The Trouble in Me

by Jack Gantos

  He knelt down on one knee to examine the red-tipped cannons, which were made of candy cigarettes. Then his eyes glazed over when he saw, up on the bridge of the cake ship, the standing Commodore modeled out of marzipan with a row of marzipan sailors saluting him. The smokestacks were made of curled thin sheets of licorice. Even the line of signal flags flying from the jack staff on the bow and up to the bridge flagstaff and over to the stacks and back to the stern ensign staff read HAPPY BIRTHDAY COMMODORE, exactly like the ones I had already burned. The ship sat on a dappled sea of blue icing with churning white foam rolling outward from the prop wash. My sister had thought of everything.

  My mother turned the music down.

  Dad beamed. He danced around the cake while murmuring, “Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa,” as his eyes searched out every nautical detail. “Wonderful. Marvelous. Genius,” he declared in a singsongy voice while sneaking swipes of battleship-gray icing off the ship’s hull.

  He had been giddy like this all my life. I never questioned it, but suddenly his cheerfulness seemed artificial, as if his life was the repetition of a recorded song going around and around, repeating itself day after day until the day came when the record got old and thin and silent and the needle peeled the vinyl into a circular curl of the Mona Lisa’s silent hair. Could having a family like us really make him happy, or was this an accidental life he was trying to make the best of, which was why all his joy seemed so vastly overinflated?

  He seemed like a hot-air balloon on the verge of exploding and showering us with the confetti of all the shredded dreams that had kept him going. I couldn’t tell if I was being too rough on him. Yesterday he seemed the same as I had always known him. But today I couldn’t be sure, and if I judged him differently, wouldn’t I judge myself differently, too? How could I know he was so full of hot air unless I was, too?

  “Who made this dreamboat?” he finally asked, and his eyes flashed mischievously as he snapped off the portside candy anchor and crunched down on it. “Which da Vinci of the ship’s galley created this masterpiece?”

  My sister had done every meticulous bit of the work. I was no help, though she had asked me to assist with painting on the ocean of icing, which was the easiest task, but I had told her I was busy.

  I had been watching television. It was a show on how to repair cars. The narrator-mechanic talked like he had a mouthful of ball bearings. He had a nasty scar running up under his neck that then hooked upward over his chin and connected with the tip of a V-shaped gap in his floppy lower lip. I guessed he had stuck his head too far under the hood and got hacked a good one by the fan blade. His lower lip warbled when he spoke, but still he knew what he was talking about, and he was efficient with his hands, which did most of the teaching anyway. I liked knowing how to repair flat tires and change water pumps and spark plugs. I wanted a car and figured I’d only get a junker, so I’d need to know how to fix it up, which was why I didn’t pitch in and help my sister.

  Mom had promised to assist with the cake, but then she got busy with a nursery project putting up wallpaper cows jumping over grinning moons in the baby’s room.

  “The moon looks a little depraved,” I had remarked that morning when I stuck my head around the corner. “It’s smiling like Hermann Göring.” I was on a kick where I tried to ruin each innocent moment by perversely listing the deeds of every evil Nazi I could recall. I was good at history.

  “Don’t be morbid,” she replied. “The wallpaper will guard the baby against germs.”

  “Or Germans,” I remarked as I slouched back to my car repair show. Mom continued to hang the wallpaper. My sister continued to sing to her records and create her masterpiece.

  Now, as my father looked eagerly into all of our faces to learn who had constructed the ship cake, I stared down at my roughed-up shoes. I expected my sister to take the full credit she deserved.

  “We all contributed,” she said graciously. “It was family teamwork.”

  She knew that saying the word teamwork was like magnifying his extra-tall, extra-gilded trophy moment because the instant she said it he livened up even more and launched into one of his instructional naval discourses.

  “A ship, like a family, is only as good as the teamwork of her sailors,” he announced as if reading out the title of a treasured lecture he was about to deliver. Then he rattled on for a while as my mind begged to drift off toward the Pagoda animal burial.

