Dead End in Norvelt (6 page)

5

Maybe since there were
so few kids in our town we did things differently, because even though Bunny was a girl the size of one of Santa’s little helpers she was still my best friend. She was so short she could run full speed under her dining room table without ducking. I tried it once and nearly decapitated myself. Her real name was Stella Huffer and her father owned the funeral parlor, but she made everyone call her Bunny. Her father sponsored our baseball team, so we were nicknamed the Huffer Death Squad, which made sense because we were really named the Pirates after the Pittsburgh team and we had a skull and crossbones on our caps.

Bunny had a great sense of humor. She’d take her double position at shortstop and second base and yell out to the rest of us, “Look alive, you bunch of stiffs.” She had about a million dead person jokes. She said her father’s spongy felt suit was the color of black lungs. It smelled like pickled onions. When you shook his limp hand he was like a scary doll that whispered, “Goodbye, dearly departed. Rest in peace.” Once we had some hamburger spoil in our refrigerator and when I opened the refrigerator door it smelled just like Mr. Huffer. I mentioned it to Mom and she replied that if you think about it a refrigerator is just a coffin for food that stands upright. Then she made me take the rotten meat up to the dump. I threw it to a nest of rats and ran for my life.

Bunny was a great girl who was better than any guy I knew because she was tough, smart, and daring. Because she grew up in a house full of dead people she wasn’t afraid of anything. When I was first getting to know her we were in a viewing room at the funeral parlor looking at a new line of cigar-shaped caskets that were called “Time Capsules of the Future.” They were made out of polished aluminum and seemed very sleek with a little glass window where the cadaver’s face could be viewed. The idea was you were buried with all your favorite things and in a thousand years a relative would dig you up and sift through your rotted remains and stuff. It was kind of a disgusting thought.

But it wasn’t disgusting to her. “I’m going to take one to school for show-and-tell,” she said. “How much will you give me if I ask old Principal Knox to try it on for size?”

She turned to me for an offer. But I couldn’t say anything because the subject of death made me pale and feel cold except for the very tip of my nose, which was heating up like a match head about to combust. I started to back away from her.

She sensed my fear and edged even closer to me. “I think coffins are old-fashioned,” she remarked, and made a disapproving face. “I’d rather be cremated and have my ashes blasted into orbit like Sputnik and go beeping around the planet for all of eternity. Now that would be cool. But Dad doesn’t like cremation because he doesn’t make any money at it except for what it costs him to burn people to a crisp and put them in a Mason jar.”

By then I had backpedaled so far I was pressed against a heavy purple velvet curtain that divided the back of the viewing room from the front.

“You’re afraid of dead people,” she suddenly said. “Aren’t you?”

Before I could deny that accusation she reached out with her short muscular arm and grabbed my shirt. “Come on,” she ordered, and with her other hand she pulled the center of the curtain to one side. “You need to see your first dead person and then you won’t be afraid anymore.”

I wasn’t sure about that theory. I quickly lizard-licked my upper lip but didn’t taste any blood. So far I hadn’t humiliated myself, but I knew the worst was still to come.

On the other side of the curtain was a closed coffin displayed on a polished wood platform. Without pausing she went up and with both hands lifted the lid. She propped the lid on a metal rod as if she were propping open a car hood. There was a dead old man in there. He was dressed in a white suit and his face was tinted with flesh-colored makeup. I stared at him. His eyes were a tiny bit open, like an alligator peeking back at me.

Bunny suddenly grabbed my arm. “Touch his hand,” she said, and she turned and slapped him hard on his hand. “Touch it—not scary at all!” she proclaimed.

My hand was paralyzed. I probably looked more dead than he did. I couldn’t touch him.

“Come on, you wimp,” she said, and jerked my hand forward and pressed it against the dead man’s neck as if I were going to take his pulse. But there was no pulse. His neck was hard as a fence post, and my legs wobbled and I had to grip the edge of the coffin with my other hand to keep from tilting over to one side. By then the blood was dripping off my chin and onto the white satin lining inside the coffin. I turned and with my last bit of strength I ran out of the room and down the airless hallway and out their front door. I could hear her laughing behind me as the blood swept back across my cheeks and all the way to my ears, like rain streaking over a windshield.

