The Pigman & Me
Page 9
2) It had an annual Fourth of July parade at which everyone got free ice cream and soda.
3) Christenings, showers, weddings, and funeral receptions were held at St. Anthony of Padua R.C. Church’s parish hall.
4) A man by the name of John Steckelman used horse teams to haul loads of harvested salt hay.
5) Travis first was named Travisville after Captain Jacob Travis, a large property holder from pre-Civil War days. After that it was called Linoleumville. After that, the citizens were able to vote whether they wanted the town called Travis, Melvin, or Blue Heaven-by-the-Sea. Of course, Travis won out.
6) There were fascinating greenhouses at Mohlenoff’s Florist and Farm.
7) There were a few Slavic as well as Polish residents.
8) A few grisly bodies were once found in an old quarry, which also had great frogs and gigantic snapping turtles.
9) Travis was a favorite place for torching junk cars.
10) Occasionally, sulfur dioxide fumes blew from Carteret, New Jersey, factories to engulf the streets.
11) Travis had the best view of the biggest garbage dump in the world, one receiv- ing over ten thousand tons of garbage each day.
In other words, I was just beginning to feel like I had a father in Nonno Frankie, and a hometown for the first time in my life. I was breathing and feeling and caring about things, and trusting about being alive. But it didn’t take long after that for the horrible things to begin to happen.
The first terrible thing was a mistake I made. I did a science project on trees, and my biology teacher was so impressed with it, she made me present it in front of the class. I showed pictures of oaks, conifers, and maples. I had samples of leaves and I discussed pollination by insects and how maple syrup was made. I had a cyclorama about photosynthesis, and a photo of a sequoia tree so big you could drive your car through a tunnel in its trunk. Naturally, I included everything Nonno Frankie had taught me, including how we had almost killed our beloved apple tree by taking the bark from half a circle around it. I explained all about the cambium layer of the tree, how vital it was, and that the life juices of all trees flow up and down through this thin living layer just beneath the bark. I noticed Moose, Conehead, and the Bronskis were fascinated with this section of my presentation, and I should have known why, but I didn’t. I simply was glad to have gotten an A+.
The seed of the next disaster happened in the place where I had always been afraid something terrible would happen. Mom had begun to work nights as a practical nurse, and she had to take the eight-twenty-p.m. bus out of Travis. I remember it was a Thursday night, and I had a lot of homework so I didn’t get around to giving the dogs their evening chow until after it had long been dark. I started downstairs. The front hallway was as ghastly and chilling as ever, and I walked through the ghoulish drafts toward the side room. This time, when I got to the end of the crypt wall, I saw Nicky and Joey in the dark storeroom with their eyes glued to the lighted crack of the bathroom door.
“What’re you doing?” I asked. They motioned me to shut up and to peek through the crack with them. My instinct was to ignore them and get on with feeding the dogs, but curiosity got the better of me. I tiptoed up to the crack to see what they were spying on. I knew what I was doing wasn’t ethically perfect, and I felt very uncomfortable about the whole lineup of us at the “hatchet” crack. I also didn’t like Connie’s bedroom door open and the sight of her eight little-faced, overdressed Kewpie dolls with beady eyes staring at me from their lineup on the bed. When I did look through the crack, I was surprised to see it was only Connie talking to my sister, Betty, though I wondered why they had to shut themselves up in the bathroom to chat. It wasn’t exactly a chat. It was more of a whisper session. Connie was telling Betty top-priority secrets. From the few words I overheard, it sounded like Connie was innocently answering a few questions about love and sex and giving Betty the kind of advice about the feelings, garments, and mechanics of passion that was a job my mother should have done years before. Of course, Mom hated love and sex so much, she never mentioned it to anybody, so I was glad Betty had someone to talk to about her being a growing, healthy young girl. I didn’t listen at the door for more than ten minutes, but the twins were really glued to it. I motioned them to go back to their own bedroom, but they refused, so I left and went about my business, feeding the dogs. Nicky and Joey were still peering through the crack when I came out of the side room and went back upstairs to sleep.
