by Jack Gantos
“Sure,” I said.
“I’m going to ask about the baby, then work the ER for some free advice about my face,” he mumbled, and drifted off.
I went to the nurses’ station and used their phone. I called Dick and gave him Dad’s instructions. One of Mom’s friends had left the minivan at the diner, and Dick said he would drive in with the cash and the dogs. When I got off the phone I was tired again. I went back to Mom’s room. She was asleep. I curled up under the covers on the spare bed and fell asleep myself.
I don’t know how long I was out but the moment I opened my eyes a nurse came in and told me if I hurried I could see the baby. Heinzie was strong enough and they had already put Mom in her wheelchair and allowed her to visit him in the intensive care unit. I followed the nurse down the hall, up the elevator, and into the viewing area, where all the premature babies were kept. There was a solid glass wall and Mom was on one side and I was directly on the other. Heinzie was in a clear plastic crib, all wrapped up in a blanket except for his tiny red face, which was lost in sleep. Mom was sitting in the wheelchair. She reached over the side of the crib and stroked the blue knit cap on his head.
“Can I go in there?” I asked the nurse.
“Not yet,” she said. “We just allow mothers. We want them to touch the babies and talk to them or sing and just be sweet to them.”
I stared at the side of little Heinzie’s soft face. He was so cute. But because he was a boy I whispered, “He’s handsome.”
“He looks just like you,” the nurse said to me as Mom gently stroked his blanket with the tips of her fingers.
“He’s my delayed twin,” I said.
Just then Dad walked up next to me. He said he had already seen Mom and the baby but he had gone down to the gift shop to buy a camera. Now he was pressing against the glass and taking pictures.
“Not with the flash on,” the nurse said firmly “We just want him to relax and bond with his mother and listen to her voice and get some love. It’s the best thing for him.”
“Sorry,” Dad muttered as she bustled off.
“The nurse said he looks just like me as a baby,” I said to him. I was so proud of that.
“I wouldn’t know,” Dad said, still sounding hoarse. “I missed your grand entrance into this world.”
“What were you doing?” I asked. It seemed incredible that someone would miss a moment like this.
“I was throwing you a monthlong party down at the pub,” he said. “I was celebrating the birth of my first-born son. She had the agony so I had the ecstasy. Cheers to that!”
He raised an imaginary glass and I knew if I could see his face under the bandages he’d have that twinkling leprechaun look that said, “I’m just a lovable imp who will never change.”
After a while a nurse joined Mom. She wheeled little Heinzie deeper into the intensive care ward where another nurse began to arrange his crib. Then the first nurse returned to wheel Mom away.
“See you later, alligator,” I mouthed.
“Bye, sweetie,” Mom mouthed back.
“I’ll be back in little bit,” Dad said to me. “Dick should be downstairs by now and I have to go pick up a prescription.”
“What about your bandages?” I asked.
“I can take them off soon,” he replied.
“Can I help?” I really was curious to see what he looked like.
“Not now,” he said. “Later. I want it to be a surprise.”
He turned away from me and leaned forward, placing his lips against the glass. He whispered something and the words buzzed like a bee trapped against a windowpane, then he pulled away from the glass and looked down at his feet. In that moment I thought I could see two damp spots on the gauze just under his eyes.
“What’s wrong, Dad?” I asked, because I suddenly felt so sad.
He didn’t answer. He walked down the hallway and out the door without looking back.
I watched him go and it was as if a part of me went with him. Maybe the Freddy part. I wasn’t sure.
“Wait!” I cried, and began to follow him. When I reached the door and walked out he was gone. I walked faster but I never caught up to him. I went up and down the halls but he had vanished.
When I finally returned to Mom’s floor a nice older woman volunteer was knocking on her closed door.
“Can I help you?” I asked. “I’m her kid.”
“I have a basket of flowers for the new mom,” she said with a smile.
“I’ll take them,” I said.
