by Corina Vacco
“Maybe they’ll print it tomorrow,” I say, trying to make him feel better. “The reporter was there. He took pictures. Maybe he’s just making sure he’s got all the facts together or whatever.”
Cornpup shakes his head. “No, if they were really gonna run it, they would’ve done it by now. They’re burying the story, like always.”
Charlie rolls up on his bike. His ear is heavily bandaged. He’s got blacktop skids all up and down his jeans. “I don’t want to talk about my ear,” he says. “Don’t even bring it up.”
I notice something wiggling around inside his zipped backpack.
Cornpup is annoyed. “Would it kill you to show up on time? Gramps is on a tight schedule.”
We know all about the tight schedule. Pills and a liverwurst sandwich at noon. Nap at one. Forty-five minutes on the toilet at two-thirty. And a mug of warm PBR when the Mets game is on. I hope I never get old.
“How’d your mom do at the farmers’ market?” Charlie asks me.
“She didn’t buy any vegetables. Or fruit. But she bought three pies. She kept going back for free samples of banana bread till the muffin man told her to move along.” I try to make this sound funny, and it is kind of funny—Charlie and Cornpup both laugh—but I feel a little sad.
I don’t know why I keep thinking Mom will snap out of her fat-lady phase. I don’t know why I keep getting my hopes up.
I watch Charlie’s backpack with a vague sense of curiosity. I’m sure I’ll find out what’s in it soon enough, but the annoying thing is waiting until he’s ready to tell us. Charlie won’t do anything before he’s ready.
We walk past an abandoned plot of land, which has become an unofficial dumping site for ceramic stuff: broken tiles, toilets and bathtubs, fake fireplace logs, and flowerpots. We pass a water treatment plant, a custard shop that will close in the fall, and a warehouse that was once a furniture store. Me and Charlie are trudging along lazily. I kick dandelions like they’re soccer balls, leaving behind a trail of decapitated yellow flowers. Charlie rolls several rocks around in his hand, and I can tell he’s thinking hard about something. Cornpup is in a major hurry. He’s already a couple blocks ahead of us.
I can’t stand it anymore. I ask Charlie what’s in the backpack.
He stares at one of his rocks, which is really a small chunk of asphalt. “Something.”
“Let me see.”
“First you have to promise to keep it.”
“I’m not promising you anything.” To Charlie, promises are permanent, like DNA or a scar. If I promised to cut off one of my fingers, he’d bring the knife.
He unzips his backpack. I see a paw. I see a black tail. “Some guy was selling dogs out on the 990. Labs, purebred, about three months old. My mom’s stupid. She doesn’t think.”
I lift the puppy into my arms. It’s a boy dog. He chews my hand playfully. I like dark animals—ravens, panthers, bats, water moccasins—because they match the darkness inside me. But I don’t know how to feel about a black dog with a pink tongue and a wagging tail. He’s dark and very happy all at once.
Charlie doesn’t take his eyes off the dog. “When she got home, she realized you can’t raise animals in a house like ours. You can’t give my old man something fresh to kick around, some new life to ruin. She tried to return him, but the trailer was gone. The guy took off.”
I think about the time Dad bet me five dollars I couldn’t catch a chipmunk. I caught a whole boxful, thinking he’d meant five dollars per chipmunk. I wanted to keep them, but Mom said, “Give me a break.” I have a feeling she’ll be equally annoyed by a puppy.
Charlie touches the dog’s face with the kind of tenderness you never see from him.
“Cornpup is too uptight. He doesn’t know how to take care of anything but himself. I need you to take this dog. I need you to figure out a way to keep him.”
Me and my friends, we laugh when we’re getting into trouble, when someone farts, when someone slips and falls. But I don’t think we really laugh because we’re happy. This little dog wags its tail, slobbers on me, licks my face like I’m made of rawhide, and suddenly I’m happy.
“You’ll take him?” Charlie asks me.
We walk a little faster, but catching up with Cornpup is no longer an option. He’s an angry speck on the horizon.
“My mom doesn’t like dogs.”
“Don’t be stupid. Everybody likes dogs.”
