Читать книгу The Hour I First Believed - Wally Lamb - Страница 11

MOTHER SAYS I’M NOT TO cross Bride Lake Road without permission, or dawdle near the ladies’ prison fence, or walk past it to our south field where the corn maze is. But I’ve done all three this morning because I’m mad at Mother and really, really mad at Grandpa Quirk. He said I’m too young to run the cash register, and I’m not. In our arithmetic workbook, I zoom through the money pages and I’m always the first one done. “Well, I’m sorry, Davy Crockett, but this is our livelihood,” Grandpa said. “No means no.”

Mother said yes, we can go to the movies tomorrow if she finishes the priests’ ironing, but no, we cannot see I Was a Teenage Frankenstein. “You’re too young for those kind of pictures, Caelum. They could give you scary dreams.”

I already have scary dreams, but Mother doesn’t know. They’re a secret.

October is busy at our farm: hay rides, pumpkins, the maze, the cider press. So many people come to Bride Lake Farm that we have to get extra helpers from the ladies’ prison—not just Hennie, who takes care of Great-Grandma Quirk, but other ladies, too. Aunt Lolly picks them because she works at the prison. Most people need eight hours’ sleep, but Aunt Lolly only needs five. Every day, she works at the farm, then takes her bath, puts on her uniform, and walks across the road to the prison. She doesn’t get home until after my bedtime. There’s good and bad prisoners, Aunt Lolly says, and she knows the difference.

Chicago and Zinnia run the cider press. Chicago has big muscles. “Good luck if you met her in a dark alley,” Grandpa said. Zinnia’s fat, and she breathes real loud, and has orange hair. “Bleach,” Aunt Lolly told Mother. “They snitch it from the laundry. Half the girls on the colored tier are strutting around like Rhonda Fleming.” Mother said they’ll be sorry when their hair starts falling out. Grandpa thinks all the colored people come from Hershey, Pennsylvania, and that’s why some are dark chocolate, some are milk chocolate, and once in a while, one comes out white chocolate. They don’t come from Pennsylvania, though. Colored people come from Africa. Mother says Grandpa Quirk’s not as funny as he thinks he is.

In our parlor? We have this picture of our farm that some guy took from when he was up in his airplane. On account of, this other time, he had to emergency-land in our hay field. Grandpa had it blowed up and put in a frame. On the bottom, it says, “Bride Lake Farm, Aerial View, August 1948.” In the picture, you can see the way Bride Lake Road cuts right across our farm. Our house and our barn and the apple orchard are on one side, and the pasture and the cornfields are on the other. The prison farm and Bride Lake are on our side, too—right in the middle. Grandpa says a long, long time ago, Bride Lake used to be part of our land. But then Grandpa Quirk’s father died and his mother had to sell some of the farm to Connecticut. So that’s when the prison got built. In the airplane picture, the cows look like ladybugs and the prison ladies look like fleas. There’s different Alden Quirks, you know: Daddy is Alden Quirk the Third, Grandpa’s Alden Quirk the Second, and Grandpa’s father was just plain Alden. If my name was Alden instead of Caelum, I’d be Alden Quirk the Fourth. “Well, someone had to come along and break the curse,” Daddy said. Then he told me not to tell Grandpa that he said it—that it was a secret between just me and him.

When Grandpa told me Bride Lake used to be ours instead of the prison’s, I was mad. Aunt Lolly says there’s perch in there, and bass, and crappies. Aunt Lolly takes the prison ladies fishing sometimes. “City girls,” she said. “Tough as nails. But then they’ll see some itty-bitty snapping turtle, or get a fish on their line, God forbid, and they turn to jelly. I’ve had to wade in after more dropped poles than I care to remember.” Grandpa says, when he was a little kid, he used to get to fish at Bride Lake all the time because Great-Grandpa was the farm manager for the prison, and Great-Grandma was like the principal or something. Grandpa says he always used to try and catch this one largemouth bass, Big Wilma, but he never did. I wish I could fish there. I can’t even go near the fence. If Big Wilma’s still in there, I bet she’s a monster.

You know how Bride Lake got called Bride Lake? Because a long, long time ago—when George Washington or Abraham Lincoln was president—this man and lady were getting married by the lake, and some other lady shot the bride in the head. Because they both loved the same man. The groom. Aunt Lolly says every once in a while, one of the prison ladies says she seen the ghost, walking out by the lake in her bride dress. “Nothing kills a nice quiet shift like one of those ghost sightings,” Aunt Lolly told Mother. “Of course, most of the girls were brought up on superstitions. Burn your hair when it falls out, or your enemy will get ahold of it and make trouble. Don’t look head-on at a gravestone, or someone you love will die. Don’t let your feet get swept with a broom, or you’ll end up in jail.”

“I guess they all got their feet swept,” Mother said.

I asked Hennie if she ever saw the ghost, and she said no. Chicago said no, too. Zinnia said she might have seen her one night, down near the root cellar, but she might have been dreaming.

This is how you make cider. First, Chicago cranks the crank and the press comes down and crushes the apples. Then the juice comes out and trickles down the trough and goes through the strainer. Then it runs into the big funnel, and out through the tube and into the glass jugs. Chicago scrapes the smushed apples into the slop barrel with a hoe, and dumps the new ones onto the pressing table, and they go bumpity, bump, bump, and they don’t know they’re about to get crushed to death.

Zinnia’s job is bottling and capping the cider when it comes out of the tube. She has to switch the jugs fast, so that not much spills on the ground. Grandpa won’t let me fill the cider jugs, because the only time I did it, I forgot to switch the tube and cider spilled all over the ground. Aunt Lolly says I’m lucky Grandpa won’t let me fill the jugs. “The sugar from the spillage attracts bees,” she said. “You want to get stung all day long, like poor Zinnia?”

Zinnia always wants to hug me and pat me because she has a boy my same age named Melvin. I said maybe some day Melvin could come play at our farm, and I could bring him to the maze and show him the shortcuts. Zinnia started crying. That’s when I seen that she has freckles. All my Massachusetts cousins have freckles, but I never knew colored people got them.

I have chores, you know. Feed the chickens, bottle-feed the calves. My allowance is fifty cents. Plus, I earn more for extra jobs, like weeding and picking up the drops at the orchard. Grandpa gives me a nickel for every bushel basket I fill. And you know what? Brown apples and wormy apples are good for making cider, because it means the apples are nice and sweet. There’s no worm guts in the cider, though, because of the strainer. When the slop barrel’s full? Chicago has to roll it down the path and dump it underneath the barn, on top of the manure pile. There’s this hole in the barn floor, and when you shovel out the manure, you throw it down the hole. And after, Grandpa uses it for fertilizer. He says apple slop sweetens the milk.

