In Zanesville

by Jo Ann Beard

  “We’re here,” I say sleepily, and crawl farther into my sleeping bag.

  Zip.

  One, two, three, four, five.

  A creak and a snap as the back door opens and shuts.

  Six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Flea kicks off her sleeping bag.

  “Nice sighing,” I say.

  Three minutes later, we let ourselves inside the dusty blackness of the vacant garage and wait. A soft thud and the padding of paws, a meow. Blacky Strout. After a moment, a muffled clatter. Ruffles.

  Silence.

  He’s always come to me, no matter what, as soon as we stepped inside. I sit down right where I am, on the mangy dirt. Oh, please, he can’t be dead; he cannot have died alone in a jumble of roofing supplies and empty motor oil cans. My legs have started trembling like crazy again.

  In one final sweep of the flashlight, we find him, up on a shelf jammed with rusted paint rollers and empty jars. He looks tiny and moth eaten, blinking into the light.

  “Whew,” Felicia says.

  We have to go eight blocks, through her neighborhood, through my neighborhood, and then into Monroe Park, a neighborhood where the shrubbery is denser. Any potential benefit of this—for people who might be out after curfew, carrying a cardboard box full of cats—is more or less undone by the fact that a number of teachers live in Monroe Park. I don’t care to see teachers anywhere except in their classroom and perhaps the hallway outside it; in Monroe Park I once saw my fourth-grade teacher on a step stool, painting a downspout while her husband stood there talking to her, drinking a beer. Another can of beer sat on the stoop, next to the open paint. Everything pointed to its being the teacher’s.

  It isn’t that I don’t know they’re regular people with regular lives; it’s that I find it confusing to think of them that way. A case in point is the time when I was a second grader and went to my friend’s house for lunch and her mother was in bed with the mailman.

  Me and Dee Jurgenmeyer, walking into her mom’s room to ask what there was to eat, and there was the whole confusing scene: the messy-haired divorced mother in a pale blue nightgown, sleeping in the middle of the day, the mailman’s familiar face with strangely red lips like a woman’s, and the mailbag itself, hanging on the bedroom door. For a long time afterward I would suddenly think, Dee’s mother takes a nap with the mailman, and I’d feel strange about it. And yet a mailman would get tired too, just like anyone else. Maybe more tired, with the bag.

  We trade off carrying the box. Felicia is starting to cry a little. We have no idea how we ended up dragging these cats down with us—they were perfectly happy in their garage when we met them. Now one is dying and the other two are frantic. Everything we go near gets ruined. Somewhere there’s a boy with a damaged hand and a mother possibly riding a motorcycle to Arkansas, a bowlegged baby teetering on a top step. Before putting Blacky Strout in the box, Felicia had taken a long time saying good-bye to him.

  She’s crying pretty hard now, which somehow makes me feel better.

  “Don’t cry,” I say kindly, lugging the box. Inside, the kittens are sliding around.

  She is silent for a while, walking along. “I’m not,” she says finally.

  The house is low and composed, with green shutters, all dark except for a faint light way back in the vicinity of the kitchen. On the porch is a basket of trailing ivy, a white wicker chair with a cushion, and an antique crank-type doorbell. We creep up and set the box on the porch floor, untie Ruffles from his T-shirt, close the flaps loosely, and tiptoe away. Along the edge of the yard, in the black shadows, Felicia stops so abruptly that I run into her.

  “What if they’re on vacation or something?” she whispers.

  Vacation! While we’re pondering this, there’s a thump and the cardboard box starts moving. A paw pokes through the flaps, thrusting around in the air; then a head squirms through alongside it and Ruffles is out, scrambling across the porch, up and over the railing, into the night.

  Gone.

  “Shite!” Felicia hisses.

  She shoves me forward and I dart across the lawn and up the steps. On the dim porch, I can barely tell the remaining kittens inside the box apart, which one is dying and which one is running for sheriff. From this view, Monroe Park looks exotic and sinister, with its moonlit teachers’ houses and overgrown bushes. There’s a narrow garage next door, made of crumbling brick, with ivy framing a small, dirty window. From here I can see that the side door is ajar, and that’s where I direct Felicia. Over there, over there. She run-walks across the lawn and shimmies inside.

