Read 18th Emergency for Free Online Page A

blob of grease.
    Ezzie said, “You dropped your spray can, did you know it?”
    “No.”
    “It’s busted.”
    “Oh.”
    “The whole nozzle’s gone.” Ezzie shook the can. “It’s full of paint but the nozzle’s gone. I told you we should have got pretzels.”
    “Well, I might as well come down then.”
    Lying on his bed now, Mouse thought that that particular emergency, falling off a cliff, had been avoided by one of those simple survival tricks. Brushes with nature were simple. Emergency Twelve—When you are falling off a cliff, grab a root with one hand, a ledge with another, put your foot on a small rock and then coolly climb down.
    His mother came to the doorway and said, “What are you and your dad going to do next weekend?”
    “We’re going to the baseball game.”
    “Well, that will be nice, won’t it?”
    “Yes.”
    “Your father’s making a special effort to get home.”
    “I wish he could be home all the time,” Mouse said.
    “Well, I do too.” She stood there a minute, looking at him. “Your father doesn’t like this either. It’s no fun for him to be driving all the time. Anyway, it won’t be forever.” She waited a minute and then said, “Well, better put on your pajamas and get to bed.”
    He got up quickly as if he had just been lying there waiting for someone to tell him what to do. He went into the bathroom, took his pajamas from a hook behind the door and got ready for bed.
    He lay there for a while. In the living room, his mother had put out the lights and was watching television. He could see the light flickering as the picture changed. He tried to think of another emergency he could handle.
    Emergency Thirteen—Octopus Attack. This was one emergency measure everyone agreed upon—John Wayne, Tarzan, Jungle Jim, everybody. It had worked in every South Sea movie Mouse had ever seen. When attacked by an octopus, you stab the octopus in the eye with the knife you have tucked into the waistband of your bathing suit.
    He lay without moving. In the living room, his mother switched channels.
    Emergency Fourteen—Parachute Jump. If you are called upon to make an unexpected parachute jump from a plane, you must relax your body completely. Ezzie had learned this from a talk show on television. The natural thing, Ezzie had learned, is for the parachute jumper to start making climbing movements with his arms and legs, trying unconsciously to get back up to the safety of the plane. Ezzie said everybody does this, but what he would do would be hold his body in a relaxed position, count to ten, and pull the rip-cord.
    While Mouse was waiting to think of Emergency Fifteen, he fell asleep.

M OUSE CAME SLOWLY DOWN the stairs in the morning. There was a small round hole in the plaster by the front door, and Mouse had once drawn an arrow to the hole and had written DROP COINS HERE BEFORE EXITING. He went out the door, looking down at his feet, taking the steps one at a time. He was trying to be late for school now that his efforts not to go at all had failed.
    “Mom, I’m sick, hear? I’m really sick,” he had said at breakfast. He had been sick too. “I can’t even eat, I’m so sick.”
    “All right, if you’re sick, show me some fever,” his mother had said, getting up from the table and going into the bathroom for the thermometer. “If you don’t have fever, you aren’t sick enough to stay home.”
    He had sat at the table while she went for the thermometer, thinking of how much he missed his father. Breakfast had been a different meal before his father started driving a truck.
    Mouse remembered suddenly the way his father used to tell his dreams at breakfast, fantastic dreams that would have Mouse hanging over his plate, too engrossed to eat.
    “Did you dream about the little people last night?” would be the first thing he would say to his father in the mornings. The dreams about the little people had been Mouse’s all-time favorites. They all ended with the little