The Key That Swallowed Joey Pigza

by Jack Gantos

  It happened so fast. I was strong but he was stronger. “Let go of Junior!” I think I yelled. He did, but then he grabbed my wrists and tugged me across the porch. When we reached the steps I started to tip forward with Carter Junior in my arms. I twisted my shoulders around, and as I toppled onto my back and sledded down the steps he plucked Carter Junior from my arms like he was picking a melon.

  Carter Junior went off like a siren. Dad tucked him under his arm and ran down Plum Street.

  By then I had flipped back onto my feet and started chasing after him.

  “Stop! Baby thief!” I hollered, then regretted saying that because I didn’t want the cops to get involved because of my promise to Mom.

  Dad turned to see how far I was behind him and his hat flew off. The back of his head looked like a thick collar of monkey fur.

  I’ve always been a fast runner and I knew I could catch him, but it was how to tackle him without hurting Carter Junior that worried me, so I just stayed right behind him.

  “Stop!” I shouted. “It’s me! Joey! Your other son.”

  But he didn’t stop. He ran like he was a cartoon caveman character, only moving from the knees down.

  I got right behind him and reached out thinking that if I could snag his back pockets and hang on I could slow him down without knocking him over. But when I snatched at him he dodged to one side and my fingers hooked his side pocket and ripped it down the seam. Some coins sprayed out, and I reached after him again as we turned the corner onto Chestnut Street. Dad leaped into the street just when a car pulled out of Quips Pub. The headlights shone on us and the driver hit the brakes. We didn’t slow down. Dad cut across the street and sprinted toward the dark path between two houses. I was still right behind him and Carter Junior was screaming in a way I had never heard a baby scream before. He was so scared, which made me feel scared, but I didn’t have time for that now. I had to be brave for him, and maybe if he could feel my courage he would be brave too.

  We passed between the houses and crossed Franklin Street and kept going.

  “Stop,” I kept saying. “Stop. You are scaring him!”

  Dad didn’t slow down. It was like he had just robbed a bank. I guess he ran so hard because stealing a kid is worse than stealing money.

  I followed him into the dark yard between two more houses and neither of us saw the clotheslines. The first one missed the baby and got Dad around the neck and his feet shot forward. He hit the damp ground on his back and as he slid forward on the slick grass he held Carter Junior up in the air to keep him safe. That was my chance. I speeded up and just when I reached out to pluck little Carter Junior back from Dad’s arms I hit the second clothesline. My head snapped back and my feet flew out and I landed flat on my back but I was in luck. Dad went sliding on his bottom and ended up pushing over the side of a kid’s wading pool. There was a big splash. I thought Carter Junior must be dead because he wasn’t howling anymore. I just grazed the side of the pool, and when I dug my heels into the grass and hopped up Dad was on his feet but he was not holding the baby. He was staring in disbelief at his hands as if they had just magically swallowed Carter Junior.

  “Where’s the baby?” I yelled.

  “I don’t know,” he said breathlessly, and then, when he saw me leaping toward him like a mad flying squirrel, he spun away and ran toward the darkest part of the backyard.

  “Wait!” I hollered. “Get back here! Help me find the baby!” But he disappeared into a thick hedge that crackled as branches shivered and snapped, and after more clawing he dropped out into the parking lot on the other side. He picked himself up.

  “Your mother’s in the hospital!” he yelled. “That baby needs his father.”

  “She’s sick,” I said as I looked wildly around for my little Buddha-Baby, “but she’s getting better.”

  “I’ll be back for my boy!” he said, panting like a wolf.

  “What about me?” I asked. “When are you coming back for me?”

  “When you learn how to listen,” he said harshly. Then he slowly loped away since he knew I couldn’t follow because I had to take care of Carter Junior.

  I turned away from the quivering hedge and heard a sound from the kiddie pool. Carter Junior was sitting on his bottom and kicking his chubby legs to the side and spinning in a circle of murky water and dead leaves.

  I snatched him up and held him in my arms and kissed him all over his wet head. I knew that if something bad happened to Carter Junior, nobody would blame me—but they’d blame Mom and that wouldn’t be fair because she was busy getting stronger and I was the one who was supposed to protect him. But he was fine.

