Mercy on These Teenage Chimps (3 page)

As Joey got sadder, I stoked the fires of anger. That fatso coach had slandered my best friend. It hurt not only him, but me, too, because weren't we almost the same? After all, weren't we separated by only a couple of streets? Wasn't his birthday in April, just like mine, and didn't we both like this gymnast girl? Of course, I would dutifully step aside to let my pained friend pursue her.

"Don't worry," I told Joey.

"What do I have to worry about? My life is over." He tore a leaf from the tree and blew his nose into it. He let the leaf go, and it fell with the weight of tears and snot.

After I left my buddy, I resolved to play Cupid. I had to find Jessica, bathe her ears with sweet sounds, and at close range plug her with a couple of arrows. Injured by love—for I would really pull back far on the bow—she would hurry over and entice Joey from the tree with tender words. But where did she live? I had no map, no hints. She had to be somewhere in Pinkerton. I imagined her doing cartwheels on her front lawn, a locket around her neck bouncing like crazy. After all, the day was pretty nice. Folks were out enjoying the rays, doing home projects in garages, and crunching snails in flower beds.

Our area has one high school, two middle schools, and four elementary schools. We can ride our bikes to the town limits and view fields of grapes, cotton, and sugar beets. There we can pet the large heads of cows and offer straw to perpetually famished goats. On windy days, we can hear music coming from beyond the coastal range, but we never get to go there. Our small town has a water tower painted with PINKERTON and, occasionally, bad words scratched by sullen boys.

"I got to find her," I said aloud.

Adams Middle School was across town. I rode my skateboard in that direction, paying no attention when Cory, a gap-toothed boy who used to thrash me weekly until Joey came to my defense, saw me go by and called me monkey face. I had a bigger calling than to stop and debate his taunts.

I skidded to a halt in front of Adams. The school was just as sorry as ours. The grass was chewed up from students playing tackle football. A window was boarded up. The V on the vice principal's door was missing. Pushed by wind, litter crawled down the open hallway, where, in the eaves, wasps hummed and stitched frightful nests. I propelled my skateboard down the hall and stopped at the drinking fountain. As at our school, this one dribbled pitifully. I pursed my lips and did my best to quench my thirst.

I spotted three girls out near the baseball diamond. They had hula hoops spinning on their skinny hips. Their hoop earrings swung with each gyration.

"Hey," I called.

The hula hoops slowed until they dropped to the ground.

"You know this girl...," I started. I decided to throw a wide net out there.

The girls looked at one another and whispered.

"Does she have monkey ears like you do?" one asked.

I ignored her smirk. "This girl does gymnastics and she's really good. She goes to this school, I think."

"We're going to call the police if you don't leave us alone," the smirky girl warned.

"Do your arms always hang down like that?" the smallest of the three asked, meaning below my knees. She had brought the hula hoop back up around her waist and was churning away.

I propped my hands on my hips and muttered darkly, "They look cute, but they're way mean." I rolled away with my head high. As Cupid I had to be noble in trying to locate Jessica. What mattered was making my friend happy.

The school was pretty empty on a Saturday, so I ventured downtown, where my uncle Vic owned a barbershop. As a young man, Uncle Vic had erred by copping a neighbor's lawn mower. Since then, he had just menaced society by giving bad haircuts.

A bald man, smelling of lotions and talcum powder, was leaving as I arrived. I made room for this portly client, who was out of breath just from stepping off the barber chair.

"Hey, little Ronnie!" Uncle Vic greeted. He was slapping snipped hair out of a towel.

"Hey, Uncle."

"How's your mommy?" He folded the towel like a flag and set it on the arm of his barber chair.

"She's okay, I guess." Mom was meeting with a friend to peddle Glorietta Cosmetics. But both of them secretly aspired to the next level: Avon.

Uncle Vic slipped a hand deep into his pocket. "Gum?" he offered.

When I nodded, he tore a slice of Juicy Fruit in half and gave me the smaller piece. My uncle had always been cheap, but he could chew your ears with a good story. His talk was free, costing nothing more than the air from his lungs.

I took the gum, unwrapped its silvery foil, and slipped it into my mouth.

"Uncle," I started. "I'm looking for this girl."

"What a little Romeo," he said. "Is she good-looking?"

