Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories

by Jean Shepherd

  I was coming home late from band practice, my left shoulder still aching from the weight of my sousaphone, lips tingling from the last 24 bars of The 1812 Overture, when I sniffed a pungent aroma that was to play a dramatic part in the erotic history of my kidhood. I sniffed again. It was vaguely familiar, yet strange—and mysteriously exciting.

  The elusive aroma mingled with the rotten-egg smell of the Grasselli Chemical Works, the swamp-gas exhalation of the Sinclair refining plant, the smoldering, metallic miasma of the blast-furnace dust that formed our daily breathing air.

  As I got closer and closer to home, the aroma grew even lustier.

  It was then that I noticed lights coming from the Bumpus house next door. The infamous house had been empty since the moiling Bumpus clan, a mob that made Genghis Khan’s hordes look like a Cub Scout Jamboree, had stealthily departed in the night with their blue tick hounds and their gallon jugs of corn likker, leaving unpaid rent and a yard full of garbage behind. I looked curiously at the lighted windows. After the Bumpus family, there was no telling what might show up. I went up our back porch and into the kitchen, already feeling a vague, rising excitement.

  “HEY, MA….”

  “How many times do I have to tell you to take off your overshoes out on the porch?”

  “Yeah. Ma, who … ?”

  “I said take ’em off on the porch. Now! Look at my floor!”

  I went back out on the porch, kicked off my overshoes and darted back into the kitchen. My kid brother sat at the kitchen table, glaring sullenly at an arithmetic book.

  “Hey, Ma, who moved in next door?”

  She didn’t answer, being busy at the moment sliding a meat loaf covered with tomato sauce into the oven. The radio on the refrigerator whined:

  When the deep purpulll fallz

  Over sleepy garden wallllzz…

  “Would you turn that radio down? I can’t hear a word you’re saying.”

  Flushed after her usual struggle with the oven door, which had a bad catch and hardly ever closed right unless it was slammed four times, my mother straightened up and wiped her hands on a kitchen towel. I reached up and turned the radio down just as the back door opened and in came my old man, snow showering off him as he stamped and snorted.

  “Holy Christ, it’s cold enough to freeze off a brass monkey’s….”

  “Please. The kids are listening.” She caught him just in time.

  “Hey, what the hell’s that I smell? You cookin’ somethin’ new for supper?” he asked suspiciously, being strictly a meat-and-potatoes man who viewed all divergences from that basic menu as an effete affectation. He truly believed that the only food people really liked was meat and potatoes and that they just pretended to like other things in order to impress each other.

  “It’s coming from next door,” my mother answered absently as she set the table.

  “Next door? Y’ mean they’re actually cookin’ supper over at the Kissels?” His voice rose in disbelief. Lud Kissel, our other next-door neighbor, had given up eating food years before, about the time he discovered bourbon, on which he subsisted entirely except for periods when he had to settle for gin. Since he had given up eating—and working—the rest of the family lived on cornflakes.

  “No, from the Bumpus house.”

  “THE BUMPUSES!” He blew up, rushing to the window. “Don’t tell me them bastards are back! Goddamnit, if I have to kick another of them lousy hounds….”

  One of his worst fears was that the Bumpuses would move back next door, just to drive him crazy. The memory of that shiftless swarm of tobacco-spitting, raw-boned, gimlet-eyed primitives was still an open wound in my father’s psyche.

  The heady aroma from next door filled our kitchen like a cloud of exotic gas. Suddenly, without warning, as the old man peered into the darkness, a loud musical thumping, heavy and rhythmic, added to the clamor.

  “What the hell is that?” The old man’s voice was tinged with trepidation. We remembered all too well the sleepless nights we spent while the Bumpuses’ ever-twanging Victrola filled the night air with the nasal sounds of Ernest Tubb, the Delmore Twins and Cowboy Copas. It was the first note of a barrage of thumpings that was to continue for some time.

  “Well, here we go again.” My father slumped into his chair at the kitchen table and opened a can of Atlas Praeger.

  “I think I know what that smell is,” said my mother with quiet authority. “Yeah?”

  “That smells to me like stuffed cabbage.”

  The old man looked up from his beer. “It does smell like stuffed cabbage. But there’s somethin’ else.” He sniffed the air.

