Pete woke up Sunday morning because he couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t breathe because his little brother was sitting on his head. His little brother was seven years old, and he was a fat, heavy, spoiled brat. Pete threw him across the room. “Get off me, you idiot!”
Joey landed against the wall, under the window. It was a small room. Throwing a seven year old across it wasn’t such a big feat of strength. And it didn’t seem to hurt the kid much either, because Joey just started ragging on him. “Mom says you’re going to be late for church if you don’t get up.”
“Yeah, well I’m never going to get up if you suffocate me!” Pete flailed around looking for objects to throw. His pillow sailed through the air, followed by several books. Judging from the accompanying thunks, some hit Joey and some hit the wall. The books were paperbacks. They probably didn’t hurt too much. The next thing he grabbed was his glasses, but he stopped himself before sending them flying. He put them on, and threw back his covers, but then thought better of the whole getting up idea, and flung the covers back over his head. He closed his eyes. It felt so nice. No air on his eyeballs. Just soft, moist darkness. He heard Joey’s footsteps pounding away down the stairs. He sighed and burrowed deeper. No. It just wasn’t any good without his pillow. The pillow his stupid brother had made him throw across the room. The stupid brother who was coming back into the room sobbing so loud it sounded like screaming.
The blanket rose into the air, exposing Pete to daylight. He didn’t want daylight. He liked the dark. Dark was friendly. He had been sleeping when it was dark. He tried to keep his eyes closed, but the darkness wasn’t as dark as it had been when the blanket was over him. He tried to pull the blanket back down, but it wouldn’t come. He opened his eyes, not all the way, just a tiny slit – just enough to see what was going on.
What he saw was brilliant magenta covered with big yellow and blue flowers. His mother’s dress. Too bright! Too bright for early morning. His mother stood by his bed with a determined look on her face, and a firm grip on his covers. Joey was clinging to her waist, trying to pull her out of the room, and sobbing: “I’m . . . scared . . . I’m . . . scared.”
“Nobody’s going to hurt you darling,” she reassured her youngest son as she continued to tug the blanket away from her oldest son.
What made his mother think nobody was going to hurt the kid? He spent his entire life asking to get hurt.
“He . . . hurt . . . me .” Each word was punctuated with a dramatic rumbling sob.
“Not as bad as I’m going to hurt you if you don’t SHUT UP!”
“Darling, it’s time to get ready for church.” His mother was talking to him now, her voice all phony-sweet. And she was just going to keep on talking if he didn’t do anything. She would start off all gentle, and then get louder, and louder, and finally she’d be yelling louder than his little brother. She was like one of those extreme alarm clocks, and she had no snooze button. Pete grunted, and sat up.
“Wonderful.” His mother smiled her approval. “We’re leaving in ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes?” he yelped. Like a wiener dog? No. Not like a wiener dog. Weiner dogs were stupid. He didn’t have time to think about Mr. McAllister’s ridiculous wiener dogs. He had to get a grip. He couldn’t get ready in ten minutes. “Why didn’t anybody tell me?” He ran into the shower before they could tell him that they had been trying to tell him for the past however long they had been trying to tell him. He wasn’t going to church without a shower. He could maybe go to church without breakfast, but not without a shower.
* * *
When they got back home, there was an envelope pinned to the front door with his name on it. His mother suggested that it must be from George, perhaps explaining why he hadn’t been at church.
They hadn’t stayed for coffee and donuts because Joey had to go home to go poo – sorry – to have a bowel movement. His mom thought the word “poo” was vulgar, and she wanted them to say “bowel movement” as if anybody knew what that was. As if any other family ever even had to talk about moving their bowels, because most people could just use a toilet wherever they were, and not turn it into a big emergency that had to be discussed and dissected until it brought the whole family home and caused them to miss out on chocolate donuts so the little prince could move his bowels into his own personal porcelain throne. But the point wasn’t missing the donuts, even though Pete really did like the chocolate ones. The point was that they hadn’t talked to George’s family because they had to hurry home so spoiled little brat Joey could use a familiar toilet.
George’s parents and Pete’s parents were best friends. They had arrived in Hong Kong at the same time, when the boys were in sixth grade. George’s parents and Pete’s mom taught at the high school. Pete’s dad was a counselor at the middle school. They had done all the typical orientation stuff together: getting ID cards, buying furniture, touring the big Buddha on Lantau Island, stuff like that. And then it seemed like they were just so used to hanging out that they just kept on doing stuff together even after both families figured out how to get around on their own. They went to the same church. (Well, they would have done that anyway. It was a religious school. Most of the teachers’ families went to church together.) But they also went out to dinner together, went hiking together, and took at least one vacation together every year.
