by Jack Gantos
“This is the back door to Storybook Land,” he whispered. “At night I call it Scary-Book Land.” He came around to my side with the rest of the six-pack hanging from his wrist like a chunky bracelet.
“I love this place in the dark,” he said, and gave me a boost up over the chain-link fence. He climbed up the side and swung himself over the top. “Follow me.”
I felt like I was walking through the dark pages of a fairy-tale book that had been closed for the night and dropped by the side of the bed.
It was scary. Every time the trees moved I kept thinking the Giant was on the loose. When we passed the Old Lady’s shoe house I thought only really crazy people would live inside a smelly shoe and I had a feeling her kids were running wild with nothing to do but come after me. I figured the Wolf was going to swallow me for good, the Crooked Man seemed really mean and was going to hit me with his stick, and when we finally arrived at Humpty Dumpty he looked like somebody whose big belly had crushed his skinny legs and was now hurt and crying because no one could ever help him get better. During the day all the stories seemed to teach lessons on how to be good and smart, but in the dark all the stories seemed to be about people with problems. Maybe that’s why Dad liked them, I thought. He fit right in. And now I did too.
“I’m scared, Dad,” I said.
“Don’t be,” he replied. “It’s only make-believe.”
“No, I mean about not living with Mom. I’m scared to tell her that.”
“Well, I think you should,” he said. “I think you should call her and tell her you’re staying with me and let her hear it straight from the horse’s mouth.”
“No,” I said. “She’ll be upset.”
“I’ll take care of her,” he said. “You just be Joey and tell her you want to live with your dad.”
“Dad, I need to tell you something about me being me,” I said.
“So tell me,” he said. “I’m listening.”
“Okay,” I said, and I tried hard to get the first word of where to start but it just seemed impossible to do because the more I tried to start talking the more chopped up the ideas became. I wanted to tell him that I thought we were a lot alike and we were both hyper and needed medicine and we shouldn’t live together since I wanted to live only with Mom, but that I loved him, yet liked living with her more and he shouldn’t hate me for that but there didn’t seem to be any way of saying so because, even though I knew how I felt, the words were all piled up against the door in my throat and when I tried to speak I couldn’t and it made me sick that I felt less like me and more like something I was becoming but didn’t know yet.
“Here’s what I think you want to say,” Dad said before I could speak. “A lot of changes are taking place all at once. What you have to do is just go with the flow and work through them. That’s all. You’ll see. Don’t even try to talk about it. Just ride it out. Believe me, you and I are two of a kind, so I know what you’re going through. Just relax.”
“That’s not it,” I said. “No.”
“Well, consider this,” he said, and opened another beer. “You know one of the reasons why I am the way I am, Joey? Because my mind is constantly focused on perfection—on the way life ought to be—and I can imagine perfection in everything but I can’t get perfection in real life. Not from me. Or your mom, or my mom, or Leezy. Which is why I need you to win tomorrow. All my life I’ve wanted to be a winner and you’re the guy who can make that happen and be my little corner of perfection.”
“I want to be perfect,” I said. “I do.”
“Then just take it easy. You don’t have to pitch a perfect game. A win is all I want.”
“I mean I’ve already made a mistake,” I said. “I’m not perfect.” And I wanted to tell him about how I should still be on my medicine, that it was a mistake to not have told Mom what I did. It was a mistake to think I could work it all out by myself. I just didn’t want anyone to get upset with me, because all my life people had been upset with me. It was a mistake not to listen to Mom because she told me not to do things for her or for him, but for me. But I didn’t listen to her and now it was too late to change things back and I was upset with myself.
“Nobody’s perfect,” Dad said. “You just have to be better than the other guy.”
“Dad, I’m scared,” I said. “Let’s go back.”
“Not yet,” he said. “I saved the best for last. I know how to turn on the bumper cars.”
That got me. “I love bumper cars!” I shouted.
