Dunc and Amos Hit the Big Top by Gary Paulsen Page A

ring.
    And never made it.
    This had been a classic case of phone answering. Amos had been walking down the hallway that led off the front door to the house when he heard the phone ring.
    Many things happened when the phone rang in Amos’s house. First, anybody and everybody in the house froze where they were in terror, wondering if they were in the line of travel between Amos and the nearest phone. This included Scruff, the family dog, who had been run over so many times, he almost no longer bit Amos when he went by.
    In Amos’s mind the ringing phone triggered a whole different set of responses. First, as the ring started, almost automatically his legs began to pump, driving him into a run before he really knew which direction to move. Second, within a split instant, his brainregistered the closest phone ringing—his father had no less than four phones in the house (he kept increasing the number as the disasters occurred)—and the direction and exact distance to the phone.
    All this happened in the first second.
    It was during the second second that things usually began to fall apart, and this time had been no exception.
    He’d had good form, almost classic, knees pumping, tongue out the side of his mouth, a good lungful of air for the start.
    But he’d been going in the wrong direction when the phone rang.
    Dunc had tried to explain inertia to him many times. A body in motion tends to stay in motion; every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
    But applying it was always hard for Amos, and he’d made two good pumps, his hand out for the phone, when his brain ordered him to turn and go the other way.
    The top half of his body began the turn, but his legs took one more step before swinging around, and in that step he came down onScruff, who had stopped dead in the middle of the hallway when the phone rang.
    Scruff reacted normally, violently. He started down with Amos on his back and reached up and around and grabbed Amos’s foot, catching a fang in the looped end of Amos’s shoelace, then cutting sideways to get out of the way.
    The fang pulled the shoelace with it, and the shoelace pulled the shoe, and the shoe pulled the foot, and the foot pulled the leg.
    Like falling dominoes, Amos came over and down.
    Except that he was still moving in full stride, his body still propelled forward, and his eyes widened in horror as he saw he was aimed at the center of the kitchen table, where his mother was busy preparing a snack after a hard day at work. She was holding a butcher knife.
    She turned, her own eyes widening to see a careening pile of boy and dog and shoes coming at her end over end. She moved deftly sideways, throwing the knife into the sink to get it out of the way just in time for Amos and Scruff to hit the table, driving it through thekitchen and onto the back porch, through the back porch and out across the small back yard into the trash barrels, swiping the trim off the side of the garage as they passed.
    On the way by, Amos had snagged the phone from the hook, and he held it to his ear in the middle of the pile of wreckage in the alley, Scruff still hanging on his foot. He said: “Hello?”
    But the wire had torn from the wall, and he’d been talking to nobody.
    “No,” he said now, remembering, “it wasn’t the whole house at all. Now, let’s go to the circus—I’ve got to sign up for the trapeze.”

• 2
    The circus was on the edge of town and was almost not a circus. At one time it had been a big, three-ring spectacular show—but that had been back in the fifties.
    It was down now to a tired bigtop tent with patches here and there and a few animal cages and a bunch of men that Dunc thought either had been in prison, should be in prison, or would be in prison soon.
    But it
was
a circus, and Amos’s nostrils flared with excitement as they chained their bicycles to a telephone pole and locked them.
    Dunc stopped at the rope-gate area leading into the circus compound and held Amos