Doris moved a little into the light and I noticed that there were dark circles under her eyes like Shirley had from never getting enough sleep.
“Well, thanks for checking on the lawn, boss,” she said before she turned her back on Jimmy and disappeared.
Bad Cop, Good Cop
On the way home, Jimmy wouldn’t shut up about Doris. She had done the worst thing anyone could do. She had called the fuzz on poor Hank more times than he could count instead of toeing the line like Shirley. She had made Hank’s life a living hell and now Jimmy just wished she’d hurry up and sell that house with the bad lawn and take the dough and get out of Dodge and never show her face again.
And about that kisser of hers? Did I see how much face paint she was wearing?
I admitted she was wearing lipstick and maybe some rouge.
She looked like a damn Injun, he said. Or like she belonged in the Combat Zone.
I suddenly felt bad for Susan. She had a mother who wore too much face paint and a father who had shot up their house. Maybe being a millionaire’s daughter wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
I wondered where Susan would live when Doris sold the house with the bullet holes and the bad lawn and moved away. Susan very well might move out to KooKooLand too and I would never see her again.
I looked out the window and tried not to think of anything ’cause everything I could think of made me feel like blubbering.
I was making a friend and losing her at the same time. It just wasn’t fair. It was a goddamn raw deal.
The more Jimmy said mean things about Doris, the faster he drove, until we heard a cop car’s siren wailing behind us.
“Oh, Jesus. A fuzzmobile,” Jimmy said.
There were some pancakes on the dashboard. Jimmy grabbed them and stuffed them under the seat next to his butcher knife.
He swerved over to the curb and watched in the rearview mirror as the cop made his way toward us.
“We’re living in a police state,” he muttered. “Big Brother, here we come.”
The cop asked for Jimmy’s license and registration and Jimmy handed them over with a go ahead and arrest me, lard-ass expression.
The cop saw Jimmy’s name on the license and broke into a grin.
“Well, well, Jimmy Norris. The one and only. You’ve got quite a reputation.”
“Yeah? Says who?” Jimmy shot back.
“All the guys at Hank’s. I hear you’re the best duck hunter in New England.”
Jimmy leaned back and took a slow drag off his cigarette.
“I do OK,” he said, acting like he didn’t want to toot his own horn, but you knew he thought so too.
“I hear you do better than that,” insisted the cop.
I could tell he didn’t want to give Jimmy a ticket anymore. He wanted a few duck-hunting tips.
“So, you think it’s going to be a good season?” the cop asked.
“There’s always a lotta ducks if you know where to look. It’s the damn quotas that are a pain in my ass.” Jimmy smiled, almost like he was letting the guy in on a little secret. The little secret being that Jimmy broke the law by shooting too many ducks almost every time he went into the marshes, but the dummkopf wardens could never seem to catch him doing it.
“So, where you headed?” the cop asked, making a stab at doing his job.
“I’m just coming back from Hank’s house,” Jimmy said, knowing that would make the right impression.
He cocked his head in my direction.
“I was just trying to get home in time to watch The Three Stooges with my kid here. She’s crazy about the Stooges. Aren’t you, kiddo?”
I thought the Stooges were pretty lame, but I played my part and nodded like I was the biggest Stooges fan in Manchester, possibly all of New England.
“My kids love the Stooges too,” the cop said.
I wondered if his kids lied about being Stooges fans too.
“Well, you better get going then,” he finally said. “I don’t want to disappoint a little girl.”
Jimmy fired up the engine.
“But take it easy, OK?” the cop told Jimmy. “You don’t want to get in an accident and miss opening day.”
Jimmy agreed he sure didn’t want to miss it, and off we went.
When we were back on our way, Jimmy said the guy was OK, that once in a while you found a flatfoot that was OK, not too often but once in a great while.
“But I bet he can’t hit the side of a barn,” he laughed. “Put us both out in the woods and he’d have nothing on me. He couldn’t touch me.”
