by Jack Gantos
“How’d Chairman Mao die?” I asked, sounding more sympathetic than I was feeling.
“Rabies. We had to put him down. Chihuahua nipped his hind leg in the first round of a fight,” he replied. “Some of the dog owners don’t pay to inoculate their street dogs. I guess they figure they won’t live long enough to get rabies—but this one must have. Either that, or my sister bit him.”
“I have a sister, too,” I said, trying to shift the conversation to common ground.
“I already checked her out,” he replied without fanfare. “Not my type. One look and I could tell she’s the kind of girl who wants to improve guys.”
“You got that right,” I said.
“I prefer girls who let guys improve them,” he continued.
“I think I could improve some girls,” I ventured.
He looked up at me for a moment and finally smiled at something I said.
“Are you the kind of guy who tries to pick up girls in study hall by helping them with their math homework?”
“English homework,” I said uneasily, hesitant to correct him, but to be honest, I was lousy at math. “I like to help, and girls like smart guys—especially book guys.”
“Did you see that girl in the white truck the other day?” he asked. He must have seen me watching. “Well, she doesn’t drive a pickup for nothing. She drove down here from Alabama to have a little phys-ed study hall with me.”
“Alabama?” I repeated. “How’d you meet her?”
“She’s my girlfriend. Leigh Dupont. Used to live in your house,” he said. “In your room,” he added pointedly, “and I could reach right through the window and touch her.”
That’s where my bed was.
“But her family moved up there from here.” He adjusted the sagging waistband of his undershorts and spit to one side, then added, “To get her away from me after some jilted neighbor told them a shitload of lies about me.” He was speaking loudly while looking at the fenced-in house on the other side of ours, as if he wanted whoever lived there to hear him.
I didn’t say anything to that other than to privately imagine Leigh Dupont in my room, reaching out toward me with both her slender arms.
“That’s how I ended up back in juvie this spring,” he continued. “I wired a car and went up to see her and got popped.”
“Too bad,” I said.
“Not really,” he replied, and looked up at the stars. “An hour with her was worth a stretch in juvie.”
I was going to agree with him, but then I didn’t know what a month in juvie meant or what an hour with a girl really meant besides trying to help one write complete sentences for a book report.
“I saw that your dad drives a Rambler—you got an extra key?” he asked. “Or does that piece of junk even need a key—maybe you just kick it in the ass in the morning and it farts right up?”
I wished Gary would hot-wire Dad’s Rambler and take it away for good. It was embarrassing to be seen in it. Dad now worked as a traveling salesman for a concrete firm and his new company car had a gray-and-tan concrete I-beam logo with CUSTOM CONCRETE painted down both sides along with a bright red phone number. Still, I was afraid to give Gary the key.
“If you get me the key I could make a copy so he wouldn’t think you did it,” he suggested slyly. “I’d be doing him a favor if that piece of crap ended up burned and dumped in the Everglades.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But it’s the only car we have and my mom’s pregnant, and he travels for work…”
He sighed impatiently. “Then I’ll return it without one little itsy-bitsy scratch,” he said. “He’d never know a thing. I’d drive up at night. See my girl. Have some fun. Drive back here before your dad wakes up.”
“Doesn’t it take about ten hours just to drive up to Alabama?” I asked, knowing it did.
“Not the way I drive,” he said. “I used to race cars. Mini-roadsters on dirt tracks. I got a room full of trophies. You should see them someday.”
“Yeah, I’d like to,” I said, and was still nervous he was going to ask about my dad’s car key again.
“Maybe we could take turns driving the Rambler,” he suggested. “And I could give you some professional racing tips on how to outwit the cops.”
I didn’t even have my learner’s permit yet.
Then as I hesitated he suddenly shifted gears. “Hey, my dad’s gone, my mom’s dead asleep, and your parents are out. Let’s have a pool party.” He clapped his hands together and smiled.
There was no fighting that wide smile. It was like a double broadside of cannons turning toward your starboard side, and just as convincing.
“Sure,” I replied eagerly—anything to get away from the car talk.
