by Jack Gantos
FAITH IN FLAMES
This next part is the hardest part to tell. Maybe because what I wanted didn’t want me. I suppose all of us look at ourselves from time to time and wish we were bigger, stronger, meaner, tougher, and more vicious than the next guy. Being smart just isn’t enough. I could be smart on my own at night alone in my room, but I wanted to be fearsome when I was out in the world walking bravely down dark streets or walking indifferently down those blindingly bright school hallways during class breaks. I wanted to be a man, and suspected I wasn’t man enough—I wasn’t a coward, but I wasn’t feared either. Still, I had enough courage to do what I had planned.
First, I hauled my bags of clothes and a can of lighter fluid to the golf course. Gary had told me where there was a tear in the chain-link fence that was hidden by heavy vines. I set them down just inside the fence. I had plenty of time to burn them later. For now, I wanted to get my new clothes before anyone showed up and saw me looking like a kid.
Then I stole the beige Levi’s at the Grant’s department store. I had walked there in the heat of the afternoon and was so sweaty when I arrived I had to kill time strolling up and down the frozen-food section at the Winn-Dixie grocery store before I settled down and got busy.
I had worn a pair of my baggy khaki work pants to Grant’s. I went directly to the Levi’s section and selected two pairs that I thought might fit me. I draped them over my arm the way my mother would and carried them into the dressing room. The first pair fit so tight I could just barely get the zipper halfway up. My pinched-in stomach hung over the waistband. Perfect, I thought. They’ll stretch into shape.
I did a few quick deep-knee bends and then sucked in my gut and pulled the waistband together until the large shiny metal stud slipped into the heavily sewn buttonhole. I let out my stomach and the button and hole held tight and didn’t pop off. I dragged the zipper the rest of the way up and the teeth didn’t separate. I pulled my khakis over them. I returned the second pair to the display where I had found them. A salesgirl casually passed by but seemed to look right through me, as all girls did.
I shrugged. “No luck with the sizing,” I said to myself, and stiffly marched straight for the exit. I walked a couple blocks until I felt confident no one was following me and then I quickly peeled the khakis down over my legs and sneakers and threw them in a trash container behind a Burger King.
The shoes were harder to swipe. I stood by the display window and waited until there were no customers in the Thom McAn store. The salesman was a kid not much older than me. I was so new to this area of Fort Lauderdale that no one had ever seen me before. I went in and scanned the display shelf. When I spotted the white alligator pumps I requested my size. When he brought them out I tried them on. Although they fit nicely I said they were “too tight in the toe” and I’d need the next size up. The moment he went into the back storage room I grabbed the shoes. I left the box. I was out the front door in a flash and ran behind the store and cut through a scrubby field toward the back of a Holiday Inn. I put the shoes inside a grocery bag I found by a trash bin and kept walking briskly until I was far enough away from the store. I walked a few streets deep from the main highway, where there was new construction. Inside a half-built house I took the shoes out of the bag and scratched up the soles and heels over a rough concrete threshold in the garage. I grabbed a handful of sandy dirt and slopped it across the toes of the shoes. They were still stiff and smelled new, but they didn’t look newly stolen. I put them back in the bag to be on the safe side. So far, it was all so much easier than I had imagined. My heart was pounding and my eyes were darting left and right, but I took a deep breath and kept going.
There was no way I was going to swipe a leather motorcycle jacket from a store. Besides, I wanted a used one that looked more like Gary’s, which was all scratched up from taking a few hard spills on a Harley. I didn’t want to look like a newly minted gang kid.
I walked down to a church secondhand clothing store called Faith Farm. My parents had bought our furniture there. It was nice—just out of style. The wooden building had been an old Florida hotel, and the donated clothes were sorted by rooms. I started going through a nasty pile of damp leather jackets. There was a lot of mildew on them and they smelled like dead cows in the humidity. The girls’ jackets were the same style as the boys’, only the sizes were different. I didn’t care. I just needed something to fit into—and by the time Gary’s friends arrived at the golf course it would be dark. It didn’t take too long to find a guys’ leather jacket that was a pretty roughed-up imitation of Gary’s. It wasn’t much money. I paid them the three bucks and went back to the golf course, where I could put on my new shoes.
