All American Horror of the 21st Century

Sonny Wilson's Last Show and Tell. Jeff Jacobson

SONNY WILSON’S LAST SHOW AND TELL

by Jeff Jacobson

When the cops interviewed me after everything that happened in Mr. Zewecki’s class that day, I could tell they didn’t believe anything I said. All they saw was this jumpy fifth grade kid with a brand spanking new bandage. There was still broken glass in my hair. They thought I was in shock.

“Can you tell us what happened this afternoon, Tom?”

I tried to tell ‘em. I really did.

But I guess it was easer to believe that Sonny just went crazy, instead of the truth.

It was Friday, Show and Tell day in Mr. Zewecki’s biology class. My buddy Mark Bower brought in a sample of poison oak, just to prove to everybody that he wasn’t afraid of the plant that most of us here in the fifth grade were smart enough to avoid. “Anybody here ever had poison oak? It itches like hell. Like hell,” Mark said, drawing it out and acting like he was being attacked by a thousand poison oak leaves that whizzed about like bees.

Mr. Zewecki said, “I think that’s just about enough language, Mr. Bower.”

“Like heeelllllllll,” Mark said, still twitching.

My other buddy, Aaron Wochowski, was next. Nervous, he stormed up front carrying his stepdad’s fifteen gallon ice chest, spilling water over desks. A carp lay sideways inside the ice chest, gills fluttering weakly in the surging water. He splashed the front row for a while and told the class about how he and his brothers would shoot carp with bows and razor tipped arrows.

Mr. Zewecki got Aaron and his carp back in their seat and eyed the class. There was over half an hour left and he’d run out of all the students he knew would have something halfway educational to show. He finally went with Gladys Peterson, the dullest girl in class. Gladys ran up and bored us all to death with her fascinating story about how she had tracked down the elusive Allinosourusectusofsomethingorother, keeping it behind her back the whole time as she chattered away, and sure enough, it turned out to be some dumb weed thing she’d plucked up, roots and all, like I said, to bore everybody to death. Mark should have known; plants didn’t impress anybody.

I knew that. And I was ready. After Gladys, it was down to just me and Sonny Wilson. No big surprise, I went next. I wasn’t as bad as Sonny’s usual Show and Tells; at least I worked at my presentations. But Mr. Zewecki never seemed to share my enthusiasm. This time, I’d caught this big moth with my dad’s casting net, but as hard as I’d tried to get it arranged on the board, it never looked like the pictures in our science book. It looked more like one of those bugs you’d find on your windshield after getting home some hot night. I wished I’d used those pins in my Sunday School shirt on both wings, instead of roofing nails on the left side.

I was trying to explain this when Mr. Zewecki said, “Thank you, Mr. Lundstrom. I’m sure everyone understands that moth wings are quite delicate.” He looked around the room, but he knew who was next. Everybody knew who was next. He said, “Well, Mr. Wilson, I guess it’s your turn.”

Sonny was the bad kid of our class; this was his second go ‘round the fifth grade. He wore the same black Chuck Taylors, the same baggy jeans, pockets stuffed with half crushed boxes of cigarettes and rocks to throw at cars or kids or dogs. It was a known fact that he cut his own hair, without a mirror, with the switchblade it was rumored he carried.

Sonny didn’t carry anything up to the front of the class. He stood there, looking just as dumb and pissed-off as a dull machete; eyes half lidded, hands in his pockets, in that scary cool Judas Priest Screaming For Vengeance shirt.

Finally, Mr. Zewecki cleared his throat. “Ahh, Sonny, do you have something to show the class?”

Sonny said, “Yeah. I got something to show the class.” He dug deep into the front pockets of his jeans, fishing around, and the girls got nervous, as Sonny was as liable to moon them as look at them.

Mr. Zewecki said, “Ahh, Sonny, I don’t think—”

Sonny pulled a wriggling plastic baggie out of his right pocket. Everybody leaned forward to get a better look. It looked like a big tadpole, but something was wrong with the head. It was too big and lumpy. Sonny held it up with both hands, thumbs and forefingers wrapped around the body as the thing flopped around inside the clear plastic. At first, I thought he’d taken a live crawdad and superglued it to a big, big tadpole. Gluing animals together to make ‘em fight was one of Sonny’s favorite hobbies.

