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Everybody Sees the Ants

 


 

New York Boston

 

 


Begin Reading

 

Table of Contents

 

Copyright Page

 

For everybody

 

who sees the ants.

 

PART ONE

 


Who can stop the tears?—Robert Nesta Marley

 


OPERATION DON’T SMILE EVER—FRESHMAN YEAR
All I did was ask a stupid question.

Six months ago I was assigned the standard second-semester freshman social studies project at Freddy High: Create a survey, evaluate data, graph data, express conclusion in a two-hundred-word paper. This was an easy A. I thought up my question and printed out 120 copies.

The question was: If you were going to commit suicide, what method would you choose?

This was a common conversation topic between Nader (shotgun in the mouth), Danny (jump in front of a speeding truck) and me (inhaling car fumes), and we’d been joking about it for months during seventh-period study hall. I never saw anything bad in it. That kind of stuff made Nader laugh. And Nader laughing at my jokes meant maybe I could get through high school with less shrapnel.

When I told the principal that day that it was a joke between Danny, Nader and me, he rolled his eyes and told me that Danny and Nader were not having “social problems” at Freddy High.

“But you, Mr. Linderman, are.”

Apparently, Evelyn Schwartz went blabbing to the guidance counselor about my questionnaire. She said it was “morbid” and “creepy.” (Evelyn Schwartz has a T-shirt that says HE DIED FOR ME with a picture of a dead guy nailed to a cross on it. Oh, the irony.) I really don’t think it’s that morbid of a thing to ask. I’m pretty sure everybody has thought about it at one time or another. My whole plan was to make a few cool pie charts or bar graphs, you know—to show off my Microsoft Excel skills with labels such as SLIT WRISTS, OVERDOSE and FIREARMS. Anyway, just because a person talks about suicide does not make it a “cry for help.” Even if the kid’s a little bit short or unpopular compared to his so-called friends.

Three hours after my meeting with the principal, I was sitting in the guidance office. Six days later, I was in the conference room with my parents, surrounded by the school district’s “experts” who watched my every move and scribbled notes about my behavior. In the end they recommended family therapy, suggested medications and further professional testing for disorders like depression, ADHD and Asperger’s syndrome. Professional testing! For asking a dumb question about how you’d off yourself if you were going to off yourself.

It’s as if they’d never known one single teenager in their whole lives.

My parents were worse. They just sat there acting as if the “experts” knew me better than they did. The more I watched Mom jiggle her leg and Dad check his watch, the more I realized maybe that was true. Maybe complete strangers did know me better than they did.

And seriously—if one more person explained to me how “precious” my life was, I was going to puke. This was Evelyn’s word, straight from her mega-hard-core church group: Precious. Precious life.



I said, “Why didn’t anyone think my life was precious when I told them Nader McMillan was pushing me around? That was… what? Second grade? Fifth grade? Seventh grade? Every freaking year of my life?” I didn’t mention the day before in the locker room, but I was thinking about it.

“There’s no need to get hostile, Lucky,” one of them said. “We’re just trying to make sure you’re okay.”

“Do I look okay to you?”

“There’s no need for sarcasm either,” Jerk-off #2 said. “Sometimes it’s hard to grasp just how precious life is at your age.”

I laughed. I didn’t know what else to do.

Jerk-off #1 asked me, “Do you think this is funny? Joking about killing yourself?”

And I said yes. Of course, none of us knew then that the suicide questionnaires were going to come back completed. And when they did, I wouldn’t be telling any of these people, that’s for sure. I mean, there they were, asking me if I was okay when they’re letting people like Nader run around and calling him normal. Just because he seems okay and because he can pin a guy’s shoulders to the mat in under a minute doesn’t mean he’s not cornering kids in the locker room and doing things to them you don’t want to think about. Because he did. I saw him do it and I saw him laughing.

They asked me to wait in the guidance lobby, and I sat in the tweed chair closest to the door, where I could hear them talking to my leg-jiggling, watch-checking parents. Apparently, smiling and joking was an additional sign that I needed “real help.”

And so I initiated Operation Don’t Smile Ever. It’s been a very successful operation. We have perplexed many an enemy.

 


THE FIRST THING YOU NEED TO KNOW—THE SQUID
My mother is addicted to swimming. I don’t mean this in a cute, doing-handstands-in-the-shallow-end sort of way. I mean she’s addicted—more than two hundred laps a day, no matter what. So I’m spending this summer vacation, like pretty much every summer vacation I can remember, at the Frederickstown Community Swimming Pool. Operation Don’t Smile Ever is still in full effect. I haven’t smiled in six months.

Mom told me once she thinks she’s a reincarnated squid. Maybe she thinks being a squid means she won’t be swallowed by the hole in our family. Maybe being submerged in 250,000 gallons of water all the time makes the hole more comfortable. I heard her yelling at Dad again last night.

“You call this trying?”

“See? Nothing’s ever good enough,” Dad said.

“I dare you to come home and actually see us every damn day in one damn week.”

“I can do that.”

“Starting when?”

After a brief silence he said, “You know, maybe if you weren’t such a nag, I’d want to be around more often.”

The door slammed soon after that, and I was happy he’d left. I don’t like hearing him call her a nag when anyone can see she does what he tells her to do all the time. Don’t talk to him about that Nader kid, Lori. It’ll just make him embarrassed. And whatever you do, don’t call the principal. That’ll get him beat up worse.

The Freddy pool isn’t so bad—at least when Nader McMillan isn’t around. Even when he is around, working his one or two lifeguarding shifts a week, he’s usually too distracted by his hot lifeguard girlfriend to pay attention to me. So, for the most part, it’s a quiet, friendly neighborhood pool experience.

