Whistling In the Dark (21 page)

I slipped my leg into the tub and it felt so good, that warm water and those bubbles. Ethel put a brand-new cake of Ivory soap on the side of the tub and I stretched out and floated a bit. “Behind the ears, too,” she said. “And wash your hair.” After Ethel closed the door, I thought about Nell and her bubblehead. Even though Nell was doing such a bad job taking care of Troo and me, before Mother got sick Nell really was only about the third worst sister in the world. I would keep that to myself, though, because I knew Troo thought Nell was the number-one worst sister. Even when she was a baby, Troo didn’t like Nell one bit. Except as somebody she liked to bite when she got her teeth. And there was no reason for it. It was just Troo being ornery. And maybe just a little green-eyed jealous of Nell.

There was a shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits knock. “Sorry to bother you,” Mr. Gary said through the bathroom door. “I need to get an aspirin out of the medicine cabinet for Mother. May I come in?”

I sunk down deep into the bubbles and said, “Sure,” even though I didn’t want him to. It was his house, after all, and woulda been poor manners to say no.

Mr. Gary came in and got the pill bottle and then snapped the medicine cabinet shut and looked at me through the mirror. “Bet that feels good, huh, Sally? I just love the water. Back home in California I live at the beach and every morning I go for a swim.” He came to sit on the side of the tub down on the end where my feet were. I checked again to make sure all of me was under the bubbles. “It’s a wonderful way to start the day. Always makes me feel good and clean and just born again.” He gave me a little splash.

I thought about that and said, “Yeah. You’re right, Mr. Gary,” but I wished he’d leave or at least stop smiling because he had this one eye that crossed over a little and made him look a little off. His “coloring” was sort of like mine. Tan skin with blond hair, but instead of green eyes he had eyes the same color as his mother’s, lagoon brown. And his blond hair was so blond, it looked, like Nell would say, out of a bottle. And she should know because she was in her second week now up at Yvonne’s School of Beauty on North Avenue.

Ethel came back and found Mr. Gary and me talking. She gave him a little push toward the door and said to me, “Did you wash your hair?”

I slipped below the water but I could hear Ethel say something to Mr. Gary and when I came up he was gone.

Ethel knelt down next to the tub and picked up the bar of Ivory and ran it between her big brown hands until there was a lather. My head was kinda under the water and I didn’t really hear her, just saw her lips moving. Ethel had wonderful lips. On the larger side. And she always wore this bright red lipstick called Fire Engine Number 5. I bet that would be what Mary Lane wore when she got older.

She pulled me up out of the water by the back of my neck and worked the lather into my hair, kneading my scalp like it was bread dough giving her a hard time. “I said what was Mr. Gary sayin’ to you?”

“He said how much he loved water and how it made him feel like he was just born again.”

Ethel rolled her eyes and said, out of patience, “That boy has some fanciful ideas and I don’t want him gettin’ your imagination all worked up again.” She scraped the soap off her hands and arms and shook it into the tub. “Dunk yourself and get out.”

I didn’t want to get out. I wanted to stay in there and float forever and feel like Mr. Gary said, just born again, but Ethel flapped a fluffy fresh towel at me and said, “Time’s a-wastin’.” I got out and let her wrap me up. “Go on into my room now and close the door behind you. Nell should be here any minute.”

I crawled back underneath Ethel’s covers, towel and all, and just stayed there like Ethel said, watching Troo out the window helping Rasmussen pick green beans and put them in a silver bowl. Rasmussen looked down at his watch and his lips moved. Then he looked over my way and waved. I pretended I didn’t see him and rolled over onto my other side and prayed Nell would hurry up and get here, because even though it was such a warm day, seeing Troo and Rasmussen together like that, so chummy, I got the shimmy shimmy shakes.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

After Troo and me got dressed in the faded navy blue church dresses and shiny shoes with cleats that Nell brought over, we went looking for Mr. Gary so we could say good-bye to him. We found him out on the front stoop, smoking a cigarette.

I said, “Mr. Gary, we gotta go to a funeral now, but we promise we’ll try to come back soon and play some old maid.”

Mr. Gary took a long draw and said, “You better make it sooner rather than later, Sally. I’m heading back to California in a few days.”

Troo said, “The land of milk and honey.”

