. And lots of people are out in their
best clothes gabbing together. Some of the men wear black skullcaps, and
some of them have big black felt hats and long white beards. We go past a
crowd gathering outside a movie house.

"They're not going to the movies," Ben says. "On holidays sometimes they
rent a movie theater for services. It must be getting near time. Come on,
I got to hurry."

We trot along the next twenty blocks or so, up First Avenue and to Peter
Cooper.

"So long," Ben says. "I'll come by Wednesday on the way to school."

He goes off spinning his dime, and too late I think to myself that we
could have had a candy bar.

12

[Illustration: Dave holding up lizard for Ben by pond in woods.]

THE RED EFT

Ben and I both take biology, and the first weekend assignment we get,
right after Rosh Hashanah, is to find and identify an animal native to New
York City and look up its family and species and life cycle.

"What's a species?" says Ben.

"I don't know. What's a life cycle?"

We both scratch our heads, and he says, "What animals do we know?"

I say, "Cat. And dogs and pigeons and squirrels."

"That's dull. I want to get some animal no one else knows about."

"Hey, how about a praying mantis? I saw one once in Gramercy Park."

Ben doesn't even know what it is, so I tell him about this one I saw. For
an insect, it looks almost like a dragon, about four or five inches long
and pale green. When it flies, it looks like a baby helicopter in the sky.
We go into Gramercy Park to see if we can find another, but we can't.

Ben says, "Let's go up to the Bronx Zoo Saturday and see what we can
find."

"Stupid, they don't mean you to do lions and tigers. They're not native."

"Stupid, yourself. They got other animals that are. Besides, there's lots
of woods and ponds. I might find something."

Well, it's as good an idea for Saturday as any, so I say O.K. On account
of both being pretty broke, we take lunch along in my old school lunchbox.
Also six subway tokens--two extras for emergencies. Even I would be against
walking home from the Bronx.

Of course there are plenty of native New York City animals in the
zoo--raccoons and woodchucks and moles and lots of birds--and I figure we
better start home not too late to get out the encyclopedias for specie