Crash

by Jerry Spinelli

  Of course the stands were going wild, too. I looked for my father—or even my mother, what the heck. Couldn’t see either of them. Well, after all, the game just started, maybe they’re on their way. Or maybe I missed them in the crowd.

  As I waded through all the pad-slapping and high-fiving, I took another look at the stands. Still didn’t see them. But I did see somebody else, about halfway up, a white-haired guy and a semi-old lady, smiling, clapping with the rest of them: Webb’s prehistoric parents.

  My second touchdown was a fifty-two-yarder on a pitchout from Brill. This time there wasn’t anybody in the way to run over. I just left them all in the dust.

  The place went wild again. This time I made them let me leave the field on my own feet. Webb’s parents were still smiling and clapping. Mine weren’t there. Okay, I figured, they’re late, give them time, they’re coming. All you gotta do is keep scoring.

  So that’s what I did. I either scored or made a long gain every time I touched the ball. I had to. Suppose they came just when I got stopped for no gain. I couldn’t stand it. And since I didn’t know exactly when they would show up, I had to be great every second. I kept telling Brill: “Give me the ball.”

  I scored my fifth TD just before the first half ended. They still weren’t there. They’re probably coming for the second half, I figured.

  They didn’t.

  TD number six came early in the third quarter. As I trotted to the sideline I kept staring at the stands, not for my parents anymore, but at Webb’s. They were still there, grinning and clapping themselves silly. I wanted to charge up there and strangle them. I wanted to shake their skinny vegetarian necks and scream into their Quaker faces: Stop cheering for me! I don’t need your cheers! I’m not doing this for you, so stop acting so damn grateful!

  When we went on offense again, I raced back onto the field. As I was leaning into the huddle, I felt a tap. I turned. It was my backup. “I’m in for you,” he said.

  “That’s what you think,” I said. I shoved him. He stumbled backward onto his second-string butt.

  I heard Coach Lattner scream from the sideline. The quarterback called to the referee: “Time out.” For the first time I noticed it wasn’t Brill, it was the second-string quarterback.

  The coach was calling me. He was waving for me to come out. I pretended I didn’t see or hear. Then he came stomping across the field. He pulled me away from the other players.

  “I’m not going to drag you off,” he whispered. “You’re going to trot off along with me. Understand?”

  I glanced at the stands. “You can’t take me out. I’m just getting warmed up.”

  “I’m here to beat Hillside,” he said, “not destroy them. You’re the only first-stringer left on the field, and you’re already benched for the first quarter of our next game.” He leaned sideways into my face. “Want to try for the second quarter?”

  He started trotting for the sideline. I went with him. The kids in the stands jumped up and gave me a standing ovation. Everybody was cheering. My name came hooting down: “Coo-gan! Coo-gan!” Except one cheerleader—Jane Forbes. She just stood there behind the bench, hands on hips, glaring at me.

  After the game Mike had to go straight home, so I walked alone. When I came to my house, I walked past it. I went around the block. Slow. Twice.

  Somebody was cooking somewhere. Whenever I smell cooking like that, it makes me want to go right into that house and eat along with them. But I can never tell which house it’s coming from. Only one thing for sure: it’s not coming from my house.

  That’s why I was so shocked when I finally opened the front door: the smell was coming from my house. And that made no sense at all. My mom’s car wasn’t in the driveway, and Abby isn’t allowed to use the stove.

  I shut the door real quiet. I got a good grip on my football bag. I tiptoed through the living room, the dining room. A suitcase sat on the floor. Something was sizzling in a pan, and it was smelling awful good. Somebody was whistling a tune. He was facing the stove. He must have heard me. He turned, a spatula in his hand.

  I screeched. “Scooter!”

  19

  I don’t really have a great-great-grandfather, like I told Webb years ago. I don’t even have a great-grandfather. But I really do have a grandfather, and his name really is Scooter. He used to be a cook in the U.S. Navy.

  “What are you doing here?” I said.

  He waved the spatula. “What’s it look like, swabbie? Making octopus stew.”

