by Jon Scieszka
“Go ahead. Make fun. Laugh,” Mom says, and probably feels outnumbered without Colin at the table. “You didn’t grow up as I did.” She points her flame-throwing finger at me. “Your grandparents sacrificed for my education. Sacrificed.” She looks at my father. “It’s our fault, you know. Keeping him away from family and land.”
And goats.
She does this. Brings up her waste not, want not childhood with the goats, the one school uniform for the year, the writing on both front and back sides of paper. I won’t let her get me. I won’t make a “sorry” face.
Later that night I’m thirsty. All I want is a tall glass of ice water and to fall asleep. I’m practically in the kitchen and I stop at the entrance, careful to not make a sound. My mom is standing at the refrigerator, the freezer side open, her head resting on the side where the ice trays go. She almost looks headless with her neck and head shoved up in there.
I don’t move. What do I say? Do? She doesn’t hear me, or if she does, she doesn’t stir. She just stands there with her head in the freezer. Sound like she’s moaning or humming, but she doesn’t hear me or sense I’m a few feet away.
Forget the glass of ice water. I back up slowly and tiptoe down the hall and into my room. I climb into bed and turn away from the bookshelf and my cousins’ “gifts,” even though they face the shelf’s wooden backing. For luck I say prayers I haven’t said since I was eight, then roll over to one side, then the other, and after doing that a few times, I fall asleep.
In the morning, when I open my eyes, three coconut heads stare at me from the bookshelf. I sit straight up.
At the library I tell Robbie what happened. How I turned the heads so I couldn’t see their faces and how I woke up with their carved-out eyes staring me down. He doesn’t believe me but wants to see the coconut heads. So I call Mom to ask if Robbie can come over for dinner and she says yes, which makes Robbie’s day because he wishes he could ask her out. I tell him that’s both sick and impossible. He counters with, “You mean like coconuts spinning around in the middle of the night?”
Before we sit down to eat, I take him to my room and show him the coconut heads. He practically shouts, loud enough for my mom to hear, “Those are cool!”
I glare at him. Traitor.
“They’re better than what they sell in tourist shops. I like this one.” He picks up the ugliest one by its straw hair. “Scary cool.”
“That’s nothing,” I say. “Try waking up to them.”
Robbie thinks I’m kidding. He runs his finger along the jaggedness of its open mouth, then traces the deep cheekbone carvings.
“Want them?”
He gives me the Brown’s Town cow look.
I repeat myself. “Seriously. Do you want them? They’re yours.”
“Really?” He’s happy like he’s just won a prize. Then something changes in his face. He says, “I don’t know,” and sets the ugly coconut head down.
I laugh. “Not so cool, are they?”
Mom appears at my bedroom door. “Robbie’s parents taught him well. He knows not to take things that don’t belong to him, like a family gift. And shame,” she says, pointing her flame thrower at me. “Your cousins made those for you because they love and miss you, and yet you can’t wait to give them away.”
We’re sitting at the table eating, hopefully changing the subject, but Robbie tries to score points with Mom.
“Oh, don’t worry, Mrs. Bailey. I wouldn’t take them.”
“Because they’re demented,” I say. Dad waves both hands like an air traffic guy, signaling “no-fly zone.”
“Demented?” Mom says. Her right eyebrow arches up. “Fine.”
She pushes her chair back, gets up, and stomps down the hall. One door slams and then another. Her heels beat the floor. Then she sits back down. She’s cool. Not crazy.
“Pass the rice and peas,” she says calmly, like she didn’t have a door-slamming fit two seconds ago.
Dad looks my way, like Boy, I feel sorry for you.
Robbie passes the dish to Mom and plunges the final stab in my back. “This stew is awesome, Mrs. Bailey. Better than the best restaurant in Montego Bay.”
She becomes smiles and sweetness. “You really must see the whole country, Robbie, not just the tourist spots. You would love it.” Her eyes are sparkling and he’s eating it up. Then she turns to me. “At least someone knows what’s good.”
Robbie chomps on his beef stew like it’s paradise on a fork. Dad refuses to throw me a rope. I’m on my own.
