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Authors: Jack Gantos

BOOK: Jack Adrift
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“You can't just quit,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “I mean my dad is going to get out early and we're going to move to Vicksburg.”
“When are you going? Because my dad quit, too.”
“Next week. He's sending us away first and he'll join us later.”
“It was nice knowing you,” I said sadly.
“I'm not gone-gone-gone yet,” he replied. “We still have a week to do weird stuff.”
“What do you want to do?”
“My dad said I can have all his model warships. He and I put together a whole fleet of them this year but he's so sick and tired of the Navy, he says he never wants to see another ship again.”
“What do you want to do with them?”
“Let's have a global total war destruction sea battle,” he gushed. “You get your ships and we'll get some fireworks and blow them to kingdom come.”
“Cool,” I said.
“You have any money?” he asked.
“A few bucks.”
“Bring it tomorrow,” he said. “We'll go down to the Big Bang Barn and buy them after class. They sell
lethal
stuff.”
“Okay,” I said. “Tomorrow we'll have a blowout. The last ship floating rules the world.”
“There won't-won't-won't be a winner,” he said. “We'll destroy the entire planet. There'll be nothing left of Earth but a cloud of toxic space dust.”
“Can we leave Earth and colonize another planet?” I asked.
“Only if you have big-big-big bucks,” he said. “My dad said poor people are the first to go in a war.”
“Julian!” his mother called out.”Get in here before you get infected with equine encephalitis.”
“What's that?” I asked.
“Horse fever,” he replied. “Your brain swells up and your head pops.”
“Julian!” she called again, and he took off running.
When I went back into my room I looked over at my ship models. I had an aircraft carrier, the
Kitty Hawk.
A submarine, the
Narwhal.
A command ship, the
Coronado.
And a few World War II battleships along with my favorite model—PT-109, President Kennedy's torpedo boat that was rammed and sunk by a Japanese ship in the South Pacific. It had taken me all year to save up for them and build them but now, like Dad, I was ready to
blow my Navy away—ready to sink the lot of them and move on to other battles.
The next day after school we went down to the Big Bang Barn.
“Let me do the talking,” Julian said, as we opened the door. “I'm a pro.”
We walked toward a man sitting at a desk reading the sports page of the newspaper. “What can I do for you, boys,” he said, without lowering the paper.
“I was hoping you could sell us some
ordnance
,” Julian said, like he was in the Special Forces.
The man lowered the paper and looked us over pretty good, then smiled. “Just how old are you?”
“Sixteen,” Julian replied. “I'm a midget.”
“That's good enough for me,” the man said. “Now let me see the color of your money.”
Julian spread out his life savings, about twenty-five dollars. The man scooped up the bills. “Follow me,” he said. We passed by the legal stuff—the sparklers and pinwheels and volcanoes and magic snakes, and then went through a door into a back room. He gave us each a small paper bag. “Start filling up,” he said. “I'll tell you when you've hit your limit.”
We filled up our bags with the really powerful stuff, and after a few minutes the man said, “Okay, that's enough. You don't want to blow up the whole planet.”
“Yes, we do,” Julian said.
“Well, have a blast,” the man said, and chuckled at himself.
We turned and got out of there as fast as we could. “This is going to be awesome,” Julian said on the way home. Then just before we reached our trailers he said, “Take my bag and hide it overnight at your house. My mom will explode if she finds it. Then tomorrow after school we'll have the blowout.”
“Okay,” I said.
 
