by Jack Gantos
I dreaded what Mrs. Lapp might say, but I didn’t have time to think about it. The cop guided me over to a long table covered with equipment. “Are your hands clean?” he asked.
I nodded. And then I just did what he told me to do. I didn’t seem to have a choice. He took my hand and rolled my fingers one by one across a pad of sticky black ink, then rolled them again onto a special paper chart until he had all eight of my fingers and both my thumbs. And the whole time he was doing that, I was thinking the police were not really protecting me from my mom and dad as much as they were preparing to find me after something bad happened. And the only way something bad would happen was if either my mom or dad did something to hurt me. And in a way, at that moment, I didn’t know who was hurting me more—my mom for not being with me when a cop was taking my fingerprints, or my dad for hounding us so that I had to get my fingerprints taken. Didn’t she know this would scare me? Didn’t he know he was scaring me? Didn’t they know anything?
After the cop finished, he sent me to the bathroom to wash my hands. I stood in front of the sink with the water running over them and looked at myself in the mirror. I felt less safe instead of more safe. I looked down at my hands. The ink didn’t come off with water, so I just rubbed them back and forth on the sides of my jeans until some of it came off and the rest of it just got pressed deeper into the lines on my hands so that they looked like rivers on maps of countries I had never seen before. I guess they no longer belonged to me now that they had been discovered by the police.
When I returned, Olivia was talking on the telephone with her mother. “You’ll never guess where we are. The police station! Joey is being fingerprinted because his mom is afraid his dad will steal him. Nobody would want to steal him. Even his dog was stolen before he was.”
She was right. Even Pablo was worth more than I was, although at that moment I felt smaller than him. I found a chair I could sit in and pulled my jacket up over my head. This was definitely bad thing number four, and I cried as quietly as I could. Olivia couldn’t see my tears, and I didn’t want her to hear them and feel good because I was feeling so bad.
Mrs. Lapp picked us up at the police station. I got in her car and let Olivia do all the talking. “Don’t you think we should kick Joey out of our school?” she said. “He is so bad. He’s like a criminal. I think he’s a bad influence on me. I even feel more blind since he arrived.” She went on and on, and by the time we pulled up in front of my house, I just wanted to jump out the window and fly away, but Mrs. Lapp turned in her seat and gave me a piercing look.
“I know this isn’t your fault, Joey,” she said. “It’s your parents acting out. So don’t worry about what Olivia is saying. I still want you in our school.” Then she leaned forward and whispered, “You are still my secret helper.”
“Thanks,” I said, and half smiled.
“I don’t want him back!” Olivia shouted.
“Hush,” Mrs. Lapp said to her, and turned to me. “I have something for Pablo.” She handed me a little silver medal the size of a penny. “Read it,” she said eagerly.
On one side was stamped in large letters: D.O.G. On the other it read: DEPEND ON GOD. “Thank you, Mrs. Lapp,” I said. “As soon as I find him, I’ll put this on his collar.”
She smiled. “I’m sure you’ll find him,” she said. “He’s in our prayers. Right, Olivia?”
“No,” she said. “He’s a dog. I don’t pray for dogs.”
I looked up at Mrs. Lapp. “Where do dogs go when they die?” I asked.
“Honey, they just die,” she said. “They have no souls, so they stay in the ground.”
“Oh,” I said. I always thought all good pets went to heaven and all the bad ones went to that other place.
“Now go home and pray,” she said. “God listens, and I’m sure he’ll guide Pablo safely back to you.”
“Even if he doesn’t have a soul?” I asked.
“God gave him legs,” she replied. “And God always helps those who help themselves.”
That made me feel better because I knew in my heart that no matter where Pablo was, he was trying to get back to me.