*   *   *

When I arrived at the baseball diamond Bunny and the other four players on our small team were already practicing. They were hitting ground balls to each other and trying to field them.

When Bunny saw me she broke away from the others and threw a fastball directly at my head. “What took you so long?” she asked, with a bit of anger in her voice.

I caught it. “Trouble,” I replied, and threw it back at her chunky feet.

“What kind of trouble?” she asked, fielding the ball and bouncing a hard grounder back at me.

I picked it cleanly. “I cut down Mom’s corn crop.” Even saying that made me wince. I threw her a grounder with some spin on it.

She scooped it up, turned, and threw me a fly ball. “Why’d you do that?” she asked.

I made a basket catch over my shoulder and threw her a high pop-up. “Dad is making a landing strip for his new plane and he wants me to help him build a bomb shelter.”

She caught the ball, then looked at me like I had lost my mind. “A bomb shelter?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“A landing strip?” she asked.

“You heard me,” I said.

“So what is he going to do—dive-bomb your own bomb shelter?” she asked. “That sounds nuts.”

It did. I walked over to the dugout to get a drink.

“Get me some water,” she called, and threw the ball to another player.

I poured two cups and carried them back over to the diamond. I gave her one.

“Thanks, pal,” she said. “And by the way, I read the Slater obituary in the paper the other day. Dad and I thought you and Miss Volker did an outstanding job.”

“How’d you know I helped Miss Volker?” I asked.

“Small town,” she said as if “small town” was the answer to every question in Norvelt.

“And because I know you like Mrs. Slater so much I got you a present from her,” she said with a sick grin on her face. She dug into her pocket and tugged at something awkwardly shaped. I reached forward and she placed Mrs. Slater’s dentures in my hand.

“Here is something you didn’t know,” she said quickly before I could get a word out of my mouth. I kept staring at those coffee-stained teeth. “When the volunteer firemen found her collapsed by the beehive she was still alive, and she had her dentures in her hand and was tapping out an SOS message in Morse code—
‘Help me! Help me!’
she spelled over and over, and then she died.”

Bunny had to be lying. But if she wasn’t I wished we had used that detail for the obituary. “But didn’t your dad bury Mrs. Slater with her dentures in her mouth?” I asked.

“You don’t know anything about preparing dead people for a viewing,” she bragged. “If you’ll notice, the stiffs are always displayed with their mouths closed because my dad has to
sew
their mouths shut. If they don’t have real teeth you just sew their gums together which is actually easier, so we keep the dentures. Dad saves them because when he gets a boxful he donates them to the retirement home and some of those old people reuse them.”

“You really have to
sew
the mouth shut?” I asked. That stunned me. It seemed so brutal.

“With an upholstery needle and twine,” she added, knowing she was making me nervous. “It’s like sewing up a turkey after you stuff it, is how my dad puts it.”

I felt my blood surge like a tidal wave toward my face.

“Are you always like this?” she asked, and pointed her stubby hand at my nose.

“Yes,” I croaked, and wiped away a few drops of blood.

“You should see a doctor,” she advised.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “I have a very sensitive nose.
Anything
makes it bleed.”

At that moment I spotted my mother on her bicycle heading in my direction. She must have kicked in the garage door and seen I had escaped out the back, and now it looked like she was coming to scalp me because she had a long wooden cooking spoon clutched in one hand. Suddenly the water in my cup was pink with blood.

I knew I had done something terribly wrong and that I should wait for her to arrive and punish me. She got closer and closer, and as I lifted my shirttail to wipe my nose I knew I was grounded for life before she wheeled into the parking lot.

When Bunny saw the stream of blood running down over my lips and dripping off my chin she nervously pounded her fist in her glove. “What’s up?” she asked. “Why are you standing around like vampire bait?”

“I’m dead meat,” I replied.

“Then I better call my dad,” she said.

“Have him bring a coffin,” I suggested. “A small one because when my mom finishes with me I’ll be chopped into little pieces.”

