Scurvy Goonda (3 page)

He imagined himself hurling the rock at the group below,
and then, just as it was about to crash down upon them:
rrrrrkkk!
It would come to a screeching halt above Duke and his groupies, crack open, and dump hair-removal liquid all over them, so that when they came into school the next day, they would be grotesquely bald. Ted bet that under his luxurious blond hair, Duke had a lumpy caveman skull.

“Aye, Ted. From here, ya could knock Duke’s head completely
off
,” said Scurvy, nodding at the rock.

“I’d miss,” said Ted. “And then he’d come up here and destroy me.”

“Nah. We have tha high ground, matey. At tha very least, ya’d be able to roll some of these larger boulders down and take off running. Might kill some of the girls, but no great loss there. Not very bright, those pocky dollies.”

“Oh, Duke, you’re so funny!” yelled one of Carolina’s friends.

“Mercy killin’ is all it would be,” said Scurvy. “Do it for the entire human race.”

“Scurvy, you know it’s not like it used to be in your time. You can’t just go around murdering everyone you don’t like.”

“Watch yer mouth,” said Scurvy. “This is
my
time as much as anyone else’s.”

“Let’s go,” said Ted, getting up from the sand.

“Help a pirate up, mate,” said Scurvy.

Ted grabbed Scurvy’s hand and pulled him to his feet. It was the first time he’d ever had to do that. Scurvy had always been terrifically strong.

“Are you okay to walk?” said Ted. “You look tired.”

“I am that, a wee bit,” said Scurvy. “Just haven’t been sleepin’.”

Ted took a final look at Carolina—geez, she was so beautiful. He couldn’t believe that somebody who looked like that could be so mean.
Ahh … Carolina
.

For a second, Ted thought that she might be looking up the sand dune at him. But she was probably just tossing her hair, or making sure that her face was getting tanned. Girls like her always got all the sunshine.

Ted’s father, Declan, had left Cape Cod when Ted was seven, saying he was going camping with friends. When he didn’t turn up a week later, Ted pictured his dad diving for sunken treasure, or releasing zoo wolves into the wild, or doing some other logical thing that would explain why he hadn’t come home. But when inquiries to his dad’s friends revealed that there was no camping trip, and credit card records showed that his father was in New York City, the truth hit young Ted: his father wasn’t coming home. Shortly after that, even the credit card records stopped arriving.

Ted kept a photograph of his father in his bedroom. He had been a handsome man with a muscular physique, a receding hairline, and big hands. Ted remembered those hands gripping his ankles as he rode on his father’s shoulders, way up high. The photo, from a fishing trip, showed his father helping him bait a hook. He remembered his father telling him stories about pirates and sea captains every night before he went to bed. He remembered that his father had loved him, though he was no longer quite sure if this was true. Maybe he just hoped he did?

Soon after Ted’s dad left, Scurvy Goonda showed up.

These days, Ted found himself thinking of his dad a lot. Any time he saw one of his classmates getting picked up at school by a father, or he passed a sports field where fathers were cheering
on their kids in soccer games or field hockey matches, he wondered what his life would have been like if his dad was still around to help him with everything.

It was hard being the only male in his family. His mother and Grandma Rose expected him to know how to change fuses and cut plants with the Weedwacker and get rid of mice. Even Adeline thought he should be a natural when it came to trapping spiders—indeed,
all
spider-disposal tasks fell on Ted’s skinny shoulders.

Ted stared out the window. A windsurfer was skimming along the surface of the water. Ted remembered that his father used to love windsurfing. Even now, sitting at the kitchen table, Ted could almost picture his father holding up a big blue sail, buzzing along on top of the waves—

“WHY DO MEATBALLS HAVE TO BE ROUND ANYWAY?” said Grandma Rose. “I WANT MY MEAT IN A TRIANGLE!”

Debbie piled spaghetti onto Grandma Rose’s plate, sprinkling the pasta with a few of her tears. Spaghetti had been Declan’s favorite meal. Debbie still made the dish every Friday night, and it always made her cry.

“Why do you make spaghetti if it makes you sad?” asked Adeline.

“It was your father’s favorite,” Debbie explained, sniffling. “I want to have it ready when he comes home.”

“How do you know he’ll come home on a Friday?”

“PIPE DOWN, ADELINE,” said Grandma Rose. “YOU SOUND LIKE A ZEPPELIN EXPLOSION.”

