The Pigman

  PAUL ZINDEL

  THE PIGMAN

  For the Boy and Girl of Stapleton

  The Oath

  Being of sound mind and body on this 15th day of April in our sophomore year at Franklin High School, let it be known that Lorraine Jensen and John Conlan have decided to record the facts, and only the facts about our experiences with Mr. Angelo Pignati.

  Miss Reillen, the Cricket, is watching us at every moment because she is the librarian at Franklin High and thinks we’re using her typewriter to copy a book report for our retarded English teacher.

  The truth and nothing but the truth, until this memorial epic is finished, So Help Us God!

  1

  Now, I don’t like school, which you might say is one of the factors that got us involved with this old guy we nicknamed the Pigman. Actually, I hate school, but then again most of the time I hate everything.

  I used to really hate school when I first started at Franklin High. I hated it so much the first year they called me the Bathroom Bomber. Other kids got elected G.O. President and class secretary and lab-squad captain, but I got elected the Bathroom Bomber. They called me that because I used to set off bombs in the bathroom. I set off twenty-three bombs before I didn’t feel like doing it anymore.

  The reason I never got caught was because I used to take a tin can (that’s a firecracker, as if you didn’t know) and mold a piece of clay around it so it’d hold a candle attached to the fuse. One of those skinny little birthday candles. Then I’d light the thing, and it’d take about eight minutes before the fuse got lit. I always put the bombs in the first-floor boys’ john right behind one of the porcelain unmentionables where nobody could see it. Then I’d go off to my next class. No matter where I was in the building I could hear the blast.

  If I got all involved, I’d forget I had lit the bomb, and then even I’d be surprised when it went off. Of course, I was never as surprised as the poor guys who were in the boys’ john on the first floor sneaking a cigarette, because the boys’ john is right next to the Dean’s office and a whole flock of gestapo would race in there and blame them. Sure they didn’t do it, but it’s pretty hard to say you’re innocent when you’re caught with a lungful of rich, mellow tobacco smoke. When the Dean catches you smoking, it really may be hazardous to your health. I smoke one with a recessed filter myself.

  After my bomb avocation, I became the organizer of the supercolossal fruit roll. You could only do this on Wednesdays because that was the only day they sold old apples in the cafeteria. Sick, undernourished, antique apples. They sold old oranges on Fridays, but they weren’t as good because they don’t make much noise when you roll them. But on Wednesdays when I knew there was going to be a substitute teaching one of the classes, I’d pass the word at lunch and all the kids in that class would buy these scrawny apples. Then we’d take them to class and wait for the right moment—like when the substitute was writing on the blackboard. You couldn’t depend on a substitute to write on the blackboard though, because usually they just told you to take a study period so they didn’t have to do any work and could just sit at the desk reading The New York Times. But you could depend on the substitute to be mildly retarded, so I’d pick out the right moment and clear my throat quite loudly—which was the signal for everyone to get the apples out. Then I gave this phony sneeze that meant to hold them down near the floor. When I whistled, that was the signal to roll ’em. Did you ever hear a herd of buffalo stampeding? Thirty-four scrawny, undernourished apples rolling up the aisles sound just like a herd of buffalo stampeding.

  Every one of the fruit rolls was successful, except for the time we had a retired postman for General Science 1H5. We were supposed to study incandescent lamps, but he spent the period telling us about commemorative stamps. He was so enthusiastic about the old days at the P.O. I just didn’t have the heart to give the signals, and the kids were a little put out because they all got stuck with old apples.

  But I gave up all that kid stuff now that I’m a sophomore. The only thing I do now that is faintly criminal is write on desks. Like right this minute I feel like writing something on the nice polished table here, and since the Cricket is down at the other end of the library showing some four-eyed dimwit how to use the encyclopedias, I’m going to do it.

  Now that I’ve artistically expressed myself, we might as well get this cursing thing over with too.

  I was a little annoyed at first since I was the one who suggested writing this thing because I couldn’t stand the miserable look on Lorraine’s face ever since the Pigman died. She looked a little bit like a Saint Bernard that just lost its keg, but since she agreed to work on this, she’s gotten a little livelier and more opinionated. One of her opinions is that I shouldn’t curse.

  “Not in a memorial epic!”

  “Let’s face it,” I said, “everyone curses.”

  She finally said I could curse if it was excruciatingly necessary by going like this @#$%. Now that isn’t too bad an idea because @#$% leaves it to the imagination and most people have a worse imagination than I have. So I figure I’ll go like @#$% if it’s a mild curse—like the kind you hear in the movies when everyone makes believe they’re morally violated but have really gotten the thrill of a lifetime. If it’s going to be a revolting curse, I’ll just put a three in front of it—like 3@#$%—and then you’ll know it’s the raunchiest curse you can think of.

  Just now I’d better explain why we call Miss Reillen the Cricket. Like I told you, she’s the librarian at Franklin and is letting us type this thing on her quiet typewriter, which isn’t quiet at all. But there aren’t many kids in seventh-period study because most of them cut it and the others get excused early because our school is overcrowded. It’s only kids like Lorraine and me that get stuck with seventh-period study because we have to stay around for an eighth-period class called Problems in American Democracy. And if you think having Problems in American Democracy is a fun way to end the day, you need a snug-fitting straitjacket.

