Heads or Tails

by Jack Gantos

“I don’t know,” Dad said roughly. “If the good Lord don’t get you, then the tax man will.”

  “Hush,” Mom snapped.

  “I’m sorry,” Dad said. He seemed to be speaking to all of us. “Lately, it all seems like death and taxes. A man just can’t get ahead these days.”

  Uncle Will kicked at the ground. Dad looked away. Aunt Nancy peeked around the corner of the house, her eyes as pink as a rabbit’s.

  Grandma was in her bedroom, and after Mom saw her, she said it would be best to let her rest and just see the adults for now.

  I was disappointed. I had been thinking of so many things to say to her. How sorry I was and how much I loved her. I drifted around the house, trying to find something to do, and soon I was thinking about Uncle Will. After what Dad had said I looked at him differently. His head was rounder than everyone else’s in the family. Maybe UFO doctors had worked on him. He had a lot of strange scars, but I knew they were from getting dragged down a hill by a car when he was my age. He had metal pins in his legs and a metal plate in his head. I had always wanted to hold a giant magnet up to him and see if he would slide across the room and stick to it. He was the youngest in Mom’s family, and she and Uncle Jim still teased him, like Betsy and I teased Pete. Before I asked him about the UFOs, I knew I’d have to wait for the right time when we were alone.

  Betsy and I were playing pick-up-sticks in the kitchen when Uncle Jim said to me, “I’ll drive you out to Jackson’s house. You can stay there with Dale.” Dale was my second cousin. Whenever we visited, all of us kids got paired up with other cousins our own age. I liked staying with him because they didn’t have indoor plumbing, so at night, instead of going outside to the outhouse in the dark and cold, we just opened a window and peed down into the flower beds.

  Aunt Stella had my favorite dinner waiting for me when I arrived. First, we all got a big hunk of fresh baloney that she cut off a huge pink coil that looked like a giant pig’s tail. And then we all got our own big mixing bowl full of her homemade berry ice cream. For dessert, we had oatmeal cookies the size of dinner plates. She was the smartest cook because she made what we really wanted to eat, not what some school nurse said we had to eat.

  They didn’t have a television so Dale and I went to bed early. But in the middle of the night I woke up with a stomachache and had to go to the outhouse. I was already half dressed because it was cold in the house. I put on my shoes and Dale’s heavy coat and made my way downstairs and out the back door. They lived far out in the country, away from city lights, so the sky was clear and filled with a million stars. I looked up and saw the Milky Way, the Big Dipper, and Mars. I spotted a few green-and-red satellites, but no UFOs. It was too cold to stand still, and by the time I reached the outhouse, I was frozen stiff. With my luck, I thought, my butt will stick to the seat and I’ll freeze to death.

  When I finished, I stepped out and heard someone talking. There was a light coming from a split in the barn doors, and I crept up to take a look. Inside, three women were walking in a circle while praying. “Please heal these chickens,” one called out.

  “Amen,” said another.

  I turned and ran back to the house. “Hey, Dale,” I said when I got upstairs. “There are women in your barn praying for the chickens.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said sleepily. “Mom let some Christian Scientist ladies pray over ‘em. There’s no cure for what they got, so she figured to give these ladies a chance.”

  “Does this seem weird to you?” I asked.

  “Sure does,” he said. “But if it works, I won’t knock it.”

  “I guess so.” I crawled into bed.

  In the morning, I went back outside to pump some water up from the well. Stella said she would heat it up for me so I could wash properly before the funeral. Jackson came out of the barn with a wheelbarrow stacked high with frozen chickens.

  “They can pray all they want,” he said as he passed by. “I believe in prayer, mind you, but ain’t no prayers gonna save these chickens.”

  After a breakfast of ice cream and hot chocolate, Uncle Jim arrived. He told Jackson there was trouble with digging the grave. “The ground is so frozen they have to set fires and then can only dig down half a foot at a time,” he said.

  “They could keep him in the icebox at the morgue until the spring thaw,” Jackson suggested.

  “I already mentioned it to Mom,” he said, meaning Grandma. “But she won’t hear of it. Says she won’t rest and he won’t rest till his body’s properly buried.”

