"Full of humor, hope, and bravery. The characters are richly drawn and the dialogue is fast paced, enticing, and downright witty. . . . Sure to be a hit." —School Library Journal
"Hilarious circumstances where you will laugh out loud and feel comfortable laughing because Babcock, his family, and friends are so likable. A very good novel with unforgettable characters." —Pick of the Lists
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About the author: Joe Cottonwood is the author of four award-winning novels for children including the best-selling Quake! His novels for adults include Famous Potatoes and Clear Heart. He has published a book of poetry, and he has written numerous songs. He has worked as a plumber, electrician, and carpenter and currently makes his living as a building contractor. His home is in La Honda, a small town in the mountains of California.
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Babcock
a novel by Joe Cottonwood
Smashwords edition Copyright © 2009 by Joe Cottonwood
Previously published in 1996 by Scholastic, Inc. For this current edition the author has abridged a few boring paragraphs and corrected a few errors in the text.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
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I loved my friend.
He went away from me.
There is nothing more to say.
The poem ends,
Soft as it began —
I loved my friend.
—Langston Hughes
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Legs
I was throwing popcorn to some ducks.
Suddenly a pair of legs — human legs — went flying in front of my face.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey, yourself,” said the owner of the legs. She was a skinny white girl with blonde hair and freckles — thousands of freckles. Big ears. She was my age. She went to my school. She hung out with two other girls who always turned their backs and giggled whenever anybody walked by — or at least, whenever I walked by.
I don’t like to be giggled at.
She stood up straight as if she was trying to stretch that skinny body until it was thin as a noodle, and then she turned a handspring — and again, her legs flew in front of my face.
I said, “Could you do that somewhere else?”
She stood facing me. Then, instead of answering me, she giggled — and did another handspring.
I said, “I was here first.”
“You don’t own this pond,” she said. “Although I do see you here practically every day. What are you doing, anyway?”
“Never mind.” I wasn’t going to try to explain to some giggler about how I spent my life. I did spend a part of most days at the lake: feeding ducks, watching frogs, talking to dragonflies. I like animals.
She tossed her blonde hair out of her face and said, “Would you move somewhere else?” Though it was a request, she spoke with the assurance of someone who was used to getting her way — because she was a girl. Because she was blonde. Because some people would think she was cute. “The moss grows here,” she said. “And the ground is so soft.” She bounced up and down on her toes. “It’s springy — like a big mat. So would you please move?”
I felt a twitching on my upper lip. When I feel that twitching, I smile. People who know me — who’ve seen my regular smile — know to watch out for this one. Boone told me once that it makes me look dead, like a smile that an undertaker put on my face. It’s a warning — if you recognize it.
“No,” I said. Of course, I could have moved. I could throw popcorn to ducks anywhere around the pond. But I don’t like to be pushed. Not by bullies. And not by skinny girls who giggle at me in school. And now my upper lip was twitching, and I was showing the undertaker smile, but she didn’t know what it meant.
“Well,” she said, “I guess there’s room enough for both of us here.”
“No.”
She looked at me with surprise. She frowned. But instead of arguing, she turned three cartwheels in a triangular pattern that brought her right back in front of me.
She brushed some hair out of her face. “See? We can share.”
“No.”
She stared at me, looking partly puzzled and partly hurt, as if she was wondering, Why are you acting so nasty to me when I’m so cute? She held her hands up near her head in preparation for turning another cartwheel or handspring or doubleflip gymnastics razzledazzle whatever when suddenly an orange dragonfly — who should have known better — zipped out of nowhere, hovered for just a moment in front of her face, and landed on her shoulder.
For a split second she looked down at that dragonfly. And in that split second I was thinking, Maybe she’s all right, after all. Maybe the dragonflies know something I don’t know about her.
“Yech!” she shouted, and she slapped her shoulder. The dragonfly cracked into slime and fell dead at her feet. “Ugh,” she said, curling her lip. “Ee-uw. Gross. Now I’ve got insect guts on my hand.” She shook it in the air.
That’s when it happened. I didn’t mean to trip her. I didn’t mean to do anything except flip the dead dragonfly away with the toe of my shoe while ducking my head so she couldn’t see the wetness brimming in my eyes, but all of a sudden she shifted her feet thisaway just as my leg went thataway, and we both lost our balance and fell to the ground, and some things are just instinct — because I was angry, you know, and I’ve fought with boys plenty of times who thought they could bully me, and it always came out the same, with me on top, and here I’d fallen accidentally and it just . . . well . . . I was sitting on her.
She flailed her legs. She screamed: “Let me up, you big fat slob!”
“Promise you’ll go away,” I said.
“You’re just jealous because you can’t do a cartwheel,” she shouted. “Because you’re too fat.” She was punching me.
“At least I’m not skinny,” I said. “You’re flat as a board.”
“Don’t call me flat!”
“Don’t call me fat.”
“You are fat. Fat! Fat! Fat!”
“You aren’t even blonde,” I said. “You’re a fake.”
“I am not a fake.”
“Your eyebrows are dark. You dyed your hair.”
“I did not. They’re just different colors.” She stopped flailing her legs and punching my side. In a hurt voice, she said, “Don’t make fun of the way I look.”
“You started it.”
“I started it? You tripped me. You’re sitting on me.”
“You called me fat.”
“Well. You are fat.”
I was starting to feel uncomfortable. What was I doing? How would it look to somebody passing by? I was too old to be fighting with a girl.
“This is unbearable,” she said. “Would you please let me up?”
“Will you go away?”
“No.”
The anger had gone out of me. The dragonfly was dead. That was that. And as for what she’d said about me — I wasn’t thinking about what she’d said. Instead, I was noticing what she hadn’t said. She’d been angry; she’d said the most awful thing she could think of to try to hurt me; she was white; I was black, and she’d called me fat. That’s all. Just fat.
I stood up, reached out a hand, and helped pull her to her feet.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She didn’t say anything. She was standing with her head bowed and her hands on her hips.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” I said.
She didn’t say anything.
“Are you all right?”
She didn’t answer.
“Would you please say something?”
