Read Jack on the Tracks Online
Authors: Jack Gantos
The next morning I was coming out of the bathroom when Betsy passed me in the hall.
“What is that smell?” she hooted.
“What smell?” I replied innocently.
She leaned forward and sniffed my neck and ears and shirt, then she paused. “I’ve got it,” she exclaimed. “It’s new-car smell!”
“It’s just some cologne I’m wearing for show-and-tell,” I said blandly.
“Where did you get it?”
“The car-parts store,” I said. “New-car smell is one of my favorite smells and I can get it in a spray can.”
“You’re nuts,” she said. “I love anchovies but I don’t rub them all over myself.”
“Well, you should,” I snapped back. “It might help improve your social life.”
“Your teacher is going to adore you,” Betsy mumbled acidly as she marched into the bathroom and slammed the door.
At school Mrs. Pierre had us line up at the door. She sniffed the first girl in line. “White Shoulders,” she announced, naming the perfume. “Am I correct?”
“Yes,” the girl replied, amazed as if her deepest secret had been revealed.
Then Mrs. Pierre sniffed us one after another, showing off her “olfactory intelligence,” as she called it.
“Old Spice. Shalimar. Canoe. Joy. English Leather,” she rattled off. “Chanel No. 5, good choice,” she said, patting a girl on her head. “Shows excellent French taste.” Then she smelled me. Her nose got closer and closer until the tip of it was pressed down inside my shirt collar. Finally she pulled back and said, “I give up. What is that?”
“New-car smell,” I said proudly, and reached into my book bag and removed the spray can.
“Well,” she said, bewildered. “That certainly is
tasteful.”
She looked over at the girls and rolled her eyes.
“Boys,”
she groaned. “Their creativity is without limits.”
I smiled weakly. At least she thought wearing new-car smell was creative.
Mrs. Pierre leaned forward and smelled the next kid. But then she said her nose was clogged up and she quit without naming the perfume.
As I shuffled toward my desk, a couple guys gave me the thumbs-up, which made me feel better. But I knew the teacher thought I was still an uncivilized boy made of snakes and snails.
After everyone had settled down, Mrs. Pierre stood on the X at the front of the class and tapped the side of her nose with one finger. “See,” she said. “The sense of smell can be trained. By the end of the year you will be able to tell, even in the dark, just who is who in this room … especially if they smell like a car.”
Then she blew her nose with so much force it made the sound of heavy furniture being dragged across a rough floor. Carefully she unfolded the tissue and examined what she had expelled. She had a look on her face of a psychic examining tea leaves. It was as though she was reading a message about her future. It must have been good because she smiled broadly before closing the tissue and slipping it into her pocket.
That night I pulled out my journal and had a sudden insight. I knew I was growing older because I could weigh both Mrs. Pierre’s good and bad qualities and come up with a sense of what I liked or disliked about her. When I was younger I could only pick out one thing about a person and get stuck on that. If a person was funny, I’d like them no matter if they were serial killers, and if a person had the annoying habit of chewing gum like a cow then I didn’t care for them even though they might be a saint. So even though Mrs. Pierre didn’t love my cologne, I still liked her idea about educating the senses.
We were next assigned to bring something to represent our sense of sound. I wanted to please Mrs. Pierre. I didn’t want her to think I was a complete moron, so I gave the assignment some careful thought. We had a record with French children’s songs and so I listened to it over and over and practiced singing.
The next day Mrs. Pierre called on me first. I knew she would because I had been so weird with my sense of smell. But I was ready for her.
I stood up and sang,
“Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques, Dormez-vous, dormez-vous
…” And I finished the whole song in French.
Mrs. Pierre was even more wide-eyed than usual. “Bravo! Bravo!” she shouted, and began to clap. “Please,” she beckoned me, “step to the front of the class and take a bow.”
I did. I bent over and peeked out at the girls’ side. They were smiling and clapping. Then I looked over at the boys’ side. They were clapping as if a gun was held to their heads. Suddenly, I had another insight. Mrs. Pierre was right. Girls are nice and supportive and boys always try to make everyone feel like a jerk. I had always figured that kids who did everything the teacher asked were just brownnosers trying to get a better grade. Now, it seemed that they were not brownnosers, they were smart kids who were trying really hard to learn what the teacher was getting at.
