The Plot Against America

disassemble and fix it. It turned out that he wanted me to wear it.

'Put it on,' he told me in his hollow, honking voice.

'Why?' I shouted. 'It's not going to fit me.'

'It don't fit nobody,' he said. 'Put it on.'

'I don't know how,' I complained in my loudest voice, and so Joey clipped the microphone case to my shirt and dropped the battery into my pants pocket and, after he checked all the wiring, left it to me to insert the molded earpiece. I did so by closing my eyes and pretending it was a seashell and that we were down the shore and he wanted me to listen to the roar of the ocean…but I had to suppress the heaves when I managed to jiggle it into place, still stickily warm from the interior of his ear.

'Okay, now what?'

Whereupon he reached over and, as though it were the switch to the electric chair he was throwing and I were Public Enemy Number One, he gleefully turned the dial at the center of the microphone case.

'I don't hear anything,' I told him.

'Wait'll I louden it.'

'Is wearing this thing going to make me deaf?' and I saw myself made both deaf and dumb, and trapped in Elizabeth for the rest of my life bending pretzels in the New Jersey Pretzel Factory.

He laughed heartily at my saying that, though I hadn't meant it as a joke.

'Look,' I said, 'I don't want to do this. Not now. There's a lot going on outside that's not so great, you know.'

But he was oblivious of what was not so great, either because he was Catholic and had nothing to worry about or simply because he was irrepressible Joey.

'You know what the crook said who sold it? He ain't even a doctor,' Joey told me, 'but he gives me the bullshit test anyway. He takes his pocket watch out and he holds it right up to my ear and he says to me, 'Can you hear the watch tick, Joey?' and I can hear a little, and so he starts backing away, and he says, 'Can you hear it now, Joey?' and I can't, I can't hear nothing, and so he writes some numbers down on a piece of paper. Then he takes two half-dollars out of his pocket and it's the same thing. He clicks them by my ear, clicks them together, and he says, 'Can you hear the coins click, Joey?' and then he starts walking away again, and I see him clicking them, but I can't hear nothing no more. 'The same,' I tell him-and so he writes that down. Then he looks at what he wrote down, looks real real hard, then he takes this tin piece of shit out of a drawer. He puts it on me, all the pieces, and he tells my father, 'Your boy is going to hear the grass growing, that's how good this model is,'' and with that Joey began to turn the dial again until what I heard was water running into a bathtub-and I was the bathtub. Then he spun it vigorously-and there was thunder.

'Cut it out!' I cried. 'That's enough!' but Joey was joyfully leaping about, and so I reached up and yanked the earpiece out of my ear and was derailed for the moment thinking that, on top of Mayor La Guardia's being under arrest and President Roosevelt's being under arrest and even Rabbi Bengelsdorf's being under arrest, the new boy downstairs wasn't going to be any more of a picnic than the one before him had been, and this was when I determined to run away again. I was still too much of a fledgling with people to understand that, in the long run, nobody is a picnic and that I was no picnic myself. First I couldn't stand Seldon downstairs and now I couldn't stand Joey downstairs, and I determined then and there to run away from both of them. I would run away before Seldon got here, I would run away before the anti-Semites got here, I would run away before Mrs. Wishnow's body got here and there was a funeral that I had to go to. Under the protection of the mounted police, I would run away that very night from everything that was after me and everything that hated me and wanted to kill me. I would run away from everything I'd done and everything I hadn't done, and start out fresh as a boy nobody knew. And I realized, all at once, where to run away to-to Elizabeth, to the pretzel factory. I'd tell them in writing that I was a deaf-mute. They'd give me a job making pretzels, and I'd never speak and I'd pretend not to hear, and nobody would find out who I was.

Joey said, 'You know about the kid who drank the horse's blood?'

'What horse's blood?'

'St. Peter's horse. This kid, he got in at night, into the farm, and drank the horse's blood. They're looking for him.'

