Everybody Sees the Ants (4 page)

“Lori, you ready to eat?” Dad yells.

She answers, “Two minutes!”

“Lucky! Do your business and wash your hands,” he says. It’s as if since my dad started working in Le Fancy-Schmancy Café, he thinks I stopped growing. I’m not seven anymore. I know when I need to pee.

When I sit at the table, they are both smiling at me and I frown. My father starts dishing out portions of barbecued honey-and-fresh-herb-marinated chicken and grilled, peppered corn on the cob. He points to the bowl of buttery, parsley-sprinkled new potatoes on the table and says, “Help yourself.”

This is a normal meal, considering it’s usually lightly
seared chicken medallions glazed with blackberry sauce or stuffed with foie gras, or pork chops breaded with organic mushroom dust and served with
petits pois
peas smothered in garlic and almond butter, with a dash of lime. I don’t know where he gets this from. Granny Janice was fond of Spam, macaroni and cheese out of a box and grilled cheese sandwiches.

While I’m halfway through my second ear of corn, Mom says, “Lucky helped a girl at the pool today. It was very sweet.”

Dad looks at me and nods his head. “Proud of you.”

“Do you want to tell him what else happened?” Mom asks.

“Nah.” I’m not even sure what she’s talking about, but I think it’s Nader being an asshole. How is this news?

“What happened?” he asks.

“It was nothing,” I say, diving back into my ear of corn.

“He got pushed around by that McMillan boy again,” she says.

“I perfected the cannonball, too. You should see it,” I say.

“Did you push him back?”

I pretend we’re not talking about this. “Huh?”

Mom says, “The McMillan boy. He wants to know if you pushed back.”

“No.”

“Good. Fighting is for sissies,” he says.

I wish I could tell him how much I disagree.

I wish he would fight himself and win me.

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? The thing about my dad?
There’s no point in disagreeing with him because he already does it all by himself. Here’s an example.

Have you ever seen those POW/MIA flags? The black ones with the soldier and the guard tower, with the words
YOU ARE NOT FORGOTTEN
across the bottom, like this?

We have them plastered all over our cars, our windows, our stuff—my baseball bat and Mom’s bird feeders. We have a flagpole in the front yard where we fly the biggest POW/MIA flag that will fit. My father sews a patch on my winter coat every year. And my swimming trunks. And my gym uniform. I have exactly fourteen different POW/MIA T-shirts. He has it tattooed on his right arm, has a license plate holder, a set of coasters, mugs and playing cards.

In our house the slogan rings true. There is no way to forget our missing heroes here. No way. But we never really talk about it.

And then he says, “Fighting is for sissies.”

Some days I want to tie the two of them to the sofa and speak my mind. Say stuff. Real stuff. Ask stuff.
How come we gave up on Granddad when Granny Janice died? Why did she ask
me to rescue him? Why didn’t she ask you? And why aren’t we doing something? Anything?

The only
real
thing I ever heard Dad say was, “It would have been better if my dad had come home in a bag, because then at least we would know.” Then he transforms into a turtle.

Of course, the shell is the biggest part of a turtle.

And we never really talk about it.

The
day after Evelyn Schwartz went blabbing to the guidance office about my suicide survey, Danny and Nader got a lecture from the principal. I know this because Danny told me on the bus home from school.

“Why’d you have to ruin our joke?”

“I didn’t think it was a big deal,” I said.

“Fish says he’s going to call my dad, man.” We called the principal, Mr. Temms, “Fish” because his eyes bulged and his head was flat.

“Why?”

“You know why. They’re all retards, that’s why.”

“Huh,” I said.

“And Nader is
pissed
,” he added.

“Him too?”

“We got called down together,” he said. “To check out your stupid little story.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah, shit. Nader’s dad will flip out, too.”

“I’m really sorry,” I said. “I didn’t think it was that big of a deal.”

“Once Nader finds you, you’ll be way sorrier.”

“You think?”

“The guy’s a maniac.”

“Yeah, but we’re—kind of friends now, aren’t we?”

He laughed and shook his head. “Not anymore, you’re not.”

I tried to look like I didn’t give a shit. “Whatever. I’m in enough trouble as it is. My parents got called into a meeting next week. They’re going to test me or something.”

“What? Test if you’re an idiot?”

I nudged him on the arm. “Yeah, right?”

“Because I can tell them that,” he said.

