Jack on the Tracks

by Jack Gantos

  I’ll be carving his initials on a tombstone, I thought. There was no way he was going to finish eating that meat. And there was no way we were going to get all the way to Miami without that fifty dollars for gas. And there was no way I was going to tell him what was on my mind because he would just tell me to settle down and “stop worrying.”

  “Watch my tables,” the waitress hollered to the bus-boy as she delivered my fries. Then she pulled up a tall bar stool and sat down. She had a stopwatch around her neck like a track coach. “You ready?” she asked Dad.

  “Almost,” he replied. “I have to get set up.” Quickly he carved the steak into fifty pieces and when he was finished he unfastened his watch and handed it to me. “I’m going to eat a piece per minute,” he said. “Keep me on schedule, but if I fall behind I’ll have ten minutes to get caught up.”

  “You bet,” I replied, trying to sound positive.

  “Okay,” he announced, and gave the waitress a nod. Instantly she clicked the button on her stopwatch as Dad stabbed a piece of meat and chucked it into his mouth. He chewed savagely, as if killing it, then swallowed.

  “Thirty seconds,” I called out, flashing him the thumbs-up.

  “What happens if I eat this in half the time?” Dad asked, and drove another piece into his mouth.

  “You die,” she said bluntly, staring down at him like a vulture. I was glad she was a vegetarian, otherwise I imagined she would eat him if he keeled over.

  I began to think of the fifty pieces as a map of the states. I figured he had just devoured Maine and was now chewing up New Hampshire. He swallowed and began to chomp down on Massachusetts. He was ahead of schedule by the time he ate his way down the east coast and started at the top of the steak again with Vermont. I kept calling out the minutes and Dad kept chewing. By the time he reached Louisiana he was slowing down, and when he swallowed, he began to gag.

  “Coffee,” he rasped.

  “Bring a pot of coffee, and a plunger,” the waitress called out to another waitress. Then she turned to Dad. “I forgot to tell you that if you barf, the deal is off. Some guys who come in here are professional barfers and they think they can just eat and barf, eat and barf.”

  “I get the picture,” Dad said, recovering. He set down his fork as he waited for the coffee.

  “Take a breather,” I said. “You’re ahead of schedule by ninety seconds.”

  After he drank a cup of coffee he picked up the pace again. He was somewhere around Colorado when he began to cough. His face got bright red and he was choking and pounding himself on the chest and when that didn’t work he started slapping himself on the back.

  Oh my God, I thought. He’s dying. I looked up at the waitress. She was using a butter knife to push her cuticles back into place. I looked around the restaurant for the poster of what to do if a person chokes, but the poster wasn’t in sight and Dad was turning blue and the veins were popping out across his forehead. Any minute I thought he would pass out and fall from the booth and I’d be begging truckers to help, pleading with them and the mean waitress as he died right in front of me from a hunk of the Rocky Mountains plugging up his throat. I would have to call Mom on the phone and tell her Dad died while eating a monster steak, and we’d all cry because Dad was gone and our new beginning was more like the beginning of the end for us. And all because of a free steak.

  “Hey,” Dad said, tapping the end of his fork on the table. “No daydreaming. What time is it?”

  “Sorry,” I yelped. I must not have noticed that he’d gotten the piece swallowed. “Sorry, I was just worried that you’d choke to death.” I looked at the watch but couldn’t tell the time because both my eyes had teared up.

  Dad put New Mexico in his mouth and chewed for a few seconds before he could say, “See what worrying will do to a person—you were paralyzed with fear. Think positive for a change. If you expect the worst, the worst happens.”

  He was right. I always thought negative thoughts. Well, I’d add thinking positive thoughts to my new beginning.

  “You can do it!” I said, cheering him on. “You’re the boss. After all, how smart can that meat be? It’s dead and you’re alive.”

  “Okay,” he said, waving his fork at me. “Don’t get carried away and start sounding like a fluff ball again.”

  “Twenty minutes left,” the waitress announced. “It’s right about this time that most of the big talkers hit the wall. Once a man got so full his belly crushed his kidney and he nearly bled to death.”

