Authors: Jack Gantos

Jack Adrift (2 page)

BOOK: Jack Adrift

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“Jack senior,” Mom said sharply, getting stirred up again, “that's called lying.”

“No,” Dad replied, “that's called getting what you want from someone too stupid to give it to you in the first place.”

“Don't listen to him,” Mom said. Pete wasn't because he was so sick. Betsy wasn't because she was wearing her miserable face again, which meant she wouldn't listen even if you pressed a bullhorn against her ear and shouted, “I'M A JERK! HIT ME!” But I was listening to Dad a lot because I was trying to figure out who I was, and how to be. School was starting in a few days and I expected the local kids were going to be staring at me, then whispering among themselves, then approaching me, then they'd want to know who I was, where I came from, and did I have any hobbies or favorite sports, or was I good at anything at all? I knew it would be a lot easier to take Dad's advice and just make up something incredible they would think was cool. Or, I could simply tell them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, which is that I am totally
boring
.

When we reached the top of the bridge, Dad stopped and we looked down on the Outer Banks. We gasped. There was no land. The bridge just slanted down into the water like a boat slip. I knew it wasn't deep, though, because all the houses were above water and I could see where the sea lapped up to their first doorsteps. Still, it looked like we were getting ready to drive right across the Atlantic Ocean toward France.

Mom smacked her lips in the nervous way she does before saying something that might rattle Dad and set him off. “Are you sure it's safe to go down there?”

Dad grinned. “You never know till you try it,” he said gleefully, and lifted his foot off the brake. The car tilted forward and began to pick up speed.

“Jack,” Dad hollered, “if Pete has to tip his bucket again, just aim his mouth overboard.”

“Aye-aye, Captain,” I called back, and gave him a snappy salute. I was ready to join the Navy myself.

“Betsy,” Dad said, catching her scowling face in the rearview mirror, “get ready to bail.”

“Can I just
bail
myself out of here?” she said as she glowered.

The car was humming down the bridge and by the time we hit the bottom our faces were all pulled back in absolute terror. We screamed. The water splashed up in front of us and a shower sprayed back over the windshield, and for a moment the car seemed to glide
weightlessly across the surface before settling down on the asphalt. The sailor had been right. The water was only about six inches deep. “We're here,” Dad announced, as he slowly navigated along the faint center line just visible under the water. Behind us our wake spread out as if we were in a boat.

“Now let's see if we can find our street,” he said. “It's supposed to be somewhere off of Virginia Dare Trail.” After we all caught our breaths, we called out the names of streets as we trolled along.

“Too bad I don't have a fishing pole,” Dad said. “We could catch dinner on the way to the house.”

“You could tie a line to the radio antenna,” I suggested.

“Yeah,” he added, “we'll have to get some surf-casting poles and I can show you how to catch a big one.”

Or just
say
that you caught a big one, I thought.

Just then we passed a school and a cemetery. I wondered if that was my school and if I would flunk out and end up next door in the graveyard. The white crosses and mossy tombstones seemed like the tips of ghostly topmasts and flags over sunken ships. “Once during a flood when I was a kid,” Dad said joyfully, “coffins popped right out of the ground and we paddled them around like canoes.”

“Jack,”
Mom cried out, and elbowed him, “that can't be true!”

“Sure it is,” he said with a laugh. “Would I lie to you?”

I wanted to find a coffin. Maybe Dad would let me tie it to the back of the car and I could ride it. But I didn't spot anything floating around the cemetery except for plastic flowers, garbage, and clumps of seaweed.

There were no other cars on the road.

A few people had stayed and their lights were on. Some were sweeping water out their front doors. When they looked up at us, we waved and they waved back. Wet carpets were stretched across sagging clotheslines. Sand bags edged the yard of a big house, but the water still got through. A banner in front of a cottage the size of a kid's playhouse read: WE SURVIVED! BUT THE STORM BLEW AWAY!

“These people are nuts,” Dad declared. “I wouldn't stay out here in a storm.”

“What are people going to say when they wake up or return and find us here?” Mom said. “They'll think we are a bunch of sea monkeys.”

“Yeah,” Betsy said, perking up, “they'll throw a net over us and call the aquarium.”

“Or the funny farm,” Mom added.

“Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise,” Dad said confidently, as if quoting one of the Ten Commandments.

“That's right,” I chimed. “The early bird gets the worm.”

Betsy squinted angrily at me. “Don't
humor him
,” she whispered.

A long time passed and we didn't find our street name but finally we spotted a blue-and-white sign that read: SEABEE HOUSING. WELCOME, SAILORS!

“That's us,” Dad said merrily, pointing. There were five long house trailers that looked as if they were set down in the middle of a swamp of thick reeds, saw grass, and scrawny, windblown trees. We almost missed the trailers because they were painted in green-and-tan camouflage.

“One of these must be ours,” Dad said, looking over a letter with his instructions.

Mom snatched the letter out of his hands. “It can't be,” she said, reading it quickly. “It's sitting in a swamp.”

“That's not a swamp,” Dad replied, waving toward the house trailer. “It's probably a tidal pool. Something educational for the kids.”

“Something to immunize them against,” Mom said. “I won't live in one of these shoe boxes.”

Dad ignored that statement and pulled the letter back out of her hands. “Says here number three is ours.”

“I can't believe we've traveled this far to live like trash
in a swamp,” Mom said, getting a bit huffy. “If my father saw this he'd â¦”

Betsy glanced over at me. “Here we go again,” she sang, as if it were my fault.

