Cartoonist

by Betsy Byars

  “Ten minutes,” he bargained.

  Silence.

  He waited in the darkness. “All right,” he sighed, “till the next commercial.”

  The light went on, and Alfie began to draw with renewed intensity. But he was in a hurry now, trying to finish before the next commercial. And when he tried too hard, he never did anything right.

  He drew the giant’s face. It looked distorted. The giant’s nose looked like a three-leaf clover. He erased it. The last square was getting a gray, used look. “I’ll have to do this whole thing over,” he muttered.

  Below he heard the strains of a Diet Pepsi commercial. Abruptly his mom turned the volume up so he couldn’t miss it. The light in the attic went off and on, off and on.

  “I’m coming,” he said.

  He turned his paper face down on the table. He got up. To lift his spirits he held “Super Bird” to the light and looked at it one more time. Then he glanced up at the ceiling where his drawings hung. He began to climb down the ladder.

  “Well, it’s about time,” his mother said. She turned down the television. “And I hope you’re going to be better company than Pap.” She crossed to the overstuffed sofa and sat.

  Pap was sitting in a straight-backed chair. He looked and was unhappy. He had not gotten to discuss politics with the Governor because the Governor’s wife, Bena, had a sinus headache. He sighed with discontent and indigestion.

  He said, “TV’s not as good as radio used to be.”

  Alfie sat down on the sofa by his mom. The springs were broken, and Alfie got the bad cushion. He sank deep. He didn’t glance at his grandfather, because he knew what was coming and he didn’t want to encourage it by appearing interested.

  Pap said, “I was on the radio one time. Did I ever tell you about it?”

  “Only one hundred and fifty thousand times,” Alfie’s mother snapped.

  Pap went on as if she had not spoken. “It was the Major Bowes Amateur Hour. I did eleven bird calls and ended up whistling ‘Listen to the Mockingbird.’ I got more applause than anybody.”

  “Why didn’t you win then?” Alfie asked in spite of himself.

  “Because a little girl that looked like Shirley Temple did a toe-tap to ‘God Bless America.’”

  “Oh.”

  “Her relatives sent in more than two thousand cards and letters. If it hadn’t been for her, I would have won, either me or the boy that played ‘Lady of Spain’ on the accordion.”

  Alfie glanced at his grandfather, then back at the television. That was the story of his family’s life, he thought. Almost. Almost winning the Amateur Hour. Bubba almost getting a football scholarship to W.V.U. His mom almost getting the job at Moore’s Jewelry Store. Alfie wanted to be different. He wanted to be more than almost.

  “Let me see if I can still remember some of my bird calls,” Pap said thoughtfully.

  “Oh, Pap, not tonight,” Alfie’s mother moaned. “If I have to hear the purple-breasted sapsucker, I’ll start screaming.”

  “All right, then, which one do you want to hear?”

  “None of them. I’m trying to watch Dr. Welby, all right?”

  “How about the bobolink? That was always your favorite when you was a girl.”

  “How about the loon? At least that would be appropriate,” she said.

  “Well, here’s the bobolink for anyone who wants to listen.”

  “Pap, have mercy! You know whistling sets my teeth on edge.” She put her hands over her ears, but carefully so as not to disturb her hairdo.

  Unconcerned, Pap whistled the bobolink call. He ended, paused, and said, “Wait a minute, let me try that again. I’m getting rusty—haven’t done my calls in a good while.”

  “In a good while! Pap, you did them last night! We sat right in this room and had our television disrupted for forty-five minutes while you whistled your head off. Isn’t that right, Alfie?” She patted her hair. It was a new shade—golden wheat—and she was proud of it.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, let me do just one more to make sure I remember. How about the whippoorwill?”

  “Pap!”

  As the call of the whippoorwill filled the small crooked room, Alfie’s mom got up and crossed to the television. She turned the volume up loud. Then she came back and flopped angrily on the sofa. The springs protested.

