by Jon Scieszka
One thing you gotta say about Chester is that he isn’t extremely dumb. He’d seen how far the switch had reached the last time he got whacked and knew right where to stand so it couldn’t get him again.
He said, “So I gotta ask, how’re you seeing me if a crow ate your eyes?”
He snapped his fingers, “Oh, I got it! Those are glass eyes you’re looking at me with. Could you pull one of ’em out for me so’s I can see how they work?”
Papa Red got his hand around the switch and said, “Sure, boy, come here and let me put it in your hand. I don’t wanna take a chance and drop it and have it break. These things is expensive.”
Chester laughed and said, “Naw, Gramps, why don’t you just roll it to me? You know, like a marble.”
I know it’s not possible, but when Papa Red whipped that switch from beside his wheelchair it was glowing and making a humming sound. He slapped it across his palms twice.
“Aww, you done slipped up now,” Papa Red said. “I got you and your back-talking, sass-filled little mouth right where I want you! I’m like a spider what’s set a trap and you ain’t nothing but a juicy fly!”
Chester checked the spot on the carpet where he knew the switch could reach, and just to be safe, took another half step back. He laughed and said, “Yeah, well, you’re gonna have to postpone your dinner reservation, Spiderman. This fly’s gotta buzz off to handle some of his business.”
Papa Red raised the switch over his head.
Chester was feeling real sassy. He laughed and said, “What you gonna do with that stick, old man? Huh? What?”
A huge mistake.
Papa Red said, “What’m I gonna do with this stick? I’m gonna smote you, that’s what. And I know you ain’t got no idea what that word means, so I’m gonna demonstrate, and I’ll bet by the end of this demonstrating ‘smote’ is one word you won’t soon be forgetting.”
When the tip of that glowing, humming switch caught Chester’s shoulder I wished I had a video camera ’cause his expression would’ve got me a million hits on YouTube! The first thing he did was get a stupid, shocked look on his face, then he howled, then he jumped straight up and made another huge mistake: instead of running to the door he grabbed his shoulder and backed into a corner.
Papa Red didn’t even have to move his wheelchair. He sat there and commenced wailing on Chester from ten feet off! The way he was swinging that switch, Papa Red looked like a conductor from the Flint Symphony Orchestra waving a baton during some big, busy, rushy song like Beethoven’s Ninth. Every time the switch hit Chester it would go, “Pie-ow!” and Chester would yelp like a Chihuahua.
I know I should’ve tried to stop Papa Red but the way that switch was ripping through the air, I figured I didn’t want to be any part of what they call “collateral damage.” Besides, Chester is a certified moron and deserved this for always messing with Papa Red. What did that dude on that old TV show used to say? “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.”
Chester didn’t have a clue how Papa Red was able to hit him with the switch, but I knew what had happened. Chester isn’t the only one who’s certified in our family. Our little sister, Lulu, is certified, too, but she’s a certified snitching, butt-kissing little brat, and she does everything Papa Red asks.
Yesterday I’d seen her going into his room carrying a tape measure and a saw. When I asked her what she was doing she told me, “You don’t look like my momma. Don’t be questioning me. I got rights….” Then she sashayed her trash-talking little behind into Gramps’s room.
A couple of seconds later they both came out, her riding on the back of his wheelchair as they whirred to the front door. The saw and tape measure were in his lap.
I didn’t care, but just trying to be sociable, I’d asked, “Where you going, Papa Red?”
He stopped the chair, looked at me, and said, “My momma died in nineteen hundred and thirty-seven, and she was a smart woman. If she was gonna get reincarnated in someone else’s body I don’t think she’d choose the body of a ten-year-old pimply idiot like you. So less’n you got some ID that shows that she’s took over your body, I’m gonna ignore that question and any others that come outta that crooked-tooth mouth of yours.”
It’s sad but the only thing he said that wasn’t true was that I’m ten years old. I’m really nearly fourteen. Oh, I’m also not an idiot.
Lulu stuck her tongue out at me.
