Jack's Black Book (15 page)

About an hour later I moaned, “Can't you hurry?”

“I'm an artist,” Savage replied, somewhat insulted. “If you want something quick, go buy one of those sissy stick-on tattoos that your mom can wash off at bath time.” Then he continued to drill me with that needle at a hundred pinpricks per second.

When he finished the dog he asked, “Any name you want underneath?”

“BeauBeau,” I mumbled. I was half delirious from the pain.

He snickered. “What? Did you ever have a girl suck on your toes?” he asked.

I spit the dog toy out of my mouth. “No,” I said. I couldn't see the connection. I couldn't even imagine it. Why would anyone suck on a toe? Suddenly I thought I had gone insane. Gary Pagoda was now my best friend, we were driving around in the Goodyear blimp on wheels, I was in a section of town that was a hangout for America's most-wanted criminals, I was getting a tattoo from a human-anatomy model who was asking if I ever had my toes sucked on by a girl, and I was chewing on a dog toy. I wasn't a good influence.
I
was under the influence, and I wanted out.

“Can I suggest something like, I'm your puppy love,'” Sam asked, trying to be helpful.

“No, just BeauBeau,” I replied. “And in cursive.”

“Okay,” he said. “You're the boss.”

Finally, when it was all over he took a step back and admired his work. “There, it's now on forever. The only way you can get that off is with a hatchet.”

I was sure Dad had one.

I hopped off the table and hobbled over to a chair. Savage gave me a hand mirror so I could examine the work. Instead of BeauBeau, he had written YO-YO. I didn't say anything—besides, YO-YO was sort of BeauBeau's nickname, and would probably be my name, too, once Dad or Mom or Betsy got one look at my toe.

Then he turned to Gary. “Anything for you?” he asked. “I'm on a roll.”

Gary unbuttoned his shirt. “Yeah,” he replied. “I been thinking. How about writing in big letters DAD FOR PRESIDENT just below the TAKE NO PRISONERS-KILL ‘EM ALL AND LET GOD SORT ‘EM OUT! and above the fightin' Irish Leprechaun.”

“You want it in American-flag colors?” Savage asked.

“Cool,” Gary replied. “He'll really dig this when I whip off my shirt at dinner.”

I knew I would never take off my shoe again in front of anyone in my family. That is, if I could ever get my shoe back on. My toe had swollen up so much I could only get my foot into my sneaker about three-fourths of the way. I just crunched down the back of the heel as if I were wearing a bedroom slipper.

As the tattoo drill whirred, Gary and Sam kept up a conversation about old pals, and old criminal times. I just closed my eyes and dropped my head into my hands.

What have I gotten myself into? I thought. This isn't what I'd call taking the highroad.

I was sitting in the bathroom soaking my toe in a jar of warm water. I knew I couldn't get rid of the tattoo, but I was trying to get the swelling to go down and keep it from being infected. Another day with Gary Pagoda, I thought, and I'll be checked into a mental institution. I balanced my diary on my lap and wrote, “Maybe I am really as dumb as Mr. Ploof said I was. I can no longer deny the facts. I haven't written the blockbuster novel I set out to write. I haven't made a fortune and moved to Paris. And even Frankie Pagoda is smart enough to test out of Sunrise. Dad was right. Brains will only get in the way for me. I should build a career based on physical labor.”

Just then Betsy yelled my name. ‘Jack, Jack! Come here quick!”

I hopped up and knocked over the jar of water. I
yanked on my sock and ran into the living room. Betsy pointed at the TV. It was a Mr. Woody commercial. He was holding a Pagoda Pet Pad and saying, “… my opponent claims he is anti-pet tax, and pro-pet. But you be the judge.” He set the pad on the ground, plugged it in, and a lab technician set a dog on it. Mr. Woody turned the pad on and the dog yapped out in pain, did a little dance, and jumped off. “A vote for Pagoda is a vote for pet abuse,” said Mr. Woody, as the dog licked its tender paws.

“Pagoda is finished,” Betsy announced. “The Pet Pad is his Achilles' heel.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “People know that dogs need negative reinforcement. It's no worse than a little tap on the butt with a newspaper.”

