by Lesley Kagen
18
DARING
There are times when I step inside our church that I can’t help but fall down to my knees. Not in prayer, of course. I am not impressed with most of the malarkey the nuns and priests try to peddle us. You’d have to be as dumb as Birdie to fall for most of those tall tales the employees of God tell us during catechism class and Sunday sermons.
Take Noah and the Ark. All you have to do is spend an afternoon at the Washington Park Zoo to know how much animals poop and are at each other tooth and nail. Noah and his family would have to jump overboard because they couldn’t stand the smell on that boat for forty days and nights and those wild animals would devour each other the second they had a chance, including the dove that showed up with the olive branch in its beak, it wouldn’t have escaped the snarling jaws of death, either.
FACT: The Almighty could’ve saved Daddy from drowning or bestowed upon me a swimming miracle, so our on-again, off-again relationship spends a lot of time in the off position.
PROOF: I only pray because I need to keep all my bases covered and I only go to church to keep Louise from heckling me. But my soul? I think it must really like the beautiful interior decoration job that was done on St. Kate’s, because like it or not, the place can make me feel like I’m having one of those holy times. Like the ones I have every so often when I’m at the cemetery pond and everything feels right with my world again for a minute or two.
The church smells of incense and floor polish this morning the way it always does, which is nice, but it’s the way the sun is passing through the stained glass that’s my favorite part. Especially the way it’s slanting into the window that belongs to St. Joan of Arc. I admire that she was a fighter, but I can’t help but wonder if being a French slut like Suzie LaPelt is why that kid really got turned into French toast, because I’m 100% positive Louise and the other gals in the parish wouldn’t mind throwing Daddy’s barmaid into a bonfire, either.
The rest of St. Kate’s is also easy on the eyes. Very la-di-da luxurious. The main altar that’s watched over by Jesus hanging on the cross is dripping with gold, there’s a fancy carved wooden stand made out of some kind of special blessed wood where the priests try to scare us into being better Catholics, and the Communion railing is made of real marbles. The main altar is where the Tabernacle sits—the rumpus room for the white wafers the priests pass out that are the “alleged” body of Jesus. (Even though we’re warned not to, I’ve chewed up a Communion wafer and it was boneless.)
On either side of the big altar, there are two much smaller ones that are not as lush but still quite nice. The one on the right belongs to the Virgin Mary. I can see that there’s no mustache above her chipped pink lip anymore so it must’ve got scrubbed off this morning by the gal who is taking our friend and church cleaner, Gracie Carver’s, place while she’s in Mississippi nursing her sister back to health.
On the altar to the left, there’s a statue of Charlie’s and Birdie’s all-time favorite saint. The same way our pal Mr. McGinty is very devoted to St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers? That’s how gaga those two go over St. Francis. Charlie adores him for two reasons. Frances was his mother’s name and that saint also liked birds the same way my fiancé does. And, of course, that means my animal-loving sister also goes nuts for that olden-days holy man who has three cute sparrows sitting on his shoulders with little cocked heads like Birdie gets when she’s hearing something nobody else can.
After The Mutual Admiration Society gets done dipping our fingers into the Holy Water font and crossing ourselves—Birdie splashes some on her face, too, she always does—and once my eyes adjust to the dimness inside the church, I easily spot who I’m searching for. Lighthouse-tall Kitten Jablonski towers above all the other kids waiting in the confession line, the ones who always show up at the last minute on Confession Thursday.
Charlie tells me when I complain to him about the stiff penances Father Ted doles out to me, “According to my most recent survey, when Father starts hearing confessions, the largest penance he doles out is three Hail Marys, but once the church bells clang twelve thirty, he switches over to the Stations of the Cross.”
He’s probably right about that, because not only does Charlie keep track of what he observes happening in the neighborhood and in movies and the sports page, etc., another hobby of his is going around the neighborhood with a clipboard and questioning people. He’ll ask what cereal someone ate for breakfast or what television shows they like, their favorite colors, and whatnot. Charlie bugging kids like this is enough to make them say, “Ya writin’ a book or something? Buzz off, Cue Ball.” But to me? This is a lot like sweating the truth out of someone, so it might turn out to be a real plus in our family detecting business.
