“Stunt pigeon!” someone called out.
Everyone laughed.
The man stared sternly. “Get your giggles over with now. There’ll be no giggles on the seven of August. No horsing around. Anybody that’s not all business”—he wagged his thumb—“you’re outta here. Understand?”
Capped heads nodded.
“Okay, now. The shooter’s done. You’re a team of three. One of you’s gone for the box. The other two—zip—onto the field. What are you gonna find? One of three things. You’re either gonna find five dead birds, you’re gonna find five floppers—that’s what I call the wounded—or you’re gonna find—and this’ll be most cases—a combination of the above. We got some sorry shooters in this town, and we got some real deadeyes, but most of ’em are in between.”
He raised a finger. “Back up a minute. If wounded birds are floppers, what do you call dead birds?” He looked over the group, his eyes were twinkling.
Someone up front said, “Croakers?”
The wringmaster laughed. “Trick question, son. The answer is dead. Dead is dead. There’s no other word for it.” He ruffled the kid’s hair. “All right…you’re on the field. Each of you heads for a bird—and not the same bird. No fighting over who gets which bird. This ain’t an Easter egg hunt.”
Giggles.
“All right. You come to your bird. If it’s dead, fine. If it ain’t dead, also fine. Whichever, you snatch it up and get the next one. Between the two of you you’re coming back with five birds. Here’s where you check ’em out. You see one that’s not dead”—he swung his head slowly, looking at every face—“you wring its neck.”
Palmer heard one stifled squeak; all else was silence.
The man held the gray thing above his head. “One hand here, one hand here, and twist in opposite directions. You do it hard, you do it quick. We’re not here to torture these animals. We’re here to kill them humanely. Hard and quick. That’s all it takes. Into a trash bag. Go to the back of the line. Next time you’re up, somebody else gets the box. Keep rotating. Everybody gets a chance. What’s the magic word?”
“Fast!”
He looked them over. “Any questions?”
A voice came out of the crowd. “How will we know if it’s dead or not?”
Somebody yipped, “Take its pulse!”
The man’s glare cut off the laughter.
The trees were silent.
“You’ll know,” said the man.
The sky was empty.
The man clapped. “All right, line up. This here’s a flopper.” He held up the gray stuffed sock. “I want each one of you to step forward, wring it like I showed, and get outta here. I’ll see you August seven. Six A.M. sharp. Let’s go.”
The crowd formed a line. Palmer had notions of drifting away, but Beans and Mutto were herding him their way.
As he waited in line, Palmer felt himself to be four years old again, at his first Family Fest, with the wounded, loppysided pigeon coming toward him and the gray, sour smell of the gunsmoke growing stronger with every breath.
He took his eyes from the field and fixed them on the pink-hatted wringmaster. He noticed how intently the man stared into the face of each kid who stepped up and took the sock. It seemed that the man was on the lookout for pretenders, for kids who didn’t really want to be there, for wimps.
And if the man detected a wimp, what would he do? Would he cry out, “Ah-hah!” and send the kid away to the jeers of the crowd? Would the kid ever be able to show his face in this town again?
Ahead of him, Beans, then Mutto, wrung the sock. Like most of the kids, they really got into it, grunting with the effort. And now the man was holding it out to Palmer. Palmer accepted it.
Beans’s voice came from nearby. “Wring it, Snots.”
Palmer could feel the man’s eyes on him. He wondered how his face looked. Would the man say, “Ah-hah!”?
Palmer had half expected the sock to sprout pink feet and glossy feathers. It did not. He wanted to call out to all the wringers-in-training: Hey, who are they trying to kid? This is no pigeon. You want to know what a real pigeon feels like—ask me. This is nothing but a sock.
“Let’s go, son,” said the man. “Hard and quick.”
Palmer wrung its neck, hard and quick. He dashed it to the ground at the man’s feet and marched off.
The man said nothing.