Don’t Touch the Merchandise
We didn’t make it home in time for the Stooges because we had to drop those pancakes off to some guy who lived in the North End, some mucky-muck Jimmy knew from Hank’s who called himself a hunter. The mucky-muck’s lawn was big and bright green, as if the worst drought in fifty years had bypassed his house completely. Jimmy said the mucky-muck had a bunch of deer and elk heads on the walls in his mansion, but that he’d bought them for a couple of C-notes from a guy like Papou’s ex-fighter Norman. I asked Jimmy why he didn’t shoot a few deer for some of these big shots himself and make some easy dough. I was still angling for those bunk beds. But Jimmy said he didn’t believe in that kind of killing. Just like he didn’t believe in jacking deer, which was when you turned a big light on in the woods and the deer froze and you could blow them away like nothing. There was a Law of the Woods, Jimmy said, just like there was a Religion of the Sea. And knocking down a beautiful buck just so some freeloader could stick the buck’s head on his wall was not in the rule book.
After the mucky-muck’s we went to the lowlife section around Lake Avenue and met up with Sad-Sack Barney, who was standing on a street corner waiting for us. Barney was a Greek guy a little taller than me who was one of Jimmy’s business partners. I was surprised Jimmy had a Greek business partner since he said Greeks would steal the eyes right out of your head and sell them as diamonds. But Barney was different. Barney was like family.
“Hi, Uncle Barney,” I said, as I scrunched over next to Jimmy to let Barney into the front seat, and also because he smelled.
“Hello, sweetheart,” he said. “How’s my little girl?”
He gave me a wink. He was cockeyed and you never knew which eye to look in.
“Never mind the hearts and flowers. What’ve you got for me?” snapped Jimmy, who said Barney would talk your ear off and then keep blabbing into the hole in your head.
Barney reached into one of his shopping bags. He always had three or four bags with him at any one time and you never knew what would be coming out of them. Cartons of cancer sticks in brands nobody smoked. Gillette razor blades. Last year’s model of genuine ladies’ Timex watches. Sometimes the items were large, like chain saws or watermelons, and you had to follow him to a shed where he had stashed them.
Uncle Barney pulled a windup monkey out of his shopping bag.
“Look at how cute this damn thing is,” he said, as he wound it up and set it on the dashboard. The monkey clapped its cymbals once and tumbled into my lap. Its motor continued to make a grinding sound.
“What am I gonna do with a bunch of goddamn windup monkeys?” snarled Jimmy.
“There are a lot of kids in the projects,” Barney said. “Many of them have allowances.”
“You know you get goofier by the day,” Jimmy told him. “What else you got?”
I started to hand the monkey back to Barney.
“Keep it, sweetheart. Consider it a birthday present from your uncle Barney.”
My birthday was in February, but I thanked him anyway.
“C’mon, hurry it up, Barney. I haven’t got all day. Some of us have to work for a living.”
“OK, you’re gonna flip over this,” Barney assured Jimmy. He pulled a Roman candle out of the bag. “Some guy in Revere got them off a boat from China.”
Jimmy had gotten fireworks from Barney before, but that shipment had all been duds and he’d ha
d to give some people their money back even though he never sold anything with a money-back guarantee.
“I’ll put you on a slow boat to China if these are like the last ones,” warned Jimmy.
“These are real Fourth of July quality,” Barney assured him.
So Jimmy gave Sad-Sack Barney some of the big-shot’s money and took a shopping bag of Roman candles home to the projects.
The fireworks were hot sellers with the greaser punks in the neighborhood. I watched them come and go all afternoon as I jumped rope in front of the house, singing:
Mickey Mouse
Had a house
Couldn’t pay his rent
So he got kicked out.
By early evening most of the punks had left. Jimmy warned them to be careful and not blow their stupid hands off or he’d get fingered. The punks laughed and said they knew what the hell they were doing.
