“That’s dull. I want to get some animal no one else knows about.”
“Hey, how about a praying mantis? I saw one once in Gramercy Park.”
Ben doesn’t even know what it is, so I tell him about this one I saw. For
an insect, it looks almost like a dragon, about four or five inches long
and pale green. When it flies, it looks like a baby helicopter in the sky.
We go into Gramercy Park to see if we can find another, but we can’t.
Ben says, “Let’s go up to the Bronx Zoo Saturday and see what we can
find.”
“Stupid, they don’t mean you to do lions and tigers. They’re not native.”
“Stupid, yourself. They got other animals that are. Besides, there’s lots
of woods and ponds. I might find something.”
Well, it’s as good an idea for Saturday as any, so I say O.K. On account
of both being pretty broke, we take lunch along in my old school lunchbox.
Also six subway tokens—two extras for emergencies. Even I would be against
walking home from the Bronx.
Of course there are plenty of native New York City animals in the
zoo—raccoons and woodchucks and moles and lots of birds—and I figure we
better start home not too late to get out the encyclopedias for species
and life cycles. Ben still wants to catch something wild and wonderful.
Like lots of city kids who haven’t been in the country much, he’s crazy
about nature.
We head back to the subway, walking through the woods so he can hunt. We
go down alongside the pond and kick up rocks and dead trees to see if
anything is under them.
It pays off. All of a sudden we see a tiny red tail disappearing under a
rotten log. I push the log again and Ben grabs. It’s a tiny lizard, not
more than two or three inches long and brick red all over. Ben cups it in
both hands, and its throat pulses in and out, but it doesn’t really try to
get away.
“Hey, I love this one!” Ben cries. “I’m going to take him home and keep
him for a pet, as well as do a report on him. You can’t keep cats and dogs
in Peter Cooper, but there’s nothing in the rules about lizards.”
“How are you going to get him home?”
“Dump the lunch. I mean—we’ll eat it, but I can stab a hole in the top of
the box and keep Redskin in it. Come on, hurry! He’s getting tired in my
hand I think!”
Ben is one of those guys who is very placid most of the time, but he gets
excitable all of a sudden when he runs into something brand-new to him,
and I guess he never caught an animal to keep before. Some people’s
parents are very stuffy about it.
I dump the lunch out, and he puts the lizard in and selects some
particular leaves and bits of dead log to put in with him to make him feel
at home. Without even asking me, he takes out his knife and makes holes in
the top of my lunchbox. I sit down and open up a sandwich, but Ben is
still dancing around.
“What do you suppose he is? He might be something very rare! How’m I going
to find out? You think we ought to go back and ask one of the zoo men?”
“Umm, nah,” I say, chewing. “Probably find him in the encyclopedia.”
Ben squats on a log, and the log rolls. As he falls over backward I see
two more lizards scuttle away. I grab one. “Hey, look! I got another. This
one’s bigger and browner.”
Ben is up and dancing again. “Oh, boy, oh, boy! Now I got two! Now they’ll
be happy! Maybe they’ll have babies, huh?”
He overlooks the fact that _I_ caught this one. Oh, well, I don’t want a
lizard, anyway. Cat’d probably eat it.
Ben takes it from me and slips it in the lunchbox. “I’m going to call this
one Big Brownie.”
Finally he calms down enough to eat lunch, taking peeks at his catch
between mouthfuls. As soon as he’s finished eating, he starts hustling to
get home so he can make a house for them. He really acts like a kid.
We get on the subway. It’s aboveground—elevated—up here in the Bronx.
After a while I see Yankee Stadium off to one side, which is funny because
I don’t remember seeing it when we were coming up. Pretty soon the train
goes underground. I remember then. Coming up, we changed trains once. Ben
has his eye glued to the edge of the lunchbox and he’s talking to Redskin,
so I figure there’s no use consulting him. I’ll just wait and see where
this train seems to come out. It’s got to go downtown. We go past
something called Lenox Avenue, which I think is in Harlem, then
Ninety-sixth Street, and then we’re at Columbus Circle.
“Hey, Ben, we’re on the West Side subway,” I say.
“Yeah?” He takes a bored look out the window.
“We can just walk across town from Fourteenth Street.”
“With you I always end up walking. Hey, what about those extra tokens?”
“Aw, it’s only a few blocks. Let’s walk.”
Ben grunts, and he goes along with me. As we get near Union Square, there
seem to be an awful lot of people around. In fact they’re jamming the
sidewalk and we can hardly move. Ben frowns at them and says, “Hey, what
goes?”
I ask a man, and he says, “Where you been, sonny? Don’tcha know there’s a
parade for General Sparks?”
I remember reading about it now, so I poke Ben. “Hey, push along! We can
see Sparks go by!”
“Quit pushing and don’t try to be funny.”
“Stupid, he’s a general. Test pilot, war hero, and stuff. Come on, push.”
“QUIT PUSHING! I got to watch out for these lizards!”
