Loser (5 page)

His father parks the Clunker, and they sit in the front seat having lunch. Donald has given much thought to lunch. On an ordinary day he might have packed a peanut butter and banana sandwich and a pack of M&M's and a strawberry Twinkie. But that is not what a mailman would eat. So he made himself a sandwich of Lebanon baloney and cheese and lettuce and pickle chips and mustard. For dessert he chose an apple. He wanted to bring coffee in the thermos jug, but his mother would only allow decaffeinated iced tea.

It's the best lunch he's ever had, sitting in Clunker Four with his dad, pith helmet and leather bag waiting in the backseat. He pours iced tea into the red plastic cup and pretends it's coffee.

He eats half his sandwich, two bites of the apple and a sip of iced tea. As he opens the car
door his father says, “Where are you going?”

“Back to work,” says Donald. He can't wait. He's too excited to eat.

“Close the door. Relax,” says his father. “You don't just wolf down your lunch and run off. Lunchtime is not for eating. Working man needs a break.”

Donald closes the door. He sits back. He folds his arms. He looks at the ceiling. He whistles.

His father laughs. “Are you relaxing?”

“Yep.”

“Well, we don't just relax. We talk too. We have a chat.”

“What do we chat about?”

“Anything we want.”

Donald doesn't have to think long. “Dad,” he says, “do you think it's going to snow?”

“Someday, sure, next winter. But not today. We got a warm day in April here.”

“Oh,” says Donald. “How about rain?”

Mr. Zinkoff looks at the sky. “Doesn't look like it.”

“Hail?” Donald says hopefully.

“Sorry.”

Donald punches the seat cushion. “Phooey.”

To Donald, one of the best things about being a mailman is that you have to deliver the mail in spite of snow, rain, hail and, for all he knows, tidal waves and tornadoes. In fact, it was on a day when he saw his father come home with icicles hanging from his earmuffs that he decided to become a mailman. He watched his father shake the snow and ice from himself, and he said, “Wow, Dad! Was it hard?” He has never forgotten the answer. His father picked an icicle from his hat, stuck it in his mouth like a toothpick and said, “Nah. No problem. Piece a cake.” From that day on, when he sees stormy weather out the classroom window, he thinks of his dad trudging heroically through the blizzard saying, “Piece a cake…piece a cake…”

The night before, Donald went to bed fervently wishing for a blizzard the next day. When he awoke he ran to the window and was met by pure sunshine. He searched sky and ground for evidence of bad weather, but could not find so much as a solitary hailstone.

“But you know,” says his father, “weather isn't the only thing you have to worry about.”

“It's not?”

“No way. There's biting dogs and wild cats. There's banana peels you can slip on. There's turtles you can trip over and break your nose. There's rhinos.”

Donald boggles. “Rhinos?”

“Sure. Who says a rhino can't escape from the zoo and show up on your mail route? Do you know of any law that says that can't happen?”

Donald couldn't think of a single law against it. “I guess not,” he says.

His father nods. “There you go. It's a dangerous world out there. A mailman has more than just snow and rain to deal with.”

Donald beams. “Yahoo!” He looks out the window, relieved to know the world is not as safe as it appears to be. “Is lunchtime over yet, Dad?”

Mr. Z consults his watch. “Almost. Just enough time to talk about the Waiting Man.”

Donald stares. “Huh?”

“The Waiting Man. You'll see him in the next block, the nine hundred block. Nine twenty-four Willow. You can see him in the window behind the mailbox.”

Donald is intrigued. “Is he waiting for the mail?”

“No, he's waiting for his brother. I hear he's been waiting for him for thirty-two years. His brother went away to fight in the Vietnam War and was MIA and never came back.”

Donald senses a sadness somewhere in the distance. “What's ‘MIA'?”

“Missing in action. It means they're pretty sure he was killed but they can't find his body.”

“Are
you
pretty sure, Dad?”

His father looks out the window. He nods slowly. “I'm pretty sure.”

“Isn't the Waiting Man pretty sure?”

“I guess not.”

Thirty-two
years
. Donald cannot imagine it. Donald cannot wait more than thirty-two
seconds
for anything. Of course, a brother isn't just anything. Thirty-two years. Would he wait that long for a brother? Would he wait that long for Polly?

His father claps his hands. “Okay. Enough of this chitchat. Time to hit the trail. Let's go! People are waiting for their mail!”

Donald scrambles into the backseat. He
straps on the bag, plunks on his helmet and hits the sidewalk.

As it turns out, no escaped rhinos are out and about this particular day. No turtles either. Not even a banana peel. But Donald does see the Waiting Man. He's a face in the window next to the numbers white against the brick: 924. He appears to be wearing pajamas. His white hair is thick around his ears and wispy on top. He is looking up the street, in the direction that Donald came from. When Donald stands on the top step, he is close enough to reach out and touch the window. But the Waiting Man does not turn, does not seem to know Donald is there. He merely stares unblinking up the street.

