For Heidi Pitlor
I was hiding in the bushes one Sunday afternoon when Sucker Boy came running through our courtyard holding up a giant bag of multicolored suckers. This was at the Bellview Apartments, a massive low-income complex that took up half a mile along University Avenue in San Diego, California. Sucker Boy had a long, twisting, whip-snapping line of admirers trotting after him, glossy-lipped Pied Piper children with suckers in their eyes. He was a damp, plump boy with a pinched pastry face and a treacherous smile. He was two years older than me, a second-grader. I never learned his real name. This was about eight minutes before he died.
I galloped out from the bushes and took my place at the end of the line. Sucker Boy could make us go wherever he wanted with those suckers. He dangled the irresistible rainbow bag above his head and led us in and out of the dappled gray groves of eucalyptus trees that grew on the hills behind our complex. We followed him down through the halls and arches and lengthening shadows of one apartment building after the next. Each boxlike stucco tenement was a different color: cinnamon, lemon, peach, lime, plum. I was breaking the rules, straying too far from home, panting and deranged, almost lost, but the chase was too tantalizing to give up.
Sucker Boy pranced around on the long terraces, then gamboled out back by the laundry, then dashed daringly down the stairs toward the avenue. Everyone knew you weren’t supposed to go out into the street, but Sucker Boy raced right out into the middle of it, holding up his gorgeous, jewel-stuffed bag. He didn’t see the dark blue car with the bug-splashed windshield. We all froze and shouted, arms out, balanced on our toes. The car’s back end chattered to one side, tires smoking, brake lights blazing. I saw Sucker Boy slip under the wheels, and I jammed my palms against my ears. The suckers were smashed to bits, a brilliant jangle of colored shards strewn down the street.
At night, my mother read to me from Henry Huggins or Ramona Quimby, Age 8 or Mr. Popper’s Penguins. The chapters were always over too soon. I tried to trick her into sticking around awhile longer, but she never fell for it. “It’s all right, dear,” she would say, then a pat, a murmur, a kiss, and the door was closing in on me, leaving an infinitesimal razor crack of faded, woolly, living-room light. My mother and father stayed up late every night. My little blue-green night light glowed like a miniature TV set, but not quite bright enough to illuminate the furry outlines of malevolent shapes: witches, gorillas, giant lizards, and especially an old green man exactly my height, his face crinkled and ringed as if composed of compressed rattlesnake parts. He wore green-plaid knickers and carried a large silver pocket watch that made a sound like a lumberjack cutting down a tree. He was Death, and I knew if he kissed me I would die. He hid out among the gorillas, waiting for me to fall asleep. Time bogged and sputtered, then simply hung motionless, stretched out and flattened before my eyes like black taffy. The moon popped over the eucalyptus trees and soaked the curtains green. I pulled the blankets over my head. The darkness weighed a ton on my chest. I didn’t believe I would make it through to the morning. I longed to call out in a ragged, night-splitting howl.
That autumn, my grandfather came to visit. I didn’t remember ever meeting him before and estimated that he was about one year older than Death. My father explained that since Grammy had passed away the year before, Grampa had become lonely in New York City and had decided to come live near us in San Diego. My parents had found a small apartment for him only a few blocks away. It would be ready in a couple of days, and he was going to stay with us until then.
My grandfather’s eyes were a gloppy, Alcatraz gray, and his teeth were burnt brown, like the inside of the pipe he smoked. The giant hearing aid strapped to the side of his head squelched and squealed. He laughed like a man gargling a jellyfish. He didn’t seem to recognize me as an individual with distinct thoughts and emotions, and to gain his attention I had to put on an act, like an organ grinder’s monkey: “Look, Grampa. Watch me disappear under this chair.” He had burn scars along his neck and up the insides of his arms (from the war, my mother said). The dome of his bald head gleamed like a wet floor, with little lavender map spots and curious moles, bumps, and other symbols.
On the second day that Grampa stayed with us, he took me down the stairs between the terraces that overlooked University Avenue, and we waited on the sidewalk for the ice-cream truck. He squeezed my hand in his shiny, burn-scarred palm. The sun blazed dustily over the roof of the Bowl-O-Rama across the street. A tiny facet of red candy glinted from the gutter, reminding me that this was the very site where Sucker Boy had gotten smashed. I was tempted to tell Grampa about it, but he was too tall and deaf, and his gummy gray eyes didn’t seem to register me.
When the ice-cream man stopped, I knew what I wanted: a Drumstick, the ice-cream cone with the chocolate-and-chopped-peanut shell. But Grampa ordered a half gallon of strawberry ice cream instead. There weren’t too many desserts I disliked, but strawberry ice cream was one of them. It was a long, glum trudge back up to the apartment, and the ice cream was already melting as my mother scooped it into bowls. The strawberries looked like frozen clots of blood.
