Jack Adrift

by Jack Gantos

  “And one I should put to use right now,” she said, turning and marching back down the hall.

  I was just imagining what Act II might be between Mom and Dad, when Betsy slowly stood up and leaned over me.

  “Hold still,” she cautioned, as she raised her open hand behind her head. “This is going to sting, but don’t think about it or you’ll twitch.”

  Then she cut loose. Slap! She smacked me across my ear. I thought I’d been hit with a baseball bat. My Will Rogers book flew to the other side of the room and I slipped off the edge of my chair.

  “Why’d you do that?” I yelped, and hopped up.

  “Mosquito,” she said. “They carry yellow fever. I may have saved your life.”

  “I think you just wanted to hit me because you’re in a bad mood,” I said.

  She scoffed. “Check your ear,” she ordered.

  I wiped my finger over my stinging ear, then looked at it. There was blood.

  “See,” she said. “I nailed a big fat one. You should thank me.”

  “For puncturing my eardrum?” I replied.

  “No,” she argued. “I killed something that had obviously punctured you.”

  I didn’t want to believe her. I wanted to think she was just mean enough to suddenly haul off and swat me around the room like a tetherball. But she was right. We were having a big mosquito problem. They were everywhere. At night they were matted up against the window screens like a fur coat. Mom kept citronella candles lit around the doorways, but that didn’t scare them off. When the front door opened, mosquitoes poured in like water. We chased them around the house with rolled-up newspapers, flyswatters, and slippers. Some mosquitoes were so full of blood that when we smashed them against the wall, they splattered like tiny balloons full of paint. Mom patrolled behind us and washed the splat marks off the wall, but I could still see a faint gray-and-red stain left behind.

  With everyone in such a bad mood, I went outside to sit. I’d rather fight with mosquitoes, I thought while rubbing my ear, than with my family. I sprayed myself with bug repellent and stood next to the swamp. The mosquitoes buzzed around my face but they didn’t like the kerosene smell of the spray. When I looked east it was already dark. When I looked west the sky seemed to have a purplish black eye. It was hard not to think about the differences between Mom and Dad. For Mom, life was about being a good person and living with pride. Dad just wanted to get ahead any way he could. I wished I could be both of them, and get ahead with pride. But by the way they talked you had to choose to be one or the other—not both. I knew we would leave Cape Hatteras but I should try harder to “live up to my potential and get better grades” as Miss Noelle had put it. Just because I knew I would never see her again didn’t mean I could slack off.

  I looked out at the mosquitoes. They were rising up from the swamp like clouds of black smoke. “It’s going to be life or death for you guys,” I shouted. “You can’t choose both!” I stepped forward and sprayed at a cloud of them. A few with drenched wings fell into the water and struggled until a small frog popped up from the swampy ooze and swallowed them. But no matter how many I killed, or were eaten, we couldn’t keep up with how rapidly they were hatching. Mom had called the health department and they had promised to come out and spray the swamp, but the epidemic was everywhere and the spray trucks were busy in rich neighborhoods.

  It was a relief to me when Julian came out of his house wearing a khaki explorer’s hat with mosquito netting that covered his entire head and was tucked into the neck of his T-shirt.

  “Guess what-what-what!” he hollered.

  “You’re going on a safari,” I replied.

  “No,” he said, grinning. “We’re moving. My-my-my dad quit the Navy.”

  “You can’t just quit,” I said.

  “I know,” he said. “I mean my dad is going to get out early and we’re going to move to Vicksburg.”

  “When are you going? Because my dad quit, too.”

  “Next week. He’s sending us away first and he’ll join us later.”

  “It was nice knowing you,” I said sadly.

  “I’m not gone-gone-gone yet,” he replied. “We still have a week to do weird stuff.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “My dad said I can have all his model warships. He and I put together a whole fleet of them this year but he’s so sick and tired of the Navy, he says he never wants to see another ship again.”

  “What do you want to do with them?”

