The Pigman (5 page)

“What did you take the money for in the first place?” I practically screamed.

John jumped at my outburst and then slowly sipped his beer. He smiled and said sweetly, “You’re a little schizo today, aren’t you?”

I didn’t get home that night until after six thirty, and I was a little scared when I found my mother there. She’s a private nurse and was supposed to be working a four-to-twelve shift that night. I never have to worry about finding my father there because he left fifteen years ago when they got a legal separation, and then he died six years ago, which made it a more permanent separation. As it is, my mother’s enough to worry about.

“Where were you?”

“I went to a drama-club meeting.”

“Until now?” She fumbled with the buttons of her white uniform, which gave me a moment to think.

“I had a soda with the kids afterwards at Stryker’s Luncheonette.”

“I don’t want you going in there. I told you that.”

“All the kids go there.”

“I don’t care what all the kids do. I don’t want you in there. I’ve seen those boys hanging around there, and they’ve only got one thing on their minds.”

My mother’s got a real hang-up about men and boys.

“You didn’t tell me about it yesterday.” She put her faded blue bathrobe over her slip. “My legs hurt.”

“I’m sorry.”

“The old fossil had me on the run from the minute I got there.” She started brushing her hair. “At least his worries are over.”

“Did he die?”

“Of course he died. I told his daughter two days ago he wasn’t going to last the week. Put some coffee water on.”

I was glad to be able to get out to the kitchen because it makes me sad to watch my mother brush her hair. My mom is a very pretty woman when she has her long brown hair down, and when she smiles, which is hardly ever. She just doesn’t look the way she sounds, and I often wonder how she got this way. It’s not exactly easy being her daughter, and more than once I’ve thought about what a good psychiatrist could do for her. Actually, I think her problems are so deep-rooted she’d need three years of intensive psychoanalysis.

“I mean the old guy’s throat was closing, and he was bouncing up and down in bed for days. If they don’t think I know when a cancer patient is going to wind up, they’re very much mistaken.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“I don’t feel like eating anything. I had a few pieces of roast beef out of their refrigerator, and I brought home some canned goods I borrowed from the pantry. They’ll never miss them. The family has started fighting over his money already. I think there’s a can of turkey soup. Why don’t you have that?”

I can’t tell you what she’d do if
I
ever took anything, but she isn’t even ashamed of what she does. She figures they don’t pay her enough, so she’ll even it up her own way.

She came into the kitchen and opened a jar of instant coffee. I handed her this oversized coffee cup I gave her for her last birthday. It has “MOM” painted in huge letters on one side. She cried when she unwrapped it.

“Here’s two dollars for your sophomore dues,” she said, putting the money down on the table. “That school thinks it’s easy for a woman to support a kid by herself—two dollars for this, five dollars for that… twenty-three bucks for a dental certificate! I can’t even afford to get myself a pair of nylons.” She pulled her bathrobe up and moved so quickly toward me I thought she was going to hit me. “Look at them! There’re so many runs you’d think a cat chewed them.”

“I could wait another week to pay the dues.”

“Pay it now. Nobody is going to talk about us behind our backs. Besides, I got an extra ten from Solvies.”

“What?”

“Solvies the undertaker. The family let me call Solvies, and they always slip me an extra ten for the business. How’s the turkey soup?”

“Fine.”

“I heard Berdeen’s Funeral Parlor is slipping twenty under the table, so maybe I’ll give them a little business when the next one croaks. As soon as this one died I called the Nurses’ Registry, but they won’t have anything for me until the day after tomorrow. Another terminal cancer.” She sat down opposite me at the table and lifted the cup to her lips. I tried to keep my eyes on the big painted letters.

“I think it’d be a good idea if you stayed home from school and cleaned the house with me tomorrow.”

“I have a Latin test.”

“Can’t you make it up?”

“No,” I said quietly, hoping she wouldn’t explode. Sometimes it’s just the way I say one word that gets her going, and she’s so quick with her hand it’s hard to think of her being gentle to sick people.

“I can’t go out and earn a living and keep this house decent. You’ve got to do something.”

I blew on a spoonful of soup. “I did the laundry yesterday.”

“It’s about time.”

“And I changed the sheets on the bed.”

“You sleep in it too, you know.” I was sorry I had said anything.

“Look up the telephone number of Berdeen’s Funeral Parlor for me and jot it down. I want to have it handy just in case.”

I put my soup spoon down.

“Are you sure you can’t stay home tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“I think you could take a year off from that school and not miss anything.”

“The test is very important.”

“Yeah, it’s important. Later on in life I’m sure you’re going to run around talking Latin all over the place.”

I’ve often wondered what she’d say if she knew I wanted to be a writer. Writer! I can just hear her.

After she went to bed, I called John. His mother answered the phone, and I could tell there was some trouble over there.

“Do you still want to go to the zoo tomorrow?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, it’s all right with me,” I whispered, keeping one eye on the bedroom door.

“What made you change your mind?”

“I just think I need a day off. What’s all that yelling in the background?”

“It’s just the Bore.”

“What did you do now?”

He raised his voice. “They’re trying to accuse me of gluing the telephone lock. They don’t trust me around here.”

“Lorraine!” The voice came from the bedroom. “Who are you talking to?”

“Jane Appling. I forgot what chapter the Latin test is going to cover.”

“Hurry up and finish.”

“Good-bye, Jane,” I said into the phone.

