A Girl Named Zippy (10 page)

He let go of my arm.

“Okay?”

He crossed his arms over his chest and looked down at me like a big Injun. He was thinking of the kind of what-for he was going to give me.

“I’m going to say this one time: are you listening?” His voice was so deep it made my chest rattle. I nodded.

“I’m going to let you stay down here but you have to hold my hand, and if you turn out like your sister I’m going to turn you upside down and spit in your butt, are we clear?” I nodded again, without cracking a smile. He’d been making the same threat my whole life.

The fact that Ruth Huff was dead was of no great concern to most; we had seen it coming for a while. People weren’t even especially titillated by the fact that it appeared that some of the cats had been snacking on her in the four or five days she lay undiscovered (although this bothered me immeasurably, since I thought I had seen just about all of nature there was to see, and this was truly new). The reason that so many people were gathered across the street from the dead woman’s house, and the reason that two more Bausback trucks had been called, was because some number of expired animals had been found in Ruth’s basement—not buried, just thrown down there.

I stood across the street holding Dad’s hand as the Bausback men (whom I hoped would someday be sent treasures straight from God) began bringing up the corpses, one at a time, and throwing them into the waiting trucks. I finally had to tie Dad’s hanky around my face to keep from fainting, and I noticed that in addition to smoking extra fast, Dad kept sticking his Vicks Inhaler up his nose.

They brought up dogs and cats, some that barely retained their original shape, some that I had seen alive only a few days before. I counted them as they were tossed in the truck: twenty, thirty, forty, fifty. Sixty-seven. There were sixty-seven dead animals in that dark house. She lived with them. She never told anyone and she never asked for any help. Then I realized what I had unconsciously been waiting for, and pulled away from Dad, heading for the Bausback men.

“Where—” Dad started, trying to catch my arm.

“They haven’t brought out King, Dad, what if he’s alive in there, I just think someone ought to check,” I said, stumbling forward.

“Sweetie, stop. Stop. I mean it—turn around.” His voice wasn’t louder, it was softer, which was twice as bad. “They’ll find him,” he said. I put my head in his stomach and he patted my trembling back. “They’ll find him.”

King had been in bed with her, and they brought him out last. Sixty-eight.

UNFORTUNATELY FOR ME
, Edythe lived on and on, through some unholy pact made with the universe. Every morning at seven she left her house and marched to the post office, where she saluted the flag and whistled “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Once a year she took down her gruesome hair and washed it, then sat out in her yard in a straight-back chair, swinging her hair from side to side, a process my dad called Blowing The Stink Off. Her whiskers got longer, then turned white. She never stopped hating me.

One afternoon, as Dad and I dawdled in the porch swing, I saw PeeDink hunting in Edythe’s yard.

“That cat doesn’t have a lick of sense,” I said, sighing.

“Well, honey, he’s not right in the head,” Dad said, flipping his cigarette into the front yard.

I glared at him. “And just what do you mean by that?”

Dad counted on his fingers. “He’s cross-eyed; he jumps out of trees after birds and then doesn’t land on his feet; he sleeps with his head smashed up against the wall, and the tip of his tail is crooked.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, how about this: he once got locked in a basement by evil Petey Scroggs in the middle of January and survived on snow and little frozen mice. When I’m cold at night he sleeps right on my face. Of that whole litter of kittens he came out of he’s the only one left. One of his brothers
didn’t even have a butthole
.”

“I stand corrected. PeeDink is a survivor.”

While we were talking PeeDink had climbed up a pine tree next to Edythe’s house and was walking around on her roof. We watched helplessly as he jumped on her chimney and looked curiously inside, then took one step too many and went straight down. Vanished.

“Ooh, I can’t watch,” I said, pulling my knees up in front of my eyes.

“On the count of three—ready? One. Two. And three!”

And PeeDink came sailing out of Edythe’s front door. He did a little somersault, then stood up and shook himself off, as he had the last six times he had fallen down her chimney. He was sooty and a little crooked, but my cat, and alive, all the same.

Dad stood up. “I’ll go get a towel.”

As I was wiping him off PeeDink made his crazy, rumbly purr and looked at me lovingly with his crossed eyes. “She just doesn’t know what a good stew you would make, does she, punkin’?” I whispered to him, and what I felt toward Edythe was grateful.

