Wringer (8 page)

Palmer came home that day to find Dorothy shooting baskets in his room.

“I asked your mother if I could come in,” she said, “so I could play basketball.”

Palmer sniffed. “That's a lie. You're here for Nipper.” He glanced at the window. The pigeon was due home any minute.

Dorothy laughed and bounced the weightless ball off Palmer's forehead. “Stop me,” she growled, scooping up the ball, and suddenly she was leaping into him, over him, her knees in his chest, jamming the ball into the four-and-a-half-foot-high basket and shrieking, “In your nose, out your toes!”

She laughed and bounced the ball off his nose. When he got over the shock, Palmer joined her, the two of them flinging the ball at each other and cackling like a pair of chickens.

Palmer wasn't surprised to find Dorothy in his room. Since he had told her about Nipper, she had
come over often. His mother, thrilled that Dorothy was back in his life, received her like a daughter.

As for the Beans Boys, as they sometimes called themselves, by spring they had tired of tormenting Dorothy and pretty much ignored her. Still, she did not come over when they were around. And whenever she saw Palmer with them at school, she acted as if she did not know him. Palmer sensed that she was doing this for his sake.

Dorothy sat on the edge of Palmer's homework desk.

“So, how was the big party,
Snots
?” she said with a sneer.

Palmer shrugged. “Okay.”

“What gross stuff did you do, you and your best friends? Did you eat a dead muskrat,
Snots
?”

“Not really. And don't call me Snots.”

“Why not? That's your name—
Snots
—isn't it,
Snots
?”

When Dorothy talked this way, Palmer could not always tell if she was serious. “It's just my gang name.”

“I sure am sorry I'm not in the gang,” Dorothy said. “Look at all the great stuff I'm missing. No neat name for me. No dead muskrats. No torturing
people on the way home from school. No making mothers scream. No Treatment on my birthday.” She rolled up her sleeve. She put on a pouty face. “Look at that, Snots, not one bruise. I want a black-and-blue arm. I want to have to do everything with one hand. I want some pain.”

Palmer's middle knuckle rose from his fist. He came at her with a wicked grin. “Okay—”

Dorothy screamed and hopped from the desk. They reeled about the room, she screaming, he laughing, and it wasn't until they quieted down that they heard the tapping.

“Nipper!”

Nipper was let in, and as usual went straight to the top of Palmer's head. This brought a complaint from Dorothy. “He never stands on my head. I want him to stand on my head.”

“Hold still,” said Palmer. He leaned in toward Dorothy until their foreheads were touching. “Go ahead, Nipper, go to Dorothy.” Nipper would not move from his perch.

Dorothy stomped her foot. “Phooey.”

“Wait a minute,” said Palmer excitedly. He transferred Nipper to the basket rim, left the room and returned a minute later. “Nipper has a thing
about ears,” he said. “Especially if there's something
in
your ear. One day I had an earache and I had one of these in my ear.” He held up a small wad of cotton. “He kept pulling it out.”

Dorothy took the cotton wad and pressed it into her left ear. “Yoo-hoo, Nipper,” she called, “look what's in my ear.” She stood in the middle of the room with her left ear to the rim. Without delay Nipper flew to her head, bent down and plucked out the wad. He flew back to the rim and let the wad fall through the net.

Palmer and Dorothy cheered: “Two!”

Palmer scooped up the foam ball, slam-dunked it and thrust his chin at Nipper. “In your face, bird.”

Nipper nodded and pecked him on the nose. Dorothy cracked up.

They were laughing and playing ball when Palmer, letting fly a long shot from beyond the bed, said, “Do you like my father?”

Dorothy watched the ball bounce off the door. “What kind of question is that?”

“Do you?”

“Sure, why?”

“Do you think he's nice?”

“Yeah, don't you?”

Palmer thought for a moment. “Yeah, he is. I guess that's the problem.”

Dorothy rolled her eyes. “You're talking goofy. What problem?”

“The golden bird.”

Dorothy threw the ball at him. “Will you please make some sense.”

Palmer looked across the room at Dorothy. She was back on his homework desk. Brown hair funneled into a ponytail by a plain rubber band. Pale blue T-shirt. Jeans. Black-and-white sneakers swinging above the floor. Same old across-the-street Dorothy he had known all his life.

And yet, somehow, not the same old Dorothy. Though she looked the same as always, Palmer had been seeing something else in her lately. Whatever it was, it registered not in his eyes but in his feelings, and was most clearly known to him by its absence in the company of anyone but her. It made him feel floating.

The previous summer Palmer's mother had taken him to the outdoor Y pool for swimming lessons. The first lesson was floating. The instructor told him to just throw back his head, bring up
his feet and allow himself to lie on his back on the water. This made no sense to Palmer. All of his life's experience told him that if he left his feet, he would fall, or in the case of water, sink.

