And then the camera shows the flatbed drivers parking alongside the road and getting out and going home, and the news switches to a fire in the city.
Abby jumped up. “We stopped them! We won! Didja see me?” She did a cartwheel out of the den. “That was me!” She threw open the front door and shouted to the world: “I’m on TV! I’m a star!”
I looked at Scooter. “Why doesn’t she get a little excited?”
That was yesterday, Friday. The whole story didn’t catch up with my mother till today. She came storming home in the middle of the morning and herded Abby upstairs. I went up to my room. I left my door open.
Abby’s door was shut, but I could hear pretty good. It went something like this:
MOM: You can’t be going around trying to block bulldozers.
ABBY: Why not?
MOM: Never mind why not. You’re only ten years old. That’s reason enough.
ABBY: I’m ten and three-quarters.
MOM: Don’t get smart.
ABBY: Don’t you want to save the earth?
MOM: I want to make a good home for my children, that’s what I want.
ABBY: Well, I want to make a good world for my children.
Silence for a while. I guess that was a point for the daughter. My mother must have looked fumey, because then:
ABBY: You’re just mad because I’m against the mail and you’re working for them.
MOM: I’m running out of patience, is what I am.
ABBY: You’re fed up with me.
MOM: I’m—
ABBY: You’re gonna tear my picture down from the wall and burn it and destroy all my dental records so there’ll never be a trace of me.
Another silence. This time I figure my mother was biting her lip, trying not to laugh. When she finally spoke, her voice started out slow, then picked up speed.
MOM: You campaign against your own mother who is trying to make a good life for you. You refuse to eat meat. We are informed that you wish to turn our backyard into a jungle. And to top it off, you announce to the entire world on television that I buy you secondhand clothes.
ABBY: Well, it’s true.
MOM: No, dear, it is not true. At least, not completely.
ABBY: What do you mean?
MOM: I mean, one of the reasons why your father and I work so long and hard is so you don’t have to wear secondhand clothes. But just to humor you, yes, I do let you buy a few things at Second Time Around. But you’re so stubborn. So when I shop for you sometimes, to get you to wear something respectable, I just tell you I bought it there.
Silence. Then squawkily:
ABBY: You lied. Isn’t this from Second Time Around?
MOM: It’s new.
ABBY: Well, I don’t want it…here…and I guess you lied to your own child about this too, huh … here … and this!…and this!…and this!
The door flew open. Out she came, stampeding down the hall. My mother called, “What are you wearing?” but my sister was charging into Scooter’s room and slamming the door.
I’ll tell you, if you never saw a fifth-grade girl run down a hallway wearing nothing but boxer shorts with red and blue anchors, you got a real treat coming. I swear, if I don’t stop laughing in the next minute, I’m gonna die.
27
NOVEMBER 20
I did it!
Our last game of the season was yesterday against Bayboro. I needed one touchdown to break the record for TDs in one season. I got three. Scooter caught them all with our camcorder. I taught him how to use it before the game.
Hogface Forbes wasn’t there. She hasn’t been to any games since she got kicked off cheerleading. She’s probably afraid if she came, she’d have to admit how good I am.
But the Late Baby was there, in the stands with his ancient parents, yelling away like he was still a cheerleader. One thing I didn’t like too much—they were sitting right next to Scooter. In fact, it looked like they were talking back and forth.
Afterwards Scooter said, “Those Webbs seem like nice people.”
“They’re fishcakes,” I told him. And that was that.
Today I was the big headline on the sports page: COOGAN SMASHES SCHOOL TD MARK.
The story started out: “John Coogan has been living up to his nickname all season long. Yesterday was no exception. The kid they call ‘Crash’ raced, weaved, and mostly bulled his way for three touchdowns as Springfield Middle School thumped Bayboro, 26-7.
“Coogan’s third score, a 47-yard beauty, gave him 23 touchdowns for the year, breaking the old single-season mark of 20 set in 1985.”
