Lesley Kagen - Whistling in the Dark

I pinched two of the string’s edges and brought them into the middle.

“You’ll see,” Troo said. “Wendy’ll be back home lickety split, runnin’ around without her clothes on again.”

Wendy did that. Forgot to put her clothes on sometimes and then got out of the house when Mrs. Latour was looking after the other twelve kids, and there Wendy’d be on the playground swings sportin’ her birthday suit. So one of us would take her home and Mrs. Latour would shake her head at her daughter and Wendy would say, “Thorry, Mama.” And then she’d give her mama a big hug and not let go because Wendy loved to hug anything, but especially her mama, and for some reason… me, Thally O’Malley.

Troo took her turn on the cat’s cradle, lifting it off my fingers into a diamond shape.

No matter what Troo said, I knew that Rasmussen had somehow hurt Wendy. There was just something about him that seemed so suspicious. Like how he was extra polite to everybody, not like any of the other fathers or brothers that lived in the neighborhood except for Mr. Fitzpatrick, who owned Fitzpatrick’s Drugstore, who was also a very polite man. Seemed like all the other men on the block were always mad about something until they had a couple of beers in them, and then some of them got madder and some of them got nicer and would start singing “Danny Boy” or “Be Bop A Lula” and try to put their hands all over their wives’ heinies.

So maybe last night Rasmussen got mad because I had hidden from him under the Kenfields’ bushes and he ran back down the alley and saw Wendy during one of her wanderings and pushed her down the Spencers’ cellar stairs and maybe even tried to murder and molest her. It would be all my fault if sweet and silly Wendy Latour never wanted to give anybody a hug again.

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.