Big Mouth (10 page)

CHAPTER 9

Halloween used to be one of my favorite holidays. I’d buy a cool sci-fi costume and be on the sidewalks by sunset, whisking my pillowcase door to door, charming and coaxing my way to the pick of everyone’s candy bowls. Then, sometime around ten o’clock, I’d drag my bulging bag home and spend another blissful hour sorting the booty:
Sour Worms, SweeTarts, Milky Way, Sugar Daddy, more SweeTarts, Milk Duds, Snickers, Twizzlers, Twizzlers again, Circus Peanuts—yuck, trash those—more SweeTarts, Snickers, Snickers again, Pop Rocks…
Just a few hours of work scored me a candy stash that lasted for weeks. What a brilliant holiday.

Then my stupid body went and got too tall for Halloween, ruining everything. The candy-givers cut me off. “You’re too old for this, sonny” “Give it up, kid” “No way, dude. Buy your own stinkin’ candy.” Oh, the agony.

I even tried draping a sheet over my head and slunching down so people wouldn’t know my age. Mrs. Mortimer next door was the only one who fell for that. She gave me a box of raisins. What planet did that woman come from? That was a good way to get your house egged.

This year, I’d just resigned myself to doling out candy to other kids. After last night’s inventory and post–ice cream agony, I was pretty wiped, anyway. A big candy-collecting mission would have been tough. And really, it wasn’t so bad passing out the loot. Kids had to beg and charm
me.

As far as my parents knew, Grampy was supposed to be there supervising me as I doled, but of course he wasn’t. He and I struck a deal on that a long time ago. As long as I promised not to set the house on fire, I could take care of myself when my parents were gone. So when he was home, he mostly just hung out in his room watching TV. Tonight, though, he and Arthur were at Scoops together.

Gardo was with me instead. Lucy probably would have been there, too, only I kind of forgot to invite her. That is, I was going to tell her about it, but then we had that fight before school and then lunch was over before I could say anything about it and then she didn’t show up for the bus ride home and then it was just too late to call her. Anyway, she probably would’ve given me grief about the ice cream thing if she had come, so maybe I was kind of glad she wasn’t there.

Gardo hadn’t even asked about Lucy. But his memory went south when he started all this no-eating-cutting-weight business last week. Not that the guy was starving right now, though. At lunch he’d wolfed down all that food after hearing about the canceled wrestling meet, and now he was going to town on my candy bars. Not that I could blame him—it was hard to resist my Halloween choice: Three Musketeers.

Sure, Snickers was supposed to be the most popular candy bar, but I only bought the kind of candy I’d want to get as a trick-or-treater, and Three Musketeers was hands down my favorite. It had the perfect balance of densely fluffed chocolate center to delicately thick chocolate shell. There were no nuts or crispies or caramel or anything else to throw off its pure harmony. It was the Yin-Yang Zen King of candy bars. The brilliance of that bar was lost on Gardo, though. He was on the couch in our living room, kicked back in jeans and his red team shirt instead of his Marilyn drag, stuffing his face and hollering at a wrestling marathon on TV. I didn’t sweat his bingeing, though, because I’d bought ten bags of the minibars, so there was more than enough for him to chow down and me to still meet trick-or-treater demand. Besides, it was cheap payment for his launching of the Thuff Enuff legend. When I started raking in prize money, Gardo would get his rightful cut.

Gardo was a good guest. He never arrived empty-handed. He’d showed up at my door tonight with a six-pack of Pepsi. Add that to my mini Three Musketeers bars, and we had one finger-lickin’ Halloween feast. Without his contribution, we’d have had to chase our Three Musketeers down with milk. Two years ago my mom banned soda from the house after Uncle Therman, Jr., Dad’s brother and a total soda freak, got squashed by a soda vending machine. He’d put his change in the coin slot, but when no soda came out, he got ticked off and tried to shake a can lose. Only he shook the machine too hard and it toppled, crushing him like an empty can.

“Woo-hoo!” Gardo shouted at the TV. “Shermie, you gotta watch this, man. The Undertaker just beaned the ref with a tombstone, then tossed him into a coffin. That’s what you gotta do, man, be totally over the top.”

“I don’t know….” I stopped filling the candy bowl in the front entryway and took a few steps toward the living room to see the TV. A guy in a black hat and trench coat was cracking some clown-wigged meathead in the skull with a big rock. “Lucy says I have to perfect my eating skills first. She says an act is nothing without the skill to back it up.”

