The Trouble in Me (7 page)

“Wow,” I said.

“I'll come up with one for you, too,” he said. “I think your gang name should be Flame-Out, so I'll work that into a design. But let's get going.”

I quickly turned and went into the house to rustle up a swimsuit. “Flame-Out,” I whispered to myself. “A gang name.” I liked it, though I couldn't picture in my mind what a flame-out looked like. Was I a jet that had suffered an engine flame-out and crashed? Or was I a jet that had suffered a flame-out and survived through superior piloting? It was impossible to tell what Gary was imagining. Death seemed as exhilarating as life to him.

In my room I had a bathing suit, but my mother had bought it for me at a thrift store and it was a bright pink-and-white lobster print with loopy rope piping along the edges and outlined lobster-claw pockets on either side. It did not look like anything Sailor Jerry would tattoo on a real man or a dead man or even a boy. It looked like something only a mother would buy for a son to keep him from becoming a real man.

I quickly took a pair of scissors out of the kitchen drawer and went into my bedroom. I pulled out some old Levi's, cut the legs off them just above the knees, stripped off my cadet uniform, and put them on. Then I had a clever idea. I got my lobster suit and ripped the rope piping off, ran it through my belt loops, and tied the ends in a square knot like a pirate belt. I looked into the mirror. The suit was okay, but I looked so small. I played no sports. I didn't work out. I had the milky physique of a very soft boy.

Why would Gary ever choose me as a friend? He was built like a boxer. He must have had friends who looked more like him. I was like some boneless squid. I turned away from the mirror. It was discouraging to look at myself. My STP T-shirt was in the wash, so I put my cadet shirt back on.

A few minutes later I headed out. I hopped the chain-link fence and landed on the freshly packed dirt but didn't waste time wondering why Gary had dug such a deep grave for such a small dog because I didn't believe him anyway. As I stood on the grave it gave me an odd sense of power that he had lied to hide something from me. If I knew the truth it would be more powerful than his lie—though what good would the truth do me? Like my dad, Gary always had the last word.

I shrugged and let that thought fade as I walked over to the pool where Gary was pouring fuel from a red metal gas can into a plastic mop bucket. He was dressed exactly the same as before. I figured he'd swim, sleep, shower, and eat in the same outfit.

“Is that gasoline?” I asked, sniffing.

“Diesel,” he replied. “Germans chug a shot for breakfast and it keeps them regular all day long.”

His younger brother opened the back kitchen door and waddled out onto the patio like a seal. He was eating a pimento cheese sandwich and wearing a full-body black rubber wetsuit and swim fins. He had a diver's mask propped up on his forehead with a double-long snorkel fixed to the side of the mask.

“I'm Jack,” I said, and stuck out my hand to shake. He looked at my hand and violently shoved the remainder of the sandwich in his mouth as if he were suddenly plugging a leaky boat.

“Is that all you're wearing?” he mumbled with his mouth full, and reached down to adjust the straps on his fins while looking me over. Then he stuck his finger deep into his mouth and wiggled it around to unclog his throat.

“Why?” I replied.

He turned toward Gary and swallowed hard. “Did you tell him how to play this game?” he asked. “Because if he gets harpooned like Eddie the Whale when we played Olympic Moby-Dick, I don't want to be arrested.”

Gary shrugged. “Fair enough,” he said. “Here is the short description of the game.”

He bent over and lowered the can of diesel fuel and began to screw the cap back onto the spout.

“First I pour the plastic bucket of fuel on the pool and then give it a few minutes until it's pretty much evenly spread over the surface of the water. Once I set it on fire,” he explained as he pointed toward the diving board, “then I turn off the pool light and go stand at the tip of the board, where you can now see that I already have that half box of twelve M-80s. You two Japanese mini-submarines dive into the water, and then I count to ten with my eyes closed and when I open them I light the fuse on an M-80 and throw it in such a way that it lands just above you and blows you out of the water and you surrender—end of game.”

I was trying not to look afraid. The M-80 was the most powerful firecracker in the world. It would blow mailboxes to smithereens. Watermelons were turned into red rain. It was like a suburban hand grenade. There was no doubt that it could blow the top of your head off.

