Whistling In the Dark

by Lesley Kagen

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “How I Spent My Charitable Summer” by Sally Elizabeth O’Malley

  Almost every Wednesday this summer, me and Troo, which is short for Trooper and not for Trudy, which everybody thinks, go to Mrs. Galecki’s. Troo’s real name is Margaret. Our daddy, before he died, gave her that name, Real Trooper, because she didn’t cry when she stepped on that rusty nail in the Am bersons’ backyard and had to have that shot. Then the whole family started calling her Trooper and when that took too much time to say, Troo. I also call her Troo genius, because she is really, really smart and knew all the state capitols by the time she was seven years old. So Troo and me almost every Wednesday go to Mrs. Galecki’s to help Ethel take care of her. I read books to her once Ethel gets her into her wheelchair out on her back screened-in porch where Mrs. Galecki likes to stare at that crab-apple tree. Her head is wobbly but her mind is still smart and not like the other grandmother of ours, who had hardening in her arteries and for a while made us call her Gramma Marie Antoinette. That was my daddy’s mother. She’s dead now. Both our grampas are dead. Our mother is dying. Troo and me go visit our other granny up on Fifty-ninth Street, who is not dead yet but is getting closer by the minute. She is eighty-four years old and can’t bend down anymore or go to the grocery store, and she has arthritis and palpitations so we have to pick things up off the floor for her and wring out her underwear and Uncle Paulie’s socks. Uncle Paulie is not exactly right in the head because of his brain being damaged, so he has to live with Granny where she can keep an eye on him. Here is another charitable thing

  I did. I wrote a letter to my mother. They don’t let kids in the hospital unless someone is pounding down heaven’s door so I have to send it in the mail and I don’t have any money for a stamp, but as soon as I can find one I am going to send it.

  DEAR MOTHER,

  HOW ARE YOU FEELING? A LOT OF THINGS HAvE BEEN GOING ON AROUND HERE. DADDY TOLD ME TO TELL YOU HE FORGIvES YOU. I MISS YOU. PLEASE COME HOME.

  YOURS IN CHRIST,

  YOUR DAUGHTER,

  SALLY O’MALLEY

  That’s what I wrote that night before Troo came back from the bathroom and Nell came in smelling like the brewery over near County Stadium, where before the baseball games Daddy and I used to sing the “Star-Spangled Banner” that ended with: The laaand of the free and the home . . . of the . . . Braves.

  Nell was leaning on the door to our bedroom. “Where you two been all day? I just ran into Hall comin’ up the block and he’s mad as a hornet and drunk as a skunk.” Nell talked in the croaky voice she must’ve inherited from her father.

  Troo pulled the sheet over her head and yelled, “Aw, shut up, Nell. Can’t you see we’re trying to get our beauty sleep here?”

  Nell tripped on her way over to the bed, then kicked at it and tried to grab for Troo, whose side was closest to the wall. “Damn your smart mouth, Troo O’Malley.”

  “Fuck you,” Troo said from under the sheet. “Just fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck you.” Fast Susie had recently taught her that word and she absolutely adored it because Troo had always been in love with all words that started with the letter f.

  Nell kept hitting at the sheet and Troo kept laughing harder and louder, and then Nell just gave up and smacked me because I was closer. “That’s a little present for your sister. Give it to her for me, won’t you, Sally dear? And by the way, you numbskull”—she stuck her pointy red nails into my shoulder—“it’s not Earl Flynn, it’s Errol Flynn.” And then Nell stumbled out and slammed the door to her bedroom hard enough to make the crucifix above our bed rattle like a train.

  “What a pill,” Troo said, still laughing under the sheet.

  I put my hand over where I thought her mouth was and said, “Shhh.”

  Hall was coming up the front steps. He was singing. And falling down. And getting back up. I got under the sheet with Troo. For a minute it was all quiet and I thought that maybe he’d passed out so I took my hand off Troo’s mouth, but then he crashed through the front door at the top of the landing and smashed into the piano and hollered, “Fer Chrissakes!” when he slammed his hands down onto the deep end of the keys and a horrible ear-aching sound echoed down the hall.