“Pass it around,” Mark suggested. “I’ll hold it.”

Sonny chuckled or coughed or fought down vomit and, after a moment, held the baggie out to Missy Johnson. Missy shrieked so loud I thought the fire alarm had gone off. She promptly slid under her desk and sprang up two rows over, still screaming.

Sonny wobbled in place, then took two lurching steps down the aisle, heading for Mark.

Mark started having second thoughts when he saw the slick grayish green skin through the froth of slimy water. “Well, I thought everyone would want to look at it. Start up front.”

Aaron leaned over and said, “I think it wants to breathe. There’s no oxygen in that water. That’s your problem.”

Sonny’s head waggled. Aaron flinched, worried he’d gone too far. But Sonny abruptly turned away from Mark and stomped over to the big sink in back. He tore open the bag and dumped the tadpole into the metal basin and twisted the COLD knob. As water splashed into the sink, the whole class crowded around and tried to peer into the metal basin.

I was right; it was a big tadpole. Sort of. The tail had to be six inches long. But Sonny hadn’t glued anything to it. It had a bunch of growths or tumors popping out of the head, as if pressure inside had finally forced these jagged shards of cartilage out of its skull. It made me feel all squirmy inside, like when I found a leech on my big toe after wading in the ditch.

“Where did you find this specimen?” Mr. Zewicki asked. Mr. Zewecki lived to say words like specimen and archaic and his all-time favorite, photosynthesis.

“Creek out back of my house,” Sonny said.

Sonny and his dad lived in this Winnebago permanently parked at a random angle on an acre of land up north, off the old highway. Just across the creek was the county dump, one square mile of mountains of garbage, churned up earth, and enough rats to reinfect the world with the Black Death.

Me, Mark, and Aaron rode out there one time to watch a fire that had erupted among the rotting refuse. We watched from the safety of a nearby rise in the highway; none of us wanted to get any closer. Off to our right was Sonny’s trailer, angled dull white and brown in the afternoon sun, like the splinter off a broken toenail. He was outside, tossing firecrackers at the circling gulls. His dad, this old guy with a tangled white beard and ponytail, was out there too with a .22, shooting rats that were fleeing the fire.

Sonny turned and saw us, but he didn’t move, just watched us for a while. We got nervous and took off. Riding away, though, I looked back. Part of me felt kind of bad; he looked tired out there, knee deep in the dying grass, still just watching.

“That is a very interesting specimen,” Mr. Zewecki said, bending over to get a better look. His tie dangled into the sink and the tadpole snapped at it. I don’t know if the tadpole thought it was a fly or what, but Mr. Zewecki jerked back like he was afraid he might fall into the sink. To cover his embarrassment, he clapped his hands sharply and barked, “Back to your seats. Everyone, now!” Water dripped from the bottom of his tie and soaked the crotch of his slacks.

Mr. Zewecki found a large jar and a pair of tongs and dropped the tadpole inside. He half-filled the jar with water and put it on his desk at the front of the room. “Where, exactly, did you say you found this?”

“I said. The creek.” Sonny was the only student still standing. “There’s lots of ‘em out there. Shoot. You oughta’ see what happens when they get bigger. Like this one,” Sonny said, and pulled a live frog out of his underwear.

The frog lay flattened in his cupped palms like a fresh cow patty. Both back legs dangled a full six or seven inches on either side of his wrist. From a distance, the only thing really strange was that the frog wasn’t green, but a shade of white the same as the underside of a mushroom, as if it had been born in a cave and had never been out until now and I was afraid the fluorescent lights might make it go crazy or something. Complicated patterns of orange streaks zigzagged across the pale, moist skin, kind of like those fish floating listlessly in a cheap black plastic pond in a Chinese restaurant.

But that wasn’t even the weird part.

