A Christmas Story (11 page)

“ ‘Mah-ree Elena, yore the answer to mah prayer.…’ ” The familiar twangy moan of old Gene Autry seemed to be coming from next to my ear. It was the first time I had ever dreamed in sound. Or
was
I dreaming?

“FER CHRISSAKE, WHAT THE HELL IS THAT RACKET?” The bedsprings clattered in the next room, as my old man cursed and leaped out of the sack, his feet thumping the floor in the dark. Instantly, I was wide awake.

“ ‘MAH-REE ELENA.…’ ” It was even louder, now that my mind was working again. The tinny plunking of a guitar cut through the darkness. My kid brother sat up in his bed across the room from me and began to whine, his usual reaction to any outside stimulus.

A guttural grunt of intense pain, followed by a high-pitched bleating wail, as the old man once again unerringly
cracked his big toe against the leg of the dresser. He had done this so many times in the past, in the dark, that all the varnish was now worn off the leg, and my father’s toe was permanently shaped like a small tennis ball.

“Now what?” My mother joined in the chorus, her hair curlers rattling in the gloom.

“ ‘WHEN IT’S TWAALAHT ON THE TRAY-ULL.…’ ” Autry had launched into another favorite of simple-minded millions everywhere.

“What the hell
time
is it?” muttered the old man. He was always an aggressive sleeper. Sleep was one of the things he did best, and he loved it. Some look upon sleep as an unfortunately necessary interruption of life; but there are others who hold that sleep
is
life, or at least one of the more fulfilling aspects of it, like eating or sex. Any time my old man’s sleep was interrupted, he became truly dangerous.

“It’s almost three-thirty. Who the hell’s playing those goddamn records at three-thirty?”

Someone was, indeed, playing records at full blast. It was then that we first became aware of another sound—one that was to become more familiar and ominous in the weeks to come: a kind of snuffling, scratching, moiling, squealing, squishy turmoil.

“ ‘…THAT SILVUHH HAI-UHD DAH-DEE OF MAHN.…’ ” Doors slammed. Twangy voices argued indistinctly. Gene Autry keened on and on. The snuffling squeals rose and fell. The old man reconnoitered silently through the bedroom curtains.

“HOOIICKK-PATOOOEY!” Something juicy splatted against the side of our house.

“Holy Christ!” The old man hissed a rhetorical comment to no one in particular.

“GRRAAAHHKKK! BROWWK!” A window-rattling burp boomed out over the scratchy Gene Autry disc.

My mother was finally galvanized into action. She had fought a lifelong battle against obscene noises of every variety. I could hear her pattering feet, as she joined my father at the window.

“Who
are
they?” she asked, after a pause to survey the scene.

“Damned if I know!” the old man answered; but I could tell from the sound of his voice that he knew trouble had arrived. Big trouble. The Bumpus crowd had moved in next door and was already in business.

Ours was not a genteel neighborhood, by any stretch of the imagination. Nestled picturesquely between the looming steel mills and the verminously aromatic oil refineries and encircled by a colorful conglomerate of city dumps and fetid rivers, our northern Indiana town was and is the very essence of the Midwestern industrial heartland of the nation. There was a standard barbershop bit of humor that said it with surprising poeticism: If Chicago (only a stone’s throw away across the polluted lake waters) was Carl Sandburg’s “City of the Broad Shoulders,” then Hohman had to be that city’s broad rear end.

According to legend, it bore the name of a hapless early
settler who had arrived on the scene when the land was just prairie and Indian trails. Surveying the sparkling blue waters of Lake Michigan, he decided that Chicago, then a tiny trading post where land was free for the asking, had no future. Struggling through the quagmires farther south, for some demented reason now lost to history, he set up camp and invested heavily in land that was destined to become one of the ugliest pieces of real estate this side of the craters of the moon. Indeed, it bore some resemblance to the moon, in that the natives were alternately seared by stifling heat in the summer and reduced to clanking hulks when the fierce gales blew off the lake. Our founding father set the pattern of futility for all future generations.

My old man, my mother, my kid brother and I slogged along in the great tradition. The old man had his high point every Wednesday at George’s Bowling Alley, where he once rolled a historic game in which he got three consecutive strikes. My kid brother’s nose ran steadily, winter and summer. My mother made red cabbage, peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, meat loaf and Jell-O in an endless stream. And I studied the principal exports of Peru at the Warren G. Harding School.

