Dead End in Norvelt

by Jack Gantos

  As soon as I saw him I knew instantly that I didn’t want him to die. He was so beautiful and at ease in the woods. This was his home, not mine, and I suddenly felt like a killer who had broken into his house and was about to shoot him. I watched and held my breath. He would stop and turn his antlered head to listen and then raise his dark nose to sniff the air, and then he would nibble on the tender bark of a thin tree, and then lick some snow, and then take a few more careful steps. The fur under his neck looked so soft, like the neck fur of a cat I had before it went out one night and never came back. I felt as if Dad and I were going to murder nature’s tame pet. What I really wanted to do was to go down and stroke his golden brown fur, and name him and give him something to eat and make him see I was not there to harm him.

  But we were there to harm him. We were going to kill him and gut him and skin him and cut him up and eat him. I turned to maybe say something of what I was thinking when Dad mechanically rotated the rifle in the deer’s direction and pressed his eye against the rubber end of the telescopic sight as if he were getting ready to shoot his old WWII enemy. Hitting the deer would be about as easy for Dad as standing at our kitchen window with a target pistol and picking off the finches and cardinals at our window bird feeder.

  I knew I couldn’t grab Dad’s rifle because it would be bad gun safety so I came up with another idea. I thought that if I could silently pass gas I would scare off the deer. But it would have to be silent so Dad wouldn’t hear it, and it was hard to tell if it would be silent because I was squatting down. I could think it was going to be silent but then it might suddenly be really loud. You could never be sure. But I couldn’t take a chance with Dad because he wouldn’t think it was funny. He didn’t even want me to breathe. He sure didn’t want me to pass deer-spooking gas.

  I saw his finger slowly curling around the trigger and it was trembling like a snake about to strike. He kept his eye pressed against the sight as he tracked the deer between the crisscrossing tree trunks, and all I could think about was my twitching sphincter. I was trying to open it just a tiny bit so a whisper-thin stream of gas would noiselessly escape into the air and stealthily warn the deer without Dad knowing it was me. I looked at Dad’s tightening trigger finger and the side of his face where his cheek muscles were knotted up as he intently followed the deer and waited for a good chest shot that would cleanly pierce the heart. I knew I only had a moment to act if I wanted to save the deer’s life. I took a deep breath, squatted down a bit, and relaxed my bottom. But nothing happened. I took another deep breath and pushed out.

  “Come on,” I said to myself, “get inspired. You have to save the deer! Think of something.”

  And just at that tense moment when I was afraid Dad was going to pull the trigger and shoot the deer, a thought shot even more quickly into my mind—a very inspiring thought. I had been reading a great book about ancient explorers before Columbus, and there was a Chinese explorer, a Buddhist monk, who sailed a Chinese junk to the Aleutian Islands by Alaska and landed on an island that was populated by a primitive tribe of people who just happened to be called the Hairy Ainus People. That name alone almost made me howl with laughter, but I kept telling myself not to laugh through my mouth, but out the other direction. I really hadn’t planned to think about the Hairy Ainus People, but there I was up in a tree house in the freezing cold and squatting down when my thoughts of the Hairy Ainus combined with a gut desire to save the deer gave me just enough oomph, and I let out a thin stream of gas which sounded roughly like the slow opening of a creaky coffin lid that had been closed for a thousand rusty years. Instantly the deer swiveled his pink ears toward us and cocked one of his strong rear legs as if he was about to bolt.

  “What was that?” Dad hissed under his breath and pulled his eye away from the sight.

  I didn’t answer him because I knew the answer would arrive without me speaking a word. Once that creaky coffin door had opened, the smell of a thousand years of rotting death drifted out through the thick woven fabric of my clothing.

  When I saw Dad’s nose twitch I knew his question had been answered. Quickly, he pressed his eye back against the sight but I could tell by the way he jerked the barrel to the left and right that the deer had vanished. I had saved his life.

  “Good timing,” he said sarcastically without even looking at me.