Donald watches the Waiting Man for much longer than he realizes. He does not move away until, in his own mind, he has waited longer than he had ever waited for anything in his life.

He is at the next house before he realizes he has forgotten something. He rushes back to deliver 924 its letter. The Waiting Man is still there.

Several houses later Donald hears someone behind him calling: “Mailman! Oh mailman!”

He turns. He has to lift his head to see out from under the brim of the pith helmet.

A white-haired lady in a mint-green dress is standing on a step waving her letter. She is surrounded by a four-legged aluminum walker. She's smiling at him. “Thank you, mailman!” she calls.

Donald calls back, “You're welcome!” He stands at attention and salutes her.

Shortly after that comes a moment Donald has not expected. He reaches into the bag and feels nothing but leather. He takes it off and puts it on the sidewalk and peers into it. Nothing. Empty. He has delivered his one hundred letters. Many times he has imagined the start of Take Donald Zinkoff to Work Day; never has he imagined the end of it.

Clunker Four grumbles at the curb.

“Workday's over,” calls his dad. “Time to go home.”

Reluctantly Donald drags the bag to the car. He gets in. He does not take off the helmet. His father gives him his day's pay. He puts it in his pocket without looking at it. He cries all the way home.

Andrew's father must have gotten a raise, because by the time Zinkoff enters third grade, Andrew is gone. Moved. To a place outside of town called Heatherwood. To a house with a driveway and a front yard with a tree, Zinkoff hears.

In November of third grade Zinkoff goes through the worst period in all his eight years. He has surgery. He goes into the hospital and they put him to sleep and the doctor turns the upside-down valve in his stomach right-side up. The good news is that he stops throwing up. The bad news is that he has to miss three weeks of school.

He drives his mother crazy. “Heaven help me” every ten minutes. On the second day after returning home from the hospital, he tries to sneak off to school. So his mother creates an
alarm. She places the alarm in front of the front door. If her son ever tries to leave, the alarm goes off. The alarm is Polly.

Polly is seventeen months old by now. She speaks very little at this point, but one thing she does say is “Bye-bye.” She says it distinctly—in fact, she shouts it—and she says it whenever she sees someone leaving the house. Each morning Mother Zinkoff padlocks the back door. Then she wheels the playpen up against the front door and places Polly inside. Then she goes about her chores, ready to come running whenever she hears “Bye-bye!”

It happens only once. Mrs. Z comes running to find her son halfway out the door and Polly yelling “Bye-bye!” at the top of her lungs. She also finds a chocolate cupcake mashed in Polly's hand. A bribe.

Once Zinkoff understands that escape is impossible, he considers other ways to spend his time. This is critical, because time sits on Zinkoff's hands like an elephant. He hates to wait. He hates waiting more than anything else.
To Zinkoff, waiting means basically this: not moving. He hates waiting in lines. He hates waiting for the bathroom to clear out. He hates waiting for answers, for toast to pop up, for bathtubs to fill, for soup to heat, soup to cool, car rides to end.

Most of all he hates sleep, the curse of the human race. Every night he protests it, every morning he gets out of it as soon as he can. In fact, as far as Zinkoff is concerned, he doesn't really sleep. He merely waits all night until it's time to get up. If pressed, he will admit to going to bed, but not to sleep.

Relatives and other grown-ups have discovered that they can amuse themselves by asking him, “So Donald, when did you go to bed last night?”

“Nine o'clock.”

“And when did you go to sleep?”

“I didn't.”

“You mean you didn't sleep all night?”

“Nope.”

Whenever his uncle Stanley comes over, he
proclaims at full voice: “Aha—there he is! The Sleepless Wonder!”

Then there are the sitting things: watching movies and reading books and the hours in the classroom. Like sleeping, these too are non-movers—but not entirely. For as long as they keep his interest, as long as they make him think, Zinkoff is moving. Of course, you wouldn't know it to look at him, since the moving part is out of sight, behind his unblinking eyes. His brain.

This is how Zinkoff at the age of eight imagines the inside of his head: a moving part, like an elbow or knee. He imagines that when he's interested, when he's thinking, his brain is moving, stretching itself, leaning this way and that, flexing. When his brain stops moving—that is, when he's bored—off goes the TV, closed goes the book, tuned out goes the teacher.

Zinkoff's blessing has been this: Boredom has not happened often.

