Heads or Tails

by Jack Gantos

  “For you,” I said.

  She had a lovely smile, just like my grandmother. She was still trembling all over like a little poodle. “Why, you are a fine young man,” she said in her shaky voice. “What’s your name?”

  “Jack,” I said.

  “Then I’ll name the bird Jack,” she said.

  That was fine with me.

  I HAD BEEN DRIVING Betsy nuts. I’m not allowed in her bedroom, but I’d been sneaking in and listening to her new radio on Saturday mornings when she takes modern-dance lessons with Sue Peabo. My radio was so old it only got the local stations. But hers got everything.

  There was just one show that interested me: “The UFO Talk Line.” People from all over the world called in to report UFO sightings and to explain why the government is always hiding the evidence. There were reports of a formation of silver UFOs over Brazil, and then the same ones were seen as far away as Rumania, and then back over Washington, D.C. But our government was denying any such sightings, even though a radio caller, Mr. Fralinger, had seen them with his own eyes. Each show, which was hosted by Dr. D. Beebe and sponsored by Dixie Cake Company, always had an invited guest who was either an expert or someone who had actually seen a UFO. Once they had on a lumberjack from Maine who had been captured and examined for five days by UFO doctors. After that show, I climbed up onto our house roof and sent out waves of “mental telepathy” thought messages to UFO pilots, telling them where I was and that I was willing to give up my life on earth to go live on another planet.

  Dr. D. Beebe reported that the government has many crashed UFOs in warehouses and has real alien beings kept in freezers so they can study them and discover the secret of eternal life, so only the rich and powerful can live forever. “It’s all a government cover-up,” he insisted.

  I was listening to a special report on secret UFO air bases in Peru when Betsy opened her door.

  “You creep,” she said. “Get out of here.” Then before I could move she yelled down the hall. “Mom, he’s in my room again.”

  Mom’s voice bounced back. “Jack, leave Betsy’s radio alone.”

  “I’m not hurting anything,” I said. “I’m just listening to the radio.”

  “You’re listening to a bunch of lunatics who take fake photographs of flying hubcaps and try and pass them off as UFOs.”

  “That’s not all true,” I replied. She was so wrong. “Some pictures are real. Even the government’s own experts haven’t proved that they’re fake.”

  “Listen to yourself. You sound like one of the nuts who hang around the bus station selling crystals from the lost continent of Atlantis.”

  “You’ll see someday,” I said. “Just remember that there is always a Doubting Thomas.”

  “Don’t bring religion into this,” she snapped. “Or you’ll be in over your head.” She was right. Betsy knew all the Bible stories by heart and was constantly correcting everyone who made a mixed-up remark.

  “Okay. But someday you’ll see.”

  “I’ll be long gone by then,” she said. She was always saying that. She had secret plans to go to college in London.

  I tuned the radio back to her station. “If my radio was any good, I wouldn’t have to use yours.”

  “If I catch you in here again,” she threatened, “I’ll punch you so hard you’ll see UFOs.”

  “Funny,” I said sarcastically, “but your face beat you to it.” I ran past her and was across the hall when her shoe hit me in the back of the head. Betsy couldn’t throw a baseball across the yard, but she was deadly with shoes. She could throw one through a donut if I held it in front of my face.

  I had to get a better radio and it had to be a shortwave radio like Dad had before it broke, so I could pick up UFO talk radio all over the world. Every country had people who had seen alien spacecrafts, and I had to know what they looked like, and if they captured people and animals, or if they thought human beings were too primitive and warlike to visit. Maybe we had diseases that would kill them, just like the American Indians died when the pioneers gave them their diseases. My theory is that humans are so inferior to aliens that they can’t stand to be around us, so they turn right around and zoom back home.

  Because we are always so mean to each other, they must think we would be especially mean to them. The international news reports on Dad’s old shortwave radio were frightening. Countries all around the world were at war. And in America there were a lot of “little wars” that I read about in the newspaper. Wars that take place in the home. I read where most of the people murdered are murdered by friends or family members or neighbors shooting each other over parking spaces. Betsy might hit me with a shoe once a week, but it’s not the same as her shooting me with a gun.

