Slider

by Pete Hautman

  “Mal’s still in bed,” he says. “Mom is at yoga.”

  “What about Bridgette?” I say. “Where’s Bridgette?”

  He misses my sarcasm completely.

  “She’s at school, I imagine, getting straight A’s,” he says.

  “I’m in the kitchen,” I say, “pouring a glass of orange juice.”

  “I’m in the kitchen too, having a conversation with my son. Arfie is sleeping on the sofa. The sun is in the sky.” Maybe he gets it after all.

  “Dad, what if I needed to make a couple thousand bucks this summer?”

  “You are not buying a motorcycle,” he says.

  “Why do you think I want a motorcycle?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “That’s what I wanted when I was your age.”

  “Suppose I want the money for something not a motorcycle. How could I do that?”

  “Get a job,” he says.

  “How am I supposed to do that? I’m fourteen.”

  “Deliver papers, mow lawns, run errands . . . I don’t know. Why do you need money? We give you ten dollars a week.”

  “That’s, like, one pizza,” I say.

  “How many pizzas do you need?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Well, I’m sure if you put your mind to it, you’ll figure something out. For every problem there is a solution.”

  I knew he was going to say that.

  Summer jobs for underage teens in Vacaville are in short supply, as in zero. Billy Fisher has the neighborhood lawn mowing sewed up, and Alison Keller delivers the Vacaville Voice, our local paper, which hardly anybody subscribes to anyway. I find nothing online except for pizza delivery, and you need to be able to drive a car for that.

  Thinking about pizza makes me hungry, so I make myself a couple of peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches.

  Mom comes home from yoga and sees what I’m eating.

  “I was planning tuna melts for dinner,” she says.

  “That sounds great,” I say.

  “It did before you ate the last of the bread.”

  “Oh. Sorry. I needed a snack.”

  “You always need a snack.”

  “Dad says I should get a job,” I say.

  That gets her attention. “He did?”

  “To make some money,” I say, as if there is any other reason to get a job.

  “What about Mal?” she says. “I count on you being around most of the time in the summer. It’s the only time I can get any work done.”

  “What work? You don’t have a job.”

  I know the second the words come out of my mouth that I’ve made a mistake. Mom’s eyes harden, and she starts listing all the things she does.

  “. . . cooking, shopping, paying bills . . .”

  I pretend to listen. I’ve heard the list before.

  “. . . taking Mal to his therapy, keeping the house clean, volunteering at the food bank, helping your grandmother with her shopping and taking her to the hairdresser every week . . .”

  It’s a long list.

  “. . . neighborhood association meetings, putting together client mailings for your father, keeping the weeds from taking over the garden . . .”

  “Okay, okay,” I say. “I get it.”

  “I don’t think you do!”

  “I do. But what about my life? I have one, you know.”

  “You have plenty of free time. What have you been doing in your room all morning?”

  “Actually, I was investigating job opportunities.”

  She closes her eyes and sighs. “What do you need money for?” she asks. “We give you money.”

  “That’s, like, one visit to SooperSlider.”

  “We have food here. You’re not starving. You don’t need to eat thirty super-whatevers every day.”

  “A job would teach me responsibility,” I say.

  “You’re very responsible already.”

  “I think it would be good for me. Just part-time. I can still help with Mal.”

  “Well . . . let me talk to Dad about it.”

  I figured that was about as far as I could push her. I put my plate in the sink.

  “See you later,” I say.

  “Where are you going?” she asks.

  “I don’t know. Maybe over to HeyMan’s.”

  “What about Mal?”

  “What about him?”

  “I have to go grocery shopping. We have no bread.”

  “I’ll go,” I say.

  She gives me a measuring look, then nods slowly and takes a twenty-dollar bill from her purse. “We need bread, mayo — the large size — and orange juice, the kind your dad likes. And two boxes of Cheerios.”

  I take the twenty. “You sure this is enough?”

  She sighs and gives me another twenty. “Get two loaves of bread. Something with whole wheat in it. And don’t forget the Cheerios. And I expect some change, okay?”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Okay,” says Mal. He is standing in the doorway, looking miserable. He’s taken off his T-shirt and attempted to put it back on, but he’s somehow managed to get his head through the armhole.

