Jack on the Tracks (11 page)

“Being or not being the victim is not the point in this case,” he stressed. “If you want to be known as a serious person on this planet you have to draw the line somewhere with what you
will
or
will not
do. And wearing women’s underwear around the neighborhood is way, way below that line.”

“But she locked me out of the house,” I reminded him. “I was desperate.”

“That’s not the point,” he said again. “So let me restate the point so you never forget it. In
life
you set high standards for yourself. You live by those standards and you never sink below them.
This
is the bottom line. And this is how you can judge for yourself your own behavior. Because if you can’t make good judgments for yourself, nobody is going to do the job for you, especially Betsy.”

I pursed my lips and lowered my head for his sentencing.

“Didn’t you think it was wrong to be mean to your sister?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Didn’t you think it was wrong to drop a pet roach into her mouth?”

“Oh, yes, sir,” I said.

“Didn’t you think it was dumb to stand naked in front of a train?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” I replied.

“And didn’t you think it was even dumber to put on the neighbor lady’s undies?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Since I have judged against you in this case do you have anything to say for yourself?” he asked.

“No, sir,” I said.

“You must apologize to your sister for your mean behavior, and you must apologize to the new Mrs. Smith for running off in her underwear, and you must promise me you will never do it again.”

“Yes, sir. I promise not to wear ladies’ undies again.”

“Then this case is closed,” he announced, and pounded on the dashboard with his fist as if it were a judge’s gavel.

On the way home I thought about the point Dad had made, and he was right. I wasn’t mad at him at all. I was guilty as charged. I had behaved lower than the standards I had set for myself. I had let Betsy get to me, and once more, I was the sucker. But I had learned my lesson, and I never again wanted to slip below the bottom line.

That night I apologized to Betsy, and after dinner I went back to my room. I climbed out my window and snuck around to the Smiths’ clothesline. I pinned the big undies back onto the line. They were wet because I had sprayed them off with the garden hose. Also pinned to the undies was my apology:
I’M SORRY I BORROWED YOUR UNDIES AT A TIME WHEN I WAS UNDER EXTREME EMOTIONAL STRESS. PLEASE DON’T MENTION THIS TO
ANYONE
AND I PROMISE YOU IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN. JACK HENRY.

I
was sitting on the floor with a book in the far corner of my bedroom. The wide pine planks were splintered from wear so I had a small round piece of linoleum to sit on. It was the fleshy color of a slice of baloney with odd white flecks which I imagined were chunks of pork brain, and black flecks which I imagined were rotten teeth. It made me a little ill to sit on it because I was still a vegetarian. But it was better than sitting on splinters.

There was just enough dim reading light coming through the curtains and I wanted it this way. I wasn’t thinking about my eyes. I was reading
A Day No Pigs Would Die
and the father and Robert had just slaughtered Pinky the pig on a cold winter morning. The father had taken a crowbar and crushed Pinky’s skull, and then slit her throat with a curved knife, and the blood drained into the fresh snow. It was so sad the tears were streaming down my face and soaking the neck on my T-shirt. I had read the same book over and over, and each time I reached the killing part I couldn’t stop myself from crying.

And that was the whole point. To feel so sad, so completely sad, and to cry so much that when I finished the book there would be fewer tears inside me and I might feel more like a man. I would feel tougher and drained of sadness like Robert felt after his pig was killed. But although I could feel as sad as Robert, I could never seem to feel as much of a man. And so I kept crying.

Suddenly Betsy pushed my bedroom door open and flicked on the blinding overhead light. Before I could wipe away the tears she saw me hunched down in the corner, bingeing on my sad thoughts.

“What are you reading?” she snapped. “Your pathetic autobiography?”

She leapt at me and snatched the book out of my hand.
“A Day No Pigs Would Die,”
she scoffed. “What’d you do. Get a pardon?”

I stood up but before I could clear my eyes and fight back she grabbed the soft band of fat above my hips with both her hands and swung me around. “Hey, Pete!” she yelled. “Hey, get in here!”

