38

RADAR CHAOS

As they sat talking, Wendy suddenly held up her hand. “Listen. Do you hear that?”

“What?” Kyle and Danny asked together.

“Silence. No music. Where’s Radar?”

“Maybe in the living room playing with his pop-up tent?”

Kyle gave a half-laugh. “Which he has already squashed so it doesn’t pop up anymore.”

“He still likes jumping on it,” Danny said. “And being inside. I think he might like it better now that the nylon lays on him like a blanket when he crawls in under it.”

“But I don’t hear him,” Wendy insisted, and left the kitchen to find him.

Radar was not in the living room, not in the downstairs bedroom, not in the downstairs bathroom. He was not on the stairs, not in her office, not in the upstairs bedrooms. She was just beginning to get seriously worried when she thought of the upstairs bathroom. The door was cracked open, just wide enough for a slender serval to squeeze through.

Suddenly there was a tremendous crash, which left no doubt as to where Radar was. Racing to the bathroom, Wendy saw shower rod and curtain on the floor. The part of the tile floor she could see was so covered with tiny bits of toilet tissue that it looked as if the room had been hit by a snowstorm. The empty toilet paper holder showed where all that shredded paper had come from — and the young serval squirming around under the tumbled-down shower curtain gave Wendy a pretty clear idea of who had created the mess.

“Radar!” she shouted. “What have you been doing?”

Instead of acting guilty, Radar poked his head from under the shower curtain wearing an expression of profound relief, as if to say, “Mommy! Thank goodness you’re here! A monster was trying to get me! Look what it did to the bathroom!” The second he was untangled from the shower curtain, he leaped into her arms and began rubbing his face all over her face and neck in a serval show of love.

“Ah, Radar!” Wendy laughed. “Who would believe that anybody as sweet as you could create such a mess? Did I know, when I told Karen I’d take you, that I’d spend the rest of my life as your personal maid?”

Radar squirmed to get down, so Wendy let him go. He stood for a minute, looking at the shower curtain that had attacked him. Then turned and sprayed pee all over it.

• • •

Back downstairs, Wendy told Danny and Kyle, “I think Radar was trying to tell us that he’s getting bored with the “Wild Thing” song, too. We should take him outside where he can do something more natural for a serval than tearing toilet paper into itty bitty pieces.”

“I’m not working today,” Kyle said. “You want to build that new enclosure?”

“For the ocelot?” Danny asked.

“No,” Wendy told him. “The ocelot is a tiny kitten, barely weaned. It’ll be a couple of months before he can be put outdoors. And Radar is still too young, too.” She glanced at the serval, now sitting primly on the fourth chair at the kitchen table. “When he’s a little older, he’ll probably decide he’d rather be outdoors in a larger space than here in the house. But right now he wants to be close to mommy, which he thinks is me. The new enclosure is for Lucky. It will adjoin BB’s, with a den box and everything just like his. But we’ll put a gate connecting the two enclosures. That way they can be together, but don’t have to be together. You know, like a couple with separate bedrooms. In case they just want to be friends.”

• • •

Construction on the new enclosure went quickly, as Wendy had already purchased all the materials, and had measured and marked the area. With Danny and Kyle both digging post holes and the three of them stringing and stapling wire, they accomplished a lot that day. They might have got even more done except for the fact that they were constantly being interrupted, or interrupting themselves, to watch Radar’s antics.

“Look at how he moves through the grass,” Danny marvelled. “He lifts his feet really high, like he’s tiptoeing. And he sprongs, almost like the llamas. There! He just did it!” Danny exclaimed, as Radar suddenly leaped into the air and came down in a completely different place

“Not quite like the llamas, though,” Danny amended. “He springs in the air like they do, but it’s a pounce, too. And not just straight ahead. That one was sideways.”

After about three hours, Radar seemed to think they had been outdoors long enough. He communicated this by leaping onto Wendy’s back and hanging there, with his long front legs holding onto her shoulders. She tried to push him off, but he hung on tighter. “He’s trying to tell us it’s time for lunch,” Wendy said.

