Dead End in Norvelt

by Jack Gantos

  For some crazy reason I started doing jumping jacks and yelled out, “Welcome to Norvelt! We are a friendly town!”

  No one could hear me over the sound of the engines but one guy who had a skull painted on the gas tank of his bike turned toward me and ran his finger across his neck, like he was a pirate and was going to slit my throat.

  “Sorry,” I said in a small voice as I crouched down behind a lavender delphinium.

  Toward the bottom of the hill they downshifted and the engine roar was so loud a few petals fell off the blossoms. The noise rippled in waves across my skin, like when you throw a rock in a pond. There was nowhere else they would be going except to Huffer’s Funeral Parlor, and I knew that meant trouble. I wanted to run down there so badly and spy in the back window and see what was up. This was one bit of whisper history I really wanted to know about. But if I did Mom would kill me. Instead, I just ran back and forth across our property line like a guard dog on a tight leash.

  It didn’t take too long before the motorcycles started up again and soon the entire swarm of them revved up the hill and passed me as before, only this time one of the motorcycles had what looked like a torpedo from PT-109 strapped on top of a sidecar. The dead Hells Angel had to be in it. His gang of friends must have come to get his body in order to give him a proper Hells Angel burial, whatever that might be. I didn’t wave to them this time. I just flopped down on my belly and watched until they were gone.

  I was still on my belly when I turned and saw Bunny running up the Norvelt road. I stood and when she got close enough I could see she was in her pink-striped pajamas. She kept glancing back over her shoulder as she hopped the gutter and zigzagged up through our yard, like someone had been shooting at her from behind. With all the running her face should have been bright red, but it was as white as a bowl of milk.

  “Oh my God!” she shouted as the sweat ran down her forehead like a waterfall. “You should have seen what just happened. They all came stomping into the funeral parlor and demanded to see my dad, and then they made him pull the body out of the freezer and then they just stole a coffin off the display table and put the frozen Hells Angel in it and took off.”

  “I saw the coffin,” I said. “It looked like a silver torpedo.”

  “That’s the Time Capsule coffin!” she blurted out. “The top of the line!”

  “Wow,” I said, taking it all in.

  “Dad called Mr. Spizz,” she added, “because he’s a volunteer cop. He’ll track them down to their clubhouse, or cave, or devil hole they live in and arrest them all and make them pay for the coffin and send them to jail.”

  As she said that I looked straight over the top of her head and down the road. There was Mr. Spizz on his giant tricycle. As he labored up the Norvelt road incline and past us I saw that he had a police badge pinned to his khaki shirt. I didn’t see a gun on his belt, but I spotted a baseball bat rolling around in the little cart he towed behind him.

  “Hurry! They went thataway!” Bunny hollered, and pointed up the road. “Show those devil-worshipping lug nuts that they can’t get away with stealing our dead people and coffins.”

  Mr. Spizz just nodded. He was out of breath and sweaty, and I figured he really didn’t want to catch up to the Hells Angels and try to arrest them with a baseball bat. Plus, it must have been a little embarrassing that they were on really fast motorcycles and he was pedaling an adult tricycle.

  “I think he’s getting too old for this job,” Bunny whispered to me as he barely made it up and over the hill.

  “I think so too,” I replied. “Dad says his next bike is going to be a wheelchair.”

  “You know what else the Hells Angels did?” she asked, knowing that I didn’t. “They said the dead guy had bought an empty Norvelt house and was going to turn it into a Hells Angels clubhouse. Can you believe that? Before they left, the leader stood up on a table and said he thought their ‘brother’ was intentionally killed to keep him from opening a clubhouse here, and to avenge his death he put a devilish curse on the town. He said we’d all die painful, agonizing deaths and that then they’d come back and take over this town and rename it Hells Angels Town.”

  “Wow. Miss Volker said to look out for a curse when she wrote the dead guy’s obituary,” I reminded her. “And that sure is a nasty curse.”

