by Jack Gantos
Dad started to say something but the other medic put a big foam collar around his neck that pushed his chin up so he couldn’t talk anymore. Then they shifted him sideways onto a wooden stretcher and I could see right away that even though he was slick with blood the piece of branch that was poking through him was only about as big around as a cue stick.
Mom climbed into the ambulance after him, and just before the driver closed the door I could see her reach for Dad’s hand and hold it tight.
Grandma saw it too. “What’d I tell you,” she said bitterly after they sped off. “They’re a couple of sick love-puppies who deserve each other.”
As soon as the ambulance was out of sight, a police car slowly rolled up to our house and two cops got out. One of them had a clipboard and the other one had a walkie-talkie that squawked like an angry parrot trapped in a box. I knew I should have been upset about what had happened, really off the wall and pulling my hair out in clumps, but somehow I wasn’t. I just stood there and breathed as deeply as I could and then let all the air leak out until I felt empty inside, as if my breath were a visitor who entered me, looked around, found nothing of special interest, and left.
Grandma turned and stared down at me with a harsh look on her lined face. “Go get lost,” she said, wheezing like a broken accordion.
“What are you going to tell them?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Grandma replied, and reached down the back of my shirt and peeled off my med patch that kept me from being too hyper. Sometimes we shared medication. The doctor wouldn’t give her a patch for being hyper, because he said at her age hyper was good. “Let me borrow this for a few minutes while the cops are here,” she said, and slapped it on the side of her neck as if she were covering up a vampire bite.
“Why can’t I stay and tell them what I saw?”
“Because you might tell the truth, and as far as I’m concerned, who can say between the two of those nuts which one is criminally insane and which one is mentally ill? Let the cops figure it out on their own. Now, skedaddle.”
“Okay,” I said, and shrugged. “See you later.” Then I scooped Pablo up, grabbed the leash that was hanging over the doorknob, and zipped out the back door.
2
PEEK-A-BOO!
When I left the house that evening, I speed-walked with my arms swinging back and forth and half dragged and half yanked poor Pablo down to the hospital emergency room to see if there was anything I could do to help. Even though Pablo’s little pink tongue was hanging out from exhaustion and he couldn’t walk another step even if he wanted, I still tied him to the fence, then went inside and asked a nurse about Dad. She set her lips so tightly together they looked like a line of red wire. It was a look I was used to seeing and I knew she was trying to decide something. Then finally she told me he had run off.
“Did you see which way he went?” I asked.
“No,” she replied. “The doctor tried to keep him overnight for observation after he stitched him up, but your dad snuck out the fire exit. We have some antibiotics for him to take, so if you see him, have him return for them. Okay?”
“Can I give him the medicine?” I asked, and held out my hand. I figured he was still angry with me for running back to Mom this summer after he flipped out during our first visit ever, and I thought if I had some medicine for him, he would calm down and know I really wanted to help him get better. I didn’t want him to be mad at me forever, so it was only fair that I shouldn’t be mad at him now. But I did have to be careful. He had already proved he was more than I could handle.
“No,” she said. “He has to get it himself.”
“He won’t do that,” I said.
“Then your mom can get it for him.”
“She definitely won’t,” I said. “And my grandma won’t do it either because she hardly leaves the couch anymore. Believe me, I’m the only one who can help.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” she said. “But we don’t give medicine to minors. Do you understand what … I … am
… say … ing?” She spoke the last part so slowly it confused me and then I guessed that when my parents had stopped holding hands they had started acting badly again, and now the nurse thought I was abused or deranged in some way from being around them.
“Can I ask you a question?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Do my parents seem unusual to you? Because they seem a little unusual to me.”
“Do your parents call each other bad names at home?” the nurse asked, bending down to look me straight in the eyes.
“They call each other bad names anywhere,” I replied. “My grandmother thinks they are criminally insane.”
“Do you want to talk with someone at the hospital about this?” she asked, dropping down on both knees and reaching for my hands with hers. When she realized she still had on her white rubber gloves she began to peel them off, which made a noise like a duck being strangled.
