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

by Yolen, Jane; Stemple, Adam

  Sammy woke in time for dinner with his sheets drenched in sweat and his mother standing over him, concern written all over her face.

  She felt his forehead before popping the thermometer in his mouth. Sammy lay still and waited for the thin beep. He didn’t have to hear the verdict; he could tell by the worry lines on his mother’s forehead what it was.

  “Oh,” he groaned, “now I really am sick.”

  His mother nodded, frowned, and patted him lightly on the head. “I’ll make you some chicken soup for supper.”

  “Thanks, Mom.” He almost slipped up and called her Mommy.

  Fevers always make me feel four years old.

  Then sighing, he rolled over and buried his face in the pillow so he wouldn’t have to see the room spin . . .

  And woke up three hours later to a thermometer in his mouth and a cold bowl of soup on his nightstand.

  “Ugh,” he said. Then, “Erg.”

  “I agree,” his mother said, and checked the beeping thermometer. “Holding steady at one hundred and two.”

  “Ew.”

  “Guess you get some more time off from school.”

  “Hooray.”

  His mother smiled a little in the half-light of his table lamp. “Be careful what you wish for, Sammy.” She handed him two ibuprofen tablets and a glass of water.

  Sammy shrugged. It made his neck hurt. In fact, his whole body ached from the fever. “I guess.”

  “Get some more rest. Hopefully your fever will break overnight.”

  “Yeah. Hopefully.” It doesn’t feel like it’s going to be breaking anything but my spirit for a while, he thought. But he drifted back to sleep thinking about the word hopefully and wondering what it looked like in Hebrew.

  The alarm, which he’d forgotten to turn off, sounded promptly at one a.m., dragging Sammy out of a fever-induced dream where a headless clay god—that somehow still sported a long white beard—chased him through the school hallways. He tried to shake off the troubling image, but it just set his head pounding.

  “The head!”

  He had to make the head.

  Eventually he’d get well and eventually have to go back to school. He needed the golem ready when that happened or he was dead meat. And Skink along with him.

  Stumbling out of bed, his pajamas soaked from fever sweat, Sammy lurched to the closet and uncovered the golem. It loomed over him, five and a half feet of molded clay lacking only a head to make it whole and the name of God to make it live. In his fevered state, Sammy really believed it was going to work. But in his fevered state, he was nearly incapable of dragging a new block of clay from the closet to the bed. So he unwrapped the block on the floor of the closet, at the feet of the golem, and started to work right there. Spreading his tools around him, he began chopping and shaving, molding and smoothing, until he had an egg-shaped sphere.

  “Hair?” he muttered. Then made a feverish decision: “Too much trouble.” So he kept the top of the egg smooth, and concentrated on making eyes. After a few false starts he had a convincing pair of peepers. They were quite large, but so was the head. And the body.

  “Golem, why are your eyes so big?” Sammy said in a high-pitched voice. He answered himself in a low growl. “The better to see James Lee coming, my dear.”

  Wow! I am delirious! he thought. Then mentally scolded himself: Less talk. More clay.

  He added thick browridges to shade the big eyes and made the pupils more crescent than round, in the hopes that the similarity to cat’s eyes would let the golem see well in the dark. “Darwin, do your work!” he whispered.

  The nose insisted on being broad and flat, like a tribesman’s, the ears slightly cauliflowered like Sammy had seen on the school’s wrestling team coach.

  He carved away some of the clay to make sharp cheekbones and a chin, first adding and then smoothing out a chin dimple made famous by a family of old actors. Then changing his mind, he put the chin dimple back in. He shaped the ears separately, and then stuck them on—he went with detached lobes—before finally coming around to the mouth.

  Stumbling into the bathroom, he checked out his tongue again. Noticed the strange flap where it attached to the bottom of his mouth. Noticed that the tongue looked smooth at a distance, but up close it was a random, pitted landscape as pocked as the moon and bumpy as alligator skin. He studied it again and again before finally returning to his room and getting back to work again, figuring that if under the tongue was where the name of God went, then he’d better get the details right.