  I didn’t say a word. I could have said it was an accident but I didn’t feel like lying. I wasn’t sorry the deer escaped and Dad could see I wasn’t sorry.

  “You know,” he said irritably, “the deer really hasn’t escaped. This just means some other guy will bag him.”

  I hoped not. And even if my hope was false hope, it was better than shooting him ourselves.

  “Well, back to gun safety,” Dad said, and pulled back and down on the bolt and removed the unused shell from the chamber of the rifle. “You understand never to play with guns, right?”

  “Right,” I replied, and I meant it. I really did. “Can we go home now?” I asked.

  “Are you cold?”

  I wasn’t. I just didn’t want to fake being happy if he shot a deer. I didn’t want to see the blood and guts hanging out and everything else. “Yes,” I said. “I’m freezing.”

  “Good enough,” he said. “I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  I knew he didn’t mind taking me back home early since now he knew he could hunt more easily by himself for the rest of the season. Then we climbed down from the tree and I walked behind him toward the car. It was cold and the snap of each twig breaking sounded like tiny hunters firing tiny rifles at tiny imaginary deer. When we got to the clearing a panel truck full of Norvelt Gun Club hunters pulled up. The driver stuck his head out the window.

  “How’d it go?” he asked too loudly, and even from a distance I could smell whiskey on his breath.

  Dad could too. “Nothing to report,” he replied, and then the first thing he said to me when we got into our truck was, “No matter what you do in life, never drink and use guns—and drive!”

  “Sorry about the gas,” I finally said. “But the deer was beautiful.”

  “What you did was nothing,” he replied, and reached over and tousled my hair. “Those other guys are the real knuckleheads.”

  * * *

  I was thinking about that winter hunting incident and hadn’t listened to a word Dad said in my bedroom, but whatever he said, I knew he was right and I nodded my head up and down to show him respect.

  Finally he asked, “Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

  “I promise,” I said as sincerely as possible. “I didn’t know there was a bullet in the chamber of that Jap rifle. I had played with it before but there was never a bullet.”

  “Are you lying?” he asked.

  “No. Not even a little,” I replied.

  “Well, something doesn’t add up,” he said, standing and pacing the room. “If I didn’t put a bullet in the chamber and you didn’t—then who did?” He stopped, and just like in the movies he gave me a long, steady look as if I were on trial and now was the moment for me to break down and confess.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said. “Honest.”

  “I know I’ve looked in that chamber before,” he said calmly, rethinking his moves. “There is no way it had a bullet in it.” He sat back down and his eyes looked vacant. Just as I had drifted off and recalled the old deer hunt, I now guessed he had drifted off thinking about the war and crawling through the sand and finding those dead men and stripping away their weapons and war gear. I looked into his eyes for any sign of emotion. Was he sad? Or proud? Or terrified? I couldn’t tell. He looked stuck in time, like an old black-and-white photograph wedged into the side of a mirror frame. Then very quietly he turned and said to me, “You know what the biggest problem was with the marines out in the Pacific Islands?”

  I shook my head no.

  “When we finally landed on those Jap-infested islands our guys had a hard time shooting the Japs—I don’t mean because th
e Japs were hiding—I mean that they had a real hard time with the idea of having to shoot another person you could look in the eye. Our officers had to threaten to shoot some of our own troops if they didn’t fire their rifles.”

  I had read Guadalcanal Diary but didn’t remember reading about that problem. All the marines I read about fired their guns like crazy at everything that moved. They even burned the Japs alive with flamethrowers. They killed them every way they could and felt like heroes for wiping them out.

  “But the Minutemen shot the British in the eyes at Bunker Hill,” I said.

  “Stuff like that only sounds good on paper,” Dad said dismissively. “But believe me, in real life when you are eye to eye with the enemy you’d rather shake their hand than shoot them.”