Mom and I leave home at ten, eat a packed lunch in the shade at one and get back home at six, where there is a 92 percent chance we will eat without Dad and an 8 percent chance he’ll take a break from working at the fancy-schmancy restaurant and come home to eat with us and say things like, “Do you think that berry compote works with the chicken?” Mom says she’s glad Dad’s a chef, because it makes him happy. She only says this to make me feel better about never seeing him. She makes herself feel better by swimming laps.

While Mom worships her pool god, I shoot hoops or play box hockey. I read a book in the shade or play cards with Lara Jones. I eat. The snack bar’s mozzarella sticks are really good as long as Danny Hoffman isn’t working, because Danny is an idiot and he turns the fryer temperature up so the food cooks faster, but the middles of the sticks are still frozen.

Danny can be cool outside of the snack bar, and he sometimes plays a game of H-O-R-S-E or Around the World with me on the basketball court. He still hangs out with Nader McMillan, but only because Nader would kill him if he didn’t stay on his good side.

I used to hang out with Nader sometimes, too, because of Danny, even after all the crappy shit Nader did to me, but that was before my famous freshman year social studies suicide-questionnaire screwup, when he decided to make my life a living hell again.

Today I didn’t bring a book, and I don’t feel like playing basketball or box hockey. Mom is out there by herself, swimming in lane three, occasionally eyeing the menacing clouds that are approaching from the west. I’m left lying here on our beach blanket in the shade, daydreaming. Sometimes I daydream myself to sleep and into my dreams. Sometimes I just close my eyes and pretend I’m a sniper, like my granddad Harry was in Vietnam. I imagine Nader in my sights, crosshairs on his forehead. Every day I kill him.

My mother could swim right through a thunderstorm, but they won’t let her.

“Let’s go stand under the pavilion until it clears,” she says.

I sit down at the picnic table across from Lara Jones, a fellow fifteen-year-old soon-to-be-sophomore from my school who has a mild case of summer acne. A lightning bolt strikes over by the basketball court, and we brace ourselves for the clap. It rattles the tin roof of the pavilion, and Lara shivers.

“Wanna play cards?” she asks me.

“Sure.”

“Gin?”

“Yeah. Ten card. No knocks,” I say, because I hate all those stupid extra rules.

“I’ll still beat you,” she says.

“Winning isn’t everything,” I say.

She grins at me. “Sure it isn’t.”

The rain comes down hard while Lara and I play gin. She beats me two out of three before the rain stops and I head over to the snack bar.

“What do you want?” Danny asks. So I ask him for a fifteen-cent bag of Swedish Fish.

“Multicolored or red?”

“Red, please.”

He mocks me, “Red, please. God, Linderman, you’re such a mama’s boy.”

I said hello to him at the mall last week, and he said the same thing: Stop being such a mama’s boy, Linderman. I liked the old Danny more—the Danny who used to play Transformers with me in our adjoining backyards. The Danny who wasn’t trying to prove anything.

He hands me a twist-tied plastic bag of Swedish Fish. “So are you gonna ask her out?”

I feign an expression of repulsion. “Lara Jones?”

“If you aren’t, I will.”

“Why?” I ask. I know Danny isn’t into Lara Jones.

“My brother says ugly girls give out faster.”

Fact is, I’d ask Lara out if I knew how to do it. But I don’t know how to do it.

Dad is actually home when we get back from the pool. He says to Mom, “See? I’m here.” After a near-silent dinner (grilled pork loin with raspberries and garlic potatoes), Dad asks me if I want to watch TV with him, and he turns on the Food Channel, which is the only channel he watches.

Tonight’s special is about Cajun food, followed by two episodes of FMC, which is The Five-Minute Challenge. Five chefs have to pick five ingredients (out of ten) and invent a meal in five minutes. The meal must be ready to serve twenty minutes after the clock starts. Dad doesn’t let me talk during the show. I’m allowed to talk during commercials, but I don’t.

Dad sits in his green corduroy chair and balances the remote on its arm. I’m spread out on the couch with my arms behind my head. My eyelids get heavy, and I can’t keep my eyes open past the first FMC episode. I have half dreams about gumbo-flavored ice cream and Lara Jones playing gin, until I hear the door close behind Dad, who left for the restaurant the minute he thought I was sleeping.

 


THE SECOND THING YOU NEED TO KNOW—NADER McMILLAN
The thunderstorms yesterday did not clear the humidity, as predicted. Petra Simmons, Nader McMillan’s girlfriend-for-the-summer, is in the diving-well guard chair, wearing a navy blue sporty bikini. She’s the color of peanut butter, holding a red float across her perfect legs. I usually can’t look at her without getting an instant boner, but today it’s even too humid to get a boner.

I do a cannonball and try to splash her.

When I surface, she says, “Feels great! Do it again!”

I aim my next splash at the guard chair, and when I look, I see Petra is rubbing the droplets of water into her arms and legs. This is probably the hottest thing that’s ever happened to me in relation to a girl. So I hop up the steps and onto the board again.

I look out over the Freddy pool. My mother is over in lane three and her stroke looks choppy and annoyed by the increasing amount of people in her way. Two of them are so involved in making out that Mom has to stop mid-stroke and wait until they drift into lane two. The make-out couple is skimpy-bikini-clad Charlotte Dent, a senior next year, and her new, twenty-year-old townie boyfriend, Ronald, who has a mustache and a red-tailed hawk tattooed across his chest, muscular shoulder to muscular shoulder. He works at the battery factory six days a week. Today must be his day off, which means he’ll leave for lunch soon and come back with a six-pack of beer and proceed to drink it in the parking lot with Charlotte. Today she’s wearing the leopard-skin string bikini, and I have to look away when she gets out of the pool, to avoid thinking too intensely about her nipples.