  At our cadet meetings, where we practiced tying elaborate boat knots and attempted to carve tiny sailing ships that fit into impossibly tinier bottles, my father often took the time to address us as a unit.

  He would stand up on the seat of a chair and begin a talk with, “Crew, nobody likes to be a weak link on a ship. Now, boys, everyone line up side by side.”

  There were only about twenty of us. We groaned as we put down our half-made elaborate boat knots, which would snailishly fall open again, or sheathed our wood-carving knives, and then we all lined up about a foot apart from each other.

  “Now, get close enough so that you can lock arms,” Dad ordered, eyeing us impatiently.

  We did. We had done it many times before, so we knew the drill by heart.

  “I want the two end boys to circle around,” he instructed, “and link up to form a perfect, impenetrable circular chain.”

  He rhythmically clapped his hands together to motivate us. Once the end boys linked arms he began to tap a beat with his foot and sing an old sea chantey that he knew we loved.

  “What shall we do with a drunken sailor?” he bellowed. “What shall we do with a drunken sailor? What shall we do with a drunken sailor? Early in the morning.”

  Then we all sang back, “Put him in the long boat ’til he’s sober. Pull out the bung and wet him all over. Heave him by the leg…”

  By then we were singing so wildly and dancing like cows kicking our legs this way and that until one of us got lifted off his feet and tilted over and then the whole chain of us would wobble a bit and slowly collapse inward with a final slaphappy groan. Then we’d have to pull our arms free and get up and do it again.

  Dad was dead set on everyone working together as a unit and conforming to the theory of the “unbreakable chain of collective strength.”

  “When you’re under enemy fire,” he instructed sagely, “every moment lost to confusion results in a casualty. It is worthy of a court-martial to waste a man’s life because of poor training.”

  Now as Dad stood in front of the birthday cake he rubbed his half-fingered fist into the palm of his good hand. I saw that stubby finger jiggle like a tongue wagging and thought of his Jack Ruby comment from breakfast. It was a stupid joke, but then I had laughed anyway. It was a teamwork laugh, I supposed, or maybe I was just being spineless.

  But suddenly the references seemed as contemptible as Mom had said and I no longer felt part of his team. If I had shown any guts I would have backed her up by blurting out, “I think it’s a stupid joke, too.” But sometimes agreeing with Mom left me the target of Dad’s annoyance, and he could fume and hold a grudge for a week, so I had kept my mouth shut.

  Then, from behind Dad’s back, and lurking on the other side of the fence, Gary and his father appeared and were breathing heavily as they leaned forward like fishermen pulling a net full of fish. They strained to drag a large canvas tarp toward the grave. I guessed the greyhound was wrapped in the tarp.

  Mom cast a puzzled glance over at the panting, struggling Pagodas and I wished she hadn’t. At first I thought Mr. Pickles was wearing a large red-velvet cake on his head. As he tugged the tarp forward I realized it was a Shriners fez, and the elaborately knotted tassel swung back and forth in front of the ceremonial silver scimitar and Moorish moon like a scolding finger saying “No, no, no.” For a second I thought Mom was going to invite them over for cake, but then she must have summed them up as hazardous social germs because she turned her back toward them and announced cheerfully, “Family-trophy-moment photo!”

  “Indeed!” Dad ag
reed, and drew himself up to attention.

  Mom quickly retrieved the camera with the flash cube from the kitchen and Dad stood with the cake tray tilted forward, but not too forward, and my sister and I knelt like bookends on either side of him. It was a classic trophy-moment photograph.

  Then I took a photo of Mom and Karen and Dad. Then Karen took one of me and Mom and Dad. By then the mosquitoes had begun to rise up off the canal into winged formations of humming hypodermics and we carried the cake into the kitchen, where Dad did the honors of slicing it up according to Mr. Bowditch’s famous nautical rules on latitude and longitude. I received a shallow piece of the ocean but didn’t dare complain. I ate it while peering out the window, trying to get a better sense of what Gary and his dad were doing. But I only saw a final glimpse of Mr. Pickles pushing up on the lower edge of his fez, which had slipped down over his eyes that were as wrinkled as raw oysters. Then he adjusted the fez as if he were carefully straightening a lampshade while he trotted toward his wine-colored Cadillac. He obviously had a Shriners meeting to attend and left the rest of the work to Gary.