  He was coming through the living room. The floor creaked in the dining room. I could hear muttering and singing and things skittering across the wood floor. And then it all stopped. He was just there. Leaning in our bedroom doorway the way Nell had. I could smell the beer. Troo grabbed my hand and squeezed it with everything she had.

  “Where the hell you two been?” he yelled. I put my fingers back up to her lips, letting Troo know not to answer.

  And then he started singing again. “Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall . . . ninety-nine bottles of beer. If one of those bottles should happen to fall . . . well, well, well. Who do we have here?” Hall ripped the sheet off us. All we had on was our underpants.

  He was breathing in the dark like somebody had been chasing him and we didn’t dare move or open our eyes, but then Troo finally said, “We’re sleeping, Hall. Get out and leave us be.”

  Hall reached over me and pulled Troo out of bed with one hand.

  He threw his beer bottle down and it spun round and round on the bare floor. He had Troo up against the bedroom wall, holding her there like he was trying to hang her like a picture. “What did you just say?” he snarled.

  Troo stuck her tongue out and Hall yelled, “Don’t you dare . . . ,” and then he lifted her off the wall and smacked her against it again.

  I knew if I didn’t stop him, he would hurt her bad. I’d seen Hall in this mood before when he was drunk and gave Mr. Hopkins, who used to live next door, a fat lip and kicked him when he was down.

  “Hall?” I said softly, swinging my feet out of bed.

  He didn’t say anything. His breathing was comin’ faster and faster, and Troo’s arms were turning redder and redder.

  “Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall . . . ,” I sang.

  Hall went way in close to Troo’s face and yelled, “Your mother ain’t here to protect you now. You ever talk to me like that again, I’ll beat you so bad you won’t walk for a week, you little—”

  “Let go of me, you fu—”

  “Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall,” I screamed out so Hall wouldn’t hear what Troo was about to say. “Ninety-nine bottles of beer. If one of those bottles should happen to fall, there’d be how many bottles of beer on the wall?” Keeping my eye on him, I grabbed for a nightie that was balled up next to the bed. “Hall?”

  He let Troo slide down the wall like he’d forgotten all about her and sang out, “Ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall.”

  I took his hand and led him into the living room. We sang together until we got down to eighty-eight bottles and he passed out on our red-and-brown couch.

  When I finally looked up, Troo was sitting on the piano bench, one of Mother’s long knives in her hand.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Kenfield’s Five and Dime had to be the best store in the whole wide world. It even smelled good because it had this case with a glass window full of tons of candy, like little wax bottles full of red liquid and pastel buttons on white paper and B-B-Bats and off to the side a little machine that made fresh popcorn all day long.

  The wood floors were a wavy dark yellow color and the aisles were skinny but full of things that Mrs. Kenfield musta collected over the years and then sold to people. She was the nicest one of the Kenfield family. And, of course, Dottie was nice when she was still around and hadn’t disappeared into thin air. Mr. Kenfield was a sour man. Mother said he was that way because he never got over what happened to Dottie. When I asked her, “By the way, whatever did happen to Dottie?” Mother gave me one of her do-you-smell-dog-poop looks and said mind your own beeswax.

  Kenfield’s even had a pet aisle where Troo and me had bought a turtle once that we called Elmer, and there were garden seeds and pencils and bars of Ivory soap. All the ladies in the ne
ighborhood would come to shop at the Five and Dime with brush curlers in their hair so they would look good for their husbands when they came home from the factory, so sometimes the store also reminded me of a beauty parlor.

  We walked down aisle three and found the boxes of Kleenex stacked on top of one another. Troo was keeping her eyes peeled for when Mrs. Kenfield got busy with Mrs. Plautch, trying to help her select some new hot pads for her kitchen. Troo had a way with Kleenex flowers. This summer, she was going to snitch the bobby pins she’d need to make the flowers out of Nell’s Future Hairdresser Kit, which Hall had paid for and said would be a good trade for Nell since everybody had hair, like everybody had feet. Hall had taken her up to Yvonne’s School of Beauty and enrolled her last week. Nell came home with a pink hatbox full of scissors and pins and combs and, of course, her favorite, permanent rods and papers and the solution that smelled like death warmed over. Worse, even, than Dr. Sullivan’s breath. That was smart of Nell, to ask Hall to enroll her when he was shnockered.

