by Jack Gantos
“I hope not,” I replied.
Mom opened the door and stuck her head in. “I’m all ready,” she announced.
“One minute,” he replied. She closed the door. He just shook his head and slowly stepped back a few paces. Then he crouched down and held his hand on his hip like a cartoon gunslinger. I recognized the pose. We used to play “Showdown” when I was a little kid, when shooting each other full of lead was just a game.
“Get ready to defend yourself,” he drawled out in a cowboy voice.
I backed away from him with my eyes on his eyes, my hand hovering over my hip. My fingers twitched.
“Draw!” he shouted as his hand came up. He pointed his finger at me and fired as I dove for cover and tumbled across the bed. I tried to draw my six-shooter but he fired again. He missed as I rolled off the bed and into the thin space between the mattress and the wall.
“I missed you this time,” he growled in a varmint voice and blew smoke from his fingertip. “But I’ll be gunnin’ for you.”
I was going to pop back up and ambush him, but he turned off the overhead light and slipped out the door. The game was over.
In a moment Mom opened the door again. “Jack,” she called, in her concerned voice, “are you in here?”
I didn’t answer. I stayed crouched behind the bed. I did my part, I thought. You do yours.
“Let’s go,” Dad hollered from the living room. “I’m hungry.”
“I promise there won’t be any more guns,” she whispered and closed the door. I didn’t move until I heard the car start. Then I crawled back on the bed. I stood and jumped up and down on the mattress. The springs creaked as I got higher and higher. I reached out in the darkness and touched the ceiling with the palms of my hands.
“I’m thirteen years old now,” I said. “I bet I live to be a hundred. That’s eighty-seven more years of dodging bullets.”
Thurston Branch
Dad’s office was dark and cool and smelled like his bay-rum aftershave. He had already left the house. I slipped in and closed the door behind me. I carefully sat down in his swivel chair to keep it from squeaking. I wasn’t supposed to be in there. The newspaper was spread out across his desk. I was searching for the movie section.
The front page still carried news of the drought and heat wave. It had been ninety-three degrees yesterday, and it was ninety-three days since it last rained. Everyone was worried about having enough drinking water. Most houses were built on top of a hollow cement cistern the size of a swimming pool. When it rained, the water ran off the roof, down the gutter, and into the cistern. It was good clean water, and most people used the rainwater for drinking and used well water for cleaning and watering their lawns.
“Water, water everywhere,” I sang. “But not enough to drink.”
I turned the page. An article was tided BOY STILL MISSING. A boy who lived over by Crane Bay had left his house a week ago and had not been seen since. Not a trace of him had been found. His parents were begging everyone to help. This was the third newspaper story on him. It gave me the creeps.
I didn’t know how anyone could get lost on the island. It was so small, only twenty-one miles long and fourteen miles across at the widest point. It was like a freckle on the globe. Even if I got lost, broke both my legs, and had to pull myself through the cane fields with my hands, I could still make it back home.
I removed the scissors from Dad’s desk drawer and cut out the article.
“Jack,” Mom yelled up the hallway from the dining room. She was writing letters while Eric slept. “You and Pete better get a wiggle on if you’re going to the movies.”
I folded the piece of paper in half and shoved it into my back pocket. Then I put the scissors where I found them, so Dad wouldn’t pitch a fit. Quickly, I flipped ahead to the movie section. Them! and Night of the Living Dead were playing. Cool. Night of the Living Dead was filmed outside my hometown in Pennsylvania. Maybe I’ll see some of my relatives lurching out of their graves to eat human flesh.
I opened the door and stuck my head out. “Okay,” I hollered back. It’s funny, I thought, how some families actually talk face-to-face and some families just yell from room to room. And another thing, it’s like when I ask Dad to hand me something, he never puts it directly into my hand. He gets about three feet away and tosses it at me like a grenade.
Mom yelled again. “Jack! You better get going!”
“I’m movin’!” I yelled back.
