The Leap Year Boy (6 page)

Sheepslayer Way was then two blocks long, and so narrow the little sunlight that found its way through the Pittsburgh smog created a sense of perpetual twilight. Children and dogs chased each other around the street’s one fire hydrant and through the tiny back yards, where hung laundry provided the demarcation between homes. In the evenings, the women swept the stoops and sat out while men smoked cigars and pipes under the street lamps.

The morning after his fight with Irene, Abe got off the trolley that ran along Penn Avenue, holding Alex on his shoulder. At 4547 Sheepslayer Way, he saw the small plaque with Dr. Malkin’s name lettered in both English and Cyrillic. He knocked rapidly. Malkin shouted from a second-floor window, “Come up already, come.”

The first floor opened to a small living room with a massive sofa that touched each opposing wall. To the left, through the short hallway, Abe smelled beets and cabbage boiling.

Dr. Malkin’s half-sister Masha, a plump woman with thinning orange hair and heavy, loose triceps, emerged from the kitchen, wiping her hands with on her brown dress. She took one look at Alex and said, “Oh my goodness, this little thing it is too precious for the words, no? Look at him, he is the sweetest little boychick. Wait, is he hungry, I could feed him a little bit borscht, I’ll cool it down special for him.” She smiled a gold-toothed smile and extended her arms.

“He don’t need none of that,” Abe said, although he himself wouldn’t have minded a big bowl of borsht with a fat dollop of sour cream. “We’re here to see the doctor, he already knows we’re here, he said to come right up.”

“Such a cute little fellow, I could just eat him up.”

Abe thought, if I give her half a chance, she probably will with those gold teeth of hers. He took the stairs two at a time. A door was open at the end of the short hallway.

Malkin stared down into a microscope, holding a partially eaten chicken leg under the lens. Abe cleared his throat. Malkin jerked the leg away from the lens. “Oh, Miller, you should have knocked, I was looking in here to make it a scientific investigation is all, you know you could learn it a lot from a piece of chicken, but pay this no mind. What is it I can do it for you today? I see you brought him the little one. I wish mine hand to God if only I could fit him under the microscope.”

“My boy here has a cough his mother thinks could be something more, but if you ask me there’s nothing to it.”

“So let us have it a look while I give him the examination, if you please.” He stood Alex on a piece of plywood laid over two sawhorses that served as his examination table. “Do you remember me, little mister, it was me what did brought you into this great and cruel world.” Malkin listened to Alex’s tiny heart and lungs. He placed him on a produce scale he’d gotten from Horshushky in exchange for a Salvarsan compound the butcher needed for a bout of syphilis. From a paint-stained filing cabinet he took a folder named Little Miller and wrote down Alex’s weight and the date, and noticed the regular progressive weight gain with each of the boy’s six-month visits. If there were a pattern to his growth, it was beyond Malkin’s understanding. On the spur of the moment, he placed the boy’s pinky under the microscope lens. “For the closer look, Miller, it does not hurt the boy one bit.” All he saw were larger fingerprints.

“All right, Malkin, does he have something or not? We don’t have all day.”

“It is not to worry, Miller, the boy here, one could say a dwarf, except his features, they are so regular, it makes me to wonder. However, he is fine in his condition, his lungs are clean, his heartbeat is regular, it is only a cold, nothing more. But you look it in some pain yourself, is it not the case?”

“I have a tooth that’s killing me, but first tell me about her.”

“Her?”

Alex said, “Delia.”

“The little one, he knows her name?”

“Yeah. Talk.”

Malkin shook a bottle of vinegar on a plaid handkerchief and wiped it on his stethoscope. “For to kill the germs, you see. So sit, Miller, you look it to me like you’re going to have a coronary attack, you’re sweating like a steam pipe. Yes, Delia Novak, you have it certainly the good taste in the women. By the way, she is owing it to me some money.”

“That ain’t my problem. I want to know where she is, goddamn it.”

Alex said, “Goddamn it.”

Now Malkin looked sideways at Alex. “This boy, there is something I don’t understand about him, or how to describe it in the medical terms, this, how do you call it, ability to parrot back the words. Perhaps I could get it from him a urine sample.”

Abe grabbed Malkin by his collar. “Tell me where Delia is, damn it.”

“All right, please, I will give it to you her address. Wait, I write it down for you in English, if you will let it go of my shirt. Please.”

