Parts & Labor (2 page)

"One
hundred fifty dollars, Max! Bring it to school tomorrow or you're dead!"

"Double
that," Bud said.

"Triple,"
Rod said.

"Uhh
…" Biff frowned. "Whatever four is."

"Quadruple,"
I said.

"Yeah,
that."

Let's
see: four times $150 equals … How much? Well, 150 plus 150 equals 300, I
knew that, so 150 plus 150 plus 150 plus 150 would equal—

"
Six
hundred dollars?
You want me to rob a bank?"

"Or
your mother's purse," Vic said.

"We
don't have that kind of money."

"You
better find it." To his buddies: "Come on, I gotta get his barf off
me."

He
grabbed the handlebars to his scooter and turned it toward Second Street, but
Rod pointed toward Third Street and said, "Mrs. Cushing's working in her
yard."

"Really?"
Vic gave him a devious grin. "Let's check out her garden."

Odd.
I wouldn't have pegged them for horticulturalists, like Mrs. Cushing. One
neighborhood mom had gotten really mad because her husband spent too much time
admiring Mrs. Cushing's garden and told my mom that Mrs. Cushing was nothing
but a horticulturalist, or something like that. Vic and his boys jumped on
their scooters and buzzed up the hill to Mrs. Cushing's house.

"Six
hundred bucks, Max," Vic yelled over his shoulder, "or you're
dead!"

I
wanted to run home and tell my big brother so he would chase them down and beat
them up and tell them to leave me alone or he'd beat them up again. But I
didn't have a big brother. I had a big sister. If I told her, she'd say,
"Max, you're supposed to be the man of the house now, so you've got to man
up and show those bullies they can't push you around." Yeah, like that
was going to happen—I was ten years old and puberty was still a distant dream.
How was I supposed to man up?

And
I couldn't tell Mom; she had enough to worry about.

I
sighed with the agony of defeat. Throwing up on their Legends was pretty cool,
but now their bullying would only get worse, if that was possible. And six
hundred dollars? It might as well be six million. I was as good as dead.

I
wiped my mouth on my sleeve then picked up the remains of the iPod off the
sidewalk. I stood and shoved the pieces into my pocket then grabbed my
backpack and slung it over my shoulder. When my head came up I noticed a pale face
in the second-story window of the neighbors' house. A kid's face. He looked about
my age. They had moved in only last weekend, but we hadn't met. Mom had taken them a pie (coconut cream, my favorite) and knocked on the door but no one had
answered so she left it on their front porch. His expression did not show
anger at the bullies or sympathy for me. It was more of a curious look. Like
the scene that had just played out in front of his house fascinated him. I
gave him a lame shrug and waved. He held an open hand to the window.

I
trudged around the hedgerow to my house.

 

 

We
lived in an old two-story frame house in an old neighborhood with lots of trees
just south of downtown Austin and Lady Bird Lake. The wood siding was yellow and
the trim was white. It needed to be repainted. And repaired. And renovated.
We couldn't afford to hire someone to do all the work that needed to be done
because money was tight now, but when I'm big enough, I'm going to take care of
all that stuff, just like Dad did.

I
really am. When I'm big enough.

I
stopped at the mailbox and removed a stack of white envelopes.
Uh-oh.
More
bills. I could see the same bold-print words through the thin envelopes: PAST
DUE. I always wanted to hide the bills because I hated to watch Mom open them; with each one she slumped further down in her chair, like the pieces of paper
weighed a ton.

I
walked down the driveway that ran along the hedgerow to the backyard. We had a
big yard with a playscape my dad had built. The grass needed to be mowed—Dad had
always kept the yard looking perfect—but the yard men wanted
fifty
dollars a week, which we couldn't afford. I wanted to mow the grass, but Mom said I wasn't old enough to safely operate the power mower. Mom was just being
overprotective—again, like when she covers my eyes in the check-out line at the
grocery store so I don't read the tabloids—but Dad always said she just didn't
want us to grow up too fast, that she wanted us to enjoy our childhood. Which
was nice, sure, but if she had her way, I'd still be wearing
Barney
underwear. She thought they were
so cute
, but let me tell you, that
kind of cute can get you beat up in second grade. Actually, it had. Anyway,
I'm going to mow the grass.

