Heads or Tails (9 page)

“Hurry up,” I hollered to him. Slowly, that huge white cloud began to cover us as we moved forward. “Where are you?” I shouted as Frankie picked up speed.

“Here,” Pete said, just to my right.

“Get closer,” I yelled. Then I heard the crash.

“Owwww,” he cried out. “Jack!”

I hopped off the back of Frankie’s bike, and when the fog drifted away, I found him. He had collided head-on with a mailbox on the edge of the street. He was lying in the grass with his good hand over his mouth. BoBo was whimpering and licking his face. “Let me see, let me see,” I shouted. He lifted his hand. His left front tooth was chipped in half. “You might as well have my allowance for life,” I said, sighing. “I won’t need it where I’m going.”

After dinner, Dad had come into my room and sat on the corner of my bed.

“What happened?” he asked.

I explained how I tried to keep Pete from following me.

“Did you ever think that you could have just turned around and led him home?”

“No,” I said.

“Don’t you think you should set a good example for him?”

“Yes,” I said, feeling doomed.

“Then why don’t you use your head, before you break it open like that Pagoda kid.”

“Yes,” I said again.

“Or before Pete breaks his head instead of his arm or tooth.”

“Yes, Dad.”

“I can’t be here to watch over you kids all the time. When I turn my back, I count
on you
to use common sense.”

“Yes, Dad.”

“I don’t want people talking about our family the way they talk about the Pagodas.” He got up and strolled out of the room.

Late that night, Pete began to complain that his arm hurt. If it’s broken, it could be the end of my life, I thought.

“Are you sure it hurts?” Dad asked him.

Pete started to cry. They got dressed and took him to the emergency room at the hospital.

“What happened?” I asked when they returned.

“The doctor didn’t set it right the first time,” Mom explained. “They had to cut the cast off and reset the arm.”

“How’d they do that?”

“The doctor just held it against the edge of his desk and gave it a crack.”

I felt sick. “Really?”

“I know how you feel,” said Mom as she ran her hand through my hair. “It was the most painful thing I ever watched.”

“What did Pete do?”

“They gave him a shot of painkiller and Dad just put his hand over Pete’s eyes. That was all.”

“Was it because he ran into the mailbox?” I whispered, knowing how Dad thinks.

“No. This was set wrong from the beginning. So don’t worry. Now go to bed, and don’t say anything to your father in the morning. He’s ready to sue every doctor in town.”

All week long I minded my own business. When Pete asked if I wanted to sign his new cast, I refused. I didn’t want to get near him. I spent my time trying to train BoBo to be a human. I slipped a T-shirt over his head and put his paws through the armholes. And I changed his name to Eric. I thought I might ride down to the Salvation Army store and buy some used baby shoes and put them on his paws.

But I was bored. I knew I shouldn’t, but a few days later I drifted over to the Pagodas’. There just wasn’t anything else to do. Before I left our house, I poured Dad’s Old Spice aftershave over my left hand.

“Come in,” hollered Mr. Pagoda, after I knocked. I took a deep breath of air and opened the door. The smell was like sticking your head in a toilet. I held my perfumed hand to my face just about each time I took a breath. Mr. Pagoda was stirring a big pot of thick yellow goop on the stove. It boiled up and spit out of the pot like a volcano. He jumped back and shielded his eyes.

“What’re you making?” I asked.

“Experimenting with banana skins,” he grunted as he stirred the pot. “Everyone throws them away. If I can make something useful out of them, I’ll make a fortune. Right now, I’m making a banana-skin shoe-repair kit in a can. When you get a hole in the bottom of your shoe, you just spray this stuff on and keep walking. What d’you think?”

Just then, the pot erupted and a wad of banana shoe glue hit the ceiling. It looked like it was stuck up there for life.

“Where’s Frankie?” I asked, looking around.

“Out back, I think.”

I nearly ran for the back door. “Air, I need air,” I gasped.

Frankie was hanging conch shells on the clothesline. Conchs are hard to pull out of their shells, so he was reaching into the shell with a pair of pliers, grabbing the long, skinny foot of the conch and pinning that part over the clothesline. “This way,” Frankie explained, “the heavy shell will make the conch really tired, and soon the shell will drop to the ground.”

“But they’re already dead,” I said. “They stink.”