“I have to go,” I said suddenly, backing away. “Thanks for your help.” I turned and ran and was just out the door when it hit me that Dad had run away from her too, and now I was pulling the same stunt he did. She must have thought we were both nuts, and that it was true what they say—the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. And as if that weren’t bad enough, as soon as I untied Pablo I began to think that maybe something really awful had happened in the hospital and maybe Mom was hurt and that’s why Dad ran away, and the nurse was just trying to break the news to me. That stopped me in my tracks, but before my old nervous habit of pulling my own hair out got my hands going, I saw a pay phone. I dug into my pocket and fished out some change and called home to make sure she was okay. Mom answered and before I could get some words out she hollered, “Hello? Hello?” She was spittin’ mad, and in the background I heard pots and pans banging together, and suddenly I remembered Booth was coming for dinner and Mom was cooking. Then she yelled, “Carter Pigza, if this is you, I swear I will call the phone company and tell them you are harassing me. You pig!”
After that it was too hard to say the words that it was just her kid on the other end calling to hear her nice Mom voice so I would know she was okay. So I gently hung up the phone and quickly walked home because I didn’t want to be late and ruin Mom’s dinner plans, or her future plans with Booth, which she said looked “promising.” But before I walked into the house, I stood and stared at the tree Dad had got hung up on. Then I squatted down and patted the dark ground with my open hand. I don’t know why I wanted to feel where his blood had made the dirt all sticky, but as I patted the spot I felt sorry for him, as if my touch could make his cut feel better. I always wanted him to be a good dad, but since he wasn’t, I just wanted him to be a good person. When I stood up, I examined his motorcycle. The fenders were scratched and dented, but the rest of it looked okay. Then I glanced over my shoulder and saw the muffler in the street. It looked like a saxophone that a Mack truck had run over, and I picked it up and carried it into the house and hid it in my room before anyone noticed I had returned. Then I went to the bathroom and scrubbed the sticky dirt and black muffler soot off my hands until the sink was filthy, and I had to clean that too because Mom was having me help out more around the house since she worked longer hours and Grandma could no longer clean up after herself. Just thinking about how sick she was made me feel fizzy inside, so I opened the cabinet and got out a new med patch. I peeled off the back and stuck it to my shoulder.
When I first met Booth after I returned from spending the summer at Dad’s house, he tried to be friendly to me. I had heard Mom angrily tell him all about Dad being a nut and me running away from him, and I knew Booth wanted to help smooth it all out by listening and just being a good guy. I liked that about him—the madder Mom got, the calmer Booth became. Still, he was another guy in the house, and Mom was mine first, and her being my mom is a thousand times more important than her being some guy’s girlfriend. So even though Booth wasn’t trying to run the show, he was still in the way.
/> Mom had taken on extra work styling brides’ hair at a place called Mimi’s Wedding World, and that’s where she met Booth, who was the chief photographer. They had been going out secretly before Mom introduced him to me. She must have told him I was “wired” because before long he wanted to get me involved in what he called some “upbeat group activities.” The next thing I knew I was enrolled in the Southern Praying Mantis Federation Karate Club, run by a man named Sifu Sam. At first I thought it would be fun to get all dressed up in a karate outfit and learn how to kick-box and chop people in half with a single whack as if my hand were a deadly meat cleaver. But what happened was the complete opposite. We learned in slow motion how to do a dozen different moves that were important to how a praying mantis defends itself. The whole time I felt like a bug stuck in honey, and I really couldn’t keep my mind on being still, because every time Booth drove me, he wanted to talk about Mom and about getting married to her and about being a super dad to me and starting over. So all during my lesson in slow motion, my brain was racing on about my uncomfortable car ride with him and sometimes I’d forget about what I was doing and fall over onto my back with my insect legs and arms wiggling up in the air as if a giant shoe were about to crush me.
Even though I didn’t want to be a praying mantis, I did like the idea of being good at karate, so at home I’d put on Mom’s white terrycloth bathrobe and run out to my backyard and begin to hop and spin in midair and karate-chop everything I could find. One day I hacked at the wooden birdhouse that was built like a Popsicle-stick log cabin and with one swing of my hand I crushed the roof. That was a good start. Then I clanged my knuckles off the metal clothesline pole but when I looked real closely at the spot where I hit the pole I couldn’t find a dent even though my hand was still vibrating. Afterward I tried to crack in half an old marble tombstone Dad had stolen out of the cemetery and brought home because it had his name on it already—CARTER PIGZA 1847-1904. I really hurt the fleshy side of my hand and it turned purple and I had to ice it down and have it wrapped in an Ace bandage for a week, which made Mom ask me day in and day out if I needed to increase my meds. After that the karate idea sort of faded away. And my talks with Booth did too.
