Bad Haircut (14 page)

Wild Kingdom

 

M
r. Norman died the summer after my first year in college. I had insomnia that night. I was lying in bed thinking bad thoughts about my ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend when my bedroom walls started pulsing with pink light. I got up and went to the window. The ambulance was right next door.

My parents were already on the front porch when I got there, my mother wide awake in her robe, my father yawning in shorty pajamas. We watched silently as the first aid squad carried Mr. Norman out of his house on a stretcher. Mrs. Norman came out right behind him in the company of a fat policeman. She wore a windbreaker over a long filmy nightgown that swirled delicately around her legs as she walked. The cop led her down the driveway and past the ambulance to a patrol car parked across the street. He opened the passenger door and helped her inside, almost as
though they were going on a date. Both vehicles sped off without sirens.

We didn't find out Mr. Norman was dead until the following evening, when his wife called and asked if I would be one of the pallbearers at his funeral. Her request surprised me. Mr. Norman and I had been on neighborly terms, but we were too far apart in age to ever really be friends. When we saw each other, we said hello.

“I'd be glad to,” I said. “He was a good man.”

I expected my parents to be upset with me for saying yes, but Mr. Norman's death seemed to have wiped his slate clean with them. My father shook my hand. “It's a good thing you're doing,” he said.

The wake was at Woodley's Funeral Home. My parents and I were numbers 7, 8, and 9 on the Register of Mourners, but when we entered the viewing room, the only people there were Mrs. Norman, her daughter Judy Klinghof, and a clean-cut guy I assumed was Judy's husband. Mrs. Norman was holding a handkerchief to her mouth and sobbing. It sounded like she had the hiccups.

Mr. Norman was laid out in a half-open coffin that seemed to be floating on a bed of flowers. My parents knelt at the padded altar in front of him and bowed their heads to pray. I glanced over my shoulder at Judy Klinghof, whom I hadn't seen for years. She had changed from a beautiful hippie girl into this plain-looking woman with rose-tinted
glasses and a perm. She was whispering something to her husband, who for some reason had taken off one of his shoes and was holding it up to the light.

When my parents were done, I got down on my knees and made the sign of the cross. Mr. Norman wore a blue pinstriped suit with a tiny American flag pinned to the lapel. He reminded me of an astronaut strapped into a capsule, calmly waiting for liftoff.

I was nine years old the first time I saw him. For my family, at least, it had been an ordinary fall Sunday. After church, we drove to Jersey City so my mother could visit her mother in the nursing home. We made the same drive every week. On the way, we passed a garbage dump that had been on fire for more than twenty years. My father told me that every time the firemen put out the blaze, it started up again a few hours later, so they finally decided to just let it burn. Some days the smoke was so heavy it was like driving through fog; other days you would just see a bonfire or two, as though people were camping out on that mountain of trash, maybe roasting marshmallows. A few miles up the road, we passed a sprawling junkyard where crushed car bodies of every imaginable color were stacked six and seven high.

Only my mother went into the nursing home. My father and I stayed in the station wagon and
tuned into the Giants game on the car radio. The Giants were awful, but it was easy to imagine otherwise, listening to Marty Glickman's play-byplay crackling from the dashboard. “Ron Johnson takes the handoff fakes right spins left breaks a tackle and struggles forward before being buried beneath a waveofredjerseysforagainof… one yard.”

A while later, my mother returned carrying a grocery bag filled with Grandma's dirty laundry. She passed the bag to me, and I stowed it in the back, holding my breath to avoid the smells. We got home in time to watch the Giants lose and then remained in front of the TV for the West Coast game at four o'clock. We ate dinner during the second half. Every time the announcer raised his voice, my father and I put down our forks and rushed into the living room to see the replay.

After the game, that lousy Sunday night feeling sank in. I had homework but couldn't tear myself away from the TV. While my mother worked at the kitchen table, writing checks and licking envelopes, my father and I watched Mutual of Omaha's
Wild Kingdom.

I was closest to the hallway, so when the doorbell rang, I got up to answer it. I was barely on my feet when it rang a second time.

“Hold your horses,” my father called out from the couch.