“Daddy, can I ask you something?”

“Shoot,” he said, flicking the lid of his lighter open and closed, nervously.

“Do you love Lindy more, you know, because she’s your real daughter?” It pained me to say it, but I had to know.

“Aw, honey,” he said, scratching the back of his head and generally looking miserable. “I guess we should have told you before now.”

“What?! What?!”

“Melinda isn’t really my daughter. Slim Jenkins is actually her dad.” He said it as if he’d found his peace a long time ago.

“Slim Jenkins?! That old drunk? The garbageman?! Daddy, he sleeps in a shed with a bunch of coon dogs! He can’t be her father! He smells like a dead possum!”

“Well, this is probably something you should take up with your mother, Zip. After all, it’s really her story.” And he walked off into the backyard to inspect the fledgling peach tree he was trying to save, mysteriously, with Mother’s pantyhose.

I lay down in a worm hole and looked at the sky. I had plenty to think about. A bob-white was calling from the meadow behind the Mooreland Friends Church. A chigger nestled into my leg. It would be another warm night.

PROFESSIONALS

I
couldn’t always go to Julie’s farm, and so I also had a best friend in town called Rose. There were a number of benefits to Julie’s silence, and one of them was that we never exchanged a cross word. Rose, though. She spoke her own mind,
and
she didn’t want to be a farmer or ride in a rodeo. Rose was going to be an artist. She was left-handed, which was very rare in Mooreland. She was also a Catholic; her family were the only Catholics in town. I believe it is safe to say that she was surely the only left-handed Catholic any of us had ever seen, so it made sense she would be artistic.

Her specialty was a long, skinny flower with a stem that curved in a left-handed way. It was unusual. She decided to branch out into portraits, and asked me to sit for her. We were in her bedroom in chairs that faced each other. They were excellent strong chairs: just that week Rose and her younger sister Maggie had hung upside down from them, as Bob and Betty Bat, as I, Preacher Bat, had joined them in holy matrimony. When it was time for them to kiss I had to quick slip a piece of paper between their mouths.

I sat very still. Rose looked up at me, then down at her sketch pad, where she made little scritchy sounds. She looked up at me again; down; scritch. I realized I had absolutely no idea what my face was doing. I could have been drooling for all I knew. The room was completely silent except for Rose’s pencil, as if we were wrapped in gauze. I could no longer control my face because something amazing was happening to my body. It started with a kind of tickle at the back of my neck which spread like heat to my limbs. I was so thoroughly relaxed I might have actually been asleep, except my mind was perfectly clear. This whole thing, the process of being drawn, was so pleasurable it had to be wrong.

After that first day I wanted Rose to draw me all the time. I didn’t care about the portraits—they were all kind of left-handed. I sat for her a few more times, and then one afternoon she announced she had decided to collect boxes instead. I asked her how many boxes she had and she said four. She had the little white box Tone soap came in, a box that had held a tube of lipstick, a smallish but entirely standard cardboard box, and her prize, a very small, square jewelry box her mother had brought home from Acapulco. Her parents were very worldly, and here was the evidence: the box was not only lined with red velvet, the outside was entirely covered with little shells. They poked up a bit sharply, which some might consider a design flaw, but the overall effect was captivating. I tried to figure out how to steal it. I tried to effect a trade—I told her about all the fabulous boxes
just lying around
at my house—but she said she couldn’t trade it because it was a souvenir. I told her if she was a real friend she’d trade it. She said if I was a real friend I wouldn’t ask, which made me
spitting
mad, so I had to go home.

As I was walking down the stairs I turned back and looked at her sadly. “And I thought you were an
artist
.”

At that time Maggie also knew what she wanted to be when she grew up. She was going to be a disc jockey, and toward that end she spent many hours saying, “Solid Gold. WLBC, 104 FM. Solid Gold. WLBC, 104 FM. Solid Gold. WLBC, 104 FM.” She was very convincing, and I found myself in awe of her prematurely deep voice.

One afternoon I took my little blue tape recorder with me to their house. My dad had gotten it for my sister, who competed in speech contests, so she could record her speeches and listen to them later. I had quietly and extra sneakily made it my own. Besides my bicycle and PeeDink, there was nothing in the world I loved more. It had only one knob, which you moved around like a gearshift (left to rewind, right for fast forward, up to play, down to record), and a detachable microphone. Hiding behind the couch in the den I had recorded whole conversations between my parents, without them ever knowing. I had yet to discover all of its uses.

