Wringer

  A world of stars and darkness gave no reply.

  In the den he whispered to the golden bird, “Where is my pigeon?” The golden bird was silent.

  He did not go to sleep that night. Instead, sleep sneaked up on him, and the next thing he knew he was dreaming of a tapping, a cruel dream of a pigeon tapping on the window. Only it wasn’t a dream, for his room was filled with daylight pouring under the raised shade, and there was Nipper, pecking at the pane. When Palmer opened the window, Nipper, as usual, hopped onto his head—and bent down and gave his ear an especially ouchy nip, as if to say, “Who said you could wake up without me?” No Christmas morning was ever happier than that one.

  It was Saturday, so the two could play as long as they wished. Palmer kept the bird in his room until noon. By that time Nipper was knocking on the window, clearly wanting to go out. Palmer hated to let him go, but he knew he must. As he opened the window and watched Nipper fly off, he knew something else: He could no longer bear this alone. It had to be shared.

  Why are you doing this to me?

  He dashed down the stairs, out the door and across the street, coatless, not feeling the cold. He knocked on her door. He pressed the doorbell. Inside he heard her footsteps, her voice calling, “I’ll get it!”

  The door opened. Warmth and light washed over him. She smiled. She was glad to see him. He did not wait another moment. He said, “I have a pigeon.”

  FEATHERFALL

  23

  Beans’s mother—Palmer had to fight the temptation to call her “Mrs. Beans”—was a perfectly normal-looking woman whose teeth were as white as the icing on her son’s tenth birthday cake. Waving her arms like a conductor, she led them in a raucous “Happy Birthday” and dished out generous gobs of ice cream.

  As soon as Beans tore open his presents—baseball from Palmer, pocketknife from Henry, Campbell’s baked beans from Mutto—Mutto called out, “Treatment! Treatment!” and dragged Beans outside. The gang headed up the street to Farquar’s house.

  Mutto banged on the front door. “Farquar! Farquar!”

  No one answered. They circled the entire house, Mutto rapping on every window and door he could reach. He threw out his arms. “Nobody home.”

  And then a strange thing happened.

  Beans, instead of being relieved that his arm was spared, said, “Let’s find him,” and trotted off after his own Treatment.

  “You’re crazy,” said Henry, who, like any normal kid, hated The Treatment. Henry always had to be prodded to face Farquar. “Why do you want to go looking for it?”

  “’Cause I ain’t ten till I get The Treatment,” said Beans.

  In a sense, this was true. Among the four friends, there was the feeling that neither calendar nor cake made a birthday, not officially. For it to be official, your arm had to feel the sting of Farquar’s knuckle. It was a dilemma: you wanted to be a year older, you did not want The Treatment, and you couldn’t have one without the other. At the very least, it slowed you down. For once in your life, you were not in a hurry.

  But Beans was in a hurry, trotting through town, checking out Farquar’s usual haunts, knocking on the doors of his friends, calling out his name. Beans seemed anxious at first, then frantic, as if not finding Farquar would condemn him to being nine forever.

  They finally found Farquar kicking a ball on the soccer field. As Beans, then Mutto and Henry ran, Palmer lagged behind. The day could not have been more pleasant. The sky was blue, the air warm. The crack of baseball bats could be heard in the distance. Newborn leaf clusters on the surrounding trees had a look of pale green popcorn. Tufts of onion grass sprouted across the soccer field, releasing their sweet scent. But the scent that entered Palmer’s nose was the sour smell of gunsmoke. The soles of his feet tingled as he walked upon the ground that halted the fall of thousands.

  Beans’s eyes were shining, his face excited as he accepted The Treatment. When Farquar finished, he noted Beans’s face registered no pain. He frowned at his famous knuckle. He bent into Beans’s face for a better look. “You okay?” he said.

  Beans threw both arms into the air, as if one of them had not just been demolished. “I’m great!” he shouted. “I’m ten!” He backed off then, until he stood alone in the field. No bird sang in the trees, no wing flew overhead. Beans made a fist of both hands and held them out before him, end to end. The grin on his face tilted, his teeth appeared, a squitchy sound came from his throat, the two closed fists snapped in opposite directions. He crowed, “And I’m a wringer!”

