Jack on the Tracks

by Jack Gantos

  “Well,” she said, bewildered. “That certainly is tasteful.” She looked over at the girls and rolled her eyes. “Boys,” she groaned. “Their creativity is without limits.”

  I smiled weakly. At least she thought wearing new-car smell was creative.

  Mrs. Pierre leaned forward and smelled the next kid. But then she said her nose was clogged up and she quit without naming the perfume.

  As I shuffled toward my desk, a couple guys gave me the thumbs-up, which made me feel better. But I knew the teacher thought I was still an uncivilized boy made of snakes and snails.

  After everyone had settled down, Mrs. Pierre stood on the X at the front of the class and tapped the side of her nose with one finger. “See,” she said. “The sense of smell can be trained. By the end of the year you will be able to tell, even in the dark, just who is who in this room … especially if they smell like a car.”

  Then she blew her nose with so much force it made the sound of heavy furniture being dragged across a rough floor. Carefully she unfolded the tissue and examined what she had expelled. She had a look on her face of a psychic examining tea leaves. It was as though she was reading a message about her future. It must have been good because she smiled broadly before closing the tissue and slipping it into her pocket.

  That night I pulled out my journal and had a sudden insight. I knew I was growing older because I could weigh both Mrs. Pierre’s good and bad qualities and come up with a sense of what I liked or disliked about her. When I was younger I could only pick out one thing about a person and get stuck on that. If a person was funny, I’d like them no matter if they were serial killers, and if a person had the annoying habit of chewing gum like a cow then I didn’t care for them even though they might be a saint. So even though Mrs. Pierre didn’t love my cologne, I still liked her idea about educating the senses.

  We were next assigned to bring something to represent our sense of sound. I wanted to please Mrs. Pierre. I didn’t want her to think I was a complete moron, so I gave the assignment some careful thought. We had a record with French children’s songs and so I listened to it over and over and practiced singing.

  The next day Mrs. Pierre called on me first. I knew she would because I had been so weird with my sense of smell. But I was ready for her.

  I stood up and sang, “Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques, Dormez-vous, dormez-vous …” And I finished the whole song in French.

  Mrs. Pierre was even more wide-eyed than usual. “Bravo! Bravo!” she shouted, and began to clap. “Please,” she beckoned me, “step to the front of the class and take a bow.”

  I did. I bent over and peeked out at the girls’ side. They were smiling and clapping. Then I looked over at the boys’ side. They were clapping as if a gun was held to their heads. Suddenly, I had another insight. Mrs. Pierre was right. Girls are nice and supportive and boys always try to make everyone feel like a jerk. I had always figured that kids who did everything the teacher asked were just brownnosers trying to get a better grade. Now, it seemed that they were not brownnosers, they were smart kids who were trying really hard to learn what the teacher was getting at.

  When I came home from school I found Betsy in the kitchen, working on the crossword puzzle.

  “Did you ever have an insight?” I asked Betsy.

  She looked up at me and frowned. “Give me an example,” she said.

  “Like I used to think brownnosers were jerks but now I understand where they are coming from and I want to be one of them.”

  “Interesting,” she mused. “I think I’m having an insight right now.”

  “Really?” I said. “That is so cool. What are you thinking?”

  “That you have bugged me in the past. That you are bugging me now. And you will continue—in your unrelenting way—to bug me for the rest of my life,” she said.

  “That’s too obvious to be an insight,” I said, catching on that she was making fun of me. “You have to try harder.”

  “How’s this,” she said, and held her temples and squinted. “In about thirty seconds you’ll either be out of my sight or dead.”

  “Okay, okay,” I moaned. “I just thought you’d like to know that I’m getting smarter.”

  “I hate to be the one to inform you,” she said. “But you must be the last person on the planet to figure out that if you do what the teacher assigns, and put some effort into the job, you will learn something.”

  “Better late than never,” I sang out.

  “What’s a five-letter word for beat it?” she asked.