Delbert Bumpus entered Warren G. Harding like a small, truculent rhinoceros. His hair grew low down on his almost nonexistent forehead, and he had the greatest pair of ears that Warren G. Harding had ever seen, extending at absolutely right angles from his head. Between those ears festered a
pea-sized but malevolent brain that almost immediately made him the most feared kid below sixth grade.

He had a direct way of settling disagreements that he established on the second day of his brief but spectacular period at W.G.H. Grover Dill—our number-two-ranking thug, right behind Scut Farkas, who stood alone as the premier bully of all he surveyed—challenged Bumpus to a showdown the first time he laid eyes on those peculiarly provocative ears. It was recess time and, as usual, we milled about aimlessly in the stickers and sand hills of our playground. It was too early for baseball; football had been over for months; we didn’t have a basketball hoop; so we just milled.

Spotting Bumpus in his worn blue jeans and black turtle-neck—tiny, close-set eyes almost invisible under a thatch of jet-black, wiry hair—Dill opened negotiations, his own slitted eyes glinting in anticipation of a little action:

“What’s yer name, kid?”

Bumpus pulled his head lower into the turtleneck and said nothing.

“I SAID, WHAT’S YER NAME, KID?” This time in a loud, trumpeting voice that alerted the rest of the school ground that spring had come and Grover Dill felt the sap rising. Bumpus, a full head and a half shorter than Dill but built along the lines of a fireplug, muttered:

“Bumpus.” It was the first word we had heard from him, his accent redolent of the deepest Kentucky hills.

“BUMPUS! What the hell kind of a name is that? Holy Moses! Didja hear that? Bumpus! What kind of a name is that?”

Dill’s humor, while extremely primitive, was refreshingly direct. He began to sing in a high, feminine voice:

“Bumpus Schlumpus, double Crumpus—” He broke off, advancing on Bumpus, sandy hair abristle.

“D’ya have a first name, runt?”

Farkas watched with Olympian disinterest as his protégé moved in for the kill. Schwartz huddled next to me, ashen-faced, while Flick attempted to blend into the sand. There wasn’t one of us who had not, at one time or another, been dealt with by either Farkas or Dill.

“I said, what’s yer first name, kid?” Bumpus, backed up flat against the school wall, finally spoke up:

“Delbert.”

“Delbert!
DELBERT!”
Outraged by such a name, Dill addressed the crowd, with scorn dripping from his every word.
“Delbert Bumpus!
They’re letting
everybody
in Harding School these days! What the hell kind of a name is that? That must be some kind of
hillbilly
name!”

It was the last time anyone at Warren G. Harding ever said, or even thought, anything like that about Delbert Bumpus.

Everything happened so fast after that that no two accounts of it were the same. The way I saw it, Bumpus’ head snapped down low between his shoulder blades. He bent over from the waist, charged over the sand like a wounded
wart hog insane with fury, left his feet and butted his black, furry head like a battering-ram into Dill’s rib cage, the sickening thump sounding exactly like a watermelon dropped from a second-story window. Dill, knocked backward by the charge, landed on his neck and slid for three or four feet, his face alternating green and white. His eyes, usually almost unseen behind his cobra lids, popped out like a tromped-on toad-frog’s. He lay flat, gazing paralyzed at the spring sky, one shoe wrenched off his foot by the impact. The schoolyard was hushed, except for the sound of a prolonged gurling and wheezing as Dill, now half his original size, lay retching. It was obvious that he was out of action for some time.

Bumpus glared around at the hushed faces, then spit a long stream of rich-brown tobacco juice onto Dill’s left tennis shoe. The buzzer sounded for the end of recess, but it was the beginning of a new era.

That’s the way the whole Bumpus crowd was, in one way or another. Overnight, the entire neighborhood changed. The Taylors, a quiet family who had lived next to us for years, had moved out and—without warning—the Bumpuses had flooded in. There were thousands of them! The house seemed to age in one week. What had been a nondescript bungalow became a battered, hinge-sprung, sagging hillbilly shack.

