Whistling in the Dark

CHAPTER NINE

The next morning over our Breakfast of Champions, I tried again with Troo. “I’m telling you, Rasmussen was on a murderous rampage and when he couldn’t murder me he tried to murder Wendy instead.” The milk had gone clumpy so we ate the Wheaties dry. And the house, even Nell’s room, smelled like something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Something like you’d smell over at the zoo.

Troo was trying to make her spoon stick to her nose the way Willie O’Hara could. “You know, you’re beginning to remind me more and more of Virginia Cunningham in that Snake Pit movie.”

That was so cruddy of Troo. She knew I worried sometimes that that was how I would end up because of my imagination. Looney people imagine things. Virginia Cunningham had and that’s why they put her out in that mental hospital and the guys in the white coats made her take hot baths all day long even though she was plenty clean. Just for a second, I wanted to haul back and smack Troo just like Hall had. Knock that spoon right off her pretty little nose.

What a completely awful person I was to think such a thing. Thank goodness she beat me to it. She threw the spoon down and said, “C’mon, I wanna play tetherball. Last one there’s a rotten egg.”

The Vliet Street School was right across from our house. It was where the kids in the neighborhood that weren’t Catholic went. But during the summer the city had this program on the playground that any kid could go to, no matter what country they’d originally come from or what religion they were.

There were swings and monkey bars and baseball diamonds. Four squares and hopscotches were painted right onto the asphalt in yellow paint. And you could play running games all day long, like red rover or dodgeball. Or standing games, like Captain May I and tetherball. And when you got worn out in the afternoon, you could sit down for a while on a green bench with a checkerboard painted right on it and watch everybody else get sweaty.

And there were these playground counselors that showed up year after year named Bobby Brophy and Barb Kircher who were not from Vliet Street. Bobby was the boss of the playground and Barb was his helper. Bobby was going to college to become a gym teacher so he loved to play tetherball and four square with us. Barb was going to college to be a cheerleader and meet somebody like Bobby, she said. Barb was extremely spunky. She was also the expert on lanyard making and had shown all us kids how to braid this long plastic stuff into a kind of necklace that you could attach keys to or anything you wanted, and wear it with any ensemble, which was what Troo had started calling her clothes. Troo and me had about fifty of these lanyards, that’s how much we loved them. The luscious colors and especially the clean smell and how they felt. Slippery and cool to the touch. We could hardly stand it when Bobby would go into the shed behind the school that only the counselors were allowed in and after what seemed like a day or so he would come out with these colored plastics behind his back, telling us to choose one of his hands and not giving them to us until we had. That Bobby was a real card.

At the end of August, a King and Queen of the Playground would be crowned at a big summer block party with soda and food and music. Last summer, even though we’d only lived on Vliet Street for less than a year, Troo got to be the Queen. That’s how outgoing she was. I was so jealous I didn’t talk to her for a full week. (Sorry, Daddy.) I have a plan to be more outgoing this summer so I might be able to be the Queen as well.

Of course, I beat Troo over to the playground with my fly-like-the-wind speed and, of course, she never said anything about being a rotten egg.

I was already swaying on one of the swings when Troo came up and said, “I spy with my little eye…” She pointed over at the monkey bars.

Wendy Latour was laying flat on top of the bars, licking on a cherry Popsicle, a big gauze bandage half falling off her forehead.

“Big deal,” I said. “Just because she’s not dead doesn’t mean that Rasmussen didn’t try to murder her.”

“Well, haven’t seen the two of you in a while,” Bobby the counselor said, appearing out of nowhere. He bounced one of those red rubber playground balls my way. “Fast Susie and Mary Lane have been lookin’ for you. They wanna play four square.”

Bobby Brophy was easy to look at, with his sandy crew-cut hair and blue eyes and a smile that showed teeth that were whiter than typing paper in his toast-colored face.

“Did you hear what happened to Wendy Latour?” I asked him. “Somebody pushed her down the Spencers’ cellar stairs and she had to go to the hospital in an ambulance.”

Troo snorted through her nose at me. “She fell down the Spencers’ cellar stairs.”

Bobby turned to look over at the monkey bars. “Like she doesn’t have enough problems already.”