  His fever was still raging as he starting digging into the head to make the open mouth. His eyes watered with hot fever tears that made the air seem to shimmer, which in turn made the golem’s head seem to move. Its eyes appeared to follow his hands’ movements, and he swore the golem’s body was leaning farther over his left shoulder to get a better look at what he was doing.

  How can it see over my shoulder when I have its head at my feet? In his fevered state, that seemed a reasonable question. How can it move before I’ve had the chance to animate it? Another good question. All of it he put down to his fever.

  Sammy ignored the heat in his cheeks and went on hollowing out the mouth, forming a uvula at the back of what was now definitely a throat. He made teeth from scraps of clay—thirty-two in all. Luckily they’d studied the human body last year at his other school and the number of teeth had been on the final exam.

  “The better to eat you with, my dear!” He chuckled softly.

  After that was done, Sammy went over and over the tongue, taking a lot of breaks to stumble back to the bathroom mirror and stare at himself with his own tongue stuck way out, until he felt he had a reasonable copy of it in clay only proportionally larger. As he picked the finished tongue up to set it in the golem’s gaping mouth, he shivered. And it wasn’t just from the fever.

  “Wow, a tongue sure is a huge, ugly thing!” He remembered his uncle Gerry who liked to eat tongue sandwiches. Cow tongues must be humongous! The thought made his stomach turn over, and for a moment he was afraid he was going to throw up.

  “Golem won’t like being decorated with puke!” he scolded himself.

  Sitting for a moment more, he got control of his stomach, his thoughts, his sweaty hands. Then he smoothed the tongue into place inside the now toothy mouth, making sure there was room for the slip of paper that had to go there.

  For a few anxious moments, he struggled to set the sizable noggin onto the golem’s body. He had to wet some extra clay, then balance—rather dizzily—on a footstool while smoothing the wet clay to the creature’s neck and shoulders to help hold everything in place. Luckily, the strokes formed natural-looking neck muscles and ligaments, and Sammy found himself wondering if that was how God had formed Adam’s neck.

  Then he started wondering that if he—as a Jew—didn’t believe God’s son was a carpenter, could he believe that God Himself was a potter?

  And what—he asked himself—would Darwin say? The thought made him giggle.

  “Your golem is totally un-evolved, son,” he said aloud in a low voice, which occasioned another giggling fit.

  Suddenly he realized how tired and sick he must be, with his mind leaping about, his hands shaking. Maybe I should wait till tomorrow to take the final step. But no, it was time, because the golem’s neck was smooth and the head firmly in place, and the mouth was open with the tongue upturned, and all that was left was to write the name of God.

  Adonai.

  His hands shook so much that he knew he wouldn’t be able to print the Hebrew word clearly. Still, he had the slips of paper.

  But where are they?

  Then he remembered—in his pants pocket.

  But where are the pants?

  Afraid his mother had already washed the pants—she was fast that way, washed glasses before you finished drinking, washed plates before you’
d finished eating—he rooted around in the clothes hamper but only found two pairs of dirty underpants and two T-shirts.

  Then where . . .?

  He turned and saw his pants at the foot of his bed.

  Thanks goodness Mom has been too busy to do the laundry!

  Fishing out the papers from the pocket, he smoothed them with his clay-pocked hands.

  In the dim light from the closet he saw how wobbly his own Hebrew letters were compared to Reb Chaim’s. He didn’t dare chance the poor writing. Taking Reb Chaim’s slip of paper, he placed it carefully under the golem’s tongue. The huge, ugly, uplifted tongue.

  “Live,” he whispered, adding, “this Jew needs your help. Keep me safe.” He thought a minute, adding, “Oh—and my friend Skink, too.”

  Then almost passing out with fever and exhaustion, he closed the closet door and went back to bed.

  And dreamed that he was making a golem.

  13.

  Still Life with Golem

  Sammy woke drenched in sweat but clearheaded. The fever had broken. Sitting up in bed, he tried to sort fevered memories from the dream images that still lingered.