After two more cannonballs I come up for air, and Nader McMillan is sitting on the edge of the pool, next to the ladder.

He leans down to my water-filled ear. “So you wanna stick your little wiener in my girlfriend, do ya?”

“No.”

“Why don’t you go back to your mom and stick it in her?”

I look over. She’s doing a lap of breaststroke with one eye on me. While my head is turned, Nader pushes the back of my skull playfully, but enough to make my head lurch forward and bounce off the ladder handle. I swim to the other ladder, ten feet away, and climb out of the water and walk over to our blanket.

Two minutes after I spread out on the blanket and open the paperback I’m reading, the yelling starts. I see Nader and his friends still over by the diving board. Petra’s in the chair. Nader is shouting and pointing. There’s movement in the water, but I can’t see who or what it is, so I get up and start to walk slowly toward the edge of the pool.

“Don’t help her!” Nader says.

Petra is standing on the chair’s step now, whistle in mouth, pointing at Nader.

“Let her get it herself!” he yells.

Petra toots her whistle at Nader and gives him the what are you doing? look with her hands out and her head tilted. He totally blows her off.

She blows her whistle again. Meekly. “Come on. Just stop.”

Nader ignores her again and starts laughing at whoever is splashing in the pool. I move close enough to see it’s Charlotte—and she’s missing her leopard-skin bikini top.

“Come out,” Nader taunts. “You little slut.”

I squint at the twelve-foot-deep diving well and see a vague shadow at the bottom.

“If one of you doesn’t get it, I will,” Petra says, now motioning for another guard to help out. I look around for hawk-tattooed Ronald. His car isn’t in the parking lot.

“Lighten up, Pet. We’re just having some fun. She’s a slut, right? She probably wants us to see her boobs,” Nader says.

That’s the last thing I hear before I swim across the pool toward the diving well. Petra isn’t helping because Nader is her boyfriend. None of the other guards are helping because they’re all afraid of him, like everyone else in this town. Charlotte is hanging on to the concrete gutter of the pool with one hand while the other is clamped across her chest.

“Hey!” Nader shouts, right before I dive to the bottom.

It’s dark this deep, and something about it makes me feel calm. Something about the pressure on my eardrums and that feeling in the back of my throat. Something about the brilliant cerulean blue of the water down here makes me feel welcome. It’s like I’m more comfortable twelve feet deep than I am on land, especially after the last stupid, horrible six months of my life.

I come up with the bikini top and swim over to Charlotte. She slips it over her head and dives under the ropes to the shallower lanes, where I help her tie it around her back.

“Thanks,” she says. “I hope this doesn’t get you in trouble with those assholes.” I look up and see Nader standing there, glaring at me. “Ronald’s been looking for a reason to beat Nader’s ass for months.”

“I’d like to see that,” I say.

She shakes her head no. “Whenever Ronald fights, there’s blood. I hate blood.”

Nader is still staring at me while I talk to Charlotte. Petra is trying to get the two other guards on duty to stop writing up Nader’s violation on the report clipboard.

“Promise not to tell him?” Charlotte asks.

I’ve never talked to Ronald in my life. The guy is totally intimidating, not to mention twenty. “Yeah, okay.”

Kim the pool manager arrives back from her lunch break, and after reading the clipboard report and talking to a few members, she kicks Nader out of the pool for the rest of the day, loudly. Jovially, even. They’re friends because Nader works here and dates Petra, so Kim’s really only doing it for show. She even towel-whips him on his way out the gate. Then he turns to me before he hops onto his bike, and says, “You’re mine, Linderman!”

I hate that word: Linderman. No matter what I do, I can never get away from it. It’s like we’re cursed.

 


LUCKY LINDERMAN IS UNDER STRICT ORDERS
My granny Janice Linderman died when I was seven. She had colon cancer. I remember the day clearly—I had a loose tooth that I was afraid to pull and two new Transformers in tow. I was playing in the corner of her living room, where she’d lived for the last month in a rented hospital bed alongside whatever hospice nurse was on duty, while Mom and Dad took turns talking softly to Granny Janice about how it was okay to die.

“Don’t worry about us,” Dad said in the softest voice I ever heard him use. I think he was crying.

“We’ll take care of everything,” Mom said, motioning me over to the bedside to say good-bye.

Granny Janice’s final breaths smelled like week-old oysters. She was pretty high on morphine and talking to herself. I didn’t know what to say, so I held her hand tightly and said, “Good-bye, Granny. I love you.”

Her fluttering eyelids lurched open, and she grabbed my forearm so hard that it left a red mark that outlived her. She said, “Lucky, you have to rescue my Harry! He’s still in the jungle being tortured by those damn gooks!”

“Gooks?” I asked.

“It’s the medicine, Lucky,” Mom whispered to me.

“You have to find him and bring him back! You need a father!” Granny blurted.

Then she died.

My mother sent me out of the room, which was fine by me, but she couldn’t erase those words from my memory. If Granny Janice needed me to do something, then I’d do it, even if I didn’t quite understand her orders.

Up until the cancer, Granny was my parent, I guess. When I was little, she’d watch me at her house while my parents worked. She’d sit at the kitchen table making phone calls and doing paperwork all day while I played with all of the cool old toys in her toy box. One time she told me that she wished I could live with her. I remember thinking that would be nice. Before she got cancer, the school bus would drop me at her door, and she would help me with my homework and feed me dinner until my mom would pick me up at six. It was just the way things were, and I liked it that way.

Dad’s eyes were red, and he put his face in his hands. I picked up my Transformers and moved to the sunroom, and while Mom and Dad made the calls they had to make, I went straight to work.