Pete and I were getting ready to walk down to Bay Street and catch the bus into Bridgetown. Television in Barbados was pretty lousy and they didn’t run any good scary stuff. Every Saturday, the Rockley Movie Theatre played a double feature. They were mostly old black-and-white horror movies I had watched on Creature Double Feature back in Fort Lauderdale. The host of that TV show was a corpse named M. T. Graves. He had one huge hairy eyebrow and fake buckteeth. Every Saturday afternoon, he’d open his squeaky coffin and pop out to announce the features.
I ran up the hall and into Pete’s room. “Come on,” I yelled.
“I’m almost ready,” he yelled back. He was standing inside his closet, searching through all his pants pockets. His pockets were supposed to be a secret hiding place, but the only secret about them was why he couldn’t find anything once he hid it in them.
“The movie is going to start without us,” I yelled. “And you know how I hate that.” I jiggled the Lemon Squash bottle caps in my pants pocket. For ten bottle caps and ten cents you got to see two movies, plus there was a chance to win a door prize. We always got the bottle caps up the street at old Mr. Hill’s store. He saved them for us.
“I only have eight,” Pete yelled and recoiled in terror.
“Jerk,” I said and squinted as I lost patience. I dashed back into my bedroom. It was like this every week. He’d hide his bottle caps from himself, then he’d lose some, then he’d forget his ten cents, then he’d forget money for candy, and then I’d have to bail him out. As I opened my cigar box, I whispered to him, “Go ask Mom for extra candy money and meet me out front.”
“Mom,” he yelled as soon as he stepped into the hallway. “Can we have extra candy money?”
“No!” she yelled back. “And don’t forget to brush your teeth.”
We hurried down the street but stopped when we saw a crowd of people gathered on the Naimes’ front yard.
“Maybe someone died,” I said to Pete. “Let’s see.”
“We’ll be late,” Pete said.
“This is better than a movie,” I replied. “This is real life.”
I grabbed his hand and squirmed through the crowd until we came out into a clearing. I saw Johnny and asked him what was happening.
“Mr. Branch is searching for water,” he whispered as if we were in church. He pointed at an old man who was as thin and bent as a praying mantis. He was dressed in a white short-sleeved shirt and brown bow tie. His hair was cut down to the nub and the part was a sharp line that might have been made by a bullet that just grazed his scalp. It was hot under the sun and the sweat made shiny trails through the dust on his outstretched arms.
“What’s that thing he’s holding?” I asked Johnny.
“A divining rod,” he replied.
I didn’t know what that was. It looked like the wishbone from a five-hundred-pound turkey. He held the two tips of the Y-shaped end gently between his bony fingers and closed his eyes. They fluttered as he slipped into a trance. He began to hum as he slowly inched forward. The tip of the divining rod wobbled up and down. Pete and I looked at each other, shrugged our shoulders, and followed at a distance. I didn’t want to get in his way. He might trip and drive that stick right through my foot.
After a few passes back and forth across the dead lawn, the tip of the rod suddenly went straight down with so much force that Mr. Branch dropped forward on his knees. The crowd “Aahed,” and a few people clapped. When he stood up, he smiled broadly and blinked sleepily at all of us who had gathered to watch him. He pu
lled a large white handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his face and neck.
“There is good sweet water here,” he announced, tramping the dusty ground with his foot. “Dig straight down and you will find drinking water.”
Mr. Naime peeled a few crisp bills off a wad held together with a gold money clip. Mr. Branch took it, frowned, and folded it into his top pocket. “I shouldn’t accept payment for this job,” he said loud enough for us to hear. “God has blessed me with this power and I should only do it to help my fellow man … but I need the little bit of money to help out my family.”
Everyone just stood limp and slack-faced after he said that. I’m not sure why. I guessed it was because he was blessed with a gift that none of us had. So if he apologized for it, who were we to argue with him?
“Allah Akbar,” said Mr. Naime and spit on the ground. I suppose he was putting a little water back into the earth.
