Loser

  But not to his father, who has brought his mailbag home with him in order to repair the strap. When Donald was an infant, Mr. Zinkoff was very good about changing diapers, but he has no stomach for vomit. He turns away, holds out the bag and growls, “Take it to your mother.”

  Early on, Zinkoff’s mother impressed upon her son the etiquette of throwing up: That is, do not throw up at random, but throw up into something, preferably a toilet or bucket. Since toilets or buckets are not always handy, Zinkoff has learned to reach for the nearest container. Thus, at one time or other he has thrown up into soup bowls, flowerpots, wastebaskets, trash bins, shopping bags, winter boots, kitchen sinks and, once, a clown’s hat. But never his father’s mailbag.

  He thinks his mother will say “Heaven help me” but she does not. She’s cool. She puts down baby Polly and unloads the bag into the toilet. She scours it with a stiff bristle brush and hand soap. She rubs it with Marley’s Leather Cream. She sweetens it with a splash of Mennen’s aftershave and sets it into the playpen for baby Polly to crawl into.

  Hungry again, Zinkoff eats a full dinner that night. And throws up into one of his socks.

  “Heaven help me.”

  9. Champions!

  Soccer is Zinkoff’s kind of game.

  Baseball has too much waiting and too many straight lines. Shooting a basketball demands precision. Football is fun only for the ball carrier.

  But soccer is free-for-all, as haphazard and slapdash as Zinkoff himself. He plays in the Peewee League in the autumn of his seventh year. His team is the Titans. Every Saturday morning he’s the first one there, kicking pinecones around the field until the coaches show up.

  Once the game begins, Zinkoff never stops running. He zigs and zags after the checkered ball like a fox after a field mouse—except he hardly ever catches up to it. Someone else always seems to reach it first. Zinkoff is forever swinging his foot at the ball a half second after it goes past him. He winds up kicking the shins, ankles and rear ends of the other players. Twice he’s kicked the referee. Once, somehow, he kicked himself. His teammates rub their bruises and call him “Wild Foot.”

  To Zinkoff a net is a net. He doesn’t much care which team the net belongs to. Several times during the season he kicks the ball at the wrong goal. Fortunately, he always misses.

  The first game is against the Ramblers. When it’s over, Zinkoff jumps up and down and pumps his fists as he has seen athletes do and yells “Yahoo!” He does not notice that he is the only Titan cheering. “What are you so happy for?” says Robert, one of his teammates. “We lost.”

  This is news to Zinkoff. Throughout the game, and even at the end, he has not thought about the score. Apparently, losing has made Robert very unhappy. It shows on his face. It shows in the way he’s kicking at the turf. Zinkoff looks around. Other Titans are kicking turf or stomping their feet or pounding their thighs with their fists. Every Titan wears a sour puss.

  And then the coach calls the Titans into a huddle and says, “Okay, on three, yea Ramblers. One, two, three—” Zinkoff bellows, “Yea Ramblers!” And adds, “You da man!”

  “Yea Ramblers” barely crawls from the lips of the other Titans.

  And then the coach is lining them up, and the Ramblers are in a line too, and the Titans and Ramblers are patting hands down the line like dominos, pat pat pat pat, no sour pusses on the Ramblers, who keep saying “Good game, good game, good game…” and Zinkoff is the only Titan saying “Good game” back.

  And then the Titans are heading for their parents on the sidelines, and in order to show their parents what serious soccer players they are, they kick the turf some more and tear off their knee pads and shirts and throw them to the ground and stomp on them. One Titan even falls to his knees and bawls while pounding his head into the grass.

  Zinkoff wants to be a good Titan. He kicks at some turf too. His mother and father look on with mouths agape as he tears off his shirt and shoes and finally his socks and stomps them all into the ground. He gets down on his knees and rips up grass and flings it into the air. He snatches the pacifier from baby Polly’s mouth and hurls it onto the field. He pounds his fists into the ground and cries out, “No! No! No!”

  By now other parents and players are watching.

  Zinkoff’s mother says, “Just what do you think you’re doing?”

  Zinkoff looks up from his knees. “I’m being mad because we lost.”

  Baby Polly is bawling.

