Finding the Worm Read online

  Jerry Manche turned again to Quentin. “The second condition is that this guy right here”—he grabbed Quentin by the shoulder and give him a gentle shake—“this guy right here has got to start feeling better. Do you think you can do that? Do you think you can do that for Bobby Murcer and the Yankees?”

  “Sure, he can do that!” Lonnie said.

  Quentin shrugged. “I’ll do my best.”

  “If you give a hundred percent,” Jerry Manche said, “you get a hundred percent.”

  “What if you give a hundred and ten percent?” Lonnie said in a real sincere voice.

  “Now that’s what I like to hear! How about it, Quentin? Do you think you can give a hundred and ten percent?”

  Quentin looked him in the eye and nodded. But even he was struggling to keep a straight face.

  “Then we got a deal.” Jerry Manche stuck out his hand again. “Put it there.”

  Again Quentin shook his hand.

  “There’s just one more thing,” Jerry Manche said. He glanced toward the front of the room, near the door, where Howie and Eric were standing. “You boys want to police that area?”

  “What do you mean?” Eric said.

  “I need you to get that stuff off the floor. Just move it out of the way. Can you do me that favor?”

  “Why us?” Howie asked.

  “Because you’re standing there.”

  “C’mon, just do it,” Lonnie said.

  As Eric and Howie started picking up Quentin’s model planes and loose clothes, Jerry Manche stood up from the bed and walked to the window. He slid it open, leaned out, and whistled real loud.

  After that, he turned back to us. “Bobby Murcer and the Yankees got a little get-well gift for Quentin. We’re going to set it up in that corner of the room. Now, if you’ll excuse me for a minute, I’m going to head downstairs and oversee the operation.”

  “What did you get for him?” Lonnie asked.

  “Hold your horses, pardner. It’ll be here in a minute.”

  Jerry Manche said that on the way out of the room. As soon as he closed the door behind him, I turned to Quentin. “Why did you tell him you’re a Murcer fan? You don’t even like the Yankees.”

  “But you do,” Quentin said. “I figured I owed you.”

  “Owed me for what?”

  “You pushed back your bar mitzvah ’cause of me.”

  “You don’t owe me for that—”

  “So I got a nurse to write a letter to the Yankees saying how I was sick,” Quentin said, cutting me off, “and how I liked Bobby Murcer, and could I please have an autograph. I thought for sure they’d send it, and then you could have it, ’cause he’s your favorite. I didn’t expect it would get like this. So don’t rat me out, okay?”

  “I’m not going to rat you out, Quent,” I said, “but that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. You didn’t need to do that.”

  “Yeah, it’s dumb, but who cares?” Lonnie said. “What matters is what’s coming up in the elevator.”

  “What do you think it is?” Eric asked.

  “It’s got to be pretty big,” Lonnie said.

  “I’ll bet it’s a fort!” Eric shouted.

  “Why would the Yankees give Quentin a fort?” Lonnie said. “That makes no sense whatsoever.”

  “Maybe it’s a baseball bat,” Howie said.

  Lonnie rolled his eyes. “I guarantee you it’s not a baseball bat. If it were a baseball bat, Manche would’ve brought it up himself. I’m telling you, it’s got to be big. It’s got to be too big for one guy to carry.”

  “Maybe it’s a TV,” I said.

  They turned toward me, all at once.

  “Now that makes sense,” Lonnie said.

  “Maybe it’s a color TV,” Howie said.

  “It could be one of those humongous ones,” Eric said, “with a remote control and a built-in stereo.”

  That set us off.

  For the next half minute, we were arguing not so much about whether it was a TV but about what kind of TV it was. But then I noticed Quentin, sitting up on the bed, waving his hand, trying to get our attention. “Um, guys …”

  “What is it, Quent?” I said.

  “Why don’t you just look out the window?”