  Freckles doesn’t seem to be breathing. I put one finger under his chin, and his head seems limp. But then he lifts it toward me without opening his eyes, and I lean into the box and kiss him. As he settles himself deeper into the towel, I give Strout one last pet and close the flaps. I ring the doorbell and sprint, down the steps and across the lawn.

  The garage is junky but it smells good, like gasoline. I squeeze through the door and grope my way over a fallen bicycle to the dirty window, just as the porch light goes on and Trent comes out, wearing a pair of striped pajama bottoms and nothing else. He looks down at the box and then toward the street, shielding his eyes from the light. Lisa comes through the screen door then, in a white nightgown and bare feet, her hair loose and curly on her shoulders.

  There are cobwebs all around us, one of them stretched like a shroud across my face. Felicia has a death grip on the bottom of my shirt. The garage has a dirt floor; anything could be living in here, including a snake.

  Lisa kneels and lifts each of our kittens out for a moment and then sets them back inside the box. Lisa and Trent talk quietly, at one point both of them pausing to stare penetratingly out into the night.

  When Strout pokes his head up and starts looking around, Trent lifts the box by its flaps and carries it inside while Lisa holds the screen door. She starts to follow and then changes her mind and walks to the edge of the porch, shielding her eyes and looking out toward the silent, empty street.

  Her nightgown comes to just below the knee and seems made of gauze; in the porch light we can see right through it. Her eyes are dark and calm, like Daniel’s. She gives a little wave, out into the summer dark, and then turns and follows her husband inside.

  We can’t bring ourselves to go back to the camper. Too dank, too claustrophobic, like being zipped into a gym bag for the night. Instead, we lie on someone’s terrace and look at the sky. There are a million stars, and it’s warm. On the other side of the street, the parochial kid’s window is open and there’s a low lamp on somewhere in the room.

  It was strange seeing Lisa and Trent like that, in their pajamas.

  “They were definitely letting it all hang out,” Felicia says.

  The only signs of life I ever saw in their bedroom were the tracks the vacuum cleaner left in the pale blue carpet. Nothing in the drawers but folded clothes, nothing on the nightstand but an alarm clock, nothing on the dresser but a cluster of glass grapes and a padded jewelry box. Nothing to alert you to their nighttime selves, his bare shoulders and chest, the precise line of hair running down his abdomen, disappearing into the waistband of his pajama bottoms, the dark smudges visible through her gown, the frank way she looked up at him, kneeling. You could somehow see that it wouldn’t be that big a leap from them inspecting a box of kittens together to an activity closer to what Yvonne and Chuck might be involved in.

  We lie there for a while on the sloped terrace, looking up at the black sky. This is how poor Daniel would look up at the ceiling, no matter where you put him. Just gazing upward, chin wet with wonder. I hope they take him outside sometimes, in the warm months, because this is so interesting, the immense galaxy looming overhead—billions of stars, ringed by the oak trees and slanted roofs of Zanesville.

  Felicia cracks her knuckles, one by one, while an airplane blinks its way across the sky. We both know the Kozak family has won. At least we’ll be getting a raise.

  “We’re just finishing out th
e summer,” she says finally. “And then no more babysitting, ever again.”

  I’ve always mentally kept track of them by cataloging the whole clan in descending order: Chuck, Yvonne, Derek, Renee, Stewart, Wanda, Dale, Miles, Lurch, whatever snakes they’ve been able to round up, and the tarantula.

  “If you’re doing size, Lurch is bigger than Miles,” Felicia points out.

  She’s right, it should go Lurch and then Miles, but I hate to see Miles followed by a snake. “I’m doing it by species,” I say.

  “Oh,” she says.

  I’ll be able to pay for the things I’ve already laid away plus new things that haven’t even arrived in the store yet. Besides what I’m going to wear to school once it starts, I wouldn’t mind having a new nightgown, something delicate and gauzy.

  In the future, I want something more interesting to happen than normally happens to me. “I’m sick of being a late bloomer,” I say.

  “Ha,” she says. “You should be.”