I try a piece of beef. I chew the meat.
Then, my tongue is beyond fire, like it’s been skin-stripped and stabbed again and again. I drop the fork and spit the chewed beef onto my plate and bang the table with my fist. “WATER!”
“Son—” Dad says.
“Water!”
There must be peppers in here. Mom knows I don’t like peppers. I’m coughing and dying, but she says in an even tone, “Water’s right in front of you. And for heaven’s sake, use your napkin!”
I don’t care about the mess on my plate. I can’t see. My tears are so hot I clamp my eyes shut.
“Dude, dude,” Robbie says. My eyes are tearing and baking. I can’t open them so I can reach for where I think my glass is. Hands, my father’s hands, grab mine and my water glass before I knock it over. He puts the glass to my mouth and I gulp, which is worse somehow, as the fire spreads down my throat and invades my body.
“Get the boy some milk,” he orders Mom. Either she’s moving slowly or time is stuck. I swear my tongue has swollen by the time she comes back with a glass of milk. I slurp it down, streams of white run down my face, and Mother says, “Really, Winston. If you just ate your food”—what she calls Jamaican food—“then you’d be able to pop peppers like you do movie popcorn. Now use your napkin.”
In my head I remember that she ladled the stew onto our plates. That she always picks the Jamaican peppers out of my plate because only she, Colin, and Dad can eat them. She goes on chatting about pure, pleasant nonsense while my eyes still burn and I’m not done coughing. Robbie’s under her spell. I’ll bet there’s no hot peppers in his stew.
That night I shower, text Colin about Mom and the madhouse, then click off the lamp. I’m almost to dreamland, but Mom isn’t done with me yet. She stomps through the house like the fee-fi-fo-fum giant. I shut my eyes when I hear the thump of house slippers near my door. She enters and then THWOK! She bangs the three coconut heads on my dresser, mutters something angry and sinister I can’t make out, then says, “Me get y’fatta next.” She shriek-laughs and stomps away.
When it’s safe, I peer up from the sheets into the dark. All I can see is the glow of white, blue, pink, and red paint on those crazy coconut heads. Their eyes seem to rise over high cheekbones and watch me. The faces, I swear, are in my cousins’ likenesses. The coconut heads don’t move, but their mouths are fixed to chomp or shriek. They’re facing me, but I’m too whipped to get up to turn them around. I flop over on my other side.
I’m five or six years old. I’m in the center of a circle. There’s singing. We’re playing kindergarten games. Ring Around the Rosie.
That’s not singing. It’s chanting.
“Find a boy,
Hunt a boy,
We chop, chop, chop!”
Knives. Big knives. Machetes. Chopping.
I run. Mother says, “Silly bwai! Don’t you know play when you see it?”
Cousins swing machetes, chanting, “We chop, chop, chop!”
I break out of the circle and outrun the chanting. Knees kick up high. I’m winning.
I look down. Tree trunks. My thighs and legs are massive tree trunks. Coconut trees. I can’t outrun the chanting.
Behind me. Slicing through the air. Machetes hacking. Goats bleating. Mother and cousins chanting:
“Fee fi fo fum
Baldie bean
Ya bedda run!”
I turn around and whoosh! I see the gleam of blades. Whoosh-whoosh. W
hoosh-whoosh.
The shriek-laugh. The goats. And whoosh!
This is what I know. Your dreams will never kill you because you always wake up in time. I know this awake and I know this while I’m dreaming. When the blades come close enough to strike, my eyes pop open.
But instead of waking up alone in my bed, I am staring into the eyes of the coconut heads. On my bed. At my feet. Not on the dresser, where Mom left them.
Then I scream for real.
My mother comes running. She’s in her white lab coat and not panicky like a mother checking on her poor son. She looks both satisfied and annoyed. “What do you mean by all of this noise in the morning? The neighbors think we’re in here killing you.”
I’m still catching my breath, but those were my thoughts exactly. I point to the coconut heads. I can’t speak yet.
She glances at them, sighs, and turns to me. “I thought you didn’t want them and now you can’t sleep without them.” She’s playing dumb to torture me.