“He’s telling you he’s tired and wants a piggy-back ride to the house,” Kyle laughed.

So they headed for the house with Radar, exhausted from his morning of “spronging” through the long grass, riding piggyback all the way.

“Radar sticks so close to you,” Danny said wistfully. “He only comes to me when he wants me to restart the ‘Wild Thing’ song.”

“I think it’s because I haven’t felt too great in the past month. Radar seems to have got the idea that he has to be close by to look after me. But,” she smiled, “I know how you can get him to come to you.”

When they got to the house, Wendy left the room and came back with a blanket. “Sit there on the sofa,” she told Danny, “and put this over you. Radar can’t resist a blanket.”

Danny draped the blanket over his lap. Radar watched with interest, then minced across the living room toward him.

“Wendy!” Danny said in alarm. “I think he’s mad about something! Look how fluffed up his tail is!”

Wendy laughed. “No, Danny. Domestic cats fluff their tails when they’re angry, but servals are the opposite. They do it when they’re happy. Just sit tight; you’ll see.”

Sure enough, Radar soon had his nose under the blanket. After a few seconds of exploration to see exactly what was under there, he squirmed onto Danny’s lap, leaving only his fluffy tail and long hind legs sticking out.

• • •

At supper that night, Kyle said, “I have to go back to work tomorrow. Wendy, what time do you have to be at the airport?”

“Ten,” Wendy said. “I’ll need to leave here by eight. Don’t ask me how Lady Fontaine got plane reservations on such short notice during Christmas week. Maybe she bought the airline or something. I talked to her on the phone about an hour ago, and she said it’s all set. She said the paperwork is ready, too. And that I know would have taken an ordinary, non-rich person at least a month.”

“Maybe it wasn’t the money,” Kyle grinned. “Maybe she kept talking until the Fish and Wildlife authorities collapsed in exhaustion and gave her what she wanted.” He gave Wendy a teasing glance. “Or maybe she’s a really beautiful woman.”

“Ah yes.” Wendy grinned back. “I do recall that she was drop-dead gorgeous. But you don’t suppose that would influence a law enforcement person, do you?”

As they kidded back and forth, Wendy noticed that Danny had become very quiet, the way he sometimes did, as if he was trying to make himself invisible. Because he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do, Wendy thought.

Kyle must have noticed the same thing, because he said, “Why don’t you ride into town with me in the morning, Danny? I’ll drop you off at your house so you can get some clean clothes, and then, if you want, you can come back out here. Ride your bike out if you don’t feel like staying in town all day.”

“You mean sleep here again?” Danny asked.

“Sure. You can stay till your folks get back.”

“Okay. I’ll come back in the afternoon, after I’ve checked around for cans. Oh, and Mrs. Armstrong asked me to clean out her chicken coop, so I better do that, too.”

Kyle laughed. “She asked you? You’re lucky. When she wants me to do something she just tells me. Been like that ever since I was in first grade.”

Danny snickered. “She is like that. But not with Tripod. He can do anything he pleases.”

“That Tripod must be about a hundred years old in ferret time,” Wendy said. “I doubt he can do anything much nowadays except keep Mrs. Armstrong company.”

“Yeah,” Danny said. “But he’s really good at that.”

“So, do we have a plan for tomorrow?” Kyle asked.

“Yes,” Wendy said. “You’re going to drop Danny at his house on your way to work in the morning. I’ll drive to Little Rock, fly to Nashville, then turn around and fly back. And Danny, when you’re done at Mrs. Armstrong’s, you’re coming back out on your bike, right? I should be home by five. If you get here first, will you feed the llamas and take Velvet for a walk?”

“Sure!” Danny said, and suddenly he was there again, just an ordinary kid, looking forward to an ordinary, or maybe better than ordinary, next day.

Radar leapt into a chair, holding the stuffed leopard in his mouth. “And you,” Wendy said, “will be on your own tomorrow. You can finish demolishing your pop-tent, and after that, maybe you can figure out how to squeeze the paw on that thing to make your own music.”