by Lesley Kagen
It’s one thing to try and fail at a dare—razzing for a month or so, some sittings on the bubbler, gum in my hair, etc.—but if a kid doesn’t give it her best shot, well. If Birdie and me don’t end up running away, I’ll never be able to leave the house or walk down the halls at school or the aisles of church or anywhere else in the neighborhood without some kid clucking and calling me a yellow-bellied chicken shit or throwing an egg at me. They inflicted so much cruel and unusual punishment on Mary Olson when she ignored one of Kitten’s dares that her family had to move out of the parish. To another state.
So before I disappear through the red velvet confessional curtain to tell Father Ted my sins, I do what I gotta do. Trying to hold back my tears, I look up to Kitten and croak out, “I accept your dare,” and then I spit in my hand and she does the same, and when we shake on it, my fate has been sealed.
19
CLOUD NINE
Maybe as a reward for letting Father Ted get out of the black box and over to his favorite barstool at Lonnigan’s faster, and for not farting, he goes easy on me for a change. After I get done telling him a short list of some of my real sins that aren’t that bad—being mean to my sister, not saying my prayers, only half following the Fourth Commandment to honor my father and my mother—he absolves me with the Latin forgiveness words and assigns me my penance. “Say three Hail Marys, Shirley,” he tells me from behind the black curtain. “Send the Jablonski kid in, and tell the rest of those delinquents to say the Stations of the Cross,” and then he slams the window shut in a very thirsty way.
I don’t want to do what Father told me to do, but to keep my soul from getting any filthier than it already is, when I come back through the red velvet curtain, I dutifully tell Kitten, “You’re up,” and then I give his instructions to the kids still in line.
Of course, there’s a rumble of grumbling and swearing, even though these greasers wouldn’t dream of sticking around to say the Stations. They’re only here today, same as me, because their mothers are probably paying Jenny Radtke a quarter to snitch on them, too. They’ll hang around long enough until that blond rat with the spelling medal that is rightfully mine leaves, and then they’ll all head up to the Milky Way Drive-In for a lunch of out-of-this-world burgers and to gun their engines and ogle girls and smear ketchup on one another and play mumblety-peg with their switchblades.
After Kitten enters the confessional, without her to stand between us, I can tell by the sneer on his face that Butch Seeback is itching to take a shot at me. I try to run, but in my weakened state, I don’t get very far before the missal he took out of a pew hits a bull’s-eye on the back of my head and almost sends me sprawling in the main aisle.
“Hey, Trigger, why the long face?” Charlie cracks as I squeeze into the pew between him and Birdie. “Did Butch threaten to rearrange your mouth to the back of your head again, or didn’t Kitten have any good information?”
“You could say that.” I rub the part of my head that got hit by Seeback’s missal missile, tell my fiancé that my sister’s bangs look very nice, and then I ask him to hold on for a second because I need to get my wits about me and update my most important list while everything is still fresh in my mind, or before I develop a case of amnesia from the noogie Kitten gave me and the smack on the back of the head that her new boyfriend treated me to.
TO-DO
1. Take tender loving care of Birdie.
2. Solve whatever happened to Sister Margaret Mary for big blackmail or reward bucks.
2. Hope that we don’t find out why Mr. McGinty kidnapped and murdered Sister M & M and concentrate on finding someone else who did.
2. Try to do Kitten’s dare and find Sister Margaret Mary.
3. Make Gert Klement think her arteries are going as hard as her heart.
4. Catch whoever stole over $200 out of the Pagan Baby collection box.
5. Practice your Miss America routine.
6. Learn how to swim.
7. Be a good dry-martini-making fiancée to Charlie.
8. Do not get caught blackmailing or spying.
9. Just think about making a real confession to Father Ted, before it’s too late.
10. Stop at Bloomers for pink roses for Daddy.
11. Think up a catchy advertising slogan for Louise that might help her beat Mrs. Tate in the election so she doesn’t blame Birdie and me when she loses.
