by Ruth Lehrer
“Fishy,” Duck-Duck said, “oathed in blood on this date of September in the Cemetery of Famous People. Put your hand on your heart and swear: ‘I, Fishy, do solemnly swear to follow the eloquent rules of the G.R. gang. I do pledge to spread fear and make graffiti of great promise and keep all Grr secrets safe. If captured, I promise to suffer torture silently and to stab myself with a pen before I would ever reveal our secret passwords. I promise to vanquish all enemies to rescue a fellow gang member. With my own red blood, to these oaths, I swear.’ ”
“I swear.”
“You are now oathed for life. Congratulations. Does your heel hurt?”
“Not bad.” It felt like knives and needles and fire, but I didn’t care.
Duck-Duck zipped up her backpack. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go to my house and get a Band-Aid.”
We scrambled back over the stone wall, through prickly brush, and across a tiny stream. Duck-Duck trotted ahead of me, picking out invisible holes in the bushes, hopping over logs before I even knew they were lurking. I had back ways too, out through the woods and swamps to my house, but Duck-Duck’s ways seemed more adventurous, like we might bump into a unicorn along the way and think it was an ordinary day.
Eventually, we passed through a hedge right into the backyard of a small house. Surrounded by hedges, I had the sudden idea we had popped through to another planet, and the journey through the woods was just there to confuse me. Close to the house, I saw a lady sitting at a picnic table.
At my house, we had a backyard too, but it was full of dead trucks and a rusty refrigerator. This backyard had green grass and soldier-tall hedges all around. It made me worry a little bit about how I’d get away. I always scouted out exits, just in case. There was barely any space between the sides of the house and the hedges. If I had to run, I’d have to go through the house.
Duck-Duck didn’t seem to have any worries. She ran up to the picnic-table lady and hugged and kissed her. I’d read books where girls kissed their mothers every morning and every night and sometimes more in between. It seemed like a lot of kissing. I hoped I wasn’t supposed to kiss the lady too.
When Duck-Duck and the lady were done hugging and kissing, the lady looked straight at me. She didn’t look like a kissing kind of lady. She had short, spiky blond hair and big shoulders. She had blue blue sky eyes that seemed to be making a list of all the dirt spots on my shirt and the hole in the knee of my pants. It was better when grown-ups didn’t see me. Fewer bad things happened. Suddenly I was mad that I’d let Duck-Duck lead me here.
“This is Fishkill Carmel,” said Duck-Duck. She said it like I was a surprise chocolate chip in her lemon cupcake. She told her mother how Worm and Frank ran after me and sliced my heel open and how my sock was soaked in blood. She didn’t say anything about the blood writing. All the while, the lady just kept looking at me.
The lady finally said, “Carmel? I don’t know any Carmels.”
Now I was sure that coming here was a mistake. I shrugged.
“Do I know your parents?”
I wanted to run back through the hedge. “Probably not. My mom is Keely Jamison. We live on Birge Hill,” I added, to make her stop asking questions.
“How old are you?” she said.
“Twelve.”
“And it’s just you and your mom?”
I started to really dislike how she was staring at me, and I wanted to say, “Fuck you, bitch,” but she was Duck-Duck’s mother and they probably didn’t say bitch or fuck you.
“Yes,” I said. I added my Fishkill sneer and crossed my arms so she couldn’t see whatever it was she was looking for.
The fancy paper in the top desk drawer at home said my father was “unknown.” Unknown. I always wondered how you could not know something like that. I mean, it’s not like a baby is a package you get in the mail with no return address. I asked my mother once when I was seven, and all she said was there were worse things than “unknown.” At seven, I didn’t know what she meant. Now I think I do.
Duck-Duck’s mother just raised her eyebrows and said, “Let me take a look at your foot. Chrissy, go get the first-aid kit.”
I sat down on the picnic bench, took off my shoe, and peeled off my sock. I wondered who Chrissy was, and then I realized the lady was talking to Duck-Duck. The blood had made the sock stiff, and my heel started bleeding again because the sock had been stuck to the drying blood. New blood, old blood, new blood — it almost made me dizzy looking at it, but blood wouldn’t scare Fishkill, so I just acted like I often got trapped at backyard picnic tables with weird, big ladies who had cotton balls and a bottle in their hands, saying, “This is going to sting.”