But it happens a lot during his three weeks of convalescing. Every day he looks out the front window at the kids going off to John W. Satterfield
Elementary. Not only is he not allowed to go to school, he is forbidden to do anything more active than walk across a room. His world shrinks to the living-room sofa. He soon becomes fed up with TV and books. Fed up with jigsaw puzzles and watercolors. Fed up with feeling the stitches of his operation. Minute after minute, day after endless day he stares out the front window, and the elephant lowers itself onto his hands, and he comes to know the Long Wait of the Waiting Man.

He comes to know how painful a minute can be, how unbearable an hour. Though he cannot put his understanding into words, he understands that time by itself is nothing, is emptiness, and that a person is not made for emptiness. One day he counts as thirty-two minutes go by on the clock, and he says to himself as he looks out the window, “Thirty-two years.” He tries to cast his brain, like a stone, that far, thirty-two years into the future, but all it falls into is an immense gray sadness. He knows it is not his own sadness but the sadness of the Waiting Man. It is everywhere, on the roof shingles and rainspouts and brick
walls and alleyways, and the sadness and the emptiness are the same thing and they will not end until a soldier comes walking down Willow Street.

Zinkoff turns from the window. He feels an urgent need to play with his baby sister. He plays with her for an hour or two and makes her laugh, and then, because still he cannot go to school, he decides that school must come to him.

He will give himself a test.

To Zinkoff there is not one darkness, but many. There is the dark in the closet and the dark under the bed and the dark he can never see: the dark inside a drawer. No matter how fast he opens a drawer, trying to catch the dark, the light pours in faster. There is the dark of outside and the dark of inside.

Unlike most children, Zinkoff is not afraid of the dark. Outside darkness does not frighten him. His father has told him that the stars are faraway suns, and the thought of all those suns up there gives Zinkoff a warm and cozy feeling at night. Inside, he seems to carry his own sunshine with him—he's a sunshine bottle—even into the closet, where sometimes he hides from Polly without a twinge of fear.

In one respect, however, he is like almost all
children: He fears the darkness of the cellar. And even then, it isn't strictly the darkness that he fears. It's what dwells in the darkness: the Furnace Monster.

Like most furnace monsters, Zinkoff's stays out of sight behind the furnace when people are around. It's when the people leave, when the light goes off and the door at the top of the stairs closes, in that purest darkness—that's when the monster comes out from behind the furnace.

To be in the cellar then, this is the most terrifying thing Zinkoff can imagine. This will be his test.

Perhaps if Zinkoff had not had two weeks to build up a good head of boredom, taking the test would not have occurred to him. But he is bored and it does occur to him and, for Zinkoff, that is that: If it occurs to him, he does it.

One day while his mother is on the phone and Polly is napping, he opens the door in the kitchen and stands at the head of the cellar stairs. He turns on the light. The cellar appears dimly below him, lit only by a bare forty-watt bulb. He counts the number of steps. There are nine. To
his eyes they look like nine hundred. Nine hundred steps into a bottomless black hole.

Knees trembling, one sweaty hand on the railing, the other flat against the wall, he lowers himself one step. He's breathing fast, as if he's been running. He sits down.

He sits for a long time. He has thought that after a while he would begin to feel better, but he doesn't. He doesn't want to lower himself one more inch. He wants only one thing in this world, to turn around, take one step back up, turn out the light, reenter the kitchen, close the door, and go curl up with Polly. He imagines himself doing exactly that…

…and lowers himself down to the next step.

More of the cellar comes into view: the cold, gray, cracked concrete floor; the once whitewashed walls, now gray and streaked with green slime, gashed and oozing sand; the coarse, timeworn planks of his father's workbench. The modern geometry of the oil furnace and water heater seem out of place in this crumbling pit that reminds Zinkoff of ancient ruins.

He lowers himself another step…and thinks he glimpses the furry edge of a flank pulling itself out of sight.

He grips the front edge of the step with both hands. He stares bug-eyed into the shadows.

The Monster speaks.

Zinkoff bolts. Back up the stairs and into the kitchen, into its glorious familiar light, the stitches in his stomach tingling. He knows it wasn't really the Monster. It was really the oil furnace kicking on with a
whoosh
. He knows it, he knows it. Nevertheless he doesn't go near the cellar door.

Until the next day.

The next day he goes down three more steps. He is truly down into the cellar now, closer to the gray stone floor than to the top of the stairs. He looks back up at the light from the kitchen. He repeats to himself: “It's only a cellar. It's only a cellar.” His heart is banging to get out. His stitches tingle. Beyond the hum of the furnace he can hear his mother's voice. She is on the phone a lot these days. She has gotten a job as a telemarketer. She sells memberships to a health club
over the phone. He whispers in the direction of the furnace: “Please don't come out.”

