The bedroom window screen does look like somebody used their fingernails on it, but that’s not enough to convince Dave to call in the troops. I search harder. Lift up branches and run my hands over the grass, but I don’t come up with a pizza cutter or anything else sharp that Greasy Al coulda used to slice open our screen and Troo’s neck.
When I inch back around the corner of the house, worried that Molinari could still be lurking around, that’s when I see my sister. She’s not out here looking for me. She didn’t even notice I wasn’t lying next to her anymore. Sometimes in the night, she starts missing Daddy too much and thinks too long about how he’d still be here if she hadn’t accidentally killed him, so she’ll come out to the glider in the backyard and smoke a cigarette and rock really fast. I can’t let her know that I’m watching. I want to rush over and tell her that accidents happen, but the last time I tried that she shoved me down on the ground and kicked me. She didn’t mean to hurt me. She just can’t stand it if anybody sees her not pretending to be brave, not whistling in the dark. But tonight, Troo isn’t gliding and puffing away like usual. She’s lying on her tummy next to the vegetable garden, breathing in the dirt smell that Daddy always had on his overalls after a hard day in the field. I can hear some cursing mixed in with her crying. I want so bad to put my arms around her, but she’d hate it if I did. All I can do is slink back to our room on still shaky legs and wait.
By the time Troo comes back to bed, I think hours musta gone by. I wasn’t worried because I was sure she fell asleep out in the yard the way she does sometimes. But when she spoons me, she smells like something else besides baby powder and grass. I can’t put my finger on it. I know I’ve smelled it before, I just can’t remember where or when. It has a rusty odor.
I bolt up and ask her where she went, but she laughs and says, “What are you talkin’ about, numnuts? I been here the whole time. Go back to sleep.”
I wouldn’t even if I could. I’m sure that after she cried herself out in the backyard over Daddy’s being gone, she decided to believe me about pepperoni-reeking Greasy Al being outside our bedroom window. I bet she flew into the night, tryin’ to sniff him out. She might even try again. That’s why I’m gonna stay on my toes until I hear Mother wake up with the clanking of the milkman’s bottles to put on her face.
At the breakfast table, freshly shaved and smelling like starch, Dave tells me over crispy bacon and scrambled eggs, “Good news, Sally! Alfred Molinari was spotted in a park yesterday afternoon by the Racine police.”
“I…” I desperately want to tell my father that those cops should get their eyes tested. Let him know that if I hadn’t woken up last night, Molinari would’ve slid over our windowsill, stuffed Troo under his arm and took off to someplace where he could torture her in private before I was able to scream bloody murder. But in this sunny kitchen with the smell of just-cut grass coming through the window and the birds singing their hearts out and coffee percolating, I keep my lips zipped. Troo’d never talk to me again if I give Dave a clue to Molinari’s recent whereabouts. My sister doesn’t want Detective Rasmussen to be the one to catch Greasy Al. She needs to be the one who hangs him by his thumbs.
Dave flaps open the Milwaukee Sentinel and sticks his nose in the sports section, his favorite part. “Big game tonight,” he says.
He doesn’t mean that the Braves are playing out at County Stadium. He’s talking about the one that’s going to happen over at the playground later on. The one game of the summer that nobody in the neighborhood misses.
Mother, who looks lovely in a creamy blouse, lights up a cigarette and says, “We’ll be there rootin’ for you, right, girls?”
The urge to tell Dave about Greasy Al paying us a visit last night is so powerful, but I can’t face the rest of my life with my sister not speaking to me, I just can’t. So I tell him, “Wouldn’t miss it for the world. Go get ’em, tiger.”
Troo doesn’t wish him good luck. She gives Dave a dirty look, stabs her fork down at her plate and doesn’t even thank him for making her French toast.
Chapter Thirteen
I will always love baseball the same way Daddy did. Unfortunately, coming to these games puts me in a pickle. I spend most of every inning thinking about how much he would love being here on a hot summer night and how bad I miss feeling his hairy arm pressed against mine, the look of his chipped-tooth smile after a really great play and how he’d jump to his feet and shout, “That’s showin’ ’em who’s boss!”
How do you make yourself forget?
It’s the Policemen (The Clobbering Coppers) versus the Feelin’ Good Cookie men (Chips Off the Old Block) under the playground’s big lights tonight. I’m sitting high up so I can get a bird’s-eye view, but not of the action out on the diamond. I’m memorizing the faces of the people coming and going. I’m looking for Greasy Al. It would be so simple for him to blend into this crowd and bide his time, especially if he was wearing a disguise like a black beard or something. After the ninth inning, he could stream out the gates with everybody else and hurry to hide between houses to follow a little girl named Troo O’Malley home. When I least expected it, that’s when he’d reach out from behind a tree and grab her. I gotta keep my eyes peeled and this is no easy job.
The bleachers around the diamond are always packed when these two teams go at each other. The last time they played it got kinda heated up and nobody talked to anybody for about a week. Mr. Jessup, who is the regular ump, is pretty strict. He got on everybody’s nerves so bad reciting the rules of the game that one of the factory men yelled out from the crowd, “Shut up already with the sermon on the mound,” and then somebody else offered Dave ten dollars to shoot Mr. Jessup and it went downhill from there.
That’s why Father Mickey is behind home plate tonight. Nobody would dare question his infallible calls. Troo is chatting up a storm with him. Usually she doesn’t like people to fidget with her, so I’m shocked when Father licks his finger and rubs it across a smudge on her cheek and she doesn’t seem to mind at all. Her religious instruction must be going really, really well, so that’s at least one thing I can like about him.
Wendy Latour comes skipping through the playground gates with the rhinestone tiara on her head and when she spots me, she spreads her legs and shouts out the same way she always does, “Thally O’Malley, hi, hi, hi!” After she throws me lots of See the USA in your Chevrolet Dinah Shore kisses, she tries to crawl up the bleachers to give me one of her enormous hugs, but she steps on somebody’s hand so Artie has to pull her back. He is really taking Charlie Fitch’s running away to heart. He looks like the “Wreck of the Hesperus,” which I have never actually seen but sounds pretty bad. All wrecks are.
Mary Lane’s mother musta given her a Toni Home Permanent Wave and left it in too long. She looks like she got struck by lightning. She is strolling alongside Fire Chief Bailey’s son, Skip, probably asking him about different and better ways to start fires. She set one last night at the empty television repair store on Lisbon Street. It’s not seeing a place burn down that she likes so much. It’s the trucks that come to put out the fire that she adores. She would like to drive a hook and ladder someday, but that will never happen because they’re called firemen and not firewomen, but that’s one of the other reasons I like her so much. She holds on to her dreams even if they’re bound to go up in smoke.
I can see Willie O’Hara playing rock, paper, scissors with Debbie, the peppy counselor, and Fast Susie Fazio is leaning against one of the swing poles. She’s flirting with her boyfriend, The Mangling Meatball. Her long black hair is swishing back and forth across her bosoms that are pushing at the seams of her white blouse like they’re trying to make a break for it.