“Sally?”
I looked down into the street below the curb. There was a Popsicle stick, so I picked it up and would give it later to Uncle Paulie.
“I know what a bad time you and your family are going through,” he said so kindly. “I really do.”
No, he did not! Was his mother dying? Was his stepfather mean drunk all the time? Did he have a dead father he’d made promises to and a little sister to keep safe and an older sister who was being a complete moony love dope? For a second, I thought, Go ahead, just steal me, molest me, murder me. Just get it over with. And it scared me to think like that. That kind of thinking did not show the kind of stick-to-itiveness that Daddy expected from me.
“You need to tell me the truth, Sally. It’s important.”
“I pulled the fire alarm. Troo found the shoe underneath the big willow tree at the lagoon.”
His mouth turned down on the edges. “That’s all I needed to know.”
He stood up and reached into his back pocket to take out his wallet. He flipped it open and got out a card. It said: David Rasmussen. Precinct 6. Badge number 343. And a phone number. “If you should think of anything else you want to tell me, give me a call here.” He pointed down at the phone number. His fingernails had dirt beneath them. Probably from burying Sara. “Or if it’s a real emergency, you know you can come to my house and tell me.” He said kind of shyly, “I’ve got a garden. I hear you like to garden.”
How’d he know that?
I stood up and Rasmussen handed me that card with his name and number on it. Taped to the back was a five-dollar bill. And that was pretty strange. But not half as strange as the pictures I saw in his wallet. One of them was of me in my school uniform taken last year. And in the plastic area where you can put other pictures, there was Junie Piaskowski in her First Holy Communion dress, smiling her head off. She had no idea what was coming.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
When I got back into the car, Eddie said, “What’d he want?”
“He was just askin’ me some questions.”
“About what?” Nell asked, rubbing on Eddie’s arm.
“Sara Heinemann.”
Eddie said, “That missing kid?”
I didn’t show them Rasmussen’s card. And I didn’t tell them about the pictures of me and Junie Piaskowski that I’d seen in his wallet. Why bother.
“I found this in the street.” I gave Nell the five dollars Rasmussen had given me to buy my silence because he suspected that I knew he was the murderer and molester. Like in that movie Troo and me’d seen. I couldn’t remember the name of it but it had to do with blackmail, which meant that somebody gave somebody else money to keep their big mouths shut or else. That’s what that five bucks was. Blood money.
When Eddie pulled away from the curb I said, “I don’t want to go to the hospital anymore.”
I wanted to see Mother and let her know about Daddy forgiving her and maybe lie down with her a bit and tell her that Rasmussen had a picture of me and a dead girl in his wallet. And I hoped that she’d believe me, but she wouldn’t. And that just made me feel sadder than being shipwrecked on a deserted island without my man Friday.
“Cool.” Eddie snatched the five bucks out of Nell’s hand as he pulled away from the curb. “Let’s go to The Milky Way.”
Nell seemed fine with us not visiting Mother, but she seemed fine with just about anything Eddie wanted to do. I stuck my head out the window so the air would run across my face. As we cruised down North Avenue we passed Mar sha’s Dance Studio and the abandoned tire building that Mary Lane had accidentally set on fire. I swear I could still smell burnt rubber.
“Sally?” Nell stuck her head out the window.
“Yeah?” I pulled my head back into the car so she did, too.
“Are you and Troo okay?”
“Yeah.”
“You know about Hall, right?”
She meant about him gettin’ some from Rosie Ruggins, the cocktail waitress who had a beauty mark in the corner of her lip that made her look like she’d just eaten a piece of fudge. We’d just passed Jerbak’s Beer ’n Bowl. Hall’s station wagon was sitting right out front. He shoulda been at work selling shoes at Shuster’s.
Nell lifted her head off Eddie’s shoulder. Her Brillo pad hairdo made her look like she wasn’t related to me at all. One day Mother showed me a picture of her and Nell’s father sitting on the fender of a car, and sure enough, Nell had her father’s chin, which was sort of squarish, and that kind of nose that was popular called a ski-jump nose.
She turned around in her seat and said in a kind voice, which really made me start to worry, “The doctor says Mother doesn’t look so good. You gotta be prepared.”
