by Paul Zindel
In front of Lorraine's house a very earthly presence made itself known to us.
“Get in here, Lorraine,” her mother brayed from the front door. Now I don't want to be rude or anything, and in fact Lorraine and I decided we're not going to talk about parents a whole lot in this epic at all, but I'd rather be attacked by an alien from outer space than by Mrs. Jensen. I gave Lorraine's hand an extra squeeze and watched her disappear inside her house while Mrs. Jensen lingered a moment longer giving me what looked like the evil eye.
“Good-bye, John,” Mrs. Jensen instructed in case I didn't know what to do.
Actually I didn't mind. Lorraine and I lately have begun to really understand our parents, so we don't ridicule them all that much anymore or pin the rap on them for everything that goes wrong. For the most part they leave us alone now that we've mellowed as high-school sophomores. The facts are still about the same though. Lorraine's mother is still a widow and a practical nurse who steals things like Lipton Cup·a·Soup and skinless sardines from houses where she works, and my mother, who is formally known as Mrs. Conlan, is informally known by me as the Old Lady and she's still an antiseptic freak who dashes around the house with a spray can of Lysol and tries occasionally to encase me in vinyl. I think that's about all the hereditary facts you've got to know or be reminded of except for the fact that my father is continuing his performance as a prime candidate for a heart attack working at the New York Coffee Exchange. His conversation is still so stimulating I continue to call him Bore. But there has been some change. All our parents are reading adult self-help books. Lorraine told me her mother's into transactional analysis now. I hope she's printed up her own T-shirt that says I DESERVE LOVE on the front and something like HONK FOR A KISS on the back. My mother, the Old Lady, is reading some book which has to do with her right to say “no” without feeling guilty whenever she gets an urge to run outside and lemon Pledge the sidewalk. And my father is rereading How to Hate Vodka, which is a book that shows Russian natives cooking potatoes, with worms and flies falling into the vats. But what I really think is terrific is that our parents understand Lorraine and me much better now that they realize they're just as much in transition as we are. It really takes the heat off us now that our parents, our teachers, and everybody knows that life is all adolescence.
And I suppose I might as well take the time now to let you know when Lorraine wrote that we weren't a romantic item, it wasn't because I didn't like Lorraine. She finally lost a few pounds and wears a little mascara on her pretty green eyes so she looks like a young Shirley MacLaine on diet pills. She thinks I didn't notice that her charms were growing, but let me tell you that her charms are growing so big that all the boys in the sophomore class have noticed them. She's not exactly Dolly Parton or Raquel Welch yet, but I'd say she's on her way.
That night at the dinner table the Old Lady said to me, “You're very quiet tonight, John.”
“Yes,” I agreed.
“What's the matter?” Bore wanted to know.
“I'm sorry. Fm tired,” I admitted and simply excused myself from the table.
“I'm worried about you,” the Old Lady said. “You look a little jittery.”
“I'm okay, Mom,” I said. Then I took my plate out to the kitchen. Ever since the Pigman died and I started carrying my own dirty dishes out to the kitchen, I can't tell you how happy that makes my parents. If you ever want to really shock your parents, just start carrying your dirty dishes out to the sink. And if you really want them to freak out, wash your own dishes. They'll go nuts. While I was out there I decided to get a breath of fresh air and have a cigarette. So I took the kitchen garbage bag out with me. I found that saved me a lot of anguish and seemed to bring exceptional ecstasy to the Old Lady and Bore. For some reason they really adore me ejecting the refuse. But I wasn't saved the anguish of smoking one of the spinach cigarettes Lorraine had insisted I switch to in the hope that I would give up smoking. What she didn't know was that I had discovered the only cure for the taste of one of her spinach cigarettes was to smoke one of my own normal ones. In fact I usually arranged my pack so half of it was filled with the spinach ones and the other half with plain old Parliament cigarettes. Lorraine just didn't understand that sometimes a cigarette is the only thing that can give me a clear head when I've got to think. And that's what I needed that night. Lorraine had made me jittery. What if Mr. Pignati was trying to reach us from the grave? I don't really believe in any of that garbage, but my mind is open to anything. I really get a little wacko whenever I'm guilty. Like if I didn't do my homework for Miss Gale's English class, I keep thinking I see Miss Gale all over the place. If I look into the sky it's like Miss Gale is flying over getting ready to drop bird turds on my head. And another thing, our Pigman was one guy who would do something like come back from the grave to let us know he was still thinking about us. And if you think that sounds nuts, you just wait until you love somebody like your mother or father and they croak, and you'll see them popping up all over the place. When my grandmother died I used to see her sitting in her rocking chair for weeks afterward.
The next day after school, Lorraine and I were coming home together on the bus and I told her the most sensible path of action was that we should just go straight over to the Pigman's house and find out what was going on. Maybe it was just a curtain moving. Maybe there was an owl living on the second floor. Maybe chipmunks had taken over the house. It was no big deal.
“Lorraine, I think we should go over to the Pig-man's house.”
“No.”
