What Would Joey Do?

by Jack Gantos

  She stuck her nose up in the air and tapped away.

  As soon as I stepped inside Grandma grabbed me by the arm and spooked me. She’d been watching us through the curtain.

  “Why didn’t you invite her in?” she rasped.

  “I did,” I said with a groan. “She’s not ready.”

  “Well, I wish you’d bring me a friend,” she said. “I’m so tired, I may not have enough energy to die properly and I’ll just shrivel up into a zombie. And if I do, I promise you I’ll haunt you for the rest of your life.”

  I believed her. “Stop it,” I said. I trotted to the kitchen to give Pablo some food before I left him.

  “Do you want some advice on making friends?” Grandma wheezed from the doorway. “I’m good at making friends.”

  “I don’t need help,” I said as I hustled past her. She stumbled back against the wall and let out a zombie wail. “Sorry!” I hollered as I ran outside and down the street. I was afraid Olivia might have run off, but she was still tapping her way along the sidewalk. I sneaked around her and was silently waiting at her front door when she arrived.

  “Beat you,” I said when she was a foot away. I stuck out my face and reached for her hand. I wanted to rub it across my toothy grin as if it were a smile in braille.

  Instead, she lifted her cane and smacked me across the shoulder. “Beat you too,” she said nastily. “Now, get out of my way.”

  If only I could.

  4

  MR. HELPFUL

  I love Saturdays. They are my best thinking days. It is my day to try to find that one special thought that turns into an idea that I remember forever and becomes a part of who I am, like a freckle or a finger or an ear. Even before I open my eyes I take a deep breath and try to picture something, anything, as if my brain were a keyhole where I can spy on my future. So each Saturday morning I try to find a little piece of a thought, and then I keep turning it over in my mind until it turns into a complete idea and at the end of the day when I’m lying in bed I put the whole thought into a little room in my head so I can remember it.

  When I woke up Grandma was still asleep and Mom wasn’t around because she had got up extra early to help Booth serve breakfast down at the homeless shelter. Now that it was getting colder, a lot of homeless people needed more help. I tiptoed out back and got a hammer and a bunch of big nails out of the toolbox, then went back to my bedroom. I closed my door and pounded enough of them into the wall over my bed until I could get Dad’s crushed muffler to stay up there. It looked really cool. Then suddenly my morning thought popped into my head as if I had hit myself with the hammer: “Why do I want the muffler on my wall, since it only reminds me how crazy Dad and Mom are?” Obviously, that question was the little piece of a thought for me to work on. I took my label gun and squeezed out WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? and stuck it to the bottom of the muffler so when I was in bed I could look up and read it.

  When I went back into the living room, Grandma was awake too.

  “Were you beating your head against the wall?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “But I was wondering. Do you think I’m weird because I’m wired, or wired because I’m weird?”

  “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Grandma asked.

  “Nobody knows the answer to that,” I said. I began to squeeze out a WEIRD OR WIRED label while Grandma kept talking.

  “Same thing with your question,” she replied. “Nobody knows, though I’ve been trying to figure it out from where I’m sitting.” She patted the couch. “Think of it this way,” she said. “Each day when my curtain opens, it is like watching you all on stage. I get to sit here like I’m sitting in a theater while you all go in and out of doors, pace the floors, yell and rant and rave and go nuts in front of me all day long. That’s how I see all this chasing around back and forth, and believe me, I don’t know if you were born nuts to begin with or if you make each other nuts with the way you treat each other. I just don’t know, and probably never will. But it couldn’t hurt if you all were nicer to each other.”

  “I’m nice,” I said, and pressed my WEIRD OR WIRED label onto my forehead. “I want to help everyone be nice. That’s all I want to do. Just help. That’s my whole thing now. I’m Mr. Helpful.” I began to squeeze out a MR. HELPFUL label.

  “I think you are Mr. Out-of-Your-Mind,” she said. “Stop trying to help everyone.”

