Wringer

  188

  She laughed aloud, hugged him again, released him.

  “Did you think you could have a pet pigeon in the house since—what?—January, and Daddy and I wouldn’t know about it?”

  “I thought you’d be mad,” he said.

  She fluttered her fingers at the door. “Go get me a tissue.” He fetched a tissue from her room. She used it to wipe the dropping from the desk. “And don’t forget the one you’re standing on,” she said, tossing the tissue into the basket. She stared at him. “Mad? Why would we be mad at you?”

  He stated the obvious: “It’s a pigeon.”

  She nodded. Her voice became even softer. “I understand. We understand. And we were a little concerned, but not mad. Never mad.”

  “But—” He did not know how to put it. “Dad.”

  She smiled. “Don’t worry. Your dad’s been changing. He didn’t even go to watch Pigeon Day last year, much less shoot.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “One night—don’t tell him I told you this—one night he snuck into your room while you were sleeping and stood there with a flashlight at your closet looking at your pigeon.” She chuckled. “Take my word for it, that bird is as safe with your dad as it is with you.”

  They talked through much of the morning. Palmer told her everything. Nipper’s arrival after the snowstorm. The daily wake-up ear peck. The guys and their growing suspicions. Treestumping Dorothy. Spitting on the classroom floor. (He wished he had a camera to preserve the look on her face.) Refusing The Treatment. When he told her of his lifelong fear, that he dreaded the day he would become ten and a wringer, his lip quivered and she made a sound of pain and squeezed him tight to her and stroked his head and his back.

  After a while she said, “Don’t let Nipper go. Keep him.”

  He tried to explain. He tried to make her understand what life was like for him. That there was simply not enough room in town, not this town, for himself, the guys and a pigeon. His fear was too great, he told her, and his course had been set.

  So when, a day later, Dorothy told him that her family was heading to the seashore for a vacation, Palmer asked her to take Nipper along and release him there. She protested, but in the end she spoke to her parents, and her parents, as Palmer had hoped they would, agreed to take care of things.

  Dorothy came for Nipper the night before. She refused to use the shoe box. She carried the sleeping bird across the street in her hands. The next day Palmer stayed in bed until noon.

  36

  Despite the heat, he slept with his window shut and locked, the shade drawn. Still he could hear them, Beans and Mutto squalling like alleycats on the back porch roof. He could hear them raise the screen, knock on the window, work to open it.

  On the street they treestumped him. They planted themselves in front of him so that he had to step around them, only to find them replanted in his new path. It took him half an hour to walk one block. They mocked and taunted him. They flicked his ears and spit on his sneakers. Beans bared his green-and-yellow teeth and breathed baked beans into his face.

  It was as if he had never been one of them.

  “He’s gone,” he told them.

  They laughed. They didn’t believe him.

  He had an idea. Invite them into his room, let them see for themselves. Maybe then they would believe, back off. But then he realized that his mother would never again allow them into her house. It then occurred to him that when he thought of the guys he was really thinking only of two of them: Beans and Mutto. Not Henry. Henry was one of them, all right, but he was different. Maybe he could sneak Henry into his room, prove it to Henry.

  The guys agreed. He did not have to convince Beans and Mutto that his mother was dangerous to them, especially in her house. And while it frustrated them that only Henry would have the privilege, they were too curious not to let it happen.

  Beans looked up at Henry. He tugged on Henry’s red-and-white-striped T-shirt until Henry bent down to Beans’s height. “Check it out good. Don’t let him trick ya.”

  Henry nodded.

  “Report back to me.”

  “Okay.”

  Palmer chose a morning when his mother was out. While Beans and Mutto waited, sitting brazenly across the street on Dorothy’s front steps, he led Henry into his house. Up in the room he held out both arms and said, “It’s all yours. Look all you want.”

  While Henry looked about, poking obediently into the closet, Palmer studied Henry. Henry was so tall that the top of his head grazed the basketball net. And yet, somehow, he did not give an impression of bigness. On the contrary, he seemed quite small, smaller than Beans and Mutto, smaller even than Palmer.

