by Corina Vacco
“You’re such a hustler,” Charlie says to Cornpup. “Always selling something.”
Today the pawnshop guy takes one look at Cornpup’s duffel bag and rolls his eyes. “I’m closing in two minutes.”
There are so many things I want in this store—a Fender guitar, speakers and amps, a rotisserie oven, a blue lava lamp, and a watch that tells you what time it is in four different countries.
“I brought some good stuff this time,” Cornpup says. “Check it out.”
Pawnshop Guy squints through his glasses. “I’ll give you a couple bucks for these cell phones. I’ll buy the tools off you too. But that’s it. I don’t want that space heater. I’ve got plenty of space heaters.”
“Fine. Whatever,” says Cornpup. “Can I use your bathroom?”
“As long as you’re quick about it. I have to be at the bowling alley in twenty minutes.” Pawnshop Guy is eating slices of bologna straight from the package without any bread.
Dad used to bowl in a league. His bowling ball was black with swirls of green, like a giant marble. The night he died, Mom sat in a kitchen chair with that ball on her lap for hours, until I told her to stop it because she was scaring me.
“Hey.” Pawnshop Guy frowns at us. “Where does your weird little friend get all these electronics? Is he a thief? Tell me the truth.”
“He knows how to fix other people’s junk,” says Charlie. “He’s like a half-insane engineer.”
“I feel like I hemorrhage money to that boy. What does he do with it all?”
“Donates it to a museum.” I’m not lying. Cornpup dumps a lot of cash into our Freak Museum—colored lights, labels for each exhibit, formaldehyde, and hardware for the growing shelves. It gets expensive.
Pawnshop Guy says, “Museum, my ass.”
Cornpup appears two seconds later with a wet piece of paper in his hands. “I just found this in the garbage. The Army Corps of Engineers is hosting a meeting about Two Mile Creek next week. Contamination. Anybody from the neighborhood can go. You know what that means?”
“It means we’ll have to jump a stupid fence every time we want to go swimming next summer,” Charlie says in a bored voice.
“I already know about the meeting,” I tell them. “My mom got a letter in the mail.”
Pawnshop Guy gives Cornpup a small wad of cash. Then we head outside.
Cornpup has a serious look on his face. “They’re taking public comments. We can tell them about Phenzorbiflux.”
“Comments are weak,” says Charlie. “If you want to bring down the biggest chemical company in the world, it’s gonna take more than comments.”
I have to agree. “Plus, they use psychological warfare. Every time someone speaks out against them, they lay off a bunch of people and threaten to shut down the Poxton plant. Then the whole town turns on you. Bring up Phenzorbiflux and twenty-five jobs disappear, guaranteed.”
“They make everyone feel afraid,” says Cornpup. “That’s their one power over us. But what if we refuse to feel the fear? Then they’re powerless.”
“It’s not fear,” says Charlie. “It’s using your head. It’s survival. You don’t work at Mareno Chem. And your parents don’t work at Mareno Chem. Some of us need those paychecks.”
“Then why do we keep looking for the barrels?” says Cornpup. “What’s the point of finding Phenzorbiflux if we can’t tell anyone?”
“The point,” I tell him, “is to find the Phenzorbiflux before you open your big mouth. If we stir up trouble now, and people lose their jobs, and we’ve got no proof to back us up, then what? Then we’ve blown our big chance. If you talk at this meeting, you gotta promise me you’ll focus on the smaller chemical companies who’ve been dumping in the creek. Don’t bring up Mareno Chem at all.”
Cornpup considers this, but he won’t look at me, and I can tell he’s pissed.
Charlie says, “Here’s the deal. We’ll keep looking for the missing Phenzorbiflux, because it’s fun. And we’ll go to this stupid meeting, because we can’t trust Cornpup to keep his mouth shut otherwise. But when it comes time to really punish Mareno Chem, we’re gonna do something big. No more talk.”
I feel a surge of adrenaline. I wish I knew what Charlie had in mind.
Cornpup is in a pissy mood now. He trudges behind us, whining about how we shouldn’t go to the creek today because the smell is too strong.
“He can go sweat to death, for all I care,” says Charlie. “It’s crazy hot out. I’m going swimming.”
