Good Graces (2 page)

“She’s wrong.” Mrs. Kambowski is the boss of the Finney Library who won’t stop teaching my sister these French words no matter how many times I politely ask her to stop. “Ya know as good as me that goin’ someplace you’ve never been before can turn out really bad,” I remind Troo. “Remember what happened to Julie Adams in the
Creature from the Black Lagoon
when she went to the Amazon? And what about Sky King? He always gets into trouble when he goes flyin’ off into the horizon.” Daddy and I never missed that show because he was a pilot, too. “And . . . and what about all the bad stuff that happened to us when we moved from the country to the city?”

“I knew you’d say that,” she says with a smile that can bring the dead back to life. She inherited it from Daddy. He gave her her nickname, too. After she got a rusty nail pulled out of her heel and didn’t even flinch, he started calling her “a real trouper” and then because that took too long to say we began to call her Trooper and then shortened it even more. Her real name is Margaret. I also call her my Troo genius because she is really smart. She can come up with plans like nobody’s business. Like this camp one she’s trying to sell to me harder than the Fuller Brush man tries to talk Mother into a new broom even though the old one’s still got plenty of bristles. “That’s why I was thinkin’ we wouldn’t go someplace brand-new. We could go to the same camp Mary Lane went to last year. That one up in Rhinelander. She bragged about it so much . . . it’s like we’ve already been there, right?”

“Wrong.” Down the block, Bobby Darin is singing on the radio, “Won’t you come home Bill Bailey,” and that has to be a sign from God to stay put right where I am. I might not have a lot of belief in Him anymore, but I got enough to pay attention to the details.

Still struggling with the laces, Troo says, “I’m . . . I’m not thinkin’ about me.”

Yes, she is.

“I looked up what’s wrong with you in Mother’s medical book. An ocean voyage or a change of scenery is the best cure for people who have lunatic imaginations,” she says in her dolly voice, which is so hard not to give in to even if you know she’s just putting it on to get what she wants; it’s adorable. “Since ya don’t like being near water so much anymore, I figure a boat trip is out.” When I don’t agree, she doesn’t give up. She never does. “I bet you’d sleep a lot better breathin’ in all that country air.”

I doubt it.

Troo hits the hay every night like a bale falling outta our old barn loft. Wrapped in Daddy’s sky-blue work shirt that still has the smell of his Aqua Velva hidden under the collar, she holds her baby doll Annie up to her cheek and I feel her sweaty leg pressed up to mine and sometimes I count the freckles on her nose to see if she sprouted any new ones or walk my bare feet against the bedroom wall because it’s always cooler on that wall and my thoughts go round and round and I flip over on my tummy and stare at the picture of Daddy that hangs over our bed. He’s in a boat holding up a fish. His hair is blown into two horns. Troo says that he looks “devil-may-care” in that picture and maybe he does, but he probably isn’t anymore. I didn’t do that good a job last summer keeping my sister safe the way he asked me to. It seems like no matter how hard I try to be prepared I’m not ready for the bad when it shows up. Take Bobby Brophy. He was the playground counselor who almost murdered and molested me last summer and I didn’t suspect a thing. He hurt my sister, too. Knocked her out cold.

“Hey!” Troo nudges me. “I just remembered. The camp’s in a pine forest. That means it’d smell like Christmas every morning and that’s your favorite holiday.” She brings one sneaker and then the other into my lap and says, “Tie me up.”

Oh, how I wish I could. With a strong rope. I would anchor her to me.

“And ya know what the best part of us goin’ to camp would be, the real
pièce de résistance
?” she says. “You won’t have to visit Doc Keller while we’re gone!”

Mother makes me go up to his office on North Avenue once a week so he can give me a dose of cod liver oil and a stern lecture with his breath that smells like old vase water. He warns me each and every time that I better get my imagination under control or else. “An idle mind is the devil’s workshop,” he says, but Doc couldn’t be more wrong. My mind is never idle. Never ever. And it’s getting worse. I think all that cod liver oil might be greasing my wheels.

“Whatta ya say, Sal, my gal?” My sister picks up my hand and twines her fingers through mine. She knows I’m a sucker for that. “Ya in?”