  Since the hamburgers were ruined Dad suggested that he and Mom go to the Sea Cadet Commodores’ cocktail party at the Kon-Tiki Club after all. He had been going to skip the party because of his birthday celebration, but now without dinner I had inadvertently given him and Mom an excuse to get away from us.

  It didn’t take them long to spruce up, and once they left the house my sister put on my mother’s lipstick and came up to me and playfully punched me in the shoulder.

  “I know you burned the banner,” she said slyly. “You are such a clown. Now you owe me one for keeping my mouth shut. And after what you did to the burgers you owe it to yourself to start paying attention to what you are doing.”

  She was right, but I wasn’t in a mood to be wrong. My mistakes always made me respond like a jerk.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Thanks. I’ll pay you back when you least expect it.”

  “Moron,” she replied in a tired voice. “You are too stupid to know when people are being nice to you.”

  She was always more fair to me than I was to her, and somehow this kept me from being totally honest with her. I wasn’t smarter than her, so being a liar was my only way of trying to get the upper hand, but she saw right through me.

  “And what were you and that kid in the skanky underwear talking about down by the canal?” she asked suspiciously. “That was pretty weird.”

  I shrugged. “Nothing,” I said. “Just saying hi.”

  The less I said about him the better. As a kid I learned that when you announced you had an invisible friend it was no longer invisible. It was best to keep Gary in the shadows.

  Karen continued. “And could you figure out what he and his dad were doing out back?” she asked. “They were creeping around like they were burying something illegal.”

  “They are burying a greyhound,” I explained. “Gary was digging the hole.”

  “I hope it doesn’t smell,” she remarked.

  “It’s a deep hole,” I added, cutting off the subject.

  “Well, I’m going to visit Suzy,” she said, and headed for the door. Then from over her shoulder she added, “Watch it. Suzy said that guy’s a two-faced user. And she should know.”

  Suzy Pryor was a friend of hers from two schools ago when we lived in Lauderhill and just by coincidence she was now living in the same Wilton Manors neighborhood we had moved into. They had been thrilled to discover each other again and were already planning out what activities they wanted to get involved with once school started. They were the type of girls who lived to organize clubs and run for class office. They were smart and energetic and had each other.

  This would be my sixth new school in eight grades. I wasn’t looking forward to another friendless year all over again. I guess you could say I didn’t make real friends. I just hung around groups of kids and mimed being a friend. I’d silently laugh at their jokes, but I might just as well have been laughing into a mirror because I was the only one watching me.

  I hadn’t made any plans for school other than to show up on time and keep my mouth shut. In my last school I had been in the Latin club and the chess club. Maybe I’d do that again. They were easy clubs to join because they had so few members they didn’t even reject the rejects. If you hung around enough you got your picture in the yearbook and pretended to be a part of something. I did. In the chess club photo I had stood with my arms high across my chest and head tilted forward in a pose that I thought would make me appear moody and troubled—as if I were someone artistically conflicted that you’d want to know. But when I saw the photo my pug face made me look like I was too mentally dim to speak Latin or play chess—and no one sought me out to get to know me better. I looked like the IQ equal of our pathetic club mascot—a three-foot-high brown Naugahyde pawn with a metal ruler stabbed into its ball-peen head and a flag taped to the ruler that read RULE THE WORLD ONE MOVE AT A TIME.

  I wished the expressions on my face matched up to my thoughts, but they rarely did. Only when I was in extreme physical pain did my face knot up and truly express extreme physical pain. Happiness looked like a square peg struggling to fit into a round hole. It was all mismatched. When it came to my heart I felt everything okay, but when I tried to express my feelings the words came out of me like invisible ink.

