by Jack Gantos
I stomped around the floor with a ruler, shouting, “Wake up! Time to sing for your supper. Eat! Eat!” I slapped the ruler against the wall and startled them into moving their lizard lard. But they were useless and only lurched forward a few inches before taking another siesta.
“Forget that idea,” I said out loud. “This is a man’s job.”
I got the flyswatter and went to work. Whack! One down. Whack! Another. Killing them properly is all in the wrist. If I swatted them with too much force, I splattered fly juice all over the wall and had to scrub them off with a rag dipped in bleach. It worked better to snap my wrist very crisply, like hitting the triangle in music class.
Whack! Whack! Whack! I became bloodthirsty. One at a time wasn’t good enough. I lined up two at a time. Three at a time. I swatted them out of midair. Eventually I became so fast I grabbed them with my bare hand and held them underwater in the sink until they drowned. By the time my frenzy was over, I counted 173 dead. But it didn’t make a dent in the fly population. One hundred and seventy-three flies immediately buzzed through my window and took their place. I tried to rally my lizard workers to eat more. But they were stuffed, and when I smacked the ruler around their tails they wouldn’t even tremble. I accidentally hit one and cut its tail off. I picked it up and pressed the broken part against the tip of my nose. The lizard blood was thick and gummy. The tail wiggled around like a tiny bullwhip. “Mush. Mush!” I shouted and lowered my nose so the little whip lashed their backs. They didn’t even twitch. They stuck to the wall like refrigerator magnets.
I collected my flies and pressed them into my diary. Crunch! It was like making a fly sandwich. Then I took a pen and wrote 173 on the plastic flyswatter flap. I planned to kill one million, save them for proof, and get into the Guinness Book of World Records.
But after a while the flies were no challenge. I had to move up. I had to find something more difficult to exterminate. I was getting older and killing flies was a kid’s game. I went out to the back yard. We had an abandoned well filled with bats. The well opening was cemented over except for a hole the size of a brick. Every evening a ribbon of bats flew out of the hole to eat insects. They spread out and darted overhead, cutting the air up into little jigsaw pieces. Now they were difficult to hit. That was a challenge.
The only problem was that Dad had told me not to mess with them. “They are animals,” he said. “You never throw rocks at animals.” He told me this after he caught me whipping broken shards of bathroom tile at them. He said he was worried about me hurting the bats, but I knew it was really that he was worried about where the pieces of tile and rocks would land. There were a lot of houses around and he was touchy about breaking windows.
Johnny Naime told me that it was impossible to hit a bat with a rock. “They have built-in radar,” he explained. “You can throw rocks at ’em all day and never hit them. You can’t even shoot a bat. They move faster than bullets.”
Cool, I thought. They were just the challenge I was after.
I got a yardstick and poked it down into the hole and stirred it around. I didn’t hear anything. I put my eye to the hole and looked in. I was a bit afraid one of them would come shooting out and bite me on the eyeball, but I knew that was impossible. Dad said they ate only bugs and vegetables.
Just then BoBo II brushed against the back of my leg. I jumped up into the air. “God! You scared me.”
Betsy had got him as a birthday gift. She named him after her other black spaniel, BoBo I. That was a mistake. BoBo I was a loser, and this one was even worse.
He rolled over and fell asleep. Something was wrong with that dog. It needed vitamins. And it smelled.
Suddenly a bat flew up out of the hole and fluttered back and forth overhead. I picked up a bunch of rocks and fired at it. I didn’t even get close.
Then a stream of them came out in a steady black line. They zipped back and forth above the house eating millions of flies. “Eat more!” I shouted. “Get fat! Slow down and I’ll nail you.” I threw about a hundred rocks. Everything missed. They were about a million times harder to hit than flies.
As quickly as they had all come out of the hole, they returned into it, like the smoke sucking back into Aladdin’s lamp. I waited a few minutes for them to settle down, then picked up a brick.
“If their radar is so good,” I said to BoBo II, “then they can dodge rocks in their sleep.” I dropped the brick down into the hole. Nothing happened. I chucked a few more pieces of brick into the hole.
A single bat came out of the well and dove at my head. It startled me and I yelled and tripped backward over BoBo II. My feet went up over my head and the bat zoomed in on my sneaker and bit it on the rubber tip. I didn’t know what bat teeth looked like, but they went through my tennis shoe and missed my toe. If it’s a vampire bat, I thought, I’m a quarter-inch from being turned into a vampire and living with Dracula for the rest of time. I had seen the movie.
I pumped my foot up and down, but I couldn’t shake it off. I threw a rock up at it, but missed and hit my ankle. I picked up another rock and whipped it at the bat. I missed, but I heard the sound of breaking glass. Oh crap! I thought. What had I hit?
But I still had the bat to deal with. I used the toe of my good shoe to wedge the heel off my bat shoe. It fell to the ground, but the bat hung on. I jumped up and hobbled off to find what I broke.
It couldn’t have been worse. It was Dad’s office window. “Ay, chihuahua,” I moaned. “Now I’ve done it.”
