Heads or Tails (10 page)

“I know what an alligator is,” he said, then added, “BoBo smelled bad.”

“He was your dog!” I yelled. “He worshipped you.”

“He ate my shoes,” Pete said.

“Don’t you get what I’m saying?” I said.

“Get what?” he said.

“No wonder I have to take care of you,” I said.

He stepped away from me. “Do you want to see my tattoo?” he asked.

“What!”
I hollered.
“What?”

“Just kidding,” he said and began to laugh.

“Give me your other arm,” I demanded. He stuck it out and I dragged him all the way home.

“E
VERYBODY PUT ON your best clothes,” Dad said. He had just told us he was offered a high-paying job with a big construction company in Cocoa Beach, Florida. “We’re going out to dinner and you can order off the expensive side of the menu.”

“All right!” Pete yelled.

Betsy was suspicious.

“Don’t give me that look,” Dad said, turning toward her. “I talked with the boss today and it’s in the bag.”

“I didn’t say a word,” she said with indifference. “It’s just that seeing is believing.”

Mom gave him a kiss. She was three months pregnant and touched her belly with both hands when she leaned forward. “Don’t mind her,” Mom said. “It’s a stage she’s passing through.” Then she gave Betsy a “straighten-up” glare.

“My ship came in,” Dad said, shaking his head. “I’ve been waiting a long time, and now it’s arrived.”

“What about the dinner I cooked?” asked Betsy. She sounded hurt. She had made lima-bean soup. His favorite. “Cat-box soup” is what I called it. The smell of it nearly gagged me.

“We’ll eat it tomorrow,” he said while doing a smooth shadow dance around the living room. “Everybody knows soup is better the second day.” Suddenly, he clapped his hands together. “Hey, let’s go! I’m the dad and you are a family on the move.” He smiled his big smile. The one I had seen when things worked out the way he said they would.

I ran up the hall and into my room. I put on a dark shirt, because I’m a slob when I eat Italian food. Once I wore a good white shirt and Mom made me wear a napkin tucked into my shirt collar with the ends gathered up over my shoulders. I looked like I was sitting in a baby chair with a bib on.

We went to the Venice Restaurant. It was decorated with murals of gondolas and churches and beautiful houses along a wide canal. Fort Lauderdale is known as the Venice of Florida because of our canals. But it did not look anything like the Venice I’d seen in books. Dad ordered a bottle of Chianti even before we sat down. Mom raised her eyebrows.

“This is a celebration,” he announced.

“That’s what I was afraid of,” she said.

“I won’t have to work two jobs anymore. In the evening I can come home, drink a cold beer, and read the paper with my feet up.”

The wine arrived. The bottle was wrapped in straw like the ones we used at home for candle holders. “Glasses for everyone,” Dad said to the waiter.

“None for me,” Mom cut in. “I’ll have a ginger ale.”

Across the street, the old people lined up for dinner at Morrison’s Cafeteria. They all looked wealthier than we were, so why were they eating there? All the food looked like lawn clippings with hard-boiled eggs and sliced beets mixed in.

Dad poured a little wine in each of our glasses, then raised his to the ceiling. “Cheers,” he said brightly. He looked happy and hopeful. “To the future.”

We all clinked glasses. The warm wine tasted like grape juice and gasoline.

“Tell us about your new job?” Betsy asked.

“As soon as I know more, I’ll tell you,” Dad said and poured himself another glass of wine.

“Then tell us more about Cocoa Beach,” she said.

“It’s a growing town. With Cape Kennedy aiming for Mars, now there are a lot of jobs. The schools are good because there are so many government brats in them. There’s a good hospital for Mom. The beaches are great, and housing is cheap. What else can I say? The place is a paradise. Oh, and I thought we could all drive up there some day this week and look around.”

“Great,” said Mom, “I’ll make some housing appointments.”

“Houses are shootin’ up like mushrooms,” he said, “and at good prices.”

Betsy and I exchanged glances. If we went up during the week, it meant getting out of school for one day, maybe two. We were almost at the end of the school year. Betsy had been saying her teachers were worn down and showing science movies all day long. Mrs. Marshall still had us going in circles. We were on our tenth copybook, and when we weren’t occupied with that, we were filling in the blanks on a mimeographed lesson plan she passed out. I could tell that she was sick of us; we were sick of her months ago.