  We stared at one another for a split second, then jumped up, the four of us at once, and rushed to the window. There was already a huge wooden crate on the sidewalk. Two short, stocky guys in tight jackets were unloading another crate, not quite as huge but still plenty big, from a long truck. Jerry Manche was standing on the curb, near the truck, pointing at the two other guys and giving orders. You could see puffs of smoky breath coming from his mouth.

  “It’s definitely a TV,” Howie said.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Lonnie said, leaning to the right for a different angle. “Why would there be two boxes?”

  “Maybe it’s another TV,” Howie said. “Maybe Quentin’s getting two TVs.”

  The rest of us just stared at him.

  “All right,” Howie snapped, “then you tell me what it is.”

  I had a thought at that moment, but I couldn’t say it out loud: that first crate, the bigger one, was the size and shape of a coffin. It creeped me out to think that, and I tried not to think it, and afterward I tried to shake the thought out of my head. But it stuck with me.

  “Hey, Quent,” Lonnie said, “don’t you want to see what’s going on?”

  “Nah, you guys can tell me.”

  “Are you tired out?” I said.

  “Not too bad.”

  Lonnie stepped away from the window. “Do you want us to go? You can say if you do. We’ll clear out in a minute.”

  “Nah, I want you to stay,” Quentin said.

  “They got the crates on wheels!” Eric said. “They’re rolling them through the front door of the building!”

  “C’mon, Quent, let’s meet them at the elevator!” Lonnie said.

  “You guys go ahead,” Quentin said. “I’ll meet you out there.”

  He seemed to mean it, so we ran out of the room like a buffalo stampede, then out past Mr. and Mrs. Selig, who were sitting at the kitchen table, and then out into the hall.

  It took a long time for the elevator to get to the fifth floor. When the doors slid open, we couldn’t even see the guys. It was just the two wooden crates sitting on dollies. But then the crates lurched forward, and we jumped back out of the way, and the two stocky guys steered the crates out of the elevator and into the hall.

  The last to come out was Jerry Manche, who looked rumpled up. He must have gotten squeezed behind those crates and between those two stocky guys. But he managed to wink at us. Lonnie gave him a real goofy thumbs-up sign, and sure enough, Jerry Manche gave him a thumbs-up sign right back. I almost laughed out loud at that, but I turned my head to the side and held it in.

  Quentin was standing at the front door of the apartment, holding it open, and his mom and dad were standing behind him.

  “We’ll take it from here, folks,” Jerry Manche called. “If you’ll just step back and give us ten minutes, we’ll be out of your hair and gone.”

  Quentin’s mom and dad pulled him back into the apartment and out of the way, and the two stocky guys steered the crates toward the front door. It was a miracle the bigger one fit. Right up until it rolled through, I was thinking, No way! It was so tight that the guy had to pull in his fingers from the edges of the crate. Then the second guy got the second crate through, and Jerry Manche led them to Quentin’s room. The four of us were trailing behind them, but Mr. Selig held up his hand, as if it were a stop sign, and that was that.

  Quentin turned to his dad and asked, “C’mon, what is it?”

  “You’ll find out soon enough.”

  Then Quentin turned to his mom, but she made a motion with her hand as if she was zipping her lips closed.

  You wouldn’t believe the noises that came out of Quentin’s room for the next ten minutes. Hammers thudding, screwdrivers twisting, metal parts cl
anging onto the floor—it sounded like they were putting together a battleship. We were milling around in the living room the entire time, just kind of rocking back and forth on our heels.

  Not Mr. and Mrs. Selig—they were sitting down on the couch. But they were listening to the racket like the rest of us, waiting for it to end. Every so often, when it got real loud, Mrs. Selig would wince. I heard her yell to Mr. Selig, “The neighbors must think we’ve gone crazy.” Mr. Selig didn’t answer her, but he gave her a quick hug.

  Toward the end, there were other sounds. Not as loud as before, but weirder. Dinging. Buzzing. Clacking. I’d never heard a television make those noises. I glanced at Lonnie, and he glanced back at me, and we both kind of shrugged without shrugging. It was a total mystery.

