The Pigman (2 page)

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. But 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.

L
ike Lorraine told you, I really am very handsome and do have fabulous eyes. But that doesn’t get me much, except perhaps with Miss King, this English teacher I’m going to tell you about. I think she really goes for me the way she always laughs a little when she talks to me and says I’m such a card. A card she calls me, which sounds ridiculous coming out of the mouth of an old-maid English teacher who’s practically fifty years old. I really hate it when a teacher has to show that she isn’t behind the times by using some expression which sounds so up-to-date you know for sure she’s behind the times. Besides, card really isn’t up-to-date anymore, which makes it even more annoying. In fact, the thing Lorraine and I liked best about the Pigman was that he didn’t go around saying we were cards or jazzy or cool or hip. He said we were delightful, and if there’s one way to show how much you’re not trying to make believe you’re not behind the times, it’s to go around saying people are delightful.

I had forgotten that stuff about paranoia in that magazine Lorraine gave me to read about seven months ago. She’s always reading about eyes exploding and nutty people and beehives and things. The only part that impressed me out of the whole article was about the crazy lady in the sanitarium who hoarded food and sheets and towels and bathrobes—the one that used to wear all the bathrobes at one time. They said at one point she had hoarded 39 sheets, 42 towels, 93 English muffins—and she was wearing 8 bathrobes. Her big problem was she didn’t feel secure. So they let her pick out as much as she wanted, and she ended up with 320 towels, 2,633 sheets, and 9,000 English muffins. Nine thousand English muffins!

But that’s how it always is. Lorraine remembers the big words, and I remember the action. Which sort of makes sense when you stop to think that Lorraine is going to be a famous writer and I’m going to be a great actor. Lorraine thinks she could be an actress, but I keep telling her she’d have to be a character actress, which means playing washwomen on TV detective shows all the time. And I don’t mean that as a distortion, like she always says I do. If anyone distorts, it’s that mother of hers. The way her old lady talks you’d think Lorraine needed internal plastic surgery and seventeen body braces, but if you ask me, all she needs is a little confidence. She’s got very interesting green eyes that scan like nervous radar—that is they used to until the Pigman died. Ever since then her eyes have become absolutely still, except when we work on this memorial epic. Her eyes come to life the second we talk about it. Her wanting to be a writer is part of it, I guess, but I think we’re both a little anxious to get all that happened in place and try to understand why we did the crazy things we did.

I suppose it all started when Lorraine and I and these two amoebae called Dennis Kobin and Norton Kelly were hot on those phone gags last September. We did the usual ones like dialing any number out of the book and asking “Is your refrigerator running?”

“Yes.”

“Go catch it then.”

And we called every drugstore.

“Do you have Prince Albert in a can?”

“Yes.”

“Then let him out.”

But then we made up a new game in which the object was to keep a stranger talking on the phone as long as possible. At least twice a week we’d meet for a telephone marathon. Wednesday afternoons we’d have it at Dennis’ house because his mother goes shopping at the supermarket and his father doesn’t get home from work until after six
P.M.
, even when he’s sober. And on Sundays we’d do it at Norton’s because his father plays golf and his mother is so retarded she doesn’t know what’s coming off anyway, but at least they didn’t mind if their kids used the house. Mine and Lorraine’s we can’t even go to. We couldn’t use the phone at Lorraine’s anyway because her mother doesn’t have unlimited service, and at my house my mother is a disinfectant fanatic. She would have gotten too nervous over all of us using her purified instrument. Another difficulty there is that my father, whom I warmly refer to as Bore, put a lock on our phone—one of those round locks you put in the first dialhole so you can’t dial. He put it on because of a little exchange we had when he called from work.

“Do you realize I’ve been trying to get your mother for an hour and a half and the line’s been busy?” Bore bellowed.

“Those things happen. I was talking to a friend.”

“If you don’t use the phone properly, I’m going to put a lock on it.”

“Yeah? No kidding?”

Now it was just the way I said
yeah
that set him off, and that night when he got home, he just put the lock on the phone and didn’t say a word. But I’m used to it. Bore and I have been having a lot of trouble communicating lately as it is, and sometimes I go a little crazy when I feel I’m being picked on or not being trusted. That’s why I finally put airplane glue in the keyhole of the lock so nobody could use the telephone, key or no key.

Anyway, the idea of the telephone marathon was you had to close your eyes and stick your finger on a number in the directory and then call it up to see how long you could keep whoever answered talking on the phone. I wasn’t too good at this because I used to burst out laughing. The only thing I could do that kept them talking awhile before they hung up was to tell them I was calling from
TV Quiz
and that they had won a prize. That was always good for three and a half minutes before they caught on.

The longest anyone ever lasted was Dennis, because he picked out this old woman who lived alone and was desperate to talk to anyone. Dennis is really not very bright. In fact, he talks so slowly some people think he has brain damage. But he told this woman he had called her number because he had heard she gave good advice and his problem was that he was about to die from a hideous skin disease because a rat had bitten off his nose when he was a baby and the skin grafts didn’t take. He kept her on the phone for two hours and twenty-six minutes. That was the record!

Now Lorraine can blame all the other things on me, but she was the one who picked out the Pigman’s phone number. If you ask me, I think he would have died anyway. Maybe we speeded things up a little, but you really can’t say we murdered him.

Not murdered him.

J
ohn told you about Dennis and Norton, but I don’t think he got across how really disturbed those two boys are. Norton has eyes like a mean mouse, and he’s the type of kid who thinks everyone’s trying to throw rusty beer cans at him. And he’s pretty big, even bigger than John, and the two of them hate each other.

Actually, Norton is a social outcast. He’s been a social outcast since his freshman year in high school when he got caught stealing a bag of marshmallows from the supermarket. He never recovered from that because they put his name in the newspaper and mentioned that the entire loot was a bag of marshmallows, and ever since then everybody calls him The Marshmallow Kid.