Wringer Read online

  It made no sense, but Palmer was thrilled to hear her voice. “It was all boys,” he said.

  “Good,” she said with a disdainful sniff. Sometimes it amazed him that this girl, just out of third grade, could make him feel so little. She went on hopping.

  “Did you hear my new name?” he said.

  She did not answer, did not look up.

  “It’s Snots.”

  A short snorty chuckle burst from her nose, then she was stone-faced again.

  He turned so that his left arm was fully facing her, so she couldn’t miss it.

  “I got The Treatment too.” She went on hopping. “For three days I could only move my arm up to here.” She did not even look. “Want to see my bruise?” Her eyes never left the green beanbag.

  He stood. He smiled. “Want to touch it?”

  It was as if he wasn’t there.

  So he ran off and found others to marvel at his bruise. He played with the guys, and when they came to taunt Dorothy, he did not feel as bad as he had before. They called her “Fishface!” and made fun of her name and kicked her beanbag off the hopscotch squares. Palmer stood back and gave a sly grin. That’ll teach you, Dorothy Gruzik.

  At the same time she befuddled him. Not once did she raise her eyes to her tormenters or say anything back. She did not run into her house. She did not cry. What kind of girl was this? She just kept playing hopscotch, as if no one else was there.

  After a while Beans could not take any more fun, so they all ran off.

  In the third week after The Treatment, Palmer came to the end of his imaginary parade. His bruise had faded to a dim yellowish blot, and the crowds had gone home. But something was still there. Palmer knew what it was. It had been there all along, silent, hardly seen among the cheering crowd, a flash of black feather now and then, an orange eye, waiting.

  As he kicked his checkered soccer ball along the streets, he could feel it lurking in shadowy doorways, behind shaded windows. He would not look. He felt it come out of the shadows, and the sunlight on the back of his neck turned to frost. It was behind him. He picked up his ball and ran.

  But he could not run from time. It was the first week in August.

  Family Fest had arrived.

  8

  Family Fest.

  Such a nice name. And a nice time it was. A week of talent contests and softball games and races and Tilt-A-Whirl and bumper cars and music and barbecue and cotton candy.

  And shooting pigeons.

  If only Family Fest would stop on Friday, Palmer had often wished. But it did not. It began on Monday and ended on Saturday. And that Saturday, the first Saturday in August, one month after his birthday, was the worst day of the year.

  During the night before, trucks could be heard rumbling through the streets, carrying wooden crates from the old railroad station to the soccer field. The crates held pigeons. Five thousand of them.

  Except on that day, Palmer had never seen a pigeon in his town. Some, he heard, were trapped in the railroad yards of the great city a hundred miles to the east. The rest were bought, paid for. Why anyone would pay for a pigeon only to shoot it was just one of many questions about Pigeon Day that bewildered Palmer.

  Palmer’s first Pigeon Day had occurred when he was four. Certain moments, five years later, were still with him. The birds in the sky, then suddenly not in the sky, only feathers fluttering. The red fingers and lips of a man cheering, spewing specks of barbecued chicken. A man wearing a bright pink baseball cap. The smell of gunsmoke.

  And most of all the pigeon, the one pigeon that hurried across the grass lopsided—“loppysided,” as Palmer would have said then—as if one leg had been kicked out from under it, hurrying, hobbling, wobbling in goofy loops, tilting like a sailboat blown over, a boy chasing after, running and reaching, the boy laughing, the people laughing, little Palmer thinking, The boy wants it for a pet. And then the pigeon was coming this way, flopping, righting itself, hobbling straight for the people, head bobbing, loppysiding on a curving course, and the people were shrieking and calling “Wringer! Wringer!” and the boy was chasing and sure enough the boy caught it, caught that hobblywobbling pigeon right in front of Palmer. And the pigeon’s eye looked at Palmer and the pigeon’s eye was orange and everyone clapped and Palmer clapped too and laughed and called out “Good!” and the boy closed his hands over the pigeon’s neck and twisted his hands real quick—like that—and Palmer heard a tiny sound, like when a twig was stepped on, and when the boy took one hand away the pigeon’s head hung down toward the green grass, so sadly dangled down, though the pigeon’s eye was still round and orange.