  He shook his head. Whatever, he thought, it’s all weird.

  Throwing off his blankets, he barely got one leg on the floor, when there was a knock on the door, and he scrambled back under the covers, making sure to tuck away his clay-spattered hands.

  “Come in!”

  His mother bustled in with a glass of water and a thermometer, and looked at him critically. “Well, now, don’t you look a whole lot better!”

  She put the water on his nightstand and popped the thermometer in his mouth. “Hardly need to take your temperature. I can tell your fever’s broken.” Putting her hands on her hips, she looked down at him. “I think it’s time to go back to school, don’t you?” She didn’t wait for an answer, just spun around and marched to the closet. “Let’s get you some clothes and get you off to school.”

  Oh, God! Not the closet!

  There was nothing Sammy could do. He was in bed with a thermometer in his mouth, and before he could grunt or speak or jump out of bed to protest, she was at the closet and opening the door.

  I can’t watch. He turned his head away and squeezed his eyes shut, though he knew it was an infantile reaction. All he could do was wait for his mother to say, “Sammy? What is that?” That being a golem. And bits of clay. And a trashed closet. And . . .

  In fact, he was terrified. Terrified what his mother would say in another second about his closet and what his father would say about all the wasted clay, and terrified that it would all lead to the discovery of his theft from Rabbi Chaim.

  His thoughts kept him from realizing that one second had turned into two, and then three and four and five, and then Sammy realized that either his mother was too stunned to speak or something very strange was happening. Slowly, he turned his head back toward the closet and opened just one eye. His mother’s back blocked his view of the closet as she stood peering into it, one finger tapping her cheek.

  Sammy opened his other eye.

  His mother reached out and snagged a shirt with bright stripes that he hated and some pants that would get him wedgied for life. He didn’t say anything, though. Because, as she turned back with the clothes draped over her arm, he could see clearly into the closet.

  There’s no golem in there!

  Sammy was too stunned to speak. He was too stunned to think. He lay transfixed, staring into the closet, as his mother took the thermometer out of his mouth and smiled at the normal reading. She puttered around his room for another minute and then said, “Okay, Sammy, dear. Get up and get dressed. Your dad’s driving you to school and after that he’s got a big order to fill. We won’t be seeing him for days. I have a lunch date so am going out later and need to get stuff done here before going.”

  Sammy didn’t answer. He was still staring at the empty closet, trying to figure out where the golem had gone.

  Did I move it? Could I have moved it? Would I remember that? And how could it have moved? It hasn’t been fired yet. And . . . His thoughts and memories were all jumbled up.

  “Sammy?” his mother said.

  “Um . . . yeah. School. Up. Okay.”

  Or had the whole thing just been a fever dream from first to last?

  His mother turned and was about to walk out, but then stopped in the doorway and looked over her shoulder. “Oh! I almost forgot. A friend of yours from school has stopped by to see how you’re doing.”

  “Skink? He’s out of the hospital?”

  His mother shook her head. “No. Well, yes, Skinner is out of the hospital. Only stayed overnight. Been home five days now. But no, the friend is someone else, someone we’ve never met before. He’s—” She stopped. Frowned. “Well, I hate to be so blunt, Sammy, but he’s a strange-looking kid. Big for an eighth grader. And bald as an egg!”

  “Um . . .” Sammy’s mind was whirling, a thousand thoughts a second whizzing through.

  It worked!

  It couldn’t have.

  There’s got to be another explanation.

  It’s magic!

  It’s bunk!

  Alopecia.

  “Alopecia?” his mother asked. He hadn’t realized he’d spoken the last thought aloud. “You do know the oddest words, Sammy.”

  “Um . . .” Where’d I come up with that one? Then it hit him. They’d studied alopecia in the human body class, as well. “It’s . . . it’s hair loss that can occur at any age. My . . . um . . . friend suffers from it.”

  “Oh.” She nodded. “I’m glad it’s that. I thought it might be cancer. He doesn’t look well. Sort of gray, if you know what I mean.” She turned toward the door and this time did walk out, saying over her shoulder, “Get dressed. Your father and your friend are already sitting down for breakfast.”

