Crash (9 page)

Abby’s door was shut, but I could hear pretty good. It went something like this:

MOM: You can’t be going around trying to block bulldozers.

ABBY: Why not?

MOM: Never mind why not. You’re only ten years old. That’s reason enough.

ABBY: I’m ten and three-quarters.

MOM: Don’t get smart.

ABBY: Don’t you want to save the earth?

MOM: I want to make a good home for my children, that’s what I want.

ABBY: Well, I want to make a good
world
for my children.

Silence for a while. I guess that was a point for the daughter. My mother must have looked fumey, because then:

ABBY: You’re just mad because I’m against the mail and you’re working for them.

MOM: I’m running out of patience, is what I am.

ABBY: You’re fed up with me.

MOM: I’m—

ABBY: You’re gonna tear my picture down from the wall and burn it and destroy all my dental records so there’ll never be a trace of me.

Another silence. This time I figure my mother was biting her lip, trying not to laugh. When she finally spoke, her voice started out slow, then picked up speed.

MOM: You campaign against your own mother who is trying to make a good life for you. You refuse to eat meat. We are
informed that you wish to turn our backyard into a jungle. And to top it off, you announce to the entire
world
on television that I buy you secondhand clothes.

ABBY: Well, it’s true.

MOM: No, dear, it is not true. At least, not completely.

ABBY: What do you mean?

MOM: I mean, one of the reasons why your father and I work so long and hard is so you
don’t
have to wear secondhand clothes. But just to humor you, yes, I do let you buy a few things at Second Time Around. But you’re so stubborn. So when I shop for you sometimes, to get you to wear something respectable, I just
tell
you I bought it there.

Silence. Then squawkily:

ABBY: You
lied.
Isn’t
this
from Second Time Around?

MOM: It’s new.

ABBY: Well, I don’t want it…
here
…and I guess you lied to your own child about
this
too, huh … here … and
this!
…and
this!
…and
this!

The door flew open. Out she came, stampeding down the hall. My mother called, “What are you
wearing?
” but my sister was charging into Scooter’s room and slamming the door.

I’ll tell you, if you never saw a fifth-grade girl run down a hallway wearing nothing but boxer shorts with red and blue anchors, you got a real treat coming. I swear, if I don’t stop laughing in the next minute, I’m gonna die.

N
OVEMBER 20

I did it!

Our last game of the season was yesterday against Bayboro. I needed one touchdown to break the record for TDs in one season. I got three. Scooter caught them all with our camcorder. I taught him how to use it before the game.

Hogface Forbes wasn’t there. She hasn’t been to any games since she got kicked off cheerleading. She’s probably afraid if she came, she’d have to admit how good I am.

But the Late Baby was there, in the stands with his ancient parents, yelling away like he was still a cheerleader. One thing I didn’t like too much—they were sitting right next to Scooter. In fact, it looked like they were talking back and forth.

Afterwards Scooter said, “Those Webbs seem like nice people.”

“They’re fishcakes,” I told him. And that was that.

Today I was the big headline on the sports page: COOGAN SMASHES SCHOOL TD MARK.

The story started out: “John Coogan has been living up to
his nickname all season long. Yesterday was no exception. The kid they call ‘Crash’ raced, weaved, and mostly bulled his way for three touchdowns as Springfield Middle School thumped Bayboro, 26-7.

“Coogan’s third score, a 47-yard beauty, gave him 23 touchdowns for the year, breaking the old single-season mark of 20 set in 1985.”

The article ended: “Perhaps the most incredible aspect of Coogan’s season-long performance is that he is only a seventh grader. That means he returns next year.

“Springfield fans can hardly wait.”

Mike called and asked if I had seen the story. I said no, so I could hear him read it to me over the phone.

N
OVEMBER 28

Scooter cooked Thanksgiving dinner. Scooter
always
cooks Thanksgiving dinner. One year he came all the way from San Francisco to do it. Of course, the best part is that now, instead of going back to San Francisco or Cape May or wherever afterwards, all he has to do is go upstairs to his room.