Zinnia and Chicago get to use our downstairs bathroom when they have to go, because we can trust them. They eat their lunch on our back porch—two sandwiches each, plus Coca-Colas and cake or pie for dessert. They told me our lunches are better than prison lunches because Hennie doesn’t skimp on the meat or the cheese. Zinnia always gives Chicago one of her sandwiches, so Chicago eats three. Chicago eats pie with her fingers, and then she sucks them clean instead of using her napkin.

You know what Zinnia’s got? A tattoo that says, “Jesus

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s.” It starts on the palm of her hand and goes up her arm. She told me she made it with a safety pin and fountain pen ink, and it hurt but it was worth it. Sometimes, when she stares and stares at her tattoo, she can feel Jesus wrap his arms around her and calm her down. Mother says I better never try giving myself any tattoo, because my blood could get poisoned.

Zinnia hugs me different than Mother does. Mother hugs me stiff, and pats my back with these fast little pitty-pats, and I just stand there and wait for her to finish. But when Zinnia squeezes me, I squeeze back. Once, when she was hugging me, she started rocking back and forth and thinking I was Melvin. “How you eatin’, Melvin? How your asthma? Your mama’s main sufferation in life is missing you, baby boy.” She was holding me so tight and so long that Chicago had to stop cranking and help me. “Come on now, Zinni,” she said. “This boy ain’t your boy. Let him go.”

If you had poisoned blood, it might be good, because then bad people wouldn’t come near you. “Get back!” you could say. “You want to be poisoned?”

Nobody even knows I’m down here at the corn maze, or that I took more stuff from the kitchen. It’s not stealing, because Hennie would let me have it anyway. I took a chunk of the ham we had last night, and some icebox cookies, and some potatoes from the bin. This time I remembered to wrap the potatoes in aluminum foil like he wants. If he’s not there, he said, I’m supposed to just leave it. Hide it in the baby buggy, under the baby.

The maze doesn’t open until ten o’clock, and it’s only eight o’clock, so the rope’s hanging across the entrance, between the two sawhorses, and the “Keep Out” sign is up. One time? Teenagers snuck into the maze at night, and took the Quirk family’s heads off and smashed them. Grandpa and me found them on Saturday morning, when we were putting out the free hot cocoa. “Goddamn juvenile delinquents,” Grandpa said. He had to shovel the broken pumpkins into the back of the truck and hurry and pick out five new ones. And Aunt Lolly had to draw on all the new faces quick, before the customers came.

“Juvenile delinquents” means teenagers. One of them put a lady’s bra on Mrs. Quirk, over her dress, and she looked weird with a bra on and no head. The pumpkins’ insides looked like smashed brains.

When you figure out the maze and get to the middle, where the Quirk family is, that’s when you get your free cocoa. It’s on a table in two big thermos jugs, and there’s cups and a ladle, and the sign says, “One cup per customer, PLEASE!” because some people are pigs. The Quirk Family is Mr. and Mrs. Quirk, their son and daughter, and their little baby in the baby buggy that used to be my baby buggy. We stuff them with newspapers and corn husks, and they wear our old clothes. This year, the boy’s wearing my last year’s dungarees, and my rippy shirt that I chewed a hole in the front of when I tried out for Little League, and my Davy Crockett coonskin cap. I didn’t want my coonskin cap anymore after Grandpa told me the fur tail looked like it had the mange. I yanked it off and threw it in my toy chest. But Aunt Lolly sewed it back on for the Quirk boy. “First time I’ve had to thread a needle since Home Economics,” she told Hennie and me. “Damn, I hated that class. My brother got to go to woodworking and make a knickknack shelf, and I had to do all that prissy sewing.”

“Here, give me that, you ninny,” Hennie said, but Aunt Lolly said no, no, now she was on a mission. She had to take lots of tries to get the thread through the needle. Each time, she stuck her tongue out and made cross-eyes, and me and Hennie laughed. Hennie and Aunt Lolly can be friends at our house, but not at the prison. If Hennie called Aunt Lolly a ninny over there, she’d get in trouble and have to go to this place called “the cooler.” Which, I think, is like a freezer or something.

Sometimes, if Great-Grandma takes a long nap, Hennie makes me gingerbread. She’s been working at our house for so long, she doesn’t even need anyone to walk her over from the jail anymore. She just waves to the guard at the gate, and he waves back. I saw Hennie and Aunt Lolly kissing once, out on the sun porch. They didn’t see me seeing them. On the lips.

You know what? The people that go into our maze are stupid. First, they run down all the dead ends and go, Huh? Then they go back on the same paths where they already went and don’t even realize it. Some people get so mixed up, they end up back at the entrance. I’m not supposed to show anybody the shortcuts. “Folks want to be lost for a little while, Caelum,” Grandpa Quirk said. “That’s the fun of it. And anyway, nobody likes a know-it-all.”

In the desk, out in the barn office, there’s this map that Daddy drew. It shows what the maze looks like if you’re a helicopter flying over it, or the geese. Daddy invented the maze, back when he was being good. He’s the one who thought up the Quirk family, too, and the free hot cocoa. Mother makes it on the stove in two big pots, and then she pours it into the big jugs she got when she used to work at American Thermos. She quit there, though, because her boss was always yelling at everybody and he gave her an ulcer. Now Mother works at the bank, and she likes it better, except she has to wash her hands all the time because money’s dirty and you never know where it’s been. I licked a dollar once. Mother made me put Listerine in my mouth and not spit it out for a long time, and it hurt.

Sometimes my scary dreams are about Daddy, and sometimes they’re about Mr. Zadzilko. Our school used to have a different janitor, Mr. Mpipi, but he got fired. And I was mad because Mr. Mpipi was nice. The teachers think Mr. Zadzilko’s nice, too, because he brings them snapdragons and these stupid Polish doughnuts that his mother makes called poonch-keys. Mr. Zadzilko’s not nice, though. When the teachers go to the toilet, he peeks at them through this secret hole.

Before Mr. Mpipi got fired, he came to our class once, and he told us about these people called the Bushmen that are his relatives or his ancestors or something. He showed us where they live on the world map—in Africa, near the bottom. You know what Bushmen hunt and eat? Jackals. And desert rats. And when they see a praying mantis, they think it’s God!

