Billy and the Birdfrogs (2 page)

“This is awful, Grandma,” I said. “Did the poor man ever get out?”

“He did, Love, he did. The workmen threw down a long rope, with a flashlight tied to the end of it so that the man could see it in the dark. They lowered it down and down, and they kept having to tie on new lengths of rope, because the shaft of this hole was incredibly deep. Finally they could hear, very faintly, the man shouting up at them, ‘I got it! Pull!’ And they pulled. They pulled him out and saved him, although he was horribly scraped and bruised. When he got out, as he lay on the ground resting and waiting for the ambulance, he told them that he hadn’t even got to the bottom of the hole. He had managed to stop himself by pressing against the sides, or else he would have just kept on going and going, who knows how deep. To China, maybe.”

“Grandma, that really
is
impossible. That’s just an expression. You can’t really go to China through a hole in the ground.”

“You’re absolutely right,” she said, smiling at me. “You would end up in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Japan. You would have to dig a hole in San Francisco to end up in China.”

“Now you’re making fun of me,” I said, laughing. “Tell me what happened next. Did the man say anything else?”

“He did, yes. He said that on the way up, with the flashlight, he could see the walls of the shaft that he had fallen down. They were rough and full of points of rock, and in places the walls sparkled with minerals. And here and there he saw the most fantastic bones, half sticking out of the walls. Huge bones. He thought they were the bones of some giant person who must have fallen down the shaft a long time ago. Except that the shaft was too narrow for a giant person.”

“Were they wooly mammoth bones, Grandma?”

“Some of them were,” she said. “The city called in your mother to investigate them.”

“Oh no. I think I know what happened next.”

“Do you?” she said, giving me a piercing look. She paused to drink some of her hot tea, then put the cup back on the table.

Chapter 3

My Mother Finds T
29

In the pause while my Grandmother drank her tea, I could hear traffic in the street outside. The city was never quiet. Our street was being repaired, and big rusty iron sheets had been laid on the street to cover up a hole that the street people were digging down to the sewer. Every time a car drove over the iron sheets, it made a booming sound that ended in a clunk like a gigantic sledgehammer. That sound went on all night long, muffled inside our house. I didn’t mind it. Whenever I woke up in the middle of the night I would listen for that booming clunk, and then I would know that everything was okay and the world was the same as it always was. But it was strange now to think we would never go outside and see the street again.

I looked at the window and suddenly noticed that the bottom of the window frame had nails sticking out of it. My grandmother had nailed the window shut. In our row of houses, all the first floor windows were protected by iron bars bolted to the outside of the window casings. Since nobody could possibly get in anyway, I did not understand why the windows had to be nailed shut.

My grandmother saw where I was looking. “I left the ones on the fourth floor,” she said reassuringly. “We can still open them and get some air.”

“But
why
, Grandma?” I was completely baffled. “What can possibly get in?”

“I’m coming to that,” she said. “But it’s a long story. I’m sorry, it’s my fault. I should have told you years ago, but I thought you were too young.

“Your mother, as I said, was called in by the city to investigate the bones. She worked at a university in the city, you know, and was a very smart woman. She went to the construction site with her team of helpers. They hooked a cable to a belt around her waist, and they lowered her down the hole with a winch. She was an expert at this kind of thing. She was wearing a miner’s hat with a bright light fixed to the front of it, and she was holding a metal pick that was tied to her wrist by a loop of string, so that if she accidentally dropped it, it would stay with her. It was for picking at rock, but also by hitting the cable with the side of the pick she could communicate with her helpers up above. Two hits meant to stop lowering her, three hits meant to start lowering again, and four hits meant to pull her back up again.

“She went down so far that her helpers could hardly believe it. They had to pay out so much cable that they were afraid they would run out. But finally they got the signal to stop. Then for an hour your mother stayed down there, and if anyone put his ear to the hole on top, he would hear very faintly, echoing and distorted from all that distance, a scraping and tapping sound, and now and then your mother’s voice saying, ‘Oh! Wow! My God! Holy Hadrosaurs!’ Finally your mother gave the signal to pull her back up again.”

“What did she find, Grandma?”

“Well, Love, she was very excited when she got back up. Her face was grimy and her hair was full of rock dust and her fingers were raw from scraping at rock that she had loosened with her metal pick. She was talking excitedly, telling everyone what she had seen, even before they had gotten her all the way to the top of the hole. She said that the hole was a natural formation. Water must have seeped down for millions of years and dissolved the rock, hollowing out a long vertical tunnel, like a chimney. And the walls of the chimney were full of extinct animals. Not every bit of the walls. Just an extinct animal here, and a dozen or so feet later, an extinct animal there. But the chimney was so deep that there were twenty, thirty, maybe more skeletons. Some were just little ones. She pulled one out of her back pocket, a lump of rock that had a mouse skeleton in it.”

“A mouse skeleton?” I said. “But those aren’t extinct. How can she have found a mouse skeleton?”

“I don’t know, Billy, I’m no expert. Your mother would have explained it. I think maybe mice have been around for a while. But it wasn’t just mice. She saw the two teeth of a saber-toothed tiger sticking out of the rock wall, like curved swords. When the construction worker first fell down the hole, he must have whacked against them.”

“Ouch!”

“Yes, that must have hurt. And she saw a gigantic sloth. Six, seven feet tall. All turned to bones. And an extinct kind of camel.”

“A camel in New York City, Grandma?”

“It sounds incredible, but that’s what she said, and I believe her. I think maybe the camel lived here before the municipality. But the best of all was a wooly mammoth skeleton. It was hundreds of feet down. It was one of the deepest skeletons that she found.”

“Did she reach the bottom of the hole?” I asked.