Speaking to the ground, she said, “It’s not fair, you know. I can’t help it if I’m skinny. I can’t help it if my eyebrows are the wrong color. I can’t help it if my ears are too big and I have too many freckles. You shouldn’t say that.”
“I didn’t say anything about ears and freckles.”
She looked up at me. “You were going to.”
“No. I wasn’t.” What amazed me was, she didn’t think she was cute. I was all wrong about her. I felt confused. I was looking into her eyes: blue, flashing, like sun on water. What had we been fighting about, anyway? I felt dizzy. I said, “I happen to like big ears. And freckles.”
She narrowed her eyes. But then she set her jaw with determination and said, “You lost, you know. You beat me up, but you lost.”
“I didn’t beat you up.”
“You tripped me. You sat on me.”
“I didn’t beat you up. I didn’t hit you. Not once. You were hitting me. I bet I didn’t even hurt you.”
“You hurt my feelings.”
“I said I was sorry.”
“You fought. And you lost.”
She was standing in front of me. She knew she had just as much right to stand there as I did. Oh yeah — that’s what we’d been fighting about. And she’d proved that I couldn’t intimidate her. I’d lost my temper, and then she’d lost hers, and we’d shouted some things that now we wished we hadn’t said, and we both were still here. Now I felt bad. I felt guilty. I felt big and awkward and stupid. I felt like a bully. She was right. I’d lost.
“Truce?” I said.
She looked me right in the eye. “My name’s Kirsten.”
“I know,” I said. “My name’s Babcock.”
“I know,” she said.
It’s funny how you can go to the same school, and some people you get to know and maybe you like them and maybe you don’t, and other people you just know by name, and it can stay that way for years until suddenly something happens. And it just happened.
“What made you so mad?” she asked.
“You killed a dragonfly.”
“You like bugs?”
“Yes.”
She stared at me. She looked me up and down, from black eyeglasses to red hightop sneakers, as if she’d never seen me before, as if knowing that I liked “bugs” made me an entirely different creature.
“Wow,” she said.
The way she said that “wow” made me think that something had just happened, something important. But I didn’t know what.
She took the ends of some of her hairs between her fingers, rolled them between thumb and index finger, and then absentmindedly placed the hairs into her mouth and started biting them.
I’d never seen someone chew on her hair before.
Then she spat it out. “You know,” she said, and she looked out over the pond, “some people — and I’m not saying this because I want to call you a name, but I think you ought to know — some people call you a geek.”
Her friends, I thought. Her giggly friends call me a geek. I gazed at the water, like her. I think at this point we felt it was easier to talk if we didn’t actually look at each other. Some mallard ducks came swimming toward us from the middle of the pond.
“But they’re wrong,” she said. “You’re not a geek. Although you are. . .”
“What?”
“Different. I mean . . . you’re the only kid in school who —you’re the only kid I’ve ever heard of — maybe you’re the only kid in the world — who has only one name. How come you don’t have a first name?”
So I explained, as I always have to. My parents left the first name blank on my birth certificate because they had this idea — a goofy idea, they now admit — that I should choose my own name. Meanwhile, they called me Baby. And then Baba, because that’s what I started saying. And when I finally got old enough to choose, they found out it was too late to change the birth certificate.
“But,” Kirsten said, “people could call you a different name even if it isn’t on your birth certificate.”
“Yes. But I don’t want them to.”
“Because you want to be different.”
“Because I want to be . . . who I am.”
She furrowed her dark eyebrows. “You are definitely Babcock,” she said. “Babcock and his briefcase.”
“It comes in handy.”
“Did you bring it here?”
I pointed to it leaning against the trunk of a willow tree.
“What’s in that briefcase, anyway?”
I didn’t answer. What I did do, though, was move my lips and hold out my hand. Dragonfly, dragonfly, come to me before I die.
Soon, one came. Kirsten didn’t move. She watched in silence as it perched on my fingertip and then flew away. With her eyes still focused on the disappearing dragonfly, she said something that caught me by surprise. She asked, “Are you gifted?”
I shrugged.
She was looking at me now. She said, “I know your grades are better than mine.”
“How do you know?”
“Come on. Everybody knows.”
Nothing is secret in this town.
“And,” she said, “I see you reading books all the time.”
“So?”
“That’s what gifted people do.” She cleared her throat. I think she realized that what she’d said sounded a little strange. “Actually,” she continued, “my mother says that everyone is gifted in their own way.” She cleared her throat again. “And whatever my special gift is, it isn’t getting A’s.”
“Maybe it’s gymnastics,” I said.
“No. It isn’t.” She threw a pebble in the water. “I’m sorry I killed your bug. I’m sorry I called you fat.”
“I am fat.”
She stood up. “And I am flat,” she said. “But I’m still hoping something will happen.”
“It probably will,” I said. “Maybe in a big way. Maybe it will be your special gift.”
She looked startled.
I can’t quite believe I said that. I felt myself blushing, though I don’t think she saw it. Of course, it’s hard to tell when I blush.
She stared at me for a moment. And then . . . I saw it.
She smiled.
A smile that was all freckles and ears. She turned one last handspring. And she ran away. She ran with grace. She ran like a breeze slipping over the grass.
The Juvenile Reptile
We had this band. We practiced in my garage.
Starting a band was my idea. The name I gave it was Two One Five Five Two. Boone, our bass player, said we should be called The Four Hairs because we each looked so different. Boone had brown hair that was all cowlick: it would lie down if he wetted it, but when it dried it just stood straight up like a hedgehog. So he kept it short. Law, our drummer, had blond hair, casual and shaggy — the surfer look. Dylan, our keyboard player, had sleek black hair. Dylan’s a sharp dresser — black turtlenecks, leather shoes. He wears an earring. He carries a comb in his back pocket and always keeps every last hair in place. My hair is curly, medium length. I play guitar.
Then one day we decided to write a song. Dylan suggested it. We’d made up raps before. They were easy. Dylan, though was talking about something new for us. He was talking about music. Dylan liked to make up little tunes on the keyboard — not whole songs, just little bits of tune.