29
Palmer caught the weightless, foamy basketball. He turned it in his hands to look at Nipper’s name in broad marker strokes. He tossed the ball back to Dorothy. Nipper chuckled down at them from a curtain rod.
“If it was only a sock,” said Dorothy, “why do you keep worrying about it?”
Palmer got up and paced back and forth. “I’m worrying because in thirteen days I’m going to be ten. And twenty-eight days after that is Family Fest. And then it won’t be a sock anymore.”
No one spoke for a while. Nipper flew to the basket rim. Palmer paced.
At last Dorothy said, “Tell them.”
Palmer looked at her. “Huh?”
“Tell them.”
“Tell them what?”
“You don’t want to be a wringer. You’re not going to be a wringer.”
Palmer stared. “Tell who?”
Dorothy stared back. Suddenly a huge grin broke across her face, she threw out her arms. “Everybody!”
Palmer glared at her. He sneered, “Yeah, right.”
Dorothy jumped down from her usual perch on Palmer’s desk. “Okay then,” she said, “how about if I tell them?” She bolted for the window. She threw up the screen, leaned out over the porch roof and yelled, “Hey, everybody, I have an announcement!”
Palmer yanked her back into the room and slammed down the screen. He stood redfaced, fuming. Dorothy wiggled and giggled out of his grasp and went to play with Nipper. Palmer shut the window and locked it. He pulled down the shade. But he could not shut out the cold, wet feeling that he had just peeked into his future.
When he turned back to Dorothy, he found her wearing an impish grin. “So,” she said, “are you going to invite me to your birthday party this year?”
Palmer sagged. He had been dreading this. So far his social life had been neatly divided into two separate relationships: one with Dorothy, one with the guys. Dorothy herself helped keep it that way by avoiding him whenever the guys were around.
Last year, except for his mother’s complaint, it had been fairly easy not to invite Dorothy. This year was hugely different. Dorothy was now his best friend, the only person in the world with whom he shared Nipper. How could he not invite her?
And how could he not invite the guys?
“Well?” said Dorothy.
“Maybe I won’t even have a party,” he said.
But he knew he would. Because the guys were already talking about it. They were expecting it. And because his strategy for surviving the summer was simply this: stay on their good side.
It was becoming harder and harder to do, for in these recent weeks Palmer had come to realize that, with the possible exception of Henry, the guys whose company he had once craved he now feared. If they ever found out for sure that he was a traitor, Farquar’s Treatment would feel like baby’s play compared to what they could do. He imagined them torturing him until he led them to his forbidden pet. At that point Nipper was as good as dead.
So when his mother at dinner one day said, “Do you want a party this year?” Palmer’s answer was yes.
After a long pause, his mother said, “Okay, but you have to invite Dorothy too.”
Palmer just shrugged and nodded. Sometimes the effort of getting through each day left him feeling heavy and dopey by dinnertime. He wished he could just go to bed and not wake up until September.
And then his mother, sprinkling salt on a baked potato, said ever so casually, “You don’t happen to know anyone looking for a lost cat, do you?”
Instantly Palmer was alert. “No, why?”
“Oh,” she said
, “I’ve noticed one around the last few days.”
Did a spider just walk across his shoulders?
“Around where?”
“Backyard. Around the side. That was yesterday. Today I found it inside, on the stairway.”
Palmer’s heart pounded in his chest. “What color?”
“Yellow,” she said, reaching for the pepper.
She said more but he was not hearing. He was racing upstairs, bursting into his room, finding Nipper healthy and plump and waddling across the floor to meet him. He fell to his knees and pounded his fist again and again into his thigh.
30
Although she insisted that she would be there right up to the last minute, Dorothy did not come to Palmer’s birthday party. Neither did his mother. “I’ll leave your father to deal with your hoodlum friends this year,” she said, and went off shopping.
The guys were thrilled. They had learned about the Sharpshooter Award, and to them Palmer’s father was as big a hero as a battlefield general. They kept running back to the den to look at and touch the trophy.
