“I’m fine, Mom,” I say, trying to sound normal. “The water was really cold.”
“You’d think you’d know how to work the shower by now, Quentin,” The Voice says.
“I know, I know,” I say.
“Why did you lock the door?” The Voice asks. “I’ve seen you naked, you know. I used to change your diapers.”
“Oh, God, don’t remind me,” I moan. The Voice recites humiliating stories at every opportunity. Her favorites involve diapers, potty seats, and embarrassing body sounds.
“I’m fine, Mom,” I say again.
“Hurry up, you need to eat breakfast,” The Voice says before she walks away. She calls for my sister with a different voice than she uses for me. My sister, Katie, is the princess in our family. I’m the toad. Just ask The Voice.
“That was close,” I say to my new prehistoric friend.
“Close,” he says.
I examine the teeth imprints on my bitten finger. After a few seconds the throbbing starts to go away. At least he didn’t break the skin. I’d have a hard time explaining human bite marks in the emergency room.
In the shower, the cave boy takes a bite out of a bar of soap. He spits it out and makes a face like he just ate Brussels sprouts for the first time. I’m not sure but I think one of his teeth came out with it because something hard clangs against the tub.
“No, you use it to clean with,” I say. I grab the soap away from him and show him how it works by pretending to wash myself.
“To clean with,” he echoes, and sputters out more pieces of soap.
The amount of dirt pouring down the drain could fill a dump truck. In the meantime, I’m envious that he hasn't had to take a shower in his whole life until now. Mom makes me take one every day. If I don’t, she threatens to turn the garden hose on me.
I’m showing the cave boy how to use the shampoo when there’s a knock at the door. “Hey shrimp, get out of there,” Katie calls.
My new friend peeks out from behind the shower curtain. His hair is full of suds. I signal for him to be quiet.
“Just a minute,” I say to my sister, like I’m the sweetest little brother on earth.
She pauses. “Hey, why are you being so nice?” she says through the door. I can almost hear her eyes narrow.
“No reason,” I say. Niceness is always suspect between us.
“Come on, Q-Tip, let me in.” Katie calls me Q-Tip whenever she’s trying to get what she wants. Since my hair is blond and kind-of curly she likes to rub the top of my head when she says it.
“I don’t look anything like a Q-Tip, you swab.”
Katie thumps the door with her claws. “I’m going to tell Mom,” she says, which she knows will get a reaction out of me. She inhales, ready to blast the neighborhood with her latest complaint.
“Wait, wait!” I insist. “I’ll be right out. Just go to your room or something.”
“Why, Q-Tip boy, are you in your birthday suit?”
“Yeah, that’s it, Katie,” I say. “Now get out of the hall so I can go to my room.”
“Quentin’s in his birthday suit . . . .,” she begins. But at least the taunting is coming from her room.
“We’ve got to make a run for it,” I say to the cave boy.
He’s drying off on the first towel he’s ever used in his life. He rubs it against his face and sniffs it like he’s in a commercial for fabric softener. He refuses to put it down. Even clean, his hair looks wild. I try to brush it before we leave, and he growls at me. I hand him the brush and show him how to do it himself. For several seconds we get nowhere. He has a decade’s worth of knots in his hair. With each attempt his growl gets louder.
“Maybe you should pull it back,” I say. I hand him one of my sister’s hair bands that are always all over the bathroom. “Lots of guys do that these days. Here, I’ll show you.”
I bunch his hair up into the rubber band.
He makes a face at me like: you’ve got to be kidding me.
“It’s the only way,” I say. “If we’re lucky, people will think you’ve got dreadlocks.”
“Dreadlocks?” he stutters.
“Never mind,” I say. Some things are too hard to explain.
He’s not too thrilled with the hair thing, but goes along with it.
Opening the door, I check again to make sure the Sister and The Voice aren’t around. Then I pull the visiting cave boy down the hallway. Once we’re inside I latch my bedroom door and throw him some clean clothes from my dresser drawer.
“Here, put these on,” I say.
He looks at them, one eyebrow raised.
