A Girl Named Zippy

by Haven Kimmel

  “Okay, okay, I’m going.” Then I’d have to reach extra hard under the couch for my wayward shoe, sometimes giving myself a crick in the neck that would cause me to sprawl out on the couch again. I occasionally sprawled so long as to merit the thunderous Zip! warning which preceded any actual fury. Hopping on one leg, trying to squeeze my foot into a shoe that was inevitably too small, I’d look around the den frantically.

  “Daddy! I can’t find my little pink New Testament!” For reasons probably due to his own lack of churchiness, Dad believed me when I said I couldn’t attend Sunday School without my Bible. I’m sure he thought of it as similar to attending fourth grade without a pencil.

  The Little Pink New Testament device had worked long and well, so well that I thought of it as permanent. Then one Sunday morning, just as I was about to collapse on the couch in helpless surrender to my heathen fate, Dad reached down under his chair and pulled out my missing Bible.

  “Where did you find that?” I asked, genuinely perplexed.

  “In the bathroom trash can.”

  “You’re kidding! How odd. I must have totally accidentally without even knowing it thrown it away with my old church bulletin last week. How silly of me!”

  “Accidents happen,” he said, handing it to me.

  “You can say that again,” I said, taking it from him as if with gratitude.

  “But just to make sure this particular accident doesn’t keep happening, I thought that from now on you could just give it to me when you get home from church, and I’ll hold on to it for you. Then you’ll always know where it is.”

  I sighed and headed for the front door. “Bye, Daddy,” I said, not looking back at him.

  “Don’t sigh,” he called out to my defeated back. “And don’t dawdle.”

  WHEN I THINK of getting up for church, it is always winter in our house, but when I think of the actual walk, a small town block—our house and yard and the house and yard of Reed and Mary Ball, who never ever left their front porch—it is always a perfect summer day that will wither in my absence. I had to walk right past my bicycle, which sat in the yard as quietly and expectantly as a good horse; I had to ignore the hopscotch squares Julie and I had drawn on the sidewalk earlier in the summer, because hopscotching in a dress and too-small shoes was a recipe for disaster.

  Sometimes the side of the house would exert a strange and supernatural magnetic force upon my body, which would cause me to fly up against it, face first, and stick there. With a great concentration of will I could rip one arm free, and then one leg, and eventually pivot until only my back was stuck. I was like a human fly, moving sideways. Smack, peel, peel, pivot, smack. I sometimes spent whole minutes just trying to pass one little section of the house.

  Then there was the backyard, which I was morally obliged to inspect. Who, if not I, would notice a fallen nest; a broken hinge on the back screen door; the lost left leg of my big toothy doll named Jeremy? I stood in the center of the yard and turned around and around until my eyes were jittery, then headed for my dad’s tool shed, a strange little wooden structure that was tilted decidedly north. The door was held closed with a wooden peg that turned, and inside was the most outrageous jumble of tools and chains and traps. The traps were all different sizes and hung from the ceiling and the walls and no way would I ever touch them. Everything in the shed was the exact same shade of gray, except for one little spot of color: my second-grade picture, propped up in the window. I was sporting the favored Pixie haircut and wearing a light-blue jumper my mother made, smiling a little closed-mouth smile that hid my toothlessness.

  Stacked on the corner of the work counter were slabs of beeswax, which Dad rubbed on his hands before handling his traps. He coated the traps with it, too; it covered the human scent that might forewarn an animal of danger. My dad’s relationship to the traps and the traps’ relationship to the necks of certain animals was something best not considered too closely.

  The beeswax, once a deep and satisfying yellow, had turned an earthy color. The little window through which Dad could look at Edythe’s yard across the street was discolored. Whatever had descended over the whole of this shed was so powerful and complete it even had a smell, and not an unpleasant one. It was a combination of oil and metal, the wooden handles of heirloom tools, and the hides of rabbits and squirrels. I stood still and breathed deeply. I could smell a horse’s tail, and bags of grain, long gone, that we fed to various ducks and rabbits who had come and vanished.

