Dead End in Norvelt

by Jack Gantos

  He looked me in the eye then reached forward and placed his big, soft hand on my forehead. “I think you’ve been out in the sun too long,” he said. “You better go in there and get some rest.”

  21

  Finally the telephone rang and in a minute I was back at Miss Volker’s house.

  “Who died?” I asked with a little too much enthusiasm.

  “No one,” she said, and gave me a cross look. “Drive over to Mertie-Jo’s house and tell her I need more cookies,” she instructed, and waved her hand toward a ten-dollar bill on my desk. “These old ladies really love them for dessert, and since I can’t bake anymore it is the least I can do to help your mom out with those great meals she cooks.”

  “Sure,” I replied, and crushed the ten-dollar bill into the palm of my hand. I was eager to visit Mertie-Jo. I loved the way she smiled at me like a dazed sunflower.

  It was the first time I had driven by myself and that made me nervous, and then going to Mertie-Jo’s house made me more nervous because I liked her but would never tell her because I couldn’t even say I liked her to myself. Even though I drove slowly to her house I felt as if I had sprinted all the way there because I was kind of sweaty and breathing hard when I arrived. I wiped my hand across my nose and checked for blood as I walked from the car to her porch. I was clean. I rang the doorbell, and when she opened the door and saw it was me she smiled her special smile as her head slowly descended, like the sun setting against the beautiful beach of her tanned shoulder. “Hi,” she said softly. “Nice to see you.”

  “Hi,” I chirped, and smiled brightly as if I were a blinding sun that had just risen.

  She squinted at me and I knew I was supposed to start a conversation, but it was as if I had suddenly had a total eclipse of the sun and my mind faded to black and became wordless. After a few quiet minutes she raised her head back up and asked, “So, why did you ring my doorbell?”

  Her question snapped me out of myself. “Oh, Miss Volker needs more Thin Mints,” I replied.

  “Must be my lucky day,” she said, finally delighted by something I said. “I sold a box to Mr. Spizz and one to Mr. Huffer, and now Miss Volker can have all I’ve got left,” Mertie-Jo offered. “We’re moving, and I can’t take them with me.”

  “Why are you leaving?” I asked, sounding a little too alarmed.

  “My dad needs a job,” she explained. “I mean, it’s been good that I’m making money on the cookies but it’s not enough to keep us going. Everyone in Norvelt would have to eat about a thousand cookies each day in order for us to get by.”

  “I’d eat a thousand cookies,” I said. “If you’d stay.”

  “It wouldn’t make me feel real good to be the cause of your grotesque weight gain,” she said, and puffed out her cheeks in a chubby way.

  “Well, I’m sorry you are leaving,” I said.

  “I’m not sorry,” she replied. “Norvelt is kind of dead. We’re moving to Pittsburgh.”

  I didn’t know what else to say so I showed her the ten-dollar bill, which was a little sweaty, and said, “Miss Volker will buy all your Thin Mints.”

  “Great! Wait right here,” she replied, and closed the door.

  In a minute she opened it up and her dad stepped onto the porch with three big brown boxes. “Where do you want these, son?” he asked.

  “The trunk,” I replied, and pointed toward the car. “I’ll open it for you.”

  “Did you drive here?” he asked as we walked down the driveway.

  “Yeah,” I said proudly.

  “You must be mature for your age,” he remarked.

  “I am,” I said, and proudly puffed out my chest as we reached the car. Then I opened the trunk and when I lifted the lid I let out the most high-pitched girlie scream of my life. “Oh cheeze-us!” I cried out, and jumped up and down with my arms flopping around. “There is a dead old lady in the trunk!”

  Mertie-Jo’s dad dropped the boxes and hurried to where I was standing. “Looks like she’s been dead a long time,” he said softly with a puzzled expression on his face. “Why, she’s become a skeleton.”

  It was a skeleton. A very white skeleton but wearing a lady’s flowered dress and red shoes.

  “Wait a minute,” he said, perking up. “This is a fake skeleton—the kind they have in science class.” He reached into the trunk, lifted it out by its neck, and rattled it back and forth. “Oo-oooo-oooh,” he moaned, and shook the skeleton in front of my face. The jaw broke away and bounced off the toe of my sneaker.