“But what about Mother?” I ask. Through the screen door, I can hear the sound of her picking up the house. She’s still kinda wobbly. If somebody you know gets sick with a gall bladder that turns into liver problems and then a staph infection like what happened to her last summer, you better start saying your prayers. Doc Keller told all of us that he’d never heard of a person getting over something that fatal. “Who’s gonna get her nummy and what if she needs something like—”

Troo hawks and throws a loogie, which is something she has started doing lately when she wants to make a point. “What’s-his-name can take care of her.”

She means Dave, who bends over backwards for Troo, same as me, so against my better judgment, which I don’t hardly have much left of anymore, I end up telling him that night out on the backyard bench that both of us want to go to Camp Towering Pines in the worst possible way. I didn’t want to, but I
had
to lie to him. I know my sister. She’d figure out some way to go to that camp without me. There’s no telling what kind of trouble she could get into if I wasn’t there to stop her. And I made that promise to Daddy that I’ll never break. Even if my life depends on it.

A
ll I keep thinking about on the six-hour bus ride up to Rhinelander is how hard it is to keep my sister under my thumb in the neighborhood. In a new and different place she could slip through my fingers so easy. This is not even counting that she could drown, get shot through the heart by an archery arrow or, worst of all, the counselors could do something when she least expects it. I asked Dave about them after he pulled some strings to get us into Camp Towering Pines. He told me not to worry, that there would be only girl counselors and, “Maybe getting away for a while will do you some good, kiddo.”

At the start of the trip, Troo was by my side counting license plates and singing along with the rest of the kids the
99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall
song, but I didn’t open my mouth. I was afraid I might toss my cookies again. I already did once and my sister’s mad at me for “stinkin’ up the joint,” so that’s why she moved to the seat behind me and is telling everybody that we got on at different stops.

When the bus pulls into the campground, I turn to tell Troo, “I . . . I changed my mind . . . I’m sorry . . . we gotta go back home right away. I can’t . . .” but she’s already gone. She rushed right past me outta the bus. Through the window, I can see her bouncing and smiling, looking the happiest I’ve seen her in over a year.

What choice do I have?

Once the counselors get me and Troo and the rest of the girls lined up in front of the main wigwam, they hold up their palms to each and every one of us, saying “How” over and over and over again when they stick feathers in our hair that still have part of the bird left on ’em. After that, they hand out our Indian maiden names that we are to be known by for the rest of the week. They call me Minihaha. (Mother made me get a haircut from our eight-years-older-than-me half sister, Nell, who, even though she is a graduate of Yvonne’s School of Beauty, made my bangs too short because she’s a basket case, so even I gotta admit, I look a little funny.

Troo is to be known as Lovely Princess Floating Gently Down the Stream of Unending Happiness Beneath a Rainbow.

Every day is torture. Every night couldn’t be worse.

In the morning, we’re supposed to swim in Lake Freezing Cold but I can barely do the dead man’s float. When the triangle bell rings at noon, we have to go to the mess hall and eat a lunch of beans and wienies and drink the juice of bugs. After that, we gotta do crafts. Forced to make leather coin purses. There’s skeeters the size of dragonflies, an outhouse that anybody could fall into and once the sun sets, those counselors always got a grisly story all warmed up. Their favorite is this one about an escaped lunatic with a hook who goes after couples who are watching the submarine races on Lovers’ Lane. After they douse the campfire, one of the counselors always reminds us to pretend we’re not kids from the city sleeping in bunk beds in a cabin in the woods of Wisconsin, but real Indian children curled up in teepees on a wide open plain. But even me, who has no problem imagining just about anything, can’t feature that. What I
can
picture so clearly is that lunatic with the hook deciding that a pretty little redheaded girl is right up his alley so he rows one-handed from the other side of the lake after midnight, crawls into our cabin, snatches my sister and runs off with her into the woods. The next morning, Lovely Princess would no longer be Floating Gently Down the Stream of Unending Happiness Beneath a Rainbow but found under one of those Christmas trees like a ripped-open present.

