CHAPTER 19

Did you know that rats are strong enough to bite through a toenail?

Rats.

Stinking rats. They can wiggle into a space as small as a quarter, so look around your house and make sure you don’t have any rat crevices or long toenails. It’s a good thing we all don’t live in New York City, where there’re supposed to be two million stinking rats. Or in Africa, where the Gambian pouched rat grows up to fifteen pounds.

Even I could be grossed out by that fact.

I might be grossed out by that fact.

Okay, I was officially grossed out by that fact.

A fifteen-pound rat that can bite through a toenail is gross.

But you know what? It made me calm down to think of Sandy being grossed out by that fact, too. I used to love causing girls to do that pinched-up, gross-out face in fifth grade. A solid gross fact is the best girl repellent in the universe.

True story.

Okay, so, rats. Rats like to eat dog food. We kept Mr. Darcy’s dog food in the garage in a large plastic container. Last week, some stinking rat chewed a hole in the bucket, and Grandpa went ballistic because, you know, that meant a rat dared to be within a one-mile radius of the Car.

“Wayne, you have rat traps around here?”

No, sir.

The next day, a big box of rat traps appeared on our kitchen counter.

“Would you mind setting these up after school and getting this problem taken care of?”

Sure.

I would be useful. How hard could it be?

As soon as Grandpa drove me home from school, he got sick from his mystery illness that made him barf up burgers and the sandwich from Mrs. Rosenblatt (yes, she sent one home with me anyway). So I set up two rat traps, which is an easy enough task if you research “Rat Traps + Best Results” online. You put peanut butter on the lever and a nugget of dog food on the trap just to attract the rat. Then you leave the trap up next to a wall because, like all rodents, rats like to travel along a wall line.

I set the trap along the garage wall and another one on the outside wall next to the patio. I figured getting the stinking rat coming or going was a good plan. Then I went to my room to do boring reading homework from my new school.

Later, I went to the kitchen to make a smoothie, and that was when I heard it.

Snap! Pop! Ka-BANG!

And I thought, Man, I nailed that stinking rat already. See if he messes with Mr. Darcy’s food again! High five, Wayne Kovok! Grandpa’s going to love this.

Well, it wasn’t the rat.

Nope. Not a rat.

It was a blue jay.

A blue jay. A blue jay with one leg, bleeding bird blood all over the patio. And it will sound weird, but I thought of Sandy sitting there in language arts class talking about some stupid poem I couldn’t figure out, her long, smooth hair moving back and forth because she was so excited about whatever it was we were supposed to be learning. And I envied her for being that way. (I only got that worked up about a subject if it was science or Texas history.) The poem Sandy went crazy for had used the word bewildered, which is not a word you hear every day. In fact, I’d never heard it before, and it stuck in my brain.

I guess I liked the word all right, but I never understood what it was to actually be bewildered.

Until the stupid blue jay nabbed the dog-food nugget and got stuck in the trap. Man, that made me feel all kinds of bewildered. I didn’t know what to do, and I just stood there and thought about my options while the blue jay stood on one leg and bled and waited for me to make a decision. It stared at me, tried to yoga balance, and poof! Lights-out! It flopped over dead.

I felt lower than a gopher hole.

“What in tarnation is this?” Grandpa said.

I shrugged. I wasn’t going to write the whole Greek tragedy on my notepad.

Boy Murders Bird and Vows Rat Revenge.

“You killed a bird with a rat trap?” Grandpa laughed, then punched me on the shoulder. Hard. “A bird? I’ve never even heard of that.”

I hadn’t ever heard of this happening, either. My neck went red from embarrassment. Just when I thought I could relax around him, not feel useless every ten seconds, this had to happen.

I made a mental note to ask Mom when he was going to move back home. Being useless around Grandpa was exhausting.

I went inside to get a bag and put the blue jay in it and carried it out to the trash. And Grandpa stood planted on the patio, still having a great laugh and shouting into the trees, “You birds better whistle and watch out. Wayne here’s got it in for you.”

The bird blood had sunk into the patio, and it took some doing with bleach to get it out. I wasn’t going to have any evidence lying around for me to remember or for the old man to relive my humiliation.

And then he said, “Wait until I tell Reed about this. Ha!”

I froze. The world froze.

His smile vanished. Our eyes locked, and I wondered which way Grandpa was going to go. Left or right. The all-riled-up, patriotic-and-have-a-memorial-moment Grandpa. Or the deflated, I just now remembered that my hero son is gone Grandpa.

He had the second kind of moment.

Everything went to fuzz. Slow minus the motion.

His hand wobbled, and he dropped his coffee mug. It shattered and splattered all over the patio where I’d been cleaning up the bird. Only it wasn’t coffee, I could tell, because it smelled sweet like tea. The fumes of bleach and sadness and tea nearly flattened me.

And Grandpa stood there still as stone. It was horrible.

“Got a broom?” he asked.

I nodded and went inside for the broom and dustpan. I cleaned it all up while Grandpa went to the living room and watched TV. I threw away the shards of the mug in the kitchen trash. There on the counter was a box of tea.

Herbal, caffeine-free tea. No coffee.

Was this unspoken proof of illness? Grandpa hated tea. He called tea drinkers sissies.

A hard, painful knot formed in my throat where my voice was supposed to be. I swallowed. Pain shot up through my neck, and tears tried their best to push their way out, but I stuffed them down.

Stupid rat.

Stupid bird.

Stupid random bird!

My stomach lurched. It’s silly, maybe even stupid, okay, but it killed me that something else had fallen from the sky on my watch.

And it’s going to sound stupid, but I guess I knew how that blue jay felt when the spring on the trap closed on its leg. Like a person boarding a plane and thinking it will land, safe and normal, then smack, you’re in a daze and beat up and living with a sad mom and her sad dad. And you survived and others didn’t and you have no idea how or why.

Why? Why? Why?

It is the question that will plague you.

Bewildering.

There was no other word for it on the planet.

It was bewildering.

DATA

Data that might affect location of the flag:

Air temperature on date of crash: low 50s.

Winds: out of the south at 50 miles per hour, wind speed that moves whole trees. The National Weather Service defines a severe thunderstorm as having wind speeds of 58 miles per hour or higher.

Precrash weather report. Source: AccuWeather. Damaging thunderstorms and travel disruptions due to high-winds prediction. Cities impacted: Houston, Texas; Shreveport, Louisiana; Jackson, Mississippi; New Orleans, Louisiana. Risk of tornadoes within this zone on Saturday after dark.

Supporting Evidence:

Meteorologist quote: “My concern is that since this storm is both out of season and on a holiday travel weekend, people might be caught off guard.”