  “Ouch,” I said, and picked it up. I turned to look at Mertie-Jo but she was back in the house. Through the kitchen window I spotted her on the telephone, and it didn’t take me long to realize she was probably calling Bunny because faintly I heard her squeal, “Oh cheeze-us!” And then she jumped around with her arms flopping up and down as I had done. She was just like Miss Volker making fun of Mr. Spizz. I felt my cheeks redden and for a moment I felt sorry for him until I touched my nose and there was a little smudge of blood on my upper lip. I wiped Mr. Spizz out of my mind just as quickly as I wiped the blood away on the back of my hand.

  Her dad dropped the dressed skeleton back into the trunk. “I’ll just put these boxes in the backseat,” he offered, and I could tell by his hokey voice that he was laughing at me himself. I walked around him to the front seat and slipped behind the wheel.

  “Good luck in Pittsburgh,” I said after he closed my door. I wanted him to like me even if Mertie-Jo made fun of me. I started the engine and pressed down on the gas to make the engine roar. The moment Mr. Kernecky stepped back from the car I punched the gas pedal and took off like I was a real man and not some spineless kid who was afraid of a plastic skeleton in a dress. When I got to Miss Volker’s house I stacked up all three boxes on top of each other and carried them as if I were Hercules. It almost killed me.

  After I put the cookies in the kitchen I didn’t want to go home, so I began to polish all of Miss Volker’s scuffed-up old-lady shoes. That was when the telephone rang.

  “Miss Volker’s house,” I said politely.

  “This is Mr. Huffer,” he said, and even though I couldn’t see him I could tell he was in his sad pose. “Tell Miss Volker that an ambulance has just dropped off Mrs. Hamsby. She looks in rather bad shape and her children called to tell me to go ahead and cremate her immediately. I am preparing to do just that in a short while, so if she wants to examine Mrs. Hamsby she needs to get here on the double.”

  “Hold on a minute,” I said, and lowered the phone.

  Before I could say anything Miss Volker stood up and walked gingerly across the floor in her bare feet. “Which one?” she asked, and stared out the window toward the funeral parlor.

  “Mrs. Hamsby,” I replied.

  “I sure liked her,” Miss Volker said in a quiet voice. “Ask him if there are any unusual details. If not, tell him to go ahead and later I’ll send you by to pick up the paperwork so I can sign it.”

  I relayed the message to Mr. Huffer. “Tell her it looks like she died of natural causes,” he said. “She called the operator and complained of body spasms. The ambulance was sent but they found her expired in the kitchen. Most likely another old-lady heart attack.”

  “Go ahead with it,” I said, and he hung up.

  Then as I continued to polish the shoes and buff them, Miss Volker walked over to her needlepoint map and stuck a red map pin into Mrs. Hamsby’s roof at A-41. She continued to stand by the map and tidy up the pins, but I knew there was nothing to tidy up. She was just letting time pass as she collected her thoughts.

  “Better sharpen your pencil,” she called over to me. “I’m in a mood today. Mrs. Hamsby was one of the good ones. I hate to see her go—though it is for the better.”

  It was always hard for me to think that death was for the better, but there was nothing I could say to Miss Volker to change her mind because I knew she thought it was for the good of the town that the old ones move on.

  “When the sun goes
down each day it turns its back on the present and steps into the past,” she started with a strong, even voice, “but it is never dead. History is a form of nature, like the mountains and sea and sky. History began when the universe began with a ‘Big Bang,’ which is one reason why most people think history has to be about a big event like a catastrophe or a moment of divine creation, but every living soul is a book of their own history, which sits on the ever-growing shelf in the library of human memories. Sadly, we don’t know the history of every person who ever lived, and unfortunately many books about historic people, like the lost Greek and Latin and Arabic texts, are gone forever and are as lost as the lost world of Atlantis.