“We scheduled an appointment for you to see a marvelous psychiatrist, Ted,” said Debbie. Grandma Rose nodded and
spaghetti spilled from her mouth. She wasn’t good at chewing anymore.

“No way,” he declared.

“Sweetheart, you need friends who aren’t imaginary pirates,” said his mother.

“He’s real to me.”

“THEN WHY CAN’T ANYBODY BUT YOU SEE HIM?” asked Grandma Rose. “YOU WEARING GOGGLES MADE OF STUPID?”

“Maybe they can’t see him because he’s… shy?” he offered.

“PIRATES AREN’T SHY!” said Grandma Rose.

This was true. Scurvy was crazed and loud and consumed by bacon lust, and generally pretty much anything but shy.

“Maybe he hides from you ’cuz … ’cuz he just doesn’t like you!” said Adeline, nodding to Scurvy, who was standing at the corner of the table observing the action. Scurvy tipped his tricorne and winked.

“Rightie-o, young Adeline,” said Scurvy.

“Don’t talk to invisible pirates, dear,” said Debbie. “And finish your milk.”

“Can I go now?” said Ted.

“Next Monday. Two o’clock. Dr. Winterhalter,” said his mom.

“I have to go to work now, Mother.”

Ted walked outside, got on his bike, and started pedaling madly.
There’s nothing WRONG
, he thought.
Except for the fact that I’ll spend the next eight hours at a lousy job where the bacon is going to be strewn around the meat aisle because our customers are MANIACS who ENJOY digging through piles of bacon, searching for the one PRIME PIECE that has only a SPECK OF FAT on it, messing up the PERFECT piles that I MADE last night
.

“Arrgh!” Ted roared at the road. But the road didn’t say anything back.

Scurvy was riding on the bike’s handlebars, and Ted had to keep pushing his head down to see where he was going. But each time he took his hand off Scurvy’s head, the pirate would pop up and put his hands in the air, feeling free, and Ted had to lean far to the side to make sure that he didn’t veer off the road or go careening into traffic.

“Stay down
, Scurvy,” said Ted.

“Bicycles are
brilliant,”
said Scurvy, his long, dirty hair flapping behind him, whopping Ted in the face.

“But I can’t see the road.”

“I’ll be yer eyes, Ted-o-mine!”

“Scurvy, please. I need my
own eyes.”

“Nonsense! Ya haven’t spent a lifetime staring at tha horizon. Ya don’t know what true vision is. Wait… a pothole coming up, starboard!”

Ted pulled on the handgrips, but he forgot which side was starboard, and then suddenly he was flying through the air, the gray asphalt beneath him and his brain firing off warning messages:
Pain coming! Try to fly!
The last thing Ted saw before he hit was Scurvy plummeting to the ground next to him.

“YER RIGHT,” shouted Scurvy. “FROM NOW ON YA SHOULD BE YER OWN EYES!”

Before Ted could respond, he smacked into the hard earth.

Each time Ted touched one of the freezing-cold packages of hot dogs or stacks of sliced bologna, his hands started to sting. Every part of his body was in pain—his elbows and knees were scraped, there were skid marks on his palms, he had a bump on his head, and he thought there might be a small pebble lodged way up his nostril.

“I asked politely, I tried to push you out of the way, I told you I
couldn’t see,”
said Ted.

“I tend tah lose my head when I feel tha wind through me hair,” said Scurvy, uncharacteristically disappointed with himself. He was dirty from the crash, curled in a corner of the meat aisle, sitting on some smoked-turkey cold cuts. There were long smears of dirt across the Lunchables boxes he had assaulted.

“Yer upset with me,” said Scurvy.

“
Yes, I’m upset
. If somebody sees me bleeding all over the meat aisle, I’m going to get in trouble.”

“Then go to tha bathroom and get some Band-Aids. Or rub some mud into tha wounds.”

“Mud won’t help.”

The truth was Ted didn’t want to leave the meat aisle to get the first-aid kit because he was afraid of running into Jed. But he needed to tend to his oozier scrapes, so he grabbed a couple of empty cardboard cartons to make it look like he was doing
something
productive, and walked through a door marked
EMPLOYEES ONLY
.

The back of the store was packed with huge boxes filled with all the other products that would eventually make their way out to the unforgiving lights of the supermarket floor.

In the midst of all these boxes was the Crusher.