  “I think they’re cooking blood soup, too.” My mother said it as if everybody cooked blood soup every night.

  “Blood soup!” My father gagged briefly on his beer.

  “AAAGGHH!” My kid brother had joined the discussion. He was a notoriously picky eater.

  “Yes. Irma Kissel says they’re Polish.”

  “Boy, that’s a relief!” The old man said it like he meant it. “For a second there, I thought we had the Bumpuses back. Sometimes I get nightmares dreamin’ about all that guitar playin’ and them dogs yappin’, and that old bastard spittin’ tobacco juice into our driveway.”

  POLISH! I thought, suddenly alert. “Do they have any kids?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure, but I think there’s two or three boys. And….” she stirred the mashed potatoes expertly, salting them lightly with her left hand, “… I believe there’s a girl.”

  My father had lost all interest in the subject and was deep in the sports page. As long as the Bumpuses weren’t coming back, he didn’t care who moved in.

  A girl! A Polish girl! A wave of ecstasy shuddered through my frame. Our neighborhood was singularly lacking in girls of any kind. For some reason, practically every kid in the neighborhood was a male. The only place we ran into actual girls was at school, and they all lived in mysterious neighborhoods far from ours. Of course, there was Esther Jane Alberry, squat, truculent and morose; and there was Helen Weathers, who had hair like a football helmet and who weighed 200 pounds soaked in sweat, which she almost always was; and there was Eileen Akers, in her thick glasses, who spent all of her time at the library. But they didn’t count. Though Schwartz, Junior Kissel and I talked a lot about girls, it was mostly hypothetical.

  “Her name’s Josephine,” said my mother. “She’s about your age. She goes to All Saints School.”

  I struggled to maintain my composure, but inwardly I reeled. My god, the jackpot! A Polish girl my age had moved next door to me!

  A prime universal belief among my peers was that the girls of the next town, East Chicago, were fantastic, and that the most fantastic of all were Polish girls. There was never any scientific evidence. It wasn’t necessary. It was just an established fact. Sometimes when Flick got his old man’s car, we’d go to East Chicago to ride around with the windows open just looking at Polish girls walking around the streets. We’d holler out at them and ride around and around the block, jabbing each other in the ribs, swigging Nehi orange, gulping down White Castle hamburgers and blatting the horn. This sport was called skragging for some reason. We never actually talked to a girl, of course, or even really got near one; we just hollered, gunned the motor and stared.

  “Josephine?” I tried to sound unconcerned, as though I hadn’t caught the name.

  My mother ladled out the gravy as she said, “They call her Josie. Their last name’s Cosnowski. They come from East Chicago.”

  God almighty! Wait’ll Schwartz and Flick hear about this! Josie Cosnowski from East Chicago! A new era had begun.

  At lunchtime the next day, the following dialog took place at a fashionable greasy spoon called John’s Place, which catered to the high school crowd and featured the gristliest hamburgers in Christendom:

  SCHWARTZ (mouth full of French fries): “I bet you couldn’t guess what I’m gettin’ for Christmas.”

  FLICK:“This ketchup is rotten. It�
��s all clotted on the bottom.” (Hollering loudly over general hullabaloo and 400 watts of jukebox. “HEY JOHN, HOW ABOUT SOME FRESH KETCHUP HERE? THIS BOTTLE’S BEEN ON THE TABLE FOR SIX YEARS!”

  SCHWARTZ: (persistently) “You wouldn’t believe what I’m gettin’ for Christmas.”

  FLICK(standing up at his stool and waving ketchup bottle): “HEY JOHN, KETCHUP OVER HERE FOR THE TROOPS!”

  JOHN (a short, swarthy man of uncertain parentage and evil temper due to a life of continual harassment by acne-plagued adolescents and a succession of short-order cooks who quit every three days): “Who the hell’s hollerin’ for ketchup?”

  FLICK: “Me. Over here.” (Ketchup in bottle, still being waved, suddenly unclots, spraying surrounding customers, including renowned defensive halfback who rises menacingly from his stool and then settles back, figuring it isn’t worth it.)

  HALFBACK: “Watch it, punk.”

