The Ears of Louis Read online

  Louis ate lunch with Matthew and another boy named John. Sometimes they traded sandwiches. Today John had a cucumber sandwich with mayonnaise and Matthew had cream cheese and walnuts so Louis stuck with his egg salad. Louis thought anybody who ate cucumber with mayonnaise or cream cheese and walnuts was crazy.

  “I caught a chipmunk in my Havaheart trap last night,” Matthew said. “I used an old doughnut for bait.”

  “I didn’t know chipmunks liked old doughnuts,” Louis said, chewing on a piece of celery.

  “They don’t,” Matthew said.

  “My mother made me pick sticks up off the lawn after school,” John said. His mother was always making him pick up his room or his books or sticks off the lawn. Louis didn’t like to go to John’s house much. His mother made him take off his shoes before he came inside.

  “Tell your little friend to take off his shoes, too,” John’s mother said when Louis came to the door. She stood and watched while Louis took off his shoes. His sock had a big hole in the toe. John’s mother shook her head and said “tsk-tsk” the way people did in the funny papers. Louis had never heard anyone say “tsk-tsk” out loud before. It didn’t make him like John’s mother any better.

  From then on, whenever John asked Louis over to play, Louis said, “Come to my house instead.” John usually did.

  Louis looked in his lunch bag. It was empty except for some celery leaves and the pieces of his name paper. He threw it in the trash can.

  “I’m going to see if I can get a game with the big guys,” he said, putting on his helmet.

  “They won’t let you play,” Matthew said. “Not those guys. They’re tough customers. You might get your head beat in.”

  The same thought had occurred to Louis but he went out to the playground anyway. The sixth graders played there every day at recess.

  Louis sat on the sidelines, watching and waiting.

  “Forty-two, sixty-three, hike,” they hollered, milling around, not doing much of anything. Louis got down on one knee and rested both fists on the ground, the way he’d seen the pros do in newspaper pictures. It was a very tiring position, he discovered. No one paid any attention to him but no one called him names, either.

  Louis hoped someone would get hurt or something. Then he could come in as a substitute. When the bell rang, no one had a sprained ankle or even a cut on the cheek. It was discouraging.

  Miss Carmichael sent him to the washroom to clean up. He walked past Mr. Anderson’s office and saw Mr. Anderson talking on the telephone, smiling at his fingernails. It was the first time Louis had seen him smile. He wondered if whoever was on the other end of the phone was telling a joke.

  Louis peeked through the window of the first grade and saw Tom leaning on his elbow, sucking his thumb. He couldn’t tell whether Tom was awake or asleep. Louis washed his hands and face without soap. He scrubbed himself vigorously with a harsh paper towel. He looked at himself in the mirror and filled his cheeks with air so his face was almost as round as Matthew’s. Maybe that way, his ears wouldn’t seem so big. But his ears looked just as big as before.

  On the way back to his room, Louis was stopped by a sixth grader.

  “I’m conducting a survey,” he said, “and you’re just the guy I want to see. As the anchor man on this survey, I’m reporting my findings after a thorough investigation. The gist of it is, do people with big ears hear better than people with small ears?” The big kid took out a pencil and a pad and looked at Louis, waiting.

  Louis looked at his shoes. He thought about butting his head into the big kid’s stomach and then running away. He decided against it.

  “Hey, man on the street, does a kid like you hear more things than a kid with ordinary size ears?” The sixth grader was getting impatient.

  Louis cracked his knuckles. The buzzing in his head was so loud the cracking noise sounded faint and far away. He wished he could give the kid a couple of karate chops. Just enough to knock him out, not kill him.

  “I’ve gotta go to the boy’s room,” Louis said. He turned and walked back to the washroom, put his head under the cold water faucet and turned it on. When his hair was wet and his cheeks cool, he carefully dried himself off. Then he opened the door and looked out. The sixth grader had gone.

  “I was about to send out the police,” Miss Carmichael said. She and Louis looked at each other.

  “We’re on our blue book, page ten,” Miss Carmichael said, and turned to the blackboard. “Please pay attention.”