7
STOCKYARDS
That night when I saw the scratchy handwriting on my “Lost Dog” sign in front of our house, I knew what had happened to Pablo. Dad had taken him. I ripped the paper down from the telephone pole. Pablo loves me more, it read. And it was signed, Humpty Dumpty. That was Dad’s nickname. No one else in the world admired Humpty Dumpty as much as he did. “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again” is how he always made excuses for himself, as if he were something broken that could never be fixed. But he was wrong—someone always patched him back up. Mom told me she fixed him up a zillion times, but he couldn’t keep it together. His girlfriends tried with him, but he cracked up. People gave him jobs, but he messed them up. And when he got hurt, like when he was stuck on the tree, the doctors did a good job of sewing him back together. So I never thought he was a true Humpty Dumpty. The real Humpty wanted to be together. But Dad enjoyed being the most untogether person I knew.
I crumpled the sign up in my hand and ran inside to check on Grandma and make sure she had some dinner. I sneaked up on her curtain and hollered out in my freak-show announcer voice, “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the one, the only zombie grandma from Lancaster!” And I yanked the curtain open.
She was sitting there hunched over and smoking a cigarette with a pained look on her face. She hadn’t touched her envelopes. “If I get any stiffer,” she said while rolling her neck around and stretching her fingers, “you can prop me up outside like a cigar store Indian.”
“Would you like something to eat?” I asked. She was getting so thin. Her shoulder blades looked like pterodactyl wings.
“Yes,” she said. “I need some nourishment so I can write out my will.”
“Stop that!” I cried out.
“Believe me,” she said, “when I’m dead, I’ll be a lot easier to tend. You can just keep my ashes in a cigarette case and dust me off once a week.”
I ran into the kitchen and fixed her a cup of tea and lined the saucer with sugar biscuits. Most of her teeth were gone and she liked to dip the biscuits in and suck the tea out of them as they dissolved in her mouth.
When I brought it to her, she spotted my black fingertips. I told her about the cops picking me up. “You know,” she said, “I’ve had a lot of experience washing off fingerprint ink. That’s how I’d know if your dad had a wild night. I’d sneak into his room in the morning and check his hands. If they were inked up, I knew he had been up to something.”
“Well, he’s up to something again,” I said. I uncrumpled the sign and handed it to her.
“That’s his handwriting,” she confirmed.
“Do you think I should tell Mom?” I asked.
“No,” Grandma said. “They got troubles of their own. She called last night after you were asleep and said she and Booth were going to hide out at a motel because your dad was bugging them.”
“Which motel?” I asked.
“She didn’t know yet,” Grandma replied. “Said she’d call back.”
“Well, why do you think he took Pablo?” I asked.
“Only he can tell you that,” she said. “No one can read that man’s mind.”
“I think he’s at the stockyards,” I said. “That’s where I saw him going the other night.”
“That sounds about right,” she said. “He’s more animal than man.”
And then, right when we were talking about him, I thought I could hear Dad’s motorcycle cutting through the cemetery behind the house. I ran to the back window and saw his single light skipping across the tombstones. Now that he had taken Pablo, I finally understood why Mom was furious with him when he first started buzzing us. She knew he was nothing but trouble, because once he arrived, he didn’t stop being trouble until he had messed everything up and there was nothing more for him to ruin. And
now that she was hiding out with Booth, he became my trouble. Once I heard him turn the corner I ran outside. In a minute he roared up our street, and as he did so, I pulled off my jacket and waved it around in the air over my head. Unlike Mom, I didn’t want to kill him. I just wanted to talk. But he didn’t. Just before he roared by, he reached back into his saddlebag, then stuck out his leather gloved hand. He was holding Pablo by the belly, and Pablo’s eyes were all bugged out, and his little front legs were stretched forward as if he were Super Dog flying through the air.
“Pablo!” I yelled. “Pablo!”
But Dad kept going.
“At least get him a helmet!” I yelled as loud as I could.
