A Girl Named Zippy (3 page)

Later still I will ask for the smell of Tinker Jones’s backyard. He had a small pond, on which floated white ducks and mallards and geese, and a big barn where the chickens roosted. There were guinea hens and shy quail hiding in the bushes at the edge of the woods. The air was permeated with the smell of the birds. It was lovely.

I made a deal with my dad—we were big on deals. I had promised that if he would let me have my own chicken I would take care of her promptly every day, and spend time with her, and never sigh when he reminded me to claim her eggs. In return he would build her a nice big cage, which he did, and a roosting box filled with fresh straw. My other part of the bargain, the tricky part, was that I had exactly the distance between Tinker’s house and our house, about eleven miles, to tame her.

I could choose from any of the young chickens in the barn, but it wasn’t hard. I wasn’t swept away by the cute chicks, and I didn’t covet any of the elaborately colored or fluffy-legged ones. The minute I saw my chicken I knew.

She was a young banty hen, a junior-sized chicken, and her feathers were black-and-white speckled. I named her Speckles. Tink put her in a box for me, and she and I climbed into the back of Dad’s truck, which had a camper shell on it at the time, and we headed for home.

I opened her box with no chicken-taming technique at my disposal, just my utter good will. I don’t remember what actually transpired between us, but by the time we got home and Dad opened the tailgate, Speckles was sitting on my shoulder, and if I made kissing sounds at her she turned and pecked me lightly on the lips.

I have noticed that otherwise sensitive and intelligent people will go to great lengths to decry the love between a person and a chicken, claiming that, of all things, chickens are not
smart enough
to love. Well, I’m here to tell you: I’ve seen women passionately devoted to men who couldn’t pile bricks, and whole families of slack-jawed nose pickers held together by “love,” not to mention all those people who curl up at night with dogs that have gunk running out of their eyes, dogs who earlier peed where they were about to walk and spent ten minutes licking their own wormy butts.

Speckles and I loved each other. Dad never had to tell me to feed her—I couldn’t wait to see her every day. In the mornings she hopped out of her box when she heard me coming, and did something like a tail-feather wag as I opened the pen door. When I sat down she hopped onto my lap, and then let me lift her up onto my shoulder, where she would sometimes just stand very officiously. Other times she sat down, tucking her legs up underneath her and making little happy chicken sounds, the bird equivalent of a purring cat.

And there it was every day, a perfect little egg, left like an offering. Fortunately I didn’t acquire Speckles as a food source, because when a banty egg is broken open in a frying pan, the whole affair is about the size of a silver dollar.

I was so fond of Speckles that Dad decided we should get a rooster and raise some babies. He went alone to pick the rooster out, and chose the most brazenly attractive of the banty males. He was blue and excessively strutty. As far as I know, there are only two names for roosters in the history of the world, Red and Chanticleer, and we could hardly call him Red.

So Chanticleer came to live with us, and life changed radically. I cannot in good taste report the relationship between Speckles and Chanty, except to say that he was relentless and she spent a great deal of time running from him. He must have been accustomed to servicing five or six hens at Tink’s, because he never stopped. I liked him not at all.

After Chanticleer came to stay with us I could no longer get in Speckles’ pen with her. Like any abusive male, her husband first separated her from her family and friends. I had to just stand on the outside with my fingers hooked in the wire, looking at her longingly. I think Speckles would have looked at me with yearning as well, except she was generally wild-eyed, and had to keep glancing over her shoulder.

One day at school I decided to just tell my dad how I felt about Chanticleer, how I wanted him to go back to the farm even though he was so extra good-looking. I thought about it all the way home. My resolve got me safely past scary old Edythe’s yard, where normally I would have become all skittery, afraid she would walk out of her terrifying house and wag her chin whiskers at me. I decided to just go straight to Speckles and explain the whole thing to her.

Dad had built the cage behind our house, where it would be in the shade almost all day, and as I marched past Dad’s tilty tool shed all I noticed was the quiet. When I got to the cage I saw why: one whole side of the cage was ripped apart, and inside there was nothing but feathers.