Eddie said, “Hey, you two, quit talkin’ about this dyin’ stuff. It’s a drag.” He’d stopped in the middle of North Avenue and turned on his blinker to turn left into The Milky Way. I had heard of it but had never been. There were boys in leather jackets and ducktails and girls with ponytails standing around and laughing and leaning on their cars and looking around to see who was looking. The rock ’n’ roll music was loud and they were all trying to get the attention of girls on roller skates who were bringing food out to the cars on red trays with legs.
Eddie pulled into an empty spot and stuck something to his window that had a speaker in it and said, “Hello?”
“Welcome to the Milky Way . . . our food is outta this world,” a tinny voice said, but it didn’t sound like she really meant it.
“Hey, Aunt Nancy, it’s me, Eddie.”
The speaker buzzed.
“Whadda ya want, Eddie?”
“Gimme four cheeseburgers, no onions, four fries and four triple Mars shakes.”
That’s when I figured out why the place was called The Milky Way, because it had all these red and blue planets and some moons and stars hanging from these poles. And the skating girls were dressed up in silver skirts and on their heads they wore something that looked like antenna that bobbed to the left and to the right as they glided in between the cars.
“When you gonna get around to changing my oil?” Aunt Nancy said through the speaker.
“Aww . . . quit busting my hump, already. I said I’d get around to it and I will.”
The speaker buzzed again and then Aunt Nancy yelled, “Four Galaxy burgers, hold the onions, four fries and four chocolate shakes. Two fifty-seven.” And then she said, “Get to that oil tomorrow, Eddie, or I’ll tell your ma what I saw in the trunk of your car when I was lookin’ for my flashlight.”
Eddie turned the same color pink as Nell’s pedal pushers.
“What did she find in the trunk?” Nell asked.
“Nothin’.” When Eddie lied his left eyebrow always twitched. I wondered if Nell noticed that. “Just some beer cans, but you know how my ma is about drinkin’ after my da’s accident.”
Eddie’s ma, that would be Mrs. Callahan, her husband got killed last winter over at the Feelin’ Good Cookie Factory. They had an open casket at the funeral so you could see dead Mr. Callahan, who hadn’t looked that great in life and looked even worse in death. Especially after that cookie press got to him. But Mr. Becker from Becker Funeral Homes had done a nice job fluffing Mr. Callahan’s face back out again so he ended up looking like one of those waxy mannequins that you pay a dime to see up at the Wisconsin State Fair. Usually they were of Marilyn Monroe or Clark Gable.
Eddie checked his hair in the mirror, got out of the car and went to talk to Reese Latour, who was leaning against the railing outside a door marked
DOLLS
. Reese was rolling dice with some other boys. He was such bad news, always beatin’ somebody up or pushin’ them around or callin’ them a name. But it looked to me that Eddie and Reese were friends because they were talking and then looking back at the car and laughing. That worried me for Nell. Like Granny said, you lie down with dogs, you get fleas.
Nell was staring at Eddie like he was hotsy totsy even though he was scrawny and his skin had some problems and me, I didn’t think he was such a looker. But he did have nice dark brown hair that he wore in a pompadour, and Nell liking hair so much, maybe that was what they had in common. That’s why people fell in love, Mother said, because they had things in common.
“Do you love him?” I asked.
Nell was looking in the mirror, smoothing on hot pink lipstick. “You writin’ a book?”
And then this girl roller-skated up and Nell smiled real fast and said, “Hi, Melinda.”
Melinda attached the tray full of bags of food to the window on Nell’s side of the car. “Hi, Nell.” Her little antenna was bobbing on her head. I wasn’t sure what Melinda was supposed to be, but then I remembered the drive-in had to do with outer-space stuff, like in
Flash Gordon
, so maybe Melinda was supposed to be a space ant or something.
Nell reached over and beeped the
ah oooga
car horn to get Eddie’s attention, to let him know the food had come. He laughed at something Reese Latour said and then walked slowly back to the car.
Eddie smiled real nice at Melinda as she whizzed past him, but when he got back in the car he said meanly to Nell, “I’ll get back into the car when I’m damn good and ready.” He looked out the windshield. Reese Latour was looking straight at him. “You don’t ever do nuthin’ like that to me again. Beep at me like that, unnerstand?” Then Eddie pulled Nell’s hair hard enough to make her neck bend back.