He sped up Plum Street, and the noise from his motorcycle was like a giant finger that pointed out exactly where he was heading. I could hear him pass the ice factory, then go under the railroad bridge, up the hill past the Goodwill box, beyond the All-American Discount Grocery Store, and back into the stockyards, where he had gone the other night. That’s where he was hiding. Now Pablo was there. And I was going to have to go there too.
I took a deep breath and started running after him. I made it to the parking lot at the grocery store when a police car pulled up behind me. Not again, I thought, and shoved my fists into my pockets. But it was a different policeman.
“What are you doing here?” the cop asked.
“Searching for my lost dog,” I said.
“Are you sure you aren’t trying to buy some liquor?” he asked harshly. “Because I’m searching for a guy who’s been buying liquor for kids. Have you seen anyone around here?”
“No,” I said. “My dog ran up this way, and I’ve come to find him.”
“Well, if you see a strange man selling liquor, give us a call at the station.”
“There’s a scary guy who sometimes sleeps under the railroad bridge,” I said.
“I know,” he said, “but he’s okay.” Then he pulled away.
Once he was out of sight, I entered the gate of the old stockyard. As I walked between the rows of empty cow pens the feeling of belonging nowhere was everywhere. It was creepy. I think it was because all the cows were gone and the only things left were the old, warped fence boards that used to corral them. Instead of wood, the boards looked like a graveyard of ribs. Even though I lived next to a cemetery, the stockyard felt more lifeless. People still cared about their dead relatives and put flowers on the graves. But no one cared about the stockyards. The only things left behind were so worthless they would soon rot down to nothing. But somewhere in there I knew Dad was hiding. And I knew he had the dogs. After he had passed me, I listened for his motorcycle, and it had stopped. He didn’t make it to the highway on the other side of the stockyard. He was hiding in the middle. I had to find him if I wanted Pablo, so I stood still and listened. Slowly I turned my head one way, then the other, like Olivia. And I thought I could hear yapping. So I zigzagged deeper into the maze, stepping over some boards, ducking under others, and the deeper I went, the more I was certain I heard barking. And then, against the starry night sky, I could make out the darker outline of a tiny shack and a yellow light winking out of a crack in a boarded-up window.
I sneaked up to the shack and pushed my eye against the crack, as if I were looking through a telescope. The small room was brightly lit by a kerosene lamp. There was Dad sitting on the floor with six yapping Chihuahuas bouncing off of him like furry springs, snapping at him, tugging on his leathers, and biting his ears. He was a busier dognapper than I thought. He was laughing and throwing a red rubber ball around the small room that all six of them would chase after and fight each other for to be the one to take it back to Dad, who put it between his teeth like a pig with an apple cooked in his mouth while the dogs tugged on the ball, tearing away little red pieces of it.
I guess because it all seemed so funny to me, I wasn’t as scared as I normally would have been, and I rapped my knuckles on the boarded-up window. “Hello!” I shouted. The dogs went into an insane frenzy of barking, and Dad jumped up and ran out the front door, and in two seconds he had me pinned down on the ground with his face an inch above mine.
“You’re hurting me!” I cried.
“You surprised me,” he replied, pulling his hands from my shoulders. “I thought you were one of those wild Amish kids coming around here to get me in more trouble. They told the cops I bought them some beer, and now the cops are trying to run me out of town.”
“Well, the cops took me to the police station today,” I said.
“What’d you do?” he asked, smiling, as if going to the police station was something to be proud of.
“Nothing,” I said as he gave me a hand up. “I just have two parents who are fighting over me, and the cops wanted my fingerprints in case I’m abducted.”
“Don’t worry,” Dad said. “I won’t abduct you.”
“You abducted Pablo,” I said.
“That’s only because I wanted to talk with you,” he replied. “It was the only way I could think to have you come here.”
“Why didn’t you just come get me?” I asked. “Or use the phone?”
“You know your mom doesn’t want me around, so I had to be a bit sneaky. And now she has a restraining order out against me. I’m not allowed to call you, or be around you or her in any way.”