The article ended: “Perhaps the most incredible aspect of Coogan’s season-long performance is that he is only a seventh grader. That means he returns next year.
“Springfield fans can hardly wait.”
Mike called and asked if I had seen the story. I said no, so I could hear him read it to me over the phone.
28
NOVEMBER 28
Scooter cooked Thanksgiving dinner. Scooter always cooks Thanksgiving dinner. One year he came all the way from San Francisco to do it. Of course, the best part is that now, instead of going back to San Francisco or Cape May or wherever afterwards, all he has to do is go upstairs to his room.
I remember when my sister and I were little, he would tell us that the store ran out of turkeys, so what we were having that year was Thanksgiving buzzard. Abby believed him, and she would bawl and bawl until he told her the truth.
This year he told her it was a fake turkey made out of soybeans. She didn’t believe him, and she didn’t eat it.
Tell you the truth, Scooter makes so many good things, you could throw out the turkey and not even miss it. Candied sweet potatoes, creamed onions, cranberry nut salad, corn pudding, gravy, cheese bread, and not one but two kinds of stuffing. One is the regular kind that goes into the bird. The other is oyster stuffing. It’s about the best thing there ever was. Abby and I are the only ones who eat it. We each gobble up what’s on our plates and go for seconds and thirds till it’s gone. Only then do we start in on the rest of the food.
But this year I figured would be different. When I saw the Great Crusader and Vegetarian digging in, I said, “You’re eating meat.”
She stared at her plate. “Oysters aren’t meat.”
“They’re not vegetables,” I said. “They’re not fruit.”
Her fork hand flopped to the table. There was real pain in her expression. She was staring at the biggest sacrifice of all. Then she suddenly brightened up. “Hah!” she went, and stabbed a forkful of oyster stuffing. “Oysters don’t have faces.”
We usually have relatives over for the day. This year it was Uncle Herm, Aunt Sandy, and Bridget.
As soon as they came in, Uncle Herm was all over Abby and me. “Hey—there they are!” He starts clapping; Bridget looks around for a hole to crawl in. “Mister Touchdown and Miss Mall.” He lays a fingertip on each of us. “Am I allowed to touch you?”
“You’ll just get bad luck touching me,” said Abby.
By that she meant the mall is going ahead. Bulldozers went in the next day, and now the place looks like a farmer’s field ready for planting.
Uncle Herm patted her head. “Hey, no big deal. Who cares anyway? The point is, you were on television. You’ll probably be getting calls from the talk shows any day now.”
I guess nobody was surprised during dinner when he brought up a certain Christmas years ago. He wagged a drumstick. “I’ll tell you, I knew that boy was gonna be a fullback some day, the way he charged into Bridget.”
Bridget groaned, “Dad.” Bridget is in seventh grade now, like me.
He pointed the drumstick at me. “Just to remind you, I’m the one that named you Crash. You remember that when they interview you on Monday Night Football.”
“Right, Uncle Herm,” I said.
I looked across the table at Bridget. She was just another seventh-grade girl. I couldn’t remember or even picture slamming into her with my new football h
elmet. She looked back at me. She didn’t start bawling. She didn’t flinch. All she did was stick a forkful of white meat in her mouth and chew.
What I’m saying is, except for Uncle Herm always telling the story of how I got my name, it’s like it never happened. But it did.
And then, in a way, it did again.
29
Dinner was over. Uncle Herm wanted to play football. It was a nice day, so we went out to the backyard.
Something new was in the corner of the yard—a pile of wood. My father looked at me. “What’s that?”
“Don’t ask me,” I said.
It wasn’t the kind of wood for making an observation post in a tree, which Abby has been pestering me about. These were split logs and sticks, a jumbled mess.
My father zeroed in on Abby. “Does this have something to do with your cockamamie idea to turn my yard into a jungle?”
“It’s not a jungle,” Abby snapped. “It’s a wildlife habitat. And it’s not just your yard. It’s my yard, too. I live here.”