Mr. Mpipi had our class all sit on the floor, even Miss Hogan. Us kids sat cross-legged, but Miss Hogan knelt on her knees and her skirt made a big circle around her. Mr. Mpipi told us a story about how Mantis made the moon by throwing fire into the night sky, and how he married a snake. And you know how Mantis travels around? Between the toes of an antelope, because that’s his favorite animal. Mr. Mpipi talked Bushman talk, with these little clicky noises before the words. Everyone laughed, even Miss Hogan, and Mr. Mpipi laughed his high, squealy laugh, too. Mr. Mpipi is colored, I think, except he doesn’t have chocolate skin. It’s more like the color of those dried apricots Grandpa gets at Christmas.

After his visit, our class wrote Mr. Mpipi a thank-you letter on big easel paper, and we all signed it. And it made him so happy that he gave us a present: a praying mantis egg case. It was supposed to hatch in April, but it didn’t. Then, after the assembly, Mr. Mpipi got fired. Miss Hogan was going to throw out the egg case, but I asked her if I could have it. She said yes, and I brought it home and put it on my windowsill.

I caught Mr. Zadzilko peeking. That’s how I know about the hole. It’s in the big second-floor closet, where the buckets and mops and the Spic And Span are. Miss Hogan wrote me a pass and sent me down to help him because I was the first one done with my Social Studies questions, and I had ants in my pants and kept bothering my neighbors. I opened the closet door and Mr. Zadzilko was peeking through the hole. He jumped when he saw me, and fixed his pants and his belt, and he was laughing like heh heh heh. “Look at this,” he said. “Mop handle musta poked a hole in the wall. Gotta patch it when I get a free minute.” He gave me a sponge and told me to wet it in the boys’ room and then go downstairs and wipe the cafeteria tables.

And after, when the recess bell rang, I went back upstairs to return my sponge. Mr. Zadzilko wasn’t there, so I turned a bucket upside down and climbed up and looked through the hole. And there was the principal, Miss Anderson, sitting on the toilet, smoking a cigarette. You could see her girdle.

I knew it was naughty to look, so I closed my eyes and got down off the bucket. And when I turned toward the door, Mr. Zadzilko was standing there.

“My, my, my,” he said. “Aren’t you the dirty boy.”

He yanked the pull chain, and the closet light went on. Then he pulled the door closed behind him. He came over and sat down on the bucket, so that he was breathing right in my face. The hole was a secret between me and him, he said. If I said anything, he’d tell the teachers he caught me looking. “You were just curious,” he said. “I understand that, but the teachers won’t. They’ll probably have you arrested. And everyone will know you’re Dirty Boy.”

He reached behind him and took a greasy paper bag off the shelf. He opened it and held it out to me. “Here,” he said. “Help yourself.” I reached in and pulled out one of those doughnut things his mother made.

“They’re called poonch-keys,” he said. “Take a bite. They’re delicious.”

I didn’t want to, but I did.

“What are you, a little mouse nibbling on a crumb? Take a big bite.”

So I did. The stuff inside looked like bloody nose.

“What kind did you get? Raspberry or prune?” I showed him where I’d bitten. “Oh, raspberry,” he said. “That’s my favorite, too. What are you shaking for, Dirty Boy?”

I tried to stop shaking, but I couldn’t. He kept looking at me.

“You know what poonch-key means? In Polish?”

I shook my head.

“It means ‘little package.’ Because the doughnut makes a little package around the stuff that’s inside, see?”

“Oh,” I said. “Can I go now? It’s recess.”

“Like us men carry the stuff that’s inside us. In our sacs. Get it?”

I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I nodded.

“You don’t look like you get it, Dirty Boy. If you get it, show me where your poonch-key is?”

“What?”

“Your ‘little package.’ Where is it? Point to it.”

I could hear kids playing outside, but they sounded farther away than just the playground. I was trying not to cry.

Mr. Zadzilko made an O with his thumb and his pointing finger. “Here’s the woman’s hole, see?” he said. “Otherwise known as her snatch, or her pussy, or her bearded clam.” He leaned closer and dropped his hand down. “And this, my dirty boy, is where your ‘little package’ is.” He flicked his finger, hard, in the place where Mother says I shouldn’t touch, and it hurt.

“It’s recess,” I said. “I’m supposed to go.”

“Go, then,” he said. “But just remember what happens to dirty boys with big mouths.”

The hallway was empty. There was laughing coming out of the teacher’s room. I went downstairs to the boys’ room. I hadn’t swallowed that bite he made me take; I’d hid it against my cheek. I spit it into the toilet and threw the rest of my poonch-key in after it. I kept flushing, and it kept swirling around and looking like it was going to go down, but then it would bob back up again. Then I thought, what if he’s got a lookout hole in the boys’ room, too? What if he’s watching me flush his mother’s stupid doughnut down the toilet? By the time I got out to the playground, I had a stomachache, and then the recess bell rang two seconds later, and we had to go in.

That night, I was lying in bed, thinking about Mr. Zadzilko, and Mother came in my room in the dark. “Caelum?” she said. “Are you asleep or awake?”

I didn’t answer for a long time. Then I said, “Awake.”

“I heard you crying. What were you crying about?”

I almost told her, but then I didn’t. “I was thinking about Jesus dying on the cross,” I said. “And it made me sad.” I knew she’d like that answer.

Mother goes to mass every morning before work. That’s why she can’t get me ready for school. Aunt Lolly gets me ready, once she finishes morning milking. Except, if there’s a problem, she calls me from the barn phone and I have to get myself ready, and not dawdle or I’ll miss the bus. One time? Some of our cows got loose and started running up Bride Lake Road. Aunt Lolly had to go get them, because they could have got hit by a car, and she forgot to call me. And I started watching Captain Kangaroo, which I’m not supposed to watch TV in the morning. And then the bus came and I was still in my pajamas. Mother had to leave work, drive back to the farm, and then drive me to school. She was crying and yelling, because now Mr. McCully probably wouldn’t pick her to be head teller, thanks to me. At the stop signs and red lights, she kept reaching over and whacking me. And by the time we got to school, we were both crying. I had to roll the window down and air out my eyes before I went in, because the school doesn’t need to know about our private family business.

On Saturdays, Mother vacuum-cleans the priests’ house for free and takes home their dirty clothes in pillowcases because Monsignor Guglielmo’s helping her get annulled. Last year, when I made my First Communion, Monsignor gave me a Saint Christopher medal because Mother’s always so helpful. All us kids got scapulars and little prayer books, but only I got a Saint Christopher medal. After Sunday dinner, Mother irons the priests’ clean clothes and drives them back. And if she finishes in time, then we can go to the movies. My favorite movie is Old Yeller, except for the part where Travis had to shoot Old Yeller because he got hydrophoby. Mother’s favorite movie is The Song of Bernadette. She says Jesus sends messages to the boys he picks to become priests, and that I should always look and listen for signs.

