The Pigman (10 page)

“She used to keep the house so clean,” Mr. Pignati muttered, lowering his head.

I squirmed slightly.

“Who?”

“Conchetta….”

John looked at me and I looked at him. It was the first time the Pigman had mentioned her in months.

“I had them make a cake—”

“Pardon me, Mr. Pignati,” I said softly, “a cake?”

“I had them make a cake… the bakery… for our anniversary.” He wiped his eyes with a wrinkled handkerchief he took from one of his pockets. “Something like our wedding cake was, with a girl in white on top… and a boy.”

I held my breath.

“She loved me…” he said. He looked so tired.

“We loved each other. We didn’t need anyone else.

She did everything for me. We were each other’s life,” he managed to say and then broke into sobs. He tried to cover his eyes and turn his head so we wouldn’t have to see him like that.

I couldn’t help thinking about my mother and father—that maybe as simple as Mr. Pignati was, he knew something about love and having fun that other people didn’t. I guess Conchetta had known the secret too.

Mr. Pignati raised his head slowly and looked at us, tears pouring down his face. John pretended not to notice by watching the television, but I knew he really wasn’t. He might have been thinking about his parents too.

I went over and put my hand on Mr. Pignati’s. There was nothing else I could think of doing.
Tell us,
I wanted to say to him, tell us if it’ll make you feel better.

“She’s dead,” he said, wiping his tears with the large white handkerchief.

There was a pause, and then John turned to the Pigman. “We’re sorry,” he said, in such a gentle way I wanted to kiss him for it. There was no need to say anything more.

Hurrah for Hollywood
was still blasting away, but now there were two thousand chorus boys swinging the blond into the air. I tried to think of something to say.

“Have another piece of candy, John?”

Without looking at the Pigman or me, he reached over and took it.

“What kind of candy is this?”

“Chocolate-covered ants.”

You never saw anybody run faster for the kitchen sink in your life, and at last there was a laugh out of Mr. Pignati. I was so relieved he had laughed that I’d have eaten snails and scungilli or anything else. Ants were nothing. Even the Pigman and I tried one of the chocolates, which tasted a little like candy with crispy rice.

“You louse!” I heard a call from the kitchen as I stuffed another little square of ants into my mouth. They really were rather tasty.

John took extra long coming back, and I could hear him getting his roller skates out of the closet in the back room where all the pigs were. I knew he’d have to do something to try to top my little ant joke. So when he came flying into the living room on skates, I laughed it up so he’d feel a little better about my slipping him the insects. Then the Pigman wanted to get in on the act. That’s how the three of us were. If one of us did something that was funny, the other two had to come up with something too. Three copycats. It wasn’t exactly that we had to show off so much as that we wanted to entertain each other. We wanted to show equally how much we were thankful for each other’s company.

Well, the Pigman passed out pencils and paper, so I knew it was going to be one of those games like how to memorize ten items.

“Number from one to five.” The Pigman started getting a little bit of the old gleam back. “This is going to tell you what kind of a person you are.” He drew a diagram on a piece of paper and laid it in front of us. I thought he had completely flipped.

“I’m going to tell you a murder story, and your job is just to listen.” When he drew the skull and wrote “ASSASSIN,” John perked up a little.

“There is a river with a bridge over it, and a WIFE and her HUSBAND live in a house on one side. The WIFE has a LOVER who lives on the other side of the river, and the only way to get from one side of the river to the other is to walk across the bridge or to ask the BOATMAN to take you.

“One day the HUSBAND tells his WIFE that he has to be gone all night to handle some business in a faraway town. The WIFE pleads with him to take her with him because she knows if he doesn’t she will be unfaithful to him. The HUSBAND absolutely refuses to take her because she will only be in the way of his important business.

“So the HUSBAND goes alone. When he is gone, the WIFE goes over the bridge and stays with her LOVER. The night passes, and dawn is almost up when the WIFE leaves because she must get back to her own house before her HUSBAND gets home. She starts to cross the bridge but sees an ASSASSIN waiting for her on the other side, and she knows if she tries to cross, he will murder her. In terror, she runs up the side of the river and asks the BOATMAN to take her across the river, but he wants fifty cents. She has no money, so he refuses to take her.

“The wife runs back to the LOVER’s house and explains to him what her predicament is and asks him for fifty cents to pay the BOATMAN. The LOVER refuses, telling her it’s her own fault for getting into the situation.

As dawn comes up the WIFE is nearly out of her mind and decides to dash across the bridge. When she comes face to face with the ASSASSIN, he takes out a large knife and stabs her until she is dead.”

“So what?” John asked.

“Now I want you to write down on the paper I gave you the names of the characters in the order in which you think they were most responsible for the WIFE’s death. Just list WIFE, HUSBAND, LOVER, ASSASSIN, and BOATMAN in the order you think they are most guilty.”

Mr. Pignati had to explain the whole story over to me again because it was too complicated to get the first time, but I ended up listing the guilty in this order: 1. BOATMAN, 2. HUSBAND, 3. WIFE, 4. LOVER, 5. ASSASSIN.

John listed them in this order: 1. BOATMAN, 2. LOVER, 3. ASSASSIN, 4. WIFE, 5. HUSBAND.

“So what?” John repeated.

Mr. Pignati started laughing when he looked at our lists. “You both picked the BOATMAN as the one who is most guilty in the death of the woman. Each of the characters is a symbol for something, and you have betrayed what is most important to you in life.”

Then he wrote down what the different characters represented.

