Amphibian Read online

  Amphibian

  a novel by

  Carla Gunn

  copyright © Carla Gunn, 2009

  first edition

  The facts and opinions in this novel belong to the narrator, the fictional Phineas William Walsh, and are not necessarily entirely accurate or a reflection of the opinions of the author or publisher.

  Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Gunn, Carla

  Amphibian / Carla Gunn.

  ISBN 978-1-55245-214-1

  I. Title.

  PS8613.U57A65 2009 C813’.6 C2009-901300-2

  For my sons

  and other amazing animals

  This morning Bird and I got in trouble. We were pretending to be spies. Our job was to decipher our enemies’ cryptic messages. In our Grade 4 classroom, Prime Enemy Number One is Mrs. Wardman. We were sure she had some undercover allies, but we weren’t sure who they were. So, to figure it all out, we were keeping track of Mrs. Wardman’s commands. At the point our covert operation was blown wide open, this was our list:

  1. Kelsie, hold your tongue. (Beside this, Bird had drawn a picture of a tongue in a hand. It kind of weirded me out.)

  2. Ryan, don’t play with your thing. (What Mrs. Wardman said to Ryan, who was spinning his X-Men eraser.)

  3. Gordon, it’s time for your medication.

  All I can figure is that the list must have slid off my desk while I was watching a spider by the window. I was thinking about how I sure hoped nobody mean spotted him. If Lyle caught him, he’d rip his legs off one by one. Then, just as I was thinking about how my grandmother always says, ‘If you wish to live and thrive, let a spider run alive,’ my eyes were pulled away from the spider and made to focus on something quite a bit bigger but not so interesting: Mrs. Wardman. She was standing over me. My brain blinked, and then I understood what that meant.

  She said, ‘Phin! Are you even listening to me? Why are you staring off into space?’ Just as I opened my mouth to say something that wasn’t the truth, I saw her see the list. As she reached down to pick it up, it was like she was moving in slow motion, like when I flip a flipbook’s pages reeaaallllly slowly. When she stood back up, she looked at me and raised her eyebrows, and then she looked at Bird. She didn’t say a word, but I knew we were in trouble.

  It didn’t take long for Mrs. Wardman to get her revenge. She moved Bird to the front of the room and left me at the back. Now all Bird’s stuff is in Kaitlyn’s desk and all of Kaitlyn’s stuff is in Bird’s desk. Kaitlyn didn’t like the picture of Dr. Evil on the inside of Bird’s desk, so she erased it. To top it all off, last week Kaitlyn was out sick with lice and I’m not so sure she’s completely cured.

  In my pencil case I have a humongous blue eraser with the words Big Mistake on it. That’s what this day was. If I had an eraser of life, I’d start at the top of the morning and work my way down. I have a feeling, though, that whoever drew this day pressed the pencil really hard and even if I rubbed and rubbed and rubbed, little horrible bits of it would still be left behind.

  When I got home, my mother was on the telephone, likely interviewing someone for a story. She’s a journalist. She works at an office building in the mornings but mostly at home in the afternoons. Sometimes when she gets off the phone or home from an interview, she’s really sad. She won’t tell me why, she’ll just say, ‘Hard story, Phin.’ That’s the code for don’t talk to her until after she comes out of her bedroom.

  I lay down on her office sofa and looked up at the ceiling. I counted the face patterns I saw in all the little blobs of paint. Seven. And one looked just like a mouse.

  When she got off the phone, my mom said, ‘Why the long face, Phinnie?’ So I told her about how Bird got moved to the front of the room and I got left at the back with Kaitlyn and Gordon who aren’t even my best friends.

  ‘Oh, that’s disappointing, sweetheart,’ said my mother, ‘but maybe it’s good to sit beside someone new for a change.’

  ‘But I don’t want to sit beside Kaitlyn – I want to sit beside Bird. That’s one of the only things that makes school fun.’

  ‘I know you don’t like it, Phin, but you can put up with it. And look at it this way – adversity builds character.’

