Heads or Tails

by Jack Gantos

  I scooted back in my chair. “Okay,” I said. I looked at Mom. She was no help. Betsy gave me her thin-lipped smile. Pete crossed his eyes at me. I knew what he was thinking.

  I took a garbage bag from the utility room and went directly to the Pagodas’ back yard. The conchs looked like diseased chicken wings. One by one, I yanked them off the line as the flies and smell swirled around my head. I didn’t have gloves and the spongy meat squished between my fingers. Conch juice ran down my arm and dripped off my elbow. When I finished, I scrubbed my hands with Dad’s Lava soap to get rid of the smell.

  “Good job,” Dad said when I returned to the table.

  “Go change your shirt,” Mom said. “It picked up the odor.”

  After dinner, Frankie knocked on my window. “Hey,” he said, “my brother’s back home. Do you want to watch him tattoo a naked lady on his arm?”

  “I can’t,” I said.

  After Frankie ran off I couldn’t sit still. “I think it’s time to go fishing, Eric,” I said to BoBo. There was still plenty of light.

  He looked up at me and I read his mind. Yes, Jack, I would like to go fishing, he was thinking. I unlocked my door and quietly walked down the hall with my rod in one hand and the tackle box in the other. I didn’t want Pete tagging along so he could drown and ruin my life.

  We went directly to a secret place behind Big Daddy’s Liquors. A large water-drainage pipe emptied into a canal. I sat on the rounded edge of the pipe and opened my tackle box. I took out my net and waded into the shallow water. A small rapids formed where the water broke over the sharp rocks that narrowed the canal as it passed under an old railroad bridge. I held my net in the running water and in a few minutes I had a small shiner. “Piece of cake,” I said.

  I gently slipped the hook into his mouth and out his gill. I dropped him in the water and slowly let out the line. The current carried the shiner about ten yards downstream. A perfect location for a hungry snook.

  After fifteen minutes, nothing happened. I figured my shiner was worn out. There was a 7-Eleven store next to the liquor store and I had enough change for a small grape Slurpee.

  “Stay, Eric,” I ordered BoBo and set my rod down on the pipe. “And guard that with your life.” He looked up at me, then went back to sleep.

  Those were my last words to him. I had taken about ten steps when I heard him yelp. When our very first BoBo was hit by a car in front of our last house, he had yelped in exactly the same way. I spun around in time to see a large alligator clamp BoBo’s head in its mouth, then drag him back down the bank. BoBo’s legs kicked out at the ground, but the alligator held him tight as it slithered backward down the bank and into the water.

  I was terrified of the alligator. It was at least ten feet long, and I knew they were fast. Sneaky fast. I stood still for a minute. I wasn’t sure what to do.

  I ran back to the drainage pipe and leaned forward. “BoBo!” I yelled across the water. I looked up and down the canal, hoping that somehow he had wiggled free. “BoBo!” I hollered, left and right. “BoBo!”

  He was gone. The water was black and smooth as it rushed by. I stepped from the pipe to the bank and to the spot where BoBo had slept. I stooped down to touch the dirt. I thought it might be warm. Half buried in the sand was the stupid watch I had earlier put on his arm.

  This could have been Pete, I thought. He would have listened to me if I told him to “guard it with your life.” He would have been on this exact spot with his back to the alligator. He would have been watching me walk away. He would have been begging me to buy him a Slurpee and I would have been thinking: Buy it yourself. And then he would have been ambushed and bitten and dragged back into the water, into the alligator lair tunneled under the bank, and eaten.

  Dad was right. I shouldn’t turn my back on him. I should keep an eye out for him. I’m the older brother and it’s up to me to help him. I shouldn’t break his arm and let him knock his teeth out or punch him like I do. Suddenly, I thought he might be at the Pagodas’ getting a naked woman tattooed onto his arm.

  I grabbed my rod and reeled in the line. Pete, I’m sorry, but wherever you are, stay put, I said to myself. I’m coming. I ran full speed with my tackle box in one hand and the rod in the other. I kept my eyes on the ground, picking the spot for each foot, making certain that I got the most out of each step.