  “Then for once she might be right,” she agreed. “I’m going to call a special Girl Scout meeting tonight so we can spread the word about the curse so people aren’t scared to death.”

  Then she turned and ran toward the funeral parlor in an odd dancing sort of way—skipping and clapping her hands and spinning around.

  12

  Thursday afternoon Mom was down the hill at the Norvelt Pants Factory filling out the paperwork for a sewing job. She had grown up with the factory manager and was sure she’d get the position and make a little extra money for “odd and ends,” as she put it. Before World War II the factory made heavy cotton pants and shirts for farmers and coal miners. During the war they made snappy-looking dress uniforms for the army. Now they were down to what Dad called a “skeleton crew” that made either brown or gray slacks for office workers.

  Dad was in the garage painting the identification numbers on his J-3, and so when the phone rang there was no one to pick it up but me.

  “Hello?” I said eagerly.

  It was exactly what I hoped it was—my ticket out of the house.

  “Help! Quick!” Miss Volker shouted over the phone. She was breathing hard but it was difficult to tell if it was because she’d gotten the dancing plague she predicted or if she was just worn out from dialing the phone, because when she dialed she had to knock the phone onto the floor and then use her big toe to turn the rotary dialer to the number she wanted. It took her about five minutes to finish a five-digit number and by then she was tuckered out.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “There are dead ones everywhere,” she shouted. “Come help me, quick.”

  “Who is dead?” I asked. “Did Spizz catch the Hells Angels and slaughter them with his baseball bat?”

  “No!” she shouted. “The vermin are dead. Rats! Mice! Even a possum! Oh my God, it’s an old-fashioned massacre, so come quickly.”

  “I’ll be right down,” I promised. “Don’t go into the basement without me.”

  I returned to my room and laced on my heavy winter boots. I didn’t want a poisoned rat to have one last spasm and bite me through my sneakers. Then I ran out to the garage where Dad was working. He had everything painted on the J-3, but the wings still needed to be bolted on. He’d have to tow the J-3 out of the garage for that final job.

  “See you later,” I cried out. “Miss Volker needs me real bad.”

  “She needs a lot more than you,” he said in a wise-guy sort of way. “She needs a boyfriend her own age.”

  My face turned red and I spun around and ran. In about two minutes I was thumping my boots across her porch. There was a big vase of flowers with a red ribbon tied in a bow around the vase. Spizz was still trying to wear Miss Volker down. I bent over to read the card and was just touching the envelope taped to the vase when Miss Volker shoved the door open with her shoulder and the edge of it cracked me flat on the side of my head. I fell over to one side then quickly popped up and dusted myself off.

  When she saw the flowers she threw her bad hands up and got them tangled in her hair. “Not again!” she groaned. “He’s driving me nuts.”

  “Who?” I asked. I was sure it was Mr. Spizz but I wanted her to say so.

  “Don’t make me spit out his fizzy name,” she said hastily. “Now hurry, maybe some of the vermin are only stunned.”

  I followed right behind her.

  “Grab the fireplace poker and go down into the basement, and if any of those vermin are twitching hit them with the poker and knock them into the Promised Land,” she ordered.

  I just stood there. I didn’t want to go down into that damp basement and beat in the cute heads of littl
e furry rodents any more than she did. I turned and said to her, “I’m afraid of dead things.”

  “Buck up!” she ordered. “I don’t want some of them to get away and breed.”

  “But when I’m afraid my nose blows a gasket,” I whined.

  She looked me right in the eye and propped her hands on her hips. “Mister, I need you to be a man,” she said with iron in her voice. “Don’t disappoint me.”

  I wanted to be a man. I didn’t want to be afraid of dead things. And I certainly didn’t want to disappoint Miss Volker, so I took the fire-blackened poker and opened the cellar door. I turned on the light and slowly descended the wooden steps.

  “Hello,” I whispered, as if mice and rats and opossums and chipmunks could start up a conversation. “If you are alive, it would be best for you to run away to your happy homes, because I’m supposed to kill you.” I thumped on the first step with the fireplace poker. Then I stood still and listened. I didn’t hear any scurrying off into the dark corners.