I stood frozen for just a moment, the way children do, my synapses firing and misfiring like crazy, trying to make sense of the senseless, and then I turned and ran into the house, dropping my books and my Honorary Mouseketeer corduroy jacket along the way, and threw myself onto the couch. I wailed and sobbed with such abandon that my mother must have feared some real calamity, and when I told her what had happened she just sat on the edge of the couch beside me, rubbing my back and telling me how sorry she was.

Then my sister came in.

“What’s wrong with her?” she asked, pointing to my hiccuping body.

“Her chicken got killed.” My mom tried, I honestly believe, to say it with real sympathy, but she had not truly known Chicken Love, and there was just the slightest warble in her voice, if I may risk such a description. It was enough to send my sister over the edge.

She tried to say, “oh, dear,” but it came out as just a big snort, and soon her legs had collapsed and she was laughing so hard she was making no sound and wiping tears off her face.

My sister’s general gaiety was interrupted by my dad coming home from work, or wherever he went during the day. When I tried to tell him about Speckles I cried even harder. I was completely undone.

It is difficult for parents to face such grief in their children, and Dad’s temper was not mild to begin with. He turned rather scarlet and puffed up like a blowfish. Announcing that he knew exactly which dogs had done it (he had seen them loose in our yard before and had warned their owner once), he took down his police-issue .357 Magnum, a gun large enough to kill, say, a mastodon, and went flying out the door.

He came back an hour later and said the dogs had been taken care of, whatever that meant. I was too stunned to ask and didn’t really want to know. Then he went out and dismantled the ravaged cage and cleaned up the feathers. Except for the bare spot, he left nothing that might remind me of what had been there.

Later that evening he took a single little egg out of his breast pocket, which he had found under the roosting box. I put it in the refrigerator, on a nest made out of a blue handkerchief. Over the next few days and weeks I took it out and looked at it many times, but I didn’t know what to do with it. I kept it so long that whatever was inside it completely dried up, and finally it was so light and insubstantial in my hand that it seemed barely to exist. It was just a sigh of a thing.

JULIE HIT ME
THREE TIMES

T
he teachers all thought that Julie couldn’t talk. I knew she could, but she didn’t want to, because she sounded funny. Her brother, David Lee, who was basically a heathen, knocked all her front baby teeth out when she was only two years old, so she never learned to talk exactly right. Maybe there was one little snaggletooth left on the side, I can’t remember, but if any teeth survived they got knocked out later the same summer when she was on a trail ride in Brown County and her horse leaned over too far to take a drink out of a creek. Julie slid right down the horse’s neck and face first into the water. There’s a picture of her in the family album. She’s wearing a little yellow shirt, and she’s pulling down the neck of it to reveal a bloody scrape that runs from her chin to her collarbone. She’s looking up at the camera, but she has her head turned a little to the side, and she is nothing but proud.

I myself had been a late talker, and had saved up a fair amount of words as a result, so I did all of my own talking plus all of Julie’s. I knew what she meant to say without her even looking at me. For instance, on the first day of kindergarten our stupid teacher Mrs. Dockerty tried to give Julie a blue crayon for coloring and Julie just sat staring at her desk and wouldn’t take it. I didn’t pipe up right away, I let Mrs. Dockerty get good and frustrated, and then I said from my desk right next to Julie’s that Julie couldn’t abide a blue crayon and somebody better give her green. Mrs. Dockerty took offense.

“I believe Julie can speak for herself,” she said with her prim little voice out of her prim little nose.

“Well, good luck” was all I said, and I looked back down and started coloring with my red crayon, which was perfectly okay with me.

And after a little while Mrs. Dockerty slipped Julie a green crayon on the sly, without even looking at me, because she couldn’t bear to think that I had been right, and Julie just went to town on her sailboat. She colored that whole page green.

From then on I did all of Julie’s talking in kindergarten, although Mrs. Dockerty pretended she couldn’t hear me, like Julie was actually speaking for herself. That went okay until one day at quiet time when Julie and I were lying next to each other on our rugs, and I saw a particular look pass over her face.

“Mrs. Dockerty, Julie’s got to poop.”

All the kids who were awake started rolling around on their rugs and snickering.

Mrs. Dockerty pointed at me with her prim little finger. “You lie down and mind your own business,” she hissed through her small teeth.

