The Pigman & Me

by Paul Zindel

  They weren’t gone a minute when Jennifer and I decided we should climb the tree and sit up in it awhile. The tree formed a thick cradle where the trunk made its first split, five feet off the ground. It was a perfect hideout, surrounded by a lush cluster of large green leaves and branches half woven like a big nest.

  “It’s beautiful up here,” Jennifer said. “We can see everything!”

  “And no one can see us!” I added.

  And it was true. We could see the whole yard, the airport, and Mrs. Lillah’s house, which had the water-head baby and chickens, ducks, and rabbits in its backyard. The land was so flat we could also easily see the monstrous black oil tankers on the river, and the coal being gurgled up onto a conveyor belt at the Con Edison electric plant.

  “Where’s your mother today?” Jennifer wanted to know.

  “She and Connie went to answer ads for work,” I said. “Now that they own the house, they have to pay the mortgage.”

  “What kind of jobs are they looking for?”

  “Mom saw a help-wanted advertisement for the ASPCA, the society to protect animals. If she gets that, she can ride around in a big van with a veterinarian and stick free needles into everybody’s dogs and cats so they don’t get rabies.”

  “That’d be exciting,” Jennifer said.

  “Yes,” I agreed. “And Connie’s gone for an interview to be a hatcheck girl at Ye Olde Tavern Lounge in New Dorp. She got all dressed up for it and said they only hire personnel who have a lot of glamour.”

  “My mother never went to work,” Jennifer said, her voice a strange mixture of embarrassment and fear. “And my father’s retired now, but he used to clean the electroplating tanks at Nassau Smelting, where they melt down junk cars to salvage metal.”

  “That must have been interesting.”

  “It wasn’t.” Jennifer’s voice trailed off. She looked away from me, so now I knew something was really wrong.

  There was a long silence.

  When she looked back at me, she had tears in her eyes. It was like anything fake had melted away between us, and I was seeing her for the first time. Her cheeks were flushed, and her hair blended in with the branches. She looked like the most sensitive person I had ever met, as though her feelings were all over her outside. A weird thought jumped into my mind. A sad thought. I felt sad for Jennifer that she wasn’t more beautiful. In the last school I’d gone to there was a very beautiful girl who everyone knew was going to have a wonderful life. She was invited to every party. All the boys gawked and showed off for her. She wore just a touch of something like an eau de toilette, some delicate fragrance that floated from her; maybe it was even manufactured by her own shoulders or in the nape of her neck. And it made me dream of holding her and disappearing into her skin. Of course, I hardly got to speak to that girl. But Jennifer looked different, more like she could one day win a minor downhill skiing championship or attempt to swim the English Channel. Her violet eyes, even with their tears, were her strongest feature. At that moment, in the apple tree, I felt I could fall into them, that I could see there was a fine beautiful soul deep inside her brain but that many boys wouldn’t take the time to find it.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “I’m going to die in this town,” she said, brushing the tears from her eyes.

  “What do you mean you’re going to die?”

  “I mean, I’m trapped like a muskrat. That’s what all the boys do in this town. Trap muskrats and skin them alive.”

  “You’re not trapped!”

  “Yes, I am. All I’ll ever know is this town. It’s all any of the girls get to know when you’re born here and have zombies for parents and muskrat killers for boyfriends. They make you get married before you’re twenty. I’ll be married and then they’ll make me a baby machine, and I’ll do huge washes, hang out clothes, fry kielbasa sausages, roast potatoes, mop floors, dance the polka, get fat, wrinkle, turn all white, and never see London or Paris or Hershey, Pennsylvania! I’ll be poor and my husband will be a garage mechanic or a plumber’s assistant or deliver kerosene, and I’ll plant window boxes of geraniums and we’ll end up sitting on a porch and I’ll be a zombie, too! I’ll never escape Travis! I just know it! Never!”

  Jennifer suddenly burst completely into tears. I sat bolt upright on my branch. I put my arm around her. I didn’t know what to say.