  She is so negative, I thought as I cheered Dad on.

  He swallowed Idaho and raced through Utah, Nevada, and Arizona, then back up to Washington State. It was as if he’d gotten a second wind, and soon he had polished off Oregon, California, Alaska, and Hawaii.

  He swallowed the last bite, wiped his mouth, and looked up at the waitress with a big grin on his face. “I’ll have a slice of Key lime pie,” he said smoothly. “And a coffee refill.”

  “I’ll be darned,” she said, and handed his fifty back. “I never had a little man figured to eat this much steak.”

  “Never underestimate the power of positive thinking,” Dad said to her, then turned and winked at me. He took the steak knife and with a flourish carved J.H. & SON into the cutting board.

  On the way out to the car Dad stopped. He took a deep, deep breath and announced to everyone in the parking lot, ‘Jack Henry Senior is ready to take on the world!” Then he pounded his chest like Tarzan.

  ‘Jack Henry Junior is too!” I yelled, and pounded my chest as a few puzzled truckers looked our way. I was ready. Just watching him eat that steak filled me with faith that he could do anything. And if he could, I could too. We climbed back into the truck and slowly took off for Miami.

  “I’ll tell you a little something,” Dad said after a minute. “Getting a fresh start in life has more to do with the way you think than with where you live, or what you eat. If you have an orderly mind, you’ll be a winner no matter where you end up. If your mind is a jumble of junk, you’ll be a loser. It’s as simple as that. You got it?”

  “Got it,” I replied. And I kept it in my mind all the way to Miami. When we got there, his words were still in me, right where I left them on a back shelf of my brain. And when I unpacked my diary I wrote them all down.

  Belling the Cat

  Every time a train rumbled past the back of our wooden house the floorboards shook and the mouse ran from one side of the living room to the other. I was trying to set the mousetrap Mom had bought, but each time I placed the tiny slice of cheddar cheese on the trigger I clumsily set it off and the thick mouse-killing wire snapped back across my fingers. My fingertips were already swollen and covered with purple blood blisters.

  “This is just what I deserve,” I muttered as I tried to set the trap again. “I shouldn’t kill any living creature. I should only eat nuts and berries and be like Noah and save all animals great and small.”

  Just then the doorbell rang. It startled me and I jerked my hand. Whack! went the wire down over my finger. “Arghh,” I moaned.

  “Don’t just sit there hurting yourself,” my older sister, Betsy, hollered from the kitchen. “Get up and answer the door.”

  I thought it might be the Welcome Wagon because we had just moved into the neighborhood and a sign down the street read, WELCOME TO MIAMI, FLORIDA—HOME OF THE DADE COUNTY WELCOME WAGON. So I figured since we didn’t know one person in Miami, it had to be them.

  But when I opened the front door, instead of a smiling lady with a housewarming basket of fruit it was just some squirming kid fighting off a big black-and-white cat that had already fastened itself to his head and clawed him down across the neck and was busy drawing blood from one of his earlobes.

  “Get this thing offa me,” he shouted desperately, and danced around while grabbing at the cat with his eyes closed so it wouldn’t blind him.

  I just stood there. I had never seen the kid before. Or the cat.

  “Help me!” he screeched
as the cat clawed hair from his skull. “The cat’s yours, anyway. My grandmother sent it over.” He jerked his head at me real quick and the cat snapped forward and did an end-over-end flip off his head and onto mine.

  “Arghh!” I yelled as it reached out and raked its claws across my arm.

  “Is that the Welcome Wagon?” Mom called from down the hall.

  “It’s the welcome cat,” the kid hollered back.

  “What?” she asked.

  Just then the cat leapt from my shoulder and in one perfect strike landed on the mouse, which was crossing the room. I could hear a small crunching sound as the cat teeth bit clean through the mouse head.

  “That must of hurt,” I remarked, and screwed up my face. I really hadn’t wanted to kill the mouse.

  “See,” the kid said, touching his ear. “You could use a cat.”

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Tack Smith,” he replied. “I live next door and my grandma lives down the street. Do you have a rag so I can wipe this blood off?”