I renamed Optimus Prime “Gook” and shifted an overgrown houseplant into the corner to make a jungle. I went to Granny Janice’s toy box and dug out a small doll that had come with a farm set—a farmer in a hat, missing one leg after I’d bent it too far backward the previous Christmas—and I buried him to his waist in the houseplant soil and called him “Harry.” While the coroner came and removed the body and helped my parents fill out paperwork, I rescued Harry from Gook about twenty times (by helicopter, riverboat, waterfall, ambush) before it was finally time to leave.

On our way home we stopped at a small neighborhood bar and grill and ate hamburgers in silence. Dad was just eating what he could, which wasn’t much, and the only thing Mom could do was point out the train set that was suspended above the middle of the dining room, as if I were five. I swear, she nearly called it a choo-choo. I decided to go to the bathroom to escape.

I didn’t really have to pee, but I went through the motions at the urinal anyway. About a minute after I got there, Nader McMillan came in and stood at the neighboring urinal. He was seven like me, but a lot taller (though that wouldn’t be difficult). He peed like he’d been holding it in for a week. It splashed off the urinal and the little lemon-shaped disk at the bottom. I felt some splash-back hit my arm, but I didn’t say anything because I knew Nader from first-grade recess and knew he was mean. I just stood there, little penis in hand, aiming but not peeing, praying he wouldn’t notice me.

“What are you looking at?” he asked, even though my eyes hadn’t moved. He turned toward me and peed on my sandals. On my feet. On my shins.

I didn’t say anything and neither did he. He shook and zipped back up and didn’t wash his hands before he left. I stood motionless, nervously wiggling my floppy tooth with my tongue until he was gone. Then I zipped myself and squished over to the sink. My feet felt disgusting, and I was debating whether to take off my sandals and wash them, when my dad and the manager came in. They looked at the pee puddle on the terracotta-tiled floor.

“Christ, Lucky,” Dad said.

The manager said, “Doesn’t look like an accident to me, man.” He opened a small closet door to the right of the urinals and retrieved a mop, a bucket and a stand-up yellow plastic sign that read WET FLOOR.

“It wasn’t me,” I said. “It was that Nader kid.”

Dad looked at the manager and said, “Really—he’s a good kid.”

“I’m sure he is. But Mr. McMillan is a regular patron here, and his kid said he saw your son doing it.”

I shook my head and started to cry.

Five minutes later we were driving home, silent, with Styrofoam carriers on our laps. As we drove through Frederickstown toward our little suburban development, I watched the big houses on Main Street pass by and I twisted my loose tooth right out of my jaw. Looking back, I guess that was the day that changed everything.

JUNGLE DREAM #1
I was walking alone on a path. I was in my Spider-Man pajamas and red Totes slippers. The jungle was loud with birdcalls and the zeep-zeep-zeep-zeep of insects. I looked down a lot, like a kid does in a big place. I focused on the bugs and the fallen leaves rather than looking up at the enormous canopy and the vines and the endlessness of it all.

When I came to a stream, I looked for rocks so I could cross it. I saw my red fleece slipper reach out for the first flat rock, and I saw it slide, and felt myself go off balance, until I was wet, bottom first, in the stream.

“Here, son,” someone said in a hushed and husky voice. I looked up, and there was a skinny man with a bushy gray beard holding his hand out to me. “Come on. No sense crying. You’ll be dry in no time.”

I took his hand and he helped me cross to the other side. When I got there, he looked me up and down. “Those are very cool pajamas. I wish Frankie could get me a pair with Spider-Man on the front.” He wore a pair of thinning black pajamas that stopped mid-shin, and was barefoot. His feet were a mess of sores and scars.

“Who are you?” I asked. “And who’s Frankie?”

The man cocked his head to the side and studied me some more, stroked his beard with his right hand and smiled. “Don’t you worry about that,” he said. “Follow me and we’ll dry those pajamas.” He walked to a sparkling clearing of sun rays, and I followed, the water squishing through my toes in my Totes.

Halfway there, a mean-looking Asian man in a worn uniform jumped out of a thatched bamboo hut. He pointed a rifle at me and yelled, “Lindo-man, who the kid?”

• • •

 


I woke up instantly, still wet, and screaming. Mom was standing over me, shaking me awake. “It’s just a bad dream,” she said. “It’s just a bad dream.”

It was two in the morning. Mom was tiptoeing around because she didn’t want to wake Dad, who had to get up in only a few hours to go to work at his new chef job. She said, handing me a pair of dry pajamas, “Just put these on. Don’t worry. Accidents happen.” I was still half inside the dream, hearing those final words that woke me. Lindo-man, who the kid?

Linderman.

Linderman.

It was Granddad. The man I was supposed to rescue. I’d found him.

RESCUE MISSION #1—A WEEK LATER
This time, as I walked toward the stream, I saw other things on the path. I saw little traps—holes dug with leaf cover to sprain an ankle in. Before I came to the clearing where the stream was, I found a group of spikes and poked them with a stick. I continued to push them until the square bit of wood lay on its side, revealing the six-inch-long nails that were hammered through it. I couldn’t be sure, but there was something smeared all over the nails, and I think it was poop.

I crossed the stream without falling in and came to the bamboo huts outside the fenced-in area. The sounds of the jungle were deafening this time. Like when the cicadas come in Pennsylvania, except it wasn’t familiar. It was all wild and scary.

“Psst.”

I looked around but couldn’t see who was making the noise.

“Kid! Look up!”

I looked up and there he was, the skinny man with the beard, sitting on a long branch of a tree. He was cross-legged, though it seemed physically impossible that he could sit that way on a tree branch, and he beckoned to me.