Chapter 5

On December 3, 1909, at approximately 5:30 a.m., the central steam pipe at Fulton Elementary School burst wide open. When Arthur and Benjamin and the other children arrived that morning, to their delight they were sent home for an unexpected long weekend.

In an unrelated event, Alex Miller’s arms grew three inches overnight. He was touching his toes without bending at the waist when Irene came into the boy’s bedroom that morning to get him dressed.

“See what Alex can do, Momma,” said Alex, who had begun to refer to himself in the third person.

“Oh my,” said Irene, looking not so much at Alex as the mess of clothes and toys scattered about the room. “Alex is doing his exercises like a big boy.”

“Alex is a big boy.”

Big, she thought. He weighs seven and a half pounds and he’s not even three feet tall. She dug through the mess on the floor: an empty can of peanut brittle; a jack-in-the-box whose head Alex had pulled off; a little wooden pony with a curly tail that wiggled when Alex pulled it on its string; filthy socks and underwear, courtesy of the bigger boys; and a red and blue sweater Irene’s mother had knitted for Alex and given her two days earlier.

Irene slipped the sweater over Alex’s head. The torso came down to his waist, but the sleeves stopped four inches short of his wrists, no matter how much she tugged on them. Could her mother have measured that poorly? And hadn’t it fit him when he tried it on the night before?

The front door banged open. Arthur and Benjamin whooped in with cries of No School! No School! Alex scrambled out of the room yelling for his brothers, leaving his mother holding his pants and wondering about the sweater.

“Ma!”

“What are you two doing home?”

“The pipes burst. There’s a flood.”

“At the school,” said Benjamin. “You should see it. They suh…sent us home. For all day. Honest, Ma.”

“Yeah, honest,” said Arthur. “Can we have something to eat? We’re starving.”

They were always starving, and always growing out of their clothes, too. Growing out of their clothes—maybe Alex’s arms were growing out of his. She laughed to herself at the thought. “First take off those galoshes, you’re tracking slush all over the place. Mind your brother and I’ll make you some oatmeal.”

“But we had it for breakfast.”

“Yeah, can we have bacon and eggs and toast and jam?”

Alex said, “Alex wants bacon and eggs.”

“Come on, Ma, make it for us, for a treat, there’s no school.”

Irene looked at her big boys with their arms around Alex. It would make a nice picture, those two big boys, their faces flushed full of life, and her little one, basking in his brothers’ attention. So precious. She needed to have pictures taken, before they were no longer so cute. “Well, all right, but you two mind your brother now. I’ll call you when it’s done.”

“Come on, Alex.”

Forty minutes later, as Irene stacked Alex’s clothes in the cedar chest she used for his dresser, she thought about the sweater again. It was possible some of the stitches could have pulled out, or her mother could have measured the sleeves incorrectly, but her mother was so picky about everything that that seemed unlikely. She came back to the bizarre thought that maybe Alex’s arms grew overnight, like Jack’s beanstalk. She imagined Alex’s arms growing longer and longer, like fleshy runaway vines up the side of the house and into the clouds. No, her mother must have measured wrong.

Something crashed in the living room, followed by a high-pitched shriek. Irene rushed in to find Alex sitting next to a broken clay flowerpot, with dried flowers strewn on the floor. The older boys stood there with their heads down, like dogs about to be beaten.

“Well?”

Arthur said, “What, Ma?”

“Don’t you what Ma me. You know what. I told you to mind your brother. What in the name of God Almighty is going on here?”

“See, we were playing muh…monkey in the middle with Alex.”

“Benjamin, don’t stutter.”

“Suh…sometimes I can’t help it.”

Alex said, “Alex is a monkey.” He loped around the room like a chimp, propelling himself with his elongated arms. Arthur and Benjamin tried to control their laughter, lest their mother smack them.

“We’ll clean it up, Ma,” Arthur volunteered. “But Alex did it.”

Alex made more monkey jabber.

“Alex, stop that. You two, you egged him on, I know it.”

“But Muh…muh…”

“Just go get the broom and dust pan.”

“Then can we go out?”

“Go, for the love of God.”

They ran to the kitchen.

“Alex go, too.”

She bent down. “Just look at your hands.” His knuckles, the size of pencil erasers, were raw and bleeding.

“Alex wants to
go
. Please, Momma? Alex will be good.”

