by Jack Gantos
Table of Contents
Title Page
1 - POTHOLES
2 - DOG-EARED
3 - STORYBOOK LAND
4 - BAD GOLF
5 - CAVEMAN
6 - THINKING
7 - MY GAME
8 - THE GIFT
9 - DOWNTOWN
10 - SECRET
11 - JELLY LEGS
12 - SCARY-BOOK LAND
13 - THE MOON
14 - THE MALL
BY JACK GANTOS
Copyright Page
Preview
For Anne and Mabel
1
POTHOLES
We were on our way to Dad’s house and Mom was driving with both hands clamped tightly around the wheel as if she had me by the neck. I had been snapping my seat belt on and off and driving her nuts by asking a hundred what if’s about Dad. She’d been hearing them for two weeks already and wasn’t answering. But that didn’t stop me. What if he’s not nice? What if he hates me? What if he’s as crazy as you always said he was? What if he drinks and gets nasty? What if I don’t like him? What if Grandma tries to put me in the refrigerator again? What if they make Pablo sleep outside? What if they don’t eat pizza? What if I want to come home quick, can I hire a helicopter?
“Yes,” she said to my last question, not really listening. She was taking the long roller-coaster way to Pittsburgh, which was up and down about a million mountain backroads, because she was afraid of driving too fast on the turnpike. As she said before we loaded up the borrowed car, “My license is slightly expired and I don’t have insurance, so just bear with me.”
“How can something be slightly expired?” I asked. “Is that the same as day-old bread? What if we get stopped by the police? What if we are arrested? What if the jails for boys and dogs look like giant birdcages?” She didn’t answer me then, and she wasn’t answering my questions now, even though I kept asking. All she did was tighten her grip and lean forward so much her chin was touching the top of the steering wheel. After a while her silence beat my talking like paper covers rock, so I kept my mouth shut even though the list of questions kept sprouting in my brain.
But then Pablo, my Chihuahua, started yapping nonstop. Maybe it was his neck she was thinking of squeezing because he was driving her nuts too. The roads were beat up and I asked her not to hit the holes because Pablo has a weak stomach and gets carsick easily, but she didn’t even try to steer around the bumps and holes. Her elbows were shaking and her jaw was so tight her front teeth were denting her lower lip. I knew she was stressed-out with the thought of seeing Dad, but right now I was more concerned about Pablo.
“Go around the holes!” I kept shouting as I rubbed Pablo’s swollen belly with the very tippity tips of my fingertips. He was lying on his back with his four feet up in the air like he was already dead, except his eyes were twitching.
“When you’re driving you can’t exactly zigzag down the road!” she hollered back. “We could lose control and flip over.”
“Well, Pablo’s stomach is about to flip,” I said, warning her.
“Then hold your hand over his snout,” she suggested, and squeezed the steering wheel a little tighter as the car stumbled along.
“Then he’ll get carsick through his ears,” I replied. “Or worse, it will back up and shoot out his you-know-where.”
She glanced over at me and glared. “You better keep his you-know-where aimed out the window,” she ordered. “I don’t want any nasty accidents.”
Just then we hit a deep hole and I lifted up off my seat. I saw another one coming and I took my hand from Pablo’s fizzing snout and reached for the steering wheel and Mom slapped my hand away just as the tire hit the hole hard and I bounced sideways and cracked my head on the half-open window and Pablo flipped over onto his hind legs like he was doing a wheelie then opened his mouth and did what I said he’d do all over the front of the radio.
“Oh, sugar!” Mom spit out. “Sugar, sugar, sugar!”
I knew that word meant trouble. The last time she said “sugar” like that was when she got the letter from Dad’s lawyer in the mail and I knew it wasn’t because she had something sweet in her mouth.
“Open the glove box,” Mom said. “There might be some napkins in there.”
I pressed the lock and the little door dropped down and smacked Pablo on his bandaged ear, which must have hurt. There was a box of tissues inside so I pulled that out and because I didn’t know what to do with Pablo I tucked him into the glove box and snapped the door shut. He started yapping again and I pressed my lips to the thin seam around the door and whispered, “Go to sleep. I’ll wake you when we get there.” He whimpered for a moment, then settled down. I tugged out a wad of tissues and began to clean the mess out from between all the little knobs and buttons on the radio, which was hard to do because the car was jerking around in all directions, so I quit.
I let Mom settle down for a mile or two while I chewed on my fingernails before she caught me and pulled my hand from my mouth and held it tight.
“Do you want me to drive?” I asked.
“I guess you may have noticed I’m a nervous wreck?” she started. “Well, I just can’t get my mind off your dad.”
That’s one thing I liked about him already. Her mind was on him, him, him. Usually it was on me, me, me, and I couldn’t do or say anything that she didn’t notice, but now I was hiding inside his shadow like a drop inside an ocean, and he got to take the blame for her bad nerves.
“You know I have mixed feelings about letting you do this,” she said. She was starting to get weepy so it was my turn to settle her down.
“What if he’s nice?” I guessed.
“He better be nice,” she replied.
“I mean really nice?” I said. “Like when you first met him.”
“He wasn’t even nice then. He was just okay.”
