The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip

  ALSO BY GEORGE SAUNDERS

  Congratulations, by the way

  Tenth of December

  The Braindead Megaphone

  In Persuasion Nation

  Pastoralia

  CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

  ALSO BY LANE SMITH

  Return to Augie Hobble

  It’s a Book

  Grandpa Green

  John, Paul, George & Ben

  The Happy Hocky Family!

  Science Verse

  (written by Jon Scieszka)

  Math Curse

  (written by Jon Scieszka)

  The Stinky Cheese Man

  (written by Jon Scieszka)

  James and the Giant Peach

  (written by Roald Dahl)

  Text copyright © 2000 by George Saunders

  Illustrations copyright © 2000 by Lane Smith

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Villard Books, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, in 2000.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  The very persistent gappers of Frip / George Saunders and Lane Smith

  p cm

  ISBN 978-0-8129-8963-2

  eBook ISBN 978-0-8129-8964-9

  I. Smith, Lane, ill. II. Title

  PS3569.A7897 V47 2000

  eBook ISBN 9780812989649

  randomhousebooks.com

  246897531

  Special thanks to Natalie.

  eBook design adapted from printed book design by Molly Leach

  v4.1

  a

  to Alena and Caitlin, both very Capable

  —GS

  to Toddy

  —LS

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by George Saunders and Lane Smith

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip

  About the Author

  About the Illustrator

  A GAPPER’S LIKE THAT, ONLY BIGGER, about the size of a baseball, bright orange, with multiple eyes like the eyes on a potato. And gappers love goats. When a gapper gets near a goat it gives off a continual high-pitched happy shriek of pleasure that makes it impossible for the goat to sleep, and the goats get skinny and stop giving milk. And in towns that survive by selling goat milk, if there’s no goat milk, there’s no money, and if there’s no money, there’s no food or housing or clothing, and so, in gapper-infested towns, since nobody likes the idea of starving naked outdoors, it is necessary at all costs to keep the gappers off the goats.

  SUCH A TOWN WAS FRIP.

  Frip was three leaning shacks by the sea. Frip was three tiny goat-yards into which eight times a day the children of the shacks would trudge with gapper-brushes and cloth gapper-sacks that tied at the top. After brushing the gappers off the goats, the children would walk to a cliff at the edge of town and empty their gapper-sacks into the sea.

  The gappers would sink to the bottom and immediately begin inching their way across the ocean floor, and three hours later would arrive again at Frip and split into three groups, one per goat-yard, only to be brushed off again by the same weary and discouraged children, who would stumble home and fall into their little beds for a few hours of sleep, dreaming, if they dreamed at all, of gappers putting them into sacks and dropping them into the sea.

  In the shack closest to the sea lived a girl named Capable.

  Earlier that year her mother had died. Since then, her father had very much liked things to stay as they were. At dusk Capable would find him in the yard, ordering the sun to stay up, then sitting sadly in the flower bed when the sun disobeyed him and went down anyway.

  The last thing her mother had ever cooked was rice, and now Capable’s father insisted that all his food be white. So in addition to brushing gappers eight times a day and faithfully mending her gapper-sack, Capable also had to mix sugar and milk and cliff-chalk into a special white dye and spread it over whatever she was cooking that night.

  It was a hard life, and it made her tired.

  “Father,” she said one day, “maybe it’s time we moved. Away from the ocean. Away from the gappers.”

  “My dear, I’m surprised at you,” he said. “This is our home. It has always been our home. There have always been gappers, and exhausted children brushing them off.

  I myself was once an exhausted child brushing off gappers. It was lovely! The best years of my life. The way they fell to the sea from our bags! And anyway, what would you do with your time if there were no gappers?”

  “Sleep,” said Capable, whose eyes were deep dark pools.

  “Ha ha, sleep, yes,” said her father sadly, and went off for his afternoon nap.

  Now gappers are not smart, but then again they are not all equally stupid. One day, at the bottom of the sea, one of the less-stupid gappers, who had a lump on one side of its skull that was actually its somewhat larger-than-average brain sort of sticking out, calculated that, of the three houses in Frip, the reddish one—Capable’s house—was about fifteen feet closer to the sea than the next-closest house, which, when you are the size of a baseball and have no legs and move around by crinkling and uncrinkling your extremely sensitive belly, is useful information.

  So that night, instead of splitting into three groups, the gappers moved in one very large impressive shrieking group directly into Capable’s yard.

  There were approximately fifteen hundred gappers living in the sea near Frip. Each Frip family had about ten goats. Therefore, there would normally be about five hundred gappers per yard, or fifty gappers per goat. Tonight, however, with all fifteen hundred gappers in Capable’s yard, there were approximately one hundred fifty gappers per goat. Since the average goat can carry about sixty gappers before it drops to its knees and keels over on one side with a mortified look on its face, when Capable came out to brush gappers that night, she found every single one of her goats lying on its side with a mortified look on its face, completely covered with shrieking orange gappers.