  “We both are, according to your mother, who said it to my mother,” I inform her.

  “I hope she doesn’t mind getting her head smacked off,” Felicia says to the sky. “I mean mine, not yours.”

  “Ha, we’re a pair of bloomers,” I say. “Late and crusty.”

  In our weakened state, this sets us off. We laugh hyenically, rolling around on the terrace, slapping weakly at the grass. Suddenly the boy materializes in the window.

  He must have been in bed, reading. We can see only his back at first, and a froth of bushy hair, as he roots around at his dresser for something, then sidles to the window, lifting what looks like a pirate’s telescope to his eye. He turns slightly, focusing it… where? On the upstairs window of the house next door? No, that house is completely dark. He continues to turn, inch by inch, until the telescope is pointing in our direction.

  “Uh-oh,” Felicia says.

  We freeze against the grass, our white tennis shoes throbbing in the darkness, as the boy stands still for a long moment, a pirate looking for land. He seems to be seeing us seeing him, but we aren’t sure. Suddenly, he holds the telescope as though it’s part of his anatomy and starts yanking on it.

  Now we’re sure.

  We scramble back up the terrace and then crawl through some shrubbery, dust off our shorts, and wander down the alley toward the camper.

  “Ee ain too noice,” Felicia says at some point.

  “Ee ain,” I agree.

  Over the past summer while we were distracted by Kozaks and kittens, Felicia has grown even taller, causing her to feel towering and uncertain and me to feel like it isn’t so much that one of us is growing but that the other is shrinking.

  We were supposed to try on our band uniforms a week ago, after school, but the music room was crammed to the hilt with folding chairs and music stands and there was nobody to guard the door. Just holding them up over our clothes, it was hard to tell how they’d fit. Now we know.

  “Do I look like Uncle Sam in this?” Felicia asks.

  The jackets are thick blue wool with bright brass buttons and yellow braiding; the pants are white with knifelike creases down the front and adjustable waistbands. The hats are hard blue cylinders with a short white brim, on top of which a hunk of braiding is secured by two brass buttons; a white strap buckles under the chin. You’re allowed to wear your own shoes, but there’s a black felt flap that buttons over the instep, creating the illusion of spats.

  First problem: the hat is resting on my ears, which means they are exposed. Second problem: the entire uniform is too large and too stiff for me—it looks like the person has withered away and the outfit is there on its own. Third problem: Felicia looks like Uncle Sam.

  “Do I?” she asks again.

  The hats are at least eight inches tall. There is a spot on the top for a metal-tipped plume to be inserted; it will be worn by the first-chair band members and the band teacher, who marches ahead of the whole pack, setting the pace by raising and lowering a gilded scepter. Since we have neither talent nor leadership capabilities, we weren’t given a plume.

  “At least you don’t have to wear one of their ratty feathers, which would make it even taller,” I say, and we stare at ourselves, standing on my parents’ bed, looking in their big vanity mirror.

  Raymond follows us downstairs and partway down the street. He’s starstruck and imagines he’s going to the parade. “I’ll go like this when I see you,” he tells us, chopping the air in front of him and kicking sideways.

  We’ve both been in band for as long as we can remember—fourth grade for me, third for her—but we’re in ninth grade now, and neither of us has risen through the ranks at all. Instead we’ve each maintained a spot somewhere in the middle of our respective rows, neither first chair nor last. Felicia plays clarinet, an instrument my mother wanted me to play because Old Milly had one in her attic, but I couldn’t play an instrument with a reed—anything soaked with spit made me gag. Also, the clarinet’s case was too heavy; the flute was the only instrument I could carry to school when I was nine.

  I like the way the clarinet sounds, like a clear cellophane ribbon unfurling, better than the flute, which has a narrow, harassed sound. I do enjoy the flute itself, the beautiful silveriness of it and the fact that it goes against your lip instead of inside it, the brown leather case with the velvet-lined depressions where the separate pieces are laid to rest, the flexible stick with a wooden handle that you wrap a rag around and run through the tubes to clean them. Altogether, band is a pleasant experience—Mr. Wilton, the teacher, pays attention only to the first-chair musicians and the percussionists, a gang of unruly thick-waisted boys wielding drumsticks, gongs, and triangles. Everyone else comes under the category of Others and gets to follow.

