by Lesley Kagen
Considering how much money Albie owed Chummy Adler, the fear of getting fired for losing control of the yard was a powerful motivator. Despite the heavy blanket of heat and his heft, he was breathing down Harry’s neck, just feet away from tackling him to the ground. But what the Almighty wants, the Almighty gets, and I believe it was His foot that tripped Albie that afternoon just as he was about to grab a hold of Harry’s shirt.
When he skidded to a stop in front of Frankie, Viv, and me, Harry was shivering and panting and didn’t look anything like the man we’d grown so fond of. He looked like a movie madman, like someone straight out of The Snake Pit.
Fighting an urge to back away from the fence, I dug into Viv’s pocket for a shortbread cookie, passed it through the iron bars, and tried to reassure him with a smile. “Everything is going to be all right,” I told him, the same way Doc told his patients, even though it wouldn’t be.
Albie had already struggled back to his feet and was barreling toward us with a look on his face that was almost as desperate as the one Harry had on his when he knocked the cookie out of my hand, grabbed my wrist, and pressed a piece of paper into my palm.
He was hurting me so badly I could hardly say, “Let go of me, Harry. Please. My wrist is gonna snap.”
Like he hadn’t heard me or couldn’t stop himself, he panted, “You’ve got to help … they’re going to kill—”
“Gotcha,” Albie yelled, and in a practiced move, he wrenched Harry into a chokehold and jabbed the syringe into his backside. In a matter of moments, the powerful tranquilizer hit his bloodstream, his hand melted off my wrist, and he collapsed to the ground at our feet.
“See what ya done?” Albie hollered at us. “I warned ya about upsettin’ them, didn’t I?” He reached down and slung Harry’s unconscious body over his shoulder like he was a sack of nothing special. “With all the talk goin’ on ’bout escaped patients, if Blake’d made it over the fence …” His eyes brimmed with rage, perspiration was cascading off his contorted face, and his precious conk hairdo was going every which way. “I got a half a mind to call the sheriff and report ya for trespassin’, and if I do, ya better not …” I could see his wheels turning, straining to piece together the best way to keep himself out of trouble. “If you tell him that I gave ya permission to visit with the patients, I’ll deny it and make sure the three of you get blamed.” He gave us such a low-down, dirty look that I was grateful for the fence between us. “Now git, goddamn it, and don’t come back!”
The girls and I didn’t need to be told twice.
Our legs were a blur when we scrambled back through the pine trees and down the dusty path with Harry’s desperate request for help and Albie’s threats ringing in our ears. When we reached the Hanging Tree, Frankie and I jumped on our bikes, but Viv didn’t. She hopped in place, cupped one hand over her crotch and used the other to point at the back of the hospital. “I can’t. I gotta pee,” she cried. “Really, really bad.”
Her bladder wasn’t only tiny, it was bashful, so she couldn’t find a spot in the woods, the way Frankie and I would. Viv needed a proper bathroom and she wanted to use the one adjacent to the hospital kitchen. I was tempted to let her try. I would have loved to get folded into Bigger’s arms and beg her to intercede with Albie, but what if we bumped into him?
He saw himself as a pretty boy, and as soon as he dropped Harry off at the infirmary or dumped him into one of the padded cells to punish him, Albie would want to pull himself together. After he changed into a fresh uniform, he’d take the back stairs down to the kitchen and ask his girlfriend to fix his conk. He’d whine to Bigger about what’d happened in the yard and complain that he could lose his job and it’d be our fault if he did. Albie wasn’t family the way Jimbo was. He owed us no loyalty and he had no backbone. After he was squared away and looking sharp again, I wouldn’t put it past him to pick up the wall phone in the kitchen and dial up the sheriff, the way he’d threatened he might.
Uncle Walt wouldn’t play favorites. He’d do to us what he did to any other kids in Summit who got caught breaking the law. After he hauled us into the station, the whole town would be gossiping about what we’d done. That’d humiliate our families—I couldn’t even picture what Aunt Jane May would do to us—but it was Frankie I was most concerned about.