This was the second time I’d broken Dad’s office window. The first time, I hit it with a tennis ball. I was playing by myself against the garage door when I smacked the ball right through the pane. It was an accident.
Dad gave me a warning which basically went: “If it happens again, I’m going to use my belt.” He meant business.
I wanted to run but knew hiding would just make it worse. As Dad would say, “Take your punishment like a man.” He was right. I couldn’t act like a boy forever. I was already thirteen. I squatted down and picked up all the glass shards. When I was little, I always called broken glass “ghost’s teeth.” That seemed like a thousand years ago. This was just broken glass, plain and simple
After I cleaned up, I wrote a note and taped it on his office door. I didn’t tell him about the bat. One thing at a time, I cautioned myself. Then I returned to my room to wait. Maybe he would just come in and tell me one of his lesson stories. I flipped through the section of my diary where I wrote them down. There wasn’t one for my particular problem.
“Once upon a time,” I wrote, “there was a son who didn’t listen to his father. He repeatedly screwed up. But the father was patient. And eventually the son figured out how not to get into trouble every day of the week. Eventually he thanked his father for his patience.”
But that evening, when he opened my bedroom door, his belt was already off. I didn’t even get a chance to explain my side of the story.
“You know the rules,” he said.
“It was an accident,” I replied, lowering my eyes.
“There is no such thing as an accident,” he said, quoting himself. “There is right and there is wrong. There is thoughtful thinking and thoughtless thinking. Your thinking today was thoughtless and what you did was wrong. That is not an accident.”
I felt trapped by his thinking. “It was an accident,” I said weakly. “Don’t you get it?”
“Children have accidents. Men make choices. Just do as you’re told,” he replied impatiently.
I put my hands out and leaned against the wall. He reached into my back pocket, removed my wallet, and flicked it onto the bed. Then he reared back and gave me five cracks in a row.
When he finished he slid the belt through the loops of his pants. It looked like a snake curling around his waist. “You’ll never grow up properly if you don’t listen to me,” he said, and left the room.
I pulled down my pants and sat on the cool floor. I decided I’d never let this happen again. I’d nev
er break his window and I’d never let him hit me. I was tired of being on the bottom of the heap. I wanted some power of my own. I was sick of beating up flies, lizards, and bats. Those were kids’ games, and the longer I played like a kid, the more I was treated like one, and the less power I had.
That night, when Mom and Dad came home from the Beau Brummell Club, they started arguing. I listened at my bedroom door. From the volume of their voices I could tell they were in the living room. They were arguing about the same stuff they always fought over. Mom wanted to return to Pennsylvania. She didn’t like being so far away from her family.
“Nonsense,” Dad replied. “If we lived back there, I’d be out in the snow framing houses for peanuts. That place is a dead end. We have no future there.”
“Well, what do we have here?” she asked. “A bunch of rummy friends and no family.”
He poured a drink. “We have friends,” he said.
“And you are drinking too much,” she added.
“Don’t start that again,” he snapped, and sat down heavily on the couch.
I picked up my diary and put a pen between two blank pages. It’s now or never, I said to myself. I’ve got to fight back. If he wants me to listen to his every word, I’ve got to be close enough to hear them all. I took a deep breath, opened the door, and went down the hall. I stood by the dining-room table and stared at them. Dad was spread across the couch, with his head propped up on the arm. Mom was standing. Her black evening shoes dangled in her hand by their heel straps. She had a tissue in the other hand and was wiping off her red lipstick. I caught her speaking in midsentence.
“ … and I called Mother,” she said, “and told her I wanted to come home for a few weeks.”
“Do what you want,” Dad said, and waved at a fly. “I can get along just fine without you complaining all day and night.”
Then he saw me. He hopped up onto his feet and put his drink down as though he hadn’t said or done anything nasty.
Just like an adult, I thought. Always trying to act innocent. They use one set of rules around us and another for themselves.
“What are you doing up?” he demanded.
Mom propped her hand on her hip.
“Writing,” I replied, trying to keep my voice steady.
“Writing what?”
“In my diary,” I said.
“He means what are you writing?” Mom said, stepping between us.
Then I unleashed the line I had been waiting to use. The one that I hoped would turn the tide and put me in control.
“I’m writing down all the things you say,” I replied. I looked down at my diary and began to write his last question.
“Stop it,” he ordered.
I wrote down Stop it in my diary.
“I think you should return to your room and read,” Mom suggested, crossing her arms. I slowly wrote down what she’d said.
“Let me see what you’ve written,” he commanded. He was angry. He picked up his drink and finished it. When he lowered his glass his eyes were red and narrow. My grandmother had once said to me, “Alcohol can turn the gentlest lamb into a lion.” I believed her.
“Give me that.” He held out his hand.
“No,” I said. “When Mom gave me the diary she said it was mine.”
He groaned and rolled his eyes. “Your mother told you that?”
“Yes.”
Mom took a deep breath and let it all out slowly. “Anyway,” she said to Dad, “I don’t want to talk about it tonight.”
