Al Capone Does My Shirts (21 page)

She’s right. I know she is. The man’s locked up. But this one sentence keeps floating around in my head.
He could if he wanted to. He could if he wanted to.

 

It’s when I see Piper that I realize what I’m going to do.

“I’m going to write a letter to Al Capone,” I tell her.

She rolls her eyes. “They don’t let just anyone write to Capone, you know. You have to be a relative and then it’s censored.”

“Yeah, but it’s your mom who censors his mail, right? Couldn’t I just drop a letter in the stack of already-censored mail?”

“I’ve tried that,” Piper says, running her fingers through her long hair.

“You did? What happened?”

“Nothin’. Never answered back. I told him to check out
Jane Eyre
from the convict library and put his answer in it.”

“Jane Eyre?
Maybe that was the problem. Can you imagine Al Capone reading
Jane Eyre
?” I ask.

“That’s the point, Einstein. A book like that would never be checked out. What con would read
Jane Eyre
? And besides, then my dad wouldn’t give me grief for wanting to read it because I had to get him to check it out from the con library for me. I figured Capone could write back in the book—you know, underlining very faintly in pencil the way the cons do.”

“No, I don’t know.”

“Let’s say you want to say, ‘I need your help.’ You go carefully through the book and look for an
I
and underline it. And then an
n
and underline it and an
e
and so on until you’ve spelled your whole message.”

“Did he get it?”

Piper shrugs. “Who knows. I never got an answer back.”

“What was the message?”

“I asked him if he’d autograph a baseball and hit it over the wall. I told him I’d auction it off. Said we’d split fifty-fifty.”

“Don’t you think he has enough money?” I ask.

“No one ever has enough money,” Piper says.

“But you didn’t get in trouble for this, right, so what’s the harm?” I ask.

“Easy for you to say. The only thing your parents did was take away your baseball glove. Not exactly a hardship.”

“You’re one to talk. You didn’t get punished at all.”

“Yes, I did. You think I wanted two months with my grandma? She’s always crabby and everything she eats is boiled. Boiled cabbage. Boiled turnips. She even boils hamburger.”

“I thought you said it was fun.”

She rolls her eyes again. “Ever heard of saving face?”

“That’s what Annie thought,” I say.

“Yeah, well, you should listen to her. She’s right most of the time,” Piper says.

“Even if you did get in trouble, it doesn’t seem to have made any difference to you.”

“Oh, yeah? Have I gotten in trouble since then?” Piper asks.

“No,” I admit. “Still, wouldn’t you like to be Big Al’s pen pal? This could be the start.”

She snorts like she doesn’t care. But her eyes are so bright, I know this isn’t true. “What’s he going to do to get Natalie in?” she asks.

“Beats me,” I say, “but if the guy can fix a whole election, he’ll figure out something.”

 

In Piper’s room the next day, she brings out the special duplicate carbon letter paper her mom uses. “Can you type?” she asks.

“Nope.”

“Me neither. Just, you know, hunt and peck. You don’t need to worry if you make mistakes. My mom makes them too. And every once in a while type three dots. That’s what she does when she leaves something out. Then, if she happens to glance at your page, she’ll think it’s a letter she’s already finished.”

I roll the brown page into her typewriter, click the carriage over and begin hunting down letters with one finger.

 

“ ‘I like your mother very much’?” Piper says when she reads it.

“You got to say something about the guy’s mother.”

“Why?” she asks.

“Because then he remembers he has one. And he knows we know her too. Makes him act better. It’s The Mom Rule—all guys use it.”

“This is Al Capone we’re talking about. I don’t think he’ll fall for a cheap trick like that.”

“I’m not taking it out,” I say.

“Suit yourself.” She takes the letter and presses it in thirds with her thumbnail, making two perfect crisp folds. She disappears with the letter. In less than a minute she’s back.

“Piece of cake,” she says.

I get up to leave. “Hey, Moose? If this doesn’t work, you going back?”

“Back where?”

“Santa Monica, stupid. Not that I care or anything, because I
don’t,
” she says.

“Well, if you don’t care, why are you asking?”

“I’m not asking,” Piper says.

“Oh, now you’re not asking. Okay, then I’m not answering.”

Piper bites at her bottom lip. “Well, are you?”

“I dunno, Piper.”

I walk down the stairs. When I get outside, I see Piper watching me through the window of her dad’s library. When she sees I see her, she closes the curtain quick and disappears.

 

 

This last week, things have been better at my house. Natalie is back at Mrs. Kelly’s. My mother is teaching piano lessons again and she and my father are beginning to discuss what they will do next. And every day I wonder if we’ll be going back to Santa Monica. It seems so long ago that we lived there now, I’m not even sure I want to anymore. And I know moving back will be bad for Natalie.

 

When I say good-bye to Scout and them on the last day of school, I get a stomachache. I don’t know if it’s good-bye for the summer or good-bye for the rest of my life. I feel so lousy, I don’t say three words to anyone on the boat ride home. I hardly notice anything until I get off the boat.

And then all of a sudden there are my parents, Natalie, Theresa and Warden Williams.

My parents never wait for me like this and it’s really strange to see the warden here. He’s hardly ever down at the dock. The boat waits for the warden. The warden doesn’t wait for the boat. Actually the boat isn’t supposed to wait for him either, but it always does.

“What’s your dad doing here?” I ask Piper.

“Beats me,” Piper says like this is no big deal, but she’s chewing her gum at twice the usual speed.

“Guess what!” My mother jumps up the second we’re close enough to hear.

“No, wait.” Theresa elbows in front of her. “Let Natalie tell.”

Natalie frowns down at her feet.

“Go on, Nat, tell him,” Theresa says.

“Eleven gulls,” Natalie says.