So I go first and edge us through the crowd to the middle of the block,
where there aren’t so many people and we can get up next to the police
barrier. Cops on horseback are going back and forth, keeping the street
clear. No sign of any parade coming yet, but people are throwing rolls of
paper tape and handfuls of confetti out of upper-story windows. The wind
catches the paper tape and carries it up and around in all kinds of
fantastic snakes. Little kids keep scuttling under the barrier to grab
handfuls of ticker tape that blow to the ground. Ben keeps one eye on the
street and one on Redskin and Brownie.
“How soon you think they’re coming?” he asks fretfully.
People have packed in behind us, and we couldn’t leave now if we wanted
to. Pretty soon we can see a helicopter flying low just a little ways
downtown, and people all start yelling, “That’s where they are! They’re
coming!”
Suddenly a bunch of motorcycle cops zoom past, and then a cop backing up a
police car at about thirty miles an hour, which is a very
surprising-looking thing. Before I’ve hardly got my eyes off that, the
open cars come by. This guy Sparks is sitting up on the back of the car,
waving with both hands. By the time I see him, he’s almost past.
Nice-looking, though. Everyone yells like crazy and throws any kind of
paper they’ve got. Two little nuts beside us have a box of Wheaties, so
they’re busy throwing Breakfast of Champions. As soon as the motorcade is
past, people push through the barriers and run in the street.
Ben hunches over to protect his precious animals and yells, “Come on!
Let’s get out of this!”
We go into my house first because I’m pretty sure we’ve got a wooden box.
We find it and take it down to my room, and Ben gets extra leaves and
grass and turns the lizards into it. He’s sure they need lots of fresh air
and exercise. Redskin scoots out of sight into a corner right away. Big
Brownie sits by a leaf and looks around.
“Let’s go look up what they are,” I say.
The smallest lizard they show in the encyclopedia is about six inches
long, and it says lizards are reptiles and have scales and claws and
should not be confused with salamanders, which are amphibians and have
thin moist skin and no claws. So we look up salamanders.
This is it, all right. The first picture on the page looks just like
Redskin, and it says he’s a Red Eft. The Latin name for his species is
_Triturus viridescens_, or in English just a common newt.
“Hey, talk about life cycles, listen to this,” says Ben, reading. “‘It
hatches from an egg in the water and stays there during its first summer
as a dull-green larva. Then its skin becomes a bright orange, it absorbs
its gills, develops lungs and legs, and crawls out to live for about three
years in the woods. When fully mature, its back turns dull again, and it
returns to the water to breed.’”
Ben drops the book. “Brownie must be getting ready to breed! What’d I tell
you? We got to put him near water!” He rushes down to my room.
We come to the door and stop short. There’s Cat, poised on the edge of the
box.
I grab, but no kid is as fast as a cat. Hearing me coming, he makes his
grab for the salamander. Then he’s out of the box and away, with Big
Brownie’s tail hanging out of his mouth. He goes under the bed.
Ben screams, “Get him! Kill him! He’s got my Brownie!” He’s in a frenzy,
and I don’t blame him. It does make you mad to see your pet get hurt. I
run for a broom to try to poke Cat out, but it isn’t any use. Meanwhile,
Ben finds Redskin safe in the box, and he scoops him back into the
lunchbox.
Finally, we move the bed, and there is Cat poking daintily with his paw at
Brownie. The salamander is dead. Ben grabs the broom and bashes Cat. Cat
hisses and skids down the hall. “That rotten cat! I wish I could kill him!
What’d you ever have him for?”
I tell Ben I’m sorry, and I get him a little box so he can bury Brownie.
You can’t really blame Cat too much—that’s just the way a cat is made, to
chase anything that wiggles and runs. Ben calms down after a while, and we
go back to the encyclopedia to finish looking up about the Red Eft.
“I don’t think Brownie was really ready to lay eggs, or he would have been
in the pond already,” I say. “Tell you what. We could go back some day
with a jar and try to catch one in the water.”
That cheers Ben up some. He finishes taking notes for his report and
tracing a picture, and then he goes home with Redskin in the lunchbox. I
pull out the volume for C.
Cat. Family, _Felidae_, including lions and tigers. Species, _Felis
domesticus_. I start taking notes: “‘The first civilized people to keep
cats were the Egyptians, thirteen centuries before Christ.... Fifty
million years earlier the ancestor of the cat family roamed the earth, and
he is the ancestor of all present-day carnivores. The Oligocene cats,
thirty million years ago, were already highly specialized, and the habits
and physical characteristics of cats have been fixed since then. This may
explain why house cats remain the most independent of pets, with many of
the instincts of their wild ancestors.’”
I call Ben up to read him this, and he says, “You and your lousy
carnivore! _My_ salamander is an amphibian, and amphibians are the
ancestors of _all_ the animals on earth, even you and your Cat, you sons
of toads!”
13
[Illustration: Dave and Mary in wind on boardwalk at beach.]