I eyed the trunk of the tree. There was no way I could get up. “How’d you get up there?” I asked.

“It’s a dream, son. You can go anywhere you want.”

So I closed my eyes and put myself in the tree next to him. We stared at each other. He sat up tall, his back straight, and smiled.

“Why are you up a tree?” I asked.

“Because it’s better than not being up a tree.”

“I saw the spikes,” I said, thinking that’s what he must have meant—that being up a tree was safer than being on the ground.

“The what?”

“The spikes. You know—the nails in the ground?”

He acknowledged what I meant. “Oh! Charlie’s booby traps! Gotcha.”

“Who’s Charlie?”

He reached out and patted my hand. “Never you mind, son. It’s nothing you need to worry about.”

Somehow, right then I knew for sure this really was my grandfather. I looked at him and could see my dad’s face in his face. I could see my face, too. It was a trustworthy face.

“Granddad?”

“Yeah?”

“What do I do about Nader McMillan?”

“Who’s that?” he asked.

“The kid who peed on my feet. He’s mean to everybody.”

“A bully?”

“Yeah,” I said. “A big one.”

The old man thought for a minute. “Do you know what my mother told me to do to bullies?”

“No.”

“She told me to ignore them. I think you should ignore that kid, too.”

“But he peed on me.”

He rubbed his chin through his beard. “He may have peed on your feet, but nobody can pee on your soul without your permission.”

I had no idea what this meant.

“What if ignoring him doesn’t work?”

“Then you get back to me. We’ll figure it out together.”

“Okay,” I said, and glanced toward the camp below. I took note of the huts, some abandoned, some in use. “Is this a camp?” I asked.

“Yes. A prison camp.”

My eyes moved to the barbed-wire fence surrounding a larger thatched hut. “Prison camp?”

He nodded.

“So you’re a bad guy? A robber or something?”

He exhaled and let his straight back curve. “No, son. I’m not a bad guy.”

I looked around the jungle and down at the prison camp. “So why are you here?”

He laughed as if he might be crazy or happy or something. When he was done, he said, “My number came up.”

I shook my head.

“The lottery, Lucky. They picked my number and drafted me. A year later I was in Vietnam fighting in a war. A year after that I was a prisoner of war, and a year after that they started moving me around to places like this.”

“Because of a number?” This did not mesh with my idea of a lottery. I’d watched those five-minute Powerball lottery shows with my mom. I was pretty sure nobody went to war because of the Ping-Pong balls with numbers on them.

“Yep. Number fourteen.” He put a small green twig in his mouth and scraped each remaining tooth clean. “Each day of the year was assigned a number. March first, my birthday, was assigned number fourteen. Got it?”

I didn’t get it. Not at all.

“Well, don’t cry, son. There’s nothing we can do about it now.” He put his arm around me, and the two of us switched positions. We sat on the branch, hugging each other, our legs swinging, me sobbing into the old man’s chest.

After a minute of this, Granny’s voice came back to me, and I remembered why I was there. I wiped my tears on his shirt and looked him square in the eye.

“I’m getting you out of here, Granddad,” I said. “I’m going to bring you home.”

 


THE THIRD THING YOU NEED TO KNOW—THE TURTLE
When we get home from the pool, I am still totally preoccupied by the Charlotte Dent bikini-top incident and the last thing Nader said to me. You’re mine, Linderman. God, what a dick.

We walk in the back door and Dad is in the kitchen, stirring sugar into a pitcher of fresh iced tea and humming a Bruce Springsteen song.

“You want two or three ears of corn?” He asks this as if the whole scene is normal. Him here, cooking dinner, being my dad. Being present.

“Two, please.”

I go into my room and change out of my pool stuff. I sit on my bed and think about Nader McMillan and wonder what I’m going to do. Ignore him. Stand up to him. Avoid him. Be “tough.” I think of the stuff Dad has said over the years. How he finally gave up suggesting things. Why are you asking me this? I never figured out what to do about my own bullies. How am I supposed to know what to do with yours?

I tried all of his ideas. I even tried a few he never suggested. I tried sucking up to Nader and being his friend, which only worked for a little while during freshman year until I got him in trouble with the questionnaire. I tried talking to one of the guidance counselors last January, only to hear that Nader is a pain, yes, but the best thing to do is stay out of his way. “He’s probably a good kid underneath it all,” the counselor said. Which isn’t true. But it meant Nader could keep treating kids like that, charming all the teachers with his perfect, whitened smile, and still play baseball in the spring. And it meant his lawsuit-happy lawyer father would stay off the school district’s back.

“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.

 


OPERATION DON’T SMILE EVER—FRESHMAN YEAR
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.

RESCUE MISSION #49—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.

 


LUCKY LINDERMAN HIDES THINGS UNDER HIS BED
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.

After that he went back to work and I went into my room and read my book. It’s called One Shot, One Kill, and it’s about snipers in different American wars. Lara Jones never fails to tell me that my reading about war makes me weird, but I can’t get her fascination with reading about fairies and wizards, so I guess that makes us even.

After the dreams started to come every other month or so—when I about was nine—I started reading about the war as much as I could. My elementary school library had a set of World Book encyclopedias and I pulled out the U–V volume one day and found “The Vietnam War” on page 372 and read about it, even though I had no real idea of what it was talking about. All sorts of names and places I’d never heard of (Gulf of Tonkin, Laos, Cambodia, Vietcong, Indochina, Ho Chi Minh). Dates (1957, 1964, 1973, 1975). Numbers (approximately 9,000,000 US military served; 58,000 dead; 300,000 wounded; 2,300 missing at the end of the war). And there were three pictures: one of a helicopter hovering inches above a clearing in the jungle, and three soldiers providing cover; one of protesters at the Capitol in Washington, DC; and one of a bunch of Vietnamese people stuffed into a helicopter during the evacuation of Saigon in 1975.