  Before Karen left the house I said, “Tell Suzy I very much look forward to seeing her.”

  I purposely spoke in a big, proper sentence because I had a crush on Suzy that had suddenly revived when I fantasized how she might possibly pull up in front of our house and rescue me in a white pickup truck and give me that flaming-hot kiss I wanted.

  Karen stopped with her hand on the doorknob. “Let me give you some girlfriend advice,” she said, turning toward me. “You should pay more attention to girls whose Salvation Army missionary work is trying to save tragic boys like you. Being a reclamation project is the only chance you have of attracting a girl as immature as you are.”

  “I’m not immature,” I said defensively.

  “Remember the burning flags today? The ruined food? Your infatuation with your new half-naked skinny-legged friend? Remember that weighing the pros and cons of the world around you is a sign of maturity.”

  “I got bored,” I said. “Most of life is boring. It’s only what I’m thinking about between the boring parts that keeps me from killing myself.” This was true only because I wished it to be true.

  “Please don’t share any more of your perpetually self-involved thoughts,” she said. “Just clean up the kitchen and the outside mess so Mom doesn’t make herself sick tomorrow by trying to disinfect the entire backyard with something that could hurt the baby. You know how obsessive she gets when it comes to germs.”

  “Germans,” I mumbled.

  She then went up the street to see Suzy. My eyes followed her until I imagined myself knocking on Suzy’s door.

  DEPTH CHARGE

  After I cleaned the kitchen that evening I was thinking about Gary and the dog burial, so I opened the back door and stepped outside.

  To the west the bright eyelashes of the sun garishly stretched across the sky for one final cameo, while to the east the pebbly clouds glowed like orange peels beneath those copper rays.

  I balanced myself on Chief Osceola and watched the distant horizon until the blazing rind of the sun set with a final flash of green light. The sky turned gray as darkness rose from the ground like a creeping tide. Sounds became softer. Air became cooler.

  I flicked on the yard lights and walked down toward the warm grill and dragged it over to its usual place by the Pagoda fence. Gary had returned and was still working. He was on his hands and knees and grunting with animal effort as he hard-packed the sandy dirt down on the grave with overhead strokes of the flat back of a shovel. A black standard poodle sat in the shade of a palm tree watching him work.

  “Is that you?” he asked, without turning toward me.

  �
�Yes. Did you bury the greyhound?”

  “It was only a Chinese crested,” he replied. “But it had the guts of a greyhound. Pound for pound, nobody packed more bark and bite in a body than little Baby Chairman Mao.”

  “It seemed a lot bigger than a Chinese crested,” I remarked. “It looked to me like you and your dad were dragging something heavy, like the size of a Great Dane.”

  Gary stood and carefully brushed the damp sand off his knees. Then he turned toward me as he locked his arms across the front of his unzipped jacket. His knuckles looked like a row of saddles linked across the scarred tops of his wide fists.

  “I like you,” he said in a deliberately cold and emotionless tone. His white face could just as easily have been a coral head with eyes and a mouth scratched on it. “And I was just thinking today that we might even become good friends, but now when you question what I tell you it makes me think you don’t know the correct rules on how to be my friend.”

  That caught me by surprise. I thought we had just been very friendly, even friendlike, and the dog comment wasn’t offensive. But maybe I was trying to be a friend too quickly, which was against his rules.

  “I’m sorry,” I replied, and stepped back a pace. “I didn’t realize a Chinese crested could be so big.”

  “Well, now you know the facts,” he said with clipped authority. “So when I say something is what it is you don’t have to question it—just take my word for it, especially when it comes to dogs, because I train them at the track, my sister grooms them, my mom’s kind of a vet, and my dad bets on them. So we know dogs.”

  From moving around so much with my family I had learned it was better to let strangers take the upper hand and say whatever they felt like saying—that way I could custom-fit my jigsawed answers to what they wanted to hear.

  Most people liked people who agreed with them and I wanted to be liked, especially by Gary. I never had a friend like him and I could feel the panic in my gut that I had crossed him.