  When the other Frip children came out to brush gappers, they found they had no gappers.

  So they went back inside and fell asleep.

  IN THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR LIVED Mrs. Bea Romo, a singer, whose children, two sons, were also singers. They all sang in a proud and angry way, as if yelling at someone, their faces bright red.

  “It’s a miracle!” Mrs. Romo shouted next morning, when she came out and discovered that her yard was free of gappers. “This is wonderful! Capable, dear, you poor thing. The miracle didn’t happen to you, did it? I feel so sorry for you. God has been good to us, by taking our gappers away. Why? I can’t say. God knows what God is doing, I guess! I suppose we must somehow deserve it! Boys! Boys! Come out and look!”

  And her boys, Robert and Gilbert, came out and looked.

  “What?” said Robert, who was himself only slightly brighter than a gapper.

  “I don’t get it,” said Gilbert, who was exactly as bright as a gapper.

  “No gappers, boys!” said Bea. “See? No more gapper-brushing!”

  “So what are you saying, Ma?” said Robert. “Are you saying we don’t have to brush gappers as long as there aren’t any?”

  “Is that what you’re saying, Ma?” said Gilbert.

  “Boys, it’s a good thing you’re such excellent singers,” said Bea Romo, sort of rolling her eyes at Capable. “Because you’re certainly no
t going to win any brain awards.”

  “Well, I don’t want a brain award,” said Robert.

  “Me too,” said Gilbert. “I don’t want a brain award either.”

  “Unless they give money with it,” said Robert.

  “Do they give money with it?” said Gilbert. “In that case maybe I’ll take it.”

  “Money or candy,” said Gilbert. “Or a trophy.”

  “Or a medal,” said Robert.

  “Unless they pin the medal right directly into your brain,” said Gilbert. “In that case, no, I don’t want it.”

  “Me too,” said Robert. “If they’re going to stick a pin into my brain about it, forget it.”

  “Boys, stop talking,” said Bea Romo. “Stop talking now, go inside and sing.”

  “Okay,” said Robert. “But no brain awards.”

  “And that’s final,” said Gilbert.

  And the Romo boys went back inside and sang some more angry scales, after which they argued about which of them sang the best, after which they wrestled about which of them sang the best and there was the sound of some wooden thing breaking, possibly a piano bench.

  LATER THAT DAY CAPABLE CAME out to brush gappers and found Mrs. Romo saying heave-ho to a team of several strong men from Fritch, the next town over, who had their shoulders to the Romos’ little green shack. It was tilted way up and Capable could see dark dirt and worms underneath and a pair of old shoes.

  “Hello dear!” Mrs. Romo said. “Hope you don’t mind—I’m moving my house as far away from yours as I possibly can! After we spoke earlier, it occurred to me that the only thing separating my yard from your yard is a picket fence. Which gappers could easily squeeze through! And one thing I don’t need at this point is a yard full of gappers! I suppose they don’t bother you anymore, you’re probably used to them, you probably even take a kind of crude enjoyment in them, but my boys are made of more sensitive stuff, and mustn’t be distracted from their singing careers! To the lot-line, fellows! Lift, men, you can do it!”

  And the men succeeded in lifting the house and moving it very very close to the third and final house in Frip, which belonged to Sid and Carol Ronsen, who stood in their yard with looks of dismay on their nearly identical frowning faces.

  “See here!” said Sid Ronsen.

  “See here!” said Carol Ronsen. “What are you doing, Bea?”

  “What in the world are you doing, Bea?” said Sid. “Good Lord! Moving your house so close? You’re crowding our little house. Do you see it? Our little house is this blue one here, the one your house is now nearly touching, Bea.”

  And it was true. The houses were now very very close. A person could easily hop from roof to roof. The Romo boys were doing just this. They were hopping from roof to roof, singing in angry voices, while the Ronsen girls, Beverly and Gloria, craned their heads out the window with their fingers in their ears.

  “I’m still on my property,” said Mrs. Romo.

  “Good Lord,” said Sid.

  “Good Lord, Bea,” said Carol. “You could look right in on us. You could look right in on us being naked in our own private bathroom.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t!” said Mrs. Romo. “Although you will probably hear us singing from time to time!”

  “Lucky us,” said Sid Ronsen.

  And immediately, Sid Ronsen hired the same five men to move his house to the far edge of his property.

  Now the distance between his house and the Romo house was exactly the same as it had been that morning.

  It was as if the world had tipped, and the Romo and Ronsen houses had slid over, but Capable’s house had stayed where it was.

  OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS Capable tried everything she could think of to get rid of the gappers.

  She tried hiding the goats under blankets,

  setting the goats on tables,

  building fences around the goats,

  shaving the goats, but nothing worked.