Frankie must have seen the fear on my face. “There's a trick to the whole thing,” he said casually. “Just stay belly-down on the bottom like a gator. The fuses are short and they blow up before they can sink down and get close to you.”

“He's right,” Gary agreed. “Just hug the bottom.”

“What do you do about breathing?” I asked, trying to sound practical.

“I have my adjustable snorkel,” Frankie said, and shrugged. “And a tennis racket.”

“I don't,” I replied, and turned toward Gary.

“A snorkel is for sissies,” Gary said derisively, and flashed his eyes at Frankie. “It just gets in the way of the strategy.”

“What strategy?” I asked, eager for some survival tips.

“Well,” he said, “let's say I throw a lit M-80 at you when you surface to breathe—right away you have two options. Either you can dive for your life, or you can show some manhood and catch the M-80 in one hand and wing it back at me and hope to blow my face off and win the game.”

I looked over at Frankie. He was getting impatient. He kept adjusting all his gear and fidgeting with this and that. Finally he blurted out, “No one yet has gone for the option of catching the M-80 because if it goes off in your hand they'll soon be calling you Captain Hook. So I've now included the tennis racket.”

Gary lunged forward and yanked the tennis racket from Frankie's hand.

“Cheater,” he sneered, and threw the racket toward the canal. “I don't like people who can't play by the Pagoda Olympics rules.”

“But the racket gives me a safer option,” Frankie whined. “I can just swat it back at you.”

“We have
already
agreed to the established options,” Gary insisted, like a TV lawyer, “and there will be no deviations.” Gary then turned toward me. “Now, since you are the guest, Sailor Jack, you have the honor of kicking off the game.”

Right away I liked being called Sailor Jack. It sounded cooler than Flame-Out and I figured a second nickname meant he already thought of me as a friend.

It was a warm feeling that passed through me, and another feeling, too, one even better, was that Gary already preferred me over his own brother. I'd have to keep an eye on Frankie, I thought, to make sure he didn't give away my hiding spots.

“Sailor Jack, you did a masterful job starting the grill, so you should enjoy this,” Gary said, and handed me a pack of matches. “I think the diesel has spread around good enough by now. Toss a match over the pool.”

I struck a match and flicked it toward the pool as if I were lighting the Olympic torch.
Flame on!
I thought to myself.

As soon as the match hit the surface a choppy crown of lime-green flames shot up and rapidly spread in an ever-growing circle until nearly all the pool's surface was on fire. An acrid black smoke swirled above the flames. I began to cough. It smelled like burning car tires.

“Turn off the pool light,” Gary instructed Frankie, then scuffed in his white fake-alligator loafers toward the diving board. Frankie flipped the switch and the backyard darkened except for the pool, which was magical with the green flames swaying back and forth like waltzing doll dresses.

“Let's go,” Frankie said, and dove in first, without much splash, like a stealthy seal.

I unbuttoned my shirt and tossed it on a plastic chair, then I took the deepest breath I could and jumped in with my eyes closed. I touched the bottom with my hand, righted myself, and then swam underwater toward the deep end. I felt around for the drain, found it, and anchored myself to it with my fingers. Before the first explosion I was actually enjoying how beautiful it was to look straight up at the bottom side of the flames on the water. I had only seen fire from above and was always tensed up as the flames angrily knifed at the air with their sharp blades. But when looked at from below, the flames stood up like small sails as the wind glided them across the glassy surface of the water.

It was musical to watch them until the first muffled explosion of an M-80 detonated and a rolling shock wave traveled through the water. When it reached me the pressure in my ears was painful, like a hand-slap against the sides of my head, and I instantly pushed off the bottom and went straight up. I broke the surface and took a deep breath and worked my jaw around to pop my ears, then dove over like a seal back down toward the drain. A blast went off close to the bottom of my feet and a pulsing ring of water elevated me like I was a sea offering on the palm of Neptune's hand. I turned over onto my back and slowly floated to the surface, where my lips parted the oily water between the flames, which had lessened and were now spread out like a field of blazing campfires. I breathed quietly as I watched Gary. He had his eye on Frankie's snorkel, which cut through the surface of the shallow water like a shark's fin. Gary lit one M-80, then another. He threw the first one in front of the snorkel and the second behind it. The explosions sent a lime plume of flaming water ten feet into the air. Frankie didn't surface. Dogs began to bark inside the Pagodas' garage.

