by Paul Zindel
I was really thankful that John got us back to Howard Avenue and the garage in one piece. He shut off the motor, and Gus was still sleeping. John thought it was better to just leave him in the car for a few minutes while we pulled the trunk inside and upstairs. When we came back out we found the dog stationed at the open door of the car as though he was a guard. I petted him a few times to show how grateful I was for protecting the old guy, and John started tapping Gus on the shoulder to wake him up.
“Gus,” he called over and over. “Come on, Gus, you're home.”
Gus didn't budge, but every single time John called “Gus,” the dog barked and looked at us as if he expected another piece of fudge to be offered.
“John, I think his name is Gus.”
The dog barked.
“Who?”
“The dog.”
“Gus?” John asked.
The dog barked again.
“The dog is Gus,” I repeated. “I think the dog is the real Gus! He must have been the Colonel's dog and gotten lost when the Colonel had to clear out of the town house.”
“Gus?” John called.
The dog just wagged his tail and barked as though he was home again at last.
nine
At first I thought Lorraine was bananas, but sure enough, every time I said “Gus” the dog would bark, and perk up, and look at me and wag his tail. At one point he ran right to my side with his tongue hanging out of his mouth. I realized of course this had to be the Colonel's dog, which is why the poor mutt was sitting in the back of the car waiting for us.
“Do you know how to wake up the Colonel?” I asked.
Gus barked, then jumped past me back into the car and started licking the Colonel's face. It took no more than a few seconds to revive the old man, and he woke up patting the dog on the head. “That's my boy,” the old man kept saying over and over again, “that's my boy.” Then the Colonel ordered us to help him out of the car. All the energy he'd seemed to have at the town house was gone. Lorraine and I lined up like crutches again and were as gentle as we could be. We got him inside the house and up the stairs, and all the while he kept telling us how nice it was going to be to have a dog around the house. When he reached his bedroom, he seemed almost surprised to find his trunk waiting for him. I tucked him into his chair and Lorraine took a blanket and covered his legs. Then I pulled down the shades to darken the room. Lorraine and I were just about ready to give him some peace and quiet when I heard him call us back. We moved close to him.
“What is it?” I asked.
There was a long pause.
“Good night, John,” he whispered. “Good night, Lorraine.”
“Good night, Colonel,” we said softly, even though it wasn't nighttime at all.
He looked at us as if he couldn't be sure he had heard us call him the Colonel. We hadn't meant to; it just happened. He turned away for a moment, and his eyes filled up with tears. Then he looked directly back at us. We reached out and took his hand and stayed with him until he fell asleep.
I told Lorraine to watch him while I took a quick run down to the little A&P. She didn't really like the idea of being left alone in the house, but when I told her what we had on our hands was not a ghost, but a very real old man who had probably gone broke because he couldn't pay taxes on the town house or come up with taxes on his income to the IRS, I think she found those earthly reasons enough. Besides, she had Gus, the German shepherd, and he looked like he'd fight to the death to protect the Colonel and Lorraine as well. I had only four dollars and thirty-seven cents, so I bought grapefruit juice, a half dozen eggs, a quarter pound of butter, a half gallon of acidophilus milk, two cans of Campbell's tomato soup, one loaf of bread, and two dozen chocolate donuts, which had been marked down because they were a little crushed. As I carried the stuff back up Howard Avenue, I wished I had taken the Studebaker, but somehow it didn't seem right unless the old man was with me. It not only didn't seem right, it seemed much more dangerous because I think cops pull a young kid driving alone over faster than they do if they see a kid with an old person. When I got back to the house Lorraine was already scrubbing out the refrigerator to make room for the fresh food. She looked really happy that I had bought eggs, and decided to boil all six of them. “We can all have dinner together,” she said, “and bring the Colonel over some more food tomorrow. My mother's got a lot of canned goods stored up.” While the eggs were cooling, I mopped the kitchen floor while Lorraine tried dusting the living room. It all looked like a losing battle, but at least it would be a little fresher and cleaner for the old man. I was just wiping down the windowsills when we heard the Colonel scream out in pain.
“Oh, my God.” Lorraine froze.
I pushed past her and ran up the stairs two steps at a time. “What is it? What is it?” Lorraine called, now breaking into motion fast behind me. The thumping of my feet on the stairs didn't drown out another scream from the Colonel. And another!
