B.u.g. Big Ugly Guy (9781101593523) Read online

  Sammy tried. “Drums? He’s good at banging on things.”

  “Nah,” said Skink. “He’s a triangle man. Makes a lot of high-pitched noise but really says nothing.”

  “He’s a blowhard.” Sammy said.

  “What’s that, Word Man?” asked Skink.

  “It means someone who brags more than he performs.”

  “Blowhard! He is indeed. I like your word.” Skink puffed up his cheeks and then blew hard as if trying to douse a cake full of burning candles.

  For a moment they both held back the laugh and then it burst from them as if from an uncapped fire hydrant. And when they finished laughing, they stared at one another, each waiting for the other to make the offer. Their friendship was too new to be compromised by saying the wrong thing.

  At last, Sammy took the plunge. He could feel his heart stuttering in his chest. “We could . . .”

  And Skink jumped in with him. “We could start a band.”

  They looked at one another and grinned.

  “A band!” they said together, both so excited by the prospect, that without thinking, Skink thrust his right hand into the air in a fist and ended up screaming with pain.

  That scream made two things happened at the same time. Mrs. Murphy, the school secretary, dyed red hair curling in tendrils around her reddened cheeks, rushed out of her office and started to scold them both. And the outside door opened. A tall black man with impossibly broad shoulders stomped in.

  “Skinner John Williams,” both the secretary and the man said together, and Skink immediately snapped to attention, turning toward his father.

  “What did you do to yourself, son?” asked Major Williams. The words were soft but the voice was huge.

  Skink held up his hand.

  “Broken?” his father asked in his loud voice.

  “Did you show the nurse?” Mrs. Murphy asked at the same time.

  “Nurse to hearse,” Major Williams snapped. “Madam, I’m taking my son to the doctor ASAP.” It was a statement, not a question.

  ASAP. It was a new word for Sammy and he liked it. “ASAP?” he whispered to Skink.

  “Army speak for as soon as possible. Like right now.”

  Major Williams put a hand on Skink’s shoulder, nodded at Sammy, and said loudly, “I assume you were a help to my boy.”

  Sammy nodded back, unable to speak, all the words he knew suddenly sticking in his throat.

  The bell rang.

  “Time for class, Sammy,” Mrs. Murphy said.

  “Skinner John!” the big voice boomed, as the major turned smartly to the right and headed for the door.

  “See you, like, tomorrow, Samson,” Skink said. “Stay out of the bathroom till then.”

  And then they were gone.

  Sammy stared after Skink thinking that it had been a very strange day, a two-rescue day. With a swim in the porcelain pool in-between.

  Suddenly, the bell rang again, loud and angry.

  Mrs. Murphy said, “You’re tardy now, Sammy!”

  Again.

  Sammy sighed and ran off to class.

  4.

  Rehearse

  Aside from another scolding for being late to class, the rest of the school day passed uneventfully. Even the bus ride home was peaceful. Not for a moment did Sammy think his tormentors had stopped for good, but Skink’s display had certainly given them pause. And what a pause! Sammy was able to lean his head back and close his eyes on the bus for the first time for . . . well, forever. He wouldn’t need saving by Mr. Baer. Not today. In fact, the entire bus was noticeably subdued.

  When Sammy got off, he had an uncharacteristic spring to his step on the two-block walk home.

  Home was a ugly stucco house, drab brown and unassuming in design but with a lot of room inside. It sat on a nine-acre plot that ended down at the Mill River, a lazy serpentine run of water that should have had large trout in it but didn’t.

  Mom called the house a tardis after the Doctor Who TV show, which was the only one she’d actually watched before selling their TV set—a tardis being something that looked small on the outside but contained universes within. It had two floors, which included a full basement. But what really sold them on the house had been the three-car garage. Sammy’s dad had immediately converted it into a pottery studio, leaving the family’s beat-up minivan to sit sulking in the driveway.

  Sammy shrugged as his street came into view. His parents might be weirder than most parents but it didn’t faze him anymore. He had darker forces to fight in school.

  “Like the Marching Morons,” he whispered.