  “Good look, Mal,” I say.

  Mom clucks her tongue and goes to help him. I make my escape before she can expand the grocery list. On the way out, I check the mailbox. A couple of catalogs and the electric bill. I’m going to have to keep a close eye on the mail from now on. Maybe I can buy myself some time if I intercept Mom’s Visa bill.

  Four Seasons Market is on the outskirts of fabulous downtown Vacaville, a ten-minute walk from home. I decide to take a stroll through downtown on the chance that I might find a Help Wanted sign in one of the businesses. Unlike a lot of other towns in Iowa, Vacaville has a thriving business district, with four restaurants, an old-fashioned movie theater, a couple of bars, a good assortment of retail stores, and a twenty-foot-tall fiberglass cow named Vaccie.

  Vaccie is located in the exact center of downtown on her own grassy meadow. The meadow is really a traffic island about fifty feet across located at the intersection of Main Street and First Avenue. Maybe you’ve heard about her. Vaccie is listed in several travel guides, is featured on travel websites, and has been written up in the New York Times. People come from miles away to take pictures of Vaccie, the Pride of Vacaville.

  Today, the only company Vaccie has is a guy in coveralls applying a fresh coat of pink paint to her udder. Tourists like to take pictures of themselves reaching up and “milking” Vaccie. It wears the paint off, so every year her udder gets a fresh new coat.

  I walk up and down Main and the parallel side streets, but the only employment opportunities I see are for a hairdresser at Krazy Kurlz and the more-or-less permanent sign in the window of Pigorino Pizza: DRIVERS WANTED.

  Being in the vicinity of Pigorino’s makes me forget that I just ate. My stomach and my feet carry me off the sidewalk and into the restaurant. Just one slice, I tell myself.

  The smell of baking pizza hits me like a truck, and the next thing I know I’m ordering a medium combo with extra sausage and cheese. As I’m waiting, I notice a new poster on the wall next to the cash register. The poster shows an American flag, an Italian flag, and images of pizza slices floating around between the words.

  My heart starts pounding as I read the words on the poster. I squeeze my eyes closed, open them, and read the poster again.

  Problem solved.

  I never dreamed that Papa Pigorino would actually do it.

  A few months ago, I was sitting in a booth waiting for a pizza when Papa Pigorino himself walked in the door.

  “Hey Papa,” I said.

  He looked at me and spread his arms and grinned.

  “Doug!” he said.

  “It’s David,” I said.

  “David! My favorite-a customer! How-a you-a doing?”

  Everybody is Papa Pigorino’s “favorite-a customer.” Papa is a born salesman. He calls himself the Colonel Sanders of pizza, and he looks the part, right down to
the white three-piece suit and the pointy little beard. Except his beard is black, and he’s only about five foot two, and instead of a tie he wears a heavy gold chain that he adds a link to every time he opens a new restaurant. There are twenty-three Pigorino’s, mostly in Iowa, plus one in Chicago and two in Omaha. But the Pigorino’s in downtown Vacaville is the original, and I’ve known Papa since I was a little kid — even if he doesn’t always remember my name.

  “I’m doing good, Papa,” I said. “How about you?”

  “We all-a got-a our-a problems.” He stroked his gold chain. “Business no so good.”

  Two other things about Papa Pigorino: (1) he loves to complain about business, even though he sells tens of thousands of pizzas every week, and (2) his Italian accent is totally fake. Papa Pigorino’s real name is Elwood Gronseth. He grew up on a hog farm ten miles south of town.

  “People no eat-a the pizza like-a they-a used to. Too many crazy diets.”

  “Have you heard of the pizza diet?” I asked.

  That got his attention. “Pizza diet? I like!”

  “No crust, no meat, no cheese.”

  “I no like.”

  “Me neither. Hey, you know what you should do? Have a contest!”

  “Contest?”

  “Yeah, like Nathan’s Famous hot dogs. They get all kinds of advertising with their hot-dog-eating contest. And they sell more hot dogs than anybody!”

