The Schernoff Discoveries (5 page)

I’m not certain when Chimmer decided to kill me, or even that he consciously made the decision. Harold always said Chimmer was not quite human and was responding to some ancient instinctual need when he beat the crap out of me.

What I know for sure is that somehow, some way, probably back in the third grade, I got on some kind of list in the dim recesses of Chimmer’s brain, a kill list or removal list, and I stuck there.

As seemed to happen in such cases, Chimmer
did not develop like the rest of us—or at any rate like me. While I remained spindly-legged, short, skinny and runty well into my first year in the army, Chimmer developed a muscular torso when he was about four. It just kept getting bigger until by the time he was twelve it was rumored that he could fold bottle caps by pinching them between his fingers and had once squeezed a cat with one hand until everything inside the cat came outside the cat.

The thing is, not everything developed evenly with Chimmer. While his body moved into adulthood, his brain—Harold says there isn’t one, just a slightly enlarged ganglion at the top of his spine—either didn’t develop at all or, if it did, went down the same road as the brains of Attila the Hun, Hitler and maybe Genghis Khan.

I could not remember a time when I was safe.

It seemed that even in my earliest memories I was either running from Chimmer, hiding from Chimmer or recovering from Chimmer. I tried everything—even sending away for the Charles Atlas course of bodybuilding from the ad in the back of a Captain Marvel comic book. If I could get strong, maybe I could turn everything around and spend fifteen or sixteen years beating the mud out of Chimmer for a change.

But I didn’t develop as fast as I would have liked—or at all, to be perfectly honest—and the one time that I actually tried to fight back when he jumped me after school he hit me so hard I didn’t even fall down but just stood there, stunned, like an ox hit with the butcher’s hammer, wondering what in God’s name had made me think I could survive such folly.

I have evolved along the lines of small mammals in the time of dinosaurs. Over the years I learned how to hide, learned how not to be wherever Chimmer happened to be. I moved from bush to post, from locker to class, trying to time it so I would miss him or at least pass him when he was otherwise occupied, say when he was stripping the wings off flies or jamming other boys into garbage cans (I wasn’t his only prey, just his favorite).

Those times when he caught me were often terrifying and
always
painful.

He had a thing about ears. He’d hold me down and rub-ruffle my ears until the cartilage seemed to break. They’d stick out and be swollen for days. Or he’d knuckle-rub my head until it was all over welts, or blacken both my eyes, or practice what we then called judo chops (karate blows now) on my neck and head. Or
he’d lock me in my locker—and could there be
more
shame than having Julie Hansen be the one to let me out? Sometimes he’d just throw me around like a gorilla playing with a tire. (Although, as Harold said, the gorilla would have been much more intelligent.)

By the time I was fourteen I had accepted the fact that he would bully me for the rest of my life, and I’d learned to exist in a kind of fearful discomfort whenever I sensed that he was within a mile or so.

It was Harold who changed this.

As might be guessed, I was from a very poor family and I was continually trying to find work to make money. Harold was from a more settled situation and his parents bought him school clothes and food but for extra things he had to get his own funds.

The world of pinsetting wasn’t a place you’d expect Harold to enter, and once he did you wouldn’t expect him to survive long.

Next to the Pony Express (they used children because they were so light they wouldn’t tire the horses) pinsetting was the worst kind of child labor. It was very dangerous, the hours were very late, the pay was very low. The concept was simple. People bowled by throwing balls down a
wooden alley to knock over pins. The ball had to be sent back, the pins picked up and replaced on the spots, and the process repeated. This was before automatic pinsetting machines, and because the pay was so low usually children were hired to set pins.

The scene in front of the bowling alley was one of sport and happiness, beer drinking and camaraderie; in the pits in back of the machines and pins it was something else. There were eight alleys in the Cry of the Loon Bowling Alley and when I first went to work there the entire pin-setting force consisted of four thirteen-year-old boys.

