Pandas on the Eastside

by Gabrielle Predergast

  “What’s a photojournalist?” I said. It came out pretty snippy, but he didn’t seem to mind.

  “I take pictures for newspapers and magazines and stuff.”

  I wanted to ask him what kind of magazines, but then I thought that if he said it was the kind with half-naked ladies in them, I would throw up on the road. “Has that always been your job?” I asked instead. That seemed safer.

  “For a while, yeah.”

  “Was that your job when…when I was born?”

  His face went soft, and he sighed. “No, Journey. I didn’t have a job then. I was a student at UCLA. A freshman.”

  “What’s a freshman?” I was asking so many questions, I’m sure he thought I was as dumb as a squirrel. If he did, he didn’t let it show.

  “A freshman is someone in the first year of college. University. Like, right after high school.”

  I had to think about that for a while. It so changed the picture I had in my head that it felt like being dunked in cold water.

  “How old were you?”

  He scratched his head, looking down at me, his brown eyes sad. “I was eighteen. I turned nineteen just after…well, just after you were born.”

  I kept my arms crossed and hugged myself a little bit, though I tried not to let him see that. Dad just stood there waiting for me to say something. But we were getting to the part of the story where he left Mom and me, and I wasn’t ready to talk about that. I wasn’t sure what to think about him being only eighteen when I was born. That seemed a little young to be a father. I didn’t want to say that, though, in case I got it wrong. So I decided to let my stomach speak for me.

  “I’m hungry,” I said.

  The sun was rising, so Dad came upstairs with me. Mom poked her head into the kitchen a few minutes later, made a squeaking noise and disappeared back to her room. While I was making toast, I heard her slam the closet door about five times, then bang the window open, then bang it closed. “What do you want on your toast?” I said to my dad.

  On the way up the stairs he’d shown me his press card from the newspaper to prove his story was true. I still thought he was flirting with Kellie Rae, but I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. That’s what Miss Bickerstaff says I should do when I’m not sure if someone has done something bad. Give them the benefit of the doubt. I’m not really sure what that means except that I’m not supposed to stay mad. Staying mad is bad karma, Mom says.

  “Got any apricot jam?” Dad said.

  And then, just like that, I almost loved him again. Apricot jam is my favorite too. I spread it so thick on the toast that I nearly needed to eat mine with a spoon. We made all kinds of slurping noises and licked our lips. Then Dad asked me if we had any coffee. I knew we did, but I didn’t know how to make it. So he showed me.

  Dad and me making coffee together. It made up for the fact that I’d caught him flirting with a girl on the street in the middle of the night. It was like he lived with us, like a normal family from TV or something.

  “Do you want to see my room? It’s really groovy,” I said after we had finished making the coffee.

  “Okay, sure,” Dad said.

  Mom glared at him as we walked down the hall and stood in my doorway, but she didn’t say anything.

  I showed him my closet, with the bead curtain instead of a door. I showed him the mood ring Mom bought at Goodwill that always told me I was angry. I showed him the picture of the spaceship on the moon.

  “What’s this one?” he asked, pointing at Mr. Huang’s note.

  I told him what the note said. I explained about the pandas and how I wanted to help them, how I was worried that they might be cold or hungry or lonely. When I finished, I glanced over at Mom. She looked real proud, like she wanted to say to him, Haven’t I done a good job with her?

  Dad took out his camera and snapped a few pictures of the note. Then he looked at his watch.

  “I’ve got a meeting,” he said. Then he went down on one knee so he could look me in the eye, like in a picture on a Father’s Day card. That made me feel special. “I’d like to show your note to some people at the newspaper. Is that okay?” he asked.

  I could barely get my answer out. The newspaper! Wow.

  “Okay, Dad,” I said.

  Even my mom was smiling.

  Eleven

  Contrary Gary

  The photograph of my note was printed in the newspaper the next day. Not the small, shabby newspaper that you pick up for free outside hotels, but the real newspaper, the one you buy out of boxes for a dime. I could not believe it when Dad came by before school and showed me. It wasn’t on the front page or anything, but I wasn’t disappointed. After all, even though the note was written in Chinese letters, I had actually made it up. So it was like having my very first story published in a newspaper! I was a real reporter at the age of ten! Like Lois Lane!