Law tapped out a beat on the drums. Bum bum bum, bum-bump a dumpa dumpa. “How’s that for a beat?” Law asked.
“I can dance to it,” Dylan said. “Now we need a tune.”
“And words,” I said.
“I’ll do the tune,” Dylan said. “You do the words.” He started fooling around on the keyboard.
Bum bum bum, bum-bump a dumpa dumpa. Bum bum bum, bum-bump a dumpa dumpa.
I listened to the drums, and — to my surprise — I already knew the words. “I’ve got it,” I said. “Listen: ‘Dragonfly, dragonfly, are you friendly? Are you shy?’”
“What’s that mean?” Boone asked.
“It sucks,” Law said.
“We don’t want to write a song about insects,” Dylan said. “We want a song about people. About song stuff. You know. About sex. About drugs. About rock and roll.”
“At least,” Boone said, “it has to be about people.”
“Maybe it is about people,” I said. The thought had just occurred to me.
“You mean ‘Dragonfly’ is a nickname?” Boone asked.
“It could be,” I said.
“Boy or girl?” Boone asked.
“Girl,” I said. Though until that moment, I hadn’t thought about it.
“Now it makes sense,” Boone said. “‘Dragonfly, Dragonfly, are you friendly? Are you shy?’ I like it.”
“Go with it,” Law said.
Bum bum bum, bum-bump a dumpa dumpa.
I went with it. I grabbed a pencil and paper and started writing down words.
I was surprised at how easily the words came. I read it aloud:
Dragonfly, Dragonfly,
Are you friendly? Are you shy?
You turn cartwheels on my shoes,
Make me lose these muddy blues.
Wild as the starry sky,
Eyes like lapis lazuli,
A thousand freckles, two big ears,
You don’t need no big brassiere.
“Hey,” Law said. “You can’t say ‘brassiere.’”
“Why not?” I said. “I’ve heard worse. Listen to the radio.”
“I don’t mean they won’t let you say it. I mean it’s stupid.”
“All right,” I said. “How about: ‘A thousand freckles, two big ears, stay with me a hundred years’?”
“Yes,” Law said.
“So you like it?” I asked.
“No,” Boone said. “What do you mean about lapis lazuli?”
“It’s a kind of rock,” I said. “I mean her eyes are blue like lapis lazuli.”
“Her eyes are like rocks?” Boone said. “That’s not . . . pretty.”
“Lapis lazuli is a pretty rock,” I said.
“It sucks,” Law said.
“Well then, how about this? ‘Wild as the starry sky, golden hair except the eye.’”
“What does that mean?” Boone asked. “You don’t have hair on your eyeballs.”
“I mean she has blonde hair except her eyebrows are dark.”
“It sucks,” Law said. “Anyway, if her hair is blonde, then her eyebrows are blonde. Like mine.”
“Not her,” I said.
“Who?” Law asked.
“Nobody,” I said. “It’s just a song.”
“Then give her black hair,” Law said. “‘Black of hair and blue of eye.’ How’s that?”
“No,” I said. “She’s blonde.”
“Babcock. It’s only a song.”
“She’s blonde.”
“All right, all right,” Law said. “‘Blonde of hair and blue of eye.’ Is that what you want?”
“Yes.”
“Do dragonflies have hair?” Boone asked.
“Yes,” I said.
Dylan had worked out a simple tune. He told me what chords to play on the guitar, and then he showed Boone how to play the simple bass line — there were only about four notes. Meanwhile, I made up another verse. We ran through it a couple of times, trying to get synchronized. And Danny showed up.
Danny was the Fifth Hair: black, thick, uncombed, wild. He had no interest in playing in a band and probably couldn’t sit still long enough to learn an instrument, anyway, but he liked to check on what we were doing.
We played our new song. I included the new verse:
I’m a reptile, juvenile,
Make me human with your smile.
When we finished, Danny looked puzzled. “It’s a song about a reptile? And he’s in love with an insect?”
“He feels like a reptile,” I explained. “But she makes him feel human.”
“And she’s a dragonfly?”
“It’s a nickname.”
“Who is she?”
“Nobody.”
“I feel like a reptile all the time,” Danny said. “I want to meet her. You say she’s skinny. Like me.”
It’s true that Danny is the thinnest boy in San Puerco. But I said, “It’s just a song, Danny. Anyway, she wouldn’t like you.”
“How do you know?” Danny asked. “If it’s just a song, why couldn’t she like me?”
“Because I wrote the words. And I know she wouldn’t like you.” I felt my lip starting to twitch. So I smiled.
“I don’t remember hearing some line saying ‘She don’t like Danny.’ Why wouldn’t she like me, Babcock?”
“Because,” I said, “here’s the next verse:
Tell your nanny, tell your granny,
You don’t like the boy named Danny.”
“What is this?” Danny asked. “Is she your girlfriend or something?”
“Don’t be silly,” I said.
We liked our new song so much, talking it over at school next day, we decided we were ready to play for an audience. We’d have an open house — that is, an open garage. Law designed a poster on his computer and printed a few dozen copies:
OPEN GARAGE!
See the hot new band Two One Five Five Two!
Refreshments.
FREE ADMISSION!
We stapled the posters to telephone poles around town. And while eating dinner, I happened to mention the plan to my parents.
“You’re going to what?”
“In our garage?”
They seemed to have the idea that the band would attract motorcycle gangs, drunks, drug addicts, people who punch out windows and spray graffiti on walls — in other words, the kind of people who went to the kind of dances they used to go to.
I told them we’d be lucky to get a few kids from my seventh-grade class, if anybody. The refreshments would be some two-liter bottles of soda pop. The town was too small to have a motorcycle gang, and no drunks or druggies were going to come drink orange soda and watch some thirteen-year-old boys play in a garage.
“At least, for a rock and roll band, you seem to have a nice sense of humility,” my father chuckled.
“Now, Thomas, don’t get upset,” my mother said, looking upset. “Don’t have a heart attack.”
“Do I look upset?” my father asked, leaning back in his chair and lighting his pipe.