“Now look, Maggie. Just say your piece right here into this little microphone and I’ll tape it, then you can hear what you sound like.”

Maggie wasn’t the least bit shy. She tried it with the microphone far away, and with the microphone right up against her mouth. She must have said Solid Gold for ten solid minutes. When I played it back for her she looked absolutely pleased. Recording only confirmed her vocation for her. We both felt so festive that we invited Rose to join us in singing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” into the microphone. We were all great singers.

I SPENT A LOT OF TIME
trying to figure out what I was going to be when I grew up. There were just so many things I was good at. For instance, I could run across the living room and dive into a headstand on the couch, with my legs slapping the wall behind it. Sometimes I would make my parents sit and watch me do this fifteen times in a row.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s another perfect ten for Zippy!” Dad would shout, while my mother clapped politely. I tended to do it until my neck got twisted, which would make me
incredibly
mad. Sometimes I had to stomp out of the house saying I hated that sport and would never do it again.

I was also very good at Interview. What follows is an actual transcript from a tape I made with my mother:

Me: “Mom. Mom. Mom. Hey. Let’s do Interview.”

Mom: “Not now, sweetheart. Let me just finish this arm.” [Note: She was knitting a sweater.]

We hear the “Me” character snort unhappily into the microphone, and then something that sounds remarkably like cat fur. The recorder is shut off abruptly, and then comes back on.

Me: “Hey, Mom. Mom. Mamamamamam. Let’s do Interview now.”

Mom: “We will. I’m almost done with this.”

There is generalized stomping and fury. The recorder is shut off, and then comes back on.

Me: “Jesus loves me, this I know. For the Bible tells me so. Lootle ones to heem belonga. They are weak but he is stronga. Mom. Mom. It is time for Interview?”

Mom: “If you don’t stop pestering me I’ll never finish this sleeve and then we’ll never play Interview.”

A little primal throaty sound. The recorder is shut off. Comes back on.

Mom: “Good evening, and welcome to Interview. Let’s just go straight to our guest and have her tell us her name. Can you tell us your name, miss?”

Me: “No.”

Mom: [surprised] “Don’t you know your name?”

Me: “No.”

Mom: “Okay, then, is there something else you’d like to tell our audience?”

Me: “Not today.”

Mom: “Well, then. I guess we’ll just sign off. Would you like to say good-bye?”

Me: “No.”

Tape is shut off.

I WAS ALSO SO GOOD
 with animals. Once when I was walking to my friend Laurie Lee’s house I saw a woodpecker on a telephone pole, exactly level with my face. He seemed to be pecking in slow motion. I stepped up to watch him. He pecked! then slooowwwly pulled his beak back. Then peck! then sloooowwwly pulled his beak back. Then peck.

I wrapped my hands around his body. He was stuck in the telephone pole by his beak, so I pulled him out and carried him home, saying calming words over him. I found a shoe box and a baby blanket and wrapped him so that just his little fuzzy red head was sticking out the top. He looked
very
sweet. I left him on the front porch and went tearing in the house, yelling for my mom.

“Mom!! Come quick! There’s a sick woodpecker on the porch! I’m keeping it warm!”

Mom came out of her bedroom, where she had recently spent a great deal of time digging through her closet. None of us knew what she was looking for, but it seemed ominous. Periodically, though, she’d come up with a gem, like a stash of Avon lipsticks no bigger than the tip of my finger that she’d found in an old purse. They were the smallest lipsticks ever, and had the names of their colors printed in tiny red letters on the bottoms of the white tubes: Night on the Town, Coral Reef, Strawberry Frost.

“Is it alive?” Mom asked, carrying a pair of blue polyester pants I was praying she wasn’t going to cut up into a “jumper” for me.

“Don’t know. Can’t tell. It ain’t moving.”

“Don’t say ain’t. Well, cover it up till your dad comes home.”

So I sat on the porch swing with my woodpecker for what must have been a long time. The woodpecker’s black eye was all looking at the side of the box. When Dad pulled up to the house in his truck he hit the big hole in front of the tree that had water in it year-round, splashing the water onto the tree and the sidewalk, like he did every day. He got out of the truck, flipped his cigarette toward Edythe’s house, and hitched up his pants, like he did every day. He noticed me sitting on the swing with the shoe box.