So, I’m going to consider confessing to Father Ted earlier from now on, because he does go very crabby and very thirsty for his Jameson’s whiskey at half past noon and who can blame him?
I’d be raring to throw back a stiff one, too, if I had to sit around in a box that’s hardly bigger than a coffin for two hours straight while every sweaty and farty kid in the parish files in to tell him their list of sins. Having to listen to what unholy screwups we all are week after week has got to make that priest feel like he’s falling down on the job, which is probably why he drinks so much.
After I check Daddy’s Timex, I tell the boy I’ll be blissfully wedded to someday, “I only got nine minutes left. Give me the rest of the money ya took out of the willow and take Birdie over to St. Francis and trim her bangs, and whatever you do, I’m warning you, batten down your hatches, dear. Our little dreamboat has been a very slippery character all morning.”
Soon as Charlie digs the last of our treasury bills out of his black hightop and says, “Good luck with Father Ted and getting the skinny offa Kitten,” I take off toward the confessional on the other side of the church that the rest of the bad kids are standing outside of, including the worst of the worst, the delinquent who I wanted to see least of all today, the kid who’s got me at #1 on his WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE list—Butch Seeback. It is my general policy to avoid him at all costs, but there is no getting around him this time. (Standing next to Kitten the way he is, Butch looks like a bowling ball about to knock down a pin.)
Moving within smacking distance of that maniac is not on my TO-DO list, so believe me, instead of weaving through these pews, I’d much rather turn tail and hide under our back porch, which I’d happily do if I hadn’t already spotted #5 on my SHIT LIST, Jenny Radtke. The little brownnoser has probably spent the whole morning saying rosaries that I wouldn’t show up so she could report me to Louise. She’s sitting right across from the confession box with that sickeningly sweet smile she’s always got glued on her face. As usual, her perfect blond pageboy that I plan to someday hack off with the dullest blade of Daddy’s Swiss Army Knife after I slip a mickey into her punch during a sock hop is Breck-shampoo perfect, and the spelling bee medal that once belonged to me and I vow will again, is hanging from her neck. She’s fingering the prize, flaunting it in my face, when I slide through the pew in front of her on my way to the sinner’s line and what I wouldn’t give to flatten her already flat face even further.
And besides that little rat fink Radtke tattling to my mother, the other important reason I gotta stick around, like it or not, is because I have a presidential duty to uphold. If The Mutual Admiration Society is going to have any chance at all of figuring out just what the heck happened to our principal so we can clear Mr. McGinty’s name, I can’t lose what might be my only chance in the near future to talk to the #1 most up-to-the-minute, in-the-know kid in the neighborhood.
FACT: Looks like Kitten Jablonski and Butch Seeback have become an item.
PROOF: She’s letting him snap her bra strap.
My confidential source and one of my worst enemies becoming a couple is enough to turn my stomach inside out and hang it out to dry, but it’s not that big of a shock that Kitten thinks Butch is hot stuff. When her and me
and Birdie go to the movies together some Saturdays, Kitten always roots for the gunslingers in the black hats and the monsters in the creature features.
FACT: Butch and Kitten are living proof of the famous saying “Love is blind.”
PROOF: Love is probably also deaf, because that’s the only explanation I can come up with for someone as on the ball as Kitten wanting to swap spit with a kid who looks like the bank vault at the First Wisconsin Bank but sounds like Lamb Chop on the Captain Kangaroo show.
When my confidential informant spots me hustling toward her, she shoves Freddie Beaudry out of the line of a dozen kids waiting to confess and waves me over. Not out of the goodness of her heart, mind you. Kitten is a very tough cookie who really isn’t known for that. She is a smooth operator—her snitches report to her day and night—who never does nothin’ or says nothin’ for nothin’. There is always a price.
When I land at the spot she cleared out for me, Kitten says outta the side of her mouth very fast, like always, because time is money, “Cuttin’ it pretty close today, Finley. What’s shakin’?”
“I been busy all morning trying to find out what happened to Sister Margaret Mary,” I say. “What’d ya hear?”
