The Pigman & Me

by Paul Zindel

  Somehow we all made it back alive with all the killies we could carry, but only four crabs.

  “Where are all the crabs?” Connie and Nonna Mamie wanted to know.

  “On their honeymoons,” Nonno Frankie explained. “In September they’ll all be back from their honeymoons, and we’ll catch dozens of them.”

  Jennifer was invited for dinner, so there were nine of us seated around Connie’s kitchen table. Mom mainly talked about the Lassie she might get. Betty looked recovered from seeing the water-head baby. Connie wore a turban with rhinestones in it and told us glamorous details about the job as hatcheck girl, which she had landed. The twins played a predining game of rolling on the linoleum floor. Nonna Mamie was checking the cheese melt on the luscious-looking pounded and fried chicken cutlets. Nonno Frankie announced he would prepare the appetizer—killies.

  We watched Nonno Frankie rinse the killies, drain them, and then toss them in flour. In a flash they were sizzling in a deep frying pan of oil. In less than five minutes the entire appetizer was in front of us on the table: a mountain of breaded midget fish with their heads still on. Mom and Betty said they weren’t going to be having any. The twins ran away from the table to swat flies. Connie and Nonna Mamie were busy with the main course. That left me and Jennifer to sample Nonno Frankie’s special treat.

  “Enjoy! Enjoy!” Nonno Frankie instructed proudly.

  Jennifer looked at me. I didn’t want to hurt Nonno Frankie’s feelings, so I reached out a fork, put one of the three-inch fish on my plate, and began to dissect it.

  “No, no!” Nonno Frankie cried out. “This is the way you eat killies!”

  He reached out his hand to the platter, snatched up five or six of the treats in his hand, and tossed them into his mouth like french fries with eyeballs.

  “You eat them heads and all!” Nonno Frankie said. “Enjoy, everybody! Enjoy!”

  “It’s a great Italian delicacy,” Connie confirmed.

  If it was good enough for Nonno Frankie, I decided, it was good enough for me, so I grabbed a handful and started munching. Then Jennifer took a handful, and she started munching.

  “May I use your bathroom a moment?” my mother asked Connie.

  “Of course,” Connie said.

  Mom stood up from the table and walked past the kitchen stove to the door at the far left front of the room. She smiled graciously and closed the door.

  I seemed to be the only one who heard her gagging.

  By the time dinner was over, we had long forgotten the killies and were all so stuffed we could barely move.

  “Now we need some entertainment,” Nonno Frankie said.

  “There is no entertainment in Travis,” Jennifer apologized. She told him about the zombies and how all they did day and night was sit on their porches.

  “Then we’ll just have to liven those zombies up.” Nonno Frankie winked.

  “How can we do that?” I asked.

  “Watch,” Nonno Frankie said.

  He went through the kitchen garbage and pulled out the tin cans Nonna Mamie had emptied to make the meal. There were all sorts of cans. Tomato paste cans. Garbanzo bean cans. Peeled zucchini cans. Empty olive oil cans. Nonno Frankie shoved them all in a bag, grabbed a big ball of twine, and went out to the front porch. It ended up just being me, Jennifer, and the twins helping Nonno Frankie tie the cans into two bunches. Then we carried them a little way up Glen Street.

  “Here,” Nonno Frankie said, halting at a spot that had two telephone poles directly across the street from each other. He tied one end of the string to one set of the cans; then he went across the street and tied the other end of the string to the second bunch of cans. Jennifer and I crossed with him to watch his handiwork.

  “I see what you mean,” Nonno Frankie said, eyeing the lit porches of the houses on the street. The zombies were sitting out in full force, snoozing or staring across to Cemetery Hill.

  Nonno Frankie loosely wedged one part of the string behind a splinter of the telephone pole and the other end of the string loosely on a splinter of the second telephone pole. That left the string stretched two feet high straight across the road.

  “Now we just sit on our porch and wait for a car,” Nonno Frankie said.

  I knew there wasn’t much traffic ever on Glen Street. However, time never went slowly with Nonno Frankie around. He taught us a song called “Isle of Capri,” showed us how to find the Big Dipper and the North Star, and told us eight jokes, including one about a boy skeleton who didn’t want to go to school because he didn’t have the guts for it. Jennifer, me and the twins were laughing our heads off so much we forgot about the biggest trap we’d set for the day.

