A Christmas Story (12 page)

The sea of wreckage spread like a blight onto the surrounding yards, first an ironing board on our lawn, then a bicycle tire in our bushes, then a few odd corncobs on the front porch. And one day, a gust of wind covered my mother’s flapping laundry—her pride and joy—with a thin, indelible coating of chicken dung, pigeon feathers, rabbit fur and goat droppings. After that, her jaw was grim, her eyes thin slits of rage, every time another burst of hawkings or blattings reminded her of the Bumpuses. The night my old man tripped in the dark over a rusty radiator in our back yard, causing him to drop his bowling ball on his left foot, didn’t help things, either. He grabbed the radiator and flung it into the dark, back into the Bumpuses’ yard; it crashed into the rubble, and for five minutes, an avalanche of sound rumbled on and on, like Fibber McGee’s closet. Emil stuck his head out of the kitchen window, quickly followed by the barrel of his trusty shotgun. When the old man stood his ground, Emil hissed, “Sic ’em, Luke!” Instantly, 17 dogs roared out from behind the garage. The old man barely made the kitchen.

A few days later, Schwartz, Kissel, Flick and I were
trudging up our driveway when Flick stopped in his tracks, pointed and said, with a touch of delighted wonder, “Hey, look at that funny little house.”

“Yeah, look at that little moon on it,” replied Schwartz, likewise with some wonder.

“What the hell is it?” Junior Kissel chimed in.

Suddenly, Delbert Bumpus shot around the side of the house, dodging his way through the junk yard like a broken-field runner, and hurled himself headlong into the tiny pine shack and slammed the door, disappearing from our view—but not, unfortunately, beyond our earshot. It was then that we found out about little houses with moons, a new concept for all of us. Devout believers in eternal verities and ancient traditions, the Bumpuses obviously distrusted newfangled, citified contraptions such as that white-porcelain doohickey beside their upstairs bathtub, which didn’t get much use, either—except, rumor had it, for the aging and storage of white lightning. From that day on, there was an endless stream of Bumpuses beating a path through the back yard at all hours of the day and night. The outhouse also solved for them the problem of what to do with last year’s Sears, Roebuck catalog.

With the Bumpuses—and the outhouse—came the rats. They must have brought back a couple of thousand from one of their trips to the dump. Emil would squat out in back and pop at them with a long-barreled single-shot .22. You could hear the ricochets bouncing off the oil drums, and then Emil yelling:

“Gahdamn, Ima Pearl, ah missed that varmint agin.”

“Emil, yew kin go out huntin’ after supper. It’s time we et.”

The Bumpus hounds, who had their own problems with an even larger population of ticks and lice, had no interest at all in the rats. Once in a while, you’d see a hound sprawled flat on his back in the dust, legs spraddled, ears spread out, mouth hanging open, tongue lolling, sound asleep in the sun, with a rat lying beside him like they were the best of friends. The rats had no such nonaggression treaty with the Bumpus chickens, whom they ganged up on now and then, but their losses were too heavy to make it a regular thing. The Bumpuses had
mean
chickens. One big gray hen with a ratty tail and demented yellow eyes chased Schwartz all the way to school one day and waited in the playground for him to come out at recess. He wisely cowered in the locker room.

They also had rabbits—and pigeons. For some reason, hillbillies dearly love pigeons. They kept them in chicken-wire pens when they weren’t out dive-bombing our yard and roosting on everybody’s laundry. And the Bumpuses had one animal nobody could identify. It was kind of round, with blackish fur and claws. It weighed about 30 pounds or so, and Mrs. Kissel told my mother it was “a swamp bear.” Nobody believed her, until one time it tried to eat Mrs. Gammie’s Airedale, Rags, who had a nervous breakdown and had to be sent to the country. But the only atrocity it ever actually committed was to devour all my mother’s iris bulbs. Emil used to holler at it once in a while, when it got to chewing on the truck tires. Its name was Jack.

The three goats never gave anybody much trouble; in fact, they kept our lawn mowed for us. They didn’t smell too good if you got downwind of them on a warm day, but nobody complained about it—what with all the other indescribable smells that drifted our way day and night. My old man would peek out of the kitchen window with a Montgomery Ward spyglass to try to see what the Bumpuses ate when they were all squatting around the trough in the kitchen, with a yellow light bulb hanging overhead amid the wriggling flypaper. There was one smell that really used to get him. He could never tell what it was—a kind of smoky, greasy, gamy animal scent. Then one night he got it. He was watching them wolf it down, the way they always did, slurping and crunching, throwing off a thick yellow spray.