  “Erp.” It was hardly a response, but she took it as such and shut the door after her.

  Sammy sat up. Pulled his hands out from under the covers and stared at them. They were pretty clean.

  Put his feet on the floor. They held him up.

  His mind was no longer whirring. In fact, it seemed entirely empty.

  He put on the dorky pants one leg at a time. Then the striped shirt.

  Plodding into the bathroom, he turned on the water and washed his face. The coolness felt grand. Afterward, he washed his hands, getting rid of the rest of the clay. He hoped the cool water would kick-start his brain, but if anything it numbed him even more.

  Back in his room, he put on socks. Sat on the bed. Listened to his mother shout, “Sammy! Breakfast!” Finally, he stood, hiked up his pants, yanked down his shirt, and headed for the stairs.

  And there, sitting at the kitchen counter, head and shoulders poking out from behind the basket of flowers and fruit Sammy’s mother kept on the table, was the golem. The tall, broad-shouldered, gray-skinned, hairless golem. He was fully dressed in canvas pants, work boots, a tan V-neck T-shirt, and a Chicago Cubs baseball cap. Though where the golem had gotten those clothes, Sammy was never to know.

  Sammy sat. “Hi . . . um . . . , Gully,” he said, “nice to see ya.”

  The golem nodded.

  “Had any breakfast yet?” Sammy asked, glad he’d given the creature teeth, though worried because he hadn’t given it any internal organs, like a stomach or a colon. Or, for that matter, a . . . um . . . hole for food to exit from. “Or are you not hungry?”

  “Not hungry,” the golem said. Its voice was large. Flat. Uninflected.

  Uninflected, Sammy thought, as well as uninspected, undetected, and possibly unsuspected. At least he hoped so.

  “Nonsense, Gully—is that your name?” Sammy’s mother said. “I’ve never known a boy your age who couldn’t eat more.”

  “Gully,” said the golem, smiling. The mouthful of teeth were
the color of the clay.

  “He’s not much of a talker, Old Gully,” Sammy put in quickly. He raced through his own cereal and banana so quickly, it felt as if it had all become a mass of clay in his belly.

  Tongue. He remembered that enormous tongue he’d shoved into the golem’s mouth just hours before, and all the banana and cereal threatened to return as quickly as it had gone down.

  “I’ve noticed,” Sammy’s father said, who had been sitting behind the newspaper and not doing much talking himself.

  “All done,” Sammy said, putting down his napkin. “Let’s go, Gully. Don’t want to be late. I’m never late.”

  “I’ve noticed,” said Gully. Again in that flat voice.

  Sammy stood, the golem stood, and Sammy’s mother stood, too. “Well, I’ve never seen you so eager to get to school, Sammy.”

  “I just don’t want to miss any more,” he answered, trying to keep his voice even, though not quite uninflected. “Or make Gully late. He’s new to the school—and it wouldn’t be a good start.” He could feel his heart pitter-patting like mad, and hoped no one else could hear it. He knew that if he didn’t get the golem away from the prying eyes of his parents, things might really spiral out of control.

  As for the golem, so far he seemed to say only what he’d heard spoken. Maybe he needed a vocabulary lesson.

  But—I have to be careful, Sammy told himself. Careful what I do and what I say. He’d been so intent on making the golem, he hadn’t given any thought to what was suppose to come after.

  “Come on, Gully. Time for school.”

  The golem grinned his big gray grin again. “I want a good start,” he said, almost as if he was being as careful as Sammy.

  They made a strange procession out to the car: Sammy’s father, small but powerful, taking the lead with a steady march; then slight Sammy, not watching where he was going and almost tumbling onto the walk because he kept craning his neck around to look at the golem; and at the last Gully, whose long strides threatening to carry him past the other two.

  His mother had insisted. “A new boy and a boy just back from having a fever? Of course Dad will drive you.” She didn’t mention the bullies, but Sammy suspected she was thinking about that, too, and he didn’t protest.