“Relax,” the instructor kept saying. “Trust the water. It will hold you up.”

But Palmer could not trust the water. For many days he could not trust it. And then, with the instructor promising not to let him sink, he tried. With the instructor's hand on the small of his back, he tilted back, back until he felt water on his neck, on his ears. The instructor's hand pushed gently upward, Palmer's feet left the floor of the pool…

“Lie back…relax,” said the instructor. “Pretend it's your bed. Trust it.”

He lay back, he tried to trust. He could see nothing but the instructor's face and, beyond, the vast blue sky. And then the instructor's face was gone, his hand was gone, and his voice was saying, “You're floating.”

Palmer got the same feeling with Dorothy. He knew that he could let go, and she would hold him up.

Tears filled his eyes. He let go. “I don't want to be a wringer. But everybody else is a wringer when
they're ten, and I'm going to be ten in seventy-one days, and then I'm going to have to be a wringer too but I don't want to. So what kind of a kid am I? Everybody wants to kill pigeons but me. What's the matter with me?”

He said it all. He said things he had been thinking and feeling for years. He said things he didn't even know he had been thinking until he heard them come out of his mouth. He told her how he hated the golden bird, the trophy his father had won one year for shooting the most pigeons. He told her it confused him. How could one person be both a shooter of pigeons and a loving father?

He apologized for joining in on the treestumping and for calling her names. “You don't really look like a fish,” he said.

“Oh thank you,” she said.

He apologized for not inviting her to his last birthday party. He apologized for the muskrat carcass.

“My mother was shaking,” she said.

He told her about Beans's party and the night they came for him in his bed and led him to the railroad station and the boxes of birds. He told her
about the time Nipper flew overhead and was seen by the guys and how scary it was to be the only person in town with a pigeon and about his dreams at night. He told her that sometimes he wished he had not joined up with the guys after all, and he told her again and again that he did not, he really did not want to be a wringer.

Dorothy hopped down from the desk. She walked across the room and stood before Palmer and looked straight into his eyes. “Then don't,” she said. She made it sound so simple.

Palmer snickered. He got up from the bed, kicked the ball around. “Yeah, don't. Easy for you to say, you're not a boy. You didn't grow up all your life scared to be ten.”

“I have an idea,” said Dorothy brightly. “Why don't you just skip ten and go right to eleven? Or tell everybody your birth certificate was wrong and you just found out you're really twenty-one.”

Palmer stomped his foot, sending Nipper in a flutter from the basket rim. “It's not funny!”

Dorothy shrugged. “Well, you didn't like my serious answer—if you don't want to be a wringer,
don't
be a wringer.” She sat on the bed.

Palmer shrieked, “I
can't
not be a wringer!”

Nipper flew to the bedstead. “Everybody is a wringer. You
have
to be a wringer. That's how it always was. You don't know, you're a girl. What do you think”—he sneered into her face—“I can be the only boy in the history of the town who was ever not a wringer? And what makes you think”—he poked his finger at her—“what makes you think Beans would ever let me get away with it? They would drag me out of this bed and out to the park. They would wring
my
neck.”

From her seat on the bed, Dorothy stared at the poking finger. She took hold of it and pulled it, drawing Palmer closer until his face was inches from hers. At that point she grabbed his earlobes and pulled him closer still. She smiled broadly. She kissed the end of his nose and laughed.

Palmer froze for a moment, stunned, then crumpled into laughter himself. They laughed and played games with Nipper for the rest of the afternoon.

For much of his life Palmer LaRue had felt he was standing at the edge of a black, bottomless hole. On the fifty-ninth day before his tenth birthday, he fell in.

Daffodils clustered like bugle bands in front yards as the Beans Boys left school behind on a sunny, cloudless day. It was a day in which everything seemed possible, the only problem being to make a choice. Beans wanted to head for the creek to hunt salamanders. Mutto craved a stone fight. Henry felt like baseball. And Palmer, he couldn't decide, or rather, he didn't want to decide. He simply wanted to enjoy: the bright spring day, the company of his friends. There was nothing he wanted to do—he simply wanted to be. But this was not something he could explain to himself, much less to the guys.

They came to the corner of Maple and Kane and stopped. A decision had to be made which way to go. Palmer was about to throw his vote to base
ball when suddenly the sunlight was briefly snipped, as if a page had been turned in front of a lightbulb. This was followed in turn by a flapping sound, the feel of a pair of four-toed feet in his hair, and the deep-throated treble of a familiar voice. Palmer's mind riffled through a thousand answers to account for all this, but only one made sense: Nipper had just landed on his head.

Three mouths gaped open; six eyes, round as tiny planets, stared. Suddenly Beans's face became a red, shrieking mask: “PIGEON!” Hands reached, wings flapped, the four-toed feet were gone from his head.

