some of them. “You ready for the first question?”
She bobbed her head up and down.
“How’d you get that?” I pointed at the Band-Aid above her eyebrow.
She started rocking the swing slowly at first and then quicker and quicker. I stomped my feet down so it’d stop. “Wendy?”
“My ath-”
“I know.” It always took a couple of tries to get Wendy to listen to you. “How’d you get that boo-boo?” She looked at me with her head to the side like the way that RCA dog did. I pointed to her bandage again. “Did a man do that to you?”
“Fell.”
“Fell?” I yelled because I just wanted her to say Rasmussen hurt her so bad and then there would be two of us and maybe somebody would believe us. “You better not be lyin’ to me.”
Wendy started to cry because she cried real easy, especially if you raised your voice to her. “My ath-”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry… oh, don’t cry.” I picked up her stubby hand. Someone had painted her fingernails watermelon pink and there was that plastic Cracker Jack ring that she always wore on her wedding finger.
“Was it Officer Rasmussen, Wendy? Did he push you and that’s why you fell?”
“Weeeeennnndy.”
Wendy perked up. It was her ma calling her. If you had to call thirteen kids for supper every day, that would give anybody the lungs of an opera singer, Mother said, and you could tell that even though Mrs. Latour and Mother were in choir together up at church, Mother thought that anybody who had thirteen kids, even if they were Catholic, was dumb as a curb.
“Weeeeeendy.”
She got up and started toward the Kenfields’ steps. “Going to Ma, Thally O’Malley.”
“Okay,” I said, giving up, but then I thought I better try one more time. “Was Rasmussen down in the cellar with you?”
She nodded her head yes and then she shook her head no so I didn’t know which she meant, but it was too late to ask her again cuz she’d already hopped down the steps.
She stopped at the bottom and said, “Rathmuthen,” and then cut across the Kenfields’ grass toward home.
“There’s a bad man out there. Keep your eyes open, Wendy,” I called after her.
She turned and opened her eyes really big and then took off again in that crazy-legged way of running she had. I sat there for a while and rocked and felt pretty good because now at least I had Wendy Latour on my side, even if she was a Mongoloid. After all, she’d pretty much just told me that Rasmussen had tried to murder and molest her.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The first time I came down to the basement by myself was the night after Mrs. Callahan’s birthday party, when Mother and Hall were screaming so bad. Mother wanted Hall to stop drinking so much and Hall wanted Mother to shut the hell up about his drinking. Troo was sleeping over at Fast Susie’s and Nell was at a school dance. I was alone in my room reading
When I got there, I sat on this hard brown suitcase that belonged to Hall when he was a sailor and had stickers all over it from faraway countries. I was gonna stay in the basement and read until the shouting coming down through the radiators stopped. I propped the flashlight up against this old lamp and made finger shadows on the wall for a while. I could do a bird and another kind of bird. When one bird was flying across the basement wall, it came across a picture of a lady in a hat sitting on a bench. Since I’d just been down there that afternoon helping Mother put shirts through the wringer, which I just loved to do because sometimes she made jokes about how she wished Hall was still inside one of those shirts, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed this picture. I got closer. When I touched it, it slid down the wall and behind where it used to be hanging was a hidey-hole. I could see the tip of something that looked like a shoe box. Then something squeaked like a mouse, which didn’t scare me, but then I thought it might be a bat and those did scare me because of this movie me and Troo saw called
So that afternoon, after talking to Wendy, I got to the bottom of the basement steps and took the shoe box out of the hidey-hole and sat down on the old brown suitcase. I slipped the cookie wrapper ring on my finger, but it fell off right away like it always did, so I stuck it back in the shoe box under the other picture. My favorite. The one of Mother with her wavy hair and freckles sitting in a rowboat down at the lagoon. She was about Nell’s age in this picture and she had on shorts that showed her pretty legs and trim ankles and she looked so very, very happy, a kind of happy that I couldn’t ever hardly remember seeing in her since Daddy died. Seeing her smile like that made me want to cry in that damp basement that smelled of coal clinkers. Cry and not have anybody to tell me to shut up with that crying. For goodness sake, why did God give you tear ducts if you weren’t supposed to cry?
The other picture, the graduation one, didn’t make me sad. It made me feel good because I knew a lot of the people in it. There was Mrs. Callahan and Mrs. Latour and Mr. Kenfield and Mr. Fitzpatrick from the drugstore. And then I noticed two other people. A homely-looking boy whose ears kinda stuck out, but I couldn’t really tell who it was cuz he had turned his face away from the camera. Who was that? I knew I’d seen him before, but it wasn’t exactly him. And then way up on the top of this graduation picture, I noticed somebody who was tall. And had light hair. It was Rasmussen! I was shocked that I hadn’t paid attention to that detail before. He hadn’t changed very much. I would take this picture over to Granny’s the next time I visited and ask if she could’ve told right off that Rasmussen was gonna be a murderer and molester. Some of the boys on Vliet Street I knew would grow up to go to jail. Like Greasy Al Molinari, whose brother Coochie got taken away not too long ago for stealing the Cadillac car that old man Holz hauer kept in his garage but didn’t drive anymore. Reese Latour would go to jail, too. You could just tell by how mean they were that nothing good would ever happen to these boys. It shouldn’t anyway.
When I heard footsteps coming down the back stairs, I quickly stuffed everything back into the box.
“Who is down here?”
“It’s just me, Mrs. Goldman.”
“What are you doing in that dark basement,
“Nothing.”
She was quiet. Then she said, “I understand.”
She went back up the steps, stopping on the landing. “When you are done with your nothing, please to come to the back door. I have made you a little something.”
Her doin’ that… I don’t know what the heck came over me. I just really used those tear ducts of mine. When I was all cried out, I wiped my face off on a dirty white blouse that was laying on top of the washer and stuck the shoe box back into the hidey-hole. And then I walked up the back steps and found a green glass plate outside Mrs. Goldman’s door. Six brown sugar cookies and a glass of cold, fresh milk in a jelly glass, just like Mother used to do for me, were on the floor outside Mrs. Goldman’s back door.