The Pagodas were like a picture-book family I once read about called the Stupids. Everyone knows that if you want to remove a conch from its shell you just drop it in boiling water and it comes right out.

“Why don’t you do it that way?” I asked Frankie.

“Dad says it boils the color out of the shells, and he wants to sell them to tourists.”

“I thought you were going to eat the conch.”

“No way. They’re like chewing on dog toys.”

He finished pinning up the last one. “What do you want to do?” I asked.

“I have a great idea,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about it all morning.”

We went around to the swing set on the far side of his house, where my mom couldn’t see us. He held up an old Hula Hoop that he had wrapped in gauze bandages. “It’s a daredevil game I saw on TV. I’ll get on my skateboard and ride it down the slide. You squirt lighter fluid on the gauze and set it on fire and I’ll fly through it. Suzie has a Polaroid camera and she’ll take pictures and we can send them in to the TV program and see if we can get on the show.”

“How do I hold the burning Hula Hoop?”

“With this.” He tossed me an oven mitt.

“Are you sure this will work?”

“Don’t know until you try it, my dad always says.”

I knew what my dad would say.

“Wait here,” Frankie said. “I’ll go get Suzie.”

It would be neat, I thought, to see a picture of myself flying through a burning hoop on a skateboard. I’ll show it to the kids at school. No one could top it.

Just then, Pete spotted me and ran over. “What’re you doing?” he asked.

“Nothing that concerns you,” I said sharply.

“Allowance for life,” he whined. “You said so.”

“It might be a short life.”

Frankie and Suzie joined us.

“Okay,” announced Frankie, “I’ll go first.”

I could see this leading to trouble. Pete will want to try it and he’ll go up in flames and Dad will build a real electric chair just for me. “We have to go,” I said to Frankie. “Come on, Pete.” I grabbed his good arm and jerked him away.

That evening, when we sat down at the dinner table, I felt proud of myself for keeping Pete alive. I knew I couldn’t tell Dad how I had used good judgment, because he would go berserk when I told him Frankie planned to skateboard through a flaming Hula Hoop. Mom dished out the corned beef and cabbage and Betsy passed out spoons.

“What’s that foul smell?” Dad asked, wrinkling up his face. “What’s rotting?”

“Calm down, it’s just boiled cabbage,” Mom said.

“I can’t
calm down
with that smell coming in the windows. What is that stench?” He held his napkin up over his nose.

I knew what it was but refused to say.

“It’s the conch meat,” Pete shouted and pointed.

From our windows, we could see the fly-covered bodies of the conchs that Frankie had left pinned to the line after the shells had slipped off

“God, these people are disgusting,” Dad griped. “I can’t wait until we move out of this neighborhood full of loonies.”

“Me too,” Betsy added. “Did you hear that Gary Pagoda stole another car and was caught in Miami?”

“The kid is a criminal,” Dad replied. “Ugh! How do they expect us to eat dinner with that stench in the air?”

It wasn’t a question anyone wanted to answer.

“Jack,” he said to me, “go over there and tell those people to take down that garbage.”

“Me?” I asked. “Me?”

“You,” he said right back. “You know them. They’re
your
friends. Now go tell them that they’re smelling up the neighborhood.”

I scooted back in my chair. “Okay,” I said. I looked at Mom. She was no help. Betsy gave me her thin-lipped smile. Pete crossed his eyes at me. I knew what he was thinking.

I took a garbage bag from the utility room and went directly to the Pagodas’ back yard. The conchs looked like diseased chicken wings. One by one, I yanked them off the line as the flies and smell swirled around my head. I didn’t have gloves and the spongy meat squished between my fingers. Conch juice ran down my arm and dripped off my elbow. When I finished, I scrubbed my hands with Dad’s Lava soap to get rid of the smell.

“Good job,” Dad said when I returned to the table.

“Go change your shirt,” Mom said. “It picked up the odor.”

After dinner, Frankie knocked on my window. “Hey,” he said, “my brother’s back home. Do you want to watch him tattoo a naked lady on his arm?”

“I can’t,” I said.

After Frankie ran off I couldn’t sit still. “I think it’s time to go fishing, Eric,” I said to BoBo. There was still plenty of light.