“What kind of signs?” I said.

“It could be anything. A voice, a vision in the sky.”

One time I saw a cloud that looked like a man with a big Jimmy Durante nose. When I sing “Inka Dinka Do” with my Jimmy Durante voice, the grown-ups always laugh. And at the end, I go, “Good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are!” and they clap and tell me to do it again. Mother never laughs, though. She says that Jimmy Durante cloud was not a sign from Jesus. I told Mother the Bushmen think God is a praying mantis, and she said that was just plain silly.

Mother and I are Catholic, and Grandpa Quirk and Aunt Lolly are Protestant. One Sunday, when Mother was outside warming up our car for church, I heard Grandpa ask Aunt Lolly, “Have the cat lickers left yet?” On the way over to St. Anthony’s, I asked Mother what cat lickers were. Her hands squeezed the steering wheel, and she took a puff of her cigarette and put it back in the ashtray. “Catholics,” she said. “You and me. If Grampy Sullivan heard Grandpa Quirk call us ‘cat lickers,’ he’d be pretty gosh darn mad.”

Aunt Lolly and Grandpa Quirk don’t have to go to church unless they want to, and they don’t have to eat Mrs. Paul’s stupid fish sticks on Friday. Mother gets mad if I hold my nose when I eat my fish sticks. “Like a little fish with your ketchup?” Grandpa always says. When Mother’s not looking, he sneaks me bites of meat.

My Grampy and Grammy Sullivan live in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts, and so don’t all my freckle-faced Sullivan cousins. When we go visit, Grampy Sullivan won’t speak to Mother. It’s because first, she didn’t marry a cat licker, and then, she got a divorce. Whenever Mother walks into a room, Grampy Sullivan walks out. Mother says he’s probably going to start speaking to her after she gets annulled. Poor Mother has to wait and wait and wait, like I had to wait until after Valentine’s Day before I got my Christmas present from Daddy.

When I was little? I used to think Grandpa Quirk was Mother’s father, but he’s not. Grandpa Quirk is Daddy and Aunt Lolly’s father. Aunt Lolly and Daddy are twins, except they don’t look alike, the way the Birdsey twins in my grade do. Aunt Lolly’s taller than Daddy, even though she’s the girl. Plus, she’s a little bit chubby and Daddy’s skinny. He has black hair, and a bushy beard, and two missing front teeth that aren’t going to grow back because they weren’t his baby teeth. Daddy and Aunt Lolly’s mother died in the middle of having Daddy, so Grandpa had to raise them by himself. And Great-Grandma Lydia was kind of like their grandmother and their mother. She wasn’t crazy then. Aunt Lolly said Great-Grandma used to be very, very smart. Daddy said, “My sister came out first, so she grabbed all the smarts and left me all the stupids.” He said he was the runt in a litter of two.

A lot of the kids in my class can’t tell the Birdsey twins apart, except I can. Thomas has a little dot near his eyebrow and Dominick doesn’t. Sometimes Thomas is a crybaby. They came over my house once. Dominick and I played Whirlybirds, on account of that’s both of our favorite show. I was Chuck, and Dominick was P.T., and we jumped down from the loft onto the bales of hay, like we had to jump out of our helicopter just before it crashed. Thomas was too chicken to play Whirlybirds. He only wanted to play with the barn kittens and throw a stick for Queenie.

Queenie’s our dog. She’s brown and white, and has these little eyebrows that make her look sad even when she’s happy. We got her from Jerry, the artificial insemination man. When Jerry comes to our farm, he brings this stuff called spunk that’s from the best sires in the state. I asked Grandpa what spunk is and he said, “Male stuff.” Jerry puts it in the cows’ hineys with this big needle-looking thing. And later, the cows have calves that grow up to be good milkers. If they’re girls. Grandpa writes a chalk mark on the barn wall every time a calf is born—X if it’s a male, an O if it’s a female. He says he’d be rich if he could only figure out how to milk a bull.

When I was a baby? It wasn’t Grandpa and Aunt Lolly that did the milking. It was Grandpa and Daddy. Then Grandpa and Daddy had a big fight, and we had to move, and Daddy worked at this place that made helicopters. I don’t remember any of that. All’s I remember is Mother and me living at the farm without Daddy. I’m the only kid in my class whose parents got a divorce.

When I was in first grade, and Daddy was being good? Grandpa let him sleep on a cot in the milk house. He got to have Sunday dinner with us, too. Mother didn’t want him to eat with us, but it wasn’t her decision. It was Grandpa’s decision. When Grandpa’s foot got infected was when Daddy started being good. Grandpa couldn’t milk, so Daddy came back and him and Lolly milked. Daddy was the one who taught me how to hang a spoon off my nose so it just stays there, and how to sing “Inka Dinka Do.” At school, I did the spoon trick for our talent show, and everyone wanted me to teach them how to do it. At recess, kids kept chasing me and going, “Please, Caelum. Please.”

Daddy got the idea for the corn maze when he was staying in the milkhouse. At first, Grandpa said no—it wouldn’t work. All people wanted was to drive out, buy their apples and pumpkins, and show their kids the cider press. And anyway, Grandpa said, what he needed come fall was silage, and what he didn’t need was everyone in Three Rivers and their uncle tramping through his cornfields. Then he changed his mind and told Daddy he could try it. So Daddy drew that map, and when the corn was about a foot high, he put me on his lap and we tractored down the paths and dead-ends and loop-de-loops. And I was the one who held the map.

That first year, it was Daddy and me who stuffed the Quirk family. And it was Daddy, not Aunt Lolly, who drew on the faces. “Free cocoa?” Grandpa said. “I thought we were trying to make money, not lose it.” But he changed his mind about that, too, and you know how much money the maze made us? Six hundred dollars! So Daddy got to eat Sunday dinner with us, whether Mother liked it or not.

One time, after Sunday dinner, Daddy made Mother cry. Lolly and Grandpa took Great-Grandma for a car ride, so it was just the three of us. Mother told Daddy to leave, but I wanted him to stay and play with me, so she said he could. Daddy was being nice at first. He tried to help Mother by bringing the dishes out to the kitchen, but she said she didn’t need any help. “If you two are going to play,” she said, “then play.”

Daddy read me the funny papers. Then we played tic-tac-toe. He wasn’t paying attention, though. He kept tapping his foot and looking over at the record player cabinet. “Want to hear a record?” he said. I said yes, either Bozo the Clown Under the Sea or Hopalong Cassidy and the Square Dance Holdup. But Daddy said he felt like listening to music. “Where’s your checker set at?” he said. “Go get it and we’ll play some checkers.”

