You Will Call Me Drog (9 page)

“Drog! What’s the matter with you?”

“Do as I say!”

“No. Not until you tell me why.”

“Drog hates Punch!”

“How come? Because he’s so nasty?”

“Yes! Yes! Would Drog beat people to death for no good reason? Would Drog throw a baby out the window?”

“I—”

“Exactly! Don’t you see, Boy? Punch is ten times worse than Drog can ever hope to be. And people love him. Oh, I wish I’d never seen the Punch and Judy show!”

So that was it. “Drog! You’re jealous of Punch!”

“Jealous? Ha! Drog is never jealous.”

“Anyway, we don’t have to watch that video again. I’ll take it back to Mrs. Belcher tomorrow.”

“Well, all right then,” he said.

As we climbed into bed that night, I said to him, “Drog, have you ever thought ... maybe you don’t have to be so bad?”

“Oh, please. What else would I be? If Drog isn’t wicked, he’s nothing.”

He started to snore, and I tried to sleep too, but I lay there wondering, is it some people’s nature to be bad like Drog said? What about Big Boy? He’d get in huge trouble if I told anybody he almost set my hand on fire. That was serious stuff. But he wasn’t bad, just mad, and I couldn’t blame him.

Only why did Drog feel he had to be bad? It didn’t make any sense. Where did he come from that bad was good? Or at least not bad?

Drog kept bugging me about aikido, especially the night Sensei had some of the advanced students show us how to use the bamboo sword and defend against a multiple-sword attack.

“That’s it? That’s the best they can do?” Drog said after practice. “They wouldn’t survive in a mouse fight. Oh, if you could only have been with me at Shaolin Temple. You had to stand in the snow for three days and nights without blinking an eye just to get admitted to that place.”

“You were at the Shaolin Temple?”

“Was I at Shaolin? You’ve heard of Bruce Lee?”

“Sure!”

“Well, who do you think watched Bruce go through his entire training with the monks? Believe me, those Shaolin fellows didn’t
practice,
they fought for keeps. With their fists and feet and with the most treacherous weapons.”

“Aikido uses weapons.”

“Oh, please. Broomsticks, wooden knives.”

“People get injured.”

“Yes, but how? Falling down? A Shaolin monk would be ashamed to fall down. Aikido is for losers!”

Before practice the next day I said to Drog, “Falling isn’t that easy, you know. Want to try it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you don’t really know what it’s like because I wear this Ace bandage. But I’m tired of wearing it. Now that I’m getting better at falling, why don’t I just practice without it?”

“You’re going to try to hurt me.”

“I’m going to try
not
to. This is aikido, remember? Scared?”

“Drog is never scared.”

Sensei took one look at my unwrapped hand and paired me with himself. We spent the hour adjusting my moves so that I could still use my Drog hand without twisting or hitting Drog’s head. I missed a couple of times and told Drog I was sorry, but he ignored me.

“We did it, Drog,” I said as we finished up.

“I don’t plan to get used to this,” he grumbled.

“Okay Drog,” I said to him when we got home, “Help me write a story for Mrs. Belcher. It’s supposed to be a true story. So what’ll I write? How about your ruby yacht one?”

“No! That’s ... top secret!”

“Top secret? How come?”

He sniffed. “I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Well, what then? You’re full of stories.”

“I’m ... not inspired at the moment.”

“Maybe I should tell the true story of a boy who got a puppet stuck to his hand.”

“Ha! You’d get it all wrong.”

I put Drog away in my pocket, took out my notebook, and just started writing. The story that spilled out on the paper was about a boy whose father took him up in a glider plane. The height scared him at first, but his dad was all excited and not worried at all, so pretty soon the boy got used to being up in the air.

His dad pointed out things on the ground: the grain silos gleaming like silver buttons from up there, the trains getting switched around in the railroad yards, the green-and-tan patchwork patterns the fields of corn and soybeans made. Except for the two of them talking, everything was quiet. Whenever the wings caught drafts of air, the plane rose a little.
This must be what a bird feels
, the boy thought.

“Uh-oh,” his dad said, pointing to a tall gray cloud east of town. Just below it was a blur of rain, and they could smell and taste wet dust in the air. He guided the plane down and down, and it touched the ground without a bounce. Then the rain hit in huge, bursting drops. By the time the dad and the boy ran to the hangar, their drenched clothes stuck to them and they were laughing. They drove to a diner in the rain and slurped sweet hot chocolate.

I asked Mom, but she couldn’t remember that time. She said Dad hadn’t gone soaring in years and I would have been too little to go along. But it was a good story. I was pretty sure it was true.

I hoped so, because Mrs. Belcher wanted the whole class to hear it. While I was reading, I glanced sideways. Big Boy was listening to every word, but when I finished and looked up from the paper at him, he looked away.