  “Let’s have a global total war destruction sea battle,” he gushed. “You get your ships and we’ll get some fireworks and blow them to kingdom come.”

  “Cool,” I said.

  “You have any money?” he asked.

  “A few bucks.”

  “Bring it tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll go down to the Big Bang Barn and buy them after class. They sell lethal stuff.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Tomorrow we’ll have a blowout. The last ship floating rules the world.”

  “There won’t-won’t-won’t be a winner,” he said. “We’ll destroy the entire planet. There’ll be nothing left of Earth but a cloud of toxic space dust.”

  “Can we leave Earth and colonize another planet?” I asked.

  “Only if you have big-big-big bucks,” he said. “My dad said poor people are the first to go in a war.”

  “Julian!” his mother called out.”Get in here before you get infected with equine encephalitis.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Horse fever,” he replied. “Your brain swells up and your head pops.”

  “Julian!” she called again, and he took off running.

  When I went back into my room I looked over at my ship models. I had an aircraft carrier, the Kitty Hawk. A submarine, the Narwhal. A command ship, the Coronado. And a few World War II battleships along with my favorite model—PT-109, President Kennedy’s torpedo boat that was rammed and sunk by a Japanese ship in the South Pacific. It had taken me all year to save up for them and build them but now, like Dad, I was ready to blow my Navy away—ready to sink the lot of them and move on to other battles.

  The next day after school we went down to the Big Bang Barn.

  “Let me do the talking,” Julian said, as we opened the door. “I’m a pro.”

  We walked toward a man sitting at a desk reading the sports page of the newspaper. “What can I do for you, boys,” he said, without lowering the paper.

  “I was hoping you could sell us some ordnance,” Julian said, like he was in the Special Forces.

  The man lowered the paper and looked us over pretty good, then smiled. “Just how old are you?”

  “Sixteen,” Julian replied. “I’m a midget.”

  “That’s good enough for me,” the man said. “Now let me see the color of your money.”

  Julian spread out his life savings, about twenty-five dollars. The man scooped up the bills. “Follow me,” he said. We passed by the legal stuff—the sparklers and pinwheels and volcanoes and magic snakes, and then went through a door into a back room. He gave us each a small paper bag. “Start filling up,” he said. “I’ll tell you when you’ve hit your limit.”

  We filled up our bags with the really powerful stuff, and after a few minutes the man said, “Okay, that’s enough. You don’t want to blow up the whole planet.”

  “Yes, we do,” Julian said.

  “Well, have a blast,” the man said, and chuckled at himself.

  We turned and got out of there as fast as we could. “This is going to be awesome,” Julian said on the way home. Then just before we reached our trailers he said, “Take my bag and hide it overnight at your house. My mom will explode if she finds it. Then tomorrow after school we’ll have the blowout.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  At dinner that night, after we all took our seats and Betsy dimmed the lights to keep the mosquitoes at bay, Mom and Dad started in on Act II of their play. We were eating boiled potatoes with lots of salt, butte
r, and parsley flakes; pork hot dogs; and celery filled with either peanut butter or Cheez Whiz. Mom had said she was just using up the odds and ends in the refrigerator. Then, in order to get some conversation going, she asked Dad how his day went.

  “Crummy,” he said, crunching down on the celery. “Dang Navy. They called Julian’s dad and me into the front office and gave us a list of all the benefits we won’t be eligible for if we take the OTH discharge.”

  “Did you read the list?” she asked.

  “Why bother?” he replied. “I told them if they let me just walk out the door and keep going, then they could keep all their benefits.”

  “You didn’t?” Mom said, shocked.

  “Did, too,” he replied.

  “Well, some of those benefits could help your family,” she said indignantly. “Did you ever think of that?”

  “Let them rot in you-know-where with their benefits,” he said, and took a deep breath, and hung his head.

  “Why don’t you just admit it,” Mom said. “You do care what the Navy thinks of you.”