“Look, there is only one way to solve this and that's to confront it. We'll go over there and you'll see there's no ghost. Ghosts don't exist.”
“And what if they do?” Lorraine asked, her eyes wet and fearful.
“Well, then we'll write our story for some spicy newspaper and call it ‘Ghost Mutilates Franklin High Teenagers.’”
“What if it kills us and we can't write the story?”
“It will be journalism's loss.” And then I just let out a horse laugh as though it was all just the most preposterous thing I'd ever heard in my life. I took Lorraine's hand and dragged her off the bus, and if she felt any electricity shooting out of my fingers, she sure as heck didn't show it on her face. All I knew was that I wanted to get over there as quickly as I could and get this thing over with once and for all. If I had known then what was going to happen, I think I would have just cut out my tongue and gotten on a slow boat to China.
four
All the way to the Pigman's house John kept saying we had nothing to be afraid of, but my whole body was vibrating with nerves. When animals or human beings find themselves in unusual situations usually their adrenaline starts to flow, and they call that the flight or fight syndrome. At the moment I was beginning to favor flight. Finally we were in front of Mr. Pignati's house again. This time the windows were lifeless.
“Let's get it over with,” John said.
We climbed up the squeaky old steps to the porch and swayed near the edge waiting for some belligerent spirit to come rushing out of the house with an axe. The thought crossed my mind that maybe, if there was a ghost, it might just be a playful one. The kind they call poltergeists. Poltergeists are the kind of ghosts that are just supposed to do things like shake your hand wearing cold cream, or push a grapefruit in your face.
“Look,” John said, “the door is wide open.”
“It's only open a crack,” I corrected.
“Same thing.”
“John, we can't go in there.”
“Why not?”
“We'll be trespassing.”
“A mere technicality,” John insisted.
I stayed near the edge of the porch as John pushed the door completely open. Nothing. We went inside. Nothing. I moved to follow him and walked straight into a cobweb. I felt I had just kissed a tarantula and let out a scream. John was at my side in a flash helping me wipe the thing out of my mouth, but I was so sorry that I had overreacted. Finally he took my
hand again and together we moved back inside the house, leaving the door open for a quick escape.
John and I felt almost lost in the living room. It was as though we had never been there before. Most of the Pigman's old furniture was gone, and even the wooden floors seemed to be faded.
“The house is dying,” I said.
“Maybe it's just as well,” John sighed.
“The wallpaper is still the same.”
“No it's not,” he said, pointing out a spot in the dining room where it cascaded to the floor.
“Maybe we could fix it.”
“What's the point?”
Actually John was right. We'd only be fixing it up for a bunch of dust in the air. We couldn't turn the house into a shrine for the dead. Our Pigman wouldn't have wanted that.
We went through the rest of the downstairs area and checked inside all the closets and under the radiators. We invaded the room behind the long black curtains where Mr. Pignati had kept all his little glass and marble pigs. I'll never forget the first moment we saw Mr. Pignati's collection of strange motley pigs, and how they were all broken by a mean kid called Norton. Now the room was barren, and the memory was so painful I had to get out of there immediately.
“The refrigerator's running,” John hollered from the kitchen.
“Go catch it,” I called back, thinking John was joking just to lift my spirits.
“No, I'm serious,” John blurted. “The light goes on when I open the refrigerator door. There's food in here.”
I rushed into the kitchen.
“What is this?” John asked, taking out a carton from the refrigerator.
“Acidophilus milk,” I read from the label.
“It sounds like a disease.” John was getting a crazy excitement in his voice and I started to get nervous again. Something in the back of my mind told me that acidophilus milk might be one of those things my mother would use on a patient. I wasn't sure. Suddenly there was a sound from upstairs and a scraping noise that stopped as quickly as it started.
John's eyes rolled upward toward the ceiling. My heart started doing flip-flops.
“Let's check it out,” John whispered, grabbing my hand.
We headed for the stairs cautiously. For some reason I thought of us as two little monkeys in a zoo clinging to each other as we started up the steps.
“Let's not and say we did,” I said.
“We're going up,” John insisted.
“One thing you don't want to do is run right up and scare off a ghost,” I advised, hoping that he would have time to consider clearing out altogether.
John just continued moving me up the stairs. “Mr. Pignati's spirit is here,” John said. “I can feel it. I really can.”
My throat felt as though it was going to close. The capillaries in my head were like the strings on a piano pounding out some atonal etude. It was all so unscientific, I wanted to say. We should get notes. We should have oscilloscopes. We should have electrodes in our heads. We should be recording all this for Psychology Today or some other illustrious scientific journal. Instead I said nothing and allowed John to haul me up alongside him. At the top of the stairs, we could see into the bathroom. Everything looked okay there.
“It's the same old shower curtain,” John pointed out. I watched him go in and open the medicine cabinet. Some shaving cream was in there. And for some bizarre reason John's face lit up at that discovery. “Someone is here,” he said with an assurance that made my jaw petrify.
“Let's get out of here,” I finally managed to utter.