When she puts her hand out, I place two bucks in it—one for giving me skips and one for whatever she’s about to tell me. “I know what you’re thinkin’, but Butch didn’t have nothin’ to do with it,” Kitten says with her grin that always makes me miss July, because her teeth are so yellow and crooked that they remind me of the ears of corn that Louise won’t buy at the Red Owl. “He was with me all night.”
That’s sickening, but not breaking news, because I already drew a line through Butch’s name on my QUESTION OR SURVEIL list, but I’m not going to ask her for my money back, because she wouldn’t give it to me.
“Tell ya what I’m gonna do.” Kitten must be in a really good mood, because she has what every girl in this neighborhood wants, a steady boyfriend, even if he is repulsive, ’cause she tells me much more charitably than she usually would, “Gimme three more bucks and I’ll give ya a big fat hint about Sister Margaret Mary’s disappearance.” After I happily hand over the cash, she makes a big show of sticking the bills down the front of her shirt, because she’s one of the few eighth-grade girls who doesn’t have to stuff socks into her bra every morning. “This morning, Sister Prudence found a note in Sister Margaret Mary’s cell that told—”
“A note?!” This is such great news that if I was Birdie, I would do the woo . . . woo . . . woo Indian celebration dance right down the main aisle of church. Charlie was wrong and I was right! Sister was kidnapped just the way I thought she was!
FACT: Whoever snatched our principal wasn’t Mr. McGinty.
PROOF: It just dawned on me that thinking this whole time that he was the guy who coulda kidnapped her was really, really, really, really stupid. Nobody goes around taking people just for the hell of it, they do it for the money, and our godfather is the last person in the neighborhood who needs bucks, so all is not lost! The Mutual Admiration Society could still find the much poorer guilty party and earn a reward from the cops or figure out some way to blackmail him, and what a feather in our detecting cap that would be!
I excitedly ask Kitten, “How much dough did the kidnapper tell the sisters he wants in the ransom note?”
She looks confused and says, “The who? The what?”
Because she’s so tall, I figure she must not of heard me, so I stand up on my toes to repeat myself. I paid for this confidential information with hard-earned blackmail money and I don’t want to share it with every other bad kid standing in this confession line, so I whisper close to her face, “The kidnapper,” which goes to show how thrilled I am at this recent turn of events, because that’s a very risky thing to do, considering her leprosy pimples and my future as a Miss America contestant. “How much ransom money does he want to return Sister Margaret Mary to the nunnery?”
Kitten snaps her head back and says, “What’s wrong with you? Ya got the delirious flu or something, Finley? I didn’t say nothin’ about a kidnapping or ransom money.”
“But . . . but . . . you just said Sister Prudence found a note and I . . . I . . .”
Damnation!
I assumed again.
If Kitten’s information is correct—and I have no reason at all to doubt a kid that I’ve admired since kindergarten when she flicked a booger into Sister Jane’s carton of milk and blamed it on Jenny Radtke—The Mutual Admiration Society is back to square one: THE CASE OF THE MISSING NUN WHO MIGHT BE KIDNAPPED AND MURDERED BUT NOT BY MR. MCGINTY.
I could kick myself and that lying Magic 8 Ball all the way down Keefe Ave.!
This hasn’t been a life-changing day at all. This has been a life-wasting day. I could’ve been doing so many more useful things all morning, like . . . like spying on Skip Abernathy to see if it’s him who stole over $200 out of the Pagan Baby collection box or I could have spent some time thinking up an advertising slogan for Louise’s treasury election or taken a bath and practiced my swimming or worked on any of the other more useful numbers on my TO-DO list.
I have suffered such a blow that I desperately ask Kitten without thinking, “Are you sure Sister hasn’t been kidnapped?”
Uh-oh.
That was a big mistake.
Kitten’s got the business slogan “Satisfaction guaranteed,” but if you ever doubt her information? Believe me, the only guarantee you’re gonna get is that she’ll give you the worst Indian burn you ever had in your life. I’m not kidding, Cochise would be jealous. (No joke.)
She’s already put her hands into a grasping, twisting position. “Ya ain’t doubting my information, are ya, Finley?”
