A Girl Named Zippy

by Haven Kimmel

  “I believe the sound I hear is coming from the basement,” Dad said, taking a step toward the basement door.

  Petey skittered over like a greased pig, trying to insinuate himself between Dad and the basement. “Ain’t no cat in here!” he squealed.

  Dad quick thrust the water jugs into Petey’s arms, who accepted them without thinking, and then Dad went for the basement door, which was so swollen he had to heave his shoulder against it to get it all the way open.

  And into the kitchen sprang a soot-colored, howling apparition, nothing but ribs and a tail. Dad said that for a few seconds he couldn’t honestly say whether it was PeeDink, until the cat looked up at him. At that moment there were three pairs of crossed eyes in one kitchen, which my dad later reported to be two too many for any man, so he grabbed the water jugs, thanked Mrs. Scroggs, and stomped out the back door, poor desperate PeeDink following close behind.

  WHAT PETEY SCROGGS did to PeeDink was all the story I needed to know about him, but I hadn’t yet reached the point of crossing the street to avoid him, or ignoring him in the hard snubbish way that means true enemies. So one afternoon, sitting in the backyard in the double glider my father won in a card game and lost two weeks later, I saw Petey walk across his backyard and into the barn where the Scroggses kept rows and rows of rabbits in cages. A few minutes later he came out with a big, fat white rabbit, and when he saw me watching him he raised his arm in a wave, and I waved back.

  Mom and Dad were only a few feet away, going over my dad’s camping checklist. My mom was having to do a lot of the work, because Dad had a maggot in his finger. A few days earlier he had slammed his hand in the door of the truck, eliminating nearly half an inch of his index finger, and the doctor had put a maggot inside the stump to eat the dead parts. Dad was a little crabby because he could feel it moving around.

  It appeared that we were either twenty minutes or six hours away from leaving for Tall Trees, depending on whether my mom found three missing cans of sterno and a case of C rations Dad stole from the National Guard Armory.

  “Bob,” Mom said, throwing up her hands. “We have enough food for a month. Why do we need a case of C rations?”

  “You never know.”

  Petey headed my way. He was carrying the rabbit with one hand under its belly and one hand holding the scruff of its neck. There was no fence separating our yards then, so he just walked over and sat down on the other side of the glider.

  “You wanna hold my rabbit?” he asked, in his objectionable voice.

  I don’t know a sane person in this world who can resist a bunny. I nodded, and he passed his rabbit over to me, settling it in my lap.

  It was a huge, furry sack of heat. I’d never seen a rabbit so big, or so white. Its skin hung down in folds on either side of my arms—it was in all ways bigger than my lap. I held it under the chin the way Petey had, with one hand, and rubbed its head with my other. Between the ears the rabbit’s skull divided in the most delicate little dip. I felt it sniff my hand, moving its nose in that quick up and down way that is the subtle answer to What does a rabbit say?

  I could have held it all day, but after only a few minutes Petey grabbed it by the neck and took off across the yard. I looked up into the setting sun and saw the outline of my dad moving toward me, then looked down and saw blood dripping on the tops of my blue tennis shoes. I looked up; I looked down; I could make sense of nothing I was seeing. Then both of my parents were sitting on the glider, and Dad had ahold of my hand, and I could see that there was a sizable, bunny-shaped portion of my index finger missing, and blood was running out steadily, dripping onto first my shoes, and then Dad’s.

  “Didn’t you feel that rabbit biting you?” he asked, wide-eyed with disbelief.

  “No,” I said, thinking maybe he was a little sensitive because of his maggot. “I reckon I was hypnotized.”

  Dad looked at my mom, stricken. “She thinks she was hypnotized by a rabbit.”

  “Well, stranger things have happened,” Mom said, carefully not looking at my dad’s bandaged finger.

  “Get in the house.” Dad ordered me by pointing with his cigarette in the general direction of the living room window.

  I got up slowly, cradling my bleeding finger. I deeply dreaded what was in store for me: much Ivory soap and hot water, followed by enough iodine to paint our front porch. No way would he settle for mercurochrome, either. We’d be lucky if he didn’t go collect the head of the rabbit and send it to the game warden, just to be sure.