  Palmer shivered. His own birthday was three months away.

  24

  Palmer came home that day to find Dorothy shooting baskets in his room.

  “I asked your mother if I could come in,” she said, “so I could play basketball.”

  Palmer sniffed. “That’s a lie. You’re here for Nipper.” He glanced at the window. The pigeon was due home any minute.

  Dorothy laughed and bounced the weightless ball off Palmer’s forehead. “Stop me,” she growled, scooping up the ball, and suddenly she was leaping into him, over him, her knees in his chest, jamming the ball into the four-and-a-half-foot-high basket and shrieking, “In your nose, out your toes!”

  She laughed and bounced the ball off his nose. When he got over the shock, Palmer joined her, the two of them flinging the ball at each other and cackling like a pair of chickens.

  Palmer wasn’t surprised to find Dorothy in his room. Since he had told her about Nipper, she had come over often. His mother, thrilled that Dorothy was back in his life, received her like a daughter.

  As for the Beans Boys, as they sometimes called themselves, by spring they had tired of tormenting Dorothy and pretty much ignored her. Still, she did not come over when they were around. And whenever she saw Palmer with them at school, she acted as if she did not know him. Palmer sensed that she was doing this for his sake.

  Dorothy sat on the edge of Palmer’s homework desk.

  “So, how was the big party, Snots?” she said with a sneer.

  Palmer shrugged. “Okay.”

  “What gross stuff did you do, you and your best friends? Did you eat a dead muskrat, Snots?”

  “Not really. And don’t call me Snots.”

  “Why not? That’s your name—Snots—isn’t it, Snots?”

  When Dorothy talked this way, Palmer could not always tell if she was serious. “It’s just my gang name.”

  “I sure am sorry I’m not in the gang,” Dorothy said. “Look at all the great stuff I’m missing. No neat name for me. No dead muskrats. No torturing people on the way home from school. No making mothers scream. No Treatment on my birthday.” She rolled up her sleeve. She put on a pouty face. “Look at that, Snots, not one bruise. I want a black-and-blue arm. I want to have to do everything with one hand. I want some pain.”

  Palmer’s middle knuckle rose from his fist. He came at her with a wicked grin. “Okay—”

  Dorothy screamed and hopped from the desk. They reeled about the room, she screaming, he laughing, and it wasn’t until they quieted down that they heard the tapping.

  “Nipper!”

  Nipper was let in, and as usual went straight to the top of Palmer’s head. This brought a complaint from Dorothy. “He never stands on my head. I want him to stand on my head.”

  “Hold still,” said Palmer. He leaned in toward Dorothy until their foreheads were touching. “Go ahead, Nipper, go to Dorothy.” Nipper would not move from his perch.

  Dorothy stomped her foot. “Phooey.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Palmer excitedly. He transferred Nipper to the basket rim, left the room and returned a minute later. “Nipper has a thing about ears,” he said. “Especially if there’s something in your ear. One day I had an earache and I had one of these in my ear.” He held up a small wad of cotton. “He kept pulling it out.”

  Dorothy took the cotton wad and pressed it into her left ear. “Yoo-hoo, Nipper,” she called, “look what’s in my ear.” She stood in the middle o
f the room with her left ear to the rim. Without delay Nipper flew to her head, bent down and plucked out the wad. He flew back to the rim and let the wad fall through the net.

  Palmer and Dorothy cheered: “Two!”

  Palmer scooped up the foam ball, slam-dunked it and thrust his chin at Nipper. “In your face, bird.”

  Nipper nodded and pecked him on the nose. Dorothy cracked up.

  They were laughing and playing ball when Palmer, letting fly a long shot from beyond the bed, said, “Do you like my father?”

  Dorothy watched the ball bounce off the door. “What kind of question is that?”

  “Do you?”

  “Sure, why?”

  “Do you think he’s nice?”

  “Yeah, don’t you?”

  Palmer thought for a moment. “Yeah, he is. I guess that’s the problem.”