Pete and George also spent most of their time together. They were both in the ninth grade, and had arranged to have the same schedule their first year at the high school. They ate lunch with the same group of kids. George tended to be a little more outgoing than Pete. George was the one who played youth soccer, for example, and Pete was the one who watched. It never looked like George was having much fun at the games. He never seemed to get too near the ball, and when he did, someone would take it away from him before he could do anything with it, but he had signed up every year since sixth grade, when they had first gotten to the Island.
Pete removed the envelope from his front door. The writing on the outside didn’t look like George’s, and anyway, George wasn’t really likely to write a letter explaining his absence from church. Church wasn’t exactly a priority in George’s life; every Sunday he tried to avoid going, and once in a while he got away with it, but Pete pretended to agree with his mom’s theory anyway, not wanting to turn it into a big conversation. He took the envelope up to his room to open it. He pulled out two thin sheets of paper, covered with single spaced typing. The first was identical to the paper Mr. McAllister had handed him yesterday. The second was dated December 1. Peter sat down on his bed, and read.
December 1
Malchisedech followed the ball into the thicket of pine trees. The ball had disappeared into an overgrowth of ivy. About 5 yards in, Malchisedech caught a glimpse of orange in with the green.
"Man I really let that one sail," thought Malchisedech. As he picked the ball up, he thought he heard a sound. A soft quiet whimpering. Someone crying softly to themselves? The estate was a good half-mile from the nearest neighbor, the brick house of the three little pigs. Yes, the ones from the famous story. Things are like that in fairy tales. Yes, this is a fairy tale. Sort of.
"Fred?" Malchisedech called softly. But it couldn’t be Fred. Fred was inside, and the only time Malchisedech ever remembered the older wiener dog crying was when the NASDAQ took a real beating in the late nineties.
"Hello?" It was coming from the path. Malchisedech made his way through the brambles to the narrow dirt path that led to the river.
"Hey, Akey, come over here. Listen."
The two wiener dogs saw her at the same time. A beautiful doe, curled up beside a bush on the edge of the path. She was shaking slightly, and crying softly.
To be continued
What the heck? Why was someone writing a story about dogs, and giving it to him, page by page? And it wasn’t Mr. McAllister. These weren’t Mr. McAllister’s wiener dogs after all. Pete knew this because Mr. McAllister had been at church sitting in the second pew on the right, struggling through the new mass parts just like everybody else, not tacking stories to Pete’s door. Anyway, Mr. McAllister was a teacher, and teachers didn’t go around trying to freak out their students with random, elaborate tricks. And even if a teacher was twisted enough to think freaking out individual students was a fun idea (Mr. McAllister was a little bit different, after all) he wouldn’t have time. Pete knew this because his parents were teachers; consequently, he was surrounded by teachers. They were too busy grading papers and planning lessons to think about their students any more than they absolutely had to outside the classroom. But if the wiener dogs weren’t Mr. McAllister’s wiener dogs, whose wiener dogs were they? Who was doing this?
A secret admirer? They were hardly love letters.
Someone who thought he would appreciate a silly story about short-legged dogs playing basketball? He didn’t think he knew anyone that creative, and how would the first page have gotten turned in to Mr. McAllister with Pete’s name on it?
He looked out the window and saw Brittany and her friend Renee kicking around a soccer ball on the field. He had wanted to talk to her about the first page anyway. Find out if she had been the one to write it on his computer. Might as well do it now. He folded up the wiener dog papers, put them in his back pocket, and went out to the field.
He intercepted the girls’ ball, dribbled it a little ways away to turn their straight line into a triangle, and booted the ball back to Brittany. They took turns shooting goals on one another. The girls were good. They kicked the ball around for a good forty-five minutes before Brittany and Renee got tired enough to sit down.
Sitting with the girls on the same bench where he had read the introduction to the wiener dogs, Pete learned that George hadn’t been at church because he had been shut up in his room all morning, and all day yesterday too, “being too poopy for words,” according to Brittany. She didn’t know what was wrong, but she said she never knew what was wrong with her brother. He just had moods. “Mom says it’s because he’s a teenager. You know, hormones.”