I flipped on the porch lights and pulled aside the curtain on the front-door window. For one
Strange moment, I thought I was watching an outdoor television: right in front of me, on my own porch, a man was choking a woman, shaking her by the neck as though she were a rag doll. I let go of the curtain and walked backwards into the hallway.

“Who's there?” My father was squatting inches above the cushions on the couch, not sure if he should stand up or sit down.

“It's for you,” I said.

Just then the doorbell rang several times in rapid succession, making a sound like a pinball machine hitting the jackpot.

My father rushed outside. “Hey! HEY!” I heard him shout. “Not on my porch!” He stuck his head inside the door. “Honey! Call the police!”

When my mother hung up, I stepped onto the porch to let my father know the cops were coming. He was standing between the man and the woman, holding them apart like a boxing referee. “Just calm down,” he was saying. “Just everybody calm down.”

The strangler was a big guy, but not scary-looking, not the type you'd expect to find murdering a woman on your front porch. In fact, he looked like he was about to cry. He punched himself in the leg and said, “I had a good life. I was happy. And that… that
whore
next door ruined it. It's all her fault.”

He pointed to the small gray house where Mrs. Klinghof lived.

“You bastard,” the woman said. “Don't blame her.” Her words came in gasps, as though she'd been running Windsprints.

“Hey!” my father broke in. “Watch your tongues. Both of you.” Then, softly: “Go on inside, Buddy.”

I stood in a daze in the middle of the living room. On TV, the white-haired guy from
Wild Kingdom
had changed out of his safari clothes. He was dressed in a suit, sitting on a stool in an otherwise empty room. “As Jim found out tonight,” he said, “the African jungle is a dangerous place. But you don't have to be standing in the path of a charging rhinoceros to put yourself and your family at risk …”

Outside, there were sirens.

On the way home from school a few days later, I saw the strangler in front of Mrs. Klinghof's house. He was unloading suitcases from the trunk of a car.

“You must be Buddy,” he said, stepping onto the sidewalk to block my path. “I'm Mr. Norman. We're going to be neighbors.” He stuck out his hand. “Come on. Shake.”

We shook. For some reason, I wasn't scared. His hand was big and soft. “Nice grip,” he said. “You're a pretty strong kid.” He touched a green and red plaid suitcase with the tip of his workboot.

“Say, how would you like to carry this up to the porch for me? I'll pay you a quarter.” He reached into his pants pocket, pulled out a handful of change, and gave me three nickels and a dime. The suitcase wasn't even heavy.

At home, my mother did her best to answer my questions. Her explanation was complicated but logical, like the solution to a word problem. Mr. Norman had been cheating on Mrs. Norman with Mrs. Klinghof. Somehow Mrs. Norman had found out, so now Mr. Norman had to move in with Mrs. Klinghof. Pretty soon, Mrs. Klinghof would become Mrs. Norman.

“Mrs. Klinghof has been very lonely since Mr. Klinghof passed away. Now she won't be so lonely anymore.”

“But what about the other one?” I asked. “The lady on the porch?”

“She's better off too,” my mother said, after a brief hesitation.

The late Mr. Klinghof had been my friend. We used to play catch on summer evenings, standing on our respective lawns, lobbing the ball back and forth over his driveway. He wore a tattered four-fingered mitt that looked like it belonged in the Hall of Fame. We were both Yankee fans, and he talked endlessly about the team, comparing current stars to the heroes of the past. Mr. Klinghof was personally acquainted with Phil Rizzuto, the
great Yankee shortstop and announcer. Just before he died, he got me the Scooter's autograph, scrawled on the blank side of a panel torn from a Parliament cigarette pack. “Holy Cow, Buddy!” it said. “Best Wishes from Phil Rizzuto.”

For a long time after his death, Mrs. Klinghof moped around the house, trying to keep herself busy with yard work. She raked the lawn even after all the leaves were gone, and swept the sidewalk once a day with a push broom. In the summer, she cut the grass with hand clippers instead of a mower. She was alone in the house. Judy had been living for years in a commune in Canada with her boyfriend, who was dodging the draft. My mother told me she hadn't even come home for her father's funeral.

Mr. Norman tried hard to be a good neighbor. He knew he'd made a bad first impression. He was always ready with a wave and an optimistic statement about the weather. He shoveled our sidewalk after snowstorms and gave my father helpful hints on lawn care, but it didn't work: my parents were barely polite with the Normans. They never stopped by the fence just to chat, the way they did with our other next-door neighbors.