My father snapped back, “That’s exactly right. And that’s why I work seventy hours a week, to make a good home for you—you, not vermin. Which is what that”—he pointed at the woodpile—“will attract.”
“What’s vermin?” said Abby.
“Rats.”
“It won’t attract rats,” she snapped. “It’s for mice.”
“Mice are little rats.” He flipped his thumb over his shoulder. “The wood goes.”
Abby boiled like a forgotten pot on the stove.
Sides for the game were me, Dad, and Bridget against Scooter, Abby, and Uncle Herm. We just played two-hand tag, and with the girls and all, it wasn’t much of a game. I kept scoring without even trying. Since the game was tag, I used my speed instead of power. Mostly my father played quarterback while Bridget and I went out for passes.
On the other team, Uncle Herm did most of the passing. Abby and Scooter were receivers. Whenever Scooter got the ball, I tried to picture him as a speedy little kid in the streets, but I couldn’t do it.
Then they ran a trick play where Uncle Herm passed to Abby, and Abby, just before she got tagged, lateraled the ball to Scooter. It fooled me just long enough to give Scooter a head start. I lit out after him. Scooter carried the ball so high it was stuffed in his armpit. And he was rippin’. I mean, suddenly he was that little kid tearing down a back alley with some housewife hanging wash and shouting, “Look at ’im scoot!” Only it was really Abby behind me yelling, “Go, Scooter! Go!” and the goal line, marked by the Weedwacker, was coming up fast, and I reached out but couldn’t touch him, so I dove, flew through the air, and tackled him at the knees and brought him down—he felt like sticks—just inches from the Weedwacker.
The ball had popped loose, it was wobbling in the end zone. I pounced on it, jumped up, saw that I wasn’t covered, and took off, ran that baby coast to coast, Abby screaming but nobody laying a finger on me. I spiked the ball in the end zone and did my TD dance, which I was never allowed to do in school.
Abby was at the other end, kneeling over Scooter, who was sitting on the grass with his legs flat out like the sides of a triangle. My father was stomping toward me, growling in my face, the clenched-teeth kind of growl he uses when he’s outside and doesn’t want the neighbors to hear: “What do you think you’re doing? What… do you think you’re doing?”
I just started walking to the other end. Abby was on one side of Scooter, Uncle Herm on the other. They hoisted him to his feet. Bridget reached in and pulled a blade of grass from his forehead. His cheekbone was red, like that Dawn clown from the dance had smacked him with her rouge.
Abby was screeching something at me, but Scooter was only looking. He undraped his arms from the others. He gave me a little nod and a smile, and then another voice came yelling, a voice I didn’t recognize: “No! No! I said never again!”
Everyone turned. It was my mother, at the back door. The reason she sounded different was because she was pinching her nose. Her other hand was holding my football laundry bag, as far out in front of her as her arm could reach.
30
I guess I forgot to empty out the bag. I couldn’t remember where I had left it, but obviously my mother had stumbled across it. You could almost see the stink fumes rising out of it.
I was going to take it, but my mother had other ideas. She let go of her nose, held her breath, and turned the bag upside-down. Stuff came falling onto the back steps: socks, shirts, jocks, towels, candy wrappers, pizza crusts, Cheerios, mouse…
Mouse?
Abby shrieked: “Mouse!”
It was a mouse, all right. It landed on a sock and scampered over a shirt, down the steps, and into the grass.
I ran the opposite way, Abby went after it. “Here, mousie! Here, mousie!” At first I thought she was trying to catch it, then I realized she was herding it toward the woodpile. I couldn’t see it in the grass; it looked like my sister was chasing a ghost.
Finally she stopped in front of the pile. “I think he’s in there,” she whispered. She patted the pile. “Make yourself at home, mousie.”
“The wood goes,” my father said.
Abby planted herself in front of the pile and folded her arms. The wood was going to go over her dead body.
