What Would Joey Do?

by Jack Gantos

  I got up and went into the living room. Grandma’s curtain was already open, and she was smoking a cigarette and flipping through the phone book.

  “Pablo missing is bad thing number three,” I said.

  “Well, hold on to your seat,” she advised. “You got four to go before blast-off.”

  “What should I do?” I asked.

  “Go get your friend and start looking for him. Tomorrow I’ll call around to all the vets and dog dealers and pet stores and places where he might have ended up,” she announced. “They won’t be open today since it’s Sunday.”

  “But Olivia’s driving me crazy,” I whined.

  “The best of friends always start off by driving each other nuts,” she said.

  “But I already have Dad and Mom and Pablo and you,” I replied. “Don’t you think I already have enough friends who drive me nuts?”

  “Your dad is insane, your mom is distracted, Pablo has the brain the size of a grain of sand, and I’ll soon be out of your hair, so it’s good that someone else is testing you out.”

  “But I’m enough of a test all by myself,” I wailed.

  Just then there was a knock on the door. Not many people ever knocked on our door, and when they did, it was usually bad news. But I was sure this would be good news. I was sure that someone had found Pablo. I leaped at the door and yanked it open.

  It was a cop.

  “Is he dead?” I blurted out. “Is he?”

  “Who?” the cop asked. “Who’s dead?”

  “My dog. Pablo.”

  “I don’t know anything about a dog,” he replied. “I’m here to take a boy named”—he looked down at a piece of paper—“Joey Pigza down to the station.”

  I looked over at Grandma with so much fear, I could feel myself turning to stone. She winked at me. “I’ll go get Joey,” Grandma said to the cop, pulling her pajama top over her head. “You just wait on the porch.”

  “Okay,” he said. And when he stepped back, I gently closed the door.

  “What do I do?” I whispered.

  “As I told you before, Joey,” she said, “you better take care of yourself because nobody can tell what your parents are up to. Now they sic the cops on you.”

  “Should I crawl under the couch?” I asked.

  “No. Go to the Lapps’,” she said. “Scram. I’ll get rid of the cop.”

  I grabbed my backpack and ran out the back door and across our yard and into the cemetery, and all along I felt as if my bottom were being poked with a long pin. I cut in front of the statue of Jesus and out the other side and down and around the block until I saw a bunch of people waiting for a bus, and I just hung around them for a few minutes having a fake conversation with myself like I was someone’s kid until I caught my breath, which I didn’t because even standing still was exhausting me, and then I headed for Olivia’s house.

  Along the way I picked up a newspaper off of a yard because the Lapps didn’t get one and I wanted to look through the Lost and Found columns. I pulled out the Around Town and Classified sections and shoved them into my backpack and left the rest of the paper behind.

  When I rang the Lapps’ doorbell, I knew exactly what I wanted to say to Mrs. Lapp.

  “Good morning, Joey,” she sang. “How nice to see you. We’re going to have family Bible study as soon as Mr. Lapp gets back from his church duties, and you are welcome to join us. Now, what would Jesus do?”

  “Hide under the bed,” I said.

  “Now, Joey,” she asked. “Why would Jesus hide?”

  “The police were after him?”

  “You mean the Romans,” she said, correcting me. “Perhaps this is the Bible lesson we should go over.”

  “Yes,” I said, “because I’d like to know how he escaped.”

  “He went to heaven,” Mrs. Lapp said matter-of-factly. “And they were not invited.”

  As soon as I entered the house, I went directly into the bathroom and locked the door. I pulled out the newspaper. There were no Chihuahuas in the Dogs Found column. But under Dogs Missing there were three Chihuahuas, just as Grandma had said. One was named Baxter, last seen in his corner yard at Walnut and Lime. The second was named Rita and was last seen tied up to a mailbox outside Zimmerman’s Café. The third was named Charro and was last seen chasing a red rubber ball down the street and around the corner by the Turkey Hill Mini Mart.

