Jack on the Tracks (14 page)

I took it to be polite. “Don’t you have anything on becoming an adult that is not dangerous?” I asked.

“Nope,” she said. “This is the only title the school board approved of.”

“Are there any kids on the school board?” I asked, knowing the answer in advance.

She smiled. “Sorry,” she said. “Adults only.”

As soon as I left the library I balled up the permission slip and put it in the trash. I knew my parents were not going to okay a puberty book with body parts pictured in it.

I had some allowance money in my pocket so I decided to walk down to the strip mall. There was a bookstore and I thought, What could be more
adult
than taking personal responsibility and buying my own book on the subject rather than begging an adult to help me?

They had a lot of books on being a baby, but none on becoming an adult. But they did have a stack of old
Argosy
magazines. I checked over my shoulder to see if anyone was looking. The kid at the cash register was reading a comic book. I knew I was breaking a promise, so I quickly leafed through a copy to make sure there were no naked pictures. There were none. No harm done, I thought, and bought the magazine.

On my way home I went to the 7-Eleven to buy a bag of gummy worms. It was candy below my age level but I ate it anyway. It was kind of like still reading picture books even though I could read novels. But I didn’t care. Picture books were fun, and gummy worms were good. I was standing in line when the person right behind me passed some paralyzing gas. It was silent, so I didn’t hear it coming, but I could smell it when it arrived. It was deadly—cheesy and moist—and I pulled the neck of my T-shirt up over my mouth and breathed as if I was wearing a gas mask. I turned to glare at the person behind me. I expected to see some nasty wino, or Pepe LePew. Instead, it was an old lady with a sweet, pink face and twinkling eyes. She looked like a nun. When she smiled at me I turned away.

“That will be ninety-nine cents,” the cashier said to me, then suddenly jerked her head back and wrinkled up her nose. “You should practice some self-control,” she said.

I blushed, then looked again at the old lady. She raised her eyebrow, then held a delicate lace hankie up over her nose. “Young man, Bromo-Seltzer works for me,” she said.

I spun back to the cashier. By now my face was on fire. “It’s her,” I whispered, and nodded toward the old woman who was holding a can of air freshener.

“Don’t be rude,” the cashier said, and propped her hands on her hips. ‘Just lay off the dairy products for a while.”

I left as fast as I could. Adults, I thought to myself, get to blame everything on kids. And the older they are the more they get away with it. When I got home I hid my magazine under the mattress and went down to Betsy’s room.

“Don’t you think it is a raw deal?” I said to her. “Adults get everything.”

“That’s why they are adults,” she said as she sewed loose buttons on a blouse. “They can handle it. You can’t.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“I mean that you don’t have the self-control to make decisions and manage your life the way an adult does,” she said.

“Not true,” I replied.

“It is too true,” she said. “You have no idea how to manage your behavior.”

“Not so,” I protested.

“Okay,” she said. “Don’t take my word for it. I’ll give you a test. Tomorrow, when we all go over to the Guggies for dinner, I want you to fake sick and stay home by yourself. The true definition of a person’s character and maturity is what kind of behavior they have when no one is looking.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean,” she said, “right now you have two kinds of behavior. There is the sneaky Jack, like when you drink out of the milk carton while standing in front of the refrigerator when no one is looking. But if Mom is around you pour the milk in a glass like the good boy Jack. Your
true
self is the one that drinks out of the carton. The
fake
self is the one that only does stuff because otherwise you’d be in trouble. In other words, you have no self-control. No inner strength. So you shouldn’t be allowed to do what adults do.”

“You must think I’m some sort of caveman,” I said. “I have self-control.”

“Fine,” she said. “You don’t have to prove it to me. You just have to prove it to yourself. Tomorrow put yourself to the test and find out if you have inner strength or if you need to be constantly watched over like a baby in order to do the right things in life.”

“Okay,” I said defiantly. “I’ll do it.”

       The next day when everyone else got ready to go to the Guggies I went up to Mom. “I don’t feel well,” I said, and put a fake sick look on my face.

“Pull yourself together,” Mom replied, as she flicked her feathered hair into place.

“I’d rather stay home and rest in bed,” I said.

