Heads or Tails

by Jack Gantos

  “I’ve seen these things fly through the air like cannonballs,” he yelled.

  All the excitement was great. Ever since I had read about the adventures of the Swiss Family Robinson, I wanted our family to be like them. My greatest wish come true would have our family carried away by a huge tidal wave and washed up on a deserted island where we had to build our own house in the trees and grow our own food and ride wild horses and educate one another.

  “Did you put your bike away?” Dad asked.

  “I forgot,” I said.

  “Well, go toss these coconuts in the canal, and then put it away like I told you.”

  “Okay,” I said and loaded up my arms.

  After I had thrown the coconuts into the water, Mom called to me. “Hurry up and get inside,” she yelled. “I want you to take a shower before I fill the tub with water.”

  When I was undressing I reexamined my dog bite. The teeth marks were still red and swollen, and when I touched them, they throbbed. Rabies, I thought. I should tell Mom and Dad right now so they still have time to take me to the hospital. But what if it’s not rabies? What if we dash to the hospital and the doctor says it’s just a simple dog bite and then the hurricane gets worse and we are stuck at the hospital? Everyone will hate me for being a big baby. Dad will roll his eyes. Mom will try to be nice. Betsy will treat me like a moron, and Pete will laugh until he falls over. I decided not to tell them. It was a chance I’d have to take.

  I went into my bedroom and locked the door. I turned my crummy radio on to the hurricane-watch station and began to go through the letters I had found at Cactus Street. I was in luck. Their names were Mrs. Cleo Stone and Jimmy Stone. There didn’t seem to be a Mr. Stone. I had an old electric bill, a postcard sent to Jimmy from someone named Harry, a bill-collection notice for late rent, a contest application, a church-picnic notice, and a telephone bill.

  I wrote their old phone number on a scrap of paper and went into Mom and Dad’s bedroom. They were in the living room watching the hurricane report on the one television station we could still get. I dialed the number and got what I’d hoped for. A tape-recorded message from the phone company announced: “The number you have reached has been changed to 723-4423.”

  I quickly rehearsed my thoughts and dialed the new number.

  “Hello,” answered a boy.

  “Is this Jimmy Stone?” I asked in an adult voice.

  “Yes.”

  “This is the dog pound,” I said. “We’re calling to make sure your dog is properly locked up during the hurricane.”

  “Have you seen my dog?” he asked excitedly. “He ran away and we’ve been searching for him everywhere.” Then he yelled away from the phone, “Hey, Mom. It’s the dog pound looking for Peanut.”

  “Give me the phone,” a woman said.

  I hung up. Then I ran back to my room and peeled off my sock. My ankle was pounding. The bruises looked dark and infected. I squeezed around a puncture and some watery pus dribbled out. I’m a dead man, I thought. Jimmy Stone’s dog had gone mad and run away.

  I removed my diary from under my mattress. I unlocked it and wrote: “My Last Will and Testament. Everything I own goes to Pete.” I signed my name to make it official. Then I spit on the page. Under it I wrote, “This is what killed me!”

  All evening long we sat in the living room and watched disaster movies on television. First we watched Key Largo, where a hurricane wipes out a hotel in the Florida Keys. That was followed by The Poseidon Adventure, which showed an ocean liner flipped over by a tidal wave. Then Earthquake came on and we watched a city crumble and burn. All the disaster scenes seemed real because of the hurricane winds howling around our house and the rain beating against the plywood shutters. I thought up a movie where a boy gets rabies and bites everyone in the whole town and infects them and then they begin to spread out across the entire country and the President has to call out the army to shoot all the rabid fiends. But the rabid people chew up the army and the President has to decide to drop the atomic bomb on the dog people. It could be the end of civilization.

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Mom said, running her hand over my head. “Don’t worry, the house won’t blow away.”

  “I’m fine,” I replied. I had only two choices now. I could just go find a safe place to die, or I could get forty shots in my stomach and throw up every day. I’d rather die.

  We were watching King Kong when the electricity went off.

  “Okay, the party’s over,” said Dad. “Time for bed.”