Wren came up to me after school and just stood in front of me like she wanted to tell me something but it might take her all day to get it out. I wanted to say, “I get it. You’re supposed to be a door.” But that sounded Drog-like and she’d probably take it the wrong way, so I waited her out.

“That boy was you, wasn’t it?” she finally said. “You and your dad.”

I nodded. Wren. The one person who could understand about my dad and me.

“Well, I don’t think I like you very much right now,” she said, tossing her braid back over her shoulder. “But I liked your story. I liked it a lot.”

I didn’t know whether to say thanks to that or not, so I kind of changed the subject. “I was going to tell one Drog told me. About this boat covered with rubies, the Ruby Yacht of Omar Khayyam. It was practically one of the wonders of the world once, he said, but it disappeared.”

Wren shifted the weight of her backpack for the walk home. “His story couldn’t have been as good as yours.”

“How’s your friend doing?” Sensei asked before practice.

“My friend? Oh, you mean Drog. Bossy as ever.” Drog squeezed. “He doesn’t like aikido practice. Makes fun of me.”

“But you come anyway.”

I nodded.

“Good. Respect him, Parker. All right, everybody, approach the mat.”

That didn’t make sense. How could anybody respect Drog? Especially me, his prisoner? If anything, Drog needed to respect me.

We practiced our throws for a while. Then Sensei said, “Have you ever known people who seem to have eyes in the back of their heads?”

Some of us nodded.

“Well, you may not think so now, but you can learn that. Not to see, exactly, but to sense what’s happening around you, even with your eyes closed or your back turned. Even if the movement is silent. Because everyone puts out energy. Good energy. Bad energy. Nervous energy. Gentle energy.

“When you center yourself, you can begin to sense what kind of energy is coming from the people around you. First the ones you see, and then those who approach you from behind. You not only
can
do this, you
must,
if you really want to do aikido. Beginning today, ask yourself what kind of energy is in each person you meet. Awareness. It’s all practice.”

On the way out, I tried to check out the storage closet without being noticed. But Sensei said, “Looking for something?”

“Do you have any really big
gi
?”

He laughed. “We have all sizes.”

He showed me a pair with pants that I could have climbed into one leg of. “Do you have someone in mind?”

“Maybe.”

“Boy, you’d better not be thinking what I think you’re thinking,” Drog said.

Mom was on the phone when I got home.

“Well, you’ll be happy to hear he’s taken up a sport, Brian, a martial arts class.... No, not karate. It’s called aikido.... Oh, he’s getting a few bruises, but he seems to like it.... No. No, he’s still got it on.... It’s not a doll Brian, it’s a puppet.... I’m doing everything I can, believe—What’s that supposed to mean? ... Of course, here he is now. Hold on. Parker?”

One-point one-point.
“Hello, Dad.”

“Hi, Son. Your mother tells me you’re taking martial arts lessons. That’s great.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So what do they teach you?

“Um. How to fight so nobody gets hurt.”

“Oh, you pull your punches?”

“No, we learn how to fall.”

“Oh? Well, that ... puppet of yours must be taking a beating.”

“No, he isn’t. I protect him.”

“Wow, Parker. You’re really into this, aren’t you?”

“You mean aikido?”

“I mean—I’m glad that you’re taking these lessons.”

What kind of energy was coming from Dad? I didn’t know. Maybe you couldn’t tell over the phone.

Actually, my seat in the back of the room was a good place to practice figuring out people’s energy. I held my book up and made little drawings of people behind it, just a few scribbly lines, and that helped me get a feeling about them.

Mrs. Belcher’s name didn’t fit her, I decided. In my drawing she looked sort of like a friendly deer: big, but quick and smart with large eyes. She could be called Mrs. Deerfield. Can’t adults change their names if they want? Wouldn’t you do that if your name was Belcher? Especially if you were a teacher? She had a different look sometimes when she was mad. I drew that one, too, from memory—a porcupine.

And Wren? Wren was hard. I’d drawn her lots of times—the way she keeps her back perfectly straight even when she’s sitting cross-legged, the way she looks far off or chews on the end of her braid when she’s thinking. But Wren was always Wren, and everything she did and said just seemed like her. I never wondered why before, never tried to figure her out.

Okay, if Wren was an animal, what kind of animal would she be? Well, she loves dogs. Maybe a terrier, because they’re really active and determined and nervous. But she’s like that mostly about little things like tests and assignments, and mostly at school. In big things, she’s calm and strong, and she can figure things out, even in emergencies. She’s even talked about being a rescue worker someday. So make her a huge Newfoundland who dashes into the ocean and saves people without even being told to.

Right. Wren wouldn’t even help rescue her own best friend. I gave up trying to draw her. Too much mad energy getting in the way.