  Maybe Miss Carmichael did know who he was, after all.

  5

  The next day Louis had just got home from school, thrown his books on the table and was leaning into the refrigerator to see what was good to eat when the telephone rang.

  “Bertha Beeble here,” a voice said. “May I speak to Louis, please?”

  Louis was delighted. He never got telephone calls, except for Matthew telling him what he’d caught in his Havaheart trap.

  “Louis here,” he said in a squeaky voice.

  “I’ve got a present for you,” Mrs. Beeble said. “I think you might like it. When you get a chance, come on over.”

  Louis was halfway across the lawn before he remembered he’d forgotten to shut the refrigerator door. He raced back, slammed it closed, then raced again to Mrs. Beeble’s. By the time he got there, he was so out of breath he couldn’t speak.

  “Step into the parlor,” Mrs. Beeble said. Only once before, on New Year’s Day, Louis had been invited to step into Mrs. Beeble’s parlor and that was to drink eggnog.

  “I got it in an antique shop,” Mrs. Beeble said, handing him a small box. “Open it, quick.”

  “Gee,” Louis said, staring at the lumpy piece of gray metal lying on a somewhat dingy wad of cotton. He didn’t know what else to say so he said “Gee” again. “Thanks.”

  “Aha!” Mrs. Beeble snatched up the present and swung it back and forth. “You don’t know what it is, do you? It’s an amulet, a talisman with a face engraved upon it. Look,” she said, taking it over to the window, “see?” Louis could make out a man’s head wearing a crown and a pair of ears that stuck out on either side of his long, narrow head.

  “In view of our conversation the other day,” Mrs. Beeble said, “I know you won’t take umbrage when I say the minute I saw it, it reminded me of you.”

  She tied a long piece of string through the loop at the top of the talisman and slipped it over Louis’ head.

  “This is a good luck charm,” Mrs. Beeble said. “It will have a powerful influence on you.”

  “It will?” Louis looked down at his amulet, which hung almost to his bellybutton.

  “We’ll have to take a reef in that sail,” Mrs. Beeble said firmly. She cut a piece off the string and retied it around his neck.

  Louis got a lump in his throat, just thinking about what they’d say when they saw him wearing a necklace.

  “Tuck it inside your shirt,” she told him. “That way, it’s a secret, yours and mine. Don’t expect miracles, though. You’ve got to believe in its powers but miracles are harder. You have to work for them. This will ward off evil, if you let it.” She shuffled the cards. “Got time for a hand or two?” she said.

  “Sure.” Louis followed Mrs. Beeble into the kitchen. “Do you wear an amulet?” he asked.

  “There’s been a lot of water over the dam since the time when a good luck charm would do me any good,” she said. “No sense crying over spilt milk, I always say. But when I was young, you wouldn’t catch me without one.” Rapidly, she dealt the cards.

  “Oh, ho ho,” she chortled as she picked up her hand. “You got that lucky charm just in time. You’re going to need it today.”

  Mrs. Beeble won the first hand, then Louis won three in a row. He had a big pile of pink and white mints in front of him. She had only four.

  “First bet!” Louis cried. It was his turn to deal. He had all hearts.

  “From now on,” Mrs. Beeble said glumly after Louis had won still another hand, “
you’re going to have to take that off and put it on the table. That way, you don’t have the advantage.”

  Absent-mindedly, Mrs. Beeble popped two pink mints in her mouth.

  Louis tapped her on the arm.

  “I won that last hand,” he said.

  “You don’t have to get sore about it,” Mrs. Beeble said. “Anyway, it’s.…”

  “Yeah, I know. Time for supper.”

  “How’d you know?” Mrs. Beeble asked.

  Louis was almost home before he remembered his manners. He ran back to thank Mrs. Beeble again for his amulet. She was sitting at the kitchen table playing solitaire. Her face was old and sad and looked different from the way it looked when she and Louis played poker. He thought of knocking on the door and calling out. Then he changed his mind. Somehow, he didn’t think she’d want anyone looking at her when she was like that. He tiptoed down the steps and went home.

