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Stop it, J.D. Why do you come up with these awful things? Holden’s a nice kid, such a nice kid. If you’re looking for stories about Holden, don’t ask random people in hotels. They don’t know him.
I remember, when he was really little, I’d take him down to that pond in Central Park, you know the one? He always wanted to go there and run around all over the place. I tried to teach him to skip stones a couple times, but he could never focus for very long. What he really liked to do was to chase the ducks around in circles. He’d try to be real quiet sneaking up on them so he could catch them, but they always heard him and flew off. But he’d never give up chasing them.
This one time, though, he found a frog under a bush by the edge of the pond. That’s not something we’d ever seen around there. Mostly it’s just ducks and people. I was sitting with my notebook on the bench, not really paying much attention, until Holden called me over, “Wow! D.B.! D.B.! Look at this!”
I went over and looked, because if Holden wants you to look at something, it’s gonna be worth the trouble of standing up to see it. It wasn’t a big frog, small enough to fit in even Holden’s little hands. It was a chocolate brown like the mud it was sitting in, and at first I thought it was just a lump of dirt, until it opened its yellow eyes and blinked at us.
Holden was staring at it so intensely. I don’t think he’d ever been so close to a frog that wasn’t in a cage before. He reached out real slowly as if he was going to grab it. I thought it was going to be like the ducks, and the frog would see him coming and get out of the way, but no.
It was incredible, but he caught it. Just reached out and grabbed it. If it had been any other kid, I would have been worried he’d hurt it, but not Holden. He’s so gentle.
He was ecstatic to have caught something. I don’t think he’d expected to be able to. He had it cupped between his hands and kept peeking at it, then looking up at me with this grin that was so catching. I couldn’t help getting as excited about the frog as he was. So excited that when he asked if we could take it home, I didn’t even think. I just said, “Sure.” I had an old aquarium from when I’d had some fish a couple years before, and we figured we could keep it there.
Holden walked back holding it really close to his body, going slowly so as not to jostle it, and talking steadily the whole way. By the end of the walk he had the entire inside of the tank mapped out, down to exactly which dish he was going to use for its water: the ugly blue one I made in art class when I was in the sixth grade. He had a name for the frog too -- Jeremy. He was so happy because he’d read that in the wild all kinds of birds like to eat little frogs just like Jeremy, and he was so glad to be saving him from that and taking him somewhere nice.
When we brought Jeremy in, our parents were out, so our maid then, her name was Daphne, helped us find the aquarium. We set it up just the way Holden had it planned out, with the water on the left and a clump of grass on the right. We were going to feed him with the bugs that got caught in the fly-paper Daphne’d put up. It was perfect for the frog, and for a couple of kids, well, it was incredible.
The aquarium went in Holden’s room, and he just sat there staring at that frog the whole rest of the afternoon. He put a cover on it when he went to bed. He used his favorite red blanket, the one he took with him to preschool every day. He just loved that frog.
So when Holden woke up the next and saw his blanket lying there alone on the table, well, he just panicked. He ran around the house demanding to know where Jeremy had gone. He was so worried, he was almost crying.
It turned out, what happened was that our mother came home and took just a look at that tank, with its mud and grass. She doesn’t like things to be messy. I don’t know how she had let me have the fish. What she did, she came in while Holden was sleeping, picked up the tank and told Daphne to take it out with the rest of the garbage. Which she did.
When Holden heard that, he just stopped right there, dead still. Didn’t say anything, didn’t even cry. Just nodded once and sat down to have breakfast.
He ate his eggs and toast real fast, not saying a word the whole time, and as soon as he was done, he just got up and went to his room. When I passed by later, I looked through the keyhole and I saw him sitting on his bed, holding his knees and rocking back and forth, crying silently. And you say this kid picked a fight with a pimp?