  Dad’s head sprang back up. “I’m not going to let the Navy tell me how I should feel about myself.”

  “I agree with that,” Mom said. “But I don’t agree that you don’t care. When I know you do.”

  “Look,” he said. “The bottom line is I want out. I don’t care if they think I’m a failure or not.”

  “Then leave with your head held high,” she said, “and we won’t feel you’re a failure either. But you behave like you are running away with your tail between your legs.”

  Dad scooted his chair back. “I am not running away,” he said sternly.

  Mom stood her ground. “You are a quitter,” she said. “And a quitter is someone who gets up and runs.”

  Dad angrily tossed his napkin on top of his plate, stood up, and took a few steps for the door before he realized he was doing exactly what Mom had said—running away. “This is my life,” he growled. “And I’ll live it the way I see fit and I don’t need you to tell me what to do, or what is right or wrong. You sound just like the Navy—maybe worse!”

  Mom stood up, turned on one foot, and stomped down the hall. Then she stopped and glanced back over her shoulder. “If you can’t admit the truth of how you feel about this to me, I can only hope you’ll admit it to yourself.” Then she walked into the bedroom. Betsy and Pete stood up and followed her.

  I looked over at Dad. He shrugged and rested his hand on the doorknob. “Don’t worry,” he said to me. “The worst that can happen to you is that you grow up to become exactly like your old man.” Then he opened the door and, as he left, his place was taken by a dark silhouette of mosquitoes.

  That night Dad slept in the car. I know because I stayed awake and waited for him to come home. I heard the car pull up into the yard. The engine stopped. The hot metal ticked. But the car door didn’t open, nor did the front door to the house. It confused me that Dad claimed he didn’t mind that the Navy thought he was doing a lousy job, because I’m sure he did mind. He always complained about people who had no pride in their work. And when I brought my report card home he always read it carefully and, if I received less than an A in any subject, he always accused me of not trying hard enough. And he would end up saying something like, “What’s wrong with you? Don’t you have any pride in your work?”

  In the early morning I heard him taking a shower. I got up and went down to the kitchen to get the water started for coffee. I knew he’d need a cup. When I saw him next, I thought he had the measles. He was covered with hundreds of red spots.

  “Dang mosquitoes,” he said, scratching at his bumpy forearms. “They ate me alive last night.”

  “I read in the paper where a woman’s car broke down in the Everglades and the mosquitoes sucked all her blood out.”

  “I can believe that,” he said glumly. “I think I need a transfusion.”

  “Coffee’s almost ready,” I said.

  “I’ll pick some up on the way to the base,” he said quietly. “Before you-know-who gets up and wants the rest of my blood.”

  “See you later?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Don’t worry. I always come around to seeing the better side of things. It just takes me a little longer than most.” Then he was out the door.

  School was pretty much the same except that something in me had changed. Now that I knew we were going to move, I felt my interest in everyone and everything shrinking. Instead of wanting to hang on tighter, I wanted to let go. Even of Miss Noelle. It was easier that way, to act like people no longer mattered much to me. Maybe Dad was feeling a bit the same. He knew he was pushing off and it was simply easier for him to say he didn’t like the Navy rather than say he was going to miss it. I could understand that. I was doing the same thing. As he would say, “You’re a lot more like your old man than you’ll admit.” He was right. I always wanted to believe that I was more like Mom, but when I was honest with myself, I knew there was a lot of Dad in me, too.

  After school that day, Julian and I met up as planned and walked home together. Then he went into his house and gathered up his models. I got mine, plus the explosives, and we met back out at the swamp. He positioned his ships on one end of the water and I set up mine. We were only about twenty feet apart.

  “Okay-okay-okay!” he shouted. “I wrote a prenuclear wasteland song that I want to sing before we get started.” He struck his air-guitar pose.

  “Sing your atomic anthem,” I said.