  “Remember,” I sang out. “I’m more scared of you than you are of me.” Then I walked all the way down the steps, and when I reached the bottom I knew why there had been no scurrying sounds. They were all dead! Every one of them—small mice and big rats and the opossum. They were splayed out crazily across the dirt floor as if they had suddenly dropped dead in the middle of a wild dance party. It made me sad.

  “What do you see?” Miss Volker called anxiously from upstairs.

  “A bunch of dead ones,” I called back. “What did you do to them?”

  “Do you see an open red box of Valentine chocolates?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I yelled.

  “Well don’t eat any, ’cause I sprinkled some of that 1080 vermin poison on them and the critters must have got a powerful dose of it.”

  I looked at the chocolates. They were chewed up, and brown bits and pieces were scattered around the box.

  “Don’t you like sweets?” I asked.

  “I don’t like sweets from that old simian sourpuss,” she replied. “Besides, I like the Girl Scout Thin Mints I bought from Mertie-Jo. I had a whole sleeve of them for dinner.”

  “What should I do with the critters?”

  “Sweep ’em up and put them in the box and we’ll bury them out back,” she said.

  “You’re going to bury them after what you did to them?” I asked incredulously.

  “Well,” she reasoned, “like most murderers I’m full of regret. If we give them a proper burial I’ll feel less guilty about poisoning them.”

  I took a deep breath and swept up the little rodents and the rest of the chocolate bits and scooped them into the box, but the opossum wouldn’t fit so I looked around the basement and found a grocery store bag. I used the red ribbon from the chocolate box to grab the opossum’s droopy tail and dropped him in. That gave me the creeps.

  When I took the box and bag upstairs Miss Volker had me set them out on the porch. “You can put them in the ground later,” she said. “I have something else for you to do.”

  Great, I thought, because sitting around my house was driving me crazy.

  When I came back inside she was in the kitchen. She nodded toward the big box of Girl Scout cookies she had bought from Mertie-Jo, and toward a stack of waxed-paper sandwich bags. “We need to bag up some cookies,” she said, “and you can take them over to the Community Center and then add them to your mother’s casseroles for the old folks.”

  “That is nice of you,” I remarked as I washed my hands.

  “I’m really not that nice,” she replied. “Deep inside I’m wishing that they would all drop dead and then my duty to Eleanor Roosevelt would be over.”

  “But then you’d have to marry Mr. Spizz,” I reminded her.

  “You have a point,” she considered. “But if he were a true gentleman, he’d just vanish and let me off the hook and then I could go visit my sister.”

  “Mrs. Dubicki said she is ready to depart this world, so maybe you’ll get to Florida sooner than you think,” I said, trying to cheer her up as I counted out five Thin Mints, put them in a bag, and pinched over the waxy top.

  “Perhaps,” she replied. “But they aren’t dying fast enough.”

  “My dad said the same thing,” I added, “only my mom was going to clobber him.”

  “Well, he’s right,” she agreed. “Honestly, this poor town is in trouble. We old ones just hang on and on. We don’t do anything for the community. Our houses are like inhabited tombs. If we don’t get any new young people to move in here this town is just going to disappear. Norvelt was built so that families would have a fresh start in life, but now those people are old as the hills and the longer they hang on the less likely it is this town will survive. I’d rather have the people drop dead than have the town drop dead and vanish from history.”

  “Like one of the Lost Worlds,” I remarked.

  “Exactly,” she agreed.

  “Maybe Norvelt can build a coal mining theme park with underground roller coasters zipping through the old mine shafts,” I suggested.

  “No one cares about digging coal anymore,” she said. “Besides, it will kill you.”

  “Then what about building a Roman colosseum or an Egyptian pyramid—like a Lost Worlds theme park?” I said.

  “We don’t need a theme park!” she shot back. “The best thing to do is what I did. I sold my sister’s empty house to a nice young man a few months ago and I’m hoping he attracts more young people. He said he had a lot of friends.”