The major catastrophe didn’t rear its head for several days. One weekday night, Connie, Mom, me and the twins were having a dinner of leftovers from Nonno Frankie and Nonna Mamie’s weekend visit. This night, it was leftover fried eggplant, an antipasto heavy on the Genoa salami, and all the garbanzo beans and baked manicotti anyone could gobble.
For some reason Betty was late coming down for dinner, so we started without her. We were slurping and chomping away when Mom wondered aloud, “What’s taking Betty so long?”
“Maybe she’s having trouble putting on her girdle,” Nicky said. He and Joey went into a spasm of giggling.
“Or maybe she’s putting on red lipstick!” Joey blurted. The twins laughed so hard, they choked on their mouthfuls of manicotti.
My mother’s ears went up like a Great Dane’s. Her eyes zipped, radar discs focusing tightly on Joey and Nicky. Connie looked nervous, and I knew why.
“Why do you think my daughter would be putting on a girdle and red lipstick?” Mom asked the twins.
“So boys will want to kiss and neck with her!” Nicky and Joey howled.
“Who told you that?”
“We heard it.”
“Where did you hear it?”
Connie sat frozen, her face red, as her kids told Mom all about their mother’s nocturnal lecture to Betty in the bathroom.
“Is what they’re telling me true?” Mom asked Connie point-blank.
“Betty needed to…know…some things…” Connie stuttered.
“WHO THE HELL ARE YOU TO TELL MY DAUGHTER ANYTHING!” my mother screamed at Connie at the top of her lungs. Nicky and Joey stopped giggling fast and ran out of the room.
“Mom, it’s O.K….” I started.
“Get out of here,” she ordered.
I left the room, but I couldn’t help hearing her shrieking.
“She needed to know things about love. She had questions…” Connie said gently.
“YOU FILLED HER HEAD WITH DIRT!”
“No, I didn’t,” Connie protested.
“When my daughter needs to know anything, I’ll tell her, not you!”
“She’s old enough,” Connie said. “Can’t you see, she’s old enough and you don’t talk to her about love.”
“And what do you know about love?” Mom screamed. “You put on a red dress, paint your face, and throw yourself at a butcher! Don’t you know what you look like when you go out? You look cheap! Cheap! You look like a clown! A dirty, filthy clown who rolls around in the backseat of Chops Tarinski’s car! You keep your rotten, lousy mouth shut around my daughter! You keep away from her! You don’t even talk to her, you tramp! You low-life, filthy tramp!”
Mom stormed out of the kitchen, right past me. I tried to tell her Connie hadn’t done anything bad, but she brushed me aside. She made for the stairs, shouting for Betty. As she went up, I was fast behind her. Betty came out of her room. She was wearing just a little lipstick and maybe some eyebrow pencil. Mom just shoved her back inside, slammed the door, and screamed a lot more. I didn’t hear Betty make a sound. Mom did all the bellowing. In five minutes Mom came charging out.
“I’M GOING TO KILL MYSELF!” she screamed. “YOU THINK I’M KIDDING, BUT THIS TIME I’M GOING TO DO IT! THIS TIME, I’M REALLY GOING TO DO IT, YOU UNGRATEFUL STONES!” She continued shouting as she ran down the stairs. “THAT’S WHAT YOU ARE!” she threw back at Betty and me at the top of the stairs. “TWO STONES AROUND MY NECK! I COULD’VE MARRIED AGAIN, BUT NO MAN WANTS A WOMAN WITH TWO LOUSY STONES AROUND HER NECK! NO MAN!”
She exploded out into the night and was gone.
The house went silent.
No one left in the house felt like saying anything.
When I woke in the morning, Mom still hadn’t come home. All I could think to do was get dressed and go out and hang out in the apple tree. A gray, wet fog still stretched from the Arthur Kill across the airport. Each step I took toward the tree felt like it was on quicksand. I refused to think of what happened the night before or what any of it would mean. As I neared the apple tree, somewhere in my heart I knew I would be losing whole pieces of myself. Mom wouldn’t kill herself, I was certain, but nothing could ever be the same.