I burst into the Colonel's room. He was bent over in his chair clutching his stomach, moaning deeply, loudly.
“What's the matter?” I cried out.
The Colonel strained to lift his face to me. It was shattered with pain. I didn't know what to do. Lorraine was at my side saying, “What's the matter? What's wrong?” The Colonel couldn't speak, and I didn't know if I should just run across the street and bang on the door of the convent; or maybe I should just tell Lorraine to run into the middle of the street and stop traffic and say, “Help! Help!” Finally words began to emerge from the Colonel. He said something about cramps in his stomach. And then I heard very clearly “Get me to a hospital.”
“Grab him,” I ordered Lorraine. She hesitated. I could see she was frightened. “Grab him!” I ordered again, and in a flash we became the old man's crutches once more.
He cried out louder as we lifted him from the chair.
“We've got to get him into the car,” I said.
“Hurry,” the Colonel moaned, “hurry!”
Somehow we managed to get him down the stairs. We practically lifted him into the air. We knew it wasn't just indigestion, or something simple like that. We knew it had to be a matter of life and death. Gus was waiting for us at the bottom of the stairs, barking. He jumped up on my shoulders and kept kissing the back of the Colonel's neck as we got him to the side door. That dog had the longest tongue I've ever seen in my life, and I never saw a dog love anyone the way he loved this old guy. I had to move fast to close the door so the dog wouldn't follow us out into the car. In another minute we were in the Studebaker, and I had the key in the ignition. The pistons began to explode again, and as we pulled out of the driveway, I could hear Gus barking frantically now from within the house. Lorraine had taken some Kleenexes out of her pocketbook and was helping dab the old man's forehead.
“It's going to be all right,” she kept saying. “It's going to be all right.” The old man just kept moaning.
“I need an emergency room,” he wheezed, “an emergency room.”
“It's all our fault,” Lorraine said.
“You're crazy,” I snapped.
“It's the fudge. You're not supposed to give fudge to anybody who drinks acidophilus milk,” Lorraine moaned.
“I don't even know what acidophilus milk is,” I countered.
The Colonel let out a piercing shriek of pain just as we turned the corner onto Clove Road. A group of Boy Scouts was standing on the corner just shooting the breeze until they heard the scream. Then they all looked up, amazed, as though they had just flunked Advanced Knotting. In another couple of minutes I had the old Studebaker crashing up the emergency ramp to Richmond Hospital. A couple of attendants were right by the entrance sneaking a smoke, but I jammed on the brakes and they came galloping to help us.
“Don't tell them I'm the Colonel,” the old man said through his pain. “Don't give them my real name.”
In two shakes of a lamb's tail the attendants had the old guy on a stretcher with wheels and flew him through these a
utomatic doors. Lorraine and I trotted behind, but to our surprise the procession came to a rapid stop in front of an admissions desk.
“What seems to be the problem?” this mean-looking nurse asked us. The Colonel couldn't talk, and you could see he was trying to hold back his anguish, but he still had to cry out in pain. As soon as the mean-looking nurse realized that the old guy wouldn't be doing any talking, she turned her attention to me, and took up a pen and an information card.
“Name of patient?” she inquired.
“Gus,” Lorraine piped up.
“Gus who?”
“Gus Bore,” I invented on the spot.
“What kind of medical insurance does he have?”
“I don't have any,” the old man grunted in an exhale. “Please help me! Please get me a doctor!”
“Haven't you got Medicare?” the mean nurse pursued.
“Get him to a doctor!” I screamed at her. I wanted to reach out and grab her by the neck and bang her head on the desk. She took a close look at me, and I could see that she knew I meant business. She wanted to know who we were, so we told her we were his grandchildren, and then she ordered us into the waiting room while she had the bozos in white uniforms roll the old man down the hall.
“We want to go with him,” I said.
“That's against hospital rules,” she said, and she sounded so secure about it I figured she wasn't lying. Besides, I knew it was better for her to think we were in the waiting room, because I'm an old hand at sneaking past nurses and going to visit whomever I want in hospitals. I had a cousin once who had his appendix out, and they said there was no visiting after eight o'clock. But I knew how to go up and down the back stairways and walk through the halls as though I was a plainclothes intern. Nobody asks you anything in hospitals if you look as though you belong there.
