Dead End in Norvelt

by Jack Gantos

  Bunny suddenly grabbed my arm. “Touch his hand,” she said, and she turned and slapped him hard on his hand. “Touch it—not scary at all!” she proclaimed.

  My hand was paralyzed. I probably looked more dead than he did. I couldn’t touch him.

  “Come on, you wimp,” she said, and jerked my hand forward and pressed it against the dead man’s neck as if I were going to take his pulse. But there was no pulse. His neck was hard as a fence post, and my legs wobbled and I had to grip the edge of the coffin with my other hand to keep from tilting over to one side. By then the blood was dripping off my chin and onto the white satin lining inside the coffin. I turned and with my last bit of strength I ran out of the room and down the airless hallway and out their front door. I could hear her laughing behind me as the blood swept back across my cheeks and all the way to my ears, like rain streaking over a windshield.

  * * *

  When I arrived at the baseball diamond Bunny and the other four players on our small team were already practicing. They were hitting ground balls to each other and trying to field them.

  When Bunny saw me she broke away from the others and threw a fastball directly at my head. “What took you so long?” she asked, with a bit of anger in her voice.

  I caught it. “Trouble,” I replied, and threw it back at her chunky feet.

  “What kind of trouble?” she asked, fielding the ball and bouncing a hard grounder back at me.

  I picked it cleanly. “I cut down Mom’s corn crop.” Even saying that made me wince. I threw her a grounder with some spin on it.

  She scooped it up, turned, and threw me a fly ball. “Why’d you do that?” she asked.

  I made a basket catch over my shoulder and threw her a high pop-up. “Dad is making a landing strip for his new plane and he wants me to help him build a bomb shelter.”

  She caught the ball, then looked at me like I had lost my mind. “A bomb shelter?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “A landing strip?” she asked.

  “You heard me,” I said.

  “So what is he going to do—dive-bomb your own bomb shelter?” she asked. “That sounds nuts.”

  It did. I walked over to the dugout to get a drink.

  “Get me some water,” she called, and threw the ball to another player.

  I poured two cups and carried them back over to the diamond. I gave her one.

  “Thanks, pal,” she said. “And by the way, I read the Slater obituary in the paper the other day. Dad and I thought you and Miss Volker did an outstanding job.”

  “How’d you know I helped Miss Volker?” I asked.

  “Small town,” she said as if “small town” was the answer to every question in Norvelt.

  “And because I know you like Mrs. Slater so much I got you a present from her,” she said with a sick grin on her face. She dug into her pocket and tugged at something awkwardly shaped. I reached forward and she placed Mrs. Slater’s dentures in my hand.

  “Here is something you didn’t know,” she said quickly before I could get a word out of my mouth. I kept staring at those coffee-stained teeth. “When the volunteer firemen found her collapsed by the beehive she was still alive, and she had her dentures in her hand and was tapping out an SOS message in Morse code—‘Help me! Help me!’ she spelled over and over, and then she died.”

  Bunny had to be lying. But if she wasn’t I wished we had used that detail for the obituary. “But didn’t your dad bury Mrs. Slater with her dentures in her mouth?” I asked.

  “You don’t know anything about preparing dead people for a viewing,” she bragged. “If you’ll notice, the stiffs are always displayed with their mouths closed because my dad has to sew their mouths shut. If they don’t have real teeth you just sew their gums together which is actually easier, so we keep the dentures. Dad saves them because when he gets a boxful he donates them to the retirement home and some of those old people reuse them.”

  “You really have to sew the mouth shut?” I asked. That stunned me. It seemed so brutal.

  “With an upholstery needle and twine,” she added, knowing she was making me nervous. “It’s like sewing up a turkey after you stuff it, is how my dad puts it.”

  I felt my blood surge like a tidal wave toward my face.

  “Are you always like this?” she asked, and pointed her stubby hand at my nose.

  “Yes,” I croaked, and wiped away a few drops of blood.

  “You should see a doctor,” she advised.

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “I have a very sensitive nose. Anything makes it bleed.”