  “A car! A car!” Jennifer finally cried out, happier than I’d ever seen her.

  Sure enough, a car had turned off Victory Boulevard, and was coming fast up Glen Street. We ducked before the car reached the telephone poles with the string. My heart was beating like it was going to jump out of my chest. For a second there was no sound and I thought the string might have broken, but I could see Nonno Frankie was calm and experienced in these matters. Then:

  CLANG! BANG! SCRATCH! BAM! CLINK!

  The clatter of tin cans! Loud, cacophonous cans being dragged along the street! The peaceful summer night was alive with rattling, eardrum-splitting sounds! The zombies awoke! They were up on their feet! The tin cans dragging along behind the car screamed at them, “Live! Live, you zombies! Live! Nonno Frankie is here!”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  School Should Be

  a Big Pot of Juicy

  Meatballs!

  That first summer I should have suspected that Nonno Frankie was becoming my pigman, but I didn’t know then what a pigman was. One of the things a pigman does is help you, but sometimes someone can be helping you and you don’t notice it. They help you in a lot of little ways and then suddenly one day it all adds up and you’re able to say to yourself, “This person is my pigman.” I didn’t know Nonno Frankie was my pigman until that September, when summer vacation was over and I had to go to school. I really hated the idea of being the only new kid in my class.

  Besides, the end of that summer had seen a number of changes in our house. The significant events were:

  1) My mother picked up four free Lassie- looking dogs from her job with the ASPCA. Any time any dog remotely resembling a collie was turned in at the animal shelter, or she heard a rumor of someone wanting to get rid of a collie- like animal, Mother snatched it up and brought it home. The collies’ names were Queenie, Prince, Lady, and Rin Tin Tin. Only Queenie and Prince were pedi- greed collies. Rin Tin Tin looked like a German shepherd with collie fur. Lady was all white and looked like an albino midget wolf. Mother said Lady could be my very own dog, but deep down I knew she didn’t mean it. She’d control the dogs just like she tried to control Betty and me and everything else. But I loved Lady instantly, even though she was already three years old and had neurotic-looking eyes.

  2) Mom let the dogs run loose in the house most of the time, but she built a wire- fence pen next to the garage for them to hang out during the day when they got too wild.

  3) Connie began to date “Chops” Tarinksi, a nice butcher who owned the store on Victory Boulevard that always had hundreds of sausages hanging in its front window. My mom was not thrilled with this budding romance.

  4) The twins made bows and arrows and ran around for weeks trying to shoot each other in the ears.

  5) Nonno Frankie pressed over fifty crates of grapes to make gallons of blood-red wine, which he stored in the toolshed.

  6) I began to lose some of my shyness and put on a ghost show in Leon and Rose Appling’s dark chicken coop. I had the kids each brought in blindfolded, made spooky sounds, and then tickled their ears with feathers so they’d think there were evil spirits flying around their heads. The climax of the show was when I told the victims they had to shake hands with a real ghost. Then I’d put a stuffed rubber glove that had been dipped in oil and cold cream into
their hands, and they’d flee the chicken coop screaming.

  7) Miss White started eating bread crumbs out of my hand.

  8) We set tin can traps over 126 times.

  9) We helped Nonno Frankie harvest tasty prize tomatoes, pumpkins, and other vegetables.

  10) Jennifer and I sat in our apple tree at least once a day, eating its giant red apples and discussing philosophic and scientific questions, like why everyone doesn’t just fly off the earth since it’s flying through space at 18-1/2 miles per second. We also carved our names in the tree by cutting away the bark so it now read “ESCAPE! PAUL & JENNI- FER!”

  As the first day of school came closer, I got sick to my stomach and thought at any time I was going to engage in reverse peristalsis. My mother took Betty and me to the Salvation Army charity store to get our back-to-school outfits, which wasn’t as pathetic as it sounds. Mother had been getting our clothes at junk shops for years, but with her gift of gab she made a good contact with a lady General at the Salvation Army store, and she’d call my mom whenever some good used clothes in our sizes had been donated. I didn’t feel funny about wearing used clothes because my mother had very good taste and usually picked us out decent outfits. I looked like a wreck sometimes though because of climbing the apple tree or tripping in mud puddles.