“There’s a card, too,” she pointed out as I reached for the basket handle.
“Thank you.”
“You are welcome, young man,” she said. “Have a good day.”
I opened the room door. Mom was back in bed. “Who knocked?” she asked as I entered.
“Flowers for you,” I announced, and held up the basket so she could see them. Then I brought her the big card which had FRAN written on it.
The moment she saw her real name she quickly ripped open the envelope. A stack of money fell out onto her blanket, and right away I figured it was the money Dick had given back to Dad. And then Mom read the card. “The loser!” she groaned, and dropped her head back into the pillow. “I knew it! I knew he was slipping off the deep end again. I could just kill him!”
“What does it say?” I asked.
“He has to go find himself,” she said sarcastically. “He doesn’t know who he is anymore.”
I wasn’t surprised because I knew exactly what he meant.
“Go downstairs,” she ordered angrily “And drag his mummy-wrapped face up here. After I work my surgery on him he definitely won’t have a clue who he is.”
I wanted to say that she should just let him go but I could tell that she wasn’t in the forgiving mood just yet.
I stood up as quietly as I could and went down to the lobby. The guard desk was unoccupied, so there was nobody at the door to stop me from going outside. Dad wasn’t there. I shuffled out to the parking lot and looked for the minivan. I didn’t see it either. But suddenly I heard dogs barking.
“El Gordo!” I shouted. “Quesadilla!” I shuffled down a few rows of cars and spotted them hiding under the bumper of a stranger’s truck in the parking lot.
“Where did you come from?” I asked as they barked and jumped back and forth and up and down. I untied their leashes from the bumper and squatted down and scratched their heads. For a moment I thought maybe Dad and Dick were still around, but when I stood up and steadied myself against the truck I saw the yellow minivan over in the corner. It was hoisted up onto the back of a tow truck like a giant busted bee.
The dogs and I walked over to where the tow truck driver was securing the minivan with heavy chains.
“Did our van break down?” I asked.
“Nope,” he said. “It’s being repossessed for nonpayment.”
I knew what that meant. “Well, did you see some guys out here?” I asked. “One of them had his whole head wrapped up.”
“Oh yeah,” he said, “he was over by the front door talking with a big blond guy who had them dogs. I spotted the big guy on the road and followed him here because the dealership sent me out to get the van. The other guy was removing some bandages from his head.”
“What happened next?” I asked.
He turned and pointed toward the hospital exit sign. “Once they noticed I was hooking the van up they hustled out of the parking lot and took off down Lime Street.”
“Thanks,” I said. I walked the dogs over to the parking lot exit sign. On the ground was a long, wide ribbon of gauze. It looked like a huge rattlesnake had shed its skin and slithered off. I looked up the street, then down, but I didn’t spot them. I knew they weren’t coming back. I stood there feeling beat up. It was all over. His return, the rewedding, the name change, the diner—everything went down the street with him. He had left me behind, and I was returning to my old self. And you know me—I can’t stay mad for very long.
“Granny was right,” I said. “When you forgive someone it does make you stronger. It makes your heart bigger than your hate.”
I cupped my hands around my mouth and took a deep breath. “You don’t have to run away. You can come back. I already forgave you!”
My words went down the street like a bloodhound but they didn’t sniff him out.
After a minute, I yelled, “Doesn’t my forgiveness mean anything to you?” I waited another minute. I wanted to holler, “Only a coward is afraid of forgiveness,” but I couldn’t. Instead I shouted, “Call us! You can change your face but not your family.” Then I turned with the dogs and tugged them forward as we walked back to the tow truck driver.
“Any chance you can tell me what the man with the bandages looked like after he took them off?” I asked.
“Not really,” he said. “Kinda looked like anyone—but I really wasn’t paying that much attention, because I wanted to get the van.”