She was killing me. I knew she wanted Pete to grab the fat above my other hip and they would have a tug-of-war which she called the “Battle of the Bulge.”

“Let me go,” I yelped.

“Crybaby,” she said, and twisted my fat as if it were the key on a windup toy. I danced up and down on my tiptoes like a spastic string puppet. “You’re the most girlie boy I’ve ever met. You aren’t on a baseball team. You’re not a Boy Scout. You hang out at the library. You even collect stamps.”

“I don’t play with dolls,” I shouted back.

“You should,” she replied, and pushed me to the floor. My lower lip quivered and I began to blubber. “Look at you,” she said with contempt. “If something really tragic happened you’d be in deep doo-doo.”

I sprang forward. If I were a bull I would have gored her. But she dodged me. I ran from my room, slamming directly into Pete. I pushed him out of the way, then tripped over Miss Kitty II. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” I said as I crawled down the hall on my hands and knees.

“Oink, oink, oink,” Betsy hollered behind me.

I jumped up and dashed out the kitchen door. I kept going across the back yard and up over the fence until I reached the railroad tracks. Then I sat there, right in the middle of the hot tracks with my chin on my knees, waiting for the train to run me down. I told myself I didn’t care if I was flattened like all the pennies and frogs and Coke cans I had set on the rails. I didn’t care if my blood and guts greased the wheels. I didn’t care if everyone I had ever loved cried when they heard I was dead. I wanted to be hard and cold and unfeeling and manly and able to bear awful tragedies like smashing in a pet pig’s skull and slitting its throat. If I couldn’t be callous and hard-hearted, I didn’t want to live.

But I wasn’t anything at all like what I wanted to be. When I watched tearjerker movies, I cried. When I listened to sad ballads, I cried. When I saw roadkill, I cried. When I passed the Miss Kitty grave, I cried. When I read awful newspaper stories about adults who beat up kids, I cried a lot. It’s a wonder I didn’t have ugly, brown tearstains running down my cheeks like I always noticed on little white lapdogs.

And each time a glassy tear slipped out of my eye it seemed that Betsy caught me. She called me a crybaby, a wimp, a candy butt, a sissy, a pantywaist, a sniveler, and a mama’s boy.

One night, while I rubbed Mom’s tired legs, I asked her about my crying problem. She said I was just going through a sensitive stage. “You’ll get older and wiser and tougher and put the world in perspective,” she said. “You used to cry over spilt milk when you were two, now you don’t. So, don’t worry, you’ll move on.”

I felt awful when she said I’d move on because the other night at dinner I spilled my milk and felt like a baby and had to jump up from the table and get a kitchen cloth just so nobody could see the tears welling up in my eyes.

Well, I was going to change my crying ways. I was going to toughen up and learn how to be hard and solid and unshakable like a man. Real men didn’t cry, they stood up to danger.

I saw a train come around the bend and felt the rail tie tremble from the weight of it, but I didn’t budge. The expression on the face of the engine was uncaring. Two black windows stared out above a rust-pocked flat front and a grill of metal bars. It could roll over me and never flinch. When it was only a hundred yards away I held my ground. Fifty yards away and the stones around my feet began to jiggle like popcorn popping. A lion’s mane of heat buckled the air around the engine. I didn’t move. Twenty-five yards away and the engineer pulled the cord on his air horn. The sudden blast unnerved me and I screamed as loud as I could and dove headfirst off the tracks and tumbled down the gravel bank with my hands over my face. I kept screaming but couldn’t hear myself over the throbbing drone of the engine and clacking wheels. Finally, I tried to play as if I were dead, but the gravel was so sharp I couldn’t imagine heaven as anything more than a bed of nails.

