The Pigman's Legacy

  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

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Zindel, Paul.

  The pigman's legacy.

  SUMMARY: Haunted by the memory of a dead friend, two teenagers join an old man in a series of misadventures.

  1. Title.

  PZ7.Z647Pj 1980 [Fic] 79-2684

  eISBN: 978-1-935169-83-3

  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.

  It was last May, about four months after our Pig-man died, that John and I were riding home platonically as usual after school, and we got so involved in a discussion on the therapeutic value of mourning that we'd gone two bus stops past our regular stop before we remembered to get off. I had been talking about how important it is to cry when somebody dies, and John said you really didn't have to cry outside, you could cry inside. And I told him that sublimation was just as dangerous as anything else the human mind could do, but I didn't mind having to walk farther than usual because I liked walking alone with John#x2014;even though I didn't know if he really liked walking alone with me. We weren't a romantic item, but ever since the Pig-man's death whenever we walked alone John would hold my hand. You might as well know here that sometimes I could feel electricity flowing through my fingers into his, which wasn't amazing, since we'd both turned sixteen and John still has long brown hair and gigantic eyes that can not only look right through you but grab your heart while they're doing it. Anyway, we were just walking along and after about five minutes John and I noticed something very peculiar. Without realizing it we had started strolling along Howard Avenue, and we were walking right toward Mr. Pignati's old house. Mr. Pignati was our Pigman's real name, and somehow we had always tried to avoid that particular route to get home ever since he had died.

  “I don't like what I'm feeling,” I told John.

  “What's that?”

  “Anxiety.”

  John held my hand tighter. “We can go back the other way,” he said.

  “No, that'll take too long.”

  But as soon as I said that, I felt a cold wind sweep between us and I began to shiver. Goose pimples rose up out of my skin like a million tiny icebergs. We started to walk around a bend past all the old villas that once housed the elite of Staten Island, when we heard a whirring sound in the air. It was chilling, like a continual shriek coming from the outer reaches of the universe. I even thought John could see the thump of my heart right through my sweater, because he squeezed my hand so hard I thought he was going to cut off the circulation in my fingers. I didn't need anyone to draw me a picture to know that John was a little frightened too, because ever since the Pigman had died his nerves seemed to have been on edge. I think what was happening to us was that we truly expected to see the ghost of our dead friend come swirling toward us.

  It wasn't until we had completely rounded the bend that we became certain that the whirring sound was coming right in our direction. Suddenly we saw what it was. A little old nun was sitting on top of a small tractor mower, cutting the grass in front of the Grymes Hill Convent there.

  John and I looked at each other in disbelief, and burst into laughter. If I hadn't known better I would've thought John had set this whole thing up just to scare me. We did the best we could to muffle our giggles because we didn't want the nun to think we were laughing at her even though she was a bit of a sight sitting atop that tractor with her habit and the chopped grass undulating in the air behind her. It wasn't until she turned up the convent's driveway that John and I could really compose ourselves. Some psychologists would simply say our laughter was a type of nervous release, but in just a few steps more we were standing right in front of the Pigman's old house, 190 Howard Avenue. The house had changed a great deal since we had last seen it. Its simple wooden frame looked as though some terrible witch had put a curse upon it and sentenced it to sleep for a hundred years. The bushes had grown so wild the house was submerged in a jungle of vines and thorns.

  “Look over there, Lorraine.”

  I almost wanted to cry. A large limb from the huge maple tree on the side of the house had split in half and was just hanging. The rest of the tree was covered with leaves, but this limb was dead, and no one had ever taken it down. That was what hurt the most#x2014;that it was clear no one cared about this house anymore. It had no doubt been left to rot and just wait for some real-estate speculators and bulldozers who would more than likely come one day and demolish it.

  “I feel terrible,” I said. “I feel as if someone's telling us to take all our wonderful memories of the fun we had in this house and bury them with Mr. Pignati.”