“I didn’t put them on my bed,” I say as strong as I can to my mother. “You put them there at the foot of my bed to haunt me.”
“Haunt you, bwai? Don’t be silly. Now get up and gather your clothes for laundry before you run to camp. And don’t just throw the clothes into the wash. You separate them first, you hear me? And be quick. I have to open the office.” Her teeth chatter like skeleton teeth. She cares more about the laundry than my near heart attack.
“Don’t I get to eat first?” I ask, although I doubt I can eat breakfast or keep it down.
“I want your laundry in the wash before you leave. I’m seeing patients today. I don’t have time to do everything.”
She’s about to leave, but I call out.
“Wait!”
She turns.
“Aren’t you taking those things with you?”
“Make your mind up, bwai. You want them, you don’t want them. But you should want them, Winston. You should.” I look down to the foot of the bed. They’re more demented than the first time I laid eyes on them, their cheeks higher, their carved mouths hungry.
“Didn’t you put them on my bed?”
She rolls her eyes up, sighs, and leaves me there, with those heads staring at me.
I sit up and stare them down. They stare back. They win.
I slide out of bed carefully and make my way to the closet without turning my back on them. The last thing I want is for them to take me by surprise. I keep the closet door wide open while I pull stuff out of my old toy chest until I come up with a “Go Joe!” camouflage blanket from back when I was collecting those action figures. I keep my eyes on the coconuts and creep up behind them, their backs still to me. I stand a little hunched, arms up, ready for the grab and run. Before they move, I suck in my breath, drop the “Go Joe!” camouflage blanket over them, drawing them together like pirate booty, and throw them into the toy chest. I slam and latch the lid, slam the closet door, and wedge the back of my desk chair under the closet knob. No way am I opening it again. If I have any dirty clothes in the closet, they’ll have to stay dirty.
I grab the clothes from my hamper and don’t bother to sort the whites from the colors. I throw everything into the wash, take my shower, dress while I’m still wet, and try to get far from those coconut heads. I’m almost out of my room, wet feet in sneakers, when I hear:
Chok. Chok-chok!
I scream. Not loud. But I scream.
Mom meets me in the hallway, her stethoscope hanging around the white coat’s collar. “My staff will be here soon,” she says. “What you screaming about now?”
“The noise,” I say.
“Oh, Winston. Noise? What noise? The washer?”
“No. The heads!” I grab the chest piece to her stethoscope and place it over my heart. “Hear that? I’m not playing.”
“No, dear. You’re giving yourself a heart attack.”
I start to tell her about the heads trying to escape from the toy box, but the doorbell to her office buzzes and she’s rushing to get it.
She didn’t even fuss about my wet shower hair. I’m in survival mode. On my own. When she returns from letting her receptionist in, I ask, “Can I sleep over at Robbie’s?”
“Robbie can sleep over here,” she says. “Now go to camp. I’m not driving you.”
“Why can’t I sleep over there?” I counter.
She says, “Because you broke his mother’s lamp. The lamp from Budapest. The lamp her grandmother smuggled out of Hungary. You broke the lamp is why. Now run.”
There is no way I am sleeping in my room. Ever. I catch up to Robbie and ask if I can sleep over. He says, “Dude. My mom won’t let you up the front steps.”
That’s that. I don’t bother to tell him about the heads that teleport from my dresser to the foot of my bed. If he didn’t believe me the first time I told him about the heads, he won’t believe me now.
I’m on my own.
Night comes too soon. I wait for my parents to turn out their lights, and I search for a safe corner in the house to hole up. Someplace where the coconut heads can’t find me. Or, someplace where Mom can’t find me.
She locks her office so there’s no access to that part of the house, and deep down I know her office is the last place I should hide. I look inside Colin’s room. It’s almost empty, except for the furniture. He took the good stuff with him when he left for college. On top of his dresser sits the wooden cricket ball, his helmet, his gloves, and his cricket bat. I never got the hang of cricket. I just couldn’t get into it. I hop onto his bed and settle in.