This is how the dream went: I woke up sometime after my mother and father had turned in for the night. The door was open, and lurid orchid-colored moonlight was pouring down the hall. I listened for the whicker of witches, the shuffle and sniff of gorillas, the papery lisp of giant-lizard tongues, but the room was strangely quiet. Peaceful. Why was my door open? I got up and peeked under the bed. I looked in the closet. I padded off to use the potty. The apartment was too quiet, like a house made of marshmallows and whipped cream. I peered at the clock in the hall, even though I couldn’t tell time. Then I went into the kitchen for a glass of water.
Death was leaning against the refrigerator, waiting for me, his silver pocket watch chopping away at the time. He smiled at me with lips that curled like a sickening green flower. Against my will, I found myself sitting down before him in one of the chrome-legged dinette chairs. He huddled at my feet and winked his spinach-colored eye at me. I felt a jerk on my nerves like a fly dropping into a spider web. Then he kissed my big toe. A whirling net of nauseous gloom descended. My skin wilted and cracked and fell like a tent over my bones. My eyeballs melted into little pots of runny goo. There was nothing but cobwebs left in my lungs. I shriveled to the fading, dusty chop of a silver pocket watch.
Every morning I woke up wet in my sheets, disgusted and disappointed with myself. My mother no longer let me wear pajamas. As soon as the sun flooded through the windows, off to the bath I went. My mother stripped the sheets and shook her head, crisp and businesslike. She had read all the bed-wetting books and tried all the tricks: no fluids before bed; night light plugged in; general fears (witches, gorillas, and giant lizards) and resentments (I had to walk to school by myself) discussed. I wanted to bring up the only subject that truly concerned me: the wicked old joker in the green-plaid knickers. But I sensed that this was not appropriate for my age. Besides, I doubted my mom, or any other power on earth, could do anything about him. She carried the sheets ( and sometimes the blankets, too ) to the coin-operated laundry behind our apartment building.
I walked to school alone. My father had to take the car, because he went straight from work to night school, and my mother was busy washing my sheets and, I believed, feeling profoundly disappointed with me. I knew she wanted me to grow up and learn to tie my shoes, stop sucking my thumb, and especially stop wetting the bed. The apartment complex had a row of street-level garages, and I walked along, looking inside each one. The garages were built too small for the average car, so most people filled them with mattresses and old boat parts. The apartments, with their battlement terraces and Alamo-thick walls, loomed above me like great desert fortresses.
The weather was hot and dry, the air scented with sage and eucalyptus, the sky a rainless, enervating blue. The sidewalks glittered like lizard skin in the crackling sun. In the distance, far beyond the Bowl-O-Rama, rose an aqua-tinted water tower beside Darnell Elementary, my school. To get there, I had to cross University Avenue and its gauntlet of cars blasting back and forth out of nowhere like missiles. Whooosh! Frrrrzzzhhh! Slaaash! My eardrums opened and shut as my head swiveled from side to side. The feeble DON’T WALK sign was a mile away. I held down the cold metal crosswalk button and thought of what it would be like to be ripped to shreds by those slashing missiles. I pictured Sucker Boy splattered in gruesome Technicolor down the sparkling asphalt, his blood mingled forever with his shattered candy. Fear and death were roaming everywhere, like starving blue-eyed tigers, and I had no charms against them, no armor, no allies, only sunlight to see them better with and this puny green sign a hundred feet away that now said WALK.
At school, the other children did things I couldn’t do: dribble a ball, climb a rope, color within the lines, stack blocks into pyramids and castles, hang upside down. Some of them even knew how to tell time. They could do somersaults and cartwheels. They could push the paper straw into the side of the milk carton without crushing it. They got stars glued next to their names. They napped well with their bellies full of milk on their name-tagged mats. They tied their shoes effortlessly. They eagerly raised their hands when they needed to go: one finger or two. This was all too much for me. I had enough problems just waking up in the morning. Then there was Mr. Knickers and getting across the avenue to worry about.
On Saturday we visited Grampa for the first time in his little burnt-smelling one-room apartment with the stove on the carpet and the sink attached to the wall. The room was dank as a forest; the dusky green curtains stayed dark even when the sun hit them. A clock sitting on top of a little bookcase beat out its dreary measure, its sharp pendulum swinging back and forth slower than any other timepiece on earth. Grampa sat in a swiveling wooden desk chair, his back to an old black desk, smoking his pipe. As he puffed away, the pipe made a sound like water being pulled through pebbles, and the big globes of tobacco smoke chugged upward and flattened against the ceiling. I lay on the floor against the wall, as far away from Grampa as possible. My mother and father sat pressed together on the sofa, legs crossed, and somehow thought of things to say. They talked about the weather, groceries, baseball, how nice the room was. I was about to wriggle out of my socks from boredom and pipe smoke. I rolled into a ball and stared at the framed black-and-white photographs of warplanes hanging on the walls. My mother and father stood up — thank God — but then my mother leaned down and said to me:“Grampa is going to watch you for a little while. We’ll be back before long.” She patted my head. “You be good, now. . . .”
