A Girl Named Zippy (9 page)

To be perfectly candid, Doc and I had a history.

My third-grade teacher had been, in my opinion, the meanest woman in the history of the Mooreland Elementary School, and a bad teacher besides. She once lost her temper with my friend Dana and shook her until Dana was wobbly. She routinely slapped children for not bathing. Her hair was dyed a pink color and set in a permanent wave and she never taught us anything. We never read any good books or did any good science or learned how to divide. I spent the whole year so bored I wanted to smash my head into the radiator. Then one day in the spring a tornado came, and our classroom was on the second floor, and when we could actually see the tornado in the distance we turned to our teacher to find out what to do and she was completely gone. Julie was standing defiantly in front of a closed window, staring mesmerized at the oncoming tornado, and our teacher was gone. I finally had to drag Julie under a desk, using my unexpected emergency strength, which I now knew came from the gypsies.

So one afternoon in the summer after my third-grade year I was standing at the drugstore counter watching Doc Holiday make my lemon phosphate, when in came my wretched, former teacher. I will never, ever know what compelled me to say what I did. It was probably just a misplaced desire to connect to a man I’d known my whole life, who had yet to call me by name.

As she sat down in a booth many feet away from me, I leaned across the counter and said, conspiratorially, “Speaking of the Wicked Witch of the West, huh? There’s no place like home, is there?”

For the first and only time in my life, Doc looked me in the eye. “She’s my wife.” He was very quiet, and so, in fact, was the whole planet.

“She is?” I whispered. I could hear myself blinking.

“What’s her name?” he asked, still drilling holes into my miserable face.

“Mrs. Holiday,” I muttered, swallowing. I could no longer look at him. I wished, in fact, for blindness.

He handed me my drink. “That’s twenty-six cents.” I handed him a quarter and a penny, as I did every day, and slouched out of the store.

I knew that in an emergency I could never count on Doc, and so I tried to keep my guard up at all times, but sometimes I got sorely distracted, notably when the new Josie and the Pussycats comic came out, which it had on this particular afternoon.

I was standing in the corner behind the magazine rack, trying to surreptitiously read a comic I had no intention of purchasing. When my instincts kicked in and I finally looked up, Edythe was heading straight for me. The bottom of her black dress was so tattered it looked like lace, and her long, white braid was coming undone, sending down strings of dry, dirty hair. Her hands were, as always, clasped behind her back, right where a bustle would be, but I knew what they looked like because I had seen them in church. Her fingernails were quite long, and filled with dirt. Her skin was so pale that a spiderweb of blue veins was visible under the grime on the back of her hands.

She was staring right at me and grinning. I stood frozen, desperately trying to breathe through the little pinhole left in my esophagus. I heard ringing in my ears, and began to pray to the baby Jesus that it would just be over quickly, that she would completely hypnotize me and drag me down to her terrible house and finish me off in whatever way she had planned, and that I would not feel any of it, like a gazelle being eaten alive by a hyena on
Wild Kingdom.

Edythe leaned closer to my face. I wheezed. She got closer and closer, and when she was only about three inches from my nose she quickly and sharply clacked her false teeth together like a castanet, which in turn waggled her dreadful and fascinating whiskers and caused her seven chins to undulate in gray waves.

As my vision dimmed and my knees began to melt, I heard Doc Holiday say quite loudly to the ice cream freezer, “That’s enough, Edythe.”

Still looking right at me, she straightened up and laughed out loud, clapping her hands in front of her like a child at a carnival. Her mouth was a dark cavern. She turned so precisely the heels of her black, lace-up boots nearly clicked together, and she marched out of the drugstore whistling “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”

I slid limply into a booth at the back of the store and put my head down, trying to catch my breath. Before I knew it Doc Holiday was standing over me, offering me a lemon phosphate.

“Talk about the Wicked Witch, huh?” he said, grimly.

“That woman is going to be the death of me,” I said, still staring at my own shoes.

“Well, what are you telling me about it for?!” he bellowed at the candy case. “That’s twenty-six cents.”