“I know a great game,” he said with enthusiasm. “They should add it to the Tokyo Olympics. I’m always inventing the Pagoda Olympic Games of the Future, and this one is called Tojo Depth Charge. I’ve been thinking about it all afternoon—that fire you started whetted my appetite for a little mayhem.”
“I’m good with fire,” I said with confidence.
“As far as I know it’s your best quality,” he confirmed. “You were like Thor at his forge over there. That grill fire was so hot I thought you were going to mold that steel spatula into a Viking branding iron and use it to burn a war oath to Odin on yourself.”
I grinned. “Yeah,” I said. “I thought about it.”
“What part of the body?” he asked.
“Undecided,” I said, because it seemed better to be vague.
“Remember, tender skin scars the brightest,” he advised, “like the neck, or the inside of the thigh, or higher up. But for now come over in fifteen minutes. Get your swim trunks on. I’ll tell my little brother, Frankie, to get ready, too. You’ll like him. I call him ‘the Cross and the Switchblade’ because he carves all the fancy little dog coffins and crosses for our pet cemetery. My sister’s home, but she’s doing a leopard-spot color treatment and perm job on a poodle tonight. We have a pet grooming business in the garage. Mostly we just do celebrity pets. This poodle belongs to the owner of Big Daddy’s Liquors.” He pointed over his shoulder to his garage. “If you want,” he said, “she can cut your hair to make you look like a celebrity ferret. She’s a pro.”
“Does she do yours?”
“I do it myself,” he said. “Without a mirror. Comes out different each time. Girls love inconsistency—keeps ’em guessin’.”
“Yeah,” I said, running my hand over my taut cadet hair like I was petting a bottle brush. “I need a cut.”
“I’ll fix you up with my sister,” he insisted. “She’ll make you look more like Sailor Jerry instead of that Junior Popeye hair you got now—that is, unless you want all your girlfriends to look like Olive Oyl.”
“Who’s Sailor Jerry?” I asked.
“Greatest tattoo artist in the world,” he replied. “I’m saving up to have my whole back done in a ‘Love Thy Neighbor’ design—it’s a skull made out of a straight razor, brass knuckles, and a blackjack, all dripping in blood.”
“Wow,” I said.
“I’ll come up with one for you, too,” he said. “I think your gang name should be Flame-Out, so I’ll work that into a design. But let’s get going.”
I quickly turned and went into the house to rustle up a swimsuit. “Flame-Out,” I whispered to myself. “A gang name.” I liked it, though I couldn’t picture in my mind what a flame-out looked like. Was I a jet that had suffered an engine flame-out and crashed? Or was I a jet that had suffered a flame-out and survived through superior piloting? It was impossible to tell what Gary was imagining. Death seemed as exhilarating as life to him.
In my room I had a bathing suit, but my mother had bought it for me at a thrift store and it was a bright pink-and-white lobster print with loopy rope piping along the edges and outlined lobster-claw pockets on either side. It did not look like anything Sailor Jerry would tattoo on a real man or a dead man or even a boy. It looked like something only a moth
er would buy for a son to keep him from becoming a real man.
I quickly took a pair of scissors out of the kitchen drawer and went into my bedroom. I pulled out some old Levi’s, cut the legs off them just above the knees, stripped off my cadet uniform, and put them on. Then I had a clever idea. I got my lobster suit and ripped the rope piping off, ran it through my belt loops, and tied the ends in a square knot like a pirate belt. I looked into the mirror. The suit was okay, but I looked so small. I played no sports. I didn’t work out. I had the milky physique of a very soft boy.
Why would Gary ever choose me as a friend? He was built like a boxer. He must have had friends who looked more like him. I was like some boneless squid. I turned away from the mirror. It was discouraging to look at myself. My STP T-shirt was in the wash, so I put my cadet shirt back on.
A few minutes later I headed out. I hopped the chain-link fence and landed on the freshly packed dirt but didn’t waste time wondering why Gary had dug such a deep grave for such a small dog because I didn’t believe him anyway. As I stood on the grave it gave me an odd sense of power that he had lied to hide something from me. If I knew the truth it would be more powerful than his lie—though what good would the truth do me? Like my dad, Gary always had the last word.