“I’m just trying to help. You don’t want her to poop in her drawers, do ya?,” which made one boy, Jackie, who was bad, roll right off his rug and into the Lincoln Logs. Everybody was laughing, in fact, except for Julie, who really did have to poop, and was starting to look worried.

“Wha—where do you hear such things? Don’t answer me. Julie, go to the bathroom if you need to.”

So Julie got up and went to the bathroom, and even though she had done nothing wrong she fell in Mrs. Dockerty’s estimation, and for the rest of the year Mrs. Dockerty didn’t like either one of us. On my end-of-the-year report card all she wrote was “Is disruptive in class. Colors outside the lines. Talks out of turn.” When I showed it to my parents, they read it out loud to me, and my mom said, “Good for you, sweetheart.” And my dad gave me a little pat on the back.

I TOOK TO TALKING
for Julie the way some children take to water. I talked for her at school and at home, and her parents were nothing but grateful, because they were completely worn out from trying to read her mind.

One night when we were in the second grade, when I was at home with my actual parents, Debbie called to ask me if Julie wanted to spend some of the money in her savings account (which was hefty—she never spent a dime) on a new saddle they had seen.

“I don’t know,” I answered. “Put her on the phone.”

Debbie handed the phone to Julie. There was a long silence, then Julie gave the phone back to her mom.

“No, she would prefer not to.”

“I told her fool father that she’d use her old saddle till it was dust before she’d crack open her piggy bank, but he wouldn’t listen.”

“I’d like a new saddle,” I said wistfully, meaning I’d like a new saddle and a new horse to put it on, and the Newmans’ many, many gorgeous acres and their excellent farmhouse with a bumper pool table in the dining room.

“Jarvis, you need a saddle like a hole in the head. I’m scared every time you get on a horse. You’re an accident waiting to happen.”

“Debbie!” I did my best to sound wounded. “I’m very careful when I ride.”

“
Julie’s
very careful when you ride. You’d break your scrawny neck if it wasn’t for her. Now go to bed. You’ve got school tomorrow.” And she hung up. Debbie talked more than anybody in that whole family.

WE WERE ON
our way home from a basketball game. It was snowing enough that Big Dave was carefully negotiating every turn and every stop. We were listening to another game on the AM radio, between two teams who could potentially play Blue River in the sectionals. Dave was crazy for basketball. He had been the all-time leading scorer in Mooreland, back when my elementary school had also been a high school. (In the 1960s the county schools were consolidated and the high school was moved to a new building four miles down the highway.) Dave had been so important to the team, in fact, that when he got Debbie pregnant early in their senior year, she refused to marry him so he could finish out the season, with the result that at their wedding she was so pregnant she had to rest her little bouquet on her enormous belly. That baby was Connie, Julie and David Lee’s older sister, who was no longer with us. She had been Called Home in the sixth grade, under very tragic circumstances we all preferred not to discuss.

Julie and I were in the back seat of the Newmans’ big gray car, which always smelled like the barn, but in a pleasant way. I was talking to Julie and also answering for her. The conversation was going quite well, and then Debbie turned around in her seat and said in a fast and kind of hard way, “You talk too much.” Which would have been humiliating enough all by itself, but I made it worse by not answering at all, by just shutting up in the most desperate and silent way I possibly could, and the absence of my voice in the car was so noticeable that everybody started to laugh. I made it all the rest of the way home without crying and without talking, and by the time we pulled into Newmans’ barn lot the car was pretty doggone quiet, and Julie was looking at me like she maybe had a few things she’d like to say, but I’d have been hanged before I would have said them for her.

JULIE
’
S GRANNY AND GRANDDAD
were named Genevieve and Kim. Big Dave looked like exactly half of each of them, and Julie looked like exactly half of each of her parents, except for some things that had passed down undiluted from Kim to Big Dave to Julie. They all had the same red hair, and kind of reddish-tan skin, and hard, square faces with sharp cheekbones. And you couldn’t get a word out of any of them. Kim was just a big, old, hardworking farmer. He smoked cigars and drank moonshine, and every New Year’s Eve we got to spend the night at his house and shoot off shotguns at midnight and drink some moonshine out of Dixie cups. It was pure poison.