Lorraine and I decided we'd have to obey orders temporarily because the mean nurse really kept her eyes glued on us. We sat in the horrible waiting room, which had several junk-food machines, a couple of telephones, and these stupid little television sets that you could put a quarter in for an hour's worth of the boob tube.
I got Lorraine and myself hot chocolates with a couple of quarters she had. She just sat on one of the benches sipping it and saying, “We killed him. We killed him. I know we killed him.”
“He's not dead,” I said.
“He's dying. I just know he's dying.”
“There's a big difference between a stomachache and dying,” I told her, and then I started to feel sick again myself. Maybe the marble pecan fudge had ptomaine in it, or botulism. After ten minutes I checked with the mean nurse and she told me to just go back and sit down. But I bugged her until she finally admitted the Colonel had been put in examination room number three. I decided to take up watch at the doorway to the waiting room, because from that point I could see all the way down the hall to where the examination rooms were. About a half hour later I saw an attendant roll the Colonel out and start pushing him out of my sight down another hall. A doctor with a stethoscope came out of the room with two nurses behind him, and they all started heading my way. I signaled Lorraine, and we stopped the doctor right in the middle of the hall while the mean nurse kept yelling, “Get back in the waiting room! Get back in the waiting room!”
“Is he all right?” I asked the doctor.
“We're taking him upstairs now,” the doctor said in a kind, professional voice.
“Can we take him home?” Lorraine asked.
“No. His system has had a terrible shock. We're going to have to run some tests. You're his grandchildren?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Then if you don't mind, please finish filling out the information on him. We're going to have to talk to your mother or father.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, and I was just getting ready to ask him another question when he wiped his nose on his sleeve and dashed off.
The mean-looking nurse seemed delighted. She had an I-told-you-so look on her face and Lorraine and I decided we had no other choice than to put down my address for the Colonel and my telephone number. We decided that if the hospital had to call it was better that they call my house, since Lorraine's mother would only think it was a crank and hang up.
“What's his birth date?” the mean nurse wanted to know.
“1906,” I invented.
“Are you sure he has no medical protection whatsoever?”
“I'm not sure,” I said. “I just don't think so, but I'll check with my mother and father. They were out tonight playing bingo,” I lied, “and then they were going to a chic cocktail party at the Waldorf-Astoria.” The mean nurse grunted and started slipping another special sheet into the typewriter and began typing. Just then Lorraine nudged me and I turned from the information desk and looked down the hall. I couldn't believe my eyes. There was the old man heading for us like a jogging ghost. He was dressed in a white hospital gown, and had just popped out of the elevator. I don't know why, but I felt he was up to something rather illegal, and I decided to keep saying crazy things to the nurse to distract her. “Oh, yes, and after the Waldorf-Astoria, they were going to go disco dancing at Studio 54, and then meet for a nightcap at the Plaza Hotel with Jane Fonda and the Archbishop of Canterbury.” The nurse grunted and kept typing and mumbling things like “We're going to have to have his Social Security number. Who is his private physician? What is his religious preference?”
By this time the old man was practically up to us. He was taking these short rapid steps that made him look like a sandpiper. And he just zoomed by whispering very clearly to us, “Let's get the 3@#$% out of here!”
Lorraine looked dumbfounded, but I almost burst into laughter because I had never seen a more welcome or a funnier sight. The mean nurse was right in the middle of talking to us when she noticed us move quickly to become human crutches for this swiftly moving form which she recognized as a patient. She stood up from her desk and began to call after us, “Where do you think you're going? Sir! Sir! Come back here!”
We hit the automatic doors and they flung open. The Studebaker was waiting right where we had left it, and like the old pros that we were, within a flash we were in the front seat just as the mean nurse came out the door with a couple of confused attendants and another doctor who looked like a medicinal dwarf. The engine exploded. I threw the car into gear and we peeled rubber down the exit ramp, with a lot of people in white yelling.
“Where are your clothes?” I asked.
“They got 'em, the scavengers,” the old man growled. “They got 'em!”
“I thought you wanted to go to the hospital,” Lorraine reminded him. “You were in such terrible pain.”
“Yeah, well I'm not now. I just needed a little medicine, not a new home.”