  “Yeah, come on in,” I said.

  Betsy was sitting at the kitchen table reading the newspaper. She was cutting out the weird “human interest” stories and keeping her own Ripley’s Believe It or Not! scrapbook. Now, every time Betsy saw something weird she would point at it and shout, “Believe it or not!” Most of the time she was pointing at me.

  When she looked up and saw us both bleeding she said in a newscaster’s voice, “Believe it or not! Jack Henry had lived in his new neighborhood less than twenty-four hours before he got into a bloodbath with the neighbors.”

  “Don’t listen to her,” I said to Tack, and handed him a wet dish rag. “She belongs to a lost tribe of older sisters who eat younger brothers.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Tack said as he wiped blood from his neck.

  “Who started it?” Betsy asked.

  “What?” I replied.

  “The fight,” she said. “You’re both covered with blood. Who started it?”

  “The cat did,” Tack said right back.

  “What cat?”

  “The welcome cat,” Tack said. “My grandmother sent it over.”

  Betsy sniffed. “I’m allergic to cats,” she complained. “Take it back.”

  “Too late,” Tack replied. “Grandma gives a cat to everyone who moves into the neighborhood. If you try to give it back, she’ll just give you two more.”

  Just then I heard Mom scream and do a little rat-a-tat tap dance in the living room. “Oh my gosh,” she shouted. “I stepped on a dead mouse.”

  “Believe it or not!” Betsy said in a spooky voice and pointed at me. “An animal killer is loose in the neighborhood.”

  “The cat killed the mouse,” I protested. “It wasn’t me. I love animals. Even vermin.”

  Betsy looked me right in the eyes. “You sound guilty already,” she said.

  Then she sneezed, and gave me an evil older-sister look that could kill.

  Mom named the new cat Miss Kitty. I called her Killer Kitty. She was a bloodthirsty bully who made cat chow out of every creature smaller than she was: mice, birds, frogs, lizards, butterflies. But she didn’t eat the roaches. That was too bad, because we had a lot of roaches and Mom made it my job to kill them—although when I captured any big ones I wrote their names with red nail polish down their backs and kept them alive in a big gallon jar in the back of my closet.

  One night, not long after we got Miss Kitty, I was lying in bed reading a book of Aesop’s fables. Dad had given me the book because it had been his as a kid. “This book belongs in the Life Lessons Hall of Fame,” he said. “My dad gave it to me and now I’m giving it to you. It’s a classic, good food for the mind.” Each fable ended with a special lesson, like “Do not count your chickens before they are hatched.” Or “Slow and steady wins the race.” Or “Familiarity breeds contempt.” I was beginning to see where Dad got some of his lecture ideas.

  Each time I turned a page in the book I winced. Miss Kitty had scratched up my fingers so badly they were sore and covered with bloody Band-Aids. But I didn’t dare wiggle when I winced because Miss Kitty was asleep across my feet, and the last time I even twitched she clawed me to the bone on one of my toes.

  Suddenly, I forgot about the pain. I was reading a fable about how some mice wanted to put a bell around the neck of a cat that had been eating them. They all agreed that belling the cat would be a brilliant idea, only nobody wanted to be the mouse to do it. The lesson of the story was, “Easier said than done.”

  Well, I’m no mouse, I said to myself, I’m a man. I can do it. I peeked up over the edge of the book. Miss Kitty was purring away with a smile on her face, probably dreaming of mouse pizza. I remembered seeing an old bell in the toolshed out back. I wondered how I might get the bell around her neck. I figured I’d need a suit of armor, or a robot, or maybe there was a way I could hypnotize her. I couldn’t think of a plan where she wouldn’t slash me to death first, so I turned the light off. I’ll sleep on it, I said to myself, and in the morning I’ll come up with something brilliant.

  I had a good night’s sleep and the next morning my brain was working. I went out to the toolshed on the back of the property and found the dented-up copper bell. It was about as big as my fist and just what I needed. It looked like a cowbell but I thought it was pretty odd that there would be cowbells in Florida.

  When I rang it in Betsy’s ear, she had the answer.

