Wringer (6 page)

A pinch on his earlobe woke him. He opened one eye to find an orange button staring back. The pigeon was on his pillow, sounding like someone gargling water. Again it nipped his earlobe.

“Ow!”

Palmer swiped, and the bird flew to the foot of the bed. “I'm awake, okay?” Palmer wondered if his old pair of earmuffs was still around.

A knock at the door. His mother!

“Palmer.”

“Yeah?” He threw his blanket over the pigeon.

“Time to get up.”

True to her word, she did not come in.

“Okay. I'm up.”

She went away.

The blanket moved like a ghost over his bed. He pulled it back. With a gobble the pigeon flew off to the comic book stack. Like the day before, it skidded off the top comic and onto the floor. This bird, thought Palmer, is either dumb, clumsy or a
comedian. Palmer dressed and went down for breakfast. This time he returned not only with FrankenPuffs but Grape Nuts as well. He spread the cereal on the snow outside his window. The pigeon did not have to be coaxed. It flew out the window and attacked the food.

Over the next week Palmer got better acquainted with the pigeon and adjusted his own life to take his new friend into account. From the library at school he borrowed a book about pigeons. Actually he sneaked it out. When it came to pigeons, he did not trust anyone in town, except maybe Dorothy Gruzik. It occurred to him that if he walked up to the front desk with a pigeon book in his hand, someone might see him (though certainly not Beans, who avoided the library like toothpaste). Or the librarian might look at him funny. Or she might act nice and then as soon as he left report him to the authorities. So he slipped the book into his bag and walked out as innocent-looking as possible. He had it back on the shelf in two days.

From the book he learned that pigeons go to sleep as soon as the sun goes down. This was called roosting. He learned that it was okay to feed his
pigeon cereal, but that outside on its own it would probably eat some gravel. The gravel goes into the gizzard and grinds the food as it comes down, since the pigeon has no teeth in its mouth to chew with. He learned that a pigeon isn't very fussy about what it eats, because its tongue has only thirty-seven taste buds.

He learned that a pigeon's heart is about the size of an acorn. And that a pigeon's heart, as measured against the size of its body, is one of the largest hearts in creation.

Palmer learned that in the wild pigeons used to live in the nooks and crannies of high rocky cliffs. When they came to this country, they headed for the things that looked like high rocky cliffs to them, which happened to be tall buildings and skyscrapers. And that's why pigeons live mostly in big cities.

He read about the passenger pigeon. Flocks of them numbered in the millions. So many were there that when they flew, they would block out the sun and people below would have to light torches. And then people began to shoot them. Even dynamite them. And by 1914 the last passenger pigeon was dead.

There's something about pigeons, thought Palmer, that makes people want to shoot them. Whatever that thing was, he could not find it in the book.

But he found much else. The book was eighty-nine pages long, and this surprised Palmer. He never would have guessed that there were eighty-nine pages' worth of things to say about pigeons.

But then, come to think of it, he himself could have written many pages about his own pigeon. (And no question now—it was
his
.) He could write about the pigeon tapping on the window every afternoon until he let it in. The pigeon strutting across the sill and onto his bed, then flying from spot to spot in the room, perching for a moment at every stop, as if to say,
Just making sure everything's as I left it
. The pigeon banana-peeling off the comic book stack in a clownish flop. Palmer finding his pigeon roosting in the closet every night after dinner.

And the sounds. So many, so different. There were tootles and grumbles and rumbles and sighs and gobbles and giggles and even a woof. His new roommate was a one-bird band!

He thought about a name. He thought about
how the pigeon nipped his ear each morning. In fact, it was always nipping at something: the Nerf ball, the gray soldiers, book covers. So there it was:
Nipper
. And simply because Nipper sounded like a boy's name, “it” became “he.”

Before long a routine had developed:

 

Wake up. (The “alarm clock” being nips on the earlobe.)

Pretend to be groggy when Mom knocks with official wake-up call.

Let Nipper out. Leave food on porch roof. (He had bought a box of Honey Crunchers, which he kept in his closet. He had studied cereal boxes and found out that Honey Crunchers contained a lot of fat; and fat helps keep a pigeon warm in winter, so said the book.)

Clean room. Leave no evidence of roommate.

Go to school (or, on weekends, out to play). Act normal. Return home. Let Nipper in.

Nipper walks up arm, stands on Palmer's head. Feels good. Nipper checks out room. Nipper skids off comic stack. Laugh. Play ball with Nipper. (Nipper would perch on the basket rim while Palmer tossed in Nerf ball shots. As the ball
went by, Nipper nipped at it. Sometimes he caught it before it went through the net.)

Go to dinner. Return to find Nipper roosting.

Homework, read, TV. Go to closet, whisper “Good night, Nipper.” Go to bed.

 

The hardest part of the routine came each day when he left the house:
Act normal.
How was he supposed to act normal in a town that murdered pigeons?