  “Can’t say as I blame her,” Jackson said. “I’ll take a run over there and see. They might need some extra wood. Hey, Dale and Jake,” he hollered from the porch, using my nickname, “go fill the truck up with firewood.”

  After we piled the wood up over the dead chickens, Dale and I jumped into the cab. Even with gloves and two pairs of socks, my hands and feet were freezing. Dale started the engine and turned on the heater. Jackson hopped in and we took off for the cemetery.

  “Jim said you can ride to the funeral with us,” he said as we drove through Mount Pleasant. We passed the hospital where I was born. We had moved out of town seven years before and I didn’t recognize anything else. The old cemetery was on a steep hill. A highway crew was salting and sanding the ice on the road.

  “These are some of your ‘pap’s friends,” Jackson pointed out as he waved to them. “They wouldn’t come out here for just anyone.”

  Up at the grave site two workmen were in a hole about three feet deep. We unloaded the wood and they set it up for a fire in the grave. They poured gasoline over the logs and threw a match to it. It caught with a whoosh.

  “Don’t worry,” said one of the men who was wearing a football helmet to keep his head warm. “We’ll be ready for you at two.”

  “Hey, Dale,” I whispered, “does all this seem weird to you, or is it just new to me?”

  “It must just be new to you,” Dale said. “Seems about the same to me.”

  We came back at two. The cemetery crew was just unrolling fake grass around the grave and driving in the last of the iron tent stakes. Mom and Grandma were in the back seat of Dad’s car. No one else was with them, so I opened the front door and slipped in. It was warm inside. Dad had the radio news on. “How’s it going?” I asked. I still didn’t know what to say to Grandma.

  “I don’t know why I listen to this damn radio,” he said under his breath. “They catch one congressman having hanky-panky with his secretary and they catch another taking kickbacks from a rocket manufacturer and so they slap their hands and send them both to a luxury prison in Arizona. Now, how much do you think that cost the taxpayer?”

  I was silent. Maybe it was a trick question and there was no answer.

  “Jack,” Mom said, “would you like to say something to your grandmother? She’s been wanting to know where you’ve been hiding.”

  I wasn’t sure if Mom was rescuing me from Dad or scolding me.

  Grandma smiled at me. She was wearing all black, with a veil over her pale face. “Hi, pumpkin,” she said and held my hand.

  “I’m really sorry,” I said. “I love Grandpa and said my prayers for him.” That was all I could say before my throat tightened up. She squeezed my hand and I squeezed hers back. I turned my head away but kept holding on.

  “It’s always the good ones that go before their time,” Dad said out loud. “The lousy ones are left alive—”

  “That’s not necessary for you to say,” Mom cut in.

  “Bye, Grandma,” I said quickly and stepped out of the car. By then, the tent was ready and the bright green plastic grass was in place. Soon Dad and my uncles and Grandpap’s younger brothers carried the coffin to the rope sling that would lower it down into the ground. But first they opened the coffin for one last look. He still seemed like Grandpap, only he was pink with makeup, like an old black-and-white photograph that was hand-painted. Mom lined us up and one by one we went up to him. I took a little school picture of myself out of my walle
t, and when it was my turn I tried to slip it into his jacket pocket. But the pocket was sewn shut. I dropped it down into the satin lining, then pulled my hand away as I said a prayer and goodbye.

  It was so cold I couldn’t cry much. But when Grandma fell across his body, crying, “Jim, Jim, don’t leave me,” I burst into tears. Mom and Uncle Will gently pulled her off, and Mr. Gotts, the funeral director, closed the casket and sealed it. They lowered it into the hole. The preacher gave a short blessing, and we all filed back to the cars, with Grandma crying out between breaths.

  The after-the-funeral party was held at Grandma’s house. People from all over came to say how sorry they were. They brought trays of food, which overlapped each other across the long kitchen table. Since Grandma stayed in her bedroom, they mostly left after a cup of coffee.