“By God, they’re eating possum! That’s what it is. Possum!”

My mother, who was always interested in cooking, asked: “Possum, what’s that?”

A
Field & Stream
subscriber, the old man immediately answered, “Possum—you know, it’s kind of a big rat.” My mother, who was putting tomato paste on top of our meat loaf at the time, dropped her spoon and ran into the bathroom. After that, she didn’t ask much about what the Bumpuses ate.

“I wonder where the hell they get it?” the old man continued. “I never heard of a possum around here.” Where they got possum was just another of the Bumpus mysteries.

Every five minutes or so, someone threw something out
the back window into the yard. My mother would be standing at the sink, peering out the window that looked right into the Bumpus house just across the driveway from us. A soggy paper sack filled with coffee grounds and apple cores would sail out and land amid the rubble.

“Tch, tch, just look at those pigs!”

She was right. We were living next door to a tightly knit band of total slobs, a genuine gypsy family. The Bumpuses were so low down on the evolutionary totem pole that they weren’t even included in Darwin’s famous family tree. They had inbred and ingrown and finally emerged from the Kentucky hills like some remnant of Attila the Hun’s barbarian horde. Flick said that they had webbed feet and only three toes. It might have been true.

Delbert Bumpus, the runt of the litter, came to school about three days a month. It was three times too often. Whenever he showed up, there would be a lot of yelling, and they’d throw him out. Delbert never played with anybody and he hardly ever talked; but he spat a lot. Since he lived with the goats and rabbits and chickens, he didn’t smell exactly like the rest of us, either—and
we
weren’t any bargain.

One time, Miss Parsons, our gym teacher, made the mistake of putting Delbert in a volleyball game. I guess they never played volleyball in Kentucky, because at first he didn’t seem to understand what was going on. But when he got the hang of it, everything changed. He stood there, watching them knock the ball back and forth, for maybe five minutes, and then somebody hit one toward him. He left the
ground about three feet and gave the ball an overhand shot that sent it screaming over the net; it caught Schwartz just below the left eye and knocked him flat. Bumpus’ side cheered.

Miss Parsons said, “No, Delbert, you mustn’t hit it that hard.”

Bumpus spat on the gym floor and glared at her for a minute, and then growled, “What the goddamn hell is this game ’spose ta be about?”

While Schwartz crawled around on the floor, crying, Miss Parsons—who taught Sunday school at the Baptist church—tried again.

“You mustn’t use those bad words, Delbert. Now, let’s begin the game again, shall we?”

Miss Parsons believed in law and order. Schwartz, who had been removed to the nurse’s office, trailing blood, had been replaced by Roger Beanblossom, who, at the age of seven, was already six feet tall. Beanblossom, famous for his serve, sliced a whistler right at Bumpus, who stopped scratching just in time to slam the ball back over the net. This time, he got Jack Morton in the pit of his stomach, knocking the wind out of him like a deflated beach ball. He slumped to the floor, the color of Cream of Wheat.

“No, Delbert.” Miss Parsons was back in the fray. “Here, I’ll show you.”

She tapped the ball delicately into the air, to show how the game was played. Bumpus, watching this exhibition,
came out with a line that soon became legend at Warren G. Harding School.

“Who the hell wants to play a goddamn silly girl’s game lahk that?”

Miss Parsons, now beet red and faced with a question many of us had privately asked, since volleyball was a hated game among the males of the school, could do only one thing. “Delbert Bumpus, you go to the office this instant!”

Picking his nose, Delbert slouched toward the door and muttered, with classic simplicity: “Screw you.”

And he left. It was lucky that Miss Parsons didn’t know what he meant by that, or there would have been real trouble. He was kicked out of school for only a week.

Then there was the time Miss Shields opened up the day by reading us a chapter of
Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy
. Miss Shields was tall and thin and wore rimless glasses. She was a very kind lady, who believed that all children were basically good.

“Boys and girls,” she began, after setting the book down, “are there any questions?”

Bumpus, who had never asked a question, spoke up. He had a very deep voice for a kid; already it sounded a lot like old Emil’s, rich and phlegmy.

“Yeah.” That was all he said.

“Oh, you have a question, Delbert?” asked Miss Shields, obviously pleased. She felt at long last she was
reaching
him.

