Whistling in the Dark

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

After Troo and me got dressed in the faded navy blue church dresses and shiny shoes with cleats that Nell brought over, we went looking for Mr. Gary so we could say good-bye to him. We found him out on the front stoop, smoking a cigarette.

I said, “Mr. Gary, we gotta go to a funeral now, but we promise we’ll try to come back soon and play some old maid.”

Mr. Gary took a long draw and said, “You better make it sooner rather than later, Sally. I’m heading back to California in a few days.”

Troo said, “The land of milk and honey.”

Remembering this morning’s bath, I said, “And water.” A specific ocean of it.

Mr. Gary stood up and took a step back so he could get a good look at the two of us. “How pretty and fresh you girls look in your dress-up clothes,” he said in his light-as-a-butterfly voice. He flicked his cigarette into the grass, gave us each a peck on the cheek and hopped down the stairs with a cheery, “I told Mother I’d cut some flowers for her. Hope to see ya later, alligators.” Even after he took the turn into the backyard, I could still smell his baby powder.

Ethel and Nell were already sitting in Eddie’s car, waiting for us. I told Troo to go ahead, and then I yelled, “Just a minute,” and went back into the house to thank Mrs. Galecki one more time for letting us stay with her. She was asleep in her kitchen chair, so I just wrote down a little note on a napkin that said, “Thanks a million!” I signed it, “The O’Malley Sisters!” and propped it up on her glass of prune juice.

When I tiptoed out the front door and turned around, there he was waiting for me on the porch steps.

“Morning, Sally.”

I jumped halfway out of my skin. This man was very good at creeping up on people. Rasmussen was all dressed up in a fancy black suit, looking very sharp. He also had on shiny black shoes. Not the spongy kind. “Can I give you a ride over to the funeral?”

“No, that’s okay.” I moved down Mrs. Galecki’s front walk, far enough away from him so he couldn’t grab me. “I got a ride.”

Because no matter what Ethel said about him, I was still mostly suspicious of Rasmussen. And then I don’t know what came over me. I felt real bold with the sun shining and the little dog Lizzie barking at a squirrel that she’d chased up the big oak tree, so I squinted at him and said, “Why do you have a picture of me in your wallet?”

That rattled his cage.

He yelled down to Nell and Eddie to wait a minute and then knelt down next to me. “There’s a lot of things going on right now that you won’t understand for a while. But I promise you, everything is going to be okay. You need to trust me a little. Can you do that?” He tried to put his hands on my shoulders, but I yanked back so hard that he lost his balance and fell forward onto his hands and knees. He got up and brushed his pants off and said strongly, “I think you need to ride over to church with me this morning. We need to talk.” He waved good-bye to Nell and Eddie and off they went with Ethel and Troo, who was smiling at me out the back window of the ’57 Chevy because she thought that was funny, me being left behind with Rasmussen.

“Let me put Lizzie in the house,” Rasmussen said. “And then we’ve got to hurry over to church. I’m one of the pall-bearers.”

He had such a nice house. Picturesque, I’d call it. It was red brick and had some ivy growing up the side of it and white shutters on the windows with red and white geraniums coming out of the window boxes.

After he got the puppy squared away he called to me from the porch, “I’m going to go get the car. Wait for me at the curb.”

I was between the devil and the deep blue sea. Since I was gonna get married to Henry Fitzpatrick I had to get to that funeral even though it would be that devil Rasmussen taking me. So I walked down his steps and tried not to think about Junie’s picture hanging in his dining room, telling myself over and over again that I was going to be okay because even Rasmussen wouldn’t do something like murder and molest me on the way to a funeral. Nobody could be that bad, could they?

He pulled up and got out of his dark brown Ford and ran around the back fender, coming right for me. I managed to get back up on the sidewalk, and was halfway up Mrs. Galecki’s steps before he caught me by the arm. I screamed and screamed so loud that Mr. Gary came running out from the backyard with a bouquet of pink flowers in his hand. He yelled, “Everything okay, Dave?”

Rasmussen just nodded at him.