  JOHN: “I don’t have ten arms, kid. Here’s your damn mustard.”

  FLICK: “I wanted ketchup.”

  JOHN: “Oh, fer Crissake!” (Disappears into smoky blue kitchen, where loud crash has just occurred.)

  SCHWARTZ: “Yep, this is gonna be some Christmas.”

  ME: (hearing Schwartz for the first time through my daydream) “Hmm?”

  SCHWARTZ: “What’s the matter with you? You got the crud or something?”

  FLICK(resigned to his fate, scooping mustard out of bottle with finger and smearing it on cheeseburger): “You got the crud? Stay away from me, man! I don’t need no crud.”

  ME: “Crud? Who’s got the crud?”

  JOHN (reappearing from kitchen trailing sweat and lugging tray of hot roast-beef sandwiches): “Who wanted the ketchup here?”

  FLICK: “I had an uncle once almost died of the crud.”

  JOHN: “WHO WANTED THE KETCHUP?”

  HALFBACK (to Flick): “Hey, Shrimp, you wanted the ketchup, right?” (Grabs ketchup from John, pours half a bottle on Flick’s cheeseburger.) “That enough? Or wouldja like a little on top of yer head?”

  ME: “Pass the ketchup, please.”

  HALFBACK: “You trying to get smart, kid?”

  SCHWARTZ (oblivious): “I think my old man’s getting me a power saw.”

  HALFBACK (shoving ketchup bottle toward me): “Just watch it, kid.”

  FLICK: “He caught it in Indianapolis, at the Y.M.C.A.”

  ME: “Caught what?”

  SCHWARTZ: “Yessir, I’m gonna mount it on my workbench.” JOHN: “Which one a you gets the coffee malt?” FLICK: “Here.”

  JOHN: “You two guys get the Cokes, right?”

  ME AND SCHWARTZ: “Yeah.” (BRIEF PERIOD OF GULPING.)

  ME: “YOU guys know the Bumpus house?”

  SCHWARTZ (chewing on an ice cube): “Don’t tell me?”

  ME: “Tell you what?”

  SCHWARTZ: “That good old Delbert Bumpus has moved back. One a them stinkin’ Bumpus hounds bit me so hard one day on my paper route, I thought I’d die. That mutt hung onto my leg for two blocks.”

  ME: “NO. Somebody else moved in.” (I paused dramatically, with impeccable timing.) “A girl.”

  FLICK: “A what?”

  SCHWARTZ: “That crummy hound waited for me every day and … a girl?”

  ME (nonchalantly sipping my Coke, milking the suspense): “Yep, A girl.” (I bit off the end of a French fry.) “She’s Polish.”

  The effect was galvanic. Flick looked up from his malt, something he rarely did, face blank with wonder. Schwartz, his hand palsied, slopped Coke on the counter.

  ME: “From East Chicago.”

  SCHWARTZ: “A Polish girl? From East Chicago? Next door to you?”

  FLICK: “What’s her name?”

  ME: “Josephine. Josephine Cosnowski.”

  The three of us sat silently for a long moment, each lost in his private thoughts. Already, schemes and fantasies were rushing through our respective skulls.

  HALFBACK: “Did you say Cosnowski, kid?” (Obviously he had overheard our entire conversation.)

  ME: (warily): “Yeah.”

  HALFBACK: “That’s what I thought you said.” (He took a huge swig of root beer, burped menacingly, hitched up his pants and swaggered out.)

  SCHWARTZ: “What was that all about?”

  ME: “Search me.”

  FLICK: “You never can figure what them jocks are thinking. If anything.”

  That night after school, Flick, Schwartz, Kissel and I sauntered casually past the Bumpus house—as casually as we could with the temperature five below and the wind howling through the telephone wires like the sound effects on I Love a Mystery. We slogged along in our overshoes, pretending there was nothing at all unusual in the fact that we had paraded up and down in front of the Bumpus house 12 times in the last ten minutes.

  “I’ll bet she’s fat,” said Flick his breath swirling in the arctic air.

  “You sure are lucky, living right next door. You can probably look right in her bedroom,” muttered Schwartz bitterly.