“You’ll be fine,” she said, not paying much attention to me.

“I think I’m going to barf,” I yelped, and ran down the hall. I lifted the toilet seat and made a series of beastly belching noises. Then I filled my mouth up with water from the sink and spurted it into the toilet bowl. “Arggghh,” I groaned.

I wiped my mouth on my sleeve and returned to Mom.

“That didn’t sound very good,” she said.

“I’m just going to get into bed and take it easy,” I said. “I think it is the
adult
thing to do. The
childish
thing to do would be to come with you then barf all over the dinner table.”

“I think you’re right,” she agreed. “Now go put on your pj’s. Miss Kitty III can keep you company.”

I did, then got into bed. Mom gave me the Guggies’ phone number just in case I began to die. “And no funny business,” she warned me.

“Don’t treat me like a child,” I whined.

“Don’t let Tack bring those magazines over here,” she said, getting to the point.

“Mom, I won’t read his magazines,” I said, knowing that I had my own.

“Fine,” she said, and walked off.

Betsy stuck her head in my door. “Remember,” she sang. “What you do when no one is looking is the real you.”

“I get it,” I said. ‘Just leave.”

As soon as they were gone I hopped out of bed. The only sounds made were mine. Somehow they scared me because they were supposed to say so much about me. The floor creaked when I walked across it. What could that mean? The curtains flapped like huge bird wings in the breeze. And when I flushed the toilet the noise seemed as loud as the sinking of the Titanic.

I sat down on a chair in the living room. Do not turn on the TV, I said to myself. Not the radio either. Just sit and think, like an adult. These were my rules. Betsy told me that it took a lot of courage to really want to know who I was, and if I was adult enough, I just needed to sit quietly and listen to my own thoughts.

My nose itched. I picked it. Then I stopped picking it. Betsy had said if I were an adult I would not pick my nose. She said if I was still a kid I would pull out a big nose-nugget then squeeze it between my thumb and finger and roll it into a ball and flick it across the room or stick it under the seat of a chair. I had done that before. And worse. I had cleaned food out of my teeth with a pencil point, spit loogies into the kitchen sink, picked the underwear lint out of the crack in my butt, jammed my little finger halfway into my ear to dig out some wax which I then sniffed, and hollered curse words when I stubbed my toe on a chair. I peed all over the toilet seat and didn’t wipe it clean, scraped the toe jam out from under my nails with a dinner knife that I put back in the drawer without washing it. But that was all in the past. Now I was a mature adult. And mature adults didn’t do any of that stuff anymore. They had conquered childish behavior.

So I sat in the chair in the living room with my hands on my lap and my feet flat on the floor. I had on a clean pair of pj’s. I had on clean socks. I had good posture and a smile on my face.

“This,” I said out loud to Miss Kitty III as she slept on the couch, “is the real me.”

Almost immediately the echo of a voice in the back of my head said, “No, this is not the real you. Don’t lie to yourself. The real you is the other you, the one who drinks out of the milk carton.” After about thirty seconds I couldn’t stand sitting still anymore. I thought my head would explode from all the quiet. “You know what you really want to do,” I said to myself. “Now go do it! Be the real Jack.”

I hopped up out of my chair, jumped over the couch, and got busy.

We did not have air-conditioning and it was already hot. So first, I created my own total comfort zone. I opened the refrigerator door and pulled a chair up to hold it open. I put the portable television from Mom’s room on another chair. I skipped down to my bedroom and got my magazine and my gummy worms. Then I took my refrigerated seat, tuned in the baseball game, and propped my feet up on an inside shelf. “Now this is aliving,” I said, and reached for a pot of cold German noodles. Miss Kitty III joined me. There was a plate of leftover meat loaf on a low shelf. I pulled off the plastic wrap and she picked at that while I moved on and worked over an old piece of fried chicken. After I chewed off all the good stuff, I tossed the bones and skin into the refrigerator so Miss Kitty III could finish the rest.