  Dorothy rolled her eyes. “You’re talking goofy. What problem?”

  “The golden bird.”

  Dorothy threw the ball at him. “Will you please make some sense.”

  Palmer looked across the room at Dorothy. She was back on his homework desk. Brown hair funneled into a ponytail by a plain rubber band. Pale blue T-shirt. Jeans. Black-and-white sneakers swinging above the floor. Same old across-the-street Dorothy he had known all his life.

  And yet, somehow, not the same old Dorothy. Though she looked the same as always, Palmer had been seeing something else in her lately. Whatever it was, it registered not in his eyes but in his feelings, and was most clearly known to him by its absence in the company of anyone but her. It made him feel floating.

  The previous summer Palmer’s mother had taken him to the outdoor Y pool for swimming lessons. The first lesson was floating. The instructor told him to just throw back his head, bring up his feet and allow himself to lie on his back on the water. This made no sense to Palmer. All of his life’s experience told him that if he left his feet, he would fall, or in the case of water, sink.

  “Relax,” the instructor kept saying. “Trust the water. It will hold you up.”

  But Palmer could not trust the water. For many days he could not trust it. And then, with the instructor promising not to let him sink, he tried. With the instructor’s hand on the small of his back, he tilted back, back until he felt water on his neck, on his ears. The instructor’s hand pushed gently upward, Palmer’s feet left the floor of the pool…

  “Lie back…relax,” said the instructor. “Pretend it’s your bed. Trust it.”

  He lay back, he tried to trust. He could see nothing but the instructor’s face and, beyond, the vast blue sky. And then the instructor’s face was gone, his hand was gone, and his voice was saying, “You’re floating.”

  Palmer got the same feeling with Dorothy. He knew that he could let go, and she would hold him up.

  Tears filled his eyes. He let go. “I don’t want to be a wringer. But everybody else is a wringer when they’re ten, and I’m going to be ten in seventy-one days, and then I’m going to have to be a wringer too but I don’t want to. So what kind of a kid am I? Everybody wants to kill pigeons but me. What’s the matter with me?”

  He said it all. He said things he had been thinking and feeling for years. He said things he didn’t even know he had been thinking until he heard them come out of his mouth. He told her how he hated the golden bird, the trophy his father had won one year for shooting the most pigeons. He told her it confused him. How could one person be both a shooter of pigeons and a loving father?

  He apologized for joining in on the treestumping and for calling her names. “You don’t really look like a fish,” he said.

  “Oh thank you,” she said.

  He apologized for not inviting her to his last birthday party. He apologized for the muskrat carcass.

  “My mother was shaking,” she said.

  He told her about Beans’s party and the night they came for him in his bed and led him to the railroad station and the boxes of birds. He told her about the time Nipper flew overhead and was seen by the guys and how scary it was to be the only person in town with a pigeon and about his dreams at night. He told her that sometimes he wished he had not joined up with the guys after all, and he told her again and again that he did not, he really did not want to be a wringer.

  Dorothy hopped down from the desk. She walked across the room and stood before Palmer and looked straight into his eyes. “Then don’t,” she said. She made it sound so simple.

  Palmer snickered. He got up from the bed, kicked the ball around. “Yeah, don’t. Easy for you to say, you’re not a boy. You didn’t grow up all your life scared to be ten.”

  “I have an idea,” said Dorothy brightly. “Why don’t you just skip ten and go right to eleven? Or tell everybody your birth certificate was wrong and you just found out you’re really twenty-one.”

  Palmer stomped his foot, sending Nipper in a flutter from the basket rim. “It’s not funny!”

  Dorothy shrugged. “Well, you didn’t like my serious answer—if you don’t want to be a wringer, don’t be a wringer.” She sat on the bed.

  Palmer shrieked, “I can’t not be a wringer!”

  Nipper flew to the bedstead. “Everybody is a wringer. You have to be a wringer. That’s how it always was. You don’t know, you’re a girl. What do you think”—he sneered into her face—“I can be the only boy in the history of the town who was ever not a wringer? And what makes you think”—he poked his finger at her—“what makes you think Beans would ever let me get away with it? They would drag me out of this bed and out to the park. They would wring my neck.”

