Junior Miles and the Junkman

By Kevin Carey

"A tender, transformative novel for all who sometimes feel they don't fit in. A terrific story."

— Naomi Shihab Nye, Young People's Poet Laureate of the United States (2021) and author of The Turtle of Oman.

Junior and his family live in a junkyard, where his father creates pieces of art from the junk surrounding them. When Junior's father falls ill and dies, Junior and his mother are left with few resources, other than what his mother brings in from her job as a waitress. The junkyard is threatened by encroaching development, and just when Junior thinks all is lost, he finds that a tin man, gifted to him by his father, begins to speak to him. The junkman provides advice in the form of enigmas. Are they clues? Or is it nonsense? Junior and his best friend, Isaac, embark on a journey to find out. Can a man made of junk parts teach Junior about art and friendship and overcoming the loss of a loved one? Only if Junior believes it can.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fitzroy Books
• Release date: Sep 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9781646033683

Book preview

9781646033683.jpg

Contents

Praise for Junior Miles and the Junkman

Junior Miles and the Junkman

Copyright © 2023 Kevin Carey. All rights reserved.

Dedication

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

Acknowledgments

Praise for Junior Miles and the Junkman

A tender, transformative novel packed with endearing characters and conversations, partially set in a junkyard, which makes it even more appealing. For all who sometimes feel they don’t fit in, for anyone who’s ever been struck down by scamming or bullying, and for anyone who ever suffers profound pangs of loss—which would be, probably, everybody. You will never forget this terrific story.

— Naomi Shihab Nye, Young People’s Poet Laureate of the United States 2019 - 2021 and author of The Turtle of Oman and The Turtle of Michigan

Kevin Carey has given us an admirable young hero who mourns, makes mistakes, and persists in search of something he can’t quite name. His adventure unfolds in the rough-and-tumble world of pre-adolescence, where bullying and bravery clash amid glimpses of a future where bright things are possible. Junior Miles is a boy to believe in.

— Jabari Asim, author of A Child’s Introduction To African American History and Preaching to the Chickens

"Featuring heart and humor, Kevin Carey has crafted a story of friendship, love, and the lengths we go to in keeping our memories close. Junior Miles and the Junkman is a treasure!"

— Erin Dionne, author of Bad Choices Make Good Stories: Conversations About Writing and Secrets of a Fangirl

Junior Miles and the Junkman

Kevin Carey

Fitzroy Books

Copyright © 2023 Kevin Carey. All rights reserved.

Published by Fitzroy Books

An imprint of

Regal House Publishing, LLC

Raleigh, NC 27605

All rights reserved

https://fitzroybooks.com

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN -13 (paperback): 9781646033676

ISBN -13 (epub): 9781646033683

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022949395

All efforts were made to determine the copyright holders and obtain their permissions in any circumstance where copyrighted material was used. The publisher apologizes if any errors were made during this process, or if any omissions occurred. If noted, please contact the publisher and all efforts will be made to incorporate permissions in future editions.

Cover images and design by © C. B. Royal

Author image painted by Debra Freeman-Highberger

Regal House Publishing, LLC

https://regalhousepublishing.com

The following is a work of fiction created by the author. All names, individuals, characters, places, items, brands, events, etc. were either the product of the author or were used fictitiously. Any name, place, event, person, brand, or item, current or past, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Regal House Publishing.

Printed in the United States of America

Dedication

To Betty, Kevin, and Michaela,

always by my side and in my heart.

1

I was born with one foot pointing west and one foot pointing north. The doctors tried to fix the west-pointing one with a big ugly shoe that was two inches off the ground and weighed three pounds. By the middle of the day in kindergarten, I’d be dragging that foot behind me like a heavy hunk of coal.

The kids called me Frankenstein even after my father let me throw the big black shoe away ’cause I still limped and dragged my foot when I got tired. Mama said I got rid of it too soon, but my father knew I was feeling like I was never going to fit in. He’ll be teased forever with that thing, he told her.

"When will I walk like normal kids?" I asked my father one day.

He put down his newspaper, then leaned toward me like he always did, and with that twinkle in his eye he said, And what makes us normal, Junior? His eyes drifted down toward my foot. It ain’t our feet. He looked back up. Normal isn’t a set of rules, or what we look like. Be your own normal, he said and went back to reading his newspaper.

I wished that someday I’d be able to see myself the way he saw me. To him, I was a million bucks. To me, I wasn’t worth much more than a quarter.

