KooKooLand (4 page)

That had got me all confused.

What about Louis Armstrong? I had asked. He was a colored person, wasn't he? That was different, Jimmy explained. Nigger music was rock and roll, where people shrieked and jumped around like baboons. Nigger music, get it?

Yes, I'd said, still confused.

I didn't like that word
nigger.
Shirley said
colored person
and my third-grade teacher, Miss Rogers, said
colored person,
so that's what I said even though I wanted to be like Jimmy most of the time. Maybe only ladies said
colored person
and men said
nigger.
I'd heard most of Jimmy's friends say the word. Hank the millionaire said it all the time. I figured it was like the difference between
damn
and
darn.
One was a swearword and one wasn't and men swore and ladies didn't.

The first time I realized there was something bad about the word was when Jimmy said it in the checkout line at the A&P and the woman in front of us turned around and told him he should use nicer language, especially around a child. He told her to mind her own damn business, it was just a word like
Mick
or
greaseball
or
Polack
. He said that he had known plenty of niggers in the merchant marine, had drunk out of the same bottle of whiskey with them. He asked her if she would drink from the same bottle of whiskey as a nigger. She nearly choked on her own spit. She paid for her groceries and beat it. Jimmy said the old battle-ax had probably never even seen a nigger in her whole life since there were only ten in the whole goddamn state.

It was true I had seen only two colored people in Manchester that I could remember. In Boston, it was a whole different story. Like this one time Jimmy got lost coming home from the Combat Zone after he'd had too many highballs in the car. Usually he could find his way out of any place. Stick him in the woods drunk, blindfolded, and without a compass and he'd still make it home in time for supper—that's what Hank once said. But this time we ended up in Roxbury—Spooktown, Jimmy called it—and all we saw were colored people. I suddenly thought about the two colored people I'd seen in Manchester and how they must feel. I'd never seen them again, so maybe they just up and moved away.

Shirley looked scared to be finding herself in Spooktown, but Jimmy said nobody or nothin' scared him. He pulled over and asked some colored guys where the hell we were. Told them he was half-lit and asked did they want a drink. The guys took a slug and Jimmy shot the baloney. He told them he'd take booze over weed any goddamn day. He'd had some weed in the merchant marine and it didn't do shit. The guys laughed and said maybe somebody'd been messin' with him and gave him tobacco instead. Jimmy said hell no, it was the good stuff he'd gotten from a crazy Jamaican named Alboy. Then he gave the guys another slug of whiskey, got some directions, and we headed home.

“Nice niggers, huh?” Jimmy asked, as we snaked through the back alleys of Spooktown.

There was an icy silence. I watched Shirley's jaw tighten.

“I don't care for that word,” Shirley finally mumbled like she had a mouth full of cotton.

“Oh yeah? Whaddaya want me to call 'em? Spooks? Jigaboos? Coons? Spear chuckers?” Jimmy asked, trying to get a rise out of her.

Shirley turned and stared out into the darkness. She looked like she didn't know where she was or how she was going to get out of there.

Finally, she grabbed the bottle those guys had just slugged from and poured herself a drink. A double.

I piped up from the backseat.

“Well, I think they were very nice colored people.”

W
e were running late as usual because after Jimmy told the Bike Story the phone rang and it was some guy looking to see if Jimmy had some new merchandise. Jimmy had to shoot the baloney with the guy for a while before he told him yes, he did have some new merchandise and to stop by later and check it out for himself.

Jimmy hung up the phone and rapped me on the head with the
Daily Racing Form
.

“Shake a leg, dum-dum,” he said. Dum-dum was one of his many nicknames for me. He'd taken to calling me that since I started pulling down straight As in school.

“Race you to the car!” he shouted.

Ever since I could walk he'd been making me race him.

“Ready, set, go!”

I tore out the door. He gave me a head start and then charged after me.

I lost. I always lost.

He reached the car first and beeped the horn to celebrate his victory. I collapsed onto the front seat beside him.

“And the winner, by six furlongs, Jimmy the Greek,” he announced. “And, in second place, dum-dum.”