After the last punk left, Jimmy told Virginia and me to go get our friends and bring them around the back of the building. He said he’d saved the best fireworks for us. So we rounded up everybody—Tina and her brother and his wiseass friends; and the Greek girls, Aphrodite and Stephanie; and the Loomis family, who never got to go anywhere; and the Riggs kids, whose old man was in the Valley Street jail sleeping off a bender. Word spread and other kids showed up, and some of their parents, carrying a six-pack under one arm and a baby under the other. Jimmy said the babies could stay as long as they didn’t squeal, but one peep outta them and they’d be booted out like a football. Somebody had a transistor radio tuned into the Red Sox game and Jimmy said he’d be booted out too if he didn’t turn those bums off.
Shirley was upstairs getting ready for her double date with Hank and the other Shirley, but Jimmy told her to get her keister outside. Her hair was still half up in pin curls, so she tied a kerchief around her head.
Jimmy had all the fireworks set up and ready to go. Whenever some nosy kids got too close, he’d tell ’em, “Don’t touch the merchandise.” He lit the fuses with the glowing end of his Lucky Strike and, one after the other, they shot up into the starry night.
They were the loudest and brightest fireworks any of us had ever seen.
And only a couple were duds.
After the last one, Jimmy said, “That’s it. The show’s over. Beat it.” He went in the house to get ready for the double date and Shirley went back to undoing her pin curls.
But none of the neighbors wanted to go home. They stood around behind the building under the cloud of white smoke that had settled there, breathing in the burnt odor that lingered.
Tina began to worry that just watching illegal fireworks might be a sin, even if you hadn’t bought them yourself or even touched them. She told me she was probably going to have to confess the whole thing to Father McSomebody.
I said if she squealed on my father and the cops stuck him in the Valley Street jail with Mr. Riggs I would never speak to her again if I lived to be a million billion trillion years old.
Telling a priest was like telling God, she assured me. Even if the Boston Strangler came and confessed, the priest would have to keep his trap shut. The pope made the rules and Rule Number One was no squealing.
“The pope oughta make an exception for the Boston Strangler,” I said.
“The pope knows what he’s doing,” Tina insisted, starting to get hot under the collar. “If you’re going to bad-mouth the pope, I won’t be your friend anymore.”
“I didn’t say anything against the pope,” I argued, knowing Susan wouldn’t like that. “The pope’s OK in my book. Anyway, I don’t think the Boston Strangler is the churchy type, so he probably won’t be confessing any sins.”
“The Boston Strangler couldn’t be a Catholic,” stated Tina. “President Kennedy is a Catholic.”
Tina was always bringing up the fact that President Kennedy was a Catholic whether it made sense to or not.
I figured now was as good a time as any to drop my big surprise on her.
“I’m thinking of becoming a Catholic.”
Tina looked confused.
“I thought you were a heathen. That’s what my mother said.”
“I am not,” I said, not knowing what a heathen was. But it didn’t sound good.
“If you’re a Catholic, you have to go to church.”
“I know that. I’m not some ding-dong,” I replied. “I have another friend who’s Catholic who I might go to church with.”
Tina looked jealous, which was just the reaction I was going for.
“I was your friend first. You oughta go with me.”
I acted like I was thinking it over. Who was my favorite Catholic? Her or Susan? Finally, I slipped my arm through hers.
“OK,” I said. “It’s a deal. I’ll go with you.”
We locked pinkie fingers.
Then we talked some more about President Kennedy. And about Mrs. Kennedy, who I said looked like a movie star, even though she was as big as a house from being in the family way.
And that got us to talking about sex. We’d picked up a few things about sex from our older sisters—a guy put his thing from Down There in your pee-pee and then peed in you. It seemed like something no girl would ever want to do. It gave us the creeps to picture the president and Mrs. Kennedy doing it.
“They’re good Catholics. They only do it to have children,” Tina said. “I’m sure they don’t like it.”
“They do it for the country,” I added. “So there’ll be a First Family.”
