Dead End in Norvelt (8 page)

Dad could too. “Nothing to report,” he replied, and then the first thing he said to me when we got into our truck was, “No matter what you do in life,
never
drink and use guns—and drive!”

“Sorry about the gas,” I finally said. “But the deer was beautiful.”

“What you did was nothing,” he replied, and reached over and tousled my hair. “Those other guys are the real knuckleheads.”

*   *   *

I was thinking about that winter hunting incident and hadn’t listened to a word Dad said in my bedroom, but whatever he said, I knew he was right and I nodded my head up and down to show him respect.

Finally he asked, “Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

“I promise,” I said as sincerely as possible. “I didn’t know there was a bullet in the chamber of that Jap rifle. I had played with it before but there was never a bullet.”

“Are you lying?” he asked.

“No. Not even a little,” I replied.

“Well, something doesn’t add up,” he said, standing and pacing the room. “If I didn’t put a bullet in the chamber and you didn’t—then who did?” He stopped, and just like in the movies he gave me a long, steady look as if I were on trial and now was the moment for me to break down and confess.

I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said. “Honest.”

“I know I’ve looked in that chamber before,” he said calmly, rethinking his moves. “There is no way it had a bullet in it.” He sat back down and his eyes looked vacant. Just as I had drifted off and recalled the old deer hunt, I now guessed he had drifted off thinking about the war and crawling through the sand and finding those dead men and stripping away their weapons and war gear. I looked into his eyes for any sign of emotion. Was he sad? Or proud? Or terrified? I couldn’t tell. He looked stuck in time, like an old black-and-white photograph wedged into the side of a mirror frame. Then very quietly he turned and said to me, “You know what the biggest problem was with the marines out in the Pacific Islands?”

I shook my head no.

“When we finally landed on those Jap-infested islands our guys had a hard time shooting the Japs—I don’t mean because the Japs were hiding—I mean that they had a real hard time with the idea of having to shoot another person you could look in the eye. Our officers had to threaten to shoot some of our own troops if they didn’t fire their rifles.”

I had read
Guadalcanal Diary
but didn’t remember reading about that problem. All the marines I read about fired their guns like crazy at everything that moved. They even burned the Japs alive with flamethrowers. They killed them every way they could and felt like heroes for wiping them out.

“But the Minutemen shot the British in the eyes at Bunker Hill,” I said.

“Stuff like that only sounds good on paper,” Dad said dismissively. “But believe me, in real life when you are eye to eye with the enemy you’d rather shake their hand than shoot them.”

Dad stood up and looked down over me with his hand on the crown of my head as if he were saying a prayer in church. Then gravely he said, “Don’t ever go to war. Even if you win, the battle is never over inside you.”

I nodded yes.

Then his mood changed. “I believe you didn’t know the gun was loaded,” he said, and dropped his hand across my shoulder. “But you shouldn’t have played with it or lied to your mom about having my permission. You are still grounded for the summer. Don’t worry, though, I might soon be joining you in your room. Your mom isn’t exactly jumping up and down with joy about the plane or her corn.”

“Move in anytime,” I said. “I’d like some company.”

“And thank your lucky stars you didn’t shoot anyone,” he added, and slapped the back of my head.

“I scared Miss Volker,” I confessed. “She dropped her hearing aid down the toilet.”

“Sorry that old Commie didn’t dive in after it,” he cracked, and then he slowly left the room to go tell Mom he had really straightened me out once and for all.

7

I was in my room
reading
Captain Cortés Conquers Mexico
which was about how Cortés slaughtered the Aztecs and turned them into a Lost World even before Pizarro had done it to the Incas. To me that meant the big lesson Pizarro learned from history was that it was okay to kill innocent people and steal their gold! In fact, Cortés was Pizarro’s hero because Cortés and his army of conquistadors used their long swords to hack to pieces so many Aztec soldiers so quickly that fleeing women and children actually drowned in rivers of blood that flooded the streets. Those who escaped from being chopped to bits later died in horrid agony from smallpox the conquistadors spread to Mexico from Europe. The writer of the book called Cortés a great man. As Miss Volker had once said, “Be suspicious of history that is written by the conquerors.” I bet the writer didn’t ask any Aztecs what they thought of Cortés.

