Lizard Music by Daniel Pinkwater Read Free Book Online

burner under it all the way to get the butter melting, and then I put a couple of slices of whole wheat bread in the toaster. It felt funny to be making a breakfast in the evening. I decided to have some orange juice too. There wasn’t any made up, but there were little frozen cans of concentrated orange juice in the freezer. I make this stuff all the time. It’s tricky to get the half-frozen lump of orange juice out of the can, and then you have to stir it a lot to get the lump to melt. I was in the middle of this when I noticed that the butter was starting to smoke and sputter. I figured it was ready and got a couple of eggs.
    Breaking eggs is much more complicated than it looks. The first one that I tapped on the edge of the pan ran mostly down the outside and sort of got in amongst the burner. I got the next two eggs to go inside the pan, but a lot of shell went in too. I tried picking it out, but it was pretty hot and splattery in the pan, so I left the shell in, figuring I’d pick the pieces out later. At the last minute, I thought I’d like ham and eggs—there was some sliced ham in the icebox—and I threw that in too.
    Everything came out at the same time. The eggs were kind of black. So was the ham. So was the toast. The orange juice was just perfect. Everything tasted okay, and I learned something—you can eat egg shells.
    Roger Mudd was telling about how the natives of some island in the Pacific were saving their money to buy the President of the United States to be their chief. They wouldn’t pay taxes or anything. They had over sixteen thousand dollars saved up. I wondered how they made their money. Fishing, maybe.
    After the news, I didn’t pay any attention to what was on TV. I had a lot of work to do on my investigation. I had gotten sort of sidetracked at the zoo. I wanted to go over what had been happening during the day. I was certain that Charles Swan was the Chicken Man in disguise. I knew that he went to Shane Fergussen’s candy store every night and watched the lizards with him. I had the phone number, HO7–8937. I was sure that the Chicken Man was the key to the lizards. I felt very excited. I was going to find out what was going on. I didn’t know how, but I just had this strong feeling that the whole thing was going to make sense soon. I looked at my notebook. None of the things in it made any sense—but they would. I just had to wait for the next thing to happen.
    Then it happened! It had been happening all along right in front of me—on TV! I was looking at it. There was this talk show. Ordinarily I never watch talk shows, but as I said, I hadn’t bothered to change the channel after the Roger Mudd show. There was this talk show—there was a host with real wavy hair and there were all these guests sitting in a row. One was an actress, and she smiled all the time. She had real big boobs, and the host kept staring at them and making faces and making jokes about how she had real big boobs. The audience screamed every time he made a face, and this actress would smile and sort of move her boobs around. Then there was this other guy—he had a sort of Jungle Jim suit with a fancy scarf, and he was smiling all the time too. Every now and then he’d say something, and the host and the actress would smile and shake their heads, and the actress would move her boobs. And there was a little short guy who was sweating; he’d jump up and down and run around the stage, and the audience would scream. Another woman came out. She was the daughter of somebody famous—I didn’t catch the name—and she came out to talk about this cookbook she’d written. She brought out all these weird dishes from her cookbook, like baked beans with marshmallows on them, and sauerkraut with coconut on top. The host tasted the dishes and made faces and rolled his eyes, and the audience screamed. All this stuff was flashing past me a mile a minute. It was happening like a speeded-up movie—and it was very important!