12

SCARY-BOOK LAND

The next morning I woke up feeling like half me and half not, like when you mix baking soda and vinegar together and come up with a totally weird third thing. Well, that’s what I felt like, something not yet named. A fizzy experiment.

Plus my shoe was still on my foot.

“Come on, Cinderella, the ball game is over,” Grandma announced six inches from my ear. She was standing over me and dangling Pablo by his hind paws so he could lick my face.

“Where’s Dad?” I asked, and licked Pablo right back.

“Still celebrating,” Grandma said. “He didn’t come home, and I need to get to the doctors’.”

“For what?” I asked.

“Measure my lungs,” she rasped. “They make me breathe into a machine and can tell if I’m breathing better.”

“But you’re still smoking,” I said. “Aren’t you getting worse?”

“No. Sometimes you can get better,” she said. “I had a friend who claimed smoking two packs a day kept her from getting cancer.”

“Sounds like a nut case,” I remarked.

She pointed toward my feet and raised an eyebrow. “Look who’s talking,” she said, and began to sing.

“Diddle, diddle, dumpling, my son John. Went to bed with his trousers on. One shoe off, and one shoe on—”

She couldn’t finish because she began to cough.

“Do you want me to help you get to the doctors’?” I asked as I stood up.

“Yes,” she croaked. “That would be nice.”

“Then I can be Mr. Nice,” I said.

I hobbled into the kitchen and got a steak knife, then squatted down and cut through the knot in my laces. I pulled my shoe and uniform pants off, then went into the bedroom and put on my jeans and a T-shirt and sneakers.

Grandma was waiting for me on the porch. “The bus stop is a long ways off,” she said, and handed me a blueberry Pop-Tart plastered in white icing. “But the bus goes right by the clinic.”

I set up the step stool and got her into the buggy. Once she was situated on her couch cushion I fixed her oxygen tank against her side. I put Pablo in his baby seat and settled him down with the Pop-Tart, slipped the stool under the buggy, and we were off.

The bus stop was a concrete bench long past the convenience store. The only shade was from the metal pole with the bus-stop sign. It was hot and Pablo’s face was covered with melted Pop-Tart icing. I got Grandma out and sat her on the bench. She put on her giant sunglasses and said, “Hide the buggy and stool in the bushes so we have it when we get back.” She pointed toward an empty field of weeds and shrubs. I did what she told me to do because it was better than anything I told myself to do.

When I sat next to her I said, “I need some medicine.”

“So do I,” she said. “Maybe the doctor can fix us both up.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You nervous?” she asked and reached across to brush some hair over the scab on my head.

“I’m always nervous,” I replied.

“I mean about the game,” she said. “You nervous about losing?”

“I suppose. But I’m more worried about what to do if I lose it out there and if Dad starts getting mental and calling me names and I just react and go nuts.”

“I guess you’ll soon find out,” she said.

“Yep,” I replied, and sighed as if my lungs too had sprung a leak. “I will.”

“I guess because I’m sick now I think back on a lot of good times we had together,” she said. Her lips were all dried from breathing through her mouth and her twisted smile looked like something pried open with a screwdriver. “Remember the time I broke the broom handle in half and taped a piece to each of your legs because I thought it would slow you down?”

“Yeah,” I said. It wasn’t funny before but now it seemed funny.

“But it didn’t slow you down. You just stomped stifflegged around like a hyper Frankenstein.”

I laughed because somehow I’d ended up outside and the neighbor lady thought Grandma had finally broken both my legs. She wanted to rush me to the doctor and kept saying, “Come here and tell me what happened.” So finally I went right up to her ear and yelled, “I’m a monster!” then clomped off, and she didn’t follow me.

“And remember the time you climbed in the washer and turned it on. If you weren’t screaming so loud I wouldn’ta found you until that rotor had beaten you into butter.”

I laughed again. But it was the kind of “ha, ha, ha” laugh that sounds more like a grownup being polite after someone tells an unfunny joke. I wished I could give out a real bellyaching laugh but that washing machine had hurt and before I knew it my fake laugh turned into saying “Ouch, ouch, ouch,” like I was being battered back and forth all over again.

I was relieved when the bus arrived and we slowly got on. Grandma rode for free because she was a senior, and I rode for free because she told the driver I was under six. We were the only passengers. I put Grandma in a seat for the disabled and put Pablo next to her. He wasn’t disabled but he wasn’t normal either.

I stood so I could hold onto a pole and spin around. After a while I figured out a game to keep me busy. I pushed the STOP bar and ran up to the front door.

“Stay behind the yellow line,” the driver said to me because I hadn’t.

“Okay,” I replied.