For Big Boy I drew a bear in boy’s clothes. A tame bear with a kind of sad expression, like he didn’t expect much anymore, but he wished people would just treat him like a bear and not make him wear those stupid pants.

I studied the drawing for a while and decided I didn’t like having Big Boy be mad at me, so I got up my nerve and walked up to him at recess.

“Norbert, can I talk to you about something?”

He turned and glared at me.

I swallowed. “I ... I don’t blame you for being mad about Drog and the play, but the thing is, I can’t control him.”

“Huh. I don’t believe you.”

I took my Drog hand out of my pocket and looked at it. “Yeah. If I wasn’t me, I probably wouldn’t believe me either.”

“So?” He started to turn away.

“So ... why don’t you come with me tonight to my aikido class?” I said it fast.

“I knew it!” Drog said.

Big Boy turned back. “Aikido? What’s that?”

“It’s a kind of martial arts.”

“Martial arts? That’s fighting, right? You get to fight?”

“What? Yeah, you get to fight. But without getting mad, you know? You stay cool.”

“Cool, huh? I get to fight you?”

“You get to fight everybody.”

He drew in the dirt with the toe of his shoe and didn’t say anything or a while. I didn’t say anything either, just waited.

“Well. Maybe I will.”

“Okay, that’s great, Norbert.”

He wrinkled his nose. “Call me Big Boy, man. Sounds better than Norbert.”

“Okay, Big Boy. I’ll call you later.”

“That does it! You are out of your mop,” Drog said on the way home.

Mom got off early from work so she could drive us. I knew she was glad I was doing something with somebody in my class, but except for smiling too much, she played it cool.

As we got out of the car, she said, “I’ll pick you boys up at 6:30, okay?”
Good, Mom, you didn’t invite Big Boy for supper or anything.

“It’s good that we have a new student tonight,” Sensei said, “because I’ve brought something that will help us review and will also show... Big Boy is it?” Big Boy nodded. “... what aikido is about.”

He passed out some small tubes woven out of colored straw.

“Everybody take one of these Chinese finger puzzles, and push your index fingers into each end.”

I only had one index finger free, so I just did one end.

“All right now, get your fingers out.”

I braced the other end of the puzzle between my knees. But the more I pulled, the tighter the thing got.

Everybody else was trapped, too.

“Ow!”

“I can’t!”

Some kids got red in the face, and one boy looked worried, like he might never get his fingers out. I pictured myself with a puppet stuck on one hand and a finger trap stuck on the other for the rest of my life.

Sensei clapped his hands, and we all jumped.

“What is the first step in a conflict?” he boomed.

“Find your one-point!” we answered in a chorus.

“Then?”

“Blend with the attacker!”

“Then?”

“Enter and turn the attack to the side!”

“Yes,” he said, in a quiet voice this time. “Now you can solve the finger puzzle.”

Everyone stopped pulling and pushed inward instead. Right away the weave loosened. We turned our fingers sideways, and they came out. Easy.

“Cool,” Big Boy said.

Sensei raised his eyebrows at me, smiled and nodded, then stepped onto the mat. What did that look mean? Oh! Maybe he was showing me one way I hadn’t tried yet to get Drog off.

Good idea. Instead of pulling, I pushed my hand
into
Drog then turned it, just like you do to open a medicine bottle. But he stayed as stuck as ever.

“C’mon baby, let’s do the Twist,” he cracked.

Sensei paired himself with Big Boy, and I watched them whenever I got a chance. I thought Big Boy would have trouble because he had so far to fall, but he did great. It was fun to watch him fall and roll. Seeing him with Sensei made me realize that he really was older than us sixth-graders. It must be hard for him to spend all day, every day, with younger kids.

“Some fools are bigger than others,” Drog said.

But I knew Big Boy was going to get his
gi,
and I was glad.

Dad came to Ferrisburg on Saturday. I got only about a half-hour’s notice from Mom.

“Why’s he coming?” I said.

“To see you, he says.” She reached for her coat. “It’ll just be the two of you. I’m going over to Nicole’s.”

This had to be about Drog. “Did he sound mad or anything?”

“Nope.”

I was glad I didn’t have too much time to think about it, because seeing Dad was sure to be a disaster. Of course he would want to hear Drog talk, and of course Drog would pull his silent act like he did with Wren, which would just prove I was a dumb problem kid who made things up.

My best hope, my only plan, was to keep Drog in my pocket the whole time and refuse to take him out.

Mom hugged me just before she left. “Good luck,” she said. “Try to give your dad a chance, now.”

Me give him a chance? But I nodded, and then she was gone.

The minutes raced toward two o’clock, even when I finally remembered my one-point. The doorbell rang, and I jumped. For a minute I thought, “who’s that?”