“Sit down,” said Dorothy, who sat on the homework desk, “you’re making me nervous.”
“I can’t help it,” said Palmer. “I almost got killed out there.”
“Palmer, they kill pigeons in this town, not people.”
“That’s what you think. You didn’t see the way they were looking at me. And don’t say”—he formed the words kill pigeons with his lips—“around him.” He nodded toward Nipper, who had stopped and cocked his head, as if listening.
“Sorry,” said Dorothy. “So what are you going to do?”
Palmer threw out his arms. “I don’t know!” He spoke to Nipper. “You dumb stupid birdbrain. Why did you do that? What am I gonna do?” When he had come home and found Nipper at the window as usual, he was both happy and not happy. He half wished Nipper hadn’t showed up, so he could be rid of the whole problem. For a moment he considered pulling down the shade, then hated himself for even thinking that and threw open the window.
He took two fistfuls of his own hair, squatted on the floor and screamed up at the pigeon. “What am I gonna do?”
Nipper’s answer was a gargling noise.
“Teach him to shoot fowl shots. Get it? F-O-W-L?” Dorothy tittered at her own joke. Palmer wasn’t amused.
Dorothy had Palmer’s Magic Marker in one hand, the Nerf ball in the other. She tossed him the ball. In large black letters on the spongy surface, she had written the words NIPPER’S BALL.
“Big help you are,” said Palmer.
Palmer’s nervousness lasted until he went to sleep that night, and resumed when his alarm clock woke him up next morning with the customary nip on the earlobe. He did not feed Nipper on the roof as usual. Instead, he spread newspaper on his floor and poured the Honey Crunchers there, plus some leftover peas from dinner the night before. Nipper loved peas. Then Palmer quickly opened the window and shooed his pigeon into the sky.
Now—what should he wear?
He was afraid that if he wore his usual clothes, Nipper might again recognize him and drop in on him after school. He needed a disguise. He looked around. He found the long-sleeved white shirt that he had once worn to Cousin Linda’s wedding, and the dark brown trousers that went with it.
He checked himself in the mirror. He still looked too much like Palmer LaRue. He went down to the basement, to the closet where his mother had stored everyone’s winter clothes. He got out his thick, quilted, thigh-length coat, the one his father said could keep him warm at the North Pole. He also grabbed his green woolen stocking cap with the pom-pom and—why not?—his father’s black-and-white checkered scarf. He stuffed hat and scarf in his pockets and was sneaking out the door when his mother screeched: “Halt!”
She approached him, squinting as if not believing her eyes. “What’s this?” she said, fingering the quilted coat.
“A coat.”
“I can see that. It’s May. It’s warm out.”
“I heard it’s gonna get colder later on.”
“Not that cold.”
“Okay, look, I’ll unzipper it.” He unzippered the coat. “I gotta go, Mom. I’m gonna be late.” He bolted down the steps and up the sidewalk, hoping his mother would not call him back. She did not.
In the classroom Palmer kept looking at the clock. For once, he wanted school to last forever. He did not want to walk home. He dreaded the closing bell. When it came he marched up to the teacher and told her he thought she should keep him after school.
She looked at him funny. “And why is that, Palmer?”
“Because I was bad.”
She looked surprised. Palmer was never bad. “I was not aware of that.”
“You just didn’t catch me.”
“Is that so? And now you wish to confess?”
“Yes.”
“You want to clear your conscience.”
“Yes.”
“I see.” She was smiling. She settled back in her chair. “So, what bad thing did you do?”
“I spit on the floor.”
Her eyebrows went up. “Really? Right here? In this room?”
“Yes.”
“When did you do this?”
“Uh, after lunch.”
She stood. “Would you mind showing me where you did it?”
Palmer had not anticipated this. He had not thought a confession required proof. “I wiped it up,” he said.
She nodded, still smiling. “Ah. Well, that was good of you. I think that settles it. You may go on home now.”