  “You’ll escape,” I finally said softly.

  “No, I won’t.”

  “Yes, you will.”

  “No,” she insisted. “You’ll escape.”

  “What makes you think I won’t end up a zombie, too?”

  “You’ve already been out of this town. You’re not like the other boys around here. I can see you’re not cursed.”

  “Don’t you have friends?”

  “All the girls I know in this town are zombies-in-training. And all the boys can’t wait to make them pregnant so they have to get married and go work at a factory, and end up as male zombies themselves. The biggest thrill any man in the history of Travis has ever had is buying a used Chevrolet. That’s the highlight of their lives, and then it’s downhill all the way. This town is a prison. It’s death, with an annex in New Jersey.”

  “But if you know that, then you can stop it all from happening.”

  “How?” she asked, desperately.

  “We’ll find out how together. We’ll be the best friends we can be and we’ll save each other.”

  “We’ll really be best friends!”

  “Yes. Come on!” I shouted.

  I climbed down out of the tree, with Jennifer right behind me. I took a penknife from my pocket.

  “What’re you doing?”

  I started carving into the bark of the huge trunk of the apple tree. The bark fell away easily from my blade, and I was able to inscribe large, thick, and clear letters. Jennifer smiled when she saw I had carved the word ESCAPE.

  “Now, this is our tree. Our own private tree,” I told her. “And whenever we see it, even just the top of it from a block or a mile away, we’ll know it belongs to us! It will remind us that we’ll both escape. We will. We’ll escape!”

  Suddenly there came the scream of wild animals, and the twins were back upon us.

  “What can we jump from now?” one of them wanted to know.

  “We jumped off the garage, every ledge of the toolshed, all the trees, the fence, the front porch, and two barrels,” the other specified.

  “Then it’s time for the apple tree again,” I suggested.

  Their eyes lit up.

  But this time Jennifer and I climbed up, too. It all just seemed so stupid and dumb that even Jennifer and I got in the mood. We started jumping out of the tree with them. Jump and climb! Jump and climb! We jumped from higher and higher! We climbed higher and higher. Jennifer and I joined right in, shrieking with the twins like three Tarzans and a Jane, until we had climbed so high we were all frightened to leap. We were so high we were near the top, and for a while all any of us saw was miles and miles of a grand adventure stretching out before us.

  I looked northeast, toward Manhattan, and I thought of Nonno Frankie.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Nonno Frankie

  Wakes Up the Zombies!

  The next Saturday, Nonno Frankie and Nonna Mamie arrived bright and early in a different dumpy pickup truck. Nonno Frankie had hired a coworker of his from the Oreo batter vat team at NBC to bring out the tools and materials he’d need to get the summer planting under way. They unloaded a winepress, boxes of tomato plants, seeds, weird collapsible metal cages, pitchfork, rake, shovel, 300-foot garden hose, eight bags of sheep manure, and lots of shopping bags containing the ingredients for another intense eating experience.

  Once they had all the stuff on the curb in front of the house, Nonno Frankie’s cookie colleague drove off, and the twins, Nonno Frankie, and the rest of us carried the stuff inside.

  Nonno Frankie locked the winepress up in the sturdy, dry toolshed because, he whispered to
me, he didn’t want the twins fooling around with it when he wasn’t there. The press was the size of half a large barrel, with a long, thick handle attached to a metal screwing gizmo. If either of the twins decided to test it out on the other, they could easily squash a hand or head or whatever part of their anatomy they felt like experimenting with.

  After that, the twins and I dashed around the place checking everything else out. Nonna Mamie and Nonno Frankie had brought so many intriguing things that weekend, I didn’t hear my mother complain once. She did keep one eye open to make certain Nonno Frankie wasn’t digging up any of her side of the yard, but on the whole, she didn’t act wacky at all. One thing she did keep saying was, “Oh, kids, I think we’re going to have our own Lassie!” She had gotten the job on the ASPCA rabies van and was meeting a lot of dogs and dog owners. One of the pooches had an owner who knew of an old lady who had gotten arthritis and couldn’t handle her pet collie anymore, and my mother had offered to take the dog off her hands. It was complicated, but Mom was supposed to find out during the next week if she’d be getting the collie or not.