  ‘What the heck does that mean?’

  ‘Well, when I was your age, Granddad used to tell me a story about a man who found a cocoon and thought he’d help the butterfly out by cutting it open. Problem was, the butterfly wasn’t ready to emerge and so it ended up with shrivelled wings and was never able to fly. What Granddad meant was that it’s good to struggle – it builds muscles.’

  ‘Well, that might be true, but I’m getting too much of a workout.’

  ‘That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’

  ‘Or weak or crippled,’ I told her. ‘And that which does kill you makes you dead.’

  ‘Oh, but just think of all the character you’re building.’

  ‘I have enough already.’

  My mom laughed, ‘Yes, well, you’re certainly quite the character.’

  I rolled my eyes at her and went to my room and got out my Reull drawings and stories. On the planet of Reull there are lots of different kinds of cats. I drew one called the Electric Cat, which you wouldn’t want to come across. I wrote about how if you mistake him for a domestic cat and take him into your house, he will shut down the power and you’ll get the shock of your life. His body reacts to things like TVs and electric mixers and sends a high voltage through them that ruins their motors. You cannot keep an Electric Cat as a companion animal.

  My companion animal is Fiddledee. She’s a really furry black and white cat with blue eyes. I went to look for her in my closet where she sometimes sleeps on top of my stuffed animals, but she wasn’t there. So then I turned on the TV to the Green Channel. The Green Channel has shows about animals and nature and how humans are ruining the environment. The life on earth is in deep trouble. Deep, deep trouble. In fact, 25 percent of all mammal species are on the Red List of Threatened Species.

  Partly because of this, my New Year’s resolution is to save at least one animal from going extinct. I have a cat-whisker collection in a matchbox. I also have feathers from different types of birds and some squirrel fur. This way I will at least have their DNA.

  On the Green Channel I watched a show about sadness in animals. When an elephant in Africa dies, sometimes more than a hundred elephants will come from all over and trumpet around the dead elephant with their trunks up in the air. Then they cover his body with branches. When a baby elephant dies, often his mother won’t leave the graveside. Mother elephants love their babies. Once, after a man in Africa used his tractor to haul a baby elephant out of a mudhole, the baby’s mother rushed up to him and wiped the mud off his clothes with her trunk.

  Last year when I was eight, I had to say goodbye to Granddad MacKeamish at a human funeral. Just a few months before that, I said goodbye to my father too. But he’s not dead. It just feels like it sometimes.

  Today after school, I didn’t stick around the playground like I sometimes do. Bird had gone home with his mother, and besides, I saw Lyle over on the monkey bars and just didn’t feel strong enough to risk being picked on. My mother says Lyle is the spawn of similarly small-minded cretins and that I should just stay away from him. She says I’ll meet lots of small-minded, life-sucking cretins all through my life. Why does she torture me like that? The Lyles in my life are going to grow bigger and bigger and that’s suppos
ed to help me feel better?

  Sometimes I have really, really bad thoughts about Lyle – the being-picked-apart-by-vultures-and-bursting-into-flames kind. And one day I said póg mo thóin to him. It means kiss my something. It’s Gaelic and I learned it from my grandfather. Lyle just looked at me confused. He doesn’t speak Gaelic. In fact, he’s not very good with languages, period. In French class, he asked Mrs. Wardman what je ne sais pas means and she said, I don’t know. He got really mad and gave her the finger behind her back.

  The reason I didn’t feel like I had enough strength left over to risk Lyle is because I was still thinking about how Mrs. Wardman was irritated with me again today. It happened in math class when we had to do logic questions. First we read this sentence: ‘Paula gave out 47 treats for St. Patrick’s Day.’ And then this one: ‘Paula received 50 treats for St. Patrick’s Day.’ Then we had to read ten statements and write T for true or F for false or M for maybe. For the question ‘Everyone who received a treat from Paula gave her one as well,’ I answered M for maybe, but Mrs. Wardman marked it wrong and put a T for true.

