KooKooLand (22 page)

Jimmy had his hands full trying to sell all those TVs. He had to move them fast 'cause he was afraid the Snitch might get wind of the TV showroom in our bedroom and send somebody from the office to check it out. I kept hounding Jimmy to take me to see Susan, but it was a week before we headed over to Hank's. By that time, I had grown attached to the snow globe and didn't want to give it up. But I reminded myself if God could sacrifice Jesus, his only kid, I could surely give up my snow globe.

We stopped by the house that wasn't Hank's anymore to check on the lawn, but nobody was home. Jimmy watered some brown spots, complaining all the while that ever since Hank had been given the heave-ho the place had gone to hell.

We left Hank's house that wasn't his and made only one stop, at the bookie joint, before we ended up at Hank's store. The place was a madhouse. Guys were getting ready for hunting season and everybody wanted Hank to fix their guns.

Hank was in a lousy mood. He said he was up to his goddamn ears in broken guns. Jimmy said he knew how Hank felt. He was up to his goddamn eyeballs with his own baloney.

I scanned the crowd of men but didn't see Susan.

“How's it going with that Shirley?” Jimmy asked Hank.

“Don't ever mention that broad again,” snapped Hank. “I'm done with her, but she won't take the hint. She found out I was at a boat show and just showed up. Do me a goddamn favor, Greek, and don't fix me up with any more nutty broads.”

“Hey, she was just something to tap, just a quick piece of action.”

“I can get my own action,” snarled Hank. “With no strings attached.”

“All right, all right,” said Jimmy. “Take it easy. I didn't know she was loco. I'm sorry, OK? Shirley shoulda known—it's her fault. So, where's the kid anyway? Where's Susan?”

“She's gone up to that girls' college. She's outta my goddamn hair.”

My heart sank. I wondered if God was punishing me for wanting to keep the snow globe.

“When will she be back?” I blurted out.

“Who the hell knows? Thanksgiving, Christmas,” barked Hank.

“Shut up. Don't bug Hank,” ordered Jimmy.

He threw his arm around Hank.

“Cheer up, Polack,” Jimmy said. “It's almost hunting season.”

A beefy guy standing nearby grumbled, “They oughta make it hunting season on coons. And I don't mean raccoons.”

A few guys laughed. Hank and Jimmy joined in.

“I don't know about you,” the beefy guy said, “but I'm sick to death of listening to that Martin Luther King. I have a dream he shuts the hell up.”

“I have a dream he gets his black ass thrown in jail for firing up those niggers,” laughed the beefy guy's buddy.

“I have a dream somebody plugs his black ass with buckshot,” cracked Hank, getting into the spirit of things.

My stomach started to hurt. I didn't like what they were saying.

I wasn't sure why all the hunters seemed to have it in for this Martin Luther King. I'd just seen him on TV a few nights before and he seemed OK. It was August 28, Jimmy's birthday. I'd made Jimmy a birthday card that showed me hitting myself on the noggin with a hammer. Above the picture I'd written
I'm nuts about you.
The card was propped up on top of the new TV set we'd gotten from Uncle Barney. The news was on and Martin Luther King was giving a speech. It seemed like a million people were cheering him on. From what I could tell, he was saying he had a dream people wouldn't go at each other's throats all the time. He had a dream they would live in peace and little white kids could play ring-around-the-rosy with little black kids.

Jimmy said he had a dream all right, a goddamn pipe dream, and made me change the channel. He was in a bad mood. He said now that he was thirty-five, the best years of his frickin' life were over.

And here we were, a few days later, and he was still in a bad mood. All the hunters at Hank's seemed to be in a bad mood. They kept getting more and more fired up about the Martin Luther King “situation.”

“Somebody oughta drop an A-bomb on him and all those bleeding hearts,” shouted the beefy guy.

“Don't count on Kennedy to do it. He's another bleeding heart,” shouted another guy, even louder.

“My daughter's a goddamn bleeding heart,” said Hank. “And so is her goddamn mother.”

“Then it's a good thing you're not married to her anymore,” the beefy guy said.

“Shut your frickin' mouth,” barked Hank, and walked away. He went into the back room and slammed the door, leaving all the men standing there with their broken guns.

