc asked.
Amos nodded.
“From that you think Melissa likes colors?”
Amos nodded again. “It’s just logical, isn’t it?”
“And you think that if you know about colors Melissa will like you?”
“It’s a start. All I have to do is learn about colors. I can see it all now. I’ll be walking down the hall and Melissa will meet me and she’ll be wearing something with, you know, colors in it and I’ll look at it and I’ll say, you know, that I know about colors and then she’ll like me because I know about colors and I’ll ask her to go bike riding with me and while we’re riding …”
“Amos, it’s getting away from you again.”
“… I’ll ask her if she wants to go to a movie sometime, and she’ll say yes, and it’s all, Dunc, all because I know about colors. Now watch while I pour this yellow into the blue and get green.”
“Amos, what are you mixing there?”
“I don’t know. Just some things that came with the chemistry set. They had names on them, but I was more interested in the colors.”
“Do you think it’s a good idea to mix them without knowing what they are?”
“I know what they are—they’re blue and yellow. And I know if I mix them I get green.”
“Amos—”
“Watch.”
Amos held up the yellow test tube and carefully poured the entire contents of the blue test tube into the yellow.
The results were immediate.
There was a loud whuummph kind of sound, like a large belch, and the room was instantly filled with a huge, packed cloud of green fog-smoke that smelled like a cross between rotten eggs and a skunk that’s been dead on the highway for about a month.
“Fire!” Amos yelled, choked, and ran for the door—or for where he thought the door ought to be. He missed by a good six feet and plowed into the dresser, where his entire collection of soccer bubble-gum cards was stored. “Fire!”
Dunc dropped to all fours. There was an open area there about six inches high, and by laying his head down sideways, he could get a breath and see clearly. “There’s no fire, Amos. Just get down on your face, and we can crawl out.”
Amos bounced off the dresser twice more before falling down and finding the clear area. Dunc was ahead of him by this time and had crawled to the door and had it open. The cloud, which had been getting thicker and stinkier all the time, was suddenly free and rushed out of the room into the hallway, down the stairs, into the living room, and spilled into the kitchen, where it swirled around the corner and caught Amos’s mother as she was taking a sip of coffee.
“Amos!” she croaked just before the stink took her down, spilling coffee on her new realty suit as she crawled for the doorway and fresh air. “Amos, you get down here right now!”
•2
“It could have been worse.” Amos put the sponge back in the bucket of warm water and rinsed it before squeezing it out and wiping the walls. “They didn’t ground me at all this time. Remember when I ran across the rug with the lawn mower that time? Dad grounded me until I was eighty-four. But all we have to do now is clean up the mess.”
Dunc paused in his wiping. The green fog had left a soft slime on all the walls. It looked bad, but it wiped off fairly easily. “And do a project for science at school. Something to bring your grade up.”
Amos nodded. “That, too—but they wanted me to do that anyway. I figure we got off fairly easy, all in all.”
“I’m not sure why I’m helping at all.” Dunc was wiping again. “I didn’t mix the junk up.”
“Because you’re my best friend for life,” Amos said, “and because I
would do the same for you if you tried to make colors and it got away from you.”
“I suppose you want me to help on the science project too.”
“Let me put it this way. You know how much I know about science, and I know how much you know about science. I vote for using you. How do you vote?”
Dunc nodded. “I agree.”
“So what are we going to do?”
Dunc frowned, thinking, his sponge stopped for a moment. “Something was in the paper—”
“Oh, no. Not that.”
“Not what?”
“The paper. You read the paper and get us into things.”
“No I don’t.”
“What about the ring of monkeys stealing toilets? You started that with the paper.”
“Well …”
“And I wound up with a toilet on my head.”
“Not this time. This was something else, something I read about the environment. Oh, yeah, I remember now. Somebody is polluting the garbage.”
Amos stopped wiping. “I must have heard wrong. I thought you said somebody was polluting the garbage.”
“I did.”
Amos stared at him. “I had a cousin once who held his breath until he turned blue because his mother wouldn’t buy him candy. He says things like that, like ‘Don’t pollute the garbage.’ Have you been holding your breath?”
“No—it’s not like that. Somebody really is polluting the garbage.”
“How can you? Isn’t garbage already, you know, polluted?”
“Well, there’s garbage and there’s garbage, isn’t there? Some of it’s worse than other types, and they’ve been finding a lot of strange garbage in the dump.”
Amos sighed. “Only you, Dunc—in all the world, only you would know what’s going on at the dump.”
Dunc rose up on his toes. “I make it my business to know things, and the dump is one of the things I know about.”
“All right, all right. So there’s weird garbage at the dump. How does that become a science project for school?”
Dunc smiled. “Simple. It’s like any other case. We just find out who’s polluting the dump, and then you do a paper on it.”
“Other case?” Amos turned. “What do you mean, other ca—”
He was going to say more, but the phone rang.
One clear ring.
And no matter what Amos was doing or saying, when he heard a phone ring, he had to answer it by the end of that all-important first ring because he was certain, absolutely positive, that it was Melissa trying to call him, and if he didn’t make it on the first ring, she would hang up.
There were phones located throughout Amos’s house. After having been trampled several times, even his older sister—who called him things with the word butt in them, like butthead and buttface and buttbreath—had voted to have a phone in nearly every room.
But they were working on the walls in the entry hall.
And there was no phone there.
There were, however, two half-filled pails of warm soapy water positioned one slightly forward of the other, approximately thirty-five centimeters apart—in short, the perfect distance for what was about to happen.
Amos was the world expert on phone rings, and as he had told Dunc perhaps two thousand times, the ring can be broken down into a series of sound pulses. There were between sixteen and twenty-two sound pulses in each ring, depending on the type of phone, but the exact number didn’t matter. What counted was the first four pulses.
