by Jim Benton
“Perfectly good food, and look what he does to it! Honestly, what makes him do that? Well, nothing for him until morning. He can go to bed hungry!” She made sure that she yelled loud enough for Jack to hear.
Jack flipped through a magazine and looked out the window. He started to get hungry, but he knew that asking for something to eat would start up a big hairy fight.
He thought about playing his music really loud, mostly because he knew his parents hated that, like all old people do.
He lay there for a while, wondering why old people hate loud things. You would think that if your hearing was bad, you’d want everything loud.
It made no sense.
“One day, when you’re old, there’s a moment when you turn the music down and you never turn it back up again,” he said to himself. “Do you know you’re old when it happens? Are you aware of the exact moment?”
He fell asleep in his clothes with the lights on.
Jack dreamt about salami. He dreamt that a big fat salami sandwich showed up at their house in the middle of the night because it had lost something. The salami sandwich resembled his old neighbor, Mr. Wallace, and it was telling his dad over and over about needing to get this thing back.
And then Jack woke up, and he looked around his room.
Somebody had come in, pulled off his shoes, and left a salami sandwich for him on his bedside table. Must have been Mom, he thought. Every time she sent him to bed hungry, she brought him something to eat later.
His room was dark, except for the dim light from his clock radio. He looked at the time. It was 6:00 a.m. He took a bite from the sandwich and pulled off his socks.
He wasn’t sure exactly what had awakened him so ridiculously early. Jack was sure that if you looked outside this early, you’d see birds and squirrels asleep on the sidewalk.
And then he heard a voice like the big fat salami sandwich he’d dreamt about. It was coming from downstairs.
He walked quietly to the door and opened it just enough to slip through. He snuck down the stairs and peered around the corner. His dad, barely awake, was talking to Mr. Wallace.
“I thought Mr. Wallace moved to Florida,” Jack whispered to himself.
Mr. Wallace was a mess. He was unshaved, his clothes were wrinkled, and he kept pulling his fingers through his messy white hair.
“It’s just like I told you on the phone. I looked everywhere,” he said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Jack’s dad patted him on the back.
“It’s going to turn up,” he told him in a reassuring voice. “You’re not the first person in the world to have lost something, you know, but let’s not talk about it on the phone again.”
Jack’s mom brought in a tray from the kitchen.
Mr. Wallace nodded knowingly.
“You’re right,” he said. “Never know who might be listening.”
“Oh, nobody’s listening,” Jack’s mom said with a dismissive little laugh. “Let’s sit down, have some coffee, and think about where it could be. I’m sure we’ll have you back on a plane to Florida before you know it.”
So Mr. Wallace HAD moved to Florida, Jack thought. But then he flew back here, in the middle of the night three days later, just because he lost something? What? What could be that valuable? He knew that Mike would tell him that it was probably a corpse.
Jack sat down on the step and listened carefully.
Mr. Wallace was rambling.
“We didn’t take it to Florida. It’s not in the old house or the garage. What if I never find it? What if I never get it back?”
Jack wanted to hear more, but it was still pretty early, and even when it wasn’t early, most of the time when adults talked, he wanted to fall asleep. He figured he should head back up to bed.
As he got to the top of the stairs, he heard his dad say to Mr. Wallace, “The two of us should drive out to the dump and have a look.”
THE DUMP! Jack suddenly felt recharged. Many times he had imagined what a dump would be like, and he pictured it being exactly like a Walmart full of aisles of great trash you can just take for free.
He pulled on his pants, stepped on half a salami sandwich, grabbed his shoes, and ran out the door, pausing only long enough to pick up the stomped sandwich and stick it in his mouth.
THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP, he came rushing down the stairs.
“Dad? Dad?” he shouted.
“STOP SCREAMING!” his mom screamed. “YOUR SISTER IS STILL TRYING TO SLEEP!” she screamed with ever-increasing volume.
“Where’s Dad?” Jack asked.