That’s what I was afraid of. Now he could be anyone. He could be strolling around town wearing big sunglasses, maybe talking in a funny accent like a foreign movie star, or he could be selling used cars, or even delivering pizza to our front door. He could become an Amish farmer with an Amish wife and kids, but even if he was driving a horse and buggy and clipclopping down the road he’d still have that Pigza head full of nonsense and he’d be shifting about in his seat just waiting to cut loose and make a run for the winner’s circle. But he’ll just be going in circles until he figures out how to be comfortable in his own skin—not some borrowed skin but the skin he was born in.
Suddenly the dogs were tired of me not paying attention to them. They tugged on their leashes and bounced up and down like springs. I knelt down and scratched their backs. “Look,” I said to El Gordo, holding him by his chin as he growled up at me. “This is a name change announcement. You are no longer El Gordo and she is no longer Quesadilla. From now on you are plain old Pablo Pigza and she is Pablita Pigza and I’d appreciate it when you bark at me if you are thinking, ‘Joey! Joey! Joey!’ Fred is dead. You got it?”
I stood and leaned against a car for a minute because I still got light-headed when I bent over.
I couldn’t take the dogs inside the hospital so I tied them to the smokers’ bench out front where Dad had picked those smoky flowers for me. “No eating cigarette butts,” I ordered. “Bite anyone who tries to take you, and I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
I went into the gift shop. I didn’t have any money to buy something fancy but it didn’t matter to me. Money never really changed our lives anyway We had a second chance but we let it fall through a hole in our pockets. It wasn’t about the money. It was us. It was like we were the big hole and anything put into us fell out. I picked out a card with a photograph on the front of a baby dressed as a bee wrapped in a blanket. I took it up to the counter.
“Can I pay you back in a little while?” I asked the lady, and gave her my best smile. “I promise.”
“Sure,” she said.
I borrowed her pen and drew a big heart inside the card. That was Mom’s heart. Inside that heart I drew another. That was mine. Inside of that one I drew another. That was the baby’s. Then down at the bottom of Mom’s big heart I drew two little ones, for Pablo and Pablita. They were our family, too.
When I got back up to Mom’s floor I was feeling a little better. I had the card but, more than that, I had my own good name. I stood at Mom’s open door and looked in after her.
“I bet he’s gone, isn’t he?” she said, looking back across the room at me.
“I don’t know,” I said, and stood by her side with the card. “I can’t tell for sure.”
“Well, I can,” she said. “Once the money was gone he was itchin” to bolt.”
That’s when I remembered to tell her about Dad crying when he was looking at the baby.
“That makes sense,” she snapped. “He always cries just before he runs off. It’s his signature emotion before he heads for the hills. Plus this.” She held out a sheet of paper.
“What is it?”
“The nurse brought it in,” she said.
I took it from her hand. It was a birth certificate that Dad had filled out and signed. For the baby’s name he had written: Junior Carter Pigza.
“I guess the Heinz family has officially vanished,” I announced.
“Like a Heinz genie gone back into the ketchup bottle,” she said, and laughed at her own joke.
“Well, that leaves me the oldest boy, so I’m the big man in charge again,” I claimed. I pointed to her and made my first family announcement. “You are Fran Pigza,” I said. “The baby will be called Junior Pigza, and you know me—I’m Joey Pigza!” It felt good to say my name so I said it again, only louder. “I’m Joey Pigza!”
“I’ll be counting on you,” she said.
“Do you think it is just too easy to be something you are not?” I asked, thinking of Dad.
“Easy in the beginning,” she said. “But after a while even the made-up self starts to gather baggage, and before you know it you might just as well have stayed your old self.”
“I was tired of Freddy,” I said.
“Maria was getting on my nerves,” she added. “Kind of like a guest who wouldn’t leave.”
“She shopped a lot,” I remarked.
“Yeah,” she said. “But you know why I was doing it all the time?”
“‘Cause you wanted to buy stuff,” I guessed.