  “Believe it or not, Florida is the number-two cattle-raising state in the nation,” she said.

  “I didn’t know that,” I said.

  “What you do know,” she said, “could fit on the head of a pin.”

  Betsy always made me feel like a moron, but I knew Dad was going to help me change all that. He was helping me organize my mind into a well-oiled machine. I stomped out of the house, and all the way down to the 7-Eleven I kept saying to myself, My plan is brilliant, my plan is dazzling. I was thinking positive, and I wasn’t nervous. I bought a flea collar and marched home.

  Miss Kitty was spread out across the long hallway rug. She had caught a mockingbird and was busy pulling off its beak. Very quietly, I tiptoed up to the edge of the rug and began to roll it up, and before she knew what happened I had her rolled up with her yowling head sticking out one end and her tail out the other. I sat down on the rolled-up rug and quickly fastened the collar with the big bell around her neck as she hissed at me. “Don’t be mad,” I said. “I’m just trying to save the animals. Noah probably had to do this with all the cats on the ark. Besides, it will do you good to become a vegetarian like me.” Once I had the buckle set I hopped up, unrolled the rug, and struck a karate pose in case she sprang at me. But she didn’t. The heavy old bell was like a ball and chain around her neck and she dragged it unhappily across the living room.

  Betsy was blowing her nose when Miss Kitty clanked past her feet toward the back door.

  “That’s cruel,” she said, pointing her damp tissue at me.

  “No worse than her killing all the birds and mice and everything else in the neighborhood,” I replied.

  “She won’t even be able to get out of the way of a car if she’s crossing the street,” Betsy said. “Think about it. Use your head.”

  “I just did,” I said proudly.

  “Well, you didn’t use enough of it,” she replied. “Mark my words. That bell is going to be the end for that cat.” She sneezed again.

  I cleaned up what was left of the bird and went into my room. I opened my diary and wrote, “Solved that problem. Miss Kitty will never sneak up on another animal again. I guarantee it.” I figured I’d win the Nobel peace prize for keeping a world war from breaking out between the cats and the rest of the animal kingdom. I taped a feather from the bird onto the page and banged the book closed.

  The bell was working. Miss Kitty still wanted to sneak up on birds and mice and lizards but she couldn’t catch them. As she lunged forward, the bell clanked and all her victims ran away. When
I checked up on her she was slumped over in the middle of the back yard looking depressed after just missing a bloated toad that disappeared in a patch of weeds.

  “Don’t look so glum,” I said to her. “You simply have to change your diet.” I went into the house and opened a can of organic lentil-and-lima-bean cat food I had bought from the sale bin at the pet store. I had to hold my nose when I spooned it into a bowl because it smelled like old garbage.

  “You’ll love this,” I sang as I set the bowl down before her. She wrinkled up her nose, and began to crawl and clank away like an escaped prisoner.

  “I’m sorry,” I called out, “but this is for your own good.” She turned and glowered at me.

  Just then Tack Smith came around the side of the house. “How’s the killer cat?” he asked.

  “She’s settled down a bit,” I replied.

  Tack opened a paper bag and dumped out about twenty small tubes of toothpaste. “Don’t tell anyone,” he said slyly, “but these are samples that the mailman left in everyone’s mailbox and I took them.”

  “Why?” I asked. I wondered if he was so poor he had to steal toothpaste.

  Tack grinned and pointed to the train tracks. “Let’s put them on the track,” he said, “and when the next train comes by we’ll see what happens.”

  I looked back at the house. Mom would wring my neck if she caught me, but I knew she was busy getting the house in order and sewing new curtains.

  “Okay,” I said to Tack. “Let’s go before the next train comes by.”

  We ran across the back yard and across a dirt road, up over a rusty wire fence that had a sign which read NO TRESPASSING, then climbed the gravel bed up to the train tracks. In one direction the tracks disappeared around a bend. In the other they ran straight as far as I could see. We were still only about fifty yards from my house, and I thought if Mom began to measure the back windows she would see me and it would be better to throw myself in front of the train than to have her send me to my room so that Dad could “teach me a lesson” when he came home from work.