  The light was on in the kitchen so Louis pressed his nose against the window and peered in, pretending he was a lonely traveler crossing the moors, looking for a place to lay his head. He saw his mother talking on the telephone and spooning cereal into his baby sister’s mouth. Tom was watching TV and sucking his thumb.

  Louis howled like a werewolf. No one paid any attention except Wilma, who got up and began pacing back and forth, back and forth. Wilma, Louis’ father said, was a dog with a persecution complex. She always thought somebody or something was out to get her. Wilma was very tense and nervous at times. The way she was pacing, Louis knew this was one of those times.

  He hung up his hat and jacket and watched TV. Click, click, Tom’s thumb said against the roof of his mouth. Tom had a giant callous where his teeth hit his thumb every time he put it in his mouth. The callous was shiny and hard and yellow and seemed almost to have a life of its own. As far as Louis was concerned, that callous was the only good thing about thumb sucking. It would be kind of neat to have a callous like that.

  “You want to go out, Wilma?” Louis said. Wilma smelled bad. That meant she’d been in somebody’s garbage can. She turned her big brown eyes on Louis, asking for sympathy. Click, click, her toenails beat a tattoo on the floor.

  Tom took his thumb out of his mouth.

  “I’m going to be a hero when I grow up,” he said.

  “Har de har har,” Louis said, very scornful. “Whoever heard of a hero who sucks his thumb? Some hero you’ll make.”

  “Heroes never die,” Tom said.

  “John Wayne dies,” Louis said.

  “No he doesn’t.” Tom put his thumb back in his mouth.

  “I bet he got killed at least four times,” Louis said.

  Tom shook his head.

  Louis thought hard. He couldn’t remember when John Wayne got killed. His mind was like a big flat stretch of desert with no footprints on it.

  The cartoon ended and a commercial came on about a lady who called up her friend from the drug store because she didn’t know what to do about occasional irregularity.

  “Try prunes!” Louis shouted, and began to feel better.

  6

  “You smell like Wilma when she gets in the neighbors’ garbage cans,” Louis told Matthew next day.

  “I caught a skunk in my Havaheart trap,” Matthew said, “and when I let him out, he sprayed me. He was scared.” Matthew made excuses for the skunk. “My mother gave me a bath in tomato juice. It’s supposed to kill the smell but I guess it didn’t do a very good job.” Matthew was pink around the edges. His hair was pink too.

  “She didn’t want me home today. She said of all days I had to get sprayed by a skunk. She’s having her bridge club over so she poured a giant can of tomato juice over me and sent me to school.”

  Calvin Leffert stood up and said in a loud voice, “I smell skunk.” Maybe Calvin wasn’t too smart but there wasn’t anything wrong with his nose.

  “Sit down, Calvin,” Miss Carmichael said. She opened the door to the supply closet and looked around. Then she went to the coat room and peered inside a few jackets and an old sneaker somebody had left a long time ago.

  “Whoever is responsible for that odor please come forward,” Miss Carmichael said.

  Louis drew a picture of a giant genie coming out of a tiny bottle. Amy Adams minced up to Miss Carmichael’s desk. “I brought in some more of my poems for the newspaper,” Amy said.

  Louis wondered what would happen if, all of a sudden, he punched Amy in the nose.

  “I know skunk when I smell skunk,” Calvin said even louder. “Some smart aleck caught it good.”

  “If any one of you is hiding an animal in here, I shall have to send that person to Mr. Anderson’s office. He will deal with the matter.”

  “It’s me, Miss Carmichael,” Matthew said, standing up, looking round and pink and sad. “I got sprayed by a skunk before I came to school when I let him out of my Havaheart trap and my mother poured a can of tomato juice over me but it didn’t do any good.”

  Amy put her hand over her mouth and giggled.

  Calvin pounded his fist on his forehead. “I knew it,” he shouted. “I knew it.”

  Mr. Anderson came into the room unannounced.

  “Well, now,” he said, smiling and stroking his mustache, “how is the fifth grade getting on today?”

