Sammie & Budgie

by Scott Semegran

  Just then, Jessie threw herself on the kitchen floor and slammed her hand on top of the quarter, like a cat swatting at a moth. Sammie was horrified that his sister interrupted his demonstration.

  "Heads or tails, big brother!" she said, giggling and laughing as she covered the coin, repelling Sammie's prying hands from retrieving the coin. Now, you may think that boys are stronger than girls but in this case, you'd be dead wrong. Jessie was a pretty tough cookie for her size. Sammie didn't stand a chance against her. It's true.

  "Hey! What are you doing?!" he said, still attempting to retrieve the coin from under his naughty sister's paws.

  "Heads or tails? Call it!"

  "That's not the game we are playing right now," he said, very upset at his sister's precociousness, but unwilling to engage with her any longer.

  "Please!"

  "Fine! Heads!" Jessie lifted her hand and it was heads, just as he'd said. "Are you happy?"

  "Again! Let's do it again!"

  "No," he said, crossing his arms, defiantly.

  "Please! PLEASE! PLEASE!!" she said, begging.

  "If I do it again, then can we play Thump?" he said. She nodded. "Fine." He flicked the quarter again and it spun on its side, wobbling topsy-turvy in its unusual orbit around some particles on the kitchen floor: bread crumbs, dry cereal, hair strands, dust bunnies. Without warning, Jessie again slammed her hand on the spinning quarter, interrupting its wobbly course.

  "Heads or tails? Call it!"

  "Heads," he said, sighing, already bored with this game.

  "You already called heads!"

  "Because it is heads."

  She slowly lifted her hand to reveal that it certainly was heads again. Her face twisted into a look of contempt and bitterness, a thing she always did when a game she started took a turn for the worse, or rather, not her way.

  "This game isn't fun anymore!" She jumped up and stormed to the other side of the apartment--in their room--where all her toys were waiting for her and her brother was not. Sammie snickered.

  "Dad, will you play Thump with me?" he said, begging, his hands praying for my acceptance.

  "Sure."

  "Yeah! I go first!" he said, returning to his ready position on the kitchen floor. He quickly flicked the coin and it spun on its side, slowly following a curved path toward me. I cocked my finger under my thumb and waited for the right time to thump the spinning coin. As it spun, it whirred and whizzed in a small circle. When the right time arrived, I gently thumped the coin and it continued to spin between us, its trajectory altered. "All right, daddy! You did it. My turn."

  As he waited his turn, I watched him, his eyes on the coin like a cat waiting to pounce on another unsuspecting moth. I hadn't seen him this focused on something--anything--in a long while. But for some reason while I watched him, an image of Selena the after-school counselor appeared in my mind, her body twisted on the asphalt of the playground behind the school, and I thought of good ol' Sammie Boy telling me that she was seriously going to hurt herself right before it happened. I was curious. How did he know that was going to happen? Was it a fluke that he knew what was going to happen to her before it happened? Or could he see what's going to happen before it happens, even if I asked him? So, I thought, 'What the hell? I'll ask him.'

  "Sammie, can you tell me what will show when the coin falls and this game is over--heads or tails?"

  "Yes, daddy." He flicked the coin and it continued to spin. "It's your turn!"

  "OK. What will it be--heads or tails?"

  "Tails," he said, without hesitation.

  Just then, I flicked the coin and it slid across the kitchen floor and slammed into the metal, oven door. It made a loud clanking noise then fell on its side, lifeless now, tails side up. It must have been a fluke. There was no way that my cute, little boy could see the future. I picked up the coin and held it between us, pinched between my thumb and index finger.

  "I'm going to flip this coin in the air and you tell me--heads or tails. OK?"

  "OK. Tails."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Yes." I flipped the coin in the air, it's metallic surface glimmering as it tumbled head over tails up, arcing in the air, then down to my hand. I caught it, then slapped it on top of my other hand. When we looked at the coin together, it was tails. "See!"

  "Again." When I flipped it, he called heads and then it was heads. Again, he called tails and then it was tails and so on. We did this together like, what, 20 times and he called it on the nose every single time. He didn't even bat an eye. It was amazing! And weird. It's true. My skin began to crawl, covered in goosebumps and stiff hairs. "How do you do that?" I said, astonished. "If I keep going, then you'll know them all, which side will show?"

