A Girl Named Zippy (6 page)

SOMETIMES I GOT TO CHURCH
during the silent time, which meant I could kiss slipping in unnoticed good-bye. But today Pastor Eddie was already preaching. Between the vestibule and the sanctuary were heavy, swinging doors on brass hinges, like those that lead to dining rooms.

I slid in next to my sister, who promptly reached out and pinched me on that wildly tender skin inside the upper arms. She knew I couldn’t hoot or howl or even kick. All I could do was snort out a few breaths like a cornered cow.

Pastor Eddie was talking about Jesus, and how He died for all of us, to save us and cleanse us of our sins. God so loved the world, I was told again today, as I had been told incessantly throughout my life, that He sent His only Son to earth to serve as a sacrificial lamb. With Jesus’s blood we were made whole; with His death we were set free. And all He wanted in return was our hearts, freely given. All we had to do was turn our lives over to Him. He was waiting right now. Wouldn’t we come?

Pastor Eddie’s eyes were closed and his arms were raised in a beseeching way. In the front row his wife, Shirley, who had made me the most beloved blanket I would ever own (and which I called my Shirley Quilt), had one hand clenched in the air, waving a tear-stained handkerchief. Around me there were choked whispers of “Yes, Lord,” and “Oh, Jesus.” Kathleen was at the piano, and began playing the chorus of “I Come” over and over, quietly.

The members of our meeting began responding to the altar call. My mom was one of the first to arrive, as usual. Soon nearly everyone was up there but me and one old woman who was too fat to walk. I had never been saved. It was a scandal. My sister periodically turned from the front of the church to give me stink eye, but I couldn’t budge. I would never, ever go to the altar. Even when I tried imagining, as my Vacation Bible School teacher had urged me to do, my heart opening up like a lily to accept God’s love, I felt nothing in my chest but my own stubborn, hard-beating muscle, not even remotely flower-like. If the Rapture came, as my brother threatened it was about to, I knew what my fate would be, and I was ready for it: I would be left with just my godless daddy and Minnie Hodson and her chickens, which we would take one by one, and kill, and eat.

UNEXPECTED
INJURIES

T
he people of Mooreland mostly took one of two kinds of vacations: they went to visit relatives in Tennessee, or they went camping. Some people liked to go camping even though their daily lives already resembled camping; once I saw two people honeymooning in a pup tent smack in the middle of the bride’s parents’ yard. The bride was a biggish girl, and as I passed the tent on my way to the post office, I saw her bare feet sticking out through the flaps. I didn’t think anything of it.

We didn’t have any relatives in Tennessee, so we spent many weekends in various campgrounds around Indiana. My favorite was called Tall Trees, about ten miles from home. Tall Trees Campground was all the name implied and more. It had its own lake and an old wooden barn with a pool table and pinball machines. The campsites were not too close together, and the big building with the bathrooms and showers was usually clean and not an impossible walk away. I’d seen way worse. Once at church camp I went to take a shower in the middle of the afternoon and all the shower stalls had about an inch of water backed up in them, and every place I looked there were frogs. It was so much like an Old Testament plague that I nearly answered the altar call that evening, but instead just closed my eyes and said “Mickey Mouse” over and over until the feeling passed.

It took, quite literally, a whole day for my dad to prepare to go camping. The trailer had to be outfitted with supplies, and they all had to go in special tiny places, all facing the same direction; the truck had to be cleaned and gassed up and all the fluids checked and topped off; the hitch had to be stepped on seventy-four times to make sure it could handle the weight of the trailer; the trailer had to be connected to the hitch, which involved actually lifting the trailer off the ground and fitting it onto the ball. Sometimes an animal or a child might be standing too close during the crucial lifting of the trailer, the proximity of which could cause my dad to become his most godless. After the trailer was hooked up, my mom and I had to stand in the yard and signal to Dad in semaphore to TURN ON YOUR RIGHT TURN SIGNAL. NOW THE LEFT TURN SIGNAL. GREAT. TRY YOUR BRAKES.

Dad was convinced that tragedy was going to rain down on us in the form of some bone-crunching accident, and all because one of the wires connecting the trailer lights to the truck went out, so sometimes we had to go through the whole light test four or five times. Then the big side mirrors on his truck had to be adjusted for ninety minutes. Then he had to drive the truck and camper around the block a few times to make sure everything felt right. Generous neighbors often stepped out of their houses and signaled that all the lights were working as he went by. Finally, he would stand up straight and sigh and say we were ready, and then I would get back in the camper and off we’d go, driving less than an hour to the campground, with me flying around in the back of the camper like a little wayward piece of popcorn.

