Jack's Black Book (7 page)

I disliked people who didn't know the proper way to bargain. Especially yard-sale people who thought every piece of cruddy junk they owned belonged in a museum. She should have said seven dollars. I'd reply three. She'd say six. I'd say four and we'd agree on five. This is the universal approach to agreeing on a price.

“I don't want to steal it,” I said to her. “I'm willing to give you fifty cents for it.”

She flipped. “Take it!” she shouted, and began to pitch a hissy fit. ‘Just take it for free, if you're so cheap! But I never want to see you again!”

Free was a pretty good price, so I snapped the case shut, put it in my bike basket, and took off before she realized she was raving and saying things she didn't mean. Perhaps someday she'd find out she had done a good deed by helping a young writer start his career. Maybe then she'd crack a smile. Maybe not.

Once I had the typewriter, I needed some free time to write without someone looking over my shoulder and telling me to wash the car, cut the grass, run down to the 7-Eleven for milk, or help move furniture around the house as if it was giant pieces in a board game. Then at
dinner that night, like a wish come true, my parents announced they were going to take a ten-day summer vacation without us.

“Your dad and I just need a little break from the daily grind,” Mom explained, as gently as possible, since
we
were the grind.

I glanced at Dad. His lips were sealed, but I could read his mind: You kids are driving me nuts.

I beamed him my own mental message: Ditto to you, too. You can leave tonight. Take off for the whole summer. I'll become a famous writer and by the time you return you'll have to speak to my book agent before you can speak to me. You'll have to offer me a contract before I'll take out the trash, or cut the grass, or ever lift a finger again.

“We've rented a cottage on the Gulf shore. If anything goes wrong we can come right back. We hope you don't mind,” Mom continued, as if reading a script.

“But nothing will go wrong,” Dad predicted, and arched an eyebrow so high I thought it was going to pole-vault off his face. “Am I right?”

“You are right,” we all replied in unison. No event would be disastrous enough that we couldn't survive it on our own. The house could be sucked down into a sinkhole, we could be victims of a chain-saw massacre, the baby could be carried away by an alligator, and we still wouldn't call him.

Mom put Betsy in charge of Eric, and me in charge of
Pete, which meant I owned him. This was going to be great, I thought. But there was a catch.

“Jack,” Dad said, as he tapped his cigarette ashes onto his dinner plate. “What is your summer job? I don't want you just sitting around twiddling your thumbs out on the front porch. There are a lot of older boys in the neighborhood, and since you aren't too swift, they could easily lead you astray.”

He caught me by surprise. Still, I knew I didn't want to make money by mowing lawns, or washing cars, or being a professional dog-walker like some of the other kids.

“I'm going to write,” I said. “Be a writer.”

He smirked. “Are you back on that again? Well, they say simpleminded people are really hardheaded,” he said, then whistled off a little steam.

Mom gave him
the look
, and he lightened up a bit.

“Okay, while we're away you can play at writing. But when we come back, if you haven't made any money at it, then I'm going to sneak you in to work at the concrete warehouse. You can keep rats from eating holes in the bags. We had a cat, but the rats ganged up and killed it. You'll just have to lie about your age, but that's no big deal. You're smart enough to do that.”

“You bet,” I said. But I didn't mean it. I was scared to death of rats, but this was one fear I wouldn't have to face. I had a foolproof way to make quick money from writing. I got the idea from watching television. I was flipping
through the channels when, suddenly, I saw it. There was a documentary on Mexico and it showed professional letter writers all lined up on chairs with desks and portable typewriters in a town square. People who had never learned to write would come to them and for a price would dictate letters. The writers would add fancy details, and dress the letters up with lots of adjectives. They made love letters more sexy, sad letters more tragic, and totally humdrum lives worth reading about.