  I folded up the paper and ran out to Olivia. Even though I knew she was going to be mean to me, I had to talk to someone or I’d explode. She was sitting at the kitchen table listening to her tape player. I plucked the earphones off her head.

  “I’m a wanted man,” I whispered. “The cops are after me.”

  “Is there a reward?” she asked, smiling.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I explained everything to her about my mom hiding out at Booth’s place and Pablo being stolen and how the other dogs were stolen too. “Maybe the cops think I stole the dogs.”

  “Maybe they think you are a serial Chihuahua snatcher,” she suggested. “Maybe they think you have a bizarre medical lab in your basement and are doing experiments on what makes things small, and yappy, and nervous.”

  “Hey,” I said. “Pablo isn’t yappy.”

  “I was thinking of you, nitwit,” she replied. “Now, what else is in the paper?”

  I looked at the Around Town section. There was no article about a dog-napper on the loose but I found something else. A bunch of Amish teenage boys and girls had been arrested for drinking. It seemed they had all gotten together and secretly rented an apartment where they kept regular clothes and had a car and played loud music and drank beer, then sneaked back to their farms and put on their bib overalls and dresses and played like everything was Amish as usual. But the night before, they had played their music too loud, and when the police arrived, they arrested the whole bunch and took them home to their farms. Now they were in big trouble with their parents.

  “What do you think of that?” I asked Olivia after reading it to her.

  “Looks to me like everyone wants a secret life,” she remarked.

  “I don’t,” I said. “With me, what you see is what you get.”

  “Well, I want one,” she said. “Anyone who is not allowed to make mistakes has to live a secret life.”

  “I don’t have that problem,” I said. “People expect me to make mistakes.”

  “Well, walk a mile in my shoes,” she said.

  Suddenly Mrs. Lapp was behind me. “Joey,” she said sharply, and removed the paper from my hands. “I thought I made it clear we don’t read newspapers in this house. Now, why don’t you two get some snacks while I brush up on today’s lesson on the Roman persecution of Jesus.”

  As soon as Mrs. Lapp left the room, I started getting jumpy. I couldn’t take not knowing what was happening to Pablo. “I gotta get out of here,” I said to Olivia. “I have to find Pablo.”

  “I’ll help if you take me with you,” she said.

  “Okay,” I agreed. “But if I go outside, I’ll need a disguise. The cops might spot me.”

  “I have an extra cane and sunglasses,” she said. “You can use them and play blind.”

  “But how do we get out of here?”

  “I’ll set off a bomb,” she said. “Watch.”

  I didn’t know what she meant. She walked over to the refrigerator and opened the door. She pulled out a big jar of pickles with both hands, turned her face away, and let it drop. It smashed, with glass and pickles and juice flying everywhere. Mrs. Lapp was there in seconds.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked breathlessly, and then saw the floor. “Are you two okay?”

  Olivia started crying, which she was very good at faking. “Joey wanted a pickle snack, and the jar slipped out of my hands,” she blubbered. “It just slipped.”

  “That’s okay, honey,” her mom said. “Did you get hit?”

  “Only in the eyes,” Olivia said. “I’ve been blinded.”

  Mrs. Lapp looked heavenward
and took a deep breath. “You two go take a stroll while I clean this up,” she said.

  As soon as Olivia got all dressed in her special protective outfit and we went outside, I said to her, “That wasn’t nice.”

  “What?” she replied.

  “Hurting your mother’s feelings,” I said. “Saying you had been blinded.”

  “Oh, give me a break,” she said. “At least my mother loves me enough to put up with me. Yours has run off with someone else.”

  “She’s just hiding from my dad,” I said. “She’ll be home soon.”

  I didn’t say anything more after that because my mind began to drift, and for a moment I could imagine coming home to a note from Mom telling me she had run off with Booth. She had run away from me before, and everyone knows doing something a second time is even easier than the first.