  “Well, you can start being madder, because this little demonstration will cost you your allowance for a week. And you have five seconds to bring that pacifier back.”

  Zinkoff is determined to become a better loser. In the following weeks he practices his losing in the backyard. But he never again gets a chance to show his stuff on Saturday, for the Titans win all the rest of their games.

  No great thanks to Wild Foot.

  One time, amazingly, he finds himself alone with the ball and a clear field ahead of him. Propelled by an excitement of whistles and screams behind him, Wild Foot boots the ball on and on, never realizing he has long since gone out of bounds. He crosses two other soccer fields and is finally stopped in the parking lot.

  On another occasion he throws up on the ball, which in turn causes two other players to throw up.

  It is after this incident that several Titans ask the coach if Zinkoff can be traded to another team. They are soon glad it didn’t happen.

  The last game of the season comes down to a play-off between the Titans and the Hornets. The Hornets also have lost only one game. The winner will be champion.

  The game goes as usual for Wild Foot. He runs around a lot. He swings his foot a lot but seldom connects with the ball. Sometimes he makes himself dizzy running in circles as he tries to keep up with the action swirling around him.

  Late in the second half the score is still 0–0. Zinkoff is standing in front of the Hornets’ net, wondering where the ball is, when suddenly it hits him in the head. It bounces into the net for a goal, and Zinkoff is instantly mobbed by cheering teammates. The final score is Titans 1, Hornets 0.

  The Titans are Peewee champions!

  The Titans go wild. They jump like kangaroos. They fall onto their backs and churn their legs in the air. They ride their parents’ shoulders and thrust up their fingers and crow, “We’re number one!”

  Zinkoff goes wild too. He tries to stand on his head. He shouts into baby Polly’s face “We’re number one!” and makes her blink. He climbs onto his father’s shoulders and proclaims to all the wide world: “We’re number one!”

  And then he looks down and sees the face of Andrew Orwell, his neighbor. Andrew is a Hornet. Zinkoff has never seen a sadder face in his life. It reminds him of a monkey’s face. He begins to notice the other Hornets, in their black-and-yellow shirts. They are slumped on the grass. They are slumped over their parents’ knees. Not one of them rides a shoulder. Every one is monkey-faced and crying and slumpy.

  Then they give out the trophies. Every Titan gets one. Zinkoff has never won a trophy before. It’s a golden soccer player on a black pedestal with a golden soccer ball at his foot. It glows as if it has been painted in sunlight. It is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen.

  Zinkoff sees the other Titans kissing their trophies, so he kisses his too. As he does so, he sees the Hornets slumping away to the parking lot.

  And suddenly he’s running, he’s yelling, “Andrew! Andrew!” Cherise and Andrew turn in the parking lot. Zinkoff runs huffing up to them. “Andrew, here.” He holds out the trophy. The look in Andrew’s eyes tells him he has done the right thing. “You take it.”

  Andrew reaches for it, but his mother catches his wrist. “Donald, that is really nice of you, but you’re the one who won it. Andrew will win a trophy of his own someday.”

  Andrew’s fingers are curled like claws. They can feel the golden trophy inches away. As his mother leads him off to the car, he cries out, “I want it!”

  That afternoon Zinkoff sits
on his back step. The trophy is beside him, brighter than ever.

  Zinkoff is playing a game he invented called Bugs on a Stick. In the next backyard Andrew sits cross-legged by a bed of purple pansies. He cradles his chin in his hands. His face is still sad.

  Zinkoff calls, “Wanna play my game?”

  Andrew shakes his head.

  “Wanna go in the alley?”

  Andrew shakes his head.

  Zinkoff asks Andrew many questions, but all Andrew does is shake his head and look monkey-faced.

  After a while Zinkoff gets tired of his game. He looks at Andrew. He can think of nothing else to say. By now Zinkoff is sad too. Not just because Andrew is sad, but for another reason: The soccer season is over. That has been the best part of it. Playing the games. He wishes he could make himself feel less sad.

  He picks up his trophy and goes inside. A minute later he opens the back door and places the trophy on the step and goes back in.

  When he comes out later that day, the trophy is gone.