  “That’s-a good-a for them.”

  “You could do it with pizza. Whoever eats the most slices in ten minutes wins.”

  Papa got this faraway look in his eyes. “Papa Pigorino, he is a-liking this-a idea.”

  “It’s a great idea,” I said, not so modestly.

  I hadn’t really expected anything to come of it, but now I’m looking at the poster and reading the small print. Every Pigorino’s in the country — all twenty-three of them — is having a qualifier contest on the Fourth of July. There’s no cash prize for the qualifier, but the winners will be entered in the Super Pigorino Bowl at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines.

  That’s where the money is. But only the victor wins the five thousand dollars. Second prize is free pizza for a year. Third prize is a Papa Pigorino Signature Pizza Cutter. All participants will receive a Papa Pigorino T-shirt.

  The entry fee for the qualifier is fifty dollars. I figure I can eat more than fifty dollars’ worth of pizza, so that’s a no-brainer. And I’m pretty sure I can eat faster than anybody else in Vacaville, so qualifying is a gimme.

  I do the math: no-brainer plus gimme equals the greatest opportunity of a lifetime.

  I’m rereading the poster for the tenth time when my pizza arrives. I take it to a booth and wait an eternity for it to cool. When I judge it to be a reasonable number of degrees below the temperature of hot lava, I set the timer on my phone and dive in.

  Four minutes later, I call HeyMan.

  “Three minutes forty seconds,” I say when he answers.

  “Is that some sort of code?” HeyMan asks.

  “It’s the David Miller World Record for scarfing an entire Pigorino’s combo with extra sausage and cheese.”

  “No way,” HeyMan says.

  I tell him about the contest.

  “Dude! You can’t lose!”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” I say. “Last year, Jooky ate forty-two slices in ten minutes. That’s, like, fifteen seconds a slice. My time is double that.”

  “Yeah, but you had extra sausage and cheese.”

  “True. But the really good news is that the Pigorino contest is on the Fourth of July. That’s the day of the big Nathan’s contest in New York. All the pros will be at Coney Island eating hot dogs. I need fifty bucks to enter, though. Can I borrow it?”

  “Huh.”

  “What does that mean?”

  I hear him say, not into the phone, “He wants me to give him fifty bucks for some pizza contest.”

  “Not give! Lend!” I shout. “Who are you talking to?”

  “Cyn.”

  “Where are you?”

  “At her house. I’m helping her put together a bookshelf — ouch!”

  “What happened?”

  “She threw a book at me. Um, I guess I should have said I’m watching her put up a bookshelf.”

  I hear Cyn’s voice in the background. “Much better,” she says.

  I grab a Super Pigorino Bowl entry form on my way out of the pizzeria. The Fourth is only ten days away, and I have to pay my entry fee by Friday. I keep thinking about HeyMan and Cyn. It bugs me that they would be hanging out together without calling me, even if it’s just to watch Cyn put up a bookshelf. Also, it bugs me that HeyMan is being weird about lending me the fifty bucks. I know he has it.

  I’m thinking so hard I forget to do Mom’s shopping until I’m almost home. I have to turn around and walk all the way back to Four Seasons. I get everything on the list — just barely, since the pizza took a big chunk out of the money Mom gave me.

  She’s in the kitchen when I get home.

  “Did you get Cheerios?” she asks.

  “I got everything.” I plunk the bag on the counter.

  She holds out a hand. “Change?”

  I give the one dollar and seventeen cents I have left.

  “That’s all?” she says.

  “I took my allowance a day early.” Before she can respond to that, I say, “By the way, I decided I don’t need a job.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. Pigorino’s is having a pizza-eating contest. I’m going to win it.”

  “Absolutely not,” she says.

  My grin goes away. “Why?”

  “People all over the world are going hungry. Those contests are a disgusting display of excess and gluttony.”

  “It’s a sport,” I say. “Dad always says I should do more sports.”

  “Eating is not a sport.”

  “It is if you can eat seventy hot dogs in ten minutes like Joey Chestnut.”

