Mercy on These Teenage Chimps

  Frowning, I shook my head. I had done better when my hand was on my heart. I puckered up my face.

  "He ate a really sour lemon?"

  Here I began to hum the Beatles' "She Loves You." It was one of my mom's favorite songs. I was certain that I was doing a passable imitation when Tammy, who had been sleeping at my side, woke with a yawn. She sat up groggily, raised her nose, and howled. I decided to stop singing.

  Jessica laughed and petted Tammy's snout.

  "Come on, you can guess," I wheedled.

  She lowered her face in thought, pulled at a handful of grass, and a minute later raised her head, flowerlike. "Joey likes me?"

  I nodded rapidly. I touched my heart and threw my hands up into the sky.

  "That's why he got the balloon from the rafters?"

  I nodded, which provoked Tammy to nod her own shaggy head. I glowered at the dog. Was she making fun of me or trying to help me out?

  "He really likes me?" Jessica asked in disbelief.

  "Lots. That's why he's in the tree."

  Jessica's mother called, "Young man, can you help me?"

  I wanted to continue our important conversation, but I knew that good manners required me to respond. A mother was in need. I was on my feet in a flash and at her side before she got off the ladder. The front window was shiny clean and reflected the blue sky of Pinkerton. My own reflection appeared in the window. With the blue all around, with a puffy cloud in the distance, I had to admit that I wasn't such a bad-looking chimp.

  "It's going to start getting warm." Jessica's mother issued this weather report as she took a few steps backward and, hand shading her eyes and on tiptoes, looked up at the roof.

  I knew what was coming. Since Jessica's father was out playing golf, I was asked in the sweetest voice if I would be so kind as to turn on the valve of the evaporator cooler.

  "I would be honored," I responded courteously.

  For the third time I struggled up a roof with pliers in my back pocket. The task was a cinch—it wasn't necessary to use the pliers. I just twisted the valve and the sound of water filled the copper tubing. Mission accomplished, I thought, and stood for a minute, hands on hips, admiring the view.

  She's coming, Joey! I shouted in my imagination. She'll be there soon.

  Jessica and her mom were watching from down below. I felt bravery circulating in my blood. Courage, too, and vision! I stared far into the distance. Macho me, I puffed out my chest, and here is where I went wrong, because the expansion of my puny rib cage shifted my balance. Two shingles peeled away from their tacks and once again I found myself sliding toward the edge. This time I didn't panic. I raised my hands for balance, bent my knees, and kept my body loose as I sailed from the roof with two shingles plastered to the bottoms of my shoes. Like a cat, I had lost another life, but I had six more.

  "That was great!" Jessica screamed in admiration. "You should go out for gymnastics."

  "Are you okay?" Jessica's mom asked.

  "Yeah, I think so." I kicked the shingles from my soles.

  Jessica's mom disappeared into the house and returned with glasses of lemonade, my reward for hard work. Jessica and I enjoyed our drinks on the front lawn. My legs buzzed from my fall and Jessica's heart, I could see, was fluttering. She was telling me about her first gymnastics competition when she was six, but I sensed that she was dwelling on my amigo, Joey.

  "I have to show you something!" she said suddenly.

  "What?"

  She jumped to her feet, ran inside, and returned with her hands behind her back, concealing what I hoped was a banana or apple. Those pretzels I had devoured an hour ago were nothing but a pile of sawdust in my stomach.

  "I saved it," Jessica claimed as she sat down, legs crossing effortlessly. "The balloon."

  Most of the helium was gone, but it was still plump as a squash. I was delighted. This was the love object that had brought them together, a sacred keepsake that cost next to nothing. A penny, maybe? But the memories!

  "You like him, too?" I asked boldly.

  She pulled a handful of grass from the lawn and threw the clippings into the air. "I don't know. He's kinda cute."

  Cute, I thought. Joey is cute?

  "He's really brave, too. I bet he would have been great in gymnastics."

  "Why don't you call him?" I gave her the number to his mom's cell phone.

  She hid her giggly smile behind her hand.

  "He'll like it. He's got nothing to do but listen to birds in the trees." This was an outright lie because I knew Joey was living like a king among those leafy branches.