The group of Germans who remained suspicious of her skin tone might dig deeper into the background of the troublemaker who’d broken the law. They’d say and do awful things when they found out the truth. Dell thought so, too. The girls and I had heard the fear cutting through her voice during that back porch meeting when she’d said, “If the truth ever comes out … God help us, Jane May.” She’d not allow her daughter to be exposed to that hatred. She’d quit her job at the Maniachis, pack their suitcases, and she and Frankie would march over the tracks to Mud Town—or all the way back to Milwaukee.
I clamped down on Viv’s shoulders and tried to shake some sense into her. “If we go into the kitchen so you can pee, we could run into Albie and …” There was no time to explain the damage that’d be done. “Get on your bike!”
“Albie didn’t mean it. He’s just mad ‘cause he got sweaty and his conk got messed up,” Viv said. “He wouldn’t dare turn us in to the sheriff.”
“Oh yeah, he would,” Frankie hollered. “I’ve seen him pass the buck in Mud Town plenty of times. He’ll do whatever he needs to do to keep from gettin’ fired ’cause if he doesn’t pay off his gambling debts, he could end up—” She ran her finger across her neck in the cutthroat sign.
Those high-tone clothes, his fancy haircut, and the shiny black Chrysler Albie drove didn’t come cheap. Everyone knew that he was in over his head with Chummy Adler, who owned a bar in Mud Town called The Top Hat, but whose real business—cards and dice—was done in the back room. To keep him and his new collection goon—Elvin Merchant—at arms’ length, I had no problem imagining Albie explaining to Dr. Cruikshank that circumstances beyond his control made him pull the siren: “Three girls trespassed onto the property. They’re the ones who upset Blake and the other patients. It’s them that should get the blame—not me.”
I wasn’t sure if Albie would sink so low as to reveal our names to the psychiatrist, but he might not have to. He’d told us that afternoon at Earl Spooner’s Club that we needed to be careful when we visited the patients because there were “eyes everywhere.” I didn’t believe him when he told us about those hidden cameras on the property, I thought he was just trying to scare us. But what if he hadn’t been lying? Not even Viv could talk us out of the trouble we’d be in if there was proof we’d trespassed on private property. A picture is worth a thousand words.
“Ride!’ I shrieked at her.
“I can’t! I’ll wet my pants!”
“Good!” Frankie said before she pedaled off.
As we watched her disappear down the path and into Founder’s Woods, Viv told me the same thing that Frankie had said about her when she’d taken off earlier without us. “She’ll come back. She’s—”
“Shut up,” I yelled. “This is all your …”
With one last glance at the recreation yard and the patients getting dragged or carried back into the hospital, and the knowledge that there was a very good chance we’d never get to visit with them again, I wanted to punish Viv for taking that away from me. Tell her that whatever awfulness happened to the patients, us, and the people we cared about was all her fault.
But in all good conscience, I couldn’t do that, could I. She might’ve pulled the trigger that afternoon, but I’d loaded the gun. If I hadn’t forced the girls to visit with the patients in the first place, none of what had happened would have.
I lowered my voice and told Viv, “If you get on your bike, I’ll forgive you for promising the new patient that we’d help him out, and I’ll beg Frankie to forgive you, too.”
That did the trick, and thank the saints that it did, because I might be in Viv’s shoes soon and need her to repay the favor. I knew what I needed
to do, and if the two of them didn’t agree with me, I’d end up breaking the Good Samaritan rule, too.
Chapter Fifteen
The girls and I had pedaled about three-quarters of the way back to town on the twisty path through Founder’s Woods when I flew over my handlebars. Last thing I heard before I landed in the dirt so hard that all the breath was knocked out of me was Viv shouting, “Frankie! Stop!”
When I came to, the two of them were kneeling next to me. Frankie was patting me lightly on the cheek because Aunt Jane May had told her plenty of times that if she changed her mind about becoming “the next Perry Mason,” her unflappability and steady hands would make her a wonderful physician.
“You got knocked out,” she said as she inspected me. “Anything broken?”
I wiggled my arms and legs. “Don’t think so.”
“How many fingers am I holding up?”
After I told her, I asked, “What the heck happened?”