“Me too,” he said. “When I sneak in at night I turn them on and just go whizzing around the floor and bang into stuff by myself. Always better to hit than to be hit,” he said.
Then before I could tell him that I always imagined him as a bumper car on the loose bouncing off everything up and down the streets and in and out of rooms, he jumped up and ran down a little path and I ran right behind him.
When we got to the bumper cars I saw one with a cross-eyed clown face painted on the front and I knew that was the one I wanted. Dad lit a match to see and opened an electric panel next to the operator’s chair. He fiddled around for a few minutes until he flicked a switch and the cars jerked forward a bit.
“It’s show time,” he yelled. “Every man for himself.”
I was already in my car when he hopped onto the hood of a car painted up like an Easter egg, and I knew I was going to turn him into a real Humpty Dumpty. I stepped on the pedal and when I looked up I saw sparks trailing down behind me where the power pole touched the ceiling, and I imagined my thoughts being pushed out like sparklers. I was smaller than him so my car was faster. About the second time around I got him in my sights and slammed his car into a corner. He tried to work his way into the middle of the track but I slammed him again and wedged him between two cars. I kept backing up and slamming into him, then backing up and slamming into him and his head was snapping back and forth like I was shaking him real good and finally he yelled, “Enough already!”
But it wasn’t enough for me. I kept letting him have it. He stood up on his seat and tried to jump to another car and I hit him again and he lurched forward and there was a burst of sparks that showered down on us like a Fourth of July rocket blowing up in front of my eyes. Dad hollered out and all at once my car stopped moving.
“My hand!” he cried, and hopped around on the smooth metal floor. “I got hold of the electric pole and it zapped me. Well, at least it’s not you,” he said, blowing on his hand. “You have to pitch. All I have to do is yell. Good thing it didn’t get my mouth.” He began to laugh like some maniac character who eats flies for supper, and I began to laugh too, not because his hand was burned but because suddenly I seemed full of electricity and I imagined if I opened my eyes real wide and my mouth and nose and ears and you looked inside of me you’d see nothing but sparks flying around.
“Does it hurt real bad?” I finally asked.
“Nay,” he said. “When I was a kid—and this is the God’s honest truth—Granny used to give me a paper clip and tell me to put it in the wall socket because she knew a zap settled me down. Heck, even these days a couple a kilowatts now and again helps put me to sleep.”
“Then give me five,” I said, laughing.
“You’re a sick puppy,” he said. “I got a blister the size of a pancake on my hand and you want to slap it.”
I just laughed even louder. “Splat!” I said, imagining the blister popping open as I smacked it.
“We better get out of here,” Dad said.
We went back to the car. “Open one of those beers for me. It’ll keep my bad hand cool while I drink.”
I did as he told me and we drove back to the house.
“Well, tomorrow’s the big game,” Dad said. “Get a good night’s sleep.”
“Okay,” I said. I was exhausted. But as I walked to my room I knew I wasn’t going to sleep. I hadn’t slept right in days. I was up so much even Pablo was growling at me for keeping him awake. I lay in bed and listened to every
wheezing breath Grandma took and I rubbed the used patch on my belly like Aladdin rubbing his lamp and whispered, “I wish I was home with Mom. I wish the game was over. I wish I was normal again. I wish Dad didn’t scare me. I wish …”
13
THE MOON
I was just getting a little too nervous at the breakfast table. I sat down and stood up. Down and up. Down and up.
“Make up your mind,” Grandma said. “You gonna be jack-in-the-box? Or jack-out-of-the-box?”
“Can I get back to you on that?” I blurted out, and laughed and forgot why I was laughing and just felt hollow inside.
“You’re nuts again,” Grandma said, and she stood up and went to the bathroom.