The Crusher was a giant vise that smashed whatever went into it into tiny cubes. Ted couldn’t fathom how something so massive had ever been transported into the supermarket in the first place. He imagined instead that the Crusher had stood in the same place for thousands of years, built by druids or ancient pagans who had worshiped the machine as a god. The Stop to Shop had to have been built
around
the Crusher.

Ted tossed his empty cardboard boxes into the Crusher, put on a pair of protective goggles, and, with an enormous heave, pulled a long metal lever to turn on the machine. The Crusher roared to life and Ted jumped away like he always did, because the machine scared the heck out of him. Gears spun and levers creaked and Ted could almost hear the cardboard boxes screaming as they were smashed and compressed and obliterated out of their peaceful boxy existence.

Such was the power of the Crusher.

Ted popped a couple of aspirin and used the first-aid kit in the bathroom to smear his wounds with some sticky iodine. Meanwhile, Scurvy Goonda stared at himself in the mirror, using his dagger to pick bits of bacon out of his teeth.

“You messed me up pretty good, Scurv,” said Ted.

“A lad needs scars.”

Then came a pounding at the bathroom door and the sound of Jed shouting on the other side:

“Get back to work, Merritt! Whatever you’re doing in there, you can do on your break!”

“Sorry, sorry.”

Ted opened the door. Jed stood right in front of him. The night manager’s eyes flicked from the bruises on Ted’s arms to the raspberry on his forehead.

“Man, somebody beat the
crud
out of you,” said Jed. “Kinda wish I had seen that.”

“I just fell off my bike,” said Ted.

“Guess that makes more sense. If you got into an actual fight, you’d probably be dead.”

“I get into fights all the time.”

“Oh, I’m sure you and your pirate pal are quite the dynamic duo.”

“Give me three minutes and I’ll turn him into chum,” whispered Scurvy, poking the night manager’s voice box with the tip of his dagger. “We’ll fish for marlin with the scraps.”

“Get back to work, Merritt,” said Jed.

Ted knew that other kids were spending their vacations driving around in Jeeps with cute girls, or teaching tennis to the children of summer people for thirty dollars an hour, or sitting in lifeguard chairs and blowing their whistles at the bronzed and the bikinied. He wondered if his job would be more fun if he had the chance to blow a whistle every now and then. It would definitely be more fun if there were more bikinis around the Stop to Shop.

All of a sudden, Scurvy smacked him across the face.

“Snap out of it!” said Scurvy. “You only need tah do this job fer three months!”

“Don’t hit me!” said Ted.

He grabbed a liverwurst pack and used it to cuff Scurvy on the ear.

“How do you like it when I smack
you
?” said Ted.

Ted stomped on Scurvy’s tricorne hat, grinding it into the freshly waxed supermarket floor.

“And see that?
That’s
for knocking me off my bike!”

“ME HAT!”
Scurvy roared. He struck back by putting his head down and ramming it into Ted’s chest, bull-rushing him into the next aisle, where they scraped and clawed each other into a tank of lobsters that crashed to the floor with a terrific explosion that sent water gushing and crustaceans scurrying toward the dairy section. Ted grabbed Scurvy’s beard and wrapped it around his neck, but with a quick flip Ted was on his back and Scurvy was sitting on his chest.

“For tha past
three hundred and twenty-five years,”
said Scurvy, breathing hard, “that
hat
has been through wars and battles and monsoons without losing its fine, handcrafted
shape!
Which ya’ve now
ruined!”

“It serves you ri—” said Ted, but he never finished his sentence. Over Scurvy’s shoulder he could see Carolina Waltz and the rest of the popular girls. They were all laughing at him.

“What are you DOING?” said Carolina.

“Oh. Hi, Carolina,” said Ted.

“God,
that’s
what its voice sounds like?” said Carolina’s friend Bridget Skoke, which Ted thought was an awful name. “I didn’t know it could
talk!”

“I’m not an
it,”
said Ted.

“Maybe that’s his
pirate
voice,” said Carolina.

“It’s my normal voice,” said Ted, who didn’t think there was anything weird about the way he spoke.

“He talked
again!
He sounds so
weird!”
said another of Carolina’s awful friends.

Sprawled on his back, Ted could see new girls continually popping into his sightline—he imagined girls piling up throughout the supermarket, clawing over cereal boxes and packets of toilet tissue, just to see him on the ground, looking stupid.

“You are so
weird
, Ed,” said Carolina.