  It was a perfect day.

  We still had a substitute teacher at school, one I’d never met before, and when I told her I had a story in the newspaper, she told me to stop telling fibs. But even that didn’t bother me, because then it was like a special secret, and special secrets are like diamond key chains that you carry around in your pocket where no one can see them.

  I knew I was telling the truth. Nothing else mattered to me.

  After school Nancy and I walked home, asking everyone we saw for a dime. We don’t usually do this, because a couple of times we’ve gotten into trouble with Officer Pete about it, but I figured that day it was worth the risk. We got a dime from Kellie Rae and another one from a man she was with (after Kellie Rae slugged him in the shoulder). Then we got a dime from Kentucky Jack because we saw him being bugged by one of those church people, which he hates. We went up to him and said, “Daddy, there you are. Mommy says it’s time to come home now,” and so on. Then we apologized to the church lady and said we would for sure bring our old drunk dad to church so that he could find the Lord and mend his ways. Then we asked her for a dime. After she gave it to us, Jack followed us around the corner, gave us another dime and went to the bar.

  Finally we ran into Contrary Gary. We hadn’t seen him in some time. Mom said he probably went to the nuthouse for a while to settle down a bit. Well, I don’t know what kind of nuts they’re serving at that house, but poor Gary seemed worse than ever. He was arguing with a fire hydrant when we found him.

  “You’re not red! You’re not red!” he kept saying, even though the hydrant was red as a cherry soda. I felt bad taking advantage of Gary. It’s not his fault his brain doesn’t work right. But I really wanted one more dime so we could have an even five.

  “You sure won’t give me a dime, Gary,” I said real loud. “You would never give me a dime.”

  Gary stopped yelling at the hydrant and turned to me. “Journey Song, don’t you ever tell me what I will or won’t do. I will give dimes to whomever I please.”

  Then he gave me a dime. For good measure he gave one to Nancy too, which made her smile.

  “We should have told him not to give us a dollar,” she said as we left Gary and the hydrant to their discussion.

  “That would have been mean. One day his head will clear up and he’ll remember the people who’ve been mean to him.”

  Nancy looked worried. “Do you think he’ll be mad about the two dimes?” she asked.

  “We can always pay him back,” I said. “By the time he gets better, we’ll have jobs.”

  We took our six dimes to Mr. Huang’s. He was stacking cans of creamed corn in a pyramid when we came in, the bell on the door jangling behind us.

  “Six newspapers, please, Mr. Huang,” I said proudly.

  Mr. Huang looked up from his pyramid. “Why you want six newspaper?” he snapped. “You got money?” I must have looked ready to chew him out, because he couldn’t keep his cranky face straight for very long. “Journey! I joke! You are famous!” He sidestepped the corn and pulled two donuts out from the shelf under the counter. “Eat,” he said, then went into th
e back of the store.

  He returned with a pile of newspapers and a tea tray. “I saved these,” he said. “All day customers want newspapers. Sold out, I say. Nice picture, yes?” He pulled the paper open and showed us the picture on page six.

  The three of us looked at the black-and-white photo for a long while. It was so groovy seeing something that I had helped make in the newspaper. And I loved that there was a little story with the picture, telling people about the pandas and their problem.

  Eastside Elementary School student Journey Song composed this note with the help of local merchant Edward Huang. The note is aimed at the keepers of two pandas said to be living in political limbo in a warehouse near the Eastside neighborhood where Miss Song lives. Miss Song is concerned about the welfare of the pandas and urges the pandas’ keepers to let them continue on their journey to Washington, DC, where a comfortable zoo enclosure awaits them. Details on why the pandas are being delayed are hard to come by, but it is believed that a diplomatic scuffle between China and the US is to blame.

  I wasn’t too sure what limbo or diplomatic scuffle meant, but I liked how the article referred to me as Miss Song, and I also liked how they wrote urges the pandas’ keepers with the apostrophe after the S, because that’s where it’s supposed to go and no one ever gets that right.