  One day in the apple tree Jennifer and I decided to tell each other about the best teachers we’d ever had in school, and the worst.

  “The first wonderful teacher I remember was Miss Stillwell,” I said, munching on an apple.

  “What was so hot about her?” Jennifer asked.

  “She was my fifth-grade teacher and she’d let me and a friend go to the rear blackboard and draw pastel pictures whenever we finished our work. In one term we drew Mount Vernon, London Bridge, the Eiffel Tower, and an anteater.”

  “My favorite teacher was in the sixth grade,” Jennifer said. “Miss Midgely. She invited the whole class over to her house for a picnic one day.”

  Before we knew it, we were remembering all sorts of things about our past teachers. I remembered Miss Wilmont, a teacher at one of my schools who came to class one day with a baby chipmunk tucked in her blouse to keep it warm and let it hear a heartbeat. And once she praised me for having decorated my biology notebook with a drawing of a life-size, grinning skull.

  “The only thing I ever got attention for,” Jennifer complained, “was in the fourth grade, when I made a vase out of a pickle jar covered in plaster of paris and decorated it with shiny buttons.”

  “I remember one teacher who taught me the difference between having a dog and a cat for a pet,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Well, this lab teacher, Mr. Soifer, said the best way was to think how each pet would treat you if you were suddenly shrunk to three inches high.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “He said a cat would instantly grab you like a mouse and chew on you, but a dog would just look a little puzzled and ask, “Hey, boss, what happened?’”

  The worst thing Jennifer came up with about a teacher was that she worked hard during her free period one term for a Miss Erskine, but Miss Erskine gave her only half a service credit when all the other teachers were giving their student slaves at least two whole service credits. The worst thing I could remember about a teacher was a Latin teacher at one school who used to seat us all according to our test marks. The kid with the highest mark got the first seat in the first row, and she often referred to the last couple of rows as the “really stupid rows.” I also went to one school that had a crazy principal who used to come rushing into our classrooms with a ruler to make sure our windows weren’t open more than six inches from the bottom. He used to drive the kids and the teachers nuts.

  But it wasn’t the new teachers I’d be having in Travis that made me nauseous. School was a sane place to me compared to my loving, wacko mother and all the weird apartments we had moved in and out of. What was bothering me was thinking about all the kids Jennifer told me I’d be meeting and what some of their character flaws were. She had even pointed out several teenage freaks on the street or coming out of Ronkewitz’s Candy Store, which was right next to the school. The following is a list of the ones she highlighted, and her comments about them:

  A) MOOSE KAMINSKI = “A big boy who is nice-looking but likes to push kids down on the ground and sit on them. He prob- ably has a golden heart and could be a good friend to somebody equally demented, but he always ends up doing rotten things so everybody will think he’s a big shot.”

  B) TOMMY ROSINSKI = “A nice weakling boy the gang calls CBRH, which stands for Cry Baby Rooster Head.”

  C) LOUIE ONTECKSKI = “Fifteen years old, gets left back a lot, very mature for his age and lives just outside of town in a house that looks like a junk-car lot.”

  D) ROBERT MUKSKI = “Thirteen, still wets his pants.”

  E) FRANK DESISKI = “Grins like an idiot a lot, but not a bad boy. Four feet high. Nicknamed ‘Little Frankfurter.’”

  F) JOHN QUINN = “A nice Irish boy, clean- cut, normal decent parents who don’t do the polka.”

  G) ROSEMARY WINSKI = “Town tramp.”

  H) HELEN YANKOWITZ = “Town weirdo.”

  I) DEANNA DEESE = “Town stuck-up beauty.”

  J) CHRISTOPHER SUSALUS, TONY PARAMUS, and SOPHIE MALLUS = “Sweet Greek teenagers bused in from farms their families own. Their par- ents don’t let them date anyone except Greeks, they can only marry Greeks, and they can only work at Greek roadside fruit and vegetable stands all summer.”