  “Oh dear,” Miss Carmichael said, putting a handkerchief over her nose. “We seem to be having a little problem. One of our students was sprayed by a skunk and there is a rather strong odor …”

  Mr. Anderson backed slowly out the door. “I do detect something,” he said. “Pardon me.…” And he disappeared as suddenly as he’d come.

  “I’ll call your mother, Matthew, and ask her to come get you,” Miss Carmichael said.

  “She’s having her bridge club and she’s making sandwiches and my father took the car to the station so she can’t come get me,” Matthew said.

  “Well then,” Miss Carmichael gave an exasperated sigh, “I’ll give you some work to take out in the hall. You can sit on the bench and do it there.”

  When the lunch bell rang, Louis and John and Matthew sat together in a corner of the lunchroom. “I don’t care how bad you smell,” Louis said.

  John didn’t say anything. He held his nose with his left hand and ate his sandwich with his right.

  “I’m glad I have two friends anyway,” Matthew said dolefully. “How’s about trading half a peanut butter and bacon for half whatever you’ve got?”

  “Hey kid,” the sixth grader conducting the survey said to Louis, “you ready with an answer for me yet? Do you hear better with those huge ears than these two creeps,” he pointed at Matthew and John, “with their tiny ones?”

  Under his red turtleneck, Louis felt the weight of his amulet and saw the bulge it made in the middle of his chest. He hadn’t told anyone at school, not even Matthew and John, about Mrs. Beeble’s present.

  Get to work, Louis said to his charm. Ward off this evil.

  “This is a very important survey I’m conducting. I don’t want to have to get tough,” the kid said. “Cough up an answer.”

  Louis held his lunch bag to his mouth and coughed elaborately into it. Then he handed the bag to the boy and said, “Look inside and you’ll find it.”

  “Wise guy,” the kid said disgustedly. He threw the empty bag onto the floor and walked away.

  “Nice work,” John said, still holding his nose. He sounded as if he had a terrible cold. “I’m proud of you, Louis. A big guy like that might’ve let you have it right between the eyes. What’s he mean anyway? Your ears aren’t huge, they’re only big. I remember when you first were my friend in second grade, in Miss Johnson’s class, I thought you had giant-sized ears but then, after a while I didn’t even think about your ears at all.”

  Louis smiled. He liked that.

  The three of them sat chewing thoughtfully.

  “I think what I’ll do next time,” Matthew said, peering between the slices of bread to make sure he wasn’t eating anything he didn’t like, “is, I
’ll only use old doughnuts for bait.”

  “What’d you use to catch the skunk?” Louis asked.

  “Fish heads. I went to the fish market and the guy was just putting out the garbage and I found a whole mess of fish heads. Skunks love fish heads.”

  “How’d you know that?” Louis asked.

  “My grandmother, she has about ten cats and she told me skunks were always jumping into her garbage and dragging out the empty cat food cans,” Matthew said. “It figures if they like cat food, they’d like fish heads, right?”

  John nodded vigorously.

  Louis said, “Cat food’s expensive and fish heads are free. I bet you thought of that too.”

  Matthew smiled. “I’m thinking every minute,” he said.

  “No wonder you smell like Wilma,” Louis said. He put on his football helmet and jogged out to the playground. A game was already in progress. Louis ran back and forth on the sidelines.

  “Hey, pass it here. Let’s have that ball. Toss it to me,” they shouted. Once somebody made a touchdown. The cheers were deafening. Louis shouted as hard as anyone on the team. He tried to imagine what it would be like to have all those people cheering for him.

  “Yeah, Louis. Yeah, Louis,” they would shout. They’d clap him on the back, arms would go around his shoulders, and they’d hoist him up in the air and carry him off the field in triumph.

  “Hey there, Elephant Ears!” The familiar words brought Louis back to the world he lived in. “How come you’re not out in Disneyland? They sure could use you out there, I bet.” It was a friend of Ernie’s, a boy with little eyes set close to his nose.

  This time Louis couldn’t think of a single comeback. When the bell rang, he loped back into his room, pretending he hadn’t heard.