Whistling in the Dark

CHAPTER TWO

Mother took me to go see Dr. Sullivan last summer when I started having real bad dreams about The Creature from the Black Lagoon. In this movie that took place in the Amazon area there was this creature who lived deep down in the water but would come up to get people whenever it wanted to. After Daddy died, I started thinking all the time about how the Creature could come for me or Troo or Nell or Mother, and what would we do if it did? We weren’t strong. We just were not. And after we moved from our farm way out in the country into the city, to make matters even worse, the Washington Park lagoon was just three blocks away from our house. That’s where they found Junie Piaskowski’s dead body our first summer on Vliet Street. They never found the person who left her there all alone next to those red rowboats you could rent. And I couldn’t believe that not one person thought it coulda been the Creature that had murdered Junie because that Creature had a lot of stick-to-itiveness. Look how much he had wanted that actress Julie Adams!

But sitting there in the doctor’s office that smelled like shots, I reconsidered about that for a while, and finally said to Dr. Sullivan, “Okay, maybe it wasn’t the Creature who murdered Junie.”

The doctor smiled and nodded his head.

“Because of those pink undies being tied around Junie’s neck,” I explained. “The Creature doesn’t have very nice fingers and you’d need very nice fingers to tie undies around a girl’s neck, wouldn’t you?”

Dr. Sullivan made me swallow some cod-liver oil and then put his face right up close to mine, so close that the pores in his nose looked like the insides of an empty egg carton. “Sally O’Malley, you have what is known as an overactive imagination.” His breath was warm and putrid, just like I imagined the Amazon would be. “That’s not good. In fact”-he looked over at Mother and shook his head-“it just goes to prove once again that an idle mind is the devil’s workshop. Have you been attending mass regularly?”

Him saying that didn’t give me a lot of faith in Dr. Sullivan. Because he was so wrong. My mind was never idle. Never ever.

The noon whistle blew over at the cookie factory and I heard Mother say from far off, “Sally? Sally! Did you hear me?” in that tone she got to let you know she had better things to do.

“Sorry.” Thinking about the Creature and Daddy like that, that was what Dr. Sullivan called a flight of the imagination, which was something I musta inherited from my Sky King.

Mother sighed one of her big sighs and said, “I have to go to the hospital tomorrow to have an operation. My gallbladder has to come out.” She placed her hand below her right ribs. “And while I’m gone”-she pointed her finger at Troo-“I want you to work on your charitable works, and you”-she pointed at me-“get control of that imagination of yours or I’ll take you back to the doctor.”

Then she looked down at her hands and twirled the wedding ring that Hall had given her, which seemed like it hurt because she had a pained look on her face. With the bad luck Mother was having with her husbands, Troo and me figured that one of the reasons she had married Hall so fast after Daddy died was because he didn’t look like he’d decease anytime soon, with his muscles and wavy Swedish hair and that tattoo on the top part of his arm that said MOTHER. Nell said that tattoo must have impressed the hell right out of Helen. And maybe it had right after Daddy died. But now Mother was stuck with Hall because if you were a Catholic you couldn’t get a divorce unless you wanted to go straight to hell and burn for all eternity. If you were a Catholic, Granny said, the only thing you could do if you didn’t want to be married anymore was to pray really hard for a certain shoe-selling louse to get run over by a bus on his way to work.

Mother got up off the bench and said in her sternest voice, “While I’m gone, the O’Malley sisters better mind their p’s and q’s, because when I come home, if I hear you gave anybody any trouble at all, I’ll give you a spanking that you’ll never forget.” And then she walked away like she’d just remembered what that better thing was that she had to do.

I waited until the screen door slammed behind her and then I said to Troo, “She’s probably gonna die just like Daddy, don’t you think?” I didn’t used to worry a lot, but I started up after Daddy died and now it was something that I did almost all the time. Because if you coulda seen my daddy. He was strong and brave with big hands and black hairy arms and wide shoulders. He was never even sick, my Sky King. So that just shows you what can happen when you least expect it.

Troo was holding a chubby blade of grass up to her mouth and trying to make it do that kazoo sound you can get out of it sometimes. “Nah,” she said. “She’s not gonna die. Helen’s too ornery to die.”

Troo never worried and had hardly cried when Daddy died, which I thought was a little weird. Because although Daddy loved me very, very much, so much that I’d never forget him in a million years, he loved Troo just a little bit more. That hurt my feelings for a while, but when you had a sister like Troo, well, you just had to expect these things.

Troo was also right as rain about Mother. She wasn’t ornery when Daddy was alive, but nowadays she was and I knew whose fault that was. So that night I planned to say extra prayers that Hall would forget to look both ways before he ran across North Avenue on his way to Shuster’s Shoes because that would give Mother another chance at marrying someone else who didn’t talk with his mouth full. If she came back from the hospital. Which she probably wouldn’t. Like I said, I didn’t have a lot of faith in Dr. Sullivan. His breath, and I’m sorry to have to say this, his breath alone could just about kill you.