  “The dog’s name is Queenie, but she’s supposed to look exactly like Lassie,” Mom said. “I heard when you walk her down the street, everyone calls out and asks if it’s the real Lassie!”

  Anyway, all of Saturday I helped Nonno Frankie mulch and plant a garden.

  “Got to turn over the earth,” Nonno Frankie sang as he pushed his foot down on the pitchfork. “Every year, you turn the dirt over and over, and start again!” Every once in a while he’d have to yell at the twins, because they were mainly interested in playing with the water hose and throwing sheep manure at each other.

  “Look at the rainbow, Nonno!” they called, sending a powerful stream of water straight up into the air. They were so hyperactively freaky, they let the water fall right back down on them.

  “Nonna Mamie fed them too much goat’s milk when they were born.” Nonno Frankie sighed.

  Jennifer came over at noon. I introduced her to everybody. She and Nonno Frankie hit it off right away, especially because she wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty, and pitched in to help with the planting.

  “Ho! Ho! Ho! What runs around a yard but doesn’t move?” Nonno Frankie quizzed Jennifer.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “A fence!” Nonno Frankie howled. “A fence!”

  Jennifer managed to convincingly howl, too, and he really appreciated that. I had warned her his jokes weren’t very funny, but Nonno Frankie’s laugh was infectious.

  “Ho! Ho! Ho!” Nonno Frankie went on, this time pointing across the airport toward the Con Edison electric plant. “I knew a man who got a big bill from that electric company. He was really shocked!”

  I mean, Nonno Frankie had something funny or nice and human and interesting to say about everything. Jennifer held up her end of the conversation, too. She told him Indians used to live on the land before the town was founded. She said a lot of folks had found arrowheads and broken pieces of white clay pottery and peace pipes.

  “That reminds me,” Nonno Frankie said. “You know what a small laugh is in the Indian language?”

  “No.”

  “A MINNEHAHA!” Nonno Frankie howled, and we howled with him.

  By mid-afternoon all the tomato plants were in, as well as eight rows of corn, three rows of beets, two of radishes, four of lettuce, and five of some weird vegetable called escarole.

  After lunch, Jennifer introduced us to Leon and Rose Appling, two teenagers from the downstairs black family next door. Leon was thirteen, and Rose was fifteen. They were very nice, but painfully polite and shy. To be truthful, they reminded me of myself, which made me like them right away. They just leaned against the iron mesh of their chicken coop, a spot that had the best view of Nonno Frankie and the activity going on in our backyard. They were no blood relation to the water-head baby, which Mrs. Lillah was rocking in its carriage in the sunshine, but they did own all the barnyard animals including a white hen they called Miss White. The reason we got to know Miss White by name was because she was the one chicken smart enough to know how to escape from the chicken coop at least once a day and strut around our yard.

  “I’m sorry about Miss White,” Leon apologized, trying to call the chicken back over the fence. “We try to plug up all the holes, but she always finds another one.”

  “That’s fine. We like animals,” I explained.

  Leon was happy to hear that. He had a round, pleasant face and a gap-toothed smile, and he practically always kept his hands in the pockets of his worn blue overalls. His sister, Rose, had a big nervous smile and long, thin arms and legs. Whenever she walked or leaned or sat, her limbs took a few seconds more to halt their moving and twitching after the rest of her body. Of course, Nonno Frankie warmed them up with a few jokes, and before we knew it Rose and Leon were letting us pet their rabbits. Nonno Frankie also gave them some radish and beet seeds and offered to catch Miss White for them and return her to their yard.

  “What do you get if you cross a vampire with a skunk?” Nonno Frankie called out, chasing Miss White. “Ho! Ho! Ho! A dirty look from the vampire!” Nonno Frankie squealed.

