Al Capone Does My Shirts

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

Today I moved to a twelve-acre rock covered with cement, topped with bird turd and surrounded by water.

I’m not the only kid who lives here. There’s my sister, Natalie, except she doesn’t count. And there are twenty-three other kids who live on the island because their dads work as guards or cooks or doctors or electricians for the prison, like my dad does. Plus, there are a ton of murderers, rapists, hit men, con men, stickup men, embezzlers, connivers, burglars, kidnappers and maybe even an innocent man or two, though I doubt it.

The convicts we have are the kind other prisons don’t want. I never knew prisons could be picky, but I guess they can. You get to Alcatraz by being the worst of the worst. Unless you’re me. I came here because my mother said I had to.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

All errors are mine and mine alone, but I would like to thank the
many people who helped me with this book.
Lori Brosnan and the GGNRA Rangers on Alcatraz Island,
Eugene Grant and Myra and George Brown, Nicole Kasprzak,
Charles Kasprzak, the Autism Research Institute, Elizabeth Harding,
Jacob Brown and Barb Kerley, the Mill Valley and San Francisco crit groups
and the books by Jolene Babyak and Roy F. Chandler.
And most especially thanks to the truly amazing Kathy Dawson.
If I were Charlotte, I would weave “Some editor” in the corner of her office.

 

PUFFIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland
(a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank,
Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Registered Offices: Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in the United States of America by G. P. Putnam’s Sons,
a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2004
Published by Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2006

Copyright © Gennifer Choldenko, 2004

All rights reserved
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Choldenko, Gennifer, 1957-
Al Capone does my shirts / Gennifer Choldenko. p. cm.
Summary: A twelve-year-old boy named Moose moves to Alcatraz Island in 1935
when guards’ families were housed there, and has to contend with his
extraordinary new environment in addition to life with his autistic sister.
[1. United States Penitentiary, Alcatraz Island, California—Fiction.
2. Alcatraz Island (Calif.)—History—Fiction. 3. Autism—Fiction.
4. Family problems—Fiction. 5. Brothers and sisters—Fiction.]
I. Title. PZ7.C446265 Al 2004 [Fic]—dc21 2002031766

eISBN : 978-0-142-40370-9

To my sister,
Gina Johnson,
and to all of us who loved her—
however imperfectly.

 

 

Today I moved to a twelve-acre rock covered with cement, topped with bird turd and surrounded by water. Alcatraz sits smack in the middle of the bay—so close to the city of San Francisco, I can hear them call the score on a baseball game on Marina Green. Okay, not that close. But still.

I’m not the only kid who lives here. There’s my sister, Natalie, except she doesn’t count. And there are twenty-three other kids who live on the island because their dads work as guards or cooks or doctors or electricians for the prison like my dad does. Plus there are a ton of murderers, rapists, hit men, con men, stickup men, embezzlers, connivers, burglars, kidnappers and maybe even an innocent man or two, though I doubt it.

The convicts we have are the kind other prisons don’t want. I never knew prisons could be picky, but I guess they can. You get to Alcatraz by being the worst of the worst. Unless you’re me. I came here because my mother said I had to.

I want to be here like I want poison oak on my private parts. But apparently nobody cares, because now I’m Moose Flanagan, Alcatraz Island Boy—all so my sister can go to the Esther P. Marinoff School, where kids have macaroni salad in their hair and wear their clothes inside out and there isn’t a chalkboard or a book in sight. Not that I’ve ever been to the Esther P. Marinoff. But all of Natalie’s schools are like this.

I peek out the front window of our new apartment and look up to see a little glass room lit bright in the dark night. This is the dock guard tower, a popcorn stand on stilts where somebody’s dad sits with enough firepower to blow us all to smithereens. The only guns on the island are up high in the towers or the catwalks, because one flick of the wrist and a gun carried by a guard is a gun carried by a criminal. The keys to all the boats are kept up there for the same reason. They even have a crapper in each tower so the guards don’t have to come down to take a leak.

Besides the guard tower, there’s water all around, black and shiny like tar. A full moon cuts a white path across the bay while the wind blows, making something creak and a buoy clang in the distance.

My dad is out there too. He has guard duty in another tower somewhere on the island. My dad’s an electrician, for Pete’s sake. What’s he doing playing prison guard?

My mom is in her room unpacking and Natalie’s sitting on the kitchen floor, running her hands through her button box. She knows more about those buttons than it seems possible to know. If I hide one behind my back, she can take one look at her box and name the exact button I have.

“Nat, you okay?” I sit down on the floor next to her.

“Moose and Natalie go on a train. Moose and Natalie eat meat loaf sandwich. Moose and Natalie look out the window.”

“Yeah, we did all that. And now we’re here with some swell fellows like Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly.”

“Natalie Flanagan’s whole family.”

“Well, I wouldn’t exactly say they’re family. More like next-door neighbors, I guess.”

“Moose and Natalie go to school,” she says.

“Yep, but not the same school, remember? You’re going to this
nice
place called the Esther P. Marinoff.” I try to sound sincere.

“
Nice
place,” she repeats, stacking one button on top of another.

I’ve never been good at fooling Natalie. She knows me too well. When I was five, I was kind of a runt. Smallest kid of all my cousins, shortest kid in my kindergarten class and on my block too. Back then people called me by my real name, Matthew. Natalie was the first person to call me “Moose.” I swear I started growing to fit the name that very day. Now I’m five foot eleven and a half inches—as tall as my mom and a good two inches taller than my dad. My father tells people I’ve grown so much, he’s going to put my supper into pickle jars and sell it under the name Incredible Growth Formula.