“Wish you were here,” I tell Colin’s room.
I fall asleep.
I can’t see myself. I can’t see where I am.
I hear chanting. It gets louder.
“We come for you,
We come for you,
Chop, chop, chop.
Chop, chop, chop.”
I’m surrounded.
Cousins, Mom, Dad, Robbie become coconut heads, Pyra, cow, goat.
I know I’m dreaming the bad dream.
So I tell myself, “WAKE UP!”
The three coconut heads dance before my eyes.
I don’t even scream. I run to the dresser, grab Colin’s cricket bat, and swing it at the dancing coconut heads for life and death. Swing like they’re hardballs until I make contact.
Cuck-CRACK!
I get one.
Then the other!
And the last coconut head is tricky, but I get him. Split him wide with the cricket bat and keep swinging and smashing.
I don’t even hear my mother and father enter the room. That part’s a blur. But I feel my father’s hands taking the cricket bat from me. I feel the other touch on my forehead and neck and that touch is hot! Hot! Then cold.
I awake in a fog that slowly clears around me. I don’t know what time it is or how long I’ve been out, but when I push myself out of bed and onto the floor, I barely feel my feet against it, like I’m wearing six pairs of thick socks. My ears slowly awaken to sound and I stumble toward it.
I make out two sounds. Two distinct sounds. One is a steady tapping or knocking. The other is my mother’s voice. I feel clumsy but manage to creep toward the sounds, without making noise—or at least I can’t hear myself making noise. I’m not sure I want her to know I’m up. When I hear words, distinct words, I stop and try to grab onto their meaning.
Chop, chop, chop, chop, chop.
She’s in the kitchen. I rub my ears as if that would help me hear better. “. . . We had to sedate him.” There is silence. The other person is talking.
I want to stick my head in to see my mother’s expression, and at the same time I don’t want to see her face.
It’s her turn to talk. She says, “You know these kids. Their changes. Their stresses.”
More from the other side. Then Mom says she can’t take off any more days. Her patients have waited long enough for her to reopen the office. Silence. She says my dad can’t take off either. Longer si
lence. She says, “I agree. Winston needs rest. Air. Clean air. Up in the country. Up in the hills. With his cousins. Yeah, mon.”
My ears are now clear, and the cold from the floor creeps into my bare feet.
Something else is being said on the other side. Something that causes her to laugh. It’s a short laugh. High-pitched. Shrieky. “So you’ll come for him, eh? You’ll come for the bwai?”
The cleaver hammers and doesn’t stop.
Chop, chop, chop.
Chop, chop, chop.
MANIFEST
WORDS BY ADELE GRIFFIN
ART BY LISA BROWN
If I’d known what suffering Thaddeus Rolf would bring me, I’d have put an end to my life right then.
Instead, I took his.
For as long as I could remember, I had lived in virtual slavery to Mr. Bludmoore, who’d bought me as a young whelp from the London Foundlings Hospital and had worked me like a mule at his establishment, the Ruddy Duck, until my present age, thirteen.
The years had been kinder to Rolf, who could have been my well-fed, strapping twin. Appearing in the doorway of the Duck in his worsted suit and hob-nailed boots, the toff was quick to show me his shilling for supper and the papers in his pocket that I could not read, but that he boasted gave him passage on the Charming Molly, set to sail for America the very next day.
“Mother’s dying wish was for her beloved brother, my uncle Würtemberger, to raise me as his own,” Rolf informed the empty room as I served him a tin plate of trotters—I’d slaughtered, skinned, and hung the pig myself last week—along with a mug of red wine. “This is my last meal on dry land. We dock in Philadelphia, where there are already thirteen churches and a courthouse. Uncle is a cattle farmer outside the city proper. He’s got his own dwelling, stables, and barns on the Schuylkill—and a king’s feast on the table each night.”
He spoke too of his dead father, “A sailor who went twice round the world. Pa’s triumphs were tattooed on his body, before his ship sunk off the coast of Cape Horn. That’s why I’m signed on as cabin boy. Uncle wanted to purchase the whole of my passage, but I’m born and bred a true sailor.”