by Jack Gantos
“That’s awful,” she remarked.
“It sure is,” I replied.
“Well, return soon,” she ordered. “I got a telegram from your father saying he was flying home this evening, and we need to spruce up for his return.”
That got my attention. “Did the telegram say anything about us moving to Florida?” I asked, suddenly thinking that if I left Norvelt, maybe I could leave my shame behind.
“Not a word,” she said with a grunt, and labored deeper into the closet as if hacking a trail through a jungle. “You know your father—he makes a mystery out of everything.”
That was true, I thought. He kept the inner workings of his mind totally private. Mom and I could never tell if he had secretly worked out a brilliant master plan for our future, or if he simply made snap judgments when we asked him “What do we do next?”
“He also sent a package,” she added, struggling to elbow her way to the very back of the closet.
“What’s in it?” I asked.
“You’ll have to wait,” she said in a strained voice as she wrestled with mothballed coats that her parents would never have thrown away. “But believe me, it’s a first for him.”
“Did he send us an alligator?” I guessed.
“I don’t want to spoil it for you—now run along so you can get back here and clean up before he lands in the backyard, or down the middle of the street, or wherever.”
I got dressed, then hustled out the front door and down to Miss Volker’s house. When I arrived I saw an official Norvelt violation ticket stuck to the outside of her porch door. I leaned forward and read it. Under VIOLATION was written: You are the last old lady standing. Under FINE it read: One shotgun wedding!
It was him! It had to be Spizz!
I ripped the ticket off the door and took it inside to Miss Volker. After I read it to her I could feel all the old-lady air in the room being sucked into her swelling lungs.
“Spizz,” she uttered bitterly, as if his name were a Transylvanian curse. “That thick-skulled white whale is going to get what he deserves,” she vowed. “And it won’t be a kiss on the lips.”
“Should we call the police?” I asked.
She paused. “No,” she said slyly. “They might catch him and just lock him up. I have a greater justice in mind for him.”
“What kind of justice?” I ventured to ask. I remembered the Classics Illustrated version of The Man in the Iron Mask and thought thirty years with an iron mask locked onto your face could be a pretty good punishment.
“I believe I’m fated to put an end to him,” she said firmly as she tried to bend her fingers as if she could strangle him. But her fingers were as stiff as rusty nails. “Lately my mind has been so full of turmoil over what to do with myself now that my Norvelt duties to Mrs. Roosevelt are done. I’ve been second-guessing myself for days. But now a great moment of clarity has saved me. I’m going to track down that thick-skulled white whale and then I’m going to kill him. I’ll be his Captain Ahab.”
“I’ve just been reading that story!” I cried.
And then I thought of something. “But didn’t Moby Dick kill Captain Ahab?” I suggested delicately because she was so worked up.
“Not in my version,” she replied with a sudden squall of emotion. “In my version I’m Mrs. Captain Ahab and I jam my ivory peg leg right down Moby Dick’s blowhole.” She stamped her foot down so hard I jumped back like a spooked cat. “Sometimes it takes a woman to get the job done properly.”
She turned and gave me a severe look that squelched what I was about to say.
“Don’t you dare feel bad for wanting to knock off Spizz,” she commanded. “He deserves Old Testament justice—an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”
“I just want to catch him,” I said. “And give him to the police.”
“And to think,” she mused, “at one time I wanted him to catch me. I was actually flattered that Spizz wanted to be my swain—but no more. He’s got to die! Yes,” she said, commenting on what she had just announced, “my duty to Mrs. Roosevelt has one last chapter—and now my life has renewed purpose by vowing to end his.”
I had never heard her talk that way. I must have looked stunned.
“Well,” she asked, jabbing her fists onto her sharp hips, “would you like to remark on what I just declared? Or are you going to stand there with your mouth hanging open like the drop seat on a union suit?”
Finally I coaxed some words out of my mouth. “Miss Volker,” I said, “this is not like you.”