  At that moment I spotted my mother on her bicycle heading in my direction. She must have kicked in the garage door and seen I had escaped out the back, and now it looked like she was coming to scalp me because she had a long wooden cooking spoon clutched in one hand. Suddenly the water in my cup was pink with blood.

  I knew I had done something terribly wrong and that I should wait for her to arrive and punish me. She got closer and closer, and as I lifted my shirttail to wipe my nose I knew I was grounded for life before she wheeled into the parking lot.

  When Bunny saw the stream of blood running down over my lips and dripping off my chin she nervously pounded her fist in her glove. “What’s up?” she asked. “Why are you standing around like vampire bait?”

  “I’m dead meat,” I replied.

  “Then I better call my dad,” she said.

  “Have him bring a coffin,” I suggested. “A small one because when my mom finishes with me I’ll be chopped into little pieces.”

  I might have been joking around but Mom wasn’t. She rode the bike up to the backstop fence behind home plate and jumped off. She was close enough for me and everyone else around the diamond to hear her shout, “You! Get over here. Now!” She pointed the spoon at the ground by her feet.

  I turned and ran toward second base. She gave chase. I looked like a bloody turkey with its head cut off as I circled the bases. “Run, Jack, run!” Bunny yelled out. “She’s gaining on you.” I could hear kids laughing.

  Mom was a lot faster than I thought and when she collared me from behind at home plate all she said was, “Mister, you are in deep trouble.” Then she clamped one hand around the back of my neck and marched me across the outfield grass and up the Norvelt road. It was about a quarter mile to my house and all I could think of along the way was that from now on I would forever be known by everyone as “the kid who got dragged off the field by his mom.” That was going to be embarrassing. And it did make me think that moving out of this town as Dad wanted to do was a good idea, not because I thought the town was a Commie town but because once you got a reputation for one stupid thing it stuck with you forever. When my cousin Bruce was a baby boy—long, long before I was even born—he went “wee-wee” in his pants in the grocery store then walked around the store in wet pants shouting, “I wee-wee! I wee-wee!” It was as if he had given himself a new name, and to this day the whole town still calls him “Wee-Wee.” I was in the grocery store with him once and in the cereal aisle he pointed to the tile floor and said, “Don’t step there. That’s where I earned my name.” I figured kids on the baseball field would be calling me “Headless Turkey Boy” and when I ran the bases they’d tease me by making clucking noises. And if I was caught in a rundown between bases kids would point and say, “Once again, caught in a rundown by his own mother!”

  When we arrived home I tried to distract her as she marched me to my room.

  “Hey, Mom,” I asked, “how come the doctor said my blood is iron poor but it tastes like copper?”

  “You are not funny,” she growled. “You are now grounded for the summer! You can only leave your room to do your chores, or go to the bathroom, and if you are lucky, mister, you might have the privilege of having dinner with me and your father. But that is it. And I’m going to call Mr. Huffer and tell him you will no longer be on the team.”

  “But, Mom,” I pleaded, “we only have six kids to begin with.
”

  “Make that five,” she replied heartlessly.

  “What about seeing Bunny?” I asked.

  “It is possible,” Mom replied, “that you will have a beard the next time you see her.”

  “Do you think she’ll get any taller by then?” I asked.

  “No, but you have every chance of getting shorter,” she replied.

  “Can I still help Miss Volker?” I asked forlornly. “She needs me.” Helping Miss Volker cook her hands and type obituaries suddenly sounded like a wonderful way to spend the summer.

  Mom paced the floor and thought about it. “I’m only letting you go down there and help her,” she concluded, “because she needs you. Otherwise you can sit in here all summer and think about your shameful behavior. Firing that gun was a dangerous accident but mowing the corn against my direct orders was willful. You deliberately disobeyed me.” Then she pointed her finger at my chest and her voice became very throaty. “You took food away from hungry people. From poor people. Nothing can be lower and more cruel than that. Now what do you have to say for yourself?”