I sat frozen against the wall long after the door had closed. Grampa gurgled and chomped on his pipe, looking down on me contentedly. I wished I could curl up in that dark little compartment under his desk. He banged his pipe into a glass ashtray, then smiled at me and held up a crystal ball filled with snow falling over a little cabin.
I got up and walked over for a closer examination. When the snow had settled, he shook the ball again. I tried to ask about the snow (it looked like detergent flakes), but his big hearing aid started squawking. The pendulum of the clock on the bookcase swept slowly back and forth, as if it were at the bottom of the ocean.“Who’s that man?” I said at last, pointing to the nearest photograph, of a tall figure in a military uniform leaning against an old airplane.
“That’s your old grampa with his Spad VII,” he said, dipping the bowl of his pipe into his can of Prince Albert tobacco and methodically stuffing the shreds in with the ball of his thumb.“That was in 1917, during the war. World War I.” He fastened one gray eye on me.“Do you know anything about that?”
I shook my head.
“Come on up here.” He hauled me up and balanced me on his knee, his pipe an inch from my face. I wondered what I’d gotten myself into.
In a rough and phlegmy voice, he began to tell me stories. At first, all I could think of was how he smelled like a sour old blanket. I kept peeking over at his tobacco can and wondering why there were slices of peeled apple in it. I wondered when my parents would return. Then I began to take notice of Grampa’s story. He pointed down as he talked. “That’s the border between Belgium and France,” he said.“Plenty of Huns in the territory. I’ll fly her for a while. You man the gun.”
He showed me how to swivel and sight my British water-cooled Vicker’s machine gun, the rounds feeding in on a canvas belt from my left. Then he pulled the strap tight under my chin and secured my goggles. In an instant, we were soaring in his French fighter plane and shooting down Fokkers and Friedrichschafens and Halberstadts and there were rainbows on our tail and flocks of geese zipping past our windows and great conflagrations and endless shimmering expanses of sea below us. German aces with Spandaus on their wings sailed in and out of the clouds and tried to blast us out of the sky. I heard myself laughing. Grampa’s knee suddenly felt like the scooped-out seat in a biplane cockpit. My fists were clenched around the handles of my machine gun.
“Scouts to port!” he shouted, leaning to the left.
I spun and fired.
Then,“Two bombers aft!” and I sent them tumbling in blazes to their graves in the sea.
“Three Fokkers thirty degrees to starboard!” he cried, tipping hard to the right. “Triplanes. By God, they’re red. It’s Richtofen!”
I whirled to shoot them out of the sky.
“Oh, they’ve got us!” he cried, dipping his knee. “Jump! Bail out!”
I turned around.“What?”
“Flames coming from the engine!” he cried. “Hold on!"
“Where are we?”
“Oh, there goes the port wing! There goes the cowling! There goes the decking!”
Suddenly, he flattened his palm across the air, his voice lowered nearly to a whisper. “Now we’re floating out in the middle of the icy North Sea, 170 miles from the Belgian coast, little fires all around us. And we’re scorched head to foot, burning and freezing at the same time.”
I shivered.
“Not a boat or a plane in sight,” he continued. “Not a trace of our Spad. Sun headed down . . . Kind of pretty, isn’t it? Like being lost in a big blue prairie. A cold prairie. . . .”
He paused to light his pipe. I watched the long flame bend and finger into the bowl. “Looks like we’re done for, young fella.”
I was still gripping the handles of my machine gun, my legs clamped tight to Grampa’s knee. I wanted to shoot down some more planes, fly over Belgium one more time. “What are we going to do?”
“Not much we can do,” he said, taking a meditative pull from his pipe. “Guess we’ll just float for a while. Maybe someone will see us. . . .” His hearing aid began to squeal, and he reached into his shirt pocket to adjust a knob. “It isn’t so bad,” he said. “Gives us a chance to get to know one another a little.”
I was quiet for a minute.
“Tell me a story,” he said. “It’ll help pass the time.”
I thought of Mr. Popper’s Penguins. Then, before I knew it, I’d blabbed my whole dream about the old green man.
Grampa nodded slowly as he listened, a finger pressed to his hearing aid. When I was finished he reached over and switched on his desk lamp. “Do you know what an impostor is?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“It’s someone who pretends to be what he isn’t. Your little green man, for instance.” He poked me in the chest. “He’s not Death. If he was, you’d be dead by now.”
I squinted at him.
“I know Death,” he continued. “I met him in 1917. He’s seven feet tall.” He raised his hand high over his head. “Voice like thunder. Face dark as a tunnel. Coal red eyes.” He shuddered. “Ghastly looking fellow.”
I considered this for a moment.
“What’s that out there?” he cried, pointing suddenly. “That light to the east, do you see it?”
“I think so. . . .”
“Might be a ship. Looks like it’s headed this way. Don’t know how we can get her attention.”
“We can yell,” I suggested.
He chuckled a little, then cupped his big hand over the top of my head.
This story is reprinted with permission from the web publication Atlantic Unbound. © 1999 by Atlantic Unbound. Distributed by the Los Angeles Times Syndicate.
