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by Pete Hautman

  “Reversal!” The Gurge thrusts his greasy fists up in triumph, and the plastic bottle pops out of his pocket and falls to the stage. “We have a Reversal of Fortune!”

  Egon Belt is crawling off the stage, retching horribly. While the Gurge is distracted, I bend over and pick up the squeeze bottle.

  The Gurge turns back to his pizza and continues to demolish it. I do the same. I’m in second place, and I want to stay there. After it’s over, I can take the bottle to Papa and tell him what I witnessed. Maybe the Gurge will get disqualified. I keep on eating. The Gurge looks over at my quickly disappearing pizza. He drops his left hand beneath the edge of the table. A second later his rock-hard fist backhands me hard in the belly. I double over, gasping in pain. The contents of my stomach are oozing up into my esophagus.

  The Gurge keeps eating as if nothing happened. I squeeze my eyes shut, tears of pain and rage coursing down my cheeks. Keep it down! It takes several breaths, but I manage to reverse the impending Reversal. I open my eyes. The Gurge is ahead by almost four slices, and the Vikings guy is ahead by one. I grab a fresh slice and slam it down.

  “Three minutes!” Papa shouts into his bullhorn.

  The Gurge is inhaling slices at a staggering rate. He thinks he has the contest won — I can see it in his face. My stomach is still throbbing from his underhanded punch. Something clicks inside me. Without giving myself time to think about it, I point toward the far end of the table and say to him, “Gurge! Over there! Check it out.”

  When he turns his head to look, I empty the entire contents of the squeeze bottle onto his pizza.

  “What?” he says, looking back at me.

  “Never mind.” I keep eating, and soon regain my rhythm. I’m starting on pizza number five when I hear a choking sound coming from the Gurge. He stands up and staggers back from the table. I don’t bother to look back as I hear the sound of forty slices of masticated pizza reversing course.

  The Gurge has regurgitated.

  The Vikings fan has pulled ahead. Several of his friends are pressed up against the front of the stage, shouting, “Go, Turk! Go, Turk! Go, Turk!”

  The only thing that can save me now is a miracle. He’s too fast, too big, too bottomless — and I’m running out of room.

  “Go, Turk! Go, Turk!”

  I’m on the edge of despair when another voice reaches my ears.

  “David! Go!”

  I know that voice. I look up.

  “David! Go!”

  I see him now, sitting up high, way in back, on somebody’s shoulders. The sunlight glints off his headphones and sunglasses. It’s Mal.

  “Go!” he shrieks, his high-pitched voice cutting through the noise. “Go!”

  It’s Dad holding him up. Mom is there, too.

  I go. I go like the Gurge on steroids.

  “David! Go!”

  I go. I go like Takeru Kobayashi. I go like Joey Chestnut. I go like Jooky Garafalo.

  “Go!”

  I shove slices of pizza in my mouth, and they are transported magically to my stomach. At the nine-minute mark, I’m into my sixth pizza. I don’t even bother to look at the Vikings guy.

  “David! Go!”

  I keep going. As long as Mal keeps yelling my name, I’m not about to stop.

  I don’t even know I’ve won at first, even though everybody is yelling my name.

  “David! David! David!”

  Papa grabs my wrist and pulls me to my feet and raises my hand high.

  “David! David!”

  I look over at the Vikings guy. He’s staring at me in shock.

  A high, thin voice cuts through the rest.

  “David!”

  I see Mal, still on Dad’s shoulders, at the back of the crowd.

  “Okay!” I try to shout, but what comes out is a croak.

  Things get kind of confusing after that. People are climbing up onstage and shoving cameras and phones in my face and asking me questions. One of them says she’s a reporter from the Des Moines Register.

  “What’s it like to eat fifty slices of pizza?” she asks.

  Fifty? I ate fifty slices of pizza?

  “Okay,” I say. One word is all I can manage.

  “You don’t seem too happy about it,” she says with a frown.

