Crash (2 page)

He handed me the turtle, and I took off on my bike. “Hey!” he yelled. I steered with one hand and pedaled like a demon up the sidewalk. Then I quick-stopped, put the turtle on its back in the middle of the sidewalk, and called, “Ha-ha, tricked ya!” I took off. I stopped again as he was picking up the turtle. “My name’s not Humphrey, either!” I rode on.

By the time I got home, a question was really bugging me. I felt silly asking my four-year-old sister, but there was no one else around.

She was collecting those bugs that roll themselves up into little gray balls. She had them all lined up. She was being real quiet so the bugs would think it was okay to open up. As soon as one of them did, she touched it with the tip of her finger and it balled right up again and sent her into giggles.

“Do we have a great-grandfather?” I said.

She went, “Shhh!” and gave roe a dirty look. She whispered, “I don’t know. Ask Mommy.”

Well, it turned out that we didn’t have one, but I didn’t learn it from my mother. I was staying out of her way for a while. Because when she came outside that day you could hear her all over town: “Where
are my PANSIES.?’”

Next time I heard him he was calling, “Hey, John! Hey, John!”

He was running up the street. I was busy peeling bark off a tree in the yard.

I glared at him. “Who says my name’s John?”

He came up to me, huffing, button going in and out. “Your sister. She said your nickname is Crash, but your real name is John Patrick Coogan.”

I didn’t know whether to be mad at him or her. “What were you doing talking to her?”

“Yesterday. I was looking for you. I saw her out front here. She didn’t know where you were.”

“I was out on business,” I said. He never seemed to turn off the goofy grin. It was starting to bug me more than the button. “You want to know my name,” I told him, “you check with me.”

“Okay,” he said, still grinning, “Can I call you Crash?”

Any other time, to any other person, I would have said yes. But even that felt like too much to give him, so I said, “No.”

He blinked. “No?”

“That’s what I said.”

He shrugged. “So what can I call you?”

“Call me horsemeat.”

He blinked some more, t was almost starting to enjoy this kid, like I was the cat and he was my mouse. He started to say something. I poked him in the chest. “You call me that and I’ll cut your hair off.” I held up the kitchen knife that I was peeling the tree with. I had him so bamboozled he didn’t know which way was up. I was practically choking trying not to laugh.

“So,” I said, “why were you looking for me?”

His old beaming face came back. “I wanted to ask you if you would like to come to dinner at my house.”

The only word I could think of was “Why?”

“Because you’re my first friend in Pennsylvania. We do that all the time in North Dakota, have our friends over for dinner. Don’t you do that here?”

“We do what we want,” I said. I was stalling for time. The last thing I needed was to have dinner with this family of hambones. And I didn’t like him calling me friend. On the other hand, I was kind of curious to get an inside look at the boss dorks and the garage that thought it was a house. But if I did go, I had to make him pay for it.

“Maybe I’ll come,” I said, “but only if you beat me to the draw.”

“Draw?” he said.

“Yeah. Water pistols. Wait here.”

I ran to my room. I got two water guns, loaded them at the
bathroom sink, and brought them out. I gave him one. “Here’s yours. Stick it in your pocket like this. We stand five steps apart. At the count of three, draw and fire. Got it?”

He didn’t say anything for a long time. The grin was gone. He just stared at the green plastic gun in his hand. He wasn’t even holding it right. He was biting his lip. Finally he looked up at me. “I can’t.”

I gawked at him. “You
can’t
?”

He shook his head.

“Why not?”

He looked me dead in the eye. “I’m a Quaker.”

“A
Quaker?”
I screeched. “What’s a
Quaker?”
The only Quaker I had ever heard of was Quaker Oats cereal.

“It’s somebody who doesn’t believe in violence,” he said.

I told him, “Who says you have to believe in it? You just do it.”

“I don’t fight in wars.”

I laughed. I waved my pistol in his face. “You hambone, this ain’t war, this is water guns.”

He held his out to me. “I don’t play with guns.”

I didn’t take it. Instead, I took a step back, aimed, pulled the trigger, and shot him right between the eyes. “Bull’s-eye!”

He didn’t move. The gun hung limp in his hand. Water trickled down his nose and around his mouth.

“Don’t you have water guns in North Dakota?” I asked him.

“Some people do,” he said. “Not me.”