They flung questions:
“Is it real gold, Mr. LaRue?”
“How many pigeons did you shoot?”
“Can we see your gun?”
At the dining room table Beans gave a speech about himself, about his hatred of pigeons and how many necks he intended to wring. He called to Palmer’s father, who was in the kitchen planting candles in the cake. “I bet you hate them dirty birds even more than me, don’t you, Mr. LaRue?”
Palmer’s father came to the doorway. He looked directly at Beans. He smiled. “No,” he said, “I don’t hate pigeons. Never did.” He returned to the cake.
The empty look on Beans’s face indicated that the answer had reached his ears, but no farther. He called, “You were a wringer, right, Mr. LaRue?”
“I was.”
“And now Snots is too, huh? How about that?”
The reply from the kitchen came after a long pause. “Palmer decides for himself. It’s up to him.”
Palmer gaped at the doorway as Beans thumped his fist on the table and growled, “Where’s the grub?”
Like everyone else, Palmer ate his ice cream and cake, but he wasn’t hungry. He opened his presents but did not enjoy them. On this day that he had dreaded for so long, he had no appetite for anything.
As everyone belted out “Happy Birthday,” Palmer stared at the man marching in with the cake and tried to imagine him pulling the trigger again and again as gray-feathered Nippers fell from the sky. The cake was placed in front of him, and Palmer found that he could neither move nor breathe. The heat from the ten tiny fires burned his face. In the plump, shimmering shapes of the candle flames he saw the ghosts of ten pigeons. “Blow ’em out!” someone squawked.
Palmer squeezed his eyes shut and blew them out.
Outside after the party, they went in search of Farquar. When Palmer recalled last year’s Treatment, he could hardly believe his own memory: pride, honor, little kids lining up to touch his devastated arm. True, last year he felt the same terror that he felt now, but he knew that after Farquar’s ten knuckles this year, no pride, no honor awaited him. Only pain and uselessness.
To his great relief, they could not find Farquar.
At dinnertime the boys split up, and Palmer returned home alone. He fed and played with Nipper. He did not feed himself. He received a happy birthday phone call from Dorothy.
Dusk was falling outside when a twinge of hunger sent him to the kitchen. He found the leftover half cake covered and sitting atop the refrigerator. He got it down. He set it on the table. He lifted the cover—and gasped aloud. Finger-lettered in the chocolate icing along the side of the two-layer cake was a single word:
TONIGHT
31
Henry.
Thinking back, Palmer recalled that as the gang was leaving the house that afternoon, Henry had rushed back in, claiming he had forgotten something.
Henry.
Whose streak, unlike Beans’s, was meek, not mean.
Who ran with Beans and Mutto. Who did what they did. But was different.
Who Palmer had seen one day pulling his little sister around the block in a wagon.
Henry had done it. Fingered the word into the icing.
Tonight.
It was a warning. Something was going to happen tonight. Something not good.
But what?
As he smeared over the word with a dinner knife, Palmer thought about it. The only place he would be at night would be in his room, in bed. If something bad were going to happen to him, that’s where it would have to be.
It must have something to do with Beans and Mutto. Or the cat. The cat had already been slipped into the house. Maybe this time—tonight—they would slip themselves in. They had already done so once. And lately, Beans especially had taken an interest in Palmer’s room. Palmer, acting put out with his parents, kept insisting he was not allowed to have visitors upstairs. This, however, had not prevented Beans from climbing the stairs to the bathroom no fewer than three times during the party.
Palmer considered phoning Henry to ask him directly, but that felt risky. Left to his best guess, he decided the warning meant that he was to have visitors that night. Considering the guys’ recent suspicions, it did not take a genius to figure out that the purpose of the visit had to do with a certain feathered roommate.