Knowing at once how he must act, Palmer looked up at the fleeing bird. “Hey, come here!” he called, reaching up, running after it. “Hey, bird, get down here!”

The others too were running, reaching, shouting. They gave chase for a full block until the gray flyer vanished over the rooftops.

As they slowed to a walk, Palmer began to talk. “Man, did you see that? Do you believe it? Where did that thing come from? I thought I was gonna have a heart attack. You sure it was a pigeon? What would a pigeon be doing around
here? Maybe it was a crow. It kinda looked like a crow to me.”

“It was a pigeon,” said Beans. His voice was not friendly.

Palmer did not return Beans's stare. “Really?” He pretended to scan the skies. “If that thing ever comes near me again”—he made a chopping motion—“I'll whack it.” He bent down and showed the top of his head to the others. He ruffled his hair. “Did it poop on my head?”

No one answered. He straightened up. He dared not look at them. They walked in silence. He felt their eyes. His heart was thumping.

“The bird is yours.” Beans's voice, from behind. Palmer turned. They had stopped ten steps ago. It felt like ten miles.

Palmer spread his arms, he crouched as if to leap from a high place.
“What?”

Mutto pointed. “It's
yours
, ain't it? That's why it landed on
your
head.”

“And that one we saw fly over us that time on your street,” said Beans.

“Yeah!” croaked Mutto.

Palmer laughed. “You're crazy! Why would I have a pigeon? I hate pigeons. I'm gonna be a
wringer. I'm gonna wring their necks. I'm gonna whack 'em.” An empty soda can was lying in the gutter. He stomped on it with all his might, stomped again and again, crushed it, flattened it. He picked it up and dashed it to the sidewalk and stomped on it some more. “Whack 'em! Whack 'em! I hate pigeons! I hate 'em all!” He looked up at the staring, glaring eyes. He clenched his fists, he screamed: “I'm gonna be the best wringer there ever was!”

An hour later in his room with Dorothy, Palmer was still jumpy. He paced back and forth, telling Dorothy what had happened. The more agitated he became, the faster he paced. Nipper observed from a booktop, swinging his head as if watching a Ping-Pong match. The bird had been waiting at the window, as usual, when Palmer returned home.

“Sit down,” said Dorothy, who sat on the homework desk, “you're making me nervous.”

“I can't help it,” said Palmer. “I almost got killed out there.”

“Palmer, they kill pigeons in this town, not people.”

“That's what you think. You didn't see the way they were looking at me. And don't say”—he formed the words
kill pigeons
with his lips—“around him.” He nodded toward Nipper, who had stopped and cocked his head, as if listening.

“Sorry,” said Dorothy. “So what are you going to do?”

Palmer threw out his arms. “I don't
know
!” He spoke to Nipper. “You dumb stupid birdbrain. Why did you do that? What am I gonna do?” When he had come home and found Nipper at the window as usual, he was both happy and not happy. He half wished Nipper hadn't showed up, so he could be rid of the whole problem. For a moment he considered pulling down the shade, then hated himself for even thinking that and threw open the window.

He took two fistfuls of his own hair, squatted on the floor and screamed up at the pigeon. “What am I gonna
do
?”

Nipper's answer was a gargling noise.

“Teach him to shoot fowl shots. Get it? F-O-W-L?” Dorothy tittered at her own joke. Palmer wasn't amused.

Dorothy had Palmer's Magic Marker in one hand, the Nerf ball in the other. She tossed him the ball. In large black letters on the spongy surface, she had written the words NIPPER'S BALL.

“Big help you are,” said Palmer.

 

Palmer's nervousness lasted until he went to sleep that night, and resumed when his alarm clock
woke him up next morning with the customary nip on the earlobe. He did not feed Nipper on the roof as usual. Instead, he spread newspaper on his floor and poured the Honey Crunchers there, plus some leftover peas from dinner the night before. Nipper loved peas. Then Palmer quickly opened the window and shooed his pigeon into the sky.

Now—what should he wear?

He was afraid that if he wore his usual clothes, Nipper might again recognize him and drop in on him after school. He needed a disguise. He looked around. He found the long-sleeved white shirt that he had once worn to Cousin Linda's wedding, and the dark brown trousers that went with it.

He checked himself in the mirror. He still looked too much like Palmer LaRue. He went down to the basement, to the closet where his mother had stored everyone's winter clothes. He got out his thick, quilted, thigh-length coat, the one his father said could keep him warm at the North Pole. He also grabbed his green woolen stocking cap with the pom-pom and—why not?—his father's black-and-white checkered scarf. He stuffed hat and scarf in his pockets and was sneaking out the door when his mother screeched: “Halt!”

She approached him, squinting as if not believing her eyes. “What's this?” she said, fingering the quilted coat.

