Ralph S. Mouse Read online

  The muddy floor caught Ryan’s attention. He studied the mud, and when Matt left to fetch a mop, he got down on the floor in front of the clock and pressed his cheek against the floor so that he could speak to Ralph. “I saw your tire tracks,” he whispered. “I bet you had a great time last night.”

  “Yeah, except for a bunch of little mice,” said Ralph.

  “What’s the matter?” Ryan asked him. “You sound unhappy.”

  Suddenly Ralph knew what he had to do. He thought fast, which was easy for him. Mice often have to think fast to survive. “Look, Ryan,” he said. “I’m in trouble, and I don’t have time to tell you about it. Just take me and my motorcycle with you, and don’t ask questions.”

  “To school?” Ryan was surprised.

  “Come on,” begged Ralph. “We’re friends, aren’t we?”

  “Sure we’re friends,” agreed Ryan, “but—”

  “There’s no time for buts,” said Ralph, who knew Ryan would soon have to leave to catch the school bus.

  “Well, OK, if you say so,” said Ryan.

  By the time “OK” had passed Ryan’s lips, Ralph was wheeling out his motorcycle with his crash helmet dangling from the handlebars. “I’ll stay out of sight,” he assured his friend. “There must be someplace I can live at school.”

  Ryan stuffed the motorcycle into one pocket of his parka and picked Ralph up carefully so he wouldn’t smash his tiny ribs. “You mean you want to stay at school?”

  “Yes,” said Ralph, suddenly frightened by his decision. “There must be someplace I can hide.”

  Ryan thought a moment. “Well, there’s one of Melissa Hopper’s boots. You could hide there.”

  “Doesn’t she wear her boots?” asked Ralph, picturing himself squashed in the toe of a boot by the foot of Melissa, whoever she was.

  “Not if she can help it,” said Ryan. “Melissa hates boots, so she leaves them at school. That way her mother can’t make her wear them.”

  A sensible girl, thought Ralph.

  Mrs. Bramble came bustling back into the lobby. “Ryan, what on earth are you doing on your knees? You should be on your way out to the highway, or you’ll miss your bus.”

  “Just checking the floor for dust,” fibbed Ryan, as he quickly slid Ralph into his parka pocket. “Bye, Mom.” And he ran out the door and went crunching through the snow to the highway.

  Ryan must have had second thoughts about taking Ralph to school. He said, “I guess Miss K won’t mind.”

  “Who’s Miss K?” asked Ralph.

  “My teacher,” explained Ryan. “Her real name is Miss Kuckenbacker, but she told us to call her Miss K, because calling her Miss Kuckenbacker would take up too much classroom time.”

  “Oh,” said Ralph, mystified.

  To Ralph, school was a strange and mysterious place. When he had been a very young mouse, Ralph had pictured school as something like a bus, because mothers and fathers who arrived at the hotel with several children after a long, hot drive across the Sacramento Valley or the long, winding ride over the Sierra Nevada often said, “I’ll be so glad when school starts.” Ralph had naturally concluded that because a school started, it must also move like a car.

  As Ralph had grown more sophisticated from listening to children, he came to understand that children moved. Schools stood still. Later on he learned that some grown-ups called “teachers” also went to school. Some of these teachers stayed in the hotel during the summer. As far as Ralph could see, teachers behaved like ordinary people except that, unlike parents, they said, “Oh, dear, school will soon be starting.”

  Ralph found a clue as to what teachers did in that mysterious place from a television commercial shown several times a day. In it, a woman who said she was a teacher held a tube of toothpaste in her hand as she walked around saying, “Toothpaste doesn’t excite me. Good checkups excite me.”

  This remark puzzled Ralph, however. When he had lived upstairs, he had once tasted toothpaste when a careless guest left the cap off a tube. He found himself foaming and frothing at the mouth as he skittered around frantically trying to find water while one of the maids ran down the hall shrieking, “Mad mouse! Mad mouse!” No, Ralph could not agree with the television teacher. Toothpaste was exciting.

  “This Miss K,” said Ralph, as Ryan reached the bus stop. “Is she OK?”