  Jessica pulled at a patch of grass around her feet until that part of the lawn was nearly bald. "Can I tell you something?" she asked.

  I was accustomed to no one ever telling me anything. I was riveted to hear her secret.

  "I'm going to quit gymnastics and get into cheer."

  I tried to look delighted.

  "What do you think of that?"

  I swallowed and timidly asked, "Jessica, what do you mean 'cheer'?"

  Her mouth opened in disbelief, revealing a wad of blue gum. She flicked a handful of grass at me. "It's cheerleading. I can't believe you! Cheer is like when you have a football team and they're down one hundred ten to three. The cheerleaders get out there and rev up the team when they're down."

  "Oh, them," I remarked lightly, realizing that cheerleading was Jessica's new passion. "Oh, my gosh, how did the team get down one hundred ten to three?"

  Jessica bellowed that I was dumb, but good dumb. I gave the whole situation some serious consideration. It seemed that Jessica was quitting gymnastics and Joey no longer wrestled.

  "Hmmm," I murmured. In one of the myriad folds of my brain, I secreted a tactic for bringing them together. Could Jessica and Joey be a team—a cheerleading team? I imagined Joey letting Jessica stand on his strong shoulders and flipping her through the air.

  From the phone at Jessica's house, I called Joey.

  "Joey, it's me," I barked brightly. In the background I could hear a blender whizzing at an incredible force. He was concocting an afternoon smoothie. My stomach growled.

  "Ronnie!" Joey yelled. The blender stopped. "Where are you? You want to come over for a smoothie? I've been playing chess."

  Joey had gotten a computer chess game for his thirteenth birthday and had yet to win against this mighty competitor. "I finally won!" he bragged with pride.

  "Shut up!"

  "Yeah, I did. Honest!"

  I congratulated him. I'd be there in a flash, I promised, and asked him to please save some smoothie for me.

  Jessica got permission to go see Joey—the boy in the tree, as her mother described him. On the walk to Joey's house, we decided to play the game of seeing how long we could keep the balloon in the air.

  "Don't let it fall!" Jessica screamed.

  The balloon was semideflated, and I patted it artfully. Jessica, a true athlete, kept the balloon from touching the ground several times. Thus, we marched over to Joey's house, full of happiness, and laughing when Tammy saved us from certain death—we pretended the balloon was a bomb—by poking it back into the air.

  Chapter 11

  "Life is a crooked road," my mother would cry when something went wrong—the day Dad hopped into that woman's sports car being the most recent. But I always wondered what she meant by "a crooked road." Mom included everything from plumbing problems to runs in her stockings to cheese gone moldy. "Crooked road," she complained from her recliner after a hard day working at the grocery store. "Life is a crooked road—you'll see!" I didn't dare point out that Pinkerton was built on straight lines, not like those winding one-lane cobbled roads in Europe. How could we really experience this crooked road business?

  But I began to grasp Mom's meaning when Jessica, Tammy, and I were playfully tapping the balloon with our fingertips, knuckles, shoulders, heads, knees, and, in Tammy's case, wet snout. We were determined to see Joey right away, but in my path—on the crooked road—a kid of
about four was crying in the middle of the sidewalk. We could have crossed the street, but that would have avoided fate or, at least, made me a coward. I was shocked to see that the little boy was sitting on my old trike! Had it already been sold at the rummage sale? We stopped to see.

  "What's wrong?" Jessica asked. She bent down and placed her hands on the handlebars. Tammy, in turn, sniffed the front and back wheels.

  "Boots!" Hot tears ran down his face.

  "Tell me what's wrong," Jessica cooed.

  "Boots." The boy pointed a sticky finger at the roof of a house, where a kitten was meowing.

  I had been in such a good mood, but now I was worried. Was it fate that I should lose another life if I had to climb to the roof?

  "How did it get up there?" Jessica cooed even more sweetly.

  "Don't know!" the boy cried. He got off my trike—his, I mean—and crumpled on the front lawn.

  I assumed that the boy had let the kitten run out of the house, and maybe the springy legs of this kitten had brought it face-to-face with the daffodils, the garden hose and sprinkler, a snail with its big shell of goo, and finally the ladder leaning against the house. That must have been how the kitten climbed onto the roof.