'Who is?'

'The guys. Nick. Those guys. The older guys.'

'Who's Nick?'

'One of the orphans. He's eighteen. The kid that did it's a Jew like you. They know for sure he's a Jew, and they're going to find him.'

'How come he drank the horse's blood?'

'Jews drink blood.'

'You don't know what you're talking about. I don't drink blood. Sandy doesn't drink blood. My parents don't drink blood. Nobody I know drinks blood.'

'This kid does.'

'Yeah? And what's his name?'

'Nick don't know yet. But they're looking for him. Don't worry, they'll get him.'

'And what will they do then, Joey? Drink his blood? Jews don't drink blood. Saying that is crazy.' I handed his hearing aid back to him-thinking that I could now add Nick to everything else I was having to flee-and soon Joey began racing from window to window again, trying to get a look at the horses, until, when he could no longer bear being out of range of a spectacle comparable in his mind to Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show coming to town and raising the big top in front of our house, he upped and flew out the door and that was the last I saw of him that night. There was rumored to be a police horse in Newark who munched on chewing tobacco, like the cop who rode him, and who was able to add numbers by tapping his right front hoof, and Joey later claimed that he'd seen him there on our block, a horse from the Eighth Precinct called Ned, who let kids swing from his tail without kicking out at them with his hind legs. And maybe he did meet the fabled Ned, and maybe that had made it all worth it. Nonetheless, for deserting me that night, for never returning, for succumbing to his love of excitement rather than obeying his mother's orders, Joey was soundly punished when his father got home from work the following morning, his horselike haunches thrashed mercilessly with the black strap off the night watchman's time clock.

Once Joey had disappeared, I double-locked the door behind him and would have turned on the radio to distract me from my worries if I hadn't been afraid of yet another bulletin interrupting a regularly scheduled program and relaying to me, all by myself, even more horrible news than had been coming at us throughout the day. It wasn't long before I started thinking again about running away to the pretzel factory. I remembered the article about the factory that had appeared in the Sunday Call about a year before and that I'd cut out to bring to school for a report I had to make on a New Jersey industry. In the article the owner, a Mr. Kuenze, had been quoted as debunking the idea, prevalent apparently throughout the world, that it took years to teach somebody to become a pretzel maker. 'I can teach them overnight,' he said, 'if they can be taught.' A lot of the article had been about a controversy over the need for salt on a pretzel. Mr. Kuenze claimed that salt on the outside was unnecessary and that he put it on only 'to satisfy the trade.' The important thing, he said, was to put salt in the dough, which he alone did, of all the pretzel makers in the state. The article said that Mr. Kuenze had one hundred employees, a good many deaf-mutes among them but also 'boys and girls who work after school.'

I knew which bus went by the pretzel factory-it was the same one that Earl and I had taken on the afternoon we'd followed home to Elizabeth the Christian who Earl had spotted as a fairy just in the nick of time. I'd have to pray that the fairy wouldn't be on the same bus-if by chance he was, I'd get off and take the next one. What I'd have to have with me was a note, a note this time not from Sister Mary Catherine but from a deaf-mute. 'Dear Mr. Kuenze. I read about you in the Sunday Call. I want to learn to make pretzels. I'm sure I can be taught overnight. I am deaf and dumb. I am an orphan. Will you give me a job?' And I signed it 'Seldon Wishnow.' I couldn't for the life of me think of another name.

I needed a note, and I needed clothes. I had to look to Mr. Kuenze like a kid he could trust, and I couldn't turn up without clothes. And this time I needed a plan, what my father called 'a long-range plan.' It came to me immediately: my long-range plan would be to save enough of the money I earned at the pretzel factory to buy a one-way train ticket to Omaha, Nebraska, where Father Flanagan ran Boys Town. I knew about Boys Town and Father Flanagan-as did every boy in America-from the movie with Spencer Tracy, who won an Academy Award for