I figured I could do something just like it on Fort Lauderdale beach. I had already gone down to the Salvation Army and bought a stack of old postcards for cheap. At the post office, I tried to bargain for stamps, but the postal clerk just laughed at me. I had to pay full price. But when I did all the math in my head, I calculated that, if I charged a dollar a postcard, I would make over seventy cents on each one sold. There were thousands of tourists on Fort Lauderdale beach and I figured I could write about a hundred postcards in eight hours, one every five minutes. That'd add up to better pay than any junior rat exterminator's. And it would give me perfect writing balance. Cheerful postcard writer by day, and tragedy-writing novelist by night.

The next morning we helped my parents load up the car.

“Remember,” Dad grunted, as he pushed a suitcase toward the back of the trunk, “when I return, I want to see some cold hard cash. If you are going to sit on your butt
all day pecking at a typewriter, you better have something to show for it, or you'll be killing rats.”

“Don't worry,” I replied, and handed him another suitcase. “The way my life is going, I'll have plenty to write about.”

“Any moron with two brain cells to rub together can write,” he said. “The problem is, getting people to read the stuff.”

“I know,” I replied. “You won't even read what I give you.” That was a mistake.

“Well, that proves my point,” he insisted, then lowered the trunk lid. “Your own father can't stand your writing.”

Mom gave him
the look
again, then whispered in my ear as I kissed her goodbye. “Take care of Pete. He's been acting a bit unusual.”

He is unusual, I thought to myself. So he's his normal self. “Okay,” I replied. “Have a great time and don't worry about a thing.”

The moment Mom closed her door, Dad tore out of the driveway and sped down the street as though he had just robbed a bank. I guess they did need a break from us.

Betsy snuck up behind me and clamped her hands around my neck. “Have you ever read the book
1984?”

“No,” I squeaked.

“At the end,” she said, “the main character is captured and his enemies strap a three-sided cage to his face. Then they fill it with starving rats that chew their way into his brain.”

“What do you want from me?” I gasped.

“You take care of Pete,” she said. “Show up every night for dinner, do everything I say, and I'll keep rats from using your eye sockets as doorways to your brain.”

“Okay,” I croaked. “You're the boss.” I went limp and she let me drop to the ground.

My first day out I was sitting under a palm tree like some wasted survivor on a desert island with the typewriter on my lap. Above me I had thumb tacked a big sign: POSTCARDS WRITTEN AND MAILED. ONE DOLLAR

Business was slow. In fact, I hadn't scored a customer all day. I hadn't even seen a mirage of a customer, and I was in a bad mood. Every time I looked up to make sure my sign hadn't blown away, the sun scorched my face and I thought of rats turning my brain into Swiss cheese. I had to make some money before Dad returned.

Pete was sitting next to me. He was so sluggish he looked like a snake propped up on a stick. “Give me a dollar,” he moaned, and stuck out his hand. “I want to buy a Slim Jim.”

He was like BeauBeau, only with a slightly larger brain. “No way,” I snapped back. “Buy it yourself.”

“You own me so you have to take care of me,” he whined, as if it were a law.

“I own you so you have to work for me,” I replied. “Now it is time for you to get your rear in gear. Because if I end up killing rats for a living, you'll be the first rat I kill.”

“I just want to buy a Slim Jim, then take a swim, then fall asleep under a picnic table.” He pouted.

“Wrong,” I replied. “You will do none of those things. You will put your mind to a moneymaking task.”

He groaned. His head drooped over to one side.

“Let me explain the number-one lesson of life,” I said. “See those people all over the beach?”

“Yeah,” he replied. “So what?”

“Well, millions of years ago the beach was covered with fish with feet.”

“I don't get it,” he said.

“Let me spell it out,” I labored, and tapped him on the head. “Once upon a time we were all just single-celled dots in a pool of slimy water. Then we were fish. Then we were fish with feet. Then we were people. And now our next step is to make money. And if you can make lots of money while doing what you love to do, then it automatically means you are a genius. We didn't go from single-celled slime to people just so we could eat Slim Jims and sleep under a table.”

He looked at his feet, then squinted up at me. “That's the dumbest thing I ever heard,” he said. “No wonder everyone thinks you're an idiot.”

I almost slugged him, but it wasn't in my best interest. “Let me spell it out even more,” I said. “If fish didn't decide they wanted to walk, we wouldn't be here today.”

