Crash (3 page)

The father chuckled. “I’ll relieve the boy’s misery.” He left the table and came back with a trash basket. He held it at my side. “Drop ’er in here, Crash.”

I leaned over, opened my mouth, and let the oatburger blob, fall into the basket. He took it away.

The other stuff on my plate was candied sweet potatoes, string beans, and something I didn’t recognize, little brown clumps. Mrs. Webb saw me looking. “They’re breaded mushrooms. Try one.”

I tried one. It was delicious.

“What do you think?” she said.

I shrugged. “It’s okay,”

Webb piped: “John has a great-great-grandfather, and he’s a hundred and fifteen years old!”

Four grown-up eyeballs landed on me. I had to think quick. “And I do dive-bombing too!” I said. “Wanna see me?”

I didn’t wait for an answer. I jumped from the table and went behind their sofa. I dived over the back of it, landed on my head and hands on the cushion, pushed off, swung my feet around, and landed on the floor. I threw out my arms. “Toldja.”

They clapped.

We went back to eating. I stuck with the sweet potatoes and mushrooms. Webb kept pushing the syrup over and telling me what I was missing by giving up oatburgers. To shut him up, I said, “Did you know your son is a Quaker?”

The parents looked at each other, at the kid, at me, and broke out laughing. “Yes,” said the father, “we do know that. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Webb and I happen to be Quakers, too.”

I said, “Oh, does that mean you don’t believe in war, either?”

“I’m afraid so,” he said.

“That’s too bad,” I told them. “Your kid is missing out on a lot of great stuff. Especially at Christmas. About half my presents are usually war things. Last year I got a G.I. Joe action figure and—oh man!”—I was getting into it now—“I just remembered my Mazooka. It’s a combination machine gun and bazooka. First you wipe out all the infantry with the machine gun, then you go after the tanks. It has an armor-piercing shell.
Sets the tank on fire. Roasts the guys inside like they’re marsh-mallows.”

I sat back and let all that sink in, let them see what they were missing. After a while the father smiled and said, “I see.”

Everybody just chewed for a minute. “I have a grandfather named Scooter,” I said.

“Now that is something,” said the mother.

“Yeah.” I popped another mushroom. “So,” I said, “are you poor?”

The parents started laughing again. I never knew I was so funny.

“I’m beginning to see why they call you Crash,” said the father, whatever
that
meant. He went on, “To answer your question, no, I wouldn’t say we’re poor. Would you?”

“Looks like it to me,” I said. “Your kid hardly has any toys, and you only have one floor on your house.” I decided to be nice and not tell them it looked like a garage.

More smiles. “No,” said the father, “we’re not poor at all. In fact, I would say in a lot of ways we’re rich.”

Could’ve fooled me. Maybe they have a limo out back, I thought.

I ate a few more breaded mushrooms. I looked around the room. I got up. Something had been bugging me from the start, and now I knew what it was. I checked out the kitchen. I took another look at the kid’s room. I checked every room in the place. I came back to the table. They were all staring at me. I stared back. “Where’s the TV?”

“We don’t have TV.”

The words came from the kid. I stared at him. “Huh?”

He said it again. “We don’t have TV.”

“You’re tricking me.”

He wagged his head, eyes all wide. “No, really.”

“What do you
do
on Saturday morning?”

“I play. Read.”

“And we go places,” the father chimed in.

“We’re looking forward to visiting places around here,” said the mother. “This is all new to us Flickertails.”

“Crash”—the father spoke—“we’re thinking of driving out to the Amish country this Saturday. I understand we’re not too far from there. Would you like to come along with us?”

Webb squawked, “Yeah!”

“I’ll be watching cartoons,” I said.

“We could wait till they’re over.”

“Nah. My dad’s taking me to see the Phillies game.”

He backed off. “Well, maybe some other time.”

Maybe never, I thought.

Dessert was gingerbread squares with warm lemon sauce. I ate six of them and got out of there.

That night I asked my mother how to spell the words and left a note on my door asking my father to wake me up before he went to bed.

I heard his voice saying, “What’s up, chief?” before I knew he was in the room.