  I carried him back toward Plum Street. When I passed the spot where I had seen the coins fly out of Dad’s ripped pocket I squatted down and picked them up because we could always use the money. And then I spotted something more valuable. It was the macramé key chain I’d made him in second grade and there was just one key on it, and it had to be his apartment key. It was an old brass key, dull and dirty, and even under the streetlight it didn’t shine. I put it into my pocket.

  “Come on, Carter Junior,” I whispered hopefully. “We have some thinking to do. But first, let’s get you cleaned up.”

  When I got to the house Olivia was pacing back and forth on the front porch. “I’ll kill him,” she hissed, while swinging her stick around like she was fighting all three of the Musketeers at once. “I’ll fix him!” she snapped. “I’ll chop him to bits and feed him to vultures.”

  “It could have been worse,” I said. “We still have the baby.”

  “You better forget about fixing up the Pigza household,” she said in a scornful voice. “Just fix the locks. He’s a menace!”

  “You don’t make this easier,” I said.

  “It’s not my job to make you feel happy,” she replied. “Rule number two at my school is that every student is responsible for their own happiness—and that goes double for adults.”

  When we went back into the house I took Carter Junior down to the bathroom and sat him in the tub and turned on the warm water and gave him a splash bath and then dried him off and rubbed Vaseline on his raw bottom so he wouldn’t get a rash. I put him in a fresh diaper and took him back out to the living room. When I got there Pablo and Pablita were growling at the door and then growling at me, and then growling at the door again. At first I thought Dad might have snuck back, but then I realized the pizza was still in the box on the porch.

  I handed Carter Junior to Olivia. “If you and I were married,” Olivia said to me as she kissed his head, “and this was our baby, I would do anything to protect him.”

  “That’s rule number one in the real world,” I said.

  “Yeah, but Pigzas don’t live in the real world,” she replied.

  That was so true because if we were the real world then the whole world was in trouble.

  But the good news is the pizza was fine. It was sort of upside down and scrunched up in the box like an accordion, but because it was Antonio’s extra-cheesy with extra red sauce it tasted the same anyway. I chopped up a couple pieces for the dogs and Carter Junior gummed a piece and Olivia and I ate like we were maniacs because we were so nervous.

  When we finished Olivia was smiling.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  “My blind-girl oracle prediction was accurate,” she said. “This pizza is really special.”

  I had to agree—even though it was the exact same pizza Mr. Fong always delivered.

  That night I went to bed with the key in my mouth. I was sucking on it like Carter Junior sucking on his thumb. It tasted like a damp old penny you find under a rock, all mossy and dirty-tasting. It was salty, and when I had worked the crud and flavor off one side I turned it over with my tongue and sucked on the other side. I fell asleep with that key in my mouth and when I woke up it was still there. I must have been sucking on it all night because when I pulled it out in the morning it was no longer mossy and dull. I had stripped every
thing off the key and now it was as bright and shiny as a brass button.

  I hopped out of bed and went into the kitchen. Olivia had been up. The pizza box was open. The last slice was gone but Dad had not come back to eat it. When I looked out the window Olivia was back to posing in the yard. Her crumb-covered right hand was held up by her ear while the birds fluttered midair and darted down in turns to peck crumbs off her palm. In her other arm she held Carter Junior over her shoulder as if he was a sack of rice. He was smacking his lips as he gummed that last slice of special pizza. A bird hovered over his head.

  I strolled out to see her, and the birds scattered into the trees.

  “You ruined it,” she said, hearing me.

  “Ruined what?” I asked.

  “I was thinking about Helen Keller,” she said thoughtfully, “and I was telling myself to count my blessings because I can hear birds, and she could not, and I bet if she could have heard birds chirping she’d have been thrilled.”

  “That’s very pawzzz-i-tive,” I said in a hugely positive way so she could hear my hugely positive smile.

  “Mom always said to be grateful for what you have,” she said. “I do try, but sometimes I lose hope.”