I remember when my sister and I were little, he would tell us that the store ran out of turkeys, so what we were having that year was Thanksgiving buzzard. Abby believed him, and she would bawl and bawl until he told her the truth.

This year he told her it was a fake turkey made out of soybeans. She didn’t believe him, and she didn’t eat it.

Tell you the truth, Scooter makes so many good things, you could throw out the turkey and not even miss it. Candied sweet potatoes, creamed onions, cranberry nut salad, corn pudding, gravy, cheese bread, and not one but two kinds of stuffing. One is the regular kind that goes into the bird. The other is oyster stuffing. It’s about the best thing there ever was. Abby and I are the only ones who eat it. We each gobble up what’s on our
plates and go for seconds and thirds till it’s gone. Only then do we start in on the rest of the food.

But this year I figured would be different. When I saw the Great Crusader and Vegetarian digging in, I said, “You’re eating meat.”

She stared at her plate. “Oysters aren’t meat.”

“They’re not vegetables,” I said. “They’re not fruit.”

Her fork hand flopped to the table. There was real pain in her expression. She was staring at the biggest sacrifice of all. Then she suddenly brightened up. “Hah!” she went, and stabbed a forkful of oyster stuffing. “Oysters don’t have faces.”

We usually have relatives over for the day. This year it was Uncle Herm, Aunt Sandy, and Bridget.

As soon as they came in, Uncle Herm was all over Abby and me. “Hey—there they are!” He starts clapping; Bridget looks around for a hole to crawl in. “Mister Touchdown and Miss Mall.” He lays a fingertip on each of us. “Am I allowed to touch you?”

“You’ll just get bad luck touching me,” said Abby.

By that she meant the mall is going ahead. Bulldozers went in the next day, and now the place looks like a farmer’s field ready for planting.

Uncle Herm patted her head. “Hey, no big deal. Who cares anyway? The point is, you were on television. You’ll probably be getting calls from the talk shows any day now.”

I guess nobody was surprised during dinner when he brought up a certain Christmas years ago. He wagged a drumstick. “I’ll
tell you, I knew that boy was gonna be a fullback some day, the way he charged into Bridget.”

Bridget groaned, “Dad.” Bridget is in seventh grade now, like me.

He pointed the drumstick at me. “Just to remind you, I’m the one that named you Crash. You remember that when they interview you on
Monday Night Football.
”

“Right, Uncle Herm,” I said.

I looked across the table at Bridget. She was just another seventh-grade girl. I couldn’t remember or even picture slamming into her with my new football helmet. She looked back at me. She didn’t start bawling. She didn’t flinch. All she did was stick a forkful of white meat in her mouth and chew.

What I’m saying is, except for Uncle Herm always telling the story of how I got my name, it’s like it never happened. But it did.

And then, in a way, it did again.

Dinner was over. Uncle Herm wanted to play football. It was a nice day, so we went out to the backyard.

Something new was in the corner of the yard—a pile of wood. My father looked at me. “What’s that?”

“Don’t ask me,” I said.

It wasn’t the kind of wood for making an observation post in a tree, which Abby has been pestering me about. These were split logs and sticks, a jumbled mess.

My father zeroed in on Abby. “Does this have something to do with your cockamamie idea to turn my yard into a jungle?”

“It’s not a jungle,” Abby snapped. “It’s a wildlife habitat. And it’s not just
your
yard. It’s
my
yard, too. I live here.”

My father snapped back, “That’s exactly right. And that’s why I work seventy hours a week, to make a good home for you—you, not vermin. Which is what that”—he pointed at the woodpile—“will attract.”

“What’s vermin?” said Abby.

“Rats.”

“It won’t attract rats,” she snapped. “It’s for mice.”

“Mice are little rats.” He flipped his thumb over his shoulder. “The wood goes.”

Abby boiled like a forgotten pot on the stove.