“Okay, I’ll help,” I say.
After pulling the T-shirt over his head, I make him change out of his animal skin into a clean pair of my boxer shorts. Then I conceal his smelly hide in the bottom of the clothes hamper. Even covered with clothes, the hamper smells like a combination of wet dog and dead skunk.
“You can’t wear the necklace,” I say. I point to the collection of teeth hanging around his neck. “It’ll draw too much attention. People will think you’re in a gang or something.” But even in Atlanta I haven’t heard of gangs this rough. Some of the teeth look human.
He takes off the necklace made of vine and wrapped carnivore teeth and puts it on the bed. Then I show him how to put the blue jeans on and zip them up. His feet miss the legs several times. But then he secures them around his waist. He studies the zipper, like it’s the greatest invention made by mankind, and then slides it up and down about a hundred times.
“Hey, you’d better not do that in public,” I say. “The police will come after you.”
“Police?” he asks.
“Grownups that carry clubs,” I say. “They make everybody follow the rules.”
“Clubs,” he says. He grunts like he understands and then lets the zipper go. Then he tugs on the seat of his jeans, looking stiff and miserable like I do when I have to wear a suit.
“It’ll get better,” I say.
His look says: Yeah, right.
“Hey, do you have a name?” I ask.
He shrugs, tugs at the seat of his pants a few more times, and then gives the zipper several swift zips.
I decide to show him how greetings in this country are done. I extend my hand. “My name’s Quentin. Quentin Moss.”
He looks at my hand like there may be a weapon attached. “Moss,” he echoes.
I try to explain to him that my name isn’t Moss, but Quentin.
“Moss,” he repeats.
“Oh, do you like the name Moss?” I ask, figuring I have to call him something.
“Moss,” he repeats, as if he’s trying it on and it fits fine.
“Moss, it is,” I say. “And if anybody asks, you can be my cousin from out of town.”
He grunts.
It dawns on me—in a painful way—that while I was so busy hiding Moss I forgot to go to the bathroom. “Wait here,” I say.
“Here,” he repeats and sits on the bed. He gives his shirt collar a tug. I’m grateful it doesn’t have zippers.
From the corner of the bathroom mirror, Katie sees me coming and narrows her eyes. I halfway expect fire to flare out of her nostrils igniting the ton of make-up she’s putting on.
“Mom told you not to wear that stuff,” I say.
“Get out of here,” she says.
“I've got to go to the bathroom, Spazz,” I say back at her. Spazz is another one of my pet names for her. I hold the front of my boxer shorts to show how serious I am.
“Why didn’t you go while you were in here? And don’t call me Spazz, Creep.”
“Don’t call me Creep, Spazz,” I answer back. I imitate her whiny voice, which now that I think about it, sounds a little like Mom’s.
“Make this Neanderthal get out of the bathroom!” Katie yells to Mom.
“You have no idea,” I say under my breath.
“Quentin, leave your sister alone,” The Voice says behind me.
I jump like somebo
dy shot me in the behind with a sling shot.
“You’re jumpy today, Quentin. Are you okay?” The Voice almost sounds nice.
“You keep sneaking up on me,” I say. It’s a lame comment but maybe she’ll believe it. I’m also hoping that she doesn’t decide to go into my room where she will find a cave boy named Moss who is a few thousand years old and wearing my clothes. I’ll be grounded into the next century.
“Mom, I've got to go,” I say. I plant a pained expression on my face, which is only a slight exaggeration of how I feel.
Emergency bodily functions get first priority when three people share a bathroom—especially if one of them is a guy. All I have to do is threaten to go outside in the backyard to relieve myself and it freaks her out. When I was three-years old some older kid told me that peeing on the shrubs was how you watered the lawn. It wasn’t until our elderly neighbor complained that I found out that’s what garden hoses are for.
I look in the direction of the backyard as a warning.
“Don’t you dare!” The Voice says. “Katie, your brother needs the bathroom.”
“Mom ...” Katie moans.