  I watched Troo sneak a box of Kleenex under her shirt, and then we left by the back door that slammed hard enough for Mrs. Kenfield to take notice and call out, “Hope your mother is feeling better, girls.”

  Taking that Kleenex made my conscience feel bothered, so when we got out in the alley I said, “We gotta take that back. It’s not right to steal.”

  “Aw, quit being such a goody-goody. The Kleenex is a consolation prize because our mother might be dying. A consolation prize like they give those women on those game shows that Helen used to watch when she ironed. Remember that?” It made me so sad to think of Mother that I wasn’t able to say anything else about the Kleenex.

  On the way back home, like Troo promised, we stopped at the park lagoon. I’d brought my fishing pole. I never caught anything, but I liked to fish once a week next to the willow tree in the shade. I have this picture of my daddy and me fishing when I was about three years old out at this lake near the farm. His hair is blown by the breeze into these two little horns. Mother said he looks devil-may-care in this picture, which I thought was a pretty funny thing to say.

  “Hall must think Mother’s gonna die,” I said, scrounging around in the lagoon mud for a worm and finally finding one.

  Troo had found an old Kroger bag in the trash can and stuck her Kleenex in it and now she was sitting on the bank dangling her feet in the water. That girl just loved to go barefoot and never worried about stepping on a rusty nail again, which I really admired. “Hall who?” she said.

  Troo hated to talk about any kind of dying and always changed the subject like that. I changed the subject back because I needed to know what she thought.

  “Hall must think Mother’s gonna die or he wouldn’t be gettin’ some from Rosie up at Jerbak’s and getting so darn drunk.” I took a bobber out of my pocket and slipped it on my line. “Since he and Nell are the only ones that get to see her, maybe he’s right.” I dropped the line into the lagoon right into the center of some willow leaves. I could see myself in the water. My face was swimming about a foot away from my body.

  Troo splashed with her feet and made me disappear. “Well, you know what Doris Day says, Que sera, sera. That’s French, you know.”

  Troo was just doing some of that whistling in the dark. I bet deep down in her heart she missed Helen as much as I did and I’d been missing her so bad. All of her. Even her yelling and her warbly singing but especially the way she looked on Sunday morning in church when she was all dolled up and the best-looking woman in the Communion line. Her white dress pressed with sharp creases and her matching white high-heel shoes. Her great hair caught at the back of her neck in a gold barrette. I even missed that sad look she gave me when she thought I wasn’t looking. And the smell of her breath and the feel of her cool freckled hand on my forehead.

  I felt a little tug on my line but brought it up too fast and discovered the worm was gone. “Darn,” I said, and turned to Troo, who was bending over the water and making faces at herself. That’s when I saw him. Rasmussen. He was parked across the street, staring at us from the window of his squad car. When he knew I’d seen him, he drove off suddenly.

  “Did you see him?” I jumped up and pointed down Lisbon Street. “That was Rasmussen. He was watchin’ us.”

  Troo looked but you couldn’t barely even see the car anymore. “That wasn’t Rasmussen. And even if it was, why would he be watchin’ us anyway?” She slipped her tennis shoes back on and then crawled into the deepness of that weeping willow tree. It was one of Troo’s favorite summer places. She loved the way she could sit in there and nobody could see her but she could see them, and how when the sun landed just right on those leaves they reminded her of those beaded curtains they had over at the Peking Palace, where we got chicken chop suey once last winter after Hall sold a lot of shoes in one day. Troo had lit up an L&M. The smoke was wiggling out through the willow branches.

  I sat down on the bank and threw my line back in even though I didn’t have a worm. I started thinking about the fish down there and what my red bobber must look like to them, floating above them, watching them like Rasmussen had been watching us.

  “Oh God. Oh sweet Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Troo yelled, crawling out from under the tree. She had a tennis shoe in the palm of her hand.