We pass a house I’ve been obsessed with for years. A great horned owl once tried to snatch a baby from the backyard. The baby had deep, infected talon wounds in its skin, but it survived the attack. I sometimes wonder if over the years that kid liked having those unusual scars. I wish I had a crazy feature like that.
Charlie’s eyes are a little watery. It’s like he’s losing a football game on account of a bad call. He feels cheated, because this dog is rightfully his. And he is jealous of me. In his mind, a dead father is probably better than a drunk one with a leather belt.
“Anyway, he’s pretty quiet,” Charlie says. “Hide him in your room. I’ll get you a bowl. I’ll get you a bag of food. And here’s his leash.”
“What’s his name?”
Charlie throws a smooth gray rock at a parked truck. Everything is his to ding and dent. He says, “Name him whatever you want. I don’t care.”
I think of some names, but they don’t seem right. I consider Max and Wolverine and Spider and Dracula. I consider Midnight and Diablo and Raven. It’s easy to come up with a million names and narrow it down to twenty. The hard part is picking just one.
Charlie glances at the plastic bag tied to my belt loop. “Let me get one of those tomatoes,” he says. “I’m dying of hunger.”
At the farmers’ market I used my own money to buy a bag of cherry tomatoes. A pretty farm girl talked me into it. “They’re the best in town,” she said. “Firm and a little bit sweet.” The last time I had a cherry tomato, I picked it from Dad’s garden behind the garage. His peppers were underdeveloped, his asparagus stalks were too thin, and his tomatoes were squishy. I don’t like eating squishy things. I don’t like juices dripping down my hands. If a peach isn’t kind of crunchy, I won’t eat it. I like bananas when they’re still a little bit green.
On the way back from the farmers’ market, I asked Mom if she wanted a tomato, and she said, “Get back to me when you have a bottle of ranch dressing.”
“But they’re good without anything on them,” I told her. “They’re not like Dad’s.”
She turned up the radio and said, “Stop talking about tomatoes. You’re giving me a headache.”
Me and Cornpup ate most of the tomatoes ourselves. We wiped them clean on our shirts. We popped the green stems off with our teeth. I thought about how Dad would’ve wanted to slice them and serve them with fresh mozzarella and basil. His garden is all dead now. Me and Mom didn’t really know how to take care of it.
Mom is gonna kill me if I bring this dog home.
I watch Charlie inhale the rest of my tomatoes. He has an iron gut, I think, because he only has to chew things once or twice before swallowing. I have to chew a lot, or else I get gas.
I put my puppy on the ground so he can bounce around and smell things. “His paws are huge,” I say. “He’s gonna be a monster.”
Charlie tells me Randy and Goat got into a huge fight last night. He tells me Goat got all scared and took off running. The friendship is over. I wonder if this means Randy will act normal again.
I remember the last time I got to hang out with Randy, just me and him, before Goat was even a blip on our radar screen. Mom had fallen asleep at the wheel on her way home from a double shift at the factory. She’d driven Dad’s Cutlass into a snowy ditch.
Of course, it wasn’t really Dad’s car anymore.
When I picked up the phone, I heard her voice, all scared and slobbery. “I almost died tonight. Now the car is stuck.”
I was reeling. If it is possible to hate your mom but love her and need her at the same time, the
n that’s what I was feeling. The thought of her getting wiped away forever on a random winter night filled me with raw fear. Charlie was sprawled out on my couch with no intention of getting up. He was finishing off an entire box of Triscuits. “Call Randy. He’ll drive you out there,” he said without taking his eyes off the TV.
Riding on the back of Randy’s motorcycle wasn’t what I thought it would be. He made me wear a helmet. He took the icy curves real slow. Mom was shaking when we got there.
“I almost hit that tree,” she said, pointing.
Randy flashed his Pellitero smile, calm and confident. “You’re fine. You’re alive. We don’t need to know all the stuff that didn’t happen.”
I let Mom hug me while Randy got the car up onto the road. “I thought we were gonna need a tow, but I guess not,” he said. “Are you okay to drive home?”
Mom joked, “I’m wide awake now.”