“Sally Elizabeth O’Malley, what is wrong with you? I was just coming over to open your car door.” Rasmussen let go of my arm and walked back over to his side of the car.

I remembered then how Daddy used to do that for Mother. Opened her car door and bent at the waist and said, “Your chariot awaits you, madam.” I hadn’t seen anybody do something that mannerly in a long time except for Mr. Cary Grant in the movies. So maybe just like Ethel said, Rasmussen was a true gentleman. Or maybe he was just a very, very good actor.

We drove for two blocks without talking and the silence was real loud until Rasmussen said, “You know that your mother and I are friends, right?”

I stared out the car window and let the breeze of the chocolate chip cookies ruffle my bangs.

“I went to see Helen yesterday.” Rasmussen put on his blinker to turn onto Lisbon Avenue.

“Is she okay?”

Rasmussen didn’t take his eyes off the road. “Yes, she is.”

I wanted to ask him so many questions about Mother, just beg him to tell me every little detail-like if she’d asked about me and when she might come home and did she need anything like her gold hairbrush. But I wasn’t a hundred percent sure he was telling the truth, and even if he was, I just couldn’t bring myself to let him know that I wanted something from him.

“Your mother is out of the woods, but…” Rasmussen turned onto Fifty-sixth Street. “There’s been some trouble with Hall and I know this might upset you, Sally, but Hall is… Hall is… ah…”

“A goddamn dickhead?”

Rasmussen laughed but then he stopped real quick and tried to look very serious. “Although I don’t approve of your language, young lady, I think that just about covers it.”

I always looked at his chin when he talked. It had a little scar shaped like a comma at the bottom of it. I would never look into his eyes, no matter what Ethel said. If I looked in his eyes, my soul might jump right out my window and fly into his. Or maybe he would hypnotize me like that doctor did in that movie called The Three Faces of Eve, where that woman had too many people living inside her so the doctor hypnotized Eve and asked for a couple of them to move out. Look into my eyes. Loook into my eyes. No, thank you very much.

“You know that your mother and I have been friends since high school, correct?” he repeated.

I didn’t want to admit it, but I sort of suspected that Mother and Rasmussen were friends because in that hidey-hole graduation picture they were standing next to each other and Rasmussen was smiling at Mother when he was supposed to be smiling into the camera of Jim Madigan from Jim Madigan Photography Studios.

“So, like I was saying, Hall is in a heap of trouble,” Rasmussen said.

“I know about that already.” I started twirling my hair around my finger, which I had started doing recently because it seemed to calm my imagination down. “Mr. Fitzpatrick told us that Hall hit Mr. Jerbak with a beer bottle and he’s in jail and charges are gonna get pressed on him.”

When we turned down Fifty-eighth Street, the Piaskowskis’ street, Rasmussen pulled up in front of their house and looked out the window. “Junie’s been dead now for almost a year. Hard to believe.” He shook himself a little like you do when you know you can’t stand feeling the way you’re feeling and you better snap out of it. “The house is for sale. Gotta get over here and work on that yard.”

I looked out at the Piaskowskis’ and noticed something I hadn’t the day Troo and me had walked past on our way to church right after we found out about Mother’s staph infection. There was a funny little blue birdhouse half hanging off the rain gutter and it had a kid’s writing on the side that I couldn’t read. It was twisting in the breeze.

Rasmussen was looking at it too because in a shaky voice he said, “Junie and I made that little birdhouse together. Blue was her favorite color. She loved birds. Especially blue-birds. She called them happiness with wings.”

I didn’t say anything but I was thinking that Rasmussen’s big, strong outside didn’t quite match up to his gooey inside, and it was a shock to me that he reminded me of a chocolate-covered cherry. Ethel was right. My thinking wasn’t straight, but straight enough to know he was telling the truth about blue being Junie’s favorite color, because I remembered how she just loved her blue Lik-m-aid so much that her lips always looked the same color as a cornflower.

“You know Junie was my niece, right? My sister Betsy’s daughter?”

“Ethel told me that,” I said quickly.

“Betsy had to move away because it was just too sad for her and her husband to live here after Junie…” He stepped on the gas and pulled away.