“
Au contraire,
my misguided friend. In the sports world, a skill is nothing without the act to back it up. Bury him, Undertaker!”

The doorbell rang, so I rushed back to the door. No one was there. “I see you, you little punks!” I shouted into the darkness. I hadn’t, actually, but word spread fast if you let doorbell ditchers think they had the upper hand on Halloween. I’d DD’d enough times myself to know that.

I fielded some legitimate doorbell dings while Gardo finished watching his match. When it switched to lady wrestlers, he met me at the breakfast bar with two cans of Pepsi. Bellied up to the bar, we toasted Halloween over a silver bag of Three Musketeers minis. My jaw was stiff thanks to last night’s ice cream-a-thon, but the minibars were pretty much bite-sized, so it loosened up quickly.

“I wonder why they call these Three Musketeers bars?” Gardo reached into the bag for another bar. “There’s nothing ‘three’ about them. They don’t even have three parts, just chocolate and nougat.”

“The bar used to come in three different flavors.”

“Really? Which ones?”

“Strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate.” My mom hid books about candy under her mattress. Thanks to my snooping, I knew the history of every candy made in America for the last one hundred years. Even Necco wafers.
Gross.
“They used to sell them in a box with three soldiers on the label. Those were the musketeers.”

“Strawberry nougat? Nasty.”

I bit the bottom off a mini and scooped the nougat out with my pinkie. I liked taking my time with those bars. Something about their mininess called for dainty eating. “I don’t know, it might be fun to taste it.”

“You’d have to pay me a lot to try strawberry nougat.”

“I’ll try any food once.”

“What about strawberry nog?”

“Instead of egg nog?” I had no idea there were other nogs. My mom didn’t have any books about that. Not that I’d found yet, anyway.

“It’s seriously gross,” Gardo said, making a face. “Nana makes it every Christmas.”

“I’d try it.”

“Not if you saw it, you wouldn’t. How about escargot?”

“Already did. They were slimy.”

“Gross! How about chocolate-covered termites?”

“Bugs?” I shuddered. “Bugs are not a food.”

“They are in some countries.”

“True.” I tried to imagine a spoonful of tiny termites dipped in milk chocolate. It would probably look like chocolate rice. Only it would be bugs. In my mouth.
Gross!
I felt butyric acid bubble. “Uh-uh, no way. No termites. Here and now, I draw the line at bugs. Raw, cooked, or candy-covered, it doesn’t matter.” In the Sherman T. Thuff Book of Good and Tasty Things, bugs were now an official no-no.

“You’ll have to eat stuff like that when you start competing.” He spun his stool back and forth, back and forth, smudging his chocolatey fingers on the white countertop. “They make you eat cow brains and sticks of butter and gross things like that, right?”

“That’s just for headlines. Hot dogs aren’t gross. Ice cream sure isn’t gross. Who knows, maybe there’s a Three Musketeers competition?” I bit the end off another mini, then pinkie-scooped the nougat. “That would be cool.”

“How many do you think you’d have to eat? A couple dozen?”

I considered the bag of minis we were finishing off. “I don’t know….”

Gardo was quiet a moment; then he smiled slowly. “We could try it, you know, to find out.”

“Oh no, no. Lucy won’t like that.”

“Who’s going to tell her? Not me. I can keep my big mouth shut. I didn’t say a word to her about the ice cream.”

“But she’s got all those graphs….” He was right, though, she wouldn’t find out. It was just me and Gardo this time, no customers or stupid Leonard to rat me out. And anyway, it didn’t really matter
what
I ate, eating was eating. Ultimately it was the volume that mattered. Lucy said so herself, I needed to work on my capacity. Besides, I loved Three Musketeers. “Okay. But we can’t eat
all
the Halloween candy. I don’t want my house egged for running out. We’ll make it a speed-eating competition. Two minutes to eat all the Three Musketeers you can.”

“What do I get when I win?”

“When
you
win? I don’t think so, little man.”

He crossed his arms. “Life is ninety-nine percent attitude, Shermie. If I teach you nothing else, remember that. Now let’s put up or shut up. Winner gets bragging rights, loser has to…oh, what should you do…”

“When
you lose,
Mr. Attitude,” I said, knowing exactly how to humiliate the guy, “you will properly bow to my excellence. To you, I will soon and forever more be Grand Master of All Things Edible and Great. And I expect a lot of genuflecting. You know how to bow to your betters, don’t you?”