  Pete had already fallen asleep, and Mom carried him up the hallway to his room. I was tired and fell asleep right away. I slept through the rest of the hurricane and didn’t wake up until Dad pushed open my bedroom door and yelled at me. “Jack! Get up this instant!” Even before I opened my eyes I knew he was furious. What did I do? Did I bite everyone in my sleep? My heart was pounding.

  “Get out here!” he hollered. What kind of trouble was I in? I ran down the hall and out the front door. Dad was lying on his back, half under his truck, trying to pull something out from around the back axle. I stood by his feet as he wrestled with a bunch of tangled pipes. Then suddenly he got it free and pushed it toward me. It was my Raleigh bike, all twisted up like a pretzel.

  “Didn’t I tell you to put your bike away!” he shouted.

  I started to cry.

  “Well?” he asked. “I’m waiting.”

  “You did.”

  “Now look at it,” he said. “It’s ruined. You just don’t listen to me. How do you expect to learn anything if you don’t listen?”

  I looked down at the bike. Every inch of it was bent. It must have blown under the truck, and when he pulled out of the carport, it got curled up under the wheels.

  “How do you expect to get good things if you can’t take care of them?” Dad continued. “You know we don’t have money to burn.” I knew this speech and it made me sad for everyone in our family. We just didn’t have the money we once had. When Dad’s good watch stopped running, he’d bought a cheap Timex. We’d bought a used black-and-white television when our color set gave out. We didn’t even have a car of our own. Dad had the company truck, which I’d just about ruined.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to him.

  “I’m sorry, too,” he said, but he was still mad. He got in the truck and drove off.

  I guess I don’t need a bike anyway, I thought. I’ll be dead soon.

  I got dressed and started to work around the house like the madman I was. I picked up all the fallen tree limbs, cut them up with a hatchet, and piled them by the side of the road for the garbage truck. I raked the lawn and swept the sidewalk and driveway. I wanted to take down the plywood shutters and have the house in perfect shape for Dad’s return, but Mom said they were too heavy. “What else can I do, then?” I asked her.

  “If you’re all caught up,” she said, “you’re free until your dad gets home.”

  “Okay.” I ran around to the back of the house and checked on my experiments. I couldn’t find the plastic drinking straws anywhere. I found my parachute soldier tangled up in a bush by the side of the house, and lightning had not struck the steel rod by the canal. I pulled it out and put it back in the utility room. That’s when I saw Pete’s new bike and got an idea.

  I went into the house and knocked on his bedroom door. “Pete,” I whispered.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Can you keep a secret?”

  “Yeah, what?” he asked.

  “I have something important to tell you.” I slipped into his room and locked the door behind me. “Cross your heart you won’t tell.”

  “Cross my heart,” he repeated.

  “Then look at this.” I kicked off my tennis shoe and rolled down my sock. The bite marks were still red and puffy. “I got bit by a dog last week and now I have rabies,” I said. “And I think I’m going to die.”

  Immediately, he started to cry.

  “Don’t cry,” I whispered. “I th
ink you can save me.”

  “How?” he asked, sniffing and wiping his nose.

  “Loan me your bike. I think I know where the dog lives who bit me. If I can find it, then I’ll know for sure if I have rabies.” It was a new birthday bike and I knew he didn’t want to loan it to me. Especially after he saw what happened to my bike. But I was desperate. “Am I foaming at the mouth yet?” I asked him. I smacked my lips together and let some drool run out of the corner of my mouth and onto my chin.

  He looked at me with fear. “I don’t think so,” he said shakily. “You’re only drooling.”

  “That’s the first sign,” I moaned. “Just make sure I don’t bite you.” I rolled my sock back up and put on my shoe. “Will you loan it to me? As you can see, it’s a matter of life or death.”

  “Okay,” he said. “But don’t tell Dad.”

  “I’ll be back before he comes home from work,” I said.

  I had a theory. I had read a book called The Incredible Journey, which was about a family who had moved across the country without their pets and the story was about how the pets had to track them three thousand miles to find them. I figured that the dog may have gotten confused by the move and returned to the old house.