  That’s why it’s important for me to sit on my roof at night and send thought messages to the UFOs telling them that I am a good person and that I don’t like violence and I don’t lie, and I want to be friends and share everything about ourselves. I wish they’d come down and take me away.

  Out front, I heard Dad’s pickup truck pull into the driveway. He had just changed jobs again. His old truck was yellow and it was always washed and waxed because it was Dad’s job to look good as a concrete salesman. But his new truck was big and covered from top to bottom with white spray paint and muck. The back was full of paint cans, tools, and two air compressors. One was for steam-cleaning the mildew off dirty tile roofs, and the other was for spray-painting them white again. Even the inside of the cab was filthy and littered with old coffee cups, sandwich wrappers, and cigarette butts. The rig looked like it had been abandoned under a tree and was now covered with a hundred years of bird droppings. And Dad was always a mess when he came home. His pants and shirt were stiff with paint and his hair was streaked white where he had run his hands through it to keep it out of his eyes.

  Mom opened the refrigerator and I heard the pssht sound of a beer can opening. She poured it into an ice-cold mug.

  “Aren’t you a sight,” she said cheerfully, meeting him at the front door.

  “Hey,” he replied and gave her a kiss. “Meet me around back. I want to get out of these clothes.”

  All this week she had been really nice to him, because last week he had gone around the bend. He had received a letter from the Internal Revenue Service saying he owed the government a lot of money. After he read that letter, he cursed and stomped through the house, giving speeches to all of us. “Let me tell you the truth about our government,” he said to me. “The real criminals are the politicians and bankers. Just once I’d like to see them arrest some of the thieves in Washington who pocket everything the working man makes.” I wanted to tell him how the government also covers up all the UFO sightings and crashes, but I kept my mouth shut.

  “You’re a big mess,” I heard Mom say.

  “I worked like a dog today,” Dad replied. “I kept thinking I was working so some congressman could send his bratty kids to college.”

  “Now, let’s not get too worked up all over again,” Mom said. “We don’t know just how serious this is.”

  Dad showered, then got busy with sorting through our tax papers. The dining-room table was covered with stacks of shoe boxes. Each was labeled Business or Medical or Insurance or Supplies or Moving Expenses. From what Dad said, the IRS wanted to examine his business deductions for the past seven years. That’s from when I started kindergarten in Pennsylvania until now, I thought. I hadn’t saved anything from that time in my life, especially boxes of little receipts. It seemed unfair, as if they expected a person to save all their diapers from when they were born.

  I thought it would be a good night to have everyone like me. I tried to find one thing each week that would make everyone forgive me for any of the rotten things I might have said or done during the week. “Hey, Dad,” I asked quietly, “would you like your shoes polished?”

  “Yeah. Sure,” he said abruptly, without looking up. He was adding a stack of figures and I could faintly hear him counting to hi
mself. I got his shoes, Mom’s high heels, Betsy’s school flats, Pete’s good Sunday loafers, and all of mine, and went out to the screened-in porch. I polished Dad’s good shoes first, then took a wire brush and scraped off all the mud and paint from his work boots. I tugged on the leather insoles until they came free, then poured a layer of baking soda on them to draw out the nasty, damp smell. There was a slight breeze and from across the canal I could hear the Diehls’ television. “The Jeffersons” was coming on next. I sang along with the theme. “Movin’ on up …” The song was like gospel music, which I liked to sing. My favorite was one called “Jesus Dropped the Charges!” I imagined going up to heaven and meeting Jesus, who was a big black man with a chorus of angels. I would list all my sins and Jesus would forgive me and then we’d all sing, “Jesus dropped the charges!” We’d dance around on the clouds, clap our hands, and sing like there was no tomorrow.

  The telephone rang and Mom answered it in the kitchen. “Hello?” she said, in her professional bank-teller voice. Then suddenly her voice tightened like a rope. “Just tell me, Jim,” she snapped, and in a few seconds she cried out, “Oh, my God, no.”

