Read Online A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel - Free Book Online
Authors: Haven Kimmel
Tags: Family & Relationships, Personal Memoirs, Biography & Autobiography, Biography, Life Stages, School Age
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and sigh and say we were ready, and then I would get back in the camper and off we’d go, driving less than an hour to the campground, with me flying around in the back of the camper like a little wayward piece of popcorn.
WE HAD A SERIES OF NEIGHBORS in the house to the north of us after Minnie Hodson died; Petey Scroggs and his family lived there for a while, and if I were able to visually represent Petey, the portrait would be nothing but a cliché. He was a mean, short boy with carrot-colored hair and freckles. His jeans were often twisted around sideways and the collars of his striped T-shirts were always stretched out and he had mean eyes and he ate his own fingernails. Petey walked with the longest stride a short boy can afford, and when he wasn’t barreling down the sidewalk on his feet, he was riding a very sinister-looking black bicycle that seemed to be made of the Devil’s own bicycle parts.
Petey got his looks from his mother, who kept her carrot hair in perpetual pin curls, by which I mean always in the pins. She and Petey were both a little cross-eyed, and she had a very high-pitched voice which caused my dad to call her Birdie. Petey looked and sounded just like her, even though he only came up to the waist of the housedress she wore all year long, which may have actually been an uncomfortable nightgown.
As for his smarts, Petey inherited those straight from his daddy, John, who was a mean drunk. My dad’s nickname for John was Jethro, after Jethro Bodine from
The Beverly Hillbillies,
which seemed to me quite insulting to the real Jethro, who, while clearly stupid, was nonetheless charming and intended no harm. John was a tobacco-spitter. There was no end of mischief in his intentions. Once he raked up all the leaves in his yard, poured kerosene on them, and set them alight, right underneath the mulberry tree our two yards shared. Twice he had, while drunk, driven his car into the corner of his own house, and Dad had seen John set his own pants on fire while trying to light a match on the zipper of his fly.
In my loneliest hour I had no need of Petey Scroggs as a playmate. I was, in fact, afraid of him, because of the many stories that circulated in Mooreland about his treatment of animals. He had once thrown a litter of kittens into a burning trash barrel, I heard at church, and Julie’s aunt told me that he snuck into a woman’s house while she was in the garden and plucked all the feathers off her parakeet, leaving it completely naked. And I knew in my heart with absolute certainty that he had been responsible for the kidnapping of my cat PeeDink one bitterly cold January.
When PeeDink didn’t come home one night none of us was really worried, because his mighty hunting skills preoccupied him. Then he didn’t come home a second night, and I had to go out in the dark and cold and call for him. After the third night we were all sore afraid, and we began canvassing the neighborhood, but no one could remember seeing him. Every day for a month I checked at Doc Austerman’s clinic, in case somebody had accidentally turned him in as their cat, thinking that maybe they could get all the broken parts of him fixed, but every day the answer was no. I was nearly despondent without him. My dad finally sat me down one night and told me that I needed to accept that PeeDink was probably gone for good, because it was simply too cold for him to have survived longer than a few nights, especially given the fact that he was learning disabled. I cried and cursed God. I told Dad if he really loved me he would just go out and find him and bring him home, and day after day Dad tried, with no luck.
Then right at the end of January the weather turned so bitter that our water pipes froze and burst. Dad gathered up all the jugs he kept for just such emergencies and trudged over to the Scroggses’ to borrow some water. While he stood in the kitchen watching Birdie fill the jugs, he heard a familiar, desperate meowing.
WE HAD A SERIES OF NEIGHBORS in the house to the north of us after Minnie Hodson died; Petey Scroggs and his family lived there for a while, and if I were able to visually represent Petey, the portrait would be nothing but a cliché. He was a mean, short boy with carrot-colored hair and freckles. His jeans were often twisted around sideways and the collars of his striped T-shirts were always stretched out and he had mean eyes and he ate his own fingernails. Petey walked with the longest stride a short boy can afford, and when he wasn’t barreling down the sidewalk on his feet, he was riding a very sinister-looking black bicycle that seemed to be made of the Devil’s own bicycle parts.
Petey got his looks from his mother, who kept her carrot hair in perpetual pin curls, by which I mean always in the pins. She and Petey were both a little cross-eyed, and she had a very high-pitched voice which caused my dad to call her Birdie. Petey looked and sounded just like her, even though he only came up to the waist of the housedress she wore all year long, which may have actually been an uncomfortable nightgown.
As for his smarts, Petey inherited those straight from his daddy, John, who was a mean drunk. My dad’s nickname for John was Jethro, after Jethro Bodine from
The Beverly Hillbillies,
which seemed to me quite insulting to the real Jethro, who, while clearly stupid, was nonetheless charming and intended no harm. John was a tobacco-spitter. There was no end of mischief in his intentions. Once he raked up all the leaves in his yard, poured kerosene on them, and set them alight, right underneath the mulberry tree our two yards shared. Twice he had, while drunk, driven his car into the corner of his own house, and Dad had seen John set his own pants on fire while trying to light a match on the zipper of his fly.
In my loneliest hour I had no need of Petey Scroggs as a playmate. I was, in fact, afraid of him, because of the many stories that circulated in Mooreland about his treatment of animals. He had once thrown a litter of kittens into a burning trash barrel, I heard at church, and Julie’s aunt told me that he snuck into a woman’s house while she was in the garden and plucked all the feathers off her parakeet, leaving it completely naked. And I knew in my heart with absolute certainty that he had been responsible for the kidnapping of my cat PeeDink one bitterly cold January.
When PeeDink didn’t come home one night none of us was really worried, because his mighty hunting skills preoccupied him. Then he didn’t come home a second night, and I had to go out in the dark and cold and call for him. After the third night we were all sore afraid, and we began canvassing the neighborhood, but no one could remember seeing him. Every day for a month I checked at Doc Austerman’s clinic, in case somebody had accidentally turned him in as their cat, thinking that maybe they could get all the broken parts of him fixed, but every day the answer was no. I was nearly despondent without him. My dad finally sat me down one night and told me that I needed to accept that PeeDink was probably gone for good, because it was simply too cold for him to have survived longer than a few nights, especially given the fact that he was learning disabled. I cried and cursed God. I told Dad if he really loved me he would just go out and find him and bring him home, and day after day Dad tried, with no luck.
Then right at the end of January the weather turned so bitter that our water pipes froze and burst. Dad gathered up all the jugs he kept for just such emergencies and trudged over to the Scroggses’ to borrow some water. While he stood in the kitchen watching Birdie fill the jugs, he heard a familiar, desperate meowing.
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