  I took Jimmy Stone’s telephone number and a couple of dollars in change I had taped into my diary. My first stop was the grocery store. I went to the pet-food section and picked out a box of dog bones to keep Peanut from chewing on me if I found him. Then I rode to 1227 Cactus Street. Their old house had been kicked around by the hurricane. The windows on the east side were blown in. The door was open, and even from the sidewalk I could see water and glass on the living-room floor. The boxes of trash I had found yesterday were no longer on the front lawn. Everything had blown away. Up and down the street people were clearing debris from their lawns and raking up all the branches and leaves. I looked around to see if there were any interesting disasters. Once, after Hurricane Cleo, I had seen a canoe balanced on the roof of a house, and a tree that had crushed a station wagon. But everything on Cactus Street looked pretty normal, so I had nothing to do but enter the house and look for Peanut. I opened the box of dog bones and walked up the sidewalk. “Here, Peanut,” I called out and tossed a dog bone into the empty living room. It landed with a splash. “Here, Peanut,” I called from the front door and threw another bone. “Come and get it.”

  I took a step into the house. Now I am trespassing, I thought, and if I’m bit by a mad dog everyone will say it’s my own fault, especially my dad, who will probably say something like, “Didn’t I tell you never to enter a stranger’s house where a mad dog is hiding?”

  The water was an inch deep in the living room. I could feel the same fear run through me that I had felt when the dog bit me. “Here, Peanut,” I said and threw a dog bone down the dark hallway. “Good Peanut,” I called. The first door I reached was on my right. I opened it just a crack and peeked in. It was the bathroom. “Peanut,” I whispered. I slipped a dog bone through the crack. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I saw three more doors. The first one was open. I tiptoed to the edge of the opening and peeked in. “Here, Peanut,” I said. But there was no Peanut. I took a deep breath and tried to walk quietly to the next closed door. My tennis shoes squeaked on the wet floor. I knocked. “Are you in there, Peanut?” I opened the door and threw in a dog bone. He wasn’t there. There was only one more door and it was open. I peeked into the room. “Peanut? Are you in here?” I threw a dog bone in the dark corner of the room. Then something in the room’s closet stirred. My heart jumped. I knew the sound of a dog’s nails clacking on the concrete floor. I wanted to run, but I had to see if it was Peanut and if he was foaming at the mouth. I threw a handful of dog bones at the closet door. He barked. “Peanut, come out,” I shouted. I threw another bone toward the closet. Then I grabbed the door handle and began to back out of the room. “Peanut, come out,” I called. He barked once more, then lunged out of the closet. The floor was wet and he slid in a panic across the room. I screamed and pulled the door shut.

  But I had to open it again. I peeked in. “Come here, Peanut,” I said. “It’s okay.” He turned and looked at me. I threw him a dog bone. Even if he jumped at me I had time to yank the door shut before he reached me. He looked at me and barked a few times and I threw him some more dog bones. If he eats, I thought, he isn’t rabid. I knew that sick animals never ate. He barked again, then sniffed at a dog bone and started to chew it. I didn’t see any foam around his mouth. I threw him another bone and he pawed at it while he chewed another. He seemed really hungry. I opened the door and slowly walked toward him. “Good Peanut,” I said. “Good dog.” I held a bone out to him and he took it in his mouth as I pet him on his head and scratched his ears. “You dumb dog,” I said. “You went home to the wrong house.”

  I dumped the box of bones on the floor then walked out of the room, closing the door behind me. I didn’t have rabies! I didn’t have to die or go mad or bite my family to death. I ran down the sidewalk and hopped on Pete’s bike. There was a pay telephone at Gus’s Gas Station and I rode over there as fast as I could. The gas station was closed for business. A big sign was propped against the gas pump: CLOSED—WATER IN GAS TANK DUE TO HURRICANE. Dam, I thought. Now I’ll never know if he put the water in himself. I could just hear Dad saying that Gus was using the hurricane as a cover-up now that everyone was wise to him selling watered-down gas.

  The pay phone was on the outside of the building. I put in the dime and dialed Jimmy Stone’s number.

  “Hello,” he answered.

  “Is this Jimmy Stone?” I asked in my adult voice.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “This is the city dog pound, and we’ve found your dog in the back bedroom at 1227 Cactus Street.”

  “Oh, that’s great,” he cried. “Hey, Mom,” he yelled. “They found Peanut at our old house.”

  “Let me have the phone,” she said.

  Oh no! I slammed down the phone. I stood still for a minute. Then suddenly I shouted, “Case closed!”