  I reached our back yard. “Pete?” I yelled as I dropped my tackle box and reel. I stuck my head through the open kitchen door. Mom was mixing a pitcher of frozen juice. “Have you seen Pete?” I asked. I was panting.

  “I thought he was with you,” she said.

  I took off, running around the Pagoda side of our house. I jumped the low hedge and made for their far yard.

  There was Pete. He was kneeling on the top of their slide, trying to get a skateboard lined up under him. Down below, Frankie held the lighter-fluid-drenched Hula Hoop, and Suzie stood to one side with her thumb on the top of a cigarette lighter. They were ready to go up in flames.

  “Pete!” I yelled. “Stop!”

  I ran up to Frankie and yanked the Hula Hoop out of his hand and flung it as far as I could. Frankie gave me a shove from behind. I turned and got ready to jump him.

  “He wanted to do it!” Frankie shouted at me and stepped back.

  “It was his idea,” Suzie said, pointing to Pete.

  “That doesn’t mean you should let him do it,” I yelled.

  I looked up at Pete. “Get down here. I have something terrible to tell you.” He let the skateboard go down the slide and he took the ladder.

  “BoBo was eaten by an alligator.”

  He looked up at me. “Are you lying?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “He was eaten by a ten-foot alligator that could just as easily have eaten you.”

  “He had fleas,” Pete said. “I hate fleas.”

  “Don’t you get it?” I said. “He was eaten by an alligator.”

  “I know what an alligator is,” he said, then added, “BoBo smelled bad.”

  “He was your dog!” I yelled. “He worshipped you.”

  “He ate my shoes,” Pete said.

  “Don’t you get what I’m saying?” I said.

  “Get what?” he said.

  “No wonder I have to take care of you,” I said.

  He stepped away from me. “Do you want to see my tattoo?” he asked.

  “What!” I hollered. “What?”

  “Just kidding,” he said and began to laugh.

  “Give me your other arm,” I demanded. He stuck it out and I dragged him all the way home.

  “EVERYBODY PUT ON your best clothes,” Dad said. He had just told us he was offered a high-paying job with a big construction company in Cocoa Beach, Florida. “We’re going out to dinner and you can order off the expensive side of the menu.”

  “All right!” Pete yelled.

  Betsy was suspicious.

  “Don’t give me that look,” Dad said, turning toward her. “I talked with the boss today and it’s in the bag.”

  “I didn’t say a word,” she said with indifference. “It’s just that seeing is believing.”

  Mom gave him a kiss. She was three months pregnant and touched her belly with both hands when she leaned forward. “Don’t mind her,” Mom said. “It’s a stage she’s passing through.” Then she gave Betsy a “straighten-up” glare.

  “My ship came in,” Dad said, shaking his head. “I’ve been waiting a long time, and now it’s arrived.”

  “What about the dinner I cooked?” asked Betsy. She sounded hurt. She had made lima-bean soup. His favorite. “Cat-box soup” is what I called it. The smell of it nearly gagged me.

  “We’ll eat it tomorrow,” he said while doing a smooth shadow dance around the living room. “Everybody knows soup is better the second day.” Suddenly, he clapped his hands together. “Hey, let’s go! I’m the dad and you are a family on the move.” He smiled his big smile. The one I had seen when things worked out the way he said they woul
d.

  I ran up the hall and into my room. I put on a dark shirt, because I’m a slob when I eat Italian food. Once I wore a good white shirt and Mom made me wear a napkin tucked into my shirt collar with the ends gathered up over my shoulders. I looked like I was sitting in a baby chair with a bib on.

  We went to the Venice Restaurant. It was decorated with murals of gondolas and churches and beautiful houses along a wide canal. Fort Lauderdale is known as the Venice of Florida because of our canals. But it did not look anything like the Venice I’d seen in books. Dad ordered a bottle of Chianti even before we sat down. Mom raised her eyebrows.

  “This is a celebration,” he announced.

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” she said.

  “I won’t have to work two jobs anymore. In the evening I can come home, drink a cold beer, and read the paper with my feet up.”

  The wine arrived. The bottle was wrapped in straw like the ones we used at home for candle holders. “Glasses for everyone,” Dad said to the waiter.

