Crash Read Free

into his dripping face. “You’re s’posed to shoot back! You’re suppose to!” I turned the gun on my own face and pulled the trigger. “See?” I fired again. “Is that too hard for ya?”
    I wound up and whipped his gun over the roof of our house and into the backyard. “Dummkopf.” I slammed my own gun to the ground. I stomped and stomped on it till it was green plastic splinters. I stormed up to the garage, over to the flower garden, out to the street, back to him.
    I took a deep breath. I got up in his face. I stared. I dared him to blink first. I wanted to hate him, I wanted to stay mad, but I was having problems.
    “Okay,” I said. I backed off. “Okay, I’ll give you one more chance to get me to dinner. If you beat me in wrestling. Are Quakers allowed to wrestle?”
    He sniffed, he licked his lips, he pinched a drop of water from the end of his nose, he smiled. “Sure!”
    We went to the grass. We wrestled. I pinned him in about two seconds.
    “Okay,” I said, “one last chance. Hit the telephone pole. Ten stones.”
    I hit the pole with six stones. He never came close.
    We long-jumped. We stood on our heads. We spit for distance.
    He was hopeless.
    I shook my head. “Aren’t you good at anything?”
    He didn’t think long. “I’m a good runner.”
    I grinned to myself. “Okay,” I said, “one really,
really
last chance. A race.” I pointed. “Up to the mailbox and back to”— I ran my sneaker toe along the edge of the driveway—“here.”
    We crouched, toes on the crack. I called: “Ready! … Set! … Go!”
    I was six years old and had never lost a race in my life. That’s why I was so surprised when I reached out to push off the cool blue metal of the mailbox to see his hand there, too. On the way back I kicked in the afterburners and zipped across the finish line. His footsteps were loud behind me.
    We stood there bent over, catching our breaths. I heard him say, “Dam!” He stamped his foot. First time I ever saw him mad.
    “Don’t take it so hard,” I told him. “Nobody beats me.”
    “That’s not it,” he said. He had on the glum monkey face again.
    “So what
is it
?”
    He sniffed. “Now you’re not coming.” He headed off down the street.
    I let him get five or six houses away before I called, “Yo, Webb!”
    He turned, sagging.
    “I changed my mind. I’ll come.”
    It took a minute to sink in. Then he jumped like a jack-in-the-box. He yelled, “Yahoo!” and ran on home.
    That night, even after I closed my eyes, I kept seeing our hands hit the mailbox together.

5
    My mother didn’t like the peel job on the tree, so I was grounded for three days. My sister collected the scraps of bark and got some Elmer’s glue and pasted them back onto the tree trunk like a jigsaw puzzle.
    When I knocked on the door of the garage-house, I could hear him squealing “He’s here!” and running. The door flew open. He looked at me like he hadn’t seen me in years. “Hi, John! Come on in.”
    “It’s Crash,” I told him.
    He didn’t answer, just closed the door behind me. The white-haired man and a lady showed up. The kid stood between us. He straightened up, put on this serious, grown-up face, and said, “John, I would like you to meet my mother and father, Mr. Raymond A. Webb and Mrs. Glenda W. Webb. Mother, Father, this is my best friend, John Patrick Coogan.”
    They got all smiley and stuck out their hands to shake and said like a duet: “Nice to meet you, John.”
    “Call me Crash,” I said.
    The mother just stood there grinning. The father nodded. “Crash it is.”
    “I crashed into my cousin with my football helmet and knocked her all the way out into the snow.”
    He nodded some more, he whistled. “I see.”
    The mother spoke up. “Penn, why don’t you take John— uh, Crash—to your room for a few minutes till dinner is ready.”
    Every other house I ever saw, you had to go upstairs to a bedroom. Here you just went a couple of steps from the front