Space Station Seventh Grade

  Of course, I realize a lot of people do it that way. Especially athletes and lifeguards. I almost got hit walking under a lifeguard stand once. I think the best I ever saw at it was a marathon runner. He was coming down a hill blowing to the left and right without losing a stride. But I want to pattern myself after Ricky Mains as much as I can. I figure if you want to be a major league shortstop, you better learn to blow your nose like one. Someday maybe there’ll be a scouting report on me: “Hits: Fair. Fields: Great. Blows Nose: Can’t-miss prospect.”

  So the time came. I was in the field, out at shortstop, nobody paying any attention to me. Just to warm up, to get the feel of it, I pressed my nostril and tried a few little fhnns. Nothing. I could tell right away there was no half-ass way to do this. I pressed. I blew. Nothing but air. I closed my eyes, tried harder. Nothing—except a sharp pain that shot up to my eye and into my brain.

  I saw what the problem was: I wasn’t loaded up enough. So for the next hour or so I forced myself not to sniff once. It’s not easy, especially when you can feel the little buggers creeping down your nose. Not only that, but I had a truckload of dust from the field coming in the other way.

  When I could hardly breathe anymore, I figured I was ready for another try. I spread my feet, leaned forward a little, pressed, closed my eyes, blew: FHNNNN!

  Eewww.

  Something came out, all right. But it wasn’t neat and sharp as a bullet, and it never did reach the ground. I took my shirt off and cleaned myself with it.

  Well, Ricky Mains probably didn’t do it right the first time either. Practice makes perfect. I wasn’t going to give up. But I was going to start carrying a handkerchief for a backup.

  As for the raccoon, we saw it late in the afternoon, when it was almost time to quit and go home for dinner. It was out in left field, sort of moseying along toward centerfield.

  Dugan spied it first. He let out a yell—“Raccoon!”—and tore off after it with a bat and ball. We all followed, scooping up stones and anything else along the way.

  The raccoon saw us and took off. He was heading for the drainpipe in center. We tried to cut him off. Ahead of us Dugan winged the ball, but it missed by ten feet. Then he dug in, leaned back like a grenade thrower, and slung the bat. It cartwheeled through the air and bounced down just behind the raccoon.

  Meanwhile, the rest of us are war-whooping and moosecalling and sending out a barrage of stones, rocks, bottles, tree limbs, baseball gloves, and chewed-up bubblegum. None of us hit it. We were pretty close by the time the raccoon reached the drainpipe. We got there just after it ducked inside.

  I had a soda bottle left. Everybody else was out of ammo. “Geteem, Herk!” Dugan was screaming. I ran up alongside the pipe and whipped the bottle into the dark, round hole. It never broke. You could hear it rattling along the pipe. But before the rattle there was another sound—a kind of soft thud.

  I turned back. All of a sudden I didn’t feel so good. Dugan was screaming in my ear, “You goteem! You goteem!” The others, the smiles on their faces were different. They were looking everyplace but at me.

  Dugan goes, “Anybody got a flashlight?” He doesn’t even wait for the answer. He gets down on his hands and knees and puts his face right into the mouth of the pipe, trying to see.

  The whistle blew at the bubblegum factory. “It’s five o’clock,” Peter said. “I gotta go.”

  “Me too,” said Calvin.

  Four of us headed back across the field to our bikes. Dugan was a madman at the pipe. “Who gotta match? Who gotta match?” he kept going. He was grabbing dry weeds and sticks and making a little pile on the lip of the pipe. He kept calling us all the way across the field: “Let’s smokeem out! Let’s smokeem out!”

  I kept looking back, wondering if the raccoon was dead. This was the second time in one year I hit something I never thought I would. When would I learn my lesson?

  I pedaled home. I prayed Dugan wouldn’t find a match.

  The next day was pretty much Calvin’s. He knows I’m interested in science and all, so he asked me over.