  She makes a tsk sound with her tongue, rolls her eyes, and slumps her shoulders — the whole I-can’t-deal-with-this-right-now package.

  “Go check on Mal,” she says without looking at me.

  The next morning I stick around the house until the mail comes, just in case there’s a Visa bill to intercept. Later I’ll head over to HeyMan’s and try to pry fifty bucks out of him. I’m pretty sure if I get in his face, he’ll lend it to me. The mail usually comes around ten, so I keep an eye out. As soon as I see the mail carrier coming up the block, I go outside and wait for her by the mailbox.

  “Waiting for this?” she says, smiling. She hands me a thick nine-by-twelve envelope. It’s from somebody named V. Schutlebecker.

  V. Schutlebecker? For a moment I’m mystified. The return address is Rockford, Illinois. I don’t know anybody in Rockford. Then I realize what it has to be. The Jooky dog! I’ve been so obsessed with worrying about Mom’s next Visa bill I almost forgot about the half hot dog that started it all.

  I sort quickly through the rest of the mail. No Visa bill. I dump the mail on the bureau in the front hall and run up to my room and tear open the package. Inside is a cheap black plastic frame containing a Certificate of Authenticity. I know it’s a Certificate of Authenticity because it says

  across the top. Below that is a photo of Jooky Garafalo. He is smiling and holding half a hot dog. Beneath that, in fancy script, are the words

  I read it twice. Kind of a weird way to say it.

  At the bottom, in blue ink, is Jooky’s scrawled signature.

  But where’s the dog? I look in the envelope and see a wad of crumpled tissue paper at the bottom. I take it out and unroll the tissue and uncover a small, oblong object tightly wrapped in tinfoil. With shaking hands, I unwrap the foil. Inside is a dark, shriveled tube of protein nestled in a shrunken, flattened, rock-hard, bone-dry bun. It looks more like a Slim Jim than a hot dog.

  The Jooky dog is mummified.

  I don’t know what I expected. I knew it wouldn’t be fr
esh and plump and edible — the contest was almost a year ago — but I thought it would look more like . . . like a hot dog.

  I try to imagine this petrified relic on display in the State Historical Museum in Des Moines. What was I thinking? No wonder nobody’s dumb enough to bid on it.

  Nobody except me.

  My first impulse is to share my idiocy with my best friend. I text HeyMan.

  I’m heading up the walk toward HeyMan’s front door when I hear voices and laughter coming from out back. I go around the house and look in the backyard. HeyMan is running across the lawn with a badminton racquet. He swings wildly and misses the birdie. On the other side of the net, Cyn is laughing. I stop at the corner of the house. HeyMan retrieves the birdie and hits it over to Cyn, who returns it in a high lob. I like watching her move.

  I’ve mentioned that Cyn is tall, but I haven’t said anything about the way that tallness is put together. She has mad pretzel abilities. When I met her back in the first grade, Cyn could put both feet behind her head and roll around in the grass like a ball. I bet she can still do it. She’s not only flexible, she’s incredibly graceful — watching her swing that racquet is like watching water flow.

  HeyMan moves more like a gorilla. He staggers toward the birdie and hacks at it with his racquet, sending it into the net. They’re both laughing. HeyMan isn’t as clumsy as he is pretending to be. He knows he can’t beat Cyn, so he’s clowning around. He grabs the birdie, tosses it high in the air, takes a mighty cut at it, and misses.

  Cyn notices me. “David!”

  HeyMan looks up and for a moment I see disappointment on his face. It lasts only a fraction of a second; then he grins and salutes me with his racquet.

  “SooperSlider Slim! The Sultan of Slide!”

  Cyn ducks under the net, picks up the fallen birdie, and starts bouncing it on her racquet.

  HeyMan points at the envelope in my hand. “Is that it?”

  “Um . . . no,” I say. I didn’t know Cyn was going to be there, and I’m not sure I want her to know what an idiot I am.

  “C’mon,” HeyMan says. “Let’s have a look.” He makes a grab for it; I jerk it away and glance at Cyn. She is bouncing the birdie, pointedly not looking at us.