Whistling In the Dark (16 page)

Ethel said, “Come down here, Miss Sally. This twistin’ and turnin’ is givin’ me a pain in my neck and Lord knows, I don’t need another one of them.”

I always did what Ethel told me to do so I hopped out of the tree and landed on the grass next to her. She ran her hand down my hair and told me it reminded her of a bag of just picked cotton.

“You know, my mama, she died young,” Ethel said quietly. “It’s a sad thing when a woman gets sick and dies ’fore she’s done doin’ her mothering. It just ain’t right and not in the order of things. So you say a lot of prayers that your mama gets better, okay?”

I nodded and then Ray Buck came over and said, “Time to take a stroll over,” and pointed toward the zoo. They were going over to see Sampson because that was what everybody liked to do over there. Admire the King of the Jungle.

“I’ll see ya later, Miss Sally. Maybe at them fireworks.” Ethel stood, pulled her lemon dress down and smiled at Ray Buck when he offered her his arm. “You give my best to Miss Troo and tell her that Mr. Gary brought along his old maid cards and he’s a-rarin’ to go.”

“You say hello to Mr. Gary for us and you can count on us this week to help you with Mrs. Galecki. I have a new book from the library with some beautiful pictures I think she’ll like. It’s called
Black Beauty
.”

Ethel grinned and said, “Why didn’t nobody tell me that somebody done wrote a book about me?”

Ray Buck started laughing so hard he had to clear his throat and spit.

I didn’t get the joke until the two of them were walking on the path over toward Sampson, and then thought I better get down to the creek and get Troo because they just announced that the sack races would begin in five minutes. I’d tell Ethel later that was a good one.

Mary Lane, who I think musta been on her third or fourth Eskimo Pie, because she had four of those sticks lined up in front of her, called me over and said, “Take these and give ’em to your uncle Paulie so I can put that in my charitable works story.”

Everybody in the neighborhood knew about Uncle Paulie and his Popsicle sticks. Just like everybody knew that Mrs. Goldman wouldn’t ever wear the color gray and Ethel wouldn’t drink Coca-Cola unless she could drop peanuts in it and that Mrs. Latour was not going to have any more kids because she’d gone into the hospital and had an operation where they took all her insides out and threw them away.

“Yeah . . . okay,” I said, picking up the sticks. Mary Lane didn’t want to give the sticks to him herself because Uncle Paulie was so odd. The way he always walked with his head down like he was searching for something. And the way he talked, which was real slow and sometimes didn’t make sense. And he also smiled too much, particularly at stuff nobody else smiled at. Like at that dead bird I found in Granny’s backyard. Before he had the accident and got his brain damaged, he hardly ever smiled. Granny used to warn me to steer clear of him, to not get on Uncle Paulie’s bad side because “That boy can get his Irish up.” The way she said it, I could tell she was afraid of her own son.

I stuck Mary Lane’s sticks in my pocket and felt like a bad Catholic for sometimes not liking my own uncle, so I made up my mind to go look for him. But first I wanted to cool down with Troo and make sure she wasn’t throwing anything at Greasy Al.

“Three minutes . . . three minutes, everybody, until the sack races . . . find a partner,” came over the loudspeaker.

Everybody was laughing and eating and sweating and the sun felt so scorchy, like if we stayed out in it long enough we’d all melt like ice cream and there’d be nothin’ left of us to see but people puddles.

I ran into Nell on my way to the creek. She seemed a little drunk because she was acting way more nice than Nell usually acted in the morning, or anytime really. She even hugged me, which was not something Nell generally did. But then she cried a little. When Eddie brought her over a cup of root beer, she started laughing again real quick. Clearly, Nell was going crazy. (Well, she certainly had the hair for it.)

I stood on top of the hill and looked down at the creek. Kids were hopping across the rocks and sometimes falling in and laughing and then getting right back up, and then I saw Troo. She and Willie were sitting next to the little waterfall and even though it was so hot she had on her prize-winning coonskin cap. I yelled to her, “The sack races are getting ready to start.”

She yelled back up, “Hold your horses.”

When I turned to walk back to the race area, I ran smack dab into Reese Latour and his flat-as-a-frying-pan face. He was staring down at Troo, grinning and rubbing the front of his pants. Reese was always doing that. Fast Susie Fazio said that Reese’d told her he had a magic genie in there and he was making a wish.