  Alfie sat between the two noises—the television and the bird calls. He closed his eyes. In his mind he went over the drawing of the giant. Suddenly he knew what he had done wrong—he had tried to show too much of the giant. Just the head would be enough, with the ring held right at the front of the picture.

  He smiled to himself. Tomorrow …

  Chapter Three

  “HEY, LIZABETH!” TREE PARKER yelled. “Take my picture. Take a picture of me and Alfie.”

  Alfie said, “Oh, come on, Tree, will you? I got to get home. I got to study.” It was after school, and Alfie was eager to get to his drawing.

  “Well, can’t you wait just one minute? I want Lizabeth to take our picture. Oh, Liz-a-beth!”

  Alfie and Tree were standing on the sidewalk in front of Elizabeth Elner’s house. Elizabeth was posing her cat on the front steps. The cat had on a doll hat and sweater. Elizabeth was spending a lot of time getting the angle of the hat just right. She ignored Alfie and Tree.

  “All right, Lizabeth, we’re going to leave,” Tree warned. “This is your last chance to take our pictures.” Tree loved to have his picture taken. The people he envied most in the world were the people at football games who managed to jump up in front of the TV camera and wave.

  Elizabeth stepped back and took a long critical look at the cat. “Now, don’t you move,” she warned. She looked through the lens of the camera and got the cat in focus.

  “Watch this,” Tree whispered to Alfie. He began sneaking up the front walk.

  Tree had gotten his nickname in second grade when he had taken the part of a weeping willow in an ecology play. Not until the class saw him standing there, wrapped in brown paper, artificial leaves in his hair, did they realize how much like a tree he was. Now no one—not even the teacher—called him anything else.

  Slowly, his long arms and legs angling out, glancing back to see if Alfie was watching, Tree moved closer to Elizabeth and the cat.

  Apparently unaware, Elizabeth said, “Because if this picture comes out, I’m going to enter it in the Purina cat contest.”

  Tree slipped closer to the steps. Then just as Elizabeth was ready to snap the picture, he jumped forward, arms out, and said, “Scat!” He was like a bundle of sticks in motion.

  The startled cat jumped to the sidewalk and disappeared in the bushes.

  Elizabeth spun around. Her face was red. “Now look what you’ve done, Tree. If that cat snags my sister’s good doll sweater, you’re going to get it.”

  “Oh, am I scared,” Tree said. His limbs trembled.

  “I mean it, Tree Parker.”

  “Come on, Tree,” Alfie said. “I got to get home.”

  Elizabeth advanced. “If that cat comes back without his outfit—my sister only let me use it because I promised nothing would happen to it—and if he comes home without it, Tree …”

  “What you going to do?”

  “Let’s go,” Alfie said.

  “Well, I want to find out what she’s going to do. What you going to do, Lizabeth?”

  “Just wait and see.”

  “Come on.” Alfie grabbed Tree by the sleeve and pulled him away. Reluctantly Tree began to walk down the sidewalk.

  “I wouldn’t let her take my picture now if she got down on her knees and begged,” he said. He spun around. “You’re not taking my picture now, Lizabeth,” he said.

  “Then quit posing,” she called back.

  “I wasn’t posing! Alfie, you saw me. Was I posing?”

  “No,” Alfie lied.

  “Anyway, why didn’t you help me? You never want to do anything anymore.”

  “She wasn’t goi
ng to take your picture, Tree.”

  “I know, but if you’d have helped, we could have got the camera away from her and taken pictures of each other and of her trying to get the camera away from us. It would have been fun. Listen, let’s go back and I’ll distract her while you grab the—”

  “I got to get home,” Alfie said.

  “I know. You got to study.” The way he said the word showed what he thought of studying. “If you want my opinion you’d do better not to study so much. Look at me. I never study and I get all A’s and B’s.” He broke off and turned to Alfie, smiling. “Hey, did I ever tell you about Lizabeth in kindergarten?”

  “Tell me while we walk.”

