However, he’s been coming home nights regularly, and sometimes in the cool part of the morning he’ll sit out on the front stoop with me. He sits on a pillar about six feet above the sidewalk, and I sit on the steps and play my transistor and read.

Every time a dog gets walked down the street under Cat’s perch, he gathers himself up in a ball, as if he were going to spring. Of course, the poor dog never knows it was about to be pounced on and wags on down the street. Cat lets his tail go to sleep then and sneers.

Between weathercasts I hear him purring, loud rumbly purrs, and I look up and see Tom there, stroking Cat’s fur up backward toward his ears. Tom is looking out into the street and sort of whistling without making any sound.

“Gee, hi!” I say.

“Hi, too,” he says. He strokes Cat back down the right way, gives him a pat, and sits down. “I just been down to see your dad. He’s quite a guy.”

“Huh-h-h? You got sunstroke or something? Didn’t he read you about ten lectures on Healthy Living, Honest Effort, Baseball, and Long Walks with a Dog?”

“No-o-o.” Tom grins, but then he sits and stares out at the street again, so I wait.

“You know,” he says, “you give me an idea. You talk like your dad is a real pain, and that’s the way I always have felt about mine. But your dad looks like a great guy to me, so—well, maybe mine could be too, if I gave him a chance. Your dad was saying I should.”

“Should what? You should go home?”

“No. Your dad said I ought to write him a long letter and face up to all the things I’ve goofed on. Quitting NYU, the cellar trouble, all that. Then tell him I’m going to get a job and go to night school. Your dad figures probably he’d help me. He said he’d write him, too. No reason he should. I’m nothing in his life. It’s pretty nice of him.”

I try to digest all this, and it sure is puzzling. The time I ran down that crumb of a doorman on my bike, accidental on purpose, I didn’t get any long understanding talks. I just got kept in for a month.

“Say ‘Hi’ for me.”

“O.K. So long.”

The weather cools off some, and Pop starts to talk about vacation. He’s taking two weeks, last of August and first of September, so I start shopping around for various bits of fishing tackle and picnic gear we might need. We’re going to this lake up in Connecticut, where we get a sort of motel cottage. It has a little hot plate for making coffee in the morning, but most of the rest of the time we eat out, which is neat.

We’re sitting around the living room one evening, sorting stuff out, when the doorbell rings. I go answer it, and Tom walks in. He nods at me like he hardly sees me and comes into the living room. He shakes hands like a wooden Indian. His face looks shut up again, the way it did that day I left him in the filling station.

He reaches in his pocket and pulls out a letter. I can see a post-office stamp in red ink with a pointing hand by the address. He throws it down on Dad’s table.

“I got my answer all right.”

Pop looks at the letter and I see his foot start to twitch the way it does when he’s about to blow. But he looks at Tom, and instead of blowing he just says, “Your father left town? No forwarding address?”

“I guess so. He just left. Him and that woman he married.” Tom’s voice trails off and he walks over to the window. We all sit quiet a minute.

Finally Pop says gently, “Well, don’t waste too much breath on her. She’s nothing to do with you.”

Tom turns around angrily. “She’s no good. She loafs around and drinks all the time. She talked him into going.”

“And he went.” There’s another short silence, and Pop goes on. “Where was this you lived?”

Tom bites off the last word. Suddenly I can see the picture pretty clear: the nice house, the father Tom always talked down and hoped would measure up. Now it’s like somebody has taken his whole childhood and crumpled it up like a wad of tissue paper and thrown it away.

Mom gets up and goes into the kitchen. Pop’s foot keeps on twitching. Finally he says, “Well, I steered you wrong. I’m sorry. But maybe it’s just as well to have it settled.”

“It’s settled, all right,” Tom says.

Mom brings out a tray of ginger-ale glasses. It seems sort of inadequate at a moment like this, but when Tom takes a glass from her he looks like he’s going to bust out crying.

He drinks some and blows his nose, and Dad says, “When are you supposed to check in with the Youth Board again?”