Sides for the game were me, Dad, and Bridget against Scooter, Abby, and Uncle Herm. We just played two-hand tag, and with the girls and all, it wasn’t much of a game. I kept scoring without even trying. Since the game was tag, I used my speed instead of power. Mostly my father played quarterback while Bridget and I went out for passes.

On the other team, Uncle Herm did most of the passing. Abby and Scooter were receivers. Whenever Scooter got the ball, I tried to picture him as a speedy little kid in the streets, but I couldn’t do it.

Then they ran a trick play where Uncle Herm passed to Abby, and Abby, just before she got tagged, lateraled the ball to Scooter. It fooled me just long enough to give Scooter a head start. I lit out after him. Scooter carried the ball so high it was stuffed in his armpit. And he was rippin’. I mean, suddenly he
was
that little kid tearing down a back alley with some housewife hanging wash and shouting, “Look at ’im scoot!” Only it was really Abby behind me yelling, “Go, Scooter! Go!” and the goal line, marked by the Weedwacker, was coming up fast, and I reached out but couldn’t touch him, so I dove, flew through the air, and tackled him at the knees and brought him down—he felt like sticks—just inches from the Weedwacker.

The ball had popped loose, it was wobbling in the end
zone. I pounced on it, jumped up, saw that I wasn’t covered, and took off, ran that baby coast to coast, Abby screaming but nobody laying a finger on me. I spiked the ball in the end zone and did my TD dance, which I was never allowed to do in school.

Abby was at the other end, kneeling over Scooter, who was sitting on the grass with his legs flat out like the sides of a triangle. My father was stomping toward me, growling in my face, the clenched-teeth kind of growl he uses when he’s outside and doesn’t want the neighbors to hear: “What do you think you’re doing?
What
… do you think you’re
doing?
”

I just started walking to the other end. Abby was on one side of Scooter, Uncle Herm on the other. They hoisted him to his feet. Bridget reached in and pulled a blade of grass from his forehead. His cheekbone was red, like that Dawn clown from the dance had smacked him with her rouge.

Abby was screeching something at me, but Scooter was only looking. He undraped his arms from the others. He gave me a little nod and a smile, and then another voice came yelling, a voice I didn’t recognize: “No! No! I said never again!”

Everyone turned. It was my mother, at the back door. The reason she sounded different was because she was pinching her nose. Her other hand was holding my football laundry bag, as far out in front of her as her arm could reach.

I guess I forgot to empty out the bag. I couldn’t remember where I had left it, but obviously my mother had stumbled across it. You could almost see the stink fumes rising out of it.

I was going to take it, but my mother had other ideas. She let go of her nose, held her breath, and turned the bag upside-down. Stuff came falling onto the back steps: socks, shirts, jocks, towels, candy wrappers, pizza crusts, Cheerios, mouse…

Mouse?

Abby shrieked: “Mouse!”

It was a mouse, all right. It landed on a sock and scampered over a shirt, down the steps, and into the grass.

I ran the opposite way, Abby went after it. “Here, mousie! Here, mousie!” At first I thought she was trying to catch it, then I realized she was herding it toward the woodpile. I couldn’t see it in the grass; it looked like my sister was chasing a ghost.

Finally she stopped in front of the pile. “I think he’s in there,” she whispered. She patted the pile. “Make yourself at home, mousie.”

“The wood goes,” my father said.

Abby planted herself in front of the pile and folded her arms. The wood was going to go over her dead body.

I was shaky the rest of the day.

As I was picking up from the back steps, I noticed a clump of stuff: pieces of paper, cloth, thread, dust balls, Kleenex, all wadded up. The mouse’s nest. The rodent had been living in my laundry bag, probably since the football season started. It had been stealing Cheerios.

I had carried that bag back and forth to school every day. I thought about the times I had stuck my hand in to pull something out. For two months I was inches from a rodent, I carried a rodent around, we ate the same cereal, we slept in the same room.