  “You’ll love this, Alfie. Her mom sends her to this special kindergarten, see, so she could get into first grade early—her birthday’s in February. And in this kindergarten they have red day and yellow day and purple day and orange day and green day. And on red day, Alfie, you get red Kool-Aid and red stars for good work. On yellow days it’s yellow Kool-Aid and yellow stars. So Lizabeth takes this test, see, to find out if she’s ready for first grade, and the first question they ask is to name the days of the week. Lizabeth knows that. It’s the one thing she’s really sure of. ‘The days of the week,’ she says—you know how important her voice gets when she knows the answer—‘The days of the week,’ she says, ‘are red, yellow, purple, orange, and green!’ That’s why she flunked the test, Alfie, and ended up in our grade. That’s why—Hey, let’s double back and ask her what day it is. I’ll say—”

  “I gotta go, Tree. This is my corner.”

  “Oh, all right. Come up later if you get through with your studying.”

  They parted and Alfie walked toward his house. The house looked even stranger from a distance. A house made without a plan. Alfie liked the idea. Three men started building a house. “You two start at those corners. I’ll start over here.”

  They’d begin. They’d hammer and saw and raise beams and lay bricks, and when they finally met in the center, they’d step back to admire their work. Their mouths would fall open in surprise. “Hey, are we building the same house?”

  “I’m working on the Mason house.”

  “I’m on the Kovac job.”

  “Well, I’m doing the new Pizza Hut.”

  They’d consult their blueprints. “No wonder it looks so weird,” they’d say, and leave, dragging their tools behind them. “If that don’t beat all.” It would make a nice animated cartoon, Alfie thought. Someday he’d do it.

  He glanced down at his turned-in feet. His shoes were eating his socks as he walked.

  He had once said he could make a cartoon about anything. Life was very close to cartoons, he had said, whether you liked it or not. That’s why they were funny. Cartoons took life and sifted out the beauty, the sweetness, the fleeting moments of glory and left you as you really were.

  He could do a cartoon about himself, he thought, about his turned-in feet. That was the stuff of cartoons, no beauty or sweetness, no moments of glory in turned-in feet.

  In the first scene he’d be walking down the sidewalk with his turned-in feet and he’d meet a man with regular feet. The man would say, “Turn those feet out, son.”

  In the next scene he’d meet a woman. She’d say, “Better turn those feet out, sonny.”

  In the next scene he’d meet a group of children. They’d yell, “Hey, turn your feet out like us. Look at our feet. See how they turn out!”

  In the last scene he’d meet a duck and a pigeon. They’d say, “Your feet look all right to us.” And the three of them would waddle off into the sunset.

  He smiled.

  He came to the front door of the house and paused before entering. The smile left his face because he was afraid he couldn’t get to the attic before his mother caught him.

  “What happened at school?” she’d ask, eyes shining. She loved gossip, even about people she’d never heard of.

  “Nothing.”

  “Oh, come on. Something must have happened.”

  “No.”

  “Come on. I’ve been sitting in this house with nothing but Pap and TV for company. What happened?” Sometimes she would make him tell her at least one thing before he could go to the attic. “Well, we had a substitute teacher in World Studies.”

  He opened the front door quietly. There was no one in the living room, but he could hear the rattle of dishes in the kitchen. Quickly, silently he climbed the ladder and pushed open the trap door. The warm attic air felt good against his face. He thought of this door as an escape hatch, like the kind on a submarine.

  Long ago, when his father was alive, he had felt like this about the junkyard. His father, starting from nothing, had built up a wrecking business. He called himself the Wreck King of West Virginia. His junkyard covered seven acres. On top of the concrete building where his father conducted business was a huge crown made of hubcaps.

  To Alfie, the junkyard had been as good as Disneyland. Car after car, some brand new, some rusted and old, an ocean of cars that would never move again. To crawl into those cars, to work controls, to sit and dream was as good as a ride on a roller coaster.

  Alfie especially liked to sit in the old Dodge sedan because every window in it was cracked and splintered, so that when the sun shone through, it was as beautiful as being in church. And the Chrysler Imperial—its windows had a smoky distortion, so that, beyond, figures seemed to float through the junkyard like spirits through the cemetery.