I started to read an article in the magazine on how successful men properly trim nose hair, but after a paragraph I was bored. I flipped through the other articles. It was all pretty dull. “You’ve been to the Elks Club with Dad enough to know how a grown man should behave,” I said to myself. I put the magazine down next to a bowl of cucumber salad and took out the Cheez Whiz. I opened the top and dipped a gummy worm in. As I ate it I thought to myself, This is the real me and there is not a thing wrong with it. I’m just misunderstood by adults. Any kid my age would agree that at this moment I was living the good life. I popped open a soda and drank almost all of it down. I could feel a huge burp growing inside my belly like a nuclear mushroom cloud waiting to let loose. I held it in and glanced up at the clock. As soon as the second hand was over the twelve I let it loose. I sounded like a yodeling bullfrog and when I finished I looked up at the clock and smiled. “That glorious sound,” I said to Miss Kitty III, “was eight seconds of pure belching pleasure.”

Then I really let myself go. I picked my nose some more, wiped my mouth on my sleeve, opened the back door and spit out any food I didn’t like, sang way out of tune, and swore at the TV anytime the other team did something good.

This was living. This was the real me.

Suddenly, headlights swept past the window and Dad’s car turned up the driveway. “Emergency!” I shouted. “Go, go, go.” I hopped up and jumped into action. I slammed the refrigerator door shut, pushed the chairs back to the dining-room table, and carried Mom’s TV back up to her room. I got it plugged in just as they opened the front door. In an instant I sprinted to my room and slipped into bed. Safe.

Betsy was the first one to check up on me. “Well,” she said. “How did it go?”

“Piece of cake,” I said, adjusting my pillow and giving a fake yawn. “I sat in the living room, read a book, and listened to opera on the radio. Finally, I got tired, washed my face, flossed and brushed my teeth, said my prayers, and went directly to sleep. Totally adult behavior.”

“Very impressive,” Betsy replied. Still, I could tell by the tone of her voice she was suspicious. But she could never prove a thing.

Mom was next. “How are you feeling, sweetie?” she asked, and pressed her palm against my forehead.

“Fine,” I said. “Better.”

“Was Miss Kitty III good company?” she asked, and lifted her hand.

“The best,” I said. “She’s a very mature cat.”

After Mom left I turned off my light and lay in bed looking up at the ceiling. I guess I am a combination of two types of people, I thought. I have a secret life as a guy doing guy stuff, and when I’m in public I live a perfect life of manners and refinement. And there will be no witnesses to judge the difference. No harm done, I thought.

       I was the first one up as usual. Our school was overcrowded with all the kids like me whose families had moved down to Florida for the construction boom. There were a lot of new jobs building houses and businesses, but they still hadn’t built enough new schools. So we were on a split shift at South Miami Elementary. The fourth, fifth, and sixth graders were on the early shift and so every morning when I woke up it was still dark.

I quietly walked down the hall and went into the kitchen. I whipped open the refrigerator door and was reaching for the orange juice when I saw her—Miss Kitty III. She was stiff from the cold. I put my hand over my mouth and stopped myself from screaming as I closed the door. “Oh my,” I said, talking out loud like a crazy person, “how did this happen?”

Then I said, “This is a joke. Pete or Betsy tricked me and I bet it’s a stuffed animal they made up to look like Miss Kitty III.” Slowly, I opened the refrigerator door again and peeked inside. It didn’t look like a toy stuffed animal. It looked more like one of my Uncle Jim’s stuffed foxes. But there was no doubt about it, it
was
Miss Kitty III. Her gray paw was still raised up in the air with her claws sticking out where she’d been furiously scratching the inside of the door. “Oh God, not this again,” I cried out in despair. I stepped back, closed the door and asked myself,
How could this happen?
It was obvious that the cat did not open the door herself. Someone must have come into the kitchen in the middle of the night to get water. They opened the refrigerator door in order to get some light. Then they turned around and opened the cupboard and reached for a glass. At that moment the cat must have seen the open refrigerator door and climbed in to explore. Then whoever the person was must have turned back around, poured cold water out of the pitcher into their glass, then quickly closed the door and returned to bed. This left Miss Kitty III trapped inside while her muffled cries went unheard. But who did it?

I opened the door again to make sure this wasn’t all a nightmare. “Oh,” I said when I got a good look at all the desperate scratch marks on the inside of the door.