by Marc Simon
“All right, Malkin, does he have something or not? We don’t have all day.”
“It is not to worry, Miller, the boy here, one could say a dwarf, except his features, they are so regular, it makes me to wonder. However, he is fine in his condition, his lungs are clean, his heartbeat is regular, it is only a cold, nothing more. But you look it in some pain yourself, is it not the case?”
“I have a tooth that’s killing me, but first tell me about her.”
“Her?”
Alex said, “Delia.”
“The little one, he knows her name?”
“Yeah. Talk.”
Malkin shook a bottle of vinegar on a plaid handkerchief and wiped it on his stethoscope. “For to kill the germs, you see. So sit, Miller, you look it to me like you’re going to have a coronary attack, you’re sweating like a steam pipe. Yes, Delia Novak, you have it certainly the good taste in the women. By the way, she is owing it to me some money.”
“That ain’t my problem. I want to know where she is, goddamn it.”
Alex said, “Goddamn it.”
Now Malkin looked sideways at Alex. “This boy, there is something I don’t understand about him, or how to describe it in the medical terms, this, how do you call it, ability to parrot back the words. Perhaps I could get it from him a urine sample.”
Abe grabbed Malkin by his collar. “Tell me where Delia is, damn it.”
“All right, please, I will give it to you her address. Wait, I write it down for you in English, if you will let it go of my shirt. Please.”
Chapter 5
On December 3, 1909, at approximately 5:30 a.m., the central steam pipe at Fulton Elementary School burst wide open. When Arthur and Benjamin and the other children arrived that morning, to their delight they were sent home for an unexpected long weekend.
In an unrelated event, Alex Miller’s arms grew three inches overnight. He was touching his toes without bending at the waist when Irene came into the boy’s bedroom that morning to get him dressed.
“See what Alex can do, Momma,” said Alex, who had begun to refer to himself in the third person.
“Oh my,” said Irene, looking not so much at Alex as the mess of clothes and toys scattered about the room. “Alex is doing his exercises like a big boy.”
“Alex is a big boy.”
Big, she thought. He weighs seven and a half pounds and he’s not even three feet tall. She dug through the mess on the floor: an empty can of peanut brittle; a jack-in-the-box whose head Alex had pulled off; a little wooden pony with a curly tail that wiggled when Alex pulled it on its string; filthy socks and underwear, courtesy of the bigger boys; and a red and blue sweater Irene’s mother had knitted for Alex and given her two days earlier.
Irene slipped the sweater over Alex’s head. The torso came down to his waist, but the sleeves stopped four inches short of his wrists, no matter how much she tugged on them. Could her mother have measured that poorly? And hadn’t it fit him when he tried it on the night before?
The front door banged open. Arthur and Benjamin whooped in with cries of No School! No School! Alex scrambled out of the room yelling for his brothers, leaving his mother holding his pants and wondering about the sweater.
“Ma!”
“What are you two doing home?”
“The pipes burst. There’s a flood.”
“At the school,” said Benjamin. “You should see it. They suh…sent us home. For all day. Honest, Ma.”
“Yeah, honest,” said Arthur. “Can we have something to eat? We’re starving.”
They were always starving, and always growing out of their clothes, too. Growing out of their clothes—maybe Alex’s arms were growing out of his. She laughed to herself at the thought. “First take off those galoshes, you’re tracking slush all over the place. Mind your brother and I’ll make you some oatmeal.”
“But we had it for breakfast.”
“Yeah, can we have bacon and eggs and toast and jam?”
Alex said, “Alex wants bacon and eggs.”
“Come on, Ma, make it for us, for a treat, there’s no school.”
Irene looked at her big boys with their arms around Alex. It would make a nice picture, those two big boys, their faces flushed full of life, and her little one, basking in his brothers’ attention. So precious. She needed to have pictures taken, before they were no longer so cute. “Well, all right, but you two mind your brother now. I’ll call you when it’s done.”
“Come on, Alex.”