She rolled her eyes when she said “hormones” and deepened her voice a little, as if she was quoting an excuse she was sick of hearing, or as if she would never develop a predilection for this particular malady, being above anything as bothersome as simple human biology. Pete couldn’t help smiling. It must be so nice to be twelve years old, and to think you knew everything.
More to the point, she hadn’t been using his laptop. Why would she, after all, when they had three computers between the four of them at her house? He suggested that maybe all four of them needed to be on the computer at the same time.
“I’m in the seventh grade,” she reminded him. “What could be so important? And even if you had left your laptop at our house, it would be in George’s room, right? You think he ever lets me in there?”
She had caught her breath, and grown tired of the conversation that felt like she was being accused of something. She stood up, and kicked the ball to Renee. The two of them took off, running up and down the field, kicking the ball back and forth between them.
Pete went back inside to find his mom on the desktop computer in the living room checking her e-mail. “Anything new?”
“Uncle Duane is digging a hole in his yard.”
“That’s nice. Why?”
“Well that’s not entirely clear. Something about going to China.”
“Going to China? He’s like eighty years old. What do you mean, going to China?”
“I think perhaps he thinks he’s digging a hole to China.”
“That’s insane.”
“He has friends helping him. Younger friends. I don’t think he’ll hurt himself.”
Pete shook his head, trying to visualize the project in his mind. “Isn’t he on oxygen?”
Joey spoke up from the kitchen, where he was undoubtedly making a mess by trying to get some food that he should be letting someone else get for him, except that no one else was ever willing to get anything for him because he was always wanting stuff, and everybody was sick of it, “Is Uncle Duane going to visit us? Can you really dig to China from Oregon?”
His dad was standing at the bookshelf, studying a globe, “Actually, it looks like he would end up in the Indian Ocean.”
“How far do you think he has to go before he hits molten lava?”
“I can always ask.” His mom typed Pete’s question into her computer, “How far do you think you have to go before you hit molten lava?”
“No!” They all rushed to stop her from hitting send, reluctant to quash an old man’s dreams. “Uncle Duane’s dreams are unquashable,” she answered, before sending the question on its way to Reedsport, Oregon.
“Hey you guys, what’s a NASDAQ?” Pete was thinking about the second page of the Wiener Dogs paper.
His mother’s answer was out of her mouth before his father could make his standard suggestion that Pete should “Google it.” His dad was into empowering young people to be independent.
"National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations Systems.”
Pete and his dad both looked at her blankly.
Pete sat down on the couch. “Does that have something to do with history?” His mom was a social studies teacher. She had nothing against intellectual independence, but she was really into meaningful conversations and rarely postponed one until he could bother to get to the Internet.
“Economics,” his dad answered, “we have some money invested in NASDAQ stocks, but I couldn’t have come up with that.”
“Actually, the acronym is obsolete,” his mom admitted. “I was showing off.”
“So it has something to do with the stock market?” Pete guessed. “It’s something you invest in?”
“It’s an exchange where you can buy and sell stocks, and it’s also an index that measures how the market is doing by taking an average of the several thousand stocks available on the exchange, and measuring whether the average price is going up or down.”
Pete noticed that he was nodding mechanically, but not understanding. His chin was bobbing in little circles, rather than straight up and down – almost as if her words were hypnotizing him. He wondered if her students ever felt this way. “And we care if it goes up or down because?”
“If you buy when a stock is down, and sell when it goes up, you make money.”
“Buy low, sell high,” his dad interjected, grinning.
His mom continued. “We want the stock market to grow, because growth is an indicator of a healthy economy. Are you thinking of investing?”
“Buy low, sell high.” His dad repeated.
“No. I just read it somewhere, and I was wondering. Hey, would Uncle Duane have NASDAQ investments?”
“Duane? No, honey. My uncle invests his money in less traditional ways.”
“Less traditional ways?”
“He bets on the races.”
“Among other things,” his dad added, presumably trying to be helpful, or maybe trying to be funny. “Buy low, sell high,” he added, when they all looked at him questioningly.
“Oh.” Pete turned back to his mom. “So he wouldn’t care if the NASDAQ took a real beating in the nineties.”
“Only if they placed odds on it in Vegas.”
Well, that probably meant that Uncle Duane wasn’t responsible for the Wiener Dogs Gruff. It had been a silly idea anyway, but Uncle Duane was a pretty silly guy.