I shrugged and let that thought fade as I walked over to the pool where Gary was pouring fuel from a red metal gas can into a plastic mop bucket. He was dressed exactly the same as before. I figured he’d swim, sleep, shower, and eat in the same outfit.
“Is that gasoline?” I asked, sniffing.
“Diesel,” he replied. “Germans chug a shot for breakfast and it keeps them regular all day long.”
His younger brother opened the back kitchen door and waddled out onto the patio like a seal. He was eating a pimento cheese sandwich and wearing a full-body black rubber wetsuit and swim fins. He had a diver’s mask propped up on his forehead with a double-long snorkel fixed to the side of the mask.
“I’m Jack,” I said, and stuck out my hand to shake. He looked at my hand and violently shoved the remainder of the sandwich in his mouth as if he were suddenly plugging a leaky boat.
“Is that all you’re wearing?” he mumbled with his mouth full, and reached down to adjust the straps on his fins while looking me over. Then he stuck his finger deep into his mouth and wiggled it around to unclog his throat.
“Why?” I replied.
He turned toward Gary and swallowed hard. “Did you tell him how to play this game?” he asked. “Because if he gets harpooned like Eddie the Whale when we played Olympic Moby-Dick, I don’t want to be arrested.”
Gary shrugged. “Fair enough,” he said. “Here is the short description of the game.”
He bent over and lowered the can of diesel fuel and began to screw the cap back onto the spout.
“First I pour the plastic bucket of fuel on the pool and then give it a few minutes until it’s pretty much evenly spread over the surface of the water. Once I set it on fire,” he explained as he pointed toward the diving board, “then I turn off the pool light and go stand at the tip of the board, where you can now see that I already have that half box of twelve M-80s. You two Japanese mini-submarines dive into the water, and then I count to ten with my eyes closed and when I open them I light the fuse on an M-80 and throw it in such a way that it lands just above you and blows you out of the water and you surrender—end of game.”
I was trying not to look afraid. The M-80 was the most powerful firecracker in the world. It would blow mailboxes to smithereens. Watermelons were turned into red rain. It was like a suburban hand grenade. There was no doubt that it could blow the top of your head off.
Frankie must have seen the fear on my face. “There’s a trick to the whole thing,” he said casually. “Just stay belly-down on the bottom like a gator. The fuses are short and they blow up before they can sink down and get close to you.”
“He’s right,” Gary agreed. “Just hug the bottom.”
“What do you do about breathing?” I asked, trying to sound practical.
“I have my adjustable snorkel,” Frankie said, and shrugged. “And a tennis racket.”
“I don’t,” I replied, and turned toward Gary.
“A snorkel is for sissies,” Gary said derisively, and flashed his eyes at Frankie. “It just gets in the way of the strategy.”
“What strategy?” I asked, eager for some survival tips.
“Well,” he said, “let’s say I throw a lit M-80 at you when you surface to breathe—right away you have two options. Either you can dive for your life, or you can show some manhood and catch the M-80 in one hand and wing it back at me and hope to blow my face off and win the game.”
I looked over at Frankie. He was getting impatient. He kept adjusting all his gear and fidgeting with this and that. Finally he blurted out, “No one yet has gone for the option of catching the M-80 because if it goes off in your hand they’ll soon be calling you Captain Hook. So I’ve now included the tennis racket.”
Gary lunged forward and yanked the tennis racket from Frankie’s hand.
“Cheater,” he sneered, and threw the racket toward the canal. “I don’t like people who can’t play by the Pagoda Olympics rules.”
“But the racket gives me a safer option,” Frankie whined. “I can just swat it back at you.”
“We have already agreed to the established options,” Gary insisted, like a TV lawyer, “and there will be no deviations.” Gary then turned toward me. “Now, since you are the guest, Sailor Jack, you have the honor of kicking off the game.”