Every time I went to the library, I revisited page 372 to see if I could understand more. This went on through middle school, when I started to read other Vietnam-related books, too. I figured out who “Charlie” was—that it was just a nickname for the enemy, the Vietcong, or the VC: the Communist soldiers fighting for North Vietnam to take over our allies in South Vietnam.

Then, when I was twelve, I took a trip to the attic to find an old baseball mitt, and I discovered the box—the box from Granny Janice’s house filled with keepsakes and paperwork and books and letters about Granddad Harry’s case. Even though it was a hot, late-spring day and the attic was sweltering, I went through the whole box, paper by paper. That’s where I found One Shot, One Kill. It’s where I found all the letters between Granny Janice and the government. It’s where I found out she was a big-time member of the POW/MIA movement who spoke at rallies and national meetings and worked with the families of the missing. There were newspaper clippings, including a big one about how the government decided to classify all missing as “presumed dead” and how Granny Janice refused to see it that way.

It quoted her. “No one has proved to me that my husband isn’t still alive somewhere in Southeast Asia. So, as far as I’m concerned, if even one man is alive, we owe him more than this—than presuming him dead for the sake of tidying paperwork.”

There were more than twenty clippings, from places all over the country where she was invited to speak. Some had pictures. There was even a picture of her at the White House. This made me realize that Granny was a hero as much as Granddad was.

At the bottom of the box, I found a shoe box full of love letters between her and Granddad Harry from the time he was in training all the way up to when he was captured. I took it and hid it under my bed at the bottom of an old box of Transformers.

There’s this one letter I read nearly every day.

Dear Janice,I’m sorry it’s been so long since I wrote. Back in August they plucked me right out of my platoon and sent me for training in the mountains over by Long Binh. I’m now a US Army sniper.Last week I sat in a tree for over twenty-four hours watching a VC spy with his family in a village. When I dropped him, I watched his wife and kids throw themselves on his dead body. Janice, God knows if anyone did it to you, I’d find them in hell and make them wish they didn’t. When I killed deer with my father, it never felt like this.But I don’t want you to know these things. You are a beautiful woman who deserves to hear beautiful things. This will make you laugh: They gave me a nickname. Because I’m so good at my job (a confirmed twenty kills) the enemy has a price on my head, but so far Charlie can’t catch me. So my PL named me Lucky. Lucky Linderman. Has a ring to it, don’t you think?Sometimes I dream of you and your skin. The way you smell. And I know that this will all be over soon and we can make perfect love with each other again. The boys on the front had magazines with pinups, and they talked about how one day they would score women like that, but they’re kids. They don’t know what love is. Here they learn what hate is, and I am so sad that they might never know love because hate came first. Maybe they will miss out on having a woman like you, and I feel sorry for them.I can’t wait to be a great father to Victor and an outstanding husband to you. Janice, you deserve it. Since that day I saw you in chemistry class with that canary yellow skirt, I wanted to make every day Christmas for you. I know waiting for me must be hard. Please remember how much I love you.All my love,Harry
This letter was the last personal letter Granny Janice received. Then, he was gone.

No one could explain it. In the box in the attic, we have a ton of letters from the government that asked to change Harry’s status to “presumed dead.” But they never had proof. No bones or tags or anything. No one ever returned his wedding ring or his teeth. In the end, they changed the status without her permission, but it’s a lie.

The last she ever heard, he might have been alive in a Lao prison camp in 1987, fourteen years after the end of the war. This information came from fifteen unrelated sources—mostly refugees and boat people, and only thanks to the civilian POW/MIA organization that Granny Janice had worked for. The Pathet Lao (Communist Laos) returned very few US prisoners after the Vietnam War.

Under a dozen.

This was okay because we didn’t technically have a war with Laos. This was okay because our government wanted to move the nation into a more positive political era. This was not okay with the more than six hundred families who’d lost track of their loved ones in Laos.

Of course, it was easy to assume that these men who never returned from the war had died from jungle diseases. Jungle diseases suck. There’s dysentery, which goes like this: constant bloody diarrhea until you die. And malaria, which goes something like this: fever, body aches, vomiting and convulsions until you die. Also beriberi, which sounds way fruitier than this: weight loss, body pain, going crazy, swelling limbs, paralysis and heart abnormalities until you die.

It was also easy to assume that these missing men had died from an assortment of war wounds—from stinging shrapnel to torture injuries to booby-trap infections, thanks to the practice of coating spikes in a variety of infectious materials. But some men survive all sorts of crazy stuff, and Communists at the time were known for holding live prisoners for use as political currency or a ticket out of their unstable country.

So every time the government tried to make Granny Janice sign a piece of paper declaring Harry dead, she fought it. I can see her saying, “Up yours! My Harry is not dead!” Because Granny Janice figured Harry could survive anything to see her one last time.

Of course, now I know it, too.

RESCUE MISSION #101—PLAYING GIN WITH FRANKIE
Granddad, his guard Frankie and I are playing a game of gin under the canopy of the jungle. I’m winning. Granddad is not really paying attention, because he is too busy swatting red ants off his ankles. He’s missing three fingers on his left hand.

“Aren’t you guys getting eaten alive out here?”

I look down at my ankles. No ants. “Nope.”

Frankie ignores us and is concentrating hard on his cards.

Granddad gets up and sees that his chair is right on top of an anthill, so he moves to another part of the card table, and play continues.

Frankie turns to me and says, “How you dealing with that jerk in school, Lucky Lindo-man?”