“A coat.”

“I can see that. It's May. It's warm out.”

“I heard it's gonna get colder later on.”

“Not that cold.”

“Okay, look, I'll unzipper it.” He unzippered the coat. “I gotta go, Mom. I'm gonna be late.” He bolted down the steps and up the sidewalk, hoping his mother would not call him back. She did not.

In the classroom Palmer kept looking at the clock. For once, he wanted school to last forever. He did not want to walk home. He dreaded the closing bell. When it came he marched up to the teacher and told her he thought she should keep him after school.

She looked at him funny. “And why is that, Palmer?”

“Because I was bad.”

She looked surprised. Palmer was never bad. “I was not aware of that.”

“You just didn't catch me.”

“Is that so? And now you wish to confess?”

“Yes.”

“You want to clear your conscience.”

“Yes.”

“I see.” She was smiling. She settled back in her chair. “So, what bad thing did you do?”

“I spit on the floor.”

Her eyebrows went up. “Really? Right here? In this room?”

“Yes.”

“When did you do this?”

“Uh, after lunch.”

She stood. “Would you mind showing me where you did it?”

Palmer had not anticipated this. He had not thought a confession required proof. “I wiped it up,” he said.

She nodded, still smiling. “Ah. Well, that was good of you. I think that settles it. You may go on home now.”

Palmer stood there, hanging from her eyes. He could not bring himself to go outside. He took a step back, turned to the side and spit on the floor. “Look,” he said, “I did it again.”

The teacher gasped. She was no longer smiling. He was ordered to fetch a paper towel and clean it
up. He was sent to the blackboard to write one hundred times:
I will never never never never never never ever again spit on the floor.
Five of the
nevers
plus the
ever
were his own idea. He wrote as slowly as he could.

The teacher was in and out of the room as he wrote. At one point the guys showed up at the door.

“What're you doing?” Beans asked.

“Being punished,” said Palmer.

Beans leaned in to look at the blackboard. “You spit on the
floor
?”

“Yep.”

The guys were goggle-eyed.

“Was it a big one?” said Mutto.

“A lunger,” said Palmer. The guys were swooning. They were really impressed. “Took me five minutes to clean it up.”

At that moment he could have been elected president of the gang.

The teacher returned, and the guys took off. From then on, whenever the teacher left the room or simply wasn't looking, Palmer erased what he had just written. When she finally packed up to go
home, she came to the blackboard and counted the sentences. “Nine!” she exclaimed. “Palmer, you write like a snail.”

“I'll go faster,” he said.

“No, you may stop now. Punishment's over.”

Palmer clutched the chalk. “I don't think I should stop till I get to a hundred. I can feel the sentences working. I think I need the whole punishment to make me stop spitting.”

The teacher took a step back. The look on her face said:
Is he going to fire one at me?
Then her expression changed, hardened. “Palmer,” she said firmly, “I am confident you will never spit in this room again. Now put down the chalk and go home.”

He put down the chalk. He got his coat and put it on. He zippered it up. The teacher's jaw dropped, her eyes widened as he pulled the green woolen cap down over his ears, as he wrapped the checkered scarf around his neck and pulled it up to just below his eyes. She was about to say something. “My mother's afraid I'll catch the flu,” he blurted and ran from the room before she could stop him.

When he got outside his heart sank: The guys
were still there. They had ignored his heavy coat on the way to school, but now, seeing the added scarf and hat, they cracked up.

“Hey Snots, where's the blizzard?”

“You look like Frosty the Snownerd.”

“My mom made me,” he told them, trying to sound resentful. “She says I'm getting the flu.” He tried to steer them to another subject. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

Beans sidled alongside, draped his arm around Palmer's shoulders. “We're your buddies, Snots. You get punished, we wait.” His smile was as flat as a cartoon.

“Palmer”—Henry was the only one who occasionally called him by his right name—“be honest, did you
really
spit on the floor?”

Palmer looked them all in the eye. “Yeah. I said, didn't I?”

They weren't sure whether to believe him—but they wanted to, Palmer could tell—and suddenly he realized he had stumbled onto a way to divert attention from Nipper. He marched back to the school door, pulled it open dramatically and pointed inside. He yanked down the scarf and growled. “Go ask Miss Kiner.”

They believed. He could see it in their faces. They mobbed him, slapping fives, cheering his name.

On the way home they pestered him again and again to tell the story, especially the look on the teacher's face. They laughed and thumped his back. They said they didn't think he'd ever do such a thing. They no longer seemed to care, or even notice, that he was muffled up like a mummy.

But they did scan the skies. In the midst of the laughing and thumping, Palmer caught their eyes drifting upward. And Mutto had something new with him this day: a slingshot. Palmer pulled the scarf higher and prayed that Nipper was already home.