  My sister came in the bathroom where I was sitting on the toilet lid, dejectedly waiting for Dad to collect sterile gauze pads and surgical tape.

  “I didn’t know rabbits were meat eaters,” she said, looking at my bright orange hand.

  “Petey’s rabbits are.” I still could not believe that a white bunny was capable of such carnage.

  “Do you think he knew that rabbit was going to bite you?”

  “I don’t know why else he brought it over. I’m afraid we can’t go camping now, too.”

  “You handle pain so well, sweetie,” Melinda said, standing up.

  “Well, I was hypnotized.”

  She walked out into the den, where Dad was still rooting through the medicine cabinet with his good hand. I heard her asking him about the camping trip, and his reply about how we’d be risking infection at every turn, including from the many, many bacteria that lived in the lake.

  “What does Mom think?”

  “I don’t know. She’s still out in the camper, counting Sterno.”

  Dad came in and bandaged up my finger until it was roughly the size of a lemon, then went out to begin the arduous process of uncamping. He found my mom sitting at the little table in the trailer, reading a book.

  A few weeks later, while I was playing in the backyard, Petey and his much older brother, Billy, and their dad came barreling out of their house, John and Billy sounding huge and dumb and scary, Petey screeching around them importantly. I dashed around and hid behind my dad’s tool shed, peeking my head out periodically to see what they were doing.

  They each had a tool of some kind—I couldn’t see clearly what the tools were—but all three of them looked dangerous. Petey ducked into the barn and came out with a rabbit, which he handed to his dad. John held it by the neck, then crossed its long ears at the top, held them up to the side of the barn and stapled them there with a staple gun. Billy stepped up with a wicked-looking little hatchet, and whack! the rabbit’s body was separated from its head, which remained stapled to the side of the barn.

  Headless bodies really do hop around for a couple seconds; this was one of the indisputable lessons of Mooreland, Indiana. I saw probably four or five such bodies bleed their life out and fall down before my dad came out looking for me. By this time I was standing right out in plain sight, in roughly the same spot I had stood just a year before, watching Minnie Hodson take the head off a chicken for Sunday dinner. That patch of ground was a front-row seat for nature’s theater: years later I could stand right there and look at the grave of a much-loved and long-lost dog.

  Dad didn’t stop to converse with me. He crossed our yard in just a few steps, and before the Scroggs men even knew he was there he had the hatchet out of Billy’s hand and John up against the bloody wall of the barn, Dad’s left forearm hard against his throat. Dad had on the face that no one in this world would choose to be faced with.

  “Do you See that Little Child standing in the yard watching you, You Stupid Son-of-a-Bitch?!?” When pressed, Dad had a way of emphasizing certain words that was like Winnie-the-Pooh gone bad.

  John was grinning in his shifty way, the way men smile at each other when one has a hatchet and the other doesn’t.

  “I sure didn’t see her there, Bob,” he croaked out around Dad’s arm.

  “You’ve got to Butcher your Rabbits on a summer afternoon when there are Children Outside Playing?!” Dad was spitting out every word.

  “Now, I—” John started, but Dad st
opped him.

  “I’ve put up with enough out of you in the past two years, John, and now I’m going to draw the line: If you ever. Do anything like this again. I will tear off your arm. And shove it down your throat. Until you choke to death. Are we clear?”

  John smiled stupidly. My dad was exactly the kind of man who made idle threats and then randomly acted on one. He had been known to raise a rifle, and to make peace over a bottle of whiskey. John knew better than to try to predict which he might do. He raised his hands in surrender.

  “Sorry!” He called out to me. “Didn’t see ya there! Won’t happen again!” He looked like a clown.

  Dad walked away quickly, and led me back into the house, roughly. “Go wash your hands,” he said, as we went through the front door.

  “But, Daddy, I didn’t get—”

  “Go wash them, I said.” His fist was clenched tight on the doorknob. I washed my hands.