  “Yeah, she’s pretty good.” Ryan stamped his feet to keep them warm. “She thinks up interesting things to do for language arts. Like our school is named the Irwin J. Sneed Elementary School, and last week she had us write a composition about who we thought Irwin J. Sneed was and why the town of Cucaracha, California, named its school after him.” Ryan scooped up a handful of snow, squeezed it into a ball, and threw it at the branch of a pine tree. Snow slid off the branch and fell with a soft plop.

  “Some kids made Irwin J. Sneed a monster from outer space,” continued Ryan, “but I made him a horse thief back in the gold-rush days when Cucaracha was a mining town. I said he was the first person to go to jail in Cucaracha, so they named the school after him. Miss K gets real excited about Cucaracha being a gold-rush town with a lot of history.”

  “Oh,” said Ralph, puzzled. “Who was Irwin J. Sneed really?”

  “Just some old guy on the school board when the school was built way back in the 1970s,” explained Ryan, as he made another snowball.

  Ralph could make no sense of this information at all.

  As the snowball made more snow plop from a branch to the ground, Ryan had a sudden thought. “I better be careful about talking to you at school, or people will think I’m nuts.”

  “Maybe some of them could understand me,” suggested Ralph. “They might even like to see me ride my motorcycle.”

  Ryan considered. “You better not go showing off. Somebody might steal your motorcycle, or maybe everybody would start bringing mice and motorcycles to school. I don’t think that would be a good idea, a whole school full of mice tearing around on motorcycles. One mouse can get by, but not a lot of mice. You know how some people get all worked up about mice.”

  As the school bus came rumbling down the highway, Ralph had to agree from his hotel experience that Ryan was right. One mouse, or even two or three, could get by. Many mice could not. “Say,” he said, “you don’t suppose there are already mice in this place.”

  “No,” said Ryan, as the bus stopped in front of him. “Mr. Costa keeps our school too clean for mice.”

  Of course, Ralph’s feelings were hurt.

  “Remember to keep out of sight,” were Ryan’s last words to Ralph as he climbed on the bus.

  Deep inside the parka pocket, Ralph felt sad, brave and noble, frightened and bewildered. He felt sad because there had been no time to say good-bye to Matt. He felt brave and noble because his going out into the strange world would protect the safety of his little relatives. He felt frightened and bewildered because so much had happened so fast. Yet the inside of the pocket was cozy. In the deepest corner, Ralph found a dried-up raisin that would have made an excellent breakfast if he had not been so nervous about what lay ahead in that mysterious place, the Irwin J. Sneed Elementary School. He nipped a tiny bite of the raisin and told himself school must be safe because so many children went there. Of course, I will be all right, he told himself, pretending to be brave, but I will be careful to stay away from Miss K’s toothpaste.

  3

  Irwin J. Sneed Elementary School

  As Ryan hopped down the steps of the school bus, Ralph poked his nose out of his pocket and found himself in a crowd of children, all of them bundled up in hooded parkas or jackets and knit caps. Clouds of vapor came from their mouths as they shouted back and forth to one another. A tiny cloud formed in front of Ralph’s nose, too.

  A boy jumped out of a yellow tow truck and shouted, “So long, Dad!” Then, as the truck pulled away, he added, “So long, Arfy,” to the dog sitting next to the driver.

  “Arf,” answered the dog, who looked like a kindly wolf.


  That boy must be Brad, thought Ralph, as the children trampled snow on the playground on their way into the long one-story building that was the Irwin J. Sneed Elementary School.

  Inside the building, the linoleum-floored hall, unlike the halls of the Mountain View Inn, was a broad smooth highway with no rough carpets to wear down the already thin tires of a little motorcycle. Ralph wondered how he could endure a whole day of waiting for night to come so he could race down that long hall. There would be no furniture to get in his way and no little relatives to make him feel guilty for not sharing his motorcycle. That hall was the perfect race-course Ralph had dreamed about ever since he had owned a motorcycle. With no one around to see him take spills, he could even rear back on one wheel to practice wheelies.

  Ryan entered Room 5, a room different from any room Ralph had ever seen. Unlike the rooms at the inn, this one was furnished with many chairs and tables instead of beds. At the front, seated at a desk, was a woman Ralph knew must be Miss K. Her toothpaste was nowhere in sight.

