The Trouble in Me

by Jack Gantos

  Gary looked down to his right, where I happened to be looking straight up at him and breathing through my mouth. He could have lit the fuse of the M-80 in his hand and dropped it straight down my throat and I would have had my larynx blown out my neck.

  Instead, he winked at me and struck a match. “What the hell,” he muttered. “You only live once—so you better kill as many as you can.”

  He lit the fuse and side-armed the M-80 at Frankie, who by then had halfway pulled himself over the far edge of the pool. The M-80 clipped him across the back and caromed over the fence, where it blew up over our yard.

  “Hey!” Frankie squealed as he stood up. “No fair! Truce. The police are coming and we gotta save a few for them.”

  With his swim fins still on he slapped across the patio like an upright frog and opened a plastic pool shed door and yanked out a fire extinguisher. Obviously he had done this before. He flipped it upside down and pulled the pin, and when he squeezed the trigger it seemed as if an entire tanker truck of whipped cream sprayed out of the wide nozzle. I hopped out of the pool and put my shirt on as he squatted down and slowly circled the pool until he had layered a thick blanket of fire-retardant foam over the entire surface.

  For a moment, beneath the foam, the still-burning diesel transformed the pool into a fancy flaming dessert with the Key-lime-green flames flickering upward and peeking deliciously through the singed milky tips of the whipped cream. But slowly the retardant worked and the flames dimmed and fizzled out and the putrid diesel fumes wafted up like toxic smoke rings.

  I pulled my shirt collar across my mouth and breathed. The smell burned my throat. It worried me. I didn’t want to someday speak through a mechanical larynx.

  The siren on the cop car wound down.

  “Battle stations,” Gary ordered. “Frankie, take the ammo and hide it in the garage and play like you’ve been helping Alice with the dog perm. Sailor Jack—hit the fence and disappear. I’ll do all the talking since I probably know them anyway.”

  I hopped the fence but didn’t go inside. There were so many possible lives to lead, but hiding from my fear wasn’t one of them. I didn’t want to sit in the house and watch TV and play like I was innocent. I wanted to get a close-up view of the danger. I was breathing hard when I pressed my chest against one of our palm trees and tried to catch a glimpse of the police. I didn’t think they’d be looking for me. If they knew Gary so well maybe they’d walk right into his house and escort him out in handcuffs.

  There was only a single cop and he looked out his cruiser window and slowly scanned the sidewalks as he rolled down our street. Once he passed our house I took a chance and dashed into the front yard and flattened myself against the dark side of a palm tree. Slowly the cruiser circled the cul-de-sac, and when the cop turned off the engine the car kept rolling until inertia brought the sticky tires to a final stop directly across from the Pagoda house.

  Without warning the cop flicked a switch and turned on his door-mounted spotlight. The beam had a canary-yellow cast to it, like the color of shame. It strangely bleached the pigment from whatever it passed over, as if to disgrace it.

  The cop trained the manual spotlight’s bright circle on the Pagoda front door, then slowly he shifted the light over to the picture window so he could see deeper into the house interior. A boxy square reflection of one of the Pagodas’ wall mirrors blinked directly back at the cop and lit up his startled expression. When nothing of value came of that window scan he ran the light slowly over the low shrubs around the house foundation. A bush moved and he held the spotlight steady, but maybe it was just one of the Korean snakehead fish flopping around like a detached foot. The beam inched up the drain spout and then methodically scanned back and forth across the roof. If the light were a pencil eraser the house would have vanished.

  Then the cop flicked a switch and the light turned off. The car engine ticked with escaping heat.

  Wherever Gary and Frankie and Alice were hiding they didn’t reveal themselves. The windshield of the cruiser faced me. The single cop sat hatless and lit a cigarette. In a while he peeled the cellophane off a box of candy, tilted his head back and shook some into his mouth. I could hear the hard candy click against his teeth. His police radio squawked and he turned it off. It must have reminded him of his other radio, so he turned it on and I could hear the jingle for WFUN and then Elvis sang “Crying in the Chapel.” The cop sang falsetto over the backup harmonies. He was pretty good.