“Gotcha a dead bird there, Zip?”

“Yep. It’s a woodpecker. Got stuck in a telephone pole. I rescued it.”

“Good for you. Let’s take a look.”

I delicately turned back the receiving blanket to reveal the whole of the woodpecker’s body, including its yellow feet, which were more decidedly scrunched up than the last time I looked.

“Oh, yeah,” Dad said, looking the bird up and down. “You’ve got a dead woodpecker, all right. Want to bury it?”

“Hmmm. I don’t know. I was thinking I might keep it for a while, maybe see if I can get it better.”

“I don’t think there’s gonna be much getting better for this bird. He’s got it as good as it gets. Look: he’s got a soft blanket and his own box. Let’s go ahead and just put him in the ground with the others before all these cats get wind of him.”

So we buried him in the garden. I was also very good at digging holes.

NOW THERE WAS SIMPLY
no one more professional at strays than my sister. She was a one-woman Humane Society when it came to sick or wounded animals; our house was virtually saturated with them. But she also took in people, which wouldn’t have occurred to me. She must have noticed that it wouldn’t have occurred to me—I can’t imagine any other reason why she wanted me to accompany her to the Kizer encampment, and so close to Halloween.

Tom Kizer took in foster children by the dozen. He had built five or six little houses on a pretty big lot on Jefferson Street, and the kids were scattered through them by age and gender. The townspeople suspected that he was making a fair profit on the children, who were packed together and ill treated, but no one ever confronted him.

I had never been inside any of the little houses, which were all the same—white with blue trim. Melinda was baby-sitting me that evening, and said she had something to take care of with Mr. Kizer. The night was cold and clear and as we walked our breath steamed out in ribbons.

“Lindy. Hey. Whatcha got to talk to Mr. Kizer about?”

“He wants me to help take care of some of his kids. I’m going to see if we can agree on what he pays me.”

“He’s gonna
pay
you?” I asked, disbelieving. The idea that she might get paid for baby-sitting cast my sister in a whole new light.

“Don’t just stop in the middle of the street like that. Keep up with me. Yes, he’s going to pay me.”

“Wow. Wow. Do Mom and Dad pay you?”

She just snorted and sped up.

Mr. Kizer himself lived in the first of the houses, the one closest to the street. It was guarded by a mangy foster dog that growled even while Melinda was scratching it behind the ears. As we knocked on the door we could hear all kinds of ruckus going on in the house.

“Sounds like wild Injuns,” I whispered to my sister, who hushed me with a look.

Mr. Kizer himself answered the door. He was wearing blue work pants, a white T-shirt, and a brown cardigan. He was in his sock feet. Something about the way he was dressed struck me as askew, but I couldn’t say what. Behind him was a whole mess of children, some standing still and sucking on their hair, some jumping around and yelling. The house was strangely dark. There could have been kids in the corners I couldn’t even see. I suddenly realized there
was
a kid in a corner, but the fact of her completely stumped me.

My sister had been talking to Mr. Kizer while I surveyed the scene, but I hadn’t paid any attention to what they were saying.

“Lindy. Hey.” I pulled on her sleeve.

“Excuse me, Tom, just a second.” She put her face down next to mine. “What?” she asked, with a sharp little point.

“What’s wrong with that girl in the corner?” I whispered, pointing at her.

“I’ll tell you on the way home,” Melinda answered, smacking my hand down. “Don’t point.”

The girl was in what I took to be a wheelchair, though I’d never actually seen one, and the whole left side of her body was pulled up tight. Her hands hovered uselessly up near her face and she was drooling, as if she had spent too long being drawn by someone.

“Lindy. Hey. Hey. Lindy.”

“Excuse me again, Tom.” I could feel my sister’s mouth right next to my ear, but I couldn’t pull my eyes away from the girl in the corner. “Stop it right now, I mean it. I’ll talk to you about it on the way home.”

“Lindy,” I whispered, “what’s wrong with that girl?”

As she straightened back up Melinda casually pulled me closer to her, so that she basically had her arm around my throat. My sister could give it to me and give it to me
hard
, it isn’t as if I didn’t know that.