Crash (7 page)

Abby turned the sign around so we all could see. It was painted in big red letters. It said:

THE MALL
MUST FALL

She wore a button that said the same thing.

My mother cleared her throat. “What’s this about?”

Abby marched around the dining room table. “We’re gonna demonstrate against the new mall. We’re not gonna let them build it.”

Abby and I fought over who got to carry Scooter’s suitcase up to his room. I won.

As usual, when he came to his picture in the hallway gallery, he had to stop and say, “Now there’s a handsome young man. I wonder who that is.”

The painting shows this sailor with his white hat cocked down to one eyebrow and his mouth open like he’s saying something. If it wasn’t hanging in our hallway, I never would have guessed it was my grandfather, the sailor is so young. My mother told us it was the first portrait she ever did. She was still in high school.

He knocked on the wall. “Nice bulkhead too.”

We groaned, which was what he wanted. It’s Navy talk. A bulkhead is a wall, a door is a hatch, the kitchen is the galley, the dining room is the mess, a stairway is a ladder.

We dragged him away from the bulkhead to his room. It was the guest room, actually, but when we turned on the light and walked in, I had the warmest feeling, knowing he’d be there for good.

I put his suitcase on the bed. “Guess this isn’t a guest room anymore,” I said. The three of us looked at each other and broke into giggles.

Scooter started unpacking. Abby said, “Aren’t you going to miss the ocean?”

Since he retired, Scooter has been living in a rooming house in Cape May, New Jersey. He said he wanted to be able to see the ocean every day.

He took out a stack of boxer shorts with red and blue anchors on them. “Sure,” he said. “When I start feeling that way, I’ll just fill up the bathtub.”

Before he could stop her, Abby snatched the top pair of shorts and pulled them on over her jeans. She checked herself in the mirror. “Oh, Scooter, can I have these, please? Just one pair?”

Scooter looked at me like he had just seen an oyster from outer space. I shrugged. “Fifth-grade girls.”

Abby crouched, pleading in front of him. “Pretty please with sugar?”

Scooter just blinked. He still wasn’t connecting. “See what your mother says.”

Abby squealed and gave us a fashion show.

I asked Scooter, “What about your sea chest?”

The sea chest is a trunk filled with the stuff he picked up from all over the world. A wooden mask from Africa. A silk robe from Japan. We would rummage through the chest whenever we visited him in Cape May.

He held up a key. “I put it in storage.”

“Aren’t you bringing it with you?” I asked him.

He took out our school pictures, the big ones with frames. “This is the important stuff.” He put them on the dresser.

Later the three of us were sitting in Scooter’s bed. This is something that goes way back to when Abby and I were little. We would climb into his bed, in our pajamas. It would be dark outside; the only light would be from the hallway. And Scooter would tell us stories. Not cuddie-your-teddy-bear stories, but screamer stories, tremble stories, sink-your-teeth-into-your-teddy-bear stories.

My parents know what’s going on, so they don’t call the police when they hear their kids screaming bloody murder. And I mean to tell you, when he says he’s in the jungle on a moonless night or in the back alleys of old Hong Kong or in a salt swamp infested with sea crocs—well, you are there with him. And when he tells you to check the vine you feel on your leg, and you look and see it’s not a vine at all but a thirty-foot anaconda already coiled three times around your leg—well, you gulp and you shriek and you might even grab onto your little sister for dear life.

When we’re good and quaking under the covers, Scooter will finish up with some lighter stuff. It’s like dessert. Sometimes he’ll tell us about the foothunters of Borneo (instead of head-hunters, get it?), how they go around lopping off people’s feet and shrink them and wear them around their necks.

And always he tells us about his pet Ollie, the one-armed octopus. He found Ollie one day while skin diving off the coast of Greece. At first he thought he was looking at some kind of pregnant sea snake or a constipated eel. Then he realized he had the ends backwards—it was an octopus with seven of its legs chewed off in a fight with something Scooter hoped he would never meet up with himself.

The octopus was flopped and all forlorn on the bottom sand, trying to pry open a scallop. Its head was the size of a soft-ball, and its one tentacle was less than two feet long. Scooter took it back to the ship, named it Ollie, and for years took it almost everywhere he went in a bucket of seawater.

This time Scooter told us about the day they worked in a carnival sideshow, with Ollie as the “World’s Biggest Sea Worm!” When Scooter finished, we just sat there, soaking up the good times.

Abby piped, “We can do this every night now—forever!”

Scooter pretended to swoon.

“Scooter,” she said, then hesitated. She was thinking hard. “Scooter?”

He leaned back against the headboard with a contented smile. “Hm?”

She hesitated some more.

I knew what was happening. We both grew up thinking Scooter’s bed was the safest place in the world, like a boat in a sea full of crocs. In fact we used to call it our bed boat. It was a place where you could say things out loud that you might only
think anywhere else. I remember once when I was little, I had a big confession to make about something I had done. I waited for weeks till Scooter showed up. I grabbed him in the driveway, dragged him up to the bed, whipped my pajamas on—I couldn’t wait till dark—and confessed.

Whatever Abby wanted to say, we were probably the first people to hear it.

“Scooter”—she repeated his name a third time—“don’t you think our grass is too short?”

Scooter just stared at her.

“What kind of a dumb question is that?” I said.

“Scooter,” she whined, “isn’t it?”