It’s not like we don’t get it, about the creek being gross and dangerous or whatever. We know bubbling gray water with marble swirls of black sludge ain’t exactly pure, but New York City is a major terrorist target, and nobody moves away on account of that. Hell, there were people who wouldn’t even temporarily leave New Orleans when Katrina was a couple of miles offshore.
We’ve got our home, a place that’s ours, things we love doing, and we just roll with it. Charlie says it’s really unhealthy to live in constant fear. He says you can live forever if you laugh and take a lot of risks.
On the way to the industrial yards, we pass Kevin Thompson’s house. His garage is open and his bike is gone, but I still glance up at his roof to see if he’s perched there with his guns.
“I’m just so pissed off,” I say. “It’s not even my fault he wants to kill me. If his dad was a great security guard, they wouldn’t’ve fired him for what we did at the grain mill. He was probably already on thin ice for something else.”
“Yeah, the two of you are gonna be enemies for a while.” Charlie swipes a football from someone’s front lawn. He jogs back to us with a huge smile on his face. “I heard he wants to hook up with Valerie, so if you go out with her, it’s like a double whammy. You think he hates you now, just wait.”
“I’m lifting weights in your garage tonight,” I say. “When he kills me, I want my gravestone to say I fought back.”
At the creek, me and Charlie toss the football around while Cornpup digs for the eternal robot. We call it that because he never stops tweaking it, giving it little remote-controlled weapons, lengthening its legs, outfitting it with cool armor. He pulls the robot up out of the earth. He peels off the blue tarp covering and then checks to make sure no dirt got into the controls. Minutes later, the robot is walking through water, firing Nerf rockets at my head. Charlie finds our Super Soakers in one of the other tunnels. He tosses me one, and then it’s like there’s this all-out battle, me and Charlie against Cornpup’s machine. We’re in the water, drenched, our shorts pretty much falling down, and Cornpup’s onshore, bone-dry, punching commands into his controller, with this crazy look on his face, shouting, “You guys are dead!”
So me and Charlie have no choice but to make balls of creek mud and start whipping them at Cornpup’s face. It’s really the most kick-ass battle we’ve ever had. By the end, me and Charlie are all slimy and green from the water, and Cornpup is covered in mud, and our faces are burning from laughing so hard. When it starts getting dark, we split up. Cornpup stays at the creek to rebury the eternal robot. Charlie is starving and runs home to eat. I feel so grimy, I can’t even think about food. All I want to do is take a shower.
Before I go into my house, I strip off most of my clothes and abandon them in a garbage can by the street. I wring out my sneakers, dripping green water onto our porch steps. I wipe my feet clean in the grass. A long, hot shower turns out to be the perfect thing. I change into jeans and a black T-shirt. Then I call Cornpup.
“You don’t have to actually lift anything,” I promise him. “We aren’t gonna force you to work out. Just come hang with us.”
He tells me he got creek water in his eyes. He doesn’t feel so great. He’s going to bed.
So it ends up being just me and Charlie lifting weights in the Pelliteros’ garage. We have the radio cranked up. We’re mocking Cornpup, who’s probably all curled up in bed right now like a granny.
“Oh, Mommy, my eyes are stinging; make me some soup,” says
Charlie.
“Oh, Mommy, I pooped the bed and it smells like ammonia,” I say.
“Oh, Mommy, help me get all this toxic mud out of my ears,” says Charlie.
Valerie and Jill show up out of nowhere, and I start freaking out in my head, because what if Val heard me say “pooped the bed” and doesn’t know I was pretending to be Cornpup?
I turn down Charlie’s metal music.
“You guys going to the cookout tomorrow?” Jill asks us.
Charlie drops his dumbbells. His arm muscles look ripped. “Hell yeah, we’re going.”
Valerie is sitting on a weight bench, legs crossed, staring at her hands. She looks up at me once, and I swear she likes it that I’m all sweaty with bloodshot eyes. Maybe I look dangerous.
We talk about dumb stuff for about ten minutes. Then Charlie gets restless because he wants to start lifting again, and the girls say they have to get going because they were supposed to be walking to the video store and straight back, and Jill’s parents will kill them if they find out about this little detour. Valerie hands me a folded-up piece of pink paper, and I shove it into my pocket to read later, when Charlie’s not around. Then the metal music is back on, and the girls take off.