I was shaky the rest of the day.
As I was picking up from the back steps, I noticed a clump of stuff: pieces of paper, cloth, thread, dust balls, Kleenex, all wadded up. The mouse’s nest. The rodent had been living in my laundry bag, probably since the football season started. It had been stealing Cheerios.
I had carried that bag back and forth to school every day. I thought about the times I had stuck my hand in to pull something out. For two months I was inches from a rodent, I carried a rodent around, we ate the same cereal, we slept in the same room.
I heard something outside. I looked out my window. Abby was slamming sticks into the wheelbarrow. The pile was shrinking.
My father had won.
That night, when the mouse thing started to wear off, my mind went back to the football game, to Scooter, to the tackle.
Why did I do it?
I was just being me, that’s all. The Crash Man.
I mean, it’s true I was a little mad at Scooter all week. It was his fault that he pressed the wrong button on the camcorder and none of the film turned out, so there was no movie of the day I broke the single-season scoring record.
Okay, so I was a little upset about it. Who wouldn’t be? But that’s not why I tackled him.
That night I heard him telling stories and Abby laughing in his room. They called for me. I said I was busy.
Real late, after midnight, I got out of bed and went down the hallway. The house was silent. All the bedroom doors were closed.
As quiet as I could, I turned his doorknob, pushed open the door. The edge of the hallway light rolled up the bedspread like some little sunrise. When it got to the head of the bed, I almost croaked—it wasn’t him. It was my sister.
I closed the door. I went back down the hall. It felt like the pictures on the wall were looking at me. I opened my sister’s door. There he was. Abby must have fallen asleep in his bed, so he just switched rooms with her.
I stood at the doorway, looking. He was sleeping on his back. He wore a tank-top undershirt. And he was old. I had never seen it before, not in the kitchen, not at the football games, not when he took us places. But now, sleeping in the bed of my ten-year-old sister, on her Sylvester sheets and Tweety pillowcase, he was just about as old as anybody I ever saw.
I didn’t like it. I closed the door and went back to bed. I hadn’t used my night-light for a long time. I turned it on. I had a hard time getting to sleep. I wanted them back in their right rooms.
The next day, when I checked the backyard, the woodpile was gone. Where it used to be was now Abby’s old dollhouse.
31
DECEMBER 19
Scooter is in the hospital.
32
DECEMBER 23
It happened last Saturday.
When I woke up that morning, I heard a hammer going. It was outside, but it sounded pretty close, so I leaned over to my window, pushed the curtain aside, and looked out. Scooter was in the cherry tree, hammering nails into boards. I figured he was making the observation post Abby had been pestering me about.
I lay back down. I went to sleep.
When I opened my eyes again, I had this funny feeling, like, I didn’t just wake up regular, but something had made me wake up. I looked at my door. It was shut. Nobody in my room. Everything was quiet… quiet…
No hammering.
I jumped to the window. He was sitting on the ground, his back up against the tree trunk, and the first thing I felt was, Great, he’s okay. But questions blew the relief away. Why was he sitting there? Why did he leave that board dangling from one nail above his head? Why was the hammer five feet away in the grass? Why wasn’t he moving?
Downstairs Abby screamed. I heard the back door open, saw her race across the brown grass, stood there at my window as she raced back to the house, as the ambulance came and the men in white pants and the stretcher with gray straps and the flashing red lights and the siren that sounded like a kazoo going farther and farther away.
It was a stroke. That’s what they told my parents. My sister and I aren’t allowed to see him.
A stroke is when an artery in the brain breaks and blood pours out, my dad says. They don’t know how long he’s going to be in the hospital. They don’t know how messed up he’ll be. They don’t even know if he’s going to live.
They don’t know anything.
Like every year, the Christmas tree stands in a corner of the living room. Like every year, all it has on it are white lights and teddy bears. You believe it? “When you have a home of your own, you can decorate your tree any way you want,” my mother says, every year.