“I have a dream that frickin' Doris never shows her painted face around here again,” spat Jimmy before he grabbed his guns and headed back to the car.

On the way home, I asked Jimmy what a bleeding heart was.

He swerved around a slow car and I had to wait for his answer.

“A bleeding heart is a do-gooder,” he finally said. “A person who wants the whole damn world to get along even though since time began people in different tribes have been clobbering one another.”

“Why?” I asked. “Why are people always clobbering one another?”

“Because we're animals,” he said. “Wild animals. Animals fight each other. That's nature. You put a tiger in a pen with Bambi, the tiger's gonna have Bambi for breakfast. The tiger and Bambi ain't gonna have a goddamn Sunday picnic. If you're stronger, you dominate. The bleeding hearts want a perfect world where everybody gets along. If I'm a tiger, they want to pass laws telling me I have to picnic with Bambi. They want to make the strong animal weak so the weak animal doesn't get a goddamn inferiority complex. They want me to share my jungle with Bambi. Well, it ain't gonna happen. Bambi better move outta my jungle and into the woods where he belongs so he has a shot to live out his life, far away from me.”

“What about boys and girls?” I asked. “Boys are stronger than girls, so wouldn't it be better if boys went to one school and girls to another so girls wouldn't get clobbered by boys?”

I was thinking about a particular boy in my class, a kid everyone called Billy from the Projects. He had bombarded me with snowballs all last winter. Sometimes he threw ice balls and they hurt like hell. Shirley had told me that Billy from the Projects hurt me because he liked me and didn't know how else to show it. That seemed idiotic, but Shirley said that I would understand it when I got older. In the meantime, I was angling to be sent to an all girls' school, especially now that I'd heard Susan was going to one.

But Jimmy wasn't taking the bait.

“Don't be a numbskull,” he said. “Separating boys and girls isn't natural. That's what the crazy Catholics do. You wanna be a crazy Catholic? You wanna be taught by a bunch of penguins?”

“No,” I said, knowing that was the right answer even though it was a lie.

“But, you're right about one thing,” he continued. “The female animal is weaker than the male animal. They're the weaker sex. And not just 'cause they're smaller. They're mentally weaker too. Unstable. Like that Shirley that's driving Hank nuts or that Doris he was married to. Doris will probably go off her rocker out in KooKooLand once it sinks in how tough she's gonna have it without Hank around. Women go nutty without a man to keep their head screwed on straight.”

“They do?”

“Sure. Remember
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
and
Sunset Boulevard
? Those women went loco without a man.”

“What about men? Do they go loco without women?”

“Are you kidding? They got no aggravation. They got it made.”

I bit my lip to keep from crying like a girl.

“I hate being a girl,” I blurted out. “I wish I was a boy.”

“I wish you were too, kiddo,” he said, bopping me on the head. “But what're we gonna do? Them's the breaks.”

When we got back home Jimmy got right on the phone to try to move those last few TVs and I ran up to my room. I took out the snow globe and shook it over and over, watching the snow fall all around the two girls on the beach. It made me feel better. It made me feel like being a girl wasn't so terrible. I told myself girls could have their own fun without mean boys throwing snowballs at them. I decided I'd give the snow globe to Susan for Christmas and that that would be even better, 'cause she would love it more than any of her other presents. I would have the best Christmas ever, even without our stolen Christmas ornaments. I told myself someday . . . someday . . . those girls on the beach would be Susan and me, out there in KooKooLand. A place where it never snowed, so nobody threw any frickin' snowballs.

T
he night before school started, Jimmy decided to take Virginia and me to the dump to shoot some rats. He wanted to get in a little target practice before hunting season began. And he thought we oughta blow off some steam before we got stuck behind our desks all day like a couple of pencil pushers.

On the way to the dump, we stopped to pick up Boozer Eddie. Boozer did landscaping jobs with Jimmy and he was crazy about rat shooting.

Jimmy pulled up in front of Boozer's house and waved his .22 out the window. Boozer came out with a half-gnawed pork chop in one hand and his .22 in the other. Boozer's wife, May, ran after him.

“Finish your dinner. Let that crazy Greek wait!” May shouted.