  “S-c-r-a-m,” I spelled out as I dashed down the hall.

  The rest of the week I did exactly what Mrs. Pierre expected. For the sense of taste I brought in french fries but I called them pommes frites. She loved that. And for the sense of sight I brought in a library book on the French painter Monet. She thought I was wonderful and went on and on about what a genius Monet was and how I had a very refined eye for “art appreciation.” And for the sense of touch I brought in Betsy’s fake ponytail because it was in the shape of a French twist. Mrs. Pierre loved it. She even tried it on for the class.

  At the end of the fifth day, after everyone had finished their show-and-tell for the sense of touch, Mrs. Pierre took her place on the X and gave us the last assignment.

  “Now that we have mastered the senses, I want you to write a story about something memorable. And, I want you to use all of your senses when writing the story, so when I read it I can smell, feel, taste, hear, and touch what you are talking about.”

  Okay, I thought to myself. This is the time for me to really show her what I can do.

  It was a Friday night but I was ready to get to work. I had given some thought to the story I had wanted to write and was eager to get started. It was about something incredible that had happened to me the week before and it involved all my senses. I went into my room, pulled out my diary, and got busy.

  THE UGLY THING

  by Jack Henry

  My friend Tack Smith called me up on the telephone. “Come over to my house,” he said all out of breath (SOUND). “I just got back from the doctor’s and have something awesome for you to see (SIGHT).”

  “Okay,” I said, even though I really didn’t want to. Something weird had recently happened at his house. His mom and dad had split up. But instead of going their separate ways they only walked across the street. Tack’s dad had traded wives with the man, Mr. Butters, who lived directly across the road. Or you could say that Tack’s mom and Mrs. Butters had traded husbands. Either way, it was very weird at his house, and even though Tack hadn’t talked about it I knew it had to be strange for him. The only thing he had said was that he woke up in his own bed and showered and dressed then carried his dirty clothes across the street where his real mom fed him breakfast.

  So, when he asked me to come over I thought it was my duty as a friend. Everyone thought that he had been getting sick and skinny because he was depressed from the parent-swap deal, but it turns out that he had a tapeworm in his belly. I figured he had saved it and wanted me to see it.

  I had put on my yellow plastic raincoat in case the visit got messy, but Mom stopped me and made me put on something decent. She said that the new mom was trash and she didn’t want me looking like trash too. Mom called her a “gold digger” because since she moved in with Tack’s dad she made him buy her a new Cadillac, install central air-conditioning, and lay multicolored shag wall-to-wall carpet in the house. So I left my door on my way to Tack’s to see his tapeworm as if I were dressed for church. I walked the twenty-five feet to his front door and took a deep breath and knocked. Just in case the new mom was spying on me through the peephole I hummed a church hymn and twiddled my thumbs in a circle like a well-mannered choirboy. But Tack was waiting for me. He whipped the door open. “You look like a Bible salesman,” he said. “Come down to my bedroom and feast your eyes on the Eighth Wonder of the World.”

  As we darted through the living room his new mom looked up from her HOUSE B
EAUTIFUL magazine and gave me a tight-lipped glare as though she had been waiting forever in a doctor’s office. It seemed she was in a lot of pain so I just waved and kept walking. Tack’s room was the same as it ever was—a total blowout wreck that was so dirty my mom would have had a heart attack. I loved it. Books were piled up as high as the curtain rods. Every animal cage he ever had was still there, including a few of the animals that were dried out like tiny mummies. A mobile of wired-together animal bones clattered in a circle overhead as they spun from the blade of a ceiling fan.

  There was a mayonnaise jar sitting on his bed. Inside was something that looked like a giant rubber band. I couldn’t make out a head or tail. “Awesome,” I remarked, pointing at it.

  “Seven feet long,” he said, raising his shirt and rubbing his sunken belly.

  “How’d you get it?” I asked, wanting to avoid the same fate.

  “Raw hamburger meat,” he explained. “I used to eat bits and pieces of it out of the bowl as my real mom mixed it up.”