“You might as well use the garage now while you still can,” my father said. “Pretty soon, I’m going to convert it into a studio.”
“Thomas,” my mother said, “you know we can’t afford — ”
“When we can afford it,” he added.
That satisfied my mother. She knew we’d never be able to pay for it. My father runs a car repair shop. In the evenings at home, he likes to draw. He’s been playing around with different ideas for comic strips, which he tries to sell to newspapers. Nobody has ever bought one. The drawing is good, but I think the ideas are dumb — like a superhero dog who can fly. He says if he ever gets the comic strip going, he’ll quit the car repair business, build a studio in the garage, and get paid for doing what he loves: drawing.
The other thing he loves doing is taking care of his old MG. If he didn’t already run a repair shop, I think he’d have to buy one just so he could keep that MG running. It’s an antique. It’s always breaking down. But he waxes it every weekend, takes it to car shows, and belongs to an MG club. My mother says it’s the only MG in the world that comes equipped with a matching sofa and loveseat, automatic dishwasher, and membership in a health club — because whenever she’s suggested buying those things, my father has always said he needed the money to fix some piece of the car.
My mother understands money. She’s more practical than my father. She’s a bookkeeper, so she keeps track of money all day. I used to think a bookkeeper was like a librarian, but then my mother explained that instead of putting books onto shelves she was putting numbers into columns. She said that her job did have one thing in common with being a librarian: she had to separate the fiction from the nonfiction.
“So we can do it?” I asked.
My father took the pipe from his lips, blew a puff of smoke, and said, “You’ll have to let us chaperone, son.”
“But — please — don’t be too obvious, okay?”
My father chuckled. “We’ll try not to embarrass you, son. We’ll just try to blend in with the crowd.”
“You can’t blend in. Oh my God. You won’t try to dance, will you?”
My father met my mother’s eye. They both were grinning.
I said, “Are you going to humiliate me?”
“Don’t worry,” my mother said. “Just play some nice waltzes. And something we can charleston to.”
“And maybe we can do a minuet,” my father added.
“You are kidding, aren’t you?”
They didn’t answer. They just grinned.
Sow bugs
Outside school I was standing with Danny and Boone, waiting until the last minute to go inside. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw three girls walking toward us. Whispering. Giggling.
I set down my briefcase. I raised my hands above my head.
Boone looked at me. “What are you doing?” he said.
I leaned to the side, kicked off with my feet — and fell on my back. My eyeglasses fell off my face and skidded across the concrete.
“What was that?” Danny asked.
“Cartwheel,” I said, reaching for my glasses and putting them on. One of the lenses was scratched. The three girls were walking away. Giggling. One was skinny. Blonde hair. Big ears.
At lunch I was walking to join Danny and Boone when Kirsten came toward me and without a word handed me a cube of paper and then walked away. It was regular notebook paper, folded and taped. It rattled. I peeled the tape and unfolded one end.
Inside was a green grasshopper.
Quick as a flash before I could reclose the paper, it hopped out of the cube and onto my ear and just as quickly hopped again from my ear and away.
I looked around.
Kirsten was gone.
The grasshopper was gone.
All that remained was a slight tingling on my ear and a cube of notebook paper in my hand.
After school I was walking up the street to my house, watching clouds, and I didn’t notice until I almost tripped over it: a dead possum. A car had run over it. The body had split, and guts were spilling out.
I hate cars.
I walked up the street wondering how we could train all the wild animals in the world to stay out of the road — or how we could give them weapons to fight back. Just as a skunk has its smelly spray, just as a porcupine has its quills, maybe animals could develop weapons against cars. Nails, maybe, that could pop the tires. Sugar water that they could squirt in the gas tank.
As I was thinking these thoughts, gradually I was becoming aware that the road was alive. That is, the asphalt was dead as always but crawling over it were dozens — no, hundreds — probably thousands — of little gray sow bugs. Now, of course, there are always sow bugs in San Puerco. You see them if you turn over a log or pick up a brick. But this was different. This was a sow bug party. I leaned down for a closer look. Where were they going? And why? They cruised along like busy little limousines. Some headed left, some headed right, some wandered up the road, some down. If I touched one, it would curl into a ball.
I held a finger down to the road. A sow bug stopped, tested the fingertip with its little antennae, and then it started climbing over my fingernail, over my knuckle into a forest of hair, tickling with its tiny feet. It looked like a miniature armadillo.
I heard a car coming. Not just coming — it was roaring and squealing up our winding street. I couldn’t see it because I was at a curve. I stood up with the sow bug still on my finger. I stayed right in the middle of the road.
My lip had started to twitch.
I heard the car roaring — too fast — closer and closer, and I heard the tires squeal as they started to take the corner. Then I saw it. The car was swaying to the side with the tires just barely holding onto the asphalt as the driver leaned into the steering wheel. And he saw me: standing, blocking the middle of the street. He had no time to stop. He hit the horn and threw the steering wheel around — and I jumped just out of the way, fell down and rolled over twice — as he crashed into the ditch at the side of the road with a screech of brake and a crunch of metal.
Then there was silence.
But only for a moment. The driver threw open his door and jumped out of the car. He was a tall, skinny black man with a stubby mustache. “Did I hit you?” he said.
“No, sir,” I said, standing up. The sow bug was gone from my finger. I guess it jumped, too. “I dodged, sir.”
“Damn,” he said. “I should’ve hit you.”
“What, sir?”
“You deserved it. What were you doing standing — smiling! — in the middle of the road? Didn’t you hear me coming? Look at this car! Look at this fender!”
I was looking. It was an old green Cadillac Coupe De Ville with rust under the doors and a coat hanger for an antenna. The tires were bald. The backseat was loaded with scruffy old suitcases and cardboard boxes tied up with twine.
“I asked you a question, boy. Didn’t you hear me coming?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then why didn’t you move?”
“I didn’t think you’d take a blind curve on a one-lane road at forty miles an hour.”
“And I didn’t think you’d be standing in the middle of the road. And what were you doing there?”
“I wanted you to stop.”
“You wanted me to stop. Why did you want me to stop?”
