Hello, My Name Is Scrambled Eggs

by Jamie Gilson

  I told him no, thank you, and showed Tom how to program Snow Falling on Pittsfield. What you do is you print PITTSFIELD in the middle of the screen and then make little random *’s appear until ping-ping-ping, Pittsfield has a white-out.

  “It seemed like,” I said, not knowing at all if I should say it, “it seemed like when your father left, he was kind of, I don’t know, like, mad at you.” It was nosy of me, but if I was going to be his friend, I had to try to help.

  Tom started fiddling with his bangs, which were getting too long. “Yes, I … Every day, I am telling him what to do, how to get to place, what sign say. In Vietnam, son not tell father what to do. At the store he cannot read names on cans. I must tell him.”

  TYPE IN YOUR NAME, the computer flashed.

  TOM WIN, he wrote. Then he spaced twice and typed, TUAN.

  “‘This telling is wrong,’ my father say. ‘I am father. You are son,’ he say. He thinks my mother will not like it. He thinks it will be bad for baby.” He pushed the OFF button. Felix sighed and turned gray.

  “Look, he’ll learn pretty soon.”

  “For him English is hard. I must tell him. That is why I study. To help. Mr. Larkin in Galang say that is the way. My father and Ba Noi say I am too much American. I must be American. I must not be American. I do not know what to do.”

  “I know he’ll get used to it. Jeff’s working with him. They’ll all learn to speak English. And your mother will like it.”

  He shook his head. “Father say he, Ba Noi, and my mother more happy with more Vietnamese. I think they want to go to Chicago. Many Vietnamese there.”

  “To stay?”

  He nodded.

  “They won’t do that. I know it.” I didn’t know it, though. What if that’s why they’d gone to Chicago early, to look for another place to live? Jeff had been talking about something to my mom and dad, I knew that much. And Quint was always saying they’d go.

  “I …” Tom wrinkled his forehead and looked glum.

  “I am worried?” I guessed.

  “Yes. I am worried.”

  “Worry won’t help.” At least if he was worried they would leave, that meant he wanted to stay. “You want to go to T.G.I.F. tonight?” I didn’t know if that would cheer him much. He’d only been that one time, the night of the TP. “They’ll be shooting marbles on the flat mat.” Caroline had even added MARBLES to the poster because so many kids had started playing.

  “No. I study.”

  “You always study.” He did, too. It must have taken him days to learn all those Central American cities. It did me. “OK, if you don’t want to go. But let’s go outside for a while, at least.” I felt like moving. “You ever build a snowman?” I knew he hadn’t.

  “No.” He laughed. “Before I come here I think snow fall in big pieces from the sky.” He threw his arms out wide. “That big! I not know about the …” He turned Felix on, pressed ENTER a couple of times, and then brought up a string of *’s.

  “Flakes, snowflakes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Come on. Grab your coat and gloves. We’ll gather us enough snowflakes to build a man.”

  Tom pulled on his big green coat, a knit cap, and a pair of gloves. I wore Pete’s warm old down jacket with the patches.

  The snow hadn’t stopped. It was almost dark, but you could still see it falling by the street light. Julia and her friends, Sandy and Ina, had started to build a snowman. When they couldn’t roll the first ball any farther, though, they’d just left it and started pushing drifts together to make a fort.

  “What’d you think?” Julia called when she saw us. We stepped back and looked. What they’d made was this wavy wall about two feet high and fifteen feet long. Fluffy ran along beside it, barking a tune I couldn’t recognize. Julia would have known if I’d asked her.

  “Looks terrific,” I told her. “Looks like some kind of fortress for extremely short people, cat-sized.”

  “It is dragon’s tail,” Tom said.

  Julia frowned and walked the length of it. “Where’s its head?”

  He pointed to the ball they’d rolled halfway across the yard. “He lose it—there.”

  So, while Julia and her gang of three kicked their wall around to make it even wavier and patted the top into a kind of scaly point, Tom and I waded through the snow to roll the ball into position. It was right under the street light. Packing, poking, and patting on more and more wet snow, we built a dragon neck thick enough to hold his round ball head. Tom gave him ears and a wide flaring snout. He looked ferocious.