Shirley opened the back door and told me to come inside. She was wearing a blue satiny dress with gold flowers on it. It was fitted but not too tight. Around the knee but not too short. Colorful but not too loud. She was wearing a little face paint, but not too much. And her hair was done up but not too high.
Tina gawked at her and told her she looked prettier than Annette Funicello. I felt bad for Tina. Her mother didn’t have a husband and was big like Tina and never went out clubbing or double dating. She only went to church as far as I could tell.
Shirley smiled and said thank you and told Tina to run along home before her mother had a conniption fit. Then she went back inside.
I promised Tina I’d ask my mother to keep an eye out for another millionaire for her mother and then maybe they could all double-date.
Tina said her mother didn’t like men ’cause they only liked one thing. She spelled it out. S-E-X.
Some of them also like hunting and fishing, I said, and went inside.
Double Date
In the living room, Hank was slow dancing with Shirley.
Not the miserable, husbandless Shirley. My mother Shirley.
They were waiting for the miserable Shirley to show up so they could head off to the Pericles Club. They were already half-lit.
Jimmy had put on some music and was crooning along with it.
You belong to my heart
Now and forever . . .
I ran into the kitchen and got myself one of the free tumblers. Jimmy poured me some Canada Dry ginger ale so I could pretend I was having a highball and join in the fun.
I watched Hank give Shirley a twirl. She was stiff as a dead duck. I knew she didn’t want to look like she was having too good a time or dance too close to Hank, or Jimmy might give her a hard time about it later.
I heard Hank tell Shirley her dark hair was beautiful.
That perked Shirley right up. It had taken her half an hour to twirl all those pin curls after coming home from Foster Grant and at least her effort was paying off.
“She’s not bad-looking for a Nova Scotia farm girl,” joked Jimmy as he cut in. He began to croon in Shirley’s ear. I watched her loosen up and try to follow his fancy footwork.
Hank sat next to me. He hadn’t bothered to get too dressed up, but he acted like he didn’t have to bother.
I sat very still beside him and tried not to stare at the line of dried blood under his chin where he had cut himself shaving or at his much-broken nose or at his hands like meat ho
oks.
He downed one beer and Shirley quickly replaced it with another. He took out a cigar and Jimmy lit it with one of his phony-baloney gold lighters that he had to click a half-dozen times before it would light.
Hank’s cigar smoke found its way right into my kisser. I wanted to get the hell out of there, but I didn’t want to blow my chance for getting more dough out of Hank. I figured if he was really looped I might get a deuce. Or if he was really, really looped he might mistake a fin for a buck and I’d have my candy covered for the foreseeable future.
While I was racking my brain for a compliment to butter him up, he spoke to me.
“Who do you think looks sharper, me or your old man?”
I wanted to tell him he did, but I didn’t want to get on Jimmy’s bad side.
“You both look sharp,” I offered. “Super-duper sharp.”
“Ah, I’ve got that two-bit Greek beat a mile,” he boasted.
“Screw you, you ugly Polack,” Jimmy called out. “You got the dough, but I got the looks.”
“Not with that Greek hook of yours. You could use it to catch a barracuda,” Hank shot back. He was talking about Jimmy’s nose, which had gained him the nickname Captain Hook when he was a kid.
“Look who’s talking. Your schnoz looks like you went twenty rounds with Dempsey.”
“Where the hell is that Shirley, anyway?” Hank suddenly snarled. “If she’s not here in five minutes, I’m takin’ off.”
“Cool your keister. Have another beer.”
Hank drained his beer and started searching around for the bottle opener to pop open another.
I spotted the opener next to Jimmy’s La-Z-Boy, snatched it up, and handed it to Hank.
Surely my efforts deserved a little reward, I thought. But Hank just took it, didn’t even look at me.
I tried another angle. “We watered your lawn,” I blurted out, including myself in the lawn maintenance, even though I hadn’t lifted a pinkie finger to help.
The subject of his house did not put Hank in a generous mood.
KooKooLand Page 9