by Paul Zindel
But John came in for the kill. He was close enough now so any punch he threw could hit me. All I thought of was Nonno Frankie, but I couldn’t remember half of what he told me and I didn’t think any of it would work anyway.
“Aaeeeeeyaaaayeeeeeh!” I suddenly screamed at John. He stopped in his tracks and the crowd froze in amazed silence. Instantly, I brought back my right foot, and shot it forward to kick John in his left shin. The crowd was shocked, and booed me with mass condemnation for my Sicilian fighting technique. I missed John’s shin, and kicked vainly again. He threw a punch at me. It barely touched me, but I was so busy kicking, I tripped myself and fell down. The crowd cheered. I realized everyone including John thought his punch had floored me. I decided to go along with it. I groveled in the dirt for a few moments, and then stood up slowly holding my head as though I’d received a death blow. John put his fists down. He was satisfied justice had been done and his black eye had been avenged. He turned to leave, but Moose wasn’t happy.
“Hey, ya didn’t punch him enough,” Moose complained to John.
“It’s over,” John said, like the decent kid he was.
“No, it’s not,” Moose yelled, and the crowd began to call for more blood. Now it was Moose coming toward me, and I figured I was dead meat. He came closer and closer. Jennifer shouted for him to stop and threatened to pull his eyeballs out, but he kept coming. And that was when something amazing happened. I was aware of a figure taller than me, running, charging. The figure had long blond hair, and it struck Moose from behind. I could see it was a girl and she had her hands right around Moose’s neck, choking him. When she let him go, she threw him about ten feet, accidently tearing off a religious medal from around his neck. Everyone stopped dead in their tracks, and I could see my savior was my sister.
“If any of you tries to hurt my brother again, I’ll rip your guts out,” she announced.
Moose was not happy. Conehead and Little Frankfurter were not happy. But the crowd broke up fast and everyone headed home. I guess that was the first day everybody learned that if nothing else, the Zindel kids stick together. As for Nonno Frankie’s Sicilian fighting technique, I came to realize he was ahead of his time. In fact, these days it’s called karate.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
My Mother Kills Lady,
And My Sister’s Eyeballs
Roll Backward up
into Her Head!
The morning after the fight, the principal, Mr. Davis, sent for me and John Quinn to come to his office. He made us shake hands, and John and I became friends. We only tried to punch each other one other time, but that was more for fun.
You know, when you look back on the past and try to remember what it was like to be a teenager, you can’t remember every single detail. Most of what I remember has to do with Nonno Frankie. Of course, a lot of the past doesn’t mean anything, but there are highlights you remember, and those highlights sometimes are pieces of a big puzzle that come together in the end as sure as destiny.
The next few months, I didn’t mind going to school at all, and I especially enjoyed playing warball in the gym. With the cold weather coming on, warball was the big indoor game, and I liked trying to sock Moose with the ball. He’d always be on the opposite team from me, and I’d try to smack him with the ball so he’d be out of the game. He liked to aim at me, too, but I was fast and usually faked him out. I relished hitting Conehead with the ball, too, because the shape of his skull would make the ball fly off in all sorts of unpredictable directions.
By December, Queenie had given birth to her first litter of nine puppies, so, including Prince, Lady, and Rin Tin Tin, we had thirteen dogs in the house. None of the puppies were selling even though my mother advertised in both the Bayonne, New Jersey, Gazette and the Staten Island Advance, but she fantasized they would go like hotcakes in the spring.
Now that we had so many collies, I began to actually believe Lady was my own personal dog like Mom had told me. Lady was a wild, albino, wolf-spirited dog to begin with, and I played games with her that made her even wilder. We had a lot of fun romping together. But then something awful happened. Mom had gotten my sister a new frilly used hat from the Salvation Army store, and Betty liked it so much, she put it on and came running to the top of the steps calling out and imitating Scarlet O’Hara’s voice. Lady and I were downstairs; we came out of the side room, where I had been cleaning up after the puppies and pumping “Hungarian Rhapsody” on the Pianola. Lady looked up with her neurotic eyeballs, didn’t recognize Betty, ran up, and bit her. It wasn’t a big bite, and when Betty cried out in surprise, Lady realized who it was and felt terrible. Lady began to whine and lick Betty’s hand for forgiveness. That evening, though, Mom had a veterinarian come and give Lady a shot that she said was going to put Lady to sleep. Whenever Mom got rid of any pets we had, she never said she was killing them; she was just “putting them to sleep.”
The next morning, Mom had Betty and me lift up Lady by her legs and bring her out to bury her in the backyard. Lady was stiff as a board, and I cried, but we managed to make a decent grave for her not far from the apple tree. The ground was hard and cold, and it took a lot of work with a shovel and pitchfork. It was good I had learned a long time before not to really and fully trust my feelings about anything where Mom was concerned. The rest of the day Betty and I spent finding stones to put on top of Lady’s grave so possums and raccoons wouldn’t dig her up.