  K) BUDDY CRABBSKI = “Was dropped on his head as a baby. A fat boy, looks like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon.”

  L) LEON BRONSKI = “One of Moose Kaminski’s henchmen. Leon’s father beats him up a lot.”

  M) MIKE BRONSKI = “Leon’s older brother. Gets beat up by his father when his father can’t find Leon.”

  N) JEANETTE FILOPOWITZ = “Nice girl who lives on our block.”

  O) DENNY KRAVITZ = “Looks like he just escaped from a reformatory. Has a skull shaped like a cone.”

  P) ELLEN FIGLER = “Nice girl.”

  Q) DORIS LASKI = “Nice girl, face like a woodchuck.”

  Anyway, the Sunday before I was to start school, Nonno Frankie saw me stumbling around in our half of the backyard in a frightened stupor. He called me over to him.

  “You start school tomorrow?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t look happy about it.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You don’t do good in school?”

  “I got good marks in all the other schools I went to.”

  “You get along with teachers?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” Nonno Frankie smiled. “School should be a happy place. It should be like a big bubbling pot of juicy meatballs! You should eat it all up and join the CP Club.”

  “What’s the CP Club?”

  “The Clean Plate Club. You must gobble up school.”

  “What if it tries to gobble me up?”

  “You don’t let it. You learn the important rules, and then nothing and nobody can hurt you,” Nonno Frankie said, giving me one of his winks. “You will meet pretty girls at school.”

  “Maybe they won’t be so pretty.”

  “When I went to school in Italy, a girl could have a face like a train wreck as long as she was blond. Ho! Ho! Ho!”

  I laughed weakly. “Jennifer told me there are some nasty kids at this school.”

  Nonno Frankie smiled sympathetically. “You’ll read, learn, and get smart!”

  My mouth had gone dry. “I want all the kids to like me,” I finally managed to say.

  Nonno Frankie looked at me seriously. “Only dead fish swim with the stream. You just worry about liking yourself, that’s what you should worry about!” He put his hand on my shoulder, and we stood at the edge of his tomato patch. “See! All the tomatoes have been picked. They all grew up and have gone into our stomachs! That�
��s the rule of tomatoes! Tomatoes have rules, and I’ll tell you all the rules you need to know for school. Have all the experiences you can. Experience is wonderful! It teaches you how to recognize all your mistakes when you make them over and over again! Do you mind me giving you advice?”

  “No,” I said. “I need all the advice I can get!”

  It seemed strange Nonno Frankie was the one taking the time to care about what I was feeling. I remember thinking that maybe this is what fathers are supposed to do. Maybe this is why fathers exist. Good fathers, not absentee fathers or spirited wacked-out mothers.

  “Don’t be discouraged by fat books,” Nonno Frankie warned me. “In every fat book, there’s a little thin book trying to get out! And don’t put grease on your hair the night before you’re going to have a big test.”

  “Why not?”

  “Everything might slip your mind! Ho! Ho! Ho! Get it?”

  “Yes, Nonno Frankie.”

  “I’ll teach you every rule I know about going to school. When in doubt, a closed mouth gathers no feet! And never get into rock fights with kids who have ugly faces, because they have nothing to lose! And never, never play leapfrog with a unicorn!”

  Now that little thought made me smile.

  CHAPTER NINE

  My First

  Fistfight

  When I think now about what it was like for me when I was a teenager, I have to admit that deep inside, my greatest need was to find a meaning to my life. Without meaning I suppose most everybody might as well be dead. Jennifer, Betty, my mother, Connie. It seemed to me that everybody was doing a desperate kind of dance to feel she was worth something. Jennifer was afraid she’d be trapped in Travis and become a zombie. My sister was still so afraid the world was rotten that she pretended she didn’t even want to be part of it. Mom was frantic to get loot. That’s the only way I can understand how she tried to become rich by having collies make love. She had tried so many other schemes: 1) selling costume jewelry from door to door; 2) selling home cosmetics; 3) coloring black-and-white photos; 4) running a hamburger stand; 5) being a riveter in a Staten Island shipyard; and 6) tending bar.