Papa Red shifted the wheelchair back in gear and they rolled out the front door.
It all made sense now: Papa Red had measured how long a switch he’d need to cover the whole room and taken Lulu and the saw out to find one that was long enough!
Like I said, he’s nuts, but he sure ain’t stupid.
Momma must’ve heard the crack of six or seven “Pie-ow”s and six or seven of Chester’s screams before she finally came to see what the commotion was about. She’s not as worried about collateral damage as I am and took two good whacks before she snatched the switch away from Papa Red.
“Daddy! I told you you can’t be beating these children like that. This is the twenty-first century. We don’t do that anymore.”
Papa Red laughed and said, “Call the po-po on me, then. I’m ninety years old. I’ll just tell ’em I was having a twentieth-century flashback! You baby them boys too much, and that one’s got a real fresh mouth.”
Momma snapped the licking stick in half.
Gramps said, “I want to move back to Gary. They know how to treat spoiled brats there.”
Momma said, “No one’s moving nowhere. This is your home now and I need you to look after these children while I’m at work. How can I leave you in charge if everything leads to you whipping them? Besides, where on earth are you getting these switches from anyway?”
Lulu would’ve busted me in a heartbeat. I kept quiet.
Papa Red said, “My lips are sealed, beat me if you want but I ain’t talking. The Kenyans captured me back in ’52 and worked me over for two weeks and couldn’t even get my social security number from me. You think you can make me talk? Ha! You and these two little momma’s boys ain’t got nothing on the Kenyans.”
Momma said, “Papa, I told you a million times the United States has never been at war with the Kenyans.”
“That’s what makes them so dangerous. No one knows how tricky they are.”
Momma sighed and said, “Chester, Trevor, follow me.” Momma closed Papa Red’s bedroom door and we stood in the hallway. Chester wiped his tears and sniffled while I waited to see what mind game Momma was gonna play on us next.
Chester said, “I’m calling child protection on him.”
Momma said, “You aren’t calling anybody. I don’t know what you did, but I know you provoked him.”
She put her hands on our shoulders and said, “Boys, this can’t keep happening. I need you to look after your grandfather, not rile him up.”
Unbelievable! Once again she was gonna try to blame me for what Chester did.
I said, “But Momma, I didn’t do—”
She squeezed my shoulder, “Trevor, you’re the oldest, I need you to keep things in order here when I go to work.”
“But Momma!”
“But nothing. You know Papa’s homesick and a little confused some of the time. You have to do everything you can to make him comfortable being with us. Trevor, I need you to be mature here.”
“But that’s not fair! You know I’m not mature!”
“Then you’re going to have to pretend you are. Isn’t it your day to keep him company? Get in there and be nice to him. He’s led an interesting life; if you give him a chance he’s got lots of great stories he can share with you.”
“They might be interesting to you, but I got a life; to me they’re—”
The gentle hand on my shoulder turned into an eagle’s claw. “Get in there now!”
What could I do? I’m in the ninth grade. I need food and clothes and stuff and she’s the dictator in control of everything.
Papa Red was a mean old fart, but it was sort of easy to understand why. A little over a year ago him and his older sister and his younger brother had their own place in Gary, Indiana. Even though they were old as water, they did everything for theirselves.
They were cool until his baby brother, Herbert, who was eighty-eight years old, got forcibly retired off the railroad. They gave him a big party and a clock. The newspapers in Gary obviously don’t have much to write about; they took his picture and wrote a story about him. Papa Red kept the newspaper article folded in his wallet. Three weeks after he retired great uncle Herbert dropped dead in the kitchen.
A week after his funeral great-aunt LaWanda went down to Lake Michigan and sat on a park bench and froze herself to death.
The day after that we borrowed a car and drove to Gary and brought Papa Red back to live with us in Flint. Kicking and fighting the whole way. But Momma works in a nursing home and said there wasn’t any way in the world her father was going in one.
I knocked on the old man’s door. “Papa Red, can I come in for a minute?”
He thought I was Chester. He yelled, “What? You back for more? Sure, come on in.”
