Heads or Tails

by Jack Gantos

  Reverend Sears stopped to catch his breath while the congregation muttered among themselves.

  “So tell us, Mr. Itani, since you are a thief, what further sins do you support through your thieving ways?”

  Candy Itani stepped toward the choir. “I’m sorry I tried to steal your purses,” he said calmly. “I know what I’ve done is wrong, but I don’t have a job and I’m desperate. I need money to feed my family and pay the rent. Like I said, I know what I did was wrong.”

  “Just knowing isn’t good enough,” Reverend Sears interrupted. “As Christians we can forgive you, and we do forgive you. We pray for your family and ask that you provide for them with honest work. And we invite you to join our church. Instead of stealing our money, you can add to our prayers.”

  Maybe I was wrong about Reverend Sears. I thought then that he would let Candy Itani go and we would take up a collection to help him feed his family. It would be a lot better than taking up a collection to put another missionary out in the Amazon.

  “But we are not to sit in judgment of you,” continued Reverend Sears. “God has laws and society has laws, Mr. Itani. You have broken those laws … Mr. Ross,” he said gravely, pointing to Johnny’s father, “go call the police. Not only has this man earned a one-way ticket to hell, but he’s going to prison along the way.”

  The organ started up and I recognized the lead-in for the “Hallelujah.” Miss Tate gave me an intense look and we both stood up as planned. I felt nervous, but after watching how frantic Candy was, how ashamed he was, sweating and apologizing to us all, I didn’t care what people thought of my voice. I sang with my eyes closed so I couldn’t see the congregation or the choir director. I listened to the music and sang, trying to lift my voice along the notes. I slurred across all the high notes, peaked like a car crash, and dried up on the low notes. I sang loud and I breathed deep and let out the great relief of that long “Hallelujah.”

  “Amen,” shouted a woman in the front. “Amen.”

  I smiled and felt proud of myself.

  “Pee-ew,” Johnny whispered.

  You brown-nosing suck-up, I thought to myself. If Brent’s the kind of friend you want, then you can have him.

  Everyone could hear the police sirens, and as they grew louder I knew they were coming for Mr. Itani. He knew it, too. He looked over his shoulder toward the back door. His body jerked in that direction, but by then a group of men had him by the arms.

  The police marched up the center aisle as if they were getting married. They handcuffed Candy Itani and led him away.

  “I think he’s pissed his pants,” Johnny remarked and pointed. “You can see it runnin’ down his leg.”

  “I can’t believe Dad invited him to come back,” Brent said. “They oughta lock him up and throw away the key.”

  I sat there and hated myself for not telling them both to go take a one-way trip to the Hell Hall of Fame.

  After church I usually ate lunch at Johnny’s house, but today I asked Mr. Ross to take me straight home. “I don’t feel well,” I said, sounding hollow. I sat in the car and made up my mind never to go back to that church again. I figured I would have to see Johnny in school the next day, but if he didn’t say anything to me, I wouldn’t say anything to him.

  When I got home, I told Mom that I didn’t want to go anymore. She asked why and I told her what had happened.

  “Then you don’t have to go,” she said. “Besides, I’ve been thinking that we’ll all start back at the Lutheran church.” But I knew we wouldn’t. And I knew my friendship with Johnny would dry up.

  I HAD BEEN READING a lot of detective novels. Dad likes to read books about World War II. Betsy reads a lot of “English literature,” as she calls it. Mom reads short stories, and Pete reads picture books. I had been reading so many detective books I began to think I was a detective myself.

  “Hey, Dad, can I find anything for you?”

  “A new job,” he said, turning a page. I wasn’t that good. He had gone through five jobs in five years.

  “What about you, Mom?”

  “I lost an earring,” she said, without looking up.