  It was dark when I found Uncle Will sitting alone in the living room. He looked tired, but I had to talk to him, because we were returning to Florida in the morning. “Uncle Will,” I said quietly, “I heard you saw a UFO. I believe in UFOs, too. What did it look like?”

  “I didn’t see it up close,” he said, “but it came in real slow, down from Canada. It looked like a meteor with a fire tail, but the folks who saw it in the air say it steered around like it was looking for a place to land. Then it went down in the woods behind the Yablonskys’ farm. A bunch of us were parked up on the ridge and saw like a whitish-blue light glowing, then fading back up in the trees. We didn’t get down to it, but the fire company had gone out there because of the possibility of it being a small plane or something. The army hadn’t arrived yet to chase everyone out, so some folks came up to it in the woods and saw it real good.”

  “Wow.” I sighed. “Was it broken open? Were there aliens?”

  “Tell you what. I’ve had about all this party I can handle. Let’s take a ride over to the fire station and you can talk to the guy who touched it.”

  I started to put my coat on when Mom saw me. “What are you up to?” she asked.

  “Will’s gonna take me to where he saw the UFO.” I could tell she wasn’t in the mood to hear about spaceships after she had been sitting with Grandma for two days.

  Will came around the corner. “I’m gonna take him with me for a few minutes. I’ll bring him back in one piece. Don’t worry, if he’s a pest I’ll ship him off to Mars.”

  “Okay,” Mom said and rolled her eyes at me. “Just make certain you have your stuff packed and ready for tomorrow.”

  We jumped in Will’s huge Oldsmobile and sped off down a dark road until we came to the town of Hecla and pulled up to the fire station. “Hey, Jerry,” Will called out as he lifted the garage door. “My nephew wants to hear your spaceship story.”

  Jerry was short and sturdy. He had a fluffy head of white hair as thick and woolly as sheep. “Sorry to hear about your dad,” he said to Will. He set his cup of coffee next to the radio scanner, then turned to me. He didn’t miss a beat.

  “We came up to it from a cropping of rock and it was down in a gully. It had not started glowing blue just yet. You could feel the heat coming off it, but there was no fire and it was in one piece, about the shape of a doorknob and about the size of a car. I could see a path of trees it had bowled down, but it wasn’t scratched. The hardest metal I’ve ever seen, looked like a blue copper. I rapped on it with my flashlight and it was like hitting solid rock. No echo and no vibration. I had hollered out that I found it and a couple of the volunteers came and saw it. The strangest part was the writing all over it, like it had been drawn on with a welding torch. I ain’t seen no writing like it, and since then I studied up on every form of writing known to man, past and present. It was totally foreign. I only wish I had a camera. And then the state police come up and run us off. Said the army didn’t want anyone messing with it. As soon as I turned to go, that’s when it started to glow blue, and I ran for my life, thought the thing might blow up.”

  “That’s amazing,” I said. I wanted to remember every word he spoke. I had to write this down when we returned to Florida.

  “Yeah. And when I got back here to the station, the army had arrived and taken over our phones, and I was told by a four-star general to keep my mouth shut if I knew what was good for me. Top Secret, he warned me.”

  “From where I was,” said Will, “it started glowing when the army arrived. Then they brought in a huge truck like a tank carrier and a crane and they loaded it up, put a tarp over it, and drove on out of there.”

  “I called the newspapers and the state cops and the local army reserve and all of them said they hadn’t heard a thing about it,” Jerry added. “I called my congressman and he reported back that there never was no sighting. If that isn’t a government cover-up, then I don’t know what is.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Can I shake your hand?”

  He stuck out his thick hand and I shook the hand that touched a UFO. “You gotta believe that they’re out there,” he insisted. “I’ll go to my grave knowing the truth of what I seen, and no army or government or some of these Bible-thumping folks around here are gonna make me think different.”

  When we got back in the car, Uncle Will told me that most people think Jerry’s gone insane. “People are nice to him to his face, but down at the fireman’s club he’s always talked about as a ‘space shot.’”

  “Do you mean that I shouldn’t believe him?” I asked.

  “Believe what you want to believe,” he replied, confusing me even more.

