Gert stood in front of me so I had to stand on my toes and move my head to see. The man in the red hat looked down and said nothing. The Fat Man and Hendo were standing back, like they were worried a bomb was going to go off but weren’t sure when and wanted to see anyway.
Toucan slapped the man’s face. His hat fell off his head and Toucan slapped the man again and told him to apologize to me. The man in the red hat didn’t try to stop himself from being slapped. He let Toucan hit him again and again.
He said he was sorry, looking at the ground.
“Louder,” Toucan said. “I don’t think she heard you,” and the man in the red hat said sorry so loud that he was almost yelling, and Toucan held on to his head and made it so he was looking right at me while he said sorry for a third time.
Toucan asked Gert if he wanted to hit him. Gert started moving toward him but I held Gert’s arm. “Don’t,” I said, because the man seemed very weak all of a sudden.
“I accept your apology,” I told him, and told Gert it was time to go.
Gert told me to thank Toucan, and I held out my hand for a dab. He laughed and said we were going to have a special handshake, and he took my hand, opened it, slapped our hands together, tightened the fingers, and then patted me on the back.
I did not like being touched and stepped back as soon as he was done patting me.
“You and Gert can practice that,” he said.
Gert gave me the keys to the car and told me I could get it started, that he’d be out in a minute.
As I was leaving, Hendo gave me a fist pound and told me I was the best good-luck charm he’d ever had. “You should come by every time I play. I’ll be a millionaire in a month.”
He told me to stay cool.
“I will. You stay cool too.”
The man in the red hat stood by himself. As I walked by him he did not say anything to me, and when I took one last look at him I saw that he was crying.
I went outside and saw that the woman and her children across the street weren’t playing anymore. The woman was inside of the house but one of the children was sitting alone on the front porch. I went to the car and got inside and turned it on. The air-conditioning whooshed in my face.
Gert came out from the house with a gym bag and threw the bag in the backseat. He said we were off like a herd of turtles, something he sometimes said as a joke. He pointed to the clock and said, “See? Plenty of time.”
Gert started the car and we started driving. The little boy in the yard waved at me and I waved back.
“Are you Toucan’s new butt boy?” I asked.
“Am I what?”
“That’s what he said. That you were Toucan’s new butt boy.”
“I’m nobody’s butt boy,” Gert said. “And I’m sorry about that. If I’d known that piece of garbage was going to be there, I wouldn’t have brought you.” He sighed. “You know I’d never let anything happen to you, right?”
“I don’t like those people,” I said.
He drove for a bit. “Yeah, well. You’re just going to have to trust me,” Gert said. “You trust me, right?”
I stared out the window.
“Hey, come on. Have I let you down yet?”
“No.”
“Because together we’re unbeatable.”
One of our favorite songs came on the radio, AC/DC’s song “Thunderstruck,” and he turned it up and started singing, and then I was singing, and I really did feel like together we could not be beat.
chapter three
It was 11:49 a.m. when we got to Dr. Laird’s. Going upstairs took exactly eight minutes, unless the elevator was broken, but I could see from the car that it was working, because someone got out of it.
Gert asked me what our rule is.
“I know the rule,” I said.
“I want to hear you say it.”
“We do not talk about Gert’s personal life.”
He nodded. “Right. So, are you going to talk about the last hour?”
“Hour and eighteen minutes,” I said. The clock changed. “Hour and nineteen minutes. And no, I will not talk about playing poker, or Toucan, or anything else.”
“Good.” Gert smiled. He told me to wait and got the envelope from his gym bag. “Give this to Laird.”
* * *
Dr. Laird specializes in development, meaning he works with children who are smarter than other children, and children who are not as smart as other children, and the kinds of kids like me and Marxy.
On his business card, which is stuck to our fridge with a magnet, he calls himself a “Developmental Psychologist.”
Dr. Laird is not like other doctors. He doesn’t take your temperature or give you medicine, at least not usually. Dr. Laird is more about asking questions and writing things down. Sometimes I go to the hospital where he has me lie down on a cold table and sends me into a machine that looks like a can of Pringles. A blue light shines across my entire body. It takes pictures of the insides of me, especially my brain, and every once in a while Dr. Laird lets me see my brain, all orange and pink and blue, which he says means those parts of my brain were working really hard when the picture was taken. Mostly we just talk, which I like because he is good at listening and asks me questions that show he is not just pretending to pay attention. There is a folder all about me, almost as long as Kepple’s Guide to the Vikings, and Dr. Laird puts the notes he makes about me every week into the file.
After I sat down, he took out a piece of paper from the file, moved his glasses down his nose, to the pointy end, and started writing.
Dr. Laird is short and has a haircut that Gert says belongs in the seventies, longer on the top and in the back than on the sides. His office is full of books and papers and pieces of paper framed and stuck to the wall that show all the schools he went to. He has big forearms that have a lot of hair on them. Gert says those forearms also belong in the seventies, which I guess means he acts like we don’t live in today, but back in time when people had hairy forearms and hair short on the sides and long everywhere else. Sometimes I thought he looked like the pictures of Vikings in Kepple’s Guide to the Vikings.
He is very good at making you talk. He does not get weird and wiggly during silences but waits for you to feel weird and wiggly and talk, which he was doing to me.
Gert does not have insurance, so we have to pay Dr. Laird with our own money. If you have a good job they give you insurance and you don’t have to pay for things like doctors or dentists. In Canada, for example, everyone has insurance. Since Dr. Laird knows we don’t have insurance, he says we can pay on a Sliding Scale. Instead of making everyone pay the same, he makes rich people pay more, and poor people like me and Gert pay less.
This is an example of Dr. Laird being heroic, even though he does not fight actual battles with his fists.
Once Gert gets his degree and a powerful job, we will have insurance and won’t have to pay anything.
Dr. Laird asked me how my birthday went. “Did you get any good presents?” he asked.
I told him about the Viking that Gert got me. “He was really cool. He wasn’t a real Viking. I think he was a stripper who takes off his clothes, only he kept his Viking clothes on.”