Hokey Pokey (6 page)

“I’m OK,” says LaJo.

“How do you know?”

“I checked.”

“You checked? Why?”

“I already knew about Jack. I saw him at the tracks.”

Dusty screeches. “What? You saw him? You didn’t say nothin? You didn’t tell me?”

“I wasn’t sure. Till I saw it again.”

Dusty tromps in agitated circles, faces LaJo. “So what do
you
think?”

LaJo takes a long time to answer. “I think something’s gonna happen.”

Dusty goes into a fit of blinking, as if blinking can erase what was said. “
Something?
What’s
something
? What’s
that
s’pose to mean? Something
what
?”

“You’re squeaking.”

Dusty kicks a stone at LaJo. He walks off as if he’s never coming back, comes back, snaps, “When?”

“When what?”

“When’s this
something
gonna happen? Whatever it is.”

LaJo shrugs. “I don’t know.” He lets out a long breath. “All I know is the tattoo is fading. Nobody else’s is. Not yours. Not mine. Only his. It’s fading. I don’t know what it means neither. Except something’s gonna happen.” He looks off. “Soon.”

Dusty shrieks:
“Soon?”

LaJo shrugs. “It’s fading fast. So … soon. You ain’t gotta be Einstein.”

The moment has become too hot. They back off, stare emptily at little kids kicking a soccer ball around. LaJo nods beyond. “Look.”

It’s the runty hellion, the walking explosion, on his haunches, watching the ballkickers.

“That’s the kid that did it,” says Dusty.

“Did what?”

“Dumped a Newbie into Socks. Didn’t you hear it?”

“Guess not.”

“Then he went to Snuggle Stop and messed with kids in line.”

“Reg’lar maniac.”

“Let’s go mess him up.”

LaJo stares.

Neither moves.

“Snugger,” says Dusty. He grins. “Little kids love that dude.”

So do you, you big baby
, LaJo thinks.
You sneak over at night. You think we don’t know? You think we don’t see you jump in with little kids and do the hokey pokey?

Silence. Eyes too bright. Corked panic. “Who’s Einstein?” says Dusty.

I
AM THE LION
. They are the zebras. They’re nervous. They keep their eyes on me even while they’re kicking the ball. They wonder which one of them I’m gonna go after, gonna eat. They blubber: “Please don’t let it be me!” The joke is, I’m staying right here, enjoying myself. Making them nervous is just as much fun as eating them. Well, almost. Well, lookie lookie, here comes the ball rolling towards me. And look—nobody’s coming after it. They’re just standing there like dopes. Look at them flinch as I stand up. They think I’m gonna take their ball. Or come after them. But I’m not. I’m just gonna turn and walk away, turn and walk away
and go back to the other lions and tell them about it and we’ll all roll on our backs in the grass and laugh big roary lion laughs
.

“G
OT THE GRUMPIES
, Jack?”

Jack unfunks slowly, finds himself straddling one end of the seesaw. How did he get to Playground? Lopez looks down from the high end, the dirty bottoms of her dangling feet a darker shade of herself. Lopez spends half her life on the low end of the seesaw, too small to push herself up, waiting for a weightier kid to take the other end, supply the power. It’s usually a futile wait. It takes a Big Kid—jumping—to reach and pull down the high empty end, and most Big Kids have no time for tots and seesaws. But not Jack. He’s always got a minute
for Lopez, tickled to hear her squeals as his downpush sends her skyward.

He peers at her up the length of the gray plank. “Huh?”

“Got the grumpies, Jack?”

He nods dopily. He resents her dragging him out of oblivion.
What kinda stupid question is that?
he wants to say.

“Bad day, Jack?”

She’s tipped forward, leaning hard into the hand bar, both terrified and thrilled to be hanging so high, not coming down. He remembers Kiki’s trembling lip. “I guess,” he says.

“Oh,” she goes with a sad sag. She mulls, then: “So it’s a bad day for me too, Jack.”

Jack is about to say
Don’t you ever compare your bad day with mine
when he realizes he’s misunderstood her. She’s trying to tell him she feels his pain. And indeed it shows on her little face. She’s not acting. Despite himself, he is touched.