  “That sounds like a good start.” I didn’t want to get her worked up.

  “I hope so,” she replied. “There are a lot of empty houses that could be homes to young couples.”

  After I bagged about a dozen servings of cookies she stopped me from doing any more. “We don’t want them to get stale,” she said, “and I’m tired. Time for my nap.”

  “Then I’ll take these over to Mr. Spizz and circle back around and pick up the rodents. I’ll bury them up at my house since I’m already digging up the ground.”

  “Tell Spizz not to eat any of the cookies,” she said harshly. “He can buy his own. These are for those old ladies. As much as I hate to say it, a good cookie is like medicine that makes you live longer.”

  “I’ll tell him,” I promised.

  “And one word of advice,” she added. “Don’t plant any vegetables above where you bury those rodents. They got enough poison in ’em to bring down an elephant.”

  “Thanks,” I said, while thinking that I better bury them up by the dump if they were so toxic.

  13

  It was the first Sunday in July and I had a smile on my face because it was my birthday and the one gift I had asked for I received. Mom bought me some industrial-strength petroleum-based grease remover that they used at the pants factory. It came in a round tin and looked like black Vaseline, and she said it worked miracles at removing everything—even bloodstains on my T-shirts and airplane oil off of Dad’s work clothes—and would certainly get rid of the itchy painted circles on War Chief. She gave me the gift the night before in case I wanted to wake up before church and get started on him.

  I did get up early and was in the pony pen rubbing the paint remover onto War Chief and scrub-brushing it in big glistening circles over the paint and then rinsing him down with soap and water. The paint was dissolving and War Chief seemed pretty happy and I was too. After about a half hour Mom joined me with a bacon and cheese sandwich wrapped in newspaper to keep it warm. “I thought you could use a little something,” she said, and gave me a goofy love look, like she was remembering the morning I was born.

  “I am hungry,” I replied, and put the brush down and washed my hands in the soap and water. I unwrapped the sandwich and took a bite, but because my hand still smelled of petroleum the sandwich tasted like my hand.

  “You better wash them again,” she said.

  “Could you hold the sandwich and feed me?” I asked.

  She smiled. “Just
like a baby bird,” she cooed, and as she held the sandwich for me she stroked my hair. Normally I wouldn’t like all this kind of Mom attention, but it was my birthday and we always acted like it was her birthday too, because it was the day I was born and the day she gave birth to me. So I was as sweet to her as she was to me.

  “I also came out here to tell you something else,” she said as she took a napkin and wiped my mouth. “I called a farrier to see if he would trim War Chief’s hooves.”

  “Did you offer to pay him in pants now that you work at a pants factory?” I asked, and looked her directly in the eye.

  “Hey, I wear the pants in this family, so don’t you be a smarty-pants,” she said, and poked me on the shoulder. “I offered him you. I told him I’d trade an hour of his time for three hours of yours. I thought that was fair.”

  I stopped chewing. “What’d he say?”

  “He laughed. And when he finished laughing he said that he lived in a ‘cash only’ world.” She didn’t sound surprised.

  “But didn’t you know he would say that?” I asked. “I did.”

  “Yes and no,” she replied. “I told him he could teach you the business and he said that nobody wanted to learn his business anymore. He called himself an antique. I told him that when I was a kid, antique men were the best because they knew how to take care of a horse, farm the land, build a house, and fix a car.”

  “And I bet he said those days were dead and over with,” I cut in.

  “Exactly,” she replied.

  “Are you ever going to realize this barter stuff doesn’t work anymore? That people want cash? They’ve always wanted cash—or gold. I haven’t read one book where people didn’t want something valuable for their work.”

  “What about a caveman?” Mom suggested. “Did they want gold?”

  “No, they wanted food and fire and safety—these things were as good as gold to them.”

  “Well, they are as good as gold to me too,” she reasoned. “So are you calling me a caveman?”