I slipped the change out of my pocket and placed it gently in his dry, old hand.

WHEN I GOT HOME
my dad was under the raised-up hood of his truck, working on something. He often tinkered with his own engines, which caused me no end of worry, because the hoods of Chevrolet vehicles made in the late sixties and early seventies weighed approximately three thousand pounds, and if they happened to fall, they simply cut a body in half.

I walked up beside him and decided to give him the what-for, even if it was, potentially, his last day as a whole man.

“Why didn’t you tell me about the gypsies?” I demanded.

He turned and looked at me with one eyebrow raised. “Been talking to your mother, huh?”

“Yes, and she told me the whole story, so don’t even try to lie and make me feel better. And what’s this about a tail?”

“Well, we all used to have tails, as I understand it.”

I realized in a flash that he was talking about evolution, which was a flat-out sin. “Ooooh, Daddy! You don’t want to be thinking that way. Here, listen to this song I learned in Sunday school:

Man is not the son of a monkey;

He was raised by God’s own hand.

And he never lived up in a coconut tree—

He was born upon the land.

I don’t believe in evolution,

’Cause the Bible says it’s true . . .

That if you monkey around with sin

It’ll make a monkey out of you!

“That’s a very nice song. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

He was doing something under the hood that required that he study a certain place for a really long time, and then take a ratchet and turn it and turn it while making little huffing noises, and then study and study some more. When my dad concentrated really hard he chewed on the side of his tongue, which I knew and he didn’t and I wasn’t about to tell him.

“Daddy, do you think Edythe knows I ain’t really a Christian?”

“Don’t say ain’t. I don’t know. She sees you in church three times a week, doesn’t she?”

“Yessir.”

“Well, I’m guessing that she thinks of herself as a Christian because she’s there, so she probably thinks you are because you’re there. See what I mean?”

“Even though it ain’t true?”

“Don’t say ain’t. Most people don’t care if it’s true or not, as long as you’re sitting there with your money in your hand for the offering.”

“Well, she for sure knows you’re not a Christian because you don’t even go and pretend.”

He ratcheted a minute, grunted, stopped, and studied. “Oh, Edythe always hated me, even when she and your mom were so thick. And I never liked her, either. She used to call our house and pretend she was going to commit suicide if your mother didn’t run over there every evening. One night she called and said she drank a whole bottle of iodine. I knew she didn’t, but I called an ambulance and told them that she had, that she would deny it with her dying breath, and that they needed to just go ahead and pump her stomach, and they did.”

“You did not!”

“I did. And she never forgave me, either, nasty old bat.”

I stood looking at Edythe’s yard. PeeDink just wouldn’t stay out of it, and every day she went hunting him with her rake. I couldn’t even imagine how sweet my life would be if someone would just come along and haul that old woman on down the line.

Dad was looking at me. “Are you going to talk to me all day?”

“I might.”

“Well, don’t. I’m about to lose my temper and start cussing, so go find something to do.”

“Okay, then. See ya, Daddy.”

“Take care, Zip.”

I TOOK OFF ON
my bicycle. I intended to head down to the post office and play a little rodeo. There was a ramp that led to the back door, about three feet off the ground, and Julie and I could ride up it full speed and go right off the end. For about a year we’d been having some good times in that parking lot.

I was almost there when I passed Ruth Huff walking down Broad Street with her hideous old collie, King. She waved. I waved back.

I decided to ride around the block and give some thought to Ruth Huff. Now she was as old as Edythe, easy, and just as disgusting. In fact, I believed they shared the same dresses. And she lived in a huge, falling down, scary haunted house that didn’t even have any lights, on a lot right next to our church. There were cats swarming all over that house, like bugs. Nobody knew how she fed them. And she walked around town all day, every day, with King, who was five hundred dog years old and was just one big clump of matted fur, except on his snoot and around his butt, which were both naked. King could only pant and gasp for air. He never had a good day, as far as oxygen went.

I passed Ruth again. She waved. I waved.