“Sorry,” she whimpered.
Eddie pulled just a little harder and said, “You better be, sister,” and then he let go and pushed her head away.
On the ride back home, nobody talked. Just the radio DJ, who said it might rain on the Fourth of July. The bag of food made my lap warm, but as hungry as I was, I couldn’t eat, thinking about what Eddie had done to Nell. Made her give in like that.
When we pulled up to our house, Nell got out of the car. Mother’s yellow scarf that Nell had started wearing around her neck fluttered in the breeze. I had barely slammed the door shut when Eddie laid rubber. Nell and me just stood there together and watched him speed down Vliet Street, Dion singing about teenager love floating back to us.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I knew Troo would be sitting on the backyard bench folding those tissues back and forth and back and forth into one chubby line and then she’d slip a bobby pin over it in the middle and slowly separate the layers of Kleenex until they looked exactly like a carnation, which was an excellent funeral flower my mother always said.
When I walked past our landlords’ kitchen window, I remembered what Mr. Goldman was complaining about yesterday to Mrs. Goldman when I’d been diggin’ for worms. His raised voice came through the window screen, saying Hall was
betrunkenes
and he hadn’t paid the rent and if he didn’t soon we would be . . .
kaput
. Mrs. Goldman said quietly back to her husband, “But, Otto, what will happen to the children?”
“Trooooo . . . ,” I yelled out, so when I came around the house I wouldn’t scare her. If there was anything Troo hated, it was to be snuck up on. She’d gotten really jumpy about that since the crash.
“Troooo . . .”
No answer. I got scared then. Maybe Rasmussen had changed his mind about coming after me. Maybe he’d decided to go after Troo. I ran down the path next to the pink peonies that had lost their smell and had started to fall apart. I stopped at the edge of the house and peeked my head around. Troo was surrounded by at least twenty white Kleenex flowers, like a girl on a parade float. She just hadn’t heard me because she could get deaf when she was working on something. The tip of her tongue stuck out of her pouty mouth.
I watched my little sister for a minute and then because our yard butted up next to the Kenfields’, one story up, I looked up at Dottie’s bedroom and just for a second I could swear she was standing in the window. That even made
me
worry about my imagination.
“Whatcha doin’ over there?” Troo laughed. “Seein’ if Dottie wants to come out and play?”
“Very funny.” I waved the bag of food at my sister. “Got you something.” I slipped off my shoes and walked across the grass toward her.
“Is that you,
Liebchin
?” Mrs. Goldman popped her head out the gardening lean-to next to the garage. That’s what she called me.
Liebchin
meant sweetheart in the German language.
Mrs. Goldman was a largish woman and when she was working in the garden, she sometimes wore a pair of Mr. Goldman’s brown shiny trousers that were the same color as her curly hair. In Germany, she had been a teacher, but now she was just a landlady. She had on a yellow ironed shirt, rolled up at the sleeves, and the first thing I noticed like always were those numbers on her arm.
I’d asked Mrs. Goldman about that tattoo the first time I helped her water the garden last summer. I asked her if she’d been a sailor like Hall. She set her hose down and asked why I thought that. When I pointed at her arm, she gave me a rusty smile, like she hadn’t used it for a while, and told me that back in Germany she and Mr. Goldman had been captured by some bad people who put them in a place called a concentration camp. Then they branded them like cattle. And those bad people were called Nazis. This was something like the Frankenstein monster for Mrs. Goldman because she shivered when she said Nazis. Like these were people that you would not want to tangle with at any time who I bet had German shepherds, which everyone knew were dogs you could never trust. (Except, of course, for Rin Tin Tin, who was the exception to the rule.)
“Do you need any help, Mrs. Goldman?” I asked, because I knew that Troo was thinking uncharitable thoughts and maybe by me being charitable it would somehow cancel them out. Troo didn’t like our landlords because our lease said we couldn’t have pets so her dog, Butchy, had had to stay out in the country with peeing Jerry Amberson. Troo held that against the Goldmans.
“Come to the garden. I want to show you,” Mrs. Goldman said, stepping all the way out of the shed.