  “I’ll get some more stuff,” Julia said. “He needs more. Wait.”

  People driving by waved and honked. I mean, you don’t see too many snow dragons swimming under Pittsfield street lights. We were beginning to look like snow creatures ourselves when Julia finally came out with a mammoth carrot and a long purple scarf.

  “It’s his cigar,” she said, poking the carrot into the dragon’s mouth. “So he can breathe fire.” Then she wrapped the purple scarf around his neck. “So he won’t catch cold.”

  Next she pulled off her mitten and shook out of it into her hand the blue cat’s-eye marble. “And here’s his eye. He’s a one-eyed dragon. He sees all.” Setting the blue wedge just right, she stuck the round eye in the middle of the dragon’s icy forehead.

  I shivered. It was, of course, a magic marble that would turn the creature live and snarling, whip loose his massive tail, and start him puffing clouds of silver steam through his fat orange cigar, DRAGON ROAMS PITTSFIELD ALLEYS. FEAR STALKS CITIZENS.

  Julia plopped onto his back, grabbed the ends of his scarf, and yelled, “Giddy-up!” Fluffy snapped at the fringe. But the dragon just sat there coldly and stared.

  “It’s getting late, my dears,” Mom called from the front porch. “How about tomato soup and grilled-cheese sandwiches? You must be frozen blue.”

  “We’ve just made a red-hot dragon,” I yelled.

  “Listen,” I told Tom, “we’d better take the marble in.” I reached for it.

  He stopped my hand. “No. Julia put it there. It is her marble. The eye look at snow first time. Look all night. Tomorrow mother come.”

  After supper and homework in front of the fireplace like two Abraham Lincolns, we climbed the steps to the second floor. I had studied math on a Friday night. I couldn’t believe it.

  Mom thought Tom’d go upstairs to the room where he’d first lived, but I wanted a sleepover so we could talk. Tom’s bag of things was on the bed next to the window. And he was taking out the Cubs’ pajamas I’d given him as I carried in the little TV and put it on the table between our beds.

  Nothing much was on, though, so after about a half-hour of flipping channels, I turned out the light. Crawling under our heaps of covers, we listened to the wind blow through the empty maple branches.

  “I like beds. I never knew beds before here,” Tom said. We could hear the sleety snow scrape at the window. Our fiery dragon had probably swum through ten-foot drifts, slithering over vast obstacles—curbs, fireplugs, parked squad cars—to talk to Pitt Pig, whose feet were stuck in concrete.

  “Tomorrow you’ll all be together again. Everything will be terrific. Your little sister will probably say her first words in English, did you ever think about that?”

  I waited for him to answer, wondering if maybe I’d talked too fast. But that wasn’t it. By his deep, heavy breaths I knew he was asleep. The house was quiet except for Tom’s breathing and the furnace in the basement huffing away. It’s funny having somebody else in your room when you’re not used to it. You know they’re there even when it’s dark.

  Pretty soon I knew it even more. Out of the quiet I heard a soft, high moan and then this choky, panting sob.

  “Tom,” I called softly. I didn’t want to scare him, but I didn’t want him to keep crying, either.

  “Tom, it’s OK. You’re here. Nobody’s after you.” I used to be afraid at night that a crow was dive-bombing me, and so I know how he felt. I t
hink I know how he felt.

  Tom turned over in bed, threw back the covers, and drew himself into a ball. His Cubs’ pajamas were all twisted.

  “Tom.” I flicked on the light between the beds.

  In the middle of a sob he opened his eyes. He frowned for a minute, blinked, and then almost smiled as he leaned on his elbow. “I wake you,” he said. “I am sorry. It is …” He pressed his fists on his eyes and lay his head back on the pillow. “I think I am not here. The sea is so big and I am there. I am on the boat and they shoot. If they catch people being escape, they kill them. My uncle True … they …” He pounded his hand on his chest. “We left him in the waves. Ba Noi cry all, all night. All day. I cry, too.”