After Lady died, my sister caught a very bad case of the flu and ran a high temperature. I don’t think one thing had anything to do with the other, but I knew Betty hid her emotions even deeper than I did. She was older than me, so that made her the first line of defense against any emotional outbursts Mom might make regarding anything. One night, my sister’s temperature got to be way over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and even Mom got worried. She made me sit at the bottom of Betty’s bed to watch her while she went down to ask Connie if she had any cold orange juice. She wasn’t gone more than a minute when Betty sat upright against her pillows and looked at me strangely. I knew something terrible was going to happen.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
Betty stared at me and began to shake. Suddenly, her eyes fluttered. Then her eyelids froze open and her eyeballs rolled backward up into her head. Where her eyes had been, there were now nothing but two big white marbles.
“What’s happening, Betty? What’s happening?” I yelled, reaching out to touch her, to let her know I was there. Then her entire body went into a pulsing convulsion.
“She’s going! She’s going!” I shouted for Mom. I don’t know why I picked those particular words. “Mom! She’s going!”
Mother rushed upstairs and saw Betty in the middle of the fit.
“Get ice!” Mom screamed at me. “Ice!”
I got the ice cubes from the upstairs and downstairs refrigerators, then ran around the neighborhood collecting ice from Jennifer and people I didn’t even know. We made an ice bath for Betty, and her fever finally came down. She was fine in a couple of weeks, charging off to school as strong as ever.
Moose Kaminski used to always say my sister was stuck-up and walked like she was bent backward over a barrel. He’d say I walked like I was bent forward over a barrel. I once told him he walked like he was bent inside a barrel, which he didn’t like, so he wrestled me down to the ground and sat on me. Like I said, he sat on almost all the kids from time to time, so I didn’t take it personally. Usually, he’d just rub a little dirt on me and say a couple of nasty things. Then he’d get up and go on his way. Most of the kids in Travis knew that Life had bigger kids in it, and sometimes they sat on you. That’s just the way Life was. What I didn’t know was that Moose was going to turn into a killer, but I’ll get to that part later.
Most of my teenage life I didn’t know what I was doing, but Nonno Frankie helped me whenever I asked, or if he noticed something was bothering me. A pigman notices things like that.
For example, Jennifer and I both didn’t know
how to catch a baseball. Neither of us had any serious training with anything smaller than a basketball. I never even saw my father during these years, let alone played catch with him. Whenever my gym class went to Schmul Park near the school for a real game of softball, no team would really want me, so I’d be picked last. I’d always be put out in left field, and whenever a ball came my way, I’d try my hardest to get under it and catch it. Most times the ball would go between my hands and hit me on the chest or head.
When Nonno Frankie found out about this, he began playing catch with me, Jennifer, and the twins every weekend.
“Keep your eye on the ball!” he’d constantly shout. “Keep your eye on the ball!”
Thanks to Nonno Frankie we all improved at catching, but some balls would still bounce off my skull. And I wasn’t good at football, particularly since Moose liked to grab the ball, run, and straight-arm me in the face. Nonno Frankie told me it wasn’t important if I didn’t have a great talent to play football because he thought the game was a case of twenty-two humans badly overexercising on a field, being watched by thousands of sitting humans badly in need of exercise.
What Jennifer and I were good at was sled riding down Cemetery Hill. Right from the first snowfall that winter, it was clear we were the perfect team to get the greatest speed and distance coming down the slopes, and we hit the fewest tombstones. Conehead and Little Frankfurter looked the most jealous about the kind of distance we could manage, even with a good “bump and jump” here and there. Moose just glared meanly at anything we did.
That winter, as the puppies grew bigger, they ate more and more food. Also, the car froze up with everything else during January and February. The snowfall was so heavy during those months that many times the buses didn’t run and there was no way for Connie or Mom to get to work. Mother finally got laid off from her job anyway because the ASPCA free pet vaccination program was suspended. It’d start up again in the summer, but that was a long ways off. And for three weekends in a row Nonno Frankie and Nonna Mamie couldn’t even make it down from Manhattan because the ferryboats ran into ice floes and even if a boat was running, the #112 bus to Travis wasn’t.
Dry dog food wasn’t very expensive, but one day we were really low on human food. That day, Miss White, the chicken from the Appling family next door, made the mistake of getting out of her coop, the way she usually did, and was strutting around trespassing in our backyard. We had nothing for Sunday dinner except a few strands of old spaghetti, and there was no expectation of any meat for the next week because Connie had had a lovers’ quarrel with Chops Tarinski. Although Connie liked to dress and make herself up glamorously, she had been raised on a farm, and one of her country talents came in handy that day. She and Mom gave the twins some crumbs of bread, which they took outside to sprinkle a trail so it led right into the back door of the house. Miss White pecked at the tasty crumbs, clearly thinking them quite a find in the snow, and eventually she just pecked her way right inside. Connie was hiding behind the door, slammed it shut, scaring the dickens out of Miss White, then grabbed her and broke her neck. It was quick and painless, though Betty and I didn’t find out about this until we came down to dinner and found a scrawny-looking roast chicken sitting on a platter in the middle of the table. We asked where it came from because we knew we didn’t have any money. The twins started to tell us, but Mom and Connie said “Shhhhh!” to them and gave them a dirty look.
I suspected the worst.
“Is … is that Miss White?” I stuttered.
