Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key

by Jack Gantos

  “Honey, he could be on the moon. I just don’t know,” she said in a voice that didn’t want to talk about it.

  “But if he is …”

  “Don’t get your hopes up about bumping into your father, Joey,” she said. “He wouldn’t know you if he saw you.”

  It hurt to think he wouldn’t know me from any other kid so I tried not to think about him or even Grandma. Already I had enough scary thoughts to worry me about my brain being messed up so I tried to think of something good like Mom told me to do. Just one good thing. I leaned my head against the glass and fell asleep. That was the best I could do.

  When I woke up, Mom wanted to know if I was hungry I was, so she got the food and I opened the dog book which I had brought with me.

  “Don’t you think you should do your homework first?” she asked, but it was more of an order.

  “After we eat,” I begged. “Then you can help me.”

  “Okay,” she said, and spread out the paper towels and sandwich on her lap. “But no tricks. You have to keep up like Mrs. Maxy said.”

  I flipped through the pages of dogs. “I like this one,” I said, pointing at a Chinese crested.

  “It only has fur on the tip-top of its head,” she said. “Like a troll doll.”

  I didn’t care about that. “This is the puppy I really want,” I said, and pointed at a brown Chihuahua.

  “Is there a Joey puppy in there?” she asked, then leaned over to kiss me and tried to be sneaky and check my bald spot again.

  “I know how to be your puppy,” I said, and jerked my head away. “After you were gone I started asking Grandma when you were coming back and she said, Any day now, I suspect.’ And she set a chair in the front-room window and every evening I would sit there with my toys and stuffed animals and books and I’d wait. Grandma wouldn’t let me out of my chair so I stood on it, kneeled on the seat, scootched it around backward, and rode it like a horse, and all the time I kept my eye on the sidewalk looking for you and every now and again a woman selling cookies or magazines or church raffle tickets would come up the sidewalk and I’d spring forward and flatten my face against the glass window, but I didn’t know what to look for ‘cause I didn’t remember what you looked like, remember? So I yelled out to Grandma, Is that my mom?’”

  “Joey,” Mom said, “is this going to be about Grandma treating you bad?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You’ve told me this before and it hurts me to hear it over and over,” she said.

  So I shut up. But it was the kind of story that doesn’t go away after the first time you tell it so you have to tell it over and over until it goes away for good. If it ever can. I looked out the window and thought of Special Ed and acted in my mind like I was speaking to him because I hadn’t told him yet but planned to.

  Grandma would tease me all the time while I waited at the window for Mom. “Look at you,” she’d say. “You’re like a little puppy.” And she made me do puppy tricks.

  “Roll over,” she’d command, and I’d get on the floor and roll over and over until I bumped into the wall. “Sit up!” she’d shout, and clap her hands, and I would, with my little arms up in front of my face and my wrists curled down like paws. “Bark,” she’d say, and if I didn’t she’d get the flyswatter and swat me across the bottom until I sounded like a pet store full of dogs. There was one command I did like. “Beg!” she’d snap, and I’d begin to whine like a dog going, “Pleeeease, pleeeease, pleeeease,” until she’d give me a hard candy that she’d swiped by the handful from the fishbowl of free candy at the bank where she cashed her Social Security check. I loved that candy and I’d beg and beg until I got it all.

  Sometimes she’d get so mad at me for not being good she’d pretend that the phone rang and she’d hold it to her ear and say, “Yes. Why yes. Oh, that is so wonderful that you are coming home. When? Tonight? Oh, Joey will be so excited. So excited.”

  And I was. I’d be pulling on the phone cord trying to get the receiver so I could yell “hurry up” into it, but Grandma would hold it tight and stiff-arm me with her other hand and then she’d say, “What? You want him to take a bath then sit nice and still and not fidget in his seat? Okay. We’ll try.” Then she’d set the receiver down and I’d pick it up and yell, “Mom!” into it but she had already hung up. “Now don’t let your mom down,” Grandma would say, and I’d run to the bathroom and scrub myself red and when I was perfectly clean I put on my pajamas and sat in the window chair and if I’d wiggle just a little tiny bit Grandma would say from across the room where she was doing crossword puzzles, “See, I just saw her walk by and she saw that you were not sitting still and she just kept on walking ‘cause your mom does not want to come home to a bad boy.”