Nothing.
Then I saw the cutting marks.
The green living layer of the apple tree had been completely chopped. Someone had taken an ax and encircled the trunk with a deep, gaping wound. The wound cried out to me, the sad lips of a death mask.
I knew in that moment that Moose had slain the apple tree.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Pigman’s
Mind-Boggling Secret!
Mom came back that afternoon. She said nothing, but Betty and I knew it was the end of our world in Travis. The final events took a couple of months, but they occurred with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. The final shocking headlines I remember from the newspapers at that time were:
1) Swordfish Spears Teenager!
2) Cleopatra Married Her Brother!
3) Monk Steals Gallbladder Operation!
I tried to keep my mind busy reading while all the problems in our house were spelling out the split between the Zindel and Vivona families. I read one book filled with unique information, like how all the faces on U.S. coins look to the left except for the face on the penny. The book also said if I added up all the letters in the names of the cards in a deck—ace, two, three, etc.—that the total would come to 52, the same number as cards in a deck. I guess I did everything possible not to face up to what was happening. Most of all, I was afraid I was never going to see Nonno Frankie ever again. Connie didn’t let Nonno Frankie and Nonna Mamie come to the house while there was such tension between her and Mom. She also, as kindly as possible, told my mother what I guess Mom had feared all along: She was set to marry Chops. Connie Vivona was going to become Mrs. Chops Tarinski, and the twins would have a new father. Naturally, Connie wanted her money out of her half of the house for her dowry, which meant the house would have to be sold. Mother agreed, because she didn’t have enough money to buy Connie out, and because the collies still weren’t selling. In fact, Mom ended up having to give all but one of the dogs away. The one puppy she sold was to the Palace Theater in Port Richmond, which ran a “Lassie Contest” in which kids were allowed to write an essay on why they would love to own a dog like Lassie in fifty words or less. A deaf teenager from Palmer Avenue won the puppy, which was a really nice touch, though I personally think the contest was benevolently fixed.
A gruff, fat real estate agent by the name of Mr. Brown got the listing for our house in July and by August it was sold. Connie and Mom didn’t make more than a couple of hundred dollars each out of it, but it was better than nothing. We all had to be out by the first of September.
The final week, Jennifer cried every day. We couldn’t bear to go near the apple tree anymore, so we spent many hours sitting on our favorite broken tombstone on Cemetery Hill. If I didn’t have to tell the truth now, I’d just write that Jennifer and I managed to understand why we had to say good-bye, and that her fears about becoming a zombie never came true. I wish I could say she grew up, married a prince, and escaped Travis to live happily ever after in a chic condo in Malibu. But she didn’t. She ended up marrying a Travis alcoholic bricklayer, and she lived for many years in the same house she grew up in, until her husband made her burn it down so they could collect the insurance money. Unfortunately, that’s the way a lot of real life is. Real life doesn’t always end the way you want it to. Truth is stranger than fiction. I think it’s also often a lot more cruel. In fiction, I could make believe the morning of my final day in Travis, when Jennifer and I took our last walk, that we held hands and thought the future was going to be carefree and rosy. I wish I could write that our friendship was so intense that we wrote letters to each other for years, that we had romantic reunions at Coney Island, Liverpool, and Madagascar, and that distance couldn’t keep us apart. The only true part would be that we did hold hands on that last walk. But we said very little. We walked in the fields among the skunk cabbages and saw a muskrat run for cover. We walked by the now-dry ditch that for a short time had been our private pike pond. The apple tree stood like a night giant, black and leafless and dead. There were reminders everywhere of things that hurt. The water-head baby. The remnants of the terrarium. The pain of saying good-bye to Jennifer was so great, my mind refuses to remember it or invent it. Any teenager who’s ever had to leave a best friend behind knows there are no words for it.
But I did get to see my pigman one more time.
Nonno Frankie and Nonna Mamie came down with their truck-driver colleague from NBC and the Sabatini Brothers to help Connie and the twins move.