  Once we were down the street, Olivia unfolded a second red-and-white cane and gave it to me. Then she pulled out a pair of dark glasses. I put them on.

  “How do I look?” I asked.

  “Don’t be a jerk,” she said. “Now what’s our plan?”

  “First, we have to go to make sure the cops have left my house. Then we’ll get the signs my grandma made and put them up all over town. And while we’re putting up the signs, we can keep our eyes open for suspicious dog-nappers.”

  “Funny,” she said sarcastically. “I’ll keep my ears open.”

  When we got to my house the cop car was gone. “Let’s go,” I said.

  She sat down on the front steps. “You can’t trick me into meeting your grandma,” she said. “I’ll wait outside.”

  “Look,” I replied. “My grandmother is sick. Just tell her you are my friend. You don’t have to be my friend, but if you were, it would do you some good.”

  “It would be a lie if I told her we were friends.”

  “Then lie,” I said.

  “W.W.J.D.?” she sang in a snotty way.

  “He wouldn’t have to lie,” I said. “He’d be my friend. I’m a kid. He likes kids. It’s the adults that drove him to his grave.”

  “I refuse to lie,” she said.

  I ran up the steps pulling at my hair. I just wanted to run in and run out, but Grandma grabbed me as soon as I opened the door.

  “What’s she doing on the steps?” she asked.

  “She won’t come in,” I said. “Believe me, I tried.”

  “What have you done to annoy her?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Honest.”

  “Well, you better hurry up and reel her in,” she said. “I’m already turning into a zombie. I scared that cop away when I told him I was your mummy.”

  She laughed, then coughed at her own joke, but I wasn’t feeling very funny.

  “What did he want?” I asked.

  “You,” she replied. “Said he had orders to pick you up.”

  “For what?”

  “For not helping your grandma and making that girl your friend.”

  I spun away from her and ran into my bedroom and got my label maker and all the dog sign stuff I needed except for the tacks. I didn’t have any but figured there’d be a lot of them in the telephone poles, and I could recycle them.

  Grandma was standing in front of the door wheezing like a fish out of water.

  “I’m still trying,” I said to her. “She can’t resist me much longer. I promise.”

  The moment I stepped out the door, I felt like a whole different person, as if I were one person playing two parts in a really strange movie.

  “Okay,” I said to Olivia. “Let’s put up a sign on every telephone pole in Lancaster.”

  “Whatever you say,” she said. “I’m the blind following the blind.”

  “I’ve been waiting for you to say that,” I said.

  We started tap, tap, tapping our way down the street. Then we’d stop at a telephone pole, and since I’d chewed my fingernails down to nothing, I’d pull a used tack out with my teeth like a beaver and tap, tap, tap a sign up. Then I’d squat down and stick a PABLO COME HOME label at dog height on the pole just in case Pablo knew how to read but had been keeping it to himself.

  After a while we worked our way over to the street with my old school.

  “That’s where I went to school before Mom sent me to your house.”

  “Did you like going there?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I miss it.”

  “Well, I have the perfect plan for how you can get back.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “It’s your turn to be mean to me,” she said. “You can be the bad kid, and I can be the good kid. You can lead me astray and be a bad influence, and when Mom finds out how awful you are, she’ll ban you from our house, and you can go back to regular school.”

  “I’m not going to cause trouble on purpose,” I said. “I only do good things to help.”

  “Think of it this way,” she said. “You don’t have to be bad to me. You can just be bad around the house until my mom kicks you out. I think you should just be a pain in the neck—you know, be hyper and run around and trash the house and knock me down the stairs a few times so that Mom changes her mind about you and then you can go back to your old school.”