  IT TOOK US LONGER than usual to get to Tall Trees, because twice I fell out of the top bunk with such a crash that Dad pulled over on the side of the road to make sure I wasn’t broken, and then before we could pull back onto the highway we had to test the lights.

  By the time we arrived I already had on my bathing suit, my floppy shoes, and my Mickey Mouse sunglasses. My rubber nose-plug was hanging expectantly around my neck. We pulled into our favorite campsite and as soon as Dad shut off the engine I hopped out of the camper.

  “Hey! Look! I’m all ready to go to the lake! Let’s just all head down to the lake!”

  But I ended up sitting on the picnic bench for the next hour picking scabs, as Dad planted us firmly and safely in our temporary home. Before I got anywhere near that bacteria-filled water he had built a fire ring, hooked us up to electricity, strung up the fishlights, smoked sixteen unfiltered Lucky Strikes, and made friends with the family at the next site. When he and I finally left for the lake, he had Mom going through everything in the camper, looking for the toothache kit he’d gotten in the Navy, back in 1954: just in case.

  * * *

  THE KINDNESS

  OF STRANGERS

  Our neighbor, Reed Ball, who never ever left his front porch, was a big old man who stood crooked, like maybe one of his legs was longer than the other. One day he wobbled down to the fence that separated our two yards and called out to my dad, who was working in our garden, that he was going to poison our dogs if they kept barking at night.

  “Is that right?” Dad said, looking at Reed in an interested way.

  “Damn right that’s right!” Reed bellowed. He was another example of an old man who could barely contain his fury but also could never let it out.

  “Keep you awake at night, do they?” Dad asked, leaning on his hoe.

  “You know they do! They’re not fit to kill!” He was talking about Kai, who was so highly evolved he could have been a spiritual leader, and Tiger. Poor Tiger. Anyone with even a little bit of a functioning heart would have pitied her, the way her snoot was shaped in such a way that she always sounded congested, and the fact that she was pig-shaped, and thus had no dignity.

  “Reed. Do you ever go in your house? Because maybe if you slept inside your house you wouldn’t be bothered by my dogs.”

  Reed made a sound like a gunked-up combustion engine then lifted and lowered one of his legs, probably the longer one, a gesture surely meant to convey stomping. He raised one of his gnarly old hands and pointed a finger at my dad.

  “You mark my words!” he said, then turned and strode back to his house, up down, up down, up the steps and back onto the padded chaise lounge where he spent his whole life. His sweet wife, Mary, was sitting on the padded glider. No one had ever seen her move more than her arms and her neck. Dad watched Reed’s slow progress, then waved at Mary in a neighborly way. She sweetly waved back.

  Our dogs barked all night that night. They were highly perturbed about something. I finally got up and went outside with a flashlight to see what was bothering them; it turned out to be a bat circling a streetlight, eating dinner. I went inside their pen and sat down with them for a few minutes, trying to calm them down, but Tiger was so pleased to see me that she shimmied and yipped and snorted until I feared she would hyperventilate.

  As I was closing the pen door to head back inside, I heard Reed call out from his porch, “You tell your dad I’ve had enough! This is the last time I’m going to tell him!”

  “Okay, Reed,” I yelled back. “Hello, Mary.”

  “Hello, sweetheart,” I heard from the darkness of their porch.

  THE NEXT MORNING I told my dad I was flat-out worried about what Reed might do to Kai and Tiger. Dad was casual, and said that he was working on it. He disappeared for a few hours, which was highly usual, and when he returned he was followed by a whole convoy of pickup trucks.

  Dad came home at dusk, and parked in front of our house. All the other drivers just stopped wherever there was room and began unloading the cargo they were carrying in their truck beds. There were wooden crates and metal boxes and carriers obviously made at home. One kennel was large enough to house a healthy calf. I stood on the sidewalk for a few minutes watching them, then ran inside to get my mom.

  “Mom! There’s about two hundred hunter-looking men in our yard with Dad!”

  Mom looked up from her book, granting me the unadulterated attention she usually reserved for really good science fiction.

  “What are they doing?”

  “They’re . . . I don’t know. There’s a bunch of them and they’ve all got boxes full of dogs.”