  I just couldn’t figure out why Mrs. Wardman had done that so I went up to her desk to ask her about it. She said that since Paula got more treats than she gave out, she must have gotten a treat from everyone she gave one to.

  I said, ‘But how can we know that for sure?’

  She said, ‘Phin, it’s logic. Go back to your seat and think more about it.’

  So I did. I thought really hard about it, but it didn’t seem like logic to me. How could anybody be absolutely sure that Paula got a treat from everybody who gave her one?

  I went back up to Mrs. Wardman and told her I thought really hard about it, but it still didn’t seem like logic to me.

  Mrs. Wardman sighed and said, ‘It is logic, Phin. Here, I’ll show you the answer in the teachers’ book.’ She showed me and, sure enough, it said exactly what she said.

  I went back to my seat and thought some more, but still it didn’t seem like logic to me. So just to be sure I had it right in my head, I drew one hundred stick kids and put a big circle around forty-seven of them to show who Paula could have given treats to. Then I put a big circle around a different fifty stick kids to show who Paula could have gotten treats from. I took my drawing up to Mrs. Wardman’s desk and showed it to her.

  That’s when she sighed – again – and rolled her eyes. She said, ‘Phineas, there are fifty kids in Paula’s class, not one hundred. Now that’s enough of that – please go back and get out your social-studies notebook like everyone else. Mrs. L’Oiseau will be here in a minute.’

  I could tell she was mad with me, so I went back to my seat. Her being angry made me angry, and it sure made that logic sheet cac, which is Gaelic for something most people do about once a day.

  It did make me feel better to see Mrs. L’Oiseau, though. She’s Bird’s mother and she works as a Thumbody who travels around to all the schools in the city. She came into our classroom wearing a funny hat and dressed up like a big thumb – although she looked more like a big peanut to me.

  She gave us each a sheet of paper and then got us to press our thumbs on an inkpad to make prints. It made me think of how it would feel to be a prisoner, except our prison was the school. I put eyes and whiskers on my thumbprint and made it into a cat. Bird put teeth on his, and it looked like I don’t know what. Then we cut out our prints and put them into round pieces of plastic and made them into pins, which we put on our shirts.

  Bird’s mother told us that we’re all special, and that we should all feel good about ourselves because we all have our own thumb-prints and no two thumbprints are the same. I didn’t know how that made us special, but I didn’t say anything. No two worms have exactly the same skin pattern, and nobody thinks they’re special. On the Green Channel I learned that humans have 50 percent of their DNA the same as worms. And we’re 50 percent like bananas too.

  After the Thumbody thing, school was over. It was kind of embarrassing seeing Bird and his mother walking to their car together, with her still dressed like a big thumb. I figured I may as well be embarrassed for Bird since he wasn’t embarrassed for himself. I think I even blushed for him. I do a better job at that anyway because his skin is dark and you can’t see his blushes very well.

  When I got home, my mother was working in her office but she wasn’t on the phone. I was still upset about the logic problem so I told her about it. My mom agreed with me. She said Mrs. Wardman was making an assumption that wasn’t really in the problem; she assumed there were only fifty kids.

  I said, ‘But doesn’t assume make an ass of u and me?’ I learned that from Bird who learned it from his cousin. He also learned from his cousin that you can guess the size of somebody’s penis – only he didn’t use that word – by looking at the distance between the tip of that person’s pointer finger and the tip of the thumb when he makes the letter L with his hand. But he’s wrong because I checked it out.

  My mother told me that ass of u and me wasn’t a very nice expression, and that I shouldn’t use it.

  I said, ‘Why is it so bad? It’s more of an insult to donkeys than to humans.’ But I was just pretending that I didn’t know the other meaning for that word. I still felt angry at Mrs. Wardman. I imagined her face on an ass – on a donkey ass, not on a human one.