  “Thanks for the warning,” Palmer said to him.

  Henry, peering foolishly into the wastebasket, said, “What warning?”

  “On the cake.”

  Henry paused, then said, “Oh. Yeah.”

  Palmer watched him search some more.

  “What’s your real name?”

  Henry looked startled. His eyes went to the window, as if the guys might be lurking there. He never looked at Palmer. “Huh?”

  “I know Beans’s real name is Arthur. And Mutto is Billy. Who are you, really?”

  Henry dropped to his knees and ducked under the bed. He stood back up. His wide, startled eyes, careful to avoid Palmer, swept across the walls. “George,” he said and left the room. He hurried down the stairs.

  Palmer called, “George! Quit!” He called, “I saw you pulling your little sister in the wagon!”

  But Henry Really George was already out the door.

  37

  Whatever Henry told them they must have believed, for they backed off. If they came across Palmer in the street or at the park, they continued to harass him. But they stopped coming to his house. They did not go out of their way to find him.

  Not that he cared.

  He tumbled lifelessly through July, feeling as dry and empty as the cicada husks on the trees. Down empty alleyways he rode his bike.

  He hardly ever saw Dorothy. They avoided each other. When they met accidentally on the street, they said hi and quickly turned in opposite directions.

  He threw away the shoe box that had served as both the soldiers’ barracks and Nipper’s roost. He kept the soldiers in his sock drawer. Sometimes he took them out to play. He arranged them on his desk, facing them to the enemy. Sometimes the enemy was large and formidable, such as a hippo slipper; sometimes it was one pink, defenseless eraser.

  One day his father showed him the proper placement of the troops. How to space them out, so that a land mine would never kill more than one. How to send flankers to the left and right, curling in a semicircle to hit the enemy from three sides and prevent him from sneaking behind you. How to keep a platoon in reserve. He learned where to place the green-faced lieutenant and the captain, and, high ground being priceless, to set the machine gunner on a book, a children’s dictionary.

  Usually it came to no more than this: a deployment of troops, twenty-seven soldiers leaning, twenty-seven tiny olive-green rifles aiming, poised on the brink of battle. And then one day they attacked. They moved forward, they bore down on the eraser from three sides, cutting off all retreat, pinning it down in murderous crossfire, the lieutenant leading the charge, the captain shouting commands, calling in air strikes. Yet somehow the wicked eraser managed to stay alive, managed even to crawl through the front lines, only to be greeted by the backup platoon. Amazingly, it survived this as well and was up and running and thought itself home free—when the machine gun opened up from atop the dictionary. RATATATATATATATATATATATAT. A merciless fusillade the machine gun laid down, and the troops regrouped and joined the fire and the roar of war did not cease until the eraser was dead and cut to ribbons.

  The next day he buried the soldiers in the backyard. The tiny green faces said nothing, the tiny green eyes stared up at him as the dirt fell upon them.

  He continued to read Beetle Bailey and to cut out the strips, but he no
longer mounted them in his collection. Then he stopped cutting them out. Then he stopped reading.

  He never touched the Nerf ball. The net hung unswished.

  He still kept his door closed, but sometimes he kept it open too.

  He went with his father to a Titans baseball game, in the twilight semipro league. They drove to Denville. It was good to go to another town. But not very good. He ate a hot dog with relish and a soft pretzel with mustard and a birch beer. The birch beer was red. The uniforms of the Titans were orange. The shirts were orange, and the socks and the T on the cap. A black-and-orange stripe went from the belt to the top of the stirruped sock. The catcher’s chest protector was orange, and so were the shortstop’s shoelaces.

  In the fourth inning there was a home run, then another, greater one. The ball flew high above the cheering crowd into the twilight sky, over the billboarded fence. It landed in dirt beyond the centerfielder’s leap and rolled onto the parking lot, a white pureness against the black macadam. Suddenly kids were racing, a flock of boys bending themselves around parked cars, colliding at the rolling ball. When they separated, one hand was raised.