“You mean,” she snapped back, “I’m not like you. You’re a kid with a whole fresh life ahead of you. I’m an old lady who is close to the end of my life. If you kill Spizz, your life is ruined. If I kill him, my life is complete, and I won’t care what they do to me.”
“I’ll care,” I quickly replied.
“Then I would be honored if you would write my obituary someday,” she suggested. “But for now it’s time to write Mrs. Custard’s obituary for tomorrow’s paper. Please take your position.”
I leaped at the opportunity to return to the old school desk in her living room. It was a lot easier for me to write about Mrs. Custard who was already dead than to talk about ways to send Mr. Spizz to the grave.
I lifted the hinged top of my desk and removed the pad of lined yellow paper and pencil I used over the summer when she had dictated the obituaries for each of the old-lady murders.
Miss Volker spread her ropy arms apart, and with her gnarled fingers balled up she stood in front of me as if she really was Mrs. Captain Ahab clutching the steering pins of a ship’s wheel, while searching the seven seas for the white whale. The curtains were pulled aside so the light of the sun shone down on her. Then she cleared her throat and dug the heel of her old-lady shoe into the carpet like Ahab planting the tip of his ivory peg leg into a hole in the deck of the Pequod. She was my captain and I was her Ishmael.
“I’m ready to write, captain,” I announced, as I lowered the desktop and raised my pencil.
“I didn’t know her that well,” she started, peering up through the windowpanes as if judging the angle of the sails. “But I do recall that Willa T. Custard came to Norvelt because of the Rural Electrification Act. In 1936 ninety percent of all electricity was in the cities and only ten percent in the country. The power companies did not want to pay the start-up cost of bringing electricity to the country dwellers. Instead, they wanted farmers to pay for the power poles, the power lines, the transformers, and all the labor costs of running electricity out to a farm.
“Very few farmers could ever afford that steep price. So President Roosevelt passed the Rural Electrification Act to help the poor farmers get electricity. The power companies protested and said it wasn’t good for the government to help people too poor to pay for electricity. But the president was right and stood his ground against big business. The government hired large numbers of out-of-work people to carry poles and dig holes and erect the poles and run the lines and set the transformers and meters and wire the houses. And then, once more and more farms and country people got electricity, they bought electric water pumps so they wouldn’t have the hard task of hand pumping water from a well. They bought refrigerators, and electric ranges, and water heaters so they could take hot showers and baths, and they even bought electric irons and vacuum cleaners and one of the most important items—the radio. People could then listen to news and music and plays and stories and jokes. And because life became a little easier they had more time to read books and play games and spend time with their families and friends, and suddenly the power companies saw their business grow and life for country people became fuller and richer.
“And we in Norvelt were made richer when Mrs. Custard and her husband, Henry Custard, both of whom worked on bringing electricity to Norvelt, decided to stay and join our community. After Mr. Custard passed away ten years ago, Mrs. Custard moved to Utah to be with her children, but recently she returned and now has been murdered in the sam
e way so many Norvelt homestead ladies have been poisoned. Some people call it a mystery, but I do not. There is only one man who could have done this and his name is Edwin Spizz.
“Mrs. Custard was a great help to our country bringing electricity door-to-door, and we honor her for her service to the nation. But Mr. Spizz is a great criminal, and every criminal is a blight on the nation no matter if he steals candy from a store, or money from a piggy bank, or a bicycle, or a car, or a life. Every criminal poisons the health of the nation as if he were a secret agent working for a foreign enemy.
“In nature if you have corn worms in your cornfield, you don’t call the police, you spray them. If you have beetles in your cabbage, you pinch their heads off. If you have mosquitoes in your ears, you swat them. Like pests, criminals destroy our great country from the inside out. Spizz is a blight on Norvelt and he shall be eradicated like any fungus or insect or worm that threatens the health of our fine town.