I was kind of stunned by imagining all the bloody carnage and I slumped back onto my bed pillow when I noticed a bubbling river of blood running out my nose and across my lips. “Dang!” I shouted. “I swear I’m going to drown in
my
own pool of blood.” I reached for a box of tissues. I rolled one up and stuck it between my upper lip and gum the way Miss Volker taught me.

I had just stopped the bleeding and hid the wad of bloody tissues behind my bed when Mom came in wearing a crisply ironed summer dress and told me to put on some “respectable” clothes. “I’m taking you out for some fresh air,” she said.

“Like walking a dog?” I asked, trying to be clever.

“No funny business,” she ordered. “Just get dressed.”

I gladly got dressed because I actually needed some fresh air after that awful book. When I met Mom in the kitchen she inspected me up and down, made me change from sneakers to loafers, and then we walked up the street a quarter mile to Dr. Mertz’s home office.

Because of Miss Volker’s needlepoint map of Norvelt I now looked at the houses differently. Some were well kept and painted nicely with tidy yards and groomed flower beds that Mom admired. But a few were uninhabited and gloomy-looking with dandelions overrunning the yard and limp gutters hanging loose from the weight of soggy old leaves and broken tree branches. Mom seemed to look away from the abandoned houses, but she always brightened up when she spotted a bird’s nest full of baby birds who were chirping for lunch. And she laughed as she pointed out the young squirrels dashing crazily across the laundry lines and how the wild brown-and-white rabbits blended in with the dried weeds and Queen Anne’s lace that lined the vegetable plots between the houses. Everything good and alive and hopeful made her smile, but what was left to fall into ruin made her tense up and turn her head away. I could read her mind, and I’m sure she was thinking that there was a time when the town was all new and perfect and everyone worked hard and had so much pride in owning their own little Norvelt house. If she had it her way it would all be perfectly fixed up to look as it had been when she was my age. But I could only see what it now was, and it looked like a town whose future was not going to circle back to its past.

Mom hadn’t made an appointment with Dr. Mertz but she timed our arrival so we would show up just at the end of his office hours. Dr. Mertz had an elderly receptionist and when we opened the door and stepped in she stopped typing, raised her eyeglasses, and asked if she could be of help.

“I just want to have a quick word with the doctor,” Mom explained, using her sweet neighborly voice as if we’d come to borrow a cup of sugar.

“Then please take a seat,” the receptionist replied routinely, and pointed toward a row of dark oak chairs before returning to her typing. She was a lot better at typing than I was. She used all of her fingers and I only used two.

“Hey, Mom,” I whispered. “Can I ask her to give me some typing tips?”

“Just mind your own business,” she said tightly while still keeping a bright smile on her face.

“Well, if we don’t have an appointment why are we here?” I asked.

“Because I need to check on something,” she said vaguely, then looked away from me and put a lot of attention into smoothing out her skirt. I knew she was up to something but I didn’t know what.

I sat in silence and stared at the taxidermed school of fish the doctor had mounted all around the walls. I counted thirty-five of them, and suddenly I wondered if Mr. Huffer could figure out a way to mount a school of old dead people on the wall in order to save space since Bunny had told me the world was running out of burial plots. I turned to ask Mom but she was in the middle of refreshing her red lipstick, and when Dr. Mertz appeared from his office door she quickly hopped up.

“Oh, hi,” he said, clearly surprised when he saw us. Then he turned to his receptionist. “Mrs. Woodcliff,” he asked, “did I have an appointment I failed to notice?”

Before Mrs. Woodcliff could answer Mom cut in. “No,” she said. “I just took a little chance and popped over.”

Dr. Mertz knew us from other appointments. He had peered up my nose with a telescopic flashlight which looked like a thin pen that clipped into the top pocket of his white lab jacket. He had also taken blood samples with a syringe, and he was the one who had given me the iron drops to take each night and told me to eat iron-fortified cereal—he had even crushed up a mortarful of the cereal and held a magnet to it and pulled out tiny specks of real iron to show me the stuff that he said was good for me. He also concluded I would need to schedule an appointment to have the inside of my nasal passages cauterized in order to burn away the number of leaky capillaries and stop the bleeding.