It really did sting, but I was glad that she said it. People always said stuff like “This won’t hurt a bit” when really it hurt like hell.
After the Band-Aid, Duck-Duck’s mother gave me a new pair of socks and two chocolate-chip cookies and milk. She poured the milk with one hand, which made me think she was really strong, because the milk wasn’t in a carton but in a glass bottle. I watched the milk running out of the bottle like a white river from her big hand. White like the socks I wore. I guessed they were Duck-Duck’s socks. They were kind of soft and cushy. Mine were always dry and woody because I never got socks new and I wore them till they weren’t really socks anymore. The cookies were soft too, with enough chips in them that I got one in each bite.
After I ate a few more cookies, Duck-Duck’s mother started looking at her watch and making comments about homework, so I knew she wanted me out. When I left, I went through the house and out the front door. I didn’t see much that first time. Just the way the couch leaned up against the wall, like it liked living there.
The next day for lunch, Duck-Duck had a turkey sandwich with mayo and a pickle. I got half the sandwich and half the pickle. I don’t think I had ever had a pickle like that, light green and sour, not pucker-up dark. Then we had little cookies with grape jelly squashed in the middle. She called them thumb cookies but they weren’t shaped like thumbs. Not my thumb, anyways. Maybe someone with big thumbs like three of mine.
After school we walked to our cemetery quince tree, and Duck-Duck got all businesslike.
“Blood oath was the first trial,” said Duck-Duck, eating a leftover cookie and licking her grape-jelly fingers. “Gang graffiti is the second.”
She pulled out a can of spray paint from her backpack and shook it up. “You pick a headstone. Then you pick a word to spray on it. Something nasty but very smart,” she said.
I hadn’t thought of that before. I knew Fishkill should be tough. And nasty, of course. But Fishkill should also be very smart.
“Graffiti is art,” Duck-Duck said, “but it’s meaner.”
I wasn’t so sure about art, but I liked mean. I took the spray-paint can from her and walked up and down the rows of dead people. I had to do well on the mean gang graffiti test.
“Don’t think about it too much,” said Duck-Duck. She had now unwrapped a stick of gum and was rolling it up like a little sleeping bag. “Artists don’t think about stuff too much.” She popped the gum in her mouth and started flipping it around with her tongue. “It’s instinct. Like the way birds make nests.”
I came to the lady poet’s stone. Last year, the sixth-grade teacher had made us read four of her poems, one after another, and hadn’t explained a thing. I pretended I understood them, but afterward I tore the pages out of the book and tossed them in the cafeteria trash. It was lasagna day.
The spray paint was a mean red. I made droplets in the path so it looked like the gravestone had walked, dripping blood, and then died right there. It served the lady poet right, getting stuck under a bloody rock.
“You done?” called Duck-Duck, hopping over the big stone and cutting across the aisle to see. She stood in front of the lady poet, chewing her gum, and read, “Lesbo.” She raised her eyebrows. “Hmm.”
I could tell I had somehow failed the test. I bit my lip.
“What’s
wrong with it?” I couldn’t believe I was asking. Fishkill didn’t need a gang to be mean. I could be mean without any help. I should’ve just shoved the paint can in her face and pulled the trigger. Maybe she’d choke on that peppermint gum that smelled like Christmas or toothpaste. “What’s wrong?”
“Lesbo’s not an artistic word. It’s only mean. You want balance. Don’t worry — it takes practice. It’s like”— she paused the way the math teacher, Miss Treadway, did when everyone got the wrong answer, and she had to explain again, but slower —“it’s like calling someone a piece of poop when really they just have a different kind of library card than you do. See?”
I had no idea what she was talking about.
Poop was a touchy subject. My grandfather used to ration toilet paper. Before each visit to the bathroom, we had to ask. We had to say if it was for a piss or crap. For a piss you got two sheets. For a crap, three.