I hadn’t noticed her at first, probably because she was so darn skinny, but there was Mary Lane hanging right below Wendy. When she saw me, she jumped down and skipped over to Fast Susie, who was over near the bubbler waving her arms around at some older boy I didn’t know. Mary Lane said something to Fast Susie and pointed at me and Troo.

“How about a game later, Sally?” Bobby asked.

He’d recently begun to teach me how to play chess, which was not at all like checkers even though it looked like it might be. I loved it when we played. How he’d bounce his legs up and down and rub his hands together like they were cold and he’d think so hard, like capturing my queen was so important that his forehead got papery lines in it.

I said, “Chess sounds great.”

“It’s a date.” Bobby laughed, because he laughed almost all the time, that’s how cheerful and full of energy he was, and then he walked off toward the baseball diamond where some kids were screaming at him to come over because it looked like they needed a pitcher. What a good egg Bobby was! So different from the other boys his age in the neighborhood. When I was grown up enough to go out on a real date, I was planning to take the bus over to the east side of town where Bobby was from. These west side boys, they could be trouble.

Mary Lane came up and knocked the red rubber ball out of my hand. “What was jerky Bobby talking to you about?”

Fast Susie was standing next to Mary Lane with her hands on her hips. Staring at Bobby’s back, which was very long since he was pretty tall, Fast Susie whistled, whoot woo, and said, “I wouldn’t throw that cat outta bed.”

“When did you get a cat?” I asked.

Fast Susie looked back at me and shook her head and said, “Boy, you are such a square, O’Malley,” and then she pulled me toward the yellow box. “Get it?” she said. “Square.” She pointed down at the box. “Square.” She pointed at me. “Get it?”

Fast Susie was always making fun of me like that because I didn’t get half of her jokes. Troo said that was because Fast Susie was très chic and I was not at all très chic. I would have to agree with her because I didn’t feel at all très chic, and I thought I would know if I did. I wondered where the heck Troo was coming up with all these new words. She was starting to sound an awful lot like a French librarian.

Fast Susie got into the server’s box. “Did you hear that Sara Heinemann’s mother sent her over to Delancey’s for some milk, and guess what?” She smacked the red ball right at me, her long black hair going every which way, the sun sliding off it like a newly waxed car.

“What?” I asked, and smacked it right back at her.

“Sara disappeared into thin air. Poof!” Fast Susie caught the ball and threw it up high and waited for it to come down before she said, “Remind you of anybody?”

She meant Dottie Kenfield, but I didn’t want to say that because then it made it seem true.

“When it got dark and Sara didn’t come home,” Fast Susie went on, “Mrs. Heinemann called the cops to start lookin’. They’ve been searching everywhere for her.”

Mary Lane musta been eating something yellow, cuz when she stuck her tongue out at me it looked like that iguana’s tongue up at the zoo. “Told ya,” she said.

Fast Susie said, “And ya know what that means, right?” She dropped the ball and walked over to Mary Lane and put her hands around her neck and started choking her. They all laughed. Not me. I knew better than anyone that Fast Susie was probably right. Sara Heinemann was probably dead. And they might never find her, because I would bet my bottom dollar that one of the cops that Mrs. Heinemann had called to go looking for her daughter’s choked body was Rasmussen. The murderer and molester himself.

After a long day of braiding lanyards with Barb, playing chess with Bobby and a wild all-playground game of red rover, we headed over to the Fazios’ for some of Nana’s excellent lasagna. During supper, Troo and Nana had a very big discussion about Doris Day movies and Nana got all silly over the actor Rock Hudson. After we’d helped Fast Susie dry the dishes, Troo and me left and didn’t say much on the walk home because I thought we both regretted having to leave that nice Italian kitchen with good smells and arms waving all over the place like they were directing downtown traffic.

We found the door to our house wide open, but when I called up the stairs, “Hello? Anybody home?” there wasn’t. Hall had definitely taken a long walk off a short pier. I figured it was because Mother was dying. But then that didn’t seem right either because Hall and Mother were fighting and taking the Lord’s name in vain all the time before she went into the hospital, so what did he care if she died.

Troo and me didn’t bother washing up because the last time we’d tried, the water came out all warm and orange. We just took off our clothes and laid down in our bed and listened to the creak creak creak of our neighbors’ porch swing. Mr. Kenfield sat out there by himself almost every summer night, just rocking and smoking. The sound and the smell always traveled up to our bedroom window and reminded me of loneliness. Especially that night, because me and Troo were all by ourselves and it felt so much like that was how it would be from now on.