  “None for me,” Mom cut in. “I’ll have a ginger ale.”

  Across the street, the old people lined up for dinner at Morrison’s Cafeteria. They all looked wealthier than we were, so why were they eating there? All the food looked like lawn clippings with hard-boiled eggs and sliced beets mixed in.

  Dad poured a little wine in each of our glasses, then raised his to the ceiling. “Cheers,” he said brightly. He looked happy and hopeful. “To the future.”

  We all clinked glasses. The warm wine tasted like grape juice and gasoline.

  “Tell us about your new job?” Betsy asked.

  “As soon as I know more, I’ll tell you,” Dad said and poured himself another glass of wine.

  “Then tell us more about Cocoa Beach,” she said.

  “It’s a growing town. With Cape Kennedy aiming for Mars, now there are a lot of jobs. The schools are good because there are so many government brats in them. There’s a good hospital for Mom. The beaches are great, and housing is cheap. What else can I say? The place is a paradise. Oh, and I thought we could all drive up there some day this week and look around.”

  “Great,” said Mom, “I’ll make some housing appointments.”

  “Houses are shootin’ up like mushrooms,” he said, “and at good prices.”

  Betsy and I exchanged glances. If we went up during the week, it meant getting out of school for one day, maybe two. We were almost at the end of the school year. Betsy had been saying her teachers were worn down and showing science movies all day long. Mrs. Marshall still had us going in circles. We were on our tenth copybook, and when we weren’t occupied with that, we were filling in the blanks on a mimeographed lesson plan she passed out. I could tell that she was sick of us; we were sick of her months ago.

  The waitress came and we ordered. Once the food arrived, we didn’t keep up the conversation. I was staring out into the future. What would it be like? I’ll be going from elementary school to junior high. From having a few friends to having no friends again. From being a home renter to being an owner. Plus, there will be a new baby in the family. We already had lived in nine different houses. This was my fifth school out of six grades. Was this going to be a fresh start? Or was this only another beginning without an end, like all the others?

  “Jack,” Mom said to me, “pay attention to what you are doing.”

  I looked down at my dinner. I had twirled nearly the entire plate of spaghetti into a large knot around my fork.

  “Maybe we should learn some table manners,” Betsy said, “before we move into a new neighborhood, so that people don’t think we were raised in a cave.”

  “Sorry.”

  Betsy shook her head. I knew she wanted us to make a good impression when we arrived. I agreed with her. I just had a hard time doing it.

  On the way home everything looked different to me. The neighborhood had changed. Suddenly, it seemed so temporary, like the fake cowboy towns built for making movies. The flat fronts of the houses were all that seemed real. If I could look behind them, I was sure I’d find the walls propped up with two-by-fours.

  When we pulled up into our driveway, I ran to the front door and was relieved when the door opened and I was able to step inside and make it back to my bedroom. I looked at my bed and chest of drawers. I opened my closet. I reached under my mattress and touched my diary. Everything was exactly where I had left it. I knew it couldn’t be any other way. But I felt different. Something in me had been flattened. The real me had already moved out of town, and the fake me was left behind.

  Dad didn’t want to go to Cocoa Beach over the weekend. He had tickets to the Jackie Gleason Golf Tournament in Fort Lauderdale. I didn’t mind playing golf, but watching other people play was boring. Dad once took me to caddy for him. I dragged his clubs across eighteen miles of desert under a blistering sun. On every hole I asked if I could buy a Coke. He never took me again.

  Some of the kids in the neighborhood talked about applying to be professional caddies at the tournament, but I didn’t have enough experience. I walked over to the Pagodas’ side yard with Pete. Frankie and Suzie were squirting lighter fluid down an ants’ hole and setting it on fire. It looked like a tiny volcano erupting, and the lines of angry ants scattered like fleeing villagers. Frankie had a rubber model of Godzilla that he chased the ants with. He crushed one and screamed, “Oh no! Godzilla has flattened the emperor’s son!”

  “The Japanese Army is fighting back,” cried Suzie. She squirted fluid on Godzilla and set him on fire. “Godzilla is on fire,” she yelled, “and he’s melting.”

