there with that other stuff. I’ll pay for it.”
“I’ve got money.”
“I know you have. You can pay next time.” He started in the direction of the bathroom.
“Make sure you wash,” I called.
He waved over his shoulder without looking back, but I could tell he was laughing.
I threw the Crunchits on the counter with some other stuff he’d put there — a couple of bananas, some little cartons of yogurt, and a Cherry Blossom chocolate bar. And some baseball magazine. Then I went outside.
The lady had put the dog on a leash, and it was sniffing around some pretty much dead flowers along the front of the service station. I watched the dog for a few seconds then looked up at the old lady. She was glaring at me. Another drug-crazed teenage pervert purse snatcher.
“What kind of dog is that?” I asked her.
She told me it was a cross between two words I’d never heard before.
“They all look like that?”
“What do you mean?”
“That is one very unattractive dog.”
She picked up the dog and kind of held it to the side to keep it away from me. Like I was an animal killer. I thought about telling her I wasn’t, but if I ever became one, I’d start with her dog. I didn’t, though, and the door of the place opened, and the old man came out with a bag full of the stuff he’d bought.
He flicked the fingers of one hand and a few drops of water hit me.
“Good for you,” I said.
He nodded and we climbed into the truck. As he put it in gear and we pulled away, I looked back at the lady and the dog. She was talking to it. Probably telling it, “Don’t worry, Pookey, I’ll protect you from that acne-covered little bastard.”
“What’s so funny?” The old man was looking at me and grinning.
“People,” I said. “People are what’s funny.”
He nodded. “No argument there. You got your passport handy?”
“It’s right on top of my backpack.”
“Better fish it out.”
I did and handed it to him. He put it beside him with his own passport and an envelope with Mom’s writing on the front. All it said was permission letter.
“Mom said you played professional baseball.”
He looked like he was going to turn up the radio but changed his mind. “Yeah, a little.”
“What were you?”
“You mean what position did I play?”
I nodded.
“Mostly third base. But I wasn’t good enough, so I was a utility player. That means I played all the infield positions. Only got in the game if someone was hurt or we were blowing someone out or getting blown out ourselves.”
“So you were a crappy fielder.”
“No, I was a pretty good fielder. I was a crappy hitter. Couldn’t handle the curve ball.”
“Mom said you got hurt. Had to quit.”
“Tore up a knee. But I wasn’t going to make it to the big leagues anyway. So it didn’t matter. I just quit a little sooner than if I’d stayed healthy, that’s all.”
“Then what?”
“Then what … what?”
“What did you do after you quit baseball?”
“Got a job.”
“What kind of job?”
This time he did reach over and turn the sound up on the radio. I muttered “rude” under my breath, but if he heard me he didn’t say anything. And then it was all about Alan Jackson telling us how great it was “way down yonder in Chattahoochee.”
5
The next part of the drive was almost as boring as the part that had gone before. When I pointed that out to the old man, he said, “That’s your favourite word, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“Boring.”
I didn’t bother to answer.
The old man was nervous about crossing the border, I could tell — he was doing this thing with his hair, kind of curling the part by his ear with his index finger. He hadn’t done that until we were about a half-hour away from the border. Now he was doing it all the time.
I figured, Sweet, the old man’s a convicted drug dealer in the States, and I’m going to spend the rest of my life in some prison with bad food and black and white TV.
But actually getting through the border wasn’t that bad. The big thing was me. Like, had the old man kidnapped me at some mall and was sneaking me across the border with a fake letter from a fake mom in some fake town?
They told us to park and come inside, and they put us in separate rooms. A guy named Granfield, who was big enough to be a defensive end and soft enough to be an angel food cake, took me into a room and closed the door. He offered me a granola bar, and I shook my head. Then he told me about fifteen times that I didn’t have to be afraid, I could tell him the truth, and there was nothing the man in the other room, whether he was my dad or not, could do.
Apparently, the permission letter from my mom wasn’t cutting it with the border police. I knew that I could put an end to the whole summer-with-the old-man gig right then and there. All I had to do was say something like there I was drinking a slurpee and minding my own business and that nasty man in the other room came up to me and told me my cat had been run over by a car so I got in the pickup that he hadn’t even bothered to wash and the next thing I knew here we were at the border and please save me Officer Granfield. That’s all it would have taken, and I’d be spending the rest of my summer reading Catch-22 and drinking milk shakes and quite possibly doing amazing things to Jen Wertz’s body.
I didn’t do that. Partly because I figured even somebody as stupid as Granfield, who didn’t smell real good, especially in a room that wasn’t all that big and had like zero air flow, would eventually figure out I was lying. And also it wouldn’t have been fair. The last thing I wanted to be doing with the next few weeks of my life was going to freaking Saigon with the old man. But he’d been fair about it. He’d phoned Mom, and he’d obviously put out some serious money to pay for the trip, and he was even trying to make it okay for me. So I couldn’t really do something as dirty as rat him out at the border for something he hadn’t done.
Instead, I said to Granfield, “Why don’t you just phone my mom, and she’ll tell you if the letter is the real deal.”
I could see Granfield was pissed. He’d been all excited about the possibility of a