“Because you picked the BOATMAN as being most guilty, that means you’re both most interested in MAGIC,” he said.

“I’m glad I picked the boatman,” I said, blushing a little. The order in which John liked things in the world was supposed to be magic, sex, money, fun, and love. The order in which I was supposed to prefer these qualities was magic, love, fun, sex, and money. I thought that was sort of accurate, if you ask me.

So John and I laughed a lot for the Pigman, making him think we thought the game was two tons of fun. It wasn’t bad, but it certainly wasn’t two tons of fun. But he always had to do something to try to top us. The longer he knew us, the more of a kid he became. It was cute in a way.

After Mr. Pignati finished playing the psychological game with us, John started skating. First he skated just in that hall leading from the dining room to the doorway with the curtains where all the pigs were. But then after a few minutes, he started skating right through the living room while Mr. Pignati and I watched television. Finally he opened the door to the porch so that now he had about fifty feet of nice wooden floor to race on. That looked so attractive I went and put my skates on. Mr. Pignati laughed like anything as we went flying by, and before we knew it he had his skates on and the three of us were zooming right from the porch through the living room and dining room down the hall into the room with the pigs. It was really a scream, particularly when we started playing tag. We were having so much fun I just never thought anyone would hurt himself. I mean, I had forgotten about Mr. Pignati going way down to the zoo in all that snow. I forgot he had shoveled the walk, and I guess for a few minutes I forgot he was so old.

John got particularly wild at one point when Mr. Pignati was
It
and there weren’t many obstacles you could skate around on the ground floor except the kitchen table, and that got mundane after awhile. So John was off, running up the stairs to the bedroom with his skates on, and we were all howling with laughter.
Clomp! Clomp!
What a racket those skates made. And Mr. Pignati started right up after him, puffing like crazy, his face redder than a beet.
Clomp! Clomp! Clomp!
right up the stairs.

Suddenly, just a few steps up, Mr. Pignati stopped. He started to gasp for air and turned around to face me at the bottom of the stairs… trying to speak. Only a horrible moan came out.

“Bet you can’t get me!” John giggled, still clomping up the stairs, not realizing what was going on behind him.

“Mr. Pignati—” I started, the words catching in my throat.

“Bet you can’t catch me!”

The Pigman reached his left hand out to me.

“What’s the matter?” I yelled.

He started to double over—his eyes fastened on me—gaping like a fish out of water. Then he pressed his right hand to his chest and fell to the bottom of the stairs.

I
knew it was a heart attack right away. Lorraine almost passed out, but I knew enough to call the police. They got there about ten minutes later with an ambulance from St. Ambrose Hospital, and we almost didn’t have enough time to get the skates off.

Two attendants came in with an old lady doctor, and we told them how he had been shoveling snow and had been out all day, and they just whisked him away on a stretcher like an old sack of potatoes. He was breathing just fine. Maybe a little fast, but it certainly didn’t look like he was going to die or anything like that.

“Who are you?” this one snotty cop asked.

“His children,” I said, and I thought Lorraine was going to collapse with fear. We both knew what her mother would do if she found out.

I answered all the questions he asked, and when I didn’t know the answers, I made them up.

“Your father’s age?”

“Fifty-eight,” I said.

“Wife?”

“Deceased.”

“Place of birth?”

“Sorrento.”

“You two kids don’t look Italian.”

“Our mother was Yugoslavian.”

I mean those particular cops were so dumb it was pathetic. I felt like I was talking to two grown-up Dennises who had arrested mental growth. It was a big deal over nothing. They wanted to know if we could take care of ourselves, and we assured them we were very mature.

“Your name?”

“John Pignati.”

“You?” The cop pointed at Lorraine.

“Lorraine… Pignati.”

They finally left after they had a good look around the place. I mean, the furnishings were enough to make anybody think a pack of wild gypsies lived there, but they were probably anxious to get along on the rounds of the local bars and collect their graft for the week. Lorraine got furious when I told her that and said she hoped I needed help some day and there were no policemen to call. Then she called me stupid and left me standing in the hall. I walked to the edge of the living room and just waited for the lecture I knew was coming.

“You shouldn’t have gone upstairs with the roller skates on,” she finally said as though in a trance.

“I didn’t think he would follow me up.”

“You just never know when to stop.”

“Oh, shut up!” I snapped at her. “You’re beginning to sound like my Old Lady.”

She turned her head away, and I was sorry I had yelled at her. “He’s not going to die. It was just a little stroke, that’s all. He was breathing fine when they carried him out.”

I needed two beers after that, but Lorraine was nervous about staying there. So we found the keys to the house in the kitchen, locked up, and took a walk in the cemetery. We didn’t last long there because it was too cold, and she felt terrible when we walked by a freshly dug grave. There’s nothing worse than a freshly dug grave with snow falling on it.

The next day we cut school and took the Number 107 bus to St. Ambrose Hospital. We got there a half hour before visiting time, but that gave us time to check on Mr. Pignati and find out that he wasn’t dead. In fact he was so alive he looked better than ever, but I’ve heard that’s the way a lot of people are when they have heart attacks. I mean, that’s supposed to be the real danger period because they feel energetic, but if they exert themselves, they can have another attack and croak. This Transylvanian-looking nun-nurse made us sign our names in a book and gave us a couple of passes so everyone at the hospital would know we had permission to be there and were not a couple of ghouls raiding the morgue. I hate to go to hospitals because you never know when you get in one of the elevators if the guy next to you has the galloping bubonic plague.