  “I’m trying to help you,” I said. “I’m trying to turn Olivia into a friend although she really upsets me because she’s so mean.”

  “You know, Joey, if you didn’t wear those med patches, you’d just be thinking about yourself, and you wouldn’t care about making everyone happy. Your problem is that you got better, and the rest of the world didn’t.”

  “And that’s why I’m trying to help the whole world,” I said. “Because now I can.”

  “No, you can’t,” she said. “You can’t do anything for a person who is stuck between being happy and being miserable. All you can do is get trapped in the middle, and anyone in the middle just gets squished.”

  “Then what should I do?” I asked.

  “Go up to the discount grocery store and get me some scratch tickets,” she said, and held out a few dollars.

  “Mom says that’s a waste of money,” I replied. “You should save it.”

  “Save it for what?” she shot back, and began to hack away into a huge handkerchief that was wadded up like a turban. “Right now my life is a lottery. I’m so old, the state won’t give me new lungs. The only way I am going to get a transplant is to buy them outright. So winning the lottery is the last chance I have of staying alive.”

  “I hate it when you talk about dying,” I said.

  “Well, you better get used to it,” she replied. “Because I’m going down the tubes, and fast. I got more fluid than air in my lungs. You want to listen? Put your ear against me, and I swear you can hear the ocean better in my chest than you can in a seashell.”

  She started to pull up her shirt, and I looked the other way.

  “Okay, okay,” I begged with my hands over my eyes. “Pull down your shirt. I’ll get the tickets.”

  She reached forward and shoved the money into my back pocket and I scooped Pablo off the stuffed chair.

  “One more thing,” she said, and waved me over to her side.

  “What?”

  She reached forward and ripped the WEIRD OR WIRED label off my forehead.

  “Ow!” I shrieked. “You pulled out some of my brain with that!”

  “Believe me,” she said, tossing the label over her shoulder, “you don’t need to advertise what is already so obvious about your brain. Now git!”

  I bolted for the door and down the steps, and up Plum Street. I ran over to the old ice factory, where during the summer I hugged the walls and stuck a COOL SPOT TO HUG label on a metal door because it was the coldest spot in town. Then I ran under the railroad bridge and touched my BEWARE! SCARY OLD GOAT MAN label, because at night some man sleeps under the bridge and when I pass through on the nights I sneak out my window and walk around town in the dark he’s always asking for money.

  Another thing I’ve been trying to do on my walks is to know what I’m looking at, when I’m looking at it. I want to be smart. When I walk down the sidewalk I see about a hundred different kinds of bugs and all I do is point at them like a caveman and say “Ugh, look, a bug,” but I know each one of them must have a different name and a different reason why and how it came to be on the planet, and I don’t know any of that stuff. I can’t even put a proper label on them. I just know one word, bug, and it makes me feel like a moron, like I should just have KID stuck to my head. It’s like when I hear some people talk and their favorite words are thing and it—as if they don’t know anything by its real name. I wish everything in the world came with a label on it, like all the food I see when I walk down the aisle in the grocery store. Everything there tells me on the outside exactly what is on the inside. Like when I get to the soup sec
tion and look at the shelf, each can is not just labeled “soup,” and then I have to shake it and guess at what is inside it. No. Each can says exactly what it is: TOMATO, CHICKEN NOODLE, SPLIT PEA … I like that and whenever I’m a little confused about something, I can walk into a grocery store, and because it is so well ordered, my brain gets well ordered. And the best part of all of this is, when I know all about everything I am looking at or thinking about, I can imagine how everything works from the beginning all the way to the end. I can think things through, as everybody is always trying to get me to do. Now I can imagine a seed being planted and watered, then sprouting, then growing and turning into a sapling, then a tree that gets bigger and bigger until it flowers and grows more seeds and those seeds fall to the ground, and then they too turn into little trees and before long there is a field of trees, then a country of trees, and then a whole world full of trees. It’s like one thought leading to another and another and another, and before long it all adds up to a complete picture of what is going to happen when enough seeds are planted.