  "I like your trike," I told the kid. "I had one just like that." I didn't say the trike once belonged to me, but I could have offered proof. I could have rolled up my pants and showed him the array of scars on my knees. And too bad I wasn't home where I could go into my sock drawer and show him the baby tooth that got knocked out when I tipped the trike over.

  The child quietly stopped sobbing when I got onto the trike and rode up and down his driveway, goofily tipping it over but righting it quickly and saying, "Oops, but I'm not hurt." This brought sunshine to the boy's face. It also brought out his sister, who asked nastily, "What are you doing?" She was about fifteen, her face colored brightly with makeup. There was no sunshine on her face. She seemed plain hard.

  Jessica stepped in and took the child's hand in hers. "Hi, Alyssa," she said. "Your brother was crying. Your cat's on the roof."

  I assumed that Jessica knew the girl from gymnastics, as the girl was slender but bulky in the shoulders. She also sported a ponytail, like Jessica.

  "What?" Alyssa stepped off the porch. Walking backward, her hand over her brow in a sort of salute, she spied the roof. When she saw Boots she narrowed her eyes at her brother.

  "Did you throw her up there?" she asked angrily.

  I took a step back at the possibility that the kid might have thrown the kitten onto the roof. To me, he looked sweet. But you could never tell.

  He shook his head.

  "Then how did he get up there?"

  "He climbed," the boy whimpered.

  Since I was experienced with roofs, both in the climbing and falling, I boldly made a suggestion to end this drama. "It's a piece of cake. I'll get her."

  I climbed the ladder, dusted off my palms as I stood up, and called, "kittykittykitty."

  The kitten meowed twice, hissed, and ran away.

  "Come on, little kitty." I got down on all fours. I meowed like a cat, but that made the cat freak out and scamper to the other end of the roof. So I played bad cop and patrolled the roof from one corner to another until the cat hissed, revealed its claws, and puffed up its tail. But once I had it in my arms, the kitten gave up and began to purr.

  "You naughty Boots!" I scolded playfully.

  To my amazement I descended the ladder without harm. But when I touched ground and handed Boots to the child my heart almost stopped.

  A familiar truck rolled up the driveway, and we had to move out of the way. It revved its engine and cut off, the exhaust pipe popping and hurling black smoke. The door opened and out stepped one of the teenagers who had stolen my bike. He was smirking at me.

  "So, how was church?" he asked.

  "It was good." I swallowed and almost braved, "I like your singing." That comment probably would have made him punch me in the nose, or at least stomp on the tips of my shoes—he stood that close to me.

  He stepped up to Alyssa and gave her a peck on the mouth. I was amazed. It sort of made me sick, as this kiss between them made the slurping suction sound you get when you unplug the drain in the kitchen sink.

  "How's my girl?" he asked, his hand around her waist. More sickness churned in my stomach.

  "Okay," she said. "You know Jessica?"

  "Nah," he muttered. "You with this guy?" He pointed a hitchhiker's thumb at me.

  "We're friends," Jessica answered.

  I could see that Jessica didn't think much of Alyssa's boyfriend. The teenager—Eric, we learned—kissed Alyssa a second time. He was just a big mean lug, but I was resolved not to tell Jessica how he had stolen my bike and how I'd miraculously retrieved it from church. Snitching on him wasn't worth it.

  "How you like your trike?" Eric asked.

  The child gripped the handlebars and lowered his face.

  "Tell Eric 'Thank you,'" Alyssa scolded.

  "Thank you," the boy whispered and pedaled away, a sign that we should leave, too.

  "We got to go," I said and laughed.

  "What's so funny?" Eric edged toward me.

  I erased the smile from my face. When I saw his mouth bend into a crooked shape, I thought of Mom and her assertion that life was at times a crooked road. It could also be full of crooked mouths.

  "You hear me?" More crooked mouth.

  "Leave him alone," Alyssa warned. "Don't be like that."

  "Heard your friend's up a tree—man!" he said. "Don't he got a home?"

  I was amazed by the crookedness of the finger he pointed at me.

  "Yeah, he's got a home. He just likes it up there."

  "Is he a monkey or something?" Crooked mouth again.