  Mom slowly lowered her book and began the process of removing herself from the deep indentation in the couch that she had been carving into it over the past twenty years.

  I ran back outside. Lined up all along the fence separating our yard from Reed’s were crates filled with coon hounds, thirty-six by my count. They were nervous and jittery, pacing and circling. Some of them were already working themselves up into a howling lather. My dad walked back and forth in front of them, trying to calm the most disturbed. The dogs’ owners left one by one without a word.

  Mom cleared her throat behind me, and Dad and I turned around at the same time.

  “May I ask?” She addressed Dad as if he had just made an announcement she found interesting, but not unexpected.

  “Ask away,” he said, shaking a Lucky Strike out of the pack.

  “What, exactly, are you doing?”

  “Dog-sitting.”

  “Dog-sitting. Are all of your colleagues going out of town at the same time?” My mom was patient as a saint, but she said the word colleague as if it were coated with the oil drained off a can of tuna fish.

  “Yep, that’s right,” Dad said, inhaling deeply on his cigarette. He had a habit of blowing all the smoke out through his nose, like a bull. “They’re going to a convention.”

  “Oh, a convention. Would that be for the Society of Drunken Philanderers?”

  “The SODP, we call it,” Dad said, nodding.

  “I see.” She stood still for a few more seconds, probably counting the dogs, then turned around and headed back toward the house.

  “Give me a hand here, Zip,” Dad said, uncoiling the hose, argument concluded. I helped him carry various buckets and pans out of his tool shed, which we filled with water and sat inside the kennels. The dogs were beautiful and stinky and hectic. From their pen, Kai and Tiger watched the proceedings without moving. Compared to these dogs, ours appeared medicated. I wasn’t sure Tiger was even of the same species.

  We finished with the watering, then stood back and watched the hounds try, without success, to settle down until they were called upon to perform the task for which they had been created. One blue tick who was exceptionally irritated chewed ceaselessly on the metal door of his cage; another couldn’t stop scratching his ear.

  “Daddy,” I said, reaching up to scratch my own ear, in sympathy. I would need a flea dip before the night was over. “Who were all those men?”

/>   “Aw, I don’t know, honey,” he said, flipping his cigarette into the gooseberry bush.

  “You mean they’re not your friends?”

  “Nope. I’d never seen them before. They’re good people, though.”

  “Well, how did we end up with their dogs?” I asked, completely mystified.

  “Word gets around when a man needs help,” he said. He took my hand and we headed toward the house. At the time I thought he meant that he was helping a group of men he didn’t know, but I quickly realized that the opposite was true.

  I GOT TO STAY UP late that night. I didn’t make a peep about it, but just kept sitting on the couch next to my mom like I was used to the nightlife. It got completely dark outside, and then darker than that, and then the moon rose up and silvered the yard, and just when I was about to fall asleep against Mom and my own better judgment, another truck pulled up in front of the house, and Dad stood up as if he’d been waiting.

  Mom didn’t say anything and I didn’t say anything. I just climbed down off the couch and pulled my red galoshes on over my pajamas and followed my dad outside. He shook hands with the driver, who was tall, shy, and looked like he might have a tapeworm.

  “This ought to do it,” the man said, handing Dad a smaller crate. I couldn’t see what was inside it, but Dad held it away from his body.

  “Tell Ron I sent my thanks,” Dad said, walking toward the backyard.

  “Not a problem,” Lanky Man said, climbing in his truck like a marionette.

  I galoshed as fast as I could after Dad, and the dogs and I realized at the same moment that what Dad was holding was a raccoon. If I’d been any less a child I would have wet my pants from the sound the dogs made, collectively; one of them barked so hard and furiously that he tipped his kennel over, and he never stopped barking as he somersaulted inside it. Twice Dad lost control of the crate holding the raccoon and nearly dropped it, which would have resulted, of course, in the raccoon running right up my pajama leg to bite me in some tender place and make me rabid. I was so overcome by the commotion and the potential for disaster that I had to just sit right down on the sidewalk and put my head between my knees.