At dinner that night, after we all took our seats and Betsy dimmed the lights to keep the mosquitoes at bay, Mom and Dad started in on Act II of their play. We were eating boiled potatoes with lots of salt, butter, and parsley flakes; pork hot dogs; and celery filled with either peanut butter or Cheez Whiz. Mom had said she was just using up the odds and ends in the refrigerator. Then, in order to get some conversation going, she asked Dad how his day went.
“Crummy,” he said, crunching down on the celery. “Dang Navy. They called Julian's dad and me into the front office and gave us a list of all the benefits we won't be eligible for if we take the OTH discharge.”
“Did you read the list?” she asked.
“Why bother?” he replied. “I told them if they let me just walk out the door and keep going, then they could keep all their benefits.”
“You didn't?” Mom said, shocked.
“Did, too,” he replied.
“Well, some of those benefits could help your family,” she said indignantly. “Did you ever think of that?”
“Let them rot in you-know-where with their benefits,” he said, and took a deep breath, and hung his head.
“Why don't you just admit it,” Mom said. “You do care what the Navy thinks of you.”
Dad's head sprang back up. “I'm not going to let the Navy tell me how I should feel about myself.”
“I agree with that,” Mom said. “But I don't agree that you don't care. When I know you do.”
“Look,” he said. “The bottom line is I want out. I don't care if they think I'm a failure or not.”
“Then leave with your head held high,” she said, “and we won't feel you're a failure either. But you behave like you are running away with your tail between your legs.”
Dad scooted his chair back. “I am not running away,” he said sternly.
Mom stood her ground. “You are a quitter,” she said. “And a quitter is someone who gets up and runs.”
Dad angrily tossed his napkin on top of his plate, stood up, and took a few steps for the door before he realized he was doing exactly what Mom had said—running away. “This is my life,” he growled. “And I'll live it
the way I see fit and I don't need you to tell me what to do, or what is right or wrong. You sound just like the Navy—maybe worse!”
Mom stood up, turned on one foot, and stomped down the hall. Then she stopped and glanced back over her shoulder. “If you can't admit the truth of how you feel about this to me, I can only hope you'll admit it to yourself.” Then she walked into the bedroom. Betsy and Pete stood up and followed her.
I looked over at Dad. He shrugged and rested his hand on the doorknob. “Don't worry,” he said to me. “The worst that can happen to you is that you grow up to become exactly like your old man.” Then he opened the door and, as he left, his place was taken by a dark silhouette of mosquitoes.
That night Dad slept in the car. I know because I stayed awake and waited for him to come home. I heard the car pull up into the yard. The engine stopped. The hot metal ticked. But the car door didn't open, nor did the front door to the house. It confused me that Dad claimed he didn't mind that the Navy thought he was doing a lousy job, because I'm sure he
did
mind. He always complained about people who had no pride in their work. And when I brought my report card home he always read it carefully and, if I received less than an A in any subject, he always accused me of not trying hard enough. And he would end up saying something
like, “What's wrong with you? Don't you have any
pride
in your work?”
In the early morning I heard him taking a shower. I got up and went down to the kitchen to get the water started for coffee. I knew he'd need a cup. When I saw him next, I thought he had the measles. He was covered with hundreds of red spots.
“Dang mosquitoes,” he said, scratching at his bumpy forearms. “They ate me alive last night.”
“I read in the paper where a woman's car broke down in the Everglades and the mosquitoes sucked all her blood out.”
“I can believe that,” he said glumly. “I think I need a transfusion.”
“Coffee's almost ready,” I said.
“I'll pick some up on the way to the base,” he said quietly. “Before you-know-who gets up and wants the rest of my blood.”
“See you later?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Don't worry. I always come around to seeing the better side of things. It just takes me a little longer than most.” Then he was out the door.
School was pretty much the same except that something in me had changed. Now that I knew we were going to move, I felt my interest in everyone and everything shrinking. Instead of wanting to hang on tighter, I wanted to let go. Even of Miss Noelle. It was
easier that way, to act like people no longer mattered much to me. Maybe Dad was feeling a bit the same. He knew he was pushing off and it was simply easier for him to say he didn't like the Navy rather than say he was going to miss it. I could understand that. I was doing the same thing. As he would say, “You're a lot more like your old man than you'll admit.” He was right. I always wanted to believe that I was more like Mom, but when I was honest with myself, I knew there was a lot of Dad in me, too.
After school that day, Julian and I met up as planned and walked home together. Then he went into his house and gathered up his models. I got mine, plus the explosives, and we met back out at the swamp. He positioned his ships on one end of the water and I set up mine. We were only about twenty feet apart.
“Okay-okay-okay!” he shouted. “I wrote a prenuclear wasteland song that I want to sing before we get started.” He struck his air-guitar pose.
“Sing your atomic anthem,” I said.
“Oh, say can you see-see-see,”
he screeched
. “By the dawn's early light. The mushroom cloud-cloud-cloud … that turns might into right!”
Suddenly he tossed his air guitar to one side and picked up a cherry bomb. “Sneak-sneak-sneak attack!” he shouted. He lit the fuse with a Zippo lighter and threw the first salvo my way. It blew up about an inch above the
Kitty Hawk
's flight deck. One
moment it was an aircraft carrier and after an explosion that knocked me back on my butt, the ship was nothing more than slivers of plastic and gray smoke.
“Direct hit-hit-hit!” he shouted, and lit another.
That got me going. I hopped up and lit three Roman candles at once. “Firing nuke-tipped rockets!” I shouted, and let loose with a neon barrage of fireballs. He kept lobbing cherry bombs and I countered with a string of M-80s. For about two minutes it sounded like a world war.
And then it was over. No ships were left. Pieces of gray plastic floated alongside scraps of red-and-yellow fireworks wrappers. From the blasts, stunned mosquitoes covered the surface of the water like surviving sailors. Then, from below, the frogs gathered to slurp them up like the sharks had done to sailors during the sea battles of World War II.
“Who won?” Julian yelled, fanning the smoke from his face.
“Nobody,” I said. “The world as we know it is over.”
Suddenly his mom came around the corner. “I told you never to play with fireworks,” she said, getting ready to give him a crack.
“It's all his fault-fault-fault!” Julian shouted, pointing at me.
“Don't you lie to
me-me-me
,” she said, imitating him. “He's bad,” she said, “but
you're
worse.”
Then before I could run away my mom opened the side door.
“Jack,” she hollered, “what's going on out there? I was in the shower and it sounded like a gunfight.”
“Nothing,” I replied.
“I swear, you get more like your father every day,” she said with disgust in her voice. “Now go to your room.”
My room was the one place I wanted to be. It was easy to sit by myself and feel all alone in the world. Like Dad sleeping out in the car, it was easier to just not talk about things that bothered me. It was easier to try to forget my past than to sort it out. It made me sad to think that, like Dad, I was already wanting a part of myself to disappear. I reached across my bed to my nightstand where I had saved one model, PT-109. I pulled it close to me, as if I were keeping it in a safe harbor. I didn't want to let it go. It was a little bit of hope that my year had been worth remembering.
 
Act III started while Mom cooked dinner. She had a look on her face that told me she was going to tell Dad about my playing with fireworks. But when he came home with a big bouquet of flowers and a card that brought tears to her eyes when she read it, I thought she might decide to give me a break and just go with the
good feeling of the evening. Then, when she let him kiss her and give her a back-bending hug, I knew I was in the clear.

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