I do push-ups till my arms give out. I do crunches till it hurts to breathe. Charlie doesn’t get tired. He only stops because he can see I’m cashed.
We go inside to make some food, but when we enter the kitchen, there is trouble. Mr. Pellitero is drunk, staggering near the sink. Mrs. Pellitero is shouting in his face, “What are we going to do for money?” over and over again.
Randy says, “Mom, calm down. There are other jobs. We’ll be fine.”
Mrs. Pellitero says, “No, Randy, we aren’t gonna be fine. All the good jobs are getting shipped off to China, and your father thinks he can just screw around. Moving to another town won’t do no good. Jobs have been disappearing all over the country.”
Charlie jumps right in on the argument, veins bulging from his arms. “Mareno Chem fired you? For what? What did you do?” he shouts in his dad’s face.
Mrs. Pellitero is making the situation so much worse. She keeps saying, “Now what are we gonna do? Now what are we gonna do? Now what are we gonna do?”
I know something bad is about to happen when I see the empty bottle of Jäger on the floor. Mr. Pellitero pops his wife in the eye with one quick, precise punch that makes me want to spit in his face. Then Charlie gives me the look, Jason, go home, and I take off running.
CHAPTER 8
COOKOUT
MOM is the only person I know who’d spend an entire morning talking about Polish sausage. “It’s hot out today,” she says. “And this meat was expensive. I’m not taking any chances.” She sends me to the basement in search of a cooler.
“The Kuperskis live across the street. Why can’t we just use a plastic bag full of ice?”
“Go find the cooler, Jason. Now.”
Our basement is such a mess. I step over lawn chairs, oil cans, a baseball bat and cleats. I move gardening tools, dead tomato plants, a broken fan, and a bag of topsoil. Things we couldn’t sell in our yard sale. A deflated soccer ball. A dented drum set. Broken furniture we’ll never fix or use. Why am I the one who has to dig through all this junk?
I woke up hungry. Today is the Kuperskis’ annual cookout, and they put out a huge spread, lots of meats and hot dishes. They don’t just invite people from Cardinal Drive either; they invite the whole neighborhood. Sid Kuperski is friends with a man who brings piles of hot wings packed in aluminum catering pans. Gloria Kuperski makes a mean six-layer taco dip, which is my all-time favorite food. Charlie doesn’t have a favorite food. He’ll eat anything, especially if there’s red meat or chocolate involved. The only person I know who doesn’t live for the Kuperskis’ cookout is Cornpup, because nothing grosses him out more than food from other people’s houses. He thinks there’s going to be a hair ball baked into one of the garlic meatballs, boogers in the pretzel cake, and weird strains of salmonella growing in the potato salad. He says there’s no end to the terrible things that can go on in a kitchen that’s not regulated by the FDA. If he comes to a cookout at all, he’ll bring his own grilled cheese sandwiches in a paper bag. But usually he doesn’t come.
“The cooler isn’t down here,” I shout. My tone is whiny, but I don’t really care. I’m not in the greatest of moods. I got about a hundred prank calls last night. I had to stay awake watching a horror movie marathon, picking up each call midway through the first ring. Otherwise our kitchen phone would wake up Mom. I try to think of something creepier than Kevin Thompson calling my house, again and again, never saying anything, heavy metal blasting in the background, but that’s about as creepy as it gets.
The cooler is under Dad’s camping equipment.
At first, I just stare. I am ambushed by a memory. It was two summers ago. I was at the beach with Mom, who was skinny then, and Dad, who would not live through the winter. I raced Dad to the pier, and I won. Seagulls were everywhere. Mom had filled the cooler with bologna sandwiches and cans of pop. She kept saying she was gonna “get a tan, dammit,” and Dad told her not to use vegetable oil, because he didn’t want to her turning into a lobster. I waded in the water, but it was kind of cold. It was going to be a good day, a family day, and I felt luckier than Charlie then, because my dad would never snap his belt at me, would never pass out drunk on the couch with a lit cigarette.