I sat up. “Dad, can we go to the Phillies game on Saturday?”

The short silence after my question gave me the answer. It was too dark to see his face, but I knew what it would look like: a kind of sad, wincey expression. There would be one of three reasons:

1. He was just starting up his own business, and he had to work seventy-hour weeks just to get it off the ground.
   

2. He and Mom already had something to do that night.
   

3. He was so dead-tired from the seventy-hour week that he didn’t even have the strength to blow his nose, much less leave the house.
   

It was reason No. 1.

“Sorry, Crashmeister,” he said, laying me back down, “we’ll get down to the ballpark before the season’s over. ’Night, now.”

“’Night, Dad.”

Saturday morning, as usual, I watched the cartoons. Every once in a while I looked out the window, down the street. I was smack in the middle of Bugs Bunny when I saw them go by. It wasn’t a limo or half a limo. It was just some junk heap. A dorkmobile. Rich, my buns.

That afternoon I was turning the channels. I came across the Phillies game. I snapped it off. I went to the refrigerator. The night before, we’d had spaghetti and meatballs. I got a meatball, dumped it into a plastic bag, and ran down the street. I dumped it out of the bag and left it there, right in the middle of their front steps.

That’s about as close as I ever got to the Webbs. Not that they didn’t keep asking me over for dinner. They did. I guess they didn’t know it was me who meatballed them. Webb even said they would cook some real meat hamburgers just for me, or I could bring my own.

They kept asking me to go other places, too. I just said no to everything, or I told them my father was taking me to ball games and stuff.

Along around third grade they finally stopped pestering me, so I could stop pestering my dad.

As the years went by, Webb found other members of his own species—a dork here, a nerd there. He gave them buttons. He kept offering them to me, then finally gave up.

Sometimes, when I went past the garage-house, I almost shuddered. No toys, no TV, no meat. It made me appreciate things. Sometimes I’d come home and look at all my stuff and say: Thank you for not sticking me with
them
.

When we started middle school, we were no longer in the same classroom all day. About all that happened between us
anymore was him calling to me and waving when he saw me on the street or in the hallways.

Then, two weeks into sixth grade, Mike Deluca moved across the street from me. He didn’t wear a button: first good sign. I asked him, “You ain’t from North Dakota, are you?”

He gets this nasty look on his face. He steps toward me. He goes, “What if I am? You got a problem?”

I step toward him. We’re nose to nose. “Maybe I do.” I poke him in the forehead with my finger.

He pokes me back.

I shove him in the chest.

He shoves me back.

I punch him in the shoulder.

He punches me back.

And then, like there was a conductor waving a baton, we both started laughing at the same time. We howled, we roared, we rolled on the ground, and before I even found out the dude’s name, I knew we were going to be best friends.

He said he was from Pittsburgh, so he was a Pennsylvanian, too. And he was going to be a pro football player, just like me. I found out all this stuff and more in the first five minutes. By the ten-minute mark we were wrestling in the grass. At fifteen minutes we were raiding my refrigerator.

Later we were looking out the front window and saw Webb go by. He was pulling his Conestoga wagon.

I told Mike, “There’s a turtle in there.”

He squawked, “What?”

“Yeah, a turtle. It’s his pet. He takes it for a ride in that wagon. He’s been doing it almost every day since before the first grade.”

Deluca didn’t say a word. He pulled the curtain aside and watched Webb go up the street, looking like he was seeing a three-eared Easter Bunny. Finally he turned to me and said, “What grade’s he in?”

“Sixth,” I said. “Ours.”

A slow grin came to his face. His eyes started to twinkle.

I told him how I met Webb. I told him everything, buttons to oatburgers. I told him the stuff I did to Webb back then. “But I don’t bother with him anymore,” I said.

Mike looked out the window again. It was like watching a cat watching a squirrel. “Well,” he said, “that’s gonna change.”

S
EPTEMBER 8

Today was the first day of school. Seventh grade. The bell wasn’t going to ring for another fifteen minutes, but everybody was already there.

Partly it’s first-day excitement. But mostly it’s checking everybody out. Seeing what they look like after the summer. Almost everybody looks different, changed at least a little bit. And not just different, but different better.