  "No, he's not a monkey."

  "Stop it!" Alyssa scolded her boyfriend playfully. "Let's go inside." She had picked up the kitten and pressed it to her heart.

  "Come on," Jessica said as she glared at Eric and pulled on my arm.

  I was a little scared of getting hit by him, but there was another emotion percolating inside me. I was sadder that my trike was gone from my life. The boy seemed deserving of a trike, but he didn't know that Eric had probably copped it from a church. I was sure he had given it to the little boy to get on the good side of Alyssa. But as I walked away with Tammy on my left and Jessica on my right, I wondered how much of a good side Alyssa had.

  "Don't feel bad," Jessica cooed.

  We had returned to batting the balloon in the air, but it was I who failed to keep it afloat. My mood had darkened.

  "I can't help it," I replied. "He's a bully. Just because he has a truck!"

  I scratched Tammy's head and hoped that I could live up to what my new dog thought of me. Why couldn't I be brave instead of a wimp pushed around by a bully? A bully who was also a thief!

  "Alyssa's not nice either." Jessica released a sigh. "I know you're feeling bad."

  "I am," I admitted. I was tired of my role as Cupid and tired of climbing onto roofs and turning on valves and rescuing cats.

  We stood in silence, or near silence, as Tammy had cornered a flea in her shoulder and was attacking it with chomping teeth.

  "Let me show you something," Jessica said after a while. She pulled on my arm and started in a direction that wouldn't lead us to Joey's place.

  "What about Joey?" I was determined to deliver Jessica to Joey and then go my own way, which for me would be a Sunday meal and an hour of Animal Planet. "Don't you want to see him?"

  "He's not going anywhere," she retorted. "You said he's not coming down."

  We hurried six blocks to the industrial part of Pinkerton and stopped in front of an abandoned broom factory. A portion of the roof was missing and through these holes birds entered and exited. A stray cat lurked near an oil barrel. And were those bats hanging in the eaves?

  "I remember this place," I remarked. "They gave away a bunch of brooms when they shut down. We got red ones."

&
nbsp; "My grandfather started the factory."

  "No!"

  "He did. He made brooms that went all over the place. In fact, when I went to see the Queen Mary in Long Beach, I saw one of his brooms. A sailor was using it."

  "Wow," I uttered. It struck me as amazing that all the things made in this town—brooms, baseball caps, computers, or boxes of raisins—could circle the globe.

  We ducked our heads and scooted through the chain-link fence. We walked around the outer grounds of the factory. A couple of rusty trucks sat with flat tires in the shadow of a tall smokestack. A rusty gasoline pump looked ready to fall over.

  "That's where they put the straw," Jessica pointed out. "And that's where they lay my dog when he got killed. That's what Dad said."

  I eyed Jessica, confused. I was suddenly overwhelmed by the smell of hay, though the pile that filled the bin was mushy in its state of decomposition.

  "My dad used to be the foreman here." She petted Tammy, who had sidled up next to her. "He used to take Mercury—that was my dog—to work. One day, Mercury got killed when a roll of baling wire fell on him."

  I swallowed and wasn't sure what to say. I had lost a cat once—to old age—and had begun to understand mortality when one morning I found my hamster, Melvin, on his back, with his eyes open and sort of grinning. I had lost a lot of playground fights. But a dog getting killed? And in an accident? That would be the worst.

  "He was a great dog. He could swim." Jessica described how she and Mercury would paddle in Bass Lake. He was also the perfect alarm clock. In the mornings, she recalled with a big smile, he scratched at her bedroom door at exactly a quarter to seven. And for comfort, what was a better shoulder than a dog's?

  "Poor Mercury," I said. At that moment I wished I had had a dog when I was little. "How old was he?"

  "Six, I think. He was so cute."

  I observed a roll of baling wire next to the bin where straw was kept. I wondered whether it was the same roll that had killed Mercury. I wondered whether his body was buried near the factory, or maybe in her backyard.

  "I know that Eric pushing you around and Mercury getting killed like that are different." Jessica wasn't making sense. She tried again. "Eric is a lot of hot air and can hurt your feelings, but when your dad comes home to tell you that your dog is dead, its way worse".