  Dad stood up and looked down over me with his hand on the crown of my head as if he were saying a prayer in church. Then gravely he said, “Don’t ever go to war. Even if you win, the battle is never over inside you.”

  I nodded yes.

  Then his mood changed. “I believe you didn’t know the gun was loaded,” he said, and dropped his hand across my shoulder. “But you shouldn’t have played with it or lied to your mom about having my permission. You are still grounded for the summer. Don’t worry, though, I might soon be joining you in your room. Your mom isn’t exactly jumping up and down with joy about the plane or her corn.”

  “Move in anytime,” I said. “I’d like some company.”

  “And thank your lucky stars you didn’t shoot anyone,” he added, and slapped the back of my head.

  “I scared Miss Volker,” I confessed. “She dropped her hearing aid down the toilet.”

  “Sorry that old Commie didn’t dive in after it,” he cracked, and then he slowly left the room to go tell Mom he had really straightened me out once and for all.

  7

  I was in my room reading Captain Cortés Conquers Mexico which was about how Cortés slaughtered the Aztecs and turned them into a Lost World even before Pizarro had done it to the Incas. To me that meant the big lesson Pizarro learned from history was that it was okay to kill innocent people and steal their gold! In fact, Cortés was Pizarro’s hero because Cortés and his army of conquistadors used their long swords to hack to pieces so many Aztec soldiers so quickly that fleeing women and children actually drowned in rivers of blood that flooded the streets. Those who escaped from being chopped to bits later died in horrid agony from smallpox the conquistadors spread to Mexico from Europe. The writer of the book called Cortés a great man. As Miss Volker had once said, “Be suspicious of history that is written by the conquerors.” I bet the writer didn’t ask any Aztecs what they thought of Cortés.

  I was kind of stunned by imagining all the bloody carnage and I slumped back onto my bed pillow when I noticed a bubbling river of blood running out my nose and across my lips. “Dang!” I shouted. “I swear I’m going to drown in my own pool of blood.” I reached for a box of tissues. I rolled one up and stuck it between my upper lip and gum the way Miss Volker taught me.

  I had just stopped the bleeding and hid the wad of bloody tissues behind my bed when Mom came in wearing a crisply ironed summer dress and told me to put on some “respectable” clothes. “I’m taking you out for some fresh air,” she said.

  “Like walking a dog?” I asked, trying to be clever.

  “No funny business,” she ordered. “Just get dressed.”

  I gladly got dressed because I actually needed some fresh air after that awful book. When I met Mom in the kitchen she inspected me up and down, made me change from sneakers to loafers, and then we walked up the street a quarter mile to Dr. Mertz’s home office.

  Because of Miss Volker’s needlepoint map of Norvelt I now looked at the houses differently. Some were well kept and painted nicely with tidy yards and groomed flower beds that Mom admired. But a few were uninhabited and gloomy-looking with dandelions overrunning the yard and limp gutters hanging loose from the weight of soggy old leaves and broken tree branches. Mom seemed to look away from the abandoned houses, but she always brightened up when she spotted a bird’s nest full of baby birds who were chirping for lunch. And she laughed as she pointed out the young squirrels dashing crazily across the laundry lines and how the wild brown-and-white rabbits blended in with the dried weeds and Queen Anne’s lace that lined the vegetable plots between the houses. Everything good and alive and hopeful made her smile, but what was left to fall into ruin made her tense up and turn her head away. I could read her mind, and I’m sure she was thinking that there was a time when the town was all new and perfect and everyone worked hard and had so much pride in owning their own little Norvelt house. If she had it her way it would all be perfectly fixed up to look as it had been when she was my age. But I could only see what it now was, and it looked like a town whose future was not going to circle back to its past.

  Mom hadn’t made an appointment with Dr. Mertz but she timed our arrival so we would show up just at the end of his office hours. Dr. Mertz had an elderly receptionist and when we opened the door and stepped in she stopped typing, raised her eyeglasses, and asked if she could be of help.