Instead of having a clearly defined head, it had this swollen nub, like the frog had just crawled out of a sluggish creek with a helmet of bleached mud still clinging to the skull and shoulders. It had a mouth, a big one down underneath, where you could kind of see the shovel-like jawline, but I didn’t think those other blinking holes were eyes. There were a dozen of these openings, maybe more, scattered at semi-regular intervals around the head, just like the growths on the tadpole. I think they were mouths, not eyes, because every few seconds or so, a whiplike, eggplant purple tongue popped out of these holes and stabbed at the air around its head like parasites trying to escape.

But I dunno. I don’t know what they were. ‘Cause, in a way, those oval, gaping slits did kinda’ look almost like eager eyelids, opening and closing over wet, empty sockets in perpetual hope that an eyeball might just grow inside someday. What I really think was this frog had a whole bunch of other heads growing out of one big one.

“Well, Sonny… that’s very interesting,” Mr. Zewecki said, frozen next to his desk.

For a moment, quiet. Even Mark was stunned into silence. But then Trent Hartwell, two rows over, sneakily fished a dried ball of snot out of his nose and flicked it at Sonny.

I felt bad again. It wasn’t Sonny’s fault that he was big and slow and had to live in that Winnebago out next to the dump. My parents never talked exactly about Sonny and his dad; whenever I mentioned Sonny’s name, they’d just exchange a couple of meaningful glances and change the subject.

Sonny lifted the frog higher, holding it out towards Trent, letting the frog take a good long eyeless look or smell or something. Sonny gave that cough chuckle thing again, and gently tossed the frog at Trent as if he was releasing a dove at a wedding.

It dropped smack in the middle of Gladys Peterson’s desk. She and the frog coolly regarded each other for a moment before it shambled over to the edge of her desk in an almost comical pigeon-toed gait, and leapt off. It landed on the floor next to Trent with a dry slap where it wobbled for a moment, as if confused.

Mr. Zewecki barked sharply, “Mr. Wilson!” He snatched a large fish net from his desk and marched forward. “I will not allow any—”

Trent kicked at the frog and sent it skittering limply across the aisle, where it slid under Gladys’ backpack, leaving behind an abrupt squirt of some liquid with a faint tinge of yellow. It was like when you were holding a frog or a toad and it would pee on you to scare you off and this was kind of like Sonny; maybe he just wanted to scare you away. I almost felt sorry for the thing, however many heads it was growing.

“Quite enough Mr. Hartwell!” Mr. Zewecki leaned on Gladys’s desk, bent over and patted the backpack with the fish net. A chorus of startled croaks erupted from under the backpack.

Sonny made a clicking sound against his erratic teeth.

The croaks found a rhythm and matched the sounds Sonny made.

Mr. Zewecki watched Sonny for a moment with wide eyes, then leaned lower, and tapped the orange canvas back once more. His tie came unstuck from his belt and fluttered down next to the fish net.

Sonny made a sharp, hissing noise, sucking spit through his teeth and the croaking stopped instantly as the frog burst from the sliver of a shadow under the backpack and leapt for the dangling red cotton. A dozen purple tongues, some as big around as a pencil, snatched at the tie.

Mr. Zewecki’s other sweaty hand slipped and he fell heavily into the desk and smacked his face flat into Gladys’s desk, cracking his nose like a soft grape.

The frog released the tie in disgust.

Mr. Zewecki slid off the desk and fell face-first onto the frog. He cried out, a stunned grunt of rage and fear and new pain as he sat up. The frog hung off his face, dangling from all those tongues. Most had found the bridge of his bloody, shattered nose, as the frog kicked and clamped down on Mr. Zewecki’s nose with its main mouth, the other mouths gaped and snapped at the air like some kind of horrible, hungry flower. One of the larger tongues squirmed up his nostril and another worked its way into his eye socket.

It must have hurt something awful, because Mr. Zewecki found his feet and went running at the front door, but since he hated what he called “intruders to the education matrix” he always locked the door during class. He just ran right into it at full speed. The door held. The frog hung on. Mr. Zewecki bounced back and crashed over his desk and hit the floor again.