Betsy scoffed. “If you want to see negative reinforcement,” she said, “you should see Mr. Woody's other commercial. He has a senior citizen testifying that he accidentally stepped on a Pet Pad and it zapped the pacemaker in his heart and he almost died.”

She was right. Mr. Pagoda was finished unless he had a secret weapon I didn't know about. Maybe he had one more invention to help him fight off Mr. Woody's ads.

That night Gary Pagoda tapped on my window.

I pulled back the curtain. I could barely see him because he had covered his face with black shoe polish like some kind of Marine commando. But the streetlight reflected off his gold tooth and I recognized him.

“Come out,” he said. “I need to talk with you.”

“About what?” I whispered.

“Just get out here,” he ordered. “Dad has sent us on a mission.”

Suddenly I was getting a very bad feeling that Gary was Mr. Pagoda's secret weapon. As I got dressed in dark clothes, I wondered what we might do. Maybe we could take undercover photographs of Mr. Woody selling dogs and cats to medical researchers where their hair would be shaved and their heads drilled and filled with wires. Maybe Mr. Woody had a mansion built with the tax money he had collected to help cats and dogs. Now, if we could get those kinds of pictures, Mr. Pagoda would have a fighting chance. Otherwise, he was doomed.

I slipped out the front door, trotted across our front yard, and climbed into the mobile home.

“What's our mission?” I asked, as we pulled away. “Where are we going?”

He removed a cassette tape from his top pocket and pushed it into the tape deck. I expected to hear our top-secret orders from Mr. Pagoda. Instead, a woman's voice came on. It was Gary's therapist. “Gary,” she said very calmly. “Close your eyes and breathe deeply. Relax and breathe deeply.”

I glanced at him. His eyes were closed, and he was still driving.

“Gary,” she said. “Remember to
center
yourself.” I wasn't sure what she meant but we were driving down the middle of the street.

When we began to drift toward the curb I reached forward and pressed the button to eject the tape.

“Hey,” he snapped and grabbed my hand. “That was helping me focus.”

“Focus on the road,” I suggested, and pointed to a telephone pole lined up in our headlights.

He steered to miss it, then snatched the tape and tossed it out the window.

“Now, why did you do that?” I asked.

“It wasn't helping,” he said, like some weary zombie warrior. “Nothing is going to help anymore.”

I didn't like the way he said that. “I was thinking that your dad needs an invention, like a secret weapon that can turn negative publicity into positive publicity,” I said.

Gary leered at me. “I'm his invention,” he said, confirming my fear. “I know how to wipe out Mr. Woody's lead.”

“I mean, is there a button you can push and Mr. Woody's lead evaporates? Something like that?” I said. “Something scientific and brilliant, like a pro-Pagoda brain wave?”

“I'm the button,” Gary said. “And I've just been pushed.”

I hoped he hadn't been pushed over the edge. But he had.

Now he was driving the mobile home through the streets with the lights off. Then he cut the engine and we began to coast down Wilton Manors Boulevard.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Hunting,” he whispered.

“For what?”

“Signs,” he replied. “When we reach the corner I want you to jump out and grab all of the Mr. Woody signs and throw them in the back.”

“Isn't this against the law?” I asked, knowing that it was. But I was trying to remind him.

“This is war,” he replied. “You saw those Mr. Woody commercials. A guy like me can't just stand back and take this kind of abuse.”

“Don't you think you are taking this too far?” I asked. “We could be arrested and they could send you away for a long time.”

“It doesn't matter,” Gary said. “I've tried to go by the straight and narrow, but nobody plays fair.” He dodged a dog that had wandered into the street.

“That's not the point,” I said. “We all know that politicians don't play fair.”

“Then why play? I'd rather just do what I want. I'd rather be a political assassin, or a flaming kamikaze.”

“I think you're losing it,” I said, taking a chance that he might get even more angry. “Maybe we should turn around and try to find your tape.”

‘Just do what I tell you to do,” he said like the old Gary, the one who loved to sharpen knives all day and throw bowling balls off highway overpasses. “Or else.”

I could just imagine the evening news with a policeman saying, “We are searching for a suspect who killed a young
man late last night. The body has not yet been identified. But there is a tattoo on one of his big toes of a dog named Yo-Yo.” Eventually Savage Sam would identify me, and my parents would bury me in BeauBeau's coffin.