The waitress came and we ordered. Once the food arrived, we didn’t keep up the conversation. I was staring out into the future. What would it be like? I’ll be going from elementary school to junior high. From having a few friends to having no friends again. From being a home renter to being an owner. Plus, there will be a new baby in the family. We already had lived in nine different houses. This was my fifth school out of six grades. Was this going to be a fresh start? Or was this only another beginning without an end, like all the others?

“Jack,” Mom said to me, “pay attention to what you are doing.”

I looked down at my dinner. I had twirled nearly the entire plate of spaghetti into a large knot around my fork.

“Maybe we should learn some table manners,” Betsy said, “before we move into a new neighborhood, so that people don’t think we were raised in a cave.”

“Sorry.”

Betsy shook her head. I knew she wanted us to make a good impression when we arrived. I agreed with her. I just had a hard time doing it.

On the way home everything looked different to me. The neighborhood had changed. Suddenly, it seemed so temporary, like the fake cowboy towns built for making movies. The flat fronts of the houses were all that seemed real. If I could look behind them, I was sure I’d find the walls propped up with two-by-fours.

When we pulled up into our driveway, I ran to the front door and was relieved when the door opened and I was able to step inside and make it back to my bedroom. I looked at my bed and chest of drawers. I opened my closet. I reached under my mattress and touched my diary. Everything was exactly where I had left it. I knew it couldn’t be any other way. But I felt different. Something in me had been flattened. The real me had already moved out of town, and the fake me was left behind.

Dad didn’t want to go to Cocoa Beach over the weekend. He had tickets to the Jackie Gleason Golf Tournament in Fort Lauderdale. I didn’t mind playing golf, but watching other people play was boring. Dad once took me to caddy for him. I dragged his clubs across eighteen miles of desert under a blistering sun. On every hole I asked if I could buy a Coke. He never took me again.

Some of the kids in the neighborhood talked about applying to be professional caddies at the tournament, but I didn’t have enough experience. I walked over to the Pagodas’ side yard with Pete. Frankie and Suzie were squirting lighter fluid down an ants’ hole and setting it on fire. It looked like a tiny volcano erupting, and the lines of angry ants scattered like fleeing villagers. Frankie had a rubber model of Godzilla that he chased the ants with. He crushed one and screamed, “Oh no! Godzilla has flattened the emperor’s son!”

“The Japanese Army is fighting back,” cried Suzie. She squirted fluid on Godzilla and set him on fire. “Godzilla is on fire,” she yelled, “and he’s melting.”

When Godzilla had turned into a glob of bubbling rubber, they lost interest in the game. “Hey,” I said. “I have a great idea for our own golf tournament.”

“We’re not allowed to play golf,” Suzie said.

“Why?” asked Pete.

“We were blasting tee shots down the hallway and one of the balls smashed against the fish tank and it exploded and all the water and fish went all over the dining room and my dad went ballistic and said we could never play again.”

“But we’ll play outside,” I explained.

“We can’t do that, either,” said Frankie. “Before we blew out the fish tank, I smashed the windshield on the station wagon, and he went ape.”

I couldn’t believe I had discovered something that they were not allowed to do. And that it was
golf!

“Do you guys want to go swimming in the pool?” Suzie asked. “We poured a bottle of dish soap in, so it’s real bubbly.”

I could see trouble. “I don’t think so,” I said to Pete and shook my head. “Are you sure you won’t play?” I asked again.

“We can’t even if we could,” said Frankie. “We’re driving up to West Virginia to pick Gary up from camp.”

“From
prison!”
Suzie blurted out.

“Mom said to say
camp,”
Frankie said, and he punched her arm.

“I’ll pour lighter fluid on you,” she cried.

I grabbed the lighter fluid from her hand. “Stop it,” I said and threw it to the other side of the yard. “Come on, Pete.”

We walked back home. “Okay,” I said. “We’ll have a two-person tournament. We aren’t gonna see any of these people again, anyway.” We sat down on my bedroom floor with a big sheet of paper and a Magic Marker. “Here’s the plan. We make our own golf course in the neighborhood. And it has to be tough. Like, we have to put a hole in all the most difficult yards.”

“Okay.”

I drew the neighborhood houses and wrote in the names of the people who lived in them. “You pick first.”