“Tuesday. My day off. And I wind up the filling-station job the next week, right after Labor Day.”

“I don’t know why you bother.” Tom starts to stand up. But while we’ve been talking, Cat has been creeping up under the side table, playing the ambush game, and he launches himself at Tom just as he starts to stand. It throws him off balance and he sits back in the chair, holding Cat.

“You’ve got nothing to worry about,” Pop says. “Cat’s on your side.”

Pop’s pretty snappish anyway. He’s working late nearly every night, getting stuff cleared up before vacation. He doesn’t want any extra problems, especially not Cat problems. Mom’s been having asthma a good deal lately, and we’re all pretty jumpy. It’s always like this at the end of the summer.

Tuesday night when he gets home, I ask Pop what’s happened about Tom.

“We’ll work something out,” he says, which isn’t what you’d call a big explanation.

“You think he can get back into college?”

“I don’t know. The Youth Board is going to work on it. They’re arranging for him to make up the midyear exams he missed, so he can get credit for that semester. Then he can probably start making up the second semester at night school if he has a job.

You know, I see “bad guys” in television and stuff, but with the people I really know I always lump the parents on one team and the kids on the other. Now here’s my pop calmly figuring a kid better chalk off his father as a bad lot and go it alone. If your father died, I suppose you could face up to it eventually, but having him just fade out on you, not care what you did—that’d be worse.

While I’m doing all this hard thinking, Pop has gone back to reading the paper. I notice the column of want ads on the back, and all of a sudden my mind clicks on Tom and jobs.

“Hey, Pop! You know the florist on the corner, Palumbo, where you always get Mom the plant on Mother’s Day? I went in there a couple of weeks ago, because he had a sign up, ‘Helper Wanted.’ I thought maybe it was deliveries and stuff that I could do after school. But he said he needed a full-time man. I’m pretty sure the sign’s still up.”

“Palumbo, huhn?” Pop takes off his glasses and scratches his head with them. He looks at his watch and sighs. “They still open?”

Dad comes back and goes over to the desk and scratches off a fast note. He says, “Here. Address it to Tom and go mail it right away. Palumbo says he’ll try him out at least. Tom can come over Thursday night and I’ll take him in.”

Tom comes home with Pop Thursday about nine o’clock. They both look pretty good. Mom has cold supper waiting, finishing off the icebox before we go away, so we all sit down to eat.

“Tom’s all set, at least for a start,” Dad says. “He’s going to start Tuesday, right after Labor Day. Palumbo can use him on odd jobs and deliveries, especially over the Jewish holidays, and then if he can learn the business, he’ll keep him on.”

“Never thought I’d go in for flower-arranging.” Tom grins. “But it might be fun. I’m pretty fair at any kind of handiwork.”

He starts for his room after supper, and we all say “good luck,” “have a good time,” and stuff. Things are really looking up.

I get up early the next morning and help Mom button up around the house and get the car loaded before Pop gets home in the afternoon. He hoped to get off early, and I’ve been pacing around snapping my fingers for a couple of hours when he finally arrives about six o’clock. It’s a hot day again.

I don’t say anything about Cat. I just dive in the back seat and put him behind a suitcase and hope he’ll behave. Pop doesn’t seem to notice him. Anyway he doesn’t say anything.

It’s mighty hot, and traffic is thick, with everyone pouring out of the city. But at least we’re moving along, until we get out on the Hutchinson River Parkway, where some dope has to run out of gas.

All three lanes of traffic are stopped. We sit in the sun. Pop looks around, hunting for something to get sore about, and sees the back windows are closed. He roars, “Crying out loud, can’t we get some air, at least? Open those windows!”

I open them and try to keep my hand over Cat, but if you try to hold him really, it makes him restless. For the moment he’s sitting quiet, looking disgusted.

We sit for about ten minutes, and Pop turns off the motor. You can practically hear us sweating in the silence. Engines turn on ahead of us, and there seems to be some sign of hope. I stick my head out the window to see if things are moving. Something furry tickles my ear, and it takes me a second to register.