“What were you talkin’ to those two niggers about?” he slobbered out. Reese’d been drinking something that I thought might set my hair on fire, that’s how strong he smelled.

Before I had a chance to tell him to mind his own beeswax, Artie came running up next to me and said, “Hi, Sally.”

Without a word, Reese reached behind me and shoved his brother down on the ground. The bike-decorating prize Artie’d picked out, a silver bike bell, flew through the air and landed at my feet, making a noise like the ones at the beginning of a boxing match. “Can’t you see that her and me are talkin’?” Reese groused. “Aren’t you supposed to be watchin’ the idiot?”

Reese was Nell’s age, almost grown up, and shouldn’t be shoving around someone younger than himself. I helped Artie up and handed him back his bell after Reese started singing, “Harelip, harelip, harelip,” loud enough for people to start looking at us. Then he took another swallow out of whatever was in that brown paper bag and got up close to me and said, “Why don’t you just marry a nigger if you love ’em so much,” and walked off.

“Two minutes . . . two minutes, everyone. Get your partners and pick your sack.”

“You wanna be my partner, Sally?” Artie acted like Reese pushin’ him down was no big deal because it happened every day, and then I realized it probably did and felt so sorry for him.

I looked back at where Troo should’ve been coming up the gully. Well, the heck with her. Let Willy watch over her for a bit. “Yeah, that’d be fine, Artie.”

Artie and I went over to the pile of sacks and found one that looked strong and didn’t stink too bad. (Each year at the Fourth of July sack race, Mr. Lane said they used the same sacks they used since the American Revolution.) We slipped our legs in and Mrs. Callahan tied us together with a rope and we hopped over to the starting line. It was funny to feel Artie’s sweaty, hairy leg against mine. Troo was gonna be so mad if I did the race with him and not her. I wanted to say to Artie I changed my mind, but then I thought he’d think I didn’t want to partner with him because he was a harelip.

I looked for Troo again and started to get worried. She loved the sack race and had been looking forward to it all year long since we had won it last year. Mr. Lane said, “On your mark . . .” Too late now to go lookin’ for her. “Get set . . .” I looked down the line at our opponents. Way on the very end was Troo. With Willie. She waved to me and gave me her teaser smile. And then more than anything I wanted to win that sack race.

“Go!”

Much to my surprise, to make up for that harelip, God had made Artie Latour a fast hopper. Real fast. Before I knew it, I was on the ground at the finish line and Mrs. Callahan was smiling and putting blue ribbons over our necks. Everybody was yelling congratulations. ’Cept for Troo.

“A new record in the sack race, folks!” Mr. Lane yelled. “That’s Sally O’Malley and Artie Latour. Let’s give them a round of applause.” Everybody clapped and then Mr. Larsen, who owned the Tick Tock Coffee Shop over on Burleigh Street and seemed to be in charge of the cookout, hollered out, “Come and get it!” and waved a flag toward the picnic area, where you could eat for free and have watermelon and ice cream Dixie cups for dessert.

Artie headed over there with me like we were still in the sack tied together. Troo was sitting on the edge of a picnic table a ways away, giving me the evil eyeball, so I thought I better go talk to her.

I said, “I’ll see you later, Artie.”

He adjusted the ribbon around his neck and said, “You’re a nice girl, Sally.” Then he got in the hamburger line. And now maybe Artie Latour had the hots for me.

Her arms crossed over her chest, her toe tapping, Troo looked very fired up. I knew what she wanted me to say and do. She wanted me to apologize for winning the sack race and give her the blue ribbon.

I sat down next to her on the picnic table and tried to put my arm around her, but she shrugged it off. “You coulda waited for me, you know,” she said with flaring nostrils.

“I called for you. Twice. You didn’t come and I was feelin’ bad for Artie since Reese pushed him down and called him a harelip.”

“Suit yourself,” she said, and walked away. Troo gave up so fast and didn’t start a real fight because we both knew later that night, I would give her that blue ribbon that said CHAMPION on it in gold letters. That was the way it was with her and me. Just the way Daddy woulda wanted it.

After the egg race and two hamburgers and a hot dog and a little dunk in the creek, we laid down in the grass under a big maple tree and I sniffed my sunburned skin, which I had always found to be a nice smell. We played crazy eights with Mary Lane and Mimi Latour until it started to get dark, and then Nell and Eddie came and found Troo and me and we went over to the lagoon to sit on a soft blanket next to the water and watch the fireworks.