“How can I help you?” Dr. Mertz asked after we silently entered his examination room.

“I just thought you might have a few extra minutes to cauterize the inside of Jack’s nasal passages,” Mom said smoothly. “He’s bleeding a lot.”

“I see,” he replied, then pursed his lips and looked down at his feet to ponder what Mom was getting at. When he looked up he said, “But you know there will be a charge for that service.”

“How much will that cost, Doctor?” she asked. As soon as she mentioned money I pretended to be distracted and fortunately, in the doctor’s office, there were plenty of plastic medical models of internal organs to study. I fixed my eyes on a purple human liver that looked just like the cow liver Mom always served me because it was “filled with iron.” Even though I tried not to listen to Mom and the doctor any talk of money always got my attention because everything in our house depended entirely on money. Decisions for us were not made on whether we wanted something, or even needed something, but on whether we could afford it or not. Dad once said, “Someday I want to live a life where I won’t be bullied by my wallet.” I wished that someday would arrive soon because his wallet was a really big bully that said “No” and “Put that back” all the time.

The doctor gave Mom a price and I could tell by the disappointed way she said “I see” that she couldn’t afford the operation. But then she quickly switched moods, smiled brightly at him, and asked, “Would you do it for some homemade jarred fruit as payment?”

He smiled widely in return, but his mind was made up. “Well,” he said slowly with a touch of regret in his voice, “that is very sweet of you to offer, but I have two cases of peaches left over from last year.”

“How about pickles?” Mom was quick to ask.

“Got a basement full of them,” he replied just as quickly, and before Mom could offer another barter he said, “I wish I didn’t have to ask you for cash, but I do.”

“I understand,” Mom said in an even voice that showed no sign of regret, and I knew we were finished. A moment later we were out on the sidewalk and strolling home as if nothing embarrassing had ever taken place.

“Why’d you offer him fruit and pickles?” I asked, and looked up at her face which didn’t look so bright and cheery. “Doctors cost money.”

“You shouldn’t be embarrassed,” Mom said, knowing that I was. “Money can mean a lot of different things. When I was a kid we traded for everything. Nobody had any cash. If you wanted your house built, you helped someone build theirs, and then they would turn around and help you build yours. It was the same with everything. I’d give you eggs and you’d pay me in milk.”

“I don’t think it works that way now,” I remarked. “If he fixed my nose I don’t think he’d want me to do brain surgery on him.”

“Not unless he wanted to become Dr. Frankenstein’s monster,” she replied with a laugh. “But seriously, it’s a shame the way this town has changed. Norvelt was set up so people who didn’t have a lot of cash could trade each other for things they needed to make a living. Instead of having to reach for your wallet you’d reach for a hammer and saw, or a plow, or baking pan—something to labor with. Money is just a way of measuring work, but you don’t need money if everyone agrees that trading one kind of work for another will do just as well.”

“I see,” I said, but I didn’t. None of the history books I ever read had people happily trading one thing for another. When I read
The California Gold Rush
no one lifted a finger unless they were paid in gold nuggets or gold dust. And Captain Kidd would have had his throat slit from ear to ear if he tried to pay his pirates in fish. When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone he did not give it away for free. They all wanted gold just like Pizarro and Cortés and just about everyone else.

“But everyone says cash is king. Not fruit and pickles.”

“Cash just means you can be a big shot and cut to the front of the line,” she said disapprovingly. “Or get what you want right away. It’s true that I wish I had enough cash to have your nose fixed. But for now I’ll just save up and we’ll pay as we go—that’s what regular people do.”

She bent down and gave me a kiss on my head which always made me feel better. “It doesn’t cost a penny to be sweet,” she said, smiling down on me. “Give me your hand.” She held hers openly toward me. “It makes me happy to pretend that I’m your older girlfriend.”