  I couldn’t believe his room. It looks like Frankenstein’s laboratory. With a bed. The first thing you notice is this skeletor hanging from the ceiling. Only it’s not a whole skeleton. It only has one leg, half its ribs, no hands, and no head. It’s not real either. It’s from a kit Calvin sent away for. The bones are made of some kind of plastic or cement or something. Calvin is making the thing one bone at a time. On each bone he writes its name with a black felt-tip pen.

  No posters of rock or TV stars on Calvin’s walls. He’s got these two charts as big as window shades showing the human body. One male and one female. I found out a lot of stuff I didn’t know. For instance, fallopian tubes aren’t where I thought they were. And they’re a lot smaller.

  Then there were all the dead things. I don’t just mean seventeen-year locust shells (which I collect myself) or a neat butterfly or two. I mean he’s got a million bottles and jars filled with alcohol on his dresser and bookcase, and every one has something in it.

  I jumped back when I saw one of them. “What’s that?” I almost yelled. It looked like a black, fat mouse.

  “A mole,” he said. “Look at the feet. And the nose.”

  He was right. The feet were like paddles with little claws sticking out. And the nose was long and snouty and funny-looking.

  “And look,” he said. “No eyes.”

  “Don’t they see?” I asked him.

  “Nah. They don’t have to. They’re blind. They just go underground.”

  “So how’d you get it?”

  “I just found it down the street one day. I don’t know why it came up.” He put the jar up to the light and turned it around. The mole bobbed a little in the alcohol.

  I thought to myself, there’s something inside out about a kid that hates chili but keeps a dead mole in his bedroom.

  In another jar he had the humongousest beetle I ever saw. Green. In perfect shape. Like it was made of plastic.

  Naturally he has all kinds of other bugs too. I recognized some of them, but some of them—man!—there’s enough there for the Japanese movie directors to start a whole new series of monster flicks. And Calvin says he got every one of them without going outside Avon Oaks.

  Besides bugs and the mole, some of the other things he has in jars are garter snakes, salamanders, crawfish, minnows, two birds, worms, caterpillars, a mouse, a tadpole, a toad, and a box turtle.

  Most of them he found already dead, he said. If he had to kill any, it would only be in the cause of science and research. And even for science and research, he had to let me know, he would never kill anything with hair, feathers, or fur. (Like a raccoon, for instance.)

  “What’s all this got to do with medicine, anyway?” I asked him. “I thought you wanted to be a doctor.”

  “It’s all life,” he goes. “Life is life. I don’t know what I’m gonna specialize in yet. I can learn a lot studying these things. Doncha know we got a lot in common with bugs and birds and all?”

  I told him just having to share Avon Oaks with some of those bugs was enough to have in common for me.

  Then he took me to the kitchen and opened up the freezer and took out a macaroni-salad container and took off the lid and showed me the inside. It wasn’t macaroni salad. There were three things. They looked exactly like worms.

  They were.

  “Cryogenics,” he goes. He took one out and held it up by one end. It’s hard to explain the feeling you get watching a worm stand straight up between somebody’s fingertips. “I froze ’em. Now I’m gonna see if I can bring ’em back.”

  “Fantastic!” I said. And I told him about the Freeze-Dried Grandmother Launch Pad I made for Peter Kim. He said great, we could collaborate. We could start out on worms and someday work our way up to grandmothers. Win the Nobel Prize. We agreed it’s amazing how great minds run in the same track.

  He kept the worm he was holding and put the other two back in the freezer. He
put the worm on a paper towel. “I put them in a week ago,” he said. “I’m gonna take one out each week. This one’s the first.”

  We sat at the kitchen table watching the frozen worm. It was like you see on TV when somebody’s in a coma: you’re afraid to take your eyes away so you don’t miss some slight movement. Calvin especially. He was like a hawk over that worm. He kept rolling it over with a toothpick. He poked it a little here and poked it there.

  We waited a whole hour for that sucker and all it did was thaw out. You could see the toothpick making bigger and bigger dents in it.

  “How long we gonna wait?” I said.

  Calvin looked up at the clock. “That’s it,” he goes. “It ain’t comin’ back.”