At first, I thought the checkerboard was up in my room. Then I remembered it was in the pantry drawer. When I got to the bottom of the stairs, Daddy was standing at the record player cabinet. Except the door on the other side was open—the side where Grandpa’s liquor’s at. Daddy took a big swig out of one of Grandpa’s bottles, and then another swig, and then he noticed me. He put the bottle back and cleared his throat. “They used to keep the records on this side,” he said. “Guess I got mixed up. Got a little thirsty, too, but that’s between me and you, buddy. Okay?” And I said okay.

Grandpa’s good at checkers, but Daddy stunk. Plus, he was playing that Dean Martin music so loud, I couldn’t concentrate. When Mother came back to the dining room to get the tablecloth, he said, “Rosemary Kathleen Sullivan, my wild Irish rose.”

Mother didn’t say anything. She bunched up the tablecloth kind of mad and tried to walk past Daddy, but he pushed his chair out so she couldn’t get by. Then he touched her hiney.

“Don’t!” she said. She got all red, and went the other way around the table, and banged open the kitchen door the way I’m not supposed to.

Daddy laughed and called into the kitchen. “Watch out, everyone! Rosemary’s got her Irish up.”

“It’s your turn,” I said. But instead of moving his man, he picked up one of mine and jumped a bunch of his own checkers. “You win,” he said. “Go play.” Over at the record player cabinet, he lifted the needle and dropped it down on that song about the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie. He went into the kitchen, whistling.

“Because I don’t want to dance with you, that’s why!” Mother said. Then Daddy said something, and Mother said, “You think I can’t smell it on you, Alden? You think I can’t recognize a lost cause when he’s standing in front of me?” Then there was some noises and a crash. The kitchen door banged open.

“Wanna play Crazy Eights?” I said.

At the parlor window, I watched him walk faster and faster, down the driveway and onto Bride Lake Road, taking swigs from Grandpa’s bottle.

Mother was sitting on a kitchen chair, crying. She had one regular cheek and one all-red one. The broken pieces of our soup bowl were on the table next to her. “Lolly told me this tureen was one of Great-Grandma Quirk’s wedding presents,” she said.

“Oh…. You want a glass of water?”

“His wild Irish rose. That’s a laugh! I was just the first girl he grabbed on the rebound.” Then she looked at me. “Don’t you ever be mean like Daddy.”

“Want some water?” I said again.

She nodded. I got her the water and she took a little sip. She kept touching the broken soup bowl. “My hands were wet from the dishes,” she said. “It slipped. It was an accident.”

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”

She took another sip of her water. “How about a hug?” she said.

She put her arms around me. It was one of her stiff hugs, with the little pitty-pats on my back. “How come you never hug me back?” she said.

“I hug you back.”

“No, you don’t.”

MISS HOGAN? AT MY SCHOOL? She used to be our second-grade teacher and now she’s our third-grade teacher, too, on account of she switched grades. And I’m glad, because Miss Hogan’s nice. Plus, she’s pretty. She drives a green Studebaker and likes cats instead of dogs. This one time, Penny Balocki in our class was teasing me and saying that I love Miss Hogan and want to marry her. I don’t, though. I like her, but I don’t love her. And anyways, she’s already getting married.

Miss Hogan’s fiancé, Mr. Foster, used to play football at Fordham University, and now he’s a cameraman at a television studio in New York City. Miss Hogan’s favorite TV show is I’ve Got a Secret because that’s the show where Mr. Foster works at. And you know what? When Mr. Foster visited us that time, Frieda Buntz raised her hand and said, “Can you and Miss Hogan kiss for us?” And she had to go stand in the cloakroom until recess.

One time, during vacation week, Mother let me stay up late and watch I’ve Got a Secret. One man’s secret was that he got struck by lightning and didn’t die. Another man had this long, long beard and his secret was that, at night, he slept with his whiskers inside the covers, not outside. They guessed the whiskers guy, but not the lightning guy. Last year, one of our best milkers got struck by lightning. Dolly, her name was. And you know what the vet said? That Dolly’s heart exploded. Grandpa had to bulldoze her across the road and down into the gravel pit. All week long, vultures kept flying over our south field.

I’ve got a secret. Someone in our grade keeps spitting in the drinking fountain in the main hallway, and Miss Hogan thinks it’s Thomas Birdsey, but it’s not. It’s me. Last week, our whole class wasn’t allowed to get a drink until someone admitted they were the spitter. And everyone got madder and madder at Thomas because he wouldn’t admit it. Even I was mad at him, because I was thirsty and I kind of forgot who the real secret spitter was. Then Thomas made a load in his pants, the way he used to in first grade, and the office made his mother come get him. Our whole classroom stunk, and Miss Hogan had to send for Mr. Zadzilko, and we all went outside and played dodgeball. Dominick Birdsey had to stop playing, though, because he was whipping the ball too hard and hitting people’s faces. And after? When we came back in the building? Miss Hogan let us all get drinks. In the hallway, Mr. Zadzilko always looks at me, and I want to say, What are you looking at, Mr. Big Fat Glasses Face? I don’t, though. I just look away.

You know what? I stole something once. Mother and I were at Lu’s Luncheonette, buying Rolaids for Mother’s ulcer. And while Mother and Lu were talking at the cash register, I just picked a Devil Dog off the rack and put it in my coat pocket. I kind of thought I was going to get caught, except I didn’t. I don’t even like Devil Dogs that much; I like Hostess cupcakes better. I didn’t eat it. I just kept reaching inside my pocket and poking it with my finger. It got squishy, and the cellophane broke. And the next morning, I mailed it in the mailbox in front of our school.

Sometimes, when I try to hand in my paper early, Miss Hogan goes, “It’s not a race, Caelum. Go back to your desk and check your work.” If I check my work and I’m still waiting and waiting, that’s when I have to take the pass and go help Mr. Zadzilko. After Mr. McCully picked Mother to be head teller, now she always has to stay late at the bank because of her extra responsibilities. She won’t let me go on the bus, because Aunt Lolly’s already working at the prison when I get home and Grandpa’s getting ready for milking. But she doesn’t pick me up until way after all the other kids go home. She had to talk to Miss Anderson about letting me stay and wait, and Miss Anderson lets me because Mother’s divorced. Sometimes, I get to stay in our room with Miss Hogan, but sometimes I have to go be Mr. Zadzilko’s helper.

He has me clap erasers, or empty the wastebaskets into the big barrel in the hallway, or wipe down blackboards with the big sponge. One time, after an assembly, I had to go to the auditorium and help him fold all the folding chairs. We stacked them on these flat carts that have wheels. You know where all the folding chairs go? Under the stage. This door I never even noticed before opens, and the chairs roll in on the carts and stay there until the next assembly.

