“Paris,” Raven said.
Wahoo had never heard of any dangerous jungles or swamps in Paris, so he assumed the famous survivalist was taking a vacation.
Mickey Cray came outside and joined them at the snake tanks. Wahoo told him that Ms. Stark was interested in using Beulah, the big Burmese.
“Good choice,” said Mickey. He appeared to be feeling better.
“You’ve seen the program, of course,” Raven said.
“Sure,” said Wahoo. “It’s on Thursday nights.”
“And rerun every Sunday morning,” she said. “So you already know that we’re all about verisimilitude.”
Wahoo didn’t even pretend to understand what the word meant. His father just looked at him and shrugged.
“Making it real,” Raven explained. “On Expedition Survival! we’re all about making it real. Derek considers that his sacred mission, a bond of trust with our viewers.”
Wahoo glanced at the massive snakes, coiled in their tanks. They were real enough; they just weren’t wild and free.
The production assistant turned to Wahoo’s father. “Any questions?”
Mickey smiled. “We put our animals on TV all the time. That’s what we do.”
Raven Stark bent down and tapped a scarlet fingernail on the glass panel that separated her from Beulah the python.
“Well, Mr. Cray,” she said, “I promise you’ve never done a show like Derek’s.”
THREE
Derek Badger’s real name was Lee Bluepenny, and he had no training in biology, botany, geology or forestry. His background was purely show business.
As a young man he’d traveled the world with a popular Irish folk-dancing group until he broke a toe while rehearsing for a street parade in Montreal. As he waited in the hospital emergency room, he happened to meet a talent agent who had gotten ill from eating tainted oysters. The queasy talent agent thought Lee Bluepenny looked tough and handsome, and asked if he’d ever considered a career in television.
As soon as Lee Bluepenny’s dance injury healed, the agent arranged for him to fly to California and audition for a new reality show. The producers of Expedition Survival! loved Lee Bluepenny’s new Australian accent, which he had shamelessly copied from the late Steve Irwin, the legendary crocodile hunter. The producers also liked that Lee Bluepenny could swallow a live salamander without throwing up. What they didn’t particularly like was his name. Lee Bluepenny was okay for a jazz piano player or maybe an art dealer, they said, but it wasn’t rugged- sounding enough for someone who had to claw and gnaw his way out of the wilds every week.
After trying out a few different names-Erik Panther, Gus Wolverine, Chad Condor-the producers settled on Derek Badger, which was fine with Lee Bluepenny. He was so thrilled to be on television that he would have let them call him Danny the Dodo Bird.
Expedition Survival! got off to a rocky start. The first episode was staged in a jungle in the Philippine Islands, where the man now called Derek Badger was supposed to be lost and starving. Disaster struck on the second day, when Derek was bitten severely by a striped shrew rat that he was attempting to gobble for dinner. The rodent had appeared to be dead, but it was only napping. Derek’s punctured lips swelled up so badly from the bite that he looked like he was sucking on a football. A medical helicopter rushed him to Manila for rabies shots.
Eventually the rough spots in the show were smoothed out, and Expedition Survival! turned into a smash hit. It wasn’t long before Derek Badger was an international celebrity, and he quickly learned to act like one.
“How’s France?” Raven Stark asked when she called.
“Heaven,” he said. “The cheese here is fantastic.”
“I’m sure,” said Raven Stark, with a note of concern. Survivalists were supposed to be lean and fit, and one of her main responsibilities was to keep Derek from getting too flabby. It wasn’t easy-the man loved to eat, and cheese was high on his list.
“Did you find me a proper alligator?” he inquired.
“Yes, a beauty.” She could hear him chewing and smacking his lips.
“How big?”
“Twelve feet,” said Raven Stark.
“Brilliant!”
“And they’ve got a slightly smaller one you can tussle with.”
There was a pause on the other end that made Raven Stark uneasy.
Derek said, “But I don’t want to wrestle the small one. I want to wrestle the monster.”
It was exactly the response she had feared. “Too dangerous,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“We can chat about this later, Derek.”
“Indeed we will. What about a python? I told you I wanted a python.”
“The gentleman has offered us a very large Burmese, though it’s not tame.”
“Even better!” chortled Derek.
Raven Stark sighed to herself. She was accustomed to working around Derek’s enormous ego, but there were times when she felt like reminding him that he was basically a tap dancer, not a grizzled woodsman.
“Anything else that’s super-scary?” he asked.
“I noticed they had a large snapping turtle,” she said.
“How large?”
“Large enough to take off a hand.”
“Excellent,” Derek said. “Set up an underwater scene-I’m swimming along through the Everglades, minding my own business, when the hungry snapper charges out from under a log and drags me to the bottom of the lagoon.”
“Right. Except turtles don’t eat people.”
“How do you know?” Derek demanded.
“Call me when you land in Miami,” said Raven Stark.
Wahoo had an older sister named Julie who was finishing law school at the University of Florida in Gainesville. His father was secretly proud of her, but he wouldn’t let on.
“Just what the world needs-another darn lawyer,” he’d grumble.
“I love you, too, Dad,” Julie would say, and pinch his cheek.
Wahoo thought his sister was pretty cool, although he sometimes felt intimidated because she was so smart and funny and sociable. Wahoo was shy, and not as self-confident. Julie had always been a straight-A student while Wahoo wasn’t: his best-ever report card was two A’s, four B’s and a C (in algebra, naturally).
“Just do your best,” his mom would say. “That’s good enough for us.”
Mickey Cray never really took an interest in the children’s schoolwork because he was too busy with the animals.
“Put the old man on the phone,” Julie said when she called.
“He’s out working with the pythons,” Wahoo reported.
“It’s about the Expedition contract. I see problems.”
Wahoo always faxed the TV contracts to his sister for her to see, even though his father normally signed them without reading a word.
“What’s wrong, Jule?”
“Like, on page seven, it says the show ‘shall have unrestricted use of the designated wildlife specimens for the duration of the production period.’ That means they can do pretty much whatever they please with the animals-and they don’t need to ask Pop’s permission.”
“This is bad,” Wahoo said. He remembered what Raven Stark had said about Derek Badger wanting to wrestle one of the gators.
