“It’s almost three-thirty. Who the hell’s playing those goddamn records at three-thirty?”
Someone was, indeed, playing records at full blast. It was then that we first became aware of another sound—one that was to become more familiar and ominous in the weeks to come: a kind of snuffling, scratching, moiling, squealing, squishy turmoil.
“ ‘…THAT SILVUHH HAI-UHD DAH-DEE OF MAHN.…’ ” Doors slammed. Twangy voices argued indistinctly. Gene Autry keened on and on. The snuffling squeals rose and fell. The old man reconnoitered silently through the bedroom curtains.
“HOOIICKK-PATOOOEY!” Something juicy splatted against the side of our house.
“Holy Christ!” The old man hissed a rhetorical comment to no one in particular.
“GRRAAAHHKKK! BROWWK!” A window-rattling burp boomed out over the scratchy Gene Autry disc.
My mother was finally galvanized into action. She had fought a lifelong battle against obscene noises of every variety. I could hear her pattering feet, as she joined my father at the window.
“Who are they?” she asked, after a pause to survey the scene.
“Damned if I know!” the old man answered; but I could tell from the sound of his voice that he knew trouble had arrived. Big trouble. The Bumpus crowd had moved in next door and was already in business.
Ours was not a genteel neighborhood, by any stretch of the imagination. Nestled picturesquely between the looming steel mills and the verminously aromatic oil refineries and encircled by a colorful conglomerate of city dumps and fetid rivers, our northern Indiana town was and is the very essence of the Midwestern industrial heartland of the nation. There was a standard barbershop bit of humor that said it with surprising poeticism: If Chicago (only a stone’s throw away across the polluted lake waters) was Carl Sandburg’s “City of the Broad Shoulders,” then Hohman had to be that city’s broad rear end.
According to legend, it bore the name of a hapless early settler who had arrived on the scene when the land was just prairie and Indian trails. Surveying the sparkling blue waters of Lake Michigan, he decided that Chicago, then a tiny trading post where land was free for the asking, had no future. Struggling through the quagmires farther south, for some demented reason now lost to history, he set up camp and invested heavily in land that was destined to become one of the ugliest pieces of real estate this side of the craters of the moon. Indeed, it bore some resemblance to the moon, in that the natives were alternately seared by stifling heat in the summer and reduced to clanking hulks when the fierce gales blew off the lake. Our founding father set the pattern of futility for all future generations.
My old man, my mother, my kid brother and I slogged along in the great tradition. The old man had his high point every Wednesday at George’s Bowling Alley, where he once rolled a historic game in which he got three consecutive strikes. My kid brother’s nose ran steadily, winter and summer. My mother made red cabbage, peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, meat loaf and Jell-O in an endless stream. And I studied the principal exports of Peru at the Warren G. Harding School.
Delbert Bumpus entered Warren G. Harding like a small, truculent rhinoceros. His hair grew low down on his almost nonexistent forehead, and he had the greatest pair of ears that Warren G. Harding had ever seen, extending at absolutely right angles from his head. Between those ears festered a pea-sized but malevolent brain that almost immediately made him the most feared kid below sixth grade.
He had a direct way of settling disagreements that he established on the second day of his brief but spectacular period at W.G.H. Grover Dill—our number-two-ranking thug, right behind Scut Farkas, who stood alone as the premier bully of all he surveyed—challenged Bumpus to a showdown the first time he laid eyes on those peculiarly provocative ears. It was recess time and, as usual, we milled about aimlessly in the stickers and sand hills of our playground. It was too early for baseball; football had been over for months; we didn’t have a basketball hoop; so we just milled.
Spotting Bumpus in his worn blue jeans and black turtle-neck—tiny, close-set eyes almost invisible under a thatch of jet-black, wiry hair—Dill opened negotiations, his own slitted eyes glinting in anticipation of a little action:
“What’s yer name, kid?”
Bumpus pulled his head lower into the turtleneck and said nothing.
“I SAID, WHAT’S YER NAME, KID?” This time in a loud, trumpeting voice that alerted the rest of the school ground that spring had come and Grover Dill felt the sap rising. Bumpus, a full head and a half shorter than Dill but built along the lines of a fireplug, muttered:
“Bumpus.” It was the first word we had heard from him, his accent redolent of the deepest Kentucky hills.