“If you say it’s too short,” he said, “it’s too short.”

“And how would you like to look out the back window and see a rabbit? Or maybe even a raccoon?”

Scooter nodded. “That would be nice.”

She crouched on her knees, leaned into him, and out it came. “Well, here’s what I did. See, I found out at school there’s these things called wildlife habitats. You can have one in your own backyard, as long as it’s big enough.” She bounced on her knees, bedsprings creaked. “And ours is! I wrote away to Washington, D.C., and I found out all you need to do. Like, you have to have water and food and cover. That means tall grass and weeds and woodpiles and stuff. And nesting places. And then when you do all that, you draw it all up in a plan and send it in, and if it’s good enough they send
you a certificate and you have an official backyard wildlife habitat!”

She stopped to take a breath.

“And then,” said Scooter, “the animals move in.”

Abby yipped, “Right! Animals and birds. We give them a place to be. We save them.”

Scooter grinned. “From the shopping centers?”

“Exactly!” She reached out and stroked my arm. “And my nice, sweet, wonderful, lovable big brother is going to build me an observation post in the cherry tree so I can observe the wildlife.”

I pulled my arm away. I laughed. “Dream on.”

Scooter thought for a while, then nodded. “I like it. But it’s not my backyard.”

Meaning, of course, it’s my parents’. I was thinking of my father, who cuts the grass and edges it and weed-whacks it and has the ChemLawn truck spray it. And my mother, who used to throw fits because I dug holes and buried her flowers.

And that’s not counting my own opinion. “I think it sucks,” I said. “I’ll take a mall over a stupid raccoon any day.”

Abby pressed her palms together like a prayer. “Scooter Pop-Pop, you say something to them. Tell them what a great idea it is, okay?” She lifted her praying hands to his nose.
“Please.”

“You keep planning it,” he said. “We’ll see.”

She squealed and hugged him. He glanced over her shoulder at the clock, and I knew he was ready to kick us out. I didn’t
want to leave yet. I had to come up with something fast, a question—and there it was, right in front of me, where it must have been all my life. “Why is your name Scooter?” I said.

I was hoping there would be a half-hour story behind it, but all he said was “Oh, I was a speedy little bugger where I grew up. One time somebody said, ’Look at ’im scoot!’ and that was that.” He turned on the lamp. “Okay, swabbies, bedtime.”

Abby kissed him, I shook hands. I turned at the door. “Did you ever run in the Penn Relays?”

He frowned. “What’s that?”

“Oh, nothing. Good night.”

“Batten the hatch on your way out, mates.”

O
CTOBER 22

My grandfather came to two practices this week. Not Webb, not anybody else can say that. The other two days he was with Abby after school.

And of course today he was at our game with Donner. They were a lot better than Hillside East. They beat us 27—19. I figured it served the coach right for making me sit out the first quarter. Once I got in, I scored all three of our TDs. After each one, I pointed to Scooter in the stands and said to myself, “Take that, Webbs.”

Actually, I was kind of surprised that Webb showed up for his cheerleading duties today. This morning, as Mike and I were heading for homeroom, we came on a whole mob of kids laughing and whistling in the hallway. We nosed our way in. The target was somebody’s locker, and you didn’t have to be a genius to figure out whose. Taped onto the door was a sign saying SISSY BOOM BAH! and hanging from the clamp of the padlock was a lacy black bra.

Mike laughed. “Looks like the whole school’s taking over our job for us.”

I didn’t really care. My mind wasn’t on Webb today. It wasn’t even totally on the game with Donner. What it was on was the school dance tonight—and Jane Forbes. I hoped she would be there, and she was.

We’ve been in school over a month now, and she hasn’t said two words to me. When I ask her a question, she nods or grunts or pretends she doesn’t hear. When I wave and say hi in the hallway, she walks by with her nose in the air. And every time she does it, I get a little madder, and I like her a little more. Is that crazy or what?

I walked to the dance with Mike. He kept smirking at me. “You love her.”

“Yeah, right,” I said, “if you spell love h-a-t-e.”

“You love her.”

“If she was a guy, I woulda clubbed her a long time ago.”

His smirk doubles, and he gets into my face and says almost in a whisper: “But she
ain’t
a guy.”

I cruised the sidelines of the dance floor with Deluca and Brill and some other footballers. I knew I was looking good. I wore my new shirt for the first time. My mother had taken the price tag off, but I saw a shirt just like it at the mall. It’s worth about ten pan pizzas.

Speaking of looks: the girls. It was funny. I mean, we had just seen them in class a couple of hours before, but now the
cafeteria was a dance floor, and they weren’t girl students anymore, they were girl girls. Pure chicks.

Jane Forbes was something else. She was like another species, she left the other girls so far behind. She came in with some friends she had made since school started. She was dressed pretty much the same as at school, which didn’t surprise me. She’s not the fancy type. She was too far away and the lights were too dim for me to see her face good, but I knew there wouldn’t be much makeup. Her hair seemed a little different.

Mike poked me. “There she is.”

I pretended to look around. “Who?”

“Who do you think?”

I couldn’t stand that grin of his. Just to show him, I turned, reached out, and without really looking tapped the nearest female and said, “Want to dance?”

Mistake.

I was looking down into a face that hardly came up to my armpit. She had a big white floppy bow in her hair. She was surrounded by three other tiny tots, all with big floppy bows.