  On the dark ride back to Jackson’s, I began to think about returning home. What a wreck, I thought. Dad is going to have to face the Internal Revenue Service, which will make him angry every day. BoBo has probably torn my bedroom to shreds, and Mom will be heartbroken. I’ll be behind in school and have a pile of homework waiting for me. I wished a UFO would come down and capture me. Just lift me off the ground and take me far away. Maybe that’s why I believe in them, I thought; they’ll take me away from all this confusion and set me down in a place without fear.

  DAD COULDN’T STAND the Pagoda family, our right-side next-door neighbors. He said they had all lost control of their senses. “Just look at ‘em,” he hollered when he watched them do something weird like paint a giant atomic-bomb target on their roof. “They are out of control. The parents just let those kids get away with anything.” The oldest, Gary, had just been sent to a juvenile prison for stealing cars. Frankie was my age. His whole face was still bruised from when he dove off the roof into their swimming pool. He was a little short with his leap and hit his forehead on the concrete edge around the pool. The whites of his eyes were still blood-red. And Suzie, his twin sister, had just tried to dye her brown hair blond with Clorox, but it turned from brown to green. Mr. and Mrs. Pagoda bred show dog poodles for a living. Inside their house they must have had thirty dogs in cages. Every time I visited them, I took a deep breath of fresh air before I stepped inside. It was the last chance for good air, because the house smelled nasty, like dog crap and piss and damp fur. It made me gag and my eyes sting. And when I left their house my clothes smelled like a used diaper.

  Frankie and I were building a tree fort around the far side of their house. We were finishing one started by his older brother before he was arrested. The platform was in place and we were adding new ladder rungs to climb up the outside of the trunk.

  “Let’s build a roof,” I suggested to Frankie. “Then when it rains we can stay in the tree.”

  “What about lightning?” he asked.

  I thought that was a dumb question coming from someone who’s roof-dived into swimming pools. He also had a spiraling scar up and over his shoulder from being hit by a boat propeller while water-skiing on old snow skis. “We’ll put a lightning rod on top of the tree,” I said, “and run a wire down to a bucket, and if lightning strikes, one of us can put it over his head and be turned into Frankenstein’s monster.”

  Frankie laughed. He always laughed at my dumb ideas—which encouraged me to say and do dumb things.

  �
�Yeah. We can do anything we want. It’s our tree fort.”

  Pete had been snooping around our yard looking for me and now I watched him run over to the tree.

  “What are you guys doing?” he asked, panting.

  “What’s it look like?” I said.

  “We’re building a clubhouse,” Frankie explained.

  “But you can’t join,” I said. “It’s private.”

  “I’ll tell Mom,” he said, meaning that he’ll tell that I’m in the Pagodas’ yard. Dad had told us not to play here. “If old man Pagoda had a brain, he’d be dangerous,” Dad said, and, “If brains were dynamite, she couldn’t blow her nose.”

  I groaned. “All right. You can join. But you have to pass the initiation. You have to play Barnum and Bailey Circus Dare.”

  “Okay,” he agreed, without asking what it was.

  I pulled a long plank from the woodpile and set it under the tree. Then I put a round piece of log under the middle of the plank, like a seesaw. “You stand on the low end of the plank, facing out,” I instructed. He did, as I climbed up into the tree fort. “When I jump on the high end,” I shouted, “you fly up in the air and do a front flip.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  I jumped and landed with both feet on top of the board. Pete flew straight up in the air, just like in the circus. He flipped forward and landed on his butt. He laughed and hopped right up. “Let’s do it again,” he shouted.

  “This time, go straight up and try to land on Frankie’s shoulders,” I said and placed Frankie in the right spot. When I jumped, he flew up, and on the way down he stepped on Frankie’s bruised face instead of his shoulders.

  Frankie dropped to the ground and howled. “He’s re-broken my nose,” he cried.

  “Come here,” I ordered and looked him over. “Naw, you’re fine.”

  “One more time,” begged Pete.

  “Okay, do a back flip.” I climbed the tree and jumped. When I landed on the board, Pete shot straight up. Then he threw his head back and flipped around wildly like a dropped cat. He landed with a thud on his back, then jumped right up.