Read Online A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel - Free Book Online Page A

He asked if the Scroggses had a cat, and Birdie said no. By this time Petey was in the kitchen, looking short and beady-eyed and nervous.
    “Well, I believe I hear a cat somewhere,” my dad said.
    “No, you don’t,” Birdie shrilled, handing Dad his water jugs as quickly as she could.
    “I believe the sound I hear is coming from the basement,” Dad said, taking a step toward the basement door.
    Petey skittered over like a greased pig, trying to insinuate himself between Dad and the basement. “Ain’t no cat in here!” he squealed.
    Dad quick thrust the water jugs into Petey’s arms, who accepted them without thinking, and then Dad went for the basement door, which was so swollen he had to heave his shoulder against it to get it all the way open.
    And into the kitchen sprang a soot-colored, howling apparition, nothing but ribs and a tail. Dad said that for a few seconds he couldn’t honestly say whether it was PeeDink, until the cat looked up at him. At that moment there were three pairs of crossed eyes in one kitchen, which my dad later reported to be two too many for any man, so he grabbed the water jugs, thanked Mrs. Scroggs, and stomped out the back door, poor desperate PeeDink following close behind.
     
    WHAT PETEY SCROGGS did to PeeDink was all the story I needed to know about him, but I hadn’t yet reached the point of crossing the street to avoid him, or ignoring him in the hard snubbish way that means true enemies. So one afternoon, sitting in the backyard in the double glider my father won in a card game and lost two weeks later, I saw Petey walk across his backyard and into the barn where the Scroggses kept rows and rows of rabbits in cages. A few minutes later he came out with a big, fat white rabbit, and when he saw me watching him he raised his arm in a wave, and I waved back.
    Mom and Dad were only a few feet away, going over my dad’s camping checklist. My mom was having to do a lot of the work, because Dad had a maggot in his finger. A few days earlier he had slammed his hand in the door of the truck, eliminating nearly half an inch of his index finger, and the doctor had put a maggot inside the stump to eat the dead parts. Dad was a little crabby because he could feel it moving around.
    It appeared that we were either twenty minutes or six hours away from leaving for Tall Trees, depending on whether my mom found three missing cans of sterno and a case of C rations Dad stole from the National Guard Armory.
    “Bob,” Mom said, throwing up her hands. “We have enough food for a
month
. Why do we need a case of C rations?”
    “You never know.”
    Petey headed my way. He was carrying the rabbit with one hand under its belly and one hand holding the scruff of its neck. There was no fence separating our yards then, so he just walked over and sat down on the other side of the glider.
    “You wanna hold my rabbit?” he asked, in his objectionable voice.
    I don’t know a sane person in this world who can resist a bunny. I nodded, and he passed his rabbit over to me, settling it in my lap.
    It was a huge, furry sack of heat. I’d never seen a rabbit so big, or so white. Its skin hung down in folds on either side of my arms—it was in all ways bigger than my lap. I held it under the chin the way Petey had, with one hand, and rubbed its head with my other. Between the ears the rabbit’s skull divided in the most delicate little dip. I felt it sniff my hand, moving its nose in that quick up and down way that is the subtle answer to
What does a rabbit say?
    I could have held it all day, but after only a few minutes Petey grabbed it by the neck and took off across the yard. I looked up into the setting sun and saw the outline of my dad moving toward me, then looked down and saw blood dripping on the tops of my blue tennis shoes. I looked up; I looked down; I could make sense of nothing I was seeing. Then both of my parents were sitting on the glider, and Dad had ahold of my hand, and I could see that