“Stupid boys and their stupid booby traps,” Frankie said.
She helped me to my feet and pointed behind me at the length of rope that’d been tautly stretched across the path. It hadn’t been there on our ride over to the hospital, so I figured that one of the little cowboys who liked to play shoot ‘em up in the woods must’ve tried to bushwhack a little Indian while we were up there. I felt stupid for not seeing it. No matter how desperately I wanted to get away from Broadhurst, I should’ve let our lookout and scout lead the way instead of breezing past her when Viv and I caught up to her on the path.
Frankie dusted the dirt off my front side and said, “You sure you’re okay? You look a little green around the gills.”
“She’s fine—let’s go,” Viv said to Frankie as she picked her bike back up off the path. “You need your treat and I need to pee.”
As tempting as a brown cow must’ve sounded, Frankie was still ticked off at her for running away from us so she could meet Ernie Fontaine and was not one to be won over too easily. “Not so fast,” she told Viv. “Biz is lucky she didn’t crack her head open and more sharp turns are comin’ up. We won’t see another trap until it’s too late, and we can’t risk gettin’ hurt in a way that we can’t hide from Auntie.”
Unless Jane May Mathews, RN, was otherwise occupied, she’d do what she always did when we returned from a day out of her sight. She’d exam us from top to bottom. We’d concealed bruises and sprained ankles from her many times throughout the years, but we’d never be able to hide a broken limb or nose.
“We’re walkin’ the rest of the way out,” Frankie said in a way that let Viv and me know that it was not open to discussion.
Something about being on foot set alarm bells off in my head, but I thought it was a side effect of getting knocked out, so I gave Frankie the okay sign. Viv pranced in place, mumbled something about a bathroom, but she didn’t fight Frankie’s decision either. She knew she’d irritated her enough for one day.
Despite the pounding in my head, my sweat-soaked blouse, skeeters buzzing around my ears, and the shocking upset that’d happened with Harry Blake and Albie, I told myself to take heart as we made our way down the winding path, because the rest of the afternoon could only go up from there.
Once we got through the woods and emptied into the park, we’d get back on our bikes and pedal over to the drug store. I envisioned Frankie quickly downing at least two brown cows. After Viv availed herself of the facilities and probably scrawled something hateful about Evelyn Mulrooney and her wretched daughter Brenda on the stall that was covered with her previous insults, we’d head straight to the five-and-dime for our decorating supplies. When we returned home, I was counting on the coast being clear. Aunt Jane May had already done her gardening, so she would probably be at Rusty’s Market shopping for what she needed to prepare the Buchanans’ picnic lunch for the Fourth of July bash. Her absence would give the girls and me the chance to clean ourselves up and get busy winding red, white, and blue crepe paper around our spokes and handlebars. By the time she came home, we’d be making Kleenex flowers, and it’d look like we hadn’t lied to her earlier about where we were going that afternoon.
After supper, we’d climb up to the hideout. I’d call for a powwow, then ease into telling the girls why I thought we needed to add a number eight to our summer list: Make things right. Hopefully, they’d be on board and we could begin throwing ideas around. If they weren’t, I was prepared to go it alone.
Most importantly, we needed to protect Frankie from unwanted attention, so we had to come up with a way to convince Albie not to report us to Uncle Walt for trespassing. I thought we should bribe him, buy his silence with a stack of Superman comic books or pool our pennies and take them to Chummy Adler’s bar to knock off some of Albie’s debt.
When a Tree Musketeer made a promise, we were bound to honor it, but I had no idea how’d we keep the one Viv had made to “help out” Ernie Fontaine.
Harry Blake was a whole ’nother ball of wax. I didn’t know what to make of how he’d acted that afternoon or what he’d meant. Was he talking about the Mondurians when he said, “You’ve got to help … they’re going to kill—”?
Considering his place of residence, someone who didn’t know him might say that he was experiencing a paranoid delusion, but it didn’t seem like that to me. Harry had sounded desperate, but not crazily so when he came running to the fence and pressed the piece of paper into my hand.