Then I grab, but too late. There is Cat, out on the parkway between the lanes of cars, trying to figure which way to run.

“Pop!” I yell. “Hold it! Cat’s got out!”

You know what my pop does? He laughs.

“Hold it, my eyeball!” he says. “I’ve been holding it for half an hour. I’d get murdered if I tried to stop now. Besides, I don’t want to chase that cat every day of my vacation.”

I don’t even stop to think. I just open the car door and jump. The car’s only barely moving. I can see Cat on the grass at the edge of the parkway. The cars in the next lane blast their horns, but I slip through and grab Cat.

I hear Mom scream, “Davey!”

I hear Pop shout about something, but I can’t hear what. Pretty soon the car is out of sight. I look down at Cat and say, “There goes our vacation.” I wonder if I’ll be able to catch a bus out to Connecticut later. Meanwhile, there’s the little problem of getting back into the city. I’m standing alongside the parkway, with railroad tracks and the Pelham golf course on the other side of me, and a good long walk to the subway.

A cat isn’t handy to walk with. He keeps trying to get down. If you squeeze him to hang on, he just tries harder. You have to keep juggling him, like, gently. I sweat along back, with the sun in my eyes, and people in cars on the parkway pointing me out to their children as a local curiosity.

One place the bulrushes and marsh grass beside the road grow up higher than your head. What a place for a kids’ hideout, I think. Almost the next step, I hear kids’ voices, whispering and shushing each other.

I try to walk faster, but I figure if I run they’ll chase me for sure. I walk along, juggling Cat, trying to pretend I don’t notice them. I see a drawbridge up ahead, and I sure hope there’s a cop or watchman on it.

The kids break out of the rushes behind me, and there’s no use pretending anymore. I flash a look over my shoulder. They all yell, “Ya-n-h-h-h!” like a bunch of wild Indians, but they’re about fifty feet back.

I grab Cat hard about the only place you can grab a cat, around one upper forearm, and I really run. The kids let out another war whoop. It’s uphill to the bridge. Cat gets his free forepaw into action, raking my chest and arm, with his claws out. Then he hisses and bites, and I nearly drop him. I’m panting so hard I can’t hardly breathe anyway.

As I cross the bridge, the cop squints at me. “What you doing, kid? Not supposed to be walking here.”

“I’ll be right off. I’m going home,” I tell him, and he saunters away, twirling his stick.

It’s dark by the time I get to the subway, and most of another hour before I’m back in Manhattan and reach Kate’s. I can hear the television going, which is unusual, and I walk in. No one is watching television. Mom and Pop are sitting at the table with Kate.

Mom lets loose the tears she has apparently been holding onto for two hours, and Pop starts bellowing: “You fool! You might have got killed jumping out on that parkway!”

Cat drops to the floor with a thud. I kiss Mom and go to the sink for a long glass of water and drink it all and wipe my mouth. Over my shoulder, I answer Pop: “Yeah, but if Cat gets killed on the parkway, that’s just a big joke, isn’t it? You laugh your head off!”

Then, of all things, he picks up Cat himself. “Come on. You’re one of the family. Let’s get on this vacation.”

At last we’re off.

Meanwhile, I’m wondering if I can get back up to Connecticut again one weekend while the weather’s still warm, and I see that Rosh Hashanah falls on a Monday and Tuesday this year, the week after school opens. Great. So I ask this kid—Kenny Wright—if I can maybe come visit him that weekend so I can do some more skin diving.

“Rosh Hashanah? What’s that?” he says.

So I explain to him. Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish New Year. About half the kids in my school are Jewish, so they all stay out for it, and I always do too. Last year the school board gave up and made it an official school holiday for everyone, Jewish or not. Same with Yom Kippur, the week after.

Kenny whistles. “You sure are lucky. I don’t think we got any holidays coming till Thanksgiving.”

I don’t figure it’d be worth train fare to Connecticut for just two days, so I say good-bye to Kenny and see you next year and stuff.

