KooKooLand (30 page)

“Don't get your cooties on me!” I yelled.

Billy from the Projects looked hurt. I felt bad, but I didn't say I was sorry.

After that, word got around about me knowing a murderer. Miss Morrissey pulled me aside and told me to quit going on about Hank. Apparently, I was scaring some of the crybaby girls. I said I couldn't help it. I was all broken up about my friend's mother dying. I put on a big, sad hound dog face. Miss Morrissey bought it and asked if I needed to go home. I said I hated to miss any school but that that was probably a good idea.

When I got home Shirley wasn't asleep like she normally was. The school had called and told her I was on my way. She met me at the door with a smile
plastered on her dog-tired face. She sat me down next to the radiator. Then she heated up her hands on the radiator and pressed them to my frozen cheeks. After a while, she got me thawed out. Then she made me cocoa with extra marshmallows.

As I slurped down the sticky sweetness, I felt an intense rush of love for my mother.

“If Daddy ever tries to stab you, I'll shoot him in the head,” I said.

Shirley recoiled as if I had stabbed her myself.

“Daddy will never hurt Mommy like Hank hurt Doris.”

“How do you know?”

“ 'Cause Daddy loves Mommy.”

“But Hank loved Doris. Daddy said he was still carrying a torch for the broad.”

Shirley frowned, tried a different angle.

“Mommy and Daddy aren't divorced like Hank and Doris. If Doris hadn't gotten a divorce, none of this would've happened.”

“If you divorce Daddy we could move to Disneyland.”

Shirley stared out the frosted-up window.

“If I divorce your father, I won't end up in Disneyland. I'll end up six feet under like Doris.”

“He wouldn't follow us to KooKooLand. He thinks the place is for dummkopfs.”

“That doesn't matter. He'd track us down and there'd be hell to pay.”

She blinked back a few tears.

“When you were a baby, I thought about leaving. I thought about going back to Canada. I even saved up some money. But I knew I wouldn't get far. I knew he'd find me.”

“We could hide in Grampy's barn,” I said, without much conviction, knowing she was right.

A tear plopped onto the kitchen table and Shirley quickly wiped it off with her bathrobe sleeve.

“I was afraid he'd take you away from me like he took Virginia from her mother.”

“I'd shoot him if he tried that. I'd shoot him right between the eyes.”

“Nice girls don't talk like that.”

“I don't care. I won't let him take me.”

She plastered on a smile again.

“He's not taking you anywhere. I shouldn't have said that. Mommy's just
tired. Mommy's not leaving Daddy. Mommy loves Daddy.”

“Why? Why do you love him?”

She took her time answering. I wasn't sure if she couldn't think of a good answer or if there were too many answers floating around in her head.

“ 'Cause no one else loves him. Not even YaYa and Papou. I'm the only one. Daddy needs me.”

She looked at me apologetically.

“And I need him.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. I don't want to be alone in my old age.”

“You'll have me. I'll take care of you.”

“You'll have a husband of your own.”

“I don't want a husband. I hate boys.”

“Someday you'll want one. All girls do.”

“Not me.”

“They're not all like your father. Some of them are like my brothers who drowned. They were good to everybody.”

She poured herself a drink.

“But the good always die young, I guess.”

“Does that mean I should be bad like Daddy?”

“No, you're Mommy's good little girl.”

“But if I'm good like your brothers am I gonna die?”

“No. Nothing bad is going to happen to you.”

“How do you know? How do you know nothing bad's gonna happen to me?”

“I won't let it.”

“Was Doris bad? Did she deserve to die like Daddy says?”

“No. Maybe she was no angel. But she didn't deserve to go to heaven yet.”

In a little while, Jimmy came home from duck hunting. I couldn't believe he could sit out in a duck blind all day and not freeze to death, but apparently whiskey kept you warmer than cocoa or a radiator.

While he stood at the stove, burning the pinfeathers off the bloody ducks, Shirley told him that Doris's funeral and church Mass were being held the next day.

“Do you think we should go, at least to the funeral?” she asked him. “For Susan and Terry's sake.”