  My little boy lowered his head, shame and embarrassment weighing it down. His excitement for playing the game was gone. He wrapped his arms around himself, squeezing his torso gently, hugging himself firmly. He was acting like I was upset with him, the way kids do when they find themselves in a jam. But I wasn't upset with him at all. With my hand beneath his chin, I lifted his head gently.

  "Will you be mad if I tell you the truth?" he said.

  "I won't be mad," I said. I was telling the truth. I wouldn't have been mad at all.

  "I really don't know how I know. I just know."

  "I see," I said, disappointed at the vagueness of his answer, his non-answer. Kids are always doing that: giving non-answers. It's their way of protecting themselves from getting in trouble. But parents are smarter than that. We know what the non-answer really means. It means they are hiding something.

  "Are you mad at me?"

  "Oh, no, no, of course not. But it's getting late. You know? You should probably brush your teeth and get ready for bed."

  "OK. But can I have the quarter?" he said, lifting his hand, the palm side up, his arm propped by his other arm at the elbow.

  "Sure."

  I dropped the coin in his hand and he slipped it into his pocket.

  "I'll put it with the Popsicle stick," he said, running to the bathroom to brush his teeth. He was such a cute kid. Just looking at him made my heart melt. It's true. And clairvoyant to boot, it seemed. Crazy, huh? I mean, I wasn't quite sure at the time if he could see the future or not but is certainly seemed that way.

  ***

  The balcony to my apartment, on the second floor at the back corner of my building, overlooked the driveway to my garage as well as the property that surrounded the back of my apartment complex. It was one of those types of apartment complexes that looked pretty fancy from the street out front but once you pulled into the complex and drove around the labyrinthine parking lot, the real lives of the tenants revealed itself: windows covered in aluminum foil and the clotheslines on the balconies and the late model cars with flat tires--lives not so fancy after all. On my balcony were only three things: a wooden bench and a wooden chair--their frames weathered and grayed and splintered and the support structure to countless spiders and their webs and their trapped meals--and an old coffee can. The seat cushions of the chairs had long-ago been tossed in the trash, victims of a malodorous assault by the old family dog who had been sprayed in the face by a cantankerous skunk then wiped her stinky dog face on the cushions until the skunk stench coated every atom of the material. It wasn't so bad sitting on the skeletal frame of the bench or chair as long as I positioned my spine or hip bones between the splintery wooden slats and not directly on them. After putting the kids to bed almost every night, I would sneak out onto the balcony, sit my boney butt on the wooden chair, and I would quietly smoke cigarettes and think about the predicament that my life had descended into. I kept asking myself when thinking about the last few years of my miserable life, 'How did this happen?' Shit, you know how these things happen. Right? They just... happen. That's life, they say. You know? That's what all the know-it-alls and the smarty-pants and the too-good-for-yous and the uppity-assholes of the world say. They think they know everything. It's true.

  T
he balcony was my place of refuge, where I smoked cigarettes and drank cheap beer and watched the sun set as well as my anonymous neighbors walk their rat dogs or take their trash to the dumpster or chase their hyper children around or haphazardly park their cars. After my kids brushed their teeth and went to bed, I planted my boney butt on the wooden chair. It was getting late at this point so there weren't too many people to watch, just a large woman talking loudly into her cell phone--her dark, curly hair perched on the top of her head with a banana clip and her terry-cloth bathrobe struggling to stay on her stout body--telling the person on the other end of the line just how much of a bitch her boss was, which was always the case. Whose boss isn't a bitch? Silly question. As I watched her shuffle away, her whining and moaning blending with the other sounds of the night--a cacophony of cicadas, crickets, mockingbirds, and mysterious night creatures serenading the setting sun--I saw some motion in the corner of my eye. I looked over at my window, the one that looked out from the kids' bedroom. A pair of small eyes watched me, peeking through the mini-blinds, little fingers prying the blinds open, scrutinizing me, and curiously monitoring what I was doing. I knew it was good ol' Sammie Boy. He always had a hard time getting to sleep and this time was probably no different. I stood up and went inside my apartment--quietly closing the door behind me--and sat on the couch. I knew he would make his way out to the living and, sure enough, he did.