"Yes, but the girl's for Joey, not me." I refrained from recounting the rafters incident. Instead, I asked if he had any customers whose daughters were gymnasts.

Uncle Vic raised his face toward the ceiling, exposing a large hairy mole under his chin, a mole that used to scare me when I was little because I thought it was a bloated tick. He snapped his fingers. "There's this guy I used to know. His daughter was into gymnastics. He does air-conditioning now, but when I knew him he was a landscape architect." He laughed and pounded the arm of his barber chair. "Fancy name for a gardener."

I wondered if this was the person Uncle had stolen the lawn mower from, but I didn't have to wonder long.

"I got snagged taking his lawn mower," Uncle Vic volunteered, not in the least embarrassed. "But you know, I wasn't stealing, just borrowing it. I had a girlfriend at the time and I had promised to cut her lawn. You know what I mean?"

I nodded. Uncle had done a stupid thing to impress a girl—just like Joey.

"So where does this air-conditioning guy live?" I asked.

He raised his hand to his mouth and began to massage it thoughtfully. His eyes got bright as he snapped his fingers at me again. "He lives off of Peach Street."

Peach Street was on the edge of town, where people kept chickens, horses, rabbits, and mules. Even pigs were okay if the neighbors didn't complain about the stink and late-night snuffling.

Before I left Uncle Vic cropped my hair for free—or sort of free. I had to sweep the front of his barbershop and scrape up the gum that dotted the sidewalk. Finished, I skateboarded to Peach and Vine, the cool air blowing around my deforested head.

The road was sort of country with the scent of cut grass in the air and the occasional stink of barn animals. Two dusty dogs lay by the road like roadkill. I was sickened. Why hadn't the owners buried them? Then, to my surprise, they flopped from one side to the other. They were just lazy hounds basking in the sun. One raised his head, displayed bloodshot eyes, rolled its loopy tongue around its jaw, and put its head back down.

"Who you lookin' for?" a voice growled.

I spun around, startled. A man on one knee, with a hammer in his hand, was doing something to a gate that was off its hinges.

"I'm looking for this girl," I answered.

The man rose slowly, hooked the hammer on the fence, and studied me.

"What girl is this, boy?" he asked.

His face was rough. A silky scar hung near his mouth, as if he were a fish that had bitten a lure. Age lines wiggled across his brow.

"She's, like, really good at gymnastics," I answered. "Her name's Jessica."

"And why do you want her?"

I plunged ahead and recounted how Joey had climbed up the rafters of the Lincoln High School gym to rescue her balloon.

"Boy, that sounds like a fishy story."

"But it's true." I crossed my heart—twice. I added details about how Coach Bear had bawled Joey out for risking not only his own life but the lives of the people he could have flattened.

A chicken, dusty and fat as a soccer ball, pecked the ground.

"You want to buy a chicken?" the man asked. "Two dollars a pound. She's 'bout three pounds. Six dollars the way she is, or seven if you want her plucked."

He began to plow dirt from under a fingernail with a matchstick. The chicken gazed up, seemingly curious about my decision.

"Nah, sir," I declined. "I'm a vegetarian." I returned to my mission and asked him again if he knew a gymnast.

The stranger pointed. "A girl that used to do flips and stuff lived over there. But she moved." He related a story about how she could fit herself into a cardboard box that was no bigger than a small suitcase. "I don't know how she did it. She was little then, but still." He shook his head and said, "When I looked in that box, she was all folded up. Just one eye was looking at me." He then nudged the chicken back into his yard, but not before trying again to close the sale.

"I'll throw in the plucking for free if you want." He pointed vaguely at a hatchet leaning against the fence.

I shook my head, and the chicken let out a happy cluck.

I rolled away
with no chicken under my arm and only a hint of where Jessica—if it was her—had moved. The man had pointed, saying "Yonder." I was baffled by "yonder." Had I missed this calculation of distance in math class? I also debated the fate of that poor chicken. She was already so fat that her feathers had separated and you could see the skin underneath. It was Saturday. Would she find herself in a stewpot on Sunday?

The country roads quickly led to our town's best neighborhood: The Heights. The expansive lawns were deep green, almost bluish. There were spring colors in window boxes and rows of daffodils in flower beds. In the eaves, wind chimes rocked but hardly made any music.