  Then, at last, Jerry Manche came out of the room. The two stocky guys came out right after him, dripping with sweat, and the second guy shut the door behind him. As soon as Mrs. Selig saw them, she jumped up off the couch and asked if they wanted glasses of lemonade. One of them nodded, and then both of them followed her into the kitchen.

  Jerry Manche, meanwhile, walked over to Quentin and said, “Now, you remember our deal, right? You’re going to give a hundred and ten percent, and you’re going to start feeling better. We shook hands on that, and I’m going to hold you to it.”

  “Right,” Quentin said.

  “Remember, you didn’t just make that deal with me. You made it with Bobby Murcer and the New York Yankees. You live up to your end of the deal, and I promise you, Bobby will swing by for a visit when the Yankees come north in April. That sounds like a pretty good deal to me. What about you?”

  “Sounds good to me too,” Quentin said.

  Jerry Manche gave Quentin a soft jab in the arm, then stepped aside. It took a second for Quentin to realize he was letting him back into his room. As soon as that sank in, Quentin rushed past him, and the rest of us followed one step behind. Quentin flung open the door and stopped in his tracks.

  There, in the corner of the room, stood a pinball machine … an actual, full-size dinging and buzzing and clacking pinball machine.

  The game was called Challenge the Yankees.

  January 26, 1970

  Good Citizenship

  Here’s the fifth essay on good citizenship I wrote for Principal Salvatore:

  I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what it means to write 200 words. For example, I started that last sentence with “I’ve”—does that count as one word or as two? Since I have to count the number of words each week, I don’t want to make a mistake and come up a word short because I thought “I’ve” should count as “I have.” That’s the kind of mistake that could get a guy in trouble, even if he’s being a good citizen and trying to turn in a 200-word essay like he’s supposed to do. I guess I could make it easier on both of us by just writing “I have.” That way, there’s no possibility of getting it wrong. Oops, I just wrote “there’s.” I should have written “there is.” When you think about it, why would I ever use a contraction? And what about numbers? If you look back over this essay, I have written the number 200 twice. Does that count as a word, or does it count as a number? What if I had written “two hundred” both times? Then I’d be that much closer to two hundred words. Hey, I just got there!

  Like I always did, I slid the paper under the door of Principal Salvatore’s office when I got to school, and, like she always did, Miss Medina handed it back to me an hour later. Principal Salvatore had written on the back:

  Contractions count as one word. So do numbers.

  Try again.

  * * *

  Quentin’s mom kept him home from school today, and when the gang went over to his house after school, Mrs. Selig answered the door and said he needed to rest. That kind of put a damper on things, and I was feeling pretty lousy about it, but then, right after dinner, the phone rang, and it was Quentin. He asked if I could come over, and I said sure, and I was sure Lonnie could come over too. But he said his mom wouldn’t let in more than one friend—and besides, he wanted to talk to me.

  That sounded odd, but I wasn’t going to say no. I put my sneakers back on, grabbed my coat, and headed to Quentin’s house. His mom let me in, even though she wasn’t smiling, and I don’t think she was crazy about me being there. I headed straight for Quentin’s bedroom. He was sitting on the edge of his bed in his Yankees cap and pajamas when I walked in.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  He reached into the pocket of his pajama pants and pulled out a folded-up sheet of loose-leaf paper, then handed it to me. “What do you make of this?”

  I unfolded the paper. It was a list of five words, except they weren’t words: zeetoosk, quilby, krestenfireyuk, horgonk, and fiffle. I stared at them for a few seconds, then glanced up at Quentin. He had a big grin on his face. “What are these?”

  “Words,” he said.

  “Did you make them up?”

  “No, I discovered them!”

  “You didn’t discover them, Quentin.…”

  “But they’re not in the dictionary,” he said. “I wrote them down while I was in the hospital, and my mom looked them up for me. She couldn’t find them.”