But the day got cut short. A sudden storm rolled up on Lake Erie. The entire sky turned the color of dirty aluminum. A cold, hard rain began to fall. Mom picked up the blanket, and we all started running. Dad had the cooler. I had Mom’s beach chair. We were all giggling. We took Highway 5 home, past Bethlehem Steel and the Coast Guard base, over the Skyway bridge. Mom turned the radio up and sang in her bluesy voice. I can’t remember what the song was, and it bothers me that I can’t remember.
Dad was the last person to carry this cooler. I don’t want to touch it. I don’t want to be the one to wipe his fingerprints away.
“It’s about time,” Mom says to me. “I thought you got lost down there.” She makes me take the cooler out back and rinse it with the hose. Then she makes me put a T-shirt on. “You’re not going to the Kuperskis’ in swim trunks. You’ll look like a hillbilly.” Never mind how she’s wearing puffy Windbreaker shorts and a MERV’S HOT DOGS T-shirt big enough to be a pop-up tent.
I walk to the back porch and turn on the hose. I rinse dried grass and a suspicious gooey pink stain from inside the cooler. I flood a couple of anthills, just because I can. I am pretty much in a daze. Dad is on my mind, no matter how hard I try to push the thoughts away. I could stand here forever, just letting the water run and run and run.
“Jason! How long does it take to rinse out a cooler?” Mom says. “Charlie’s on the phone.”
I turn off the faucet. I’m supposed to coil the hose over a hook on the side of our house, but that’ll take too long. As a rule, Charlie doesn’t hold on the line for more than a minute or two, if that. I leave the hose in a sloppy heap and jog back to the house.
“Holy loudness. What’s going on over there?” Charlie asks. He’s eating something crunchy.
“My aunt Ellen just pulled up in her crappy car. You’re supposed to be on your way over here. Is Cornpup with you?”
“He’s sick again.”
“Oh. Did you get the candy?”
“Nope. Randy wouldn’t take me to the store. But we have Popsicles in the freezer.”
“Those’ll be good,” I say. “But hurry up. My mom’s making me do stupid little jobs around the house.”
Charlie hangs up without saying goodbye.
Mom says, “Do you want to tell me who kept calling at all hours last night? Was that Charlie?”
“No,” I say. “Some little kids found our number in the phone book, is all.”
Ellen, who is skinny, walks into our house without knocking. She’s carrying a casserole dish in one hand, and my little cousin, Bryan, on
her hip. She says, “Lynn, you’re going to be hot in that big old T-shirt,” and I shoot her a dirty look, because I don’t care if it’s nine thousand degrees outside; Mom should be wearing more clothing, not less.
“Wow, so you’re going to be a high schooler in a couple of months,” Ellen says to me. “Are you excited?”
“Not really,” I say, but she’s only half listening.
Mom runs into the bathroom to change. She comes out wearing a one-piece bathing suit and the same pair of Windbreaker shorts, but without a shirt. She embarrasses me constantly. I don’t get a break.
When Dad died, Mom started eating double helpings of everything; sometimes she even goes back for thirds. I don’t think she all of a sudden got hungrier. I just think the sadness dug a real deep hole in her, and she’s trying to fill it with stuff that tastes good. Things haven’t been easy for her, I know, but she’s not the only one hurting. And it’s not like it would be that hard for her to ride her bike to the air products plant a few times a week. Or eat salads every once in a while.
I go to my room and find a T-shirt to wear with my swim trunks. When I return to the kitchen, Bryan is holding a bag of balloons.
“Fill these with water for me,” he says. He is standing on a step stool and has already tried to fill two blue balloons himself, but they’ve exploded in the sink.
“Fill them yourself,” I say. Ellen goes out back to smoke a cigarette.
“Hey, guys.” Charlie has let himself in. He doesn’t look angry or embarrassed. It’s like the things I saw last night—the bottle of Jäger, the crying mom, a fist to the eye—never happened. He tosses a box of Popsicles into the freezer. He has on an old Sabres ball cap with tar on the brim. He drinks our green Kool-Aid straight from the pitcher.
“Charlie! Charlie!” Bryan shouts. “Fill these for me, okay?”
Charlie is always nice to little kids, which is something I’ve never understood. He fills thirty water balloons to a near-bursting size, while Bryan jumps in place for a full minute, the way he does when someone flushes a toilet and he gets to see the water swirl.