WE HAD A SERIES OF NEIGHBORS
in the house to the north of us after Minnie Hodson died; Petey Scroggs and his family lived there for a while, and if I were able to visually represent Petey, the portrait would be nothing but a cliché. He was a mean, short boy with carrot-colored hair and freckles. His jeans were often twisted around sideways and the collars of his striped T-shirts were always stretched out and he had mean eyes and he ate his own fingernails. Petey walked with the longest stride a short boy can afford, and when he wasn’t barreling down the sidewalk on his feet, he was riding a very sinister-looking black bicycle that seemed to be made of the Devil’s own bicycle parts.

Petey got his looks from his mother, who kept her carrot hair in perpetual pin curls, by which I mean always in the pins. She and Petey were both a little cross-eyed, and she had a very high-pitched voice which caused my dad to call her Birdie. Petey looked and sounded just like her, even though he only came up to the waist of the housedress she wore all year long, which may have actually been an uncomfortable nightgown.

As for his smarts, Petey inherited those straight from his daddy, John, who was a mean drunk. My dad’s nickname for John was Jethro, after Jethro Bodine from
The Beverly Hillbillies,
which seemed to me quite insulting to the real Jethro, who, while clearly stupid, was nonetheless charming and intended no harm. John was a tobacco-spitter. There was no end of mischief in his intentions. Once he raked up all the leaves in his yard, poured kerosene on them, and set them alight, right underneath the mulberry tree our two yards shared. Twice he had, while drunk, driven his car into the corner of his own house, and Dad had seen John set his own pants on fire while trying to light a match on the zipper of his fly.

In my loneliest hour I had no need of Petey Scroggs as a playmate. I was, in fact, afraid of him, because of the many stories that circulated in Mooreland about his treatment of animals. He had once thrown a litter of kittens into a burning trash barrel, I heard at church, and Julie’s aunt told me that he snuck into a woman’s house while she was in the garden and plucked all the feathers off her parakeet, leaving it completely naked. And I knew in my heart with absolute certainty that he had been responsible for the kidnapping of my cat PeeDink one bitterly cold January.

When PeeDink didn’t come home one night none of us was really worried, because his mighty hunting skills preoccupied him. Then he didn’t come home a second night, and I had to go out in the dark and cold and call for him. After the third night we were all sore afraid, and we began canvassing the neighborhood, but no one could remember seeing him. Every day for a month I checked at Doc Austerman’s clinic, in case somebody had accidentally turned him in as their cat, thinking that maybe they could get all the broken parts of him fixed, but every day the answer was no. I was nearly despondent without him. My dad finally sat me down one night and told me that I needed to accept that PeeDink was probably gone for good, because it was simply too cold for him to have survived longer than a few nights, especially given the fact that he was learning disabled. I cried and cursed God. I told Dad if he really loved me he would just go out and find him and bring him home, and day after day Dad tried, with no luck.

Then right at the end of January the weather turned so bitter that our water pipes froze and burst. Dad gathered up all the jugs he kept for just such emergencies and trudged over to the Scroggses’ to borrow some water. While he stood in the kitchen watching Birdie fill the jugs, he heard a familiar, desperate meowing. He asked if the Scroggses had a cat, and Birdie said no. By this time Petey was in the kitchen, looking short and beady-eyed and nervous.

“Well, I believe I hear a cat somewhere,” my dad said.

“No, you don’t,” Birdie shrilled, handing Dad his water jugs as quickly as she could.

“I believe the sound I hear is coming from the basement,” Dad said, taking a step toward the basement door.

Petey skittered over like a greased pig, trying to insinuate himself between Dad and the basement. “Ain’t no cat in here!” he squealed.

Dad quick thrust the water jugs into Petey’s arms, who accepted them without thinking, and then Dad went for the basement door, which was so swollen he had to heave his shoulder against it to get it all the way open.

And into the kitchen sprang a soot-colored, howling apparition, nothing but ribs and a tail. Dad said that for a few seconds he couldn’t honestly say whether it was PeeDink, until the cat looked up at him. At that moment there were three pairs of crossed eyes in one kitchen, which my dad later reported to be two too many for any man, so he grabbed the water jugs, thanked Mrs. Scroggs, and stomped out the back door, poor desperate PeeDink following close behind.

WHAT PETEY SCROGGS
did to PeeDink was all the story I needed to know about him, but I hadn’t yet reached the point of crossing the street to avoid him, or ignoring him in the hard snubbish way that means true enemies. So one afternoon, sitting in the backyard in the double glider my father won in a card game and lost two weeks later, I saw Petey walk across his backyard and into the barn where the Scroggses kept rows and rows of rabbits in cages. A few minutes later he came out with a big, fat white rabbit, and when he saw me watching him he raised his arm in a wave, and I waved back.