  “Oh, say can you see-see-see,” he screeched. “By the dawn’s early light. The mushroom cloud-cloud-cloud … that turns might into right!” Suddenly he tossed his air guitar to one side and picked up a cherry bomb. “Sneak-sneak-sneak attack!” he shouted. He lit the fuse with a Zippo lighter and threw the first salvo my way. It blew up about an inch above the Kitty Hawk’s flight deck. One moment it was an aircraft carrier and after an explosion that knocked me back on my butt, the ship was nothing more than slivers of plastic and gray smoke.

  “Direct hit-hit-hit!” he shouted, and lit another.

  That got me going. I hopped up and lit three Roman candles at once. “Firing nuke-tipped rockets!” I shouted, and let loose with a neon barrage of fireballs. He kept lobbing cherry bombs and I countered with a string of M-80s. For about two minutes it sounded like a world war.

  And then it was over. No ships were left. Pieces of gray plastic floated alongside scraps of red-and-yellow fireworks wrappers. From the blasts, stunned mosquitoes covered the surface of the water like surviving sailors. Then, from below, the frogs gathered to slurp them up like the sharks had done to sailors during the sea battles of World War II.

  “Who won?” Julian yelled, fanning the smoke from his face.

  “Nobody,” I said. “The world as we know it is over.”

  Suddenly his mom came around the corner. “I told you never to play with fireworks,” she said, getting ready to give him a crack.

  “It’s all his fault-fault-fault!” Julian shouted, pointing at me.

  “Don’t you lie to me-me-me,” she said, imitating him. “He’s bad,” she said, “but you’re worse.”

  Then before I could run away my mom opened the side door.

  “Jack,” she hollered, “what’s going on out there? I was in the shower and it sounded like a gunfight.”

  “Nothing,” I replied.

  “I swear, you get more like your father every day,” she said with disgust in her voice. “Now go to your room.”

  My room was the one place I wanted to be. It was easy to sit by myself and feel all alone in the world. Like Dad sleeping out in the car, it was easier to just not talk about things that bothered me. It was easier to try to forget my past than to sort it out. It made me sad to think that, like Dad, I was already wanting a part of myself to disappear. I reached across my bed to my nightstand where I had saved one model, PT-109. I pulled it close to me, as if I were keeping it in a safe harbor. I didn’t want to let it go. It was a little bi
t of hope that my year had been worth remembering.

  Act III started while Mom cooked dinner. She had a look on her face that told me she was going to tell Dad about my playing with fireworks. But when he came home with a big bouquet of flowers and a card that brought tears to her eyes when she read it, I thought she might decide to give me a break and just go with the good feeling of the evening. Then, when she let him kiss her and give her a back-bending hug, I knew I was in the clear.

  Not long into dinner Dad looked at all of us. “It’s just hard for me to admit failure,” he said. “I wanted this Navy stint to work out but it was a mistake. Like I said before, I don’t take orders too well anymore.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that,” she said. “I can’t even get you to listen to good sense.”

  He gave her a don’t start that again look.

  “What I mean,” she said, “is that you don’t have to admit to failure. You just have to tell the truth all the time and then failure is never an issue.”

  “I don’t like to lose at anything,” he said.

  That reminded me of a Will Rogers quote. “Hey,” I said, “Will Rogers said to live your life so that whenever you lose, you’re ahead.”

  Dad gave me a puzzled look. “You know,” he said, “for a guy who would rather buy the Brooklyn Bridge than sell it, you really have no ground to stand on when it comes to telling other people how to live their lives.”

  I wasn’t sure if he was just teasing me, or if he was miffed. But Mom came to my defense. “He was only trying to be helpful,” she said to Dad.

  He looked at me. “With help like that, who needs enemies?”

  “Did Will Rogers say that?” I asked.

  “No, I did,” he replied, and tapped himself on the chest.

  I changed the subject. “Julian said his dad is sending them all away before school ends.”

  “That’s because Julian’s dad would rather be in an empty house trailer eating TV dinners and drinking cheap beer, with his dirty shoes propped up on the coffee table, than be with his family,” Dad said.