The Hour I First Believed. Wally Lamb
and he gave her an ulcer. Now Mother works at the bank, and she likes it better, except she has to wash her hands all the time because money’s dirty and you never know where it’s been. I licked a dollar once. Mother made me put Listerine in my mouth and not spit it out for a long time, and it hurt.
Sometimes my scary dreams are about Daddy, and sometimes they’re about Mr. Zadzilko. Our school used to have a different janitor, Mr. Mpipi, but he got fired. And I was mad because Mr. Mpipi was nice. The teachers think Mr. Zadzilko’s nice, too, because he brings them snapdragons and these stupid Polish doughnuts that his mother makes called poonch-keys. Mr. Zadzilko’s not nice, though. When the teachers go to the toilet, he peeks at them through this secret hole.
Before Mr. Mpipi got fired, he came to our class once, and he told us about these people called the Bushmen that are his relatives or his ancestors or something. He showed us where they live on the world map—in Africa, near the bottom. You know what Bushmen hunt and eat? Jackals. And desert rats. And when they see a praying mantis, they think it’s God!
Mr. Mpipi had our class all sit on the floor, even Miss Hogan. Us kids sat cross-legged, but Miss Hogan knelt on her knees and her skirt made a big circle around her. Mr. Mpipi told us a story about how Mantis made the moon by throwing fire into the night sky, and how he married a snake. And you know how Mantis travels around? Between the toes of an antelope, because that’s his favorite animal. Mr. Mpipi talked Bushman talk, with these little clicky noises before the words. Everyone laughed, even Miss Hogan, and Mr. Mpipi laughed his high, squealy laugh, too. Mr. Mpipi is colored, I think, except he doesn’t have chocolate skin. It’s more like the color of those dried apricots Grandpa gets at Christmas.
After his visit, our class wrote Mr. Mpipi a thank-you letter on big easel paper, and we all signed it. And it made him so happy that he gave us a present: a praying mantis egg case. It was supposed to hatch in April, but it didn’t. Then, after the assembly, Mr. Mpipi got fired. Miss Hogan was going to throw out the egg case, but I asked her if I could have it. She said yes, and I brought it home and put it on my windowsill.
I caught Mr. Zadzilko peeking. That’s how I know about the hole. It’s in the big second-floor closet, where the buckets and mops and the Spic And Span are. Miss Hogan wrote me a pass and sent me down to help him because I was the first one done with my Social Studies questions, and I had ants in my pants and kept bothering my neighbors. I opened the closet door and Mr. Zadzilko was peeking through the hole. He jumped when he saw me, and fixed his pants and his belt, and he was laughing like heh heh heh. “Look at this,” he said. “Mop handle musta poked a hole in the wall. Gotta patch it when I get a free minute.” He gave me a sponge and told me to wet it in the boys’ room and then go downstairs and wipe the cafeteria tables.
And after, when the recess bell rang, I went back upstairs to return my sponge. Mr. Zadzilko wasn’t there, so I turned a bucket upside down and climbed up and looked through the hole. And there was the principal, Miss Anderson, sitting on the toilet, smoking a cigarette. You could see her girdle.
I knew it was naughty to look, so I closed my eyes and got down off the bucket. And when I turned toward the door, Mr. Zadzilko was standing there.
“My, my, my,” he said. “Aren’t you the dirty boy.”
He yanked the pull chain, and the closet light went on. Then he pulled the door closed behind him. He came over and sat down on the bucket, so that he was breathing right in my face. The hole was a secret between me and him, he said. If I said anything, he’d tell the teachers he caught me looking. “You were just curious,” he said. “I understand that, but the teachers won’t. They’ll probably have you arrested. And everyone will know you’re Dirty Boy.”
He reached behind him and took a greasy paper bag off the shelf. He opened it and held it out to me. “Here,” he said. “Help yourself.” I reached in and pulled out one of those doughnut things his mother made.
“They’re called poonch-keys,” he said. “Take a bite. They’re delicious.”
I didn’t want to, but I did.
“What are you, a little mouse nibbling on a crumb? Take a big bite.”
So I did. The stuff inside looked like bloody nose.
“What kind did you get? Raspberry or prune?” I showed him where I’d bitten. “Oh, raspberry,” he said. “That’s my favorite, too. What are you shaking for, Dirty Boy?”
I tried to stop shaking, but I couldn’t. He kept looking at me.
“You know what poonch-key means? In Polish?”
I shook my head.
“It means ‘little package.’ Because the doughnut makes a little package around the stuff that’s inside, see?”
“Oh,” I said. “Can I go now? It’s recess.”
“Like us men carry the stuff that’s inside us. In our sacs. Get it?”
I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I nodded.
“You don’t look like you get it, Dirty Boy. If you get it, show me where your poonch-key is?”
“What?”
“Your ‘little package.’ Where is it? Point to it.”
I could hear kids playing outside, but they sounded farther away than just the playground. I was trying not to cry.
Mr. Zadzilko made an O with his thumb and his pointing finger. “Here’s the woman’s hole, see?” he said. “Otherwise known as her snatch, or her pussy, or her bearded clam.” He leaned closer and dropped his hand down. “And this, my dirty boy, is where your ‘little package’ is.” He flicked his finger, hard, in the place where Mother says I shouldn’t touch, and it hurt.
“It’s recess,” I said. “I’m supposed to go.”
“Go, then,” he said. “But just remember what happens to dirty boys with big mouths.”
The hallway was empty. There was laughing coming out of the teacher’s room. I went downstairs to the boys’ room. I hadn’t swallowed that bite he made me take; I’d hid it against my cheek. I spit it into the toilet and threw the rest of my poonch-key in after it. I kept flushing, and it kept swirling around and looking like it was going to go down, but then it would bob back up again. Then I thought, what if he’s got a lookout hole in the boys’ room, too? What if he’s watching me flush his mother’s stupid doughnut down the toilet? By the time I got out to the playground, I had a stomachache, and then the recess bell rang two seconds later, and we had to go in.
That night, I was lying in bed, thinking about Mr. Zadzilko, and Mother came in my room in the dark. “Caelum?” she said. “Are you asleep or awake?”
I didn’t answer for a long time. Then I said, “Awake.”
“I heard you crying. What were you crying about?”
I almost told her, but then I didn’t. “I was thinking about Jesus dying on the cross,” I said. “And it made me sad.” I knew she’d like that answer.
Mother goes to mass every morning before work. That’s why she can’t get me ready for school. Aunt Lolly gets me ready, once she finishes morning milking. Except, if there’s a problem, she calls me from the barn phone and I have to get myself ready, and not dawdle or I’ll miss the bus. One time? Some of our cows got loose and started running up Bride Lake Road. Aunt Lolly had to go get them, because they could have got hit by a car, and she forgot to call me. And I started watching Captain Kangaroo, which I’m not supposed to watch TV in the morning. And then the bus came and I was still in my pajamas. Mother had to leave work, drive back to the farm, and then drive me to school. She was crying and yelling, because now Mr. McCully probably wouldn’t pick her to be head teller, thanks to me. At the stop signs and red lights, she kept reaching over and whacking me. And by the time we got to school, we were both crying. I had to roll the window down and air out my eyes before I went in, because the school doesn’t need to know about our