  I took a deep breath. Knocking her down the stairs was a tempting idea. But it was only an idea, and I was a person. Ideas were a dime a dozen, and I wasn’t going to tempt fate by faking being bad, because, who knew, maybe the part of me that was my own worst enemy, the old Joey, would like it if I was bad again and would keep me bad and I wouldn’t get a second chance to be better. When I was little, I used to make a lot of ugly faces at everyone, and Grandma said to me once, “If you keep that up, your face will stick that way.” And as soon as she said that, I started making a million ugly faces until my face hurt so much I wanted to stop, but I couldn’t. I was so out of control, I kept sticking out my tongue and stretching my mouth with my fingers and pulling down my eyes and popping the skin off my eyelids and braying like a donkey and drooling down my chin and pulling stuff out of my nose. It was insane and painful, and by the time I wore myself out and went to sleep that night, my face was as sore as if someone had pinched me on it a million times. It was awful.

  “No,” I said. “I can’t do it. It would be as if after being blind for a long time you got your eyesight back and it was beautiful and then suddenly I asked if you would be blind for a little while again to help me out—just for a little while—and then when I said so you could go back to seeing. Would you do that? I don’t think so. And I wouldn’t blame you.”

  She looked at me for a moment as if she could see me. As if her eyesight had returned. At that moment I thought she understood everything I had just said, because I didn’t think I could say it any better than I had.

  “Well, I’m warning you,” she said sternly, “if you won’t be bad, I’ll be even worse to you. I’ll make your life unbearable!”

  “You already are,” I said.

  “I’m tired of you,” she snapped. “Take me home. You can go looking for Pablo by yourself.”

  “I’m going to look for him if it takes all night,” I said.

  Suddenly she changed her tune. “If you go at night, take me with you,” she said.

  “No, I can’t.”

  “I’ve always wanted to go out at night,” she said.

  “Will you tell my grandma you’re my friend?”

  “Never,” she replied, and crossed her arms across her chest.

  I turned my back on her and began to tack up one last sign.

  While I tapped away, she tiptoed out into the middle of the road, threw her cane into the air, and ran recklessly with her arms waving about and her head thrown back. “Help!” she hollered as she ran. “Joey Pigza is after me!”

  “Stop!” I hollered, and ran after her. My sunglasses fell off, and my cane dropped to the street.

  “Help!” she hollered. “A maniac is trying to murder me!”

  “That’s not true!” I yelled as I passed a wom
an who was raking leaves. “I’m a very nice boy!”

  I was catching up to Olivia, but I didn’t get to her in time. The road curved, and she went straight into the curb and hit a fire hydrant with her leg and tumbled head over heels and landed on her face in the dirt, and by the time I got there I thought she was dead she was so stretched out.

  Then she began to laugh. “That was the best thing I’ve ever done,” she said, wiping dirt from her face.

  “Let me see your leg,” I said. “Did you hurt yourself?”

  “Don’t ruin the moment,” she said. “I feel like I’m finally living dangerously.”

  “No, you are making me live dangerously,” I replied, rubbing her leg. “Your mom is going to kill me when she sees this bruise.”

  I looked up at Olivia. She was smiling. “Exactly,” she said.

  Just then a squad car pulled up, and the very same cop that was at my door got out of his car. “Hey,” he said. “I saw you this morning. What’s your name?”

  “His name is Joey Pigza,” Olivia blurted out.

  I gave her a pained look. Turning me in to the cops was about the meanest thing she could have done to me.

  “Come on,” the cop said, and grabbed my wrist. “I’ve been looking all over town for you. I need to take you down to the station.”

  “Why? I didn’t steal my own dog,” I cried.

  “Your mother has taken out a restraining order against your dad, and we just need to have your fingerprints on file in case of an abduction,” he said. “It’s routine.”

  “I wish you had Pablo’s paw prints,” I said. “He’s the one who has been abducted.”

  “Your friend better come along,” the cop said to me.

  She’s not my friend, I wanted to say as he helped her into the backseat with me.

  When we arrived at the station the three of us went in. Olivia was smiling from ear to ear. “Wait until my mom finds out about this,” she sang gleefully. “I was hoping you would be a little bad to me, but being picked up by the cops is more than I ever could have hoped for.”