  I peered up at the house, hoping for a glimpse. I could still see the scuff marks on the front door where Floyd Bumpus had kicked it in the night he and old Emil, his father, had the fistfight that Emil won by hitting him with a tire iron. The place looked the same, but it was different, somehow. Now it was a girl house. It kind of radiated femaleness. The steady thump of polka records shook the frozen ground beneath our feet, and the seductive aroma of stuffed cabbage filled our nostrils. It was almost dark and the streetlights were coming on up and down the block when Junior Kissel made the first score.

  Flick had just picked up a chunk of rock-ice and was about to throw it at a shivering sparrow huddled on top of a garage. I was busily trying to scratch my left shoulder blade because my sheepskin coat always itched through my shirt. Schwartz was bent over hooking his galoshes.

  “There she is!”

  We stood poised in the icy air, like some diorama of Ancient Man at His Daily Tasks in the Museum of Natural History. The side door of the Bumpus house had opened and two figures emerged into the gloom: a short, lumpy lady with a shawl over her head, and behind her, barely visible in the darkness—a girl! She had on a parka with those rope hooks which were very big that year. The lady picked up something next to the basement stairs, and together the two of them disappeared back into the house.

  For a half-minute or so, nobody said a thing. Finally Flick tossed his ice chunk in the general direction of a streetlight and Schwartz whistled a low, quavering note.

  “Well, I saw her first,” said Kissel.

  I didn’t say anything. But I knew what I had to do. There was no turning back.

  Every night before I did anything else, I had one chore to perform. I was supposed to go to Pulaski’s store to buy whatever my mother put down on a list. It wasn’t really every night: just whenever she didn’t feel like doing the shopping herself in the afternoon; but it was often enough to be irritating. Tonight was a store night. On the way through the darkness, as I cut across a vacant lot, I imagined how I would meet Josie. She’d fall off a ladder and I’d catch her. I’d dribble a basketball in the gym and crash into the stands—right into her lap. Or a bus would run up on the sidewalk with a crazed driver at the wheel, and I’d scoop her up just as the wheels were about to…. Men think these things.

  I went into Pulaski’s store, still in a misty daze. The usual mob of steelworkers crowded the joint. Pulaski sold a lot of chewing tobacco and work gloves. Pulaski himself toiled behind the glass meat counter, his apron stained with grease and blood. Howie, his current clerk, a guy who used to work at the Esso station, glared at me from behind the grocery counter. Grubby kids huddled around the penny-candy case, as I had done in my long-gone youth. I had played softball with Howie before he had become permanently angry working at the gas station and Pulaski’s. He didn’t go to school anymore, just worked and drove around in Pulaski’s panel truck, delivering potatoes and sacks of groceries.

  “Whaddaya want? And be q
uick about it, fer Crissake.”

  He worked 19 hours a day, and everyone thought he was lucky because he didn’t have to go to school anymore. He had a thin, red, hawklike face. His hair was a kind of mustard yellow, and it stuck up all over his head like worn-out paint brushes. He was famous because he’d had to quit school over a girl. He had just made the basketball team in the middle of his sophomore year and then suddenly he had dropped out and gotten married. After that, he was always mad.

  “Gimme a loaf of Silvercup.” Pulaski’s was not a self-service store. He kept everything safely out of everybody’s reach.

  “Large or small?”

  “Large.”

  I read off the rest of the list and Howie packed everything into a paper sack as the crowd eddied around me.

  “Oh, yeah. And a Mr. Goodbar.” At that stage of the game, I was completely hooked on Mr. Goodbars. There was something about the way the chocolate mixed with the peanuts when you crunched your teeth down on it that got me where I lived.

  Howie shoved the candy bar toward me. He knew I usually ate it on the way home, and it didn’t go into the sack. I handed him the money and he savagely hit the keys on Pulaski’s cash register.

  “Goin to the game Thursday?” I asked, passing the time of day.

  “Are you kiddin’?” That was his standard answer to almost everything. I guess he felt that the world kidded him a lot.

  My frozen feet propelled me unsteadily back toward home. I had made this trip so many times that my body moved totally on its own. The street lamps were festooned with the plastic wreaths and electric candles that the town put up every year. Sometimes they didn’t take them down until April. A giant semi boomed past, cascading gray slush up over the sidewalk.