The work was staggering, stultifying. To the rear of where the pins stood was a small pit area—perhaps three feet by five feet with a rubber-matted floor. In back of this pit was a leather-covered cushion to catch the flying ball and pins. Between every two alleys was a slotted ball return groove and above the pin area was a machine that worked with a lever and had a hole for each pin.

Above and slightly to the rear of the pit was a wooden shelf on which the boy setting pins could sit, presumably in safety. The bowler would throw his ball and hit the pins. Then the
pinsetter would swing down into the pit, snatch up the ball and return it in the groove, pick up the pins and place them in the hole in the placement machine, and swing back up to the shelf before the bowler threw again.

In practice, it was a dance on the edge of disaster. Since there weren’t enough boys it was often necessary to set two alleys at the same time, which gave us no time to rest and required a kind of rhythm that could lead to injury. It was up on the bench as the balls slam into the pins, the pins fly everywhere (including up at the boy), back down into the pit, throw the ball into the return groove, pick up the pins, slam them into the machine, roll out of one pit and into another just after the ball hits, return the ball, pick up the pins, flip them into the machine, swing back to the first pit. In all that chaos it was very easy to forget when the ball was due, easy to step into the pit just as the ball arrived. This was especially bad at night when setting for the leagues. The men were often drunk and threw very hard, so the pins ricocheted and became four-pound wooden missiles, and the setter was tired and simply forgot his timing and wound up bending over just as the ball—sixteen pounds of granite-hard material—came
roaring into the pit like a train. It was, as Harold said later when it happened to him,
exactly
like kissing a grenade. Bones were broken, setters sometimes knocked unconscious, and a night without serious bruises and bleeding wounds was unusual.

All for seven cents a line. Figuring two lines an hour on each alley, and setting two alleys if everything was working right, it was possible to make twenty-eight cents an hour, plus tips, which they would sometimes slide down the gutter—a dime, maybe as much as a quarter. The best week I ever had I made twelve dollars and forty cents working every night from six to midnight and both weekends, setting for non-league bowlers.

It was a world Harold didn’t understand, even when I tried to tell him about it, and so one day when he stopped me in the hall and asked me if they needed pinsetters, I was more than surprised.

“You want to set pins?”

He shrugged. “I need money and it’s the only job available.”

“Why do you need money? Aren’t your folks able to help you?”

He shook his head. “I need the money for a
new ham radio transmitter. I want to move up to a forty-watt and make a new dipole antenna as well. I need forty-eight dollars and fifty-seven cents and my father doesn’t approve of my ham ambitions and since there are no other jobs available …”

And that’s how it happened.

It was, of course, a complete catastrophe. While I wasn’t athletic I had a fair amount of hand-eye coordination. Harold seemed to have a kind of reverse coordination and would frequently—as he might have said—do
exactly
the wrong thing at
exactly
the wrong time.

By the end of his first night of setting pins he’d taken a ball directly in the stomach and two pins in the head, had a nosebleed that had splattered his shirt and left him looking like the survivor of a car wreck, and had picked up a limp. At the end of our shift I watched Harold as the manager handed him a dollar and eight cents.

He looked at the money Ernie put in his hands. He folded the bill neatly, put it in his pocket and staggered down the stairs and out of the bowling alley.

“Are you all right?” I caught up with him. “I mean, you look …”

“I am not all right. But I have worked and been paid. If my calculations are correct I need to do this for thirty-six-point-eight more days before I will have enough for the transmitter. A person can do practically anything for a short time if he doesn’t think he has to do it for life. I’m looking at it in this manner. If I thought I had to reset bowling pins in a pit for the rest of my life”—he sighed—“I would hold my breath until I died.”

It would be nice to be able to say Harold set pins for thirty-six-point-eight more days and bought the transmitter but it would not be
exactly
true because he had been there only four days when Chimmer arrived.

I’d never thought of Chimmer as working. I just assumed that people would give him money to make him stay away—which I would gladly have done if I’d had any money. But one afternoon he came in and Ernie, always desperate for pinsetters, hired him on the spot.

