A Christmas Story (14 page)

“HOLY CHRIST!” The old man leaped out of his chair.

“THE HAM! THE HAM! THOSE GODDAMN DOGS! THE HAM!!”

He fell heavily over the footrest as he struggled to get into the kitchen, his voice a high-pitched scream of disbelief and rage. My mother just stood in the dining room, her face blank and staring, two aluminum hair curlers still in place. I ran through the kitchen, following my old man out to the back porch.

The snarling mob had rolled across the back yard and was now battling it out next to the garage, yipping and squealing with excitement. Occasionally, one of them would be hurled out of the pack, flipping over backward in the air, to land heavily amid the barrel staves and sardine cans. Instantly, he would be back in the fray, biting and tearing at whatever moved.

The ham didn’t last eight seconds. Old Grandpa Bumpus and a dozen other Bumpuses stuck their heads out of various windows, to see what all the yowling was about. Without pausing to aim, he reared back and spit a great big gob of tobacco juice—a new long-distance record—right into the middle of the pack. It was a direct hit on our ham—or what was left of it.

He whooped wildly, wattles reddening with joy, spraying tobacco juice in all directions, while Cletus, his dimwitted grandson, yelled from the basement door:

“GAHDAMN, GRAN’PAW, LOOKA THEM HOUN’S GO! LOOKA THEM OL’ BOYS GO! HOT DAMN!!”

Delbert, meanwhile, circled around the roaring inferno, urging them on, kicking dogs that had given up back into the fray. Suddenly, he looked up at where I was hiding, a sadistic grin on his face, his hair hanging low. Our eyes met significantly for a fleeting instant and then he went back to kicking. A paralyzing fear gripped me. I remembered! That time I threw him out at first! Was this what he meant? Was
I
responsible for this tragedy? Oh, God, no! I slunk back into the shadows.

Bumpus women, their lank hair streaming down over their red necks, cackled fiendishly. Emil Bumpus, who had been asleep under the front porch, came reeling out, trailing his jug of white lightning. He took one look and practically passed out, wheezing and harrumphing and gurgling with hilarity.

My old man just stood stock-still on the back porch for a long moment, and then he blew his stack. I had never seen him do anything before that came near what he did now. We kept bottles on the back porch to be returned to the grocery store. He reached down and grabbed a milk bottle. His face white with rage, he wound up mightily and, with a sweeping, sidearm motion, hurled the bottle against the side of the Bumpus house with a deafening crash.

Grandpa Bumpus stopped in mid-spit, a big juicy gob hanging down over his chin. Emil dropped his jug to the ground, eyes lighting up with joy. This was back home for
Emil. He was in his element. Turning around as if to run for his shotgun, he paused when he saw the old man standing there unmoving—radiating the clearest and most beautiful rage I’d ever seen in my life.

I cowered next to the railing on the back porch. Even the dogs felt his hatred. One by one, they fell silent. The bare, shiny bone of the ham lay in the sun. Big Red licked his chops.

After a long, pregnant moment, the old man turned, walked back into the kitchen and slammed the door. He stood for a minute by the kitchen table, looking down at the big sheet of wax paper dripping warm ham gravy. The heavenly aroma still hung heavy in the house. The old man just stood there—and came as close to crying as I’d ever seen him come.

Finally, he spoke, in a low, rasping voice: “All right! OK! Get your coats. We’re going to the Chinese joint. We’re going to have chop suey.”

Ordinarily, this would have been a gala of the highest order, going to the chop-suey joint. Today, it had all the gaiety of a funeral procession. The meal was eaten completely in silence.

That was the beginning of the bitter Shepherd-Bumpus feud. Relentlessly, the old man beleaguered the Bumpuses at every moment. He had tap-dancing cleats put on his shoes, which proved to be quite a nasty surprise to Big Red the first day he tried his usual ankle grab and caught a cleat behind his left ear. The old man took up tobacco chewing and arched long, undulating gobs onto the Bumpuses front porch
when the wind was right. Every time the Bumpuses cranked up for a Gene Autry record festival, the old man countered with
In a Persian Market
played at full blast on our Sears, Roebuck Silvertone phonograph.