After the United Nations assembly was when Mr. Mpipi got fired. After he did his dance. First, Miss Anderson gave a speech about the UN. Then the fourth graders sang “Around the World in Eighty Days.” Then some lady who went on a trip to China showed us her China slides. Dominick Birdsey started tickling me, and Miss Hogan made us sit between her and Miss Anderson. The China lady talked so long that the projector melted one of her slides, and some of the sixth-graders started clapping.

Mr. Mpipi came on near the end. He walked out on the stage, and instead of his janitor clothes, he was wearing this big red cape and no shoes. He told everyone how the Bushmen hunted jackals, and prayed to their praying mantis god, and he talked their clicking talk. The sixth-graders started being rude. It’s okay if you laugh with someone, but it’s bad if you laugh at them. Mr. Mpipi thought everyone was laughing with him, so he started laughing, too—his squealy laugh—and that made things worse. Miss Anderson had to stand up and give the sixth-graders a dirty look.

Mr. Mpipi said he was going to show us two Bushman dances, the Dance of the Great Hunger and the Dance of Love. But he wasn’t going to stop in between, he said. One dance was just going to turn into the other one. “Because what does all of us hunger for?” he asked. No one in the audience said anything. Mr. Mpipi waited, and then finally he said the answer himself. “We hunger for love!”

He untied his cape and dropped it on the floor, and all’s he was wearing was this kind of diaper thing. I saw Miss Anderson and Miss Hogan look at each other, and Miss Anderson said, “Good God in Heaven.” Mr. Mpipi was shouting and yipping and doing this weird, shaky dance. He had a big potbelly and a big behind, and the sixth-graders were laughing so hard, they were falling off their chairs. Then someone yelled, “Shake it, Sambo!” Mr. Mpipi kept dancing, so I don’t think he even heard it, but Miss Andersen walked over and started flicking the auditorium lights on and off. Then she went up on the stage, handed Mr. Mpipi his cape, and said the assembly was over. “Everyone except the sixth-graders should proceed in an orderly fashion back to their rooms,” she said.

Later, during silent reading, Miss Hogan had me bring a note down to Miss Anderson’s office. Her door was closed, but I could hear Mr. Mpipi in there. He was saying, “But why I’m fired, Mrs. Principal? Please say the why?”

When the teachers are around, Mr. Zadzilko’s all nice to me. He calls me his best helper, and his junior janitor, and stuff. When it’s just him and me, he calls me “Dirty Boy,” and he keeps flicking his finger at me down there. “That’s to remind you that if you ever blab about certain secrets you and me got, I’ll tell everyone that Little Dirty Boy likes to look at his teachers’ twats.” And I think that means their girdles.

I killed something once. One of our chickens—the brown speckled one with the broken beak and the pecked-at head. “Nervous Nellie,” Grandpa always used to call her. He says a fox probably got her, but it didn’t. The other chickens were out front, pecking at the dirt, and she was all by herself behind the barn. I never liked her—never liked to look at that broken beak. At first, I was just tossing pebbles to bother her. Then I tossed a rock. Then I threw a rock, hard as I could, and it bounced off the barn and beaned her on the head. It looked funny at first, the way she just dropped, but then I realized she was dead and I got sad. She had blood coming out her eye. When I picked her up, she felt limp, like the rag doll Great-Grandma Lydia always wants me to hold and kiss. “Hold my baby,” she always says. “Kiss my Lillian.” Mother says Great-Grandma Lydia has cracks in her brain, and that’s what makes her crazy. The cracks are because she’s so old. All day long, she laughs at nothing and wants me to kiss her dolly. When Nervous Nellie died? I said a Hail Mary for her and buried her under some mucky leaves by the brook. Mother says God has a different heaven for animals than the one for people, but there’s no hell for animals, on account of animals don’t commit sins.

If Daddy steps one foot onto our farm, Grandpa’s getting him arrested for trespassing. Mother says I can’t tell anyone at school because that’s private information. Private information is like a secret, and trespassing’s when you step on someone’s private property and wreck things—like when those bad teenagers wrecked the Quirk family. At school, during morning exercises, we always say something about bad people who trespass against us. It’s in either the Pledge of Allegiance or the Lord’s Prayer. I always get those two mixed up. You know what? Miss Hogan’s picked me to lead morning exercises twice this year, and some kids haven’t even done it once.

“Tell him he can go to hell!” Grandpa said, that time the phone rang at supper, and Aunt Lolly answered it. It was Daddy.

“He just wants to apologize to you, Pop,” Aunt Lolly said. “Why don’t you let him apologize?” The phone in her hand was shaking, and Grandpa let out a big breath and got up from the table.

“Apologize for what?” I asked Mother, but she shushed me.

“Here, give me that thing,” Grandpa said.

Mother leaned toward me and whispered. “For what he did when you two went downtown to buy your present.”

“What is it, Alden?” Grandpa said. I could hear Daddy’s little voice coming out of the telephone, except not what he was saying. “Yep,” Grandpa kept saying. “Yep…Yep.” Then he said, “You know how I end each day, Alden? I go upstairs. Kiss my poor, dear mother goodnight—make sure she’s quiet and comfortable. Then I take my bath. Then, before I climb into bed, I get down on my two bad knees and pray to God that my beloved Catherine, who gave her life to bring you into this world, is resting peacefully in heaven. And do you want to know what else I pray for, Alden? I pray that your son doesn’t grow up to be a no-good bum like his father.”

Then I could hear what Daddy was saying. “But just listen to me. Okay, Pop? Can you please just listen to me?”

Grandpa said something about a broken record and hung up in the middle of Daddy’s talking. He looked over at Aunt Lolly. “There,” he said. “You satisfied?” Aunt Lolly didn’t say anything, but she was almost-crying-looking.

And later? When Lolly and me were feeding the chickens? I said, “Do you love Daddy, even though he’s bad?”

“He’s not bad,” she said. “He’s just got his troubles, that’s all. And of course I love him. He’s my brother. You love him, too. Don’t you?”

“I love him but I hate him,” I said.

She shook her head. “Those two cancel each other out. You’ve got to choose one or the other.”

I shrugged. Thought about it. “Love him, I guess.”

Lolly smiled. Then she reached over, grabbed my nose, and gave it a little tug.

WHAT DADDY DID WHEN WE went downtown was: first, he got drunk, and then he broke the cigarette machine, and then he made that gas station lady dance with him. It was my fault, in a way, because I couldn’t pee in the alley.