Troo rolled onto her stomach and pulled up her T-shirt, letting me know she wanted me to rub her back, which was something I’d done every single night since I could remember. “Do you know why Fast Susie is called Fast Susie?” she asked.

I thought about that afternoon. “Because she is an excellent person to have on your team for red rover?”

“No,” Troo said and laughed. “It’s because she lets boys get some of the sex.”

Fast Susie was three years older than me. Thirteen. A teenager. Different things happened when you got that old. Gettin’ some of the sex must be one of them.

“Fast Susie goes to second base,” Troo said.

What the heck was she talking about? Everybody knew that Fast Susie didn’t like baseball and what did baseball have to do with the sex? “What do you mean Fast Susie goes to second base?”

For a minute, I got worried that talking about baseball like this would make Troo remember the day her and Daddy and Uncle Paulie didn’t make it home after the game. Right after the crash I tried to ask her what happened. How come Daddy smashed into the elm tree? Wasn’t he paying attention? But Troo wouldn’t talk to anybody for a long time after the accident and now if I tried to bring it up she’d just get mad or pretend she didn’t hear me.

“Going to second base is when you let a boy touch your titties, which is another word for bosoms,” Troo said.

“Ohhh…” I tried not to act too disgusted. To be more très chic. “Is there a going to first base?”

Troo stretched out next to me, long and lean. “Frenchie kissing is going to first base. That’s when a boy puts his tongue in your mouth.”

I would never, ever let somebody touch my titties when I grew them or do Frenchie kissing to my mouth.

“And third base?” I asked. Eddie Mathews was the third baseman for the Braves and Daddy’s absolute favorite. I really missed listening to the ball games on the radio with my Sky King. His beer in his hand, his gal Sal on his lap. I didn’t really understand baseball but Daddy, he was an adorer of baseball. And I was an adorer of Daddy. The farm porch at night always smelled of his hard day in the field and the yellow light on the radio shined on his excited face when Hank Aaron would hit a home run and Daddy would jump up out of his chair and his gal Sal fell onto the floor. Especially the summer he died. Because that summer the Braves were gonna be in the World Series, he said, and we would go and eat salted peanuts and hot dogs with mustard and pickle relish. Which were my absolute favorites.

“Third base is when a boy touches you down there.” Troo pointed to my undies.

I would never, ever let anybody touch me down there.

“So is a home run gettin’ some?” I asked, finally catching on.

“Yup, a home run is gettin’ some.”

When hell froze over.

Troo asked, “You know that Junie was molested, right?” She rolled over and ran her fingers down my neck like it was a piano.

I hadn’t known Junie like a friend. But I’d seen her at the playground sometimes and she seemed really nice and loved lanyard making as much as I did and was very good at it.

Troo said, “Do you even know what molested means?”

“No.” I stuck my face into my pillow, until I reached the Aqua Velva smell.

“Fast Susie said that when a girl is molested it means that somebody touches her in her private parts and hurts her real bad. And then he gets some sex from her even though she doesn’t want to give it.”

I turned my head and looked out my window over to Dottie’s bedroom. Her ghost had started crying.

“Sally?” Troo whispered, pulling the sheet up over our heads.

“Yeah?”

“You hear that?”

“It’s Dottie’s ghost.”

Troo moved a few inches closer. “That would be a real bad thing.”

I wasn’t sure if she meant Dottie disappearing into thin air or what happened to Junie. But it didn’t matter because they were both real bad things. “I won’t ever let anything happen to you. You know that.”

I couldn’t stop thinking about how Rasmussen had touched Junie when she hadn’t wanted him to. How scared she musta been. “Are you sure about that?” I asked. “About that molesting part?” I stopped rubbing her back because just then the thought of touching skin made me feel a little sick to my stomach right below my wishbone.

“Fast Susie says that the man molested Junie and then had the sex with her and when he was done he wrapped her undies around her neck and pulled on ’em until she couldn’t breathe anymore.”

After Troo fell asleep, I laid there in the dark and listened to Dottie’s ghost crying, hoping so bad that Fast Susie was wrong. Because I knew that if somebody didn’t listen to me, if somebody didn’t stop Rasmussen right away, me and Junie Piaskowski would soon have a lot more in common than our love of lanyards.