Ruth also went to my church, and like Edythe, she had a powerful stink. All the stinky old people went to my church. Ruth maybe even had double the odor of Edythe, because of all the cats and the constant presence of King’s mange. She carried a little black-beaded purse with her everywhere she went, which looked like she’d been carrying it since Christmas Eve of 1872, and in it she kept a plastic baggie filled with quarters. No one knew what they were for.

When I approached Ruth again, she waved me over. Her hands were all gnarled up, and dirtier than Edythe’s.

I rode up next to her, then leaned over and very reluctantly patted King on top of his head, where I could completely feel his bony skull. On impulse I checked the sky for buzzards, but it appeared that King would escape for another day.

“How are you, angel?” Ruth asked, patting me on the arm with one of her claws.

“I’m fine, ma’am, and how are you?”

“You’re a Jarvis, am I right?” One of her rheumy eyes was looking at the post office.

“That’s right.”

“You’re the little Jarvis?”

“I’m the baby of the family. I’ve been seeing you in church my whole life, ma’am.”

“Well.” She nodded, as if a great mystery had been solved. “You want a quarter?”

“Oh, no—” but she was already scrambling in her purse.

“Here you go, take it.”

When she handed it to me I was filled with the spooks about her dirty fingernails touching me, and there was something in the moment that seemed to make it hang suspended. One of Ruth’s eyes was looking right at me, and the quarter was touching my hand; one of her fingernails was just grazing my palm, and even King had raised his head for the transaction. Everything was going wrong for King except whatever was behind his eyes, because when I glanced at him I saw nothing but smarts.

I rode away, toward the drugstore. I always kept a penny in my shoe. I turned back and waved at Ruth. She waved.

THERE WERE SO MANY
animals buried in our backyard that every time we planted a tree or rototilled the garden a handful of smooth white bones got churned up into the light. It was disturbing. We were only allowed by law to bury animals under a certain weight, but everyone defied the code.

For instance, when Big Dave Newman’s most beloved horse, Navajo, died from eating a piece of barbed wire fence, we left him lying where he was until the middle of the night, then we all snuck out and helped drag him on a tarp to the top of a small hill, where we sat quietly while Dave dug a grave for him, grief stricken.

Our German shepherd, Kai, was buried in our backyard. Many of the dearly beloved dead were buried where they shouldn’t have been.

County law dictated that we should call a company called Bausback. They picked up dead animals for free, and were paid by the state. Bausback had a fleet of big yellow trucks that were as heavy and rounded as trucks made by Tonka, and the contrast between their cartoon shape and their mission made them all the more sinister. As with garbage trucks, the bed was covered and had a door that opened to reveal the machinery where the animals were transported.

Every time I saw a Bausback truck in town I couldn’t help following it. This was a good way to keep up with animal gossip, and also to see some of the more shocking aspects of nature. I had seen cats, dogs, birds, and rabbits slung into the Bausback maw, and once a whole goat, which really surprised me, because I didn’t know of anything that could kill a goat.

I was riding around in the cemetery at the edge of town when I saw the Bausback truck go by that Saturday afternoon. I was waiting for Julie to get off duty pumping gas and join me, but I didn’t stick around and wait for her. I took off after the truck, my legs pumping and the streamers at the end of my handlebars flying out behind me like circus-colored hair.

I was still a block from Ruth Huff’s when the smell hit me, which was the usual smell of her house multiplied many, many times. The whole volunteer fire department was gathered outside, plus Astor Main’s scary hearse, the Bausback truck, and sixteen assorted townspeople, including my dad, who met me halfway to the commotion.

“Zip, you just turn around and head home. This is no place for you.”

“Nuhn uhn, there’s no way I’m going home,” I said, scrambling off my bike and heading for the conflagration.

“Now wait a minute,” he said, grabbing me by the arm. “Since when did
you
start telling
me
what you’re going to do?” He was serious. He was all bent down in my face with his big eyes and smoky breath.

“Since just this one time. If you’re going to whup me, go ahead, because I’m planning on staying right here.”