“Thanks, Lopee,” he says, and pushes himself up, sending her—“Wheee!”—down. Useless as counterweight, she butt-bounces off the ground and shoots right back up, leaving Jack no more than a moment at the top—which is, next to Gorilla Hill, the second-highest
point on Hokey Pokey. In that moment Jack sees it all: Great Plains and the rolling dustball of the wild herd, Trucks, Tantrums, The Kid, Hippodrome, the
DON’T
sign, Stuff, the red bluff and jungle treetops beyond and kids big and little everywhere streaking, leaping, chasing, shrieking, warring, hopscotching, foot-balling, hide-and-seeking, jumproping, hokeypoking, razzing, dazzing, runamucking, chuckleducking—all in full play now well into the sunny day that never really ends but is merely interrupted by the unwelcome arrival of night.

Jack has always loved these panoramic, top-of-the-plank snapshots of the world. It’s one of the reasons he likes to seesaw Lopez. But this time … this time, as he sinks slowly back down, he is aware that something at the top was different. The world looked exactly the same as always—the places, the kids—but this time there was a slippery sense, like an uncatchable moth, that he himself was no longer part of the picture, was on the outside looking in, that the world he was seeing was no longer his. For a scary instant he thought his end of the seesaw was going to keep on rising and catapult him clear out of Hokey Pokey.

Lopez, hanging on, hovering, surveys the world. He speaks up to her: “Not just bad.”

She turns away from the spectacular view, looks down at him, her little eyebrows pinched with concern. “Badder than bad, Jack?”

“Different,” he says. “
Bad
’s not the word.”

“What
is
the word, Jack?” Intensely curious.

He looks about, as if to find the word in the dust. “I don’t know.
Strange
, maybe?”

She tastes it.
“Strange?”

He shakes his head—“No … not …”—knows it’s hopeless. “I don’t think there is a word.”

Lopez laughs, is so into her own laughter she doesn’t notice she’s shaking the high end. “Yeah there is, Jack. There’s a word for everything. You just don’t want to say it to me ’cause you think I’m little.”

He can’t explain, even to himself, so he reaches for something solid. “She stole my bike.” It takes a moment to register. She gapes at him, speechless. He fires the other barrel. “She painted it.”

Lopez practically falls off her perch, recovers, squeals: “Painted your
bike
?
Your
bike?
Scramjet?
”

Jack is grimly pleased. Little as she is, Lopez is normally hard to surprise. “Yeah,” he says. “Yellow.”

Lopez is twisting in her seat, scanning, thrusting her finger now. “Jack! Jack! There it is! She’s riding it! Way over there!”

Jack pushes up, glimpses the yellow streak from the top before bouncing back to the ground.

“What are you gonna do, Jack?”

I’m gonna sit down and cry
, he thinks.
Nope. Already did that. I’ll go to Tantrums. I’ll make Robert the Fuse seem like a peeper. I’ll catch her … I’ll catch her and I’ll … She’ll wish she was never …

The question flies to the Mountains, echoes:
What are you gonna do, Jack?

I’m gonna die, because there’s no such thing as life without my bike
.

Echoes:
What are you gonna do, Jack?

“Catch the train.”

That was weird. He imagines he just said
Catch the train
.

Lopez is laughing. “What’s funny?” he says.

“You just said ‘Catch the train,’ Jack.”

He stares at her. “I did?”

“Yeah, you did. There’s no train, Jack. Just tracks. Everybody knows
that
.” She giggles some more.

What’s wrong with me?

He’s woozy. The plank is getting rubbery. He hears himself laughing along, showing her he’s just being silly. But she’s stopped laughing now, she’s giving him a new look, a look he can’t read. He wants to make the
look go away, wants to make Lopez happy again. He pushes off the ground, sends himself up, her down, and at the top he shouts, “Look, Lopee—no hands!” and he releases the hand bar and thrusts his hands to the sky as he bounces back down. But her shriek of delight never comes. From her high perch she’s gaping wide-eyed at him and the look is now unmistakable: it’s pure shock. She points. “Jack! Your
tattoo
!”

For a moment he’s puzzled, then realizes his shirt must have ridden up his stomach during his no-hands descent. Straddling the seat, he looks down at his white cotton T-shirt and suddenly knows he doesn’t want to do it. The shadow of the brown bird flits across the gray plank. He pinches the hem of the shirt between a thumb and forefinger and slowly lifts. He gasps. His tattoo, the open eye, identical to that of every other kid in Hokey Pokey, is down to a couple of eyelashes and a gray smudge where the sharp dime of the eyeball used to be. It’s all but gone. And he hears that sound again. A whistle.

Next thing he knows, he’s on his butt in the dust and someone is calling, “Hey, Jack! Look what we got!”