I shrug. “It’s under control,” I say. I hadn’t talked about Nader with Granddad for years. How could I complain about titty twisters at recess to a guy who was missing his limbs or his teeth or his whole damn life? I know he told me to come to him if ignoring Nader didn’t work, and I wanted to, but I’d stopped telling any adults about it in real life, and here in the jungle it felt too whiny.

And I wasn’t there to whine. I was there to outsmart Frankie, kill him if I had to, and then rescue Granddad Harry.

“Gin!” I say, and I lay down my run of diamonds and four queens.

Frankie picks up his rifle and puts it to my head. “Why don’t you tell us the truth, kid?”

Granddad is standing now. “Frankie, put the gun down.”

“But he don’t tell you the truth, Harry. He lie.”

I duck, punch Frankie in the gut and grab his rifle from him. I kick him to the ground and put my bare foot on his neck. Granddad sits on his torso. I put the rifle to his head.

“It’s none of your goddamn business how my life is,” I say. “You got that?”

He nods quickly. My finger jitters on the trigger.

“Don’t kill me! Please!” he says.

I laugh. But my trigger finger just won’t pull.

Granddad says, “Don’t, Lucky.”

“I’m getting you out of here, Granddad. For good. Forever.”

“I let you go,” Frankie says. “You go and I never see you again!”

I kick him in the face. His nose bleeds instantly.

“Lucky, stop,” Granddad says.

“Why are you defending him? He’s tortured you for your whole life!”

“He’s fed me, too.”

I look at Granddad and figure he must be suffering from some freaky kind of Stockholm syndrome, where you bond with a kidnapper.

“He brainwashed your ass,” I say. I point the rifle right at Frankie’s temple. “I’m taking you home.”

When I feel my finger pull the trigger, I wake up.

• • •

 


Next to me on my pillow is a winning hand of gin. An ace, two, three, four, five and six of diamonds and four queens. The cards are coated in four decades’ worth of jungle dirt.

I pull out my Transformers box from under my bed and put the cards in, alongside all my other jungle souvenirs that I’d collected over the years: the very first one—a small rusty bolt I’d found when I was ten, the cigar from my first booby trap, a small block of wood with nails hammered through it. A petrified frog. Two rocks. A map. An empty C ration can. An assortment of metal parts.

I lie back down for a while, feeling like a jungle hero. But then I hear Mom and Dad talking in the living room, and I remember that I am a weak suburban failure.

 


LUCKY LINDERMAN IS NOT MAKING SCRAMBLED EGGS
Le Smugasbord is closed on Mondays, so we treat Mondays in the summertime the way most people treat Sunday. Dad is required to stick around all day if possible, though he usually only makes it until midafternoon before something we do makes him mad. Around ten, Mom comes to my bedroom door and says, “Lucky? You want some brunch?”

I groan and tell her I’ll be there in ten minutes.

Through my one half-open eye, I see her put a pair of swimming trunks on my dresser. “I bought these a size too big last year. I think they’ll fit you now.”

When I arrive in the kitchen, I realize I’ve been set up. The eggs are still in the carton next to an empty bowl. The whisk is sitting on the counter next to the bowl. There’s a loaf of bread by the fridge, and an empty frying pan on the stove.

Oh, God. Not this again—the once-a-month attempt to give-a-shit-through-cooking.

Before I can turn around and go back to my room, Dad arrives next to me, and Mom is at the kitchen doorway.

“French toast or scrambled eggs? It’s up to you,” he says.

“I don’t care. Whatever you guys want,” I say.

“Nope,” Mom says. “It’s your choice!”

I go to the cabinet with the cereal in it and pull out a box of Cheerios. I grab a bowl and am about to get a spoon out of the drawer, but Dad stops me.

“Come on, man. Just for fun. Let’s make breakfast together.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Why not? How come you don’t want to cook with your old man anymore?”

“Dunno. Just don’t think I’m good at it,” I say.

“You were great at it once. Aren’t you the only person in the family who can crack an egg and not get shell?”

“I doubt I could do that anymore.”

“These things take practice. Remember when we used to make pancakes and waffles together?”

I was seven. That makes it over half my life ago. I don’t tell him this.

“I’m fine with cereal. I’m not really that hungry.”

“I don’t think that’s the real reason,” Dad says.

I’m too tired and cranky to deal with this. So, I decide if Dad wants to talk about real reasons, then I will. I put the box of Cheerios on the table and look him square in the eye.

“I don’t want to talk about food anymore. It’s all you ever talk about. I don’t want to cook with you, and I don’t want to watch the stupid Food Channel with you, either,” I say.

He stands there and just stares at me.

Mom says, “Your father talks about more than food.” Defector.

He mutters under his breath like we can’t hear it. He says something about how nothing he does is ever good enough.

“No, because if you tried, then it would be good enough,” I say. “But you don’t.”

He looks at Mom and she shrugs. She lowers her head as though she might agree with me. She’s a crazy double agent.

“I guess I’m not needed here,” he says, and goes to get his keys off the counter.

“Actually, Dad, that’s the problem. You are needed here. I do need a father, you know?”

He slams the keys onto the counter. “Goddamn it! You don’t have any idea what it’s like not having a father! You don’t know how good you have it!”

He walks straight through the front door and to his car, gets in, backs down the driveway and takes off.

My mother sighs. A big one. Then she sits down at the kitchen table and sighs again. Another big one. She rubs her forehead with her fingertips until she can figure out what to say.

Then she gets up, puts the whisk back in the drawer and says, “Why couldn’t you just have fun and cook some eggs? He needs that.”

“Well, I needed stuff, too, but when I needed it, he wasn’t here, was he?” I say. “I gave up trying after my thirteenth birthday. Remember that?”