  10. Atrocious

  Second grade is no more than a minute old when Zinkoff gets off on the wrong foot with his teacher.

  He asks her how many days of school are left. Not in this year but in all remaining eleven years. The teacher, whose name is Mrs. Biswell, thinks it is the most annoying, untimely question she has ever heard. Here she is, all bright and shiny for first day, and this kid in the front row can’t wait till he graduates from high school. It’s insulting and disrespectful. She comes closer than she ever has before to saying, “That’s a dumb question.” Instead, she says, “Don’t worry about it. You’ll be out of school soon enough.”

  Zinkoff has no intention of worrying about it. And he certainly doesn’t want to be out of school. He simply wants to hear her say a really big number in the thousands, so he can feel that his days in school will never come to an end. He has thought every teacher starts out the school year like Miss Meeks, but now he guesses he was wrong.

  In the meantime he is packed off to the far back corner, last seat—the boondocks—as Mrs. Biswell assigns seats by first letter, last name.

  The next bad thing he does is laugh. This might have been okay, but, Zinkoff being Zinkoff, he doesn’t stop laughing. And when he does stop, it isn’t long before he begins again.

  Part of this is his own fault. Zinkoff is an all-purpose laugher. Not only do funny things make him laugh, but nearly anything that makes him feel good might also make him laugh. In fact, sometimes bad things make him laugh. He laughs as naturally as he breathes.

  One day in the playground, a third-grader, angered by the sound of Zinkoff laughing, grabs Zinkoff by the wrist and pulls his arm behind his back. The higher he pulls the wrist toward the shoulder blade, the louder Zinkoff laughs, even through his tears. In the end the third-grader becomes frightened and gives up.

  Of course, Zinkoff’s classmates know what an easy laugher he is, so whenever they wish to be entertained, all they have to do is get Zinkoff’s attention and stick out a tongue or pretend to pick and flick a booger. For half the class the entertainment is not in hearing Zinkoff laugh but in seeing him get in trouble.

  Mrs. Biswell does not like children. Although she never says this, everyone knows it. Everyone wonders why someone who does not like children ever became a teacher in the first place. As the years have gone by, Mrs. Biswell herself has begun to wonder. Once a year, at home, she wonders aloud why she ever became a teacher, but there is never an answer from her husband or her three cats.

  It is widely believed that Mrs. Biswell never smiles. In fact, this is not true. Mrs. Biswell smiles perhaps five or six times a year, but her face is so stone-chiseled into a permanent scowl that her smile appears to be merely a tilting of the scowl.

  It is therefore impossible to tell if Mrs. Biswell is really mad by looking at her face. The key is her hands. Anger makes hooks of her fingers and clamps her hands together. As her anger rises, the gnarled hands begin to churn over each other as if she is washing them in gritty soap.

  Nothing makes Mrs. Biswell madder than sloppiness. She has had many sloppy students before, but Zinkoff is in a class by himself. Especially with a pencil in his hand. His numbers are a disaster. His fives look like eights, eights look like zeros, fours look like sevens.

  At least there are only ten numerals. The alphabet gives him twenty-six letters to butcher. And once she starts teaching cursive, she might as well try to teach a pickle to write. His o’s are raisins, his l’s are drunken chili peppers, his q’s are g’s and his g’s are q’s.

  And lines! The boy never saw a blue line he couldn’t miss. Over the line, under the line, perpendicular to the line—his letters swarm willy-nilly across the page like ants on a sidewalk.

  The teacher asks for a volunteer to help Zinkoff. Andrew Orwell volunteers. For a half hour each day Andrew sits with Zinkoff and shows him how to make better letters and numbers. After a week, Zinkoff’s writing is worse than ever. Andrew is fired.

  After two months of the worst penmanship she has ever endured, the teacher wrings her hands and calls out to the boondocks: “Your handwriting is atrocious!”

  Zinkoff beams, not knowing the meaning of the word. “Thank you!” he calls back.

  “My handwriting is atrocious!” he announces to his parents at the dinner table that day. His father, seeing how proud his son is, replies, “One thousand congratulations.”

  His mother gives him a star.