“What the…?” someone said from a lawn across the canal, his words carried on the breeze.

“They're doin' it again!” came a second voice that was neither a man's nor a woman's—it was something mechanical, as if it were the voice cranked out of a rusty windup toy. Then I realized it came from one of those throat devices some old ex-smokers press against a flabby gray hole in their neck after having surgery to cut out their cancerous larynx.

I hugged my knees and half exhaled as I descended toward the drain. Once I touched it, I drifted upward very slowly, inch by inch, like a bubble of tumbling air toward the flaming surface just beneath the diving board.

Gary was pacing above me. The horseshoe cleats on the heels of his shoes gouged white shavings from the fiberglass diving board. He shifted to the left, then stepped to the tip. The board creaked as it dipped downward. He was after Frankie, not me. After all, I was a new friend in training, kind of a pet. He might make me fear him, but he wouldn't hurt me. Not yet, anyway.

From the main boulevard a police siren was growing louder as it closed in on the Pagoda address. Frankie stood up in the shallow end and splashed a circle of flames away from himself.

“Time out!” he shouted. “Those old throat-croakers must have called the cops again.” He pushed his mask up on top of his head. “Assholes!” he yelled loudly in the direction of the people who had complained. “Go smoke a butt and relax!”

Gary looked down to his right, where I happened to be looking straight up at him and breathing through my mouth. He could have lit the fuse of the M-80 in his hand and dropped it straight down my throat and I would have had my larynx blown out my neck.

Instead, he winked at me and struck a match. “What the hell,” he muttered. “You only live once—so you better kill as many as you can.”

He lit the fuse and side-armed the M-80 at Frankie, who by then had halfway pulled himself over the far edge of the pool. The M-80 clipped him across the back and caromed over the fence, where it blew up over our yard.

“Hey!” Frankie squealed as he stood up. “No fair! Truce. The police are coming and we gotta save a few for them.”

With his swim fins still on he slapped across the patio like an upright frog and opened a plastic pool shed door and yanked out a fire extinguisher. Obviously he had done this before. He flipped it upside down and pulled the pin, and when he squeezed the trigger it seemed as if an entire tanker truck of whipped cream sprayed out of the wide nozzle. I hopped out of the pool and put my shirt on as he squatted down and slowly circled the pool until he had layered a thick blanket of fire-retardant foam over the entire surface.

For a moment, beneath the foam, the still-burning diesel transformed the pool into a fancy flaming dessert with the Key-lime-green flames flickering upward and peeking deliciously through the singed milky tips of the whipped cream. But slowly the retardant worked and the flames dimmed and fizzled out and the putrid diesel fumes wafted up like toxic smoke rings.

I pulled my shirt collar across my mouth and breathed. The smell burned my throat. It worried me. I didn't want to someday speak through a mechanical larynx.

The siren on the cop car wound down.

“Battle stations,” Gary ordered. “Frankie, take the ammo and hide it in the garage and play like you've been helping Alice with the dog perm. Sailor Jack—hit the fence and disappear. I'll do all the talking since I probably know them anyway.”

I hopped the fence but didn't go inside. There were so many possible lives to lead, but hiding from my fear wasn't one of them. I didn't want to sit in the house and watch TV and play like I was innocent. I wanted to get a close-up view of the danger. I was breathing hard when I pressed my chest against one of our palm trees and tried to catch a glimpse of the police. I didn't think they'd be looking for me. If they knew Gary so well maybe they'd walk right into his house and escort him out in handcuffs.

There was only a single cop and he looked out his cruiser window and slowly scanned the sidewalks as he rolled down our street. Once he passed our house I took a chance and dashed into the front yard and flattened myself against the dark side of a palm tree. Slowly the cruiser circled the cul-de-sac, and when the cop turned off the engine the car kept rolling until inertia brought the sticky tires to a final stop directly across from the Pagoda house.