Charlie knows how my temper flares if anybody interrupts me when I’m working on a list, so he slouches back against the pew, weaves his fingers together, and plays that “Here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open the door and see all the people” game with Birdie until I have my business squared away and I’m feeling less dizzy.
“So?” he asks. “What’d Kitten have to say about Sister Margaret Mary?”
“You’ll be happy to know that you were right about everything. Sister M and M wasn’t kidnapped and she didn’t have an accident, either.” I repeat to Charlie the exact words Kitten said before I cut her off at the pass: “This morning, Sister Prudence found a note in Sister Margaret Mary’s cell that—”
“Let the nuns know where she was going?” Charlie says.
“I think so.” I sigh stronger than Louise does when she stares at me like I’m a lost cause, and for once I’d have to agree with her. “But I thought when Kitten first mentioned that a note was found that it was a ransom note and when she told me it wasn’t, I got so disappointed that I accidentally questioned her information and she . . . she . . .” When my lips begin to tremble, Charlie, who keeps close track of the who, what, where, when, and why goings-on in the neighborhood, picks up my hand, looks at my red wrist, cringes, and says, “She gave you this hideous Indian burn.” He closes his eyes the way he does when he’s feeling very sad or when he’s trying to recall one of his statistics. “I know that hurts like the dickens, but look at it this way. Ya got off lucky ’cause she likes you and Birdie so much. If any other kid questioned her information in front of the other greasers like you did, she’d . . . she’d . . .” He opens his beautiful green eyes, sees the look on my face, and gulps. “Kitten dared you,” he says with a groan, but Birdie doesn’t. Not because she doesn’t understand the hot water I’m in, but because she doesn’t understand anything at this point in the game. My little dreamboat has hauled anchor and sailed off to parts unknown. She’s rocking back and forth in the pew next to me, grinning up at St. Francis like the two of them are taking a stroll on the deck of a luxury cruise liner on the high seas.
After I tell Charlie what Kitten dared me to do, he says, “Oh, Tessie, The M . . . m . . . m . . .” He hates it when he nervous stutters, so he looks up to his favorite saint for a little help and his prayer is answered. “The Mutual Admiration Society will find out what happened to Sister Margaret Mary, we will.” He picks up my hand and blows on my wrist to cool it down. “I know how much you were countin’ on solving this case, but you gotta remember the encouraging words from the first chapter of Modern Detection. ‘Don’t give up. If the investigation you’re working on isn’t fruitful, try shakin’ another suspicious tree.’”
I know that Charlie’s trying to cheer me up by reminding me that I have the two people I love most in the world to lean on over the next three days and that we have so many bad apples in this neighborhood that we’ll have no problem finding another case to solve, but after striking out all morning, I’m feeling more like gum stuck on the bottom of a shoe than a gumshoe.
“I wish you the best of luck,” I tell Charlie. “I’m throwing in the detecting towel.”
“Aw, c’mon, Tessie,” Charlie says. “Don’t be that way. You know that—”
1:24 p.m. “We gotta go,” I say before he can tell me to keep my sunny side up. I love him very much, but this is one of the things we do not have in common. How can he be so cheerfully sad all the time? It’s like being hungrily full or . . . or smartly dumb, which, well, I guess I am the perfect example of. “Louise wants us to clean up the house, and then I gott
a get busy workin’ on the dare.”
When the three of us pass the pew Jenny Radtke is still sitting in, she’s brushing her perfect little blond pageboy when she laughs and says, “The same way you’ve failed to beat me in the spelling bees, you’ll fail to complete Kitten’s dare, and then ya know what’s gonna happen, ya loser? You’ll be an even bigger laughingstock, which is going to wreck your mother’s chances of becoming the new treasurer of the Pagan Baby Society.”
I lunge at her and snarl, “Sit on a screwdriver and rotate, ya stupid little squealer,” which wasn’t half as much fun as something else I had in mind, before levelheaded Charlie planted himself between her and me so I couldn’t commit spelling-medal strangulation.