  In the last inning there was a foul ball, though at first Palmer did not know it. He was reading the billboards when suddenly the people around him were leaping from their seats, someone was shouting, “Look out!” A shadow fell over him. Turning, he heard the sound, inches from his face—something like a slap—then laughter, his father’s voice saying “Gotcha!”; his father’s body standing, leaning over him, blotting out the entire field and sky. Then the light came back and someone was saying “Look at his face,” and his father was smiling and looking down, and his hands were opening like a flower.

  On the ride home Palmer held the foul ball in his own hands. He imagined he felt a heartbeat.

  38

  It was as if he could smell into the future. The gray, sour odor of gunsmoke came to him a full week before Family Fest was due to begin. There were shots too: the popping of cap pistols from four-and five-year-olds practicing to one day be wringers and shooters. All things in their gunsights became pigeons: grasshoppers, mailboxes, yellow squash, each other.

  The sun dazzled in a cloudless sky. The sidewalks, if you took your shoes off, burned. After dinner people watered flowers.

  At night he heard trucks rumbling.

  Little kids on pastel bikes pedaled furiously, churning the heat to butter, gasping stories of wooden crates piled higher than skyscrapers, of crates broken into, pigeons flushed and killed, security guards posted.

  Men on porches cleaned their shotguns.

  Women baked pies.

  In the mornings he thought he felt a nip on his ear. He opened his eyes and looked about, but he was alone.

  At first Palmer believed he had released Nipper for Nipper’s sake. Then he began to see that it had been for his own sake as well. He knew this from the relief he felt from sleeping with the window open, of no longer fearing the yellow cat. The tension that had choked him for months was gone.

  The price of peace had been high: expelling himself from the gang, proclaiming himself a traitor, banishing his beloved pet. For such a price, a peace should be excellent. Yet when Palmer reached for it, tried to taste it, it was not there. Instead he found only his blizzard-blown friend—images and memories and dreams.

  One night he dreamed about a pigeon crossing a road in a faraway place. A car zoomed by, knocking the pigeon down. Other cars zoomed, and soon the pigeon was meat and feathers, flat. Then an old woman with a watering can began to sprinkle the road, and the meat plumped up and came together again with the feathers, and the old woman took the reconstituted pigeon in her hands—only now it wasn’t an old woman, it was a kid, a wringer, throttling the pigeon by the neck, and the pigeon had a beak that was soft like lips and the pigeon was speaking…speaking….

  Throughout the days and nights of Family Fest, he stayed close to his parents. He did the Fun House with his father and Tilt-A-Whirl with his mother. Several times in the noise and jostle he thought he heard Beans’s voice. At the bake sale he had never seen so many pies at once, more pies on the endless table than soldiers buried in his backyard. His mother let him pick out his favorite. He chose raspberry crumb.

  During the week his father said many things, mostly with his hands. He rubbed Palmer’s hair and squeezed his shoulder and tugged on his shirt and tickled his ribs and pulled him backward with a finger hooked in the back pocket of his jeans and lightly brushed the side of his neck with his fingertips as he stopped and chatted with friends. Each of these things had a different meaning to Palmer and yet the same—a language unlearned, of words unheard, that came to roost at some warm and waiting perch far below his ears.

  He could not remember the last time his father called him “big guy.”

  In other years his father had always stopped at the shooting gallery, where flat yellow ducks cruised smugly until shot in the eye: pop ping…pop ping. This year they walked by, not even looking. Palmer tried not to hear, but even as he bobbed on a merry-go-rounding horse, as he breathed deeply the sweet crispy tangle of a funnel cake, there it was: pop ping.

  On Friday he rode his bike to the old train station. He heard them before he saw them, a noise like turkeys. He pulled up in front of the crates. The top crates towered high above him, and the whole slatted, gobbling tenement occupied more space than the boarded-up station. In the shade of the old ticket window a man sat whittling a stick.