  I thought Tack’s real mom might have sent his new mom some raw hamburger and now she had a tapeworm which is why she looked so grumpy.

  Tack began to unscrew the jar. “Let’s measure it,” he said. “I want to be sure. Maybe it is a world record and I can be famous.” He fished the end of the worm out with two fingers and began to gently unravel a piece of it across the bedsheet. It smelled like pickle juice (SMELL).

  I spotted a ruler on his desk. I got it and began to hold it against the white worm. “How’d you know it was in you?” I asked.

  “Stool sample,” he replied. “The doctor gave me something that looked like a Tupperware container and I had to poop in it and take it to a lab. They did some tests and the doctor called and told my mom.”

  “How’d they get it out?” I asked, imagining they might have had to use a long pair of tweezers.

  “Poison,” he said and made a yucky face. “The taste almost killed me.”

  “Then what?” I asked.

  “It died in my belly,” he said, “and I pooped it out.”

  “Gross,” I shrieked, and felt my butt pucker up (TOUCH). “What did it feel like coming out?”

  “The only thing I could think of at the time,” he said, “is once I was picking my nose and I got the hard, crusty part of a booger between my fingers and slowly began to pull it out. And as I did so I could feel something tickling me way up behind the corner of my eye. And as I pulled I felt the tail of the booger slide all the way down the inside of my nose till I had it out. It was all jelly white like a squid tentacle and about four inches long. My biggest booger ever. And that is what the worm felt like, a cold tickle.”

  I could hardly believe what he had just said. I stood there looking at his face, and then at the worm, and back at his face again.

  “Wow,” I said. I just didn’t know what else to say. It was all so weird. Then finally I said, “What are you going to do with it?”

  “Eat it,” he replied ghoulishly. “Give it a taste of its own medicine.”

  He took a knife and fork out of his desk drawer and sliced off an inch.

  “Are you joking?” I asked, wide-eyed.

  “No,” he said. “I asked you over so you’d be a witness when I told everyone at school.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m watching.”

  He reached into his desk and pulled out a little paper packet of salt. He poured some on, then quickly sucked the piece of worm off the fork and swallowed (TASTE). “Gave him a taste of his own medicine,” he remarked.

  “That is sick,” I said. “Sick, sick, sick.”

  “Excellent,” he said, and grinned. “Just remember, I’m the number-one sicko in this neighborhood.” He held up his pointer finger like a champion. “Number one and don’t you forget it.”

  Suddenly I had an insight. I figured Tack was fooling me. “That wasn’t a worm,” I said. “That was really spaghetti!”

  He smiled. “Good guess, Henry. We have a new pasta machine that can make a spaghetti strand from here to the moon.” He opened another drawer and pulled out a baby-food jar. “This is the real worm,” he said, frowning. “Only about a foot long. But saying it was seven feet and all made for a better story.”

  “Well, a tapeworm is pretty gross no matter how big.”

  “I wanted the world record,” he said. “I was going for twenty feet.”

  “Eat some more raw meat and give it a shot,” I said.

  “Not yet,” he said. “First I’ll have to fatten up, or there will be nothing left of me but a big, drippy worm.”

  THE END

  The next day I walked up to Mrs. Pierre’s desk first thing and turned in the story. “I really worked hard on this one,” I said. “I hope you like it.”

  “I’m sure I will,” she chirped. “You have such good taste.”

  “You smell very nice today,” I said. “Is your perfume French?”

  “It is. Very perceptive of you,” she replied.

  “You have a little lipstick on your teeth,” I whispered, trying to be discreet.

  She slipped her tongue across her teeth and wiped them clean. I was so eager to be polite I said, “You’re welcome,” before she even had time to say thank you.

  When I turned around there was some guy staring at me. I knew the look. It meant, I can’t stand your guts, you low-life teacher’s pet. I used to stare at brownnosing kids exactly the same way. But that was before I changed my tune and started working with my teacher instead of against her.

