Read Online The Trouble in Me by Jack Gantos - Free Book Online Page B

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.
    â€œTime 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.
    â€œHey!” 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.
    â€œBattle 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.
    Without warning the cop flicked a switch and turned on his door-mounted spotlight. The beam had a canary-yellow cast to it, like the color of shame. It strangely bleached the pigment from whatever it passed over, as if to disgrace it.
    The cop trained the manual spotlight’s bright circle on the Pagoda front door, then slowly he shifted the light over to the picture window so he could see deeper into the house interior.