  I could see it meant a lot to him. “All right, you discovered them. What do they mean?”

  “That’s what I can’t figure out,” he said. “I got the last one, krestenfireyuk. That’s the gunk that builds up under the cap of a hot-sauce bottle. That’s the easy one. The others I can’t get.”

  “That does sound like a pretty good definition for krestenfireyuk.”

  “When I was lying there, I couldn’t do much. I couldn’t get out of bed.…”

  “How did you go to the bathroom?”

  “You don’t have to go at first because of the tubes. After the tubes come out, they give you this metal thing that looks like a toilet seat, but it’s got like a pan underneath—”

  I waved my hand. “All right, I can figure out the rest.”

  “Anyway, I was lying there, and the nurses kept coming in and asking me how I felt, but I couldn’t talk, because that tube thing was stuck down my throat, and I got mad—”

  “C’mon, Quent, you never get mad.”

  “Well, I did in the hospital,” he said. “I got mad because I couldn’t talk. So when the doctors took the thing out of my throat, I started talking and talking.” He let out a weak laugh. “I didn’t even know what I was saying. I just kept going. I like words, Jules. I like how they sound. You ever think about words? They come out of your mouth, and right away people know what you’re talking about.”

  “I think about words all the time,” I said. “I think about them when I’m writing.”

  “But also when you’re talking, right?”

  “Well, talking happens a lot faster than writing. You don’t have as much time to think about words when you’re talking.”

  His eyes got a frustrated look in them, like I was missing the point he was making. “But don’t you ever get the feeling that there’s stuff you want to say, but there’s not enough words?”

  “Is that why you made up those new ones?”

  “I discovered them! There’s a difference!”

  “If you say so.”

  His voice got low. “Look, I know I’m not so smart as you, Jules—”

  “C’mon, Quent!”

  “But I’m good at discovering words. I’m just not so good at figuring out what they mean. I thought maybe you could figure out what they mean, and I could keep discovering them. Then, maybe, someday you could make a book out of them, and it could be all the words I discovered.”

  “Do you mean like a dictionary?”

  “It could be that, or else it could be like a story with my words in it.”

  “If I use your words in a story, we’re going to need a dictionary too.”

  “Then maybe you could write both,” he said.

  That made me laugh. “You wouldn’t believe the things people are telling me to write at school.”
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  “You don’t have to do it right away. You could do it when you have time.”

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll figure it out as soon as I have time. You just keep coming up with the words.”

  He put out his hand, and I shook it.

  “I’ve got one more question,” I said. “You don’t have to answer it if you don’t want.”

  “You want me to take off the wig?”

  “No!”

  “ ’Cause I’m not taking off the wig.”

  “I don’t want you to take off the wig, Quent.”

  “Then what’s your question?”

  “It’s just that … when I first heard how sick you were, I thought … even though I didn’t want to think it—”

  “You thought I might die?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Me too.”

  “You thought about it too?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “I guess what I want to know is, when you were in the hospital, were you scared?”

  “Not all the time,” he said.

  “But you were scared, right?”

  “It really wasn’t so bad. It didn’t hurt that much, not even the needles. I guess I got scared sometimes just because—” He cut himself off and took a breath. “Just because I had so much time to think about it. Like a couple of times, I got scared to close my eyes, so I tried not to fall asleep. That was the worst thing.”

  He looked up at me like he’d said enough, like he wanted me to let it go.

  Right then Mrs. Selig knocked on the door. She didn’t come in, but she said through the door, “Quent-Quent, it’s getting pretty late. Don’t you think your friend should be heading home?”

  I smiled at Quentin. “Quent-Quent?”

  “She says stuff like that,” he said.

  “I guess I’ll be heading home.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “You think you’ll go back to school this week?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so. My mom says next Monday.”

  “Oh.”

  “But I can go out before then. Maybe tomorrow.”

  “Then we’ll come by tomorrow, after school.”

  I slipped the paper with Quentin’s words into my pocket and stood up.