Grandpa had let Daddy borrow the truck, but Daddy and me were only supposed to go to Tepper’s, pick me out my present, and then come right back.

On the way into town, it started snowing—little snowflakes, not the big fat ones. We were both pretty quiet for a while. Being alone with Daddy felt different than being with him when Grandpa and Aunt Lolly were there. Daddy said, “You know what I’m thinking of buying you? One of those genuine Davy Crockett coonskin caps. How would you like one of those?”

“Good,” I said. I didn’t really want another one, but I didn’t want to say I didn’t. I was a little scared, but not that much.

“You want to play Antarctica?” he said.

I didn’t answer him because I didn’t know what he was talking about. “Well?” he said. “Do you or don’t you?”

I shrugged. “How do you play?”

He rolled down his window, then reached past me and rolled down mine. Cold air blasted in at us, and snow. “I don’t suppose your mother ever allowed you the pleasure of spitting out the car window,” Dad said. “But here in Antarctica, you can go right ahead and spit.” So I did. Then we rolled our windows back up and played the radio loud. Antarctica was kind of fun, but not really. There was a parking place right in front of Tepper’s.

The cash register lady said they didn’t sell coonskin caps anymore, so Daddy said, “Let me speak to the owner.” “No, sir,” Mr. Tepper said. “Davy Crockett kind of came and went. How about a hula hoop?” I didn’t really want one of those, either, but I picked out their last black one. “This thing’s only two ninety-nine,” Dad said. “Go ahead. Pick out something else.” He didn’t have enough money for ice skates, though, or this Cheyenne Bode rifle I kind of liked. So I got the hula hoop, some Dubble Bubble, and a Silly Putty egg. By the time we left Tepper’s, the snow had started sticking. “Well, Merry Christmas in February,” Daddy said. “Better late than never, right? You thirsty?”

The Cheery-O tavern had these two bartenders, Lucille and Fatty. Lucille asked Daddy what he wanted to wet his whistle, and Daddy said, “How ’bout a root beer for my buddy here, and I’ll have a root beer without the root. And maybe you can get that good-for-nothing husband of yours to cook us up a couple of his fried egg sandwiches.”

“Coming right up, Ace,” Fatty said. Everyone at the Cheery-O was calling Daddy “Ace.”

I ate my sandwich neat, but Daddy got yolk in his beard. He kept making me sing “Inka Dinka Do” for everybody. Then he started playing cards and drinking these drinks called Wild Turkeys. Fatty kept filling up my root beer mug without me even saying anything. I had to show some man with watery eyes how, when you press Silly Putty onto the funny papers and peel it off again, it makes a copy. “The Japs must make this gunk,” he said. “Because when you copy it, the words come out Japanese.”

“No, they don’t,” I said. “They’re just backward.” And the man laughed and called over to Daddy. “Hey, Ace! There’s no flies on this one.”

“No, but there’s flies all over you, you piece a shit!” Daddy called back. I thought the man was going to get mad, but he just laughed. Everyone laughed.

At first, the Cheery-O was kind of fun, but then it got boring. Daddy kept playing cards, and then Lucille yelled at me because I was hula-hooping on my arm, and I started doing it faster and faster, and it flew off and almost hit the bottles behind the bar. “One more hand, Buddy,” Daddy kept telling me. “This is my last hand.” For a long time, I just stood at the front window and watched the cars go by, slipping and sliding in the snow.

“Okay, let’s make like a tree and leave,” Daddy finally said. We were almost out the door when he grabbed my shoulder. “Hey, how would you like to be my lookout?” he said. He got down on his hands and knees and stuck his hand up inside the cigarette machine. My job was to tell him if either Fatty or Lucille was looking. Then Daddy said some bad words, and when he got up off the floor, his hand was bleeding. When he kicked the front of the machine, the glass smashed. “They’re looking!” I said. We ran.

The problem was, all those root beers made me have to go. Daddy took me to the alley between Loew’s Poli and Mother’s bank. “Go piss down there,” he said. “Go on. Hurry up.” His blood was dripping on the snow.

“I can’t,” I said.

“Sure you can. No one’s gonna see you. This is what guys do when they get caught short. It’s what I do.”

I started crying. “I want to, Daddy, but I can’t.”

He looked mixed up, not mad. “All right, all right. Come on, then.”

Whenever Mother and I went in the Mama Mia Bakery, the Italian lady was nice. But she was mean to Daddy. “Drunk as a skunk, and with a little boy, no less! You ought to hang your head in shame!”

“He just needs to use your toilet,” Daddy said.

“Get the hell out before I call the cops!”

Daddy said the Esso station would let us use their restroom, if his friend Shrimp was on and the boss wasn’t around. Shrimp and Daddy were friends, from when Daddy used to work there, before he got fired.

“Harvey comes back from the bank and sees you here, he’ll probably shitcan me,” Shrimp said. The other mechanic stopped working and came over.

“Jesus Christ Almighty, Shrimp,” Dad said. “You’re gonna let the kid have an accident?” Shrimp gave Daddy the key, and Daddy unlocked the door. “I’ll wait right out here,” he said. “Make it snappy.”

I was all shaking at first, and I got some on the seat and the floor. I kept peeing and peeing and peeing. The flusher didn’t work. There were dirty words on the wall and someone had drawn a picture of a man’s pee-pee. The sink had a spider in it. I put on the faucets full blast and watched it get caught in the tidal wave. It was dirty in there, but it was warm from this steamy radiator. I wanted to leave, and I didn’t want to. I didn’t like it when Daddy got drunk.

He wasn’t waiting right outside. He was in where Shrimp and the other guy were fixing the cars. He was talking louder than everyone else. “What do you mean you don’t want to dance with me, darlin’?” he said to some lady in a mink stole. “Sure you do!” He kept trying to waltz, and the woman kept trying not to, and when Shrimp tried to stop it, Daddy shoved him away. Then that Harvey guy got back from the bank.

It was a dirty fight. Three against one, plus Harvey kept hitting Daddy in the face with a bag of change. The lady’s stole got ripped, and she got rippy stockings and a skinned knee. Dad’s mouth was all bloody, and one of his front teeth was just hanging there. Stop crying, kid, everyone kept telling me. It’s okay. Stop crying. And I wasn’t even crying. I was just choking.

At the police station, we had to wait and wait. The blood on Daddy’s hand and his mouth turned rusty-colored. He still had egg yolk in his beard. When he reached up and pulled on his hanging tooth, I looked away. “My name is mud,” he kept saying. “Alden George Quirk the Third Mud.”

“Yeah, but don’t forget,” I said. “You invented the maze.”