  I could vaguely remember a horse named Princess who (could it be true?) was kept in this shed at night. There was just enough room for her to stand without moving, her tail against the wall and her head against the door. One winter morning my brother went out to feed her, and against all physical odds she had turned around in the night, and when he opened the door she reared up and kicked him with both hind legs, sending him flying across ten feet of yard and up against the side of the house. When we came running out to see what had happened, Dan was in a heap on the ground, trying to catch his breath. Two of his ribs were broken and his sternum was bruised. He wore a bright yellow, down-filled coat then, probably a color, like blaze orange, recognized by hunters. He was tall and muscular, but lean, and he unconsciously flexed his jaw muscles all the time, the way some people jingle the spare change in their pocket. Of my parents’ children my brother fared the best, genetically speaking, and was in fact so handsome that both Mom and Dad were reluctant to take credit. Regardless of the fact that he was beautiful, and should have had every advantage because of it, the world was not right for my brother. There was some standard by which he measured everyone, all human activity, without articulating it or giving us any clue where we were going wrong. He was silent and furious nearly all the time. Girls were crazy about him.

  The air in the shed was so thick and still I could almost hear it ticking. I could see, in a trick of memory, Princess’s hind legs bursting out of the door of the shed; my brother flying backward, bent in the middle like a man accepting the momentum of a cannonball; his slide down the side of the house and his jumble of long limbs when he landed. An unexpected and corrosive dread overcame me, starting in my stomach. I felt like I was the meal over which two alligators were fighting, and all I could do was stand still and wait for one to win.

  I have to go to church before Dad comes outside, I told myself repeatedly. I have to go to church. I stepped outside, blinking at the sudden brightness, like a person just emerged from a stint in solitary confinement. Between our house and Minnie Hodson’s was our clothesline, which caught my eye. My mom had hung out a sheet patterned with fading yellow roses, two pillowcases, and a pair of her own underwear, which caused my sense of unease to billow. As I stood there looking at my family’s laundry, Minnie Hodson slammed out of her own back door, followed by her spaniel dog, Lucky.

  The two of them walked around the yard casually. It was a beautiful day. Minnie was feeding her chickens out of a pocket in the front of her apron, making little comforting clucking sounds at them, which they imitated. Lucky sat down smiling, his tail brushing a winged pattern into the dirt of the barren yard. I don’t know how she chose, whether by some fixed criteria or just her own fancy, but suddenly Minnie reached down and picked up a chicken by the neck and spun it in an arc over her head, breaking its neck. Within seconds she had it on a darkened stump, where she cut off its head with a little hatchet she was carrying in the same apron.

  She held the chicken’s body upside down for just a few seconds, to drain some of the blood. Lucky surveyed the scene with a curious light in his eyes. I had unconsciously crossed part of the yard, and was now standing under the lower branches of the mulberry tree, still at an age where anything I couldn’t see couldn’t see me. The other chickens had scattered, and now Minnie and Lucky walked toward their back door. I grimaced against the inevitable screech when the door opened and its slamming shut, before they even happened.

  And suddenly I felt my dad’s hand on my shoulder. I looked up
at him, at where he was standing in a corona of Sunday light, then back down at my shoes, which I had managed to stain with mulberries in the few minutes I stood absolutely still.

  “What’s going on out here?” Dad asked, crossing his arms and looking into Minnie’s yard.

  “Nothing, Daddy.” I leaned over and spit on my old saddle shoe, then scrubbed at it with my fist. “I’ve got to get on.”

  He nodded at me, then turned back toward the house. If blood had a smell, he missed it; if something new and permanent was written on my face, no one was saying so. A cigarette burned in my father’s hand everywhere he went.

  SOMETIMES I GOT TO CHURCH during the silent time, which meant I could kiss slipping in unnoticed good-bye. But today Pastor Eddie was already preaching. Between the vestibule and the sanctuary were heavy, swinging doors on brass hinges, like those that lead to dining rooms.