“The sow bugs, sir.”
“The what?”
“Sow bugs. Sir. I didn’t want you to run over the — ”
“You made me wreck my car because of a damn insect?”
“Thousands of them, sir. Actually, they aren’t insects. They’re crustaceans. They’re related to — ”
“I don’t believe it.”
“ — crabs.”
“What?”
“Crabs, sir. Sow bugs are related to crabs.”
“I’ll crab you, boy. Now get over here and help push this car out of this ditch.”
“Sir, I think you’d better walk. Leave the car here. You can get it later. I’ll help you. The sow bugs are still all over the road.”
The man glared at me with his hands on his hips. “Do you hear me?” he said. “Are we speaking the same language?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What is your attitude, boy?”
“My attitude?”
“Never mind.” He threw his hands up in the air. “I’ll do it myself. And if you’re still in this road when I come through, you’re gonna be one big, fat, dead sow bug ’cuz I ain’t gonna stop. I ain’t even gonna slow down. In fact, next time I see you in the road I’m gonna go faster.”
With that, he stepped into the Cadillac and slammed the door. He tried to back up. The rear wheels spun. He gunned the engine. The wheels spun faster, and smoke rose into the air. He punched his open hand against the steering wheel. And then, while he wasn’t giving it any gas, the car started to back out. He’d been trying too hard.
Once he was back in the road, he looked at me and scowled. I didn’t try to stand in his way. Suddenly with a roar and a spinning of wheels, he started fishtailing up the narrow street. In a moment, he was gone, leaving the smoke and the smell of burnt rubber.
Behind him, on the asphalt, I found hundreds of little gray bodies — crushed. They hadn’t even had time to roll up in a ball.
Peanut Butter and Sauerkraut
When I came to my house, the Cadillac was parked in my driveway next to my mother’s van. Right away my lip started to twitch.
My mother was out in the driveway next to the Coupe De Ville. She gave the man a big hug, slapping her hands on his back. Then she stepped back from him and saw me coming.
“Baba!” she called. “Come meet your Uncle Earl.”
Uncle Earl saw me, and he looked startled. Then he smiled. “We’ve already met,” he said. “I — uh — I ran into him, just down the road. That is, I almost ran into him.”
Mother smiled. “That’s nice,” she said. “But Earl, why didn’t you tell us you were coming?”
“Oh, I just thought I’d come by and give you a holler.”
“But can you stay a while?”
“Oh, I reckon, if it ain’t too much trouble.”
“No trouble at all. We’d love to have you stay.”
Where? We didn’t have a spare room. But I didn’t have to wonder for long.
“We’ll put you in Baba’s room.”
“Baba?” Uncle Earl said. “You call him Baba?”
“Well, you know, Earl, he was supposed to choose his own name. Only he never did. So we had to call him something. Baba is what he used to say, before he could say Babcock. And of course we can’t call him that, because it’s our name, too.”
“So,” Uncle Earl said, looking down at me, “you want me to call you Baba, too?”
“No, sir,” I said.
“What should I call you?”
“My friends call me Babcock.”
“Like your mama say, I can’t call you that.”
“One of my friends calls me Badger.”
“Not bad,” Uncle Earl said, fingering his mustache. “But based on what I know about you, based on what I seen, I think I got a better name for you: Beauregard. Beauregard Bodacious Babcock. How does that strike you?”
“Terrible, sir.”
“Beau, for short. Or Beau Bo. I like the ring of that. Beau Bo Babcock. Hee-hee!” Uncle Earl slapped his leg.
I turned to my mother. “How long is he staying?”
My mother frowned. I knew it was a rude question. “As long as he wants,” she said. She looked at me sharply. “Uncle Earl is family. And family is always welcome at our house.”
Uncle Earl looked at me with what I thought was a smirk.
My father’s MG drove into the driveway and parked behind the Cadillac. More squashed sow bugs, I thought. My father stepped out and broke into a grin. He walked up and shook Uncle Earl’s hand. “Earl!” he said. “Nice to see you. What kind of trouble are you in now?”
“Thomas,” Mother said. “Don’t tease my brother.”
“I’m not teasing,” Father said, still smiling. “I’m just asking. If you’re visiting us, I know you’re on the lam from something. What is it this time — money? Or women?”
“I’m just taking a little vacation,” Uncle Earl said, and I noticed that his upper lip had started to twitch.
I guess it runs in the family.
My mother cooked up a storm that night.
I stared at the slice of pork on my plate, that slice of flesh that once had been part of a living, breathing animal, and then I stared at the gravy dribbling off the biscuits with bits of meat and grease — guts spilling out of a run-over possum. I poked my fork into the green beans with little bits of bacon mixed in — sow bugs squashed into the road.
I pushed the plate aside.
My mother asked, “What’s the matter, Baba? Aren’t you feeling well?”
“I feel fine. I’ve just made up my mind.”
“About what, son?”
“I’m a vegetarian.”
“Oh, no, Baba, you don’t want to be a vegetarian. Vegetarians don’t eat right. It isn’t natural. They don’t get enough protein. The only way to get enough protein if you’re a vegetarian is to eat all those beans and things, and then you’ll get fat.”
“I am fat.”
“Don’t you like my cooking?”
“I love your cooking. That’s why I’m fat.”
“Do you want to lose weight? We could put you on a diet. You don’t have to be a vegetarian if you want to lose — ”
“No, ma’am. I don’t want to lose weight.”
“Then why do you want to be a vegetarian?”
“Because I hate cars.”
My father froze with his water glass halfway to his mouth. He stared at me. He said, “You hate cars? What does that have to do with being a vegetarian? We aren’t eating cars here, are we? And what does that say about me? Do you hate me, too, because I work on cars?”
“No, sir, I don’t hate you. It has nothing to do with you. And nothing to do with cars. The thing is — ”
“You just said you were a vegetarian because you hate cars. Now you say it has nothing to do with — ”
“Cars kill animals. I like animals. I don’t want to eat animals. That’s all I meant.”