“Hey,” he whispers to my back as I tug my still-drifting sister down the main aisle of St. Kate’s feeling lower than low, bluer even than one of Gracie Carver’s Billie Holiday songs she likes to listen to when she cleans the church. “I’m going to stay and light some candles for my ma, but after ya get your chores done, we should go over to the convent and talk to Linda O’Brien. She got sentenced to work in the kitchen this week for telling her mother that she wouldn’t know her ass from a hole in the ground, so she’s probably the snitch who told Kitten about Sister Margaret Mary’s note that Sister Prudence found. You could bribe Linda to tell you where Sister is with the rest of our treasury money.”
That’s very sweet of Charlie, but very dopey. First off, we only have three dollars left after I paid Kitten for information, and second off, Linda O’Brien wouldn’t tell us where our principal went even if she knows. She’d never risk that, not for all the money in the world. Believe me, nobody wants to double-cross Kitten. (There are stories floating around the neighborhood about kids who have that are too gruesome to repeat in mixed company.)
When we reach the church doors, gentlemanly Charlie opens them for Birdie and me, and I guess I must look pretty pathetic, because he finally does the something that I have been wanting and waiting for him to do for the longest time. He uses his mouth for something other than talking!
And then, I don’t know what the hell happened, because I’m not kidding, the sweet peck on my cheek from his lips that are so much softer than I ever imagined drove any bad thoughts I was having out of my brain faster than St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland.
I feel lighter than air! I’m floating down the steps of St. Kate’s on cloud nine! I forget that I am a detective who was so positive that she had a kidnapping and murder case on her hands but was 100% wrong. I forget that I shook on a dare that could make my life, my sister’s, and my mother’s take a terrible turn for the worst. I even forget to miss Daddy.
It’s my little dreamboat Birdie who brings me back to earth, for a change, after we make the turn onto our block and she docks herself in front of the Tates’ house.
Birdie points and says, “Uh-oh.”
She’s talking about the new, huge sign our mother’s opponent has sticking out of her front lawn. It’s almost as big as the WORKS OF ART billboard her brother and my friend, “The Leonardo da Vinci of Undertaking,” has on top of the old Goodyear tire store on North Ave.
TWO-FOUR-SIX-EIGHT!
WHO’S NEVER MISSED A PAGAN BABY MEETING?
NANCY TATE!
Maybe Louise was right after all and her opponent really is a lame duck, because she’s wasted a piece of perfectly good poster board on a terrible slogan that isn’t even true. The gal formerly known as Mommy has many, many faults, but to the best of my knowledge, the one and only time she ever stayed home on a Thursday night was when Doc Reynolds made her, because she had a strepped throat. So if Mrs. Tate is trying to convince the voters in the parish with her new advertising sign to make her the treasurer because our mother is an undependable meeting-misser, she’s barking up the wrong—
Damnation!
Louise got so wrapped up in going out to dinner at Mama Mia Ristorante with what’s-his-name after her first day at work at the Clark station that she completely forgot all about tonight’s Pagan Baby meeting! Her not showing up at the school gym at 6:00 p.m. sharp to pack cardboard boxes with Ban deodorant, Ivory soap, Breck shampoo, and all the rest of the “gifts” a.k.a. “bribes” those gals send to the jungle will destroy her chances of being the new treasurer.
FACT: The patchwork quilts Mrs. Tate makes on her Singer sewing machine are packed in those boxes that are going to the Congo, too, but they’re not bribes. If those natives don’t right away stop voodoo worshipping and convert to worshipping Jesus, those quilts are used as torture devices.
PROOF: If the parents don’t sign on the dotted line ASAP, Kitten Jablonski told me that Gert instructs the missionaries to roll them up in those patchwork quilts and keep them there until they agree to let the priests baptize their babes in the Amazon River.
That’s how evil and eye-for-an-eye Gert Klement is!
And since she was the one who nominated Louise for the treasury job, if our mother makes her look bad in front of the whole parish by skipping the get-together in the gym tonight so she can go out for a fancy Italian dinner while all the rest of them are breaking their backs packing those boxes, mark my words, Gert will act very revengefully. In the name of the Lord, of course.