  I felt the rough outer fibers of the crusty palm bark against my cheek. When I scuffed my skin against the trunk it smelled like the dried spices my mother kept in a kitchen drawer. Maybe it was coriander I was thinking of, or cardamom. Then it came to me that it smelled faintly of the sandalwood incense my sister burned in her room with the lights turned low as she listened to her records. The sandalwood smoke and music drifted out from under her door and turned the hallway into a waiting room where I sometimes quietly leaned against her doorjamb and hoped to receive an invitation to enter. But I always knew I was excluded.

  Once I had broken down and knocked. When she answered I asked to join her.

  “I won’t say a word,” I promised, “or sing. I’ll sit by the wall on the dark side of the bed. You won’t know I’m there. I really just need to get away from myself.”

  My voice was reedy from whispering and begging at the same time.

  “Sorry,” she said, and softly touched my shoulder.

  For a minute she let her hand rest there like a firm and empathetic bridge between us. I realized that’s all I needed—just a reassuring touch to steady me as I sorted out my own thoughts.

  Finally she said, “It takes privacy to find your true self.” She patted my shoulder. “That’s why I like to be alone. And you have to learn to be alone, too.”

  I had grown up shadowing her from room to room. I was restless without her. I feared being alone. She’d tolerate me when I was younger, but even then it was a rule that I had to remain silent. Lately she hadn’t tolerated me all that much. But for some reason this one time it seemed like she was the one who needed to talk and I was eager to listen.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, trying to draw her out.

  “Once I was the most beautiful baby girl in the world,” she said in a weird fairy-tale whisper. “And I was chosen to be born into our family.” Then with some creeping sadness in her voice she continued. “Over time that baby grew up and slowly transformed into the misshapen girl I am now. I’m like a cliffside tree with branches desperately reaching to run away with the wind. I can’t get out of here fast enough. I’ve grown up to become a grotesque version of that beautiful baby girl. How could that happen?”

  I knew what she was talking about because when I was young I was exactly who I said I was, and did what I thought was right to do. Then as I got older I left that true self behind and began to know myself only through the eyes of the people around me. I reshaped myself and made it easier for everyone to think I was doing okay because I learned to do just okay things. But I wasn’t okay. I was lost. Still, I loved the word okay. It was a magic word that cast a paralyzing spell over my parents while I was busy searching to become the opposite of okay.

  Something like that must have happened to my sister, too, though I never noticed because I was always thinking about myself. Now I wished I had paid more attention to her.

  “I wish,” she continued, turning back to herself, “that there was a path of words I could walk down and they would lead me into a grotto pool where I could re-purify myself and return to the girl I was. But there isn’t a path, or even a girl. She’s gone, and I’m stuck trying to invent who I want to be, and I’m finding that figuring out who I want to be is so much harder than just being who I was when I was a little kid.”

  On that happy thought she lowered her hand from my shoulder. “You’ll see,” she said. “Everyone foolishly goes through hating their past—when they should realize it is the one true thing you have.” Then she retreated to h
er room, closed the door, and turned up her stereo.

  Now, with my face scuffed up against the palm trunk, I was beginning to understand what she meant. The questions that troubled her were mine, too—they were the questions of people who didn’t have faith in themselves. But how we built faith in ourselves was different. She wanted to rearrange her past and bring truth and purity back into her future. But I wanted to invent my future any way I could, and being a better liar was a better path. When I looked into the mirror I wanted to see a lot less of me and a lot more of some invented kid—Gary’s kind of kid. That’s the faith I wanted.

  Suddenly I had a temptation to do something bad to that cop. But what? What would Gary do? Let the air out of the cop’s tires? Or throw a rock at the windshield? That seemed too stupid. Yet the desire to do whatever Gary might do was a growing thunderhead above me and I just wished I could be struck by the lightning of a great idea.

  Then what I never imagined might happen, did happen. Gary walked out his front door and with his metal horseshoe cleats on his heels kicking up sparks across the asphalt he slowly sauntered up to the cop’s open window. He said something and there was a chuckle and they shook hands. Gary then walked around the front of the car and got into the front passenger seat. He took a cigarette from a pack the cop offered, then lit it and blew smoke sideways out the window.