  His last memory of the junkyard still hurt him. It was the day the yard was sold at auction. Alfie had sat on a wrecked Ford pick-up truck, on the fender where a dent made a perfect seat, and had watched the junkyard go to a man named Harvey Sweet. For a long time after that, Alfie had been as lost as a bird without a nest. Then he had found this attic.

  Suddenly he heard his mother’s voice in the kitchen. She was complaining to Pap. “Oh, I wish Bubba was here, don’t you, Pap?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t you miss him?”

  “Who?”

  “Pap, put down that paper!” Alfie heard her crumple it. “I’m talking about Bubba. Don’t you miss Bubba?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you ever miss anything?” she asked in exasperation.

  He took the question seriously. “I miss the junkyard,” he said after a moment.

  Slowly Alfie let the trap door close. He knew what Pap meant about missing the junkyard. It was possible to miss a place more than a person, if the place was where you felt at home. And Pap had been more at home sitting on an old Coca-Cola crate in the shade of the hubcap crown than he had ever felt in his chair in front of the television.

  He also understood why Pap did not miss Bubba. He himself was glad Bubba was gone—working at a gas station in Maidsville, married to a girl named Maureen. There was something about Bubba that overshadowed everyone, like the walnut tree in their old yard whose leaves were so thick nothing could grow beneath. Its shadow had been as black at noon as it was at midnight.

  “Well, I do miss him,” his mother said loudly below. She had come into the living room and was standing right below the trap door. “Something was always happening when Bubba was here. It was like all the life and all the fun went into Bubba, and the other children, well …”

  Alfie wished suddenly there was an easy way to close the ears. He could hear too much in the attic. You could shut your eyes, he thought, block out everything you didn’t want to see, but the ears …

  Alfie sat down quietly at his table. He did not turn on the lamp. A little light filtered in through the slits in the eaves, a soft dusty light like in very old paintings.

  “Oh, I’m going out,” his mother said below.

  “Where to?”

  “Out!”

  “Well, if you’re going to the beer hall, wait for me.”

  “You got any money, Pap?” she sneered. “They don’t take food stamps.”

  “They take Social Security money, don’t they?
The government ain’t made a law about how we spend that, have they?”

  Alfie heard the front door close. He reached out and turned on the light. He looked up at his cartoons, his comic strips, his drawings.

  With one hand he reached for a pencil, with the other a fresh sheet of paper. A slight smile came over his face. He was home.

  Chapter Four

  ALFIE LAY IN HIS bed. He was staring up at the ceiling. He did not see the sheets of pale plywood or the dark nail heads, because in his mind he was looking beyond the ceiling into the attic.

  Alfie squinted his eyes. He tried to imagine the house without ceilings, with only the rafters. He imagined his cartoons, Scotch-taped, pinned, thumbtacked to the underside of the roof, hanging down, enlivening the whole crooked house. He imagined people dropping by the house to look up at his drawings the way they went into the Sistine Chapel to see Michelangelo’s.

  Someday the attic would be famous. “This is where he began his cartoons,” they’d say. There would be people filing through, climbing, one by one, up the ladder to the attic. There would be a souvenir stand where copies of his comic strips could be bought and machines where his cartoons could be viewed for a quarter.

  He shifted and sighed. He was restless. He could not fall asleep. He knew this was because of the comic strip he had drawn after supper. He had been so pleased with it that he had taken it down to show his mother.

  “What’s this?” Squinting, she had turned it first one way and then another, as if it were a modern painting.

  “Like that,” he had said, putting it right. He looked over her shoulder with a pleased, expectant smile. It was the strip about his turned-in feet, and she would have to laugh at that. When he was little, she had laughed about his feet all the time and called him “Duck” and “Pigeon.” For the first time he had felt secure about pleasing her.

  “What is this thing?”

  “It’s a comic strip. I drew it.”

  She held it at a distance to see it better.

  “It’s about me,” he went on. “Don’t you see the feet?”