“As the last original Norvelter I pledge to you that Spizz shall find that the terrible swift harpoon of justice is in my hands.”
She paused and I slowly dared to peek over at her because she was talking in a fearsome way I had never heard her talk before. “Is that all?” I asked with my pencil trembling above the notepad.
“What more do you want?” she barked back at me.
“Don’t you always do a This Day In History piece to end the obit?” I said in a whisper. “Like with all the other old ladies.”
“If you insist,” she said reluctantly.
She threw her head back and marched in a wide circle beneath the ceiling fixture as if her face were the planet Earth orbiting the sun. The more she concentrated on what to say, and the more she circled, the more a dark shadow of wicked thoughts crept across her face until she was wearing the black mask of a total eclipse.
And then out of that merciless mood her mouth began to unwind the terrible oath of her vengeful thoughts.
“This day in history is like no other. Today is a mystery of history that hasn’t yet happened,” she stated. “But if history is a gun, then on this day the trigger has been pulled. Only time will tell us the day when the bullet strikes its target and history is made. Mark my words, I have a new purpose in life. I made sure this town was a pillar of health, but now I’ll make sure Spizz is six feet under an unmarked stone.”
I wrote it down just as she said it even though I wanted to change the words around because they sounded too harsh to me. She had taught me before that no one should practice revenge. But now her oath to bury Spizz seemed like an oath to bury her own beliefs.
“Is that good enough for you?” she asked, restraining her leftover anger.
“You’re the captain,” I snappily replied, and saluted.
“And don’t forget it,” she ordered. Then, as if her last blast of bitterness had ripped the sails that drove her anger, Miss Volker wilted down onto the couch and slouched over to one side, and soon I could hear her low snoring, which sounded more like the purring of a tired old cat.
She didn’t move as I took my notes and typed them up on her clackity typewriter, and when I was finished I took the obituary down to Mr. Greene to print in the Norvelt News.
But after he read it he looked up at me with concern in his eyes and across his firm, even mouth. “I’m sorry,” he said somberly. “But I can’t print this. It’s too severe. Besides, we don’t know if it was Mr. Spizz who killed Mrs. Custard.”
“But Mrs. Custard was killed with a poison Girl Scout cookie like a lot of the other old ladies,” I stated. “Plus, whoever did it stole Mr. Spizz’s adult tricycle from behind Mr. Huffer’s house and that’s how he got away. Who else would know to do something like that? Even a killer Hells Angel would be too embarrassed to escape on a tricycle. It has to be Spizz.”
“It could have been anyone,” replied Mr. Greene. “Besides, the police say they have a list of murder suspects to investigate, so I can’t go around spreading rumors in the newspaper. That’s not the Norvelt way. However, we did print that there is a reward for the capture and arrest of the killer—and that’s a fact.
“Well, I know I didn’t kill Mrs. Custard,” I said meekly, “but maybe I scared her to death with my Spizz costume.”
“That was poor judgment,” he replied with a touch of disappointment. “But foolishness is not the same as murder.”
“But everyone in town says it’s Mr. Spizz,” I argued, pleading my case.
“That could very well be true,” Mr. Greene concluded. “But for now let’s not rush to judgment. Go back and tell Miss Volker to revise her obituary. No one person can take the law into their own hands and be a vigilante, otherwise we’d have chaos, with everyone walking around with guns and shooting each other—and what kind of town would we have then? Certainly not an Eleanor Roosevelt town built on peace and equality.”
He had made his point. “Okay,” I said, and walked slowly back to Miss Volker’s house.
When I explained to her that the police were tracking down other suspects and we had to rewrite the obituary she struck her salty pose. “Another suspect!” she cried out so fiercely the word split the air like an ax splitting wood. “That’s like telling Captain Ahab that there were two white whales haunting the seven seas.” She scoffed at the thought. “And by the time Greene wises up it might be too late for some other old lady.”
“Like you?” I asked.
