A Girl Named Zippy Read Online Free PDF Page A

difficult for parents to face such grief in their children, and Dad’s temper was not mild to begin with. He turned rather scarlet and puffed up like a blowfish. Announcing that he knew exactly which dogs had done it (he had seen them loose in our yard before and had warned their owner once), he took down his police-issue .357 Magnum, a gun large enough to kill, say, a mastodon, and went flying out the door.
    He came back an hour later and said the dogs had been taken care of, whatever that meant. I was too stunned to ask and didn’t really want to know. Then he went out and dismantled the ravaged cage and cleaned up the feathers. Except for the bare spot, he left nothing that might remind me of what had been there.
    Later that evening he took a single little egg out of his breast pocket, which he had found under the roosting box. I put it in the refrigerator, on a nest made out of a blue handkerchief. Over the next few days and weeks I took it out and looked at it many times, but I didn’t know what to do with it. I kept it so long that whatever was inside it completely dried up, and finally it was so light and insubstantial in my hand that it seemed barely to exist. It was just a sigh of a thing.

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    JULIE HIT ME
THREE TIMES
    T he teachers all thought that Julie couldn’t talk. I knew she could, but she didn’t want to, because she sounded funny. Her brother, David Lee, who was basically a heathen, knocked all her front baby teeth out when she was only two years old, so she never learned to talk exactly right. Maybe there was one little snaggletooth left on the side, I can’t remember, but if any teeth survived they got knocked out later the same summer when she was on a trail ride in Brown County and her horse leaned over too far to take a drink out of a creek. Julie slid right down the horse’s neck and face first into the water. There’s a picture of her in the family album. She’s wearing a little yellow shirt, and she’s pulling down the neck of it to reveal a bloody scrape that runs from her chin to her collarbone. She’s looking up at the camera, but she has her head turned a little to the side, and she is nothing but proud.
    I myself had been a late talker, and had saved up a fair amount of words as a result, so I did all of my own talking plus all of Julie’s. I knew what she meant to say without her even looking at me. For instance, on the first day of kindergarten our stupid teacher Mrs. Dockerty tried to give Julie a blue crayon for coloring and Julie just sat staring at her desk and wouldn’t take it. I didn’t pipe up right away, I let Mrs. Dockerty get good and frustrated, and then I said from my desk right next to Julie’s that Julie couldn’t abide a blue crayon and somebody better give her green. Mrs. Dockerty took offense.
    “I believe Julie can speak for herself,” she said with her prim little voice out of her prim little nose.
    “Well, good luck” was all I said, and I looked back down and started coloring with my red crayon, which was perfectly okay with me.
    And after a little while Mrs. Dockerty slipped Julie a green crayon on the sly, without even looking at me, because she couldn’t bear to think that I had been right, and Julie just went to town on her sailboat. She colored that whole page green.
    From then on I did all of Julie’s talking in kindergarten, although Mrs. Dockerty pretended she couldn’t hear me, like Julie was actually speaking for herself. That went okay until one day at quiet time when Julie and I were lying next to each other on our rugs, and I saw a particular look pass over her face.
    “Mrs. Dockerty, Julie’s got to poop.”
    All the kids who were awake started rolling around on their rugs and snickering.
    Mrs. Dockerty pointed at me with her prim little finger. “You lie down and mind your own business,” she hissed through her small teeth.
    “I’m just trying to help. You don’t want her to poop in her drawers, do ya?,” which made one