  I shrug. I don’t know if I’m happy or not — I’m mostly incredibly full, and I want to lie down. After a few minutes, Papa and Vito manage to clear the stage, so it’s just me and the Vikings guy. The third-place winner has tottered off in a daze, not bothering to collect his Papa Pigorino Signature Pizza Cutter.

  Papa presents me with a check for five thousand dollars, and that sets off another round of photos. He puts his arm around me and makes a short speech about how great Pigorino’s pizzas are. He finally releases me and presents the second-prize gift certificate to the Vikings guy, who looks as if he never wants to see another Pigorino’s pizza for the rest of his life. I know how he feels.

  I climb off the back of the stage, wishing somebody would roll me up in a rug. I stagger off, looking for HeyMan and Cyn, or my parents, but before I find them I come across the Gurge. He is sitting on the ground with his back to a trash container looking dismally pale and miserable. He fixes his beady blue eyes on me.

  “You,” he says.

  I pull the empty squeeze bottle from my pocket and toss it in his lap. “You dropped this.”

  He stares bleakly down at the bottle, takes a shuddering breath, and closes his eyes. I leave him to his misery.

  I ride home with Mom, Dad, and Mal. Dad is driving. I have the front passenger seat tipped back, because with fifty slices of pizza in me I don’t fold so good. Mom and Mal are in back. Nobody talks much at first. I know they’re mad at me, even if at the same time they’re a little bit proud of me for winning. We’re out of Des Moines and on the highway when Dad clears his throat.

  “David, you’re right.”

  Nothing he could have said would have surprised me more.

  “About what?”

  “I’m going to tell you a secret,” he says. “We don’t know what we’re doing.”

  “We who?”

  “Your mother and I. There is no college degree in parenting. You have kids, and all of a sudden you have to make a million impossible choices. You make mistakes. You try to be fair, and you fail. Your sister, you know how smart she is, how good she is in school, and we’re proud of her for that.”

  “Really? I never noticed.” I can’t keep the sarcasm out of my voice.

  “You also know that Bridgette sometimes tries a little too hard. She can be needy, always begging for praise. She’s been like that since she was a toddler, and I suppose we encouraged it. She craves approval and support — she demands it — and we give it to her, occasionally to excess.”

  I look back at Mom. She nods, and I realize that what Dad is saying, whatever he’s getting at, is coming from both of them.

  “And Mal is . . . Mal.”

  “Go,” Mal says.

  “Which leaves you stuck in the middle. You’re the easy one, David. You’ve never demanded much from us, and you always seem to do okay — despite the poor judgment you showed using your mother’s credit card. You’re a low-maintenance kid.”

  “Great,” I say. “I’m a Toyota.”

  “That is not a bad thing. Would you rather be a bundle of insecurities like your sister? Or developmentally disabled like Mal?”

  “Okay,” Mal says.

  “Anyway, what I — your mom and I — want to say is this. We’re not perfect, and we know you don’t get acknowledged for everything you do, but we love you and we’re proud of you and we’re grateful for you every single day.”

  I stare at my knees. My eyes are stinging a little, but I manage not to cry.

  “The other thing we want to say is that you’re not off the hook. Your actions — stealing from your mother and participating in that contest against our wishes — tell us that you have to prove to us you can be trusted. You’re going to
have to work at it. And so long as you are living under our roof, there will be no more eating contests.”

  The way I’m feeling right now, that’s fine by me.

  According to Cyn, the stuff in the squeeze bottle was most likely syrup of ipecac.

  Back in the twentieth century, you could buy ipecac in any drugstore. It was used as an emetic — something that makes you throw up. They used to give it to people who accidentally ate something poisonous.

  “There are better treatments now,” Cyn says, “and they don’t sell it in drugstores anymore. The Gurge probably bought it online.”

  “Well, it sure works!”

  It’s the Monday after the Pigorino Bowl. Cyn and I are sitting on the patio watching Mal unscrew the big bolt holding together the legs of the picnic table. He’s wearing his sunglasses but not his headphones. Dad is at work, and Mom is helping out at the church rummage sale.

  “What are you going to do?” Cyn asks.