  I had nothing to say for myself. What I did was wrong, and then what I said next was cowardly. “Dad made me cut down the corn,” I whimpered, and dabbed at my nose for sympathy.

  “Well, mister,” she informed me with no trace of sympathy in her voice, “I’m going to march your father into this room and make him cut you down to size. And when he finishes with you I’ll make him wish he had already built that bomb shelter because he might be living in it.” Then she turned and stormed out of the room, did a quick pivot, and stormed right back. “Oh!” she said icily. “And another thing! I saw that toy airplane he won in a card game, and mark my words—you will never get in it. Never!” Then she stormed out again.

  6

  It took two days for Dad to march into my room and cut me down to size. He knew he had gotten me in trouble with Mom and so he quickly wrangled a construction job in West Virginia for a couple days of paid work. He thought Mom might cool down, but he could have been away for two years and she would still have been just as angry. It was as if she could preserve her anger and store it in a glass jar next to the hot horseradish and yellow beans and corn chowchow she kept in the dank basement pantry. And when she needed some anger she could just go into the basement and open a jar and get worked up all over again.

  When he returned from West Virginia she ambushed him in the kitchen, and after she gave him a tongue lashing a second time around I knew he’d be seeing me next. And then he walked down the hall, one loud footfall after the other in a very deliberate way, as if he was letting me know in advance that he had no choice but to do the awful thing he had been told to do.

  My room was as small as a monk’s cell. I had a single bed, a dresser with an attached mirror, and a small closet, but I didn’t have a Bible. If I did have a Bible I would have been down on my knees and reading it with an angelic look on my face. The only religious book I had in my collection was the Landmark biography Jesus of Nazareth. I had it on my lap when Dad pushed open my bedroom door. He quickly stepped into my room and roughly closed the door behind him. But he didn’t look angry. It seemed to me that he had willingly retreated to my room after the scolding Mom gave him about the corn and airplane. He took a deep breath and slowly ran his hand back and forth across his mouth as if he were trying to erase it and the lecture he was supposed to deliver.

  Before he could get the first word out I sat up and asked, “Hey, Dad, how come we don’t have any good information on the boyhood of Jesus?” I held up the book I was reading so he could see what I was talking about. “I mean, it seems that outside of the fact that he was entirely Jewish, we know that he didn’t have to go to school and study because God funneled all his preaching knowledge directly into his brain.”

  Dad shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said, and pulled up a short stool. “I wasn’t around back then. But I wish I could cram some knowledge directly into your brain.”

  “I guess that would take a religious miracle,” I ventured.

  “I didn’t come in here to talk about Jesus,” he said, trying to sound stern. “I came in here to talk about gun safety.”

  “What about the corn?” I asked.

  “Your mom will handle that beef,” he said. “I’m here because she told me about you firing off the Jap rifle, and that’s my beef with you.”

  “It was an accident,” I explained. “Honest. I didn’t know it was loaded.”

  “Don’t you remember last winter when we went deer hunting and I taught you about gun safety?” he said, raising an eyebrow. “Don’t you remember anything I teach you?”

  How could I forget?

  * * *

  It was the first Monday after Thanksgiving. Deer hunting was popular in our area because shooting and dressing a deer provided a lot of winter food for a family, so we had school off for the first day of hunting season. Through one of his friends Dad had bought me a secondhand camouflage hunting coat, pants, face scarf, and gloves so that if I stood next to a tree you would never see me—which was not good because people sometimes shoot on impulse when they hear something move, and that something could be a person.

  “Itchy trigger fingers,” Dad had said, aiming his trigger finger toward me and giving it a pull, “and stupidity is what gets people killed.” So in order for people to see me and not shoot me he had also bought me a large blaze orange cap which kept slipping down over my face. I just hoped there wasn’t some hunter who mistook me for Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and let me have it.

  We got into Dad’s truck when it was pitch black out. He was eager to get to our tree house in the mountains because sunrise was when the hunting officially started and he wanted to get the jump on the other hunters.