The meeting was on a Tuesday. But Nader found me on Monday, in the locker room after gym.

“Hey, Linderman! Pay attention!” he shouted.

Then he grabbed the shortest, scrawniest kid in the locker room and threw him into the corner bench. He had his friends hold him down, take off his clothes, and blindfold him with his smelly gym uniform. The more the kid screamed and kicked, the more of Nader’s minions helped to hold him down, legs open. I could see him struggling against their hands, trying to bring his knees together. I could see him shaking. Breathing heavily. Panicking. Gagging.

While the other boys chanted “Don’t barf, pussy!” Nader produced a banana from his gym locker, walked over to the toilets, dipped it, and said, “Watch closely, Linderman, because this is what snitches get.”

That night I made my first booby trap.

I was in a pit, up to my knees in water. It was raining frogs. Big, fat green raindrops with legs that hopped the minute they landed. They were in my shorts. In my shirt. They were in my brain. There were leeches sucking life out of my ankles and calves. The frogs were trying to gnaw them off with their sharp frog teeth. It was agony.

This was my forty-ninth mission to rescue Granddad, so it wasn’t the first time I’d seen frog rain, leeches or the jungle. So far we’d never quite made it all the way out. Obviously.

On our many journeys together, Granddad had showed me how to make booby traps, but I’d never done it by myself before. I took my machete to the bamboo and whittled it into spikes. A hundred spikes. No one could see me because the pit was a mile off the jungle path and hidden by underbrush that was impossible to get through.

Granddad was sleeping ten feet away. I’d helped him escape Frankie’s prison camp the night before, and we’d been hacking through the vast jungle all day. I stayed in the pit through the night, carving spikes until they were sharp
enough to cut stone. I tested one on my left index finger, and I barely had to connect to draw blood. I set them into the trap and covered the hole around me.

Then I was so tired I fell asleep standing up, my head resting on the muddy side of the frog-drenched pit, still knee-deep in leeches.

Granddad Harry woke me up inside the dream.

“You ready?”

He pulled me out and set me on the side of the hole. There were so many leeches, I thought I’d rather amputate my legs than pull each one off. The rain had stopped, but not for long. The sky was still cloudy, and this break was the cruel joke of the rainy season—a moment to pretend you weren’t soaked to the marrow and being eaten alive by the jungle.

Granddad dragged me to the shelter he’d made out of a tarp and three bamboo poles. I said, “I need to cover the pit. Finish the job.”

He thought I was delirious, and I probably was. My legs were just blood and bites and animals and teeth. I passed out by the time he got to the fourth leech. There were at least one hundred to go.

When I came to, curled under the tarp, it was raining frogs again. I looked over to my booby trap and it was perfect. My legs ached as if they were shot with salt pellets. Even the bones hurt. When I looked down, and my eyes adjusted to the dim monsoon light, I saw that my legs looked as if they’d been attacked by a tiger.

Granddad said, “You need to heal those legs, son.”

“Ughhhh.” This was supposed to be me speaking, but I couldn’t speak. I drooled out this sound.

“Go back to sleep. I’ll try to get us to a hospital.”

I knew he was lying. How could an escaped POW from the Vietnam War walk into a hospital with his wounded half-dream grandson and get help? It was impossible. I was going to die there.

If I was going to die, then I wanted to die with honor. I’d rescued my long-missing grandfather, and I wanted him to get out the rest of the way without me.

I said, “Iiihyyyyy.”

If I was going to die, then I wanted to die without secrets. I tried to tell Granddad about the banana incident and what Nader did to snitches.

I said, “Ttrroooooo.”

Nothing came out right. The leeches ate my brain. They ate my tongue.

Granddad Harry stroked my head and handed me a cigar. “Congratulations on your first booby trap, son. Now go back home and get yourself some rest.”

•   •   •

When I woke up, out of breath and completely freaked out, I tried to calm myself with the words Mom always said when I’d woken up from jungle dreams before: “It was just a bad dream, Lucky. Just a bad dream.”

But it wasn’t just a dream. I still had the cigar in my hand.

Last
night after dinner and his “Fighting is for sissies” declaration, Dad showed up at my bedroom door.

“Help me take down the flag?” he said.

I followed him to the front lawn, where we took down the POW/MIA flag, followed by the American flag. Usually he does this by himself, so it was nice helping him fold them into perfect triangles.