“Then we’re going to make one stop before we swing by your place,” Randy told her.
We followed Mom’s car till she turned off 290. Then we drove to Wendell’s Diner, where Randy bought me a huge piece of pecan pie with ice cream on it. I didn’t want pecan pie, because I like apple, but he kept saying, “You gotta try it. Seriously, just try it,” so I did.
Molly McVie was our waitress. She was supposed to have died five years before, leukemia or something, but she miraculously recovered. I remember thinking she was the prettiest girl in Poxton. I remember thinking that’s why she got to live, because the grim reaper fell in love.
“I’m gonna marry her someday,” Randy told me.
I believed him. The Pelliteros always get what they want. They set their eyes on a girl or a touchdown, and everybody else might as well quit.
I didn’t mind that Randy ate most of my pie. It didn’t bother me when he was whispering stuff into Molly’s ear. It felt good, knowing things about Randy that Charlie didn’t know.
A few months later, when Goat came on the scene, Randy turned mean. He had a new girl on the back of his motorcycle every weekend. Sometimes he whipped beer cans at our heads.
Charlie loops his finger through a hole near the collar of his faded Bills T-shirt. He takes a deep breath and says, “Randy’s in love or something. Goat kept making nasty comments about his girl, kept jabbing him, trying to start something. So Randy smashed his face.”
“Wish I could’ve been there to see that,” I say.
We climb Gramps’s wooden porch steps. I carry my puppy close to my chest. Charlie rings the doorbell.
The Mets game is blasting from an old radio—two outs, bottom of the first, runner on second. We hear shuffling. We hear an old man coughing. We hear what sounds like a person tripping over a cardboard box. The door flings open. Gramps has a crazed look in his eyes, white hair and long eyeteeth, brown spots all over his skin. “Oh. It’s you.”
Charlie laughs. “Who’d you think it would be?”
“Jehovah’s Witnesses. They won’t leave me alone.”
Cornpup greets us from the living room, where the sticky floor is pulsing with ants. He looks at me and says, “Why do you have a dog?”
“Charlie gave him to me.”
Cornpup doesn’t feel like he got passed over. He wants a dog even less than I want to watch Mom enter a hot dog eating contest. He has the Freak Museum to take care of. A dog could chew up something toxic and irreplaceable. “You should call him Rocky,” he says.
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “I was thinking Viper. His teeth are real sharp.”
Charlie smiles a little. He approves.
Me and Charlie sit on the couch. Cornpup is pouring maple syrup onto the floor, which is something he’s done every Friday for as long as I can remember, because Gramps needs traction when he’s shuffling around, and God forbid he use a walker.
It catches us all off guard when Gramps turns off the Mets game and grabs Cornpup by the throat.
CHAPTER 15
SHOCK
THE argument is hard to follow. Gramps says something about experimental surgery. Cornpup says something about Dr. Gupta, who knows how to make burn victims look a lot better than lizards, who understands skin the way steelworkers understand hot metal. Gramps says Cornpup is gonna end up deformed. And Cornpup says, “Look at me. I’m already deformed.” They shout back and forth about detox tea, skin cream, and the difference between a plastic surgeon and a witch doctor. Gramps says there’s no way Cornpup’s mom is gonna give him two hundred dollars. And Cornpup says he just needs her to sign the consent forms; he’ll find a way to come up with the money on his own.
Me and Charlie look at each other. Cornpup has been hiding things.
It’s hard to breathe in this stuffy room, surrounded by maple syrup and piles of random junk. There is a tuba in the kitchen sink, a heap of books spilling out of the coat closet, a gooey pile of Scrabble squares and Monopoly hotels at my feet. Viper is the only peaceful thing. He just met me today, and already he is sleeping soundly in my lap.
Gramps shuffles across the sticky floor. No one would ever look at him and think, Steelworker, lost two fingers saving another man’s arm, could work an open-hearth furnace in his sleep. “I’m not paying you to do the syrup anymore. If you want to stop coming here, that’s fine. At least you know where I stand.”
Cornpup drops the syrup tub. He looks up at us, like he’s just now remembering we’re here. He says, “I’m getting my skin fixed for real this time. And no one is going to stop me.” Then he runs out the door.