  Anyway, Miss Reillen is a little on the fat side, but that doesn’t stop her from wearing these tight skirts which make her nylon stockings rub together when she walks so she makes this scraaaaaaatchy sound. That’s why the kids call her the Cricket. If she taught wood-shop or gym, nobody’d really know she makes that sound—but she’s the librarian, and it’s so quiet you can hear every move she makes.

  Lorraine is panting to get at the typewriter now, so I’m going to let her before she has a heart attack.

  2

  I should never have let John write the first chapter because he always has to twist things subliminally. I am not panting, and I’m not about to have a thrombosis. It’s just that some very strange things have happened to us during the last few months, and we feel we should write them down while they’re fresh in our minds. It’s got to be written now before John and I mature and repress the whole thing.

  John doesn’t really curse that much, and I don’t think he needs his system. But even when we were in Miss Stewart’s typing class, he had to do something unusual all the time—like type a letter in the shape of an hourglass. That’s the kind of thing he does. And as you probably suspected, the reason John gets away with all these things is because he’s extremely handsome. I hate to admit it, but he is. An ugly boy would have been sent to reform school by now.

  He’s six feet tall already, with sort of longish brown hair and blue eyes. He has these gigantic eyes that look right through you, especially if he’s in the middle of one of his fantastic everyday lies. And he drinks and smokes more than any boy I ever heard of. The analysts would call his family the source problem or say he drinks and smokes to assert his independence. I tried to explain to him how dangerous it was, particularly smoking, and even went to the trouble of finding a case history similar
to his in a book by Sigmund Freud. I almost had him convinced that smoking was an infantile, destructive activity when he pointed out a picture of Freud smoking a cigar on the book’s cover.

  “If Freud smokes, why can’t I?”

  “Freud doesn’t smoke anymore,” I told him. “He’s dead.”

  Another time I got my mother to bring home a pamphlet about smoking in which they showed lungs damaged from tobacco poisons. I even got her to borrow a book from a doctor, which had large color plates of lungs that had been eaten away by cancer. She’s a nurse and can get all those things. But nothing seems to have any impact on John, which I suppose brings us right back to his source problem. Actually, we both have families you wouldn’t believe, but I don’t particularly feel like going into it at the moment because I just ate lunch in the cafeteria. It was Swiss steak. That is, they called it Swiss steak. John called it filet of gorilla’s heart.

  Also, you’ll find out soon enough that John distorts—when he isn’t out-and-out lying. For example, in Problems in American Democracy the other day, Mr. Weiner asked him what kind of homes early American settlers lived in, and John said tree huts. Now John knows early American settlers didn’t live in tree huts, but he’ll do just about anything to stir up some excitement. And he really did set off those bombs when he was a freshman, which when you stop to consider sort of shows a pattern—an actual pattern. I think he used to distort things physically, and now he does it verbally more than any other way.

  I mean take the Cricket for instance. I mean Miss Reillen. She’s across the library watching me as I’m typing this, and she’s smiling. You’d think she knew I was defending her. She’s really a very nice woman, though it’s true her clothes are too tight, and her nylons do make this scraaaaaaatchy sound when she walks. But she isn’t trying to be sexy or anything. If you could see her, you’d know that. She just outgrew her clothes. Maybe she doesn’t have any money to buy new ones or get the old ones let out. Who knows what kind of problems she has? Maybe she’s got a sick mother at home like Miss Stewart, the typing teacher. I know Miss Stewart has a sick mother because she had me mark some typing papers illegally and drop them off at her house after school one day. And there was her sick mother—very thin and with this smile frozen on her face—right in the middle of the living room! That was the strange part. Miss Stewart kept her mother in this bed right in the middle of the living room, and it almost made me cry. She made a little joke about it—how she kept her mother in the middle of the living room because she didn’t want her to think she was missing anything when people came to visit. Can you imagine keeping your sick mother in a bed right smack in the middle of the living room?

  When I look at Miss Reillen I feel sorry. When I hear her walking I feel even more sorry for her because maybe she keeps her mother in a bed in the middle of the living room just like Miss Stewart. Who would want to marry a woman that keeps her sick mother in a bed right in the middle of the living room?

  The one big difference between John and me, besides the fact that he’s a boy and I’m a girl, is I have compassion. Not that he really doesn’t have any compassion, but he’d be the last one on earth to show it. He pretends he doesn’t care about anything in the world, and he’s always ready with some outrageous remark, but if you ask me, any real hostility he has is directed against himself.

  The fact that I’m his best friend shows he isn’t as insensitive to Homo sapiens as he makes believe he is, because you might as well know I’m not exactly the most beautiful girl in the world. I’m not Venus or Harlow. Just ask my mother.