  I went right to work. First, I searched where she said she’d last seen it. Nothing. So then I followed a hunch. Mom has glasses, but she doesn’t wear them. She doesn’t like the heavy way they feel on her nose. So when she vacuums around the house she picks up things she can’t see. Once she vacuumed part of my stamp collection off my desk. So I checked the vacuum-cleaner bag and, sure enough, found the earring, twenty-eight cents, and the tiny silver key to Betsy’s diary.

  When I asked Betsy if I could find something for her, she said, “You should go find something worth doing.”

  “I need money,” I whispered in her ear. “How much would you pay for the key to your diary?”

  “I’ll murder you in your sleep,” she said. But I didn’t care if she wanted to kill me. My days as a detective were numbered. I had rabies.

  Four days earlier, I had been bitten by a dog. I’d left my Raleigh bike outside the library, and when I came out, a boy about my age and a big black dog were standing next to it. Dad had bought me the Raleigh three years ago for Christmas. It was red with chrome fenders, a chrome headlight and bell, and a basket on either side of the rear wheel. It was an expensive English bike and Dad had bought it back when we had money. But now there wasn’t any extra money to afford “special things,” as Mom put it. I had never seen another bike like it, and a lot of people stopped to admire it.

  As I lifted the kickstand with my foot the dog began to growl. I swung my leg over the seat and the dog jumped at me and bit me on the ankle. I jerked my leg back and lost my balance. I fell over sideways, with the bike crashing down on top of me. I had a stack of books in my backpack and they dug into my ribs when I hit the sidewalk. The dog lunged at my face.

  “Hold him back,” I shouted, but the boy didn’t move to call off the dog. He looked directly into my eyes and did nothing.

  “Get it away from me,” I yelled. He turned and walked away. “Hey! Come back here,” I hollered. Maybe it’s not his dog, I thought. The dog went back down to my ankle. I tried to crawl farther under the bike to protect myself. But it clamped its teeth on my leg and tried to drag me away. It wanted to bury me like a bone in its back yard. I yanked my leg back and kicked it in the face. Suddenly, it lost interest in me and ran after the boy as if nothing had ever happened. I saw the boy pet the dog on the head and then reach into his pocket and toss him a biscuit.

  I stood up and walked my bike around the building. I wasn’t hurt and my bike was okay, but I was mad. I rolled down my sock and looked at the two bites. They weren’t bleeding, but the skin was broken in three places. I knew a kid who’d been bitten by a raccoon and had to have forty rabies shots in his stomach. Every afternoon for a month the school nurse came into the classroom and escorted him down the hall to the clinic. A half hour later he staggered back to his seat as if he’d been punched in the belly. The teacher let him rest his head on her stuffed Piglet.

  One day, she asked us a math question and he raised his hand. “You must be feeling better,” she remarked. He threw up on her shoes.

  I didn’t want forty shots in the stomach with a needle as thick and long as a pencil. But in case I got rabies, I needed to know where the dog lived. If I started foaming at the mouth and biting everyone I could tell Dad who to sue.

  So I’d followed the boy up the street. I didn’t want to get close because I was afraid the dog might bite me again. After five blocks, he turned onto Cactus Street and went into a small wooden house at number 1227.

  •

  “Five dollars for the diary key,” I said to Betsy.

  “Two,” she replied. I followed her to her room. She closed the door and grabbed me around the neck. “Give it to me, you jerk.”

  “I’ll bite you,” I managed to say. “I have rabies.”

  She let me go. “You’re gross! Now, give it to me.”

  “A dollar,”
I said. She gave me a quarter. I gave her the key. She kicked me in the leg and I dropped to the floor.

  “They shoot people with rabies,” she growled. “I hope I get to pull the trigger.”

  I thought I’d go to the library and check out more detective novels. Our school was too cheap to have its own library. A Broward County Book Mobile arrived every Friday and class by class we took turns checking out books. But they didn’t have many detective novels. Mostly they had smelly old books that had other people’s names or library seals stamped on the title page. There were a lot of books on subjects like canning vegetables and how to get soup stains out of silk ties. I hate having to read books that other people think are junk. “Something is better than nothing,” said Mrs. Marshall when I complained. But reading junk books is the same as having to eat someone else’s leftovers.