His chair was still next to the window and he had his right hand by his side. He probably had a spare switch.
I put my hands up in front of me. “Look, Papa Red, I didn’t say nothing smart-mouth to you. It was Chester.”
He showed his right hand. All he had in it was his house slipper. Cool. He couldn’t dish out too much pain with that.
I sat on the edge of his bed and tried to think of the best way to start a conversation with this crazy old man.
All I could think of was, “So, the Kenyans captured you, huh?”
“Yeah, I let that slip, didn’t I? Well, nice try, but you ain’t getting another word outta me about that. Now, let’s get serious. How much you gonna charge me to go out and cut me a switch that’s exactickly eight feet, three and a quarter inches long?”
“You’ll have to wait for Lulu to do that. I ain’t getting involved.”
“For the love of…. If your great granddaddy Iron John got reincarnated and saw how washed out and weak his genes had got over the years he’d wanna die all over again.”
I don’t have any idea at all why the man was so stuck on talking about reincarnation all the time. I told him, “I don’t care what you say, Papa Red. There’s no way your father was rougher on you and your brothers and sisters than Momma is on us.”
“What? You think you got it rough? Let me tell you about rough.”
Here we go, but this is what Momma wanted me to do to earn my room and board, so I acted like I was interested.
“It was back in thirty-five, two years before Momma died. I was ’bout your age, ten years old.”
“Papa Red, you know I’m thirteen.”
“Well, if that’s true I wouldn’t let no one know, ’cause you act like you’re ten. Interrupt me again and I’ll wear you out with this house shoe. Nineteen hundred and thirty-five. Gary, Indiana, where it really gets cold in the winter-time, not this little chill y’all here in Flint whine about.”
I wasn’t looking for a weather report so I told him, “You were saying Iron John was rough on you?”
He said, “If you keep your mouth shut and listen you wouldn’t have to ask what I was saying. Gary, Indiana, nineteen hundred and thirty-five, middle of the winter. At that time in the Depression there were only three black people in all of Chicago that owned a Packard automobile. Your great granddad Iron John was the only one in the entire state of Indiana who did.”
“What, was a Packard expensive, like a Benz?”
“Expensive? Your great granddad’s cost more than three Cadillacs. For thirty years he used to be chauffeur for Mr. Tom Foster, who ran one of the mills in Gary. When old man Foster died, ’stead of leaving Iron John some cash he willed him that Packard. It was in all the papers, too. I got the articles to prove it.
“Main problem with that Packard was it didn’t have no desire at all to start up once it got below zero outside. Iron John was ’bout the only one who could get it running. That’s why when I wasn’t but ten years old he started teaching me ’bout starting it in the cold. It just got to be one more chore I had to be ready to do morning, noon, or night.
“I know this here happened on a Friday night around six o’clock ’cause that was spaghetti night and another one of my chores was to fix the spaghetti with Ma. We already’d mixed the tomato paste and tomato sauce and onions and green peppers and garlic and I was cutting up the hot dogs and dropping them into the pot of the burbling-up sauce.
“Most folks think when you make spaghetti all you do is hack up some weenies and toss them any old which way into the pot. Sure, you’ll end up with something close to spaghetti if you do that but will it be any good? Will someone be so impressed that they’ll stop eating for a second, look up, and say, “My goodness, that boy sure can cook”? I don’t think so.
“Life’s all about learning tricks, and one of the tricks in making the kind of spaghetti that someone might say is righteous good is to cut the hot dogs at a forty-five-degree angle, not straight across. That lets more of the sauce soak up into the meat and gives it that little pop of flavor everyone likes so much when they bite into one. Most people don’t know that when Chinese folks invented spaghetti they used to peel the skin clean off the hot dog. Not that they had anything against the skin. They did it so they could get the most sauce soaked into each piece of hot dog.”
Papa Red looked at me and said, “I know you wants to be a writer, but if you had any sense you’d be taking notes.”
I tapped the side of my head. “I got a real good memory, Papa Red.”