  On the moonlit drive through the shadowed mountains he said to me, “I think you are old enough to do this. But I’ll teach you all about gun safety, because no matter what, gun safety is the number one concern when out hunting. Of course, good hunting skills are important too. But safety is tops.”

  “Sure,” I said, full of enthusiasm. “Safety first.” He smiled, and it made me happy to say things I knew he liked to hear.

  “Once you load a rifle,” he explained, “and have a shell in the chamber, you always keep the barrel pointed toward the ground.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And when you are just learning about guns always keep the safety on too,” he added.

  “Okay,” I said. “But what do you do when you see a deer?”

  “You won’t see one unless you are totally quiet,” he said firmly.

  I held my pointer finger up to my lips. “Shhhh,” I whispered.

  “No sneezing,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “No coughing.”

  “Yep.”

  “And here is a little-known fact, but good hunters believe it is absolutely essential,” he stressed.

  “No fake deer talk?” I guessed.

  “Yes, that too,” he said impatiently. Then he leaned toward me and quietly said, “No farting.”

  “What?” I asked. I hadn’t expected him to say that.

  “Do you know what that word means?” he asked.

  “Yeah. I got it right on my spelling test,” I remarked, trying to make a joke.

  “Well, don’t fart or you’ll scare the deer,” he continued seriously. “They have very sensitive noses and ears.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “When I was a boy,” he continued, “my dad coated me with deer gland scent so they couldn’t smell me because I couldn’t hold my gas.”

  “Where do you get deer glands?” I asked.

  “From between the toes of dead deer,” he explained. “I smelled awful. So for now,” he cautioned, “just be quiet and think about what I said. When we get to our deer-spotting tree house I’ll go over everything again.”

  “Sure,” I replied, trying to sound respectful, but not as intense as he was.

  After
that we drove in silence as the sky blued and the few big clouds showed their low gray bellies. We turned off a main road and onto a smaller road and then onto a narrow trail where the long leafless branches of the trees scraped jaggedly against the sides of the truck as we plowed roughly through the heaving snow. Finally we entered a small clearing. We were the first truck there and instantly Dad was in a good mood. He checked his watch. “Ten minutes till sunrise,” he said. “I think this is going to be my lucky day.”

  I threw on an orange backpack, which was stuffed with dry socks, dry gloves, and two Thermoses full of hot coffee. Dad put on his orange hat and vest and we started to trudge up a tree-covered hill. Right away he turned toward me with his finger over his lips, and then he pointed toward the snow where the wind had blown it skin-thin. There were fresh deer tracks. I smiled and he smiled back and gave me a big thumbs-up. We kept climbing, one silent step after the next, and before too long we reached a colossal tree. Dad stopped and pointed skyward. About ten feet above the ground was a tree house platform with low sides. There was no roof. There were ladder slats nailed to the trunk of the tree. Dad brushed the snow off the slats with his gloves and then noiselessly climbed up, and I climbed up after him.

  Without talking we cleared snow from a corner of the platform and got our gear settled. Dad opened a Thermos and poured us a cup of coffee. He took a sip then passed it to me. As I took a sip he carefully slipped a brass and copper shell into the chamber of his deer rifle and pushed the bolt forward and over. The keen click-click of metal against metal was like a vault locking. We were loaded and there was no way out until he got his deer. “Remember everything I said about gun safety,” he whispered.

  “Yes,” I whispered back, and gave him the last bit of coffee.

  “No accidents,” he reminded me, and tightly puckered his lips to remind me about the unwanted bodily noise.

  “Total silence,” I vowed, and extra quietly screwed the top back onto the Thermos.

  He raised the rifle and rested the stock on the half-high wall of the tree house. I squatted just behind him, and as his head turned to scan for deer within range, my head turned so I could see exactly what he was seeing—cold black tree trunks, the yellow-lichen-covered tops of frost-gray rocks, and wind-carved waves of white snow. Our heads swiveled back and forth for what seemed like an hour. And then suddenly Dad stiffened. I did too. About fifty yards ahead a white-tailed deer was slowly picking his way across the snow-covered rocks and roots.