  I turned off the light, not wanting to look at him sad, and remembered how Quint had said the Nguyens were cowards because they wouldn’t go down the escalator. I asked him, “Were there pirates?”

  “I do not know … pirates. Men jump in boat. Take all. Hurt …”

  “That’s OK. You don’t have to tell me. I just wondered about the pirates.”

  “Snow on your window sounds like scratch of rats. At night rats look for rice on boat.” He stopped talking, and I thought he had gone back to sleep. “I smell the seasick. I am afraid we fall in the waves.” The wind began to sound like rats to me, too, sharp-toothed and hungry. “I am sorry,” he said, “I wake you.”

  When I was little and would wake up soaked after the crow attacks, my mother would change my bed and tell me to think good thoughts. And I would think hard about pink cotton candy and the time I won a stuffed penguin that leaked a trail of little white chips all the way home from the carnival. And I’d think about hitting a home run with three kids on base or about swimming underwater the whole width of the pool. But I wasn’t sure what would be good things to Tom. If he thought about the happy stuff in between war times, that would only make him sad because he couldn’t go back. Maybe ever. Besides, one thought would lead to the next and the first thing you know he’d be on that little boat again with the rats.

  “Are you OK?” I asked.

  “I am OK, no kidding,” he told me. Those were my words he was saying, but they meant different things to him. I knew that.

  “Good night, Tom. Tomorrow’s going to be terrific.”

  “Harvey?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are not Zilch?”

  “Right. Zilch is not who I am. My name is also not Scrambled Eggs.”

  “Harvey?”

  “Yes.”

  “I am not Tom. I decide. I will be American. I will. But my name is Tuan Nguyen.”

  Not my kid at all. “Yeah,” I said, “I guess I knew.”

  11

  Pho Tai and Pumpkin Pie

  AFTER A NIGHT of snow, our creature looked more like a stretch-tailed ghost than a dragon. His spine was rounded, and he seemed to cruise half underwater. Even though it was Saturday and usually a work day, Tuan Nguyen and I both stayed home for the big welcome. In the blue sky and warming day, we’d swept the steps, front and back, cleared the walk, and even shoveled the snow off the driveway before Julia came outside with Frank F. Fluffy.

  The puppy plowed through the snow, nose tilted down, disappearing into the deep, except for his brown swishing tail. Yipping a kind of shorthand “Jingle Bells,” he was clearly tone deaf but showed a lot of promise with the volume. His real talent had turned out to be his teeth, with which he’d gnawed off both of Zachary’s wings. Julia didn’t seem to mind, though. Poor Zach had become a flightless has-been.

  Waving the carrot that had dropped into the snow, Julia announced, “Our dragon gave up smoking last night. He spit his cigar out.” I shook the snow dust from his purple scarf, and Tuan woke him up, blowing the white off his eye.

  A snowball zipped past my ear. Nobody was in sight in the direction it came from. No whole body, anyway. Down the block, Quint’s blue coat stuck out from both sides of a tree that was skinnier than he was.

  “Hey, your disappearing act needs work!” I yelled, and he fell, arms straight out, like a chopped-down tree, into a drift.

  We ran over to check him out, and when we looked straight down on him, he opened his eyes and said to Tom—Tuan, “How come Mr. Tandy’s newest math sensation isn’t inside studying?”

  “Because I just got up,” I answered. “Besides, I never study. I am gift-ed.”

  “Very funny,” he said, but he laughed anyway. He got up and shook the snow off. “Thought you might like to know my uncle got a job yesterday. In Jacksonville. He got it from a want ad, and he’s gonna move there, get an apartment. He says there are more jobs in Jacksonville.” Quint smiled his smirk. “And more Vietnamese, too, for those who’d like to move to a place where they talk Vietnamese.”

  “Cut it out,” I told him. “Be nice, for just once. Tuan’s mother and baby sister are coming this morning.”

  “I knew Tom’s mother was coming. Who’s this Tuan person?”

  A horn honked down the block, and Tuan searched the street for the blue van.

  “He’s going back to using his old name. He’d never even told his family about being Tom.”