When we moved a mile down the road from the small white house on Riverside and into the double-wide trailer on the grounds of my father’s junkyard, the kids had at me about that too. You couldn’t get any lower than living on Riverside. Half the houses had been boarded up since the factories closed, and the river that ran behind Broadway smelled like rotten eggs. Leave it to my father to find a way to set us even further down the social ladder.

"Why’d we have to move here?" I asked him.

Opportunity, he said, smiling like he’d inherited a gold mine.

Mama nodded, agreeing with me. Why, why, why, she whispered.

You’ll see, he said. Wait until the junk starts turning more profit. We’re busy taking in right now.

I wondered when we’d be busy moving the junk out. It seemed like that was the way you made money. Piles of rubber tires, auto parts, construction waste, copper and cast iron, railroad ties, telephone poles dropped off by the city, and lines and lines of wrecked car bodies, some piled on top of each other like building blocks and none of it went anywhere. My father was the proud owner of forty acres of contaminated, rock-filled soil, covered by every imaginable piece of junk known to mankind, all piled in sections to the sky like giant metal teepees.

Even the twenty-five-year-old chain-link fence surrounding the yard had seen better days. There were holes big enough to drive a truck through. The kids at school would tease: Even the junk doesn’t want you, it’s run off through the fence. I’d have to agree that the fence didn’t do much to keep people out or to keep things in.

Who wants to steal junk anyway? my father asked me, walking through one of the openings. If they wanted it, it wouldn’t be here, right?

He was always trying to pull me into his world of junk, promising me a part in his magical transformation dream. First thing we need, Junior, is equipment. We’ll start with a masher and a crane.

I nodded, taking in my father’s junkyard plan. I figured he was a bit dramatic, but wow, the masher was pretty cool—four concrete walls squeezing anything you dropped inside into a kind of mangled rectangle. It made big cars into scrap boxes you could move and stack around the yard.

I never knew if there was any true purpose for the things my father was buying, but I figured he probably liked the idea of crushing it as much as I liked watching it get crushed.

Did you see that, Junior? he’d say, wiping the sweat from his forehead.

It was amazing how a junky old car transformed into something different.

Truth was, as much as my father liked wheeling the junk around and crushing it, he liked sculpting it even better. Most of his time was spent in a little tin-and-wood shed about a hundred yards from the trailer, back through the maze of piled junk, like a log cabin in the mountains. That’s usually where I’d find him, all hours of the day, fastening pieces together with metal cement or a torch, turning junk into figures of animals, people, cars, and sometimes globs of unrecognizable metal.

One Christmas he made a three-foot Santa Claus out of wire coat hangers and crushed soup cans and hung it on the front door; Mama kissed him right there on the steps. He was always coming home with something for us, pulling one of his creations from behind his back: a tiny angel made of tin strips and bottle caps, a bracelet of polished machine washers, or some perforated aluminum shaped into a foot-high Eiffel Tower.

He’d hand a new creation to Mama. For you, darling, a junkyard special, he’d say and she’d smile like it was some kind of diamond necklace. And believe me, when she smiled like that, not just with the corners of her mouth, but with her dark eyes sparkling, it made the whole world feel lucky for just being alive.

I knew how she felt. When he gave me something still warm from the torch, a porcupine made of ten-penny nails or a tiny ship cut out of a sardine can, I’d get all warm inside like he was passing me magic itself. I knew it was just junk, but it was the way he could make anything into something else, like how he could make bad days at school (which were most days) into good nights at home.

God doesn’t make junk, Junior, he said to me often. Everyone has a purpose. And when you find yours, you’ll be worth a million bucks.

I always believed what my father told me.

Never once in twelve years did I ever have a reason not to believe him, not even when that masher and crane sat quiet and the yard did nothing but pile up more junk.

I believed him when he flipped pancakes one at a time on our little stove, pointing the spatula at me and saying, These will put meat on your bones.

I believed him when he told me driving in a junkyard (but only in the junkyard) was legal for twelve-year-olds, while he fastened wooden blocks on the gas and the brake pedal of the old truck and let me drive back and forth from the shed.

I believed him when he told me I was destined for wild adventure, or when he was soothing the wounds of another day at school with his promises of great things for me.

I believed him when he held my face in his rough hands, telling me that he’d always be there for me.

But the day he told me he had cancer and that he was going to die, I called him a liar and ran into the junkyard, where I stayed until Mama found me in the back of a beat-up old Chevy van.

I had been crying for hours. It was hard to hold in the shakes.

But soon hard became harder—watching my father each day transform into a shell of himself. He stopped cooking breakfast in the morning and was too tired to even talk. Mama said the medicine made him sleepy, but it seemed to me that his life had up and gone away before his body decided it was time.