He took to throwing beer bottles out of the kitchen window and hurling coffee grounds onto the roof of the Bumpus truck when it bellowed by, taking the Bumpuses down to pick up their weekly relief check. He put bottle caps and tacks in the driveway and laughed uproariously every time one of the Bumpus women fell out the back door. He planted stickers in the cave that the Bumpus hounds lived in under the garage and took to jumping up and down on the garage floor late at night, when the hounds were asleep. Once he even bayed at the moon louder than all the hounds put together. I still remember the startled look on Big Red’s face when the old man let out a long, drawn-out, quavering howl that he had learned from 20 years of watching Tarzan pictures.

The only trouble was that nothing he did—but
nothing
—made the slightest dent on the Bumpus way of life. They didn’t even seem to know he was doing anything. The bottle caps and tacks he threw in the driveway never even scratched their feet, horny-hard after generations of shoelessness. The only thing that came of it was that we got two flats in one day on the Olds. His pitiful tobacco juice added as much to the sea that the Bumpuses themselves produced as a raindrop in the ocean. Nothing he could do had any effect. One night, he told my mother he had concluded that the
Bumpuses planned
the ham raid, the dogs carrying out their orders like guerrilla fighters. He hinted that he had something up his sleeve that he was working out in the basement that would really settle the score once and for all. He was biding his time.

The Bumpuses, meanwhile, went on with life as usual. There wasn’t much they could do to us that they hadn’t already done without intending to. Grandpa Bumpus jacked up his output of tobacco juice a little, but the rest of them just went about their business—collecting junk and piling it in the yard, tossing potato peels out the window, brewing moonshine, hollering, hitting each other and scratching themselves.

Then one night, without warning, everything changed forever. I awoke suddenly about three
A.M
. with a strange feeling that something was wrong. It was. For a couple of minutes, I couldn’t focus my mind; then, gradually, it became clear to me that something was up. I heard my father in the next room. He had apparently awakened about the time I had.

He said hoarsely to my mother, “Hey, wake up!”

Then a long period of silence, while he listened in the darkness. We were always having alarums and excursions, but this was really different.

The bedsprings squeaked and the old man’s feet pattered across the bedroom floor; the usual thump and groan of excruciating pain as he stubbed the foot of the dresser. A rustling silence as he peered through the curtains into the blackness of the night.

“Shhhhh!”

Another pause. I waited, scared and anxious in my bed, my kid brother mewing softly across the room.

“I’ll be damned!” the old man said aloud in wonder. “You’ll never believe it.”

“Believe what?” whispered my mother, who had gotten up and joined him.

“Just take a look out there,” he said with disbelief. “They moved out! They’re gone!”

I realized why I had awakened. For the first time in many months, the sound of Gene Autry records had ceased; the continuous whine and yelp of the Bumpus hounds had been silenced. Everything was—
quiet
.

My father sniffed noisily.

“The smell is gone. Even the smell is gone!”

It was true. The air in my bedroom was clear of cabbage, dog urine and corn whiskey for the first time in six months.

The next morning, the truth was there for all to see. The Bumpuses had packed up and moved on, leaving behind a sagging shambles of a house, the back yard rutted and ground to gray dust by the endless clawings and scratchings of the Bumpus dogs and the Bumpus chickens, with great, tangled rat’s nests of rusting junk and weather-beaten barrels, and smelly gallon jugs and empty bean cans that told everything there was to know about the way the Bumpuses lived out their days. They just ran up a big enough rent bill and then moved out in the middle of the night. We never heard another word about them.

At first, my father seemed to be glad. Then, about a
month later, a nice old couple moved in next door and soon had the house and yard looking like an illustration for an insurance company that sold retirement plans to nice old couples. They went to bed every night at 8:30 and had a canary as a pet.

One night at supper, after a couple of beers, the old man finally said it:

“You know, they cleaned out just when I was going to hand ’em my crusher. I’ll bet they did it on purpose.” He got kind of moody for a while after that. We never found out what he had planned.

For many years a cult radio and cabaret personality in New York City, JEAN SHEPHERD was the creator of the popular film
A Christmas Story
, which is based on this book and has become a holiday tradition on the Turner Network. He was also the author of
A Fistful of Fig Newtons
and
The Ferrari in the Bedroom
, as well as
In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash
and
Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories
, both of which are available in Broadway paperback. Jean Shepherd passed away in 1999.