“No, Nat.” Theresa shakes her head.

“
Eleven
gulls!” Nat says, louder this time.

“No, I mean . . . yeah, you’re right. Eleven gulls,” Theresa says. “But what else?”

Natalie’s shoulders are hunched up like she is stuck in a shrug. She says nothing.

“She got into the Esther P. Marinoff,” Theresa announces with a big grin.

“Natalie!” I wrap my arms around her in a spontaneous bear hug.

“I don’t like that! I don’t like that,” Nat says, and I let go.

“Sorry, Nat,” I say.

“Sorry,” she says, moving her shoulders now like she’s trying really hard to get them to fit. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she mutters.

“Mr. Purdy called,” my dad explains. “He’s decided to open another branch of the Esther P. Marinoff for older children and he wants Natalie to be the first student.”

“You’re sure? I mean, this is for sure?” I ask.

My dad nods. “Apparently he’s been planning this for some time—been waiting for the right moment to launch it.”

“How come he didn’t tell us that before?” I say.

My father looks sideways at my mother. My mother shakes her head. “We don’t know,” she says.

The warden clears his throat. I can feel the heat of his eyes on me. I glance at him and then away. A patch of sweat breaks out on my forehead.

“See, Moose?” the warden says. “Didn’t I tell you your parents would work it out?” He winks at me and smiles out of one side of his mouth. Then he turns his attention to Piper. “Sweetheart, just wanted to tell you how proud I am of your grades. Straight A’s
again.
” He waves her report card in the air, like he wants us all to see.

“Thank you, Daddy,” Piper says as the warden puts his arm around her.

I watch them walk up the hill. When they are out of earshot, I ask my dad, “Just all of a sudden like that?”

My dad nods. He chews at his bottom lip. “You know anything about this, Moose?” he asks.

“No,” I answer almost before he gets the question out.

He nods like he believes me, then pops a toothpick in his mouth. “Life is amazing, isn’t it? You can’t ever tell what will happen. Nobody knows until they go ahead and play the game.”

“You can say that again,” I say.

 

The next morning I get up and pull a clean shirt off the hanger. As I shoot my arm through the sleeve, I hear something crackle. I dig my fingers in the pocket and pull out a torn scrap of brown paper. It’s folded in half and in half again. Inside is one word scribbled hastily in pencil and underlined twice.

Done,
it says.

 

 

Al Capone Does My Shirts
is a work of fiction, but many of the details about life on Alcatraz are true.

During the twenty-nine years when Alcatraz was a working penitentiary (1934-1963)—or, as one convict described it, “a maximum-security, long-term burying ground for convicts of particularly vile renown”
¹
—the families of most of the guards and prison administrators lived on the island. Between fifty and sixty families resided on Alcatraz at any given time. Nine babies were born to mothers who lived on the island and some children lived their entire childhood on Alcatraz.

There was a whole village on the island: a post office with a pelican insignia postmark, a tiny grocery store, a play area called the parade grounds and an Officers’ Club complete with a bowling alley. Many of the kids lived in 64 building, an army-issue apartment building that still stands today. No children were ever hurt or taken hostage during the Alcatraz penitentiary years. One guard felt that there was an unwritten “code of rule among the inmates that family men were safe.”
²
This may have been true for some convicts, but certainly not all. During the Battle of Alcatraz in May of 1946, two guards were killed and fourteen injured. Almost all were family men. At least one autobiography of an Alcatraz inmate contains detailed escape plans, which included taking the warden’s wife as a hostage.
³

Today it seems surprising that so many children lived on Alcatraz, but at the time Alcatraz was thought to be a better place for kids than the city. “Our parents frequently said they felt safer living on Alcatraz than in San Francisco. There was no traffic, no burglaries; few of us, in fact, worried about security. It was a low-crime neighborhood, after all. Fences and locked gates were everywhere, yet some residents didn’t lock their doors.”
⁴
“All of our bad guys are locked up” is a refrain sounded again and again in the handwritten accounts of island life found in the Alcatraz Island Ranger Library.

Also, it was much cheaper to live on Alcatraz. 1935 was a depression year and San Francisco rents, even then, were costly. Prison guards were not highly paid, and as one former Alcatraz guard stated, he “Never even considered living off the island as it was too expensive to live in San Francisco.”
⁵

But perhaps the most important reason families lived on the island in the early years was because Warden James A. Johnston wanted it this way. Ready access to his staff of guards in the event of a prison break was an important aspect of his overall security plan. High-ranking officers were expected—perhaps even required
⁶
—to live on Alcatraz. “When we had a disturbance, if we were at a party, we didn’t put on our coats or anything, we just went right up the hill. They used to call down at 64 building and the phone was right outside my apartment and we answered the phone and they’d say: ‘We have trouble in the cell house,’ and that’s all they had to say. Everybody available went ...”
⁷

The warden lived in a beautiful mansion located right next door to the cell house. Warden Johnston (dubbed “Old Saltwater” by the cons) opened Alcatraz and ran it for fourteen years. Warden Johnston’s youngest daughter, Barbara, also lived on the island—though she bears no resemblance whatsoever to Piper.

During 1935 all of the Alcatraz kids took the boat to San Francisco, where they attended school. The only exception was made for kindergarten-age children, who attended a kindergarten held on Alcatraz, taught by one of the moms who lived on the island.
⁸

As you might imagine, saying you lived on Alcatraz did, in fact, garner quite a lot of attention at school. Some kids thought it was weird. Others were “dazzled by the prison stories.”
⁹
Most kids who lived on Alcatraz seemed to take the prison for granted. Jolene Babyak, who was a kid on the island during the ’50s, said it was like living next to the police station. She said she wasn’t scared “because there were so many guards around.”
¹⁰