“Well, did you kiss him on the lips?”
“What do you think?” she said.
Just the thought of her kissing Dad made me silly and I began to sing, “Mom and Dad sitting in a tree k-i-s-s-i-n-g.”
“Stop that!” she snapped. “You’re buggin’ me again.”
I took a breather then started up again. “Have I done something wrong?” I asked.
“No,” she replied. “I just have a case of bad nerves.”
“Then, why are you sending me to Dad if you don’t think he’s any good?”
“I’m not sending you because I like him,” she replied. “I’m sending you because you might like him and because I think—not with my heart—that it is a good thing for you to have a relationship with your father. And now that he claims to have stopped drinking and has a job and has gone to court to get some visitation, I’m sending you to him because I think it’s the right thing to do. But don’t ask me how I feel about all this.”
“How do you feeeeel?” I asked, and leaned forward and pressed my smiley face into her shoulder.
“Don’t go there,” she said. “I really don’t want to feel anything about all this.”
“Mom and Dad, sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g!” I sang again with my head bouncing as if my neck was a big spring.
“Now, Joey,” Mom said, lifting one hand off the steering wheel and pushing me back to my side. “Get serious. Don’t cling to the notion that me and him are going to get back together. No way is that going to happen, so just let it go and focus on your relationship with your father. You have six weeks with him. Figure out what you want from this guy before you get there. Give it some thought because he can be, you know, wired like you, only he’s bigger.”
Even as she talked I didn’t listen because I liked what I was thinking more than what she was telling me so I ju
st hummed, “Mom and Dad, sitting in a tree …”
After that she re-gripped the steering wheel and seemed to aim for the holes. Some quiet time passed and since she didn’t pay any attention to me I said, “Are you sending me because of my trouble with Pablo?”
“That’s only part of it,” she said. “But that last little business was a wake-up call for me—and for Pablo. I mean, I can’t keep you locked up in the house all summer.”
The little business she referred to made me hang my head, because it was all my fault, and like most everything wrong I did, she felt responsible so I just slumped into the corner of my seat. I put my tiny tape-player speakers in my ears and turned on the music. Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass were playing “Lollipops and Roses” and while I nodded along I added up the good and bad things about my behavior that day, which is what my special-ed teacher told me to do when I felt sad.
Before I had gone to special ed and got my new meds it would have been impossible for me to sit still and make a list of good and bad things. I didn’t have time for lists. I didn’t have time for anything that lasted longer than the snap of my fingers. But after I got my good meds, which were in a patch I stuck on my body every day, I started to settle down and think. And not just think about all the bad things that had already happened. I started thinking about the good things I wanted to happen. And the best part about thinking good things was that now I could make them come true instead of having everything I wanted blow up in my face.
So, as I sat in the car and took a deep breath, I asked myself what I wanted from Dad. Even though I thought for a long time, my list was short. There was really only one thing I wanted. So after a while I sat up and told Mom.
“I just want him to love me as much as I already love him,” I said.
She listened, then pursed her lips before saying, “Honey, I’m sure he does.” Her voice sounded like she had a long list of other things to say, but didn’t.
2
DOG-EARED
Bad things started not long after school had ended and Mom was leaving me home alone all day because she had to work. She had given me a trumpet and the Herb Alpert tape and wanted me to learn all the songs, but it was too hard so I only learned a few of the sounds. Mostly, Pablo and I hung out in our fenced-in little back yard, which was all dirt and rocks and dry islands of dead grass that looked like knotted-up troll hairs and were as hard to pull up as if I was pulling one of those wrinkly little people right out of the ground. Pablo and I were digging into the dirt with the splintered handle of a broken baseball bat and collecting good throwing rocks. When I got a pile of them, about twenty-five roundish ones, I started throwing them like some maniac pitching machine— wham! wham! wham!—one right after another at a target I had drawn on the wood fence and their echo cracked through the neighborhood. I was so good I almost got a bull’s-eye every time. But then I got bored and had to make it harder so I bent over and sidearmed one between my legs. I wasn’t so good that way because the stone went flying over the fence and then I heard something break so I stopped and ran inside. A few minutes later a man knocked on our door but I was hiding behind the couch and after he said some bad words he finally went away.
That’s when I searched the house for new things to do and found the dart set in the attic. There was a lot of game stuff up there that must have belonged to my dad and since he wasn’t in the picture anymore I took it for mine. I went down to the living room and drew a bunch of animals with bull’s-eye heads on pieces of paper which I taped on couch pillows. I scattered them around the room then started to practice. I’d spin around a few times then screech to a sudden stop and wing a dart at the closest bull’s-eye. I was pretty good and really liked having to throw the darts when I was dizzy Even as the room was spinning like a wobbly carousel I was pretty good. I hit all my targets, somewhere. And one time I kept spinning until everything was blurry like when you tape bottle bottoms over your eyes and when I stopped I threw a dart at the first animal I saw and heard Pablo yelp and when I could get my balance back and focus my eyes I found him quivering in a corner of the couch with a dart through his ear. I called to him but he didn’t say a word. At first he just sat there stunned and stared with his shiny bug-eyes at me like he couldn’t believe I had hurt him and then he went nuts and was running around the room yapping and hopping and dragging that dart around. When I finally cornered him I told him he was going to be okay. And he was okay, because the dart had just gone through the skin and made a clean hole. It was like I had poked it through a soft piece of suede. There was only about a drop of blood spilled, but the sight of blood really makes him hysterical. So I held him down and tried to cover his eyes as I pulled the dart out. He went berserk, and I got worried the hole might get infected and he would have to have his ear amputated and go to his own doggy speeial-ed for disabled dogs, so I wrapped him up and carried him down to the hair salon to get Mom’s opinion on if we should take Pablo to the vet or just put one of my old patches on him. She was in the middle of teasing out a woman’s hair when I brought Pablo in wrapped in a bath towel, and she gave me a pretty stressed-out look. “It was an accident that the dart went through his ear,” I explained. “I was aiming at a moose.”