“Well, you’re in Pennsylvania now, chief.” I aimed again and fired.

He still didn’t move. This was crazy. Whoever heard of a kid who didn’t shoot back? Then all of a sudden I got it. “Hah!” I sneered. “Now I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to trick me.” I backed up a couple of steps, went into a crouch,
swung my gun arm up, straight out stiff, left hand clamping right wrist, like I saw on TV. “Well, it ain’t gonna work, sonny.
Hasta la vista
, hambone. Bam! Bam! Bam!” I fired three quick ones. He didn’t move, except to blink when water hit his eyes. I couldn’t believe anybody could be so dumb.

“Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!”

I stepped to the side to get a better angle on the button.

“Bam! Bam! Bam!” Tracer jets of water smacked the button while he stood there drenched and monkey-faced and droopy. I was laughing so hard I thought I’d bust a gut.

I aimed again. “Bam!” The gun spluttered. Out of ammo. I laughed harder. I could hardly stand.

He held out his gun. His loaded weapon. Held it out to me.

I stopped laughing. I stared at him, at his gun. I swiped it from his hand.

“That ain’t the way it goes!” I yelled into his dripping face. “You’re s’posed to shoot back! You’re suppose to!” I turned the gun on my own face and pulled the trigger. “See?” I fired again. “Is that too hard for ya?”

I wound up and whipped his gun over the roof of our house and into the backyard. “Dummkopf.” I slammed my own gun to the ground. I stomped and stomped on it till it was green plastic splinters. I stormed up to the garage, over to the flower garden, out to the street, back to him.

I took a deep breath. I got up in his face. I stared. I dared him to blink first. I wanted to hate him, I wanted to stay mad, but I was having problems.

“Okay,” I said. I backed off. “Okay, I’ll give you one more chance to get me to dinner. If you beat me in wrestling. Are Quakers allowed to wrestle?”

He sniffed, he licked his lips, he pinched a drop of water from the end of his nose, he smiled. “Sure!”

We went to the grass. We wrestled. I pinned him in about two seconds.

“Okay,” I said, “one last chance. Hit the telephone pole. Ten stones.”

I hit the pole with six stones. He never came close.

We long-jumped. We stood on our heads. We spit for distance.

He was hopeless.

I shook my head. “Aren’t you good at anything?”

He didn’t think long. “I’m a good runner.”

I grinned to myself. “Okay,” I said, “one really,
really
last chance. A race.” I pointed. “Up to the mailbox and back to”— I ran my sneaker toe along the edge of the driveway—“here.”

We crouched, toes on the crack. I called: “Ready! … Set! … Go!”

I was six years old and had never lost a race in my life. That’s why I was so surprised when I reached out to push off the cool blue metal of the mailbox to see his hand there, too. On the way back I kicked in the afterburners and zipped across the finish line. His footsteps were loud behind me.

We stood there bent over, catching our breaths. I heard him say, “Dam!” He stamped his foot. First time I ever saw him mad.

“Don’t take it so hard,” I told him. “Nobody beats me.”

“That’s not it,” he said. He had on the glum monkey face again.

“So what
is it
?”

He sniffed. “Now you’re not coming.” He headed off down the street.

I let him get five or six houses away before I called, “Yo, Webb!”

He turned, sagging.

“I changed my mind. I’ll come.”

It took a minute to sink in. Then he jumped like a jack-in-the-box. He yelled, “Yahoo!” and ran on home.

That night, even after I closed my eyes, I kept seeing our hands hit the mailbox together.

My mother didn’t like the peel job on the tree, so I was grounded for three days. My sister collected the scraps of bark and got some Elmer’s glue and pasted them back onto the tree trunk like a jigsaw puzzle.

When I knocked on the door of the garage-house, I could hear him squealing “He’s here!” and running. The door flew open. He looked at me like he hadn’t seen me in years. “Hi, John! Come on in.”

“It’s Crash,” I told him.

He didn’t answer, just closed the door behind me. The white-haired man and a lady showed up. The kid stood between us. He straightened up, put on this serious, grown-up face, and said, “John, I would like you to meet my mother and father, Mr. Raymond A. Webb and Mrs. Glenda W. Webb. Mother, Father, this is my best friend, John Patrick Coogan.”

They got all smiley and stuck out their hands to shake and said like a duet: “Nice to meet you, John.”

