Man Trip

by Graham Salisbury

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2012 by Graham Salisbury

  Jacket art and interior illustrations copyright © 2012 by Jacqueline Rogers

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Wendy Lamb Books, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Wendy Lamb Books and the colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! www.randomhouse.com/kids

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at

  www.randomhouse.com/teachers

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Salisbury, Graham.

  Calvin Coconut : man trip / by Graham Salisbury; illustrated by Jacqueline Rogers. —

  1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Fourth-grader Calvin flies from Oahu to the big island of Hawaii to go

  on a deep-sea fishing trip with Ledward, his mother’s boyfriend, and learns

  to appreciate other living creatures—especially one enormous marlin.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89797-9

  [1. Big game fishing—Fiction. 2. Fishing—Fiction. 3. Human-animal relationships—

  Fiction. 4. Family life—Hawaii—Fiction. 5. Hawaii—Fiction.]

  I. Rogers, Jacqueline, ill. II. Title. III. Title: Man trip.

  PZ7.S15225Cadm 2012

  [Fic]—dc23

  2011010959

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment

  and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Chapter 1: Tossing Bufos

  Chapter 2: Your Friend, Shayla

  Chapter 3: Tickets

  Chapter 4: Junk Fish

  Chapter 5: Man Trip

  Chapter 6: Kiss a Bufo

  Chapter 7: Word Problems

  Chapter 8: The Moon

  Chapter 9: The Kona Coast

  Chapter 10: Violent Creatures

  Chapter 11: Ono

  Chapter 12: Marlin

  Chapter 13: The Black Mariah

  Chapter 14: Big Mama

  Chapter 15: Stick and Knife

  Chapter 16: Sharks

  Chapter 17: The Frog

  Chapter 18: Partner Up

  Chapter 19: Brown Rubber Slipper

  Chapter 20: Seventeen Bufos

  Chapter 21: The Brotherhood of Men

  About the Author

  Every time my mom calls me her little man of the house, I slip out the back door and run down to my friend Julio’s. “Man of the house” means: “Time to clean your room,” or “Take out the garbage,” or worst of all, “Cut the grass.”

  This time it was the grass.

  I glanced at the door. Mom hooked her finger into the collar of my T-shirt. “Oh no you don’t. You’ve let that grass grow far too long. You need to cut it. Now.”

  Dang.

  “Aw, come on, Mom, I hate that job.”

  “We all have to do things we don’t like. Now, I filled the gas can at the service station. You have everything you need to get that old lawn mower started. Bye.”

  I hung my head and made a big show of how hard this was for me. I mean, jeese, I could have been at the beach. “You’re killing me, Mom.”

  She pointed her finger. “Go.”

  I went out to the garage.

  Actually, cutting the grass wasn’t hard. It was just disgusting.

  Who wanted to go out there and shred bufos? Bufos are toads, big fat juicy ones. And when the grass got long they came up from the river and dug down into it to sleep. Unless you got down on your hands and knees to look for them, you couldn’t see where they were. But the lawn mower could, and it spat shredded bufo guts all over my feet, every time.

  I poured gas into the tank and rolled our cranky mower out into the sun.

  It was hot as a frying pan. Nothing moved, except my dog, Streak, who was lounging in the shade under Mom’s car. She lifted her head but didn’t get up.

  “Hey,” I said to her. “You want to help?”

  Streak yawned and went back to sleep.

  “Lazybones.”

  I looked out over our front yard and all that grass sloping down to the river that ran by our house. Mom was right; I’d let it grow too long. It was so long I wondered if it was even possible to cut it. Man, I thought, there have to be a hundred toads in there.

  I pushed the mower to the edge of the driveway.

  “Now’d be a good time to wake up and run for it, bufos,” I said. “That is, if you know what’s good for you.”

  I could almost hear them snoring.

  Up the street, Julio’s house slept in the Saturday-morning stillness. Julio wasn’t out cutting his grass. Nobody else was out there, either. The place was a ghost town.

  I looked back at my dog. “Maybe everyone heard Mom say ‘man of the house’ and ran for it, Streak.”

  Who could blame them if they had? Sometimes I got Julio or Willy to take a turn at cutting the grass. They didn’t mind … until they got splattered with toad guts. Tito and Bozo came wandering down our street once when I was mowing. They didn’t care about the grass, but they loved the toad guts. “Ho, so gross!” Tito said. “I like it.”

  Tito and Bozo were sixth graders at my school. I tried to stay away from them because they liked to cause trouble.

  Yeah, well, this lawn mower was trouble. I yanked the pull cord.

  The engine spat, shuddered, and died.

  I tried again. This time it coughed out a cloud of stinky smoke.

  But it stayed on.

  I covered my ears. The thing was as loud as six guys on motorcycles, gunning their engines and flexing their tattoos.

  Streak got up and loped around to the back of the house. “Oh, great,” I called. “Just leave me here by myself.”

  I started mowing by the driveway and inched my way down the slope toward the river. I had to push a foot, then pull back, then push, then pull. Inch by inch. Otherwise the grass would clog the blades and kill the engine.

