The Trouble in Me

by Jack Gantos

  I moved quickly. I filled up a pillowcase with all my stuff, and with that pillowcase over my shoulder, I went into the garage and got another can of lighter fluid and marched to the backyard. I dumped some of my things out onto the ashes of the last grill fire. Then I reached into that pillowcase and pulled out all my personal journals—they had to be the corpses on the top of the funeral pyre. They had to burn first. I hadn’t written much in them, but I knew what I had written was true, which was why I feared them. They were a plea to remain as I was, to be myself and trust the fire of my own voice, but all I wanted to do was escape myself.

  I flipped open the hand-sized front cover on one of my black writing books and saw my signature in fountain-pen script on the inside. A teacher once told me your own name written with your own hand is an engraved portrait, and in that ink script my name locked letters like a fortress gate that had been hammered out of wrought iron. Inside the journal each scribbled letter and word on the paper was louder and stronger than these new thoughts reshaping me into Gary’s double.

  I knew if I read deeper into the journals I would never escape my old self. My written words held truths about me that I didn’t want to hear. Those journal sentences were stacked up like old stone fences, word upon word, from hand to pen, from the top of the page to the bottom. There was no getting around those heavily written words that came straight from my heart and were unpassable to any stranger. And I knew that if I read one sentence of my journal it would tell me to be true to myself—it would beg me to be my own man and it would turn me away from Gary and buck me off his train. But I had lost faith in myself, and without faith I hadn’t the courage to reach out and turn the journal page and read beyond my fancied-up name on the endpaper.

  Quickly I began to spray the pages with the oily lighter fluid. I didn’t start out to hate myself, but I couldn’t burn those pages unless I worked myself into a frenzy of circling around the grill and squirting more and more fire-starter onto the paper, which soaked it up as I soaked up the suspense of my own destruction. This was the only way I knew how to give up on myself, and with a lighted match held like a pen in my hand I stabbed the paper and my name disappeared. Poof!

  The small front door of my journal burst into flames. The curling pages went up like witches’ skirts burning at the stake with their twitchy madhouse laughter, but soon the flames robbed their chatter of oxygen and choked them down to a crackle. The white pages of paper flags waved their surrender to the blaze, but the merciless flames took no prisoners and blackened them. The cardboard journal bindings turned as brown as rolled cigars and the sentences blew away in cloudy rings of smoke. As my books burned, a fresh book opened within me—one to be scripted and polished by Gary.

  I kept squirting on more and more lighter fluid until what written life I had placed onto those pages had burned down to silent ashes. Pictures blistered, and cards, stamps, newspaper clippings, tickets, bookmarks—all of it crumbled to smoldering cinders, and soon nothing remained of the arson but metal binders, paper clips, and blackened staples. It was very satisfying.

  Yesterday when I climbed onto Gary’s train I was riding along as swiftly and dangerously as he was. Then I realized I was just some scrap cargo on his back. But not anymore. Now I was only silence. And from silence I could shape myself into any word I wanted, and I wanted that word to be Gary.

  INCOMING FIRE

  For two days I didn’t see Gary. I kept looking for him every chance I had. I went outside and washed and polished the Rambler. I cleaned the inside and scrubbed the wheels and all the time I listened for his voice, or his shoes scraping across the asphalt, but heard nothing. I constantly took out the trash and looked toward his house. I did the laundry for my mom so I could pin it up to dry on our backyard clothesline. To kill time I stood on our back porch and held an empty glass up to my mouth as if I were drinking. Secretly I was looking through the bottom of the glass as if it were a telescope. But I didn’t spy him. Instead the round emptiness of the glass was like my own blank face spying on me. I closed my eyes. Where was he? Without him I was drifting back to my old pathetic Popeye self.

  To buck myself up I imagined setting fires. I took out a box of matches I’d been carrying around in my back pocket. I opened the small drawer and plucked one out. I struck it on the box side. It flared up. The smell of sulfur burned the inside of my nose. I loved that smell and imagined holding the match to a handful of hay and setting Rome on fire. Burned it to the ground. I lit another and London went up in smoke. Then Tokyo. Chicago. Boston. San Francisco. Each match was another disaster. Washington. Atlanta. New York City. When I ran out of matches I was thirsty.

  I was in the kitchen when he knocked on our front door. I could tell by the metal sound that it had to be the rings on his hand.

  “I’ll get it!” I hollered. When I opened the door he surprised me. He was dressed in a pair of khaki slacks and a white T-shirt and new Converse sneakers. He appeared more like me just as I tried to appear more like him.

  But no matter how he dressed he was still Gary. “Hey, Sailor Jack,” he said, and tugged a slender mother-of-pearl penknife from his pocket. “Can I use your phone?”

  “Is yours broken?” I asked.

  “I hate it when people ask me questions,” he snapped back, and flicked open the blade. “But I’ll tell you because it’s funny. I racked up about a thousand dollars in phone calls talking to Leigh in Alabama and my dad can’t pay the bill, so our phone is dead.”

  “You mean your girlfriend who drives the pickup?” I asked.