  From her seat on the bed, Dorothy stared at the poking finger. She took hold of it and pulled it, drawing Palmer closer until his face was inches from hers. At that point she grabbed his earlobes and pulled him closer still. She smiled broadly. She kissed the end of his nose and laughed.

  Palmer froze for a moment, stunned, then crumpled into laughter himself. They laughed and played games with Nipper for the rest of the afternoon.

  25

  For much of his life Palmer LaRue had felt he was standing at the edge of a black, bottomless hole. On the fifty-ninth day before his tenth birthday, he fell in.

  Daffodils clustered like bugle bands in front yards as the Beans Boys left school behind on a sunny, cloudless day. It was a day in which everything seemed possible, the only problem being to make a choice. Beans wanted to head for the creek to hunt salamanders. Mutto craved a stone fight. Henry felt like baseball. And Palmer, he couldn’t decide, or rather, he didn’t want to decide. He simply wanted to enjoy: the bright spring day, the company of his friends. There was nothing he wanted to do—he simply wanted to be. But this was not something he could explain to himself, much less to the guys.

  They came to the corner of Maple and Kane and stopped. A decision had to be made which way to go. Palmer was about to throw his vote to baseball when suddenly the sunlight was briefly snipped, as if a page had been turned in front of a lightbulb. This was followed in turn by a flapping sound, the feel of a pair of four-toed feet in his hair, and the deep-throated treble of a familiar voice. Palmer’s mind riffled through a thousand answers to account for all this, but only one made sense: Nipper had just landed on his head.

  Three mouths gaped open; six eyes, round as tiny planets, stared. Suddenly Beans’s face became a red, shrieking mask: “PIGEON!” Hands reached, wings flapped, the four-toed feet were gone from his head.

  Knowing at once how he must act, Palmer looked up at the fleeing bird. “Hey, come here!” he called, reaching up, running after it. “Hey, bird, get down here!”

  The others too were running, reaching, shouting. They gave chase for a full block until the gray flyer vanished over the rooftops.

  As they slowed to a walk, Palmer began to talk. “Man, did you see that? Do you believe it? Where did that thing come from? I thought I was gonna have a heart attack. You sure it was a pigeon? What would a pigeon be doing around here? Maybe it was a crow. It kinda looked like a crow to
me.”

  “It was a pigeon,” said Beans. His voice was not friendly.

  Palmer did not return Beans’s stare. “Really?” He pretended to scan the skies. “If that thing ever comes near me again”—he made a chopping motion—“I’ll whack it.” He bent down and showed the top of his head to the others. He ruffled his hair. “Did it poop on my head?”

  No one answered. He straightened up. He dared not look at them. They walked in silence. He felt their eyes. His heart was thumping.

  “The bird is yours.” Beans’s voice, from behind. Palmer turned. They had stopped ten steps ago. It felt like ten miles.

  Palmer spread his arms, he crouched as if to leap from a high place. “What?”

  Mutto pointed. “It’s yours, ain’t it? That’s why it landed on your head.”

  “And that one we saw fly over us that time on your street,” said Beans.

  “Yeah!” croaked Mutto.

  Palmer laughed. “You’re crazy! Why would I have a pigeon? I hate pigeons. I’m gonna be a wringer. I’m gonna wring their necks. I’m gonna whack ’em.” An empty soda can was lying in the gutter. He stomped on it with all his might, stomped again and again, crushed it, flattened it. He picked it up and dashed it to the sidewalk and stomped on it some more. “Whack ’em! Whack ’em! I hate pigeons! I hate ’em all!” He looked up at the staring, glaring eyes. He clenched his fists, he screamed: “I’m gonna be the best wringer there ever was!”

  26

  An hour later in his room with Dorothy, Palmer was still jumpy. He paced back and forth, telling Dorothy what had happened. The more agitated he became, the faster he paced. Nipper observed from a booktop, swinging his head as if watching a Ping-Pong match. The bird had been waiting at the window, as usual, when Palmer returned home.