When I came home from school I found Betsy in the kitchen, working on the crossword puzzle.
“Did you ever have an insight?” I asked Betsy.
She looked up at me and frowned. “Give me an example,” she said.
“Like I used to think brownnosers were jerks but now I understand where they are coming from and I want to be one of them.”
“Interesting,” she mused. “I think I’m having an
insight
right now.”
“Really?” I said. “That is so cool. What are you thinking?”
“That you have bugged me in the past. That you are bugging me now. And you will continue—in your unrelenting way—to bug me for the rest of my life,” she said.
“That’s too obvious to be an insight,” I said, catching on that she was making fun of me. “You have to try harder.”
“How’s this,” she said, and held her temples and squinted. “In about thirty seconds you’ll either be out of my sight or dead.”
“Okay, okay,” I moaned. “I just thought you’d like to know that I’m getting smarter.”
“I hate to be the one to inform you,” she said. “But you must be the last person on the planet to figure out that if you do what the teacher assigns, and put some effort into the job, you will learn something.”
“Better late than never,” I sang out.
“What’s a five-letter word for beat it?” she asked.
“S-c-r-a-m,” I spelled out as I dashed down the hall.
The rest of the week I did exactly what Mrs. Pierre expected. For the sense of taste I brought in french fries but I called them
pommes frites.
She loved that. And for the sense of sight I brought in a library book on the French painter Monet. She thought I was wonderful and went on and on about what a genius Monet was and how I had a very refined eye for “art appreciation.” And for the sense of touch I brought in Betsy’s fake ponytail because it was in the shape of a French twist. Mrs. Pierre loved it. She even tried it on for the class.
At the end of the fifth day, after everyone had finished their show-and-tell for the sense of touch, Mrs. Pierre took her place on the X and gave us the last assignment.
“Now that we have mastered the senses, I want you to write a story about something memorable. And, I want you to use all of your senses when writing the story, so when I read it I can smell, feel, taste, hear, and touch what you are talking about.”
Okay, I thought to myself. This is the time for me to really show her what I can do.
It was a Friday night but I was ready to get to work. I had given some thought to the story I had wanted to write and was eager to get started. It was about something incredible that had happened to me the week before and it involved all my senses. I went into my room, pulled out my diary, and got busy.
THE UGLY THING
by Jack Henry
My friend Tack Smith called me up on the telephone. “Come over to my house,” he said all out of breath
(SOUND).
“I just got back from the doctor’s and have something awesome for you to see
(SIGHT).”
“Okay,” I said, even though I really didn’t want to. Something weird had recently happened at his house. His mom and dad had split up. But instead of going their separate ways they only walked across the street. Tack’s dad had traded wives with the man, Mr. Butters, who lived directly across the road. Or you could say that Tack’s mom and Mrs. Butters had traded husbands. Either way, it was very weird at his house, and even though Tack hadn’t talked about it I knew it had to be strange for him. The only thing he had said was that he woke up in his own bed and showered and dressed then carried his dirty clothes across the street where his real mom fed him breakfast.
So, when he asked me to come over I thought it was my duty as a friend. Everyone thought that he had been getting sick and skinny because he was depressed from the parent-swap deal, but it turns out that he had a tapeworm in his belly. I figured he had saved it and wanted me to see it.
I had put on my yellow plastic raincoat in case the visit got messy, but Mom stopped me and made me put on something decent. She said that the new mom was trash and she didn’t want me looking like trash too. Mom called her a “gold digger” because since she moved in with Tack’s dad she made him buy her a new Cadillac, install central air-conditioning, and lay multicolored shag wall-to-wall carpet in the house. So I left my door on my way to Tack’s to see his tapeworm as if I were dressed for church. I walked the twenty-five feet to his front door and took a deep breath and knocked. Just in case the new mom was spying on me through the peephole I hummed a church hymn and twiddled my thumbs in a circle like a well-mannered choirboy. But Tack was waiting for me. He whipped the door open. “You look like a Bible salesman,” he said. “Come down to my bedroom and feast your eyes on the Eighth Wonder of the World.”