“Right,” I said.
“You betcha,” the old man agreed.
“Back to the house on the double?” I asked him.
He patted my knee again and smiled. “That's my boy! That's my boy!”
Now this next paragraph that I'm typing I'm not going to show to Lorraine until the book is over. She thinks I don't know that she's been writing pages on the side and hiding them, but I'm not stupid. I know she's been coming into the book closet and using the typewriter when I'm not here, and I found some of her pages hidden behind a set of Silas Marner on the top shelf right next to the one where I hide my cigarettes. I've got to tell you that when the old man slapped my knee and said, “That's my boy!” it made me feel terrific inside. It made me feel terrific because my father never touches me, much less says “That's my boy.” You see, my mother and father never even touch each other, which makes me wonder how on earth I ever was born. I figure it was just an accident—they both happened to be walking around the bedroom nude and they made a mistake and tripped. They had me so late in life they were too old and grouchy to be parents. I'm sure my mother would have been much happier giving birth to a bottle of Windex, and at that time my father would have preferred a keg of beer inste
ad of a son. My parents never hug each other. At breakfast my father never reaches out and takes my mother's hand. My mother doesn't kiss my father when he comes home from work. We're a family of untouchables, and if you think that sort of thing doesn't rub off on the kids, you're crazy. My mother hates it if anybody even touches themselves. When I was three years old she caught me touching a sensuous part of my anatomy and threatened to slice it up like a pepperoni. She made me so nervous about my body that I could hardly walk, much less dance at a social gathering. I know Lorraine's case is similar to mine, because whenever we try to dance, the two of us are so awkward we practically fall down. Sometimes we even dance into other couples or crash into the wall. But once I realized what was going on, I tried to change all that. I took a good look at the teachers in my school. You could tell some of them had happy love lives because they weren't afraid to hug you or shake your hand, or say something nice and smile. Some of their faces didn't get all twisted up and frightened when something to do with sex came into the classroom conversation. When a kid is really frightened about touching other boys and girls and grown-ups, that's when I think a lot of problems come in. But what I'm really trying to say is that just about at this time I was beginning to think how nice it would be to be able to put my arms around Lorraine and start kissing her. (End of my humble secret paragraph.)
ten
I can tell you one thing, by the end of Saturday John and I knew we had an incredible case history on our hands. We took the Colonel home and set him up in his chair and gave him a little cereal and milk. Gus had been barking loud and clear when we came up the driveway, and he seemed to really enjoy a couple of the boiled eggs we had made in the afternoon. The Colonel told us the whole sad story of how he hadn't been able to find Gus on the day he had to split from the town house, and we stayed with him until he fell asleep. The next morning we were over bright and early to fix him a little Sunday breakfast. We brought some bacon and a lot of other things we took out of our own kitchens, like a Belgian frying pan and a good spatula. The old man slept most of Sunday, which gave John and me plenty of time to talk about what we thought was going on. The names alone had been confusing. Sometimes I would call the old man Gus even though I knew now that Gus was the dog. And sometimes I would call the dog the Colonel. It took a whole lot of reconditioning for me to get it straight that the old man had really been a famous subway designer and no doubt once had a lot of money and had gone broke. Actually, the Colonel's story wasn't all that different from what had happened to Dolly Racinski—the custodial lunchroom woman at Franklin High—except Dolly had been more up front about it from the beginning. By the end of Dolly's first week pushing a broom in the lunchroom we knew her whole history. When she knew we were interested she came around to our table every third-period lunch and gave us each and every detail. She had never been married either but had fallen from a position of some importance. She had been an assistant dietician at Hill View Hospital on Staten Island when it was a TB sanatorium—but then they invented miracle drugs, and when TB disappeared they turned it into the Staten Island poorhouse and she was demoted to a sweeper. We had asked her one day why she didn't quit when they demoted her, and she said she would have lost her pension and she wasn't going to let the City cheat her out of it. We even asked her why she wore such large earrings and loud-colored dresses, and she said it was to cheer up the veterans, who used to make up most of the TB patients. Sometimes they had come to the hospital right from the war, and they always complimented her on her cheerful appearance. She told us half the fun of being a woman was to cheer people up and show them that life could be an upper. We didn't know it at the time, but all of these talents were going to come in handy pretty soon!