  Things were going fine for about five minutes.

  Then, spluuurt!

  “Ahh!”

  I leaped back, letting go of the mower.

  “Dang it!” My bare feet were painted with the remains of some sleeping bufo who never knew what hit him. “I hate this!”

  I left the mower growling and ran up to the house to squirt my feet off with the hose.

  “I saw that,” Mom said, poking her head out the screen door. “You’ve got to chase all the toads out of the grass first.”

  “It’s hopeless, Mom. There are too many, and anyway, it would take me all day. And you can’t see them. The grass is too deep.”

  “Calvin. You can’t just chop them up! That’s cruel.” She shook her head and went back inside.

  “Yeah, I know,” I mumbled. “I’ll chase them out.”

  The ones I could find, anyway.

  I killed the engine and left the lawn mower sitting halfway down the slope.

  “Dang toads,” I muttered.

  But Mom was right. I couldn’t just kill them. And anyway I didn’t want to.

  I started searching the grass.

  The way I found them was with my feet. They were squishy when you stepped on them. Creepy, but it worked.

  “Yuck!” I said, stepping on my first snoring victim.

  I rea
ched down and dug him out. He was fat, soft, and ugly. I held him up and looked him in the eye. “This is your lucky day, toady. You live to catch another fly.”

  That day when Tito and Bozo watched me, Tito said that if I didn’t like all the guts I should dig out the toads and throw them into the river. “They like the water,” he said. “Throw um high. Like a baseball. They like that, too.”

  “No they don’t.” I didn’t believe him.

  “Sure they do. Try it and see. They just kick back to shore.”

  He was right. They just swam back into the swamp grass.

  “Okay, toad,” I said now. “Here you go!”

  I tossed the toad in a high arc into the water. It landed with a splat and floated for a few seconds, un-moving. Then it woke up and kicked to shore. How can they like that? I wondered.

  I shrugged and started looking for another one.

  By the time Ledward drove up in his old army jeep, I’d tossed eight toads into the river. Ledward was my mom’s boyfriend. He was a giant Hawaiian guy who had a banana farm up in the mountains.

  Ledward shut the jeep down and got out. He grinned. “You looking for bufos in the grass?”

  I nodded. “I gotta get them out so I can cut it.”

  I felt around with my foot and found another one. I pulled it out and catapulted it into the river.

  Splat!

  It took a while to recover. “Maybe you should carry them down to the water?” Ledward said.

  I looked back at him. “Why?”

  “Well, that one hit kind of hard. What you’re doing could hurt them. Maybe even kill them. Did you think about that?”

  “No.”

  “Well …”

  Ledward studied me a moment, then went into the house.

  Just before lunch on Monday, I was sitting at my desk in Mr. Purdy’s room as school dragged on. At home, I hadn’t mowed any more grass, but I’d dug up fourteen toads and sent them swimming.

  I shook my head, thinking of all the grass I still had to cut. And now it had grown two days longer. Prob’ly all the bufos I’d dug up had already come back, too.

  I frowned. What if what Ledward said about me hurting them was true? Would those ones come back?

  I looked up at the clock. Ten minutes till lunch.

  Mr. Purdy was standing over by Willy on the other side of the room, talking about something.

  Outside, the sky was blue. I could feel the sun’s heat coming into the classroom. My desk was in the front row, on the end by the window. I had the best seat you could get.

  Almost.

  To my left I could gaze out and see the schoolyard. In front of me was Manly Stanley, a centipede who was our class pet and lived in a terrarium on Mr. Purdy’s desk. And behind me, I could look back and see my goofy friend, Rubin.

  Everything was perfect.

  Except for what was on my right.

  “Hi, Calvin,” Shayla said.

  She reached over to drop a folded-up piece of paper on my desk.

  I stared at it, then slowly picked it up and opened it.

  A cartoon frog decorated the top. A frog! I couldn’t get away from them!

  Shayla’s had a bow on its head.

  Jeese.

  Below the frog, she’d written:

  Dear Calvin,

  My mom finally said I could get a dog. Can you tell me where you got the one you brought to class that one time? I want to get one just like yours.

  Your friend, Shayla … in the next seat

  My friend?

  I crumpled the note in my fist and glanced around the room, looking for help, a distraction or something. Anything.

  I turned and looked back at Rubin, but he was busy picking his nose. Julio dozed at his desk by the door.

  Shayla turned around, too. “What are you looking at?”

  “Nothing.”

  She reached over and poked my arm. “I really like your dog. What kind is it? Do you think there’s another one like it? Was it in a box of puppies? Did you get it at a store? Did it cost money? Was—”

  I closed my eyes and took a breath. “I got my dog at the Humane Society. Ledward took me.”

  “What’s the Humane Society?”

  “It’s where they keep lost cats and dogs.”

  “Oh. Well, do you have the address?”

  “Uh—”

  We jumped when we realized Mr. Purdy was standing there listening. “You two think you could wait until lunch to finish your conversation?”