“Shut up or I'll belt you one!” Boozer yelled at her as he jumped into the front seat.

“Hey, May, we'll bring you back a nice fat rat you can fry up for breakfast,” Jimmy called out, emphasizing the word
fat
since May was big as a house.

“I'll feed it to you, Norris. Right up your ass!” May screeched.

“Your wife's got a mouth as big as her keister,” Jimmy said to Boozer.

“Don't I know it,” laughed Boozer. “Let's get the hell outta here.”

Jimmy peeled rubber.

As Boozer finished his pork chop, he told us what he'd been up to.

“I shot eight squirrels today with a slingshot,” he crowed, his milky-blue eyes all bright and glossy. “Right outside my house. You oughta seen 'em drop outta those trees.”

He made a corkscrew motion with his pork chop and whistled loudly to create a sound effect for the falling squirrels.

“I skinned one alive. Boy, did it squeal.”

I felt my stomach clench. Virginia scrunched her eyes closed.

We'd come to the conclusion that Boozer was a nutcase some time ago, when May had called Jimmy all worked up because Boozer had strung their cat up by its front paws. Apparently Boozer had been trying to train the cat to walk on its hind legs. but the cat was not getting the hang of it. So Boozer tied ropes
around the cat's front paws and hoisted it up. The cat had flipped out and hurt itself and May said there was blood all over the place.

“He killed the goddamn cat?” bellowed Jimmy, sounding like he might string up Boozer.

May said no, the cat was alive, but his paws were all skinned up.

Jimmy rolled his eyes like he thought May was getting hysterical.

“All right, all right. I'll come over. I'll fix him up good as new,” Jimmy the Cut Man assured her.

He hung up and proceeded to gather together alcohol, a needle and thread, and some Gold Bond Medicated Powder.

Shirley, Virginia, and I stood there, horrified.

“Boozer's sick,” choked Shirley.

“He's mean,” I wailed.

“He's a cat torturer,” moaned Virginia.

“Boozer's OK,” Jimmy snapped. “He got a little carried away with training the cat, that's all. He loves that cat same as I love Sylvester. So shut your traps.”

We shut our traps. We were stuck with Boozer.

Once we got to the dump, Jimmy mixed up some highballs and we waited for the sun to go down. The stink of the place made me feel like barfing, so I breathed through my mouth. To kill time before the rats came out, Jimmy set up some cans for us to practice on. I had gotten to be a pretty good shot. I blasted away some Snow's Clam Chowder, Campbell's Cream of Mushroom, and Green Giant Niblets corn. Pretty soon my ears were ringing like a pinball machine. I was afraid I might go deaf, but earplugs were out of the question since Jimmy said they were for sissies.

When it started to get dark the rats began to slink out of their hiding places. Jimmy raked the piles of garbage with a flashlight and Boozer blasted away. Then Boozer held the flashlight and Jimmy blasted away. I kept score so they'd know who had killed the most rats and who could lord it over the other one. Sometimes it was hard to decide whether to count a rat as dead if it was still stumbling around, but usually I gave the shooter the benefit of the doubt.

Finally, Jimmy passed his gun to me. My hands started to shake. It wasn't that I felt bad about shooting rats. I didn't. Rats weren't cute like squirrels. They didn't frolic through the treetops or nibble peanuts you left for them on the windowsill. They didn't have a TV cartoon made about them like Rocky the Flying Squirrel did. Rats were what YaYa would call filthy rodents. They slunk around at night like criminals. The only reason my hands were shaking was 'cause I wanted to prove I was the best goddamn rat-killer around.

But I was so anxious I couldn't shoot straight. To be good at killing you had to be relaxed. Loosey-goosey. Jimmy had taught me that. Then you had to picture the thing you wanted dead as stone-cold dead already. But I just couldn't do that. Those rats were as alive as I was.

I didn't manage to blow away one rat that night.

“Gimme my gun back, Helen Keller,” Jimmy barked. “You're wasting my ammo.”

I handed over the .22.

Jimmy turned to Virginia, who was hanging off to the side, trying to be inconspicuous.

“What about you, Four-Eyes?” he asked. That was his latest nickname for her now that she was wearing glasses—or, at least, wearing them when he was around.