I was going to burn my old clothes right away but then thought the smoke might attract someone who would call the fire department. So I took the bags and marched farther in until I found an asphalt path that hadn’t fully crumbled into pieces from all the sun, roots, and vines. Gary had said he would meet me at an old clubhouse before it got dark, so I thought I would follow the path. Before too long I found the clubhouse. It was in ruins. Southern oaks had grown through the foundation and collapsed the walls. The moldy terra-cotta roofline sagged like a lower jaw of blackened teeth. Part of the building had been set on fire. Vines laced over the windows like spiderwebs covering flies. The inside walls were velvet curtains of golden-green mold. I ran my hand down the wall. It seemed to purr like a cat. It was a sensation that made me want to live there like a hermit or a monk waiting patiently for the fiery Apocalypse. Unlike my own room, it felt oddly comfortable, surrounded by what had been beautiful, then abandoned and left to rot. It reminded me of my sister’s story about being born into perfection and then growing up only to find herself in decline. But she wouldn’t be in decline over here. Nature always presses forward to regain its beauty and purity. I missed her at that moment. I wished she was with me so I could tell her that I now understood what she meant when one night she said to me, “The house is a bit of a monster, and slowly you belong to it and begin to function in it like living furniture that gets rearranged—you become another gear inside the machine of the house, or a hand puppet to your parents. You won’t find freedom until you find yourself in a place that doesn’t own you.” She was right about that. And now I felt like a stripped gear that had rolled out of the machine of the house and escaped to find my own special place.
Even Gary had his girlfriend—his girl from Alabama with her white truck and scoop-neck top and rising breasts and blond hair and nice smile and thin lips and an attitude that said she was looking to leave her house with a man and not a boy, looking for some guy who was moody and tough and simple and who loved her completely and wanted out of his house as much as she wanted out of hers.
Just as I wanted to go from the inside of my house to the outside, I wanted to be turned inside out, and so I started taking off the rest of my old clothes. I left my T-shirt on because the leather jacket was still sticky with mildew. I put my new shoes on. There was no mirror, but I didn’t need one because how I now felt inside was better than how I could ever look on the outside.
Maybe Gary will see how great it is to be with me, his double, and he won’t go up to Alabama and leave me here looking in the mirror at a reflection of myself—that would just be double the misery.
“Hey, Sailor Jack!” Gary hollered. “Where the hell are you?” Startled blackbirds flew up into the air, then resettled. He was over by the fence.
“Over here!” I hollered back. I was very excited for him to see me. He must have been excited, too, because I heard him crashing through the bushes like a beast.
As he entered the clubhouse clearing I spread my legs and arms out like a storefront mannequin. “Notice anything different?” I asked.
“You can look like me, but you aren’t me,” he replied. Then he stepped toward me and with some malice in his voice said, “I have a bone to pick with you, Sailor Jack.”
“Did you bring the other guys?” I asked nervou
sly, looking over his shoulder. I was eager to meet them but didn’t want them to see him pushing me around like a kid.
“That’s just it,” he said. “I had to call off the party because you screwed up with your lousy excuse for Mr. Mercier. He got your phone number, okay.”
“But we aren’t listed in the phone book,” I protested weakly, and felt that this was all about to go the wrong way. “I called the operator and they don’t have us listed in information.”
“Well, did you ever walk outside your house and look at your dad’s company car? His work number is in bright red block letters and Mercier wrote them down and called him this afternoon. Your dad told Mercier that there was no cadet survival trip in the Everglades and that you were lying your ass off. So now I am screwed. Mercier called my mom and said it’s back to juvie for me.”
I didn’t figure Mr. Mercier would see the car, and though I was good at lying maybe he was better at catching liars.