Like tan, from swimming pools and beaches and all. Like brown hair now blond. Like taller. But a lot of it is clothes.

I’d say one-quarter is checking out other kids’ clothes, and three-quarters is showing off your own. Your new sneaks, your labels. Talking prices.

It was like, “Hey, man, check this.”

“Cheapo, man. Check
this
.”

So there we were, comparing prices, and Mike says, “Look.”

I looked. “Where?”

He pointed. “There.”

I followed his finger. I shook my head, grinning. “You believe it?”

He laughed. “Him? Yeah, I believe it.”

We both laughed.

It was Webb—and I mean the
same old
Webb. Same old supermarket sneakers, same prehistoric pants, probably from that great-grandfather of his. Same old scrawny oatburger body. Only the button changes. Today it read SMILE.

“Uh-oh,” I whispered, “here he comes.”

Mike went instantly into his routine, meaning he acts like Webb is cool, or at least normal. He put on this huge grin and goes, “Yo, Webberoni. Whattaya say, dude.” He held up his hand. Webb high-fived it. Then they medium-fived and low-fived and behind-the-back-fived and between-the-legs-fived. Then Mike ran Webb through the handshake. They looped and hooked and twirled every possible combination of fingers. Must have taken five minutes.

All this time Mike kept his face straight and cool, so I did the same, which was killing me, I wanted to laugh so bad. Of course Webb, he doesn’t know cool from fool, so he was giggling away the whole time.

Finally Mike stepped back and looked Webb up and down and went, “All right, Spider—lookin’
good.
” He rubbed the sleeve of Webb’s prehistoric shirt between his thumb and forefinger. He nodded, all serious. “Hey, good stuff. Where’d you pick this up?”

Webb looked down at his own shirt, probably seeing it for
the first time in his life. “I don’t know,” he said. “My mother usually buys my clothes.”

“Maybe Second Time Around?” said Mike.

Webb nodded. “Maybe.”

Mike and I both exploded. We turned away and pretended we were having coughing fits. Second Time Around, see, is a thrift shop. In other words, used clothes. Me and Mike, we’d come to school in our underwear before we’d wear something from Second Time Around.

We never turned back to Webb, because our eyes landed on someone else. We looked at her, we looked at each other, and we both said the same thing: “Who is that?”

She was standing by herself. We moved a little closer to get a better look.

“Teacher?” I said.

“Nah.”

“Lost? She thinks this is the high school?”

“Nah, she’s gotta be one of us.”

Which was hard to believe. But not impossible. Every once in a while a girl will come back from summer vacation, and she’s not just a little different, a little better—she’s, like,
Whoa!

There’s a girl in college now who is still a legend around here. On the first day of school, her homeroom teacher refused to believe she was who she said she was. She got sent to the principal’s office. The principal, the secretary, the nurse, and the janitor—none of them believed her. She had no ID She wasn’t allowed into the class until her mother brought in her birth certificate to prove who she was.

So we stood there thinking of girls from last year and trying to imagine how they would look if they went
Whoa!

Mike suggested, “Andrea Tarpley?”

“No way,” I said. “She don’t look anything like Andrea.”

He punched my arm. “That’s the point. If it is her, she
won’t be
looking like Andrea anymore.”

I studied her some more. “Absolutely not.”

We went through other names.

“Rita Mazelli?”

“Julie Stein?”

“Michelle Pratt?”

“Hold it!” I said. I made my hands like a telescope and peered through. “It’s Michelle.”

Mike made his own telescope. “I don’t think so. Look, she’s all by herself. If it was Michelle, she’d be with her friends.”

“Even they don’t know it’s her,” I said. “I’m going over.”

“Going over? What’re you gonna do?”

“I don’t know. Say hello.”

I started over. Mike trailed, whispering, “You ain’t interested in girls yet.”

“I just got interested.”

She was standing sideways to me as I moved in. She kept staring straight ahead. She was beautiful. I came right up to her and made the first move of my life. I tapped her on the shoulder and said, “Hello, Michelle.”

She turned. She smiled. She looked right at me. She was a goddess. She said, “I’m not Michelle.” She walked away.