Back home I’m pretty busy right away, on account of starting in a new school, Charles Evans Hughes High. It’s different from the junior high, where I knew half the kids, and also my whole homeroom there went from one classroom to another together. At Hughes everyone has to get his own schedule and find the right classroom in this immense building, which is about the size of Penn Station. There are about a million kids in it—actually about two thousand—most of whom I never saw before. Hardly any of the Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village kids come here because it isn’t their district. However, walking back across Fifth Avenue one day, I see one kid I know from Peter Cooper. His name is Ben Alstein. I ask him how come he is at Hughes.

“My dad wanted me to get into Peter Stuyvesant High School—you know, the genius factory, city-wide competitive exam to get in. Of course I didn’t make it. Biggest Failure of the Year, that’s me.”

“Heck, I never even tried for that. But how come you’re here?”

“There’s a special science course you can qualify for by taking a math test. Then you don’t have to live in the district. My dad figures as long as I’m in something special, there’s hope. I’m not really very interested in science, but that doesn’t bother him.”

So after that Ben and I walk back and forth to school together, and it turns out we have three classes together, too—biology and algebra and English. We’re both relieved to have at least one familiar face to look for in the crowd. My old friend Nick, aside from not really being my best friend anymore, has gone to a Catholic high school somewhere uptown.

On the way home from school one Friday in September, I ask Ben what he’s doing Monday and Tuesday, the Jewish holidays.

“I skate on my tail,” I say, because it’s true, and it would be doubly true in a hockey game. I try quick to think up something else. We’re walking down the block to my house, and there’s Cat sitting out front, so I say, “Let’s cruise around and get down to Fulton Fish Market and pick up some fish heads for my cat.”

“You’re a real nut, aren’t you?” Ben says. He doesn’t say it as if he minds—just mentioning the fact. He’s an easygoing kind of guy, and I think most of the time he likes to let someone else make the plans. So he shrugs and says, “O.K.”

I introduce him to Cat. Ben looks him in the eye, and Cat looks away and licks his back. Ben says, “So I got to get you fresh fish for Rosh Hashanah, huh?”

Cat jumps down and rubs from back to front against Ben’s right leg and from front to back against his left leg and goes to lie down in the middle of the sidewalk.

“See? He likes you,” I say. “He won’t have anything to do with most guys, except Tom.”

“Who’s Tom?”

So I tell Ben all about Tom and the cellar and his father disappearing on him.

“Gee,” says Ben, “I thought I had trouble, with my father practically telling me how to breathe better every minute, but at least he doesn’t disappear. What does Tom do now?”

“Works at the flower shop, right down there at the corner.”

Ben feels around in his pockets a minute. “Hey, I got two bucks I was supposed to spend on a textbook. Come on and I’ll buy Mom a plant for the holidays, and you can introduce me to Tom.”

We go down to the flower shop, and at first Tom frowns because he thinks we’ve just come to kid around. Ben tells him he wants a plant, so then he makes a big thing out of showing him all the plants, from the ten-dollar ones on down, so Mr. Palumbo will see he’s doing a good job. Ben finally settles on a funny-looking cactus that Tom says is going to bloom pretty soon.

I sleep late Monday and go over to Peter Cooper about eleven. A lot of kids are out in the playgrounds, and some fathers are there tossing footballs with them and shouting “Happy New Year” to each other. It sounds odd to hear people saying that on a warm day in September.

Ben and I wander out of the project and he says, “How do we get to this Fulton Street?”

I see a bus that says “Avenue C” on it stopping on Twenty-third Street. Avenue C is way east, and so is Fulton Street, so I figure it’ll probably work out. We get on. The bus rockets along under the East Side Drive for a few blocks and then heads down Avenue C, which is narrow and crowded. It’s a Spanish and Puerto Rican neighborhood to begin with, then farther downtown it’s mostly Jewish. Lots of people are out on the street shaking hands and clapping each other on the back, and the stores are all closed.

Ben looks out the window and says, “Hey, this is Houston Street. I been down here to a big delicatessen. But we’re not heading downtown anymore.”