“You've been out in the sun too long,” he cracked.

I was losing patience. “We're growing up,” I said.

“No kidding,” he sputtered. “Nobody grows down.”

“I don't mean that.” I sighed. “I mean it's time to make something of ourselves. Take the next step. Make some bucks.”

Pete's eyes glazed over. If I were a book, he was ready to close me.

“The point is all about you and me. Look at it this way. Some fish were dumb. They walked in the wrong direction and died. But the smart ones kept walking from one puddle to the next. The same for us. You and I are—”

“Going from puddle to puddle.”

“There you go again,” I moaned. “Missing the—”

“I have an idea,” he said abruptly.

“That's it!” I said, encouraging him. “Evolve. Be something. Turn your idea into money.”

“Dad says, It takes money to make money,'” he said, and held his hand out again. “I need to go home and get Dad's old Polaroid. Then I'll need ten dollars to get started.”

“Started on what?” I asked. “What?”

“It's a surprise,” he replied coyly.

“Well, if I'm gonna bankroll your lazy butt,” I stressed, “everything you earn belongs to me.”

“I'll save you from rats eating your face off,” he said, and made a bucktoothed rat face.

That got me. I gave him the ten.

He jammed it into the pocket of his cutoffs, then began to half flop and half crawl across the sand like a fish with feet. After he had gone about ten yards he turned to grin at me. “When I come back, I'll have evolved,” he said.

“Yeah. You'll be a newt,” I muttered under my breath.

As soon as Pete left I opened my black book and began to wonder what awful things I could write about. I looked around the beach. I knew that beneath the normal surface of society lay hidden the twisted underbelly of life. That's the good stuff I wanted to write about, but everything looked pretty normal from where I was sitting. The lifeguard stood in his orange tower. The tourists were spread out on hotel towels, and after baking under the sun all morning they looked like neon-pink hors d'oeuvres on crackers. The palm readers were setting up their striped tents, and the ice-cream vendors were working the crowd. Nothing looked suspiciously abnormal. I stared at the blank pages of my book and thought, Don't panic, you've always been a magnet for weirdness. Sit tight, it will come your way.

Suddenly a bald guy with a swollen belly and a gold chain around his neck so thick you could anchor a ship on it slogged a path through the sand and stood in front of me. He had on so much suntan lotion he glowed like a freshly glazed donut.

“I want ten cards, dated the next ten days. On each one I want you to make up an excuse why I can't return to prison on time. And make it believable. You know, like my mother died and I have to attend her funeral. Or they're throwing me a parade for pulling kids out of a burning building. Stuff like that. I'm on a furlough and I have to send them to my parole officer. Fil pick 'em up after lunch.”

He pulled a folded ten-dollar bill from the little mesh pocket inside the waistband of his stretchy tiger-print swimsuit.

I held out my hand, and he dropped it in. The bill was damp. I'll sterilize this later, I thought to myself as I smiled up at him.

“Make 'em good,” he warned me. “You have a nice typewriter. I'd hate to see something bad happen to it.”

“Don't worry about a thing,” I said nervously, then smiled at him as I recited my business jingle. “You go free, and leave the writing to me.”

He marched off, probably to go kick sand on little guys with cute girlfriends.

I gave him ten days of the worst bad luck I could imagine: Sun-poisoning rash on privates from day at nude beach. Stung on eyeballs by man-o'-war. One hundred stitches in foot from stepping on child's rusty sand shovel. Inner tube swept out to sea by rogue dolphins. Needed blood transfusion after wicked mosquito attack. Witness to a lifeguard mugging. Ear infection from sea monkeys. Amnesia caused by heat stroke. Buried in sand while
sleeping and left for dead. Needed hip replacement after crippled by suicide surfer.

I closed the typewriter case with a snap. I figured if my postcard business didn't work out I could write headlines for the
National Enquirer
or
The Weekly World News.

When he returned he read each one, slowly, with his lips moving. “You have a sick mind, kid,” he declared.