After the train passed I hopped up and went over to Tack’s original house. I felt tougher already. I was bruised and bleeding along a few scratches but I wasn’t crying about it. I knocked on his door and while I waited I took a stick I found on the ground and jabbed it at one of my cuts. It hurt, and my eyes glazed over, but still no tears. Maybe I was getting tougher, I thought, yet I knew the ultimate test was before me.

When Tack opened the door I jumped inside. They had air-conditioning now and if the door was open longer than two seconds his new mom pitched a hissy fit and yelled at us for letting the cold air escape.

“I have a favor to ask you,” I whispered.

“You can’t give back the cat,” he said. “Too late.”

“It’s not about the cat,” I replied. “I love the cat. Take me to your basement. I need to see the spot again.”

He was silent for a moment. “Haven’t you had enough?” he asked.

“I’m tougher this time,” I said. “I can handle it.”

“No you can’t,” he said. “Nobody, not even Jock, can handle the spot without …”

“Don’t say it,” I said, cutting him off. “I don’t want to hear the c-word.”

He turned and I followed him around to the kitchen, where he opened a door that looked like it might be a closet, only there were steps that led down into the basement. Tack flicked on the lights.

“You go. I’m staying up here,” he said.

I forced myself down the stairs. At the bottom I walked over to the far side of the pool table. The balls were spread out across the green felt where a game had suddenly stopped. Each ball had a fuzzy cap of dust on it. There, on the floor, on the smooth, pearly gray concrete, was a drawing of a cross and the words
JIMMY SMITH. GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN. LOVED BY ALL.
I stood over the cross and took a deep breath. I gritted my teeth and stared down at the painted memorial and recalled the story. One night while playing pool with his buddies, Tack’s oldest brother, Jimmy, had opened a bottle of whiskey and drank it straight down like water. He set the bottle on the edge of the pool table, and then his eyes rolled back and he collapsed into a heap on the floor. He died instantly from alcohol poisoning.

It was about the saddest story I had ever heard, and I stood there and looked at the cross, then read the inscription. I knew that if I was going to be a man I was supposed to buck up and not cry. But I didn’t stand a chance, and within seconds the tears streamed down my face and left dark drops on the dusty floor. I sniffed and glanced up to see Tack standing next to me. He was sobbing, and that really got me going.

“Tell me again why he did it,” I said after a few minutes.

“Mom said he was a sensitive soul in an ugly, cruel world. But I read his diary. He said he was depressed and had a death wish.”

“Why’d he want to die?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“Because,” Tack said gravely, “he was sick and tired of feeling sad all the time.”

My knees buckled when he said that. I knew exactly how Jimmy Smith felt, which only sent a fresh wave of tears rushing down my face.

“It’s just so sad,” Tack said, wiping his eyes on the tail of his shirt. “I can’t come down here without crying.”

“I know what you mean,” I said. Then suddenly I felt confused because both of us, two boys, were standing side by side and crying. It seemed as forbidden as if we were smoking cigarettes, or kissing. I knew if Betsy peeked through one of the narrow, ground-level basement windows and saw us down here, she would think we were sick and needed to be put into an insane asylum. And maybe she was right. Or maybe she was wrong. Because if it was okay to cry, then Tack was the greatest friend I ever had. But if all this crying was warped, then Tack was a bad influence and I should stay away from him. I didn’t know which. “Let’s get out of here,” I said, and he agreed.

“Hey, Tack,” I said when we had shut the door behind us and were standing in the kitchen, sniffling. “Have you ever punched anyone really hard?”

“Yeah,” he replied. “Why?”

“Punch me,” I said, and jutted out my chin. “In the face.”

“Why?”

“I need to toughen up,” I said.

“Look,” Tack said. “If you want to toughen up, you need to suck it up. You don’t need to take a sucker punch.”

“Well, maybe you’re right,” I said, thinking that he
was
a great friend.

“Tell you what,” he suggested. “Come with me to my Boy Scout meeting tonight. We’re looking for new members. It’s just guys, and we’ll eat beans and sleep out in tents and cut deadly farts with the flaps closed and you’ll feel better.”