  “Obviously I can’t go to Papa. If I tell him I’m the one who spiked the Gurge’s pizza, he might disqualify me and take the money back. Anyway, I don’t think he wants his Pigorino Bowl to be ruined by scandal. But I feel bad for Egon Belt. If the Gurge hadn’t cheated, Egon might have won.”

  “Or the Gurge might’ve won,” Cyn says. “Makes you wonder why he did it, since he was already ahead.”

  “He’s the Gurge,” I say. “Hey Mal!”

  Mal looks at me through his sunglasses.

  “Be careful with that. You pull the bolt all the way out, the table might fall down.”

  “Okay David Go,” Mal says. He continues to fiddle with the bolt.

  “Mal has become quite the conversationalist,” Cyn says.

  “Yeah, he has four words now.”

  “Four? What’s the fourth?”

  “Kohlrabi.”

  “Kohlrabi? Like that vegetable that nobody eats?”

  “Yeah. He started saying it on the way home from the fair. Mom says she’s going to try to get him to eat some. I’ll be surprised if he goes for it. He thinks it means potato chips.”

  “How are things with you and your mom?” Cyn asks.

  “As good as can be expected, seeing as I stole two grand from her.”

  “At least they showed up to cheer for you.”

  “I think my dad was originally planning to come and yank me off the stage and drag me home. But then Mal flipped out when Dad tried to leave the house without him. He started screaming ‘Go, David, Go!’ over and over. Mom couldn’t believe he all of a sudden had two new words. It was her idea to bring him to the fair. She thinks he’s on the verge of becoming the next Shakespeare, once he learns to write. Mal’s pretty good at getting what he wants.”

  “Hay asked me to ask you when your loyal investors get paid.”

  “I signed the check over to my mom. She’ll deposit it in her account, and I’ll have her write you guys your checks.”

  “Your mom’s keeping the rest of the money?”

  “We’re negotiating. She thinks it should go to my college fund. She wants to have a talk when she gets home. I’m not looking forward to it.”

  “Maybe this will help. I found —”

  She is interrupted by a crash. The picnic table has collapsed on one side, forming a little lean-to. Mal is tucked underneath it, looking out at us.

  “Mal made himself a house,” Cyn says.

  “Are you okay, buddy?” I ask.

  “Okay,” he says, smiling happily.

  “Good job, Mal.” I turn to Cyn. “You were saying you found something?”

  “I found Jooky Garafalo.”

  As much as I want to hear about Jooky, my first priority is to get Mal out from under the table before it collapses completely. I coax him out by promising him kohlrabi. We go inside, and I find him the bag of potato chips Mom hid in the cupboard.

  When I get back outside, Cyn says, “Jooky works at Vock’s Vinyl, a used-record store in Newark, New Jersey.”

  “Can you hold the table up for a sec?”

  Cyn grabs the side of the table and lifts so I can slide the bolt back in. I screw the nut back on the bolt as tight as I can with my fingers.

  “How did you find him?” I ask.

  “Internet magic,” Cyn says.

  I crawl out from under the table and give it a shake. It feels solid enough.

  “Seriously,” I say, sitting down on the bench seat.

  “Well, it took a while.” Cyn sits next to me. “I started by looking for Garafalos. It turns out that there are more Garafalos in New Jersey than anywhere. You know how Jooky has all those fast-food-logo tattoos? I checked out all the tattoo parlors in New Jersey. Most of them have websites with pictures of their work. One shop called Payne and Gaines specializes in corporate-logo tats. They had a shot of one of Jooky’s arms on their site.”

  “You are amazing,” I say.

  “I know! So I called them and told one of the owners, Mickey Payne, that I wanted to get in touch with one of his customers. I described Jooky’s tattoos, and he said, ‘Oh, that’s Jeremy Garafalo, only he calls himself Jooky now.’ He said he didn’t know where Jooky lived, but he told me where he works.”

  “He just told you?”

  “Not at first, but I said I was a reporter for BuzzFeed and we were doing an article on the ten best tattoo parlors in the U.S. He got all excited and told me all kinds of stuff.” She takes out her phone and her thumbs become a blur. “I just texted you everything, including the phone number of the record store. Did you know that Jooky has a Burger King tattoo on his left butt cheek?”