As soon as she was out of sight I reached for the telephone. I punched in the numbers for home and it rang and rang and I started thinking that Mom wasn’t at home or at work and I got it mixed up in my head that she had gone someplace and hadn’t told me—like Mexico again although I knew she hadn’t but maybe she had anyway. She probably went where life was a lot easier and where she’d be happier without me pestering her. Maybe she got tired of worrying about me. I figured if I started walking now, by the time I got home she wouldn’t be there. Not even a note on the table. Nothing. And all her stuff would be packed and gone. I’d open her closets and they’d be empty except for the old things that reminded her of life with me and she’d have left them behind just like she was leaving me. And everything in her drawers would be gone. All her perfume and jewelry and shoes and magazines, and the only thing left in her room would be the blurry pictures of me in motion because she didn’t want to be reminded of her old life now that she was busy making a new life. I was desperate to see her and have her hold me and even though a small part of me said I was thinking out of control, I was too far out of control to listen and as the telephone rang I suddenly remembered that Mom didn’t have a license anymore and couldn’t pick me up if I wanted her to so I said to myself, “Just walk home anyway, just go out the door and follow the road and it will get you home,” and even though I felt my legs were full of springs and ready to walk around the planet I knew I wouldn’t get there fast enough to stop her if she was running away. Then I thought of Dad’s car so I hung up the phone and went into his room where he was still asleep and I knew he’d sleep for a while because there were so many empty beer bottles on the floor neatly lined up around his bed like a brown picket fence. I picked up his pants where he had folded them over a chair back and fished the keys out of the pocket and crept up the hall, when Grandma called to me from the bathroom.
“Get in here,” she said, and I thought she had seen me take the keys and I was going to tell her I planned to wash the car but she only said, “I need your opinion on something.”
I stuck my head around the corner and almost screamed, but I caught myself. Grandma had pulled half a cheek full of loose skin all the way back behind her jaw where she had it gathered in a wad and clipped to her ear with a clothespin. “Don’t you think I’d look better with a face-lift?” she asked, and breathed through her mouth like a fish out of water. “I met someone nice at one of your ball games and he said I must have looked good twenty years ago.”
I didn’t know what to say but opened my mouth anyway and said, “You better watch out. If you pull the skin too tight it might rip apart like when you pull Play-Doh too hard.”
“That’s a nasty thought,” she snapped, then looked into the mirror again and checked the color of her tongue, which was gray-looking and cracked like a dried-up bar of gas station soap. I didn’t want to see anything more and when she asked me to take the little plastic tongue scraper and scrape the gray gunk off her tongue I just moaned as if I had seen a ghost and turned and ran down the hall.
I tugged Pablo out of the hole he had dug in the couch cushion and ran out the front door. I got into the car and moved the seat all the way forward like Dad had showed me. Then I took the key and stabbed it over and over at the little keyhole but the key kept sliding away until I got my face really close to the slot and slowly wiggled it in. Then I glanced up at the front door to make sure that nobody was looking before I turned the key and slouched down and pressed the gas and the engine started. I pulled the gearshift down to R and the car backed up and I went straight out the driveway and right away I knew I was in trouble because I couldn’t see where I was going and steer and press the pedals all at once so I pressed the gas and lurched back then looked up over the seat and by then I was already out in the middle of the road and before I could hit the brake the car flattened the neighbor’s mailbox and slid down into a little rain ditch and stopped. I was so scared I just turned the car off and grabbed the keys with one hand and Pablo with the other and ran back across the street and into the house where I pushed Pablo back into his hole and raced up the hall where I darted into Dad’s room and put the keys back in his pants. One good thing about wrecking the car was that it knocked some sense into me and I no longer thought Mom was trying to leave me behind and as I sneaked down the hall Grandma was still looking into the mirror only now she had both sides of her face pulled back and held in place with circles of Scotch tape.
“Give me a hand,” she gurgled, and held the roll of tape out, and I did what she said and circled it from around her chin to the back of her head and around and around like I was wrapping up the Egyptian mummy in a scary movie.
