Jack on the Tracks

by Jack Gantos

  Tack gave me half the toothpaste tubes. “Unscrew the tops,” he said, “and set each tube on the tracks with the hole facing us.”

  “What for?” I asked.

  “We’re going to play like we are standing in front of a firing squad,” he said, “like captured spies. Just before the train hits the tubes I’ll holler, ‘Ready, aim, fire!’ And when the toothpaste hits us we’re dead.”

  “Cool,” I said, and began to lay out my toothpaste tubes, positioning them so they’d blast us real good. Tack finished laying his out, then leaned over and placed his ear against the iron rail like a TV Indian.

  “I can hear one coming,” he said.

  I touched the rail and felt it vibrate, and then I looked up and down the tracks until I could see a big yellow engine round the bend.

  “Get ready,” Tack yelled. He pulled out a pack of chocolate cigarettes and gave me one. I stuck it in the corner of my mouth. Then we took our positions side by side and stood as if tied to poles with our hands behind our backs. We were very brave with our chins thrust forward. We didn’t wear blindfolds.

  The train was about fifty yards away when Tack announced in a fake deep voice, “Do you traitors have any last words?” Just then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Miss Kitty dragging herself up over the first rail.

  “Stop!” I yelled, and lunged at the cat. Tack turned to see what I was doing and yanked me to the ground just as the train came roaring by. The engine hit the toothpaste tubes and we were both blasted. Tack rolled off me, clutching his heart. I jumped up and tried to find Miss Kitty. She wasn’t on my side of the tracks and I had to wait until the train passed to see if she made it all the way across before the huge wheels got her.

  I kept thinking, If she lives I promise to remove the bell. I’ll let her eat any warm-blooded creature of her choice. I’ll even let her chew on me. Please, please, please, I begged, let her live.

  But once the train had passed, I couldn’t find her. I searched along the tracks. I poked through the weeds. I kicked over a few big rocks. And then I found the copper cowbell, flattened out like a giant penny that had been set on the tracks. Attached to the bell was the collar, sliced clean through, with a little neck patch of bloody fur caught in the buckle.

  “Oh my God,” I shouted, and danced nervously around. “What happened to the cat?” I poked the piece of fur with the tip of my shoe. Maybe the wheel of the train had cut the collar clean off and the cat had run away. I told Tack what I was thinking.

  “No chance,” he replied as he took a fake puff off his chocolate cigarette. “That cat did not escape.”

  “Well, then, where did it go?”

  “How do you think those train wheels stay greased?” he replied, then answered his own question. “Track kill.”

  I moaned, and while I was frantically looking around, Betsy had come out to see what we were up to.

  “Why are you covered with toothpaste?” she asked.

  “Firing squad,” Tack said matter-of-factly, as if that would explain why we looked like toothpaste testers at the end of a long workday.

  Just then Betsy spotted the flattened bell. “Did you put the cat on the tracks?” she asked, horrified.

  “No,” I said. “I love animals. I’d never do a thing like that.”

  “But you put the bell on the cat,” she said. “I told you it was going to come to this.”

  “We don’t know if it’s dead,” I cried out. “We only have the bell and collar and fur patch. It might have lived and run off.”

  “Believe it or not!” Betsy shouted, and looked up at the sky as if she were having a private conversation with God. ‘Jack Henry killed the cat and is now trying to play innocent.”

  Well, if she was talking to God, I thought, He would know I was innocent. Maybe I was dumb, or maybe I had done something stupid, but I wasn’t cruel.

  I picked up the bell, the collar, and the little patch of bloody neck fur. “I’m sorry, Miss Kitty,” I said, and petted the dirty fur with my fingertip. Then my eyes started welling up and I had to get out of there.

  Later, in the back yard, I buried the piece of fur with the spot of blood on it. I put up a cross of twigs, and with a rusty nail scratched “Miss Kitty” on a stone which I pressed into the ground. “I’ll never have another cat again,” I whispered into the soft dirt. Then I turned and trudged across the back lawn. Pete followed. I had asked him to keep me company at the burial because I knew I was going to first feel sad, then guilty. After I took a few steps I said, “It should have been me who got hit by the train.”