  Heat washed over my face. Mr. Purdy wasn’t the only one looking at us. The entire class was!

  Julio was grinning like a fool.

  Willy flicked his eyebrows.

  Maya rolled her eyes.

  Rubin made a kissy face and gave me a thumbs-up.

  “Hey,” Julio said out in the schoolyard after lunch.

  We were sitting in the shade of a monkey-pod tree—me, Julio, Rubin, and Willy. The sun was burning everything in sight.

  Shayla was with two girls across the way by the drinking fountain. All three of them were peeking over at us and whispering.

  “So listen,” Julio said, “why don’t you invite your girlfriend over to sit with us? We don’t mind if you like Shayla.”

  “Shuddup!”

  He laughed.

  “Look,” he said, lifting his chin toward them. “They’re talking about you.”

  “No, they’re talking about you because of how you’re so ugly.”

  Everyone cracked up.

  When Shayla started walking over to us, I scrambled to my feet and ran for my life.

  That night after dinner, headlights flashed through our front window. My little sister, Darci, and I were sitting on the living room floor.

  Darci was watching cartoons, and I was sitting next to her, trying to figure out how to tie a bowline knot with a piece of rope.

  Ledward parked his jeep, jumped out, and hurried to the screen door.

  Something was up.

  He burst into the house waving an envelope. “Your mom around? Got something to show her.”

  “Out back with Stella,” I said. Stella was a girl who came from Texas to live with us, help Mom, and go to high school.

  Ledward dipped his head at the rope in my hands. “Whatchoo doing?”

  “Trying to tie a bowline. What’s in the envelope?”

  “Tickets.”

  “For what?”

  “Not for what … for where.”

  Ledward turned as Mom and Stella came back in.

  “Well, this is a surprise,” Mom said.

  She gave Ledward a peck on his cheek, then looked at me. “You just going to leave that lawn mower sitting out there in the yard, or are you going to finish what you started?”

  “Uh … there’s too many—”

  “The toads are no excuse.”

  “Yeah,” I mumbled. “I’ll finish, Mom.”

  “He’s been tossing them into the river,” Ledward said. “I told him I wasn’t so sure that was a good idea.”

  Mom cocked her head. “Tossing what into the river?”

  “Bufos.”

  Stella gave me a look that said: Now, this is interesting.

  Mom turned to me. “Really? Tossing them, or just letting them loose in the water?”

  Now Stella’s grin said: Let’s see you get out of this one.

  I squirmed. Why did Ledward have to bring that up? “They’re just toads, Mom. And anyway, Tito said they like it.”

  Stella snickered.

  “Tito?” Mom said. “That boy who’s always in trouble?”

  Mom looked at Ledward.

  Ledward cleared his throat. “I have an idea. But first, I have something for you.”

  “Oh?”

  He pulled the tickets out and held them up. “Remember you wanted to take Darci to Kauai to visit your mother? Well, here you go, courtesy of Hawaiian Airlines.”

  He handed her the tickets.

  “Wow! Where’d you get these?”


  Stella peeked over Mom’s shoulder.

  “Won them,” Ledward said. “There was a promotion at my bank. I put my name in a box and bingo! I won. With these tickets you can fly anytime, anywhere in the islands.”

  “Well, aren’t you the lucky one. And you’re giving them to us?”

  Mom threw her arms around him, waving the tickets. “Darci, look. Ledward hit the jackpot!”

  Darci turned away from the TV. “What?”

  “Ledward won some airline tickets and he’s giving them to us. Isn’t he sweet? Now we can go see Nana.”

  Darci jumped up, grinning.

  Mom shuffled the tickets. “There are four of them. We’d only need two, unless you want to come, too, Calvin.”

  “No, no. I’m fine.” I didn’t want to get trapped doing girl stuff with Mom and Darci.

  “Hey, wait,” Stella said. “Can you fly to California with those tickets? I want to go to Hollywood. And then New York, and stop in Texas on the way.”

  Ledward hesitated. “I don’t think Hawaiian Airlines flies to—”

  “She’s joking,” Mom said.

  “Oh. Yeah. Sure.”

  Mom leaned her head against Ledward’s chest. He was way taller than her. “Thank you, Led. It’s so thoughtful of you to share these with us.”

  Ledward put his arm around her as the phone rang.

  “I’ll get it.” Stella ran to the kitchen.

  “Hello,” she sang, probably thinking it was her boyfriend, Clarence.

  She covered the receiver with her hand and stretched the phone cord toward me from the kitchen doorway. “For you.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Some girl.”

  I froze. “Girl?”

  “The name Shayla mean anything to you?”

  Think.

  “Uh … uh … tell her I’m not here,” I whispered.

  “Calvin!” Mom whispered back. “Answer that phone.”

  Stella raised a clenched fist. “I will not tell her you’re not here, and unless you want some Texas Nice, microchild, you’d better come here and talk to this girl.”

  Texas Nice was something Stella always threatened me and Darci with. I figured it was a hard slug in the arm. But she’d never followed through with it.