The week I turned thirteen, I was so sick of Dad only caring about food that I swore off eating until my mother took me to the doctor. I think I lasted six days. The doctor examined me and asked me a bunch of gastronomical questions—mostly about poop and any pains I might have.

“You seem fine,” he said.

“I am fine.”

He looked at Mom, who was sitting on the chair next to the exam table. “Lori, do you mind giving us a minute?”

She left, and he turned back to me. “Do you want to tell me what’s really going on?”

“I hate my father,” I said.

“Why?”

“He works all the time and doesn’t care about us.” I added, “He hardly talks to us.”

“My father rarely talked to me, either,” he said. “But I didn’t stop eating because of it.”

“What did you do?”

His tone changed. “I grew up and realized how silly I was being.”

On the way home I asked Mom, “Do you ever think that if you were a pork chop or a leg of lamb, Dad would pay more attention to you?”

She laughed. “Yes, Lucky. I have felt that way.”

“What did you do about it?”

“I don’t know,” she answered. But I knew. She swam more laps.

 


THE FOURTH THING YOU NEED TO KNOW—THE ANTS
The Freddy pool is looking especially inviting today. Mom comments to Kim the manager about her stellar water quality. Kim mentions something about calcium levels. It’s very exciting stuff here on a sunny Tuesday in July. Seriously. Could we all be more boring?

I head into the bathroom to change and am happy to find that the new swim shorts Mom gave me aren’t those annoying extra-large puffy things. These are a little gay, but at least they won’t hang down and almost show my butt crack when I climb up the ladder, and I’m pretty sure they’ll make for better cannonballs.

When I walk out of the men’s room, Nader ambushes me.

He pulls and twists my arm so hard I think he’s going to dislocate my shoulder. He pushes me onto the concrete and puts his knee in the middle of my back, the way the cops on TV do. He turns my face to the side and presses my cheek into the baking cement. I can feel it burn my skin.

Up close, I see the sparkling bits. I can see the tiny world ants see. Hills and valleys of concrete—crumbs from the snack bar, and the trail of water that leaks from the pipe under the water fountain between the bathrooms.

Nader begins to move my face across it—slowly scraping me against sandpaper. He says, “See what happens when you fuck with me, Linderman?”

I don’t say anything. My face stings and I tense it. He drags it more, pressing it so hard I swear my cheekbone is going to shatter. I can feel the skin melting off it. I feel oddly happy. Peaceful. Like I’m going crazy.

Ants appear on the concrete in front of me. Dancing ants. Smiling ants. Ants having a party. One tells me to hang on. Don’t worry, kid! he says, holding up a martini glass. It’ll be over in a minute!

“Answer me!” Nader says.

Time has slowed to a complete head-fuck. I can’t say anything. I don’t think he knows how hard he’s pressing my face into the concrete. And yet the smell of the concrete is pleasant. The ants continue dancing.

Danny pokes his head around the wall.

Nader says, “See what happens when you fuck with me, dude?”

Danny says, “Come on, man. He’s all right.”

“Answer me!” Nader says again.

I don’t know what to say, so I say, “What did I do?”

He laughs. “You fucked with me. Remember? Helping that little slut? See what happens? Karma, dude! Say it! Bad shit happens!” He jerks my face with every enunciation.

I concentrate on the feeling of my skin peeling off my cheek. I wonder will the ants eat it after this is over. Do ants eat skin?

“Say it, Linderman! Bad. Shit. Happens.”

I say, “Bad shit happens.”

“Now keep your fucking mouth shut,” he says into my ear. He’s so close I can smell the toothpaste he used this morning.

He gets up and struts behind the bathhouse to his bike and rides off.

While I lie there for a second or two, I have one of my old Transformers daydreams from when I was seven. I am Optimus Prime, and I grow to the size of the entire swimming pool. I stomp Nader into dust. I regrow him like dehydrated potatoes, and then I stick him in my prison camp. There are a lot of bamboo spikes. I make him eat rat shit. The ants all laugh.

I’m sitting up, propped against the men’s room doorjamb, and Kim the pool manager is squinting at my face.

“Jesus, Lucky!”

I blink.

“You okay?”

I nod feebly. At the same time I hold back maniacal laughter, suppressing my inner crazy person who is still watching ants dance. One of them is popping the cork on a bottle of champagne. Another is setting up a limbo stick.

“Who did it?” she asks, looking around. I glance at Danny, who’s now in place behind the snack-bar counter with his head through the window, craning his neck so he can see us.

She says, “Who did this to him?”

He shrugs. Asshole.

“Come on. I have to clean that,” she says, and helps me up. She signals to the guard on duty to get Mom’s attention. I reach up and touch my right cheek. It’s sticky and bloody, and it hurts like the road rash I got when I crashed my bike when I was eight.

“Brace yourself. It’s just water, okay?” She holds a bottle of distilled water the way I hold mustard when I’m about to squirt it onto a hot dog, and she cleanses the wound—which is my entire cheek. Mom arrives at the door of the office with a towel wrapped around her.

“Lucky? What happened?”

“I—uh—got—uh—” I can’t finish the sentence, because she wraps her arm around my shoulder and looks closely at the damage. Her expression is a mix of intense concern and anger. Even though she’s being soft to me, I can see her inner squid inking all over the place.

“He won’t tell me who did it,” Kim the manager says.

“We’re going home.” Mom turns and storms toward our stuff.

Kim the manager squats and looks at me as she applies Neosporin. “It’s gonna heal better if I don’t cover it.” A nod at this, and she puts her hand on my arm. I’ve known her my whole life. She’s put Band-Aids on my stubbed toes and treated the bee stings on the soles of my feet. She says, “You have to tell me who did this so I can boot ’e


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