The little conniver, she thought. He already knows how to navigate around his mother’s heart. Well, maybe she should let him out for a few minutes. It wasn’t all that cold. His brothers would watch him, and she could use a minute for herself, maybe read a magazine for ten minutes or figure out how she was going to pay both the butcher bill and the milkman this week.

She washed his knuckles with a soapy dishrag. “All right, Mr. Big Boy.” She laid his snowsuit out on the floor. “Can you help Momma put on your snowsuit?”

With his newly elongated arms, it was simple for Alex to reach down and grip the pant legs. However, putting the right leg into the right hole was another matter. He put both feet into one of the snowsuit legs and fell over. He kicked violently, and the more he struggled, the more entrapped he became, as if the snowsuit were a Chinese finger puzzle.

Standing in his red snowsuit, he looked like a small fireplug. The material from the legs bunched up around his ankles, but the arms were still a bit short.

Irene led him out to the snow fort Arthur and Benjamin had built with snow bricks molded from one of her pound cake pans. She went into the kitchen and began to cut stew meat into chunks, rinsed the carrots and the celery, the onions, the potatoes. She monitored Benjamin and Arthur’s yells as they cut through the chilly air.

The Miller boys were at war with the Walsh twins, Jackie and Kevin from across Mellon Street. They’d stockpiled a great deal of ordnance—50 snowballs, each the size of a hand grenade. But now the well-provisioned warriors had a new problem—Alex. When the Walsh attack came—imminently, the boys were sure—what were supposed to do with their tiny little brother, who would just be in the way? The Walsh twins were clever, sneaky fighters. Just yesterday, they’d jumped Benjamin, who’d walked home from school by himself because Arthur had to stay for detention. They washed his face with snow and called him a dirty Jew, which sounded tough to them, even though they weren’t quite sure what it meant.

Alex picked up a snowball.

“Alex, put that down,” said Arthur.

“Why?”

Imitating his father’s voice and lack of logic, he said, “Because I said so, that’s why.”

“Aw, luh…let him have one,” said Benjamin.

“Shut up, stutter-mouth.” Arthur squatted with his back against the inside front wall of the fort. “Dad said he’s gonna take us to the Pirates this year.”

“When?”

“I don’t know, sometime.”

“No, I mean, when did he suh…say that? I didn’t hear him say that.”

“You didn’t hear it, Benjamin, because he didn’t say it to you, he said it to muh…muh…me, stupid stutter-mouth. Hey Alex, don’t put that snowball in your mouth.” Alex dropped his right arm to his side and peered over his left shoulder. He swung his arm like a catapult and tossed the snowball four feet ahead of him.

“Wow,” Arthur said.

“Wow,” Benjamin said.

This time, the snowball went a foot farther.

Benjamin stood up to retrieve it. Almost immediately, a snowball with a stone inside caught him flush on the cheek. He went down as if shot. Arthur turned toward where the missile had come from, but as he did, Jackie Walsh rushed the fort from the other side, snatched Alex and ran off across the street.

Arthur knelt down beside his brother. “Benjamin, they got Alex. Stop crying and get up…”

“Boys?” Irene’s voice rang out from the house.

“Oh shit,” said Benjamin, sobbing. “It’s muh…Ma.”

Irene walked through the slushy snow in her apron and boots, her hair tied behind her head, with two cups of hot cocoa in hand. “Alex,” she called, “time to come in.”

The brothers stood side by side at attention. Benjamin held his right hand over his cheek, where a red welt the size of a boy’s fist was in bloom. He sniffed back the tears as his mother approached.

Arthur said, “Hi Ma.”

She pulled Benjamin’s hand away from his face. “Jesus, Joseph and Mary, what happened to you?”

With all the stoicism he could muster, he replied, “Nothing, Ma.”

“Don’t you nothing me—wait a minute, where is Alex?”

Irene gripped her sons by the wrists, and they marched like a drill team across Mellon Street. Benjamin held a chunk of hardened snow to the side of his face, where the bruise was transitioning its way from red to blue to purple.

Irene banged on the Walsh’s front door with the fury of Grendel’s mother. Her boys cowered beside her.

The door opened tentatively, as if the occupant was expecting a bill collector. Mrs. Walsh, a graying woman with a matching complexion and a sunken jaw line, thanks to several missing molars, scanned the Miller contingent and said, “What’s the trouble?”