Free Dunc's Dump by Gary Paulsen Page A

clearly. “There’s no fire, Amos. Just get down on your face, and we can crawl out.”
    Amos bounced off the dresser twice more before falling down and finding the clear area. Dunc was ahead of him by this time and had crawled to the door and had it open. The cloud, which had been getting thicker and stinkier all the time, was suddenly free and rushed out of the room into the hallway, down the stairs, into the living room, and spilled into the kitchen, where it swirled around the corner and caught Amos’s mother as she was taking a sip of coffee.
    â€œAmos!” she croaked just before the stink took her down, spilling coffee on her new realty suit as she crawled for the doorway and fresh air. “Amos, you get down here right now!”

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    â€œIt could have been worse.” Amos put the sponge back in the bucket of warm water and rinsed it before squeezing it out and wiping the walls. “They didn’t ground me at all this time. Remember when I ran across the rug with the lawn mower that time? Dad grounded me until I was eighty-four. But all we have to do now is clean up the mess.”
    Dunc paused in his wiping. The green fog had left a soft slime on all the walls. It looked bad, but it wiped off fairly easily. “And do a project for science at school. Something to bring your grade up.”
    Amos nodded. “That, too—but they wantedme to do that anyway. I figure we got off fairly easy, all in all.”
    â€œI’m not sure why I’m helping at all.” Dunc was wiping again. “I didn’t mix the junk up.”
    â€œBecause you’re my best friend for life,” Amos said, “and because I would do the same for you if you tried to make colors and it got away from you.”
    â€œI suppose you want me to help on the science project too.”
    â€œLet me put it this way. You know how much I know about science, and I know how much you know about science. I vote for using you. How do you vote?”
    Dunc nodded. “I agree.”
    â€œSo what are we going to do?”
    Dunc frowned, thinking, his sponge stopped for a moment. “Something was in the paper—”
    â€œOh, no. Not that.”
    â€œNot what?”
    â€œThe paper. You read the paper and get us into things.”
    â€œNo I don’t.”
    â€œWhat about the ring of monkeys stealing toilets? You started that with the paper.”
    â€œWell …”
    â€œAnd I wound up with a toilet on my head.”
    â€œNot this time. This was something else, something I read about the environment. Oh, yeah, I remember now. Somebody is polluting the garbage.”
    Amos stopped wiping. “I must have heard wrong. I thought you said somebody was polluting the garbage.”
    â€œI did.”
    Amos stared at him. “I had a cousin once who held his breath until he turned blue because his mother wouldn’t buy him candy. He says things like that, like ‘Don’t pollute the garbage.’ Have you been holding your breath?”
    â€œNo—it’s not like that. Somebody really
is
polluting the garbage.”
    â€œHow can you? Isn’t garbage already, you know, polluted?”
    â€œWell, there’s garbage and there’s garbage, isn’t there? Some of it’s worse than other types, and they’ve been finding a lot of strange garbage in the dump.”
    Amos sighed. “Only you, Dunc—in all theworld, only you would know what’s going on at the dump.”
    Dunc rose up on his toes. “I make it my business to know things, and the dump is one of the things I know about.”
    â€œAll right, all right. So there’s weird garbage at the dump. How does that become a science project for school?”
    Dunc smiled. “Simple. It’s like any other case. We just find out who’s polluting the dump, and then you do a paper on it.”
    â€œOther case?” Amos turned. “What do you mean, other