One
day. When I'm old enough.

At
the end of the driveway was a detached garage with a basketball hoop and a
studio apartment above that my dad and I had converted into our man cave. We had
our man talks up there and watched the Red Sox games on cable (Dad had grown up
in Boston so he was a member of the Red Sox nation). I hadn't been back inside
the man cave since.

The
garage below was empty. Mom wasn't home yet.

A
dog barked, and I flinched. But it was just Butch, the pit bull in the yard
back of ours, barking like the deranged dog he was and trying to climb the tall
chain link fence like he wanted to run over and attack me. He did. But he couldn't
climb the fence (I didn't think). Still, he was pretty scary. When he got
out—which he managed to do at least once a week—he enjoyed terrorizing the neighborhood
kids. Especially me.

I
hated that dog.

I
wanted my own dog. I wanted to throw a stick and yell "Fetch!" and
watch him chase across the yard and, well, fetch. We were going to get a
golden retriever, but we can't afford a dog now. Mom said dog food and
veterinarians cost too much so a dog would have to wait. But some day I would
have a dog.

Some
day.

I
spit out the throw-up taste again then walked around to the back door and dug
my key out of my backpack. I unlocked the door and went inside and into the
kitchen. I tossed the bills on the table then emptied my lunch box and stashed
it in the lower cabinet. None of the cabinets had doors, and the floor was the
cement slab. The walls were bright yellow (Mom said the prior owner's only sense
of taste was in his mouth). Mom and Dad had gotten a good deal on the house
because it was a serious fixer-upper, but Dad hadn't finished fixing it up when
his National Guard unit had gotten called up. His favorite show was
This
Old House.
We had moved into this old house four years ago right after
Maddy had been born and Dad had been promoted to station chief. He was a
fireman, and the house was his project.

It
looked like a construction project.

Mom or Dad used to always be home to greet us after school. If Dad were here, he'd give me a
big hug and say, "Max, my boy! How was school?" Then we'd toss the
ball in the backyard or shoot hoops or work on the house until dinner. After
dinner, we'd do homework (he understood math; I didn't). If he was at the fire
station for his twenty-four-hour shift, he'd always call to see how my day had
gone.

But
now the house sat empty and silent.

I
climbed the stairs. Scarlett's bedroom was off to the left, mine to the
right. Her door was closed, but she wasn't home. Scarlett was in eighth grade
and always had after-school activities—on Wednesdays it was band—so Mom picked her and Maddy up on her way home from work, unless she was running late. I never,
ever entered her room, not even to snoop around her stuff while she was gone; a
fourteen-year-old girl's room was just too creepy. Dad always said, "Max,
God didn't intend for guys to understand girls, which is why He gave us a
hundred sports channels on cable."

Made
sense.

Scarlett
and I shared a bathroom, which neither of us liked. The sharing, not the
bathroom. She didn't like that I left the toilet seat up and sometimes forgot
to flush; I didn't like that she hung her personal items to dry over the shower
curtain rod. I mean, a guy my age didn't need to see that kind of stuff.
Fortunately, none of that stuff was there to see when I walked into the
bathroom. I brushed my teeth then rinsed with mint-flavored mouthwash to get
rid of the throw-up taste, but I couldn't get rid of the smell. Then I got a
washcloth off the shelf and soaped it up. I sat on the bare wood floor and
wiped the blood off my knee and scrubbed the road rash.

Yow,
that stung!

I
patted it dry then found a big Band-Aid in the medicine cabinet and stuck it
over the scrape. I rinsed the washcloth. I could hear the water running
through the exposed pipes because Dad had torn down the walls, but he had deployed
before he could put up the new Sheetrock panels that were stacked out in the
garage. The Army didn't ask if it was a convenient time for him to fight a
war; they just ordered him to Afghanistan, like he didn't have a job or a house
to fix up or a family to take care of.

