The Pigman by Paul Zindel Page B

and I went into the room with all the pigs, and I started lifting the bigger ones to see what country they were made in.
    You could hear Lorraine upstairs for about five minutes. When she came downstairs, she had this picture in her hands.
    “Who’s this?”
    There was a pause. Then the smile faded off the Pigman’s face. He took the picture from her and moved over to the stuffed armchair and sat down.
    “My wife Conchetta,” he said, “in her confirmation dress.”
    “Conchetta?” Lorraine repeated nervously. We both knew something was wrong but couldn’t put our finger on it. I got the idea that maybe his wife had run off to California and left him. I mean, you couldn’t blame her when you stop to think that her husband’s idea of a big time was to go to the zoo and feed a baboon.
    “She liked that picture because of the dress,” he went on. “It was the only picture she ever liked of herself.”
    He got up and put it in the table drawer where all those old
Popular Mechanics
books were, and when he turned around, his eyes looked like he was going to start crying. Suddenly he forced a smile and said, “Go upstairs and look around while I get you some wine. Please feel at home, please….”
    Then he went down the hall toward the kitchen.
    “What else is up there?” I whispered to Lorraine.
    “I don’t know.”
    I decided to take a look, but frankly there wasn’t much to look at. At the top of the stairs was this plain old bathroom with a shower curtain that had all kinds of fish designs on it.
    When I opened the door on the left, I got a little bit scared because there was one of those adjustable desk lamps with a long neck that made it look like a bird about to attack. I put the light on though, and the room was a huge bore. The ceiling slanted on the far side, and there was only one window. It was okay if you wanted to keep somebody as the Prisoner of Zenda, but it looked like a rotten place to work. All it had was this big desk made by taking a thick piece of plywood and laying it over two wooden horses, and a bookcase with blueprints and stuff in it, and a big oscilloscope, with its guts hanging out, in the corner. There were three old TV sets too, but they looked like they didn’t even work.
    Then I went into the room on the right of the hall. It was a bedroom—much neater than the rest of the house—and it had a lot of drawers and things to go through.
    The bedroom had a closet too, so I started with that. There were all kinds of dresses in it, and lacy ladies’ coats, and hats that looked like they must have been the purple rage at the turn of the tenth century. It was a big loss; it really was. And let me tell you, this room was a little nerve-racking too. It had a double bed with a cover made of millions of ruffles, and the way the pillows were laid out, it looked like there might be a dead body underneath. I checked that out right away, but there were only pillows. Then I found one drawer in the dresser bureau that had a lot of papers in it.
    There were some pictures, and I looked at them quickly. Also there were some bills and old letters and things tied up with a putrid ribbon and then—sort of funny—this little pamphlet caught my eye. It was called
WHAT EVERY FAMILY SHOULD KNOW.
That’s all there was on the cover, and it really had my curiosity up, so I opened it. The very first page gave me the creeps.
    I ditched that quick enough, but one thought struck me about that dumb high school I go to. They think they’re so smart giving the kids garbage like
Johnny Tremain
and
Giants in the Earth
and
Macbeth
, but do you know, I don’t think there’s a single kid in that whole joint who would know what to do if somebody dropped dead.
    In the same drawer there was a leather case with a broken thingamajig to close it, and it had jewelry in it—a lot of junky women’s jewelry that looked like it was made out of paste and stuff. I mean, that wife of his—Mr. Pignati’s wife—looked like