As soon as he came to a stop and opened the front doors I ran down the steps and dashed along the bus to the back doors which I pulled open and hopped right back on again and took a seat and bobbed my head back and forth and wiggled my butt and whistled. Granny just gave me a head-shaking you’d-better-watch-your-step look, but I gave her an innocent look in return and soon stood up in the aisle and bus-surfed as I stumbled and swooped forward like I was riding a huge wave in Hawaii. Then when I spotted the next bus-stop bench I pressed the STOP bar and I could see the driver peering back at me in his big mirror.

“Time to stop!” I hollered. “Got places to go and people to meet!”

The bus driver glared at me and I looked over at Grandma and Pablo. “Ask,” she hissed, “if there is a smoking section on this bus.”

“Hey, driver!” I yelled forward. “Is there a smoking section on the bus?”

The driver turned around. “Yeah. We got two. One on the front bumper and one on the rear bumper. Take your pick.” Then he laughed to himself.

“Funny,” Grandma rumbled, and began to tap out a cigarette from her pack.

“Are you going to smoke?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “What’s he gonna do? Throw an old invalid off the bus? Just let him try and I’ll have Pablo nibble him to death.”

The driver didn’t pull over at the next stop, so I stood up and pressed the STOP bar again and again until the buzzer was almost a nonstop sound.

“I need to get off for real!” I hollered.

Finally the driver swung the bus over to a stop. I hopped down the stairs and turned to run to the back door. But the doors wouldn’t pull open and in a panic I ran back toward the front door but by then the driver had closed that door and as he pulled away I saw his ugly laughing face in the tall side mirror.

“Grandma!” I yelled, and waved my arms around as I ran after the bus. I didn’t see her face—just a puff of smoke coming out her window. In a moment they were gone and I had no idea where I was, so I just stood on the bench until I caught the next bus. The driver let me ride for free after I told him I’d lost all my money but he said he couldn’t catch the other bus and so really I didn’t know where I was going. I kept looking out the window for a clinic but after a long ride I spotted the bus stop where we first began in our neighborhood so I knew I had missed where Grandma was going. I pressed the STOP bar and got off. I waited and waited on the bench and I didn’t have a watch but I knew it was a long time I waited because I stopped twenty-three buses and asked many of the same drivers if they had seen a grandma with a Chihuahua and an oxygen tank and all of them said they had not seen hide nor hair of her. I don’t know what happened to the driver who tricked me. But I began to think that maybe Grandma drove him nuts and he had just pulled his bus over and quit.

So I ran around the field and threw rocks at signs, jammed sticks down ant hills, drew funny faces in the dirt, and did things until a bus pulled up and Grandma got off just about dragging her oxygen tank and clutching poor Pablo so hard he had fingerprints left on his sides like when I squeeze the loaves of white bread in the bakery. I got the buggy loaded back up and carted her home.

“You just won’t learn,” she kept saying. “That’s your problem in a nutshell. Everybody tries to fix you up but you. Maybe you can’t be fixed,” she continued. “Maybe you’re one of those broken things that stays forever broken.”

I just hung my head and felt bad again, like I had always felt bad with her when I had done something wrong and she really let me have it.

Finally I got smart enough to change the subject. “What’d the doctor tell you?” I asked.

“He said the smoking is definitely making me better,” she said. “And that I’d be cured by now if I smoked a better brand.”

So when we passed the convenience store I went in and bought her some good smokes with the last of my emergency money and that made her happy with me.

It was already dusk but from down the road I could see Dad’s car in the driveway and as we got closer he was standing on the porch holding a beer in one hand while watching us through an old spyglass and tottering back and forth on his heels as if he were on the high seas.

I pulled up with Grandma and helped get her out of the buggy as he circled around us.

“I’ve been waiting all afternoon,” he said, and pointed to a bandage over his arm muscle. “Got something special to show you.”

He ripped the bandage off with a flourish. There was a slick tattoo of my baseball jersey on his arm where the skull tattoo had been. When I reached out to touch it he got me in a headlock and rapped his knuckles on my bald spot and it hurt but it didn’t bother me because I was grinning like a carved pumpkin with the light shining out my eyes and ears. I never thought anybody would tattoo my name on their arm.

“Were you drunk when you did it?” I asked.

The corners of his mouth curled up like warped paper.

“I was out celebrating,” he replied with the curlicues winding and unwinding like a yo-yo. “Nobody gets a tattoo when they are sober! This one’s not finished yet. After you win the championship I’ll have your record—5 wins, 0 losses—tattooed along with ‘PAL Champs.’”

“Did Leezy get one?” I asked.

He smiled. “Next time you see her, ask about her ankle,” he suggested slyly.

“Can you move your arm?” I bleated. “Your BO is killing me.”