Palmer stood there, hanging from her eyes. He could not bring himself to go outside. He took a step back, turned to the side and spit on the floor. “Look,” he said, “I did it again.”
The teacher gasped. She was no longer smiling. He was ordered to fetch a paper towel and clean it up. He was sent to the blackboard to write one hundred times: I will never never never never never never ever again spit on the floor. Five of the nevers plus the ever were his own idea. He wrote as slowly as he could.
The teacher was in and out of the room as he wrote. At one point the guys showed up at the door.
“What’re you doing?” Beans asked.
“Being punished,” said Palmer.
Beans leaned in to look at the blackboard. “You spit on the floor?”
“Yep.”
The guys were goggle-eyed.
“Was it a big one?” said Mutto.
“A lunger,” said Palmer. The guys were swooning. They were really impressed. “Took me five minutes to clean it up.”
At that moment he could have been elected president of the gang.
The teacher returned, and the guys took off. From then on, whenever the teacher left the room or simply wasn’t looking, Palmer erased what he had just written. When she finally packed up to go home, she came to the blackboard and counted the sentences. “Nine!” she exclaimed. “Palmer, you write like a snail.”
“I’ll go faster,” he said.
“No, you may stop now. Punishment’s over.”
Palmer clutched the chalk. “I don’t think I should stop till I get to a hundred. I can feel the sentences working. I think I need the whole punishment to make me stop spitting.”
The teacher took a step back. The look on her face said: Is he going to fire one at me? Then her expression changed, hardened. “Palmer,” she said firmly, “I am confident you will never spit in this room again. Now put down the chalk and go home.”
He put down the chalk. He got his coat and put it on. He zippered it up. The teacher’s jaw dropped, her eyes widened as he pulled the green woolen cap down over his ears, as he wrapped the checkered scarf around his neck and pulled it up to just below his eyes. She was about to say something. “My mother’s afraid I’ll catch the flu,” he blurted and ran from the room before she could stop him.
When he got outside his heart sank: The guys were still there. They had ignored his heavy coat on the way to school, but now, seeing the added scarf and hat, they cracked up.
“Hey Snots, where’s the blizzard?”
“You look like Frosty the Snownerd.”
“My mom made me,” he told them, trying to sound resentful. “She says I’m getting the flu.” He tried to steer them to another subject. “What are you doing here, anyway?”
Beans sidled alongside, draped his arm around Palmer’s shoulders. “We’re your buddies, Snots. You get punished, we wait.” His smile was as flat as a cartoon.
“Palmer”—Henry was the only one who occasionally called him by his right name—“be honest, did you really spit on the floor?”
Palmer looked them all in the eye. “Yeah. I said, didn’t I?”
They weren’t sure whether to believe him—but they wanted to, Palmer could tell—and suddenly he realized he had stumbled onto a way to divert attention from Nipper. He marched back to the school door, pulled it open dramatically and pointed inside. He yanked down the scarf and growled. “Go ask Miss Kiner.”
They believed. He could see it in their faces. They mobbed him, slapping
fives, cheering his name.
On the way home they pestered him again and again to tell the story, especially the look on the teacher’s face. They laughed and thumped his back. They said they didn’t think he’d ever do such a thing. They no longer seemed to care, or even notice, that he was muffled up like a mummy.
But they did scan the skies. In the midst of the laughing and thumping, Palmer caught their eyes drifting upward. And Mutto had something new with him this day: a slingshot. Palmer pulled the scarf higher and prayed that Nipper was already home.
27
Nipper was home that day, waiting at the windowsill. But Palmer was too worn out to be relieved. All the stress and weirdness of the day had left him totally wrecked. It was all he could do to drag himself down to dinner.
Summer vacation was over a month away. He couldn’t imagine lasting that long.
But he did. Somehow, day by day, he got through it.