Act normal.

In his room, in the streets, at school, seven days a week he whispered to himself: “Act normal…act normal….”

But how could he act normal knowing there was a second pigeon right here in the house, a golden one that never took wing from the mantel in the den? Knowing that in this house, in this town, only the golden pigeon is allowed to roost. Knowing that he was holding inside himself such stupendous news.

Act normal
.

He tried. Which is to say, he kept his mouth shut. He did not rap his fork on the dinner table and shout, “I have a pigeon!” Did not jump up in class and shout, “I have a
pigeon
!” He did not throw up his arms in the middle of the street and shout to all the world, “I HAVE A PIGEON!”

He did not.

But he did say to his mother one Saturday
morning, “I think I'll change my own bedsheets from now on.”

His mother was standing on a chair changing a lightbulb. As soon as Palmer said it, she wobbled on the chair, her eyes rolled. He was afraid she was going to topple. She looked down at him as if he were a stranger. “Would you repeat that?”

He repeated.

She finished changing the bulb. She got down and sat on the chair. “Is this another sign of your maturity?”

Palmer nodded. “Yep. And I don't even use the nightlight anymore.”

She whistled. “What's next? Are you going to go out and get a job?”

“Just trying to help out,” he said pleasantly. “And I'll empty my wastebasket too. And clean my room.” He patted her on the head. “You'll never have to do it again.” He kissed her on the cheek and walked off.

He could feel the stunned silence behind him. He was in shock himself. Was this him? He could not remember the last time he kissed his mother. He was not the mushy type. He was acting anything
but
normal. And he was beginning to learn how far he would go to protect his secret.

After dealing with his mother, Palmer turned his attention to the guys.

Certain scenarios gave him the sweats. It is afternoon, and the guys are in the backyard just as…Nipper swoops in to land on the porch roof. Or the guys sneak into his room at night, as they did before, and one of them…opens the closet door.

He toyed with the idea of coming right out and telling them they could never come to his room again. Tell them the room was crawling with cooties, or a ghost used to live there. But he knew that would never work. Telling Beans not to trespass would be as useless as telling Nipper not to peck.

Or he could tell them his mother said they were no longer welcome in his house (a lie). Because she didn't like them (the truth). But he didn't have the nerve to say it.

And so he tried simply to give them no reason to want to come to his house. One Saturday, for
example, Beans decided they should all have lunch at Palmer's. They had done so a few times before, and Beans had always found something he loved in the refrigerator. Thinking fast, Palmer told them the refrigerator had broken, roaches had infested the kitchen, and they had nothing in the house but tuna fish and water. Beans believed him.

Another time, they had been playing outside in the snow and Beans decided he was too cold. “Let's go to Palmer's,” he said. “We don't have heat,” Palmer said. “Our heater broke.” Beans said he didn't care; the house had walls and a door, didn't it? So that's where they headed.

Palmer could not think of anything until they were at his front steps, when suddenly he pointed across the street and yelled, “Let's bomb Fishface's!” By the time they finished snowballing Dorothy Gruzik's house, it was nearly white, and Beans had forgotten that he was cold.

It became a habit, using Dorothy to divert attention from himself and his house. As soon as the guys would drift onto Palmer's block, he made his move:

“Let's bomb Fishface's house!”

“Let's bomb Fishface's car!”

“Let's bomb Fishface!”

When there was no snow on Dorothy Gruzik's sidewalk, they brought their own chalk and drew funny faces in her hopscotch squares. They ambushed her on the way home from school. They taunted her and ran rings around her as she walked. Sometimes they simply stood in front of her in the middle of the sidewalk, like human trees, forcing her to walk around them. Then they would run ahead and become new sidewalk trees, making her detour around them time after time, all the way home. Beans gave the game a name: treestumping.

One day Dorothy was not there. She was home sick. The snow had melted. There was nothing to bomb her house or car with. Every hopscotch square had been funnyfaced.

“I'm cold,” said Beans, turning to Palmer. “Let's go to your house.”

And Palmer, with no time to think, heard himself say, “Let's go to
your
house!”

Palmer had never been to Beans's house. He had been to Mutto's and to Henry's, but never to Beans's. He had come to imagine that Beans lived alone. Beans never mentioned parents, brothers, sisters or any other aspect of family life. Palmer further imagined that Beans lived by himself in a lean-to, or even better, a cave, a hole, down by the creek.

So he was surprised when Beans said okay to his suggestion. And even more surprised, ten minutes later, to discover that Beans did not live in a lean-to or a hole, after all, but in a house. And from the looks of it, a fine house, with a front porch and a shiny brass doorknob. Mutto rang the doorbell—which he did whenever he approached a house, even his own—and inside could be heard a two-note chime.