He tightened his grip as I twisted my head like a cork. I tried to pull back but it felt like my neck was being snapped off. “I’ve been thinking again,” he singsonged into my ear. “Since tomorrow is the big day we gotta pay our respects to my Humpty buddy.”

“Who?” I croaked.

He dragged me across the porch and down the stairs as my legs and feet twisted behind.

“Let him go,” Grandma barked out. “You’re ripping his darned head off.”

“I’m just horsing around,” Dad said. “Don’t get bent out of shape.”

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“None of your business,” he yelled over his shoulder as he dragged me to the car. “Get in,” he ordered, opening the door and wrestling me onto the seat. He slammed the door, then walked around to his side.

“Don’t wait up,” he yelled to Grandma. “And whatever you do, don’t cook. I don’t have time to clean up after you later.”

As soon as he sat down he reached into the back and pulled a can off a six-pack.

“Dad, you shouldn’t drink and drive,” I said, still catching my breath. “It scares me.”

“Then you drive,” he snapped back, and kicked open his door.

“That would scare me too,” I said, and rolled my head around on my neck like I was trying to screw it down for a rough ride.

“Then don’t worry about a beer,” he replied, and pulled his door shut. “And another thing, don’t get worked up over the small stuff in life, otherwise it will kill you.” He started the engine and reversed quickly into the street. “Save your worries for the big stuff, like figuring out a plan for you to stay with me and Leezy. We got to get around your mom. You got any ideas on how to do that?”

I didn’t. And I didn’t want to “get around” Mom. I wanted to run straight at her and bury my head right in her middle and have her wrap her arms under me and hold me and sing sad country songs like she does so I could hear the sound of her voice nuzzling around inside her belly.

“Well, I got some ideas,” Dad continued. “Possession is nine-tenths of the law, and right now,” he said, reaching over to clamp his hand on my shoulder, “you and I are a team. Right, buddy?”

“You’re my dad,” I said.

“You’re my kid,” he replied, and gave me a shake.

“Can I turn on the radio?” I asked.

“No noise,” he said. “We gotta be quiet.”

I didn’t talk and he didn’t talk and I wished I was driving the car because it would give me something to do besides shift around in my seat and knead the flesh on my arms and legs as if I was made of Silly Putty and could stretch and press myself into a big dumb lump. After a while Dad turned off the headlights and we went down a dirt road until he pulled in between two weeping willow trees.

“This is the back door to Storybook Land,” he whispered. “At night I call it Scary-Book Land.” He came around to my side with the rest of the six-pack hanging from his wrist like a chunky bracelet.

“I love this place in the dark,” he said, and gave me a boost up over the chain-link fence. He climbed up the side and swung himself over the top. “Follow me.”

I felt like I was walking through the dark pages of a fairy-tale book that had been closed for the night and dropped by the side of the bed.

It was scary. Every time the trees moved I kept thinking the Giant was on the loose. When we passed the Old Lady’s shoe house I thought only really crazy people would live inside a smelly shoe and I had a feeling her kids were running wild with nothing to do but come after me. I figured the Wolf was going to swallow me for good, the Crooked Man seemed really mean and was going to hit me with his stick, and when we finally arrived at Humpty Dumpty he looked like somebody whose big belly had crushed his skinny legs and was now hurt and crying because no one could ever help him get better. During the day all the stories seemed to teach lessons on how to be good and smart, but in the dark all the stories seemed to be about people with problems. Maybe that’s why Dad liked them, I thought. He fit right in. And now I did too.

“I’m scared, Dad,” I said.

“Don’t be,” he replied. “It’s only make-believe.”

“No, I mean about not living with Mom. I’m scared to tell her that.”

“Well, I think you should,” he said. “I think you should call her and tell her you’re staying with me and let her hear it straight from the horse’s mouth.”

“No,” I said. “She’ll be upset.”

“I’ll take care of her,” he said. “You just be Joey and tell her you want to live with your dad.”

“Dad, I need to tell you something about me being me,” I said.

“So tell me,” he said. “I’m listening.”

“Okay,” I said, and I tried hard to get the first word of where to start but it just seemed impossible to do because the more I tried to start talking the more chopped up the ideas became. I wanted to tell him that I thought we were a lot alike and we were both hyper and needed medicine and we shouldn’t live together since I wanted to live only with Mom, but that I loved him, yet liked living with her more and he shouldn’t hate me for that but there didn’t seem to be any way of saying so because, even though I knew how I felt, the words were all piled up against the door in my throat and when I tried to speak I couldn’t and it made me sick that I felt less like me and more like something I was becoming but didn’t know yet.

“Here’s what I think you want to say,” Dad said before I could speak. “A lot of changes are taking place all at once. What you have to do is just go with the flow and work through them. That’s all. You’ll see. Don’t even try to talk about it. Just ride it out. Believe me, you and I are two of a kind, so I know what you’re going through. Just relax.”