Duck-Duck cast a critical eye on the blood-drip path. “Nice gravy droppings though.”
Gravy? I looked at the grass. “It isn’t gravy,” I said. “It’s blood.”
“Blood? Even better.”
Maybe I hadn’t failed completely.
“The dead rock bled out. See?” I pointed to the drops, like steps to the bloody stone. “It didn’t start out dead.” I wasn’t sure why she needed me to explain that.
“Movement and color. Very artistic,” said Duck-Duck. “We could edit it a little, though,” and she picked up the spray can again.
First she sprayed red all over my Lesbo, and then she dug in her bag and pulled out a white can. In sharp, shining letters she wrote Dead Rok, with a thick underline.
Duck-Duck stood back to admire her work. “Very nice. See? You knew what to write. Next time it will come right away. Now we have to pick up all the evidence so no one will suspect us.”
We shoved everything into her backpack and escaped through the bushes just as two men with a dog came up the cemetery path.
When I was eight, Keely got drunk and ran her junk Escort into a ditch on Guttersnake Road. The cops came all the way up the hill to tell Grandpa.
“Why don’t you answer your phone?” they kept asking. “Get the car towed, will you? And someone has to pick up your daughter.”
Grandpa only drove to Guttersnake because the cops expected him to. I pretended to be asleep, because otherwise Grandpa would have thrown me in the back of the truck and I would have had to be there and watch the whole thing. When they came back, Keely was bloody and cursing, and Grandpa was punching the walls. I didn’t know if Keely was bloody from running off the road or from Grandpa’s fists. After that, she didn’t have a car anymore and she had to walk everywhere, like I did. If she had been smart, she would have just walked home in the first place. The next morning, Grandpa was still mad because he had lost his truck keys, and he blamed Keely.
I always thought the name Keely was a whiny misspelling of Kelly. It would be just like Grandpa to misspell a baby girl’s name. Kelly sounded like a lady newscaster. Keely sounded like someone who couldn’t get up in the morning even if the alarm clock went off three times. Keely sounded like someone who would run her car off the road. She was more a Keely than a Mom. Even when she bought popcorn and shared it with me, she was more like a screwed-up big sister, more a Keely than a Mom. Keely fit her.
Duck-Duck’s mom had a nice unrusty car with four doors, an open-up back hatch, and cup holders for everyone. I liked looking at the car. I was sure Duck-Duck’s mother never ran her car off a road in the middle of the night. The Wednesday after we sprayed gang graffiti, Duck-Duck and I stood in the driveway looking at the bird poop on the back hatch of her mom’s car. The car was blue, and the poop was green.
“Do you think birds aim for cars, or do you think it’s an accident every time?” asked Duck-Duck. She had thrown her backpack on the front step. I kept mine on.
I thought about the birds sitting in the trees, eating seeds and laughing at us.
“I think it’s a kind of bird joke,” I said. “ ‘Can you hit the blue car? I bet I can get the window.’ ”
Duck-Duck laughed. “Hey,” she said, “want me to teach you how to open car doors with the power of your mind?”
It wasn’t a gang test, she said. It was just regular gang activity. Something to make sure people would remember to be very scared of us.
She blinked three times and then closed her eyes.
“The power of the brain,” she whispered, “hasn’t ever been fully tapped. If you concentrate hard enough, locks are no barrier.” She started breathing loudly, in, out, in, out.
I didn’t know that gangs tapped the power of minds. Gangs spit and spray-painted words on walls. Or at least that’s what I thought gangs did. And that was enough. Scary and enough.
“Can’t we just use the clicker?” I said. Duck-Duck was holding it in her hand. She started swinging it like a pendulum before the car door.
“It works better this way,” she said, but then she hit the button.
Beep-beep, flash-flash, said the car.
“Hop in,” said Duck-Duck. “Would you like to drive?”