And even though I wanted to tell my father about the horrible days at school, dealing with the bullies and the nicknames, I couldn’t. I wondered what I was going to do if he was really gone.

But then a strange thing happened.

One morning, my father jumped out of bed. I got something to do, he said, and without changing into work clothes, he headed out to the shed and stayed there all day and all night.

The next morning before I left for school, I could hear him banging and the torch going when I snuck by for a listen.

And for the next seven days, he holed up inside that shed, coming out only at night to sleep. I couldn’t see what he was working on ’cause he locked the door with a padlock and kept the key on a string around his neck.

Then I guess he finished. He came in earlier than the other nights and lay down on the couch in back and went to sleep for the last time.

I never thought it possible for a heart…

My heart…

And probably Mama’s…

To break into so many pieces. A week later, after the funeral, Mama handed me an envelope my father had written my name on—Junior Perfect Miles. A tear dropped from her eye as she passed it to me, one shiny wet line on her brown cheek.

And as much as I wanted to rip it open, I couldn’t. So I tucked it under my mattress.

2

I went back to school after a couple of weeks. Mama said it would be good for me.

It never has been before, I told her.

Maybe it will be now, she said, her eyes wide but distant, as if she were talking to someone behind me. She held up a brown paper lunch bag, her hair tied tight behind her head, not dancing off her shoulders as usual.

I took the bag from her, thinking about my father and how quickly things can change, like a light switch that goes from bright to dark.

Mama leaned back against the door frame of the tiny bathroom. I looked around at the rest of the trailer—the white plastic table in our tiny kitchen, the spots of peeling paint on the yellow wall, and the only painting we owned hanging on a junkyard nail behind her. It was a picture of an old man praying over a loaf of bread. No meat. No potatoes. Just bread. Suddenly I felt like there was no room to breathe, no space, and I wondered about the changes coming for me.…

For us.

I mustered up a smile, then let the door swing shut behind me. Chewing on a green apple from my lunch bag, I walked slowly out of the junkyard gates by the traffic circle and turned right toward Gibson Field. The Field was named after a guy who played three seasons for the Brooklyn Dodgers a thousand years ago. He coached Little League teams until he died in a car accident, back in the days when there were enough kids in Riverside to field a few teams. Why did the good guys always have to die?

I shook my head. At least someone from the city cared enough to keep cutting the grass in the good weather, leaving the weeds tall behind the outfield so the homerun balls wouldn’t roll into the river that seemed to wrap its way around everything here.

When I got near Roosevelt Elementary School, I saw the brown clouds of dust the kids were kicking up around them. They ran in groups, chasing other groups, spinning each other to the ground, and laughing. They ran from the field where the grass used to be to the two-shaded asphalt on the basketball court. One kid spit high into the air as he ran the other way.

I walked by the skeleton of a monkey bar set, picked halfway clean by kids who used the stolen metal bars as extensions for their chopper bicycles, and in through the stale walls of the school building, which always smelled like glue and sawdust. Isaac stood by the row of green lockers, with his bright red hair and thick glasses, and looked my way.

He smiled, then frowned. How you doing, Junior?

I’m here.

And I’m with you, he said.

I was almost a foot taller than Isaac, but he reached up and grabbed my shoulder anyway, his white freckled arm next to my brown one. It made me think of what my father used to say about him and Mama. She’s the cappuccino and I’m the cream. We always laughed at that one.

How’s your mom holding out? Isaac asked.

All right. I guess.

And the digs?

It’s a junkyard, Isaac.

"Like I’m living in a mansion."

I shrugged. A junkyard was still a junkyard no matter what my father had thought.

We walked past the kids piling in, the bell ringing long and loud. Bill Ridley led a small group of them up the center of the corridor. Ridley was tall, with thick square shoulders and a big jaw that jutted out in your face when he talked to you. He had sideburns—the only kid in the sixth grade with enough facial hair to show whiskers since Michelle Niles and her mustache moved to California.

Hey, Frankenstein, he said. I heard your old man is dead. That true?

I nodded, but inside something else was going on. I wanted to strangle him. I had pretty much learned over the years to ignore comments from kids like him. My father told me once, Most bullies need to try and make others feel less than, so they can feel good about themselves. I believed him, yet still, I couldn’t shake the anger Ridley had created in my gut.

If you wanted to understand anything about Roosevelt School, you had to start with Bill Ridley and the spell he held over the students who went here. He was the biggest, the strongest, and the oldest kid, having stayed back a couple of times. Most people did their best to avoid him whenever possible.

For me, he seemed to always be around the next corner.

Ridley smirked, deciding not to hassle me anymore that day, probably because of my father. He walked