  I stuck my finger down my throat and pretended to gag. “Aaaaach!” Then I rushed into him.

  “Hey, swabbie,” he said, “you’re squeezing too hard. I’m not one of your girlfriends.” He looked around. “So where is everybody?”

  “Mom and Dad are working. I don’t know where Abby is.” I remembered the suitcase. “You’re staying, right?”

  “If you haven’t sold my old bed.”

  “How long?” Usually he stays a night or two.

  “Oh”—he turned back to the stove—“maybe for good.”

  “Yeah, don’t I wish.” I knew he was kidding, but I hugged him from behind anyway, just thinking about it. I squeezed his arms and turned him around. “Scooter, you shoulda seen me today! Our first game. I scored six TDs! Six! They said it’s the record for a single game.”

  His eyes popped. “Six? Am I hearing right?”

  “Yeah. And they took me out in the third quarter. I was awesome!”

  He gave a low-key smile. His eyes went back to normal size and got real soft. He patted me twice on the cheek. “You didn’t have to score all those touchdowns for me to know that.”

  The front door opened. I thought it was Abby, but it wasn’t. It was my parents. I looked at the clock. It was only twenty minutes after five.

  In the kitchen they hugged Scooter and did the “Aaaaach!” routine when he told them it was octopus stew. It’s a family joke we do when Scooter visits and cooks for us. It’s never really octopus, but that’s the only thing we know for sure. He makes it up mostly from whatever he finds in the kitchen, so it’s always different. And always great.

  My father said, “Finally we’ll be getting some good food around here.”

  My mom punched him, but she laughed, too. She hates to cook. But I was stuck on my dad’s words, the way he said them: we’ll be getting…

  “Scooter’s just coming for a day or two, right?” I said. “Like usual?”

  Silence. Stares bouncing around the kitchen. Slow-growing grins.

  “Don’t you listen, swabbie? I told you once.”

  …maybe for good.

  I must have looked pretty funny, because everybody took one peek at me and burst out laughing.

  I cheered. “All right!”

  Abby phoned and said she was at a friend’s and would be home soon.

  Scooter said, “Not soon enough, the eight-arm stew is ready. Everybody sit.”

  My mother pinched her nose and pointed. “Not till you get that out of here.”

  I ran my football bag upstairs.

  The eight-arm stew didn’t look too good, but taste was something else. “This is scrumptious,” my mother said with her mouth full. “What’s in it?”

  “Chef’s secret,” said Scooter. He never tells what’s in it till we’ve eaten.

  I wasn’t interested in what was in the stew. I looked at everyone. “So Scooter’s moving in. He’s not gonna leave. Ever. Is that it?”

  My dad nodded. “That’s it. If he can stand you two.”

  My mom turned to Scooter. “I waited till we got you here to tell you this: dear Abby is now a vegetarian.”

  Scooter winced and blessed himself. He’s not a Catholic, but he does it when he feels unsafe. “Since when?” he said, as if he were saying, “When did she die?”

  “Been going on several weeks now.”

  “Does she count fish as meat?”

  “She counts anything that has a face.”

  Scooter nodded slowly. “I gu
ess that includes mice, then.”

  My mother stared at him. He was grinning and looking at her plate of stew. Her eyes bulged. She squawked. She jerked around to look into the kitchen. The trap was still there, a little glop of peanut butter as bait.

  Scooter chewed yummily on a forkful of stew. “I always like to make use of the local livestock.”

  My mother wagged her fork at him. “I wouldn’t put it past you. I really would not.”

  We all laughed.

  “Anyway,” my mom said, “it would take more than eating a mouse to spoil this day for me.”

  “How’s that?” I said.

  She sipped her coffee. “Well, you know about the new mall that’s coming. And you know my company is the real estate agent for it. But what you don’t know—and what I didn’t know until this afternoon—is that yours truly, the least senior member of the team, will be getting a piece of the action. I am going to handle three of the small stores.”