  All day I kept imagining Mrs. Pierre reading my story and laughing, then standing in front of the class and reading it out loud as an example of “the fruit of the senses.” I even imagined that she would allow me to sit on the girls’ side because I had proven that I was a boy not made of snakes and snails and puppy dogs’ tails.

  When it was time for afternoon recess Mrs. Pierre kept me behind. I smiled up at her and got ready to be praised.

  “I read your story,” she said coldly. “And I was appalled. Shocked. Mortified! It is in the worst taste possible.”

  I was shocked too. “What’s wrong with it?” I asked.

  “It is everything—the beginning, middle, and end. Simply, it is bad manners to write such a story. You should be ashamed.”

  She thrust it back toward me as if it were a pair of smelly socks.

  “I’m going to be working late tonight,” she said. “I would very much like to discuss your inappropriate work with your parents.”

  “I’m not sure I can get them to come,” I said, worried.

  “Well, see what you can do,” she pressed. “Otherwise I will have no choice but to grade your story harshly.”

  “Okay,” I said. And because I was still trying to please her I added “goodbye” in French.

  She didn’t answer.

  We were sitting at the dining-room table. My plate was piled high with fish sticks floating in a puddle of creamed corn. I was nervous because I knew I was going to have to ask Mom or Dad to meet with Mrs. Pierre.

  “You haven’t touched your food,” Mom observed. “Looks like you lost your best friend.” She must have seen the stunned expression on my face.

  “My teacher hated my story,” I said quietly.

  “Why, honey?” Mom asked.

  “She said it was in bad taste,” I replied.

  “Bad taste?” Betsy asked, incredulous. “You get graded for bad taste? I’d love to have your teacher. I bet she failed you for something because you have the worst taste of anyone I know.”

  “Well, what did you write about?” Mom asked.

  “Tack’s tapeworm,” I said, and shrugged. “No big deal.”

  “Gross!” said Pete.

  “Hey, tapeworms are not in bad taste,” Dad said. “I could tell you some stories that are in really bad taste.”

  “Let’s not,” Mom said, giving him the evil eye.

  “The point is,” Dad said, “there are good stories and lousy stories. Taste has nothing to
do with it.”

  “Writing about gross things shows bad judgment,” Mom continued with me, ignoring Dad. “There is no reason you have to discuss this issue in class when there are so many uplifting stories to tell. Why not write about how your sister won that beauty contest in North Carolina.”

  “That would just be had writing,” I groaned. Pete laughed.

  “No kidding,” said Betsy. “You couldn’t possibly capture my beauty with the way you butcher the English language.”

  “She wants a parent meeting tonight to discuss it,” I said, finally getting to the point.

  “I just got home from work,” Mom said. “Can’t Mrs. Pierre do it some other time?”

  “I’ll take you,” Dad said. “I have to swing by the Elks Club anyway, so we can drop by the school first.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  On the way over in the car Dad quietly worked a toothpick around between his teeth.

  “Hey, Dad, did you ever have an insight about life?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he replied. “I had one. And that was all I needed. When I was about your age I figured out that I could either do and say the things I thought of. Or I’d end up doing and saying the things other people thought of for me. It was that simple.”

  I knew just what he was talking about. And suddenly I had an insight. Dad said what he said because he knew just what I was going through and he was coming to the rescue. I reached over and gave him a tap on the shoulder.

  Dad smiled. “You’re a chip off the old block,” he said. “Now don’t worry about tonight. You just let me do the talking and watch how a pro handles this situation.”

  When we came marching through the classroom door Mrs. Pierre had just finished putting on a fresh coat of lipstick and was slipping the tube back into her purse.

  “Nice to meet you,” Dad said, and pointed directly at her mouth. “You got some lipstick on your teeth.” Then, before she could say a word, he got right down to business. “Now what is the problem with Jack’s story?”

  Mrs. Pierre hesitated. I could tell she felt awkward talking about me in front of my face.