“Well, are we still going to have a party?” I stupidly asked. He slapped me hard enough that I fell over and landed across my bags of clothes.
“You deserve that and more,” he said, standing over me. “And you’ll get more from your dad because he’s looking to kick your ass and I’ve given him a little extra incentive to do so. But for now I got you here with me,” he added bitterly, “so I get to kick your ass first.”
“What should we do?” I asked, and stood up while keeping my eyes on his hands. “How can I help? Do you want to punish me now and get it over with?” I asked, thinking that if he hit me now he would settle down like a bomb defused.
“If you were me you’d know what to do,” he said. “But you aren’t me yet, so you don’t know. What we’re going to do is blast out of here with a bang. I have one final Olympic game for you and then I’m off for Alabama.”
“Should I build a bonfire?” I asked. “There’s a lot of dry wood and I brought my old clothes to burn.”
“Nice outfit,” he finally said, calming down a bit as he looked me over.
“I stole everything,” I bragged. I didn’t mention the jacket.
“Stop showing off,” he said, “and get that fire going. Nothing speaks the truth like the pure pain of flame!”
I dashed over to where I had the clothes. There was a pit filled with ashes from other bonfires, so I turned my bags inside out and squirted some of my lighter fluid on the old clothes. They caught fire immediately. Then quickly I began to gather up dry branches. I pitched the wood around the clothes as if I were building a tepee. Soon a bright, tall flame shot into the air like the lashing tongue of a snake. As I admired the flames I began to sweat across my chest and down my arms and over my upper lip. It felt good to think about myself as a man.
Gary had walked off as I built the fire and when he returned he had a shoebox in his hand. He set it on the upturned end of a log.
“You know I like games and there is only one tonight—but it is truly life changing,” he said seriously. “I call it the Olympic Transformation Game. Kind of a Frankenstein’s monster sort of game. Since I only have one box you only have one game choice, but it’s better than any three choices combined. All you have to do is lift the top of the box and turn the doorknob and be transformed, and I hang a gold medal around your neck. Simple as sin!”
“What doorknob?” I asked.
He slapped me softly back and forth across the cheeks as if his hand were a paintbrush. “When will you learn to stop asking questions, Sailor Jack?”
I shrugged.
“Let me explain.” He opened the shoebox and revealed the runty spaniel puppy. It was as small as a squeeze toy. He lifted it up. “Alice donated it especially for you,” he said. “She picked it out herself.”
I reached forward and patted its little head. It turned its snout toward me and licked my fingers.
“He is the door you have to open,” Gary said, and set him back into the box. “Now put the palm of your hand on his head like it’s a doorknob, give it a sharp turn and enter my world.”
“This isn’t an Olympic game,” I said. “You just made this up because you’re mad at me.”
“Think whatever you want,” he replied coldly, “but now it’s time to do what you’re told to do.”
I wavered and looked Gary in the eye.
“After this I’m leaving,” he said. “And if you want to step into my shoes, my skin, my wicked ways, you have to open the door and really step up. So put your hand back on little Runty’s head and turn the knob. Come on, twisting it is no more than opening a tiny dollhouse door.”
He reached for my hand and pulled it forward and set it on top of the puppy’s head.
“Now get a good grip on it,” he instructed. “And turn.”
I turned its head to the side and the puppy squirmed.
“I didn’t hear it turn all the way,” he stated. “It’s a door, so you have to turn it hard enough to hear the lock click open. Then you can step forward and call yourself Gary Pagoda. That’s what you’ve wanted, and this is your Olympic moment to transform yourself into me. Now turn the knob because you won’t be golden until you open door number one.”
“What is your Olympic game?” I asked.
“The Olympic Vanishing Act!” he said proudly. “I’m done here. I’m just going to go up in smoke.”
He lit a cigarette. “And since someone has to take my place in juvie when I’m gone it might as well be you—my double. Now turn the knob, snap open the lock, and step into my shoes.”
I hesitated.