  My mother said that sometimes people – even teachers – make mistakes. She says that sometimes it’s not a good idea to point out to people that they’re wrong. She said that sometimes it’s better to just let it go and be right inside your own head instead of worrying what’s inside the other person’s head. I have to think more about it. Don’t people want to know when they’re wrong? Why does being wrong make people happy?

  I told my mother that if I was wrong about something and somebody told me the right answer, then that would make me happy. She said she would always do her best to tell me when I’m wrong. I think she already does that, and that made me happy.

  Then I went up to my room to draw and try to forget about whether or not Paula got treats from all the kids she gave treats to. Who gives out treats on St. Patrick’s Day anyway?

  I drew the Oster, which was a species hunted by Gorachs – who think they’re the most intelligent beings in the universe – for their five-nostrilled noses, which the Gorachs used to hold things upright, like pens and pencils and things like that. Gorachs also liked to use them for sprinkler nozzles. They did this by drying them out for weeks and weeks and then using glue from the stomachs of the Tussleturtles (kind of like earth turtles but with bulging stomachs that slowed them down even more and made the Tussleturtles really, really wise because they were never in a hurry) to coat them so that they would be waterproof.

  The Oster is now extinct. The other creatures of Reull are very, to-infinity sad about this. They know that with the extinction of the Oster, one more string of the web of life has been torn away forever.

  Then I drew the web of life that was holding Reull in place in the universe. Lots of the web strings were in place but lots of them were broken. There can only be a few more destroyed before the whole planet falls into space.

  Today we had to take Fiddledee to the vet. She has red in her poop, and Mom says that can’t be good. The vet’s name is Dr. Karnes. She is really big and has lots of sticking-up hair that looks a little like a lion’s mane and makes her face look bigger than it really is.

  Dr. Karnes listened to Fiddledee’s heart, checked her body for lumps and weighed her on a scale like the one at the grocery store. Then she took her temperature. When my mother takes my temperature, she has an instrument that she sticks in my ear. Then she presses a button and the instrument beeps, and then she takes it out to read what it says.

  Fiddledee wasn’t so lucky. Dr. Karnes had to put the thermometer in another place, and I can tell you it wasn’t her mouth. I held her while the vet did that because Fiddledee likes me best, and the vet said I would help reassure her that she would be all right.

 
; I looked into Fiddledee’s eyes, and she looked just like the cats on those birthday cards with the bulging eyes that are supposed to show that they’re surprised by how old you are. I think I know now how the photographer gets their eyes to bulge like that.

  Finally, it was all over and I let Fiddledee go. She climbed right back into her cat carrier, which was kind of funny because it took Mom and me a long time to get her in there in the first place.

  Dr. Karnes said she doesn’t know for sure if there’s anything wrong with Fiddledee. She said we have to keep an eye on her and bring her back in another month to see if she’s lost any weight. We’re also supposed to watch her litter box for more red poop and to bring a fresh piece in for a test if it looks red. I hope there’s nothing wrong with Fiddledee.

  When we left the animal clinic, we ran into a man my mother knows. He had a dog who got bitten by another dog and had to get stitches. My mother introduced me to the man, whose name is Brent. I said hi, but I decided I’d rather talk to his dog, so I did.

  On the Green Channel, I learned that a human can check to see if he’s top dog by taking one of his dog’s toys or chewies and putting it in his own mouth and walking around with it proudly. I think it might be a better idea to only pretend it’s in your mouth. If the dog growls or chases the human, the human is not top dog. If the dog doesn’t do anything or just tries to play, the human is top dog.

  Another test is to wet your dog’s food with your own spit and offer it to your dog. If the dog eats it, he’s submissive, but if he growls or won’t eat it, he’s dominant. To wet your dog’s food, you can just spit on it and not really put it in your mouth.

  I patted Kooch on his head and his back and on the top of his muzzle and he looked happy. Submissive dogs look like they’re smiling. If you want a dominant dog to start being more submissive, you can hold his mouth into a smile once in a while, and that will start to make him feel more submissive.