  “But here in Norvelt we had one of those librarians who collected the tiniest books of human history. Mrs. Hamsby, who died today at age seventy-seven, was the first postmistress of Norvelt and she saved all the lost letters, those scraps of history that ended up as undeliverable in a quiet corner of Norvelt. But they were not unwanted. Mrs. Hamsby carefully pinned each envelope to the wall, so that the rooms of her house were lined from floor to ceiling with letter upon letter, and when you arrived for tea it appeared as if the walls were papered with the overlapping scales of an ancient fish. You were always welcome to unpin any envelope and read the orphaned letter, as if you were browsing in a library full of abandoned histories.

  “Each room has its own motif of stamps, so that the parlor room is papered with human stamps as if people such as Lincoln, or Queen Elizabeth, or Joan of Arc had come to visit. The bedroom has the stamps of lovely landscapes you might discover in your dreams, and the bathroom has stamps with oceans and rivers and rain. Each stamp is a snapshot of a story, of one thin slice of history captured like an ant in amber. There is history in every blink of an eye, and Mrs. Hamsby knew well that within the lost letter was the folded soul of the writer wrapped in the body of the envelope and mailed into the unknown. And for this tiny museum of lost history we citizens of Norvelt thank her.”

  “That was a good one,” I said quietly with admiration, finally looking up from my pad. “I’d love to see the inside of her house.”

  “You might,” she replied. “Or maybe your dad will haul it off to West Virginia, where I bet they’ll rip every one of those letters down and toss them in a furnace.”

  “They wouldn’t do that,” I said. “Would they?”

  “It’s been done before,” she said. “Which is why we have to save the history we have. You never know what small bit of it might change your life—or change the whole world!”

  I turned my pad to a clean page and sharpened up my pencil. She looked me in the eye. I looked her right back. “Hit it!” I said.

  “On this day in history, August 1, 1944, a book of letters written by a child was close to being destroyed in the blink of an eye. This was the day that Anne Frank, a fifteen-year-old Jewish girl, last wrote in her diary of the two years she and seven of her family and friends hid in the secret rooms above her father’s office building, while the Nazis searched for Jews to deport to concentration camps. Three days later they were betrayed and captured. Anne and her sister, Margot, were sent to the Bergen-Belsen death camp.

  “Anne’s diary, which the Nazis thought was so meaningless, was thrown onto the floor of her hiding place. The diary was recovered by a friend and carefully preserved so that someday she could return it to Anne, but Anne and her sister died of typhus in the concentration camp just weeks before the camp’s liberation.

  “Only her father, Otto Frank, survived, and he was given the book when he returned to his building after the war. After reading the diary he decided to have it published, even though many people did not find it worthy. But in the United States, one person who felt the true power of the diary—a diary as loud as the six million Jews who lost their voices—was our own Eleanor Roosevelt. She wrote the introduction to the first American edition and was so deeply moved by this young girl’s words that she said the diary was ‘one of the wisest and most moving commentaries on war and its impact on human beings that I have ever read.’

  “We are proud in Norvelt that our men and women fought in the war to liberate oppressed people and allow their found voices to record the history of that terrible time.”

  “That was really important,” I said to Miss Volker as I raced to get her words down on paper.

  “Anne Frank can never be forgotten,” she replied with reverence. “And it is yet one more reminder why I stay to take care of this town. Mrs. Roosevelt is the greatest American woman who ever lived and she has always been devoted to those who suffer. And to this day she herself is suffering from a terrible illness, so how can I give up my duties when she has given so much of her life for us?”

  I got this one typed up as Miss Volker stretched out on the couch and took a restorative nap. She always needed to recharge her batteries after a passionate obituary. She was still sleeping when I finished. I covered her with the old knitted afghan and walked down to see Mr. Greene.

  “It can only mean one thing when you walk into my office,” he said as he tapped out his pipe.

  “Yep,” I said, and handed him the obituary.

  He read it on the spot. “Those old ladies seem to be dropping like flies,” he said, and pressed more tobacco into the charred bowl of his pipe. “A real shame. Someone should look into all these deaths.”

  “Isn’t that what the newspaper is for?” I asked. “To look into things?”

  “I’ll take that under advisement,” he said. Then he lit a match.

  22

  “It’s time,” Dad announced, and rubbed his hands together as he stood up from the breakfast table, “to get an elevated perspective on Norvelt.”

  “What’s that mean?” Mom asked suspiciously, looking up from Mrs. Hamsby’s obituary with tears in her eyes.