I was jealous of Mr. Branch. Finding things was the best way of getting stuff for free, and if I were him, I would run around all day finding anything I could. I’d start a business: YOU LOST IT, I’LL FIND IT! I’d take fifty percent of the value of the object found. Since school began full-time, Mr. Cucumber had been drilling us on fractions and percentages. He’d be very pleased to know that his math exercises were working for me.
Pete tugged on my arm. “Come on,” he whined.
I shook him off. I wanted to get a better look at that divining rod to see what it was made out of.
Mr. Branch walked over to his tiny Morris Minor. It was a British car the size of a washing machine. He opened the door, pulled out a suitcase, set it on the ground, and clicked open the latches. The case was empty except for a bunch of soft rags, which he removed and wrapped around his divining rod before shutting it in the suitcase and sliding the suitcase back on the front seat. It looked like an ordinary tree branch. As he pulled away, we waved.
“Come on,” I hollered at Pete. “We’re late.”
The front of the theater was decorated with a giant bottle of Lemon Squash. It was outlined in bright green neon, with little blue neon droplets of bottle sweat. Just gazing up at that bottle made me feel hotter. I was dying of thirst. The double front doors had an icy penguin on one side. On the other a sign read: COME IN. IT’S COOL INSIDE. I pushed the door open and we burst into the cold air as though with one quick step we had traveled from summer into winter.
A kid in a starched purple-and-gold uniform took our bottle caps and gave us a scrap of yellow paper with a big number hand-stamped on it. “Hang on to this,” he snapped. “You might get lucky.”
I stopped in front of the water fountain and drank about a gallon. The water was ice-cold and hurt my teeth, but it had been so hot outside I needed cold belly water to chill my innards. When I finished I held Pete up under his arms while he tanked up. Then we both ran up to the balcony. The wood stairs were so old it was like running up a flight of sponges.
Even though we were a little late we were still in luck. We slouched down into two seats and stared at the screen as if we were hypnotized. “What’s your ticket number?” I asked Pete.
“Four,” he said.
“Mine’s 17.”
Before each feature was a short movie of a race. They were always real old and silly like the Keystone Kops. The races were different each week. Last week it was motorboats. This week it was cross-country horse racing. Already they were galloping across the fields and kids were shrieking, yelling out their horse numbers and throwing candy.
We missed the beginning, but Pete’s horse was challenging the front of the pack. My horse was stuck in a mud hole. The kid next to me was cheering for number 11. Secretly, I felt good when his horse took a wrong turn into an apple orchard. For a moment Pete’s horse took the lead, but then his jockey got knocked off when he hit a low tree branch. My horse dragged itself out of the mud and picked up speed but then stopped at a lemonade stand. I groaned. Number 4 dove off a railroad trestle. Number 11 fell in love with a billboard of a horse. Number 2 was the winner.
A girl in the row behind me jumped up and let out a deadly scream right in my ear. “I won!” she squealed. “I won, and I’ve never won anything before in my life.”
I elbowed Pete in the shoulder. “Time to get candy,” I said. “Hand over your money.” I bounced down the rickety steps, hoping to get to the refreshment counter before the line got too long.
By the time I returned, the Living Dead were already chewing on some smelly old flesh. Pete was balled up in the corner of his seat. “I just love a barbecue,” I whispered, and passed him the popcorn.
That night I took out my diary and taped the newspaper article about the missing boy on a page. I also removed a second piece of paper from my pocket. I had gotten it at the refreshment stand when I bought my candy. It was a handbill, also about Wade Block, the missing boy. I hadn’t shown it to Pete because I thought it might really scare him. There was a request for information with a police telephone number. The missing boy’s mother said he was last seen on his bicycle heading for the movie theater. He was wearing a red soccer jersey with the number 8 on the front. The bike had not been found either.
I didn’t know what the kid looked like but thought I would try something like Mr. Branch. I opened my diary to a clean page and took out a pencil. I shut my eyes real hard and tried to picture him. He had my brown hair and brown eyes. He was about my height. He wore that soccer jersey and shorts and tennis shoes.