I will beat you, I vowed to myself. I will beat you someday. I will. I will. I will.

He started up the car and I turned to wave good-bye to Shirley. I knew she'd be standing there in the doorway. Just like Jimmy was superstitious about two-dollar bills and I was superstitious about stepping on cracks and possibly breaking my mother's back, Shirley was superstitious about me leaving. She had to watch until I was clear outta sight or she figured something terrible would happen to me and it would be all her fault 'cause she'd turned her head away a split second too soon. I always put on a big smile to convince her I wasn't going to die and waved until I couldn't see her anymore.

Jimmy cruised through the projects, one eye on the road, one eye on the
Racing Form
. He took a Lucky Strike from behind his ear and punched in the car's lighter.

“Your old man's got a college education in horse racing, kiddo,” he said.

I nodded like it was news, even though I'd heard it a million times before.

“Handicapping's harder than any straight job, but nobody gives you any credit for it. People call you a bum, but you gotta be a genius to make any dough from it. As much as Einstein knows about the theory of relativity, which is his racket, is what I know about horses.”

He pronounced horses
hosses.
Like the name of the fat brother on
Bonanza
, Hoss Cartwright.

He lit his cancer stick and went back to studying the
Racing Form
.

I stared out the window at our neighborhood. The place was called Elmwood Gardens, but there weren't any elm trees or gardens around. The elms had all died of some disease and the gardens, well, I figured that was just a con job to make you think you were living in some kind of paradise like the people at the North End.

The North End was the ritzy part of town, where Hank's store was, where we were headed right now. Jimmy did some landscaping up there when his luck wasn't running so good at the track. Shirley cleaned houses there when she wasn't doing piecework at the sunglass factory. Mansions, Shirley called those North End houses. She made the insides look nice so the rich people would never have to see a bathtub ring or a greasy stove or a dusty tennis trophy. Jimmy took care of the outsides so they wouldn't trip over a twig or step in dog shit or have to shovel any frickin' snow.

We lived in the South End, in what my sister had told me was poor people housing. The poor people housing consisted of a bunch of pink, blue, or pus-green two-story buildings that, rumor had it, were going to be repainted but never were. Our place had a kitchen and living room downstairs, and two bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. There were also bigger apartments, where the Catholics with nine or eleven or thirteen kids lived. I figured Catholics must like sex more than other people 'cause they had so many kids, but my friend Tina, a major Catholic, got PO'd when I said that and shouted they did not, they liked it less.

It felt like it was a million degrees in the car. I tried to roll down the window but something was broken and it would only go halfway down.

In the summer Manchester got frickin' hot. Jimmy said it was because we were in the frickin' Merrimack Valley and all the hot air got trapped there like in a hot-air balloon except nobody was goin' anywhere. The few people who
could afford a fan would plunk themselves down in front of it and just stare into the blur of spinning blades. Everybody else would hose themselves down like the seals at Benson's Wild Animal Farm. At night you had to leave the windows wide open, but then you couldn't sleep 'cause the sound of gypsy moths against the screen made you think somebody might be breaking in.

That wasn't a far-fetched idea. It's just what had happened a few weeks before. Somebody had broken in and stolen all our fancy Christmas ornaments. Shirley had brought those ornaments all the way down from Nova Scotia, where she grew up. Had hand-carried them on the Bluenose ferry 'cause they once belonged to her grammy and were made of glass and painted with cozy Christmas scenes. They were frickin' antiques, Jimmy had said. He said he would've shot the punks who stole them right between the eyes if only he had woken up. If only the fan in his bedroom hadn't been so goddamn loud he didn't hear the bastards. I wondered what the punks wanted with our Christmas ornaments in the broiling-hot summer. Maybe they had seen our beautiful tree the Christmas before and had been thinking about those pretty, North End–looking ornaments ever since. I vowed to peek in every window of every apartment next Christmas and track them down, just like Nancy Drew would. Even if I had to freeze my frickin' keister off.