Sonny gave that cough chuckle, this time scraping something thick off the side of his mouth and wiping it on his jeans.

Mr. Zewecki got hold of the frog, yanked it off his face, and threw it across the roo where it hit one of the glass cabinets hard enough to crack the pane. The frog slapped the floor and retreated into the darkness underneath.

Mr. Zewecki pulled himself up against his desk. His face looked like someone had stabbed him a whole lot of times with a BBQ fork. I’d like to think that Mr. Zewecki wasn’t scared, that he knew what he was saying when he put his hand up like one of the students, that he was still in control and everything was okay, as he breathed out, “Ahvuhhnnunn kaahhhmmm daahhnnnn.” Then his head dropped to his chest, his arm flopped down, and he didn’t move.

“Mr. Zewecki?” Missy asked. Then again, in a higher register, “Mr. Zewecki?”

Aaron ventured forward, keeping an eye over where he’d last seen the frog, and poked Mr. Zewecki’s chest. Mr. Zewecki groaned, but that was all.

Sonny didn’t look like he cared much about what Mr. Zewecki had to say as he clapped and stomped his feet, coughing out wet grunts of “Hi-ha-hi-ha-hi-ha-hi” loud at the glass cabinet, as if egging the frog on.

I didn’t feel so sorry for him anymore.

Aaron poked Mr. Zewecki again. I thought Mr. Zewecki was long dead but then he raised his head and pulled himself up into a sitting position, leaning back against his desk. It sounded like it hurt to breathe. Something was happening to his skin. It puckered, crinkling inward against the joints and bones, like an old leaf getting sucked into a shop-vac. A mottled, parasitic growth bloomed from within, eating at the flesh in a seething frenzy. Pretty soon he looked like he’d been dead for ages, leaning back against an old dead log, consumed by fungus.

The rest of us kept looking back and forth, from Sonny keeping his odd, shuffling dancing going, back up to the front cabinet and the deep shadows under it.

A glimpse of white. Missy screamed. The frog shrank back.

If it wasn’t for the eerily perfect rhythm, I would have thought that Sonny was having some kind of seizure, somehow managing to remain upright as he wobbled and clapped and said, “Hi-hi-ha-hi-ha-hi-ha-hi-ha,” over and over and over. He spit on the floor.

The frog took four quick hops into the center of the classroom. This time, Missy wasn’t the only one that screamed. I sprang out of my desk and ran past Mark and jumped onto the back countertop.

Kids jumped on desks and scrambled to the back counter. A few waited near the glass cabinets, ready to crawl on top, but most of the class stood on the countertop, their backs against the rain lashed windows.

The frog crawled under Gladys’ backpack in the stampede.

Sonny’s shuffling and clapping and moaning tapered off. He wound his way through the desks to Gladys’s and knelt down. He gently gathered the frog into his cupped hands and brought it up to his face. And then, without hesitation, without any kind of warning whatsoever, he let the frog crawl into his open mouth. The frog kept going, wriggling its way inside, over the tongue and down Sonny’s open throat and when the webbed back feet had disappeared Sonny snapped his jaws together and smiled. And burped.

“Guh-ross,” Kirsten Thayne said. I wasn’t sure if she meant the burp or the whole frog thing.

Adding insult to injury, Sonny farted. At least, I hope it was a fart. It sounded awfully wet. Then he did it again. And again. I pulled my shirt up over my face. But Sonny wasn’t finished. This horrible gastric symphony kept going, and after each release, Sonny’s eyes sank a little further into his head.

I swear I saw something moving in his pants.

Sonny scratched his belly, lazily, like he was sitting alone on the couch, bored, watching baseball. Then he unsnapped the top button of his jeans and lifted his shirt. Sonny always had a slight potbelly from all the frozen corn dogs and bacon sandwiches and Hostess Ho-Hos, but right then he looked four or five months pregnant. The frothing, bad sounds dribbled away and all I could hear was Sonny’s breathing.

The smell had reached everyone else and nobody even wanted to breathe.