Gary tossed me a flashlight. “Now get going,” he said.

“I'm supposed to be a good influence on you,” I replied, trying one last time to reason with him. “Not your partner in crime.”

“Hey,” he said menacingly. “If I wasn't here with you, I might set this thing on fire and run it right through Mr. Woody's picture window. So see, you have been a good influence. I'm only pulling up a few signs.”

I jumped out of the mobile home and ran into the field where a bunch of signs were nailed to wooden stakes pounded into the ground. I flicked on the flashlight and looked for Mr. Woody's face. I felt as if I were burglarizing a home. When I spotted a sign I grabbed it and pulled it out of the sandy soil. This is all wrong, I thought. Dad might be cynical about politics, but what I was doing was criminal. Then I thought, if I don't do it Gary will take one of the wooden stakes and drive it through my heart.

“Come on,” he yelled. “Hurry up. We got a million more of them to pull up by sunrise.”

I grabbed a bunch of signs and carried them to the big side door of the mobile home. Gary opened the door and I threw them in.

“We'll burn these later,” he said.

We drove to the next corner and I pulled up a few more. When we got to a billboard Gary jumped out of the
mobile home with a can of spray paint. He went around to the back of the billboard and climbed up the ladder. When he stood on the platform he wrote MR. WOODY SUCKS.

“Can't you be more clever than that?” I yelled up at him.

“What's wrong with what I wrote?” Gary barked back. “He sucks! That means don't vote for him.”

“It does not,” I said. “It sounds so immature.” I knew the moment I said the word “immature” that I was dead meat. When he climbed down the ladder he ran and lunged at me. I fell over backward and he sat on my chest with both his huge hands around my neck.

“I didn't mean it,” I choked out, thinking, Here comes my death.

“I won't kill you ‘cause you been nice to me,” he said. “But if you say one word to the cops I'll have Savage Sam tattoo Jack sucks' on your forehead. So just keep your mouth shut.”

“Okay,” I croaked.

Then he jumped up and ran back to the mobile home.

I hopped up onto my feet and watched as he coasted down the road like a silent ballistic missile searching out a target.

That was the last anyone ever saw of him for forty-eight hours, until election day.

Mr. Pagoda had another secret weapon. Sympathy. For the last two days before the election he went on television pleading for his son to come back. He even suggested that Mr. Woody had something to do with his disappearance. And somehow he managed to ask for people's votes while the Pomeranians sat on his lap like electrocuted wigs.

“I told you,” Dad said. “Politicians will say anything to get elected.”

Mr. Pagoda's sympathy request couldn't counter Mr. Woody's commercials. He'd shown an infant crawling across the Pagoda Pet Pad when zap! the tot flew backward like a fish being jerked out of water.

The next day everyone went to the polls. And that evening I went over to the Pagoda house for the election party.

Mr. and Mrs. Pagoda, Frankie, Susie, and I were all
squeezed onto the Pagoda couch watching the TV and waiting for the final ballot results. Right from the beginning it didn't look good for Mr. Pagoda. And an hour later he called Mr. Woody and conceded. In a few minutes all the local news stations announced that Mr. Woody would declare his victory.

As Mr. Woody stood out on his front yard answering questions from the press someone suddenly yelled, “Look out!” Mr. Woody and everyone dove for cover as Gary drove across the lawn in his mobile home, which had flames streaming from the windows. It looked like the explosion of the
Hindenburg
zeppelin we had seen in a history-class movie. The TV cameraman caught it all, even the flaming SilverStream roaring away down the street.

We just sat there. Stunned.

“I hope he didn't hurt himself,” said Mrs. Pagoda.

“And he was doing so well,” said Mr. Pagoda. “This is really depressing. But I'm glad that thing was a rental.”

Frankie looked at me and winked. Then he reached down under the skirt of the couch and removed the Pet Pad transformer, and before I could stand up he gave it a full blast. Wham! All of us were suddenly jolted off the couch and onto the floor. We knocked over the coffee table, the dog trophies, the framed dog photos, and their collection of Avon dog-shaped cologne bottles.