Mom gives Katie The Look, almost always reserved for me, that says don’t mess with me. After you live with people a long time you can skip the words. All Mom has to do is look at us and we know what she means. The Voice and The Look are like Siamese twins. Recognizing her text message of looks is crucial, since I don’t have dad to decipher her moods. It’s pure survival, at this point.
With reluctance, Katie steps aside so I can get in the bathroom. As she walks away, I hold up my arms in victory while she snarls in my direction. A minor battle won in the Quentin/Katie wars. A war I have been drafted into simply by being born.
“You should see what a mess he left in the bathroom, Mom. There’s dirt everywhere.”
She turns around to gloat. I give my sister a look that needs no translation and throw a wet wash rag at her that misses. Tattling is unforgiveable. Any peace treaty we might have been working on is now ripped into bits.
“Quentin, I’ve told you a thousand times to clean up your messes,” The Voice says, in tandem with The Look. “You don’t live in a cave, you know.”
I smile. No, I don’t live in a cave. But I know someone who does. I realize that with Moss in the picture, I’m no longer out-numbered, and it makes up a little for dad being gone.
Mom goes back downstairs. I go into the bathroom and since I know Katie is waiting, I close the door, determined to take the longest, slowest pee in Quentin Moss history. I write out my entire name with urine and even dot the “I.” To further waste time, I also take a long, glacial look in the mirror to search for whiskers that might be breaking through the skin any day now. Facial hair is the first step to freedom from The Voice and The Look. Once I start to shave, I know my days at home are numbered. I open the cabinet and dash on a handful of Dad’s leftover aftershave. It smells potent, and for a second I feel like I might tear up, and not just from the smell, but from missing my dad.
“Mom, he’s taking too long,” my sister yells from her bedroom.
“You think this is long, just wait,” I say under my breath. I glance at my primitive self in the mirror and grunt.
HIDING PLACES
Some people play sports or read, but my hobby is to think up ways to irritate my sister. As a younger brother, I consider it my duty. Most of what I come up with would get me arrested. Since I don’t think my dog Coltrane would take to living in a jail cell, I resist acting on those. So far I’ve come up with 77 ways to get revenge.
It’s not that my sister and I dislike each other. We hate each other with a passion. When I was four she talked me into playing bull fights. She was the matador. I was the bull. She used her red sweater as the cape and before I knew it my bull horns, as well as my bull head, hit the living room wall going full speed. I almost passed out from the blunt force trauma. Not to mention that my head hurt for about a year after that. It not only left a dent in the wall, but a dent in my skull about the size of a quarter. Whenever my feelings for my sister start to soften, all I have to do is touch the scar and I see red.
More than once I’ve wished for an older brother to look out for me. It occurs to me that Moss could take my sister in a fight any day.
“Mom, get this cretin out of the bathroom,” my sister yells, which snaps me out of my fantasy. I remember that Moss is still in my room and listen at the door to make sure I don’t hear any grunts or anything.
The Voice yells up the stairs that I’ve been in the bathroom long enough.
Before leaving, I take action on revenge idea #77 and put a dollop of mom’s hemorrhoid cream on Katie’s toothbrush so she’ll think it’s her whitening toothpaste.
“Mom, he’s got on that horrible aftershave again,” my sister yells, with her own look of revenge.
“Quentin?” The Voice yells from the kitchen. “You’d better get breakfast or you’re going to be late.”
“I’m coming!” I yell back. Yelling is a standard mode of communication in our house since Dad left. My best friend Dex says his family doesn’t yell. In fact, they don’t even talk to each other. I guess I’d prefer yelling to nothing at all.
The fight with my sister makes me almost forget about the Stone Age kid in my room. I haven’t begun to figure out what to do with him. I whistle, hoping something comes to me on the few steps between the bathroom and my room. Whistling always helps me think. But when I walk into my room, I see my problems have only just begun. My window is wide open and there’s no cave boy to be seen. I run to the window and hang halfway out to peer into the backyard. There is no exit. The only way to escape is to jump from the second floor window onto an oak tree limb several feet away from the house. I can’t imagine how Moss pulled this off without breaking his neck. Something moves in the bushes. I hear a zipper.