  “I know,” John said softly.

  We just stood there, hypnotized by the house, remembering the past. Then the wind started to blow again. Suddenly I was talking to myself. What was that? What is that curtain flapping at the window upstairs? What am I seeing? What is that moving? My eyes must be playing tricks on me! There was a face in a window. Dark, ominous eyes staring out into the street at me#x2014;and I knew they could see my eyes staring back.

  I reached my hand to my mouth to muffle a scream, and the face disappeared.

  “John! did you see that?” I asked as my blood froze and my mouth dropped open.

  three

  I didn't see what Lorraine was talking about. In fact the only reason I think she had ghosts on the brain was because of all those psychology books she reads. I tried to tell her that all psychologists are screwballs, which is why they go into that field anyway.

  “No, I didn't see anything,” I told Lorraine. But I'm afraid I said it a little too quickly. I suppose the truth of the matter was that I wasn't sure. Maybe there was something, but it was probably a reflection from something. It could have been a shadow from the berserk foliage around the old house. But with Lorraine and her built-in radar equipment I sometimes have to listen to her because you can never tell what signals she's picking up on. The month before, Lorraine had the same dream three nights in a row. I mean that's the kind of psychology freak she is. She said in this dream she was walking down the main aisle in the school cafeteria and kept seeing some person with flashlights for ears. Now ordinarily that would just seem very crazy, but the very next week this lady by the name of Dolly Racinski was hired as the cafeteria-floor sweeper. It was sad to see this happy and perky little sixtyish old woman pushing a broom and picking up squashed half-pint milk containers, which all the teenage baboons jump on so they make explosion sounds. But the really weird part was that Dolly Racinski wore giant-sized pom-pom-shaped rhinestone earrings that sparkled exactly as if she was wearing flashlights in her ears. And then whenever she took off the custodial smock, she always had on a green or gold electric-colored dress that was so bright you'd think she was on fire. She pushed that broom and her earrings would swing from left to right#x2014;and we soon learned she never took her earrings off. It was just like that lady I read about once in the National Enquirer who was out in the rain and got struck by lightning which melted her left earring to her ear in such a way that she would have to wear it for life unless she wanted to have her ear cut off. It was funny how Lorraine and I thought of her dream the moment we saw Dolly. In fact it was spooky considering the fact that Dolly
would one day come to play such an important part in our lives. Of course we're the ones who made her play that part, because even from the first day she came to work we used to say, “Hi, Dolly. How are you feeling today?” She'd push the broom by and say, “Lookin' up! Lookin' up!” And sometimes when other kids would throw pennies and m&m's at her, we'd yell at them. And she would come over to us and say, “You kids are swell. You kids are just swell.”

  But at the moment Lorraine saw the ghost on Howard Avenue we really didn't think Dolly Racinski or anybody was going to help us. Of course, we are very used to not getting help from the adult world at all, as a general rule.

  “It was a ghost,” Lorraine insisted as she rushed down the street fleeing the old house.

  “There are no such things as ghosts,” I kept repeating, trotting in order to keep up with her.

  “Oh come off it. You saw the eyes. They looked just like Mr. Pignati's.”

  “I didn't see any eyes.”

  “Yes you did.

  “Mr. Pignati must have come back from the other side to give us a message,” she said. “Dead people do things like that. I know about it!”

  Lorraine babbled on a mile a minute all the way until we reached her house. She started quoting all these weird cases, like the time some famous poetess died and all her relatives saw this apparition rise up off her body and dance on the ceiling. And she told me it's a well-known fact that many star ghosts from Forest Lawn come out at night and run around that fancy cemetery#x2014;like Jean Harlow and Jeanette MacDonald have been seen prancing around the Hall of the Resurrection they have there. I tried to change the subject three times, but I couldn't stop her from talking about Duke University and all those other places that have experiments that prove the existence of supernatural presences and other spooks.