My grandfather always drove the green pickup, slimy with rust, and with cruel pointy seat springs. When I was a passenger, I would lie in the bed of the truck, flattened low so the police wouldn’t see me. Grandpa said it was illegal to ride back there. He said if they caught me, he would have to let the cops handcuff me and take me to jail. Once I cut my hand on a rusty sheet of metal, and I lay in the back, slamming against the jarring bed of road, bleeding until Grandpa stopped. He was mad because blood got on his new tarp and made a stain he said wouldn’t come out. The tailgate didn’t stay shut, and at night I dreamed of sliding out onto the road, only to be run over by a police car that had been tailing us. If I could drive, I wouldn’t have to ride in the bed of anyone’s truck ever again.
“Sure,” I said to Duck-Duck. “Do we have enough gas?” Before Keely smashed up her car, she was always running out of gas.
“Yup. I’ve got Mom’s license too. If we get stopped, I’m going to argue that since my mother pays taxes, her license should be a family membership, and I’m her dependent.” Duck-Duck adjusted the mirror and handed me the keys. “I’m going to be a lawyer when I grow up.”
Grandpa would argue, I didn’t hit her — she hit me and Do I look like someone who would do something that stupid? but his kind of arguing didn’t seem to help with the cops. The only license I ever had was the get-free-lunch-because-you’re-poor license. I filled out that application because Grandpa wouldn’t and Keely said she had a headache.
“They fucking want to know about my money?” Grandpa said. “Why don’t they just go piss in a bucket and call it lunch?”
Lunch on a tray seemed like a step up from tomato soup, so later I grabbed the form out of the trash. On the income line, I wrote it messy-like, with too many decimal points. I had no idea what would win me lunch, so I erased and smudged, making a list of numbers that could be mistaken for other numbers, and passed it to the gray lunch lady at the register. Over her little glasses, she gave me a gray lunch-lady look, and I was sure she was going to pass it back, but no — I got a card with lunches in it.
There’s always something wrong with it if they give it to you for free.
The Every Tuesday Chicken Fingers were a perfect example. I would imagine chickens with ten breaded fingers, and then I could feel the greasy skin sticking in my teeth and I’d have to stop chewing. Grandpa was so wrong, it was hard to think he might have been right about lunch and the piss in the bucket.
“Hey,” said Duck-Duck. “Are you with me? You need to turn the car key.” She guided my hand and the key to the ignition and prodded me just a little. “Turn it.”
I had to move the seat first because I couldn’t see and reach all at the same time. Duck-Duck showed me the levers and the pushers, and I levered and pushed the seat all the way forward and a little bit up.
The first time I turned the key, I
held on too long and it gave this wiry rattle that didn’t sound like a real car. The second time, I let go quick, and it kept running like a car is supposed to. I was probably a natural driver.
“What now?” Grandpa’s truck had three pedals. This car had just two.
“One for go, one for stop,” said Duck-Duck. “If you make a mistake, we’ll get the best lawyer in town to defend you. That’s why I want to be a lawyer. What are you going to be when you grow up?”
This caught me off guard. I couldn’t tell her I had never thought about being anything. “I’m going to have my own apartment in the city,” I said, “and maybe a car too.”
“Well, sure, but what are you going to do?” She looked up and down the street. “There isn’t anyone coming. Push the go pedal.”
I pressed the pedal for go, but the car just whirred and spun and didn’t go anywhere.
“You have to take off the E brake,” Duck-Duck said.
I had to figure out how to push the button and pull on the E brake lever between the seats. You had to do both at the same time, but once I did, the brake was off and the car rolled backward, but just a little. It took me a second to remember which pedal was stop and which was go, but then I slammed the stop pedal hard and we jerked forward and back and stopped immediately.
“Do it again,” said Duck-Duck, “but this time go forward.” She rammed the stick between our seats from the P position to D and said, “Go!”
This time the car rolled forward when I let my foot up. I rolled and rolled and then I remembered I should steer too. I was halfway down the street when I remembered you’re supposed to stay on one side of the road and not the other. When I steered to the right, I went over a bit too far and drove up on the corner of someone’s lawn where they had pink flowers and ugly plastic statues.
Crunch went the statues. The pink flowers were flattened.
“Cool,” said Duck-Duck. “That was just beautiful.”