It was something from my worst nightmares. To be working at a difficult and dangerous job where injury was not only possible but probable and then to look up and see Chimmer evilly grinning in the next pit over put me very close to my limits.

But for the first few nights the work was hard enough to keep even Chimmer busy and exhausted. He just took his money and went home like the rest of us.

By the end of the week, though, he was back in form, making my life as close to hell as he could. I’d lean over to pick up pins and he’d slap me in the back of the head, cuff my ear, pour water on my head from the water bottles we brought back to drink from while we worked. Now and then he’d reach over and tip my pins just after I set them. Through all this I worked in a kind of quiet fury. I couldn’t think of any solution except to kill him. I don’t know how long it would have gone on this way had Harold not intervened. By doing so he solved my whole Chimmer problem.

It had been a long evening and I was a wreck. The leagues were bowling and I was setting pins on the alley reserved for two construction firms. They were pounding back the beers and throwing the balls so wildly the pins flew all over the pit area.

Chimmer was working next to me and Harold was on Chimmer’s other side. Chimmer’s alley was the funeral-home team. They were very slow and he had lots of time to bedevil me. I
worked through it and thought about what Harold had said about doing something for a short time that I didn’t have to do for my whole life. But Harold forgot himself.

“Why don’t you leave him alone?” he said.

In the roar of the pins crashing and the machines clanking down, Chimmer didn’t hear Harold. Besides, he was busy pouring water on my back and could only focus on one thing at a time.

“
I said, why don’t you leave him alone?
”

Unfortunately Harold yelled just when there was a lull in the noise. His words boomed through the pits.

Chimmer swung his big body around, looked at the scrawny, dirt- and sweat- and blood-streaked apparition in front of him and said, “What?” It was as if somebody had tried to stop an earthquake.

“Leave him alone,” Harold said. “He’s never done anything to you.…”

And I must confess that for a moment I was grateful that Harold had Chimmer’s attention. I thought, good, I can get to work while he pulls Harold apart. But I knew that I’d have to do whatever I could to help Harold.

Chimmer set a frame and then reached over
into Harold’s pit, caught him by the back of his waistband and threw him over into the pins. Harold stood up and Chimmer hit him in the face and broke his glasses. It was more than I could stand. Harold wasn’t badly hurt and the glasses could be fixed, but there was something about it all—Harold trying to help me, the way Chimmer had hit Harold without warning, the cruelty and unfairness—and I completely lost control of myself.

I screamed a word I’d read in the Mickey Spillane books. I flew out of my pit and landed on Chimmer’s back, driving him forward and down into his pit.

He shrugged me off like a fly. The whole thing would have resulted in my complete self-destruction—I had, after all, attacked him and thus committed a form of suicide—except that fate decided to help me out.

As Chimmer turned I launched a fist at his face. I thought I might as well. I could only die once.

At the precise instant that I started my swing one of the construction workers threw a ball at something close to the speed of light. I heard a thunder of crashing wood as it plowed into the
pins. My fist came up and forward and met Chimmer’s jaw just as a pin screamed over my shoulder and caught him full on the forehead.

He went down like a stone. The men up front stopped throwing balls for a moment. There was an uncharacteristic silence in the pit. Harold leaned over, holding his broken glasses on his nose, and studied Chimmer.

“I think you killed him.”

“No. It wasn’t me. A pin caught him. Besides, you couldn’t kill Chimmer unless you cut his head off and drove a stake through his heart and even then he wouldn’t die for a long time.”

“Whatever. He’s not breathing.”

I looked and at first I thought Harold was right, but then I saw Chimmer’s chest rise.

Still, he was stone cold out. Ernie helped us drag Chimmer up onto the bench. This wasn’t the first time a setter had been knocked cold; Ernie sprinkled some water in his face and studied him professionally. “He’ll have an egg up there but I think he’ll be all right. Who’s going to set his alley till he comes to?”

I was already setting double but Harold was working only one alley. “I’ll take it,” Harold volunteered.