He looked up at me and I read his mind. Yes, Jack, I would like to go fishing, he was thinking. I unlocked my door and quietly walked down the hall with my rod in one hand and the tackle box in the other. I didn’t want Pete tagging along so he could drown and ruin my life.

We went directly to a secret place behind Big Daddy’s Liquors. A large water-drainage pipe emptied into a canal. I sat on the rounded edge of the pipe and opened my tackle box. I took out my net and waded into the shallow water. A small rapids formed where the water broke over the sharp rocks that narrowed the canal as it passed under an old railroad bridge. I held my net in the running water and in a few minutes I had a small shiner. “Piece of cake,” I said.

I gently slipped the hook into his mouth and out his gill. I dropped him in the water and slowly let out the line. The current carried the shiner about ten yards downstream. A perfect location for a hungry snook.

After fifteen minutes, nothing happened. I figured my shiner was worn out. There was a 7-Eleven store next to the liquor store and I had enough change for a small grape Slurpee.

“Stay, Eric,” I ordered BoBo and set my rod down on the pipe. “And guard that with your life.” He looked up at me, then went back to sleep.

Those were my last words to him. I had taken about ten steps when I heard him yelp. When our very first BoBo was hit by a car in front of our last house, he had yelped in exactly the same way. I spun around in time to see a large alligator clamp BoBo’s head in its mouth, then drag him back down the bank. BoBo’s legs kicked out at the ground, but the alligator held him tight as it slithered backward down the bank and into the water.

I was terrified of the alligator. It was at least ten feet long, and I knew they were fast. Sneaky fast. I stood still for a minute. I wasn’t sure what to do.

I ran back to the drainage pipe and leaned forward. “BoBo!” I yelled across the water. I looked up and down the canal, hoping that somehow he had wiggled free. “BoBo!” I hollered, left and right. “BoBo!”

He was gone. The water was black and smooth as it rushed by. I stepped from the pipe to the bank and to the spot where BoBo had slept. I stooped down to touch the dirt. I thought it might be warm. Half buried in the sand was the stupid watch I had earlier put on his arm.

This could have been Pete, I thought. He would have listened to me if I told him to “guard it with your life.” He would have been on this exact spot with his back to the alligator. He would have been watching me walk away. He would have been begging me to buy him a Slurpee and I would have been thinking: Buy it yourself. And then he would have been ambushed and bitten and dragged back into the water, into the alligator lair tunneled under the bank, and eaten.

Dad was right. I shouldn’t turn my back on him. I should keep an eye out for him. I’m the older brother and it’s up to me to help him. I shouldn’t break his arm and let him knock his teeth out or punch him like I do. Suddenly, I thought he might be at the Pagodas’ getting a naked woman tattooed onto his arm.

I grabbed my rod and reeled in the line. Pete, I’m sorry, but wherever you are, stay put, I said to myself. I’m coming. I ran full speed with my tackle box in one hand and the rod in the other. I kept my eyes on the ground, picking the spot for each foot, making certain that I got the most out of each step.

I reached our back yard. “Pete?” I yelled as I dropped my tackle box and reel. I stuck my head through the open kitchen door. Mom was mixing a pitcher of frozen juice. “Have you seen Pete?” I asked. I was panting.

“I thought he was with you,” she said.

I took off, running around the Pagoda side of our house. I jumped the low hedge and made for their far yard.

There was Pete. He was kneeling on the top of their slide, trying to get a skateboard lined up under him. Down below, Frankie held the lighter-fluid-drenched Hula Hoop, and Suzie stood to one side with her thumb on the top of a cigarette lighter. They were ready to go up in flames.

“Pete!” I yelled. “Stop!”

I ran up to Frankie and yanked the Hula Hoop out of his hand and flung it as far as I could. Frankie gave me a shove from behind. I turned and got ready to jump him.

“He wanted to do it!” Frankie shouted at me and stepped back.

“It was his idea,” Suzie said, pointing to Pete.

“That doesn’t mean you should let him do it,” I yelled.

I looked up at Pete. “Get down here. I have something terrible to tell you.” He let the skateboard go down the slide and he took the ladder.

“BoBo was eaten by an alligator.”

He looked up at me. “Are you lying?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “He was eaten by a ten-foot alligator that could just as easily have eaten you.”

“He had fleas,” Pete said. “I hate fleas.”

“Don’t you get it?” I said. “He was
eaten
by an alligator.”