“BUMPUS! What the hell kind of a name is that? Holy Moses! Didja hear that? Bumpus! What kind of a name is that?”
Dill’s humor, while extremely primitive, was refreshingly direct. He began to sing in a high, feminine voice:
“Bumpus Schlumpus, double Crumpus—” He broke off, advancing on Bumpus, sandy hair abristle.
“D’ya have a first name, runt?”
Farkas watched with Olympian disinterest as his protégé moved in for the kill. Schwartz huddled next to me, ashen-faced, while Flick attempted to blend into the sand. There wasn’t one of us who had not, at one time or another, been dealt with by either Farkas or Dill.
“I said, what’s yer first name, kid?” Bumpus, backed up flat against the school wall, finally spoke up:
“Delbert.”
“Delbert! DELBERT!” Outraged by such a name, Dill addressed the crowd, with scorn dripping from his every word. “Delbert Bumpus! They’re letting everybody in Harding School these days! What the hell kind of a name is that? That must be some kind of hillbilly name!”
It was the last time anyone at Warren G. Harding ever said, or even thought, anything like that about Delbert Bumpus.
Everything happened so fast after that that no two accounts of it were the same. The way I saw it, Bumpus’ head snapped down low between his shoulder blades. He bent over from the waist, charged over the sand like a wounded wart hog insane with fury, left his feet and butted his black, furry head like a battering-ram into Dill’s rib cage, the sickening thump sounding exactly like a watermelon dropped from a second-story window. Dill, knocked backward by the charge, landed on his neck and slid for three or four feet, his face alternating green and white. His eyes, usually almost unseen behind his cobra lids, popped out like a tromped-on toad-frog’s. He lay flat, gazing paralyzed at the spring sky, one shoe wrenched off his foot by the impact. The schoolyard was hushed, except for the sound of a prolonged gurling and wheezing as Dill, now half his original size, lay retching. It was obvious that he was out of action for some time.
Bumpus glared around at the hushed faces, then spit a long stream of rich-brown tobacco juice onto Dill’s left tennis shoe. The buzzer sounded for the end of recess, but it was the beginning of a new era.
That’s the way the whole Bumpus crowd was, in one way or another. Overnight, the entire neighborhood changed. The Taylors, a quiet family who had lived next to us for years, had moved out and—without warning—the Bumpuses had flooded in. There were thousands of them! The house seemed to age in one week. What had been a nondescript bungalow became a battered, hinge-sprung, sagging hillbilly shack.
I remember only brief images of various Bumpuses. They never mixed with anyone else in the neighborhood, just moiled around, hawking, guffawing, kicking their dogs and piling up junk in the back yard. They drove an old slat-sided Chevy pickup truck that was covered with creamy-white bird droppings and a thick coating of rutted Kentucky clay. It had no windshield and the steering wheel looked like it was made entirely of old black friction tape. It roared like a tank, sending up clouds of blue smoke as it burned the sludge oil that the Bumpuses slopped into it. It seemed to be always hub-deep in mud, even though there was no mud in our neighborhood.
Old Emil Bumpus was kind of the headman. He was about eight feet tall and
always walked like he was leaning into a strong wind, with his head hanging down around his overall tops. He must have weighed about 300 pounds, not including his chaw of navy plug, which he must have been born chewing. His neck was so red that at first we thought he always wore some kind of bandanna. But he didn’t. He had an Adam’s apple that rode up and down the front of his neck like a yo-yo. His hair, which was mud-colored, stuck out in all directions and looked like it had been chopped off here and there with a pair of hedge-trimming shears. And his hands, which hung down to just below his knees, had knuckles the size of pool balls, and there was usually a black, string bandage around a thumb. His hands were made for hitting things.
The Bumpuses weren’t in town three days before Emil cleaned out the whole back room at the Blue Bird Tavern one night. They said somebody had given him a dirty look. Another time, Big Rusty Galambus, who had heard about that incident and felt his reputation was at stake, busted Emil’s gallon jug over the back of his head. They said that Emil didn’t even know he’d been hit for a couple of minutes, until somebody told him. Then he turned around, stood up, looked down at Big Rusty and said:
“Ah’d be mo’ careful with that thar jug a mahn ef’n ah was yew. Ef ah didn’ know bettuh, ah mighta tho’t yew was spoilin’ for a fight.”