  Dad jumped up from the table. “What?” he asked. Mom was crying so hard she just passed the telephone to Dad. After listening a moment, he spoke evenly to Uncle Jim: “We’ll leave tonight and see you in a day or so.”

  I knew someone must have died but I didn’t know who. The only time I heard Mom’s voice sound so intense was when Pete was dying. He hadn’t learned how to walk yet and Mom had him in the playpen. He reached between the bars and ripped a leaf off a house plant and tried to swallow it. When she found him, he was blue. That’s when I heard her voice snap: “Jack, call your father at work! The number’s above the phone!” By the time he arrived, Mom had flipped Pete upside down and with her long fingernails had finally gouged out the leaf.

  I felt horrible as I stood on the porch with a shoe in each hand. I was going over in my mind who I would least want to die. Not my grandparents or uncles and aunt. Not their children. Not my great-uncles or even my second cousins. I didn’t want anyone to die. But one of them had already been chosen.

  I wiped my eyes against my shoulders. Pete was crying and hugging Mom around the waist. Betsy was blowing her nose into a tissue. Mom’s face was set crookedly, and then a low moan rose up out of her like an air bubble coming from deep underwater, and then more moans that turned into the word “God.” “Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.”

  Dad hugged her from behind and held her up. “God. God. God,” she cried. “Why?”

  I took my place next to Betsy. “It’s Grandpap,” she whispered.

  Dad woke me up at three in the morning. “It’s time, son,” he said. I jumped out of bed as if I had never slept.

  “What can I do?” I asked.

  “Get washed up and help your mother load the trunk.”

  I took my duffel bag out to the kitchen. Mom was wrapping sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs in aluminum foil. We packed up the trunk and laid out our good clothes on top of the luggage. “Is this all that’s going?” I asked. She said it was, and when I closed the trunk she began to cry again.

  BoBo was barking from my bedroom window when we pulled out of the driveway. “Did you close your bedroom door?” I asked Betsy.

  “Of course,” she said. “That brain-dead dog’s going to chew up everything in the house.”

  We each sat next to a window in the back seat. Pete slept between us, his head on Betsy’s lap and his feet on mine. Mom had called Steve Smith, a kid who lived down the street, who made a business out of taking care of people’s pets while they were on vacation. He was cheaper than the kennel. Maybe Mom will let me call him and tell him to close my door. But I doubt she’d let me make a long-distance call.

  After a few miles on the Florida Turnpike, I fell asleep. When I woke up it was light outside and I saw cows in the fields. “Where are we?” I asked.

  “Kissimmee,” answered Mom. She was the navigator and it was always her job to call out the road signs and plan our routes and handle the tolls.

  “How’re you doing, Dad?” I asked. Mom didn’t know how to drive, and so I thought it was smart to ask him questions and keep him alert.

  “I’m hanging in there.” In one of his Popular Science magazines a man invented a hat that had a built-in alarm, so that if your head slumped over, the alarm would go off and wake you up. Dad always drove straight through from our house to Pennsylvania without stopping to sleep. He wanted to save money by not staying in a motel. But I knew he really liked it when we arrived and my uncles slapped him on the back, saying things like “I never could have done it without stopping,” or “You’re a better man than I.” And even if we arrived around breakfast time, they always welcomed him with a cold beer.

  Mom poured Dad a cup of coffee from the thermos. I started thinking of our car as if we were in a cross-country race. I imagined a big number 3 painted on our roof. Every time we passed a car I felt closer to being in first place. But I hated it when we stopped for gas and all those cars passed us by. I especially hated how long it took everyone to use the bathroom. Dad was in and out like a veteran race driver. I followed his example. Mom and Betsy were slow, and Pete was a snail. When we stopped in Georgia, Mom sent me in after him.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. He had fallen asleep while sitting on the toilet with his chin in his hands. “Hey! We’re losing the race!” I yelled, clapping my hands. He sat up and tripped forward over his pants. His head hit me in the stomach and knocked the wind out of me. I fell over into a puddle of unknown liquid. “Just my luck,” I muttered. “This stuff will rot my pants.”