  All of a sudden Nancy started laughing. “Bear cat,” she said with a snort.

  “What?” I said. Nancy says strange things nearly as often as Contrary Gary does, but there was something about bear cat that jingled in my head.

  Nancy pointed at the photograph of the Chinese note. “The pandas are called bear cats,” she said. “That’s funny.”

  “How do you know they’re called bear cats?” I asked. I remembered that fact from the book on pandas I’d read at the library, but I didn’t think I had told Nancy.

  She pointed again. “It says right there, see? Bear. Cat.” Then she took a big bite out of her donut and chewed happily.

  I looked at Mr. Huang. He seemed to know what I was thinking straightaway. Everyone knew Nancy couldn’t read. People on the Eastside love to gossip about other people who have worse problems than they do. Mr. Huang grabbed a piece of paper and a pen and quickly jotted down some Chinese letters. He showed them to Nancy.

  “What does a quick brown fox have to do with anything?” she asked.

  Mr. Huang scribbled something else.

  “Don’t open a shop unless you like to smile,” Nancy read. “I do like to smile, but that’s good advice for you, Mr. Huang.”

  I could not say anything for nearly a minute. Finally Mr. Huang rescued me.

  “You can read Chinese?” he said to Nancy.

  “Is that what that is?” Nancy said. “It’s pictures. Each picture makes a word. That’s not reading. That’s just looking at pictures.”

  I had learned a word in school recently—flabbergasted. It means “overcome with surprise.” I was flabbergasted. Nancy Pendleton was ten years old, and after five years of trying could not read English well enough to order from the menu at the Ovaltine Café, but she could read Chinese. If that wasn’t flabbergasting I didn’t know what was.

  “Where in the heck did you learn to read Chinese?” I said.

  Nancy shrugged. “Mrs. Chu, I guess. She babysat us until I got old enough to keep the boys under control. Remember her? She used to look at this book of fortune-telling or something. I just followed along. It wasn’t that hard. I didn’t know it was Chinese. I thought it was a secret code.”

  “Reading is a code, Nancy!” I yelled.

  “You don’t need to get all crabby with me, Journey Song,” she said, looking hurt. “I know I don’t know everything. I know what I know, though, and if you say that’s Chinese writing, well then, gosh, I guess I know how to read Chinese.”

  Mr. Huang was grinning from ear to ear. “Celebrate,” he said. “More donuts for everyone.”

  Twelve

  Michael Booker

  Nancy started a new reading program that Monday at school, mostly designed by me and David Schuman, who is also a good reader. We showed Nancy words and told her to ignore the letters. She said that was easy because they looked mostly like chicken footprints anyway. I didn’t know how she could think English letters looked like chicken feet and Chinese letters didn’t, but Nancy is pretty weird about most things, so I guessed it made a kind of sense.

  We told Nancy to think of the words as pictures instead of looking at the letters. So, for example, Nancy pictured the word cat as a sitting cat. The c is the cat’s curved tail; the top of the t is the cat’s ears, et cetera. I have to admit, once I tried this with Nancy, I couldn’t look at the word cat without seeing a cat. Dog was a dog lying down; bed was a bed with a headboard and footboard. Foot was a foot with only two toes. We went on like that all morning. Once Nancy had seen a word as a picture, she remembered it.

  I couldn’t wait for Miss Bickerstaff to come back to school so we could show her how well Nancy was doing. I didn’t have to wait very long, because at lunch that day Mr. Hartnell told us Miss Bickerstaff would be back the next day. I felt great after lunch. Miss Bickerstaff was feeling well enough to come back to school. I was sure everything with the pandas would work out. Life was good. Then Michael Booker went and ruined it all.

  Michael Booker comes from a bad family, so it’s only partly his fault. And I don’t mean a poor family. All the kids at Eastside Elementary come from poor families, and that’s no excuse to be mean. But Michael’s family is bad. His father went to jail for punching a policeman, and his older brother is one of those people who sell things I’m not supposed to know about. His mother is a drinker, like mine, only she never goes to meetings and hardly ever leaves the house. She throws things too, I’ve heard, although I’m not supposed to gossip, so that’s all I’ll say about that. They live squashed up in a basement apartment on Princess Street, which is not as pretty as it sounds. Maybe Michael has more reason to be mean than most, but he had no reason at all that day to be mean to me.