“Yeah, yeah. Fine. How about when
you
lose?”

I scanned the kitchen and then the living room, my gaze running over my Galactic Warriors fan club magazines in the bookcase, the Pepsis on the table, the candy bar wrappers on the couch and coffee table, the TV screen with some long-haired blond woman twisting another long-haired blond woman’s leg over her head—

That’s it!
“If I lose, I’ll let you practice your Cripple Crossface takedowns on me for a whole fifteen minutes.”

“Done!” He popped off his stool and ran to fetch more candy from the living room.

Gardo did have attitude; I’d give him that. What he didn’t have was a clue about what he’d just gotten himself into. Attitude wouldn’t beat natural talent. With all he knew about eating, he’d probably take the traditional route, eating bar by bar, one at a time. I planned to apply the Solomon Method. Lucy said that technique had the shortest bite-to-swallow duration. I just hoped my jaw wasn’t too sore. I really didn’t want Gardo twisting my legs around my head for fifteen minutes.

Gardo brought over two full silver bags from the coffee table. Ripping both open, he set one in front of me and one in front of himself. Then he kicked his stool away so that he could compete from a standing position. “Okay, there are sixty-three candy bars in each bag. Ready, set—”

“Wait! I need to stretch first.”

“Aw, Shermie.”

I put up my hand in a
stop
gesture to shut him up, then started stretching. I let my head sag back, then forward, then to the side, then to the other side. I dangled my arms straight, then shook them. My First Contact medals jangled on my chest. I’d put my Galactic Warrior uniform back on for the trick-or-treaters. Actually, I could probably wear it every night and be happy. Slowly, I rolled my shoulders backward and forward, backward and forward.

Gardo stood there with his arms crossed, looking like he was picking his teeth with his tongue.

I pointed to the stove. “Make yourself useful. Go set the timer.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” He saluted. After setting the timer for two minutes, he remained next to the stove with his finger hovering millimeters from the start button. “Are you done?”

“Done.” I climbed back onto my barstool and dumped my bag of Three Musketeers onto the counter. Carefully, I spread the pile of minibars flat with my hands so that I could grab the bars quickly. “Okay, on my mark. Ready…set…GO!”

He pushed start, then dashed back to the counter. We exploded in a frenzy of hands and candy bars and flying wrappers. As fast as we could, we tore open a wrapper, shook out the candy, then grabbed the bar and shoved it into our mouths. Immediately I realized that the wrappers were slowing us down big-time. We should have taken them off before we started. An amateur mistake, but the clock was running and we’d already filled vital belly space, so I wasn’t going to stop the race now. At least we were equally handicapped by the goof.

I pulled ahead of Gardo right away thanks to the Solomon Method. Grabbing one bar in each hand, I fed them into my mouth two at a time, side-by-side, and then
bite, bite, chew, swallow,
real quick. Only it was more like
bite, bite, chew, chew, chew, chew, chew, chew, swallow.

Too much chewing.

To increase my speed, I started inserting each new set of bars even before I’d finished chewing the ones already in my mouth.
Bite, bite, chew, chew, chew, chew, chew, chew, swallow.

Still too much chewing! How did Tsunami swallow after only two chews? My bite-to-swallow duration sucked.

I tore two more bars free and kept eating.

Next to me, Gardo was just cramming the minis into his mouth as fast as he could unwrap them. There was no technique in his style. He was a starving man who’d just stumbled into a buffet. His whole face was involved in the chew, his eyes huge, his cheeks puffed out like a chipmunk, his mouth opening wide again and again. He was working a wad of light and dark brown that only seemed to get bigger. Brown saliva trickled out the corners of his mouth and down his chin.

I swallowed and paused to warn him, “That’s too much at one time. Swallow some first.”

He flipped me off and shoved in another bar.

“Suit yourself,” I said.
Bite, bite, chew, chew, chew, chew, chew, chew, chew, swallow…

I glanced at the oven timer. One-fifteen to go. Man, that forty-five seconds flew by.
Bite, bite, chew, chew, chew, chew, chew, chew, chew, swallow…Bite, bite, chew, chew, chew, chew, chew, chew, chew, swallow…

I had a huge pile of empty wrappers, but Gardo’s empty wrapper pile was starting to look bigger. I had to go faster.
Bite, bite, chew, chew, chew, chew, swallow. Oh, ow!
That was too big a lump to swallow. I could feel it squeezing down my food pipe. The Solomon Method sucked.