  “Nicest girl in the world,” he said, and ran his free hand back through his hair. “Never say anything bad about her,” he advised, pointing the blade at me. “She’s my savior and soon we’re going to get married.”

  “My sister bakes really great cakes,” I said. “You could hire her for the wedding. She could bake a cake that looks like your bride’s truck on a highway.”

  “Or,” he suggested as he peeled the curves of dirt from under his fingernails, “she could bake a cake of me making a phone call from your kitchen.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “I’ll call her collect,” he replied, nudging me. “I swear. Your parents won’t know.”

  “My dad is probably up and he’s a freak about phone charges.”

  “It’s a collect call!” Gary said, and snapped the knife blade back into the handle. “It won’t cost him a penny.” He dropped his head into his hands. “I feel a bad mood coming over me,” he said in a distant voice, and lifted his right shoe, cocking it back like a nervous horse about to kick.

  “Sorry,” I said again. “When my parents leave you can do it.”

  “Forget it,” he said, annoyed, and turned his face away as he quietly cursed over his shoulder.

  When he suddenly turned back his mood seemed to have changed.

  “Well, I got a more important favor to ask you anyway,” he said, sounding upbeat.

  “If I can do it I will,” I said, relieved by the sudden shift in his mood.

  “My probation officer is coming for an important house visit today—which is the reason I’m kind of dressed like you—and I was wondering if you could come over and be my friend, like, a new nice friend. Not like my old juvie friends, who can be a little too criminal.”

  “Yeah,” I said enthusiastically. “I can be your new friend.”

  “Good,” he replied, “and you won’t be sorry. I only have a couple weeks left on probation, and my officer said I need to start hanging out with the type of people that make me a better person—like you.”

  “Me?” I said, and pointed to myself.

  I didn’t say it out loud, but my plan was that hanging around him would make me sort of a shadier person. Something more like his old friends.

  “You do know right from wrong?” he asked. “It’s an essential skill for the job.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Of course I know right from wrong.”

  “Then you got the job!” he said c
heerfully, and clapped his hands together. “You won’t regret it. In fact, you can almost consider it a lifetime position.”

  “Perfect,” I said. “Just what I was looking for.”

  At exactly the correct time I walked over to the Pagoda house. I was wearing an “after-church outfit,” as my mom would have called it: brown slacks, a yellow tucked-in shirt, and penny loafers with dark socks.

  I had my chess set with me and adjusted the box under one arm so I could ring their cracked plastic doorbell.

  As soon as Gary jerked the front door open and I timidly stepped over the threshold, he slipped behind me and grabbed the back of my neck and bulled me headfirst down the hall and into a bathroom, where he shoved me up against a narrow wall between the box shower and stained toilet. He kicked the door closed behind us.

  I crossed my arms over the chess set and held it flat against my belly as if it might shield me from a gut punch.

  He seemed angry for no reason I could tell.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, afraid even to say that much. I didn’t dare say anything about him being in a bad mood. I’d already seen how that word always set him on fire.

  He reached out and clamped his hand onto my chin and lined our eyes up. “I’ve just let you into my house, which means we are breaking new ground here,” he said intensely. “I normally don’t let people in, so this makes me nervous. But we don’t have much time before the probation officer comes—now let’s get our stories straight about our new neighborly friendship.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll say anything you want.”

  “I like you, Sailor Jack, and I don’t mind looking out for you, but don’t cross me, because one word out of place and that dick can send me back to juvie. I’m close to the finish line with my probation, and I don’t want to go all the way back to square one and have to shit in a bucket and eat cold grits and turnip greens three times a day.”

  “I’d never cross you,” I said to him. “I’ve got your back.”

  And then I said what I had really been eager to say. “Count on me. I’m your right-hand man.”

  He smiled. “You are a lot of amusing things to me, but you are not my right-hand man,” he said directly. “You are my shield against going back to juvie. In other words, you are not going to watch my back because you are my face. So, Mr. Face,” he asked, “you ever been punched in the face?”

  “No,” I said, and quickly turned my cheek to one side. I knew what was coming.

  “Look me in the eyes,” he ordered, and lowered his hand to grip around my neck. “It won’t hurt as much as you think.”

  The moment I straightened my chin out his fist hit me squarely on the mouth and my head snapped back against the wall. Stuff fell over in the shower and slid around out of sight.

  “What do you taste?” he asked.

  I licked my lip. “Blood,” I replied.

  “Good,” he said. “But don’t think of it as blood. It’s vitamins. Blood is what makes you a man. And I need a man like you to be a good influence on me. You make me a better person in the eyes of my probation officer. You are the innocent Sea Cadet mask I get to wear. In other words, in the eyes of my probation officer you are going to make sure I know all my rights from all my wrongs.”

  “What’s in it for me?” I asked.

  “A question like that is very disappointing,” he said in a slow, menacing way. “It makes me think you don’t understand our relationship. So let’s make this clear once and for all. You”—and he drove his finger into my chest—“get to be next to me. That’s the gift I’m giving you in return. You got that?”