  When Sammy got within half a block of the safety of home, he saw his dad standing beside the car in a mud-spattered apron. Hands on his hips, he was leaning backward to stretch his spine. Sammy knew he’d probably spent all day sitting at the wheel until “the potter’s stool has to get surgically removed from his butt,” as Mom liked to say. But his dad was also watching Sammy’s return in case the Boyz—as he dubbed them—had trailed Sammy home. It had happened before. Not once, but several times.

  Sammy’s dad was short and stocky with big, Popeye-looking arms from long hours throwing clay. Pottery was not just his business but his passion. Sammy couldn’t remember a time when his dad wasn’t covered with bits of clay. His hair was thinning in front but remained thick, curly, and wild in back, and he wore thin-rimmed glasses that would have given him the look of a college professor if they hadn’t been heavily speckled with bits of gray clay, as if they had some sort of disease.

  “Clay pox,” Mom called it.

  “Father, I am home,” Sammy’s voice was strange, deep, formal, not at all his school voice, which was high and often desperate sounding, like the voice of a cornered mouse.

  Dad broke out of his stretch and fixed Sammy with eyes that glinted with humor. He answered with equally deep formality. “And have you made your fortune, Son?”

  “Not today, Father.” It was an old game they played, ever since Sammy had been about three years old, because of their shared love of fairy tales.

  Dad sighed theatrically, breath frosting in the cold air. “I’ll have to keep working, then. Someone has to keep this family afloat. And you’d better get started on your homework.”

  “Not yet, Dad,” Sammy said. “I need to practice clarinet first!”

  “Imagine that. You’re going to delay homework to play music. Shocking!”

  Sometimes, Sammy thought, Dad’s attempts at humor are pretty lame.

  Scampering into the house and shucking his coat, shoes, and backpack inside the front door, Sammy went straight to the basement. With Dad’s studio in the garage, the basement had been freed up as a rec room, and Sammy had taken it over. He walked past bookshelves stuffed so full that any new books couldn’t actually be shelved but had to sit on top in piles. His mother liked to say, “It’s lucky Sammy’s books have been moved to the basement or the house might have fallen in on itself.”

  He headed straight for the “Music Area,” though that was a rather lofty title for the corner of the basement that contained Sammy’s clarinet, a folding chair, a music stand holding staff paper, a precariously perched metronome, and—of course—a small bookshelf. But instead of fairy tales, fantasy novels, and young adult adventures (his usual reading choices) this shelf held only music books. And not just any music books. These were klezmer music books.

  Sammy had begun music lessons studying classical clarinet in third grade. By sixth grade he was in the school band, playing pop music and marching songs. But when his grandfather had sent him several CDs of klezmer music for his birthday, Sammy had been hooked. And now he was learning to play klezmer, the folk/pop music of the Jewish people. His uncle Freddy, a real professional musician, had told him lots of stuff about klez, as he called it, at a family bar mitzvah before Sammy’s dad had hauled them all to the Mi
dwest in his quest for a cheap studio. Uncle Freddy said klez was a mishmash of styles that shouldn’t work but did—a sound perfect for a people who were spread all over the world, but still shared a religion, a culture, a music.

  “The original fusion music,” said Uncle Freddy.

  In fact, Sammy couldn’t remember a time he hadn’t been in love with those slinky, gliding melodies, the polka backbeat, the jazz chords, the New Orleans horns. So while other kids listened to soft rock or hip-hop or country—depending on which school clique they were in—Sammy listened to bands like the Klezmatics and Brave Old World. He even had a sticker on his clarinet case that read: DRUNK ON KLEZMER JUICE, which Uncle Freddy had given him the day they moved.

  When his parents had first realized how passionate Sammy was about the music, they’d given in.

  “Which instrument?” Mom had asked hesitantly.

  His father added, “We can’t afford a piano . . . not yet, son.”

  Sammy had grinned and didn’t hesitate. “Clarinet.”

  Clarinet was the voice of klezmer.

