McMummy (11 page)

Mozie slipped into the vacant seat beside his mother.

She patted his arm. “I’m glad you’re back,” she said.

“S
OMETIMES I THINK I’M
living up to my name.”

“How?” Mozie asked.

“Batty! I’m going batty!”

Mozie shifted the telephone. “What’s happened now?” He settled down to listen.

“Did you see the morning paper?”

“No.”

“Well, it’s all about this big green thing that terrorized the Miss Tri-County Tech pageant. They’re calling it the Abominable Lettuce. And you know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking that could be McMummy. Maybe the pod wasn’t empty after all.”

Mozie straightened. “I haven’t seen the paper. We don’t take it. We—”

“And it’s got a picture. It looks like what they did was take a file photo of Bigfoot and color it green. But—get this! One of the contestants’ dad had his video recorder and got it all on tape! It’s going to be on the seven o’clock news. Every hour a reporter comes on TV saying, ‘Don’t miss the Abominable Lettuce tonight at seven.’

“But if you look at this picture—the size is right. It’s got sort of a little head and the body is roundish and—”

“I’ll be right over,” Mozie said.

He ran the four blocks to Batty’s house and Batty was waiting with the newspaper.

“My dad thinks some college boys wrapped themselves up in kudzu for a prank. My sister thinks it was Fig Newton from her school, and I think it was McMummy. That’s why I think I’m going batty.”

“Then I’m going batty too,” Mozie said.

“I think we ought to be out looking for him. I think we—”

Mozie cut off Batty’s words with a wave of his hand. He took the paper and bent over the picture on the front page.
CREATURE INTERRUPTS PAGEANT.
There was a blurred shot of a green figure emerging from under a curtain with girls in swimsuits running in the background. Valvoline stood to one side with her hands on her hips.

“Hey, you were there, weren’t you?” Batty said.

Mozie nodded. He began to read.

Last night the Miss Tri-County Tech pageant was interrupted when a prankster wrapped in green leaves burst onto the stage during the swimsuit portion of the pageant.

The pageant was resumed after the Abominable Lettuce, as it’s being called, fled the scene. No one gave chase.

Miss Valvoline Edwards, winner of the pageant, said, “I didn’t think I would win when that whatever-it-was came onstage—some people will do anything to get attention—and then after it was all over and I was standing there in my swimsuit about to cry, I looked down and I could not believe it. There was my lucky mustard seed necklace—I lost it last week and now it turned up at my feet. I knew right then I was going to win.”

Mozie let the paper drop to his lap. “Yes, I was there.”

“So what happened?” Batty asked.

“What happened was that I knew something terrible was going to happen. I could feel it. All night there had been this humming noise and everybody thought it was in the loudspeaker and it kept getting louder and louder, and I knew exactly what it was.”

Mozie paused to get his breath. Batty silently urged him on.

“It was McMummy. And I had just turned to my mom and was getting ready to say, ‘I know what that noise is. Remember me telling you about the pod? That’s what it is and we’ve got to do something.’

“But before I could speak, Batty, McMummy came onstage. It was awful. First he got tangled up in the curtain, and the whole curtain came down on top of him and the girls ran screaming around in their bathing suits. It was like somebody had seen a shark at the beach.

“And McMummy lumbered to his feet, and then he got tangled up in these arches the dancers dropped on his head, and for a minute he was in the lights, flailing at the noise, and I got a good look at him.”

“So what was he like? This picture? He couldn’t have looked like that.” Batty slapped the newspaper in disgust.

Mozie shook his head. “I don’t think I can describe him. You’ll have to wait for the seven o’clock news.”

“I can’t wait. You have to tell me. Did he look like beans?”

“No.”

“Lettuce?”

“Sort of. You know those trees in the old Walt Disney movies—like people would be lost in the forest and the trees would have faces and their branches would reach out like arms? Remember that?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that was kind of what this was like. He was like half vegetable, half human, only there was no way you could say, ‘The arms are human,’ because they weren’t. They were like—well, roots that had been pulled up out of the ground, with smaller roots for fingers.

“And you couldn’t say, ‘The face is human,’ because the features were set back in wrinkles, and if he had a nose, I didn’t see it.

“And you couldn’t say, ‘He moves like a human,’ because there was something about his movement—well, he rolled sort of, and you couldn’t say the sound was human because everybody but me thought it was something in the public-address system—”

“So what could you say was human?” Batty interrupted.

Mozie remembered Valvoline. He put his hand on his chest and patted the place just over his heart.

Batty looked at his friend. Several expressions crossed his face before he settled on mild disgust.

“But let’s go look for it. You think it’s around the Stuart Center? We could find it. We could go on
Sightings
. The park! I bet he would head for the park—”

“He did head for the park.”

“You saw him? You followed him?”

“Yes. Anyway, he’s gone now, so it doesn’t matter.”

“Gone? Like dead?”

Mozie nodded.

“You’re going through all this human-vegetable assessment without telling me he’s dead?”

“It’s hard to tell.”

“I tell hard stuff all the time!”

Mozie sighed as he began the long painful story of his search in the park—of finding one scrap of green after another and finally, after that long solid trail of green, finding the remains.

He left out only the part where he leaned against the tree and wept.

When he was finished, Batty was silent for a moment, and then he summed it up for himself, creating a new verb in the process.

“He saladed himself,” he said.

M
OZIE HAD NEVER HEARD
the forest so full of sounds. Every bird that had survived the storm was singing with joy. The deep grass was alive with insect sounds. The air itself seemed full of energy.

Mozie felt he was the only unhappy thing in the forest. He made his way slowly through the trees to the clearing where the greenhouse had once stood.