My mother laid a hand on my arm. She said, “If you become a vegetarian, Baba, do you expect us to become vegetarians, too? Do you expect your Uncle Earl to become a vegetarian?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Then do you expect me to cook a separate meal just for you?”
“No, ma’am.” I pushed my chair away from the table.
“Where are you going?”
“To the kitchen. To make a sandwich.”
“I don’t think we have anything. Except sauerkraut.”
She knew I hated sauerkraut. I said, “Do we have peanut butter?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I’ll make a peanut butter and sauerkraut sandwich.”
As I walked into the kitchen, I heard my father say, “Don’t worry. This too shall pass.”
I brought the sandwich back to the table and ate it, every last crumb of it. Then I licked my lips, just to show them I was happy. I drank a glass of milk. I still could taste sauerkraut in my mouth. I looked at my plate. It didn’t look like possum guts any more, or even like sow bugs. It looked like food. I was still hungry. But there’s one thing about me that’s stronger than hunger: I’m stubborn.
“Mmm-mmm. This sure is fine pork roast,” Uncle Earl said. He looked at my mother and winked.
“Wonderful gravy,” my father said. “And I just love bacon with my green beans.”
“May I be excused?” I said.
“Wait until dinner is over,” Mother said.
And I knew they could be just as strong-minded as me. I guess that runs in the family, too.
“Yes,” Uncle Earl said. “Wait and watch us eat some real food.”
“Is there dessert?” I said.
“Yes,” my mother said. “Your favorite. Apple pie.”
Uncle Earl got a twinkle in his eye. An evil-looking twinkle, if you ask me. He said, “Would there just happen to be any lard in that pie crust?”
“I wasn’t going to mention it,” my mother said. “But yes, there is.”
“And isn’t lard made out of animal fat?” Uncle Earl said.
“Yes,” my mother said.
Uncle Earl turned to me. “And how do you feel about eating animal fat, Mr. Vegee-terarian?”
“May I be excused?” I said.
“No,” my father said.
“It looks like there’s going to be an extra piece of apple pie for us to share,” Uncle Earl said. “Mmm-mmm. Is it that delicious Dutch crumb apple pie just like Mama used to make?”
“Yes,” my mother said. She frowned. She likes it when I enjoy her cooking.
“I just love Dutch crumb apple pie,” Uncle Earl said, looking at me. “I’m sure glad there’ll be an extra piece.”
“May I please be excused?”
“No,” my father said.
“Yes,” my mother said, glaring at Uncle Earl.
I left the table and went to my room — or what used to be my room. Uncle Earl had piled his raggedy suitcases and boxes wrapped with twine on the bed, the mouse cage, the terrariums, even on the fish tank. I moved a box and opened the lid to the aquarium and fed my two goldfish named Sojourner and Truth. In a peanut butter jar next to them, a dozen tadpoles wiggled in circles. Next, in a mayonnaise jar a bunch of dragonfly larvae rested under a stalk of duckweed. On the windowsill lay a few chrysalids from which butterflies soon would emerge. I peeked in the terrarium where Marcus, the horned toad, squatted on a rock while Garvey, the blue-bellied lizard, did push-ups in one corner. Martin Luther, the kingsnake, stared hungrily at them from his own terrarium next door. Martin Luther had a permanent smile fixed on his face — probably the same smile that I got when I was angry.
I unrolled my sleeping bag and lay down on the floor. It was too early to go to bed, but I wanted to be alone. I wanted to think. I heard the mice, Frederick and Douglass, scurrying in their wood shavings. I heard the hum of the motor pumping air to Sojourner and Truth. I heard nothing from Marcus, the horned toad. He never moved. Sometimes I worried that Marcus would die and I wouldn’t even know it until he started to rot. In the darkness, in silence, Martin Luther slithered; the tadpoles swam; the dragonfly larvae oozed along. Inside the chrysalids, invisible, in silence, caterpillars were working miracles.
Lately I’ve felt like a chrysalid myself. And I wonder, when I crack my cocoon, what strange winged beast will crawl into the light of day?
The Real World
I had just drifted off to sleep when Uncle Earl came into the room, switching on the light, slamming the door, humming to himself. He was not the quiet type. I tried to roll over and cover my head, but Uncle Earl said, “Hey. What’s with this place, anyway?”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“I thought you guys lived in California.”
“We do, sir.”
“That’s what my map say, too. But that road is West Virginia. These mountains are West Virginia. I had to stop three times and eee-gurgitate.”
“What, sir?”
“Egurgitate. Unswallow.”
“You were carsick, sir?”
“I didn’t say I was carsick. I just say I had to egurgitate a few times. I never thought my own sister would live in a place that would make me puke. I thought she lived near San Francisco. It looks near, on the map.”
“It’s a couple hours driving.”
“A couple hours egurgitating, you mean. This is just a teenie weenie town. You could put both City Limit signs on the same post. You can’t even get a drink in this town.”
“Yes you can, sir. There’s a Coke machine at the bait shop.”
“What bait shop?”
“Outside town. There’s a shack by the road. You’ll see a sign out front. It says WORM FARM.”
“I’m talking about getting a drink and you’re telling me to go to some place called the Worm Farm?”
“You can go to the restaurant.”
“I saw that itty bitty restaurant. It’s so small, the flies have to wait in line for a table.” He imitated a hostess’ voice: “Bluebottle fly. Party of four. Your table is now ready. Fruit fly. Party of six hundred. Your garbage can is now ready.”
“You can go to the bar.”
“What bar? Where?”
So I told him where the tavern was located. And after that, Uncle Earl seemed to have run out of things to say. In a minute, he was asleep with a rattling snore like grinding gears.
I woke up in my sleeping bag on the floor in the middle of the night. Uncle Earl was snorting and groaning and thrashing around on my bed. He made as much noise sleeping as when he was awake. I didn’t see how he could be getting any rest. It looked as if he was having a wrestling match with his sheet. Suddenly he rolled over and made a sound as if he was blowing his nose into the pillow. Then he lay quietly.
Another sound came faintly from another part of the house: the rustle of paper. The scratching of a pencil.