  Instead of going straight to the library, I rode my bike over to a field of thick bushes across the road from Gus’s Gas Station. I was always curious about Gus’s Gas Station because there were no other stations in Fort Lauderdale named after a person. We had fancy Exxon and Chevron and Texaco stations, but there was only one greasy station named after Gus. In the detective books, the most clever criminals always had their hideouts in fake businesses. I had been spying on Gus from across the road, trying to catch him and his gang doing criminal things like stuffing bodies into oil drums so they could dump them out in the ocean. Maybe they were secret agents and the giant gas tank under the station was a spy headquarters and the light pole was a radio antenna.

  Whenever I was riding with Dad, I asked him to stop and buy gas at Gus’s. But he wouldn’t.

  “He sells cheap gas,” Dad said. “People say he puts water in it.”

  “Is that all?”

  “That’s bad enough,” Dad replied.

  As I crouched behind a bush and watched, nothing unusual happened at Gus’s except for the normal stuff that would happen at any gas station. People pulled up in their cars and Gus hobbled out of his office and put gas in their tanks and washed their windshields. I didn’t see anything like secret signals, or secret doors, or wanted criminals hiding behind all the used tires in his garage. He didn’t even go near a water hose, or drink a glass of water. Between customers he just sat in his office and peeled an apple with a knife big enough to amputate my leg.

  I got back on my bike and rode down Federal Highway. I passed by the parking lot at King’s Department Store. A carnival had set up in the parking lot. “Live a little,” I said to myself. “You’ll soon be a goner.” I parked the bike and ran to buy a ticket to the WILD ROCKET. A sign said it was the most powerful ride in the world. It was built like a cigar, with a seat in a little cage on each end. An axle ran through the middle of the cigar, and when the ROCKET spun around, it went about a hundred miles an hour. There was another sign that read: “Warning! This ride is not safe for people with heart problems.” It didn’t say anything about rabies.

  I climbed into my cockpit and put on my seat belt. I made sure my shoelaces were tied so my shoes wouldn’t come off during the ride and hit me in the head. Suddenly, the engine started and I grabbed the handlebar. In a minute I couldn’t even keep my eyes open and I screamed bloody murder. Then I felt like I passed out.

  When the ride stopped, a carnival worker opened my cage and unlocked my seat belt. He gave me a hand and helped me down. The world was still spinning at a hundred miles per hour. When my feet hit the ground, I stumbled forward and fell. My blood felt like Coca-Cola when you shake it up. I crawled and staggered around the parking lot until I found a light pole to lean against. I wiped my mouth on my sleeve. It was all foamy. The first sign of rabies. It was starting. My leg began to throb.

  To hell with the library, I thought. I’ve got to save myself. I turned onto Cactus Street and pedaled as hard as I could. I needed to see the dog. Because if it was still alive and not foaming at the mouth, I’d live. But as I sped by I didn’t see the dog. Instead, I saw that the front door was wide open and an old beat-up couch was out on the sidewalk, along with a few cardboard boxes of junk. It all looked suspicious to me.

  There were no curtains on the windows and suddenly it struck me that they had moved. “Oh, crap,” I said. They probably knew their dog had rabies and that I was infected and so they had to get out of town before I died and they were arrested for murder. I slowed down and circled back to the house. Even though I was afraid of the dog I stopped in their front yard and got off my bike. I walked up to the open door and knocked on it. “Hello?” I shouted. “Anybody home?” If anyone answered, I planned to ask if my friend Frankie Pagoda lived there. But there was no answer.

  “Anybody home?” I yelled again. There was no answer. My ankle began to throb. Soon I’d be foaming at the mouth, running on my hands and feet, and biting the neighbors. Finally I’d be tracked down and captured by police dogs, but it would be too late to save me. I’d be shot and buried in a pet cemetery.