  “That’s not true!” I’d scream. And I’d get so nervous I’d pull my hair out. Not fistfuls, but one little hair at a time until I had round bald patches on my head. I knew it was bad, but I couldn’t help it, and then Grandma would pick up the phone again and say, “What? You aren’t coming back until he learns not to pull his hair out like an idiot? Okay, I’ll tell him.” Then she’d hang up and say to me, “Did you hear that, Joey?” And by then I’d be crying and crying because I hated myself so much for not being able to sit still and keep my hands in my lap, and then Grandma would say into the phone again, “But you are willing to try again tomorrow night. Oh, that is so nice of you, dear. You are a saint to love this boy the way you do. I’ll see to it that he is in the chair by the window. Yes, I’ll tell him that you’ll be passing by to check on him and if he is sitting still you will come knock on the door.”

  So the next night I’d start off sitting in the chair twiddling my thumbs and when any woman walked down the street I’d straighten up and sit real still but when the woman passed by I’d slump back because there I was being good, but for the wrong woman. And I waved and smiled so much at strange women that once I was playing on the front porch and a woman passed by and pointed at me and said to her kid, “Look there is that nice boy who sits in the window and waves to everyone.” So I waved back and her daughter said, “What’s wrong with his head?” Because I had those little shiny spots that looked like holes.

  I turned away from staring out the bus window and from thinking of Grandma and the past and looked at Mom, who was filing her nails. “Can I talk to you again?” I asked.

  “Only if you tell me something new,” she said.

  “Okay. One of the reasons I want a puppy is because it will wait in the window for me every day and every day I will come home to it. You didn’t come home to me but I promise I’ll come home to it. I’ll take care of it because I don’t want it to feel like I did. So if the test on my brain is good then I should get a puppy because of a celebration, and if the test is bad I should get one because you have to be really nice to me because then it’ll be proven that I’m messed up in the head and nobody can fix it. Either way, I should get a dog.”

  When I finished talking her head was tilted forward against the back of the next seat, because everything I said was all in her brain like a heavy weight and she had to rest it for a minute. But I didn’t care. Special Ed said I might get mad at her someday and he was right.

  “So why, after all I put you through, do you still love me?” she finally said, and slipped the nail file into her purse. “Why?”

  “I don’t know why,” I said. “I just do. You’re my mom and I do. Anyway you love me and I’m messed up in the head for life.”

  “Don’t think that,” she said, and kissed me on the side of the face, then began to straighten my shirt and push back my hair as if looking better would mean I was better.

  “And the puppy?” I asked.

  “I think you know that once we get back home we can get one.”

  “Yes!” I said, and pumped my fist. “Yes! ‘Cause Maria has one and I don’t want to have to wait until someone cuts off my nose to get one.”

  “I’m sure Maria is a very nice girl,” Mom said. “So no more si
lly talk about her. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, and began to flip through the dog book again.

  “We’ll find a cure for you, Joey,” Mom said.

  “No you won’t,” I replied. “There is no cure.”

  “Well, you’re not doomed,” she said sarcastically

  “I know,” I said. “But there is no cure. The doctor and Special Ed said so.”

  “I don’t mean cure like you take a pill and it all goes away,” she said.

  “Then say what you mean,” I said, and I could feel myself slipping away because suddenly I didn’t want to sit in my seat and everything outside the window became really blurry and I could feel my brain getting stuck on one thought. “You know what I mean? Say what you mean. You know what I mean?” I said again as if repeating that thought would give me a running head start into getting the next thought going. But I was stuck in a rut. “You know what I mean?” I repeated, a little louder and a little meaner. “You know what I mean!”