  “Better not stand there too long,” the man called, laughing. “Smell’ll knock ya over.”

  Palmer stayed a long while, his eyes closed, listening, trying to feel.

  On Friday night the shooting gallery was mobbed. And at home the golden bird was gone from the mantel.

  39

  Until he found himself there, he had not been sure that he could come.

  He had awakened with a start. He was sweating. His throat was sore. His dreams had been noise, the birdscream of thousands, a shrill wail that came on like day itself until his own voice was swept away with it.

  The street was still in shadow, the grass in the park wet with dew. He first heard the shots as he trotted through the playground, past the sliding board where he had once rowdied with the guys. From the sound of the shots—pop pop—he might have thought the shooting gallery was ahead, except there were no pings.

  Gunshot mixed with its memory in the picnic grove.

  He was surprised at the size of the crowd already there. He had not before understood how early in the day one must begin in order to kill, and watch killed, five thousand birds by nightfall.

  Someone, turning, saw him and bowed with a sweep of the hand. “Hey, looks like a wringer kid here. He musta got up late. Make way.” Others turned, staring, smiling. He ran.

  There was a grandstand, like at the Little League field. It was full. He stood beside it. Directly across the field from him the wringmaster in his neon pink baseball cap was directing the wringers.

  Twice as high as the grandstand and almost as long was the mountain of crates housing the five thousand birds—four thousand and something now that the shooting had begun. A truck with an elevator platform lifted workmen to the top of the stack. Crates were emptied, five pigeons at a time, into two white wooden boxes, each about the size of Dorothy’s bicycle basket.

  While one box was on the field, the other was being reloaded with birds. Each box had five compartments, each compartment with a pigeon, a hatch and a string to open it.

  The boxmaster wore an orange vest.

  The shooters were to the left. They aimed their quarter-size black barrels toward the open end of the field. Here the sound was not pop. It was boom.

  The waiting shooters chatted and joked with each other, their guns slung like baseball bats on their shoulders. But when a shooter stepped up to the white chalk line, he became all business. His face was grim, his eyes intense and focused on the white box ten feet in front of him. In this the shooters were all alike.

&
nbsp; In other ways they differed. Some, when they stepped up to the line, shouldered the gun immediately and aimed at the box, as if this were a day to kill five thousand boxes. Others were more patient, holding the gun across their chest at parade rest until the first bird was released. A few shooters stood at attention, the heel of the gun resting on the ground.

  There were differences among the pigeons as well. Some, when their hatch was raised, simply walked out, head bobbing, as if this were nothing more than a stroll on a city sidewalk. Others began at once to peck about for food. Others came out flying, although one, causing much laughter, flew only to the top of the box. Sooner or later most of them took off.

  In Palmer’s memory, recorded during his first visit to Pigeon Day six years before, the birds were shot out of the sky, above the treetops, among the clouds. He was surprised to find now that it did not really happen that way. In fact, the birds seldom flew more than shoulder-high to a man before a blast of pellets stopped them. They seemed not so much to be shot down as tripped. The men might as well have waited by the box and whacked them with a bat as they came out. The pigeons were denied even the elegance of a long fall.

  Occasionally there was a stubborn bird that refused to fly. It would poke and peck about, perhaps circling the box, perhaps even ambling over to the spectators, who would laugh and shoo it back to the field. But the crowd’s patience with stubborn birds was short. Soon they would be calling, “Toss ’im!” And the boxmaster would attempt to scoop up the bird in a long-handled fishing net and toss it into the air and run.

  Boom.

  If the boxmaster could not catch the bird, the scorekeeper would cry, “Fire!” and the shooter would.

  Boom.

  And sometimes the invisible pellets, like a sudden gust of wind, not only killed the uncooperative walking bird but kicked it into the air as well, as if to say, There, you stubborn bird, now you’re flying, aren’t you?