I wish I had a pencil and a piece of scrap paper. I’d sketch a picture of Gramps as a carnivorous plant, growing out of a steel bucket of maple syrup.
“He’s a fool,” Gramps says to us. “I know you boys think you know everything, but experimental surgery is no joke. He could die. For what? For pretty skin! And you two are no better. Self-absorbed fools is what you are.”
Charlie says, “You don’t know us. You don’t know anything about us,” and storms out the front door.
Now me and Viper are stuck dealing with Gramps, who is clearly insane. I would explain our world to him, but he would never understand. We cross a landfill on our way to school. We swim in creek water that smells like nail polish remover. Charlie can convert a third and twenty-six situation into a touchdown. I can create a world of uranium monsters and blind creek serpents on a sheet of blank paper. Cornpup can transform a pile of broken metal parts into a four-foot-tall robot. We are not fools. We are brave and brilliant.
Gramps touches my arm. There are tears in his eyes. “Will you talk to him for me?” he says. “Will you tell him not to do the surgery?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” I stand up and turn the Mets game back on. Three balls, one strike, no outs. There are two runners on base. I feel like I can’t get away from this place fast enough. When I walk outside, Cornpup is nowhere in sight. Charlie is carving I hate you in Gramps’s porch steps with his army knife. “Race you home,” he says.
We break into a hard run. The weight of Viper in my arms slows me down a little, but I am only two steps behind Charlie’s heels. My legs are getting stronger. Charlie hops an overturned garbage can and stumbles into the grass. We start laughing our heads off then, and I think there is nothing that feels better than a fast run.
Bang. A muffler backfires at the end of the street. All I can think of is dead seagulls falling like rain. Tomorrow night there will be fireworks on Sturgess. Kevin Thompson wants to push me into the bonfire. He wants to see me burn.
When I say I want to walk to Cornpup’s house, Charlie refuses to come along. He’s pissed about the secret surgery plans. He needs time to cool down.
I think I’ll try to talk Cornpup out of the surgery, but not because of anything Gramps said. I’ve got my own bad feeling about this. Some big-shot doctor shows up out of the blue and wants to put Cornpup under anesthesia so he can cut him up at no charge. It sounds shady.
Mrs. Schumacher opens the door and says, warily, “He’s in his room.” Then she goes b
ack to watching TV. I climb the stairs and stand outside Cornpup’s bedroom, my hand ready to knock, when I hear sobbing worse than how I wept, biting my pillow in the dark, the night Dad died. He is snorting, hiccupping, moaning. His sadness is like static electricity, shocking my hand when I touch the door. I feel like I’m doing something wrong, like I’m violating his privacy in a big way. When he gasps for air, I suddenly, finally, understand what this means to him. He wants this surgery the way I want Dad back.
I walk down the stairs and out the door. I’ve made a decision. I’m gonna help him.
I have to help him.
But first, I have to sneak a puppy into my house.
CHAPTER 16
BONFIRE
ON Sturgess, there is a patch of fenced-off coal ash, as fine as sand. Everybody is barefoot, shoes piled high in a pit of cement blocks, because it’s tradition to pretend this is a beach bonfire, that the dark industrial yard is really a raging ocean.
We show up carrying things that will burn. Charlie has a bag of foam egg cartons. I have a can of paint and some cracked wooden paneling we found in my garage. Cornpup is carrying five newspapers and a long, heavy chain.
“What’s that for?” Charlie asks him.
“I found it at the railroad tracks,” Cornpup says. “I’m gonna climb that huge tree for real this time.”
“Shut up,” I say. “No one can climb that.”
“You need a rope, not a chain,” Charlie points out. “Or you’ll fall in the fire.”
“What I need is motivation. When there’s a bonfire underneath me, falling isn’t an option.”
Bang. I close my eyes and see a cardinal buried in a Dumpster.
Kevin Thompson wants to kill me tonight. In front of Val. In front of everyone.
I need to calm down.
“Who picked out this crappy music?” says Charlie. “My grandma listens to soft rock. Where’s the hard stuff?”