  She smiled from ear to ear. I couldn’t remember seeing her look so proud. We all clapped. She took a shy bow.

  “Does this mean we’ll be rich?” I said.

  She gave a grinny little snort. “Only thing it means for sure is that I’ll have more work.”

  I kept staring at her. She looked away. The silence got longer.

  “I was awesome today,” I said.

  My dad smacked the table. “I forgot. Your game. How’d it go? Who won? How’d you do?”

  Suddenly I didn’t feel like telling-them. I chewed some stew. I shrugged. “Scored six TDs.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw my father’s jaw drop. I looked at the ceiling. I had never noticed how pure white was the fluorescent light.

  “A school record,” said Scooter.

  My mother’s voice came cracking and low. “Crash, that’s wonderful. I’m really proud.”

  I took a deep breath. I wanted to leave.

  Abby came in. She screamed when she saw Scooter and ran to him. It was complicated hugging him, because she carried a big white cardboard sign tacked onto a three-foot stick.

  “What’s this?” said Scooter, drawing back and almost getting clobbered.

  Abby turned the sign around so we all could see. It was painted in big red letters. It said:

  THE MALL

  MUST FALL

  She wore a button that said the same thing.

  My mother cleared her throat. “What’s this about?”

  Abby marched around the dining room table. “We’re gonna demonstrate against the new mall. We’re not gonna let them build it.”

  20

  Abby and I fought over who got to carry Scooter’s suitcase up to his room. I won.

  As usual, when he came to his picture in the hallway gallery, he had to stop and say, “Now there’s a handsome young man. I wonder who that is.”

  The painting shows this sailor with his white hat cocked down to one eyebrow and his mouth open like he’s saying something. If it wasn’t hanging in our hallway, I never would have guessed it was my grandfather, the sailor is so young. My mother told us it was the first portrait she ever did. She was still in high school.

  He knocked on the wall. “Nice bulkhead too.”

  We groaned, which was what he wanted. It’s Navy talk. A bulkhead is a wall, a door is a hatch, the kitchen is the galley, the dining room is the mess, a stairway is a ladder.

  We dragged him away from the bulkhead to his room. It was the guest room, actually, but when we turned on the light and walked in, I had the warmest feeling, knowing he’d be there for good.

  I put his suitcase on the bed. “Guess this isn’t a guest room anymore,” I said. The three of us looked at each other and broke into giggles.

  Scooter started unpacking. Abby said, “Aren’t you going to miss the ocean?”

  Since he retired, Scooter has been living in a rooming house in Cape May, New Jersey. He said he wanted to be able to see the ocean every day.

  He took out a stack of boxer shorts with red and blue anchors on them. “Sure,” he said. “When I start feeling that way, I’ll just fill up the bathtub.”

  Before he could stop her, Abby snatched the top pair of shorts and pulled them on over her jeans. She checked herself in the mirror. “Oh, Scooter, can I have these, please? Just one pair?”

  Scooter looked at me like he had just seen an oyster from outer space. I shrugged. “Fifth-grade girls.”

  Abby crouched, pleading in front of him. “Pretty please with sugar?”

  Scooter just blinked. He still wasn’t connecting. “See what your mother says.”

  Abby squealed and gave us a fashion show.

  I asked Scooter, “What about your sea chest?”

  The sea chest is a trunk filled with the stuff he picked up from all over the world. A wooden mask from Africa. A silk robe from Japan. We would rummage through the chest whenever we visited him in Cape May.

  He held up a key. “I put it in storage.”

  “Aren’t you bringing it with you?” I asked him.

  He took out our school pictures, the big ones with frames. “This is the important stuff.” He put them on the dresser.

  Later the three of us were sitting in Scooter’s bed. This is something that goes way back to when Abby and I were little. We would climb into his bed, in our pajamas. It would be dark outside; the only light would be from the hallway. And Scooter would tell us stories. Not cuddie-your-teddy-bear stories, but screamer stories, tremble stories, sink-your-teeth-into-your-teddy-bear stories.