“What’s that?” my grandmother said. She had fallen suddenly into a thoughtful silence. Even mention
ing the wooly mammoth skeleton seemed to make her sad.

“You don’t have to tell me anymore right now, Grandma,” I said. “You must be tired of talking.”

“Me, tired?” she said, rousing up and smiling at me. “What a silly thought. Of course I’m not tired. No, Billy, she
didn’t
reach the bottom of the hole. It just kept going and going underneath her. She said that when she loosened bits of rock with her pick, she could hear them rattling down and down, hitting against the sides of the chimney, until the sound faded away in the distance. And she was already hundreds of feet down.”

“Maybe,” I said, “there were lots of other skeletons even further down.”

“That’s very likely,” she said. “Your mother was very excited. But the city officials were not at all happy.”

“Why not?” I said indignantly. “That’s silly. They could have gotten lots of great new skeletons to put in the museum.”

“That’s what I thought, too. But, you see, the workmen were trying to finish a building, and the housing commissioner really wanted it finished on time. It was going to be a row of townhouses. Lots of rich friends of his had already paid to live in them, even though the houses weren’t built yet. When the housing commissioner found out that a scientist had been called in to delay the project, he was very angry. He showed up at the dig and started to shout at everybody. He even yelled at the construction worker who had first discovered the hole, and kicked him in the leg, even though the poor man had only just gotten back to work from his injuries.”

“That’s awful, Grandma!”

“Yes, it was awful. He was an awful man. He still is. His name is Waldo Earpicker and he’s still the housing commissioner. Your mother told him that she would go straight out and publish an article in
The New York Times
, all about the amazing extinct animals, and then the whole city would be on her side, and the whole building project would have to stop. You should have seen his face. It turned a very unhealthy red.”

“What did he do, Grandma?”

“There wasn’t much he
could
do, Love. He really wanted the workmen to cover up the hole with cement and build a building on top of it. But he didn’t want it to get into the papers. So he made a deal with your mother. She didn’t tell the newspaper. She kept it a secret. All the construction workers were paid to keep it secret. And when they built the row of houses on the block, they left a secret hole in the basement of one of the houses. That way, your mother could study the extinct animals whenever she wanted.”

“But,” I said, “she would have to go through someone else’s house, and get into that person’s basement.”

“Not necessarily,” my grandmother said with a wink. “Not if she moved into that particular house and lived there.”

I was beginning to understand. “Do you mean,” I said, amazed, “that our house is the one?”

“That’s right,” she said. “We moved in as soon as the row was finished. We got our house for free; that was part of the deal. That Mr. Earpicker, he was furious, I can tell you. I thought he was going to try to push us down the hole and get rid of us, but he had to give in. There was nothing else he could do.”

“Grandma, are you saying that the really, really deep hole is right
here
in our basement?”

“That’s precisely right,” she said.

“But, that’s amazing, Grandma! I never knew! You never told me!”

“Of course I didn’t,” she said, shortly. “Do you think I wanted you to fall down that great long hole? No!”

I shuddered at the thought.

“But wait a minute,” I said suddenly, looking at her hard. “Grandma, wait. How long ago did you say the hole was found?”

“About ten years. Almost eleven.”

For the first time, I began to get the suspicion that the entire story was made up and was one gigantic joke that she was playing on me. “Grandma, I don’t think our house is only ten years old. Or even eleven. It’s all blackened and stained on the outside. It looks like it’s been here for fifty years, at least.”

“You’re too clever by half, Billy,” she said, sipping her tea serenely. “But houses in New York get very dingy, very quickly. It’s the pollution.”

That made sense to me, so I didn’t worry anymore.

“Yes,” my grandmother continued, “that was almost eleven years ago. We moved in, and there were always six or seven workers and helpers living with us, sleeping on the living room floor. Every day, your mother, or one of her helpers, would get lowered down, down into the hole, and chip away at a specimen. All the specimens had names. I remember the day that R46A finally came loose and was lifted out of the hole by a cable.”

“R46A! Is that really what it was called?”

“He.
What
he
was called. Yes, he was an extinct species of gorilla, only three inches tall.”

“Three inches, Grandma? Are you
sure
?”

“I suppose I might have the exact measurement wrong. I can’t remember the details too well. But I remember the celebration. Your mother and her head assistant were so happy, they danced around and around the basement together. She married him a few months later.”

I began to get a prickly feeling, and wrapped my arms tightly around my knees. I had never heard anything about my father. I had never even seen a picture of him. All I knew about him was that he must have worn a pair of brown corduroy pants. I had found the brown pants ripped up at the bottom of a bag of cleaning rags. “Was the head assistant my father?” I said.

“Yes, he was,” my grandmother said, but she had a strange closed expression on her face. “I never trusted him,” she added.

“What was wrong with him?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing yet, anyway. He was a good assistant. They got seven skeletons out of that hole. Eight, if you count the mouse skeleton on the first day. But the real prize, the real Rolls Royce of extinct animals, was the wooly mammoth. T29. For years, your mother dreamed about T29, but she was afraid of ruining him if she worked on him in too much of a rush. She waited patiently, and finally got to that deep, deep part of the tunnel and began to pick away the rock and dirt around T29.”

“But how could she get a wooly mammoth out of a skinny hole?”

“That is a good question,” my grandmother said. “They planned on taking him out one bone at a time. They were able to get out three of his tailbones. That alone took half a year.”

“No! Is that true? Half a year for three tailbones?”

“That’s what happened. It was very slow work, because the stone was especially hard at that place in the tunnel. And then . . . then something awful happened.”

“What, Grandma? What happened?”

Her face had turned white and her expression was sad. She looked especially old, and her skin sagged under her eyes more than usual.

“I don’t know if I can tell you,” she said.

“You have to now, Grandma. You’ve told me so much already.”