  Tuan nodded and stepped out into the street to look again.

  It was empty of blue vans. And nobody else was expected. We weren’t having a big party the day Tuan’s mother and sister came. Instead, we were going to let them get to sleep early. People would say hello to them at the big Thanksgiving festival we have every year at the church. That was five days away. Every year Miles’ Bakery roasts all the turkeys, and families bring other food from home.

  “Are we too late?” Caroline and Suzanna slid down the street, one carrying a yellow rubber duck and the other a small brown bear with a plaid bow. Caroline had her hair all tucked under a fuzzy white cap that looked as soft as new kitten fur.

  “We’ll baby-sit. Babies are crazy about us.” Caroline squeezed the duck and it went, “Meow.”

  “Not yet,” I told them. “It’s just noon. Probably it’ll be an hour or so.”

  “We could always build a snowman,” Caroline suggested, pulling the furry cap down over her ears.

  “Or a fairy princess to go with the dragon,” Julia said. “I’ll go get a wand.”

  “Bizarre.” Quint looked after her.

  The warm air made the snow damp and heavy, good packing, and so we started rolling balls to build with. A fairy princess, or whatever.

  “Cut it out, Quint,” Suzanna yelled.

  “I’m going to blast you!” Caroline told him. He was tossing handfuls of snow down the necks of their coats whenever their backs were turned. The two of them started pelting him with snowballs.

  “Come on, you guys, we won’t get anything built that way.”

  “But, Zilch, this is fun.”

  “Sometimes you’ve got really weird ideas of fun, you know that?”

  He plucked the marble eye from the dragon.

  “Hey, put that back. It’s mine.” Julia marched toward us with a construction-paper star on a stick. She’d taken it down from her bulletin board.

  Quint dropped the big blue marble like it was scorching his fingers. But then he scooped a handful of snow around it. “Just a touch of magic, my small friend.” He patted her on the head. “A little frozen prestidigitation.”

  I mean, how could she argue with that? He was putting on another show.

  After packing one, he made two more and threw the first in the air, the one with the marble. I think. Then he threw another. Then the third, juggling them higher and higher, no sweat.

  “Question is,” he went on, keeping the balls moving, “which one has the dragon’s all-seeing eye inside? Who can say?”

  He caught them and held them out for our inspection. “Ladies and gentlemen, is it snowball number one?” He pitched it up, caught it behind his back, and then flung it against the base of the street lamp. When the snow crushed and fell away to the sidewalk, there was a marble there—but it was red.

  We all gasped.
>
  “What, red? Did it change colors? Or is it, then, in snowball number two, round and cold and icy?”

  First he tossed it high. Then, catching it in his fingertips, he wound up like a pitcher throwing your basic fast ball, and hurled it at the dragon. Its soggy snout collapsed neatly into the sea. “Whoops! As you can plainly see, it’s not in ball number two.” So far as we could see, nothing was in ball number two. I gathered up the snow from the snout and threw it, grapefruit-sized, back at him. It caught him on the shoulder, but he brushed the slush off and grinned.

  “Unless there has been some major mistake …” He packed his last snowball tighter. “… it must be hidden in number …” And before we knew it, the snowball was coming. Somebody should recruit Quint for the majors, no kidding. He’s got an arm. “Catch it, Zilch!” he yelled, and it came at me straight as radar.

  I ducked and the ball skimmed past. It whizzed between Tuan and me into the street like a missile, just as a car came driving by. It wasn’t the blue van we’d been waiting for, but it wasn’t just any old car, either. It was one of Pittsfield’s two squad cars. The one. And the officer inside was the same guy Tuan and I had met before in the night under the stars, moon, and toilet paper.

  Quint’s snowball slapped into that squad car’s windshield with a crack that sounded like a branch snapping in a storm.

  The policeman hit the brakes, skidded in the slush, and swerved totally around into the curb.

  If I could have, I would have melted and run down the gutter.

  The policeman didn’t have a spotlight this time. He didn’t need it. Even getting out of the car, his eyes held us. Everyone but Julia, who ran for the house, dog at heels, yelling, “Quint killed a car!”