It was seven-thirty in the evening. Mozie had watched the seven o’clock news with his mom. The report about McMummy was one of the comedy news reports that the station was so fond of.

“The Northwest has its Bigfoot. The Himalayas have the Abominable Snowman. And now Downs City has the Abominable Lettuce. Here’s Carol with the story.”

The news report made it all seem like such a joke, like something out of a situation comedy—the huge green form—it did look sort of like a man-sized lettuce—careening onstage, doing what the reporter called “bringing down the curtain.”

Valvoline in the foreground was so startled that she put her hands on her hips and stood bowlegged. The Tri-County Dancers forgot everything they knew about grace and lumbered around the stage like elephants.

And the reporter’s final attempt at humor: “And as for the Abominable Lettuce, it was last seen being chased by a giant bottle of salad dressing.”

The phone rang then. “That’ll be for me,” Mozie said.

Batty’s voice said, “Can you believe that? Here is the story of the century—here is McMummy! And the stupid station is making jokes about a giant bottle of salad dressing.”

“It was awful.”

“We ought to go on television and tell them what really happened.”

“They’d never believe us, Batty.”

Mozie broke off his thoughts as he entered the clearing.

There was the smell of decay here now, and Mozie didn’t want to stay, but he felt coming here was an important part of his good-bye.

He walked slowly, picking his way over the shards of glass. He thought he saw a scrap of green. He bent forward quickly, but it was only a leaf

He was through here. There was nothing for him to do. Still, he could not bring himself to leave.

He remembered that Professor Orloff had said, “It’s yours now.” This was his, but all that was left was rotten plants and broken glass and rafters twisted like pretzels.

He continued to walk aimlessly around the ruins of the greenhouse. He heard a droning noise and he looked around quickly, bright with hope. Then he realized that the hum came from a plane heading for runway 28. He knew that he would probably be looking around with hope for the rest of his life whenever he heard a humming noise.

He was at the rear of the greenhouse now—or what had once been the rear. He recalled that he had stood right here—he put his feet on the spot—when he had first seen the pod.

He closed his eyes, and the memory washed over him like a wave. His heart beat faster, as it had then. His pulse quickened. He could smell the Nile again instead of the rotting vegetables.

He opened his eyes, smiling ruefully at himself. He glanced down. Half buried in the soft earth was something that …

He bent. As carefully as someone digging in an Egyptian ruin, someone uncovering a valuable artifact, he began to brush away the loose earth.

A green object—the green of new life. No, two of them, there were two!

Mozie picked them up and held them in his palm. They were beanlike, yet they did not have the shape of any bean he had ever seen.

He drew in his breath. They were in the shape of the pod. He held two tiny pods in his hands—miniature mummy cases—small rounded top, widening for the body.

Mozie got slowly to his feet. He continued to watch the two seed pods in his hand with awe.

Professor Orloff had given the greenhouse to him. These were his. These beans—human beans.

He closed his hand gently over the small objects. His mind raced with plans.

This afternoon he would come back with a shovel. He would scoop up the earth of the Nile and plant these pods in it.

He would search the area for the supply of Vita Grow. There might be some left. He would water these beans and take care of them until …

Mozie headed for the forest and broke into a run. As he ran home, the forest seemed to open a path for him like something out of a fairy tale.

There was his house—Crumb Castle #3.

“Mom, Mom, guess what!” he cried. And Mozie ran into the house to show his mother the beans.

Betsy Byars (b. 1928) is an award-winning author of more than sixty books for children and young adults, including
The Summer of the Swans
(1970), which earned the prestigious Newbery Medal. Byars also received the National Book Award for
The Night Swimmers
(1980) and an Edgar Award for
Wanted . . . Mud Blossom
(1991), among many other accolades. Her books have been translated into nineteen languages and she has fans all over the world.

Byars was born Betsy Cromer in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her father, George, was a manager at a cotton mill and her mother, Nan, was a homemaker. As a child, Betsy showed no strong interest in writing but had a deep love of animals and sense of adventure. She and her friends ran a backyard zoo that starred “trained cicadas,” box turtles, leeches, and other animals they found in nearby woods. She also claims to have ridden the world’s first skateboard, after neighborhood kids took the wheels off a roller skate and nailed them to a plank of wood.

After high school, Byars began studying mathematics at Furman University, but she soon switched to English and transferred to Queens College in Charlotte, where she began writing. She also met Edward Ford Byars, an engineering graduate student from Clemson University, whom she would marry after she graduated in 1950.

Between 1951 and 1956 Byars had three daughters—Laurie, Betsy, and Nan. While raising her family, Byars began submitting stories to magazines, including the
Saturday Evening Post
and
Look
. Her success in publishing warm, funny stories in national magazines led her to consider writing a book. Her son, Guy, was born in 1959, the same year she finished her first manuscript. After several rejections,
Clementine
(1962), a children’s story about a dragon made out of a sock, was published.

Following
Clementine
, Byars released a string of popular children’s and young adult titles including
The Summer of the Swans
, which earned her the Newbery Medal. She continued to build on her early success through the following decades with award-winning titles such as
The Eighteenth Emergency
(1973),
The Night Swimmers
, the popular Bingo Brown series, and the Blossom Family series. Many of Byars’s stories describe children and young adults with quirky families who are trying to find their own way in the world. Others address problems young people have with school, bullies, romance, or the loss of close family members. Byars has also collaborated with daughters Betsy and Laurie on children’s titles such as
My Dog, My Hero
(2000).

Aside from writing, Byars continues to live adventurously. Her husband, Ed, has been a pilot since his student days, and Byars obtained her own pilot’s license in 1983. The couple lives on an airstrip in Seneca, South Carolina. Their home is built over a hangar and the two pilots can taxi out and take off almost from their front yard.