  “That’s what Betsy said,” Pete replied.

  “Don’t you have a thought of your own?” I growled. After the guilt came anger.

  “Why should I?” he said. “Betsy is smarter than all of us put together.”

  “I can’t believe you listen to her propaganda,” I said. “Betsy is no smarter than my little finger.”

  “She said you ate the cat,” Pete declared.

  I was stunned. “Ate it!” I screeched.

  “She said the next war is going to be fought over food and that people have to be prepared to eat their pets.”

  “Where did she hear that?” I asked.

  “Miss Fry,” he replied. She was our crazy survivalist next-door neighbor who was gleefully preparing for the end of the world.

  “Well, I didn’t eat the cat,” I said.

  “Did it taste like chicken? Because if it does I’ll have a bite.”

  “Are you listening to me?” I asked. “I didn’t eat the cat.”

  “Betsy said you lie,” he said. “So how do I know what you did?”

  He was no help at making me feel better. Poor Miss Kitty, I thought. I kept wondering what had happened to the rest of her. It couldn’t have been very pretty. And even though I wanted to believe that she had escaped and run off into the bushes to lead a long and happy life, I honestly didn’t believe it. The only thing I knew for sure was that I didn’t eat her.

  I trudged through the back door and into the kitchen.

  “Well look what the cat dragged in,” Betsy sang tauntingly.

  I groaned and covered my heart with my hand. “Can’t you see I’m in emotional pain?” I said to her.

  “What’s emotional pain compared to being flattened by a train? Besides,” she added, “you should cheer up. Just in case you are arrested for caticide, it says in the newspaper that when criminals in prison are allowed to keep cats in their cells they become nicer, less violent people.”

  “Well, what happens to the cats?” I asked. “Do they become meaner and more savage?”

  “Believe it or not!” Betsy shouted up at the ceiling. ‘Jack has asked a good question.”

  Just then there was a knock at the door.

  “Make yourself useful,” Betsy snarled, and jerked her thumb toward the living room.

  I opened the door. It was Tack Smith again. He was all cleaned up and smiling nicely, and he had another cat. Only this one wasn’t scratching him up, it was just sitting calmly at his feet. It was wearing a thin collar, and Tack reached forward and offered me the leather leash handle. Oh no, I thought, not this again, and I stepped back.

  “Brought you a replacement cat,” he said cheerfully. “Grandma picked it out herself.”

  “Did you tell her what happened to the first one?” I asked, ready to slam the door on him and hide.

  “Didn’t have the guts,” he replied. “Grandma just had a pacemaker put in. It’s one thing to lose a cat, but another to lose your grandmother.”

  “Well, no dice on the cat,” I said. “I’ve had it.”

  ‘Just hold your horses,” he said. “I know you are going through cat mourning, but you have to calm down. This cat is smarter than a dog.” He turned to the cat and commanded, “Roll over!”

  The cat stretched out and rolled over.

  “Bark!” he ordered.

  To my surprise, the cat began to spit out a strange little bark.

  Ta
ck unhooked the leash. “Fetch,” he hollered, throwing a stick across the yard. The cat ran after it and brought it back and dropped it at his feet, then obediently waited for him to throw it again.

  “See,” Tack said. “You’ll love this cat. It’s like a dog without being a dog.”

  I was beginning to think I could open my heart one more time and love this cat.

  Just when I stooped down to pet it Betsy called out, “Does that cat know you killed the last one?”

  “What it doesn’t know won’t hurt it,” I replied.

  “Why don’t you take it out to the tracks and ask it to play dead?” she continued.

  “I never meant to hurt that cat,” I replied, defending myself.

  “Hey,” Betsy said, as she returned to her crossword puzzle. “What’s a four-letter word for cat killer?”