  In all ways that teacher Biswell can see, the Z boy is a shambles. She shudders to think what must happen when he is in the same room with a coloring book. He is even at odds with his own body—not rare among second-graders, certainly, but this boy takes the cake. Hardly a day goes by in which he does not fall flat on his face for no apparent reason.

  When he isn’t laughing he’s flapping his hand in the air. He’s forever asking questions, forever volunteering to answer. For every right answer, five are wrong. The more he gets wrong, the more he wants to answer. The better to be seen back in his last-of-the-alphabet desk, he sometimes crouches on his seat like a baseball catcher, stabbing his hand into the air and grunting aloud.

  It is unthinkable to Mrs. Biswell that such a mediocre-to-poor student could actually like school, so she concludes that his antics and reckless enthusiasms are merely ploys to annoy her.

  Even so, she might forgive him—forgive him the sloppiness and the clumsiness and the endless laughing and the general annoyance that he is, forgive him for being a child—had he possessed the one thing for which she has a weakness: brilliance.

  Brilliance is the one thing that makes Mrs. Biswell happy. In fourth grade in her own childhood, in the second report period, she got all A’s and won a prize in her school’s science fair. Ever since, she has had the highest regard for academic achievement. In all her years of teaching, she could name only nine students who deserved to be called “brilliant.”

  Zinkoff is not one of them. Quizzes, tests, projects—he never earns an A, and only one or two B’s. He might earn more C’s if she could understand his answers. Typically, she throws up her hands and gives him a D.

  And so, in all these ways Zinkoff grinds down the patience of Mrs. Biswell. He is the greenboard against which her stick of chalk is reduced day by day. By December it is a nub.

  And then he ruins her eraser.

  Mrs. Biswell has long loved her eraser. It is so much better than the cheap, flimsy things that come through school supplies. Its deep, firm pad of felt soaks up chalk dust like a sponge. It is the Rolls Royce of greenboard erasers. Ten years ago she put out her own money for it, and she expects it to last for ten more. Every Friday she takes it home and claps it against the back of the fieldstone barbeque pit in her yard. No one but her is allowed to touch it. For that matter, no one but her is allowed to touch the greenboard or the chalk.

  One day she comes back late from lunch to find Zinkoff writing at the greenboard. The students in their seats let out a collective gasp. Zinkoff merely smile
s at her and keeps on writing.

  “Stop!” she screeches.

  He stops. He looks at her, his eyes round as quarters. Then, quicker than she can think, he grabs the eraser and begins swiping at the greenboard.

  “Stop! Stop! Stop!” she screams.

  The words hit Zinkoff like a bear paw. His body flinches in three directions, he drops the eraser to the floor and throws up all over it.

  “Out! Out! Out!” screams Mrs. Biswell. She stands in the doorway pointing down the hall. “Get out of my classroom and never come back!”

  Zinkoff gets out.

  In a daze he leaves the room and walks down the hallway. He flinches one final time as the classroom door slams shut behind him. He walks until he comes to the door at the end of the hall. He opens it and goes outside and keeps on walking. He walks for a long time, feeling behind his head the pointing finger of Mrs. Biswell.

  In time he finds himself home. His mother is looking at him with alarm. She is asking him where his winter coat is. She’s telling him that he is trembling.

  Mrs. Biswell tells the principal it was a mistake. She was merely pointing to the principal’s office, she says, sending him there. The principal says mistake or not, no teacher can banish a student from school. Mrs. Biswell says she simply lost her temper, as anyone would have done if they had had to put up with that student. The principal says a teacher isn’t just anyone, and he scolds her in the privacy of his office.

  When Mrs. Zinkoff telephones the principal and asks if it’s true that her son was told never to return to school, the principal laughs and says it was all a mistake and of course he is most welcome to come back. Zinkoff is back at school next day before the janitor.

  For the rest of the school year Mrs. Biswell wrings her hands and combs the stores and catalogs for another Rolls Royce eraser. With her own money she buys Zinkoff a yellow plastic beach bucket. She tells him he is never to go anywhere inside her classroom without it. Zinkoff never throws up into the yellow bucket, but he does use it to carry around his collection of interesting stones and pieces of colored glass.