  It only took him five seconds to spear the worm with the toothpick, carry it to the back door, and flip it outside.

  I was surprised at how fast and easy he did it. How he could be so interested in the worm one minute, then throw it right out without batting an eye. I said so.

  “That’s research,” he goes. “The scientific method. We might have to try a million worms before we succeed. Besides, I’m practicing.”

  “Practicing what?” I said.

  “Not getting too involved with your patients. Half of them go dying on ya. You can’t afford to like them too much, y’know? You’d go crazy, I read.” He snapped the toothpick and threw it into the wastebasket. “You gotta be hard to be a doctor.”

  Then he told me about his next experiment. It had to do with lightning bugs. He wanted to perform a transplant. Transplant a lightning bug’s flasher onto some other kind of bug.

  I asked him what for.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  That didn’t sound like Calvin. I told him he wasn’t being very scientific.

  He looks up at the ceiling and gives this smug little grin. “Ever hear of pure research?”

  “Pure research?”

  “Yeah. Pure.”

  “No,” I said. “That supposed to be different from other kinds of research?”

  “Yep,” he goes. “Pure research is the best kind of research of all. It’s when you do something just to find out what’ll happen. Not so you can make a million dollars off it.”

  “So what do you do it for?” I asked the grand wizard.

  He sniffed at the ceiling. “Knowledge. Maybe a thousand years later somebody’ll come along and make something out of what you discover. But as far as you’re concerned, all you want to do is add a little bit to the knowledge of mankind.” He leaned back on the hind legs of his chair. “That’s pure research.”

  He leaned back too far, and he and the chair went crashing to the floor. What came out of my mouth was pure laughter.

  So much for the first two working days of vacation. Little by little I settled into my summer schedule.

  1. I rode my bike. I rode past Debbie Breen’s house a lot.

  2. I played ball at the park. I kept track of my hitting. After two weeks I was batting .920 and I had forty-one homeruns. I was aiming for last summer’s record of three hundred nineteen homers. I still wasn’t having much success with the Ricky Mains nose-blow though.

  3. I kept an eye on the drainpipe in centerfield.

  4. I taught the corner kids. They started to figure I know a lot more than just making paper airplanes. They stopped waiting for me to get to them. As soon as they spotted me riding down the street they came running and yelling: Jason! Jason! C’mere! Jason, look. Jason, how do you do this? Jason, what about that? Every day they had a new question or a new problem waiting for me to solve. I passed a lot of good stuff onto them. I showed them how to pour salt on a snail. How to make Popsicle-stick things. How to leave a piece of candy in the middle of the sidewalk to attract a million ants and gross out the grownups passing by. How to take care of a scab. How to tell poison ivy. How to act if a bee comes around. How to find neat stuff at the sewer grates after storms. How to clean out your bellybutton lint.

  When I tried to tell them about Pioneer, though, they didn’t understand. They’re not old enough yet to be amazed at distances like that.

  5. When I got desperate for money, I grabbed Richie and we bagged groceries for a day.

  6. Mostly I was outside. I pretty much let my space station slide. When I did come inside during the day, it was usually to check the refrigerator. All that heat and sweat calls for a lot of ice cream. But, starting one day, I had to settle for cold water. There wasn’t a spoonful of ice cream in the freezer.

  I couldn’t understand it. I knew our half-gallon was gone, but there was always a box of Ham’s Dutch chocolate almond in there. Then I went upstairs and looked in Ham’s study, and I knew why he stopped hollering about his ice cream disappearing. There on the floor next to a bookcase was this little white baby freezer—with a padlock on it.

  LITTLE BROTHERS

  RICHIE’S PARENTS GOT A TENT. A BIG ONE. THEY’RE GOING camping later this summer.

  Richie asked if he could bring it over to my yard—he only lives across the street—so we could give it a test run. His parents said okay.

  Dugan wasn’t around. Calvin was doing his lightning-bug transplant that night. So that left three of us: me, Richie, and Peter Kim.