There was something about the way he said it that persuaded Rusty, a scarred veteran of the open hearth, who had once hoisted the back end of a Ford truck with his bare hands when the jack busted, to apologize and say that the jug slipped.
Emil let it pass; after all, he had 9000 more jugs at home, of all sizes and shapes, sitting on various window sills. We wondered what they were for, until we saw the Bumpuses carrying in pieces of copper tubing—and until we got our first whiff of a mighty aroma from their basement that overpowered even the normal neighborhood smell from the Sinclair oil refinery a half mile away. It got so bad at times that starlings would sit around on the telephone wires back of the Bumpus house, just breathing deeply and falling off into the bushes and squawking. From time to time, there would be a dull explosion in the cellar, and a Bumpus would run out of the house with his overalls on fire.
One afternoon, with a snootful of whatever they were making down there, Emil came reeling out onto the back porch. He was yelling at somebody in the kitchen, his deep molasses drawl booming out over the neighborhood.
“WHO YEW THANK YO’ TAWKIN’ TEW?” With that, he grabbed ahold of the back porch and pulled it right off the house. He just grabbed the porch and yanked it out by the roots:
“AAAuuuggghhh!”
From that day on, the Bumpus house had no back porch, only a door about eight feet up in the air and a rusty screen. Once in a while, one of them would jump out—and land in the garbage. And every so often, one of the skinny, red-faced sisters would fall out accidentally, usually carrying a pail of dishwater or chicken innards.
“Lawd a’mighty. Amy Jo, ef’n yew cain’t watch them clodhoppers a yourn, we gonna have to chain yew up!” Another raucous round of harrooping. They sure loved one another.
From the day they moved in, the house was surrounded by a thick swamp of junk: old truck tires, barrels full of bottles and tin cans, black oil drums, rusty pitchforks, busted chicken crates, an old bathtub, at least 57 ancient bedsprings, an old tractor hood, a half-dozen rotting bushel baskets overflowing with inner tubes and galoshes, a wheelbarrow with one handle, eight or nine horse collars and a lot of things that nobody could figure out—things that looked like big tall water boilers with pipes sticking out. For some reason, they loved wire; they had all kinds of it—chicken wire, baling wire and rolls of barbed wire, just sort of lying around. And in between the big stuff, there was all the little stuff: sardine cans, old batteries, tire irons, old blue tin cups, corncobs, leather straps and a lot of tire pumps. They were always bringing home license plates, which they nailed up by the basement door. The Bumpuses went to the city dump two or three times a week—like art patrons to a gallery—to stock up on more of the same.
The sea of wreckage spread like a blight onto the surrounding yards, first an ironing board on our lawn, then a bicycle tire in our bushes, then a few odd corncobs on the front porch. And one day, a gust of wind covered my mother’s flapping laundry—her pride and joy—with a thin, indelible coating of chicken dung, pigeon feathers, rabbit fur and goat droppings. After that, her jaw was grim, her eyes thin slits of rage, every time another burst of hawkings or blattings reminded her of the Bumpuses. The night my old man tripped in the dark over a rusty radiator in our back yard, causing him to drop his bowling ball on his left foot, didn’t help things, either. He grabbed the radiator and flung it into the dark, back into the Bumpuses’ yard; it crashed into the rubble, and for five minutes, an avalanche of sound rumbled on and on, like Fibber McGee’s closet. Emil stuck his head out of the kitchen window, quickly followed by the barrel of his trusty shotgun. When the old man stood his ground, Emil hissed, “Sic ’em, Luke!” Instantly, 17 dogs roared out from behind the garage. The old man barely made the kitchen.
A few days later, Schwartz, Kissel, Flick and I were trudging up our driveway when Flick stopped in his tracks, pointed and said, with a touch of delighted wonder, “Hey, look at that funny little house.”
“Yeah, look at that little moon on it,” replied Schwartz, likewise with some wonder.
“What the hell is it?” Junior Kissel chimed in.