  “I know what you mean,” I replied. “I should be happy with just having Mom and Carter Junior but I want Dad too—as nutty as he is.”

  “Well, you can have your dad,” she said. “Just give me Carter Junior because he is a good influence on me. It’s impossible to be a grump when I’m with him.”

  “He is the perfect Buddha-Baby positive Pigza,” I remarked.

  “Yep,” she said, and kissed his head. “Babies make me happy.”

  “What about me?”

  “You make me happy when you don’t act like a baby,” she said.

  I reached out and pressed the key into her hand. “As for the imperfect Pigza,” I said, “he dropped his apartment key last night.”

  “And I bet you’re insane enough to try to find him?” she said without enthusiasm.

  “Every door in town,” I replied with conviction. “Once an idea gets inside me it’s like I become the idea in motion, and the only thing that will fix me will be to fix him or my head will explode.”

  “But while you are out looking for him, he knows where to look for you. Does he have a key to this house?” she asked.

  “Mom had the locks changed,” I said, “and got a meat cleaver.”

  “Then I’ll stay here with Carter Junior,” she said. “But if he breaks through that cardboard front door, I’ll get the meat cleaver and fix his face my way.”

  “You could only make it better,” I said.

  Just then the kitchen phone rang. I swiped the key from Olivia’s hand and ran back inside the house. I didn’t have to be an oracle to know who it would be. I picked up the phone and could hear his clammy breathing. “You have my key,” he said. “Give it back.”

  “You ruined our family,” I said. “Give that back.”

  “I’ll leave you alone if you give me the key,” he offered.

  “You’ll never leave us alone,” I replied. “You always say you will, but you never do.”

  “Show me some respect—I’m your dad,” he replied.

  “Earn some,” I said right back. “Nobody hates you. We’re just afraid of you, which is confusing because we love you.”

  “Just be a man and bring the key to Antonio’s,” he said roughly.

  I was going to yell back, Just be a man and say you love us, but he hung up on me first. I hate being hung up on.

  Now I really wanted to fix him. Just then I noticed the microwave door was open and a gang of roaches were gathered inside. I slammed the door shut and hit the popcorn button. I stuck my fingers in my ears. Even though roaches don’t scream I can hear their pretend screams.

  When Dad tells me to be a man he’s really telling himself to be one, and when he says he is happy to be away from us I can hear that he is not. I think he is screaming to grow up and come back to us—the only thing is, he never listens to himself.

  I got dressed and said goodbye to Olivia and Carter Junior, then headed out. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do when I saw him so I figured I better think of a plan.

  Over the summer while Mom was so depressed in bed and holed up in her room with Carter Junior I spent a lot of time out of the house trying to come up with a plan to find Dad. At first I just started running up and down the streets as if I might bump into him. I wasn’t even sure I would talk to him, but I imagined playing something like tag where I ran by and slapped him on the back and shouted, “Tag! You’re it!” and then I’d turn around and blast off like a giggling maniac and he’d chase after me and we’d both zigzag back and forth across the street as if we were lacing up a tall boot. Finally he would follow me into the house and tag me—but I wouldn’t let him go. He’d be trapped in there like a wild horse in a corral and I could tame him and then we could run through the town together with me riding on his back and he’d be totally under my control.

  That plan never worked. As I continued to roam the streets I saw a lot of dad-duds I thought were him. I’d run by a diner and glance in the windows. There were always a lot of blank-looking guys hunched over cups of coffee and sandwiches but none with Dad’s patchwork face. When I passed a corner store that sold lottery tickets I always gave the guys slouching in the doorway a second look because playing the lottery was Dad’s favorite game.

  I’d run up and down the lines of homeless men waiting for a handout from the shelter at Saint Francis. I jogged by a man stretched out on a sheet of folded cardboard. He had a filthy scarf loosely wrapped around his face. Through the opening I could see two eyes balled up into small dark fists. He was about the right scrawny size as Dad and as I circled him he unwrapped his stiff scarf and glared at me.

  But it wasn’t my dad. “Wrong face,” I yelped as he snatched at my sneaker with one hand like it was the edge of a cliff.