“Mr. Pignati, are you there?” John began to speak to the air in front of him. “It's John and Lorraine,” John called gently into the hallway leading to the Pigman's old bedroom.
The door to the room was closed, but the scraping sound from beyond reached my ears with no trouble at all.
“Did you hear that?” I asked John.
“Naw,” John said, “it's nothing.”
“Are you crazy? It sounds like the top of a coffin sliding to the floor.”
“Mr. Pignati,” John called again, knocking gently on the door now.
And what happened next almost gave me a thrombosis.
“Come in,” an old man's voice demanded.
John and I grabbed each other as though we had just been sentenced to death. We watched in terror as the owner of the voice from the other side started to open the door.
five
I don't know why Lorraine has to get so dramatic about everything. I personally think it's all that dream interpretation she does. But whatever, the sound of that old guy's voice made her turn stark white. The door slowly opened and there they were—the same pair of dark beady eyes Lorraine had claimed she had seen at the window the day before. The eyes were set in a head half hidden by shadows. And the head itself was set upon a skinny and practically neckless frail body. The hands that appeared in front of us looked rubbery, as though they just rolled off at the end of his wrists. But one thing was certain: this was no ghost It was an elderly bum who had obviously broken in and made himself at home.
Lorraine and I and the hobo just stood there in a staring match. Finally the bum spoke.
“If you don't mind, I'm going to sit down before I fall down.” This gruff voice emerged from the old lips.
Lorraine and I said nothing. I think we were more embarrassed than anything else. Here we had expected to see our dead Pigman, and we'd only made royal jerks of ourselves. The old guy turned carefully and made his way across the room to a dumpy chair by the bed. It looked like a puff of wind could make him topple into pieces like a snowman.
“I thought you were the guys from the Internal Revenue Service,” he said, adjusting himself in the old wicker chair. “Who are you kids?”
“We're sorry if we frightened you,” I said, “but we knew the man who used to own this house.”
“Frightened me?” The bum sounded amused. “You didn't frighten me. I was sleeping.”
“But the bed isn't even rumpled,” Lorraine observed quickly.
“I don't have to answer to you. Or to your friend neither,” the bum belched. “I don't happen to sleep in beds. I can't get up from a lying-down position. I like a chair. When you're my age, young lady, you'll know what I'm talking about.”
“We're sorry, sir,” I said.
“Yes, we are,” Lorraine echoed. “We're very sorry.”
There was a long pause, and I could see the disappointment in Lorraine's eyes as she surveyed the room. It was obvious this old guy had broken into the Pigman's house, and we weren't about to let him get away with it. I was just about to yell at him when the bum started yelling at me.
“All right, you nosy whippersnappers, you've had your look around. What do you want here?”
“I'm going to ask you the same question,” I told him straight off. “What are you doing here? Why did you break in?”
“None of your business,” the old guy yelled. “I saw you nosing around here yesterday. I may be old, but I'm not blind.”
The bum was doing his best to really scream at us, but his lungs just didn't have it in them. He looked like he was crumpling right before our eyes. You could tell he was suffering. You could also tell he was angry.
“I'm waiting for an answer!” his voice finally said in a wheeze.
I decided to be a little respectful because of his age. I could see he was really no threat at all. “My name is John Conlan and this is Lorraine Jensen,” I said proudly, deciding it was better to be truthful than tell him I was Prince Igor and that Lorraine was Lady Slobovia of Rumania.
“He's right,” Lorraine piped in. “We were friends of Mr. Pignati, who used to live here.”
“If he used to live here, which he doesn't now, then you must've come here to rob the place. Well, you're not going to rob me. You're trespassing just as much as I am!”
“We don't want to rob you,” Lorraine said, sounding hurt that he'd even think such a thing.
“Ha, who are you kidding? Kids
like you love to crack old people over the heads with roller skates and rocks!”
“That's not true,” I said. “We just came to look the place over; to remember all the good times we had with our friend. We didn't know somebody was living here.”
“You mean ‘squatting’ here,” Lorraine corrected.
“Well, now you do, so beat it!”
Lorraine and I looked at each other, and the old guy noticed the exchange of glances.
“You are from the Internal Revenue Service, aren't you?” He sounded terrified. “They're using kids now, aren't they? They send kids out to get the money. For God's sake, all I ask is to be left alone!” He rested his head against the top of the chair and closed his eyes. You could see that the old guy did have a neck after all. You could also tell he was on the run and hiding out.
“We're not from the IRS, sir,” Lorraine stated. “We're just high-school kids, and we didn't come here to do any harm. We promise you we didn't.”
“I think we'd better go,” I told her, but I could see that Lorraine's sense of social work was now beginning to grow. I could just see this dossier growing in her mind.
Lorraine just kept staring at him. I thought her eyes were going to bulge out of their sockets and bounce across the floor. That's when I turned and looked at the guy again. He was just sitting there with his head back. His position looked extremely unnatural. More than that, he looked like he'd just kicked the bucket.
“Oh God,” Lorraine said. “Do you think he's had a stroke?”