A Girl Named Zippy (19 page)

He walked past me on up to the front door. He held it open like a gentleman.

“You coming in?”

“Yes.
And
I know about how Roscoe Brown got shot in the leg by Parker Simmons in a card game down at the garage because Roscoe Brown called Mrs. Simmons a sack of something.”

That stopped him.

“How do you know that?” he asked, squinting up his eyes and using his special x-ray truth vision on me.

“I forget,” I muttered, slipping by him into the living room.

He laid his keys and cigarettes and lighter down on the table, and started to unsnap the .38 he kept in a shoulder holster. “Well, Zip, I can’t imagine what all you know, but I bet it isn’t near as much as what I’ve
forgotten
. And I’m not going to tell you about Polly’s brother because it’s too grown-up a story for you, and you should just leave that poor child alone about it. Just in case you’re thinking about pestering her.”

“I wasn’t going to pester her,” I said softly, fully intending to. I walked my fingers very slowly and silently toward his gun. I just wanted to give it a little rub.

Dad turned toward the den, and as he walked away he said without looking behind him, “You thinking about touching that gun?”

“No, sir,” I said, putting my hand speedy-quick in my pocket.

“That’s good.” He disappeared behind the curtain that separated the living room from the den. We didn’t do any living in the living room—we did it all in the den—but no one seemed to have caught on enough to change the names.

I rode by my brother’s house, where he moved after he got married, just in case he had forgotten he didn’t read the paper and then accidentally read it. He wasn’t home, which was just as well, because he almost never spoke to me. It appeared that he just didn’t like anyone and I was no exception. Then I rode over to my sister’s house, who always, always spoke to me. She had been married for a year and a half and I was welcome in her house anytime, which I took advantage of, because she had the smallest, sweetest house I’d ever seen. It was very warm and cozy inside, so cozy, in fact, that twice she’d set it on fire. Now every time I rode past it I checked for suspicious smoke, but today appeared to be a good day.

I went in through her kitchen door without knocking. “Lindy! Hey, Lindy! I’m looking for the
Courier-Times
! Did you read it?”

I heard her call from her bedroom, “I’m back here!”

She was sitting at her sewing machine, making curtains for the nursery down the hall. She wasn’t pregnant yet, but would be anytime, because nobody would be a better mother, which was a thing God definitely paid attention to when He was passing out babies.

“Hey, you stinkin’ little kid,” she said without turning around. It was her way of saying love to me. “How was your day at school? Have you seen Dad yet? Is he drinking?”

“What? No, he only drinks at work.” My sister could ask the weirdest questions. “My day was fine, thanks,” I said fast, nearly waving my hands with impatience. “Hey. Do you know that Polly girl in my class?”

Melinda stopped sewing for a second and looked up. Her back was still to me. “Yes, I do. I baby-sat for her a few times when she was younger. She’s an amazingly sweet child, which causes me to suspect that you’re not friends with her.” She went back to sewing.

“Of course I’m friends with her,” I said, sitting down on the floor next to her so I could see her face, in case she decided to start lying. “I mean I like her a lot, or whatever.”

“Mmm hmm,” she said, and the sewing machine made the same sound. “Why do you ask?” She was already suspicious.

“I was just wondering if maybe you’d read today’s paper and maybe there was something in there about Polly’s older brother which is a very dramatic story and caused Polly to cry on Mrs. O’Dell this morning.”

“Ahh,” she said, lifting up the pedal foot and snipping some threads. The curtains were bright yellow, for either a boy or a girl. She’d already painted a big, smiling sun on the wall, by hand. She could do anything. “As a matter of fact, I do know the story you’re trying so desperately to hear, and I’m not going to tell you because I imagine Dad has already told you no and the last thing I need is to get in any worse with him. Plus you’d just tell Rose and everyone else you know and cause Polly more pain. So forget it.”

“But Lindy! It’s already been in the paper! How come I’m the only person alive who’s not allowed to know it?” She was making me so mad I was completely dismantling the rubber on my sneakers.