Suddenly, Delbert Bumpus shot around the side of the house, dodging his way through the junk yard like a broken-field runner, and hurled himself headlong into the tiny pine shack and slammed the door, disappearing from our view—but not, unfortunately, beyond our earshot. It was then that we found out about little houses with moons, a new concept for all of us. Devout believers in eternal verities and ancient traditions, the Bumpuses obviously distrusted newfangled, citified contraptions such as that white-porcelain doohickey beside their upstairs bathtub, which didn’t get much use, either—except, rumor had it, for the aging and storage of white lightning. From that day on, there was an endless stream of Bumpuses beating a path through the back yard at all hours of the day and night. The outhouse also solved for them the problem of what to do with last year’s Sears, Roebuck catalog.
With the Bumpuses—and the outhouse—came the rats. They must have brought back a couple of thousand from one of their trips to the dump. Emil would squat out in back and pop at them with a long-barreled single-shot .22. You could hear the ricochets bouncing off the oil drums, and then Emil yelling:
“Gahdamn, Ima Pearl, ah missed that varmint agin.”
“Emil, yew kin go out huntin’ after supper. It’s time we et.”
The Bumpus hounds, who had their own problems with an even larger population of ticks and lice, had no interest at all in the rats. Once in a while, you’d see a hound sprawled flat on his back in the dust, legs spraddled, ears spread out, mouth hanging open, tongue lolling, sound asleep in the sun, with a rat lying beside him like they were the best of friends. The rats had no such nonaggression treaty with the Bumpus chickens, whom they ganged up on now and then, but their losses were too heavy to make it a regular thing. The Bumpuses had mean chickens. One big gray hen with a ratty tail and demented yellow eyes chased Schwartz all the way to school one day and waited in the playground for him to come out at recess. He wisely cowered in the locker room.
They also had rabbits—and pigeons. For some reason, hillbillies dearly love pigeons. They kept them in chicken-wire pens when they weren’t out dive-bombing our yard and roosting on everybody’s laundry. And the Bumpuses had one animal nobody could identify. It was kind of round, with blackish fur and claws. It weighed about 30 pounds or so, and Mrs. Kissel told my mother it was “a swamp bear.” Nobody believed her, until one time it tried to eat Mrs. Gammie’s Airedale, Rags, who had a nervous breakdown and had to be sent to the country. But the only atrocity it ever actually committed was to devour all my mother’s iris bulbs. Emil used to holler at it once in a while, when it got to chewing o
n the truck tires. Its name was Jack.
The three goats never gave anybody much trouble; in fact, they kept our lawn mowed for us. They didn’t smell too good if you got downwind of them on a warm day, but nobody complained about it—what with all the other indescribable smells that drifted our way day and night. My old man would peek out of the kitchen window with a Montgomery Ward spyglass to try to see what the Bumpuses ate when they were all squatting around the trough in the kitchen, with a yellow light bulb hanging overhead amid the wriggling flypaper. There was one smell that really used to get him. He could never tell what it was—a kind of smoky, greasy, gamy animal scent. Then one night he got it. He was watching them wolf it down, the way they always did, slurping and crunching, throwing off a thick yellow spray.
“By God, they’re eating possum! That’s what it is. Possum!”
My mother, who was always interested in cooking, asked: “Possum, what’s that?”
A Field & Stream subscriber, the old man immediately answered, “Possum—you know, it’s kind of a big rat.” My mother, who was putting tomato paste on top of our meat loaf at the time, dropped her spoon and ran into the bathroom. After that, she didn’t ask much about what the Bumpuses ate.
“I wonder where the hell they get it?” the old man continued. “I never heard of a possum around here.” Where they got possum was just another of the Bumpus mysteries.
Every five minutes or so, someone threw something out the back window into the yard. My mother would be standing at the sink, peering out the window that looked right into the Bumpus house just across the driveway from us. A soggy paper sack filled with coffee grounds and apple cores would sail out and land amid the rubble.
“Tch, tch, just look at those pigs!”
She was right. We were living next door to a tightly knit band of total slobs, a genuine gypsy family. The Bumpuses were so low down on the evolutionary totem pole that they weren’t even included in Darwin’s famous family tree. They had inbred and ingrown and finally emerged from the Kentucky hills like some remnant of Attila the Hun’s barbarian horde. Flick said that they had webbed feet and only three toes. It might have been true.
A Christmas Story Page 8