“Are you nuts?” he said. “Then it's gonna look like we're taking Doris's side.”

“Well, what if just me and the kids go? We'll sit in the back. No one will
even know we're there.”

Jimmy considered that scenario, taking a swig of his highball to help him think better.

I had all sorts of mixed-up feelings about attending Doris's funeral. On the one hand I was terrified at the prospect of seeing a real live dead woman. This wouldn't be a movie dead woman, covered in Karo syrup, but an honest-to-God dead lady, staring me right in the face. I might scream or start bawling or faint and fall into the coffin and get her cooties all over me. On the other hand, I felt going there could make me Susan's friend for life. I pictured myself sitting beside her, holding her hand while she cried on my shoulder. I pictured myself bringing her over to our apartment for hot cocoa with extra marshmallows and finally giving her that snow globe.

But Jimmy put the kibosh on the whole thing.

“I feel bad for those kids, I really do. I love 'em like my own,” he said. “But they're better off without that whore of a mother. And Hank's buddies gotta stick together. We gotta show everybody in this city what we thought of Doris. A big nothing. A big fat zero.”

So no one from the Norris family went to the funeral or to the church Mass. We stayed the hell home to show we were on Hank's side.

But as it turned out, Hank ended up going himself.

That Monday he appeared in court dressed in a nice suit, a white shirt, and a tie. I'd never seen Hank decked out in a suit before, but Jimmy said Stanley Brown had to make him look like an upstanding citizen, like John Q. Public. Hank stood before the judge and pleaded innocent to killing his ex-wife, Doris, and a guy he barely knew. Well, actually, Hank didn't say a word. Stanley Brown did all the talking. One of the county attorneys wasn't too thrilled about that. He pushed to have Hank speak for himself. To have him stand up there and look everyone in the eye and say he was innocent, even though everyone in the goddamn city knew he wasn't. But the judge said that wouldn't be necessary. Hank could keep his mouth shut, which he did until the hearing was over and he was carted back to jail.

Later that day, Stanley Brown made his next move. He asked the court for permission for Hank to attend Doris's Mass.

“That's a smart strategy,” Jimmy explained. “Brown wants to make it look like Hank's sorry. Like he didn't mean it. Boo hoo hoo.”

The judge granted the request even though, as Jimmy pointed out, an accused murderer going to his victim's church service was not something you saw every day.

Bright and early the next morning, Hank walked into Our Lady of Perpetual Help church escorted by the county sheriff and the chief of police, who had seemed sympathetic to him at the hospital.

In keeping with Doris's instructions to Susan, the Goodwin Funeral Home handled all the arrangements.

Hank and the cops sat in the back of the church—supposedly so Hank wouldn't seem so conspicuous. Frankly, I didn't see how that was possible. I figured most of the people there must be gawking at Hank the whole time or trying their damnedest not to. Some of them were probably pretty riled up at having the dead woman's murderer in their midst. Any way you cut it, a lotta them would've ended up thinking about Hank, not Doris, which kinda made sense since Jimmy said Hank always had to be the goddamn center of attention.

As for how Hank felt attending the service of his ex-wife, the police chief told a reporter that from up close where he was sitting, Hank had seemed very remorseful and had even cried.

Just like Jimmy had said.
Boo hoo hoo.

When it was all over, Hank was whisked back to the Valley Street jail.

But he didn't have to stay cooped up there very long. The next day, the day of John Betley's funeral and church Mass, Stanley Brown filed a petition to have Hank moved to the state hospital in Concord—or, as Jimmy called it, the cracker factory. The judge immediately granted the request.

“Yabba dabba doo! Brown got him sprung from the slammer in four days,” Jimmy said, having a highball to celebrate. He raised his glass to Hank. “We'll be throwing one down together soon, my brother.”

Jimmy insisted I have a little sip to join in the celebration, since Shirley was at work and he was too goddamn happy to drink alone. I slugged it down fast, but it still stung like hell. He put on some Louis Armstrong records and made his trumpet sounds. He told me to have another sip. And then another.