  My parents know what’s going on, so they don’t call the police when they hear their kids screaming bloody murder. And I mean to tell you, when he says he’s in the jungle on a moonless night or in the back alleys of old Hong Kong or in a salt swamp infested with sea crocs—well, you are there with him. And when he tells you to check the vine you feel on your leg, and you look and see it’s not a vine at all but a thirty-foot anaconda already coiled three times around your leg—well, you gulp and you shriek and you might even grab onto your little sister for dear life.

  When we’re good and quaking under the covers, Scooter will finish up with some lighter stuff. It’s like dessert. Sometimes he’ll tell us about the foothunters of Borneo (instead of head-hunters, get it?), how they go around lopping off people’s feet and shrink them and wear them around their necks.

  And always he tells us about his pet Ollie, the one-armed octopus. He found Ollie one day while skin diving off the coast of Greece. At first he thought he was looking at some kind of pregnant sea snake or a constipated eel. Then he realized he had the ends backwards—it was an octopus with seven of its legs chewed off in a fight with something Scooter hoped he would never meet up with himself.

  The octopus was flopped and all forlorn on the bottom sand, trying to pry open a scallop. Its head was the size of a soft-ball, and its one tentacle was less than two feet long. Scooter took it back to the ship, named it Ollie, and for years took it almost everywhere he went in a bucket of seawater.

  This time Scooter told us about the day they worked in a carnival sideshow, with Ollie as the “World’s Biggest Sea Worm!” When Scooter finished, we just sat there, soaking up the good times.

  Abby piped, “We can do this every night now—forever!”

  Scooter pretended to swoon.

  “Scooter,” she said, then hesitated. She was thinking hard. “Scooter?”

  He leaned back against the headboard with a contented smile. “Hm?”

  She hesitated some more.

  I knew what was happening. We both grew up thinking Scooter’s bed was the safest place in the world, like a boat in a sea full of crocs. In fact we used to call it our bed boat. It was a place where you could say things out loud that you might only think anywhere else. I remember once when I was little, I had a big confession to make about something I had done. I waited for weeks till Scooter showed up. I grabbed him in the driveway, dragged him up to the bed, whipped my pajamas on—I couldn’t wait till dark—and confessed
.

  Whatever Abby wanted to say, we were probably the first people to hear it.

  21

  “Scooter”—she repeated his name a third time—“don’t you think our grass is too short?”

  Scooter just stared at her.

  “What kind of a dumb question is that?” I said.

  “Scooter,” she whined, “isn’t it?”

  “If you say it’s too short,” he said, “it’s too short.”

  “And how would you like to look out the back window and see a rabbit? Or maybe even a raccoon?”

  Scooter nodded. “That would be nice.”

  She crouched on her knees, leaned into him, and out it came. “Well, here’s what I did. See, I found out at school there’s these things called wildlife habitats. You can have one in your own backyard, as long as it’s big enough.” She bounced on her knees, bedsprings creaked. “And ours is! I wrote away to Washington, D.C., and I found out all you need to do. Like, you have to have water and food and cover. That means tall grass and weeds and woodpiles and stuff. And nesting places. And then when you do all that, you draw it all up in a plan and send it in, and if it’s good enough they send you a certificate and you have an official backyard wildlife habitat!”

  She stopped to take a breath.

  “And then,” said Scooter, “the animals move in.”

  Abby yipped, “Right! Animals and birds. We give them a place to be. We save them.”

  Scooter grinned. “From the shopping centers?”

  “Exactly!” She reached out and stroked my arm. “And my nice, sweet, wonderful, lovable big brother is going to build me an observation post in the cherry tree so I can observe the wildlife.”

  I pulled my arm away. I laughed. “Dream on.”

  Scooter thought for a while, then nodded. “I like it. But it’s not my backyard.”

  Meaning, of course, it’s my parents’. I was thinking of my father, who cuts the grass and edges it and weed-whacks it and has the ChemLawn truck spray it. And my mother, who used to throw fits because I dug holes and buried her flowers.