by Jack Gantos
“You look like a college boy,” Mom commented, startling me as she snatched a glance into my room on the way to her own.
I beamed. I felt transformed inside the new clothes and almost weightless because I was about to leap into the future without the heaviness of a past. I was so excited I just had to move around.
“Can I wait in the backyard?” I asked. “I want to be there when he lands on the roof.”
“Yes,” she said, “but don’t make a mess of your clothes. I don’t want you getting all scuffed up before your father sees you looking so neat. No monkey business, understand?”
I did. I went outside and stared up into the sky but I didn’t see him. I was eager to tell him the exciting news about the summer bomb shelter project he had me working on. The fall weather had been pretty warm, so last weekend I put in a few extra hours of digging the deep hole. That’s when I made an incredible discovery. In a back corner of the hole I had unearthed the cover to an old bomb shelter that no one knew already existed. I hadn’t opened it because I was going to wait for Dad to return home and share the discovery with him. I could just see him jumping up and down with excitement and slapping me on the back and saying “Good job, son” and bragging to everyone down at the Elks Club about what a great kid I was and that if King Tut’s tomb hadn’t already been discovered I would have been just the boy to find it.
I looked up into the blue sky and squinted. Where was he? I thought I saw him but it was just a circling hawk. To kill time I slowly walked along the airstrip he had built from the backyard on out through our garden and into the field behind the house. I made sure to walk softly because I didn’t want to kick up any dust onto my new shoes and pant cuffs. I picked up a few loose stones that looked like Indian arrowheads, but they weren’t and I tossed them aside. Where was he?
I was bored and started thinking about the bomb shelter. Wouldn’t it be great, I thought, if I opened the lid and discovered that it was huge inside, like a landlocked submarine and fully stocked with beds and water and food and a generator for operating a ham radio so we could communicate with other bomb shelter families? And then I hoped it would be filled with books and magazines—maybe even a fresh pile of Classics Illustrated—and more new clothes. And then I thought that it would only take me a moment to open the bomb shelter cover and climb down and explore it by myself, and then I could put the cover back on and pretend like I didn’t know what was in there and he and I could explore it together. I didn’t see anything too wrong in doing that. I just had to make sure I didn’t get my new clothes all dirty.
For a moment I thought I could dash into the house and get the BB gun and then pretend like I found it in the bomb shelter and that way I could keep it. But I didn’t want to take a chance that Mom might catch me in the act so I canceled that thought.
I walked over to the hole I had dug and bent over and carefully rolled up my pants legs a few turns. Then I slowly inched down the slippery ramp of planks I had made for the wheelbarrow. I stood next to the bomb shelter cover, which looked like a round concrete manhole cover. I lifted the handle of my pickax and with the steel point of the pick tried to pry up the concrete cover from where it was snugly fitted into the top of the shelter. But the point kept slipping out and the cover wouldn’t budge.
I figured it had been sitting there for a long time, maybe from World War I when people were afraid of gas attacks, not atom bombs. That got me even more excited because cool survival stuff from fifty years ago would be a great treasure. I picked up a sledgehammer and struck the cover a few times. I was in luck. The cover lifted just enough to where I could then jam the tip of the pick into the gap and lever up the edge. Once I got it going it slid off without too much effort.
Quickly I squatted down and tilted my head forward for a better view into the dark hole, but before I could make out anything specific the humid updraft of some smelly, putrefying flesh roared out of the hole like a raw fist. It hit me squarely in the face with a knockout punch. I stumbled back a step but didn’t fall. What was that brutal smell? It was familiar but I was too stunned to think clearly.
I staggered around like a bowling pin about to tip over. Still, I kept warning myself, “Don’t get dirty. Don’t get dirty.” My eyes glossed over and watered as I bent down to blindly feel around for the pickax. I needed to shift that concrete cover back in place before Dad arrived.