  I limped over to the boxes of junk on the front lawn and began to search through them. I needed their names, and if I was lucky, I’d get their new address so I could find out if their dog was infected. The boxes were mostly filled with broken stuff: a chipped plate, a used toothbrush, old shoes, ripped shirts, an old Halloween mask of Spider-Man, and a broken thermos bottle. But there were a few old letters. I shoved them into my backpack. I felt really guilty going through someone’s garbage, especially in the middle of the day. Real detectives always did this stuff at night when no one was looking. Plus, I knew I’d have to hide all the stuff from my mom because she really disliked “snoops and sneaks,” and if she caught me, she’d probably turn me in to the police.

  “Hey, kid,” a man hollered from next door.

  I jumped up and spun around. “What?”

  “Why are you going through their trash?” he asked. He was big. Maybe an off-duty cop.

  “I’m looking for used books,” I replied. “For our school library.”

  “Don’t you know there’s a hurricane heading our way?” He took a couple steps toward me.

  “No,” I said and trotted over to my bike.

  “Well, you better get a move-on. That hurricane should hit the shore in a few hours.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  The wind had already picked up. I hopped on my bike and flew down the street. During hurricane season it was pretty normal to have a lot of warnings. Just about everyone kept a hurricane-tracking map in their house and charted the movement of the latest hurricane, so they’d know if it was heading our way. But the hurricanes were unpredictable and would veer off in all directions. Nobody knew if it was really going to hit until it was actually on top of us. The best part about hurricanes was that we were always being let out of school early to go help our parents, who had gotten out of work early, to tape up the windows and tie down everything around the house that could easily be blown away.

  By the time I rode up our driveway, Dad was nailing sheets of plywood over the floor-to-ceiling windows in the Florida room.

  “Where’ve you been?” he yelled. The words seemed to blow up over his head and away. I parked my bike in the carport and went to help him. I couldn’t tell him I was spying on a dog who gave me rabies. And I didn’t want to tell him I was at the carnival having fun while he was working his butt off. “I was spying on Gus,” I yelled back and held up one end of the plywood.

  “What were you bothering him for?”

  “You said he puts water in his gas tanks, and I wanted to catch him.”

  “You knucklehead,” he said. “He wouldn’t do it in broad daylight. He’d wait until it was dark.”

  “Well, I thought with the hurricane coming on, he might try something.”

  “Well, think about doing the right thing and sticking around the house when you’re needed,” he said. He pounded another nail through the plywood and stopped yelling.

  While Dad and I finished the windows, Mom and Betsy took care of the other hurricane-emergency procedures we were taught o
n television. They filled plastic jugs with drinking water, turned up the refrigerator to get it real cold because the electricity always goes off, put candles and matches in all the rooms, and checked the batteries in the flashlights and radios. Dad had Pete put the rake and hose and lawn tools in the utility room. I got the aluminum ladder for Dad and held it as he climbed up to the roof to remove the television antenna. When he came down, he said to me, “Make sure you put your bike in the utility room so it doesn’t blow around.”

  “In a minute,” I said. I put the ladder away, then set up some weather experiments. In science class we saw a movie on the weird power of hurricanes and tornadoes. It showed how high winds had driven plastic drinking straws through trees. I thought that was pretty cool so I went into the kitchen and got some straws. I stripped the paper off and set them out on a tree stump. I aimed them for our plywood shutters, thinking that if I was lucky they would stick in the wood like darts. Next, I had an army man with a plastic parachute. I took a marker and wrote my name and telephone number and “Reward offered for return” on the parachute, then threw it on top of the carport so it might get a flying start when the winds picked up. My last experiment was sort of dangerous but I did it anyway. Dad had some steel rods in the utility room. I took one out and sunk it into the ground by the edge of the canal. It stuck out about two feet above the ground. I was hoping it would conduct lightning and melt. When I passed through the front yard, Dad was snipping the coconuts out of the palm trees with a long tree clipper.