Forty minutes later, as Irene stacked Alex’s clothes in the cedar chest she used for his dresser, she thought about the sweater again. It was possible some of the stitches could have pulled out, or her mother could have measured the sleeves incorrectly, but her mother was so picky about everything that that seemed unlikely. She came back to the bizarre thought that maybe Alex’s arms grew overnight, like Jack’s beanstalk. She imagined Alex’s arms growing longer and longer, like fleshy runaway vines up the side of the house and into the clouds. No, her mother must have measured wrong.
Something crashed in the living room, followed by a high-pitched shriek. Irene rushed in to find Alex sitting next to a broken clay flowerpot, with dried flowers strewn on the floor. The older boys stood there with their heads down, like dogs about to be beaten.
“Well?”
Arthur said, “What, Ma?”
“Don’t you what Ma me. You know what. I told you to mind your brother. What in the name of God Almighty is going on here?”
“See, we were playing muh…monkey in the middle with Alex.”
“Benjamin, don’t stutter.”
“Suh…sometimes I can’t help it.”
Alex said, “Alex is a monkey.” He loped around the room like a chimp, propelling himself with his elongated arms. Arthur and Benjamin tried to control their laughter, lest their mother smack them.
“We’ll clean it up, Ma,” Arthur volunteered. “But Alex did it.”
Alex made more monkey jabber.
“Alex, stop that. You two, you egged him on, I know it.”
“But Muh…muh…”
“Just go get the broom and dust pan.”
“Then can we go out?”
“Go, for the love of God.”
They ran to the kitchen.
“Alex go, too.”
She bent down. “Just look at your hands.” His knuckles, the size of pencil erasers, were raw and bleeding.
“Alex wants to go. Please, Momma? Alex will be good.”
The little conniver, she thought. He already knows how to navigate around his mother’s heart. Well, maybe she should let him out for a few minutes. It wasn’t all that cold. His brothers would watch him, and she could use a minute for herself, maybe read a magazine for ten minutes or figure out how she was going to pay both the butcher bill and the milkman this week.
She washed his knuckles with a soapy dishrag. “All right, Mr. Big Boy.” She laid his snowsuit out on the floor. “Can you help Momma put on your snowsuit?”
With his newly elongated arms, it was simple for Alex to reach down and grip the pant legs. However, putting the right leg into the right hole was another matter. He put both feet into one of the snowsuit legs and fell over. He kicked violently, and the more he struggled, the more entrapped he became, as if the snowsuit were a Chinese finger puzzle.
Standing in his red snowsuit, he looked like a small fireplug. The material from the legs bunched up around his ankles, but the arms were still a bit short.
Irene led him out to the snow fort Arthur and Benjamin had built with snow bricks molded from one of her pound cake pans. She went into the kitchen and began to cut stew meat into chunks, rinsed the carrots and the celery, the onions, the potatoes. She monitored Benjamin and Arthur’s yells as they cut through the chilly air.
The Miller boys were at war with the Walsh twins, Jackie and Kevin from across Mellon Street. They’d stockpiled a great deal of ordnance—50 snowballs, each the size of a hand grenade. But now the w
ell-provisioned warriors had a new problem—Alex. When the Walsh attack came—imminently, the boys were sure—what were supposed to do with their tiny little brother, who would just be in the way? The Walsh twins were clever, sneaky fighters. Just yesterday, they’d jumped Benjamin, who’d walked home from school by himself because Arthur had to stay for detention. They washed his face with snow and called him a dirty Jew, which sounded tough to them, even though they weren’t quite sure what it meant.
Alex picked up a snowball.
“Alex, put that down,” said Arthur.
“Why?”
Imitating his father’s voice and lack of logic, he said, “Because I said so, that’s why.”
“Aw, luh…let him have one,” said Benjamin.
“Shut up, stutter-mouth.” Arthur squatted with his back against the inside front wall of the fort. “Dad said he’s gonna take us to the Pirates this year.”
“When?”
“I don’t know, sometime.”
“No, I mean, when did he suh…say that? I didn’t hear him say that.”