“There’s nothing sneaky about taking every Chihuahua in town,” I pointed out.
He laughed. “They all look the same to me,” he said. “Besides, if I snatch a dog off the street, nobody will care. But if I snatch you, then I’m kidnapping, and I’m locked up for the rest of my life. And as much as I wanted to see you, this way you have really come to see me.”
“Well, what do you want from me?” I asked.
“I want to know something for sure,” he said.
“What?”
“I want to know if your mom and you ever want me back, or if you are always going to think I’m a total knucklehead and never want to see me again.”
“She already has a boyfriend she’s thinking of marrying,” I said.
“She may want to be with that Booth guy, but I’ve been watching him around town. He’s just some clown with a camera.”
“And Mom thinks you’re just some clown with a motorcycle,” I said. “If you were nice to her, she might be nice back.”
“True,” he agreed. And then he smiled his evil biker smile. “But then I’d have to be nice to her, then she’d be nice to me, and we would just be like some seesaw of niceness going up and down.”
“Yeah,” I said. “What’s wrong with that?”
“I’ve never been able to stay long on the seesaw,” he said. “As soon as I get the other person up in the air, I hop off and ka-boom! They crash to the ground.”
“Didn’t anyone show you how to play nice?” I asked.
“Yeah. But you may have noticed I’m a bit of a loser. It’s not that I don’t know how to play nice, it’s that I don’t want to play nice. That’s the difference.”
“I know a kid who thinks just the way you do,” I said.
“You mean that girl I see you with?”
“Yeah,” I said. “She’s always getting me in trouble or hurting my feelings or something bad.”
“Only a sucker would put up with a friend like that,” he said.
“Well, do you think I’m a sucker?” I asked.
He paused. “Not really,” he replied. “I’m the sucker. I wouldn’t have the patience to put up with someone like that, so I’d never stick around long enough to find out if they would ever learn how to be nice.”
“And do you think we should put up with you long enough to find out if you will ever be nice?”
He ran his hand over his chin and rubbed the sore spot where Mom had kicked him. “That’s a good question,” he said. “No amount of goodness seems to improve me. I just get worse to everyone, including myself.”
“But you wanted to see me,” I said, “so you must still be trying to do something right.
”
He took a cigarette out of his pack and offered me one.
“I don’t smoke,” I said.
“I did when I was your age,” he boasted, then shrugged his shoulders as he lit up. “There’s only a few things I can do with my life,” he said, exhaling loudly. “I can smoke, which I do. I can drink, which I do. And I can chase after your mom every blue moon, which I do. And right now I’m under the spell of a blue moon.”
“But why?” I asked.
“Because from time to time I think that if I was back with her, she’d help me get a grip on myself.”
“And then what?”
“And then after a while I’d get mad at her for not allowing me to screw my life up. You know, it’s a vicious cycle. And right now I’m at the part of the cycle where I want your mom back.”
“Well, that’s news to me,” I said. “The only thing you’ve done so far is scare us half to death. And now you stole Pablo.”
“That’s part of the cycle too,” he said. “I want you back, but then when I have you, it drives me loco to have to be responsible all the time.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t want us,” I said. “Maybe you should leave us alone.”
“You could be right, son. Besides, I’m tired of camping out here,” he said, waving toward the stockyard. “It’s depressing. Yet I don’t have a clue about what I should do next.”
“Get some help,” I urged.
“I’ve tried that,” he replied. “Help just means that someone tells me I’ve got to start making good decisions for myself.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s exactly what help is.”
“What fun is there in that?” he asked, and grinned, as if he were thinking of something bad he’d rather do, like get drunk or do something to drive Mom crazy. “Help is just something you think about while you’re busy having fun, and fun is what you’re doing while help takes its time finding you.”
“That doesn’t sound right to me,” I said. “When I’m having fun, I’m not thinking of help. I’m just hoping the fun never stops.”