Maniac chuckled. “I believe it.”
They walked on.
“Magee?”
“Yeah?”
“I had to ask you something. Now I gotta tell you something.”
“What’s that?”
“You smell like a buffalo.”
Ears of a hundred different shapes prickled at the long, loud laughter of the boys.
“Magee?” Mars Bar said, after a spell.
“Yeah?”
“My mother wants to ask you something, too.”
“Your mother?”
“Yeah. Like I told her about you, y’know. Actually, she already heard about you.”
“So?”
“She wants to know, like, uh, why don’t you come to our house?”
Maniac turned, stared directly at Mars Bar. Mars Bar looked away. He said nothing more.
They walked on, silent among the crickets and fireflies.
Having made a full circle of the zoo, they were back at the pen of the American bison. Maniac said, “I can’t.”
“Why not?” said Mars Bar. “My house not good enough? My mother?”
Maniac struggled for words. “I didn’t say I didn’t want to. It’s just … I don’t know … things happen … I can’t…”
“Look, man,” Mars Bar snapped, “ain’t nobody sayin’ come live with us. All we sayin’ — all she sayin’ — is, you wanna come for a little, you know, visit? You want to? Well, come on, you can. That’s all. Don’t go makin’ no big thing, man. Ain’t no big thing.”
Maniac shuddered. He turned his eyes to the sky, beyond the flickering fireflies to the stars. If there were answers, they were as far away as the constellations. “I gotta go,” he said, and before Mars Bar could react, he was over the fence and hurrying for the lean-to.
46
The teeth of the buffalo clamped firmly upon his ear and lifted his head up from the straw, up from sleep.
Mars Bar was right! They DO eat people!
The buffalo did more than bring great pain to his ear. It spoke to him.
“Ain’t you nice … ain’t you nice …”
But the voice of the buffalo was the voice of Amanda Beale, and its teeth were her fingers pulling and wrenching his poor ear till he was sitting upright.
“See that, “ she snapped, and scrambled his brains with a smack to the head. He’d rather she pulled his ear. “There you go, making me say ain’t. I have not said that word all year long, and now you go making me soooo mad.” She snatched a handful of straw and flung it at him.
“I’m sorry” he said. He wondered if he would have better luck sleeping in the emu pen. “Can I ask a question?”
“Make it quick,” she growled.
“Except for making you say ain’t, what is it I’m saying I’m sorry for?”
“What?” she screeched. She was standing above himrthands on hips. He didn’t need the light of day to feel the look on her face. “You’re sorry for a whole mess of things, boy. You’re sorry because you didn’t accept Snickers’s invitation to his house. And you’re sorry because he came throwing a ball up against my bedroom window and waking me up and telling me I had to get up out of my bed and sneak out of my house in the middle of the night and come out here and do something about all this. That is why you are sorry, boy.”
Maniac yawned. “Snickers?”
“That’s what I’m changing his name to. How bad can you act if everybody’s calling you” — she said it loud—“Snickers?”
A voice came rasping from the fence. “Shut up, girl.”
Maniac howled with laughter. It struck him that it had been a long time since he had reared back like this, so he just let the laughter carry on as long as it wanted.
When he finally settled down, Amanda said, “Okay, let’s go.”
“Huh?” said Maniac.
“Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“Home.”
“Whose?”
“Mine. Yours. Ours. Come on, I’m sleepy.”
Oh, no. Maniac opened his mouth to speak, to protest, to explain — but there was too much. A hundred nights would not be long enough to explain, to make her understand. So he simply said, “I can’t,” and lay back down.
In an instant he was bolt upright again, yanked by a hand he couldn’t believe belonged to a girl. “Don’t tell me can’t. I didn’t come all the way out here in my nightshirt and my slippers and climb that fence and almost kill myself so I could hear you tell me can’t!” She was yelling. Several pens away, Prairie Dog Town stirred. Heads popped into the moonlight. “You got it all wrong, buster. You ain’t got — ouuu, see” — she kicked him—“you do not have a choice. I am not asking you. I’m telling you. You are coming home with me, and you are going to sleep in my room, which is going to be your room — and I don’t care if you sleep on the floor or the windowsill or what — but you are going to sleep there and not here. And you are going to sleep there tonight and tomorrow night and the night after that and the night after that and every night, except maybe once in a while if you decide to sleep over at Sniekers’s house, if he ever asks you again. This is not your home! Now move!”
She jerked him to his feet. Applause and a brief whistle came from the fence.
Amanda led him by the hand across the muddy, lumpy earth. “Boost me,” she commanded at the fence. He boosted her. Mars Bar helped her down from the other side. Maniac hesitated, then climbed over himself.
They walked through the zoo and down the boulevard, the three of them, Amanda and Mars Bar/ Snickers and Maniac, Amanda grumbling all the way:” … You’re more trouble outside the house than in it … Now I’m gonna have to throw these slippers away, ’there’s probably buffalo poop all over them … And you better not come within ten feet of me, boy, till you get a bath …”
Maniac said nothing. He was quite content to let Amanda do the talking, for he knew that behind her grumbling was all that he had ever wanted. He knew that finally, truly, at long last, someone was calling him home.
New from jerry spinelli
Eggs
Nine-year-old David has recently lost his mother in a freak accident and he’s taking his anger out on his grandmother. Thirteen-year-old Primrose lives with her childlike, fortune-teller mother, with a framed picture of the father she never knew. Witness how their unlikely friendship helps them deal with what is missing in each of their lives.
www.lb-kids.com
Available wherever books are sold.
Hachette Book Group USA
Maniac Magee
Newbery Medal Winner
might have lived a normal life if a trolley accident hadn’t made him an orphan. After living with his unhappy and uptight aunt and uncle for eight years, he decides to run—and not just run away, but run. And this is where the myth of Maniac Magee begins, as he changes the lives of a racially divided small town with his amazing and legendary feats.
“Writing that bursts with creativity, enthusiasm, and hope for the future: in short it’s a celebration of life.” —Booklist
Other great books by Jerry Spinelli
Eggs
*“Elegant and memorable.”
—Kirkus
Space Station Seventh Grade
“Achingly honest, excruciatingly funny.”
—Kirkus
The sequel to Space Station Seventh Grade
“Fresh and funny.”
—Publishers Weekly
Who Put That Hair in My Toothbrush?
“Hilarious.… A lively, absorbing novel.”
—Horn Book
1 * fin·ster·wal·lies (fin’ster-wäl-ez) n. [Two Mills, Pa., W. End] Violent trembling of the body, especially in the extremities (arms and legs) (back to text)
2 * It turned out to be four and a half blocks long. Someone tied it to a stop sign and started walking, and that’s how far he got before it gave out. aside, grabbing more scraps, crying out, “Oh no! . …Oh no!” And then she was running. (back to text
)
3 * Nobody knows why “buffalo” became “bull” in the jump-rope song. History often gets things wrong. (back to text)
Maniac Magee Page 12