“You didn’t hear it, Benjamin, because he didn’t say it to you, he said it to muh…muh…me, stupid stutter-mouth. Hey Alex, don’t put that snowball in your mouth.” Alex dropped his right arm to his side and peered over his left shoulder. He swung his arm like a catapult and tossed the snowball four feet ahead of him.
“Wow,” Arthur said.
“Wow,” Benjamin said.
This time, the snowball went a foot farther.
Benjamin stood up to retrieve it. Almost immediately, a snowball with a stone inside caught him flush on the cheek. He went down as if shot. Arthur turned toward where the missile had come from, but as he did, Jackie Walsh rushed the fort from the other side, snatched Alex and ran off across the street.
Arthur knelt down beside his brother. “Benjamin, they got Alex. Stop crying and get up…”
“Boys?” Irene’s voice rang out from the house.
“Oh shit,” said Benjamin, sobbing. “It’s muh…Ma.”
Irene walked through the slushy snow in her apron and boots, her hair tied behind her head, with two cups of hot cocoa in hand. “Alex,” she called, “time to come in.”
The brothers stood side by side at attention. Benjamin held his right hand over his cheek, where a red welt the size of a boy’s fist was in bloom. He sniffed back the tears as his mother approached.
Arthur said, “Hi Ma.”
She pulled Benjamin’s hand away from his face. “Jesus, Joseph and Mary, what happened to you?”
With all the stoicism he could muster, he replied, “Nothing, Ma.”
“Don’t you nothing me—wait a minute, where is Alex?”
Irene gripped her sons by the wrists, and they marched like a drill team across Mellon Street. Benjamin held a chunk of hardened snow to the side of his face, where the bruise was transitioning its way from red to blue to purple.
Irene banged on the Walsh’s front door with the fury of Grendel’s mother. Her boys cowered beside her.
The door opened tentatively, as if the occupant was expecting a bill collector. Mrs. Walsh, a graying woman with a matching complexion and a sunken jaw line, thanks to several missing molars, scanned the Miller contingent and said, “What’s the trouble?”
“My son. Where is he?”
Mrs. Walsh turned toward the living room. “Jackie! Kevin!”
Voices from inside said, “What, Ma?”
Irene was in no mood to wait for an invitation. She swept by Mrs. Walsh and found the boys sitting on a threadbare sofa with Alex propped between them, his snowsuit pulled down to his waist. The twins teased him with a sugar cookie, holding it above his head, just slightly out of his reach. They’d gotten a good fix on the range of his arms.
Irene said, “Stop it.”
The twins froze.
With one swift motion she snatched Alex back and pulled up his snowsuit. As she passed by Mrs. Walsh, who hadn’t moved from the threshold, she said, “In the future I’ll thank you to tell your boys to keep their grubby hands off my son.”
“They’re just kids. Don’t get so high and mighty, Mrs. Miller.”
Irene stopped in her tracks. “What?”
“My boys didn’t do nothing wrong, no harm to him. They was just playing with the little freak.”
Irene’s lightning left hook would have done heavyweight champion Jack Johnson proud. The force of the blow knocked Mrs. Walsh back through the threshold and onto her rear end some six feet away, landing at her sons’ feet.
With her hand to her cheek, she said, “You hit me.”
“Say another word about my son and I’ll hit you again.”
Irene marched back across the street. Looking over his mother’s shoulders at the twins cowering in their doorway, Alex waved bye-bye. Arthur and Arnold followed, heads downcast, faces grinning.
The sun had gained momentum, and the snow in the street had mostly turned to brownish slush, exposing an amalgam of cinders and horse manure. Without looking at the boys, Irene admonished her sons. “Destroy that fort.”
“But, Ma.”
“You want to get it worse than she did? Wait until your father gets home.”
Ten minutes later the fort was slush, too.
Inside, Irene pulled off Alex’s snowsuit. She tried three different shirts and sweaters on him. All of them were way too short in the sleeves. She bit her lip. It was true. It was incredible. His arms really had grown. What was next?