A half block later, Rasmussen turned into what was really the playground of the school but was also used as a parking lot when there was a funeral or a wedding or any other big occasion. I couldn’t wait to get out of that car. Rasmussen was making me feel sad for him, the last way on Earth I expected to feel, and it was making me so nervous that I started sweating buckets. When he put the gearshift into P, I pulled down on the door handle.

“Wait just a minute, Sally. I’ve got something else important to tell you.”

His hands were knotted up around the steering wheel and he looked as antsy as I felt. Maybe because we were so close to church he’d started feeling real guilty and was about to confess to the murders. That’s just how he was acting. Like after the cops gave somebody the third degree in a movie and then the guy gets all twitchy and just puts his head down on the table and starts yelling, “Okay, I did it. I did it!”

Rasmussen said, “Mr. Jerbak died.”

“What?”

“Mr. Jerbak died.”

I wanted to say I never did like Mr. Jerbak anyway. He was always beating on his boy Fritz, who would come to school with black eyes that he said he’d gotten when he tripped over the dog but everybody knew Fritz Jerbak didn’t have a dog.

“Do you know what that means?” Rasmussen asked.

I spotted Troo standing at the corner of the church next to the statue of St. Francis is a sissy. Which in St. Francis’s case meant he was light in his sandals. Willie O’Hara came up with that one.

“It means there’s gonna be another funeral?” I said.

“That’s right, but that’s not what I meant. Mr. Jerbak’s death means that Hall won’t be around anymore. He’s going to jail for more than a few days.”

I was bowled over like a strike. “Hall is going to jail forever, you mean?” If Hall didn’t pay the rent from the money he made sellin’ shoes up at Shuster’s, we’d have no place to live. We were kaput. Oh sweet Jesus, Mary and Joseph. I grinded my teeth together and got prepared for Rasmussen to tell me that Troo and me were going to go live in the orphanage up on Lisbon Avenue.

“Maybe not forever, but Hall is going away for a really, really long time.” Rasmussen swiped some sweat on his forehead with a folded white handkerchief he’d taken out of his front suit pocket. “Do you know what that means?”

I thought I did.

“It means that you and Nell and Troo will have to move out of your house. The Goldmans will let you stay another week, but then… well, they have to rent it out to people who can pay. Do you understand?” He had put his arm over the back of the front seat and was leaning toward me so close that I could smell orange slices.

I was looking out the window at Troo and trying not to think of the lonely faces up at St. Jude’s. Me and Troo were about to become two more lost causes. “So we have to go live in the orphanage?”

“Well, that’s what I’m getting at here.” Rasmussen’s words started to gush out of him like he’d sprung a leak. “Your mother thinks it would be a good idea for you and Troo to come and live with me until she gets better enough to come home.”

“WHAT?” That had to be nothing but a flight of my imagination, what he just said, because going to live with him was the most Virginia Cunningham crazy idea I’d ever heard!

There was a knock on the half-rolled-down car window. It was Mr. Fitzpatrick, also dressed in a black suit with a white carnation on the lapel. He leaned his head down and said, “We’re all set, Dave.”

Rasmussen said, “Be there in a sec, Lou.”

I just couldn’t believe this. Mother thought it was a good idea for Troo and me to go live with Rasmussen? Mother, how could you? I would have to make sure and ask Nell about this. Yes, that’s what I’d do. Rasmussen was probably making this whole thing up. Of course he was.

Rasmussen opened his car door and said, “I’ve got plenty of room at my house. There are four bedrooms. And Ethel could come over to help you anytime you needed something that I couldn’t do for you, like fix your hair.” He picked up my braid in his hand that Ethel had done that morning, and for a second I thought he was going to start crying. And even though he could still be that murderer and molester, I didn’t push him away. He’d probably tell Mother if I did. Now that I knew that Rasmussen and Mother were friends, I’d have to walk on eggshell feet around him.

He swung his legs out of the car and got out, but then leaned his head back in like Mr. Fitzpatrick had and said, “Talk it over with Troo. See what the O’Malley sisters think.” And then he walked off to the front of the church to join the other men who were in black suits with just shaved faces that looked sad beyond belief.