That’s why I’ve been spending my nights tossing and turning even worse than I usually do, which I didn’t think was humanly possible. Standing watch over my sister is never easy and she hasn’t been any help at all. She giggles along with the other girls when they tease me about the dark circles I’ve got under my eyes. No matter how deep I stick my fingers in my ears, I can hear them calling me “Smudgy” and telling each other how camp is the greatest and that they never want to go home, which makes me feel even more like the odd maiden out because that’s
all
I want to do. I miss . . . everything. Troo doesn’t. She’s been having a gay old time making sit-upons and new friends and practicing her ventriloquist act for The Heap Big Talent Show, which is tonight.

I know that I’m not good at a lot of things, not like Troo is, but I do my best after my sister drags me up on the camp stage and growls into my ear, “You’re embarassin’ me. Again. Do one of your dumb imitations.”

So I try to perform my best Edgar G. Robinson, “You dirty rat,” but my tongue gets so twisted up that it comes out sounding like, “You thirty brats,” which makes everybody boo, and one kid, who is my sister, throws a stick of beef jerky at me. Of course, after all is said and done, Troo wins the top talent prize, The Golden Tomahawk, hands down. Nobody even cares that her lips moved.

By the time Sunday comes, I am very weak, almost floppy. I got a nose ache from pressing it against the cabin window counting the minutes until Dave’s woody station wagon comes roaring up the camp drive to rescue me.

When I finally spot him, I try to yell, “He’s here! He’s here!” but I hardly have enough air left in me to sigh out to Troo, “We’re goin’ home.”

“You are. I don’t got a home anymore,” she hollers on her run out the cabin door.

She hides in a tree and refuses to budge, but Dave is brave and tells her that she has until the count of three to get down. That takes a lotta guts on his part because he knows Troo will give him the cold shoulder all the way home. Or maybe that’s why he nixed the staying-longer-at-camp idea in the first place. Just to shut her up. I love my sister, I would die for her, but a spade is a spade. Troo is a smart alec, most especially to Dave, who she reminds, “You’re not my real father,” in case he forgot after she said it a half hour ago.

On the drive home, once Troo falls asleep against my shoulder hugging The Golden Tomahawk, I tap Dave on the shoulder and tell him, “Thank you for sendin’ us! That was really something!”

The reason I am not telling him that camp was the fourth-worst experience of my life behind losing Daddy and Mother almost dying and Bobby trying to murder me is because I don’t want to hurt his feelings. Dave is a lot like me in the personality department. That’s who I get it from. Not from my mother, who says, “Being sensitive and a dime will get you a cup of coffee.”

But when he parks the woody station wagon in front of our house on 52nd Street, since he is a police detective, Dave mighta deduced that I didn’t tell him the truth, the whole truth and nothing but about my camping experience. Because after Troo stomps off in a huff, I can’t stop myself from leaping out of the car, sinking down on my knees and kissing our front lawn, that’s how grateful I am to get back to the city where I know who lives in what house, which shortcuts we shouldn’t take and, most important, all the best hiding places.

T
he first day back home, my sister and me and one of our best friends, Mary Lane, are having what Troo calls a
rendezvous
at Washington Park, the most important place to everybody in the neighborhood next to Mother of Good Hope Church. The park’s got everything.

Like the lagoon.

I used to love standing under the weeping willow and throwing in a hook, but I had to give that up. Instead of whiling away an afternoon dreaming about what I’m gonna catch, all I can think about these days are the innocent little fish swimming below the surface, so overjoyed to see that friendly worm waving in the water that they don’t even stop to wonder at their good luck. The lagoon is where the police found the two dead girls with pink undies tied around their necks in pretty bows. First one summer and then the next, Junie Piaskowski and Sara Marie Heinemann were laid out next to the rotting red rowboats you can rent for a dollar and I was almost spread out there, too. I could hear the muddy lagoon water lapping onto the rocks when Bobby Brophy ripped his shirt off over his head.

The park also has a swimming pool. I just about go dead in the water watching Troo climb up those silvery high-dive steps and run to the end of the board screaming, “Geronimo,” which she will probably do even louder now after all the practice she got at camp.

The Jack Hoyt Woods are a big relief. When you can’t take the sun beating down on you for one more second, you can eat a peanut-butter-and-marshmallow sandwich in a leafy branch or get your ankles wet when you look for leeches under slimy rocks in the Honey Creek that runs through it.