  When I came out from under the railroad tracks, I crossed the street and went up to the big blue Goodwill donation bin. I liked to hide in it once in a while but today I wanted to check the Goodwill donations before I went to the grocery store because the last time I was at the store there was a lady walking around in just her socks and she looked like she could use some shoes. I went up to her and asked her what size she wore, but she just grunted at me, so now I had to guess and keep a pair on me in case I saw her again.

  But when I pushed open the swinging flap on the bin and stuck my head in to check on my JOEY WAS HERE label and look for shoes there was some homeless guy sitting in there and he grabbed my arm and I screamed bloody murder and he let go and I backed right out. “Run!” I yelled to Pablo, and we dashed across the parking lot as fast as we could until we reached the grocery store. Then I remembered that Mom and Booth were helping at the homeless shelter, so I ran back to the Goodwill bin and pushed open the flap with a bent whiffle bat and yelled, “You should go down to the shelter and get some food. Ask for Fran!” Then I turned and ran away feeling a lot better because I had helped him out.

  The manager of the All-American Discount Grocery Store loves that I come to help out. It’s like I work there, but I don’t, because I work for free. What I do is first take an empty shopping cart and go up and down each aisle and find all the food that is out of place, and once I have a cart full of food, I get busy returning each item. And while I do this totally relaxing job I can think about all the mixed-up stuff in my own life, because thinking is like taking an out-of-place thought in my brain and putting it in its proper place. If every item in the world and every thought in my brain were in its proper spot, it would be the same as everything in my life being just right. Grandma would get new lungs, Mom and Dad would stop fighting, Olivia would start being my friend, and Pablo would follow my orders like he is supposed to but doesn’t always. And I would end up sitting in the front row of Mrs. Lucchina’s class again, where she could look at me all day and think to herself, “I wish all my students were as nice and thoughtful and smart and well behaved as that handsome Joey Pigza.”

  Before I went into the store, I tucked Pablo under my shirt. It tickled because he was breathing so hard I could feel his breath like little puffs of dragon steam against my belly. I pulled down the neck of my T-shirt and peeked in on him. “Stop that,” I whispered. “I have to go check in with the manager.”

  Then I marched right up to the manager’s cubicle and knocked on his little door, which he never closed.

  He didn’t look up from the piles of paper on his desk. “I’m busy!” he shouted.

  “It’s me, Joey!” I shouted right back. “Mr. Helpful is here to help.”

  He turned toward me and smiled. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m always happy to see you. But you have to leave the dog outside.” He pointed to my belly.

  “How’d you know?” I asked.

  “All my training in spotting shoplifters,” he said, and pointed up at the black-and-white security monitors over his desk. “A lot of people shove stuff under their shirts, especially around the holidays. After a while it’s easy to tell what is real belly and what is not.”

  “I’ll be right back,” I said. I ran out the front door and around to the back of the building, where the big trash Dumpsters were parked. I lifted up my shirt and put Pablo on the ground. He started sniffing the grease spots, and I knew if I could find something for him to eat, he’d take a nap and stay put. I dug through some trash boxes and found a lot of rotten vegetables he wouldn’t even drool on. Then I spotted a box of old honeydew melons. Pablo loves melon. I picked one up, reared back, and threw it against the wall. It split open and fell to the ground. As soon as he smelled it, he ran over and began to lick the insides. “Don’t eat the seeds,” I warned him, “or a melon vine will grow inside you.” I turned and looked across the beat-up parking lot. Only a lady in a purple wig and big black boots was picking her way around the holes in the asphalt. She looked harmless. “See you in a little bit,” I said to Pablo, and headed back to the store.

  I grabbed a cart and got started. Because Thanksgiving was only a few days away, the entire store was decorated for the holiday with cardboard turkeys and pumpkins, and plastic Indian corn, and fake fall leaves.