Mrs. Tate must’ve heard through the grapevine that Louise was going to be slurping up spaghetti tonight with Moron Gallagher instead of attending the meeting and she got on the stick and made up this huge advertising sign to spread the news. Or maybe it was Louise herself who smiled at the weak-chinned, shorter-than-Daddy lout at her side at Mr. Peterman’s funeral and bragged about how she was going straight from work to a supper date after one of the gals asked her where she found the gall to show up looking like Rita Hayworth on May Day when all the rest of them were looking like Bette Davis on Ash Wednesday.
This is not looking good, unless . . .
Mrs. Tate wouldn’t remind Louise about tonight’s meeting for obvious reasons, but did Kitten’s mother, Mrs. Doreen “Dory” Jablonski, happen to pull her best friend to the side at the funeral and tell her, If you want to win that election, doll, you can’t miss the meeting tonight. Ya better postpone your date to tomorrow night?
Dang, I sure hope so, for more than one reason.
Even though I can’t really spare the time because I am under so much pressure to complete the dare to find out where Sister Margaret Mary went, I have to keep my strength up. So tomorrow night, I’ll bow my head and thank St. Peter, the patron saint of fishermen, the way I always do every Friday, for providing at least one meal a week that I don’t have to spend worrying if Birdie and me are being food poisoned by Louise.
Wait just a cotton-pickin’ minute.
Louise moving her date from tonight to tomorrow night could work out much better than I could ever have dreamed of! Friday Fish Fry would be the perfect place to act on one of these ideas I came up with for the guy who is trying to take Daddy’s place. #4 is what I got in mind:
JUST DESSERTS
Find out where the numbskull lives and smear black shoe polish on his Chevy’s whitewalls.
Put a bag of burning dog doo-doo on his porch, ring the doorbell, and run.
Call him at his “alleged” job at the American Motors plant and use that impression you learned from watching gangster movies where the wops are always threatening their enemies: Dis is Three-Fingered Louie Galetti and you-a better stay away from that doll Louise Finley if you-a don’ wanna be fitted for a cement raincoat, ya goomba.
Doctor up his food, if you ever get to meet him face-to-face.
I guess Charlie’s long-awaited kiss did not only fuel my heart, it must be fueling my brain with high octane, because on top of the genius revenge I’m already planning for Leon Gallagher, I’ve just had another brilliant idea! This one for my mother’s opponent in the Pagan Baby election!
“Tessie?” Birdie tugs on the bottom of my T-shirt. “You seein’ what I’m seein’?”
“Only if you’re ESPing me and seein’ the new
sign I’m gonna stick in the Tates’ lawn tomorrow night.” I mad-scientist laugh, the way they do in the movies after they’ve dreamed up something really nasty.
“Hark!” Birdie shouts in her old-timey voice.
Still planning out what I’m hoping to pull on what’s-his-name at the fish fry if the timing is right, and what I’m definitely going to pull on Mrs. Tate, I don’t really pay attention to what Birdie is harking about. I figure it’s probably just a robin redbreast sitting on a tree branch or something shiny she’s found sparkling out of a sidewalk crack, until she elbows me hard in the side and says, “A certain unwieldy elderly lady who does not have our best interests at heart, sister dear, has returned from unfortunate Mister Peterman’s funeral.” She raises her arm and points up the block at the white Rambler with the little black flag waving off its antenna that’s coming down Keefe Ave. “To avoid being thoroughly interrogated and enduring the subsequent consequences which are surely to be inflicted upon us after Missus Klement shares our forbidden location with our mater-familias, might I suggest that we return to our homestead posthaste?”
20
O, DIOS MIO, I AM SO MUCHO TEMPTED
The Finley sisters are so used to running away from our putrid neighbor that it isn’t until after we half tripped up our porch steps, yanked open the door of the house, and sagged onto the sofa huffing and puffing that we figured out that we didn’t even need to amscray—another kind of Latin, this one pig—when we saw Gert’s boxy car cruising down the block toward us. Louise told me to go to confession this morning before she left for work and that’s exactly where Birdie and me were coming from.