“I saw this coming from a long way off,” she said. “If some part of me didn’t love him a lot I’d never see his weak side. They say love is blind, but for me it’s the opposite. It makes me see the good in him, too, which is why I can never hate him.”
“I just learned that,” I said. “Once I forgave him I couldn’t get mad at him anymore.”
“You and I think alike,” she said.
“So then why’d you get back together with him?”
“Hope,” she said without regret. “I had hope that he had changed for the better. And for a while it was promising. But I don’t regret it—we have Junior.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I love being a brother.”
“He is muy magnífico,” she sighed, “but I think he is going to be worse than you. Did you notice that he has a cowlick in the front of his head and in the back? That means he’ll be coming and going at the same time.”
The thought of a cow licking him made me laugh. “We can’t screw this one up,” I said. “He’s the Pigza of the future.”
“He’s that and more,” she murmured.
“Is it strange having a kid?” I asked.
“Yeah, it’s like marrying someone you never met.”
“Better that than remarrying someone you have met,” I said.
“Yes,” she said, and laughed, then quickly looked away as her hands covered her face. I think she was crying, but whatever she was feeling she wanted to keep private.
“I better go check on the dogs,” I said as I stood up and walked toward the door. “I don’t want them to think the rest of us have run off.” Then, in case she was crying, I added, “I’ll be back.”
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
When I was a boy, all my favorite friends were like Joey Pigza. They were wild, out of control, fun, smart, and slightly insane. For instance, my good friend Frankie Pagoda was a genius at thinking up dangerous activities nobody should ever try. He had a swimming pool in his backyard and every day he would climb a ladder and get on top of his roof then run down the slope of the roof and dive into his swimming pool. That bored him after a while, so he hauled his bicycle up to the top of the roof and rode it down—but he missed the pool. He flew through the air and hit his head on the concrete edge of the pool, and I thought he had killed himself, but despite the huge dent in his head, he was OK. He also invented the “Ring of Fire”—a game where we would roller skate down a metal slide and dive headfirst through a burning hula hoop that had been soaked in kerosene. That was good.
&nb
sp; Then there was my old friend Kenny Diehl who invited me into his basement, where he kept a live, six-foot-long alligator as a pet. We would play a game called “Alligator Wrestler” …
So when I grew up, I knew a lot of kids as wild as Joey Pigza, and I loved them. But my family moved a lot, and I ended up going to ten different schools in twelve grades, so all my friends disappeared into my past. Also, as I moved on in my life, without the influence of my wild friends I became a quiet reader and a writer.
But one day, my wild old past was suddenly reawakened. I was speaking to students at a school. There was a wiry kid in the front row who was a little bit jittery. As I spoke, he was spinning in circles at his desk. But he was clearly very smart because as soon as I would start a sentence he would cut me off by blurting out exactly what I was about to say. I would start a sentence and he would finish it. He really seemed to like this game as he spun around and around in his seat, but then suddenly something changed for him. He kept waving his arm to gain the teacher’s attention, but she was busy with another student. Finally, the spinning boy could not hold back what he needed to say any longer and he hollered out, “Teacher! Teacher! I forgot to take my meds!” She just pointed to the classroom door and he shot out of his desk and through the door. I heard him running down the hallway to the nurse’s office, punching all the metal lockers, which went “Bam! Bam! Bam!” about a hundred times in a row.
At that moment, I knew he was a great kid. That night as I sat down to write in my journal, I remembered that kid and wrote about him. And then I remembered my old friends—Frankie, Kenny, and others. It was at that moment I began to write the first Joey Pigza book—and in a way Joey has now become another of my wild old friends.
GOFISH
QUESTIONS FOR THE AUTHOR
Jack Gantos
What did you want to be when you grew up?
I didn’t have much sense of myself as a future adult with a job when I was a child. I’m sure I projected somewhat into my future but was probably happier thinking I would remain a child. I did pass through many stages along the way to being a writer—an anthropologist and archeologist were the two most attractive.