“That’s not it,” I said. “No.”

“Well, consider this,” he said, and opened another beer. “You know one of the reasons why I am the way I am, Joey? Because my mind is constantly focused on perfection—on the way life ought to be—and I can imagine perfection in everything but I can’t get perfection in real life. Not from me. Or your mom, or my mom, or Leezy. Which is why I need you to win tomorrow. All my life I’ve wanted to be a winner and you’re the guy who can make that happen and be my little corner of perfection.”

“I want to be perfect,” I said. “I do.”

“Then just take it easy. You don’t have to pitch a perfect game. A win is all I want.”

“I mean I’ve already made a mistake,” I said. “I’m not perfect.” And I wanted to tell him about how I should still be on my medicine, that it was a mistake to not have told Mom what I did. It was a mistake to think I could work it all out by myself. I just didn’t want anyone to get upset with me, because all my life people had been upset with me. It was a mistake not to listen to Mom because she told me not to do things for her or for him, but for me. But I didn’t listen to her and now it was too late to change things back and I was upset with myself.

“Nobody’s perfect,” Dad said. “You just have to be better than the other guy.”

“Dad, I’m scared,” I said. “Let’s go back.”

“Not yet,” he said. “I saved the best for last. I know how to turn on the bumper cars.”

That got me. “I love bumper cars!” I shouted.

“Me too,” he said. “When I sneak in at night I turn them on and just go whizzing around the floor and bang into stuff by myself. Always better to hit than to be hit,” he said.

Then before I could tell him that I always imagined him as a bumper car on the loose bouncing off everything up and down the streets and in and out of rooms, he jumped up and ran down a little path and I ran right behind him.

When we got to the bumper cars I saw one with a cross-eyed clown face painted on the front and I knew that was the one I wanted. Dad lit a match to see and opened an electric panel next to the operator’s chair. He fiddled around for a few minutes until he flicked a switch and the cars jerked forward a bit.

“It’s show time,” he yelled. “Every man for himself.”

I was already in my car when he hopped onto the hood of a car painted up like an Easter egg, and I knew I was going to turn him into a real Humpty Dumpty. I stepped on the pedal and when I looked up I saw sparks trailing down behind me where the power pole touched the ceiling, and I imagined my thoughts being pushed out like sparklers. I was smaller than him so my car was faster. About the second time around I got him in my sights and slammed his car into a corner. He tried to work his way into the middle of the track but I slammed him again and wedged him between two cars. I kept backing up and slamming into him, then backing up and slamming into him and his head was snapping back and forth like I was shaking him real good and finally he yelled, “Enough already!”

But it wasn’t enough for me. I kept letting him have it. He stood up on his seat and tried to jump to another car and I hit him again and he lurched forward and there was a burst of sparks that showered down on us like a Fourth of July rocket blowing up in front of my eyes. Dad hollered out and all at once my car stopped moving.

“My hand!” he cried, and hopped around on the smooth metal floor. “I got hold of the electric pole and it zapped me. Well, at least it’s not you,” he said, blowing on his hand. “You have to pitch. All I have to do is yell. Good thing it didn’t get my mouth.” He began to laugh like some maniac character who eats flies for supper, and I began to laugh too, not because his hand was burned but because suddenly I seemed full of electricity and I imagined if I opened my eyes real wide and my mouth and nose and ears and you looked inside of me you’d see nothing but sparks flying around.

“Does it hurt real bad?” I finally asked.

“Nay,” he said. “When I was a kid—and this is the God’s honest truth—Granny used to give me a paper clip and tell me to put it in the wall socket because she knew a zap settled me down. Heck, even these days a couple a kilowatts now and again helps put me to sleep.”

“Then give me five,” I said, laughing.

“You’re a sick puppy,” he said. “I got a blister the size of a pancake on my hand and you want to slap it.”

I just laughed even louder. “Splat!” I said, imagining the blister popping open as I smacked it.

“We better get out of here,” Dad said.

We went back to the car. “Open one of those beers for me. It’ll keep my bad hand cool while I drink.”

I did as he told me and we drove back to the house.

“Well, tomorrow’s the big game,” Dad said. “Get a good night’s sleep.”

“Okay,” I said. I was exhausted. But as I walked to my room I knew I wasn’t going to sleep. I hadn’t slept right in days. I was up so much even Pablo was growling at me for keeping him awake. I lay in bed and listened to every wheezing breath Grandma took and I rubbed the used patch on my belly like Aladdin rubbing his lamp and whispered, “I wish I was home with Mom. I wish the game was over. I wish I was normal again. I wish Dad didn’t scare me. I wish …”