  “Sure,” I said, breathing harder. “Does that mean I get to end up being like you?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said as he lit a cigarette. “Even if you could be me you don’t want to be me. Heck, I don’t even want to be me.”

  “Yes you do,” I said quietly because I was a bit timid with what I was about to say. “I’ve given it a lot of thought. I want to be your double—kind of like a twin. Then you’d have someone just like yourself to hang out with.”

  He seemed amused by this. “You’re a little stranger than I thought, Sailor Jack,” he remarked. “But like I said, maybe. Someday you’ll meet my friends and you’ll see just how far you have to go to come up to our level.”

  I didn’t like the thought of his friends. They’d just steal Gary’s attention away from me. Maybe I could convince him not to see them. After all, my job was to give him good advice to keep him out of trouble.

  Just then the doorbell rang.

  “You going to be around later?” Gary asked.

  “Yeah,” I replied.

  “Great,” he said. “I have a little something for you—later.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “What!” he shot back harshly. “I hate that word! Like when Alexander Graham Bell said, ‘Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you,’ Watson didn’t sit on his ass and whine, ‘What ya need me for, boss?’ Did he?”

  “No,” I said.

  Gary blew cigarette smoke in my face. “Be like Watson and come when you are called. I already have parents who ruin my mood by asking what I’m doing. And now I have a probation officer crawling up my butt asking me what, so just either wait for me to show you what or go spend your time trying to be a girl with your sister and her friends.” He reached out and grabbed the window curtain and handed it to me. “Wipe your mouth. You had a bathroom accident and you’re bleeding.”

  “Gary!” Mrs. Pagoda sweetly called down the hallway as the house shifted a bit toward her. “Your Mr. Mercier is here and I hope you filled out those papers.”

  “I did!” he hollered back, tossing his butt in the toilet and flushing.

  Then he turned to me and leaned his forehead directly onto mine. His nose was against my nose. As he spoke his lips buzzed over my lips. “If in any way you screw this up for me I’ll kill you. You know that grave I dug yesterday? Well, the last asshole who screwed me over is in there. So no funny business. Pay attention to me and agree with everything I say.”

  He pulled his face away, tousled my hair a bit, and gave me a shove forward. “Go be the fake good kid I know you are,” he whispered. “Lie to my probation officer even better than you lie to your parents, yourself, or any girlfriend you might have had.”

  “Got it,” I said, feeling anxious but eager to perform well in front of the probation officer. I was a pretty careful liar and once I got started I could slip one lie into another and into another like a nest of little boxes that all fit together.

  When we entered the living room, Mrs. Pagoda was disappearing up the hallway. She moved like a slow billiard ball rolling toward a pocket and then she opened the door to a darkened den and rolled in. In the flickering light from a television, I could see Mr. Pagoda’s feet resting on an ottoman, but I couldn’t see the rest of him. Mrs. Pagoda closed the door behind her.

  In the living room, Gary put his heavy hand on my shoulder to steady me. “Mr. Mercier,” he said in a respectful voice, “meet my new friend, Jack Gantos.”

  Mr. Mercier was dressed in a baby-blue suit and white open-collared shirt and when we shook hands he held mine tightly enough to keep me from pulling away.

  “Nice to meet you,” he said crisply. “Do you have a record?”

  I glanced at Gary. I was stupidly thinking of a record album.

  “He’s so clean,” Gary said to Mr. Mercier, “that he doesn’t even know what a ‘record’ means.”

  “You ever been to jail?” Mr. Mercier asked, giving my hand an extra squeeze. “You ever been busted for shoplifting? You ever skip school? You ever steal a bicycle?”

  “No, sir,” I said. “None of those things.”

  “Then why would you suddenly start hanging around with this criminal, who thinks right and wrong are the same word in the dictionary?”

  He let go of my hand and began to crack his knuckles. If he had snapped my arm it wouldn’t have sounded as loud as
him cracking his thumb.

  “Well,” I said nervously, “because I’m really good at chess and he knows how to play and so we became chess friends.” I was trying to sound convincing. “It’s easy because we’re next-door neighbors and he’s nice—I mean, he doesn’t cheat or anything.”

  “Gary,” Mr. Mercier said, pivoting so quickly toward Gary I thought he was going to hit him with a sucker punch. “What’s your favorite chess piece—the pawn or the queen?”

  Gary pushed his hair away from his eyes. “The knight,” he replied casually. “He’s just like me. Two steps in one direction”—he took two steps forward—“and then one quick step off the deep end.”

  As he said that he turned to the side and dropped down onto one knee.

  I laughed and the moment I did so Mr. Mercier re-grabbed my hand, and very hard this time. He wanted to keep my mouth on a tight leash.

  “So, Jack,” he said, “how long have you known your new chess friend?”

  I cut my eyes toward Gary. I knew he was aching to answer, and he jumped right in.

  “Jack and I have been friends since he moved in next door.”

  Mr. Mercier let out a sigh of frustration.

  “Jack,” he said with more force, “how long have you lived next door?”

  It had only been a few weeks.

  “A month,” Gary blurted out.

  “Let the kid answer the questions,” Mr. Mercier insisted, and slapped Gary across his leg.