  At the rear of the room, Ryan hung his backpack on a hook. Then he removed his parka and hung it on the hook, too.

  “Hey, don’t leave me here all by myself,” squeaked Ralph, alarmed at being alone in such a strange place. “Take me with you.”

  “Promise you’ll stay out of sight?” whispered Ryan out of the corner of his mouth.

  “Sure,” agreed Ralph.

  Ryan started to poke Ralph into the pocket of his jeans until Ralph objected. “Hey! Not here. This place is too tight. You’ll squash me when you sit down.”

  “Sorry,” said Ryan, and he dropped Ralph into the breast pocket of his plaid flannel shirt.

  No sooner had Ryan sat down at the table than he and the rest of Room 5 stood up again to recite some words about a flag and something about liberty and justice for all. Whatever it was, Ralph hoped mice were included.

  Ryan sat down and began to shuffle books and papers while Miss K talked about numbers. Ralph tried to listen above the steady lub-dub, lub-dub of Ryan’s heart, but soon he grew bored. Ryan’s shirt was new and the flannel still fuzzy. Ralph nipped a hole in the front of the pocket for a better view and then, lulled by the muffled lub-dub, lub-dub and the steady rise and fall of Ryan’s chest, fell asleep as if he were being rocked in a cradle. Because a heart does not strike the hours like a clock, Ralph slept until recess and again until lunchtime when Ryan remembered to slip a bit of sandwich into the pocket for his lunch.

  Sometime in the afternoon Ralph awoke feeling hot, cramped, and restless. Maybe no one would notice if a small brown mouse poked his nose out for a breath of air. After a few whiffs, Ralph stuck his head all the way out to see what was going on. All heads, except one, were bent over papers on the tables. One girl was chewing her pencil and staring into space.

  That’s funny, thought Ralph. I didn’t know people gnawed things too.

  Unexpectedly, the girl turned her head and looked straight at Ralph. Then she tapped another girl on the shoulder and pointed.

  Too late, Ralph ducked back into the pocket. He heard the girls whispering, and soon others were whispering too. Oh, oh, thought Ralph, feeling both guilty and doomed. He had broken his promise to stay out of sight. He was in trouble.

  Miss K spoke. “Melissa, is something disturbing you?” she asked.

  Melissa, thought Ralph. So that’s the girl whose boot I’m supposed to live in.

  “Not exactly, Miss K,” answered Melissa.

  “There seems to be something going on that I don’t know about,” persisted Miss K. “Won’t someone let me in on it?”

  “I—uh—thought I saw something move in Ryan’s pocket,” admitted Melissa.

  “Ryan, do you have something you wish to share with the class?” asked Miss K.

  Ralph squeezed himself into a corner of the pocket as Ryan’s heart began to beat faster, or rev up, as Ralph thought of it.

  “No, not exactly,” Ryan told his teacher.

  The class began to speak. “Yes, he does.” “He does too.” “I saw something and it moved.”

  Ralph dug his claws into the flannel shirt as Miss K said, “Ryan, why don’t you come to the front of the room and let us see what it is?”

  Ralph started to chew through the side of the pocket closest to the heartbeat.

  As Ryan walked to the front of the room, he reached into his pocket, grasped Ralph by the tail, and dragged him, clawing and struggling, out of the pocket. Ralph was so angry at this treatment he was squeakless. When Ryan set him on the palm of his hand, he turned his back to the class and sat quivering with rage and terror.

  “What a beautiful mouse!” said Miss K, who was young and enthusiastic and eager to give her pupils learning experiences. “Class, gather around for a better look.”

  I’m beautiful? thought Ralph. No adult, or child for that matter, had ever described him as beautiful. Far from it.

  “Look at his perfect little paws,” said Miss K.

  Ralph looked too as the class left their seats to crowd around. His paws looked like ordinary mouse paws to him, but now that she mentioned it, maybe….

  “And his lovely little ears,” continued Miss K.

  “Aw—” breathed the children. “He’s cute.” “He’s really neat.” “He’s darling!”

  Well, what do you know? Ralph perked up and stopped quaking. Shyly he turned to face the class.

  One member of Room 5, however, did not admire Ralph. “He’s just your standard brown mouse,” said Brad. “There are plenty more like him.”