With my eyes closed, I started to draw. When I finished I looked down at the page. There he was. It was a picture of me. I’m not lost, I said to myself. I’m right here. I closed my eyes again and tried to picture the boy. But he was gone. It was as if he had turned and run out of my imagination and left me behind. I jumped up and walked around the room.
My grandfather had told me that everyone has a double on the other side of the world. Barbados, I thought, was almost on the other side from Pennsylvania, and now I wondered if that kid was my double. I closed my diary. The thought was too creepy. “You don’t have a lost double,” I said out loud. “You sound like Pete.” But that didn’t help.
I crossed the hall and knocked on Betsy’s door. Whenever I had a dumb idea, she could always set me straight by making me feel so stupid I gave up on it. “Come in,” she shouted.
“Can I ask you a dumb question?” I said.
“How do you know it’s only dumb?” she replied. “It may be the stupidest thing ever uttered on this planet since the start of recorded history.” She turned her book over and crossed her arms. She smiled that know-it-all smile.
“I know this sounds crazy, but do you think you have a double in the world? Someone exactly like you in … in every way? Looks like you? Thinks like you? Acts like you?”
To my surprise, she gave the question some thoughtful consideration instead of snorting at me. “Some people believe it,” she replied. “But I don’t. Mostly it’s just a projection of the spiritual and emotional side of yourself.”
I nodded as if I understood, but I was lost. She had been studying psychology and I figured she was studying me like Jane Goodall studied the apes.
“Tell me,” she said. “Can you communicate with your double?” She peered deep into my eyes.
“I think so,” I replied.
“You’re schizophrenic,” she said, getting slightly excited, like a mad scientist discovering a new life form. “You have a multiple-personality disorder.”
“Is there a cure?”
“I … would … say,” she pronounced, stretching out her words, “that, on average, people spend about ten years in a mental hospital and then they give out and commit suicide.”
I blinked. “Thanks,” I said weakly, and returned to my room. For once, Betsy didn’t knock the idea clean out of my head. Instead, she made it worse. Now I felt like a nut case.
And I was. That night I had the scariest nightmare of my life. It was so hot I had moved to the concrete floor, which was cool with all that
water beneath it in the cistern. I stretched out like a dog, belly-down, arms and legs spread apart. It felt so good. I put my head on my pillow and fell asleep. The next thing I knew I was paralyzed with fear. I heard noises in the yard outside my French doors. I tried to get up, but I couldn’t move. The doors opened and a boy stepped into my bedroom. I still couldn’t move; not a finger, not a toe. I couldn’t blink. I felt like a frozen side of beef just lying there, waiting for a big meat hook to be driven into my shoulder. He walked forward with his arms stretched toward me like one of the Living Dead. I tried to scream but nothing came out. My jaw was frozen. I tried to move my arm but couldn’t. He came closer and stood above me. I couldn’t make out his face. It looked like a smeared thumbprint. He reached for me and I stopped breathing. I felt myself slowly dying. I blacked out.
When I snapped awake, I was lying on the floor in the same position as when I fell asleep. I was rigid and cold but I could move again. Slowly, I pulled my knees up, then my arms. I rubbed my face. I looked at the French doors. They were locked. Nothing had changed except for me. I got up and took a hot shower.
After I dressed I went into the kitchen. I was starving.
“What were you moaning about last night?” Betsy asked. “You sounded like a ghost with a stubbed toe.”
“Just a dream,” I said.
She set her toast down on her plate. “Tell me about your dream,” she said. “Dreams are the keys which unlock the inner mind.”
I sat down and told her everything. Every detail. I wanted her to make ruthless fun of me. To tell me I was a goon, a loser, a jerk … anything. But she told me just what I didn’t want to hear.
“A paralyzing dream doesn’t mean death,” she said seriously. “It means your brain is awake with anxiety while your body is still sleeping. But I can cure you,” she added. “I want you to come into my room for an hour every day and tell me honestly everything that is on your mind. If you do that, I can figure out what you’re afraid of and cure you before you go around the bend and end up a vegetable for the rest of your life.”