All I could think was that the flesh-rotting smell I was breathing into my lungs came from some sort of secret survival chemicals the people had stored in the bomb shelter to kill enemy invaders. It was probably homemade nerve gas that had leaked out and now I had breathed enough of it into my lungs to kill me. I didn’t want to die, but I really didn’t want it to also kill my dad. He had survived World War II and I didn’t want him being killed by some leftover gas from World War I.
Despite my dizzy groping around I couldn’t find the pickax to try to close the cover.
“Stay clean,” I kept muttering. “Don’t get dirty. Don’t panic. You can do it.”
I took a deep breath to calm myself, but the smell was so potent I pinched my nostrils shut with one hand. That helped a little and with the back of my other hand I kept rubbing my burning eyes in order to clear up my watery vision, and that’s when I saw that instead of tears I was crying red blood out of my eyes and wiping it on my sleeve.
“Ohhh, cheeze-us-crust!” I wailed. “The blood is back! And it’s leaking out my eyes.”
Stay calm, I said to myself. Think this through. I figured my nose must have started bleeding, but because I had it pinched tightly the blood backed up and was now pushing out of my eye sockets.
“This is so bad,” I whimpered. I felt my legs giving out as I sobbed bloody tears. “I’m dying,” I moaned hopelessly. “I’ve been gassed to death.”
There were sparkling stars and meteors diving in circles behind my eyes. And then everything around me became edged in gray, and then it got darker and darker.
That’s when I lost it. I blacked out on my feet. I must not have fallen down right away. I must have first stumbled around stiff-legged like the living-dead and circled about the hole groaning and twitching and chewing on my lips as blood sprayed out from the rims of my eyes. My arms stuck straight out from my sides like a scarecrow. I had no idea how quickly or slowly I was dying, but my numb legs could just barely hold me upright as I inched forward in nervous spasms, and then I shockingly hopped like a frog right into the middle of the bomb shelter opening.
It was the sudden splash and slap of mucky water on my face that snapped me out of my stupor, along with the incredibly sharp pain on the underside of my outstretched arms where they hit the solid concrete rim of the round opening. That hurt, but thank goodness my arms were sticking straight out or I would have been fully submerged in the smelliest rotten-flesh stench ever.
“Oh, cheeze-us-crust!” I shouted again, and regained some of my senses. And then my brain began to function. “This isn’t nerve gas!” I cried out. “The bomb shelter is filled with a whole town full of rotten, mushy dead people!”
I think it was right then that my nose burst open like a blown-out tire and I got a little hysterical because I was bleeding foamy blood out of both my nose and my eyes. I stuck one finger in an ear and pulled it out to check for blood, because Bunny Huffer said that a lot of dead people bleed from the ears from brain melt. There was no blood on my fingertip, so I was momentarily relieved.
Suddenly I remembered Mom’s warning about not getting dirty. “My clothes!” I gasped, horrified by the mess I had made of them.
I don’t know how I did it but I shot up out of that hole like a swamp rocket and stumbled rabidly toward the house like a snapping, gasping, dangerous animal.
“Mom!” I hollered toward the back door. “I fell into a bomb shelter full of toxic human remains.”
In an instant she rushed out onto the porch, then froze. I didn’t know it at the time but the horrified look on her face was caused by what she smelled an
d not from what I had just told her. “Don’t get near me,” she ordered, because I was muddy and dripping with blood and brown muck and staggering unevenly toward her and she was all made-up in her beautiful new dress.
“I need help,” I begged in a pathetic baby voice. “Help me, Mommy!”
“Stand back!” she commanded as if she were leveling a shotgun at me.
I took a step forward.
“I’m warning you!” she said sternly, and then her nose flared open and immediately flattened against her face like a door slamming. “Whatever you fell into,” she said, “they are not the kind of human remains you are thinking of.” She quickly pressed the palm of her hand against her flattened nose in order to keep it in place. “You must have cracked open the septic tank cover and you fell into your own human remains.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I cried, running in place in my sloshy shoes because I would have collapsed if I stopped moving. “My own remains? Tell me quick because I think I’m dying.”
“When you flush the toilet where do you think it goes?” she asked, and removed her hand from her face.
I thought about it. “A hole in the ground?” I guessed.