“Because you’re too little,” she said, looking me in the eye for the first time. She had her beautiful black hair tied back in a ponytail and her gray eyes were so wide and bright she looked like somebody had just made her up out of an idea.

“How can you say that? I’m
so
big.”

“Oh, yeah? Tell me one big thing about you.”

“Okay, I can ride my bike standing up on the seat.”

“That doesn’t sound so big to me. That sounds like you in the emergency room, yet again.”

“The emergency room isn’t so bad. All the nurses are so nice to me.”

She harummphed. “Of course they are. They all have crushes on your father.”

“He’s your father, too.” I secretly suspected that Slim Jenkins wasn’t actually related to Melinda. In the past month I’d heard Dad accuse Mom of having secret love interests with both Richard Boone and Isaac Asimov.

“Is not.”

“Is, too.”

“You know what would show me how big you are? If you let this thing with Polly drop and didn’t pursue it, if you just left her alone and didn’t cause her any grief. That would be a very big thing.”

I stood up fast. “I’ve got to go. I’ve got some stuff to do. Those are real pretty curtains.”

As I walked out the door I heard my sister yell, “Think about it!”

And I yelled back, “I can’t hear you!”

By the time I went to bed that night I had encountered four people who knew the story and wouldn’t tell me and twice that many who didn’t know what I was talking about and couldn’t figure out what I was doing at their door. Donnie Fisher thought I was selling something for school with an amazingly convoluted sales pitch, and Agnes Johnson asked me first thing if my mother knew where I was, which stopped me cold, because my mother almost never knew where I was.

“No, ma’am,” I answered, involuntarily telling the truth.

“Then go home,” she said, shutting her front door.

I WOKE UP
the next morning greatly determined to solve the mystery. I marched down to school early, without Rose, and sat at my desk studying a poem I was certain Mrs. Denver didn’t know existed. It was called “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note,” by a man named Leroi Jones, and the more I studied it the more it agitated me. When I had read the stanza “And now, each night I count the stars,/And each night I get the same number./And when they will not come to be counted,/I count the holes they leave” for the fifth time, I decided to tear the poem out of the book and throw it away, just to make it gone. At the top of the page, where it met the spine, I made a tiny little tear. The sound it made was awful. I stopped and wiped my hands on my pants, then tried again, but I just couldn’t do it. The book was so clean and white, and the letters were so perfectly black and defenseless; it would have been like tearing the ears off a kitten.

I closed the book and put my head down on my desk in order to formulate a plan. I would probably start by just asking all of my classmates if they knew the story. Surely somebody’s parents talked about Current Events at the dinner table. Not Kelly’s parents, the Hickses; they were the last people in the world to carry tales. And not the Newmans—nobody ever said anything in that house but me. Rose’s parents were too sophisticated to care; Dana’s parents had undoubtedly spent the evening chain-smoking and bowling in New Castle. Rachel’s parents only talked about Jesus; Sammy and Smarty didn’t have a dinner table; Jackie didn’t have parents. If I asked Mrs. O’Dell she’d just smack me and make me sad, and Mrs. Denver had such a bug-eyed innocence I didn’t dare ask her for fear she’d betray herself. That left only one person: Polly herself.

I decided to approach the situation in a straightforward way. I wrote her a note: “Dear Polly, Please meet me back here during recess. I need to ask you something.” I had just finished folding it when Mrs. O’Dell came shuffling in, carrying her old blue book bag.

“Hey, Mrs. O’Dell,” I said, giving her a little wave.

“Causing trouble, are you?” she said, trying to focus on me.

“No! Why would you say that?”

“Because I’ve known you your whole life, that’s why.” She sat down at her desk in the corner and started to adjust the papers she had to grade. Her glasses were about an inch thick, and were something like quatrafocals, so she had to bob her head up and down to keep things in focus.

When the other students began arriving, I noticed that Mrs. O’Dell wasn’t harsh with any of them. In fact, all adults were harder on me than anybody else. My teachers generally didn’t like me, and considered me to be the source of any disruption, even when I was perfectly (or basically) innocent; Edythe wanted to kill me; Doc Holiday yelled at me every time I walked in the drugstore, even though I was such a faithful customer; Rose’s parents considered me pure trouble. A person could easily work herself into a state by pondering such things. Luckily, Polly came in and distracted me.

