His size was the key to her brilliant plan. She dumped him into the burlap sack, one leg in, one leg out, told him to hang on and took off with the “Go!” Raymond was so tiny it was as if she was racing alone. He just hung on to the finish line. The officials conferred. They decided she’d done nothing against the rules and had no choice but to declare her—and Raymond—the winners. “Miss Boo Boo Dunbar!” came out of the loudspeakers, and that’s how she replayed it to me on the concrete bench. The prize was a picnic basket full of Tastykake pies.
“I gave him the lemon,” she said. “I hated lemon.” She rubbed her massive stomach. “You know where the rest went.”
The brewery whistle announced lunchtime. As the women headed back inside…
“Day I’m out, what I’m bringin’?”
“Sweet potato pie!”
Many of the women asked if I was going to the fireworks that night. The sound in their voices, the looks in their eyes, told me the Fourth was not after all just another day to them.
—
My band of Jailbirds headed for the park, where every grill and picnic table was occupied. Blankets and bare feet and deviled eggs wherever you looked. Face painting. Sack race. Baby-crawl race. Uncle Sam on stilts. Barbershop singers at the band shell. Talent show.
No doubt people thought they were celebrating the 183rd birthday of the USA. They were wrong. The parades across the country, the fireworks, the picnics, the speeches—it was all really a celebration of Reggie Weinstein’s stupendous day at Bandstand. We roamed from band shell to zoo and everywhere heard the cries:
“Reggie!”
“I saw you yesterday!”
“Reggie!”
Thanks to our famous friend, we were all offered picnic food from a hundred blankets and tables. Every other minute another little kid asked for the celebrity’s autograph.
We happened to stop by the talent show as some kid was playing the clarinet. Reggie jabbed me. “Hey—that’s him.”
“Huh?” I said. “Who?”
“Him. The guy that likes you. From outside the jail that day.”
The boy was finishing his performance and taking the instrument away from his face, and—yes—it was the Roadmaster bike kid. He took a quick bow and waved and trotted off the stage as the audience applauded.
I jabbed her back. “You’re crazy. He doesn’t like me.”
“He just waved at you,” she crooned.
I corrected her. “He waved at everybody.”
To my relief the focus quickly returned where it belonged:
“It’s Reggie Weinstein!”
“Hi, Reggie!”
“Hi, Reggie!”
At least a hundred girls asked her what it had been like to dance with Tommy D. It got so routine, the rest of us began to answer for her, replying with her own dismissive shrug and her own words: “No big deal.”
After the talent show a Philadelphia Mummers Parade string band came onto the stage. And then the Hancock County Memorial Band played into the dusk and the little kids started yelling, “Fireworks!”
Few waits in the world are as long as the wait for nightfall on the Fourth of July. The population of Two Mills gathered on the banks beyond the American Legion baseball field. On the sandy infield, pyro tubes stuck out like stubble on a giant’s chin. An ambulance rolled in beyond the backstop. Then a fire truck. Screaming children ran amok while a thousand grown-up eyes measured the sky for the perfect pitch of darkness. Without warning came a deep, concussive thump and a whistling into the night, a plasticky crinkle above the trees—“There!”…“There!”—and red, white and blue pearls, pulpy as pomegranate seeds, canopied over the wonder-struck faces and spilled down over the park.
Thousands of eyes turned upward, marveling. I wondered if, somewhere in the multitude, two of them belonged to Eloda Pupko’s sister.
As the night exploded, I thought of the inmates. I wondered if they could hear the thunder. I imagined leading them out of their cells and up a ladder to the top of the wall, where they would sit, their legs dangling over the side, their faces alit in wonder and joy.
The finale pounded the skies with the violence of a battleship bombardment. The end was sudden, unexpected. Dazed, the town waited for more. “Is that it?” In time the headlights of the ambulance went on. The cloud of cordite drifted up from the infield. Reluctantly we began to pick ourselves up from the ground and make our ways home.