He got sick when we were in the third grade, but Julie never told me. Word never got to me at all, until my mom told me one day after school that Kim had been taken to the hospital, and he died that night. Julie was at school the next day as if nothing had happened, but it had so much happened that I was obliged to say something. We were out on the playground, on the sidewalk next to the school, and I stopped Julie and tried to look her in the eye.

“I heard about your granddad, Julie, and I’m really sorry.”

She looked at me, and I was completely undone when I saw that tears were standing in her eyes. I had never, ever seen her cry. Then she pulled back her fist and punched me so hard in the belly that my diaphragm collapsed like an old balloon. I let out a big whoosh, doubled over, and then toppled over onto my butt. I was staring right at my dirty old black-and-white saddle oxfords with liver-colored soles, and making a big groaning sound trying to refill my lungs. She let me catch my breath and then offered me her hand. She helped me up and we went straight on to play two-square, which was where we were heading in the first place, and she beat me every single game, as she always did. Julie could have beaten the people who invented two-square.

I went to Granddad Kim’s funeral, nervously. Inside the mortuary Dave and his brothers and their wives were gathered around the casket. Julie was sitting miserably on a white padded chair up against the wall. Her parents had stuck her in a pretty, green dress, which I was certain was making her entirely more unhappy than the fact of the wake. Julie in a dress was like the rest of us in quicksand. I avoided her eye, and I never spoke to her, but I knew she’d never forget I had been there. Julie never forgot anything.

SHE WOULD HAVE PREFERRED
to be completely invisible, but God had other plans for Julie. Her hair, which was the strangest color, hung down her back like a slick red curtain. And her large round eyes and her eyebrows were all the same warm color as her hair, and it didn’t really matter what she did or how she felt about it, she was stuck with being beautiful.

Watching her work on the tractor engine one afternoon I became hypnotized by the way panels of her hair kept falling forward and framing her face. It was obviously nothing but annoying to her, but I just wanted to reach out and touch it. I wanted to reach out and touch it and reach out and touch it, so I reached out and touched it, and she quick stood up and punched me in the arm. She had a way of punching with the knuckle of her middle finger raised slightly which, magically, completely separated the muscle from the bone.

“Ow! Why’d you hit me?!” I yelled, rubbing my arm.

“Why’d you touch my hair?!” she yelled back.

“Because you’re so beautiful!” I shouted, which caused her to punch me in the other arm, even harder.

I jumped down off the tractor and started to head for the house. Julie went back to the greasy tractor engine, as if nothing had happened. I didn’t have full use of my arms, because they were both kind of tingly and numb, and so I couldn’t fully defend myself from Red, the Newmans’ wretched, oversized rooster. As I stepped out of the pole barn he charged me. I squealed and went left. He charged again. By employing a sophisticated pattern of squeals and zigzags I made it halfway across the barn lot before he came at me seriously. By this time Sarge, the Newmans’ extra nice three-legged dog was barking, and Biz, the Newmans’ most viciously evil dog was hurling himself at his pen, and all I could do was stand there wailing with my arms hanging uselessly at my sides. I had to keep looking down to make sure I hadn’t lost my fingers.

Red was about a foot from me when Julie came flying out of the barn with a stick, which she threw at Red as if it were a frisbee, hitting him in the side of the head and causing him to do a very comical rooster roll across the dusty barn lot. When he stood up he actually shook his head a few times, trying to clear it. Then she leaned down and scratched Sarge behind the ear a few times, which made him wiggle his hind parts so hard his leg stump thumped on the ground. Then she quick picked up the basketball lying next to the chicken coop and shot an eighteen-foot jump shot at the hoop on the side of the pole barn, sunk it, ran on back into the barn, and fixed the tractor.

I thanked her for rescuing me by bringing her her favorite lunch: MoonPie and a Pepsi, and she wasn’t mad at me at all. But the next day I had two Julie-shaped bruises, one on each arm, in addition to a small sister-shaped bruise I’d gotten in church the previous Sunday, on the underside of my arm. I was very proud of them and didn’t want to wear a shirt even though it was only forty degrees, because I thought I looked like Lydia the Tattooed Lady.