On the first pulse the feet had to be moving, right foot first, driving down, and by the second pulse the left foot had to be starting its upswing to come down and power the speed up. At the same time the arms had to come up in the classic form, the head back, the tongue out the side of the mouth, nostrils flared—without all these ingredients, it was impossible to make the phone by the end of the first ring.
On the first pulse of this ring, Amos was nearly perfect. Instantly, when the ring started, his mind calculated the exact distance to the nearest phone—seven point three nine meters to the phone hanging on the kitchen wall—and the right foot came down, the left up, his arms raised, nostrils flared, tongue out, a bit of spit flying from the end. Absolutely classic.
It was during the second and third pulses that things started to go horribly wrong.
The left foot came up, powered down like a driving piston, and would have moved his body correctly.
Except.
With amazing accuracy, as if it had cross hairs and a scope, the left foot came down in the center of Dunc’s bucket of warm soapy water. And even here it would have been possible to avoid disaster if Amos had only had smaller feet. But his tennis shoe was the exact size needed to cause his foot to jam down and stick hard in the bottom.
Approximately three-tenths of a second later his right foot came down and with the same accuracy jammed into the other bucket of warm soapy water and the potential disaster was complete.
Had he been able to stop, there would still have been time to avoid complete catastrophe. But his weight was forward of his movement, his arms were pumping, and his brain was centered on one thing.
The phone.
Later, Dunc said it looked like a nuclear device had detonated in a soap factory.
His momentum carried Amos four quick, choppy steps, his feet acting like plungers in the buckets, turning them to foam that flew around him, ahead of him, behind him in a wild spray that covered everything, blinding Amos, smearing the walls, floor, ceiling as he propelled his way into the kitchen.
And even here there was a slight chance to at least lessen the damage.
Had Amos caught the phone, it might have stopped him, or at least turned him.
But he was blinded by the soap foam that clouded around him, and he missed the phone by a good three centimeters.
Which allowed him to drive straight into the kitchen, aimed at the kitchen table.
Where his mother was sitting looking at an antique glass fishbowl she had just purchased. She looked up just as Amos—or the cloud containing Amos—came barreling in through the kitchen door.
By this time, Amos was starting to fall, tripped by the buckets, and his head came down at the exact angle to drive into the fishbowl.
Still moving well, he bounced off the side of his mother, tipping her chair backward, past her and out into the porch, through the porch, where he carried the screen door off and somersaulted into the back yard, where he finally emerged as a large white cloud topped by a glass-enclosed head, causing their neighbor—an old man named Clarian who sometimes drank red wine during the day—to call the police and report a “UFO man.”
Dunc helped Amos pull the fishbowl off his head—luckily there was still enough soap to make his ears slide easily—and pulled Amos to his feet.
“What do you think,” Amos said. “Too much speed when I hit the kitchen?”
Dunc nodded. “Yeah—but good form. Absolutely classic.”
•3
“It’ll be like a commando raid,” Dunc said. “I saw this old movie on television about the Second World War where these guys get into dark clothes and make a raid on some radar installations.”
Amos shook his head. “You’re gone. Completely gone.”
“No, really—”
“Dunc, you’re talking about going to the dump after dark to collect samples of garbage.”
“So you have to use your imagination a little bit, that’s all.”
“That isn’t all you have to do. This is a dump, not a radar station. There are rats out there as big as Ford Fiestas, just waiting for somebody to be dumb enough to come into the dump at night.”
“We have to go at night—they wouldn’t let two kids in there during the day to rummage around through the trash.”
Amos shook his head. “I still think it’s a bad idea.”
But he was weakening, and Dunc felt it. “It’s the only way to do this—you’ll get a good grade in science, and we’ll crack the case of the errant tra
sh.”
“What?”
“I’m going to name this the case of the errant trash.”
“Name what?”
“This whole case.”
“It’s not a case, Dunc. It’s a science project.”
Dunc nodded. “I know, I know. But if it were a case, I would name it the case of the errant trash. All the best detectives named their cases like that—you know, later, when they wrote about them.”
Amos stared at Dunc for a long time, then shook his head and sighed. “I think you’ve gone too far on this one. If I didn’t need a good science grade, I’d walk out this door right now.”
But he didn’t go. They were in Dunc’s room where Dunc kept all his “equipment”—black sweatshirts and stocking caps and a small flashlight—that he used when they needed to work at night.
Dunc looked at his watch, which told the exact time, date, and elapsed time in the mainland United States as well as in Alaska, Asia, and Europe, plus the tide tables in all the major oceans of the world, and—according to Amos, who had an old digital watch that didn’t work unless you hit it on a rock—told Dunc when he was hungry as well.
“We have thirty-one minutes, forty seconds until sundown, according to my watch.”
“Approximately,” Amos said. “Don’t you mean approximately?”
“No. Exactly. But it still won’t be dark enough to perform our mission.”
“Don’t do that. Don’t say things like ‘case’ or ‘mission’ anymore. Every time you say that, I wind up getting pooped on by bats or forgetting my name.”
“Project,” Dunc added quickly. “We won’t be able to go on our science project until solid dark. There’s a half moon tonight, and it won’t be too bright, so we should be all right for a go …”
Amos winced.
“… at sunset plus one hour forty-two minutes. Maybe we’d better synchronize our watches.”
Amos stared at him.
“Right,” Dunc said. “We’ll skip that part. Let’s go over the plan one more time.”
“Dunc—”
“I’ve written it out as a poem so it will be easy to remember. You remember how well that worked, don’t you?”