“Yes!” the twins cried out with pride.
Betty and I got up from the table and went upstairs. We searched our kitchen cabinets and finally found a can of tuna fish. We dined on it in silence.
The next day Mom decided to overcome her deep man-hating tendencies and told Connie she should patch things up with Chops Tarinski. Connie was thrilled when Mom said it would be O.K. to let him come visit her at the house, which is what the fight had been about in the first place. Chops couldn’t understand why Connie wasn’t allowed to have him in her own apartment. Apparently, he had told her he adored her, and wanted to start feeling more like part of her family. Connie told us he really wanted to get to know Nicky and Joey better, which didn’t look like it sat very well with Mom for some reason. Anyway, Chops was invited to come over, but Mom told Connie to suggest to him that instead of candy or flowers, hamburger meat and rib-eye steaks would be more cherished. However, Mom also gave strict instructions to Connie that she couldn’t “make out” with Chops under our roof, that it was not a suitable activity in a house filled with innocent youth.
I didn’t think any more about the matter until one night I woke up to strange sounds coming from downstairs. I looked at the clock and saw it was past two a.m., and the first thought that passed through my mind was that a maniac was trying to break into the house to cut our throats. Of course, it would take a maniac to try to break into our house, which had over a dozen dogs. My next thought was that the strange bumping sounds I heard were from aliens trying to signal me in Morse code that I was too good for this world and should return with them to their planet. The more awake I became, the more realistic I was, and I decided to creep down the stairs toward the sounds. I tiptoed because I didn’t want the puppies in the side room to think it was feeding time and have them go berserk waking up the whole house.
Halfway down the stairs, I was sorry I had started. The front hallway was truly dark and shadowy now, and I felt very, very alone. The eerie bumping sounds continued, and I wanted to run back to bed, but I was drawn further and further down the stairs as if Druids had mesmerized me. The draft near the front door was especially chilling, as if many ghouls were floating all about me. I turned and started down the hall past the cryptlike slab of wall. The sounds were coming from the direction of the small dark storeroom straight ahead. More than ever the doorway looked like a huge beast’s mouth. The door to Connie’s bedroom was closed, but a slit of light glowed from the crack in the bathroom door. The crack looked even more like it had been made by an ax murderer, and the coldness of the room reminded me of my first fears about it. This was a room where something awful would happen, perhaps was happening!
The sounds came from the bathroom. I put my eye to the crack. At first, I could see only the other bathroom door. It was closed and its hook locked in place. The crack was too narrow to see the whole room, but by stretching my right eyeball far to the right, I saw a man had a woman up against the wall. At first it looked like he was strangling her, or had his teeth sunk deep into her neck like a vampire. The bumping sound turned out to be the woman’s elbows and head gently hitting the plumbing pipes as the man pressed against her. All it turned out to be was Chops Tarinski kissing Connie Vivona.
“Hey, Mom!” I heard the twins calling from the other side of the door. “Mom, what are you doing?”
“Nothing, darlings,” Connie called back. “Go back to sleep.”
I tiptoed back out of the storeroom, but I still couldn’t shake the feeling that someday something would happen there. Something terrible one day soon.
Mom with Queenie, who she hoped was going to make her rich by giving birth to lots of dogs who looked like Lassie.
Me at a dude ranch my aunt Tillie took me to once.
My first grade report card. It speaks for itself.
Me on the wing of a Basic Trainer 6. This plane really shook our house every time it took off.
Me sitting in a Cessna near my backyard in Travis.
Me and some kid from Travis. I could hardly ever have my photo taken without fooling around.
Miss Ella Haines, one of my teachers, on the left. I don’t remember the name of the other teacher. Miss Haines was dynamic and kept us constantly surprised.
Lots of dogs who grew up to look like Lassie, but nobody wanted to buy any.
Mom in a cut-out photo from another one of her get-rich-quick schemes. She tried hand coloring photographs, but then Technicolor was invented.
Gradu
ation from the eighth grade.
Richard Cahill and me. He and I collaborated to write a short story called “A Geometric Nightmare,” for the school newspaper in which we got even with a strict teacher. I think I look a little like a sniveling idiot here.
Me with some kids from the neighborhood.
The Pigman’s daughter and her identical twins. The twins in a rare moment when they weren’t jumping off fences or leaping out of high trees.
CHAPTER TWELVE
God, Death, and
Boiling Lobsters
By the time spring came around, there had been a lot of death and destruction. It depressed me and Jennifer. We started having regular discussions about death while sitting up in our apple tree. Besides the deaths of Lady and Miss White, there were a number of other events that weighed us down:
1) The water-head baby had died at Easter, which everyone had expected anyway, but it was sad to see Mrs. Lillah sitting out in front of her house with no baby carriage to rock.
2) Jennifer and I tried to transplant fish we caught from Willowbrook Lake to a small pond behind my house, but they only lived two days before turning belly-up, probably because the pond didn’t have enough plants and oxygen to support them. The fish had been handsome pike, each over a foot long, strong, healthy fighting fish with iri- descent backs and sharp teeth. But we had doomed them by wanting to keep them in our own private puddle.