Much to their surprise, Arthur and Benjamin didn’t “get it worse” that night from their father, as Irene had threatened. Their punishment was limited to the two whacks on the rear end with a broom handle from Irene and an afternoon’s confinement to their room, where they were forced to copy over their homework ten times. At dinner that evening, Abe asked about the purple bruise on Benjamin’s face. Irene told him something about a snowball fight, leaving out the details of the kidnapping, rescue operation and left hook, lest Abe charge next door to extract even more vengeance on Walsh senior, whom Abe had more than once threatened to flatten like a pancake.
After the dinner dishes were cleared, Irene sent Arthur and Benjamin to their room. She gave Alex some measuring cups to play with while she ran warm water into a washtub for his bath. “Abe,” she said, “we have to talk.”
From the tone of her voice he thought, look out, here it comes. “Yeah?” he said nervously.
Irene said, “It’s about Alex.”
“What about him?”
“There’s something going on with his body.”
“What’s wrong with his body?” he asked, feigning concern, although what he really felt was relief that this wasn’t going to be about Delia.
“He’s growing, Abe.”
“Growing? Well that’s good, right? See, I told you all he needed was a little time.” He turned to Alex. “You’re gonna be a big boy after all, right Alex?”
“It’s not what you think.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’ll show you. Alex? Come here, honey. It’s time for your bath.” She ran hot water into the kitchen sink and tested it until it was lukewarm. She added a handful of soap flakes. As she lathered him up his arms, she said, “Take a look at them.”
Alex, standing in the tub, splashed soapsuds at his parents. Thanks to the length his arms, he barely had to bend to reach the water.
Abe pressed Alex’s arms to his chest, dampening the front of his shirt. Holy God, he thought, what happened here? “Irene?” He released his son’s arms. He’d prayed that the boy would grow, but who could ever imagine he’d grow like this? He looked at Alex dangle his arms in the water. How the hell did they get stretched out like that? It had to be painful. He bent closer. “Alex, do your arms hurt you?”
Alex splashed water in his face.
Chapter 6
Three weeks went by. Alex’s condition remained stable. He gave no indication that his long arms bothered him in any way. He cont
inued to scoot and crawl around like a wind-up toy, eat like a small horse and throw whatever objects were handy at his brothers and the cat.
However, his arms pained Irene, constantly. Night after night, she had troubling dreams about Alex, in which his nose grew like Pinocchio’s, or his head mushroomed and rotted, or his penis elongated grotesquely, in shades of green and blue.
Abe tried his clumsy best to calm her fears. Since Alex didn’t express any discomfort, he was of the opinion that perhaps the boy’s condition wasn’t a problem after all, that it was just a growth spurt—an odd one, to be sure, but then, hadn’t Alex been unusual since the day he was born? Maybe his elongated arms were a forerunner, a harbinger of better things to come, an indication that the rest of his body was bound to catch up sooner or later, and that the best strategy was to keep the whole thing on the Q.T., to wait and see what, if anything else, developed.
Besides, Abe had places to go and people to see, namely Delia Novak. The slip of paper Malkin had given him with her address was burning a hole in his pocket. The question was, how was he going to get out of the house? According to the address, she lived across town, closer to where he worked than to Mellon Street, and Irene barely let him out of the house as it was, although he was damned if he knew why she wanted to keep him home. What the hell was there to do at home? Oh, it was all right playing with Alex and the boys. But after they went to bed, what was he supposed to do with Irene, sit there all night and listen to her complain about the price of chicken and the neighbors that didn’t take care of their yards or her mother’s reluctance to give her the good china? As if he cared a rat’s asshole about china, or wanted to hear her carp about a loose gutter, a drafty window, the state of the furniture, Christ, it never ended. And if it wasn’t that, she was moaning about Alex and his arms, and every time he tried to change the subject to something he cared about, something that affected his life, like the imbeciles at work and his fat lazy boss who hadn’t done a day’s work in a year, she told him to keep his mouth shut and quit his whining, he was lucky to have a job. Lucky, huh? Try lathing metal pipe ten hours a day in the heat and stink of summer or the aching cold of winter, with the icy wind blowing in off the river, see how lucky you’d feel.