I
stood, went into my room, and shut the door. I dropped my backpack on the
floor then pulled the broken iPod out of my pocket. I set the pieces on my
dresser in front of the big photo of us that Mom had taken at the airport the
day Dad deployed; he was standing between me and Scarlett in his desert camouflage
fatigues with his big arms wrapped around us. Maddy stood in front with a
frown; she had a mad on that day because Dad was leaving. I did too, but I
tried to smile anyway.

I
always liked looking at photos of Dad in his Army uniforms. He was on active
duty back before I was born. He had been stationed in a lot of foreign
countries, like Germany and California. When he got out of the Army, he stayed
in the Guard, moved to Austin, and became a fireman. And a home repairman. He
could fix anything and build everything. We always joked that if he had been
the guy in that
Castaway
movie, after five years on that island he'd
have built a house with running water and a vegetable garden. He could survive
on a deserted island just fine.

But
a war was different.

A
bottle of Old Spice aftershave sat next to the photo. I picked it up, pulled the
top plug, and sniffed. I always liked the way Dad smelled, but I was starting
to forget his scent so Mom gave me his aftershave. I was sniffing the Old
Spice and staring at Dad's image and getting sad when I felt someone's eyes on
me. I looked up, and in the dresser mirror I saw Legend Jones smiling at me
from the big poster—
Buy Legend sneakers - Be a star
—taped to the closet
door across the room. For some reason—or maybe for no reason—Legend's smile
turned my sad into mad.

I
threw the broken iPod across the room at his image.

My
face felt hot so I went over and opened the big double window. My room looked
out over the driveway and the hedgerow and the new neighbors' backyard. The
breeze blew in and cooled me down. The window was low with shutters that
opened out. There was no screen. Dad had finished the shutters but not the
screen, so I could sit on the window sill and dangle one leg outside, which I often
did; it was a good place to think. But I had to be careful to always lock the
shutter and the window when I left my room because one time Mom found Maddy sitting on the window sill and really freaked out. It was a long drop to the
driveway below.

My
room was my man cave now. I didn't have cable TV or even my own computer up
here; we shared a family computer down in the den. But I had movie posters on
the walls—
Star Wars
and
Star Trek
and
Men in Black
with
Agent K's quote: "Fifteen hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was
the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth
was flat, and fifteen minutes ago you knew that people were alone on this
planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow."

A telescope stood by the
window, my science fiction books on the bookshelf (I was a sci-fi guy so I had
never gotten into
Harry Potter
like most kids, but I did like that
Diary
of a Wimpy Kid
), and a chessboard on a little table in the corner (Dad had
tried to teach me) next to my sports rack with my basketball and baseball bat,
glove, and ball (I played rec). A huge tub of Legos sat in another corner. I
used to build all sorts of stuff with Legos, but I had lost interest.

I
had lost interest in most things now.

I
flopped on my bed and stared at the ceiling. Dad had painted it black so when
I turned my solar system lamp on in the dark, it looked like the night sky with
the sun and the planets and the stars. When he came up to say good-night, he'd
always lie next to me and we'd say prayers then we'd talk about space and stuff,
like if there were other life forms out there. Dad said it was dumb for us to
believe that we were the only intelligent beings in the universe. "All
you've got to do is watch those reality TV shows to know there's got to be someone
smarter than us out there," he said. He'd always kiss me on my forehead
and say, "I love you, buddy." You never know how important your dad
is until he's not there to kiss you good-night.

Tears
came into my eyes.

I
felt weak and I felt sad and I felt mad. I rolled over and punched Jabba the
Hutt in the
Star Wars
poster on the wall hard enough to hurt my hand.
But I didn't feel the pain. I retrieved my stuffed bear from its hiding place
between my bed and the wall and pulled off my rec specs then buried my face in
my pillow and hugged my bear and cried some more until I fell asleep.

"Wake
up!"

I
opened my eyes to a girl on fire. I screamed.

"Aah!"