The funeral was on Friday morning. I had the day off from the sheet-metal yard where I was working that summer, driving a forklift for minimum wage. My alarm clock didn't go off until eight, two hours
later than usual. I had stayed awake thinking about Patty until almost three in the morning, so I was grateful for the extra sleep.

Patty was my ex-girlfriend. She was a year younger than me, a senior at Harding High. For most of my freshman year in college, we'd managed to conduct a fairly successful long-distance relationship. And then I botched it.

Near the end of spring semester, this girl named Brenda from my intro psych class invited me to a party in her dorm room. We slept together that same night. The next day I wrote a long letter to Patty, who was still a virgin. I didn't mention anything about Brenda. I just said that we should start seeing other people. Three days later Patty called. She was crying.

“I don't want to see other people,” she said. “I want to see you.”

Brenda and I only lasted a few weeks, just long enough to discover that except for the ability to get on each other's nerves, we had absolutely nothing in common. When I called Patty to apologize and patch things up, she told me she'd already started seeing Brian Kersitis, this guy in her class. I liked Brian; he was the lead singer in a pretty good heavy metal band called Warlock.

“I guess I messed up this time,” I said.

“Yup,” she said. “I guess you did.”

I didn't realize how badly I'd messed up until I got home from college and didn't have anything
to do at night. I had no desire to hang around the house with my parents, and I didn't feel like going to the woods to get wasted with my high school friends. I just wanted to be with Patty. I missed her even more now that it was graduation week. I should have been going to parties with her every night, drinking beer, sharing the fun. Instead I spent hours in bed with my eyes wide open, imagining her and Brian Kersitis in the back seat of a car. On the night Mr. Norman died, a dark brown Chevrolet zoomed by me while I was walking down Grand Avenue near McDonald's. The car was decorated with blue and gold streamers, the colors of Harding High, and the word “PARTY!” was soaped across the side in big letters. Patty and a couple of her friends were leaning out the windows, shaking their fists and screaming at the top of their lungs, the way you do when you graduate.

My parents had already left for work, so I had the house to myself when I got out of bed. After I took a shower, got dressed, and ate a bowl of cereal, there was still time to kill. I turned on the TV and watched a rerun of
The Munsters
, an episode in which Herman makes a fool of himself trying to win Eddie's love, only to find out that Eddie loved him all along.

At nine o'clock sharp, Judy's husband Bob knocked on the front door. He and Judy were staying next door, looking after Mrs. Norman. Since we were both pallbearers, Bob had suggested
that we drive together to the funeral. Woodley's was providing limo service for Judy and Mrs. Norman.

Bob stepped into the hallway and shook my hand. He was a tall, baby-faced man with hair that was parted in the middle and feathered back over his ears. Like me, he was wearing a dark blue suit, but his tie was wide and colorfully striped, a bit too cheerful for the occasion.

“I'll be ready in a minute,” I said.

“No rush,” he said. “You got any coffee? There's only Sanka next door.”

“I could make some. But doesn't the final viewing start in fifteen minutes?”

“I don't know about you,” he said, “but I could do without the final viewing. I sat in the funeral home for two hours last night and two hours on Wednesday. That's enough for me.”

Bob followed me into the kitchen. He sat down and drummed his fingers on the table.

“You ever been to a wax museum?” he asked.

I poured water into the coffee maker and tried to remember if I had. “I'm not sure. Maybe a long time ago.”

“Judy and I were in Niagara Falls a few months back and we went to one. This was on the Canadian side.”

“Yeah? How was it?”

“Awful,” he said. “No one looked like they were supposed to. Bob Hope looked more like
Nixon than Nixon did. It was a rip-off.”

“Sounds like it.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I'd forgotten all about it until I saw Jerry in that coffin. He looked like one of those wax statues. Some celebrity you never heard of.”

I sat down while the coffee brewed. It wasn't a very hot day, but Bob's face was red and sweaty. There was a napkin holder on the table beside a bowl of artificial fruit. He took a peach-colored napkin and wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Christ,” he said. “It's a scorcher. What a day for a funeral.”