  When Godzilla had turned into a glob of bubbling rubber, they lost interest in the game. “Hey,” I said. “I have a great idea for our own golf tournament.”

  “We’re not allowed to play golf,” Suzie said.

  “Why?” asked Pete.

  “We were blasting tee shots down the hallway and one of the balls smashed against the fish tank and it exploded and all the water and fish went all over the dining room and my dad went ballistic and said we could never play again.”

  “But we’ll play outside,” I explained.

  “We can’t do that, either,” said Frankie. “Before we blew out the fish tank, I smashed the windshield on the station wagon, and he went ape.”

  I couldn’t believe I had discovered something that they were not allowed to do. And that it was golf!

  “Do you guys want to go swimming in the pool?” Suzie asked. “We poured a bottle of dish soap in, so it’s real bubbly.”

  I could see trouble. “I don’t think so,” I said to Pete and shook my head. “Are you sure you won’t play?” I asked again.

  “We can’t even if we could,” said Frankie. “We’re driving up to West Virginia to pick Gary up from camp.”

  “From prison!” Suzie blurted out.

  “Mom said to say camp,” Frankie said, and he punched her arm.

  “I’ll pour lighter fluid on you,” she cried.

  I grabbed the lighter fluid from her hand. “Stop it,” I said and threw it to the other side of the yard. “Come on, Pete.”

  We walked back home. “Okay,” I said. “We’ll have a two-person tournament. We aren’t gonna see any of these people again, anyway.” We sat down on my bedroom floor with a big sheet of paper and a Magic Marker. “Here’s the plan. We make our own golf course in the neighborhood. And it has to be tough. Like, we have to put a hole in all the most difficult yards.”

  “Okay.”

  I drew the neighborhood houses and wrote in the names of the people who lived in them. “You pick first.”

  “The Metrics’,” he said. “Michelle gave me a chocolate, and after I ate it, she told me it was dog candy.”

  I put an X on their yard. I picked the Rooks’ because of Gary’s nasty mom. Pete picked the Diehls’ because their mean Doberman pinscher was on a chain. I picked the Peabos’ because Mr. Peabo drank too much and when he got sick Mrs. Peabo kicked him out of the house and he crawled
around on the lawn and vomited all over. “Just think if your ball lands in a puddle of puke,” I said and made a stinky face.

  Pete picked the Irwins’ because they had friends who belonged to a mean motorcycle gang. I picked the Gibbonses’ because Mrs. Gibbons had yelled at me for throwing a rock at her mailbox. Pete picked the Pagodas’ because Gary was coming home. I picked the cranky old couple, the “crazies,” because they always yelled out their window at us if we cut through their yard. We didn’t know their real name. “And we’ll put the last hole at our house,” I said, “because Dad will go berserk if he knows we are doing this.”

  Pete looked nervous.

  “Don’t worry,” I whispered. “We’re going to do all of this when Dad’s asleep.”

  “What about alligators?”

  “I’ll handle them. What we need is equipment.” I wrote up a list: coffee cans, tennis balls, golf clubs, orange spray paint, a flashlight, and a trophy. “We better use tennis balls instead of golf balls. We don’t want to break anyone’s windows.”

  I sent Pete to find coffee cans, while I went down to the Salvation Army Thrift Store. It was my favorite store because everything was so inexpensive. Plus, they had stuff that wasn’t for sale in any other store. I wished Mom would let me decorate my room with the great old stuff they had. I wanted the matching lamps made out of carved Mexican dancers. They had old brass beds that were tarnished, or painted in the last century. Some of the furniture was futuristic-looking, as though it came out of the Jetsons cartoons. I really wanted the old dark furniture that had carved panels of men and women and animals and plants. They also had really old Spanish-style furniture that was half chewed by termites and so old-looking that Christopher Columbus might have brought it over. Plus, I knew some of it had secret panels. I rapped on all the spots I thought might open up and reveal a hidden treasure. But I only woke up a lot of termites.

  I went over to the trophy case and picked out a huge golf trophy, and a smaller one for second place. It didn’t bother me that a Mr. Justman had won the first one in 1947 and a Mrs. Lower had won hers in 1968. They were a dollar each.