  “Come on,” Mom whispered, and grabbed my hand. “Let’s go back to the bathroom for just a minute.”

  She pulled me out of the seat and tightened her grip on my hand as she dragged me down the aisle, and I kept bouncing from side to side and touching some people.

  “Sorry,” Mom kept saying to them. “Sorry.”

  And for a second I thought, She is sorry. She is always sorry.

  When we got to the bathroom it was so small. Mom opened the door and sat down on the toilet lid and I leaned in over her. She pulled the door closed against my butt and latched it, then unzipped her purse. She took out my medicine and I opened my mouth.

  “Be my good little baby bird,” she said quietly, and slipped the pill onto my tongue.

  We stayed that way and as the bus rumbled down the road it felt like the whole planet was loose and was bouncing down a long flight of steps.

  “I have a confession to make,” Mom finally said.

  “What?”

  “There was a time where I wanted to be with you but I wasn’t in shape to return. I was drinking with your father and wasn’t taking good care of myself. So when I decided to return I would walk by the house and try to see you because it would give me extra strength to pull myself together. But I swear, I never saw you sitting in the window and I never knew what Grandma was making you do.”

  I put my cheek down on the top of her head and smelled her hair. Because she had so many beauty supplies it always smelled sweet and creamy. We stayed that way until the bus stopped and the driver knocked on the door.

  “Pittsburgh,” he said. “Come on out.”

  13

  MOON MAN

  My test was over within a few minutes after we arrived at the hospital. First, we got into an elevator and off at Radiology. Mom went up to the woman at the desk and was given some papers to fill out while a nurse came for me. “When you finish up the paperwork,” she said to Mom, “well be in room number 3.”

  As soon as we walked into the examination room I spotted the glass jar of Band-Aids. “Can I have one?” I asked.

  “Sure,” she said, and opened the jar herself, then slipped just one into my top pocket. Before I could ask for another she put the jar up on the top shelf. “Now undress and put this on,” she instructed, and gave me a thin white robe.

  “But my outfit’s new,” I said. “I just put it on after the bus ride.”

  She smiled. “Don’t worry. We’ll keep an eye on it. And I want you to put this rubber mouthpiece between your teeth and bite down really hard. We’ll need you to keep your jaw and teeth clenched so we can keep your head real still while we take the pictures.”

  “But I got my new outfit for the picture,” I said.

  “It’s not that kind of picture,” she said.

  “Okay,” I answered, because this time I didn’t want to do anything wrong.

  “I’ll get everything ready,” she said, and half stepped out the door. “Just remember, this won’t hurt and it won’t take long. Lots of kids have done it. It’s a breeze. The most important thing is to lie still.”

  As soon as she was gone I pushed a chair over to the stack of shelves, hopped up, and opened the jar. I grabbed a handful of Band-Aids and stuffed them into my pocket. Then I hopped down, put the chair away, and changed into the robe.

  After that everything happened so quickly I didn’t have time to make mistakes. The nurse took me into a bright room and helped lift me onto a table. She made me lie on my back and all the time she kept squeezing my arms and legs and shoulders into place as if I were made out of Silly Putty until I was just the right shape.

  “Now hold still and play like an Egyptian mummy,” she said. “Don’t even wiggle your eyes.”

  I closed them, and could hear her quickly walking away. A door closed on the other side of the room and soon the machine that takes the pictures began to buzz, then slowly it passed over me. And when it did my brain tingled as if it were a honeycomb full of bees. I always liked bees and honey and it made me feel better to think of bees than being some old dead mummy with a dried-up walnut brain. Suddenly the buzzing stopped, and it was finished.

  A door opened and I heard footsteps coming my way. “You can open your eyes now,” the nurse said. “And wiggle your eyeballs.” She reached into my mouth, pulled out the rubber mouthpiece, and put it in a small white bag. “Hop up. You were great. No twitching, no coughing or sneezing. You’re a real pro at being still.”

  I grinned. “I must be getting better already,” I said.