As I watched those red, white and blue stars burst up in the sky, I wondered about two things. The first was, how bad did it hurt when you got murdered and molested because we were sitting not far from the willow tree where Troo’d found Sara Heinemann’s shoe. And the second thing I wondered as I sat there, Troo’s head in my lap, a warm lagoon breeze running across my cheeks when all the fireworks went off at the same time and everybody’s faces were lit up and tilted toward the sky, I wondered could Mother see these fireworks from her hospital window and if she could, was she missing me the same way I was missing her?

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

When all that was left of the fireworks was the smoke, Nell gathered up the blanket and said for me and Troo to walk home with the Latours because she and Eddie were going down to Lake Michigan to watch the submarine races. That was fine with me. It was a warm night and I liked to walk and look into people’s houses through their picture windows when their lights were on and there was a mother and the father and some kids and sometimes they looked just like a painting. I wasn’t a peeper like Mary Lane. I didn’t like to look
that
close. I just liked that feeling . . . that feeling of everything being the way it was supposed to be.

Up the block the rest of the neighborhood was making their way home and I could hear Mrs. Latour yelling at one of her kids to shut up and quit their whining. Troo said, “I let Willie give me a smooch down by the creek.” I thought smooching with a boy was more disgusting than when Wendy Latour ate that dusty wiener she found underneath the picnic table today so I changed the subject.

“Did you see Ethel and Ray Buck?” I asked. We were walking past the Fitzpatricks’, who lived a block down from their drugstore. Nobody home.

“Yeah. Ethel says that Ray Buck is a fantastic bus driver. He has routes all over the city and has to remember them all by heart.” Troo kicked a rock. “And she told me that Mr. Gary is in town and asking about us, which is kinda nice because Mr. Gary is flush, Sally. We could ask him to borrow us some money after Mother dies and Hall gets into some trouble, because you know he’s going to, and then we can move to France.”

And that’s why she was called a Troo genius because, you see, I never woulda thought of that. It was better than a good plan. Troo was especially right about Hall. I’d heard him talking to himself two nights ago in the bathroom when I was laying in bed, my sheets smelling like this bird’s nest I found once in the backyard. “That manager,” Hall said and then stopped to puke. “That big Shuster’s manager from Cincinnati, he’s got nooo idea who he’s dealin’ with. They’ll regret this when the best shoe seller west of the Mississippi is gone.” In the morning I found him asleep in the bathtub. Hall was very bad at directions.

“Mr. Gary has very dreamy eyes,” Troo said in her sleepy voice, the one she got when she listened to Bobby Darin on the blue Motorola transistor radio that Mr. Gary brought us last year all the way from California for no reason at all. I thought that maybe Troo had a crush on Mr. Gary even if his ears stuck out and . . . Eureka! That’s who the other boy was in Mother’s graduation picture. It was Mr. Gary! I had no idea that he knew Mother. He’d never said anything. I should’ve paid attention to details because all you had to do was look at those ears that stuck out of his head like rowboat oars. I became extra excited to see him because I’d ask him questions about Mother and probably, because I had to know, the guy who was standing in the top row. Rasmussen.

When we walked by Fitzpatrick’s Drugstore, we waved through the window at Henry Fitzpatrick, a boy in my class. The drugstore had a soda fountain and Henry was sometimes the soda jerk, which was not a very nice thing to be called. I felt bad because Henry also had some disease called homofeelya and he had to be careful not to fall down on the playground because with this homofeelya you could start to bleed until all your blood was gone. So Henry was kind of pale and knobby and was especially careful when he opened a can of any kind.

But Henry liked to read just like me, so sometimes we sat on the front step of the drugstore and talked about books. A lot of the other kids called him Homo Henry, I think because of his bleeding disease, so he didn’t have a lot of friends. He wanted to be a pilot when he grew up so he read a lot about airplanes, which reminded me of my Sky King. But Henry had to know that no homofeelyas would get to be a pilot because what if he crashed or something and started bleeding all over the place and left a trail into the woods so the Russians could find him and then torture him to tell government secrets. I figured that Henry would grow up to be a pharmacist like his father and I bet he knew that too, and that’s why he looked kind of sad most of the time.