I just sat there. Couldn’t even blink my eyes, that’s how shocked I was, until Troo came up and stuck her head in the window.

“Did he tell you?” She was hopping from foot to foot the way she did when she got so excited she couldn’t stand it, or if she had to pee. “Well, did he?”

“Did he tell me what?” I didn’t want to say what he told me just in case it was something different from what somebody told her. Mostly, I didn’t want her to know we were going to have to go live in the orphanage because no way on Earth was I gonna live at Rasmussen’s.

Troo pulled me out of the car and we started walking toward the church doors. “Hall is going to jail for a really long time because Mr. Jerbak is dead from when Hall hit him on the head with a beer bottle. And Mother is not gonna die.”

“Yeah, he told me that.”

“Isn’t that fantastic!” Troo yelled real loud and then remembered she was at a funeral and said quieter, “So fucking fantastic!”

Part of it was fantastic. The part about Mother getting better. And even that part about Hall because all we ever got from him were some hits on the head and some slaps with his belt, and now Mother would be free to get married to somebody else because I didn’t think the Pope made you stay married to a murderer. But that part about going to live with Rasmussen? I didn’t think that was so fucking fantastic.

“Yippie ai oh ki aa,” Troo shouted, a yellow rose from Rasmussen’s garden bouncing on her head.

We walked into the church right behind the Latours, so we had to wait a while because it takes fifteen people a long time to stop at the holy water font, especially when Wendy Latour decides to wash her face in it. I asked Troo, “Who told you all this?”

“Nell told me on the way over.” Troo smiled at Artie Latour. He still had the hots for her because his little harelip twitched into a smile until Reese put his fingers around his neck and squeezed until he turned back around again. The Latours had scrapple for breakfast. I could smell it on them.

“Nell talked to Rasmussen. He’s a good egg, just like I been tellin’ you.” Troo’d lowered her voice into a whisper because that was what you had to do in the church, which smelled of incense and had stained-glass windows that calmed me down when the sun came through and made puzzle pieces of red and yellow and green lights on the floor. While we waited in line to go down the main aisle, I looked over at the Virgin Mary statue that always smiled at you no matter what, with her petal pink lips and chipped blue eyes that followed you wherever you went. Candles flickered beneath her feet, lit by people who’d dropped a dime in the tin collection box and asked Jesus’s mother to have a good talk with her son about granting their prayers.

To tell you the truth, I didn’t get half of what went on up at that church. With all the Latin mumbo jumbo and the Stations of the Cross and the nuns who waltzed like ice skaters wherever they went but would smack you a good one for not singing along with a hymn. I didn’t even get what my First Communion was supposed to be about, even though people made a big deal about it and I got presents and my picture taken by Jim Madigan. I know it was the first time I tasted Jesus’s body, which had been stuck into a little white cookie. And if you didn’t let that cookie wafer melt in your mouth and you bit into it, Jesus would come squirting out and you would be in mortal sin trouble. But I still really didn’t get why we had to do that. But that Virgin Mary statue that always smiled and made you feel loved no matter what… I got that.

Troo and me looked down the church pews until we found Ethel, who really stood out because she was a Negro and nobody else was. She also had on a huge hat that looked like a flying saucer had landed on her head. Troo and me genuflected and then said excuse us… excuse us… as we made our way down the pew.

Once we got down next to Ethel I whispered to Troo, because I just had to know, “Did Nell tell you Rasmussen wants us to come and live with him until Mother gets out of the hospital because the Goldmans have to rent the house to somebody who can pay?”

Troo grinned and nodded. I’d been able to tell she really liked Rasmussen that morning when I was watching them in the garden, because she tilted her head to the side and smiled at him in the way she did when she really liked somebody. So I figured, if he hadn’t made it all up, we would do what Troo wanted to do, go live with Rasmussen. Because my Troo was on cloud nine and I just didn’t want to wreck that for her by telling her what I really thought. That moving into Rasmussen’s would be like showing the witch in Hansel and Gretel how to turn on the oven.