  She moved the goats inside, but the gappers only squeezed under the door and blundered into the dye vat and left white streaks across the floor as they chased the worried-looking goats around the kitchen.

  Finally her goats stopped giving milk altogether, which meant no milk and no cheese, and no money from selling the milk and cheese, which meant that Capable and her father were reduced to eating dandelions, which she first had to paint white.

  “Father,” she said late one night. “I can’t keep up. Our goats are dying. We’re going to have to ask the neighbors for help.”

  “Have we ever done that before?” he said.

  “We’ve never needed help before,” said Capable.

  “Well I’m against it,” he said. “If we haven’t done it before, it stands to reason that this is the first time we’ve done it, which means that, relative to what we’ve done in the past, this is different, which I am very much against, as I always have been, as you well know. I have consistently been very very consistent about this.”

  Then he went back to sleep and Capable went out to the yard. Twenty times she filled her sack with gappers and walked to the cliff. As she brushed and bagged she thought of her mother, and while thinking of her mother she seemed to hear her mother’s voice, saying: Honey, if you need help, ask for help, you’re not alone in this world, you sweet little goof.

  So she went inside and wrote a note to the Romos and the Ronsens:

  Dear friends, it said, we need your help. The gappers are too much for me. They’re killing our goats. Please help, I beg you, your friend Capable.

  Then she left a copy for the Romos and a copy for the Ronsens, and went to sleep happy, feeling that tomorrow things would get better.

  “GOOD LORD!” SAID SID RONSEN next morning, standing by his fence, reading the note. “What is the meaning of this? What is she thinking? Are those gappers our gappers? Are those goats our goats?”

  “Good Lord!” said Carol Ronsen. “They certainly are not. They are her goats and her gappers, as indicated by the fact that they are in her yard. Is her yard our yard? I think not.”

  “I feel that our yards are our yards,” said Bea Romo.

  “Quite right!” said Sid Ronsen. “Well said, Bea.”

  “I for one,” said Carol Ronsen, and then forgot what she was going to say, and poked Sid Ronsen, who almost always knew what she had been about to say.

  “I for one,” he said, poking her back, out of habit, “do not intend to stand idly by while my poor daughters, Beverly and Gloria, who only recently were freed from gapper-duty, go marching out of my yard, into her yard, and lend a hand. What sort of father would I be? What kind of message would I be sending? Wouldn’t I be saying: Girls, I don’t value you, I think you should work like dogs to solve a problem that isn’t even yours? Preposterous! I refuse to say that! I am very sorry that Capable’s luck has gone bad, but, come to think of it, I for one do not believe in luck. Do you know what I do believe?”

  “You don’t believe in luck,” said Carol Ronsen, who was quite thrilled that what she had been going to say had turned out to be so very long and opinionated.

  “I believe we make our own luck in this world,” said Sid Ronsen. “I believe that, when my yard suddenly is free of gappers, why, that is because of something good I have done. Because, as both of you ladies know, I have always been a hard worker.”

  “As have I,” said Bea Romo. “I too have always been a hard worker, as have my boys, and look: No gappers, just like you. I suppose one might say that we too have made our own luck. With our hard work.”

  “Work, work, work,” said Carol Ronsen.

  “Perhaps I should compose a response,” said Sid Ronsen.

  “That would be super,” said Bea Romo.

  So Sid Ronsen composed the following response:

  Dear Capable, it said, we are in receipt of your letter of the other day, that other day, whenever that day was, when you sent that letter that you sent us. We regret to inform you that, although we are very sympathetic to your significant
hardships, don’t you think it would be better if you took responsibility for your own life? We feel strongly that, once you rid your goats of gappers, as we have, you will feel better about yourself, and also, we will feel better about you. Not that we’re saying we’re better than you, necessarily, it’s just that, since gappers are bad, and since you and you alone now have them, it only stands to reason that you are not, perhaps, quite as good as us. Not that we hate you! We don’t. We sort of even like you. Just please get rid of those gappers! Prove that you can do it, just as we proved we could do it, and at that time, and that time only, please come over, and won’t that be fun, all of us standing around the fire, sharing a laugh about those bad old days when we all had gappers.

  Love, Your Neighbors.

  Sid crept to Capable’s mailbox and slipped the note in.

  THAT AFTERNOON, MRS. ROMO finished her usual afternoon session of shouting at her boys for not doing their afternoon scales, then stepped out onto what she called her veranda, which was a little square of hard-packed dirt where the cat liked to leave its chewed-up spitty toys.

  Walking by was Capable, looking mad, leading her goats on a rope.

  With Capable was her father, muttering and shaking his head.

  “Hello, dear,” said Mrs. Romo. “How quaint that you’ve tied all your goats to-gether. They look so cute. Why did you do it? Just being silly? Taking them on a little tour of the town?”

  “No,” said Capable. “I’m giving up.”

  “Why say it so grumpy?” said Bea Romo. “And what do you mean you’re giving up?”