Mom and Dad were only a few feet away, going over my dad’s camping checklist. My mom was having to do a lot of the work, because Dad had a maggot in his finger. A few days earlier he had slammed his hand in the door of the truck, eliminating nearly half an inch of his index finger, and the doctor had put a maggot inside the stump to eat the dead parts. Dad was a little crabby because he could feel it moving around.

It appeared that we were either twenty minutes or six hours away from leaving for Tall Trees, depending on whether my mom found three missing cans of sterno and a case of C rations Dad stole from the National Guard Armory.

“Bob,” Mom said, throwing up her hands. “We have enough food for a
month
. Why do we need a case of C rations?”

“You never know.”

Petey headed my way. He was carrying the rabbit with one hand under its belly and one hand holding the scruff of its neck. There was no fence separating our yards then, so he just walked over and sat down on the other side of the glider.

“You wanna hold my rabbit?” he asked, in his objectionable voice.

I don’t know a sane person in this world who can resist a bunny. I nodded, and he passed his rabbit over to me, settling it in my lap.

It was a huge, furry sack of heat. I’d never seen a rabbit so big, or so white. Its skin hung down in folds on either side of my arms—it was in all ways bigger than my lap. I held it under the chin the way Petey had, with one hand, and rubbed its head with my other. Between the ears the rabbit’s skull divided in the most delicate little dip. I felt it sniff my hand, moving its nose in that quick up and down way that is the subtle answer to
What does a rabbit say?

I could have held it all day, but after only a few minutes Petey grabbed it by the neck and took off across the yard. I looked up into the setting sun and saw the outline of my dad moving toward me, then looked down and saw blood dripping on the tops of my blue tennis shoes. I looked up; I looked down; I could make sense of nothing I was seeing. Then both of my parents were sitting on the glider, and Dad had ahold of my hand, and I could see that there was a sizable, bunny-shaped portion of my index finger missing, and blood was running out steadily, dripping onto first my shoes, and then Dad’s.

“Didn’t you feel that rabbit biting you?” he asked, wide-eyed with disbelief.

“No,” I said, thinking maybe he was a little sensitive because of his maggot. “I reckon I was hypnotized.”

Dad looked at my mom, stricken. “She thinks she was hypnotized by a rabbit.”

“Well, stranger things have happened,” Mom said, carefully not looking at my dad’s bandaged finger.

“Get in the house.” Dad ordered me by pointing with his cigarette in the general direction of the living room window.

I got up slowly, cradling my bleeding finger. I deeply dreaded what was in store for me: much Ivory soap and hot water, followed by enough iodine to paint our front porch. No way would he settle for mercurochrome, either. We’d be lucky if he didn’t go collect the head of the rabbit and send it to the game warden, just to be sure.

My sister came in the bathroom where I was sitting on the toilet lid, dejectedly waiting for Dad to collect sterile gauze pads and surgical tape.

“I didn’t know rabbits were meat eaters,” she said, looking at my bright orange hand.

“Petey’s rabbits are.” I still could not believe that a white bunny was capable of such carnage.

“Do you think he knew that rabbit was going to bite you?”

“I don’t know why else he brought it over. I’m afraid we can’t go camping now, too.”

“You handle pain so well, sweetie,” Melinda said, standing up.

“Well, I was hypnotized.”

She walked out into the den, where Dad was still rooting through the medicine cabinet with his good hand. I heard her asking him about the camping trip, and his reply about how we’d be risking infection at every turn, including from the many, many bacteria that lived in the lake.

“What does Mom think?”

“I don’t know. She’s still out in the camper, counting Sterno.”

Dad came in and bandaged up my finger until it was roughly the size of a lemon, then went out to begin the arduous process of uncamping. He found my mom sitting at the little table in the trailer, reading a book.

A few weeks later, while I was playing in the backyard, Petey and his much older brother, Billy, and their dad came barreling out of their house, John and Billy sounding huge and dumb and scary, Petey screeching around them importantly. I dashed around and hid behind my dad’s tool shed, peeking my head out periodically to see what they were doing.

They each had a tool of some kind—I couldn’t see clearly what the tools were—but all three of them looked dangerous. Petey ducked into the barn and came out with a rabbit, which he handed to his dad. John held it by the neck, then crossed its long ears at the top, held them up to the side of the barn and stapled them there with a staple gun. Billy stepped up with a wicked-looking little hatchet, and whack! the rabbit’s body was separated from its head, which remained stapled to the side of the barn.