Each morning as he left the house he faced two problems, and no matter how well he solved them that day, next morning they would be waiting for him again:
1. How to avoid Nipper on the way home from school.
2. How to keep the guys from turning against him.
As he had discovered the first day, getting into trouble could both detain him after school and boost his popularity with the guys. So he spit on the blackboard, he talked and laughed in class, he took off his shoes and socks, he hid in the map closet, he tickled other students and, on Monday of the last week before summer vacation, he tickled the teacher.
“Palmer!” she shrieked. “What has gotten into you?”
She had been asking him this question for some time now. He was running out of answers. “Puberty,” he said. He didn’t know what it meant, but he had heard that it happened to teenagers and that it made them batty, at least in the eyes of grown-ups.
“Try again,” she said. “You’re too young for puberty.”
“I’m very mature for my age,” he said.
“Good,” she said, “then you’re mature enough to stay after school for a week.”
That would take care of the rest of the school year. Palmer forced himself not to grin.
The teacher tickle made Palmer immensely popular, not only with the Beans Boys but throughout the entire school. His reputation soared as a kid who did crazy things. Students broke out laughing when they saw him in the hallways. They egged him on to “do something nutty.” They offered him morsels from their lunches.
“You’re famous,” Dorothy told him in his room one day.
“I know,” said Palmer, slumping, “but I don’t want to be. I want to be nobody. I want to be invisible. If I was invisible, then Nipper would be too.”
Dorothy, for no apparent reason, started to giggle. She quickly clamped her hand over her mouth. “Sorry,” she said. “I know I’m not supposed to laugh, but sometimes I can’t help it. I keep thinking of you tickling your teacher.” Another giggle spouted. “It’s just not you.”
Palmer threw up his hands. “I know! I know! And wait till you see what happens in two days.”
Dorothy’s eyes widened. “What?”
“Miss Kiner said I won’t have detention on the last day of school. I’ll have to go home at the regular time. My mom will never let me wear my winter coat anymore in this weather, so I’m afraid Nipper’s going to see me again coming home from school.” Palmer paced about the room. “I have nightmares all day. I see Nipper landing on my head and Beans snatching him by his legs and—” He couldn’t even say the rest. He went over to Nipper, who was strutting along the booktops.
“What are you going to do?” said Dorothy.
Palmer stroked Nipper’s smooth, glossy head. “Wear a mask.”
Dorothy’s hand shot to her mouth. “Oh no.”
“Oh yeah.” With his fingertips he lightly tickled Nipper’s breast feathers. He had discovered that Nipper loved this and would stay still for as long as he kept doing it.
“Do you have a mask?” said Dorothy.
“My elephant mask.”
Dorothy screeched, “Your elephant mask? From Halloween? With the trunk?”
“Yeah.”
Both of Dorothy’s hands clamped her mouth, as if she were about to throw up. Her cheeks flushed, her eyes bulged. She ran from the room and slammed the door. Palmer could hear her muffled sounds coming from the stairway. If he didn’t know better, he would have thought she was sobbing.
Minutes later she returned, wiping wetness from her cheeks, struggling to keep a straight face.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She joined Palmer in scratching Nipper’s breast feathers.
“I can’t wait till school is over,” said Palmer.
“I know.”
“But I don’t want it to be over because then it’ll be closer to my birthday.”
“I know.”
“It’s all crazy. I almost get dizzy sometimes.”
“I know.”
Lightly, lazily they tickled Nipper’s feathers. Their fingers mingled.
“Know what?” said Dorothy.
“What?”
“You’re a hero.”
“Huh?”
“All this stuff you’re doing. You’re probably the naughtiest student there’s ever been in our school. And you’re doing it all to save him.”
Palmer frowned. “That’s no hero. I just live in the wrong town, that’s all.”
The pigeon seemed to be looking at them separately, one with each orange eye. A faint murmur came from deep in his throat.
“Hear that?” said Dorothy. “He’s saying, ‘That feels sooooo good.’”