  I slid in next to my sister, who promptly reached out and pinched me on that wildly tender skin inside the upper arms. She knew I couldn’t hoot or howl or even kick. All I could do was snort out a few breaths like a cornered cow.

  Pastor Eddie was talking about Jesus, and how He died for all of us, to save us and cleanse us of our sins. God so loved the world, I was told again today, as I had been told incessantly throughout my life, that He sent His only Son to earth to serve as a sacrificial lamb. With Jesus’s blood we were made whole; with His death we were set free. And all He wanted in return was our hearts, freely given. All we had to do was turn our lives over to Him. He was waiting right now. Wouldn’t we come?

  Pastor Eddie’s eyes were closed and his arms were raised in a beseeching way. In the front row his wife, Shirley, who had made me the most beloved blanket I would ever own (and which I called my Shirley Quilt), had one hand clenched in the air, waving a tear-stained handkerchief. Around me there were choked whispers of “Yes, Lord,” and “Oh, Jesus.” Kathleen was at the piano, and began playing the chorus of “I Come” over and over, quietly.

  The members of our meeting began responding to the altar call. My mom was one of the first to arrive, as usual. Soon nearly everyone was up there but me and one old woman who was too fat to walk. I had never been saved. It was a scandal. My sister periodically turned from the front of the church to give me stink eye, but I couldn’t budge. I would never, ever go to the altar. Even when I tried imagining, as my Vacation Bible School teacher had urged me to do, my heart opening up like a lily to accept God’s love, I felt nothing in my chest but my own stubborn, hard-beating muscle, not even remotely flower-like. If the Rapture came, as my brother threatened it was about to, I knew what my fate would be, and I was ready for it: I would be left with just my godless daddy and Minnie Hodson and her chickens, which we would take one by one, and kill, and eat.

  * * *

  UNEXPECTED

  INJURIES

  The people of Mooreland mostly took one of two kinds of vacations: they went to visit relatives in Tennessee, or they went camping. Some people liked to go camping even though their daily lives already resembled camping; once I saw two people honeymooning in a pup tent smack in the middle of the bride’s parents’ yard. The bride was a biggish girl, and as I passed the tent on my way to the post office, I saw her bare feet sticking out through the flaps. I didn’t think anything of it.

  We didn’t have any relatives in Tennessee, so we spent many weekends in various campgrounds around Indiana. My favorite was called Tall Trees, about ten miles from home. Tall Trees Campground was all the name implied and more. It had its own lake and an old wooden barn with a pool table and pinball machines. The campsites were not too close together, and the big building with the bathrooms and showers was usually clean and not an impossible walk away. I’d seen way worse. Once at church camp I went to take a shower in the middle of the afternoon and all the shower stalls had about an inch of water backed up in them, and every place I looked there were frogs. It was so much like an Old Testament plague that I nearly answered the altar call that evening, but instead just closed my eyes and said “Mickey Mouse” over and over until the feeling passed.

  It took, quite literally, a whole day for my dad to prepare to go camping. The trailer had to be outfitted with supplies, and they all had to go in special tiny places, all facing the same direction; the truck had to be cleaned and gassed up and all the fluids checked and topped off; the hitch had to be stepped on seventy-four times to make sure it could handle the weight of the trailer; the trailer had to be connected to the hitch, which involved actually lifting the trailer off the ground and fitting it onto the ball. Sometimes an animal or a child might be standing too close during the crucial lifting of the trailer, the proximity of which could cause my dad to become his most godless. After the trailer was hooked up, my mom and I had to stand in the yard and signal to Dad in semaphore to TURN ON YOUR RIGHT TURN SIGNAL. NOW THE LEFT TURN SIGNAL. GREAT. TRY YOUR BRAKES.