“Call me Crash,” I said.

The mother just stood there grinning. The father nodded. “Crash it is.”

“I crashed into my cousin with my football helmet and knocked her all the way out into the snow.”

He nodded some more, he whistled. “I see.”

The mother spoke up. “Penn, why don’t you take John— uh, Crash—to your room for a few minutes till dinner is ready.”

Every other house I ever saw, you had to go upstairs to a bedroom. Here you just went a couple of steps from the front room and bam, you were there.

“Didn’t you ever live in a two-story house?” I asked him.

He thought. “In North Dakota we lived on the second floor of a house, but somebody else lived on the first floor.”

I shook my head. “Weird.”

His room was weird, too. “Where’s your toys?” I said.

He dove under his bed and pulled something out. “Here!”

“What is it?”

“A Conestoga wagon. It’s just like the one my great-great-
great
-grandfather Webb went out to North Dakota in. My great-grandfather made it for me. He said there’s a place in North Dakota where you can still see the ruts in the ground from all the wagon trains.”

It was wood, not even painted, old-looking, about ready for the junk heap. He pulled it across the floor.

“It wobbles,” I said.

He just kept grinning at it, like it was going to stand up on its bind wheels and bark.

I had been thinking about how some kids call their grandfathers “Pop-Pop.” “So,” I said, “what do you call him? Pop-Pop-Pop?”

I was too busy laughing at myself to hear his answer. I looked around. “So where’s the rest?”

Now he was pulling the wagon in circles. “The rest of what?”

“Your toys.”

He pointed to the wagon. “There it is.”

“I mean the rest.” I looked under his bed. I nosed into his closet. “Dump trucks. Fire engines. Cars. Cranes. Steam shovels. Batman. Spider-Man. Dino—”

“Wait!” he squawked. He ran to a bookcase filled with books and grabbed an old pretzel tin. He pried off the lid. “It’s not a toy, I guess, but it is pretty neat.”

I looked. “Dirt?”

“It’s dried mud from the Missouri River. There’s an old legend. If you scoop up some from the bottom of the river and you wait fifty years, the mud can heal whatever’s wrong with you. All you have to do is add water and make it mud again and put it where it hurts, and the hurt goes away.”

I snorted. “You believe that?”

He shrugged. “Maybe. Anyway, my great-grandfather got this mud from the bottom of the river sixty-four years ago. Next to my Conestoga wagon, it’s the best thing I have.” He closed the tin and put it back on the shelf.

Mud.

I shook my head and went to the window. How pitiful
could you get? He had only one toy to his name—and what was worse, the dumb porkroll didn’t even know how bad off he was.

It was depressing to be in that room, so I was glad when his mother called, “Boys! Dinner! Come and get it!”

At first I thought they were hamburgers. But the color wasn’t right. Fish cakes? I took a bite. Big mistake.

Both parents were looking at me. The mother said, “Penn, didn’t you tell your friend?”

Webb gawked at his mother. His eyes bulged. A pained look came over his face. “Oops … I think I forgot.”

“Forgot what?” I said.

“You didn’t really forget, did you, son?” the father said.

Webb looked sheepish. “I guess not.”

I guessed I was getting a little tired of all this claptrap. I aimed myself straight at Webb. “What am I supposed to know?”

Webb’s eyes shifted to me. “I was supposed to tell you we’re vegetarians.”

I had never heard the word. “What’s that?” I said. Meanwhile I’m thinking: Are these people ninja tomatoes or something?

“We don’t eat meat,” Webb said.

“And you didn’t tell him,” said the father, “because you were afraid if you did, he might not want to come for dinner.”

Webb nodded. His face was in his plate.

I was still wondering if I heard him right. “You mean, you don’t eat hot dogs?”

All three said, “No.”

“Hamburgers?”

“No.”

“Chicken? Turkey? Steaks?”

The father propped his elbows on the table, clamped his hands together, smiled. “Crash, I guess we just feel that animals are God’s creatures and that it’s not for us to, uh, consume them.”

I still had the first bite in my mouth. I figured whatever it was, it wasn’t one of God’s creatures. I pointed to my plate. “So what’s that?”

The mother chirped, “Oatburger,” all cheery.

“Look,” said Webb. He poured pancake syrup over his. “They’re great this way.”