We’d been in such a hurry to get away from Albie, and then I’d had that fight with Viv and took a tumble off my bike, so I’d forgotten all about the note. Hoping that it might give me a clue to Harry’s behavior, I reached down to dig for it in my shorts pocket, when Frankie stopped without warning on the skinny path. I narrowly missed colliding with Viv, who’d bumped into Frankie hard enough that she lost her footing.
“What the hell, Frankenstein?” Viv said as she fought her way out of the bush she’d tumbled into. “Is there another trap?”
I looked over Frankie’s head to see that indeed there was. The worst trap imaginable.
“Good afternoon, ladies,” Elvin Merchant said with a lopsided grin. “Fancy meetin’ you here.”
The boy blocking our way down the path was a real looker. His dark hair was styled in a pompadour and his eyes were the color of the blue stones you’d see in fancy jewelry. His mother, Emmy, was the one who’d taught him his good manners before she went for a walk around the block a few years ago and never came back. Unlike some of the folks in town, I didn’t look down on her for disappearing because I’d seen firsthand the damage her husband could do the times she’d show up at our front door late at night asking for Doc. Her husband, Jasper Merchant, would’ve eventually killed her—of that I was certain. To this day, I wonder if that’s exactly what he’d done. That mean son of a bitch was bad enough when he was sober, but when he drank, he would knock his boy around and treat him like hired help, too.
Elvin did most of the work at the family service station and his arm and chest muscles were obvious beneath his stained white T-shirt. He was hovering so close to us that I could smell the beer, sweat, gasoline, and something else that I was unfamiliar with at the time but now know was masculine need.
I tried to tell him to leave us alone, but all that came out was a croaking sound. Viv was in the same boat as me. She looked like a silent movie heroine screaming at a villain. Frankie was cooler under fire because she’d had some experience with this kind of belligerent behavior before. On the nights we’d play ghost in the graveyard in the Mud Town Cemetery, we’d sometimes sleep at Jimbo’s house. If in the wee hours he was called over to Earl Spooner’s place to give the heave-ho to a man who was too full of booze and himself, Frankie would tag along. She’d watched and learned how to handle a mean drunk.
“Go home and go to bed,” she told Merchant.
“Only if you come with me.” He grinned at Frankie the sickly way he did when we’d ride past the service station late at night. “I’ve been waitin’ here, so I could show
you a good time.”
So it hadn’t been some little cowboy who’d stretched the rope across the path. Merchant must have seen us riding over to Broadhurst and knew we’d come back this way. The trap was his handiwork, or one of his gang’s. I looked around for the other juvenile delinquents, but if they were hiding and waiting their turn to have at us, they were doing a good job. The woods were as still as a tomb, and the only sound to be heard was the whine of mosquitoes and our shortened breath.
Merchant was swaying on his feet, but when he made a move toward Frankie, he might not have been as drunk as I thought he was. When she went to shove him away, he caught her hand mid-flight and did not slur his words when he said throatily, “Don’t be like that, honey. I wanna get to know ya better.”
Viv finally found her voice and hollered, “Let go of her, ya stinkin’ grease monkey!” She drew her leg back, but I got her by the waist and pulled her back. One of her knobby-kneed kicks wouldn’t dent the anesthetized state Merchant was in. It’d only make him madder, and I could see the outline of his switchblade in the pocket of his tight blue jeans.
Our only hope was that someone would hear us scream for help, but the mercury had topped ninety degrees five days in a row, the humidity had refused to take a back seat, and what breeze there was served the devil. Kids who’d been playing in the woods earlier in the day were now cooling off at Grand Creek, jumping off the diving boards at the community pool or sucking up phosphates in air-conditioned comfort at Whitcomb’s, and we were much too far off the beaten trail for any adult to come running.
“If you hurt her, you won’t get away with it like you did Cindy Davenport,” I hollered at Elvin. “You’ll go to jail this time ’cause I’ll—”
“You’ll what? Tell your fuckin’ uncle?” Beyond caring and seemingly beyond the law, Elvin laughed, got a fistful of Frankie’s blouse and tugged her closer, but she didn’t go easy. Twisting and slapping at his chest, she was doing her best, but she could not free herself from his drunken desire.