“He had an errand to do. Why?”
“I don’t know. I just wanted to know. Never mind. I don’t know. No reason.”
Saying any more than that would have revealed that he had been listening in on their conversation. But it was exactly the kind of meaningless jabbering that alerted Mom to a Lie in Progress.
“No reason, huh?” she asked.
“No reason, Mom. I mean, I’m curious, okay? No reason for you to dump all this junk on me.”
“Dump this junk, huh?”
How did she do that? Jack realized she was pulling it out of him like some sort of a Jedi, or worse, like some sort of Jedi’s mom. That’s probably where Jedis learn mind tricks, from their moms.
“Going over to Mike’s house!” he shouted back to her, as he escaped through their front door before he revealed anything else.
He ran across the street, where Mike was in his driveway, tossing up clumsy shots at his basketball hoop in his pajamas.
“If I make this shot, you have to pay me a hundred dollars, okay?” he said, a single eye peering from behind his messy bangs.
“No. Listen, Mr. Wallace was at my house this morning and … Why are you out here in your pajamas?”
Mike missed the shot.
“I thought I could make that one,” he said. “See? If you had bet me, you would have won a hundred dollars.”
“It wasn’t a bet,” Jack said quickly. “And why are you out here in your pajamas?”
“The gravity of the sun messes up my shots, so I decided to come out and shoot a few before the sun showed up.”
“The sun is still there,” Jack said, “even when you can’t see it. The gravity is still there.”
“That explains why I missed that shot, I guess. Good point, Jack.”
“But listen—Mr. Wallace lost something important. Something valuable.”
Mike caught the ball.
“Valuable?”
“I think so,” Jack said. “And my dad took him to the dump this morning to find it.”
“So THAT’S the hobo I saw with your dad.”
“Maybe it’s a briefcase full of money,” Jack said.
“Maybe it’s a Pegasus,” Mike suggested. “One of those flying horse things.”
Jack paused, looked straight at Mike, and cocked his head like a dog does when it hears a peculiar noise.
“You think Mr. Wallace lost a flying horse? That’s what you think? How would you lose something that big? And what makes you think there even is such a thing?”
“You said it was something valuable. What would be more valuable than that? Anyway, they have wings, stupid. It could have flown away. God, Jack, use your head,” he said, slapping his forehead with his palm.
“So, you’re saying that you really think it might have been a Pegasus?”
Mike tossed his bangs back and looked at Jack with both eyes; he felt vaguely insulted by Jack’s tone. He knew how to put Jack in his place.
“Let’s go ask Maggie if she hopes it’s a briefcase full of money or a Pegasus,” he said, and took off in a full run for Maggie’s house.
“NOOOO!” Jack yelled, bolting after him and making the tackle before Mike had gotten more than fifteen feet.
Mike squealed in the highest, girliest voice he could, “I’m Maggie, and I weally weally hope it’s a pwetty fwying pony, Jack, so we can get married and fwy away on a big dumb h
oneymoon of wuv.”
Jack stood up and watched Mike roll around on the grass, howling with laughter. Kicking him always just made him laugh harder, so all Jack could do was wait for him to quiet down on his own.
* * *
They spent the rest of the morning arguing about what Mr. Wallace lost, with Mike threatening to go tell Maggie about the Pegasus every single time Jack made fun of his guesses.
After a few hours, Jack’s dad’s car came around the corner. Jack waved and motioned him to stop.
Jack’s dad rolled down the window.
“What is it, Jack? I’m kind of in a hurry here.”
“Where were you?” Jack asked.
“I, uh, had some stuff to do. We’ll talk more later,” he said, and pulled into their driveway. Jack watched him walk quickly into the house, brushing himself off as he went.
Mike ran across the street toward Jack’s house, and Jack had no choice but to follow him. Mike ran into Jack’s garage.
“Quick! Let’s go in and see what they’re talking about,” Mike said, and the two of them slipped in quietly. They hid next to the doorway and listened carefully.