Next he tried to get along with Grandma, but that was a mistake. One night he asked if she wanted to go to the senior citizens’ center for a bingo tournament, and she told him she’d rather visit the morgue and hang out with the real dead people than go to the senior citizens’ center and hang out with the living dead.
“Aw, come on,” Booth crooned, and reached for her elbow. “You don’t really mean that.”
“Mister,” she said, jerking away and sizing him up with a knitting needle as if she were going to pin him to the wall, “I don’t say anything unless I mean it.”
Booth smiled and slipped his hands into his pockets, and I could tell in his mind he knew we were not an ordinary family and he had his work cut out for himself if he was going to win us over. I also knew he had just better stick with winning over Mom, because Grandma and I didn’t pay him much attention and never would. It’s not that we didn’t like him, but he was just one more person to listen to, and in our house, which was a lot like those family TV talk shows where everyone yells at once, we didn’t need another opinion.
When I came out of the bathroom from washing the muffler dirt off my hands, the sink, and the floor, I went into the living room. Booth was already sitting in a chair with his legs neatly crossed and a little silver camera in his lap. He had arrived from work with all his photographic equipment, and as soon as he saw me, he snapped my picture and started talking right away about how lucky he was to have a job taking pictures of people on the happiest day of their lives, and that weddings had to be the most glorious event on earth, and that he couldn’t wait to get married someday so he could make a video of it like a Hollywood movie with a hundred camera angles and close-ups and harps playing in the background, and children dressed like golden angels, with pink cupids shooting rubber love arrows—and he kept talking, but by then Grandma had rolled her bloodshot eyes more times than a losing slot machine and was shuffling her way toward the sofa to hide behind her curtain and smoke a cigarette. I edged my way across the floor until I was behind the upright lamp and could peek around the fringed shade at Mom just to see her expression every time he mentioned marriage. Whatever she was thinking, she didn’t show it. Her face looked like a picture of someone trying to solve a crossword puzzle. But not having an audience didn’t trouble Booth and he went from talking to whistling like a gooney bird while fooling with his camera.
“You know why I like Booth?” Mom had said to me one night. She was tapping sand out of my sneakers into the palm of her hand.
“Why?” I asked. I wasn’t really listening because I was trying to fix an old waffle maker I had found in the big Goodwill donation bin up the street. The wires were frayed and I was taping them together and getting ready to plug them in.
“Because he is so upbeat. Nothing gets him down. He can always find the silver lining in a bad situation.”
“He must be good at it,” I replied, “because he sure seems to like it around here.”
“That’s because I’m the silver lining,” she chirped. “And you could improve your attitude and learn a thing or two from him.” She tossed my shoes into the closet and brushed the sand from her hands on the back of her pants. “He makes me feel like we have a real chance at a normal family life. What do you think of that?”
I didn’t know what to say because I didn’t know anything about normal family life. I just leaned forward and plugged in my waffle maker and something down the hallway went pop! Then the lights went out.
“You blew a fuse,” Mom said.
“Sorry,” I whispered, but I wasn’t worried. I had blown and changed fuses before. My all-time list of objects stuck in sockets included a thermometer, a fork, a knitting needle, a penknife, an ice pick, a wet Q-tip, tweezers, and a pair of Mom’s flea market earrings that got smoking hot and melted like metal tears.
Tonight since Booth was present, Mom insisted that we all sit down at the dining room table together and not eat in front of the TV like everyone wanted. So when Booth stopped talking about weddings, and when Grandma finished her cigarette, and when I finished spying on Mom’s face, we all took our places, which meant I sat next to Booth because Mom was still trying to fix us up. She had cooked spaghetti and put the platter down in the middle of the table. She served us all, and silently we began to eat. I looked at my watch. Seven seconds passed before Booth couldn’t hold himself back any longer.
“Fran, this is the best spaghetti I’ve ever eaten,” he announced. “You must be part Italian.”