He told me, “I like keeping my cooking as original as I can, so I tried peeling the skin off the hot dogs once, and I ain’t trying to talk no smack about the way Chinese folks cook, but it didn’t work for me. After I peeled the hot dogs I ended up with a pile of meat skins that looked pretty disgusting, and with that reddish brown color, my brother, Herbert, said it looked like me and Iron John, who was a redbone like me, had shed all the skin off our fingers and toes and set them in a nasty, flimsy pile. Besides, taking the skin off took that magic little pop away and everyone complained that they weren’t getting as much meat. But what’s life if you don’t try new things?”
Papa Red was getting off the subject again. I wanted to hear about that Packard and this was turning into the Rachael Ray show. “Papa Red, you were telling me about starting that old car.”
He didn’t miss a beat. “Ma had been at the sink washing dishes and I’d cut half the hot dogs up and was plopping the bits into the spaghetti sauce one at a time so’s not to splash no sauce on the stove. The back door come open and a wind so cold that you’da swore God was mad at the world cut through the heat of the kitchen. Next thing you know, a real angry god, this one the god of five forty-one Jackson Street, aka Iron John, come in from outside.
“He said, ‘What the heck is this? I thought I told you ’bout teaching that boy this woman mess. If he’s gonna be a man you can’t have him sitting in the kitchen cooking. If you too lazy to do it your own self get one of those worthless girls to help you.’
“He grabbed one of the whole hot dogs from the butcher’s paper next to me and said, ‘Get your coat on, boy.’ Then, just to meddle with Ma, he left the back door open as he went back out.
“In my mind I imagined myself taking the knife and sticking it into his hand so hard that he’d be pinned to the kitchen table. Then I’d calmly reach over, take the stolen hot dog out of his hand, and tell him, ‘Touch another one of my hot dogs when I’m cooking, and next time it’ll be your tongue I stab to the table.’
“Ma picked up the dishrag to wipe her hands, closed the door, and told me, ‘You best go on,’ and took the knife to finish cutting the hot dogs.
“I said, ‘You know you got to cut them sidewa—’
“She swatted at me with the dish towel and said,
‘Look, Chef Boyardee, I been doing this since before you was born. Now you best get out there and see what he wants before he gets mad.’
“When I got dressed for the cold and went outside the car wasn’t running and Iron John was sitting inside behind the steering wheel. The battery must be dead.
“I wondered why he wanted me to come with him and opened the big Packard’s back door, but before I could crawl in, Iron John said, ‘Naw, sit up front.’ I opened Momma’s door and slid into the car.
“He told me, ‘It’s ’bout time you learned some man-work. I ain’t ’bout to let no one turn my little men-boys into no little bouquet of flowers.’
“I said, ‘Yes, sir,’ and something in my stomach twisted a little when I wondered what ‘man-work’ was. I hoped it wasn’t gonna be something too terrible.
“He pointed the hot dog he stole like a finger. I had to smile at myself ’cause, just like Herbert had told me, it was right close to the same reddish color as his skin, which I guess means it was the same color as mine, too. He started the man-work lesson by wagging the hot dog and saying, ‘You know this here is the top of the line auto-mobile for the Packard Motor Car Company, right?’
“‘Yes, sir,’ I said.
“‘And how many colored folks in Chicago or the whole state of Indiana owns one of these Packard auto-mobiles?’
“I’d heard it a million times. I said, ‘Two doctors and one numbers man in Chicago and only you in Indiana.’
“‘That’s right. And it’s ’bout time you learned how to start a man’s car up in the winter. Ain’t no reason for me to be dragging my bad leg out in the cold to warm this car up when I got you and your worthless ma sitting ’round doing nothing.’
“This was a lie. He always made every last one of us come out into the car when he warmed it up. He told us a long time ago that starting the car on a cold day made him miserable. He also was always telling us he was a expert on white people and that one of the best sayings they’d ever come up with was ‘misery needs company,’ and when it came to being froze in the winter he couldn’t think of no one to be better company for his misery than Ma and his kids.’”