  “What’s the next town?” Dad asked when we were back on the highway.

  “The sign says ‘Trash Barrel’ ahead,” Mom replied and began to search the map. “I can’t find Trash Barrel anywhere on this map,” she said. Betsy looked over at me. I wasn’t going to say anything. Then we saw Dad grinning at us in the mirror and making the “crazy” sign with his finger twirling around his ear.

  “Oh, God,” Mom said and burst out laughing. “I am losing my mind.” She laughed at herself and we all joined her and had an even bigger laugh when we passed “Trash Barrel.”

  We drove on through Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. When we reached Virginia, Mom wanted to change places with me so she could stretch out. I had been waiting for the opportunity to get at the radio. Once she got settled, I began searching the AM band for a UFO talk line. “Hey, Dad, do you believe in UFOs?” I asked.

  “Just death and taxes,” he said dryly. “I only believe in what I can see and feel. There are no such things as UFOs.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know. Besides, there is no proof.”

  “But a million people have seen them.”

  “And people used to think the world was flat,” he replied. “If I see it, I’ll believe it.”

  “What about things you can’t see?” I asked. “What about things like luck and God?”

  “If I can’t see it, I don’t believe it,” he said.

  On the few Sundays we went to church, he stayed out in the car and read the newspaper. Once I overheard him say to Mom that only hypocrites went to church and that the good people stayed at home and lived decent lives. “That’s just an excuse to be lazy,” she had replied. “Besides, you’re going to confuse the children.”

  He had me confused. If he didn’t believe in God, maybe he believed in luck. “Hey, Dad, was it just bad luck that you got caught cheating on your taxes?”

  He flared up. “I didn’t cheat on my taxes. I’m being robbed by the government so another congressman can take a Hawaiian vacation. But you,” he said, pointing at me, “can go to the loony bin for believing in UFOs. Take a good look at your uncle Will. He’s a real flake and he claims to have seen UFOs.”

  “Really?”

  “That’s what he claims,” Dad said. “But everyone knows that Will doesn’t know his ass fro
m his elbow.”

  It was lucky Mom was asleep. I knew better than to get him talking like that. I couldn’t wait to see Uncle Will. I always thought he was a bit strange, but now I realized that he was just misunderstood, like a lot of people who had seen UFOs. “Do you think it’s bad luck that Grandpap had a heart attack?” I asked, changing the subject.

  “It isn’t good or bad luck. It’s just part of life. I had a friend who was hit by lightning on the golf course. He had three young kids. And look at Johnny Foil. Nobody knows when their time will come. Grandpap probably died from working so hard in the coal mines all his life.”

  When I was little, I used to sit on his basement stairs and wait for him to come home from the mines. He was black with coal dust, and he had his own shower down there. He would put his miner’s helmet on my small head and turn on the light and I’d play like I was digging coal. Then he’d open his lunch bucket and give me a piece of pickle he had saved just for me. I’d suck the vinegar out of it while he showered, and then he’d sit me down on his thigh and give me a horse ride while he sang, “Rattle up a June bug … A penny royal tea … Cat’s in the cupboard and can’t see me.”

  I tried to keep Dad awake by talking, and even though I was excited to question Uncle Will, I still fell asleep.

  When I woke, there was snow on the ground and my face was cold from pressing against the window. Mom leaned forward from the back seat and began to straighten up my hair. I knew we must be close. She picked at the sleep in the corner of my eyes, then licked her thumb and wiped a smudge off my chin. Betsy started to brush out her long hair, and then Pete woke, so Mom started to work on him.

  We pulled into the driveway and up to the garage. Uncle Will and Uncle Jim came around the back of the house to greet us. Mom began to cry. Uncle Jim was holding a beer in one hand and wiping tears away with the other. “How you doing,” he managed to say to Dad as he got out of the car.