The Pigman's Legacy (The Sequel to The Pigman)

Paul Zindel THE PIGMAN'S LEGACY

Gunn Memorial Public Library Yanceyville, N.G 27379

The Pigman's Legacy

Copyright © 1980 by Zindel Productions, Incorporated All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Printed in the United States of America. For information address Harper Row, Publishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10022. Published simultaneously in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, Toronto. First Edition

The Promise

We, the undersigned kids, make this solemn promise to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, and we pray that anyone who reads this won't go around saying the terrible things they said about us and the first old man who became our friend. His name was the Pigman and certain persons who read that memorial epic said we knocked him off. Please don't believe them. We didn't kill the Pig-man. We never even meant to hurt him. But we can't be phonies. We, the undersigned kids, are scared that you're going to blame us for still another death, but we've got to tell the story anyway. We're typing this one in the third-floor book closet at Franklin High with a portable Smith-Corona typewriter sitting on a stack of
Hamlets
. We are going to tell you everything the way it happened and we just hope that the rest of you kids learn from our mistakes. Signed with imitation blood borrowed permanently from the Acting Club,

THE PIGMAN'S LEGACY

Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

one

In case you didn't read the first memorial epic Lorraine and I wrote about the Pigman, don't worry about it. I never used to like reading either because a lot of my teachers made me read stuff I didn't need. I may be retarded and selfish but I only like to read things that are going to help me in
my
life. I mean Lady Macbeth says a lot of brilliant things, but Shakespeare or no Shakespeare, I don't know what she's talking about, and I'm not a stupid boy. Maybe someday I'll be ready for characters like her and Coriolanus and that girl who had to wear the scarlet letter. But right now I find them so boring I could barf. In fact, whenever my English teachers tell me I have to read a book and write a book report about it, I go straight to the library and look for the thinnest book on the shelf. Consequently I have given book reports on such subjects as the tulips of Alaska, Peruvian baseball, and the poetry of Rimbaud#x2014;a wild boy who croaked so young he didn't have time to write all that much. Also, nobody calls me the Bathroom Bomber at all anymore because it's been ages since I gave up setting off firecrackers in the boys' john. The only practical jokes I do now are those designed to show the warm foibles of being human. Like a couple of months ago I tied the end of a catgut line from my fishing reel to one of Lorraine's old pocketbooks and left it around for kids to rip off. When somebody would pick it up, I'd let them get about a hundred yards before I'd start reeling them in and you should have seen the surprised looks on their faces when I snapped them around. Also, I've given up writing graffiti on desks. The few times I've had to write graffiti at all lately I've done it on a neat 3 × 5 card and Scotch-taped it to someone's back. Like:

Also you should know I now don't condone the marking and destruction of public property. Whenever I see these subway trains and buses with Magic Marker writing and spray-can painting on them, I'd like to get whoever did it and immerse them in a vat of two-hundred-year-old wonton soup. And then I'd like to catch all the night watchmen and inspectors who are supposed to protect our trains and buses because they are not doing their jobs. They're probably goofing off in little shacks drinking beer and having smokes, which is why some demented delinquent can sneak in to write in thick eight-foot-tall blue Day-Glow letters NORTON WAS HERE on the entire side of seventy-six Staten Island Rapid Transit local train cars.

The one shady thing I still do is curse. But Lorraine, the traditionalist that she is, still won't let me curse in our second memorial epic. If I want to write a curse it has to be the old system of @ # $% for a mild curse and 3@#$% for a horrendous curse. Maybe because the world is so awful just now is the reason everybody's going around saying @#$% on you and go 3@#$% yourself all the time. I don't know.

Also, almost everything that happens in our bizarre escapade that you're about to read, provided you're not hauled off to a loony bin before you finish the epic, is haunted by this dead man called the Pigman. And you don't really have to know exactly who the Pigman was in order to understand the strange things that happened after he shuffled off this mortal coil. All you have to do is understand a little about what it's like to feel guilty about something. And if you've never felt guilty about anything then you must be a lily-white angel from heaven, in which case you really should stop reading this immediately before you have celestial cardiac arrest.

Lorraine is already panting to get at the typewriter, and since she's the kind of pubescent expert on psychology we need at this point, it's just as well.

two

As usual, I should never have let John write the first chapter. I am not a pubescent expert on anything. I simply happen to like psychology and read a lot of books on the subject. I happen to think that kids and everyone can find salvation through Freud, Jung, and a few other great minds of our century. And I'm sorry John doesn't like reading about them or Lady Macbeth, but I happen to think they've got a few things to teach us. I'll admit I too don't know what Lady Macbeth talks about whenever we have to read that play, which seems to be just about every year. Let's just say I know enough about guilt trips to know that they're not vacations, but what John and I are really trying to tell you is that you don't have to know a whole lot about our past in order to understand what we're going to tell you. All you have to know is that once upon a time we were a little younger and met a sweet lonely old man who tried to be a kid again but died. He lived in an old house on Howard Avenue and he used to give us a lot of presents and let us sip some wine with him now and then. I'll even have you know that there are some people who think that we gave
him
things too. Some people said we weren't fleecing him and that we weren't responsible for his death. Some say the best present we ever gave him was our youth. And if you ask me I think Freud, Jung, and even Harry Stack Sullivan would have approved of the entire relationship. It's only the mean people who say the gift we gave him was death. And to those people we could be just as mean back to them and say it was the Pigman who killed our childhood. And to be truthful, neither John nor I was really sure who was right, which I suppose is the real reason we've got to tell you what happened after the Pigman went to his grave.

I guess there does come a time in everybody's childhood when somebody does kill it. Every kid has his childhood die at some point. Maybe your childhood is already dead as you are reading this or maybe we're going to kill it, or maybe it's still alive and going to live on for a couple more years#x2014; but eventually it has to go to stiff city. I think that's what a Pigman really does even if he doesn't mean to. If you are a kid and somebody has already killed your childhood then you know what I'm talking about. A Pigman is anybody who comes into your life and causes a voice inside of you to say, “Okay buster, the jig's up. There's no more Santa Claus. There's no more Easter Rabbit. There's no more blaming Mommy or Daddy or your teachers or your brothers or your sisters or your friends,
there's only you!
” And the day your childhood dies is probably the first day you really know what guilt is. When your childhood dies it's so painful you figure you must have done something absolutely dreadful to be left hurting so badly inside. You want to lock yourself in your room and hide in your closet and scream. One kid I know had a mother who got killed in a car crash and he knew what I was talking about. Even if it's a divorce, if your father or mother walks out, that can make you feel like you've met a Pigman. If your dog gets run over and you didn't have it on a leash. If your cat gets distemper because you didn't give it all the right shots. These are all like encounters with a Pigman. Even though the Pigman himself could be a wonderful person. They don't mean to kill your childhood, it just works out that way. Somehow a Pigman makes you grow up and so it's for you who have met a Pigman, or even more, I suppose, for those who hear the footsteps of a Pigman coming near, that John and I must write this epic. We've already met our Pig-man and can now tell you how we found out whether the legacy he left us was the legacy of life or the legacy of death.