Finally, he told me to get my pip-squeak ass to bed. He thought it was a riot that I was stumbling around like a pint-sized alkie as I made my way up the stairs. Somehow, I managed to climb up onto the top bunk. I lay in bed with the room swaying and told Virginia I'd never, ever drink again, even if Jimmy tried to pour booze down my gullet the way Boozer Eddie had threatened to do with that pigeon.

“Booze makes you wanna barf at first, just like ciggies,” Virginia said, blowing perfect smoke rings from the cancer stick she was puffing on. “But then you get used to it and you feel like you're on top of the world.”

I didn't want to be on top of the world. I didn't even want to be on the top bunk. I wanted to be on solid ground.

“Will you switch beds with me, just for tonight?” I asked her. “I'm too dizzy up here.”

“All right, kiddo. But you owe me one.”

She helped me down from the top bunk and tucked me into the bottom one. I closed my eyes to stop the spinning and finally I fell asleep.

I woke up all groggy. I tried to drag myself out of bed but my legs felt heavy, like two fallen tree trunks. Jimmy laughed and said I was just having my first hangover. He said not to worry, that after a while I'd be able to hold my liquor 'cause all the Norrises were good at that.

Then he told me I could stay home from school, which was pretty cool. Just like getting sprung from jail.

M
y hangover didn't hang on. By ten a.m. I made myself some breakfast—a baseball-sized blob of vanilla ice cream drowned in a mud puddle of chocolate syrup. I checked out the newspaper for more stuff about the murders. There were no new developments. I read an article on the front page titled “Negro Full of Hate.” It said colored people were mad as hell 'cause they stirred up their hatred toward white people over their whole lives. They lived lives of hate.

I didn't know whether that was true or not. I didn't know any colored people to ask. But if it was true I could sort of understand it. Sometimes I felt like I was living a life of hate too. I hated so many things it wasn't funny. I sat down and made a list of everything.

Mackerel, rats, and prunes were on the list.

Insects of all shapes and sizes. Spiders, june bugs, even ants. I once stomped an anthill to smithereens just for the hell of it until a boy came and stomped all over my feet and shouted, “See how they feel!” His old lady made him apologize, but what he said got me to thinking and I hadn't done it since.

There were a lot of people I hated too. I made another list.

Billy from the Projects. Some other dummkopfs in my class. My stupid teacher. Heddy. Boozer Eddie. Hank. I put Jimmy on the list, erased him. Put him back on.

I made another list. A list of the people I loved. That was shorter. Shirley. Virginia. Susan. I added Sylvester to make the list longer even though he was a cat.

The next day I went back to school. I looked around at my classmates and thought about who belonged on what list.

While I was figuring all that out, Hank's lawyer was figuring out some stuff too.

He went over to check out the crime scene.

In the five days since the murders, the cops had been guarding Hank's old
house like it was Fort Knox. By the time Stanley Brown headed over there, the place had been pretty well gone over. The main evidence Brown could see were the signs that someone had broken in and two big bloodstains where Doris and John had taken their last gurgling breaths.

Brown left the house and came back the next day with a photographer to take pictures of the evidence. But, when they got there, presto chango!—the bloodstains had disappeared. Someone had scrubbed them away. You couldn't even tell where the bodies might have been.

Except for the fact that two people were dead, it was almost like the murders had never happened. Like it was just a bad dream that only two people were never gonna wake up from.

Because of this turn of events, Brown asked the court to toss out all the charges against Hank. He said he'd been robbed of the chance to examine evidence and was hamstrung as far as defending Hank. Any blood that he could have sent to a lab to prove that someone other than Hank had carved up Doris and John was now gone. Hank, he argued, couldn't possibly get a fair trial and should be set free. Free as a Polish eagle.

Brown didn't get into who might have made those stains disappear. All he said was the house was still being watched by the cops when he returned.

The court put off making a decision until after the holidays, which left Hank cooped up in the mental hospital.

In the meantime, a whole mess of headshrinkers began examining him. Headshrinkers who worked for the cracker factory. Headshrinkers who worked for the state. And a big-deal headshrinker who Stanley Brown brought in, Dr. Harry Kozol of Harvard University, who was an expert on violent nutcases.