Heads or Tails

by Jack Gantos

  Dad took a deep breath. “They didn’t get the military contract they expected,” he explained. “So they won’t be building the new airport and don’t need to hire me. It just fell through, nothing more to it than that. I shouldn’t have believed it until I saw the first paycheck.”

  “I thought you had already signed a contract,” Mom said.

  “Not yet,” muttered Dad. “We only shook hands on it.” He looked out at all of us. I felt the small beginning of a pain in my chest that wanted to grow.

  Dad stood up and passed between us. “Let this be a lesson to you,” he advised. “Never do business on a handshake. You’ll get screwed every time.”

  “No kidding,” Betsy mumbled.

  I turned and went back to my room. I threw myself across the bed like something that had been tossed away. The future looked like more of the past. I imagined Johnny Foil flying his airplane and how good he must have felt, looping through the air, until suddenly he collided with the film plane and crashed to the ground in a ball of flames. Gary Pagoda can’t kill me now, I thought, I’m already dead.

  It took me a long time to calm down and begin to imagine how disappointed Dad must feel. Then Mom and Betsy and Pete. Feeling this terrible for losing something that we didn’t even own yet was hard to understand. It wasn’t like losing money out of my pocket. It was more invisible, like losing hope.

  In the morning, we all walked around the house like zombies, with red, worn-out eyes. Mom and Dad looked through the “Houses for Rent” section of the newspaper. After they circled a few ads and made a few telephone calls, they climbed into the truck to inspect the houses. When they returned, Mom seemed relieved. “Well, we found a nice house,” she announced.

  “Where?” Betsy asked. The location determined our next school.

  “On Eighth Street, in old Fort Lauderdale,” she said. “I always loved it down there because the trees are so old.”

  “That means I go to Sunrise Junior High,” I blurted out. It was a school filled with kids like Gary Pagoda.

  “I’ll be going to Fort Lauderdale High,” Betsy said happily. “If I had to go to Plantation High, I’d run away and join a convent.”

  “Why?” Mom asked.

  “It’s a suburb full of morons,” Betsy said.

  “Actually, we looked at a house out there today,” Mom said and plopped down in a chair. “We didn’t like the people we’d be renting from. They had a beer keg next to the television, and they owned a pit bull.”

  “Those dogs are killers,” I said, kneeling down and pulling her shoes off. Her feet were swollen.

  Betsy ran into her room to use the telephone so she could tell her friends that she’d still be in town.

  “Where will I go?” Pete asked.

  “There is a school down the street,” Mom said, fixing his hair with her fingers. “You can come home and eat lunch with me and the baby each day.”

  While Mom took her nap, Pete and I took down the tent. Frankie Pagoda came running over when he saw us.

  “You guys won’t believe this,” he blurted out. “Gary stole our car last night and he’s just been caught in Georgia.”

  “We saw him last night,” I said. “We passed through your yard and he tried to kill us.”

  “Yeah, he showed me his knife.”

  Mr. Pagoda called for him. “Gotta go,” Frankie said. “We’re picking him up again.”

  I wished they would leave Gary in jail until we moved away.

  After dinner, Mom was hot. “Let’s take a drive along the beach,” she suggested. “That always cools me down.”

  “Sure,” said Dad. “Jack, Pete, you boys put the lawn chairs in the back of the pickup, so your Mom can sit back there and get a breeze.”

  I loved setting up house in the back of the truck. We loaded up the lawn furniture and filled a small cooler with ice and a jug of lemonade. We brought plastic cups and pillows. “Ready,” we shouted.

  “Let’s go by the new house,” Betsy said.

  It wasn’t far away. It was an old Spanish-style house with a red tile roof. Some people were still living in it, so we couldn’t go inside. There were two tall palm trees in the front yard. They seemed to be a hundred feet high. I looked up at them. At that moment, the wind blew and a heavy brown coconut broke away and fell onto the sandy yard with a thud.

  “We better have the coconuts cut out of the trees,” Mom said. “They could hit one of the kids and really hurt them.”

  “Nay,” Dad replied. “They’re so hardheaded, the coconut’ll just bounce off.”

  I could already see my first chore. Plus, the lawn was worse than where we now lived. There were so few tufts of grass that mowing the lawn will create a sandstorm. I’ll have to wear a turban on my head. The hedges hadn’t been clipped and had grown up over the windows. And I knew Mom would make me scrub the mildew out of the cracks in the ancient stucco walls.

  We drove along the beach and cooled down with the sea breeze, then turned up Broward Boulevard. We were almost home when Dad turned into the drive-in theater and pulled over. “Look,” he said excitedly and pointed up at the theater sign. “The Sound of Music is finally gone!”

  “Yeah,” I shouted. “Planet of the Apes is playing!”

  “I wanna see it,” Pete shouted.

  Dad paid and we entered. We found a good spot in the middle and he parked the truck backward, with the lawn furniture facing the giant movie screen. Everyone took their seats and I poured out cups of lemonade. A Bugs Bunny cartoon was playing. Bugs glued Elmer Fudd’s shoes to the floor, then pulled his nose until it stretched far enough down the street to tie it in a bow around a blacksmith’s anvil. Then Bugs let it go. The anvil blasted up the street and hit Elmer square in the face and drove him through a barn. But after Elmer pulled his face out of the hole in his head, he was back on his feet, and once again he was chasing that rabbit down the street.