Mom giggled.
Grandma looked at me and frowned so forcefully her mouth bent down like a horseshoe.
“And, Granny Pigza,” he said like a game-show host about to hand her the keys to a new car, “how was your day?”
“Just another hurdle on my way to the grave,” she said matter-of-factly
Booth gave a little chuckle. “You are a straight shooter,” he said. “Anyone who can speak the unvarnished truth is to be admired.” He lifted his camera to take her picture. “Give me a little smile,” he said. She pushed out her lower dentures like a horse spitting its bit.
Then he turned his search for a silver lining toward me. “How’s the new homeschool going, buddy?”
My head was someplace else. It had already been a tough day and I was feeling pretty drifty when I remembered I had forgotten to check on my yard-gnome friends on the way home from the hospital. There’s a house down the street with a group of those little gnomes—the kind with white beards and red and green outfits and matching caps—and I always wonder what they are up to. Sometimes they are balanced on ceramic toadstools. Sometimes they are peeking out from under bushes, or leaning against huge spotted frogs. I wonder when nobody’s looking if they run over and kick those big blue and green mirrored balls in other yards and chase the pig
eons around and try to capture squirrels for a barbecue and dig holes and build traps for the dogs that come into their yard and lift their leg on them? They’ve sort of become my friends, and I took the new plastic label gun that Grandma had gotten me with her cigarette coupons and made up names for all of them and stuck them to the backs of their heads. There is IGOR I HATE YOU because he carries a little hatchet and looks evil, and LEG-LIFT HANS because he is Pablo’s favorite, and the HUNCHBACK OF PLUM STREET because he has a nasty hunch and a lazy eye, and the one who is missing most of his face I named I’M DOPEY—HIT ME AGAIN after one of the seven dwarfs, because he was always my favorite.
I make up conversations they might all have if they came to life and wanted something real to do besides being posed like goofballs all day long. In a way I felt a lot like those gnomes because they aren’t used for much more than a decoration, and since coming back from spending time at my dad’s house in Pittsburgh that’s how I felt once Mom told me she had a new boyfriend and she wanted me to be the best Joey I could be, which to me meant “Don’t do any weird Joey stuff” that would scare her boyfriend off. Not that I’m weird, but sometimes I don’t think she understands that there is a difference between the stuff I want to do and the stuff I do just because I let myself go, like when you let the air out of a balloon and it goes swooping around full of silliness like a butterfly hugging itself. Because every time I get an idea about something and tell her about it she treats me like the old wired Joey and she replies, “Did you think that through all the way?” And even though I want to unscrew my head and bounce it wickedly off the walls and scream at the top of my lungs, “Can I get back to you on that?” I don’t. Instead I look her directly in the eyes and relax my shoulders and stretch out my fingers and give a pretend little Pablo yawn, and when I can see her face swelling as if she’s about to erupt, I reply, “Yes, Mom, I thought it all the way through. All the way, from the beginning to the end, and I considered every particle in between.” This works okay if I’m doing something like using white glue to make a kite out of the chopsticks and paper menu that always come with the Chinese takeout food. But if I’m just totally spacing out and doing anything that pops into my mind, like trying to screw my shoes to the bedroom wall as if they’ve come alive and are walking up the sides and on the ceiling and on the furniture, she pitches a fit and tells me I’m not thinking things through and that to a normal person I look a bit “out of the ordinary.” That’s her new way of describing me to Booth. She won’t call me anything like strange or abnormal or peculiar. She just says things like “Oh, don’t mind that Joey is trying to get pet termites to live in the woodwork. He’s not like other boys. He is out of the ordinary.” And Booth, whose head is so rectangular it looks like a shoebox with a nose stuck on one long side, gives me that I-didn’t-raise-you-to-be-this-way-but-I’ll-put-up-with-you-as-long-as-your-mom-is-my-girlfriend-otherwise-I-would-put-you-in-a-rubber-room look. In return I give him my Don’t-fall-asleep-on-the-couch-because-when-you-wake-up-you-might-find-that-I-slowly-cut-all-your-clothes-off-and-when-you-stand-you-will-be-totally-naked-and-Grandma-and-I-will-have-your-camera-ha-ha-ha look.