Later, after Dad woke up and screamed at the sight of Grandma with her face-lift because she scared him half to death and had made a mess in the bathroom, he spotted the car across the street. I thought I was going to be in big trouble, but he didn’t say anything more to me than maybe he forgot to put the car in park and it must have rolled down the drive overnight, because he had done that before. While he went to call a tow truck to pull it back to our driveway I turned the television station to one of those exercise shows where people were doing all kinds of hopping around and sweating, and I just did what they did and tried to wear myself out. But then Dad saw me doing push-ups and he turned off the TV.
“I want you to sit down and rest,” he said, and scooted the coffee table back into its place and smoothed the carpet marks out with the bottom of his shoe. “You got the biggest game of your life tonight and I don’t want you wearing yourself out. Now what do you want for breakfast?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m fine. Just fine.” And I didn’t know what else to do so I went into my room. I sat down on the corner of my bed with Pablo and put the little speakers into my ears and listened to the tape. I pulled out my trumpet and started to play along, which must not have sounded very good because Pablo hopped down and began scratching at the door to get out, but I didn’t stop playing. I kept thinking to myself that the music is the glue that keeps me together and so I played as loudly as I could.
The next thing I knew Grandma burst into the room and pulled the trumpet out of my hands. “You gotta knock that racket off,” she said in a tight voice that sounded like her jaw was broken because she had it all taped up.
“I’m just keeping busy,” I said.
“Well, try to keep busy doing something more quiet,” she suggested.
“Yeah,” Carter yelled from the kitchen. “Like cleaning.”
I hopped up and went to the bathroom and closed the door before Grandma could get there first. I was going to get the cleaning supplies out of the cabinet but then I saw Dad’s foamy shaving cream on the counter and suddenly thought it was a great time to do something I had been wanting to try. The Tijuana Brass tape cover had a naked woman buried under a mountain of whipped cream and since I didn’t have whipped cream I thought shaving cream would do. I took off all my clothes except for my underwear and began to shake the can and spray foam all over my body. I started with my legs and inched my way up bit by bit and by the time I sprayed a big swirly beehive of foam on top of my head I didn’t look anything like the tape cover. Instead, I looked like the abominable snowman. I started making moaning noises and I was hoping Grandma would come
and knock on the door because I remembered a scary movie where the abominable snowman met the mummy for a showdown.
“Grand—maaa!” I wailed. “Grand—maaa!”
“What’s going on in there?” she asked, and pounded on the door. “Are you ill?”
“Grand—maaa!” I wailed again. “Open the door.”
She pushed the door open and I lunged at her. “Arghhh,” I growled.
Her mouth popped open so wide it snapped the tape around her jaw and she screamed until she lost her breath and had to lean against the wall. I dropped to my knees with laughter and when she finally recovered she said, “I don’t know what’s gonna kill me first—a heart attack or a lung attack.” Then she started to laugh too.
It was funny until Dad came around the corner and saw the shaving cream mess all over the bathroom.
“What has got into you?” he barked. “You’re goofing around and making a mess and all I ask is for you to rest before the game. Now get in the shower, then clean up the floor and get back to your room. You hear me, mister?”
“Yes, Dad,” I said. “I was only having some fun.”
“This is not a fun day,” he snapped back. “This is a serious day. We’ve got a big game ahead of us—not a shaving contest! Now do you hear me?”
“Can I get back to you on that?” I replied.
He jerked forward like he was going to take a swipe at me but Grandma stepped between us. “Calm down, boys,” she said. “Save it for the game.”
Dad turned and marched back to the kitchen, where he loudly announced that he was going to clean the oven, “because someone made a potpie mess again!”
“That will be the third time he’s cleaned it this month,” Grandma whispered to me.
I took my shower and went back to my room. I got dressed in my baseball uniform and sat in a chair until I couldn’t do that any longer, so I got out my duffel bag and I filled it with all my stuff. Then I dumped it out and packed it again. I got tired of that so I lifted up my shirt and got a pen and started to draw tattoos all over my body. I kept doing that until Dad poked his head into my room and told me it was time to eat a little something then head out to the ball field.