Remembering this morning’s bath, I said, “And water.” A specific ocean of it.

Mr. Gary stood up and took a step back so he could get a good look at the two of us. “How pretty and fresh you girls look in your dress-up clothes,” he said in his light-as-a-butterfly voice. He flicked his cigarette into the grass, gave us each a peck on the cheek and hopped down the stairs with a cheery, “I told Mother I’d cut some flowers for her. Hope to see ya later, alligators.” Even after he took the turn into the backyard, I could still smell his baby powder.

Ethel and Nell were already sitting in Eddie’s car, waiting for us. I told Troo to go ahead, and then I yelled, “Just a minute,” and went back into the house to thank Mrs. Galecki one more time for letting us stay with her. She was asleep in her kitchen chair, so I just wrote down a little note on a napkin that said, “Thanks a million!” I signed it, “The O’Malley Sisters!” and propped it up on her glass of prune juice.

When I tiptoed out the front door and turned around, there he was waiting for me on the porch steps.

“Morning, Sally.”

I jumped halfway out of my skin. This man was very good at creeping up on people. Rasmussen was all dressed up in a fancy black suit, looking very sharp. He also had on shiny black shoes. Not the spongy kind. “Can I give you a ride over to the funeral?”

“No, that’s okay.” I moved down Mrs. Galecki’s front walk, far enough away from him so he couldn’t grab me. “I got a ride.”

Because no matter what Ethel said about him, I was still mostly suspicious of Rasmussen. And then I don’t know what came over me. I felt real bold with the sun shining and the little dog Lizzie barking at a squirrel that she’d chased up the big oak tree, so I squinted at him and said, “Why do you have a picture of me in your wallet?”

That rattled his cage.

He yelled down to Nell and Eddie to wait a minute and then knelt down next to me. “There’s a lot of things going on right now that you won’t understand for a while. But I promise you, everything is going to be okay. You need to trust me a little. Can you do that?” He tried to put his hands on my shoulders, but I yanked back so hard that he lost his balance and fell forward onto his hands and knees. He got up and brushed his pants off and said strongly, “I think you need to ride over to church with me this morning. We need to talk.” He waved good-bye to Nell and Eddie and off they went with Ethel and Troo, who was smiling at me out the back window of the ’57 Chevy because she thought that was funny, me being left behind with Rasmussen.

“Let me put Lizzie in the house,” Rasmussen said. “And then we’ve got to hurry over to church. I’m one of the pall-bearers.”

He had such a nice house. Picturesque, I’d call it. It was red brick and had some ivy growing up the side of it and white shutters on the windows with red and white geraniums coming out of the window boxes.

After he got the puppy squared away he called to me from the porch, “I’m going to go get the car. Wait for me at the curb.”

I was between the devil and the deep blue sea. Since I was gonna get married to Henry Fitzpatrick I had to get to that funeral even though it would be that devil Rasmussen taking me. So I walked down his steps and tried not to think about Junie’s picture hanging in his dining room, telling myself over and over again that I was going to be okay because even Rasmussen wouldn’t do something like murder and molest me on the way to a funeral. Nobody could be that bad, could they?

He pulled up and got out of his dark brown Ford and ran around the back fender, coming right for me. I managed to get back up on the sidewalk, and was halfway up Mrs. Galecki’s steps before he caught me by the arm. I screamed and screamed so loud that Mr. Gary came running out from the backyard with a bouquet of pink flowers in his hand. He yelled, “Everything okay, Dave?”

Rasmussen just nodded at him.

“Sally Elizabeth O’Malley, what is wrong with you? I was just coming over to open your car door.” Rasmussen let go of my arm and walked back over to his side of the car.

I remembered then how Daddy used to do that for Mother. Opened her car door and bent at the waist and said, “Your chariot awaits you, madam.” I hadn’t seen anybody do something that mannerly in a long time except for Mr. Cary Grant in the movies. So maybe just like Ethel said, Rasmussen was a true gentleman. Or maybe he was just a very, very good actor.

We drove for two blocks without talking and the silence was real loud until Rasmussen said, “You know that your mother and I are friends, right?”

I stared out the car window and let the breeze of the chocolate chip cookies ruffle my bangs.