  “Um . . . why would I know that?”

  “You wouldn’t, and that’s the point. Mickey Payne said Burger King wouldn’t give Jooky any sponsorship money, so he put their logo on his butt.”

  “Have I told you how amazing you are?”

  She smiles at me. “Not in the last twenty seconds.”

  “Hay thinks you’re amazing, too.”

  She looks away. “Yeah, we’ve been hanging out a lot lately.”

  “I noticed.”

  She shrugs and gives me a sideways look. “Hay’s more mature these days.”

  “So, are you guys . . .”

  “I don’t know.” She tosses her hair in a girlie gesture that is not like Cyn at all.

  “I do. You’re in love with him.”

  “I’m more in like with him. I like you, too, but in a different way.”

  “I get it.” I do get it, and the funny thing is, I think it’s cool. I’m happy for them. For a while I thought maybe I was jealous, but I’m not. Just a little envious. I’m wondering how it will be for the three of us, how it will change. “We’re still going to do things together, right? You guys aren’t going to get all weird?”

  “We’ve always been weird.” Cyn grabs my hand and squeezes. “All for one, and one for all.”

  “The Three Musketeers?”

  Cyn smiles and nods.

  After Cyn leaves, I pick up my phone and retrieve her text with the record-shop number. I’m shaking so hard, I keep hitting the wrong keys, but finally I get a connection.

  “Vock’s Vinyl.” The guy who answers the phone sounds like a gravel truck.

  “Is Jooky there?”

  I hear the guy rumble, “Yo, Jook.”

  A few seconds later, Jooky Garafalo himself is on the line.

  “Yah, man.”

  “Jooky? Jooky Garafalo?” My voice has gone all creaky.

  “How many guys named Jooky you know? What can I do you for?”

  “Uh, my name’s David Miller. I’m calling from Iowa, and I’m your number-one fan.”

  “Oh yeah? Cool. Iowa. You got corn there, right? That corn-on-the-cob contest?”

  “Uh, yeah. But I just called to say I think you’re the best, and . . . I’m sorry about Nathan’s this year. I was rooting for you.”

  “No biggie, bro. I just couldn’t find my flow.”

  “I have a question. You know that half d
og?”

  “Dude, did you call me just to remind me of my worst days?”

  “No! I’m calling about that Certificate of Authenticity you signed for the Gurge.”

  He doesn’t say anything for a second; then, “Aw, man, tell me you’re not the chump bought that thing off Virgil.”

  “I sort of did. Is it real? The half dog?”

  “Well . . . yeah, it was a half hot dog I didn’t eat. But that thing I signed doesn’t actually say it was the particular half dog that Chestnut beat me by. Virgil told me it was just a joke. Paid me twenty bucks to sign it. I didn’t know he was gonna put it up on BuyBuy.”

  “Would you be willing to swear to that?”

  “What, in court? That’s a negatory, bro. I don’t groove with the system. Sorry, dude. You got Gurged, and I feel for ya, man, but I’m out. I got records to sell and a pierogi contest comin’ up next week.”

  I hang up, feeling defeated. If Jooky won’t testify that the half dog is fake, I’ve got nothing.

  Mal and Arfie, having finished their potato chips, come back outside. Mal is still wearing his shades. He immediately goes to the picnic table and starts fussing with the bolts. Arfie moves off to a safe distance to watch.

  “Mal, cut it out.”

  Mal slides out from under the table.

  “If you hurt yourself, Mom will kill me,” I say.

  “Okay.” He wanders out into the yard with Arfie at his heels.

  I think about what I just said — Mom will kill me — and that gives me an idea. I grab my phone and call directory assistance. It takes a few minutes, but I finally get a human being on the line.

  “What city, please?”

  “Galena, Illinois.”

  “Last name?”

  “Schutlebecker.” I spell it out.

  “First name?”

  “Um . . . Mrs.?”

  Fortunately, there is only one Schutlebecker listing in Galena, Illinois.