  I knew what Dad meant.

  “Time for me to join the birds,” Dad said smoothly as he flapped his arms. “Just look out the window.”

  I leaped from my seat and nearly cracked the window glass with my forehead. The J-3 was sitting at the beginning of the runway and was polished, painted, and poised to fly. “When did you pull it out of the garage?” I asked without taking my eyes off the plane. I just had to take a ride in it. And secretly I wanted to fly it!

  “Early this morning,” he said casually, and tilted back in his chair, full of satisfaction from finishing a job Mom thought he couldn’t complete. “When I returned from dropping another empty Norvelt house in West Virginia, I had a couple of the workers help me move the J-3, then lift the wing in place so I could bolt it on.”

  “Can I go with you? Can I? Please?” I begged. I wished I had never traded Mom my ONE FLIGHT IN THE J-3 ticket.

  “No, you can’t get in that plane,” Mom said firmly, and she meant it. “It’s not even inspected.”

  “Oh cheeze-us-crust!” I grumbled.

  “I wish you would stop that fake cursing,” she scolded. “It’s just as rude as the real thing.”

  “A test flight is all the inspection it needs,” Dad replied. “But Jack can help me get her ready.”

  “Whatever you need,” I said excitedly. “I’ll be your ground crew.”

  “Then follow me,” he replied.

  “If you don’t mind, I’ll watch from the porch,” Mom informed us, and stood up to clear the table. “That is, unless you need me.”

  “I’ll handle it,” I said to her. It was finally my chance to be a part of the airplane crew. Dad didn’t want me hanging out in the garage with him because it annoyed Mom. She thought that fixing up the J-3 was too much fun for a kid who was being punished. She liked it a lot more when I was digging the bomb shelter in the sun.

  In a few minutes we were standing in front of the J-3 as Dad explained my duties with military precision. “Your job will seem scary,” he said, summing things up as he put his hand on my shoulder. “But it’s not dangerous as long as you do everything the right way—just like gun safety. Follow the rules, okay?”

/>   “Okay!” I shot back, then took my place standing at the rear of the plane. I didn’t want to mess anything up like I did when we went hunting.

  Dad placed both hands on the varnished wooden propeller. He rocked it back and forth a few times to get the fuel flowing into the engine, and once he smelled it he put his entire weight into a big swing. The engine started, and the sound of the spinning propeller was as loud as a thousand-pound wasp. My hair blew straight back but the plane didn’t budge forward because Dad had the wheels chocked with big wedges of firewood. I gripped the tail and watched him make sure to stay out of the path of the propeller as he trotted around the wing and back to the fuselage, where he opened the flimsy cockpit door. He hopped up into his seat, closed the door, and stuck his hand straight out the window and gave me the thumbs-up.

  That was my signal. I dropped to my hands and knees and crawled forward alongside the humming body of the plane. The prop wash peppered me with stinging bits of loose dirt and small gravel, but no big rocks. When I reached the left-side wheel under the fuselage I pulled away the wood chock in front of the tire. Then I rolled over twice under the belly of the plane to the other wheel. Once I removed the chock I scampered back to the tail and waited. When Dad waved the back flaps up and down that was my cue. I ran and jumped into the shallow bomb shelter, then flipped myself over and peeked up over the edge. He gunned the engine and the J-3 began to jitter and lean forward, and once it started rolling down the runway it quickly picked up speed. I jumped out of the bomb shelter and ran after it like I was Orville Wright chasing after his brother, Wilbur.

  “Wait for me!” I yelled. Maybe he had waited, but I couldn’t tell because by the time I reached the very end of the runway I didn’t know if he was off the ground or under it because I was covered by a thick brown cloud of loose dirt. I squinted and coughed and covered my face.

  “Jackie!” Mom shouted from the back porch. “Where is he?”

  I still couldn’t see him but I could hear him. “I’m not sure,” I shouted back, and scanned the sky for any trace of him. “Maybe he’s going to Kitty Hawk.” I had been reading about the Wright brothers. “Or to New York to fly circles around the Statue of Liberty.” Wilbur had done that and I was sure it was a stunt that Dad would try.