  “Yep,” she replied. “Now, come along.”

  Mom was waiting for me in the exam room. “How’d it go?” she asked, and kissed me on the head.

  “I think my brain is filled with bees,” I replied.

  She got a crooked smile on her face. “Don’t make fun of your brain,” she said. “It scares me.”

  Because she was scared, then I got scared and wanted to get going. I quickly pulled my clothes back on and we said thank you and goodbye to everyone. As we walked away the nurse said the test results would be sent directly to the doctor. We didn’t stop to talk about it. We got into the elevator and when the doors closed I felt much better.

  “I don’t like hospitals,” I said to Mom.

  “That’s why they have gift shops,” she said, and put one arm around me while her other one held her travel bag.

  “What can I buy?” I asked. “What?”

  “There are rules,” she reminded me. “Just keep in mind my wallet is pretty skinny.”

  We went into the gift shop and I could feel my head buzzing again. They had the coolest stuff I had ever seen. It’s like they saved the best toys in the world just for the sick kids. There was a whole zoo of kid-sized stuffed animals. I pointed at the giraffe.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Mom said.

  “How about the big battery-powered car I can drive?”

  “Nope.”

  “The five-pound can of peanut brittle?”

  “Nope.”

  “What then? What?”

  “Be reasonable, Joey,” she said. “Choose something that can fit in your pocket.”

  “You’re supposed to feel sorry for me,” I said.

  “What I feel for you and what I can afford are two different things,” she said. “Besides, you’ll be fine.”

  “Fine,” I repeated, only in a different way, and stomped over to the revolving postcard rack. “I’ll just get a card,” I said loudly, making a fuss, but I didn’t care. I wanted something nice because there was still a chance my brain looked more like scrambled eggs than a honeycomb.

  “A card is a very nice souvenir,” she said just like a mom because the saleslady was watching us as if we were house burglars.

  I grabbed the wire postcard rack with one hand and spun it around as fast as I could just as some old lady was about to pluck one out, and I almost chopped her finger off. She gave me a startled look like the hoot owl at the Amish farm, then backed off toward a shelf of Beanie Babie
s. I kept spinning the rack faster and faster until it was a postcard tornado and the cards were sailing out of their holders and skidding across the floor.

  “Joey!” Mom snapped, scolding me. “Joey Stop it.”

  I wouldn’t, but she did. She grabbed my arm with one hand and the wire rack with the other and it nearly toppled over but didn’t. It just wobbled around in a circle like a drunk person. “Now help me pick these up,” she ordered, bending over.

  I got down on my hands and knees like a dog and put them in my mouth.

  “Stop that,” she said, getting mad and yanking them out of my mouth. “Nobody wants Joey slobber on their card.”

  “I know what I want that will fit in my pocket,” I said.

  “What?”

  “A Chihuahua.”

  “Can I get back to you on that?” she snapped.

  Then the saleslady stood over us. “May I help you?” she asked as if she wanted to help us right out the door.

  “Do you sell Chihuahuas?” Mom asked.

  “I’m afraid not,” the lady replied with a really fake smile on her face and then she began to tidy up the postcard rack.

  “Then we’ll just have to take our business someplace else,” Mom said, sounding snotty. She grabbed my arm and marched me across the lobby and out the door and we kept marching until we weren’t really sure where we were.

  After a few minutes Mom set her bag down and looked over at a bank clock. “We’ve got some extra time to kill. Let’s do some sightseeing.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We could go to the Igloo and see the Penguins.”

  “I don’t think they let you see the hockey rink when they’re not playing a game,” she said. “Besides, I was thinking more about going up to the Sky Deck of the PPG building and seeing the whole city from one spot.”

  “Do they have telescopes?”

  “I would think so,” she said. But she wasn’t sure so I started hoping they did right away because there was something more inside my mind buzzing around besides bees. I had an idea about what I wanted to find in Pittsburgh.

  When we arrived at the PPG building we took the elevator up about fifty floors and by then Mom looked pale.