  “Where did you get your mouse, Ryan?” asked Miss K.

  “At the hotel where I live,” explained Ryan. “He’s a very smart mouse. His name is Ralph.”

  “What’s his last name?” someone asked.

  “Mouse,” answered Ryan. “His name is Ralph S. Mouse. The S stands for Smart.”

  “May I hold Ralph?” asked Miss K, and Ralph found himself transferred to a softer, cleaner hand. He sat up and began to groom his whiskers, always a good performance. He could see that Ryan was happy to be receiving so much attention from his classmates.

  “Aw—” breathed the class again. “Look at him. He washes like a little cat.”

  “Such a tiny scrap of life,” said Miss K. “He’s a little miracle.”

  Ralph stopped wiping his paws over his whiskers to look with love at Ryan’s teacher. Her long shiny hair fell over her shoulders. It looked so strong that Ralph was sure that just one of her hairs would be perfect for tying his exhaust pipes in place.

  “Perhaps the custodian has a cage we could keep him in,” said Miss K.

  Love turned to distrust. This wonderful woman with useful hair was turning out to be like any other grown-up.

  Ryan spoke up. “I don’t think Ralph would be happy in a cage,” he told his teacher. “I’ll just keep him in my pocket if it’s all right with you.” Good old Ryan.

  Miss K gently handed Ralph back to Ryan, who stuffed him into his shirt pocket. “Thank you for sharing Ralph,” she said above the lub-dub of Ryan’s heart, now steady as a well-oiled motor. “Class, how would you like to draw pictures and write stories and poems about mice? Friday afternoon we could have a mouse exhibit to show off our work. Ryan, you could bring Ralph to school again so he could be our guest of honor.” Miss K, who had no idea Ralph was planning to live at school, was a teacher who could turn anything into a project.

  Most of the class was enthusiastic. Others thought mice were as good a subject as any for drawing and writing. A boy named Gordon said he didn’t like to do any of those things. Miss K suggested he could go to the library, look up facts about mice, and write an essay about them. “And what do you want to do, Ryan?” she asked.

  “I would like to tell how smart Ralph is.” Ryan’s answer threw Ralph into a fright. What was Ryan going to tell his classmates about the motorcycle? Ralph would not ride his precious motorcycle in front of everyone.

  “Splendid, Ryan,” said Miss K, “but why not show us
how smart he is? Do you know what a maze is?”

  “Sort of,” said Ryan. “I’ve seen them on the kid’s page of the Sunday paper. You take a pencil and try to draw a line through the open spaces of a diagram from one side to the other. It isn’t easy, because there are a lot of dead ends.”

  “That’s right,” said Miss K, who was drawing a maze on the blackboard as Ryan spoke. “Scientists use mazes with walls to test the speed with which mice learn. They start a mouse at one end and time him to see how fast he reaches food at the other end. Then they have him do it again. If he cuts down his time, they know he has learned from the experience. Do you think you could build a maze?”

  “I’d like to try,” Ryan answered.

  “Good,” said Miss K. “I’ll bring a stop watch for timing Ralph’s race through the maze.”

  “I can bring my cap pistol for a starter’s gun,” volunteered Brad, showing interest for the first time.

  “Good idea,” said Miss K. “You like to build things, so perhaps you could help Ryan build his maze.”

  The boys eyed one another as if they were not sure how a partnership would work out. “Uh—OK,” agreed Brad.

  So it happened that Ralph was not only a learning experience for Room 5, he was to have a learning experience of his own. He was not sure he liked the idea, especially that part about the starter’s gun. What if he couldn’t run through the maze faster the second time? What if he couldn’t find the food the first time? What if he turned out to be stupid?

  Of course, I’m not stupid, thought Ralph, as he tried to make himself comfortable in Ryan’s pocket once more. I can ride a motorcycle, can’t I? He began to have doubts again, and doubt turned to anger. His intelligence or stupidity was nobody’s business but his own.

  When the last bell rang and Ryan went to the back of the room to collect his parka, Ralph poked his nose out of the shirt pocket. “I’m not going to do it,” he squeaked at Ryan. “I’m not going to run any maze just because you say so.”