There is one other sound: the
tock-tock
of his mother's cooking timer. He has set it at five minutes and brought it with him. It sits on the step beside him. It sounds like the thunder of a kettle drum. He has just decided the timer is broken when it goes off with a firebell clang. He yelps. Back to the kitchen.

On the third day he leaves the timer behind. He lowers himself step by step until his feet rest on the cold cellar floor. He starts counting, whispering the numbers. He will stay until he reaches one hundred. It is noticeably cooler down here. Above him a slurry of light barely leaks from the forty-watt bulb, mocking the sun and stars he loves. A smear of light puddles at the far corner of the furnace. At last he reaches one hundred and returns to the kitchen.

He tries to feel good, to congratulate himself for what he has accomplished. But he cannot fool himself. He cannot forget that the test is not over.

The next day he returns to the doctor's office
to get his stitches out. Then comes the weekend. He resumes the test on Monday. He does the same thing he did the first day—he lowers himself down three steps—only this time there is one difference: He does not turn on the light. This time the only light reaching the cellar comes from the doorway at the top of the stairs. He begins counting.

How he wishes for the puny light from the forty-watt bulb! He holds up his hand. He stares at the backs of his fingers, anchors himself to the sight of them. His stitches are gone now, but the scar they left behind tingles on. By the time he reaches one hundred, the fingers he's staring at are shaking. He clambers up the stairs.

Next day: down six steps. More than halfway. The hand before his face less clear now. He finds himself counting too fast, makes himself slow down. It takes forever to reach one hundred.

When he descends to the bottom step next day, the hand he holds up is pale and ghostly. It does not seem to be his. He forces himself to stare
into the blackness before him. He counts a new way: “The light is right behind me, five…the light is right behind me, ten…the light is right behind me, fifteen…” Some of the counts come out as burps. He burps a lot since the operation. By the end he's screaming, “The light is right behind me one hundred!” as he flies up the stairs.

His mother comes running. “What happened?”

“Nothing,” he says.

“Why were you screaming? Why are you breathing so hard?”

“I am?”

She takes his chin in her hand and tilts his face upward. “I think we'll both be glad when you go back to school. Back to the sofa.”

As usual Zinkoff is first up next morning. He is so nervous, he's burping even more than usual. He can hardly get his breakfast down. Hard as the darkness test has been so far, the worst is yet to come. He waits for his father to leave for work. He waits for his mother to begin her telemarketing phone calls. He peers into the living
room—The Alarm is in her playpen, guarding the front door.

For a long time he sits alone in the kitchen, feeling the light, soaking it up, imagining himself a light sponge. Never before has he so appreciated the mere sight of common things. The silvery sides of the toaster and its tiny pinched reflections. The plump blue-and-yellow Dutch boy cookie jar. The red straw sticking up from Polly's drinking cup.

He takes one last look around. Will he ever see these things again?

He pulls from his pocket the single sock that he has brought along. He bunches it into a ball and sticks it into his mouth. He sits some more.

He ponders his plan: three steps on the first day, three more on the second, down to the bottom on the third.

At last he pushes himself up from the chair and, like a condemned man, takes the long, doomed walk to the cellar door.

He opens the door. He takes one step forward. He pulls the door shut behind him.

And learns that his fear has missed the target.

He was expecting darkness, yes, really dark darkness—but this is something else. This is darkness so absolute, so wickedly pure that he himself seems to have been wiped out. He holds his hand one inch before his face and cannot—positively can not—see it. He reaches for his opposite forearm, missing it on the first try, to reassure himself that he is still there. He squeezes the forearm in hopes that some of the light he has sponged up will come squirting out. It does not.

He reaches behind for the door, for its smooth painted surface. His trembling fingers find the doorknob.
Turn it
, a voice inside his ear whispers,
turn it and go back
. And that's what he tells his hand,
turn it
, but his hand is not listening, his hand is letting go and now his whole body, contrary to all his wishes and good sense, is lowering itself to a seat on the first step.

And he learns a second thing: He can forget the three-day plan. He must do it all today.

Now.

Or never.

He lowers himself one more step, seven to go…one more step, six to go…one more…one more…his silent scream probes for a weakness in the sock…one more…one more…and the Monster is out from behind the furnace now, he knows it, he feels it. The Monster is in front of the furnace and is moving toward the stairway. The Monster is inches in front of his face now, he can touch it if he reaches out…or takes one more step…

…the scar is singing…

He doesn't think about it, he just does it. Two steps from the bottom he turns and runs back up the stairs.

In the dazzling light of the kitchen he rips the sock from his mouth. He stands gasping over a chair. He thinks of the two steps he stopped short of. He has failed. Flunked his own test. He thinks about it for several moments. He hears his mother's voice on the phone, upstairs. He listens. He heads off to play with Polly.

Four days later he goes back to school.