  He sat with me on the couch, laying his head on my stomach, and said, "You smell like smoke, Daddy."

  "I know," I said. "I'm sorry about that." I placed my hand on his back. I could feel his lungs inflate then deflate as he held me.

  "You shouldn't smoke. At school, my teacher showed the class a picture of a smoker's lungs. They were black! Do you think your lungs are black like that, Daddy?"

  "I don't know," I said, taking a deep breath, then sighing. "I really hope not."

  He quickly jumped up and stood in front of me, his fists pressed into his hips like a comic book super hero getting ready to belch out his heroic soliloquy while standing over a defeated foe, and he said pointing at me, "You shouldn't shmoke those nasty shmigarettes, Daddy!" I chuckled. Before I go on, let me explain something to you.

  Just so you know, Sammie Boy had this cute habit of adding 'shm' to words and changing the way they sounded, encoding them into his own form of the English language. He called it Shmenglish. For instance, instead of saying 'apple,' he would say 'shmapple.' And instead of saying 'television,' he would say 'shmelevision.' When he spoke Shmenglish, he would ask me for things like 'shmookies' or 'shmotato shmips.' It was freakin' adorable. I loved it!

  As this new and enigmatic mode of language sunk into his little brain over time, he eventually started to recite entire sentences in Shmenglish. In the past, if me or his mother would ask him to do a chore like, 'Sammie, take out the trash,' then he would respond, 'Shmammie, shmake out the shmash!' He would stop whatever it was he was doing and run around in circles shrieking, 'Shmake out the shmash! Shmake out the shmash! Shmake out the shmash!' and continuing on in this manner yet never doing what we asked him to do which was: take out the trash. It was a diversion tactic that worked pretty well for him for a while. Most parents have a soft spot for little things their kids do that they find cute. Of course, no one else found this behavior to be cute at all--not his mother, his sister, his teachers, his grandparents, his friends' parents--nobody. I was the sole, approving, audience member of his Shmenglish monologues, his only fan, his shmonly shman, and Sammie knew this. Boy, did he eat that shit up, too. I soon became fluent in all things Shmenglish.

  Once it was common knowledge that nobody liked hearing things repeated in Shmenglish but me, it became a form of communication spoken only between the two of us--me and my boy. In private, we would carry on entire conversations in Shmenglish, stopping only when one of us just couldn't take it anymore, laughing and coughing and gasping for air, or when things got serious. And I was completely aware that this was probably only amusing to me and good ol' Sammie Boy but I didn't care. I cherished these conversations with him, even if they were ridiculous. Well, mostly ridiculous. He was such an adorable kid, I tell you. It's true.

  "Shmigarettes are bad for your shmealth!" he continued.

  "Shmeally?" I said, the corner of my mouth tweaking upwards, straining to hold back a laugh.

  "Shmes! Shmeally!" He then tumbled on top of me, giggling and laughing all over the place. He thought that was just the funniest thing in the entire world.

  I put my arms around him and laughed too, even though I was a little embarrassed that I was being scolded for smoking by my third-grade son. What could I say to him? The truth of why I smoked even though I knew my lungs were probably as black as the inside of a BBQ grill just wasn't good enough for him. There was a time when I didn't smoke, which seemed so long ago.

  "You're a good kid, Sammie Boy, but it's past your bedtime," I said, patting his little back.

  "But I'm not tired!" he said, pleading, his arms and legs gesticulating as if he was running even though he was laying across my lap.

  "It doesn't matter. You still need to go to bed. Do you want me to tuck you in?"

  "No," he said, kissing me on the cheek then slowly walking back to his room, his head down, a sigh punctuating his exasperation. "I'm a big boy now. I don't need a tuck in." He disappeared into his and his little sister's room, closing the door gently behind him. But before I could compose myself enough to stand back up and sneak back onto the balcony to smoke more shameful cigarettes and drink more cheap beer, good ol' Sammie Boy flung his bedroom door open and came running back into the living room as fast as he could, a piece of paper in his little, clinched fist. He slammed the paper on the coffee table then ran back to his room, screaming, "I drew this for you!" This time, he slammed his bedroom door shut.