I don’t think she meant for Butch to hear that, but he did, because he belts out in his high-pitched lamb voice, “Ya hear that, everybody? The Finley snot just doubted Kitten’s information!”
All of a sudden the kids that were ratting their hair and cracking their gum and making out in the confession line freeze in place, and even Mrs. Cumberland, who was practicing the organ in the choir loft, quits playing “Holy, Holy, Holy” in the middle of the chorus.
Of course, I didn’t mean to ask Kitten if she was sure she knew what’s going on in the neighborhood. It just slipped out. But doubting her information like that? Especially in front of all these kids? That was . . . that was like asking Mr. Skank if he knows how to embalm a body or . . . or asking Mr. Yerkovich at Bloomers flowers if he knows how to arrange a wedding bouquet or asking Mr. McGinty if he knows how to dig a proper grave. Those are their “bottom lines” and Butch is making it sound like I just crossed Kitten’s!
I peek over to where I left my troop of two to see if they noticed how quiet it’s gotten, and how I could really use some help, but it looks like I can’t count on them to come to my rescue. Charlie’s back is turned, and he’s busy doing exactly what I asked him to do. He’s got out his whittling knife and his determined look and is trimming Birdie’s too-long bangs the way she likes them as they chatter away to one another, probably about what a great saint Francis is or something else dumb.
I have taken a long walk off a very, very, very, very short pier. And I’m positive that groveling is not going to get me out of the fix I’m in, but I give it a shot and try to tell Kitten anyway, “I . . . I didn’t mean to doubt . . . I’m sorry.”
If it was just the two of us standing here getting ready to confess, I’m pretty sure she’d just punch me in the arm and say, Don’t let it happen again, Finley, because she knows how highly I regard her and I have never, not once, over all these years questioned how good she is at her job. But with all the greasers hanging on her every word and her new boyfriend egging everybody on, she’s got no choice. She has to think of her reputation.
Kitten leans down, grabs my left wrist, and twists the ever-lovin’ hell out of it, and fine, I guess I deserved that. But then, I don’t know, ya know? Maybe she’s showing off for Butch or maybe it’s just that �
��time of the month” the eighth-grade girls talk about at recess or maybe I hurt her feelings or something, but Kitten grins with her corn teeth and says loud enough for all the greasers in the confession line to hear, “Finley here”—she hard-noogies the top of my head with her bony knuckles—“I guess she knows better than me and doesn’t need my information.” There’s lots of laughing and booing and cat-calling from the crowd. “Sooo . . . go ahead, kid. Show us what ya got. Find out on your own what happened to Sister Margaret Mary.” My wrist is burning and now I got a headache and I think I might toss my cookies, because I can tell that Kitten’s not done humiliating me for doubting her by the look on her pimply face—I’ve seen this look many, many times over the years. She’s about to growl out the dreaded life-changing challenge that no kid in the neighborhood ever wants to hear, “I dare ya.”
That’s when Mrs. Cumberland goes back to playing “Holy, Holy, Holy” on the organ, and the greasers go back to snapping their Black Jack gum, and Butch Seeback starts bleating, and brownnosing Jenny Radtke hyena-giggles because a dare is a very big deal around here. Especially one that comes out of Kitten Jablonski’s mouth. She’s dared kids to stay overnight in the abandoned haunted house on 70th St. where a murder took place or jump offa the roof of school or steal real gold St. Christopher medals off of gravestones when jumpy and armed Mr. McGinty is just a few yards away or slam back so many potato pancakes that they throw up on one of the nuns on Fish Fry Friday.
Now that I know that Sister Margaret Mary is not dead and not been kidnapped, that means that the only mystery The Mutual Admiration Society has left to solve is finding her, which I really, really, really, really don’t want to do. For Birdie’s sake, wherever our overly strict principal she is, I hope she stays there forever. But because of Kitten’s dare, I really don’t have any choice in the matter now, do I. Her legion of snitches will be spying on me from every street corner and alley and from behind every tree and garage in the neighborhood for the next three days, and if I don’t look like I’m at least trying to find out what happened to our missing principal, those snitches will report back to her and I’ll be so far up shit creek without a paddle that it won’t be funny.