  I started up the first aisle, and when I passed a cardboard cutout of a Pilgrim family in those funny top hats and square shoes I started thinking about Mom and Dad and Booth and Grandma, especially Grandma. She had told me she “saw something ugly heading our way,” but wouldn’t share it with me. It had to do with what she called the “law of seven.” She said that when it comes to disasters, there are six awful events and then the seventh is a total catastrophe. I figured if the motorcycle wreck was one, the drinking glass smashing the window was two. And now, as I put an open package of cookies into my basket, I was wondering what number three would be.

  As I worried, I strolled up the special-sale section where all the leftover Halloween candy was stacked along with all the spooky plastic pumpkins and fake bloody hands and eyeballs on springs and fang-toothed Draculas and ghosts and glowing skeletons and black Grim Reapers and all the stuff that is really spooky at night but isn’t spooky during the day when it is lined up on the shelves with big red mark-down tags all over it. A lot of the world is like this, I thought. It’s spooky when you first see it at night when you are out trick-or-treating, but the next day it looks pretty harmless. It was like Grandma. When I was really young and she took care of me, I thought she was the scariest witch on the planet. But now that I’d gotten to know her she was just some grouchy old ladybug.

  Suddenly I heard something that put the fear in me, just as the clock in the crocodile had put the fear in Captain Hook. It was Olivia tapping her way down the aisle. I gasped and did an about-face and ran right into Mrs. Lapp.

  “Why, Joey,” she said, “what are you doing here?”

  “Bargain hunting,” I whispered as I tried to edge around her.

  “Is that Joey?” Olivia shouted. “What’s he doing here?”

  “Extra credit,” I said.

  “Well, you can give me some extra help,” said Mrs. Lapp. “I forgot my coupons at home. If you and Olivia could stay here while I run and get them, it would be a lot faster for me. Okay?”

  I was trapped. “Okay,” I said, “but I’m working my Saturday job.”

  “Well, I’m sure Olivia would be happy to help you. Wouldn’t you, Olivia?”

  She whacked her stick on the floor as if she were scaring away a snake. “I love to help,” she said.

  After Mrs. Lapp left I stared at Olivia. If she were an out-of-place product, I’d put her in the frozen food aisle.

  “What’s your job?” she asked.

  “Putting things in their proper place,” I said. “I tidy up the store.”

  “How much do they pay?” she asked.

  “I do it for free,” I said. “It’s k
ind of a hobby. I used to play baseball, but this is better for me.”

  “Well, let me help you,” she said sweetly.

  “That’s nice of you,” I said, but I was suspicious. “We can work together.”

  “That’s just what I was thinking,” she replied. Then in a flash she started grabbing things off the shelves and tapping down the aisle and putting the first things she grabbed back in the wrong place and then she grabbed some more stuff and started shoving wrong things everywhere. I had to run behind her and grab the out-of-place stuff, then turn and put it back in its right place, then hurry and catch up to her but by then she had already moved more stuff all around and I was falling behind. And before long I was so far behind I was just running up and down the aisles with my eyes darting across the shelves because I was finding her disasters everywhere. I found a frozen turkey in the potato bin and apples with the dish soap and cans of beans with the toilet paper and no matter how hard I tried to straighten up the confusion, she was ten steps ahead of me and in no time the store was in worse shape than after a week of regular people making a mess.

  She made me so nervous, I didn’t know what to do. I ran over to the manager’s little cubicle. He was busy with a phone call. I stared up at the black-and-white security TVs, and there she was in aisle three, just snatching things left and right and running around and misshelving them all over. But then I saw something else. She was smiling. And not just her little smirk-smile, but a big huge grin was spread out over her face, and she was laughing so hard even her eyes seemed alive, and I just stood there thinking, Yes, she does laugh. She can have fun. She knows how to have a good time. The store radio was playing the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine,” and her lips were moving as if she was singing it out loud, and she was bopping her head to the beat and tapping her cane as if she were on stage. At that moment I was thankful to be me, because I was the only secret helper spy on the planet who could see behind her mean-girl Halloween mask.