  I couldn’t think of one.

  "J-a-c-k,” she spelled out.

  “I’ll get you,” I said. “Cross my heart, I’ll get you back.”

  “Sorry to burst your bubble, feline felon,” Betsy said. “You couldn’t get me back in ten lifetimes.”

  I had an awful feeling she was right. But it was okay. Because now I had the best cat in the world. I let out a sharp whistle. “Come on, Miss Kitty the Second,” I commanded, and my dog-cat dutifully followed me up the hall to my room.

  The Sixth Sense

  On the first day of class, our fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Pierre, met each one of us at the door. “Bonjour,” she said enthusiastically, and shook each of our hands as we entered the classroom. “I look forward to a bea-u-ti-ful year with you. Bonjour. We are at the beginning of a new adventure. Bonjour.” It didn’t take me long to figure out she was head-over-heels in love with everything French.

  It was already hot at eight in the morning and her shiny red lipstick had begun to spread into the tiny cracks above and below her lips. It gave them a furry look, and each time she sang “Bonjour,” they moved like two caterpillars.

  “Bonjour,” I said in return to her greeting. She smiled at me and this made me decide immediately that I liked her, and so I planned to sit as close to her desk as possible.

  But she didn’t allow us to choose our own seats, and instead made us gather in the front of the room. “Clap, clap,” she said as she clapped her hands to get our attention. “I’ve arranged the seating chart according to gender. I find it best when boys and girls don’t mix and distract one another. Boys are snakes and snails and puppy dogs’ tails and need to fight among themselves. And girls are sugar and spice and everything nice and need their own milieu.”

  She had me confused. Did she really mean that all boys were disgusting and all girls were charming? Even my sister didn’t believe that. The last time someone gave Betsy pink-colored clothes she cut them into strips and we used them for kite tails.

  Down the middle of the room Mrs. Pierre had positioned tall bookshelves filled with books. I guessed that the boys’ and girls’ sides wouldn’t be able to see each other except through the peeking spaces between the top of the books on one shelf and the bottom of the next shelf.

  She began to assign all the girls to desks on the right side of the room and all the boys to the left. I ended up in a seat close to the back and next to the bookshelves. When she finished, she stood on an X-mark I had seen taped to the floor. The X was directly in line with the end of the bookshelves and just in front of the blackboard. In that one perfect spot all the boys could clearly see her, and so could all the girls. When she stood on the X and looked at the entire class her left eye was pulled way over toward the girls and her right eye was pulled way over toward the boys. It gave her the look of a hammerhead shark. Suddenly the red lipstick looked like the blood of her victims and I began to change my mind about liking her. I put her on “wait and see” status, which is what my mom does with people who she isn’t sure of right away.

  While I was thinking about the mysterious differences between boys and girls, Mrs. Pierre turned her back toward us and faced the blackboard. Above the alphabet letters on top of the board she had mounted a rearview mirror from a car so she could keep her eyes on us even as she wrote, and when she did write it was amazing. She put a piece of chalk in each hand and stretched them out as far as she could. Then she started writing with both hands at the same time. Her left hand wrote normally from the beginning of the sentence to the right. Her right hand was incredible. She started with the period of the sentence, and then with the last letter of the last word, and continued to write completely backward from right to left. She did this with ease, and she did it all in cursive, and she finished the sentence exactly in the middle where her two hands met and seamlessly completed the final word.

  I felt my lips move in awe as I read, “The education of the senses is the foundation of civilization.”

  Writing a sentence from both ends and finishing it in the middle was an amazing skill. I may have hated the way the room was organized, and I hated being thought of as nasty just because I was a boy, but her handwriting made me like her again.

  “Does anyone know what this means?” she asked as each of her protruding, independent eyes scanned us.

  She pointed to someone on the girls’ side. “Stand up, please.”

  “It means, Mrs. Pierre,” the girl said with a fake French accent, “that without an understanding of our senses there would be no civilization.”