  “Percussionists will listen and will count,” he says to the ceiling, arms raised. “Miss Chambers: tenderly. Mr. McVicken: crisply. Mr. Waddell: lilting. Others: follow.”

  He closes his eyes and begins pawing at the air, and suddenly the sound of “Greensleeves” is rising up and wheezing around us as we labor along. I like to play hunched over, with one elbow resting on a knee, the flute pointed down at the floor. Not everyone gets into marching band, and we have no idea why we were chosen.

  “You two are the long and short of it,” Wilton said one day after the bell rang and people were shuffling out of his cluttered room, trying not to knock things over. Later that day he posted a list for marching band and our names were on it. Even though Wilton is well known for his high-strung personality and depressing body malfunctions—platter-size armpit rings, foam collected at the corners of his mouth, dandruff—he’s right now our favorite teacher.

  The annual Zanesville parade is always in mid-October and always has a Halloween theme. It’s a hectic, gargantuan affair, fifteen blocks of Elm Avenue devoted to it and people standing ten deep all along the way. This time, instead of watching from the sidelines, we’ll be marching in formation, behind the majorettes and in front of the football players and the floats.

  “I can’t play and walk at the same time,” I confess to Felicia.

  “Ha, me neither,” she says.

  Wilton’s wife is there in the John Deere Junior High School parking lot, helping people fasten their top coat buttons and referring to Wilton as Jim. She’s blond, friendly, and pregnant, wearing a big black wool tent and a pair of nurse’s shoes. When we walk up, she tries to give us each a plume, sorting through a flat decaying box to find two that aren’t bald.

  “No, thanks,” Felicia says, alarmed.

  “Jim?” the wife calls, pointing at us.

  Wilton shakes his head and she smiles warmly. “You’re fine just how you are,” she says.

  It feels very strange being in the dark with people from school when it isn’t schooltime. Wearing the uniforms has pried us all loose from our normal selves and we’re wandering around disoriented. Some people are randomly blowing into their instruments, creating an angular, cacophonous noise that is causing my heart to po
und.

  “People, people, people,” Wilton calls tonelessly from the bumper of a pickup truck. “Please, people. People, please.”

  Off to the side, things are quieter. The float looks like a giant sheet cake on wheels. All those Kleenexes stuffed into all those holes. A skeleton is working on a special effect while a witch hands him tools. They have the overcheerful, pious look of involved parents, trying to make a cauldron belch smoke.

  A group of cheerleaders walks past, followed by a group of football players, one of whom is Danny Powell, who lives in my neighborhood and was my friend when we were five. He and I used to play a game under the picnic table where we pretended to be Vic and Gin, friends of my parents who hosted my family’s yearly fishing vacations. The real Vic and Gin owned a motel in the Wisconsin Dells and once gave me something off the check-in counter in their lobby—a black plastic thing that held a card for the vacationers to fill out when they registered. Attached to the black plastic thing was a chain and a pen, which had run dry. Danny and I used it in our game of Vic and Gin, which consisted of one of us pretending to be a traveler and the other pretending to be a motel owner. The game gradually devolved into Gin making Vic plates of food out of sticks, grass, and maple seeds, which he would then pretend to eat. Eventually we drifted apart. Now he’s become suave and massive, his head sitting like a pea atop his shoulder pads.

  He nods as he passes.

  “Hi,” I say.

  The cheerleaders are their usual glossy selves, wearing letter sweaters over turtlenecks, short pleated skirts, and leg-colored tights. They stretch and mill around, talking to one another while absentmindedly doing the semaphore signals that go along with their cheers. Two of them move off the gravel into the grass and spot each other doing backflips.

  The football team has momentarily turned its attention from the cheerleaders to the band’s majorettes, who just took off their coats, unveiling sequined leotards, fringed wrist cuffs, and white ankle boots. They are all ninth graders, like the rest of us, but the whole corps seems to have developed quite graphically overnight: they look middle-aged and lewd, parts of them drifting out of the packed leotards.