  “Holy cow,” I whispered. Troo set the shoe on the ground and poked at it with a stick until it flipped over and you could see somebody had stitched a little pink butterfly near the heel. “It must be Sara’s. Look at that blood. We should tell somebody.”

  It occurred to me that maybe Rasmussen hadn’t been watching us. Maybe he’d been waiting for us to leave, because right before he fell asleep last night he remembered this shoe with the little butterfly on the heel that he had left behind when he’d murdered and molested Sara. He’d come back for it. The laces were still tied. And the blood spots made a kind of connect-the-dots pattern.

  “It’s definitely Sara’s,” I said, inspecting it.

  “How do you know that?” Troo asked.

  “Whose else could it be?”

  “Aw, c’mon. It could be anybody’s. Like . . .” She couldn’t think of anybody’s name so instead she just stood up and flicked the willow leaves off her shorts. “It’s probably just mud anyways.”

  I was sure we needed to call the police. But that would mean Rasmussen would show up, and wouldn’t that be just hunky-dory for him? Here I was, the girl who he was trying to murder and molest, poking at the bloody shoe he’d been looking for. It would be a two-fer for him.

  Then I had an idea. Me, not Troo, who usually had the ideas since she was so outgoing and a genius. I put the shoe down next to the lagoon bank, setting it upright so it looked real sharp, like the ones up in Shuster’s window. Then I walked to the firebox and said, “I’m gonna pull this thing.”

  The wind changed direction and the sweet smell of chocolate chip cookies came floating in on the breeze, which was making little swirls on top of the lagoon. Troo closed her eyes and breathed in the smell and said, “You better not. Remember how mad they got the last time?”

  I’d pulled this exact same fire handle last summer right around this time. And boy, were those firemen steamed when they found out there was no fire. I’d done it cuz Mary Lane said she’d give me a dime if I would and, after all, she was our best friend.

  “I’m gonna pull it so somebody finds this shoe,” I said. “It’s a clue. Like in Cinderella. Ready?”

  I yanked the little black handle down and Troo grabbed her Kroger bag and we took off across the street and hid behind a garage. About three minutes later the sirens were wailing down Lisbon. We watched as the firemen jumped off the truck and looked around for the smoke. Then one of the guys took his fireman’s hat off and threw it on the ground and said loud enough for us to hear, “Those goddamn kids. That’s the third time this month.” But just like I planned, he saw the shoe next to the lagoon and then called over another short fireman, who picked it up, and they got back into the tr
uck and drove off. For a second there, I thought the fatter one saw us and I picked up Troo’s hand to hightail it out of there.

  Now somebody had that shoe who might think it could be Sara’s, and thank goodness that somebody was not Sally O’Malley. That was a big relief because I had enough other things to worry about. Like staying two steps ahead of Rasmussen.

  We took the shortcut home through the Von Knappens’ backyard, and when we turned the corner to head down Vliet Street I saw something that I wished I hadn’t. Right then I knew I had a lot more to worry about than I’d originally thought. In fact, I knew right then that Troo and me were, like Hall said all the time now, “Up the Shit Creek without a paddle.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  A squad car was parked right in front of our house. Rasmussen was sitting on the steps closest to the street. His stork legs were stretched out, his elbows on the step above him. Behind him, Mrs. Goldman, the landlady who lived downstairs from us, was peeking out her lace curtains, probably checking to see what all the commotion was about.

  The cop had two soda bottles in his hands. “Hello, girls,” he said politely.

  I didn’t say anything but Troo said, “Hi, Officer Rasmussen,” as she eyed those Cokes. The hair around her forehead had gotten curlier than usual and she smelled from the walk home the way she did when she got real sweaty, which was sort of like your hand did if you held a nickel in it too long.

  Rasmussen patted the step next to him. After Troo sat down, he handed her the soda and she guzzled the entire bottle down. Rasmussen smiled at me and said, “Well, what have the two of you been up to today?” He waggled the other Coke in front of me. I shook my head no, so he gave it to Troo, who burped real loud for an almost ten-year-old and then drank that one down, too.