Read Online In Zanesville by Jo Ann Beard - Free Book Online Page B

Elm Ave and the IGA parking lot, where the rest of the parade is forming.
    Right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right,
     left, right, left, right, left, right, left.
    The neighborhood looks haunted, with wet leaves clumped in the gutters and streetlamps creating cones of light high in the
     air. At the corner, instruments are lifted to lips and blown into, and a big misshapen sound comes forth. The song of the
     weirdos. Somewhere behind us, cheerleaders and football players follow along wryly.
    As doom descends, panic rises, and a vampire motors past in a golf cart, smiling with plastic teeth.
    *     *     *
    In retrospect we probably should have quit band after the parade instead of during it.
    “In
retrospect,
we never should have been in band in the first place,” Felicia says. “I was only doing it because you said to.”
    “You played the clarinet when I met you!” I say indignantly.
    “Remember I said, ‘I play the clari
not
’?” she reminds me.
    “Remember I said, ‘My playing is
flut
ile’?” I reply.
    “That’s when we first knew each other was funny,” she says dispiritedly.
    We’re carrying our instruments and our hats. We tried to take the jackets off to be less conspicuous, but it was too cold.
     So we’re a block off Elm Ave, where there are no elms and where the parade is roaring along at one mile an hour, thousands
     of people lining the route, just as we feared. A car swishes past us and pulls up at the curb, and a man gets out balancing
     a pizza box and a six-pack of pop.
    “The parade’s thattaway,” he says cordially.
    “We know,” Felicia answers.
    He stares at us for a moment, resting the pop against his hip.
    “Which school is that uniform?” he asks.
    “John Deere,” I say.
    “I went to Walt Whitman way back when,” he says. “Worst years of my life—just kidding.”
    Now that I’m not in the parade, I have nothing against it. We decide to cut over and watch it from the Grassy Knoll, a hidden
     spot about ten feet above the sidewalk, where a gentlysloping hill meets an eight-foot retaining wall. From up there, if one were so inclined, cars going by on Elm Ave can be bomped
     with soft, rotting vegetables, preferably ones that splash, like tomatoes. We’ve never done it ourselves, but we know of certain
     others who have.
    “I hope your sister and her friends aren’t there,” Felicia says.
    The Knoll is on the far side of the RF Charity Home for the Infirm, where the old folks have been bundled up and put out on
     the sidewalk in their wheelchairs. Some of them are waving and clapping, some of them look angry, some have already faded
     into sleep.
    When I was young, the RF was an actual house with tall, shuttered windows and a cupola, donated by Miss Jemima Rosen of the
     Rosen Fertilizer family after her death. It was a place for old schoolteachers and nurses, mostly, but then they tore it down
     and built a facility, low and brick. Once, years ago, a demented woman came up on our porch, knocked on the door, and, when
     my mother answered it, told her that they were trying to kill her over at the Fertilizer Home. My mother brought her in, put
     a housecoat on her, and called one of her friends to discuss it before giving up and reporting it to the home’s staff. When
     they came to pick her up, the old woman was at the sink drying dishes that I was running water over and handing to her.
    I felt so strange about that woman, her dark eyes and cottony hair, the thin, pilled nightgown she was wearing. Off and on
     for a year afterward, I would ride my bike in their circular drive, watching for her, but she was never let out again.
    The Grassy Knoll is empty and has a perfectly framed view of the parade route: A series of floats with macabre themes is under
     way, each appearing and then making way for the next, like Pez,followed by a cluster of boys on dirt bikes weaving in and