Jack Dempsey

It was hard to give Jack up. We'd been with each other through thick and thin. When we moved here there hadn't been much for me at first. I'd left my friends behind. Cousins too. I had no brothers or sisters, so not much. Lots of TV stations in this new place, but there's only so much Jeopardy and Perry Mason a guy can watch, you know? And Sundays, Sundays were slow. Not even the FBI on Sundays. Dad was stuck on Ed Sullivan and Have Gun Will Travel. Topo Gigio is okay, but even so...

Then my Dad had an idea, a really good one. He bought an aquarium. Colorful gravel, a flossy filter, an undersea castle, and really cool fish: fancy guppies, mollies, neon tetras, a spooky looking catfish, and the star of the bunch, a Jack Dempsey fish. I named him Jack. I could tell he was special right away, and not just because of the color. I looked him up. 'Pugnacious,' it said. Then I looked up pugnacious and asked my Dad. Seems he was named after a famous fighter, a boxer, the very best.

I could see that. He took no grief from any other fish. I thought about that on the blacktop at school. Not everybody knows it, but gangs pick fights with bigger boys. I think it must give them something to brag about. If you're fat, you're more of a target. So I thought about Jack. If I could I stared 'em down. Sometimes that worked. Sometimes there was shoving, even hitting, but not much, cuz the teachers patrolled the blacktop. There was more trouble after school, on the way home.

I liked the other fish, but I read all I could about Jack, and Jack grew. I learned about the tank. When I changed the water I had to wait 24 hours for the chlorine to evaporate. But if it rained I could collect the water from the downspouts and use it right away. The temperature had to be just right. I checked the thermometer twice a day. Feeding? Not too little and not too much. The guppies got to the surface first, but Jack always got his share.

When I looked at the tank most of the fish ignored me, but not Jack. He came right up to look me in the eye. At night, when I couldn't sleep, the light over the tank was still on, and I would get up to talk to Jack. Fish don't sleep it seems to me. They're always on the lookout. Why do we have to sleep if fish don't sleep?

We had a ping pong table. It folded in half, so I put one half up in the air, and I could play sort of, knocking the ball against it, hitting it when it came back. And it gave me an idea. By then we had a second tank. Jack had gotten big, and he chased the smaller fish too hard, so we separated them. And there was a science fair. The teacher said we could do an experiment. Dad and I had gone away for a week and we fed the fish with a big wet food thing that looked just like a ping pong ball. They all rushed to the surface to eat off the ball.

I thought, well, if the fish think it's food, and they all rush for a ping pong ball, they could knock it from one tank to another and the other tank would knock it back, and I could teach the fish to play ping pong. That would do well in the science fair, I thought. Ping-pong playing fish.

Mr. T asked us all if we were entering the fair and what our exhibit would be. He asked me and I said I am doing an experiment, sir. He seemed pleased with that. When I didn't enter he said "What happened to your experiment?" I told him it was a failure. He said, "Isn't a negative experimental result a valid result?" He was quite a science teacher.

I said, "In this case I don't think so."

Phys Ed was hard. I could not turn a somersault. Mr. G tried to teach me, but no dice. And it didn't do me any good with the bully boys. But there was Jack. He got bigger and I got bigger. Actually we both got a lot bigger.

Then came the tonsils. I was 8. Jack was two and a half. I had three throat infections in two months. I was missing a lot of school, staying at home alone while Dad went to work. He took me to the doctor.

"We don't take tonsils out as much as we used to," the doctor said a bit too quickly.

Dad would have none of it. "He has to see the specialist," and so I did.

"These are the worst tonsils in the country," the specialist said, and I was booked in the hospital.

There were two of us in the room. The other 8 year old boy weighed 48 pounds. I weighed 84. Big like Jack.

The needle made me sleepy. The doctor picked me up off the gurney to put me on the table, grunted, and swore. I was too heavy for him. "This is breakfast," he said as he put the ether over my mouth. "Count backwards from ten." I made it to five. Then there were colored spirals and a humming sound. I was swinging out and back, farther and farther each time. I thought, if I swing out farther this time I will die. Then I was awake.

I lifted my head up to look around. The nurse said, "Why is this one awake? He's just finished, and the one from half an hour ago won't wake up!"

Back home things had changed a bit in the aquarium. Dad said Jack had been chasing the other fish, even the catfish. Dad tried big snails, but Jack just cracked the shells and ate them. "Like escargots," Dad said, whatever they are. He bought Jack a sort of snake thing called a loach. It buried itself in the gravel so it was safe from Jack.

That fall at school we started industrial arts. I couldn't see the art in it. The shop teacher didn't like us. I made a little bridge for Jack's tank. The teacher didn't think much of it.

With my tonsils out I had no throat infections and I grew like a weed. In two months I weighed 109 pounds. Jack was growing too.

One day the shop teacher told us all to sit on the benches while he yelled at us. "I wouldn't hire any of you to make anything," he started to wind up. "You're all useless. Now if any of you wants to do something else in this time that's fine by me. If you don't want to work with tools, just say so and we'll think of something else. You can take Home Ec."

Some of the boys laughed at that. "Well then, what's it going to be? Shop or cooking and sewing?" I thought for half a minute. Home Ec meant girls. "Well? Anyone?" He stared at us.

"Sir, I'll take Home Ec," I volunteered. This way I could cook for me and Dad too. He only knew how to make Western omelettes and milkshakes, and I was getting tired of them. No angry shop teacher, better food, girls. Trifecta.

I took some ribbing for that but it was worth it. Jack agreed it was a smart move. And somehow Jack had grown even bigger. And now he was alone in the tank, just him and the loach, and Dad pointed out that he was getting too big for the tank, and I could see he was right. Jack was a third the length of the tank. One flick of his fins sent him into the glass.

"We need a bigger tank, Dad," I said.

He said no, Jack already had the fifteen gallon tank. We weren't about to get a bigger one. He said I would have to bring Jack back to the pet store.

And he was right. Dad was always right when he said the hard things. So that Saturday I filled a pail with rain water. I fished Jack out with a net, and put him in the pail with a lid on top. It seemed a long walk to the store.

The owner looked at Jack and gave me ten dollars for him. "How big a tank do you have him in?" He asked. I told him. "I have never seen a fish that big in a tank that size. I don't know how he got that big!"

I was sad, but it was for the best. I went back to visit him the next day. "Where's the Jack Dempsey fish?" I asked.

The owner said he'd been bought right away. The man who took him home had him in a hundred gallon tank. I smiled and smiled. Jack will love it there. A hundred gallon tank!

I ran home to tell Dad. And I said, "But the owner doesn't know how he got so big in our tank."

Dad paused, the way he does when he's admitting something he had failed to disclose. "I don't suppose," he said, "it was because I fed him a ball of raw ground meat every day..."