“Why would anybody want to shoot him?” said Palmer.
“Nobody’s going to.”
Palmer turned to her. “But why would they want to?”
Dorothy stared back. She had no answer.
On the last day of school, wearing his elephant mask on the walk home, the trunk hanging down to his waist, Palmer was a sensation. The problem was keeping the mask on, because first Beans, then everyone else had to yank on the trunk. Every time the mask was pulled off, Palmer covered his face with his hands. He imagined Nipper was circling overhead, trying to spot him.
At last he made it home. He collapsed onto his bed. Nipper marched up one of his legs and down the other. The bird’s feet tickled, but Palmer was too worn out to laugh. He could smile, though, for school was over. Finally.
But another school was about to begin.
28
Palmer had just finished supper on Monday when the doorbell rang. It was the guys.
“Let’s go,” said Beans.
“Where?” said Palmer.
“School. Come on. It starts in ten minutes.” Beans grabbed Palmer’s wrist and pulled him down the front steps.
Was this some kind of joke?
“School?” said Palmer. “School’s over.”
“Not this school.”
They were trotting. Beans still had his wrist.
Palmer pulled himself free. “What school?” They were heading toward the park. “Where are we going?”
Beans’s eyes lit up. “Wringer school.”
Palmer felt walloped. He jerked to a halt. Suddenly his throat would not work. He could not speak.
Everyone had stopped.
Beans said, “What’s the matter?”
Palmer rasped, “Nothing.”
“Ain’t you coming to wringer school, Snots?” said Mutto. He was leering.
“Don’t you want to learn how to wring pigeons?” said Beans. He moved his fists as if twisting a wet towel. “Don’t you want to learn how to wrrrrring their necks?”
Henry was looking away.
Beans was in his face. “You hate pigeons, don’t you?”
Palmer nodded. “Sure.”
Mutto’s eyes were scanning the sky.
Beans thumped his shoulder. “So let’s go!”
They ran.
That was the worst of it, the running. What am I doing
? Palmer kept thinking, but his legs ran on.
At the soccer field a mob of kids was gathered around a man with a neon pink baseball cap. The man who had been waiting for Palmer for ten years. The wringmaster.
“You stay out of the way,” he was saying, calling really, so everyone could hear. “Each shooter gets five shots at a time. Count ’em. Until the last one, you don’t move. You stay here.” He pointed to the ground at his feet. “Right here. And where are your eyes all this time?”
“On you!” piped half a dozen voices.
The man nodded. “That’s right. I’m easy to find, easy to see. I guarantee nobody else is gonna be wearing a hat this ugly.”
Giggles.
“So, you’re listening for the five shots and watching me, and when I go like this”—he lifted the pink hat and waved it—“that’s your signal. You move. Fast. Three of you. We move in groups of three. First man gets the empty bird box and takes it”—he pointed—“over there. So they can load ’er up again with five more birds. The other two, you’re moving out onto the field—fast. Everything you do is—fast.” He replaced his hat. He looked over the group. “What’s the magic word, men?”
Everyone, including Palmer, yelled: “Fast!”
The man paused, then whispered, “Why?”
For a long time there was no answer. Then a mild, uncertain voice spoke. “There’s so many pigeons?”
The man snapped his fingers and pointed to Henry. “Bingo. There’s five thousand birds, men, and only one day to turn ’em into fertilizer. Every dead birdie means five bucks to maintain this here park you’re standing in. Anybody here don’t play in this park?”
No hands went up.
He shrugged. “There you go. It’s for you. You’re helping yourself.” He looked them over. “Any questions?”
Palmer had a million, but he asked none. Nor did anyone else.
The man nodded. “All right. Last item—wringin’ the bird.”
A cheer went up from the crowd.
The man held up something.
Another cheer.
The something was gray, perhaps once a large sock. It was stuffed to plumpness, most of it, with a narrow neck ending in a golf ball-size head.
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