  “Oui! Oui! Oui!” Mrs. Pierre cried out, as if she were the little piggy toe that cried all the way home. She paused and composed herself by smoothing the wrinkles out of her skirt with the palms of her hands. “Without knowing who you are, you will never know why you do what you do. So for the next five days of school we will work on educating the five senses. Smell, hearing, touch, taste, and sight. The beauty of educating all five senses is that you get the sixth for free. Now who can tell me what the sixth sense is?” she asked. Once again her ball-bearing eyes worked independently of each other as she scanned the class.

  “A spooky feeling like when a ghost enters a room?” some guy said.

  “Déjà vu?” said a girl I couldn’t see.

  “You can sense danger?” another guy guessed.

  Mrs. Pierre smiled. “No, no, no,” she said. “You are trying too hard. Here is one of nature’s greatest gifts. Once you educate the five senses you develop the most important sense of all, the sense of good taste.”

  I could hear a few confused kids smacking their lips.

  “I don’t mean good taste as with your tongue. I mean good taste as in good manners, how to dress, how to think, how to live, how to be sophisticated and civilized”

  I loved getting things for free, and it sounded like a great secret that after you got the five senses under control the sense of good taste came as a bonus. Sure, I thought, she’s different, but no other teacher I ever had cared enough to really want to educate us about ourselves.

  “And then, students,” she said, and clapped her hands together as if they were a pair of cymbals, “we will apply our sharpened senses to create only what comes from refined civilizations—great literature. For, as the French say, ‘Literature is the fruit of the senses.’”

  I perked up when she said she wanted us to write. I was hoping to get a teacher who allowed us to keep journals. But then I slumped back down into my seat when she announced, “So, tonight your homework is to work on the sense of smell. Tomorrow, arrive wearing a perfume or cologne that smells heavenly.” When she said heavenly her nose flared, her eyelids fluttered, and her knees buckled. I thought she was going to faint. But she pulled out of it and before long we were learning how to name our senses in French.

  After school I opened my journal and leafed through. It was the kind that had a wise saying printed on the top of each page, and I was looking for something to inspire me. A lesson is something someone teaches you, one read. An insight is something you teach yourself. I couldn’t think of an insight I had discovered on my own. It seemed to me that everything I knew was taught to me
by someone else. I figured it was about time I grew up and figured some stuff out on my own. Suddenly, I remembered my sense-of-smell assignment, so I put my journal down and got moving.

  The next morning I was coming out of the bathroom when Betsy passed me in the hall.

  “What is that smell?” she hooted.

  “What smell?” I replied innocently.

  She leaned forward and sniffed my neck and ears and shirt, then she paused. “I’ve got it,” she exclaimed. “It’s new-car smell!”

  “It’s just some cologne I’m wearing for show-and-tell,” I said blandly.

  “Where did you get it?”

  “The car-parts store,” I said. “New-car smell is one of my favorite smells and I can get it in a spray can.”

  “You’re nuts,” she said. “I love anchovies but I don’t rub them all over myself.”

  “Well, you should,” I snapped back. “It might help improve your social life.”

  “Your teacher is going to adore you,” Betsy mumbled acidly as she marched into the bathroom and slammed the door.

  At school Mrs. Pierre had us line up at the door. She sniffed the first girl in line. “White Shoulders,” she announced, naming the perfume. “Am I correct?”

  “Yes,” the girl replied, amazed as if her deepest secret had been revealed.

  Then Mrs. Pierre sniffed us one after another, showing off her “olfactory intelligence,” as she called it.

  “Old Spice. Shalimar. Canoe. Joy. English Leather,” she rattled off. “Chanel No. 5, good choice,” she said, patting a girl on her head. “Shows excellent French taste.” Then she smelled me. Her nose got closer and closer until the tip of it was pressed down inside my shirt collar. Finally she pulled back and said, “I give up. What is that?”

  “New-car smell,” I said proudly, and reached into my book bag and removed the spray can.