Mom and Betty were finishing packing our junk into our old, patched-up car. I badly needed to talk to Nonno Frankie alone. I watched and waited for my chance. Finally, he was by himself in the toolshed taking apart his winepress and packing gallon bottles of his blood-red wine. All Mother had screamed for days at Betty and me was “DON’T TALK TO THEM! DON’T TALK TO ANY OF THEM!” But I didn’t care if she caught me and tried to beat me with a barber strap. I went into the shed.
Nonno Frankie looked like he was expecting me. He closed the door, shutting out all the racket of the moving.
We sat on empty barrels. He wore the same oversized plaid shirt and brown baggy pants as when I first met him. He had the same excitement and energy in his eyes. It was as though everything was falling down around me except him.
He smiled at me. Not a Ho! Ho! Ho! smile. It was a warm, gentle smile. There, amid cobwebbed windows and shafts of sunlight, he appeared to be a magical being to whom I could tell anything. Particles of dust floated in the sunbeams and moved with his every breath.
“Being different isn’t enough,” I said.
Nonno Frankie nodded. “No. ‘Io sono differente’ is not enough.”
“I need to know more?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“You must climb Mount Vesuvio.”
“I can’t go to Italy.”
“You can go in your mind,” Nonno Frankie said. “You can go everywhere in your mind. Close your eyes and I will take you to the volcano.”
I closed my eyes.
“What do you see?”
“Nothing.”
“You must imagine.”
“Imagine what?” I asked, keeping my eyes closed.
“Imagine you open this toolshed door and see a path heading up a mountain. The mountain is covered with smoke pouring down from the crater’s brim. Can you see?”
“Yes.”
“Now, breathe deeply and don’t be afraid. Walk up the mountain path. Soon you are higher on the mountain and see a temple.”
“A temple?”
“Yes,” Nonno Frankie said. “It is made of white marble with hundreds of delicate cupids and baby angels carved on its arches. You walk inside and see an open coffin with a dead body lying in it. Do you see it?”
“Yes,” I admitted. I was able to see anything in my mind Nonno Frankie wanted me to see. I felt frightened, but kept my eyes closed.
“You walk to the coffin and look inside. You see the face of the corpse. It is you.”
“Me?”
“Yes. You. But different. It is you shining. It is you pure and glowing like young eggplants, and string beans, and budding sprouts. It is you before insects and poisons and witches and thirst have hurt you. Now, if you look closely, you will see the dead boy is breathing.”
“Breathing?”
“Yes.”
“He will tell you something.”
“What?”
“I don’t know,” Nonno Frankie said. “Just listen to him. Look at him in your mind and let him speak to you, and you will know more than that you are different. This shining secret boy will let you know the answer to your question.”
“What question?”
“The question you came to this toolshed to ask.”
“He’s not saying anything,” I said. I was keeping my eyes shut as tight as I could, but the glowing ghost of myself said nothing.
“Then look in his hands. Sometimes your ragazzo will not talk. Sometimes he will give you a present. Look in his hands. He won’t fail you. He is a perfect boy. He is a wise ragazzo. He will have any answer you will ever need in life. Whenever you’re being attacked by witches or bullies, or starving, or confused, this boy will help you. Just ask your question.”
“I’m frightened.”
“Ask.”
“I have only feelings. I don’t know the words.”
“Try!”
“I want to know what’s going to happen to me,” I blurted. “What am I going to be?”
I was about to give up when I noticed something in the boy’s hands. I couldn’t see what it was. At first it was small, but it became golden and large and heavy. In my mind the boy gave me this piece of gold and then lay back down in his beautiful coffin. I told Nonno Frankie everything I was seeing. I told him I thought the boy had given me a large gold pipe or log. Nonno Frankie told me to keep my eyes closed, to take the gift and walk out of the temple, past the carved cupids and angels. I did. I carried the object through the vapors and down the volcano. Then I saw clearly what the magical boy had given me. A pen! A gigantic, golden pen five feet long and a foot thick.