I parted with the girls at the baby wading pool and headed for the railroad tracks. In those days it was not unusual for kids to take that route out of the park, even in the dark. I had done so many times.
I had just begun my trek along the tracks when I heard: “Cammie!”
37
It was the Roadmaster kid, jogging up behind me. He carried what looked like a miniature black suitcase. Then I remembered: clarinet.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” I said.
“Cool fireworks, huh?”
“Yeah.”
After the way I had brutalized little Benny House at home plate the last time I’d seen this kid, I was surprised he wanted to talk to me. He wore his usual Phillies baseball cap.
Lately I’d been wanting to get one for myself. Now I decided I would not. We walked side by side on the railroad bed. We left the streetlights behind. Soon I could not see him.
“Better than the fireworks where I came from,” he said.
Even unsociable me knew I was now supposed to ask him: And where was that? But I said nothing.
“I’m from Punxsutawney,” he said.
Goofy name for a town, I thought.
Though darkness made my eyes useless, there was plenty to hear. Up and down the tracks voices of all ages filled the moonless night as families streamed home from their holiday at the park. A hundred footfalls on the railway cinders gave the sound of a cement truck’s rolling crunch.
I could feel him staring at me, feel him wishing I would speak.
Finally he said, overpronouncing it: “Punxsutawney?” With a question mark.
“So?” I said.
“Groundhog?” he said.
“Huh?” I said.
And then he told me. About Punxsutawney Phil the groundhog and how the whole world turns to the coal country of Pennsylvania every February second to find out if Punxsutawney Phil will see his shadow or not so the world will know if there’s going to be another six weeks of winter. That Punxsutawney. I had heard about the groundhog-and-his-shadow thing, but I’d thought it was a fable or some such.
He laughed, for no good reason that I could tell. “So since I came down here, when I tell people I’m from Punxsutawney, lots of times they say, ‘You don’t look like a groundhog.’ ” He laughed again. He was really cracking himself up. Maybe you should’ve told jokes for your talent. I thought of saying it, but didn’t.
I figured his coming from another town explained a lot. Like why he was wasting his time with Cammie O’Reilly, the town curmudgeon.
“I’m Danny Lapella,” he said.
As soon as I replied—“Congratulations”—I knew how mean it sounded, but he just laughed.
“Nice to meet you, Cammie,” he said.
Something bumped my arm, went away, then came back and stayed. He’s touching me! I thought, then realized he was going for a handshake. I decided to give him a break. Our hands fumbled in the darkness and did a quick shake.
“When I saw you outside the prison that day, I never knew you lived there.” His voice had the same awestruck tone I’d heard a thousand times before. But something else annoyed me even more: he’d been asking around about me.
“Now you know,” I said.
And just like everyone else, he said, “Do you know the prisoners?”
“No prison questions,” I said.
“Okay,” he said. If he knew I was rebuking him, he wasn’t showing it. “So. Did you see me wave at you?”
Two reactions hit me at once. (1) Surprise: Reggie had been right. He j
ust waved at you. (2) Resentment: this kid had a way of catching me off guard.
“No,” I said, and decided to mess with him. “When was that?”
“At the talent show.”
“You were in it?” I said, faking interest.
“I played the clarinet.”
“That was you?”
“Sure. That was me. I waved to you afterward.”
He was becoming visible. We were approaching the dead end of George Street and its last light pole. I looked straight at him. “Why would you do that?”
He stared at me. He was stumped. “I don’t know….I just…”
“There were lots of people there,” I pointed out. “You could’ve been waving to anybody.”
He protested: “Oh no. It was you. I saw you there. Standing near the flagpole with your friends.”
I sniffed. “Sorry. Don’t remember you.”
It was fun seeing him squirm.
“Well,” he said, “did you at least like the music?”
“What music?” I said.
“The clarinet music,” he said, displaying the instrument case. Frustration was beginning to show in his voice. “Do you at least remember somebody playing the clarinet?”
“What’s a clarinet?” I said.
