Free Dunc's Dump by Gary Paulsen Page B

ca—”
    He was going to say more, but the phone rang.
    One clear ring.
    And no matter what Amos was doing or saying, when he heard a phone ring, he had to answer it by the end of that all-important first ring because he was certain, absolutely positive, that it was Melissa trying to call him, and if he didn’t make it on the first ring, she would hang up.
    There were phones located throughout Amos’s house. After having been trampled several times, even his older sister—whocalled him things with the word
butt
in them, like butthead and buttface and buttbreath—had voted to have a phone in nearly every room.
    But they were working on the walls in the entry hall.
    And there was no phone there.
    There were, however, two half-filled pails of warm soapy water positioned one slightly forward of the other, approximately thirty-five centimeters apart—in short, the perfect distance for what was about to happen.
    Amos was the world expert on phone rings, and as he had told Dunc perhaps two thousand times, the ring can be broken down into a series of sound pulses. There were between sixteen and twenty-two sound pulses in each ring, depending on the type of phone, but the exact number didn’t matter. What counted was the first four pulses.
    On the first pulse the feet had to be moving, right foot first, driving down, and by the second pulse the left foot had to be starting its upswing to come down and power the speed up. At the same time the arms had to come up in the classic form, the head back, the tongueout the side of the mouth, nostrils flared—without all these ingredients, it was impossible to make the phone by the end of the first ring.
    On the first pulse of this ring, Amos was nearly perfect. Instantly, when the ring started, his mind calculated the exact distance to the nearest phone—seven point three nine meters to the phone hanging on the kitchen wall—and the right foot came down, the left up, his arms raised, nostrils flared, tongue out, a bit of spit flying from the end. Absolutely classic.
    It was during the second and third pulses that things started to go horribly wrong.
    The left foot came up, powered down like a driving piston, and would have moved his body correctly.
    Except.
    With amazing accuracy, as if it had cross hairs and a scope, the left foot came down in the center of Dunc’s bucket of warm soapy water. And even here it would have been possible to avoid disaster if Amos had only had smaller feet. But his tennis shoe was the exactsize needed to cause his foot to jam down and stick hard in the bottom.
    Approximately three-tenths of a second later his right foot came down and with the same accuracy jammed into the other bucket of warm soapy water and the potential disaster was complete.
    Had he been able to stop, there would still have been time to avoid complete catastrophe. But his weight was forward of his movement, his arms were pumping, and his brain was centered on one thing.
    The phone.
    Later, Dunc said it looked like a nuclear device had detonated in a soap factory.
    His momentum carried Amos four quick, choppy steps, his feet acting like plungers in the buckets, turning them to foam that flew around him, ahead of him, behind him in a wild spray that covered everything, blinding Amos, smearing the walls, floor, ceiling as he propelled his way into the kitchen.
    And even here there was a slight chance to at least lessen the damage.
    Had Amos caught the phone, it might have stopped him, or at least turned him.
    But he was blinded by the soap foam that clouded around him, and he missed the phone by a good three centimeters.
    Which allowed him to drive straight into the kitchen, aimed at the kitchen table.
    Where his mother was sitting looking at an antique glass fishbowl she had just purchased. She looked up just as Amos—or the cloud containing Amos—came barreling in through the kitchen door.
    By this time, Amos was starting to fall, tripped by