“What a genius,” she groaned. “And that hole would be called a septic tank, and that is where all the human waste from this house goes.”
I must have looked stumped. I was thinking that a septic tank was some kind of military vehicle with a cannon mounted on the top.
“I mean poop!” she shouted impatiently.
I held the back of my hand under my nose and sniffed myself. “Cheeze-us-crust!” I howled, and began to shrink slowly down inside the thick brown crust of my disgusting clothes. All I could think of was poor Mrs. Custard hitting the floor with a final thud, and in a moment I would be right behind her. Then I looked back toward my mother. “What do I do?” I begged, and extended both arms toward her. “I’m still your sweet little baby boy.”
Her reply was like the swift lash of a whip. “Get the garden hose,” she snapped, and pointed toward the side of the garage where it was coiled.
I ran toward it, and when I turned it on the first thing I did was blast myself in the eyes with ice-cold well water until I could feel them floating in their sockets like shivering guppies.
A moment later I felt Mom grab the back collar of my shirt and hold me up. She had quickly taken her dress off and now was standing in her full slip and sheer stockings.
“Dear God,” she said in her church voice, “if you spare him from any horrid disease, I’ll devote my life to doing good deeds for others.”
“Me too,” I said.
“Don’t open your mouth,” she ordered. “The germs will rot your stomach.” She began to roughly unbutton my shirt and arm by arm pull me out of it. Then she worked my shoes off and threw them over her shoulder. Then she wrestled my pants down to the ankles, and leg after leg tugged them off my feet and flung them to one side. “Your new never-been-worn-before clothes are ruined,” she declared with disgust. “They smell like some baby’s nasty bottom.”
“How was I to know the bomb shelter was a septic tank?” I said, trying to defend myself even while thinking I had become one gigantic skid mark.
“Anyone with a brain,” she replied, “would know that you don’t jump into a hole that smells like the elephant cage at the zoo!”
And that is when I first heard Dad’s plane circling around just above the treetops. He must have been pretty stumped up there looking down at us as Mom tried to yank off my streaky brown underwear while I pranced around until I finally broke away from her grip and dashed witlessly toward the house. And he really must have been puzzled as to why Mom was wearing soaking-wet underclothes and looking like someone had dragged her through the mud. But no matter what he guessed about us he would have definitely known something was wrong when even from his cockpit he could see her swirl around and point toward the back door as she roared out over the noise of his engine in the voice of an angry lioness, “You are grounded!”
Maybe that’s just when he dropped into a dive and swooped down over the house and yard and tossed a huge bouquet of yellow roses out the window. They almost hit her, but she wasn’t upset one bit. She picked them up and buried her nose into the thick carpet of rose petals as if they were an oxygen mask.
He circled around until I could hear him pull back on the throttle as he lined up the wheels with the dirt runway we’d made where our cornfield used to be.
He touched down as Mom blew him a kiss and I slip-slopped down the cellar steps toward the basement bathroom. What could possibly go wrong next? I thought.
Then, with some little relief, I thought that nothing could go wrong next. The worst was over. Surely, it had to be over. And I was now alone, which made my shame and embarrassment almost tolerable.
So it was pretty surprising that while I stood naked under the longest scalding-hot shower of my life my mother yanked back the curtain and looked me up and down as if I was a threat to the health of all the citizens of Norvelt and even the nation. She was wearing a bleached-white one-piece bathing suit that made her look like a no-nonsense nurse from a Swiss sanatorium. Her face was set for combat. In one rubber-gloved hand she held a homemade bar of acidic lye soap she used for laundry, and in the other gloved hand she had a stiff horsehair brush she used for scrubbing out the toughest grime and stains in Dad’s work clothes.
“I’m naked,” I sort of squeaked out. “I’m too old for this.”
“Move over,” she ordered, stepping into the shower like a boxer stepping into a ring while I quickly tried to adjust my posture in order to hide my private parts. “When I’m finished with you,” she said sternly, “you’ll still be naked but you’ll also be antiseptic.” And then she lathered the soap onto the brush and proceeded, one harsh stroke after the next, to remove a layer of skin from every square inch of my body.