Three blocks later I encountered my mom at a corner. She was staring at something round and shiny in her hand. At first I thought it was a compass. Was Mom lost?

"Hey, Mom," I yelled. Without a doubt, she'd been out hawking her Glorietta Cosmetics in the better part of Pinkerton. Her briefcase sat at her feet.

"What are you doing here?" Mom asked. She eyed my haircut. "Did your uncle cut your hair, or did Joey?" Joey occasionally mowed my head with a pair of kindergarten scissors, and sometimes I did my magic on his hair.

"Uncle," I answered.

Mom turned my head this way and that, and judged that Joey was the better barber.

"What do you have in your hand?" I asked.

She held up a Sacagawea dollar, which winked a single sparkle, then popped open her briefcase and let me view her loot of fifty-nine more. She had made a hefty sale to a woman who had paid in dollar coins. Mom complained that her back was stiff from lugging the briefcase.

"I'll take them home for you."

Mom brightened at my suggestion. She poured thirty coins into my right pocket and twenty-nine into my left pocket, then gave me one to spend on a soda.

"Go straight home, Ronnie," she told me. I parted company with Mom and took off on my skateboard, slowing now and then to hitch up my pants. The coins were weighty, and I wasn't sporting a belt to keep my pants up. Each time I propelled myself on my skateboard, I sounded like a tambourine. The coins were like music.

I was two blocks from home when I met Cory, who was sitting on a fence with two of his friends. He unleashed terrible threats, flicked a bottle cap at me, and ordered me to stop or else.

"Come here, monkey face!" he growled. "I wanna talk to you!"

I knew he wanted to pour nasty words into my ears since Joey wasn't with me. However, he was scared that neighbors might hear—an old lady was raking leaves nearby and Cory knew better than to let loose with cusswords. Peppered with age, she was probably hard of hearing, but I suspected that Cory wouldn't chance it.

"I have to go," I hollered in return. I pulled off, my skateboard chipping up sparks against the cement, but Cory and his friends were on my tail.

"Joey," I whimpered. I envisioned Joey pinning Cory in six seconds and doing it again for the fun of it.

"Your friend's not going to help you now!" Cory yelled.

Breathing hard, Cory described how he was going to get me into a headlock, run my nose into the ground, and twist my ears off. The ears he was going to feed to his 4-H project—a hog named Porky.

With the Sacagawea coins jingling in my pockets, I had to hold them down with the flat of my palm. If they spilled, Cory and his friends would jump for them. How could I face Mom, who was walking around the rich part of town in worn shoes? When she wasn't selling cosmetics, she worked at a grocery store, and with Dad gone, every dollar mattered.

I made it home, but my pants almost didn't, as they slid around my ankles when I rounded the corner onto my block. It was this calamity, perhaps, that saved me from a showdown with Cory. He stopped to bend over and laugh, then gave up the chase. But it was no laughing matter.

I took the key from under our front mat and entered the house, my face shiny with sweat. I got a drink of water and noticed that the answering machine's red eye was blinking. I pushed the Replay button.

"Ronnie, can you come over?" The voice was Joey's. I picked up the sound of wind and a bird's chirping. I assumed that his mother had passed her cell phone to him up in the tree. His mother was a super nice mom who let you rob the fruit bowl of all the bananas and apples when you came over.

Joey's voice wasn't edged with urgency. "Come by when you have a chance," he said.

I took a break from my search for Jessica.

For lunch I devoured two quesadillas while I sat on my mom's recliner watching
Animal Planet.
The show was a repeat about an injured female bald eagle rescued from its twiggy nest by a biologist. The first time I caught that episode I had clung to the arm of the recliner, muttering, "Don't let the eggs fall." I pushed my knuckle into my mouth and wept when the biologist discovered that two of the three bald eagle eggs were cracked.

When the program was over, I ventured into the bedroom for a belt. I'd cleared my pockets of the coins, but there was no telling if I might run into Mom again with an additional horde of Sacagawea dollars. I then got a call from this kid named Wilson who wanted to borrow my skateboard. Wilson was freckled, smaller than me, and smarter than most everyone. I said, "Sure," and hid the skateboard under a blanket on the front porch for Wilson to come pick up.