  “You’re not a pretty girl, Lorraine,” she has been nice enough to inform me on a few occasions (as if I didn’t remember the first time she ever said it), “but you don’t have to walk about stoop-shouldered and hunched.” At least once a day she fills me in on one more aspect of my public image—like “your hair would be better cut short because it’s too kinky,” and “you’re putting on too much weight,” and “you wear your clothes funny.” If I made a list of every comment she’s made about me, you’d think I was a monstrosity. I may not be Miss America, but I am not the abominable snowwoman either.

  But as I was saying, it is a fact that John has compassion deep inside of him, which is the real reason we got involved with the Pigman. Maybe at first John thought of it all simply as a way of getting money for beer and cigarettes, but the second we met the old man, John changed, even though he won’t admit it. As a matter of fact, it was this very compassion that made John finally introduce himself to me and invite me for a beer in Moravian Cemetery. He always went to Moravian Cemetery to drink beer, which sounds a little crazy, but it isn’t if you explore his source problem a bit. Although I didn’t know John and his family until two years ago when I moved into the neighborhood, from what I’ve been able to gather I think his father was a compulsive alcoholic. I’ve spent hours trying to analyze the situation, and the closest I’ve been able to come to a theory is that his father set a bad example at an age when John was impressionable. I think his father made it seem as though drinking alcoholic beverages was a sign of maturity. This particular sign of maturity ended up giving his father sclerosis of the liver, so he doesn’t drink anymore, but John does.

  I had moved into John’s neighborhood at the start of my freshman year, and he and a bunch of other kids used to wait for the same bus I did on the corner of Victory Boulevard and Eddy Street. I was in a severe state of depression the first few weeks because no one spoke to me. It wasn’t that I was expecting the boys to buzz around and ask me out, but I was sort of hoping that at least one of the girls would be friendly enough to borrow a hairpin or something. I stood on that corner day after day with all the kids, and nobody talked to me. I made believe I was interested in looking at the trees and houses and clouds and stray dogs and whatever—anything not to let on how lonesome I felt inside. Many of the houses were interesting as far as middle-class neighborhoods go. In fact, I suppose you’d say it was a multi-class neighborhood because both the houses and the kids ranged from wrecks to rich. There’d be a lovely brick home with a lot of land, and right next to it there’d be a plain wooden house with a postage-stamp-sized lawn that needed cutting. The only thing that was completely high class was the trees. Large old trees lined most of the streets and had grown so tall and wide they almost touched. I loved looking at the trees more than anything at first, but after awhile even those started to depress me.

  Then there was John.

  I noticed him the very first day mainly because of his eyes. As I told you, he has these fantastic eyes that take in everything that’s going on, and whenever they came my way, I looked in the other direction. His eyes reminded me of a description of a gigantic Egyptian eye that was found in one of the pyramids I read about in a book on black magic. Somehow an archaeologist’s wife ended up with this huge stone eye in her bedroom, and in the middle of the night it exploded and a big cat started biting the archaeologist’s wife’s neck. When she put the lights on, the cat was gone. Only the pieces of the eye were scattered all over the floor. That’s what John’s eyes remind me of. I knew even from the first moment I saw him he had to be something special.

  Then one day John had to sit next to me on the bus because all the other seats were taken. He wasn’t sitting there for more than two minutes before he started laughing. Laughing right out loud, but not to anyone. I was so embarrassed I wanted to cry because I thought for sure he was laughing at me, and I turned my head all the way so the only thing I could see out the window of the bus was telephone poles going by. They call that paranoia. I knew that because some magazine did a whole article on mental disturbances, and after I read the symptoms of each of them, I realized I had all of them—but most of all I had paranoia. That’s when you think everybody’s making fun of you when they’re not. Some extremely advanced paranoiacs can’t even watch television because they think the canned laughter is about them. Freud would probably say it started with my mother picking on how I look all the time. Bu
t no matter how it started, I’ve got to admit that when anyone looks at me I’m sure they’re noticing how awful my hair is or I’m too fat or my dress is funny. So I did think John was laughing at me, and it made me feel terrible, until finally—and the psychiatrists would say this was healthy—I began to get mad!

  “Would you mind not laughing,” I said, “because people think I’m sitting with a lunatic.” He jumped when I spoke to him, so I realized he wasn’t laughing at me. I don’t think he even knew I was there.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. I just turned my head away and watched the telephone poles some more. Then I heard him whisper something under his breath, and it had just the tone of a first-class smart aleck.

  “I am a lunatic.”

  I made believe I didn’t hear it, but then he said it again a little louder.

  “I am a lunatic.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t go around bragging about it,” I said, and I was so nervous I dropped one of my books on the floor. I was mortified picking it up because it fell between the seat and the window, and I was sure I’d look like an enormous cow bending over to get it. All I could think of at that moment was wishing one of his eyeballs would explode and a nice big cat would get at his neck, but I managed to get the book and sit straight up with this real annoyed look on my face.

  Then he started that laughing again. Very quietly at first, and boy, did it burn me! And then I decided I was going to let out a little laugh, so I did. Then he laughed a little louder, and I laughed a little louder, and before I knew what was happening I couldn’t stand it, so I really started laughing, and he started laughing, and we laughed so much the whole bus thought we were out of our minds.