Paranoia
Imagery is used to a paint a portrait of paranoia. With the arrival and adoption of Nipper as a pet pigeon, it is becoming more and more difficult for him to keep his dark secret still a secret and the darkness of it stimulates an intensifying fear of the Beans Boys finding out he really didn’t want to be wringer:
“He stayed put. He crouched and cringed behind the sofa as if neither furniture nor darkness were enough to hide him. He stayed through a thousand tocks of the unseen clock, and another thousand, and the bonging of his heart. And only when he heard, from behind the house, two sharp, quick yelps, did he know for absolutely sure that they had been there.”
The Kid Who Dreaded Sundown
Each setting of the sun brings Palmer one day closer to the day he has been dreading almost his entire life. The inexorable quality of inevitability has reached the point where it informs every single action, whether related or unrelated to the arrival of the moment of doom that is approaching with no possibility of avoidance in sight. Imagery is brilliantly engaged to portray this oppressive feeling:
“The sun dazzled in a cloudless sky. The sidewalks, if you took your shoes off, burned. After dinner people watered flowers.
At night he heard trucks rumbling.
Little kids on pastel bikes pedaled furiously, churning the heat to butter, gasping stories of wooden crates piled higher than skyscrapers, of crates broke into, pigeons flushed and killed, security guards posted.
Men on porches cleaned their shotguns.
Women baked pies.”
How to Confuse a Pigeon
In an attempt to save Nipper, Palmer and Dorothy try to take him so far away and get him so confused he can’t find home in on Palmer’s head anymore as this particular propensity potentially could prove fatal for the bird with the dreaded Pigeon Day approaching. Getting the pigeon far away is easy, but how to confuse a bird? Imagery tells the tale:
“Dorothy stopped at the roadside and watched Palmer drive her bicycle deeper into the meadow. The wheels jumped, the basket bounced over the clodded earth. Thistletops erupted, wildflowers wobbled as the bike charged in reckless patterns only a fly could follow: circles, figure eights, zigzags, crazy doodles. This went on for many minutes when suddenly the bike bolted on a bee-line into the woods beyond.”
Treestumping
The Beans Boys don’t much for care Dorothy. She’s just a girl who doesn’t—maybe even can’t—get the beauty and magnificent honor of being wringer. So they abuse her as young boys are wont to do. One of the means of abuse is a young boy version of tubthumping to which Beans gives the name treestumping:
“Sometimes they simply stood in front of her in the middle of the sidewalk, like human trees, forcing her to walk around them. Then they would run ahead and become new sidewalk trees, making her detour around them time after time, all the way home… Beans began to do more. Instead of just standing stiff and stumplike in front of her, he waggled his arms and legs. He rolled his eyes and wiggled his ears. He stretched his lips to show every one of his multicolored teeth. He grunted and bellowed and snorted and just plain screamed in her face…He looked like a puppet on string…Dorothy never flinched, she never looked.”