  Palmer had turned and looked up at his mother and said, “Why did he do that?” and his mother had said, “To put the pigeon out of its misery.”

  “Was the pigeon in misery?” Palmer asked his mother.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Why?” said Palmer.

  His mother did not answer. She was looking at the sky.

  “Because he was loppysided?”

  She smiled thinly, she nodded. “Yes.”

  “The boy didn’t want him for a pet, did he?”

  His mother kept looking at the sky, kept not answering. Palmer began to notice a gray, sour smell in the air. Suddenly his mother grabbed his hand and pulled him away. As they squeezed through the crowd, the happy faces of the people and the cheers and laughter and the fingers red from barbecue sauce gave Palmer the feeling that he was leaving a party.

  The boy, Palmer learned later, was called a wringer. It was his job to put the wounded pigeons out of their misery.

  During the following year Palmer thought about that quite often. If the wounded pigeons were in misery, he wondered, why put them there in the first place by shooting them? Why not just let them all fly away?

  Palmer’s mother had no answer to these questions, so Palmer thought about it some more and concluded that all pigeons must be miserable, wounded or not, and that was why they must be shot. And perhaps the pigeons themselves knew this. Perhaps when the boxes were opened and they flew into the sky over the soccer field, they were not trying to fly away at all. They were simply giving the shooters a good target, they were saying, “Here we are, put us out of our misery.”

  How sad, to be a pigeon. And how nice of the people, that they would stop at nothing to help. They would shoot and wring—and, Palmer imagined, punch and hand grenade and bayonet if they had to—anything to end the poor birds’ misery. And this, Palmer guessed, was why the people were so happy. Because every dangling, orange-eyed head was one less miserable creature to weigh heavy on their hearts. Heaven, Palmer thought with a smile, must be teeming with pigeons.

  On the mantel of a fake fireplace in the den of Palmer’s house stood a statue of a pigeon. It was golden. It was beautiful. Words were etched into a shiny panel below the statue. Palmer could not yet read, so he pretended that the words said: In honor of all pigeons. This house loves you.

  But the questions did not stop. Killing the pigeons and putting them out of their misery stubbornly refused to mean the same thing. Palmer thought about misery, and it seemed to him that a shotgun was not the only way to end it. When Palmer was miserable, for example, his mother or father would hold him close and wipe his tears. When Palmer’s mother or father put him out of his misery, they did not shoot him, they offered him a cookie. Why then on Pigeon Day did the people bring guns instead of cookies?

  It was confusing.

  “Was Daddy a wringer?” Palmer asked his mother one day.

  After a minute she said, “Better ask your father.”

  So he asked his father. “Daddy, were you a wringer?”

  His father looked at him and said, “Yep.”

  “Will I be a wringer too?”

  His father gave a snappy nod and said, “Sure thing, big guy.”

  Sure thing. Palmer pronounced the words over and over in the days that followed. Sure thing.

  Boys became wringers, he heard, when they became ten y
ears old.

  9

  Palmer had attended his second Pigeon Day with Dorothy Gruzik and her family, as his mother had other things to do. It was Dorothy’s first. She pointed to the mountain of boxes at the far end of the field. “What are they for?” she asked Palmer.

  “That’s where the pigeons are,” he told her.

  “What are they doing in there?” she said.

  “They’re waiting to get out,” Palmer told her. He felt like an old pro, clueing in the new kid. “They go from the big boxes to those little white boxes there. Every little white box has five pigeons. Somebody pulls a string and a door opens and one pigeon flies out.” His father had told him these things. “Guess how many pigeons there are.”

  Dorothy gave it some thought. “A hundred.”

  Palmer smiled smugly. “Five thousand.”

  Dorothy Gruzik’s mouth fell open as her eyes rolled upward. She was imagining a skyful of pigeons. “Wow,” she said. “Then what?”

  “They shoot them.”

  For a long time Dorothy Gruzik did not move. It looked as if she were waiting for rain to fall into her mouth. When she finally turned her eyes back to Palmer, he wished he wasn’t there.

  “What?” she said.