Right away I liked being called Sailor Jack. It sounded cooler than Flame-Out and I figured a second nickname meant he already thought of me as a friend.
It was a warm feeling that passed through me, and another feeling, too, one even better, was that Gary already preferred me over his own brother. I’d have to keep an eye on Frankie, I thought, to make sure he didn’t give away my hiding spots.
“Sailor Jack, you did a masterful job starting the grill, so you should enjoy this,” Gary said, and handed me a pack of matches. “I think the diesel has spread around good enough by now. Toss a match over the pool.”
I struck a match and flicked it toward the pool as if I were lighting the Olympic torch. Flame on! I thought to myself.
As soon as the match hit the surface a choppy crown of lime-green flames shot up and rapidly spread in an ever-growing circle until nearly all the pool’s surface was on fire. An acrid black smoke swirled above the flames. I began to cough. It smelled like burning car tires.
“Turn off the pool light,” Gary instructed Frankie, then scuffed in his white fake-alligator loafers toward the diving board. Frankie flipped the switch and the backyard darkened except for the pool, which was magical with the green flames swaying back and forth like waltzing doll dresses.
“Let’s go,” Frankie said, and dove in first, without much splash, like a stealthy seal.
I unbuttoned my shirt and tossed it on a plastic chair, then I took the deepest breath I could and jumped in with my eyes closed. I touched the bottom with my hand, righted myself, and then swam underwater toward the deep end. I felt around for the drain, found it, and anchored myself to it with my fingers. Before the first explosion I was actually enjoying how beautiful it was to look straight up at the bottom side of the flames on the water. I had only seen fire from above and was always tensed up as the flames angrily knifed at the air with their sharp blades. But when looked at from below, the flames stood up like small sails as the wind glided them across the glassy surface of the water.
It was musical to watch them until the first muffled explosion of an M-80 detonated and a rolling shock wave traveled through the water. When it reached me the pressure in my ears was painful, like a hand-slap against the sides of my head, and I instantly pushed off the bottom and went straight up. I broke the surface and took a deep breath and worked my jaw around to pop my ears, then dove over like a seal back down toward the drain. A blast went off cl
ose to the bottom of my feet and a pulsing ring of water elevated me like I was a sea offering on the palm of Neptune’s hand. I turned over onto my back and slowly floated to the surface, where my lips parted the oily water between the flames, which had lessened and were now spread out like a field of blazing campfires. I breathed quietly as I watched Gary. He had his eye on Frankie’s snorkel, which cut through the surface of the shallow water like a shark’s fin. Gary lit one M-80, then another. He threw the first one in front of the snorkel and the second behind it. The explosions sent a lime plume of flaming water ten feet into the air. Frankie didn’t surface. Dogs began to bark inside the Pagodas’ garage.
“What the…?” someone said from a lawn across the canal, his words carried on the breeze.
“They’re doin’ it again!” came a second voice that was neither a man’s nor a woman’s—it was something mechanical, as if it were the voice cranked out of a rusty windup toy. Then I realized it came from one of those throat devices some old ex-smokers press against a flabby gray hole in their neck after having surgery to cut out their cancerous larynx.
I hugged my knees and half exhaled as I descended toward the drain. Once I touched it, I drifted upward very slowly, inch by inch, like a bubble of tumbling air toward the flaming surface just beneath the diving board.
Gary was pacing above me. The horseshoe cleats on the heels of his shoes gouged white shavings from the fiberglass diving board. He shifted to the left, then stepped to the tip. The board creaked as it dipped downward. He was after Frankie, not me. After all, I was a new friend in training, kind of a pet. He might make me fear him, but he wouldn’t hurt me. Not yet, anyway.
From the main boulevard a police siren was growing louder as it closed in on the Pagoda address. Frankie stood up in the shallow end and splashed a circle of flames away from himself.
“Time out!” he shouted. “Those old throat-croakers must have called the cops again.” He pushed his mask up on top of his head. “Assholes!” he yelled loudly in the direction of the people who had complained. “Go smoke a butt and relax!”