Dad took a step toward me. I bit my lip. Here he comes, I thought. Don’t look away. No matter what he does, don’t look away. He’s going to grab my diary and toss it across the room and take out his belt. But he didn’t. He ran his hands through his hair, turned, and left the room.
“If I were you,” Mom said once he was safely down the hall, “I wouldn’t try this stunt too many times.”
Why not? I thought to myself. It worked. I’ll do it a hundred times in a row if I want to.
“And another thing,” she said. “I don’t like your attitude.”
Great! I thought. I could feel the new power in me. The power to annoy her.
“I think you need to go to your room,” she said.
“Fine with me,” I replied. “It will give me more time to write all this down in my diary.”
She groaned. I could tell she regretted getting me a diary. But it was too late to take it back.
I stood up and retreated down the hall. I was feeling very powerful as I closed and locked my bedroom door. I opened my French doors and stepped out. I climbed up into the avocado tree and looked up and down the street. I was taller than any of the houses. I was taller than Dad. “The pen is mightier than the sword,” I whispered. I finally understood what that meant.
A few days later Mom opened my bedroom door and sat on the edge of my bed. She had just returned from having her hair and nails done. “I have something to tell you,” she said seriously. “Sit down.”
I sat next to her and sniffed the air. She smelled like hair spray and nail-polish remover and lots of gardenia perfume. I took a deep breath and held it in.
“I spoke with Grandma and have decided to go up and visit her for a month. I’m taking Pete and Eric … but you and Betsy have to stay here.”
“Why?” I blurted. “I’m always left behind.” I felt betrayed.
“Because your father and I had a talk and agreed that if we stay in Barbados longer than the summer … maybe for a long time … you will have to get ready for school here.”
“But it’s July,” I said. “July!”
She paused. “You have to go to summer school,” she said. “The school system here is more advanced than in Florida. If you don’t go to summer school to catch up, you’ll have to repeat sixth grade.”
“No way.” I groaned. Florida was screwing me up again. I had told her my last school was for simpletons only, but she didn’t believe me. Now she knows, and I have to suffer the consequences. As usual.
“Which means,” Mom continued, “that you have to stay here with Betsy and Dad for a month. I know this is not fun, but Marlene will cook and keep your clothes clean and you are old enough to be responsible.”
“I’m old enough when you want me to be responsible so you can do what you want. But I’m always too young when it comes to doing what I want.”
“You’re not a kid anymore,” she said. “You are a young man. Act like one.” She stood up. “I don’t want to hear any back talk,” she said in her bossy voice. “You understand that this is the best situation we can work out for everyone. This whole family doesn’t revolve around you and your needs.” She frowned, which meant she had spoken the Truth According to Mom and that was that. She left the room.
“You’ve just thrown me to the wolves,” I shouted. “The wolves!”
She opened the door and smiled at me. She was so beautiful I forgot to be mad. “Your sister said the same thing,” she said, and laughed. She glided toward me and gave me a big hug. “You know,” she said, “I think this will give you and your dad some time together to smooth out some of your friction.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. I was pretty sure our relationship was about winning and losing, about who was the boss and who was the peon.
“You know what I mean,” she said. “You’re getting older and you are starting to bump heads with your dad.”
I wasn’t ready to discuss it, so I changed the subject. “I’ll miss you,” I said.
“I’ll miss you more than you’ll miss me,” she replied, and became teary-eyed, which made me feel like a jerk for ever saying anything mean to her. Even though she was leaving me with Dad and Betsy for a month, she was my mom. It was my job to be nice to her, no matter what.
Two days later they were gone and Betsy and I were eating dinner with Dad. Marlene served a platter of flying fish and okra.
“I love this fish,” I said to Marlene.
“Thank you,” she said in her f
ormal voice. When she passed me, she bent forward and whispered, “We’ll have chicken hearts this week.”
“Yum.”
“Tomorrow,” Dad started, delivering the opening word to the evening announcements, “the driver will pick you up and take you to the prep school. Marlene will have your lunches packed. After school you’ll come directly home and do your studies. Marlene will have dinner for you every night at six. If I’m not home, eat without me and be in bed by nine. Any questions?”
Betsy didn’t argue with him. I didn’t either. I pulled my plate close to my chest, lowered my mouth, and scraped the food in.
“Look at him,” Betsy said arrogantly. “He uses BoBo II’s rules of eating. First, eat everything as quickly as possible. Second, eat everything you dropped on the table or floor. Third, wash it down by slurping loudly. Fourth, nose around for more. Fifth, when there is no more, lick your lips and drift away.”
I stared at Dad. If Mom were here she would ask Betsy to apologize.
Dad laughed. “You know,” he said to Betsy as if I weren’t present, “the best way to feed Jack would be to put a funnel in his mouth and just pour it down his throat.”
Now it was her turn to laugh. Without Mom, I was a Ping-Pong ball whacked back and forth.
“May I be excused?” I asked, and was halfway out of my chair.
“Only if you’ll get our fishing gear organized,” Dad said. “I thought you’d like to join me.”
“All right.” I loved to fish.
I ran into the kitchen and called Shiva. We were supposed to go running later on.