  Dad was convinced that tragedy was going to rain down on us in the form of some bone-crunching accident, and all because one of the wires connecting the trailer lights to the truck went out, so sometimes we had to go through the whole light test four or five times. Then the big side mirrors on his truck had to be adjusted for ninety minutes. Then he had to drive the truck and camper around the block a few times to make sure everything felt right. Generous neighbors often stepped out of their houses and signaled that all the lights were working as he went by. Finally, he would stand up straight and sigh and say we were ready, and then I would get back in the camper and off we’d go, driving less than an hour to the campground, with me flying around in the back of the camper like a little wayward piece of popcorn.

  WE HAD A SERIES OF NEIGHBORS in the house to the north of us after Minnie Hodson died; Petey Scroggs and his family lived there for a while, and if I were able to visually represent Petey, the portrait would be nothing but a cliché. He was a mean, short boy with carrot-colored hair and freckles. His jeans were often twisted around sideways and the collars of his striped T-shirts were always stretched out and he had mean eyes and he ate his own fingernails. Petey walked with the longest stride a short boy can afford, and when he wasn’t barreling down the sidewalk on his feet, he was riding a very sinister-looking black bicycle that seemed to be made of the Devil’s own bicycle parts.

  Petey got his looks from his mother, who kept her carrot hair in perpetual pin curls, by which I mean always in the pins. She and Petey were both a little cross-eyed, and she had a very high-pitched voice which caused my dad to call her Birdie. Petey looked and sounded just like her, even though he only came up to the waist of the housedress she wore all year long, which may have actually been an uncomfortable nightgown.

  As for his smarts, Petey inherited those straight from his daddy, John, who was a mean drunk. My dad’s nickname for John was Jethro, after Jethro Bodine from The Beverly Hillbillies, which seemed to me quite insulting to the real Jethro, who, while clearly stupid, was nonetheless charming and intended no harm. John was a tobacco-spitter. There was no end of mischief in his intentions. Once he raked up all the leaves in his yard, poured kerosene on them, and set them alight, right underneath the mulberry tree our two yards shared. Twice he had, while drunk, driven his car into the corner of his own house, and Dad had seen John set his own pants on fire while trying to light a match on the zipper of his fly.

  In my loneliest hour I had no need of Petey Scroggs as a playmate. I was, in fact, afraid of him, because of the many stories that circulated in Mooreland about his treatment of animals. He had once thrown a litter of kittens into a burning trash barrel, I heard at church, and Julie’s aunt told me that he snuck into a woman’s house while she was in the garden and plucked all the feathers off her parakeet, leaving it completely naked. And I knew in my heart with absolute certainty that he had been responsible for the kidnapping of my cat PeeDink one bitterly cold January.

  When PeeDink didn’t come home one night none of us was really worried, because his mighty hunting skills p
reoccupied him. Then he didn’t come home a second night, and I had to go out in the dark and cold and call for him. After the third night we were all sore afraid, and we began canvassing the neighborhood, but no one could remember seeing him. Every day for a month I checked at Doc Austerman’s clinic, in case somebody had accidentally turned him in as their cat, thinking that maybe they could get all the broken parts of him fixed, but every day the answer was no. I was nearly despondent without him. My dad finally sat me down one night and told me that I needed to accept that PeeDink was probably gone for good, because it was simply too cold for him to have survived longer than a few nights, especially given the fact that he was learning disabled. I cried and cursed God. I told Dad if he really loved me he would just go out and find him and bring him home, and day after day Dad tried, with no luck.

  Then right at the end of January the weather turned so bitter that our water pipes froze and burst. Dad gathered up all the jugs he kept for just such emergencies and trudged over to the Scroggses’ to borrow some water. While he stood in the kitchen watching Birdie fill the jugs, he heard a familiar, desperate meowing. He asked if the Scroggses had a cat, and Birdie said no. By this time Petey was in the kitchen, looking short and beady-eyed and nervous.

  “Well, I believe I hear a cat somewhere,” my dad said.

  “No, you don’t,” Birdie shrilled, handing Dad his water jugs as quickly as she could.