Something definitely moved in Sonny’s pants.

Holding the T-shirt up to his pudgy n*****s with his left hand, he casually scratched his way down to his distended stomach with his other hand, worked one ragged fingernail deep into the grimy folds of his belly button, hooked that finger into a stout claw, and yanked.

The skin and thin muscles of Sonny’s stomach split easy, like wet cardboard.

White frogs erupted out of Sonny and spilled over each other, awash in a flood of living, wriggling chaos. He staggered to the left and went to his knees, dropping frogs in his wake. Thirty or forty of them curled and spasmed on the tile floor behind him. More spilled out of his wet jeans.

The legion of frogs strung blood and pink bits of meat in their wake as they surged across the floor in a frothing nightmare. Their hideous croaking filled the classroom. They swarmed over Mr. Zewecki. A couple bit him; it looked like they did it just for the hell of it and so I didn’t feel so embarrassed about running for the counter.

Sonny fell backwards and lay still. A couple of the frogs crawled back into the dripping remains of his stomach, but he didn’t move.

By then, everybody was kicking at the windows. A few frogs were flicking their tongues at the back counter, but none of them hopped any higher than a foot or so. For the most part, they seemed content so explore the floor of the classroom, occasionally biting at each other and desk legs. A couple crawled into Aaron’s ice chest and ate the carp. They all looked like they were growing multiple heads.

I grabbed the nearest heavy object, a terrarium with two turtles inside. I felt sorry for the turtles but threw the whole thing at the closest cluster of frogs. The terrarium broke, but didn’t shatter, scattering five panes of thick plastic. “Don’t make ‘em mad!” Missy yelled at me.

But the crashing terrarium didn’t bother the frogs at all. They flinched at first, sure, but then just jumped across the sand, biting at the glass and the twigs. One of ‘em pinned both turtle shells to the floor with its front feet while all those purple tongues popped the little turtle legs and heads off like they were plucking berries off a thick vine.

Aaron threw an aquarium at the floor. It burst and the water washed the frogs backwards. Without waiting for anyone, he jumped down and grabbed the nearest desk. He swung it up to me and Mark.

We shifted our grip on the desk and swung it together, like a battering ram. It crashed through the window beautifully. Mark and Aaron crawled past and punched out most of the remaining slivers of glass, following the desk outside. Nobody needed any encouragement. Kids flowed through the window like a dam had broken.

I stayed back, watching the classroom, just to make sure that Mr. Zewecki was really dead. In spite of being mean most of the time, as if his students just lived to create problems, I was going to miss him; we got to do a lot of cool stuff in his class. By then, pretty much everybody was out of the classroom.

Sonny hadn’t moved. Some of the frogs were nestling against his body, for warmth. I had to give him credit. Nobody was bored by his Show and Tell. Still, I wanted to make sure that Sonny was truly dead too, or at least that no more frogs would crawl out of him, so I launched a potted plant at his head and then immediately wished I hadn’t.

He wasn’t dead. His one working eye blinked the dirt out and found me. He made that hissing sound instead and instantly, five pale frogs landed up on the countertop with me.

That’s when I cut my head. I couldn’t get through the window fast enough.

But the frogs didn’t follow me out. I went down the lawn to where everybody huddled together on the sidewalk. Somebody said Missy had gone to get Principal Harrison from the office. The rest of us just watched the broken window.

We all tried to tell Principal Harrison what happened, but she went ahead and opened the door with her keys anyway. Twenty minutes later, when she hadn’t come out, and the school had become a riot of red, blue, and white lights, we told the cops over and over that those frogs, they weren’t normal, they were poisonous or something. But like I said, they didn’t listen.

So me, Mark, and Aaron decided to ride out to Sonny’s trailer and see if we couldn’t set some more fires.

* * *

A most American rite of passage is the school days ritual of “Show and Tell,” which, as practiced in my youth, was a chance to show off something of yours that the other kids wished they had. Soon, of course, Jeff Jacobson’s narrative will be “historical fiction” because everyone will have everything, and thus no need to brag about material possessions.