I might have been joking around but Mom wasn’t. She rode the bike up to the backstop fence behind home plate and jumped off. She was close enough for me and everyone else around the diamond to hear her shout, “
You!
Get over here.
Now!
” She pointed the spoon at the ground by her feet.

I turned and ran toward second base. She gave chase. I looked like a bloody turkey with its head cut off as I circled the bases. “Run, Jack, run!” Bunny yelled out. “She’s gaining on you.” I could hear kids laughing.

Mom was a lot faster than I thought and when she collared me from behind at home plate all she said was, “Mister, you are in deep trouble.” Then she clamped one hand around the back of my neck and marched me across the outfield grass and up the Norvelt road. It was about a quarter mile to my house and all I could think of along the way was that from now on I would forever be known by everyone as “the kid who got dragged off the field by his mom.” That was going to be embarrassing. And it did make me think that moving out of this town as Dad wanted to do was a good idea, not because I thought the town was a Commie town but because once you got a reputation for one stupid thing it stuck with you
forever
. When my cousin Bruce was a baby boy—long, long before I was even born—he went “wee-wee” in his pants in the grocery store then walked around the store in wet pants shouting, “I wee-wee! I wee-wee!” It was as if he had given himself a new name, and to this day the whole town still calls him “Wee-Wee.” I was in the grocery store with him once and in the cereal aisle he pointed to the tile floor and said, “Don’t step there. That’s where I earned my name.” I figured kids on the baseball field would be calling me “Headless Turkey Boy” and when I ran the bases they’d tease me by making clucking noises. And if I was caught in a rundown between bases kids would point and say, “Once again, caught in a rundown by his own mother!”

When we arrived home I tried to distract her as she marched me to my room.

“Hey, Mom,” I asked, “how come the doctor said my blood is iron poor but it tastes like copper?”

“You are not funny,” she growled. “You are now grounded for the summer! You can only leave your room to do your chores, or go to the bathroom, and if you are lucky, mister, you might have the privilege of having dinner with me and your father. But that is it. And I’m going to call Mr. Huffer and tell him you will no longer be on the team.”

“But, Mom,” I pleaded, “we only have six kids to begin with.”

“Make that five,” she replied heartlessly.

“What about seeing Bunny?” I asked.

“It is possible,” Mom replied, “that you will have a beard the next time you see her.”

“Do you think she’ll get any taller by then?” I asked.

“No, but you have every chance of getting shorter,” she replied.

“Can I still help Miss Volker?” I asked forlornly. “She needs me.” Helping Miss Volker cook her hands and type obituaries suddenly sounded like a wonderful way to spend the summer.

Mom paced the floor and thought about it. “I’m only letting you go down there and help her,” she concluded, “because she needs you. Otherwise you can sit in here all summer and think about your shameful behavior. Firing that gun was a dangerous accident but mowing the corn against my direct orders was willful. You deliberately disobeyed me.” Then she pointed her finger at my chest and her voice became very throaty. “You took food away from hungry people. From poor people. Nothing can be lower and more cruel than that. Now what do you have to say for yourself?”

I had nothing to say for myself. What I did was wrong, and then what I said next was cowardly. “Dad made me cut down the corn,” I whimpered, and dabbed at my nose for sympathy.

“Well, mister,” she informed me with no trace of sympathy in her voice, “I’m going to march your father into this room and make him cut you down to size. And when he finishes with you I’ll make him wish he had already built that bomb shelter because he might be living in it.” Then she turned and stormed out of the room, did a quick pivot, and stormed right back. “Oh!” she said icily. “And another thing! I saw that toy airplane he won in a card game, and mark my words—you will never get in it
. Never!
” Then she stormed out again.

6

It took two days
for Dad to march into my room and cut me down to size. He knew he had gotten me in trouble with Mom and so he quickly wrangled a construction job in West Virginia for a couple days of paid work. He thought Mom might cool down, but he could have been away for two years and she would still have been just as angry. It was as if she could preserve her anger and store it in a glass jar next to the hot horseradish and yellow beans and corn chowchow she kept in the dank basement pantry. And when she needed some anger she could just go into the basement and open a jar and get worked up all over again.