  “They shoot them,” he repeated, and the words were dusty and bitter on his tongue. There seemed only one way to get rid of the bad taste, and that was to flush out his mouth with more and more words. “They go bam! bam! bam! They open up a box and the pigeon flies out and the gun goes bam! and the bird goes—” Palmer raised his hand high above his head and dived it down to the ground to show her; for sound effect, he tried out his newly learned whistle. “And then another one comes out—bam! Another one—bam!” After each bam! came a dive and a whistle. “And the wringers run out to get the pigeons, and if the pigeon isn’t dead the wringer wrings its neck.” He brought his curled fists together and snap-twisted them. “Like that.” He made the sound of a twig breaking.

  She was already running, tunneling through the crowd, bouncing off grown-ups’ legs, her mother after her, “Excuse me…excuse me…”

  Palmer bored through to the back side of the crowd. Dorothy was running past the picnic tables, her mother chasing.

  Palmer called: “They put them out of their misery! That’s all! That’s all!”

  He discovered that he was crying.

  10

  By the following year Palmer no longer cared to watch. So he spent Pigeon Day at the playground with Dorothy Gruzik. Through the day the squeak of the seesaw and the creak of the swings joined the sound of the shotguns. At this distance they sounded like balloons popping.

  While they were on the swings, a boy he knew as Arthur Dodds came by. Arthur had not yet begun calling himself Beans. He was dashing through the playground when he spotted Palmer and Dorothy and skidded to a halt.

  “Whattaya doing?” he demanded of the two of them.

  “We’re swinging,” said Dorothy. “What’s it look like?” Even then she wasn’t afraid.

  “They’re shooting the pigeons,” he said. His feet were still pointed toward the soccer field; his whole body was twitching. “Come on!”

  “We’re staying here,” said Dorothy.

  Palmer was glad that Dorothy answered, but now Arthur Dodds was heading straight for him. “What’s your name?” he growled.

  “Palmer.”

  “Your first name.”

  “That is my first name.”

  “What kind of a name is that?”

  What could Palmer say? He shrugged.

  Arthur Dodds came closer. At that time he still had his baby teeth, which were as colorful as his second teeth would become. “You coming?” he said.

  Palmer did not know what to say. He looked at Dorothy. She was staring at him. Somehow her face gave him the answer. He shook his head no.

  Arthur Dodds exploded. “Sissymissy! Girl-baby!” He gave the swing chain such a yank that Palmer was thrown like a bronco rider onto the ground. Arthur Dodds took off, braying, “I’m a wringer, I’m a wringer! I’m gonna get me a pigeon and wring ’im!”

  And he did.

  As Palmer later heard the story, Arthur Dodds made a real nuisance of himself that day. He kept darting onto the field to chase wounded pigeons, only to be chased away himself by the real wringers. Arthur Dodds, like Palmer, was only six years old at the time.

  Finally he got what he wanted. A shot bird, instead of falling onto the soccer field, made it to the picnic area before it came down. Arthur saw and lit out after it. He heard a woman screaming. The bird had fallen right into the pink-fringed stroller where her baby was sleeping.

  By the time Arthur got there, the pigeon was on the ground and being chased around the picnic tables by half a dozen squealing toddlers. Arthur joined the chase. The bird flapped up onto a table. People screamed. Hot dogs flew. Arthur lunged across the table, knocking drinks, smashing pickled eggs, and snatched the pigeon by the legs in a bowl of chicken salad. According to the story, Arthur threw his arms into the air like a boxing champion and crowed, “Got me one!” Then, right before the gaping eyes of the picnickers, he wrung its neck.

  Arthur Dodds wasn’t finished. So proud was he of his dead pigeon that he took it home, wrapped it in newspaper and hid it under his bed. For almost a week he charged kids a quarter apiece for a look. Then his mother started to smell something, and pretty soon that was that.

  Palmer smelled something too, something about his father when he would return from Pigeon Days. As often happened, Palmer would wind up in his father’s lap. It was his favorite place in all the world, where he was safe from everything. But on those days he could smell the gray and sour odor of the gunsmoke. The closer he nuzzled into his father’s shirt, the more he could smell it.

