Properties
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- extracted_at
- 2026-01-27T17:16:46.103Z
- extracted_by
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- text
- 2865 teacher, Miss Aigletinger, that took us there damn near every Saturday. Sometimes we
2866 looked at the animals and sometimes we looked at the stuff the Indians had made in
2867 ancient times. Pottery and straw baskets and all stuff like that. I get very happy when I
2868 think about it. Even now. I remember after we looked at all the Indian stuff, usually we
2869 went to see some movie in this big auditorium. Columbus. They were always showing
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2870 Columbus discovering America, having one helluva time getting old Ferdinand and
2871 Isabella to lend him the dough to buy ships with, and then the sailors mutinying on him
2872 and all. Nobody gave too much of a damn about old Columbus, but you always had a lot
2873 of candy and gum and stuff with you, and the inside of that auditorium had such a nice
2874 smell. It always smelled like it was raining outside, even if it wasn't, and you were in the
2875 only nice, dry, cosy place in the world. I loved that damn museum. I remember you had
2876 to go through the Indian Room to get to the auditorium. It was a long, long room, and you
2877 were only supposed to whisper. The teacher would go first, then the class. You'd be two
2878 rows of kids, and you'd have a partner. Most of the time my partner was this girl named
2879 Gertrude Levine. She always wanted to hold your hand, and her hand was always sticky
2880 or sweaty or something. The floor was all stone, and if you had some marbles in your
2881 hand and you dropped them, they bounced like madmen all over the floor and made a
2882 helluva racket, and the teacher would hold up the class and go back and see what the hell
2883 was going on. She never got sore, though, Miss Aigletinger. Then you'd pass by this long,
2884 long Indian war canoe, about as long as three goddam Cadillacs in a row, with about
2885 twenty Indians in it, some of them paddling, some of them just standing around looking
2886 tough, and they all had war paint all over their faces. There was one very spooky guy in
2887 the back of the canoe, with a mask on. He was the witch doctor. He gave me the creeps,
2888 but I liked him anyway. Another thing, if you touched one of the paddles or anything
2889 while you were passing, one of the guards would say to you, "Don't touch anything,
2890 children," but he always said it in a nice voice, not like a goddam cop or anything. Then
2891 you'd pass by this big glass case, with Indians inside it rubbing sticks together to make a
2892 fire, and a squaw weaving a blanket. The squaw that was weaving the blanket was sort of
2893 bending over, and you could see her bosom and all. We all used to sneak a good look at
2894 it, even the girls, because they were only little kids and they didn't have any more bosom
2895 than we did. Then, just before you went inside the auditorium, right near the doors, you
2896 passed this Eskimo. He was sitting over a hole in this icy lake, and he was fishing
2897 through it. He had about two fish right next to the hole, that he'd already caught. Boy, that
2898 museum was full of glass cases. There were even more upstairs, with deer inside them
2899 drinking at water holes, and birds flying south for the winter. The birds nearest you were
2900 all stuffed and hung up on wires, and the ones in back were just painted on the wall, but
2901 they all looked like they were really flying south, and if you bent your head down and
2902 sort of looked at them upside down, they looked in an even bigger hurry to fly south. The
2903 best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was.
2904 Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would
2905 still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south,
2906 the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and their
- title
- Chunk 5