“Yeah.” He was a kid of few words.

“Well, what is your question, Delbert?”

“Was this guy Raggedy Andy a bohunk?”

“What was that?” Miss Shields was caught off guard.

“Mah Uncle Cletus knew a bohunk onc’t named Andy.”

Miss Shields, who did not know Delbert Bumpus the way the class did, gamely replied: “Well, no, Delbert, Raggedy Andy was not of Bohemian extraction. He was a doll.”

“Well, ah’ll be goddamned,” he snorted.

“What was that, Delbert?” Miss Shields felt the class slipping from her grasp.

“You mean a doll that walked aroun’? Shee-it!”

“Delbert, you mustn’t use words like that in class. Yes, Raggedy Andy was a doll who walked around, and so was Raggedy Ann.”

Delbert snorted again in disbelief and, as he sat down, said in a loud voice, “Ah nevah did heah such a crock a hog drippin’s.”

“Delbert,” said Miss Shields with an ashen face, “report to the office this instant!” We waited for him to say what he usually said when he left the room, but I guess he liked Miss Shields. He just stalked out and went home.

The only time Delbert ever said anything to me directly was one day when I made the mistake of throwing him out at first base. He looked at me real hard for a long time and then said: “Doan’ worry, piss-ant, ah’ll git yew someday.”

Little did I dream at the time what form his revenge would take.

Delbert was the only Bumpus kid in my grade, but they
infested Warren G. Harding like termites in an outhouse. There was Ima Jean, short and muscular, who was in the sixth grade, when she showed up, but spent most of her time hanging around the poolroom. There was a lanky, blue-jowled customer they called Jamie, who ran the still and was the only one who ever wore shoes. He and his brother Ace, who wore a brown fedora and blue work shirts, sat on the front steps at home on the Fourth of July, sucking at a jug and pretending to light sticks of dynamite with their cigars when little old ladies walked by. There were also several red-faced girls who spent most of their time dumping dishwater out of windows. Babies of various sizes and sexes crawled about the back yard, fraternizing indiscriminately with the livestock. They all wore limp, battleship-gray T-shirts and nothing else. They cried day and night.

We thought that was all of them—until one day a truck stopped in front of the house and out stepped a girl who made Daisy Mae look like Little Orphan Annie. My father was sprinkling the lawn at the time; he wound up watering the windows. Ace and Emil came running out onto the porch, whooping and hollering. The girl carried a cardboard suitcase—in which she must have kept all her underwear, if she owned any—and wore her blonde hair piled high on her head; it gleamed in the midday sun. Her short muslin dress strained and bulged. The truck roared off. Ace rushed out to greet her, bellowing over his shoulder as he ran:

“MAH GAWD! HEY, MAW, IT’S CASSIE! SHE’S HOME FROM THE REFORMATORY!”

Emil grabbed her suitcase and Cassie, the ripest 16-year-old ever to descend on northern Indiana, kissed her father in a way that clouded up windows for blocks around.

“Mah Gawd, Cassie, yew sure filled out!” he boomed, slapping her none too paternally on the backside. Maw Bumpus, drying her hands on her apron, yelled from the porch:

“YEW GIT IN HERE, CASSIE, AN’ LEAVE YORE PAW ALONE. LEASTWAYS TILL WE’VE ET.”

After that, my father stepped up his spyglass work considerably, since they had no window shades and Cassie liked to dress very casually around the house. She also liked to lie in the swing on the front porch and suck jawbreakers when the weather was hot.

On Saturday nights, even before Cassie arrived, a roaring fleet of old cars would park around the Bumpus house and a mob of slope-browed, slack-jawed friends and relatives would crowd into the place. All night, paneless windows needlessly flung wide, a thunderous square dance would shake the crockery for blocks around. Hawking and spitting and swilling applejack, they yelled and sweated and thumped up and down, while old Emil sat in a corner and sawed on his fiddle. On those nights, hardly anyone dared leave their homes. These parties always ended one way—with a sudden crash, a prolonged scuffle and then:

“EF’N YEW LAY ANOTHA FINGA ON MAH WOMAN, AH’LL SLICE YEW UP LIKE HOG BACON!”

“YEW AN’ WHO ELSE, YEW SONOVABITCH!?”

Followed by screams, crashing bottles, running feet; then a distant wail of sirens. A tremendous roaring of ancient motors, a cloud of gravel and they were all gone, leaving a trail of blood and sweat behind them.