He went upstairs to feed Nipper, who had returned from his daily wanderings. While the pigeon pecked at nacho pieces, Palmer sat on the bed to think the whole thing through. It occurred to him that he could close and lock his window and thus keep them out. It was a simple solution, but it also created its own problems. The guys might keep banging on the window all night until Palmer answered. Foiled at Palmer’s window, they might get in other ways, other windows. They might wake up his parents. And most important, with the window closed on a hot summer night and no one answering their taps on the pane, they might well become more suspicious than ever.
No, the window had to stay open. He had to let them in. And that meant, of course, that Nipper could not be in the room. Neither could Palmer. He thought about it. They would go downstairs. They would hide in the dark. He did not think the guys would search the whole house. The target was his bedroom.
And what could he say next day when Beans asked him where he was last night? He could say it was too hot in his room so he slept downstairs on the sofa. Or, even better, he stayed overnight at relatives’.
The moon was beaming outside his window when a happy thought came to him: this whole thing could turn in his favor. Once they saw for themselves that there was no pigeon or evidence of a pigeon, they might drop their suspicions. They might believe him. They might back off. So maybe, crazy as it sounded, it was good that they were coming.
Palmer had no trouble staying awake in the dark. He was too nervous to sleep. At last he heard his parents’ footsteps coming up the stairs. Ten minutes later the bright crack under his bedroom door went dark.
He waited until he thought they were asleep. He turned on the flashlight he had brought up for this night. Nipper was up at his usual spot on the closet shelf. When the light beam struck, the eye facing Palmer went from buttonhole slit to orange button; otherwise the bird did not move. This was normal behavior, Palmer knew. Nipper would be easy to handle. When he settled down to roost, he went into a dopey trance that firecrackers could not disturb.
Palmer stood on a chair and, cupping his hands, gently lifted his forbidden pet from the shelf. Holding both pigeon and flashlight was tricky, but Palmer managed to tiptoe downstairs without waking up the house. At first he sat on the sofa, with Nipper in his lap. Still feeling unsafe, he went behind the sofa. He turned off the flashlight.
In the utter darkness he felt himself to be nothing but ears and fingertips. He could feel Nipper’s heartbeat, putt-putting away behind the toothpick ribs like a tiny motor scooter. He could feel the cold, golden gaze of the trophy pigeon two rooms away. The si
lence of the house at night was not total. Somewhere a clock was ticking. Cricks and creaks came from nearby and distant quarters, as if the house were twitching in a sleep of its own.
Palmer tried to aim his hearing upstairs. He held his breath as long as he could, listening. Was that a window screen opening? A footstep? He pictured them in his room, shadows, dark upon dark, Beans’s penlight like a starflake moving in the darkness, pointing at the bed—He’s not here!—pointing under the bed, shining on the bookcase, the basket rim, the desk, the closet…the closet shelf…the empty closet shelf…the closet…oh no!…the closet floor…the Honey Crunchers! He had forgotten to bring them downstairs. Would they see them? Would they figure the cereal was Palmer’s, for snacking? Or would they guess the real reason? He thought of going up—because maybe they were not there—racing up the stairs, grabbing the cereal box, racing back down. Ten seconds was all he needed. He could do it. But what if they were there? What if that creak he just heard…
He stayed put. He crouched and cringed behind the sofa as if neither furniture nor darkness were enough to hide him. He stayed through a thousand tocks of the unseen clock, and another thousand, and the bonging of his heart. And only when he heard, from behind the house, two sharp, quick yelps, did he know for absolutely sure that they had been there.
And even then he waited for another thousand tocks before he allowed himself a deep breath and, at last, sleep.
32
He awoke to Nipper pecking at his ear. And just in time. His father, earliest bird in the house, was coming down the stairs. He scooped up his pigeon and crouched behind the sofa. When his father passed into the kitchen, he dashed up the steps and into his room.
Glancing around, he saw no evidence of night visitors. The window screen was firmly shut. Everything was in its place.
Except one thing, as he soon found out.
He hadn’t even had breakfast yet when the doorbell rang. As soon as he opened the door he found himself facing the Nerf basketball. Curling around it were Beans’s fingers.