Jack’s dad was flustered. He talked loudly as he described the morning to Jack’s mom.
“First off, there’s no dump, not like what I was imagining. I don’t know what we were thinking. Our trash goes to a landfill and the closest one is an hour’s drive from here. And there’s no way to know if Wallace’s trash is even aboveground anymore. They’re constantly bulldozing stuff under.”
“Did you look around?” Jack’s mom asked.
“Well, yeah. Kind of, but you have no idea. A dump like this is a massive operation. You wouldn’t even know where to start. And the people there won’t let you wander around looking for stuff. There’s big machinery and trucks everywhere. You could get killed.”
“Where’s Mr. Wallace?”
“I dropped him off at his son’s house. He’s hoping that maybe his son picked it up last time he was in for a visit.”
“Should we … report it?”
Jack and Mike looked at each other. “I have to pee,” Mike whispered to Jack.
“Report it? And get us in trouble, too? There’s no reason to report anything,” Jack’s dad said. “It’s just misplaced, that’s all.”
Mike tugged on Jack’s arm. His whisper was louder and more urgent. “Every time I hide, I have to pee. You know that.”
“Well, if it doesn’t turn up soon,” Jack’s mom said, “we could get in trouble anyway.”
Jack whispered to Mike, “What could they get in trouble for? What is this about?”
Mike’s eyes crossed. He couldn’t hold it any longer. “We have initiated Launch Sequence,” he whispered, and ran out the door, letting it close behind him with a loud slam.
Jack, thinking quickly, covered the sound of the door slam by pretending he was walking into the house. “Mom!” he yelled. “Do we have any German chocolate cake?”
“Cake?” his dad said. “Since when do we eat cake in the morning?”
Jack had the answer to that. He thought to himself: We have coffee cake, hotcakes, pancakes. We have cake things for breakfast all the time. But this wasn’t the time to make Dad mad.
“Oh, right,” he said, and made a quick exit.
Out the window, his parents watched him run across the street to Mike’s house. “Look both ways, look both ways,” his mom whispered through clenched teeth.
Mike and Jack sat on Jack’s front lawn as the sun went down on a fairly unusual day. They were absentmindedly ripping handfuls of grass out of the lawn and waving off mosquitoes.
“Why do mosquitoes come out in the evening?” Jack said. “Wouldn’t it make more sense to come out during the day when more people are out?”
“If I was a mosquito,” Mike said, “I’d try to get all the other mosquitoes to help me steal a whole bottle of blood from the hospital and then we’d take that back to our mosquito house and drink it until it was gone.”
Jack stared at his best friend. He felt that there was no doubt that Mike was a very special kind of stupid, but he couldn’t really argue with him about the blood bottle. It actually was a pretty good idea, if mosquitoes could pull it off.
“If we put a raw steak out on the ground, would mosquitoes bite it?” Mike asked.
Before Jack could answer, Mike ran off toward his house.
“I’ll see if we have one!” he yelled.
Jack lay down on the cool grass and looked up at the purples and yellows of the evening summer sky. He closed his eyes and started snickering at the idea of mosquitoes robbing hospitals.
“What’s so funny?” Maggie said.
She was standing directly over him, looking down. He hadn’t heard her walk up.
Jack scrambled to his feet. “Mosquitoes,” he said, “stealing hospital blood.”
Maggie smiled politely. Jack felt as though he had just been punched in the face by her prettiness.
Maggie sat down as Mike returned. They had no idea why Maggie had decided to join them, but it was okay with them. Jack and Mike looked at each other, shrugged, and sat down as well.
Must have been that wave, Jack thought. I should have waved a long time ago. I must be a pretty good waver.
Mike pulled a raw steak out of his pocket. “Look,” he said, and tossed it on the grass.
Jack felt a little embarrassed and apologetic. “Mike’s doing an experiment. He wants to know if mosquitoes will try to suck blood from a raw steak.”