  They sat there, talking casually. I could hear the brighter sounds of laughter and above the car’s roofline I could see Gary’s hand quickly waving back and forth, flopping like a glove. Maybe it was just a gesture for something he was saying, but it looked more like a “hurry-up” hand signal. Then he lowered his hand and from a corner of my eye I saw the arc of a sparkling fuse. Frankie must have tied the remaining M-80s together and tossed them from behind the hedge of the other neighbors’ house. They hit the thin metal roof of the squad car, bounced down onto the hood, and in an instant the soft air hardened with a booming explosion followed by the smaller pulsing explosions that echoed as they scattered down the streets. I dropped and flattened out on the lawn and gritted my teeth to remain silent.

  I stayed that way, smelling the thinning cloud of flinty gunpowder while pinned down by the thousands of sun-curled grass needles that had worked their way like cat claws through my clothes and into my naked skin.

  WHITE FIRE

  After the M-80s had exploded on the hood of the cop car Gary kicked open his door and staggered out. He rubbed his ears and then cupped his hands around his mouth.

  “Hey, Flame-Out!” he hollered. “You shouldn’t have done that. I think I’m deaf, you little prick!”

  As soon as he said “Flame-Out” my heart froze. He was turning me in! I was Flame-Out.

  It was as if he had given me that name in order to set me up when it was his idiot brother, Frankie, who had thrown the M-80s. But Frankie was long gone and there I was, pinned to the ground just waiting for that cop to walk over and seize me by the hair and rip me clean off this wiry grass as if he were shucking the dried husk off one of the shriveled coconuts.

  “Who’s Flame-Out?” I heard the cop ask as he stepped out of his cruiser to walk off the blast.

  “Some goofy kid,” Gary replied. “The only thing I know about him is his stupid comic-book nickname and red hair.”

  Then he waved his hand in the opposite direction of our house. “He lives in one of those new custom homes.”

  The cop nodded, then quickly doubled back to his cruiser, got in and slammed the door, and took off with his red lights flashing.

  Gary stood there in the dark for a moment, sniffing the air as if he were a dog sniffing me out. When he seemed to catch wind of me he trained his eyes in my direction. But I didn’t leave my hiding place. I was too upset with myself to face him. I had doubted him and now I feared him.

  “Good night, Sailor Jack,” he said casually, and as he dragged his heels across the asphalt I thought, Only when I become him will I overcome my fear of him.

  After he went inside I stayed chest-down on the grass carpet of claws. I wanted to feel that needling pain because it matched the pain in my heart. I deserved to suffer and my doubt was like a weight twisting my chest back and forth against the blades of grass. Later I heard the squealing bearing in the Rambler’s water pump as my parents pulled up the driveway. I held my breath. I heard their low voices and the front door open and close. They never checked my bedroom. I lowered the side of my face onto my forearm and must have fallen asleep because when I woke the eastern sky was a yellowing smudge.

  Inch by inch I painfully levered myself up from the bent claws of clinging grass and scooted into my house. I crept down the hall to the bathroom and quietly locked the door. I carefully unbuttoned my blood-speckled cadet shirt, but even with the buttons undone the shirt didn’t drop. The needles of grass had pinned it into my chest when I threw myself down on the yard and pressed down even more forcefully. The shirt was tightly fixed to my chest by both the grass and the dried clots of blood.

  I opened the medicine cabinet and took out a pair of scissors. I snipped a line up the side seam of the shirt to my underarm and then out to the lower edge of my half-sleeve. Then I snipped from the top edge of my sleeve to my collar. The back of my shirt swung open and just hung there, so I quickly cut through the opposite side seams in the same way. The whole back of the shirt dropped to the floor, but the front was still pinned and plastered to my chest. I knew it wasn’t going to come off easily.

  I took a deep breath and with my thumbnail and a fingernail tried to grip the head of one of the embedded grass needles, but my nails were too short to hold on. I opened the medicine cabinet again and found an old pair of fingernail clippers. The sharp, pointy bite on the curved blades would do it.