Right there. If he’d had any sense he would have hauled off and hit me. But I guessed Punxsutawney kids were too dumb to know they were being messed with.
All he said, his voice deflating like an inner tube meeting a nail, was “It’s a musical instrument.”
It occurred to me to finish him off by asking, Did you win? and forcing him to say, No. And then to rub it in with You mean you lost? and forcing him to say, Yes. But I didn’t. I just said, “Oh,” and let it stand there by its unfriendly self.
At that point he should have taken the hint and gone slinking off into the night. Instead he promptly recovered and launched a monologue that lasted the rest of the way. He told me about his stamp collection. His dog, Bijou. His love of lowland gorillas and Swedish meatballs and his mixed feelings about the word “misanthrope.” He told me he was going into seventh grade—“Just like you!”—and that he was nervous but excited, too.
He told me about what they did on the Fourth of July up in coal country. Kids poked holes in a tin can and attached it to a string and put glowing embers of coal in the can and then swirled the can in big circles in the night. “You should see it,” he gushed. “A hundred kids doing it at once!”
And that’s all I remember about the walk, Danny Lapella talking nonstop until suddenly he was saying, “Well—here we are.” And I looked up, and indeed there it was, the fortress, my home, looming in the night. I was surprised. And then annoyed to realize why I was surprised: I had been paying much closer attention to his prattle than I had intended.
I snipped at him. “I don’t need to be walked home, y’know. I can go anywhere I want by myself. I bike all the way to Valley Forge. I walk along the tracks at night all the time.”
“Okay,” he said, much too agreeably. “Bye.” And with a wave he was gone.
In spite of myself I just stood there. Words fell from my brain to my mouth. All I had to do was let them out: You don’t look like a groundhog. But I said nothing and went inside.
Two days later I heard he had won first prize in his talent-show age group.
A day after that I looked up the word “misanthrope.”
38
The resonance of my time with Andrew never faded. And yet, as the days before and after the Fourth went by, I did not ride my bike back to Mill Street. Why? I think I was afraid. Afraid of how much I cared. Afraid I might say or do the wrong thing—Cannonball Cammie!—and spoil the memory of that perfect day.
Then the coal came.
By 1959 all the houses in town were heated with oil or gas, not coal—except for the Big House. My father got most of the improvements he asked for from the county authorities. But oil-burning furnaces were not one of them.
Halfway down the alleyway side of the prison, before the exercise yards began, there was a pair of green wedge-shaped hatchways jutting out from the base of the stone wall. The hatches were about twenty feet apart. They were secured with the biggest padlocks I had ever seen. This was how the coal got in, the coal that kept the prison so toasty in the winter that inmates often lay about their cells in underwear. (So I was told.) Like the Quiet Room and the Christmas party and steak once every two weeks, this was my father’s doing: “It’s a penitentiary. Shivering in the cold makes you bitter, not penitent.”
So once in the summer and every month in winter, a convoy of J. Gresh coal trucks lined up down the alley from the hatchways to Marshall Street. The hatches were opened, a pair of sliding board–like chutes were lowered into the black maw and down came the coal, truckload after truckload. A guard stood by the hatches until they were padlocked once again.
On the morning in July when the coal was coming down the chutes, I opened the back door and let the full force of the noise hit me: thunder falling down a bottomless stairway. I closed the door. No yard today.
Eloda was cleaning the bathroom. I was on the living room floor playing Monopoly against myself. I didn’t know someone was at the door until I heard the knock. The roar of the coal had muffled the sound of footsteps on the stairs.
I knew it wasn’t Reggie. She never came this early. And she’d never asked to visit the women’s yard again. Her interest in the prison was now focused on the person of Marvin Edward Baker.
With a chill I wondered if it might be Danny Lapella. I hadn’t seen him since the Fourth of July night. I’d been trying not to wonder what it all meant. If I’d truly believed it was him on the other side of the door, I would have run and hidden under my bed and let Eloda answer. But the knock had the sound of a little kid’s hand, not a big kid’s.