“Probably it’ll turn again,” I say.

It doesn’t, though, not till clear over at Sixth Avenue. By then everyone else has got off and the bus driver turns around and says, “Where you two headed for?”

It’s funny, a bus driver asking you that, so I ask him, “Where does this bus go?”

“It goes from Bellevue Hospital down to Hudson Street, down by the Holland Tunnel.”

“Holy crow!” says Ben. “We’re liable to wind up in New Jersey.”

“Relax. I don’t go that far. I just go back up to Bellevue,” says the driver.

“You think we’d be far from Fulton Fish Market?” I say.

The driver gestures vaguely. “Just across the island.”

So Ben and I decide we’ll get off at the end of the line and walk from there. The bus driver says, “Have a nice hike.”

“I think there’s something fishy about this,” says Ben.

“That’s what we’re going to get, fish,” I say, and we walk. We walk quite a ways.

Ben sees a little Italian restaurant down a couple of steps, and we stop to look at the menu in the window. The special for the day is lasagna, and Ben says, “Boy, that’s for me!”

We go inside, while I finger the dollar in my pocket and do some fast mental arithmetic. Lasagna is a dollar, so that’s out, but I see spaghetti and meat balls is seventy-five cents, so that will still leave me bus fare home.

A waiter rushes up, wearing a white napkin over his arm like a banner, and takes our order. He returns in a moment with a shiny clean white linen tablecloth and a basket of fresh Italian bread and rolls. On a third trip he brings enough chilled butter for a family and asks if we want coffee with lunch or later. Later, we say.

“Man, this is living!” says Ben as he moves in on the bread.

“He treats us just like people.”

Pretty soon the waiter is back with our lasagna and spaghetti, and he swirls around the table as if he were dancing. “Anything else now? Mind the hot plates, very hot! Have a good lunch now. I bring the coffee later.”

He swirls away, the napkin over his arm making a little breeze, and circles another table. It’s a small room, and there are only four tables eating, but he seems to enjoy acting like he was serving royalty at the Waldorf. When we’re just finished eating, he comes back with a pot of steaming coffee and a pitcher of real cream.

I’m dolloping the cream in, and it floats, when a thought hits me: We got to leave a tip for this waiter.

I whisper to Ben, “Hey, how much money you got?”

He reaches in his pocket and fishes out a buck, a dime, and a quarter. We study them. Figure coffees for a dime each, and the total check ought to be $1.95. We’ve got $2.35 between us. We can still squeak through with bus fare if we only leave the waiter a dime, which is pretty cheap.

At that moment he comes back and refills our coffee cups and asks what we will have for dessert.

“Uh, nothing, nothing at all,” I say.

“Couldn’t eat another thing,” says Ben.

So the waiter brings the check and along with it a plate of homemade cookies. He says, “My wife make. On the house.”

We both thank him, and I look at Ben and he looks at me. I put down my dollar and he puts down a dollar and a quarter.

“Thank you, gentlemen, thank you. Come again,” says the waiter.

We walk into the street, and Ben spins the lone remaining dime in the sun. I say, “Heads or tails?”

“Huh? Heads.”

It comes up heads, so Ben keeps his own dime. He says, “We could have hung onto enough for one bus fare, but that’s no use.”

“No use at all. ’Specially if it was yours.”

“Are we still heading for Fulton Street?”

“Sure. We got to get fish for Cat.”

“It better be for free.”

We walk, threading across Manhattan and downtown. I guess it’s thirty or forty blocks, but after a good lunch it doesn’t seem too far.

“They’re not going to the movies,” Ben says. “On holidays sometimes they rent a movie theater for services. It must be getting near time. Come on, I got to hurry.”

We trot along the next twenty blocks or so, up First Avenue and to Peter Cooper.

“So long,” Ben says. “I’ll come by Wednesday on the way to school.”

He goes off spinning his dime, and too late I think to myself that we could have had a candy bar.

I say, “Cat. And dogs and pigeons and squirrels.”

“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?”

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!”

“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!”

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.

“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.

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.

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!”