“Never. When it comes to me the white whale has a fatal flaw,” she said sagely. “He loves me, and when he pulls alongside me for a kiss I’ll return his love with a cold harpoon to the heart.”
She decided not to revise the obituary, and by the time I returned home Mom was busy ironing all the clothes she was giving away and didn’t hear me come in. When I entered my room I saw the open box Dad had mailed to us. It was empty, but my bed was laid out with a new outfit that Mom had arranged to look like a paper cutout of a boy. I stood and looked at the flat outfit—flat shirt, flat pants, belt, socks, and shoes. I felt a little flat too. Steamrolled, I guessed.
4
Mom was flat in a different way. She was more of a paper doll princess. She entered my room holding a peacock-blue silk dress against her body as if it were a dance partner. “Look at what your father sent me,” she said, gushing. “It doesn’t look like anything you could ever find in Norvelt!” She spun in a circle and the dress fluttered around her like a shimmering butterfly.
“Go put it on,” I said.
“Not until I take a bath,” she replied. “After wrestling with all those smelly old clothes in my closet I don’t want to ruin this.” She smiled broadly and held it away from herself so she could look it up and down. “I’m sure it fits perfectly,” she said happily, measuring it with her eyes.
“How did he know your size?” I asked.
“Honey,” she said, like she could taste the word as she tilted her head to one side, “he’s my husband. All he has to do is put his hand around my waist and he knows.”
I had never heard her talk that way before. Something had changed.
She paused and bit down on her lip. “I have a secret,” she said.
“What?”
“Well, your dad wants us to move to Florida and I’m beginning to think that it’s a good idea. Especially after I heard more about this awful business with Mrs. Custard’s death.”
“True,” I said, and lowered my head because I knew more about it than she did. “A lot seems to be changing around here.”
“But one thing,” she cautioned. “Don’t tell your father that I told you I’m excited about making a go of it in Florida.”
“Why? Wouldn’t it make him happy to know you felt that way?”
“He needs to first make me feel happy,” she replied, and gave her new dress a playful smile.
That smile could mean a million mysterious things, I thought. All I had to do to make her happy was to keep my room clean, follow orders, say “please” and “thank you,” and every now and again sit on he
r lap and allow her to hug me and sniff the top of my head as if I were still her “sweet little baby boy.”
“Your father may show up at any time,” she said, suddenly sounding like my mother again. “Now take a quick shower and come back here and put on your new outfit so that we look perfectly put together for him. And don’t use up all the hot water,” she ordered, “because I need to take a bath.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, grinning. “I never use up all the hot water.”
I gathered some underclothes and headed down the hall to the bathroom. About two minutes later I was in the shower when Mom pounded on the door. “Hurry up,” she called out excitedly. “He just phoned. He’s gassing up at the airfield in Latrobe and will be here shortly. He said he’s going to land on the roof!”
“I bet he can do it,” I sputtered, and rinsed as fast as possible. Latrobe was only ten miles away. I turned off the water and wildly dried off by jumping up and down like a madman while giving myself fifty lashes with a damp towel. Then I stepped into my clean undershorts. I had just snapped the elastic around my waist when she burst into the room, and as if we were in a revolving door I was suddenly flung out into the hall and she was in the bathroom.
When I entered my bedroom I came to a standstill. I don’t think I had ever gotten five pieces of new clothes at one time before. Even from the doorway they smelled wonderful, and when I stepped forward and touched them they felt so smooth and perfect. I put on the shirt and buttoned it up. Then I carefully put on the pants and the belt. I sat on the edge of the bed and slipped my feet into the socks and then worked each foot into the shoes. They were a perfect fit. In my dresser mirror I did look grown-up and mature. I put extra Vitalis in my hair because it was now so short. With a black plastic comb I carved a crisp part on the left side of my head and combed the uneven hair down to my ear. Then I combed the rest across the top of my head with one neat stroke and smoothed it down with my hand just as the barber taught me.