I opened the door. It was Andrew.
He was beaming. He threw up his arms. “I’m not s’pose to come but I comed anyway!”
A shadow me left my body and scooped him up and squeezed and tickled while he howled with laughter. The skin-and-bones me said, “Hi.” I was uneasy but I wasn’t sure why. I was about to find out.
He frowned. “What’s that noise?”
“Coal.”
“We get coal,” he said—then suddenly he was looking past me, wonder-struck. He pointed. “Is that a crimimal?”
I turned. Eloda was standing by the dining room table, gawking back.
“No,” I told him. I cupped his little shoulder. “She’s a trustee. Now what—”
He broke from me and started darting about the apartment. “I wanna see crimimals!”
Eloda had disappeared.
I caught up to Andrew in the kitchen. He was looking out the back window. He pointed. “What’s that?” he said.
It was before ten. The women were not out yet. “It’s the exercise yard,” I told him.
He brightened. “Jumpin’ jacks!” He did a few.
“Right,” I said. “Keep everybody in good shape.”
I pulled him away. He broke back to the window. “Where are they?”
“Too early,” I told him, and suddenly he was out the back door. I caught him at the bottom of the steps. I hauled him back up, squirming and whining.
Eloda was waiting in the kitchen. “He goes,” she said. She pointed to the front door. “Out.” Her face, her voice said, Don’t mess with me.
Andrew froze in mid-whine. Even then I didn’t trust him to go on his own. I carried him to the door. I was on the landing watching him head down the stairs when suddenly he turned and raced back up. I slammed the door shut behind me and got set to block him, but it wasn’t the exercise yard he wanted; it was me. He plowed into me and gave me the kind of wraparound squeeze I’d seen him give his mother that day. Before I could return the hug, he raced down to Reception and out to the street.
When I opened the door, Eloda was right there.
“Shut the door,” she said.
I shut the d
oor. I expected her to step back. She did not. For the first time, I could count the freckles under her eyes and across her nose. I could smell the dustrag in her hand. Lemony. Coal was roaring down the chutes.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she said.
I didn’t understand the question.
“You don’t do that.”
“Do what?” I said. And recalled my vague uneasiness when Andrew arrived.
“Bring little children in here. A place like this.”
“Eloda,” I said, “I didn’t bring him. He just—”
“You don’t talk back. You listen.”
Not only was defense useless, it suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t even want to defend myself. Circumstance had delivered to me the very thing I’d wished for. She was scolding me.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“Never again.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Expose a child to this.”
“No, ma’am.”
“And me”—she flapped her hand behind her, toward the yard—“us. We are not on display. We are not a freak show.”
“No, ma’am.”
She took my face in her hand.
“Do you hear me?”
I was shaking. “Yes, ma’am.”
She squeezed my face till my mouth was fish-lipped. “You will straighten up and fly right. You hear?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She squeezed harder. The hurt both startled and thrilled me. She yelled in my face: “Camille?”
The coal was roaring. I yelled back: “Yes, Mother!”
We stood gaping at each other, both of us astonished at what I’d just said, petrified in a suddenly empty bucket of sound: the coal had stopped falling. I broke first. I left her there, facing the door as I ran to my room.
39
After that we avoided each other like a pair of house cats. If I was in the living room, Eloda was in the laundry room. When she was in the kitchen, I was anywhere else. Normally, when the great lunchtime whistle sounded, I ran up from the women’s yard and met Eloda at the kitchen table. Out of habit I did so on the first day after Andrew’s surprise visit. As I entered the back door, I glimpsed blue denim fleeing the kitchen. On the table were a half-drunk glass of ice water, crumbs, and an unused napkin—a household misdemeanor that would never happen with the Eloda I knew. From then on, at the whistle, I dawdled in the yard, kicking cigarette butts, before slowly—and noisily—mounting the outer stairs. I always found the kitchen empty and spotless.