“Moss?” I say, in the loudest whisper I can manage.
He looks up at me and smiles as he relieves himself right in the middle of my mom’s prize azaleas. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to do the exact same thing. But while I’m impressed with Moss’ resourcefulness and his aim, I imagine the fireworks this will set off with The Voice and The Look if my mom walks out the back door at this very minute and finds him.
“Stay there!” I say in a loud whisper. I hold up my arm like I’ve changed into a school crossing guard. Moss finishes watering the azaleas and then flourishes his zipper with impressive speed.
“Don’t move!” I insist. I hold out my hand again.
“Don’t move!” he repeats, and holds out his hand, too.
I rush to put on my standard middle school outfit––blue jeans, T-shirt, running shoes, and an Atlanta Braves baseball cap that my dad bought me when we went to a ballgame two summers ago. As I’m putting on my socks, I dream up revenge tactic #78, which involves hiding a pair of ripe gym socks under my sister’s bed. The smell will be so intense, she’ll think there’s a corpse buried under her bed in a shallow grave—like Moss smelled when he first arrived.
Revenge may be hereditary. My dad said he used to bug his older sister, too. Sometimes I wish he was still around to give me some pointers. Heather, the waitress he left us for, wears bright red lipstick and chews bubble gum with her mouth open. One Saturday morning, just over a year ago, right in the middle of our father/son time, Dad announced that he and Heather were moving to Oregon to open up their own restaurant. We haven’t seen him since. The Voice tries not to let me hear her cry, but she does sometimes.
I finish getting dressed and run downstairs to deal with the Stone Age boy in the backyard that has relieved himself all over my mom’s blooming pink azaleas.
Moss has given up on the zipper, but is now turning the garden hose on and off, giving the plants a shower, as well as himself. I sneak up behind him in the bushes and grab the hose.
“Put that down, Moss,” I say. I’m not too thrilled with how much I sound like The Voice and before I can stop myself I
also give him The Look to show my disapproval.
Unfazed, Moss grunts his usual grunt. Then he starts to sniff like a dog following a scent. His sniffing nose follows a trail that ends up about an inch away from my face. Eyeball to eyeball, he crinkles his nose.
“Animal, dead,” he says.
“That’s not a dead animal,” I say, “that’s my aftershave.”
“Animal, dead,” he says again. He waves his hand in front of his nose to dispel the scent. If a smelly cave boy thinks you stink, that’s saying something.
“This stuff grows hair on your face,” I say in my defense.
He gives me a look like I’m trying to sell him a used cave with a pack of wild hyenas inside.
“Come on,” I say. I motion for him to follow me and lead the way to the tree house, where I can hide him until we leave for school. We sneak from one group of bushes to the next to avoid being seen. The back door opens and we dive into the bushes like Olympic swimmers jumping into the pool at the start of a race. The Voice tells Coltrane to go do his business. Coltrane makes a bee-line for us, barking the whole way. The Voice yells at him to stop, but then gets distracted and closes the door.
Coltrane joins us under the bush and growls at Moss.
“Stop it, Cole,” I say. He looks at me with his big brown dog eyes like he’s seeing double. Then he raises his leg and pees right where Moss peed on Mom’s azaleas. Dog and cave boy pee glistens on the petals. I roll my eyes. I’m like the only civilized creature here. Considering my own primitive tendencies, that says a lot.
Moss and I crawl from behind the bushes and one of the azalea limbs slaps us hard in the face like it’s paying us back for what Moss did. I rub my stinging face and motion for Moss to follow me. At least he’s good about going along with what I say. Being in my dream doesn’t seem to bother him that much. But my guess is that not all dreams are this easy to deal with. Especially a dream where lions are after you, like the one I had the night before. If a lion had ended up in my bedroom, I might not be here right now. It would have had Quentin pancakes for breakfast.
Quentin and the Cave Boy - Funny books for boys and adventurous girls Page 2