  Pulling his clarinet case out, he sat down on the chair. Putting the instrument together was a ritual. Wet the reed, check the cork. Push the bell, joints, and barrel together, pushing as you go, then the ligature and reed get strapped on like a toreador’s belt before he goes to face the bull. Lifting the clarinet to his lips, he licked the reed a couple times, blew a note, then adjusted his embouchure—the way his mouth held the instrument. With his top teeth touching the reed less firmly than before—he had a tendency to bite when he played his first note of the day, something that his old teacher had nearly cured him of—he blew a second note, strong and clean.

  Then came the scales. Major first, then minors, to warm up. Then the fun ones. The klezmer ones: Ahava Raba, with its flat second and raised third, and Mi Sheberach, the altered Dorian mode. He knew he should do more, but Sammy was impatient to play some tunes.

  Klezmer is dance music. That was the very first thing he learned about it. Uncle Freddy said it every time they met. And though he sat down to assemble the clarinet and stayed sitting to run the scales, Sammy always stood up to play so he could sort of be dancing, too. He was weaving back and forth, the tip of his clarinet dancing little circles and figure eights in the air, as he blew a Bulgar circle dance. He’d never played Klez with anyone except for his old clarinet teacher, but in his head he could hear a bass oom-pah-ing, as well as a piano mimicking it, and an accordion doubling the melody with him.

  He switched to a kolomeike, fast and furious, and his imaginary band switched as well. Then he was on his own, playing a mournful introduction to the next piece.

  But maybe not alone for much longer. Soon the imaginary band he jammed with would be replaced by one real friend.

  Then Sammy stopped thinking and simply lost himself in the music until his mother came home from her work at the local library and called him up to dinner. He’d been so engrossed in playing, he hadn’t even noticed the time or the smell of the food cooking in the kitchen.

  5.

  A Bar Too Far

  At dinner, the family got right down to the ritual of eating. Mom always called it the “Greenburg Grabfast.” Not a word was allowed till after they’d all had at least seven bites.

  Seven! Sammy never knew where that rule had come from, but they kept it religiously. It was the only religion they actually practiced. Well, until that very moment. He ate his seven bites quickly, then looked up brightly, ready to point out that he’d finished.

  His mother was waving a piece of paper at them.

  Dad had a hand up to stop her as he was finishing his seventh bite. Then he smiled in her direction.

  Sammy knew the letter. It was from Grandpa Aron, the only person in the universe who wasn’t online.

  “Grandpa writes that he’ll pay for a bar mitzvah if we can find a Hebrew teacher somewhere close by. And I’ve managed to find a rabbi and a synagogue.” She smiled encouragingly in Sammy’s direction.

  Sammy glared at her and his dad, who said nothing, which was odd because he was not one to be quiet about religious matters.

  “Not easy to find out this way,” Mom said. “It’s in Carston. An hour from here.” She waved her hand vaguely toward the north, though Sammy—who liked to read maps—knew the town was really southwest from there.

  “But, Mom . . .” Sammy had said before she raised a warning hand.

  “You know Grandpa Aron isn’t well and, as you’re his only grandson, and named after his father, we can’t really say no, can we?”

  There wasn’t any need to argue. It was a done deed—finished, sealed, stamped, delivered. Just like that letter, Sammy thought. Once his mother made up her mind about something, there was no going back. So now I have to be driven fifty miles to learn an unlearnable language in order to have a party when I turn thirteen that no one here will come to.

  Feeling grumbly, he decided to tackle another seven bites just so he didn’t snap at his mother and father and get detention at home as well. Normally he loved his mom’s spaghetti and meatballs, but her announcement had taken away his appetite, maybe forever. After his third bite—two of the meatballs and one of the spaghetti—he put his fork down.

  Mom looked long and hard at him. “Don’t forget your greens. You know, they won’t poison you.”

  Sammy made a face. “You should have said that before . . .” Then he put his right hand on his neck and stuck out his tongue as if he’d really been poisoned.

  To delay the actual green deed, he shoveled some of the limp spinach carefully onto his fork. He had an announcement of his own, and it might just change everything. Casually, he said, “I made a friend today.” He didn’t mention sitting with Julia Nathanson. That was too new and too personal to tell anyone, especially his parents.