I walked over to the coat rack like I was going to get something out of my jacket pocket, and dropped the note on her desk as I passed by. She was very surprised, and did not handle the transaction with any finesse. She stared at me hard for about half a minute, then looked at the note. As I passed her on my way back to my desk she said, “Did you drop this?”

“No! Read it!”

Mrs. O’Dell was trying desperately to see who was talking, but we were just out of range. When I dared look back at Polly a few minutes later she just nodded at me, wide-eyed.

When I snuck back in our classroom during recess Polly was already sitting quietly at her desk. I chose the chair in front of her, straddling it backward.

“You know about my brother, don’t you?” she asked, tears filling her eyes. Her face was bigger than those of other girls our age. She was heavier and more developed. I could see that there were a number of things separating her from the rest of us.

“Well,” I began, trying to be at least a little bit honest. “I know
something
. I really just wanted to hear about it from you. I didn’t want to believe the wrong thing.”

And then she started wailing in earnest. She didn’t try to wipe her face or control it or anything. If I’d ever seen Julie crying like this, she would have assassinated me.

“He didn’t mean to kill that man!” she wailed, which I knew from Perry Mason was a miserable way to begin a defense.

“Whoa, whoa. Why don’t you just start at the beginning and tell me the whole story.” I sounded oddly adult and comforting, even to myself, which was when I knew that I was genuinely a bad person, and that was why adults treated me the way they did. But Polly bought it completely, and started at the beginning.

Her brother had been an officer in the Marines, and a prisoner of war. It had taken a long time for him to get home, but a few months ago he had arrived back in Indiana. He was anxious to see his wife, but when he went to their small, rented farmhouse, she no longer lived there. When he pressed her parents, who were elderly and frightened, they told him that she was living in a mobile home with an old drinking buddy of his whose name, ironically, was Butcher.

He went to Butcher’s trailer with a loaded .12 gauge shotgun, a detail that would be important in his trial. When his former friend opened the door, Polly’s brother shot him once in the chest, then turned around and went home to his parents. He confessed all of it, blandly, to the police.

As if this weren’t bad enough, the prosecution had in its possession a photograph that Polly’s family was desperate to keep out of the trial. The judge had already ruled it admissible, so they had no hope that it wouldn’t be used as evidence. It showed Polly’s brother in a village in Vietnam whose name I had never heard before, but which would be heard many times in the years to come. He was standing atop an enormous pile of dead civilians, including women and infants, with his rifle in the air, bellowing. His hair had turned snow white.

Polly cried and cried. She loved her brother the way I loved my sister, even loved the stranger who had come home in his place. She cried not because he might go to jail for the rest of his life, but because she didn’t want people to think ill of him, and even more, she wanted it to never have happened. She wanted to undo it all.

It wasn’t until she finished her story that I realized how hard my heart was pounding, and how much I just wanted to get up and leave the room. Even without extensive tact conditioning, I realized I was stuck in the situation I had created, a situation in which a girl was sobbing out a story I had no business demanding.

I went to Mrs. O’Dell’s desk and brought Polly a box of Kleenex. Old women always know the value of tissues. She was just wiping her face and blowing her nose when Mrs. Denver came in to find us.

“Hey, girls! Come on out to the playground and join us. No use sitting in here moping.” Mrs. Denver could be crazily cheerful.

I looked at my teacher and realized that she thought I had taken Polly under my wing. She thought I was trying to help her, which was the last thing in the world I wanted to do. I suddenly felt very, very busy. I had so many things going on. All my life I had heard that you can’t help everyone, and Polly, quite obviously, was everyone.

Mrs. Denver took Polly by the hand and led her outside. I walked a few steps behind them. Mrs. Denver’s entrance had prevented me from having to respond to Polly’s story in any way, which was a miracle of luck. I watched the two of them head toward the open field where kids were gathered in clusters, playing games, Mrs. Denver scuttling in her nervous, good-willed way, Polly already taller than the adult walking next to her, and cumbersome.