D
USTY CAN
’
T FIGURE OUT
what he’s looking at. On the one hand, Jack wobbles and tumbles comically backward from his seat on the seesaw; on the other hand, little Lopez, before she drops down, was definitely not laughing, not with that look on her face. Whatever. Dusty crackles with news and nothing is going to stop him, especially not LaJo, who refused to help and now glumps along twenty feet behind. “Hey, Jack!” Dusty calls. “Look what we got!”

Jack doesn’t turn around, just sits in the dust. Maybe he doesn’t hear. Dusty comes alongside. “Jack, look.”

Heavily, as if his head weighs too much, Jack turns. His face is pale. His eyes land on the bike but somehow don’t seem to see it. Dusty pats its rump. “It’s a new bike, Amigo.”

Jack doesn’t respond. He seems to be in a fog. “We cut it from the herd. Well, I did.”

It’s old. Slow. “Hey”—he buddyclamps Jack’s shoulder—“listen, I ain’t saying we’re giving up on Scramjet. We’ll get it back, Jack, we’ll get it back. I’m just saying, hey, it don’t hurt to have a backup, right? Plan B. Just in case.” He ignores LaJo’s background slur—“It’s a nag”—plows on: “We can fix it, dude. Clean this baby up. Shine ’er up.” Even as he pats the lopsided saddle, a spring falls off. “We’ll paint it, Jack. Black. Just like Scramjet. Maybe stripes!”

Jack is on his feet, walking away.

“You can call it Scramjet Two, Jack!” Dusty calls. “Waddaya think? Huh?”

They watch Jack go off, wanting to follow but leery. “I told you he didn’t want it, ya dumb turdbrain,” says LaJo.

“We can paint it,” Dusty says weakly, more to himself than anyone else.

LaJo wags his head. “Let it go.”

“No.” Dusty’s answer comes fast and firm, but when
LaJo lifts his hand from the bike’s rump, Dusty doesn’t resist. LaJo gives a gentle push, sending the creaking, leaking nag off in the general direction of Great Plains.

They watch Jack. Dusty’s eyes brim. “I just thought—”

LaJo waves him off. “Forget it.”

Jack’s slumpshouldered figure recedes. The boys feel a vague unwinding, themselves helpless spindles.

“He knows,” says LaJo.

“What?” says Dusty absently. Then, turning, startled:
“What?”

“He saw it.”

Dusty blinks a rainbow: tears, sun. As always, little kids are coming up to Jack, tugging, pestering, asking to play, but he ignores them. “You think?”

“Yeah.”

Dusty squints after Jack. His lips move with unspoken words. He scuffs off, kicks dirt, picks up a stone, throws it, returns to LaJo. “What … what …” LaJo turns aside, Dusty pulls him back. His eyes are bright. “What’s going on?” LaJo shrugs. Dusty grabs his shirt, wrenches.
“Huh?”

LaJo sends Dusty reeling with a shove. “What do I look like, the freakin answer man?” He stomps to the seesaw and jerks down the high end, sending Lopez and her running nose on her quickest up and down ever.

D
ROPS
A
LBERT OFF
at Cartoons. Up on the giant outdoor screen twenty-foot-tall Sylvester the Cat is chasing Tweety Bird. So what’s new? Kids on trikes mob the front, Albert’s favorite place, so he heads back to the walkers and in a moment disappears among the cross-legged grass-sitters. Jubilee turns and pedals off.

The first thing she did after getting the bike was make a beeline for the tree hole and leave a note for Ana Mae:
Meet me at The Kid
. But then she got caught up in her joyride and Albert, and now she wonders if Ana Mae has bothered to wait this long.

She has. There she is, napping on the pedestal of the great statue, her back against The Kid’s stony shin, her brimmed cap down over her face. The great outstretched arm and famously pointing finger appear to shelter her.

She calls: “Ana Mae!” Ana Mae’s cap falls as she jerks awake, looks around. Her eyes locate Jubilee, lock in as Jubilee heads straight for her like a shot arrow, rumppumping and yelling “Yeeeeeee-haaaaaaaah!” In a swirl of dust the bike skidbrakes a one-eighty and comes to a stop directly beneath the stone finger, the front tire kissing her pal’s sneaker toe.

Expecting boggle-eyed stupendiment, Jubilee is disappointed. Ana Mae is staring, but with nothing more than routine curiosity. “New bike?” she says. “You made me wait here for
this
?”

Jubilee remembers: the bike is yellow now. Ana Mae doesn’t recognize it. “It’s not just any bike,” she says.

Ana Mae yawns. “Really.”