“Come on,” he urged me. “Some of my guys would snap that head off faster than twisting the beer cap off a cold one.”
I looked to the side where the flickering light from the fire was casting shadows of my burning clothes inside the empty body of the clubhouse. From the first moment I saw Gary and jumped on his train this was where it led me. Now I was here and this was what I wanted. It was just going to be a little harder than burning my notebooks and shoplifting some clothes. Those acts had been rungs on a ladder to this moment and so I planted my feet and reached forward and held the spaniel’s small head in my hand. Then I looked Gary in the eye.
He nodded. “Do it,” he whispered. “Go for the gold. You’ll never regret it.”
I couldn’t look at the dog. I looked away from Gary and into the fire, tightened my grip, and turned. The dog’s legs scrambled around the box to keep up with the twist of my wrist. I reached forward with my other hand and held his body in place as I turned his head until I reached the point where there was only one small vertebra of resistance. One more twist and I would step out of my space and into Gary’s.
He reached forward and pressed his hand over mine. “Time’s running out,” he said. “The Olympic judges are getting impatient.”
Just then the puppy yipped. I jerked my hand away and the box flipped over onto the ground. The puppy rolled out and scurried into the bushes. Gary dropped to his knees and reached down to grab him. The sun had already lowered and the underbrush was dark. I hoped Runty had gotten away. This was all my fault. I had made a mistake about Mr. Mercier but the puppy was innocent. After a minute Gary hopped back up onto his feet. He held Runty in one hand.
“You like fire so much,” he said, “so here’s a little something to keep it going.” He tossed Runty like a log onto the flames.
I spun around and in a few quick steps reached into the fire and snatched him out.
“Loser!” Gary snarled. “Even if you broke his neck you’d never be me.”
I lobbed the puppy into the bushes just before Gary’s fist caught me on the side of my jaw. I went down onto one knee as he threw his arms triumphantly up over his head.
“Pagoda scores a knockdown in Olympic boxing!” he announced, and did a boxer’s shuffle step as he cheered for himself.
That punch had knocked me senseless but I managed to stand back up. His second punch knocked me flat, and this time I stayed down.
“The ref has stopped the fight!”
he roared. “It’s Olympic gold for Pa-go-da!”
I began to crawl on all fours toward where I had last seen the puppy. Gary lunged at me and landed on my back, locking one hand around my chin and the other on the back of my head. Maybe he’d snap my neck and I’d pass through a door and never come back.
“There is only one reason stopping me from doing what I should,” he said, “and she’s in Alabama.”
He let me loose and hopped up.
“Congratulations,” he said bitterly. “Instead of you stepping into my shoes, I’ve knocked you clean out of yours.”
He was right in a way he didn’t fully understand. But I did. The more true he had been to himself, the more false I had been to myself.
I rolled over and sat up next to the fire. I felt cold and pulled my smelly jacket over my throbbing head and leaned face forward between my knees. I was frozen in place. Somehow I had slowly transformed, cell by cell and atom by atom, until there were no remains of my own flesh and bone and I’d transformed into a perfect fossil of my own self-deception.
HOUSE ON FIRE
I told you earlier that if you end up not liking yourself then it’s better to fake being someone else. The only problem with that advice is sometimes you get tired of being a fake and you want to return to yourself—your true self. I’ll tell you this from experience: it’s a lot easier to lose yourself inside the maze of someone’s life you think is better than your own than it is to stand alone under the noonday sun and be your true self.
So that night he hefted me off the ground and after a few slaps to the back of my head we walked out of the golf course.
When we passed through the fence I saw the half-hidden Rambler in the moonlight.
“That’s my dad’s car,” I gasped. “What’s it doing here?” I looked around as if Dad were waiting to snatch me.
“Poetic justice,” Gary replied. “Your dad has a big mouth. While he was sitting on your back porch bitching to your mother about what a liar you are, I walked around to the front and rolled the Rambler down the driveway. I had it wired in a minute. Stealing his car is the least I could do to pay him back.”