When I finally rinsed away the lye soap my scorched skin felt hotter than the water. I stepped out of the shower, and as I reached for a towel she pulled it away from me. “Drip dry,” she commanded. “Shimmy like a wet dog.” After a minute of spastic gyrations I was positioned in front of the medicine chest mirror, where I watched her shave off what top hair Bunny had left behind until my skull was as blinding as the lightbulb hanging by its neck from the ceiling.
“Stand with your arms and legs apart!” she barked like a policewoman. I did, and she leaned toward me and with her nose about an inch away from my body she sniffed me up and down each arm and leg and the whole middle of my body and even inside my ears. Then, as she slowly sniffed her way across my upper lip, she suddenly inhaled even harder, as if she were vacuuming the unhealthy air from my lungs right up through my nostrils. She didn’t like what she smelled. Something was wrong. Her nose crinkled up and she opened the medicine chest and removed a Q-tip. Then she uncorked a bottle of rubbing alcohol and poured it on the Q-tip and slowly twirled it up my nose. I couldn’t breathe, but I didn’t dare make a peep because I was trying not to think where she might next stick the head of that Q-tip.
5
How could I have known as I stood there naked and embarrassed in front of my mother that falling into that septic tank of human waste would turn out to be some kind of fairy-tale baptism that transformed me from a kid who could do nothing right into the mature young man Mom hoped I’d become?
It only took a week before I was standing at the kitchen sink and properly washing the dinner dishes. When the telephone rang I wiped my hands on a towel, and when I picked up the receiver the opportunity to prove my new maturity to my mother was on the other end.
It was Miss Volker. She didn’t sound right. Her voice was quivering so much her chattering teeth seemed to type the words she spoke. “Do you know what day this is?” she stammered.
“Do you mean what is This Day In History?” I replied. “Or do you need to know that this is November 7, 1962?”
“I mean did you listen to the evening news on the radio?” she asked
. And before I could answer she abruptly added, “Today we are living in history. Today is the day that Eleanor Roosevelt passed away.”
I paused and so did she, and while she wept for a minute I quietly waited. This was not a day in history Miss Volker ever had on her calendar. She had written about war and peace, heroes and villains, and the rich and the poor. Day after day her calendar of history marched forward with new facts and faces. Now the sad news of Mrs. Roosevelt’s passing would be added to this procession of time, but for Miss Volker I knew she would feel it every day of her life. Once she blew her nose and took a deep breath I thought she might have pulled herself around, so I ventured to say, “I’ll be right over to help with the obituary.”
“I’m not ready,” she replied, sniffing. “I need to settle down and give some thought as to what I want to say. I’m a scrambled mess at the moment.”
“Then let me know when you want me to help,” I offered. “I’ll do anything you need. Anything. You name it.”
“Well, I do have one little favor,” she ventured to request, with some mystery in her voice as she perked up a bit, “but let me speak to your mother. I’ll need her permission for what I have in mind.”
I called Mom to the kitchen and passed the phone over, and as she listened to Miss Volker she nodded her head and repeated “Yes, and yes, and yes to that too” about a dozen times, and by the end of the week I wasn’t sitting in school, or working on one of Dad’s dig-till-you-jump-into-a-septic-tank projects, or helping Mom organize yet another community event. Instead, my mother had loaned me out to Miss Volker to be her dependable, all-purpose traveling companion on the train to Hyde Park, New York, where Eleanor Roosevelt was now buried next to her husband, President Franklin Roosevelt.
“Do everything she requires of you,” Mom said strictly as she stood in front of my dresser drawers and began to set aside clothes I would need for the forthcoming trip. “And do everything by the book. No cutting corners. No drifting off into outer space when you should be planning ahead on how to help her up or down stairs, or with her hands—remember, she can be helpless.” Mom sounded just like Dad and, like him, she was never finished with giving orders. “Her concerns come first and yours come second, if at all. That is what a mature boy does—he serves.”