  Then he began smelling the gray and sour odor even when his father wasn’t there, even when Pigeon Day was over. It might happen in the morning as he sat in school, or at night as he lay in bed. It could even happen in his father’s lap in the middle of winter, when the shotgun had been locked away for months.

  The smell was sure to come on his birthday. It did not spoil his birthday, as it did not spoil his father’s lap, but it changed those things so they did not feel quite as good as before.

  Other things changed. Arthur Dodds became Beans, and Beans was joined by Billy Natola, who became Mutto, and by a new, very tall boy in town known only as Henry. Palmer wanted to join them, but they said he was too small and too young and that he had a funny first name and that he played with girls, little ones at that.

  Which wasn’t true. The older he got, the less he had to do with Dorothy Gruzik. When he went off to first grade, he left her behind on her front steps, clutching a doll. In second grade he said to the guys, “She’s my neighbor, that’s all. I can’t help that, can I? And anyway, what do I want with a first grader?” But they weren’t listening.

  Palmer invited them to his eighth birthday, but no one came. So his mother stormed across the street and dragged Dorothy to the dining room table, and his mother and father and Dorothy sang “Happy Birthday” to him, and his mother had a big smile but her eyes were red.

  That was the summer that Palmer’s family went on a vacation trip. They stopped in the big city for a day. From the tourist information center they got a map and gave themselves a walking tour of historic places.

  Pigeons were everywhere: sidewalks, ledges, steps. Palmer even saw one crossing a street with a crowd of people on a green light, just another pedestrian. They strutted boldly, those pigeons, going about their business, pecking here, pecking there. They did not seem in the least bit afraid or apologetic. They acted as if they belonged, as if this was their city as well as the people’s.

  And the people, they did not even seem to notice the pigeons. Palmer kept tugging at his parents: “Look, there’s one!…Look at that one!” But the city people ignored them. No one had a shotgun.

  Except for the wounded pigeon that was wrung in front of him when he was four,
this was Palmer’s first close look at the birds. He had heard that pigeons were dirty, filthy, nothing more than rats with wings. He looked and looked, but all he saw were plump, pretty birds with shiny coats. He was especially fascinated by how they moved. They did not hop, like sparrows or robins, but they walked, one pink foot in front of the other, just like people. With each step the head gave a nod, as if to say, Yes, I will. I agree. You’re right. As Palmer saw it, the pigeon was a most agreeable bird.

  They were passing through a park with many trees and benches when Palmer saw something that stopped him in his tracks. A man sitting on a bench was smothered in pigeons. They were on his shoulders, his head, his lap, snapping up seeds that the man appeared to have poured over himself. The pigeons were cooing and the man was giggling—or was the man cooing and the pigeons giggling? It was hard to tell.

  Back home, it occurred to Palmer that since he now could read quite well, he should have another look at the inscription on the golden pigeon statue in the den. It said:

  Sharpshooter Award

  Pigeon Day

  1989

  There, standing before the golden pigeon, the odor of gunsmoke came to him, and he understood that his father was a shooter.

  It was about then that Palmer began to feel a certain tilt to his life. Time became a sliding board, at the bottom of which awaited his tenth birthday.

  Beans kept asking, “You gonna be a wringer?”

  Every time, Palmer would look straight into that crayon box of teeth and say, “Sure thing.” And every time he said it he could feel his heart thump. For among all the changes in his life, one thing stayed the same. It was something he had known since his second Pigeon Day, when he sat with Dorothy Gruzik on the swings: He did not want to be a wringer.

  11

  Cotton candy days, Ferris wheel nights. Family Fest was almost better than Christmas—and longer. What had been the American Legion baseball field last week was this week a wonderland. Ten times over Palmer explored every ride, every food stand, every amusement booth. He loved the boiling fat’s crackling hiss that cooked his fries and funnel cakes. He loved the yelp and splash when a ball hit the mark at the Dunk-A-Kid booth, the pop of darted balloons, the St. Bernard-size grand prizes, Tilt-A-Whirl’s woozy flight, neon lights like bottled fireworks, House of Horrors and Pretzel Man and chocolate bananas on a stick.