The next day we cut school. That’s easy because this girl by the name of Deanna Deas is in love with John and she happens to work in the Dean’s office which gets the cut and absentee cards the teachers send down—if they happen to remember. So Deanna said she’d fix it up so John and I wouldn’t get anything sent home, although I’ll bet she was sorry she wasn’t cutting with John. Somehow I don’t really think she was jealous. People just don’t get jealous of me. I’m the type the boss’s wife would hire for her husband’s secretary. Deanna Deas is the type the boss’s wife would definitely not hire. She even bleaches her hair.

John had called the Pigman and made arrangements for us to meet him in front of the zoo at ten o’clock in the morning. We didn’t want to be seen walking around our neighborhood with him, but the zoo was far enough away so we knew we’d be safe once we got there.

John and I arrived around nine thirty and sat down on the benches at the entrance. The sea-lion pool is right there, and that kept John busy while I was combing my hair and polishing my Ben Franklin sunglasses. I don’t wear all crazy clothes, but I do like my Ben Franklin sunglasses because everyone looks at me when I wear them. I used to be afraid to have people look at me, but ever since I met John I seem to wear little things that make them look. He wears phony noses and moustaches and things like that. He’s even got a big pin that says “MY, YOU’RE UGLY,” and he wears that once in awhile.

I really didn’t want to go to the zoo. I don’t like seeing all those animals and birds and fish behind bars and glass just so a lot of people can stare at them. And I particularly hate the Baron Park Zoo because the attendants there are not intelligent. They really aren’t. The thing that made me stop going to the zoo a few years ago was the way one attendant fed the sea lions. He climbed up on the big diving platform in the middle of the pool and unimaginatively just dropped the fish into the water. I mean, if you’re going to feed sea lions, you’re not supposed to plop the food into the tank. You can tell by the expressions on their faces that the sea lions are saying things like “Don’t dump the fish in!”

“Pick the fish up one by one and throw them into the air so we can chase after them.”

“Throw the fish in different parts of the tank!”

“Let’s have fun!”

“Make a game out of it!”

If my mother had ever let me have a dog, I think it would have been the happiest dog on earth. I know just how the minds of animals work—just the kind of games they like to play. The closest I ever came to having a pet was an old mongrel that used to hang around the neighborhood. I thought there was nothing wrong with sitting on the front steps and petting him, but my mother called the ASPCA, and I know they killed him.

At ten o’clock sharp, Mr. Pignati arrived.

“Hi!” he said. His smile stretched clear across his face. “Hope I’m not late?”

“Right on time, Mr. Pignati. Right on time,” John answered.

I felt sorry for the old man because people just don’t go around smiling like that all the time unless they’re mentally unbalanced or harboring extreme anxiety.

“What’ll it be first? Peanuts? Soda? The Snake Building?” He sounded so excited you’d have thought we had just landed on Venus.

I should have just left there and then because I knew things were going to get involved. I realize now there were plenty of bad omens within the next few minutes. If I’d had half a brain, I’d have Pogo-sticked it right out of there.

The first was a woman selling peanuts. I went up to her and said, “I want four bags of peanuts.”

“How many bags?” she said.

“Four bags.”

“Well, why didn’t you say so?”

I mean, that’s how antagonistic she was. A real devoted antagonist. You could tell she hated kids—just hated them. I don’t know whether one of the requirements of dealing with kids is that you have to hate them to begin with, or whether working with kids makes you hate them, but one way or another it works out that way—except with people like the Cricket, and she doesn’t really know what we’re like.

That was the first omen. I should have left right on the spot.

Then I was attacked by a peacock. This low-IQ peacock came tearing after me as soon as it heard me open my bag of peanuts. They let them run around loose at Baron Park Zoo, and this white one opened up all its feathers and started dancing in front of me and backing me up against a fence.

“Just offer it a peanut.” The Pigman was grinning. “He likes you. Ha, ha.”

The third omen that this was going to be a bad day was when we went into the nocturnal room of the Mammal Building. The whole room is pretty dark so you can see these animals that only come out at night, like owls and pottos and cute little vampire bats. I had never seen this nocturnal room before, and I almost went into shock when I got a look at the vampire bats. They had some explanatory pictures next to their glass cage that showed a couple of bats sucking the blood out of a horse’s neck while the horse was sleeping.

But that wasn’t the part that was the third omen. I mean, that exhibit would have been there on any day. It was this child that I thought was an omen—a little kid about ten years old who was sitting right up on the railing and leaning against the glass of the bat cage. Only he wasn’t looking at the bats. He was looking at
you
when you came to look at the bats. And when I came up to the cage to see these ugly blood-sucking creatures, I had to look right into this little kid’s face that had a smirk on it. He made me feel as though I was a bat in a cage and he was on the outside looking in at me. It all made me very nervous.

But Mr. Pignati just loved the nocturnal room, and the only one who loved it more was John. John likes things like king vultures and alligators. He was even excited in the snake house. As far as snakes go, I think once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. So I let him and the Pigman go on running around while I took this snake quiz that was on a lighted sign. They had ten statements and you had to pick out which ones were false.

I mean, it was not exactly a depth quiz. I was right on every one of them. Just in case you’re trying to take it, I won’t put down which of the statements are false until the end of this chapter.

Anyway, after seeing Galapagos tortoises, reticulated pythons, and puff adders, the Pigman dragged us over to the Primate Building, more popularly known as the monkey house.

“I want you to meet Bobo.”

“Bobo?” Even John’s eyes widened.

“My best friend,” Mr. Pignati explained.

We stopped in front of a cage with bars, only about three feet from where we stood. Let me tell you, Bobo could have used a good spray deodorant. A little door was open at the back of the cage, and apparently Bobo was in the inner part where they get fed.