Maggie giggled. “Cool,” she said.
“Do you think they will?” Mike asked her.
“I don’t know. The meat might not be enough to make them bite. They’re attracted to heat, and the carbon dioxide that animals exhale. Also, the juice in meat isn’t blood, exactly. It’s mostly water mixed with something called myoglobin. Most of the blood drains out during slaughter.”
Jack slapped at a mosquito that was biting him.
“How do you know that?” Jack was visibly impressed with how smart she was.
“The web,” she said. “I read a lot of stuff online.”
“Do your parents let you go online whenever you want?” Mike said enviously. “My parents watch every little thing I do on the computer.”
“Not whenever I want, but pretty often, I guess.” She looked directly at Jack. “We should chat sometime.”
Maggie’s dad called to her from her front porch.
“Mags! Let’s go!” he shouted.
“I gotta run,” she said, and started toward her house. “He’ll freak out if I don’t hurry up.”
“See ya,” Mike said.
“Blug-buh,” Jack said.
He had meant to say “bye-bye,” but his throat was choked up with the new respect he had for her, which he was trying to swallow on top of the stomachful of pure crush he already had.
Maggie stopped and turned back to them.
“Oh, one more thing. Have either of you EVER heard of a kid whose face really and truly froze in an ugly expression they made?”
“Like his?” Jack said, pointing to Mike’s face.
Mike pointed at his own face for clarity.
Maggie shook her head. “No, like this,” she said, and twisted her face up into a spectacularly ugly expression.
They shook their heads no.
“I didn’t think so,” she said. And there was something about the way she said it that made her seem like a detective, which, on top of her appearance as Internet master, bug scientist, and world’s prettiest face, made Jack feel like he might vomit Pure Total Crush out on the grass, which would probably be bad for the lawn and get him yelled at.
They watched her run up onto her porch and into her house.
“Maybe we should go to the dump,” Mike said.
“Huh?” Jack said numbly, still thinking about Maggie and his crush vomit for her.
“Maybe your dad just isn’t very good at trash picking. Maybe if you and I went, we could find wh
atever it is Mr. Wallace threw away. We’re the best trash guys in the world. Remember that one time you found that totally awesome giant bra?”
Jack shivered. “Don’t remind me,” he said, and he looked up at Mr. Wallace’s house, just in time to see a curtain flutter slightly.
“Did you see that?” he said. “Somebody is inside the Wallace house.”
“Like a deformed hobo?” Mike said hopefully.
“I saw the curtain move. Somebody’s in there.”
“It’s probably some sort of deformed hobo,” Mike repeated. “Let’s get my dad’s golf clubs and attack him.”
The debate over the rightness and wrongness of attacking a deformed hobo had to wait. Jack’s mom called him to come in for the night, and Mike sat down on his own porch, knowing that he would be called in next.
“I think it would be cool to find a giant bra,” he said.
Early the next morning, Maggie was awakened by the sounds of a loud police radio out front. She staggered from her bed and pushed back her hair so she could see. From her window, she saw three police cars across the street.
She ran downstairs and out the front door.
Her mom, dad, and brother, Sean, were on the lawn, watching the small crowd of neighbors and police standing on the sidewalk outside the Wallaces’ old house.
She spotted Jack and Mike in the crowd and waved.
Jack trotted over to her happily as Mike trailed behind.
“Hey, Maggie,” Jack said.
“What happened?” she said.
Jack began to answer but Mike interjected.
“Got your basic deformed hobo incident,” Mike said, hiking up his pants with authority.
“No. No deformed hobos. Somebody broke into the Wallace house. I heard one of the police say that the place had been torn up pretty bad, like some walls ripped down and stuff,” Jack said.
“Yeah, your deformed hobos will do that. And the mutated hobos, too,” Mike added. “If science has taught us anything, it’s that a mutant hobo has the strength of ten gorillas.”
“Did they catch anybody?” Maggie’s mom asked. Her voice sounded concerned.