  We were doing long division quietly at our desks when Michael leaned over and whispered to me.

  “Hey, Journey,” he said, all serious-looking. “My brother found out that those pandas died.”

  I felt like the floor had turned to smoke and I was falling all the way to the basement.

  “He did not,” I said, feeling tears in the back of my eyes.

  “No talking,” said the substitute. She didn’t even look up from her knitting.

  I couldn’t help it. Even though I didn’t really believe him, part of me thought that it might be true. Tears started to leak out of my eyes.

  “Look at the baby crying,” Michael whispered. “They’re just stinky bears. Nobody cares.” Then he grinned to himself. “Hey, I’m a poet and I don’t even know it!”

  “SHUT UP!” I yelled. “You shut up and never say another thing to me ever again, you little twerp!”

  The whole class stopped what they were doing. The substitute finally looked up.

  “What on earth has gotten into you, Journey?” she said.

  “Michael said a mean thing to me,” I said, sniffing back my tears.

  “Michael, is this true?”

  Michael looked all innocent and said sweetly, “I was only telling her about a news story I heard that concerned her.”

  Well, this is where I lost control. I turned and pushed Michael and screamed, “You lying little…” And then I said a word that no child should ever say at school. It was one of those words I learned from Jack and Gary, a really bad word that sounds even worse coming out of the mouth of a ten-year-old. Some kids gasped when I said it. Even Michael looked shocked. And the substitute? She looked ready to stab me with one of those knitting needles, right there in front of everybody.

  “I will not have language like that, missy. You will leave this classroom and not come back today. I will be speaking to your mother about this. Go straight to the office.”

  I really hate being called “missy
,” plus I was half-crazy with worry, so I never made it to the office. I ran out of the school, cut across the field and headed down to Hastings Street. I had to go right that minute and find out for sure that the pandas were okay and that Michael Booker was just lying about them to be mean. I thought maybe someone in the neighborhood would know something. I was only halfway to Mr. Huang’s when I ran into Contrary Gary. And I mean ran into him. He was coming out of the police station, and I bowled him right over.

  “Ouch!” I said, then saw it was Gary in a heap on the sidewalk. “You sure can’t tell me what you’re doing at the police station, Gary,” I said, thinking fast.

  “I will tell you whatever I want,” said Gary. “It so happens I got arrested last night for creating a disturbance.” He said this like he was pleased rather than ashamed of getting arrested, but Gary is contrary, after all.

  “Gary, you wouldn’t tell me anything you heard overnight about those pandas.”

  Gary got up, all proud, and dusted himself off. “Journey Song, if I knew anything at all about the pandas, I would tell the whole darn world.”

  Only he didn’t say “darn.” He said a much worse word than that, and I began to understand how he might have been disturbing last night.

  “I have to go, even though you want me to stay,” I said.

  “Get away with you! I don’t want you around!” Gary said as I ran on down the street.

  I slowed a bit and tried to think. Why would Michael Booker’s brother know anything about the pandas anyway? Michael Booker’s brother had never done a day of proper work in his life, so why would he be anywhere near the dock warehouses where decent people made an honest living? Michael was probably just mad at me because I can do long division better than him. And he was probably jealous because Nancy got so much attention for learning to read so quickly when he himself couldn’t read until third grade. I started to think maybe I was panicking for no good reason. My mom says I do this a lot.

  But then I thought about how delicate pandas must be, living in the clouds and eating nothing but bamboo. Being cooped up in a stinky warehouse couldn’t be good for them. They might have caught pneumonia, and I know that can kill you because an old man in our building died of pneumonia last winter after falling asleep at night on Wreck Beach. For all I knew, the pandas could be dead—or dying, anyway—and nobody cared but me. And Nancy. And Mr. Huang. And my dad. And Mom. And okay, probably a whole bunch of other people, since the story was in the newspaper and all, but still. I felt responsible for them. I had to find out for sure that they were safe. But maybe running around in the street wasn’t helping anyone.