  I stared at the crinkled paper on the coffee table, Manila paper with rough edges ripped from his spiral sketchbook (the one he carried with him everywhere), a drawing in black ink throughout the folds and creases of his wadded, paper canvas. I picked up the paper, unfolded it, and examined the line art of a boy sitting next to a bird--a big toothy grin on the boy's content face, the bird with a blank look, both of them sitting in a sparse world, nothing around them. Underneath the picture, the words 'Sammie & Budgie' scrawled in my boy's meticulous scribble, the drawing depicting the passive-aggressive way in which I knew he was attempting to keep his wish of owning a pet bird in the front of my mind. I thought it funny that he would even think I would forget anything he said or did or wanted. I loved being a dad and I loved being Sammie and Jessie's dad. I knew--at a very young age--that I wanted to be a dad. As far as I knew, I always wanted to be a dad. Being a dad was my calling. It's true.

  ***

  ***

  Sammie and Jessie went to a very normal elementary school in a very normal suburban neighborhood outside of Austin, Texas. The neighborhood was called Wells Port and the school was called Wells Port Elementary (brilliant, huh?). Built in the 1980s, the neighborhood had grown from a cookie-cutter tract development with little planning into a diverse, tight-knit, established community. Sammie was in the third-grade and Jessie was in the first-grade. The routine of getting them to school was pretty simple. It consisted of waking them up, feeding them toasted frozen waffles, helping them pick out their clothes without violating any major fashion rules (Did I even know the rules?), and making sure they brushed their teeth and their hair while I went downstairs to the garage to start the car and throw their school stuff in the trunk. Inevitably, whenever I opened the door to the garage, they would lose their little minds and run out in mid-whatever they were doing--tooth brushes in their mouths or brushes in their hair or half-way dressed and undressed or one shoe on and one shoe in-hand or whatever half-assed task they were lazily attempting to complete. The sound of the door to the garage creaking open always sent them into an impassioned, freakazoid panic. It happened every time like clockwork. Little kids are predictable little creatures.
It's true.

  The door would creak open and they would run out saying, "Daddy! Daddy! Don't leave yet!"

  Which always had me asking the same rhetorical question. "Why do you think I'm leaving you?" Then they would stand there, dumbfounded--toothpaste dripping down their chins or hair brushes dangling in their tangled hair or their stomachs undulating along with their panting from sprinting to the kitchen--looking at me like I was severely abusing them, which I wasn't. Kids can be so melodramatic sometimes. It's simply what they do. "The whole reason for my existence at this point in my life is to take you to and from school."

  "Oh, good!" they would always say, returning to the bathroom or their bedroom to complete whatever they were doing.

  So I would drowsily descend the stairs to my garage, their backpacks and hoodies and lunch boxes in my arms, attempting to not fall down the stairs and bash my head open on the landing, opening the garage door and placing all of their crap in the trunk of my car: a white, 2000 Volvo S70. Now, there are some who would say that a Volvo S70 is a luxury car. I fully admit that there was also a time when I truly believed a car like a Volvo or a BMW or a Volkswagen or some shit like that was considered a luxury vehicle even though I knew--after owning this car for a couple of years and surviving a few painful visits to the auto mechanic--that cars like this were really just albatrosses tied to your wallet like an anvil chained to your bank account, quickly sinking to the bottom of the deep blue, murky sea of diminishing returns. But for whatever reason, I still wanted to own a Volvo S70. My desire to own this car occupied a place in my brain that couldn't have been satiated by owning any other non-luxury vehicle; it had to be this car. And boy, did my wallet take a hit by owning this money pit. It really did. I might as well have set my wallet and debit card and credit cards and bank account on fire and let them burn to ashes. It spent an inordinate amount of time in the shop. More times than not, the Volvo wouldn't start or--if it started at all--it would come to life in fits and starts, as if it was going to eventually explode. Aargh! On a good morning, I would throw their school things in the trunk, start the car, and be ready to take them to school. This particular morning was pretty good; the Volvo started right up.