I got up and walked to the kitchen. My father had a drawing board set up on the table. His back was to me. I watched from the doorway, and he didn’t know I was there. The clock on the wall said 2:14 A.M. He’d drawn four squares for a comic strip, and now he was filling it in. First he made bubbles of dialogue. Then he drew a knight in armor and a woman on a castle turret, and then a dragon.
I wished he could sell his comic strip to the newspapers for a million dollars. I wished he didn’t have to stay up late and lose sleep and then feel tired all day while he was repairing cars. I wished he had a drawing studio instead of having to work on the kitchen table, having to wait until all the meals were served and the food was cleared.
My father sat back in his chair and relit his pipe.
“Is it done?”
He jumped at the sound of my voice. Then he smiled. “Done for tonight,” he said.
“Could I see it?”
He gestured for me to take a look.
I read it.
“You didn’t laugh,” my father said.
I looked at him. “It isn’t funny,” I said.
Suddenly my father slashed a big X across the page.
“Is that better?” he asked.
“No.”
He put his head in his hands, tired and sad.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“So am I,” he said through his hands. Then he sat back and put the pipe to his mouth.
“Is this fun?” I asked. “Is this what you really want to do?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because,” he said, holding the pipe in his hand, “if I don’t repair somebody’s car, some other mechanic will do it. But if I don’t draw my cartoons, nobody else can do it. Only I know what I want to say.”
He stared into the bowl of his pipe.
“What do you want to say?” I asked.
“That’s the problem. I don’t know, exactly.”
I wanted to make him feel better. I said, “Somebody was just telling me that we each have a special gift. I guess drawing is your gift.”
“I hope so, son. I hope so.”
“Why don’t you draw something real? Instead of knights and castles or superhero dogs. Draw the real world.”
My father wrinkled his nose. He tapped his pipe. He said, “The real world isn’t very funny, son. Sometimes the real world is an awful place. We protect you from it. There’s no problems in this town. That’s why I like it here.”
He was wrong. San Puerco has certain people, certain ignorant people. Hey nigger. I hear it. Anyway, he doesn’t live here just to protect me. He also lives here because of the price of houses. They cost less in San Puerco because there aren’t any jobs. You have to drive an hour to get to Pulgas Park, where my father’s garage is.
“I’m not as protected as you think,” I said.
“You think you know the real world?” My father waved his pipe toward the bedroom. “You could ask your Uncle Earl. He’s seen the real world. He’s seen a lot of it.”
I’d heard some stories about Uncle Earl. I’d heard he was arrested for speeding in Mississippi and spent thirty days in jail. I’d heard bits of other stories, but my mother always stopped talking about them when she saw that I was listening.
“He’s scared of the mountains,” I said. “Scared of the roads. But he drives way too fast. And then he gets carsick.”
“Earl’s a city boy,” my father said. “He’s always lived in cities.”
“He sleeps funny. He makes noise. He throws himself around on the bed.”
“Maybe that’s the real world, coming back to him,” my father said.
Back in bed, I lay awake. I was thinking about the real world. I know real. One night my mother was driving me home in the van on the highway that twists down the mountain through the redwood forests to our town, and we were talking and playing the radio and feeling relaxed — when a pair of headlights swung around a corner and headed straight at us. My mother made a hissing sound through her teeth as she cut hard on the steering wheel. A split second later, the headlights crunched into the side of the van and caromed off again. I was thrown against the door in my seat belt, and my mother jerked toward my seat in hers. We were stopped. The other headlights were stopped. My mother looked at me wildly and shouted, “Are you all right?”
“Yes.” My shoulder felt bruised. “Are you?”
“Yes.”
Just then we heard a screech of tires, and the headlight — just one, now — took off up the road.
“Get him!” I shouted. “Follow him! It’s a hit-and-run. He’s getting away!”
My mother opened the door and stared up the highway as the taillights disappeared. She looked down at the deep ugly gash in the side of the van. There were no houses nearby, no other cars. Just us and giant redwood trees under silent stars. “I’m going home,” she said.
“But he hit you. He’ll get away!”
“You want me to chase a drunk up the mountain in this old van?”
“His car must be damaged, too. Maybe you can catch up.”
“I’m going home.”
And she drove to our house, and she threw her arms around my father, and she cried and cried. He called the sheriff, but it was too late. We didn’t even know what the other car looked like except that it had one headlight. By the time my father called, it could be anywhere.
That’s the real world: two headlights coming at you in the night. And there’s no time to get out of the way.
But when the real world tries to hit me and run, I’ll follow. I’ll chase it down and make it pay.
Absquatulation
After school as I was walking home I saw Kirsten running ahead of me wearing a bright blue backpack. When she came to a telephone pole where we had stapled one of our posters about the Open Garage, she stopped and read it. I caught up with her — walking fast. I hate to run. Hate it.
“Are you going?” I asked.
She glanced at me, then looked back at the poster. “I can’t. I’m running that day,” she said. “I’m entered in a junior marathon.”
“So — you like running?” I asked. Which, I knew, was a stupid question.
“I love it.”
We have something in common, I thought. We both have strong feelings about running.
“I wish I could go,” she said. “Nothing ever happens in this stupid town, and now when something finally does, I’ll be at a marathon. But — then — my mother wouldn’t let me go to a dance.” She said all this while still looking at the poster, which she must have read fifty times by now.
“Why not?” I asked.
Kirsten turned to look at me. “Because she’s my mother.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know how to explain my mother.”
“Give me a hint.”
“Well . . .”
“What?”
“She likes palm trees.”
Without another word, Kirsten started running down the street. I watched until she disappeared around a corner, ponytail bouncing on her backpack.
I knew where she lived. If her mother liked palm trees, I knew exactly where her house was. San Puerco is on the side of a mountain in the middle of a redwood forest where it’s cool and shady even in the summer. There’s one lot, though, where all the trees have been cleared and the sun bakes down. In front of the house there’s a silver Buick station wagon and three palm trees curling upward toward the sun.
That was where Kirsten slept, where she ate her meals and did her homework: the house of the three palms. And it did give me a hint about her mother. A warning, actually. A warning that I ignored.