“I went to see Helen yesterday.” Rasmussen put on his blinker to turn onto Lisbon Avenue.

“Is she okay?”

Rasmussen didn’t take his eyes off the road. “Yes, she is.”

I wanted to ask him so many questions about Mother, just beg him to tell me every little detail—like if she’d asked about me and when she might come home and did she need anything like her gold hairbrush. But I wasn’t a hundred percent sure he was telling the truth, and even if he was, I just couldn’t bring myself to let him know that I wanted something from him.

“Your mother is out of the woods, but . . .” Rasmussen turned onto Fifty-sixth Street. “There’s been some trouble with Hall and I know this might upset you, Sally, but Hall is . . . Hall is . . . ah . . .”

“A goddamn dickhead?”

Rasmussen laughed but then he stopped real quick and tried to look very serious. “Although I don’t approve of your language, young lady, I think that just about covers it.”

I always looked at his chin when he talked. It had a little scar shaped like a comma at the bottom of it. I would never look into his eyes, no matter what Ethel said. If I looked in his eyes, my soul might jump right out my window and fly into his. Or maybe he would hypnotize me like that doctor did in that movie called
The Three Faces of Eve,
where that woman had too many people living inside her so the doctor hypnotized Eve and asked for a couple of them to move out.
Look into my eyes. Loook into my eyes
. No, thank you very much.

“You know that your mother and I have been friends since high school, correct?” he repeated.

I didn’t want to admit it, but I sort of suspected that Mother and Rasmussen were friends because in that hidey-hole graduation picture they were standing next to each other and Rasmussen was smiling at Mother when he was supposed to be smiling into the camera of Jim Madigan from Jim Madigan Photography Studios.

“So, like I was saying, Hall is in a heap of trouble,” Rasmussen said.

“I know about that already.” I started twirling my hair around my finger, which I had started doing recently because it seemed to calm my imagination down. “Mr. Fitzpatrick told us that Hall hit Mr. Jerbak with a beer bottle and he’s in jail and charges are gonna get pressed on him.”

When we turned down Fifty-eighth Street, the Piaskowskis’ street, Rasmussen pulled up in front of their house and looked out the window. “Junie’s been dead now for almost a year. Hard to believe.” He shook himself a little like you do when you know you can’t stand feeling the way you’re feeling and you better snap out of it. “The house is for sale. Gotta get over here and work on that yard.”

I looked out at the Piaskowskis’ and noticed something I hadn’t the day Troo and me had walked past on our way to church right after we found out about Mother’s staph infection. There was a funny little blue birdhouse half hanging off the rain gutter and it had a kid’s writing on the side that I couldn’t read. It was twisting in the breeze.

Rasmussen was looking at it too because in a shaky voice he said, “Junie and I made that little birdhouse together. Blue was her favorite color. She loved birds. Especially blue-birds. She called them happiness with wings.”

I didn’t say anything but I was thinking that Rasmussen’s big, strong outside didn’t quite match up to his gooey inside, and it was a shock to me that he reminded me of a chocolate-covered cherry. Ethel was right. My thinking wasn’t straight, but straight enough to know he was telling the truth about blue being Junie’s favorite color, because I remembered how she just loved her blue Lik-m-aid so much that her lips always looked the same color as a cornflower.

“You know Junie was my niece, right? My sister Betsy’s daughter?”

“Ethel told me that,” I said quickly.

“Betsy had to move away because it was just too sad for her and her husband to live here after Junie . . .” He stepped on the gas and pulled away.

A half block later, Rasmussen turned into what was really the playground of the school but was also used as a parking lot when there was a funeral or a wedding or any other big occasion. I couldn’t wait to get out of that car. Rasmussen was making me feel sad for him, the last way on Earth I expected to feel, and it was making me so nervous that I started sweating buckets. When he put the gearshift into P, I pulled down on the door handle.

“Wait just a minute, Sally. I’ve got something else important to tell you.”

His hands were knotted up around the steering wheel and he looked as antsy as I felt. Maybe because we were so close to church he’d started feeling real guilty and was about to confess to the murders. That’s just how he was acting. Like after the cops gave somebody the third degree in a movie and then the guy gets all twitchy and just puts his head down on the table and starts yelling, “Okay, I did it. I did it!”