Because in the winter, that's what you did. Froze your keister. It got so cold you could never believe it had been so hot. People would hang their laundry out front—that is, if some punk hadn't torn down their clothesline already—and the clothes would swing on the lines all stiff like paper doll clothes and the ice on the sheets would crackle when you took them down. You had to take everything down at night or it sure as hell wouldn't be there in the morning. Somebody else would be sleeping on your frozen sheets or wearing your mother's brassiere.

Jimmy swerved to a stop in front of the housing project office. It was the beginning of the month and we had to pay the rent. I didn't like going in there, but I didn't want to fry to death in the car like I heard had happened to some other kids when their father forgot about them. Plus I knew they had a fan in there that I could stand in front of.

The lady who worked in the office perked right up when we walked in. Jimmy flashed her a smile. His cigarette was dangling off his lower lip like it might fall at any moment and cause a fire.

I made a beeline for the fan as Jimmy laid out some bills on the counter.

“Thirty-seven simoleons, baby. Don't spend it all in one place.”

The lady giggled and turned all dopey-eyed. It made me want to smack her.

“Or maybe you want to take it and run away together.”

“Oh, Jimmy, you're such a kidder.”

“You think I'm kidding? Who's kidding? Who wouldn't want to run away with a beautiful doll like you?”

Jimmy looked like he might just plant one on her. I stepped in front of him. He elbowed me aside and leaned in closer to her.

“You're a real stand-up gal for not ratting me out to the main office.”

She fidgeted a little. “I think nosy neighbors oughta mind their nosy business is what I think.”

They were talking about the busybody who had sent an anonymous note to her last month complaining that Jimmy had bought himself a racehorse. The person didn't think racehorse-owning tycoons oughta be living in the projects, riding the gravy train, when honest poor people were on a waiting list to get in. The busybody said the horse probably cost a thousand simoleons, but Jimmy had only paid five hundred, so it showed what the busybody knew. A big fat nothing. Jimmy had a few hunches who the snitch might be but no solid leads. He just knew it hadda be a woman 'cause women were always flapping their big traps.

I was hoping to solve the mystery myself and then maybe get Jimmy to buy me and Virginia some bunk beds as a reward. Right now, there was barely enough room for us to walk around our two beds, never mind do the turkey trot or Watusi.

Jimmy said he'd buy the office woman something real swanky if the horse hit, which he said he knew it would. The damn thing was named Victory Bound, so you knew it was a winner. Until the big score, Jimmy said, he wanted to give the woman a token of his appreciation for not being a rat. He took out a gold lighter and laid it on the counter with the simoleons.

“Genuine gold-plated. I got it in France when I was in the merchant marine,” he said. “Maybe you'll think of me every time you light up.”

I'd seen that lighter before. There was a whole box of them in my bedroom closet.

The woman acted like nobody ever gave her anything. It almost made you feel bad for her. Almost.

She said no, she couldn't accept it.

He said she had to or his heart would break.

She said OK, it was gorgeous, just gorgeous.

Finally, we got the hell out of there.

It seemed even hotter when we stepped back outside. When you got
cooled by a fan you always had to pay the price when you walked away 'cause it felt hotter than before. Everything—and everyone—had a price. That's what Jimmy said, anyway.

“That lady likes you,” I blurted out.

“Ah, she's not my type,” he explained. “Now, Ava Gardner, that's a real woman. Va-va-voom. She makes Marilyn Monroe look sick.”

“Marilyn Monroe kicked the bucket,” I reminded him.

“I know she's dead, dum-dum, but if she was alive. If both of them were standing here wanting to groove with me, there'd be no contest. Ava would win, hands down. Too bad Sinatra tapped her first.”

We climbed back in the car and left the projects. We drove up the main drag, Elm Street, past the Blessed Sacrament school, where all the Catholics went, and Bakersville, where I went. I looked up at the darkened windows on the top floor, where my fourth-grade classroom would be. Fourth grade was supposed to be where the shit really hit the fan, where school got really hard and you weren't doing baby math anymore. Last year I had gotten all As, but how long could a person keep that up? I didn't even want to think about it.