  I felt bad for him but he did give me an idea. I wrapped white toilet paper around my head and kept it tight with a few rubber bands. I separated a few of the edges around my eyes so I could see, and lifted a little flap under the tip of my nose so I could breathe, and I opened a gap for a mouth. I didn’t want much of me to show. I got some ketchup and mixed it with garden dirt and rubbed that on the toilet paper to make it look as if I had been bleeding and dizzy and had fallen down and was hurt. This is what I figured Dad must have looked like at some time.

  Then I got a piece of cardboard out of the trash and with a marker I wrote in big letters:

  HIT MY HEAD!

  LOST MY MEMORY.

  DO YOU KNOW WHERE I LIVE?

  I walked downtown to an old section by the farmers’ market and held up the sign. I wasn’t asking for money. I was just asking how I might find my dad. But no matter how many streets I ran up and down and how many windows I looked into or how long I sat pretending to have amnesia, I still couldn’t find Dad or anyone who knew where he was. He had vanished behind that new face, which was so repulsive that people wanted to forget it.

  But then, just when I thought I’d never find him, he came to my front door and now I had his house key and knew he worked at Antonio’s pizza. All I needed was the other piece of the key—the lock.

  So I jogged down Chestnut Street to Antonio’s parking lot and crouched down behind a car fender and spied on him just as he had been spying on us. Every few minutes a big hat would slowly jut out the side kitchen door and the dark shadow of his face would stare down the street as if I was dumb enough to show up and stick the key into his hand.

  After a while he stepped outside and was smoking a cigarette with another delivery guy when his boss leaned out the door and said, “Hey, Pigza, run these pizzas up to the college dorm.”

  Dad snuffed his cigarette out on the bottom of his shoe and hustled into the kitchen. He came out with a stack of pizzas and got into the Antonio’s delivery truck.

  Once he was out of sight I trotted over to t
he kitchen door where the other guy was still smoking.

  “Is Mr. Fong around?” I asked.

  “He only works nights,” the guy said.

  “Oh,” I said to myself. I was hoping Mr. Fong could tell me where Dad lived.

  “Well, do you know where that other pizza delivery guy lives?” I asked, trying out Plan B.

  “Why do you want to know?” he asked.

  “I’m his kid,” I said proudly. “Can’t you tell? I look just like him.” I made a bug-eyed, bucktooth, silly face because no matter how hard I tried I never could make a scary face.

  “You must be pulling my leg,” the guy remarked, and began to laugh out loud. “Pigza has a kid? Women won’t open the door when he delivers. If you were his kid you’d already be dead from fright. Just looking at him almost gives me a heart attack!”

  “But do you know where he lives?” I said, feeling a little sad about what he had just said about Dad.

  “Does he know you are his kid?” he asked.

  “Just as much as I know he’s my dad,” I replied.

  He blew out a final puff of smoke and flicked the butt into the parking lot with a little smile on his face as if he had thought of something clever. “Try Alley Oop Street. Alley Oop is his nickname. We stopped there once after a delivery and he ran into his place for something. I didn’t pay attention to the number but I remember the street name because he was singing that silly caveman song about Alley Oop. You know, ‘He got a big ugly club and a head fulla hairuh, Alley-Oop, oop, oop-oop.’”

  “Alley Oop?” I repeated.

  “Alley O. Over by Buchanan Park,” he said and pointed. “Offa West End Ave, like Alley A, Alley N, Alley O.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I got it.”

  I took off before Dad returned. Buchanan Park was a few blocks away from where I went to school, for one day so far. When I reached Alley O, I paused and stood behind a tree. The alley was long and unpaved and either side of it was lined with old brick garages that had been turned into apartments. I took the key out of my pocket. It was a Yale key, so I was looking for a Yale lock. I just got myself revved up and marched over to the side door of the first garage. It was a Yale lock but my key didn’t fit. I dashed over to the next garage side door and tried it. Nope. I tried the next one. Nope. I looked over my shoulder to see if anyone was paying attention to me. Nope. I went to the next garage. Nope. The next. Nope. And by the time I finished one whole side of the alley I was feeling like my chances of finding his apartment were either half better, or half worse.