When I got home, my father’s MG and my mother’s van weren’t there. He was repairing somebody’s car; she was doing somebody’s bookkeeping. But I wasn’t alone. There was a green Cadillac with a crumpled fender.
“Hey. Hey Beau!”
“What, sir?”
Uncle Earl was lying on my bed, smoking a Kool. The whole room smelled like tobacco smoke. I hoped it didn’t bother Martin Luther or Frederick or Douglass or any member of my little zoo. Uncle Earl put down his newspaper — opened to the racing page — and said, “What’s happening, bro?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“Sir? I call you bro and you call me sir?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t you know how to talk? Don’t you want to sound like a brother?”
“You’re not my brother.”
“I’m a brother.”
“I don’t talk that way.”
“You talk like your parents.”
“Yes, sir.”
Uncle Earl was staring at me over the smoke of his cigarette. After a moment, he said, “You know what the trouble with you is, Beau? You’re too middle-class. You, and your papa, and your mama, too.”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“I mean I ask you for ice cream, and you hand me vanilla.”
“Look again, sir.”
“Look at what?”
“Your cone, sir. What I give you.”
“What is it?”
“Rainbow sherbet.”
Uncle Earl shook his head. “Only wusses eat sherbet.” He stubbed out the cigarette in a seashell of mine that he was using for an ashtray. “But I forgive you. Y’all is family, and I love you anyway.”
It always surprises me how easily some people can use those words: I love you. I’m not even sure what it means, exactly — scientifically. What is love? How do you explain it on the molecular level?
Uncle Earl sat up on the bed, stomped his feet on the floor, clapped his hands, and said, “You want to play some catch?”
“With what?”
“With a baseball, of course. You got a mitt?”
“No, sir.”
“Just a minute. I got a mitt you can borrow.” He opened one of his cardboard boxes and started rooting around.
I stepped outside. The air tasted clean. My father’s pipe smoke didn’t bother me nearly as much as the smoke of a cigarette. Law and Boone walked up the driveway. Uncle Earl was still inside. Before he could find a mitt, I went to the garage.
We didn’t rehearse. I swept the floor, put my father’s tools away and stacked up some buckets of paint. Boone tried to clean some oil stains on the floor while Dylan stabbed a broom at some dusty old cobwebs. Law hung two clip lights to some rafters to brighten up the corner where we were going to play.
“It still looks like a garage,” I said.
“It’s supposed to,” Dylan said. “We’re a garage band, aren’t we?”
I came back to the house just before dinner.
“Where were you?” Uncle Earl said. “I found you a mitt, went out in the yard — and you’d already absquatulated.”
“Ab- what?”
“Absquatulated. Gone. Vamoosed. Like a coo-ool breeze.”
When I sat down for dinner, my mother gave me a guilty look and said, “It’s chicken, Baba. I’m sorry. I’d already bought it before you decided to be a vegetarian.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “I’ll have peas.”
Uncle Earl loaded his plate with chicken, saying, “Mmm-mmm. I sure do love fried chicken. You bread it just right, sister dear. I sure am glad I don’t have to vegetate.”
“Speaking of vegetating,” my father said, “just what are you doing now, Earl? Are you looking for a job?”
Uncle Earl shifted slightly in his seat. His lip twitched — just slightly. “I’m thinking about a new career,” he said.
“In what?” my father asked.
“I haven’t decided.”
“Can you fix cars?”
“No.”
“You want to learn? You could start in my shop.”
Uncle Earl shifted again in his seat. He pulled at the collar of his T-shirt as if it had suddenly gotten too tight. He said, “Where would I start?”
“You’d start by sweeping the floor and giving people rides to work after they’ve dropped off their cars.”
“You mean I’d be a porter?”
“That’s where you’d start. And we’d train you. Next, you’d start doing some oil changes, rotating tires, grease jobs . . .”
“Grease?” Uncle Earl curled his lip, which made his mustache stick out.
“You don’t like grease, Earl?”
Uncle Earl’s lip was twitching solidly now. The mustache wiggled like a fuzzy worm. He said, “I think I’m allergic to grease.”
“And manual labor,” my father said.
“Now, Thomas,” my mother said.
“What happened to that last career you had?” my father said. “Weren’t you selling used cars? In Baltimore?”
“Oh. That. Yes. Well. That was a long time ago. I found better opportunities than that. In Atlanta. I was in the jewelry bidness.”
“The jewelry business?”
“Mostly wristwatches.”
“Used wristwatches?”
“They were like new. I guaranteed them.”
“What happened to that business?”
“It became time to . . . sort of . . . ” Uncle Earl’s lip was twitching badly.
“Absquatulate?” I suggested.
“Exactly,” Uncle Earl said. “All bidness ventures run a natural cycle, and in the end you have to know when it’s time to . . . absquatulate.”
“What did you do after that?” my father asked.
“I had a church in Chicago.”
“A church?” My mother laughed. “You?”
“I was the Reverend Earl, if you please. Founder of the Church of MegaChrist.”
“And, Reverend, did that business venture run its natural cycle?” my father asked. “Or this time was the problem a woman?”
“There were some women of passionate faith,” Uncle Earl said. “There was also a bit of a problem regarding the building fund.” His lip twitched again. “That’s why I came here.”
“All the way from Chicago?” my father said. “You really had to absquatulate after that one.”
“Preachers don’t get the respect they used to,” Uncle Earl said, shaking his head. “It’s a damn shame.”
Rock and Roll
We left the garage door open with our band set up in a corner against the back wall. We were nervous. About thirty people were standing around, spilling out of the garage, waiting for us to begin. There wasn’t going to be enough soda pop. My mother was pouring it into Dixie cups.
We didn’t know how to begin. Dylan nudged Boone. “Say something,” Dylan whispered.
Boone looked panic-stricken. “What should I say?”
“Welcome people to the garage. Tell them the soda is free. Ask them to dance if they feel like it. Introduce us. Tell them they can use the bathroom in the house. Tell them our first song will be 'Johnny B. Goode.' Say something.”