And he laughed and said no, he didn’t. All’s he did was copy the idea from some farm he seen when he was hitchhiking through New Jersey. Then he touched my cheek with his sandpaper hands and told me I was his California kid. “How come I’m that?” I asked, but he didn’t answer me.

Later, one of the policemen who arrested us at the Esso station came over and said they finally got ahold of Grandpa.

“What’d he say?” Daddy asked.

“That he can’t come pick up the boy because you have his truck. But that’s okay. We can run him back out there.”

“What did he say about me?” Daddy said.

“That we should lock you up and let you dry out, same as we do with all the other bums.”

The cruiser had a radio, and a siren, and chains on the tires because of the snow. The policeman told me to sit in the back. “Did I get arrested?” I said. He said I didn’t because I didn’t do anything wrong. “You know what you need for the ride back home?” he said. He pulled in front of the Mama Mia Bakery.

I don’t think the Italian lady recognized me, because she was nice again. “Which would you like, sweetheart? A sugar cookie or a chocolate chip?” I took a chocolate chip and it was free. The policeman got a free cruller. He was going to pay for it, but the bakery lady said, “Oh, go on. Get out of here. Your money’s no good in here.” She said it nice, though. Not mean.

On the way home, I remembered about my hula hoop and my Silly Putty: I’d forgotten them back at the Cheery-O. I didn’t eat my cookie. I just held it, all the way back. Even with the snow chains on, the police car kept wiggling back and forth on the snowy road. The cows were out in the pasture still, not in the barn. They had smoky breath and snow on their backs, and when I saw them, I started crying.

One time, I had a scary dream that Daddy was giving me a ride in a helicopter. We were flying over our farm, and he said, “Hang on. Something’s wrong. We’re going to crash!” And then I woke up.

In this other scary dream, Mr. Zadzilko grabbed me and put me in that dark space under the stage where the folding chairs go. He locked that little door and nobody knew I was there. When I tried to scream, nothing came out.

Mr. Zadzilko told me he killed a dog once, by tying a rope around the dog’s neck and throwing the other end over a tree branch, and then yanking. “You oughta have seen the way that dog was dancing,” he said. “You got a dog. Don’t you, Dirty Boy?” he said.

I said no, I didn’t.

“Yes, you do. He’s brown and white. I seen him that time my mother and me drove out to your farm for cider. Maybe if Dirty Boy tells certain secrets, his dog will get the Stan Zadzilko rope treatment.”

“How come you have a mother but no wife?” I said, and he got all red, and told me that was his business.

I DUCK UNDER THE KEEP-OUT rope and take the shortcut to the middle of the maze. That’s where Daddy meets me. His tent’s somewhere in the woods, past the gravel pit. Sometimes he’s by himself and sometimes he’s with that kerchief lady who always stares at me and smiles. He’s trespassing.

I hide the ham and the cookies and potatoes in the baby carriage, under the Quirk baby, the way he says to do when he’s not here. I’m glad he’s not here this morning—him, and that lady, and his stupid jack-o-lantern missing teeth.

Back at the farm, there’s trouble: a big fight, Hennie and Aunt Lolly on one side, and Zinnia and Chicago on the other. “One little raggedy-ass jug of cider—that’s all I ever snitched from here, so help me Jesus!” Zinnia says. “So that later on down the line, I could sip me a little applejack.”

“Then why’s half a ham missing?” Hennie says. “Why is it that this morning a package of icebox cookies was unopened, and now it’s half-gone?”

“I don’t know about no icebox cookies!” Zinnia says. “Ax him!” Her finger’s pointing at me.

“Caelum?” Aunt Lolly says. “Did you eat some of the cookies that were in the pantry?” I shake my head. And I’m not lying, either. I took them but I didn’t eat them.

“Come on, Zinnia,” Aunt Lolly says. “I’m escorting you back. You’ve broken a trust, so I can’t have you working here anymore.”

“Then take me back, too!” Chicago chimes in. “You can crank your own damn apples. Haul your own damn slop barrel down that hill.”

“Don’t you realize that it’s a privilege to work here?” Hennie says.

“Privilege my black be-hind!” Chicago says. “What’s so ‘privilege’ about me breaking my back all day for no pay?”

I can’t tell Lolly and Hennie that it was me who took the food, because then Grandpa will find out Daddy’s trespassing and get him arrested. And it’s a secret. I promised him I wouldn’t tell. And you know what? I think Lolly’s wrong. I think I can love and hate Daddy. Because now Zinnia and Chicago are in trouble, just like Thomas Birdsey got in trouble that time when it was me who was the secret spitter. And tonight, if I die in my sleep like the prayer says, I’m probably going to hell because getting other people in trouble for something you did is, I think, a mortal sin, not a venial sin, and probably hell is going to have a hundred million Mr. Zadzilkos with devil horns.

BUT THAT NIGHT? WHEN I’M lying in bed, thinking about Mr. Zadzilko and getting scared again? I put my light on, and take my pen, and do what Zinnia did: I write “Jesus” on the palm of my hand, and the S in the middle of Jesus becomes the first S in “saves.” It’s not a tattoo, but maybe it’ll work. I kept staring at it and staring at it, and saying, “Jesus…Jesus.” I don’t feel his arms around me, though; I don’t feel anything. Maybe it’s because I didn’t prick myself with a pin, or because every time I say “Jesus,” all’s I can see is Mr. Mpipi, up on the stage, dancing his crazy dance.

On Monday morning, Miss Hogan makes an announcement. “We have to be extra tidy for the next several days,” she says. “Poor Mr. Zadzilko’s mother died over the weekend. He’s going to be absent all week.”

She shows us the sympathy card she’s going to pass around and says to make sure we sign in cursive, in pen not pencil, and neat not sloppy. When the card gets to me, I write “Caelum Quirk,” but Mr. Big Fat Glasses Face probably doesn’t even know my name. All’s he ever calls me is “Dirty Boy.”

All day, I keep thinking about Mr. Zadzilko being absent. And after school—after I empty our wastebasket and wash our board and I’m still waiting for Mother—I go up to Miss Hogan’s desk. “What is it, Caelum?” she says.

“I’ve got a secret.”

“You do, do you? Would you like to tell me what it is?”

“Miss Anderson smokes,” I say. “When she sits on the toilet. I seen her from Mr. Zadzilko’s peeking hole.”

For a long time she just looks at me—like I said it in Japanese or something. Then she gets up, takes my hand, and has me show her.

And you know what? The next morning, when I wake up? The egg case on my windowsill has hatched. There’s tiny little praying mantises scrambling all over the sill, and on the floor, and even in my bed.

Hundreds of them.

Thousands.

Millions, maybe.