Beans took a key from his pocket and unlocked the door. He waved, “Come on in.” Inside, Palmer looked about for signs of primitive living—mud,
piles of rubbish—but saw nothing but clean furniture, carpets, pictures on the walls. A regular house.

Beans led them straight back to the kitchen. “Wait'll you see this.” He dragged a chair in front of the refrigerator and stood on it. He opened the freezer compartment and began pulling out frozen dinners and plastic containers. Reaching in to the very back of the freezer, he pulled out a frozen dinner, jumped down from the chair and put the dinner on the kitchen table. The lid said spaghetti and meatballs.

“Yummy,” said Henry.

“I hate spaghetti,” said Mutto.

“You'll like this,” said Beans.

The box was bigger than the others, a so-called “He-Man” size. And it had already been opened. Palmer could tell because the lid was held on by Scotch tape. Beans peeled away the tape. He seemed especially slow and careful about it. He looked up and grinned at each of them. He lifted the lid. It was not spaghetti and meatballs.

All three visitors recoiled. Henry went, “Eewww!”

Mutto was first to recover. He leaned in. “What is it?”

Without warning Beans snatched the contents of the box and bopped Mutto on the head. “A muskrat!”

He threw it on the table. It clattered like a piece of wood. It was flat and stiff and mostly black, and Palmer never in a million years would have guessed it had once been a muskrat. Tree bark, he would have guessed, or sewer-grate flotsam. Now, staring down at it with the rest of them, he noticed clotted ridges that might once have been fur, and frost-fastened along one edge, a naked tail.

“Where'd you get it?” said Henry.

“Panther brought it,” said Beans.

Palmer boggled. “You have a panther?”

Mutto and Henry laughed. “It's a cat,” said Mutto.

Beans shoved him. “It's a panther!” He bopped Mutto again with the muskrat carcass, chased him once around the table and out of the kitchen.

While howls and thumps rang throughout the house, tall Henry leaned in close to Palmer and softly uttered, “Panther's a cat. It's the meanest cat in town. You can't pet it. It's always catching birds and mice. It bites their head off and brings the body to the front steps and leaves it there, like a
present. Beans says Panther even killed a deer once.” He searched Palmer's face. “You believe it?”

Unsure, Palmer stared back—and the hurricane swirled into the kitchen, Mutto screaming and laughing around the table, Beans waving the muskrat like a tomahawk.

Suddenly Beans stopped. He dropped the carcass on the table. He brought his hands up to the sides of his face, like paws; he crooked his fingers, like claws. He drew back his lip to show his teeth of many colors. He snarled, “Panther prowls the jungle. Panther stalks his prey. He waits, he creeps—” Beans crept across the kitchen on tiptoe. “He
pounces
! He
bites
the neck!” Beans pounced on Mutto's back. Mutto wobbled howling out the back door with half an inch of neck skin clamped between Beans's Technicolor teeth.

Outside Palmer met Panther for the first time. The cat was ambling into the backyard from the weed field beyond. Beans yelled “Panther!” The cat meowed, showing its daggery teeth. It was a yellow cat, ordinary-looking, no bigger than a usual cat. But Palmer noticed that no one, not even Beans, bent down to pet it as it ambled past the
four of them and disappeared around the front of the house.

Beans, hoisting the muskrat carcass like a flag, blared, “Back to Fishface's!” and led them out to the sidewalk. They were crossing the street when Beans abruptly stopped. “Detail, halt.” He rapped his knuckles against the carcass, he shook his head disappointedly. “We gotta go back.”

Back to the house. In the kitchen Beans placed the carcass in the microwave. He set it for one minute, full power. At the end of the minute, he tested it with his finger. He sniffed it. He gave it another minute. By the third minute Beans was the only one left in the kitchen. The others were outside sucking fresh air and trying to expel from their nose buds the odor of warm, dead muskrat.

Beans finally came out carrying a supermarket bag. On the way to Dorothy Gruzik's, Beans walked half a block ahead of the rest. When he reached Dorothy's, he sprang into action while the others hid behind a car several houses away. Palmer could see Beans reach into the bag. When his hand came out it was holding the carcass by the tail. Again he reached into the bag, this time
coming out with a hammer. He then nailed the tail to the Gruziks' front door, punched the doorbell and took off. He dived behind the car just as the door was opening. A lady—Mrs. Gruzik—appeared.

None of them saw what happened next, but there was really no need to see. The scream came as they huddled against the tires of the car. Palmer had thought he knew screams. He had heard plenty of them in the movies and on TV and at sporting events. But what he heard now was something else—it was real—and it sent icy buckshot through his body.

They heard the door close. When they looked up, the carcass was gone, and Beans and Mutto were on their backs, flinging arms and legs into the air and howling with boundless delight. It was during this celebration that Mutto, looking straight up into the gray January sky, said in a voice both dreamy and weary from laughter, “Hey, ain't that a pigeon?”