  “A friend,” Mom said, smiling. “How nice.” She didn’t elaborate, in case this was Sammy’s idea of a joke. Or an end run around the bar mitzvah news. Sammy knew she was brilliant that way, figuring out every angle. She had a degree in child psychology, not that she could find a job here in that field.

  “Someone to bring home some time?” Dad asked. His voice was neutral on purpose, like a car at a stop sign.

  Swallowing the mouthful of the hated greens, Sammy nodded.

  “Good.” Dad looked down at the spaghetti and meatballs on his plate and grated himself a little mountain of Parmesan over the top.

  Mom stared at them both. “Good is all you can say? It’s Sammy’s first friend since we got here. Four months, since July, and then that nastiness at school with those boys, and that’s all you can say? Good? It’s wonderful, Sammy.” Obviously she’d made up her mind that Sammy hadn’t made a joke and was going all out. “What’s his name?”

  Sammy was about to say, “How do you know it isn’t a her?” But instead he finished swallowing. Hesitated a beat. Then said quietly, “Skink.” He waited for their reaction. It was not long in coming.

  “SKINK?” They said it together, like some kind of comedy act.

  Mom added, “I hope that’s a nickname.”

  At the same time Dad said, “Of course that’s a nickname.”

  Sammy sighed. “His whole name is Skinner John Williams. He’s named after his grandfathers. But everyone calls him Skink.”

  This is worse, Sammy thought, than being grilled by the CIA. But by dinner’s end, some forty-eight bites later (Sammy knew because he was counting every one of them), his mother said, “Why not ask Skink for dinner, Sammy. For Sunday.”

  Getting up from the table to help put the dishes in the washer, Dad added, “We’d love to meet him.”

  They’ve got to be kidding.

  Standing to do his part of the cleanup—the glasses and silverware—Sammy thought about that invitation. There was no way he would ever—ever—ask Skink to meet his parents. He wouldn’t want any
one to have to sit through that kind of grilling.

  Especially not a new friend.

  A new friend who could split Formica tabletops with his bare hand.

  But on Sunday, when the doorbell rang and Sammy went to answer it, he was thinking, I never should have told them his real name.

  His mother hadn’t waited for Sammy to invite Skink; she called his parents herself. It turned out, Mrs. Williams wanted to come over right away, to thank Sammy for all he’d done. And she wouldn’t think of making Mrs. Greenburg cook. She and Major Williams hadn’t had a grown-up date night in ages, so busy with their moving. They’d take the opportunity to go out. The two moms had had a lovefest over the phone. Or at least so it seemed from what Sammy overheard. Sammy could only imagine what it had sounded like from the other side. Skink would probably never forgive him.

  Opening the door, Sammy was ready to apologize for his mother, indeed for Jewish mothers everywhere.

  Skink and his father stood on the doorstep.

  “I have to . . .” Sammy started.

  “Hey, Sammy.” Skink stepped in, punching Sammy lightly on the arm with his right hand. The hand he had hurt. He held a guitar case in his left.

  “Good evening, Samson,” said Major Williams loudly, enveloping Sammy in a painfully firm handshake before walking past. Only then was his wife revealed—a thin but quite tall Asian woman who’d been hidden by his bulk. He turned slightly and spoke to her, even more loudly than before. “Jin, this is the boy we told you about. Samson.”

  “I’m called Sammy,” Sammy began.

  “Samson’s a man’s name! A strong man!” the major said in his large voice, indicating by its very loudness that Sammy was going to be Samson to him forever.

  “Hello, Sammy,” said Skink’s mom. Her handshake was mercifully gentler than her husband’s. “John has told me so much about you.” She had a light accent.

  “John?” Sammy asked.

  “She’s never approved of Skinner as a name,” Major Williams roared in his parade-ground voice. “But a family name’s no shame, I always say,” going on loud enough that Sammy was sure the neighbors could hear, though there weren’t any closer than a football field away. “Be proud of your name, son. It’s a Biblical name. A strong man’s name. As you were when you took care of Skinner in the face of an overwhelming enemy. Now, where’s the head of the household? Ah, there she is.” His voice never lowered the entire time.