  “I just want to have a quick word with the doctor,” Mom explained, using her sweet neighborly voice as if we’d come to borrow a cup of sugar.

  “Then please take a seat,” the receptionist replied routinely, and pointed toward a row of dark oak chairs before returning to her typing. She was a lot better at typing than I was. She used all of her fingers and I only used two.

  “Hey, Mom,” I whispered. “Can I ask her to give me some typing tips?”

  “Just mind your own business,” she said tightly while still keeping a bright smile on her face.

  “Well, if we don’t have an appointment why are we here?” I asked.

  “Because I need to check on something,” she said vaguely, then looked away from me and put a lot of attention into smoothing out her skirt. I knew she was up to something but I didn’t know what.

  I sat in silence and stared at the taxidermed school of fish the doctor had mounted all around the walls. I counted thirty-five of them, and suddenly I wondered if Mr. Huffer could figure out a way to mount a school of old dead people on the wall in order to save space since Bunny had told me the world was running out of burial plots. I turned to ask Mom but she was in the middle of refreshing her red lipstick, and when Dr. Mertz appeared from his office door she quickly hopped up.

  “Oh, hi,” he said, clearly surprised when he saw us. Then he turned to his receptionist. “Mrs. Woodcliff,” he asked, “did I have an appointment I failed to notice?”

  Before Mrs. Woodcliff could answer Mom cut in. “No,” she said. “I just took a little chance and popped over.”

  Dr. Mertz knew us from other appointments. He had peered up my nose with a telescopic flashlight which looked like a thin pen that clipped into the top pocket of his white lab jacket. He had also taken blood samples with a syringe, and he was the one who had given me the iron drops to take each night and told me to eat iron-fortified cereal—he had even crushed up a mortarful of the cereal and held a magnet to it and pulled out tiny specks of real iron to show me the stuff that he said was good for me. He also concluded I would need to schedule an appointment to have the inside of my nasal passages cauterized in order to burn away the number of leaky capillaries and stop the bleeding.

  “How can I help you?” Dr. Mertz asked after we silently entered his examination room.

  “I just thought you might have a few extra minutes to cauterize the inside of Jack’s nasal passages,” Mom said smoothly. “He’s bleeding a lot.”

  “I see,” he replied, then pursed his lips and looked down at his feet to ponder what Mom was getting at. When he looked up he said, “But you know there will be a charge for that service.”

  “How much will that cost, Doctor?” she asked. As soon as she mentioned money I pretended to be distracted and fortunately, in the doctor’s office, there were plenty of plastic medical models of in
ternal organs to study. I fixed my eyes on a purple human liver that looked just like the cow liver Mom always served me because it was “filled with iron.” Even though I tried not to listen to Mom and the doctor any talk of money always got my attention because everything in our house depended entirely on money. Decisions for us were not made on whether we wanted something, or even needed something, but on whether we could afford it or not. Dad once said, “Someday I want to live a life where I won’t be bullied by my wallet.” I wished that someday would arrive soon because his wallet was a really big bully that said “No” and “Put that back” all the time.

  The doctor gave Mom a price and I could tell by the disappointed way she said “I see” that she couldn’t afford the operation. But then she quickly switched moods, smiled brightly at him, and asked, “Would you do it for some homemade jarred fruit as payment?”

  He smiled widely in return, but his mind was made up. “Well,” he said slowly with a touch of regret in his voice, “that is very sweet of you to offer, but I have two cases of peaches left over from last year.”

  “How about pickles?” Mom was quick to ask.

  “Got a basement full of them,” he replied just as quickly, and before Mom could offer another barter he said, “I wish I didn’t have to ask you for cash, but I do.”

  “I understand,” Mom said in an even voice that showed no sign of regret, and I knew we were finished. A moment later we were out on the sidewalk and strolling home as if nothing embarrassing had ever taken place.

  “Why’d you offer him fruit and pickles?” I asked, and looked up at her face which didn’t look so bright and cheery. “Doctors cost money.”