  When I pinched the grass head with the clippers and extracted the first quill from my chest I made a low hissing sound like steam. That was shameful. I didn’t like to feel pain, but I didn’t like to show it either. Gary wouldn’t. He would probably just flex his chest muscles and propel the prickers out of his body. But not me. I bit down on my lip and quietly extracted another.

  It felt very satisfying to methodically pull each dry blade of grass out and line them up on the porcelain edge of the sink. It was even more satisfying to work like a surgeon in absolute silence. I had always respected the strength of silence. Whenever I picked up a smooth river rock with my hand I held it to my ear. The silence within it was as vast as the universe. In time it would erode and slowly its drifting particles would fan through the atmosphere and silently cast their pinprick shadows onto the earth.

  Or, if I saw something lost, like a Kennedy half-dollar that had rolled unseen through the bars of a sewer grate, I imagined myself as that dead president whose silver lips were perpetually sealed, thus keeping his silence forever more noble than his final gasp.

  Then a new image occurred to me. I pictured myself standing in the middle of a flat field of hard-packed clay. I saw myself as a nail that someone would hold point-down against a board while with their other hand they would raise a hammer and pound, pound, pound me into the wood until you could see nothing of me but my flattened head flush with the top of the board and there I’d be, inside the wood, imprisoned, mum, serenely unthinking, and just as pure white and compressed as a stick of chalk.

  I kept thinking about being the tranquil nail inside that board as I silently pulled out each painfully brittle quill of grass from my chest. Along the edge of the white sink those tan quills lined up like the thin, bloody teeth of the Korean snakehead fish in our canal.

  After the last quill was out, the front of the shirt still did not drop to the floor but remained pressed against my chest as if it were an adhesive blood-and-cloth scab patched across an open cavity.

  I knew my next step would test the strength of my silence. I reached my right hand across to my left hip and picked at the corner of the fabric until a small flap of the shirt was free enough to grip. I tugged up a little more cloth so I could wrap the corner around my fist and
then in one mechanical motion I coiled my torso downward toward that hip.

  I must have looked like a discus thrower tucking into position. I could feel the muscles quivering down my back as I took a deep breath. With my grip on the shirt corner I unleashed the full torque of my upper body and in one twisting motion ripped that crusty red flag of pain clean off the small white patch of my chest.

  Instantly I hunched over and again bit down on my fist. And then I bit even harder. But I succeeded. Not one sound came from my mouth.

  After a few deep breaths I straightened up and felt even stronger. I soaked a towel with rubbing alcohol and scrubbed my sticky chest until the alcohol seeped into each thin wound like the cleansing tongue of a flame. I closed my eyes and mutely tensed all my muscles until the pain faded away or I got used to it.

  Either way I felt I earned a trophy moment of self-control. If I ever wanted to be like Gary I had to learn that the language of pain was silence.

  On my way back to my room my sister opened her bedroom door. I quickly held my bloody shirt to my chest.

  “What were you doing in the bathroom for so long?” she asked, and reached out and snatched the shirt from my hands.

  She stared at my chest. “Did you do this to yourself?” she whispered harshly.

  I nodded. I didn’t want to wake my parents.

  “To yourself?” she asked again.

  I nodded.

  “Well, you better look in the mirror,” she advised. “And I don’t mean the mirror in the bathroom. Whatever you are doing to yourself is wrong, and if you are doing this because of Gary, then I’m warning you that you’ll become as sick as he is.”

  I remained silent and pushed past her. I was sick of being myself. Talking about what I wanted would never get me what I wanted. I quickly slipped into my bedroom and locked the door.

  I had been thinking that all my memories were a loud noise holding me back from my great future with Gary. That had to stop. If silence made me empty inside, then Gary’s words would fill me. That made sense, so I gathered up my class notebooks and all the school projects and photographs and teacher notes and class awards and childish drawings and art collages that I had saved as if they were the essential bits of reflective squares that blazed around inside my mind like a spinning mirror ball lighting up my entire childish past. All that early work was eager to define me, to tag along like a pathetically babyish younger twin, but it all had to go because it wasn’t invited where I was going. Every piece of my past was a betrayal because it was about the kid I no longer was.