“Now don't feel bad,” Dad replied. “We're all in the same boat. It's just temporary Navy housing.”

“Well I didn't join the Navy,” she said.

“You did worse,” Dad said with a laugh. “You married the Navy, which is ten times as bad 'cause you don't even get paid.”

“Yeah,” she said without much humor. “And now that I've been captured I'm being tortured, too.”

“Yep,” Dad said. “You'll just have to show some grit, because the Geneva convention doesn't cover marriage.”

Mom reached over and pinched him until he hollered. That must have made her feel a little better because she did show some grit. She always tried to make the best of a bad situation. “There's number three,” she said. “Dock this boat and let's go see just how bad it is.”

Dad drove up to the front door. If I'd had a rope I would have run a line from the hood ornament to the doorknob to keep us from drifting out to sea.

Dad took off his shoes and socks, hopped out, and sloshed his way around the car. He picked Mom up like a new bride and carried her up the few steps. She reached out and turned the doorknob. It was unlocked
and they stepped right in. A moment later the lights inside began to come on. I peeled off my shoes and socks and Pete crawled onto my back. “Puke on my head and I'll drop you,” I said, as I carried him through the water.

“Drop me and I'll need mouth-to-mouth resuscitation,” he gurgled.

That was a disgusting thought.

Betsy sat in the car by herself, pouting. I knew she was wishing for the worst and had her fingers crossed that things inside the house would be so bad we'd all just run screaming back to the car, and Dad would drive down the road and over the bridge and all the way back to our hometown, where Betsy had a million great friends. I knew how she felt. I was leaving my friends behind, too. But since she was three years older than me she knew hers longer, and because of that I figured she'd miss them more.

But the little house wasn't so bad. The Navy had filled it with new furniture and carpets. As Mom said, “It's not fancy, but its good
family
furniture.” There were clean pillows and linens folded on the fresh mattresses, and the bathroom was spotless. The kitchen was small, but everything in it was spick-and-span. There was a new couch with a matching coffee table and lamps.

Pete threw himself on the couch like a dead dog lying on its back, with its legs straight up in the air.

“If you have to be sick, do it in the bathroom,” Mom insisted.

“There's no TV,” he whined. “I'll never get better.”

“You don't need one,” Dad said. “TV is only for people who are stuck out in the sticks.
We
are in Cape Hatteras! There are millions of things to do here.”

I looked out the front window to see if I could find some of the millions of things to do. Across the street was a Gulf gas station. The sun had almost faded and the round orange Gulf sign shined orangely onto my face. “It looks like a giant orange lollipop,” I said to Betsy, who had finally given up and come into the house to haunt us.

“No,” she said sharply, “it's a giant
sucker
they put up just in your honor.”

“You know,” I said, trying to sound like Mom and keep my spirits up, “this moving is hard enough without you being nasty on top of it all.”

Betsy stepped back and put her hands on her hips. “I've been thinking about what Dad said, and you
should
worry about making friends,” she said directly. “You are a
boy.
And boys don't make friends, just enemies. Girls make friends like this,” she said, snapping her fingers. “Boys just size each other up like hungry wolves fighting over a hunk of red meat. And believe me,” she said, poking me in my soft belly, “you'll make a nice meal for someone.”

Just then Mom walked up to us. “That Gulf sign makes us look like we have jaundice,” she said, holding me by the chin and looking into my eyes. “Even your eyeballs are orange.” She pulled down the shade, then looked at Betsy and put her arm around her shoulders. “Come on,” she said warmly, “help me make up the beds and get this place organized.”

“Okay,” Betsy said. She sounded tired of being miserable.

“Jack! Pete!” Dad called from the front door. “Come help me unload the trunk.”

“Yes, sir!” I hollered back, and saluted in his direction.

“Yes, sir!” Pete said, and crawled off the couch. He was tired of being miserable, too.

After Mom got the kitchen boxes unpacked, we ate dinner from the cooler full of leftover food we had packed for the trip. As I looked around the table, it seemed that everyone was doing much better. Betsy was happy because she had gotten her own little room. As usual, I had to share with Pete. Mom was happy because the house was clean and easy to keep that way. And Dad looked ready to hit the sack and get charged up for his new
ambitious
life.

After I took a shower in something like a tin phone booth, I said good night to everyone and crawled between my sheets, which smelled like Cream of Wheat. I
was exhausted, but before I fell asleep I still wondered what the kids at school might want to hear about me. I knew Mom was right, that I should just tell the simple truth: I was from a small farm town full of nice people with enough oddballs thrown in to make the place interesting. But I was more attracted to Dad's advice. It just seemed much more fun to make up who I was, to invent myself so everyone would think I was interesting. And suddenly it struck me that maybe Dad said to tell people what they want to hear because he knew life was easier that way, that if you agreed with everyone they wouldn't say mean things about you, or pick on you. I wanted to get up and ask him if that's what he meant by telling people what they wanted to hear, but I knew he was already asleep, and wouldn't want to hear from me. Soon, I didn't want to hear from myself anymore and drifted into sleep.

In the morning I opened my eyes and looked directly out my window. There was a kid staring at me. He was standing up to his knees in the little swamp between our two trailer homes. His hair formed a perfect V down the middle of his forehead, kind of like the pointy end of a can opener or, as Dad would say, a church key. When he saw me staring back at him he waved.

“Where are you from-from-from?” he asked, sloshing through the pea-green water.

“New York City,” I replied, lying before I could stop myself. I guess I was more Dad than Mom.

BOOK: Jack Adrift

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