  I mean, everybody was having a lot of fun. But then Nonno Frankie started the main festivity of the day. “Let’s catch crabs and killies!”

  “What are killies?” Jennifer and I asked.

  “Little fish,” Nonno Frankie explained.

  Within minutes, Nonno Frankie had a whole expedition organized to march to the Arthur Kill. It turned out the collapsible metal cages were crab traps, and he had a box with two wire-screen cylinders that he told us were the killie traps. It looked like it was going to be a great adventure, so I went looking for my sister, who hadn’t been around for a while. Finally, I found her lying across the bed in her upstairs room. She was crying.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “I saw the water-head baby,” Betty sobbed.

  “Oh.”

  I tried to explain to her how going to catch killies with us might take her mind off the sight of the baby, but she said she just wanted to stay in her room and be alone awhile. That’s how my sister always was. She could be strong and tough one minute, flicking her long blond hair like nothing in the world could bother her, but then she’d see something cruel and unexplainable once in a while and go cry someplace where no one could see her. I had long ago learned to respect her feelings.

  “You want me to stay with you?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “I just need to cry awhile.”

  “Nonna Mamie told me she’s making chicken parmigiana, roast peppers, and linguini for us tonight,” I told her. That cheered her up a little.

  VAROOOOOMMMMM!

  Because of the airplanes taking off and landing, we had to walk along the edge of the airport. Three planes took off over our heads as Nonno Frankie led me, Jennifer, and the twins on our first trip to the river. We carried the traps, but Nonno Frankie hauled a shopping bag of fish heads, which he’d brought all the way down from the Fulton Fish Market in Manhattan. The whole trek wasn’t much more than a mile.

  Jennifer knew the way to the river from many years of playing there with her brothers when they were kids. But Nonno Frankie knew the names of the flora and fauna better than anyone. On our hike he pointed out wild beach plums, possum tracks, poison ivy, pieces of granite, blue jays, cardinals, sparrows and sparrow nests, chicken hawks circling in the sky, a turtle (the twins wanted to take it home, but he said “no”), and a garter snake.

  Closer to the kill, Jennifer pointed out a sandy inlet where she told us all the Travis kids went swimming, but it was Nonno Frankie who selected a spot right at the river’s edge where he wanted us to put out the crab and killie traps. Among the important things Nonno Frankie taught us that day were:

  1) how to tie a fish head to the bottom of a crab trap so crabs can’t steal the bait;

  2) that killies look just like sardines;

  3) why k
illies can swim into a narrow hole in a killie trap but then can’t find their way out;

  4) how to put a fish head on a string with a sinker attached to it, throw the line ten feet out, let it sink to the bottom, and then actually feel a crab eating the fish head;

  5) how to gingerly pull a crab line in;

  6) how to keep the crabs and killies you catch nice and moist in a burlap bag;

  7) a lot of incidental information, such as the fact that “A MAN, A PLAN, A CANAL—PANAMA” backward and forward spells the same thing.

  We started to catch killies all over the place. Nonno Frankie told us he was voted the best killie catcher in his hometown in Sicily, and it was easy to see that had to be the truth. We would have caught a lot more of everything if Nonno Frankie hadn’t had to keep stopping the twins from trying to build rafts and launch themselves out into the kill. Their attention span for everything that afternoon, except raft building, was very short. Nonno Frankie sat Nicky and Joey down at one point and gave them a big lecture on how many kids die each year because they try to build rafts and then float to their deaths down rivers and streams. He acted out what it was like to drown, and even dropped down on the ground to portray to them how horrible it was to breathe in the water. When that didn’t seem to work, Nonno Frankie told them the real danger of being out in this channel was that there were killer whales in the Kill Van Kull renowned for devouring young boys on rafts. He also told them there were monstrous whirlpools that could spring up and suck them down through the earth to China. The twins found that idea scary for a while, but eventually they started building another raft.