“Aw, sugar!” she said. “Sugar! Sugar! Now let me see what you’ve done to poor Pablo.”
I told her we were only playing nice and she said to the lady that she’d be back in a minute and grabbed me by the arm and we dashed into a back room full of shampoo smells. She opened a first-aid kit and put iodine on Pablo’s ear, and then a Band-Aid on either side of the hole. He was fixed, but Mom and me were not because she was steaming mad.
“I can’t do my work if I have to worry about what trouble you are cookin’ up all day long,” she said.
“No more trouble,” I said. “I’ll just sit and play my trumpet. But I’ve been thinking, can I have one of your hoop earrings for Pablo? You won’t let me pierce my ear but since he has a hole …”
“I’ve had it,” Mom said. “I’ve had it up to here.” And she held her hand up to her forehead. But there was still an inch to go to the top of her head, so she hadn’t had it with me completely.
“It’s not my fault,” I said quietly. “I think my patch wore down.”
“The only thing worn down is that excuse,” she said right back. “I could plaster you in patches and you would still do the same nutty stuff.”
“Don’t raise your voice,” I said. “You know it upsets Pablo.”
I thought she was going to burst into flames she was so mad. “Okay,” she said to herself, and shoved her hands into her pockets like she was digging for change. “Take a deep breath. Count to ten. Maybe day care is the answer.”
“Maybe I can get a job here with you,” I suggested. “I could wash hair.”
“You’d put us out of business in a week,” she said, starting to come around. “You’d scrub those old-lady heads down to a nub. They’d look like the little bald spot you wore down on your own crown picking and scratching.” I touched my head and gave her a hurt face because my bald spot was a sensitive subject.
“I’m sorry,” she purred, then grabbed me and gave me a hug and said we’d figure something out.
After she went back to work, Pablo and I marched home. Pablo was fine and as soon as I unlocked the front door we ran to Mom’s jewelry box and got a big hoop earring because she hadn’t said no, exactly. I put it through Pablo’s hole and called him “Pirate Matey Pablo!” Then we turned the couch into a pirate ship. I got a sheet and hoisted it up with the floor lamp and clamped a steak knife between my teeth and we got busy attacking other ships. When Mom came home she caught me sword fighting with my patch over one eye and lipstick blood on my shirt and arms. She sent me to my room to chill out while she mixed a drink.
“Do you feel like your meds are really wearing off?” she asked when she came to check up on me and found me walking on my hands.
“Can I get back to you on that?” I shouted, and fell over
.
“Don’t play with me that way,” she replied, and dropped to her knees and felt under my shirt for the patch, then tickled my belly “I love you too much to get jerked around by you.”
The next day the letter came from Dad’s lawyer and that’s the last time until the car ride I heard Mom hissing, “Aw, sugar, sugar, sugar!”
I must have fallen asleep in the car because I woke up when it stopped and Mom was tugging on the speaker wire from my tape player like I was a fish she was reeling in.
“Are we there yet?” I asked, and rubbed my ears.
“Almost,” she said. “Your dad’s place is up the street. I wanted to stop and talk over a few things before we arrive. Most of all I want to say my real goodbye to you now, because when I see your dad and grandma everything is going to be weird and I might be weird too and I don’t want you thinking I’m bailing out on you or something.” She held me by the cheeks and kissed me like you would a picture in a frame. “Listen to your dad,” she said. “He’s your dad. But if anything seems out of whack you call me right away and I’ll come get you. Okay?” She held my chin in her hands and stared real hard into my eyes before looking toward her purse.
“This is for you,” she said, and handed me an envelope folded in half. “There is money in it. Not play money. But emergency money.” I opened the envelope. There was a twenty-dollar bill and a page of lined paper with rows of quarters taped to it. She read the puzzled look on my face.
“The quarters are for a pay phone,” she explained.
“Can I call you now?” I said. “Because I already think this whole thing is out of whack.”
“This is not out of whack,” she stressed. “You are starting from scratch with your dad, so everything feels strange.” Then she put the car in gear and I knew she was being brave so I didn’t say another word. We slowly rolled forward and just up the street Grandma was sitting on a porch smoking, and next to her was a thin man dressed in neatly pressed clothes. He was sweeping the porch but leaned the broom handle against the wall when he saw us.