As we darted through the living room his new mom looked up from her
HOUSE BEAUTIFUL
magazine and gave me a tight-lipped glare as though she had been waiting forever in a doctor’s office. It seemed she was in a lot of pain so I just waved and kept walking. Tack’s room was the same as it ever was
—
a total blowout wreck that was so dirty my mom would have had a heart attack. I loved it. Books were piled up as high as the curtain rods. Every animal cage he ever had was still there, including a few of the animals that were dried out like tiny mummies. A mobile of wired-together animal bones clattered in a circle overhead as they spun from the blade of a ceiling fan.
There was a mayonnaise jar sitting on his bed. Inside was something that looked like a giant rubber band. I couldn’t make out a head or tail. “Awesome,” I remarked, pointing at it.
“Seven feet long,” he said, raising his shirt and rubbing his sunken belly.
“How’d you get it?” I asked, wanting to avoid the same fate.
“Raw hamburger meat,” he explained. “I used to eat bits and pieces of it out of the bowl as my real mom mixed it up.”
I thought Tack’s real mom might have sent his new mom some raw hamburger and now she had a tapeworm which is why she looked so grumpy.
Tack began to unscrew the jar. “Let’s measure it,” he said. “I want to be sure. Maybe it is a world record and I can be famous.” He fished the end of the worm out with two fingers and began to gently unravel a piece of it across the bedsheet. It smelled like pickle juice
(SMELL).
I spotted a ruler on his desk. I got it and began to hold it against the white worm. “How’d you know it was in you?” I asked.
“Stool sample,” he replied. “The doctor gave me something that looked like a Tupperware container and I had to poop in it and take it to a lab. They did some tests and the doctor called and told my mom.”
“How’d they get it out?” I asked, imagining they might have had to use a long pair of tweezers.
“Poison,” he said and made a yucky face. “The taste almost killed me.”
“Then what?” I asked.
“It died in my belly,” he said, “and I pooped it out.”
“Gross,” I shrieked, and felt my butt pucker up
(TOUCH).
“What did it feel like coming out?”
“The only thing I could think of at the time,” he said, “is once I was picking my nose and I got the hard, crusty part of a booger between my fingers and slowly began to pull it out. And as I did so I could feel something tickling me way up behind the corner of my eye. And as I pulled I felt the tail of the booger slide all the way down the inside of my nose till I had it out. It was all jelly white like a squid tentacle and about four inches long. My biggest booger ever. And that is what the worm felt like, a cold tickle.”
I could hardly believe what he had just said. I stood there looking at his face, and then at the worm, and back at his face again.
“Wow,” I said. I just didn’t know what else to say. It was all so weird. Then finally I said, “What are you going to do with it?”
“Eat it,” he replied ghoulishly. “Give it a taste of its own medicine.”
He took a knife and fork out of his desk drawer and sliced off an inch.
“Are you joking?” I asked, wide-eyed.
“No,” he said. “I asked you over so you’d be a witness when I told everyone at school.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m watching.”
He reached into his desk and pulled out a little paper packet of salt. He poured some on, then quickly sucked the piece of worm off the fork and swallowed
(TASTE).
“Gave him a taste of his own medicine,” he remarked.
“That is sick,” I said. “Sick, sick, sick.”
“Excellent,” he said, and grinned. “Just remember, I’m the number-one sicko in this neighborhood.” He held up his pointer finger like a champion. “Number one and don’t you forget it.”
Suddenly I had an insight. I figured Tack was fooling me. “That wasn’t a worm,” I said. “That was really spaghetti!”
He smiled. “Good guess, Henry. We have a new pasta machine that can make a spaghetti strand from here to the moon.” He opened another drawer and pulled out a baby-food jar. “This is the real worm,” he said, frowning. “Only about a foot long. But saying it was seven feet and all made for a better story.”
“Well, a tapeworm is pretty gross no matter how big.”
“I wanted the world record,” he said. “I was going for twenty feet.”
“Eat some more raw meat and give it a shot,” I said.
“Not yet,” he said. “First I’ll have to fatten up, or there will be nothing left of me but a big, drippy worm.”
THE END