“The Metrics’,” he said. “Michelle gave me a chocolate, and after I ate it, she told me it was dog candy.”

I put an X on their yard. I picked the Rooks’ because of Gary’s nasty mom. Pete picked the Diehls’ because their mean Doberman pinscher was on a chain. I picked the Peabos’ because Mr. Peabo drank too much and when he got sick Mrs. Peabo kicked him out of the house and he crawled around on the lawn and vomited all over. “Just think if your ball lands in a puddle of puke,” I said and made a stinky face.

Pete picked the Irwins’ because they had friends who belonged to a mean motorcycle gang. I picked the Gibbonses’ because Mrs. Gibbons had yelled at me for throwing a rock at her mailbox. Pete picked the Pagodas’ because Gary was coming home. I picked the cranky old couple, the “crazies,” because they always yelled out their window at us if we cut through their yard. We didn’t know their real name. “And we’ll put the last hole at our house,” I said, “because Dad will go berserk if he knows we are doing this.”

Pete looked nervous.

“Don’t worry,” I whispered. “We’re going to do all of this when Dad’s asleep.”

“What about alligators?”

“I’ll handle them. What we need is equipment.” I wrote up a list: coffee cans, tennis balls, golf clubs, orange spray paint, a flashlight, and a trophy. “We better use tennis balls instead of golf balls. We don’t want to break anyone’s windows.”

I sent Pete to find coffee cans, while I went down to the Salvation Army Thrift Store. It was my favorite store because everything was so inexpensive. Plus, they had stuff that wasn’t for sale in any other store. I wished Mom would let me decorate my room with the great old stuff they had. I wanted the matching lamps made out of carved Mexican dancers. They had old brass beds that were tarnished, or painted in the last century. Some of the furniture was futuristic-looking, as though it came out of the Jetsons cartoons. I really wanted the old dark furniture that had carved panels of men and women and animals and plants. They also had really old Spanish-style furniture that was half chewed by termites and so old-looking that Christopher Columbus might have brought it over. Plus, I knew some of it had secret panels. I rapped on all the spots I thought might open up and reveal a hidden treasure. But I only woke up a lot of termites.

I went over to the trophy case and picked out a huge golf trophy, and a smaller one for second place. It didn’t bother me that a Mr. Justman had won the first one in 1947 and a Mrs. Lower had won hers in 1968. They were a dollar each.

When I returned home and showed them to Pete, he got excited. “I’m gonna win first prize,” he said.

“Did you get the coffee cans?” I asked.

“I forgot,” he said.

“What about the flashlight?”

He forgot that, too. “What have you been doing?” I asked.

“Watching the golf tournament on TV,” he said. “I’m learning how to do it.”

“Great idea,” I said. “Maybe we’ll see Dad in the crowd.”

I sat down and stared intently at the gallery of people on the television. All those golf fans dressed in bright pink and lime green and pure white made my eyes hurt.

“Jack,” Mom said when she came into the room. “Do you know what your father would say to you if he could see you watching him?”

I thought about it for a second. “No.”

“He’d say, ‘Didn’t I tell you to mow the lawn today?’”

I groaned. “I’ll get right to it.”

On Sunday, we didn’t have all our golf course built. We spray-painted the tennis balls and the insides of the coffee cans bright orange so we could see them at night. We scrounged through Dad’s workbench until we found two batteries for my flashlight. Pete and I picked out a golf club from Dad’s golf bag and practiced in the back yard. We put a can over on its side and tried to putt the balls into it. We took about ten shots each just to get across the back yard and into the can. “We’ll practice this week,” I said to Pete, “and next weekend we’ll have the tournament.”

“Great,” he said. “When we move to Cocoa Beach, Dad said I could take golf lessons and join a golf club.”

“Wow.” I sighed. I was hoping for piano lessons. We hadn’t been able to afford it, which upset me because I had a suspicion that I could be a great piano player if only I had the chance. I was the only kid I knew who asked his parents for piano lessons. All the kids who took them hated them and made fun of their teachers. I used to want to trade places with those kids and live their lives. But now I wouldn’t have to feel like I wanted out of our family just because I wanted things we couldn’t normally afford. Now I could have everything I wanted. I sat down on the grass and stared out into space. It felt good just to think that things were really getting better in the rich land of Cocoa Beach.