  “LOOK OUT. There’s gonna be a fight,” Gary Rook hollered. I looked up and saw his sister’s big pink Ford pull into their driveway.

  We were in his wide back yard, shooting arrows at a scarecrow his dad had planted in their vegetable garden. We had sawed off the steel points and twisted used thread spools onto the ends. When we missed the scarecrow, we didn’t want to kill old Mrs. Gibbons on her back porch.

  Gary was allowed to do almost anything he wanted to do. His dad worked all day building fancy doghouses for a chain of kennel clubs, and his mother sat in the house and read gossip magazines and watched soap operas. Last month, Gary rode their riding lawn mower to the grocery store just to buy a Royal Crown Cola. He cut through a lot of lawns and left a path to the store and back. When people called his house to complain, his mom told them all to drop dead.

  His sister had moved out of the house last month.

  “Mom just found out that Angela’s living with a divorced mountain man,” Gary said. “And she’s mad as all get-out.”

  They were from Tennessee. I imagined a scrawny man wearing a coonskin cap.

  I heard the front door slam.

  “You have no right telling me how to live my life,” shouted Angela. “It’s my life and I can do as I please.”

  “If you lived decently I wouldn’t have to tell you how to live,” Mrs. Rook hollered.

  “It’s not right for you to phone me up at all hours of the day and night and call me names,” Angela shouted.

  “I wouldn’t have to call you names if you’d just run your life like I brought you up to live it,” Mrs. Rook yelled.

  I didn’t like hearing Mom and Dad argue, and now I felt the same way just listening to Gary’s mom and sister. But Gary snuck across the ground and knelt under the kitchen window so he could hear better.

  I looked at my watch. It was four o’clock and time to go home. Mom had taken a job as a bank teller at First Federal Savings and Loan and w
anted us cleaned up for dinner when she arrived from work.

  Finally, Angela yelled out louder than before, “You drive me crazy.”

  “I just wish I could drive you to your senses.” The door slammed shut and Angela started up her car with a roar. Her tires squealed in the driveway and just when I thought she was driving off, she suddenly turned the car and started driving on the grass. She drove up over the low azalea hedge into the back yard. The engine roared and grass and dirt kicked out behind the rear tires. I froze. She drove right by me, then between Gary’s house and the Gibbonses’. Then I saw her circling back toward us again, only this time faster. I ran for a big palm tree. Gary stayed pressed up against the back of the house. Mrs. Rook was yelling out the back door. The pink car skidded sideways across the grass while Angela spun the steering wheel one way and then another. Her face was puckered up around her mouth and her wig had slipped over to one side, making her head look huge and uneven. I kept running. Angela lost control of the car. She looped around in a circle and plowed across the vegetable garden, flattening the scarecrow. The engine stalled and I heard her laughing as I sprinted for the street.

  She started up and fishtailed around to her front yard. When she reached the street, her tires jerked and squealed and I smelled the burnt rubber as the car took a hard left and was gone.

  I ran toward home. I cut across the Veluccis’ yard, jumped a hedge, jumped a flower bed, and ran around a wading pool to our back door. I whipped it open, ran down the hall and into my bedroom. My heart was pounding and I was panting like a dog.

  When I caught my breath, I pulled out my diary. “I wish I was a cop,” I wrote. “I’d arrest Gary’s sister for attempted murder! There ought to be a law against people like her driving cars.” I squeezed the book closed over a plastic sample packet of cologne I took from Betsy’s fashion magazine. It popped open like a blood blister. The smell was horrid, like hospital air. The people who make this junk should also be arrested, I thought.

  I began thinking about Donna Lowry because she wore perfume. But when I smelled hers, it made my shoulders shiver. She had long, reddish-brown hair. She wore blue jeans and T-shirts and white sneakers to school. She was smart and popular and a member of the Safety Patrol. Only six kids could be members of the Safety Patrol and everyone thought they were the coolest kids in the class. They got silver badges on a bright orange belt that made an X across their chests. They had traffic-police whistles and could stop cars to help kids cross the streets leading to school. And if cars wouldn’t stop they could write down their license-plate number and report them to the police. I wanted to join. I could meet Donna and maybe I could arrest Gary’s sister.