I remember only brief images of various Bumpuses. They never mixed with anyone else in the neighborhood, just moiled around, hawking, guffawing, kicking their dogs
and piling up junk in the back yard. They drove an old slat-sided Chevy pickup truck that was covered with creamy-white bird droppings and a thick coating of rutted Kentucky clay. It had no windshield and the steering wheel looked like it was made entirely of old black friction tape. It roared like a tank, sending up clouds of blue smoke as it burned the sludge oil that the Bumpuses slopped into it. It seemed to be always hub-deep in mud, even though there was no mud in our neighborhood.

Old Emil Bumpus was kind of the headman. He was about eight feet tall and always walked like he was leaning into a strong wind, with his head hanging down around his overall tops. He must have weighed about 300 pounds, not including his chaw of navy plug, which he must have been born chewing. His neck was so red that at first we thought he always wore some kind of bandanna. But he didn’t. He had an Adam’s apple that rode up and down the front of his neck like a yo-yo. His hair, which was mud-colored, stuck out in all directions and looked like it had been chopped off here and there with a pair of hedge-trimming shears. And his hands, which hung down to just below his knees, had knuckles the size of pool balls, and there was usually a black, string bandage around a thumb. His hands were made for hitting things.

The Bumpuses weren’t in town three days before Emil cleaned out the whole back room at the Blue Bird Tavern one night. They said somebody had given him a dirty look.
Another time, Big Rusty Galambus, who had heard about that incident and felt his reputation was at stake, busted Emil’s gallon jug over the back of his head. They said that Emil didn’t even know he’d been hit for a couple of minutes, until somebody told him. Then he turned around, stood up, looked down at Big Rusty and said:

“Ah’d be mo’ careful with that thar jug a mahn ef’n ah was yew. Ef ah didn’ know bettuh, ah mighta tho’t yew was spoilin’ for a fight.”

There was something about the way he said it that persuaded Rusty, a scarred veteran of the open hearth, who had once hoisted the back end of a Ford truck with his bare hands when the jack busted, to apologize and say that the jug slipped.

Emil let it pass; after all, he had 9000 more jugs at home, of all sizes and shapes, sitting on various window sills. We wondered what they were for, until we saw the Bumpuses carrying in pieces of copper tubing—and until we got our first whiff of a mighty aroma from their basement that overpowered even the normal neighborhood smell from the Sinclair oil refinery a half mile away. It got so bad at times that starlings would sit around on the telephone wires back of the Bumpus house, just breathing deeply and falling off into the bushes and squawking. From time to time, there would be a dull explosion in the cellar, and a Bumpus would run out of the house with his overalls on fire.

One afternoon, with a snootful of whatever they were
making down there, Emil came reeling out onto the back porch. He was yelling at somebody in the kitchen, his deep molasses drawl booming out over the neighborhood.

“WHO YEW THANK YO’ TAWKIN’ TEW?” With that, he grabbed ahold of the back porch and pulled it right off the house. He just grabbed the porch and yanked it out by the roots:

“AAAuuuggghhh!”

From that day on, the Bumpus house had no back porch, only a door about eight feet up in the air and a rusty screen. Once in a while, one of them would jump out—and land in the garbage. And every so often, one of the skinny, red-faced sisters would fall out accidentally, usually carrying a pail of dishwater or chicken innards.

“Lawd a’mighty. Amy Jo, ef’n yew cain’t watch them clodhoppers a yourn, we gonna have to chain yew up!” Another raucous round of harrooping. They sure loved one another.

From the day they moved in, the house was surrounded by a thick swamp of junk: old truck tires, barrels full of bottles and tin cans, black oil drums, rusty pitchforks, busted chicken crates, an old bathtub, at least 57 ancient bedsprings, an old tractor hood, a half-dozen rotting bushel baskets overflowing with inner tubes and galoshes, a wheelbarrow with one handle, eight or nine horse collars and a lot of things that nobody could figure out—things that looked like big tall water boilers with pipes sticking out. For some reason, they loved wire; they had all kinds of it—chicken wire,
baling wire and rolls of barbed wire, just sort of lying around. And in between the big stuff, there was all the little stuff: sardine cans, old batteries, tire irons, old blue tin cups, corncobs, leather straps and a lot of tire pumps. They were always bringing home license plates, which they nailed up by the basement door. The Bumpuses went to the city dump two or three times a week—like art patrons to a gallery—to stock up on more of the same.