  We weren’t allowed to bring the tent over and set it up until after dinner, so we all just hung around my yard and talked about it and figured where it would go and made plans for the night and just in general got all excited.

  We were sitting on the back steps drinking ice tea and discussing things when I thought I saw something under the snowball bush. I went over for a look. It was my brontosaurus.

  I howled. “Timmy!”

  My mother opened the screen door. “What now?”

  “Look!” I hollered. “I got him his own for Christmas, and he still takes mine!”

  As usual she takes his side. “He has good taste. He knows yours are better.”

  I shoved it at her. “Look!”

  “What’s the matter with it?”

  “It’s all muddy and messed up!”

  “Can’t you clean it?”

  “I shouldn’t have to clean it! He shouldn’t be touching it!” I screamed my lungs out. “IT’S MINE!”

  Richie and Peter got down from the steps and sort of backed away. My mother was staying calm and patient. She just blinked and gawked at me for a while. She couldn’t believe how mad I was. A fly went in right past her, but she kept the door open.

  I looked down at my dinosaur. I always kept it so clean. I was sick. I ground my teeth. “That’s the last time.”

  “Jason,” she goes, soft.

  “He’s not gettin’ another chance.”

  Her voice snapped sharp this time. “Jason.”

  “The. Last. Time.”

  The door slammed behind her. “Jason!”

  “What?”

  “Now you stop that. You do not talk like that. Timmy is your little brother. You want to know something? You’re nicer to those little boys on the corner than you are to your own brother. Did you know that?”

  I wanted to say, Yeah, I know. I know it’s a crime when I throw your ratty old crown, but it’s okay for him to ruin my dinosaur. I said, “No.”

  She softened up. Smiled. “He’s little. Timmy’s little. You know why he takes your dinosaurs? Jason?”

  “Yeah. He’s a thief.”

  “He takes them because you’re his big brother.”

  “Great,” I said. “Where do I resign?”

  “He takes them because he looks up to you. You’re special to him.”

  “Great.”

  “Your things seem special to him. Because they’re yours. See? That’s why he likes to play with your things: just because they are yours. If they weren’t yours”—she chuckled—“he wouldn’t even want them.”

  “Great,” I said, and walked away.

  I just walked around the yard for a while, stewing in the sun. I had the brontosaurus by the neck, like a club.

  Peter and Ric
hie joined me. Little by little we got back to talking about camping out. But Peter seemed a little different, not so interested anymore. Sure enough, after a while he says, “Uh, you guys… I don’t think I’ll be coming over tonight.”

  We asked him why not.

  He scrunched up his face. “Well… I forgot to tell you. My mother wanted Kippy to come along tonight too.”

  Oh shit, I thought. Which is what I could tell Richie thought too. But we never let it show to Peter. So I just said, “Well, it’s okay with me. But he’s kinda young, ain’t he?”

  “She said she’s not afraid as long as she knows we’re all at your place. She said Kippy likes you.”

  I was shocked. “Me?”

  He shrugged. “That’s what she says. He talks about you sometimes.” He looked at Richie. “You too.”

  “So?” I said. “What’s the problem? Why can’tcha come?”

  He picked up a leaf and started folding it, real neat. “Well… I know you don’t want little kids around. He’d spoil it all.”

  You can say that again, I thought. “Look,” I said. “For you to come, does he have to come too?”

  “Besides,” he said, “I think my mother thought Timmy was gonna be there too.”

  “Peter,” I said, “you’re avoiding the question. Does he have to come if you come?”

  He looked away and nodded. “Yep.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So that’s it. You’re comin’.”

  “Nah,” he goes.

  I grab him by the arm and look him in the eye. “Peter, listen. I said you’re coming. I don’t mind having Kippy around. I just thought maybe he was a little too young to go sleeping out. That’s all. Okay?”

  He wagged his head. “I don’t know. He’ll spoil things.”

  “Spoil things? Waddaya mean?” I sort of ranted like a courtroom lawyer. “Spoil things? For who? He’s not gonna spoil anything for me. Richie, he gonna spoil anything for you?”