Signature of Witness
By Friday, I had gotten Gunnar a full year.
6. A Nasty Herd of Elephants That Are Nowhere Near as Embarrassingly Adorable as Me. Don’t Ask.
Nobody gets up early on Saturday morning in our house anymore. Friday night’s a late night for the restaurant. Mom and Dad are usually up even later than me—and that’s saying something. I slunk into the kitchen at around eleven that morning to see Mom, clearly still on her first cup of coffee, trying to comfort an inconsolable Christina.
“But I don’t want to put Ichabod to sleep,” Christina said through her tears. “It’s inhumane.”
“It’s inhumane to let him suffer.” She looked at our cat, who was now lying on the windowsill in the sun. If he was suffering, he wasn’t showing it. It was actually the rest of us who were suffering, because poor Ichabod was so old he had forgotten the form and function of a litter box, and had begun to improvise, leaving little icha-bits in unlikely places.
“It’s the way of all things, honey,” Mom said sympathetically. “You remember Mr. Moby—and what about your hamsters?”
“It’s not the same!” Christina yelled.
Mr. Moby was Christina’s goldfish. Actually a whole series of goldfish. She named them all Mr. Moby, the same way Sea World named all their star whales “Shamu.” Then she graduated to hamsters, which were cute, cuddly, vicious little things that would devour one another with such regularity you’d think cannibalism was in their job description. But Christina was right—this was different. A cat was more like family. Besides, in my current state of mind, mortality was kind of a sore spot.
“Mom,” I said, “couldn’t we just let nature take its course, and let Ichabod go when he’s ready?”
“I’ll clean up if he misses the litter box,” Christina said. “Promise.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe she can levitate it out the window.”
Christina scowled at me. “Maybe you could give Ichabod one of your friend’s extra months.”
This surprised me—I didn’t even know she knew about that, but I guess word gets around. Fortunately it flew miles over Mom’s head.
“You know what?” Mom said. “I’m not gonna worry about this anymore. It’s on your head.” Then she poured herself a fresh cup of coffee.
I went over to Gunnar’s house that afternoon, using our Grapes of Wrath project as a cover story, but what I was really hoping for—and dreading at the same time—was seeing Kjersten. It turns out she had left early for a tennis tournament. I was deeply disappointed, and yet profoundly relieved.
We were halfway through The Grapes of Wrath and had decided that, for our project, we were going to re-create the dust bowl in Gunnar’s backyard, then arrange for our class to come see it. The dust bowl is what they called the Midwest back in the thirties, when Oklahoma, Kansas, and I think maybe Nebraska dried up and blew away—which has nothing to do with Gone with the Wind, although that movie was made during the same basic time period.
Mrs. Ümlaut fretted a lot when we told her about our plan. Fretted: that’s a word they used during the dust bowl. (“Fretted,” “reckon,” and “y’all” were very popular in those days.) But since the backyard was mostly crabgrass already going dormant for the winter, she reluctantly agreed to let us kill the whole yard as long as we promised to redo everything in the spring. I couldn’t help but glance at Gunnar when she said that, because what if he wasn’t around in the spring? Then again, maybe this was her way of implying to him that he would be.
I figured the biggest problem with the dust bowl was Gunnar’s unfinished gravestone smack in the middle of the yard. By now Gunnar had finished his first name and begun working on his middle name, Kolbjörn, which he was worried wouldn’t fit on one line. “I may have to start over on a fresh piece of granite,” he told me. I just nodded. I decided it was best if I didn’t involve myself in tombstone-related issues.
Before we began murdering helpless vegetation, Gunnar took me up to his room to show me what he had done with the twelve months I had gotten for him. He had three-hole-punched them, and put them in a binder labeled Life. He displayed it proudly, like someone else might display a photo album.
“I consulted with Dr. G yesterday,” Gunnar said. “He says I might make nine months—maybe more, because my symptoms haven’t been getting worse.” Then he patted his Binder of Life. “But maybe the real reason’s right here.”
I let out a nervous chuckle. “Whatever it takes, right?”
I still didn’t know if he was serious, or just playing along. The kids who donated their months were, for the most part, treating it like a game. I mean, sure, they were hung up on the rules, but it was more like how you argue over a Monopoly board, and whether or not you’re supposed to get five hundred bucks if you land on “Free Parking.” The rules say no, but people still insist it’s the cash-bonus space. In fact, my cousin Al once busted a guy’s nose over it—which sent him directly to jail, do not pass “Go.”
The point is, even when a game gets serious, there’s still a line between game-serious and serious-serious. If I was sure which side of that line Gunnar was on, I’d have felt a whole lot better. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who felt a little unsettled around Gunnar. Sure, girls flocked to him, but when it came to our literature circles, they divided right along gender lines, with all the girls going for things that sounded romantic, like East of Eden. We had four guys in our group to start with, but they had all migrated to other novels. I suspected their migration was, much like the farmworkers in our book, driven by empty plains of death. In other words, they couldn’t handle Gunnar’s constant coming attractions about the end of his life.
“I’ll never forget,” he said to Devin Gilooly, “that you were my first friend when I moved here. Would you like to be a pall-bearer?”
Devin went bug-eyed and vampire-pale. “Yeah, sure,” he said. The next day, he not only switched to a different novel, he switched to a different English class. If it were possible, I think he would have switched to another school altogether.
“Doesn’t your culture ululate for the dead?” Gunnar asked Hakeem Habibi-Jones.
“What’s ‛ululate’ ?” Hakeem asked, making it clear that any cultural traditions had been lost in hyphenation. Gunnar demonstrated ululation, which was apparently a high-pitched warbling wail that was maybe meant to wake the dead person in question. All it succeeded in doing was chasing Hakeem away.
After that, it was just Gunnar and me. Even now, as we started pumping out poison in his yard, I was afraid Gunnar would talk about the death of weeds and find a way to relate it to himself, like maybe he was some unwanted plant targeted by the Weedwhacker in the sky.
He didn’t talk about himself, though. Instead he talked about me. And his sister.
I was all set to put a painfully ugly shrub out of its misery when Gunnar said, “You know, Kjersten really likes you.”
I turned to him, and ended up spraying herbicide on his shoes. “Sorry.”
He took it in stride, just wiping the stuff off with a rag. “You shouldn’t be surprised,” he said. “Not with that kiss all over the school paper.”
I shrugged uncomfortably. “It wasn’t all over the paper. It was on page four. And anyway, it wasn’t really a kiss—it was just a peck. Or at least I think it was supposed to be.” But I couldn’t help but think about what Lexie had said. “Has Kjersten ... said anything about it to you?”