KooKooLand (5 page)

We drove farther north, past the place where you got your TV fixed and the garage where you got your old clunker fixed and the Dunkin' Donuts where Jimmy knew the girl behind the counter and would get free maple crullers. We passed Central Avenue, where YaYa and Papou's beer joint was. We passed Zayre's, the cheapo store, where Shirley bought me jumpers that were too long and kneesocks that were too high so there was no chance of any leg showing and Jimmy blowing a gasket.

We finally made it to the nice part of town. I peered out the window at all the joints I planned to shop in when Jimmy's ship came in. The Bon-Ton Junior Miss Shop was where I intended to get most of my outfits. I figured that's where Susan shopped 'cause Virginia said that's where all the popular girls went. Candy-asses, she called them. The name candy-ass made you think maybe those girls ate a lot of candy and were lard-asses but they weren't. They all had cute asses like Annette Funicello. I asked Virginia if being a candy-ass meant they were sweet like candy, but she said, no, they were a bunch of stuck-ups. She didn't long to be a candy-ass like I did. She didn't want to wear shirts with Peter Pan collars and pleated plaid skirts and clodhopper saddle shoes. She wanted to wear dungarees and tight black sweaters and put black stuff around her eyes like the raccoon ladies in the Combat Zone. But unfortunately, she said, Jimmy made us dress like a couple of Greek yayas.

Jimmy barreled up the main drag so fast I couldn't get a good look at the
candy-ass clothes. An ad came on the radio for Hank's Sports Center. Jimmy and I began to sing the Patti Page song that was the background music for the ad. I knew all the lyrics because Jimmy played the song whenever he got sloshed. It was about a merchant mariner who sailed around the world making women of many nationalities miserable. Patti told the joker to shape up or ship out. Jimmy said no broad would tell him what to do if she knew what was good for her, not even Miss Patti Page.

Cross over the bridge, cross over the bridge.

Change your reckless way of living, cross over the bridge . . .

Patti crooned in our ears.

And that's what we did. We crossed over the Amoskeag Bridge and pulled into Hank's place.

T
he store was jammed with men. Some looked like mucky-mucks and some looked like they didn't have a pot to piss in.

The smell of WD-40 hung in the air like a greasy fart.

Everywhere I looked I saw things I was afraid of tripping over. Fishing poles. Oars. Big, black rubber boots. One wrong step could send me flying into the blade of an outboard motor that would slice my head in two. Or a bowie knife could fall off a shelf and stab me in the gut. I watched guns being cocked and triggers being pulled and I wondered if some half-lit guy who traded in a gun had gone and left a bullet in the chamber. A bullet that would go straight through my kitty T-shirt and into my heart. And no one could save me. Not even kind Dr. Kildare on TV, or the darker, mean-looking Dr. Ben Casey, who Virginia thought was sexier.

Only Dr. Susan Piasecny could save me.

I saw her smiling at me.

She was standing behind the ammo counter. Jimmy was already there, kidding around with her. My legs went stiff. My tongue felt like it had been glued to the roof of my mouth. I couldn't even get a word out about wanting to be a lady doctor too or about how much I enjoyed the Good & Plenty she'd given me or about how I was now storing my Barbie accessories in the Good & Plenty box.

Apparently, she had spoken to me.

“Hey, dummkopf, get your ass over here and say hello to Susan,” ordered Jimmy. “You were dying to come and now you're acting all tongue-tied like the Mummy.”

I started to smile and then stopped myself. Some of my front teeth were coming in crooked. They were sticking out all funny, unlike Susan's, which were perfect. Jimmy said the crooked teeth made me look like Dracula. He had taken to wiggling his fingers in front of his mouth like they were rubbery fangs.

Trying to forget I had the Mummy's personality and Dracula's smile, I made my way over to Susan.

“Hi,” I mumbled, looking down at the hole in my sneaker where my toe was poking through. My feet, Jimmy had said, were getting big as Frankenstein's.

“You've gotten so tall. Your hair looks so pretty,” gushed Susan.

“What do you say?” asked Jimmy, starting to sound annoyed.

“Thank you,” I replied, finally looking up. I stared into her warm brown eyes. They appeared to have dots of gold in them.

Jimmy playfully pinched Susan's cheek.

“You got cheekbones like Pocahontas. Must be that drop of Injun blood on your mother's side.”

Susan swatted him away like he was a mosquito.

“Watch out. I just might scalp you,” she said.

Jimmy laughed and backed off.

She moved away from him and came closer to me. She was wearing crisp cotton slacks, spotless sneakers, and a bandanna tied around her long, graceful neck. She seemed both warm and cool.

“I hear you're real smart. Mr. Personality here's been bragging. He says you got all As last year.”

I felt warm and cool too. My cheeks were burning up. My tongue was still frozen.

“I told her to go break a window,” Jimmy joked. “Get a B in behavior so the other kids don't think she's a brownnoser or a square.”

Susan leaned closer to me. Like we were having our own private conversation. Like we were already best friends. “Don't listen to him. You just keep it up, study hard, and you'll be headed to Radcliffe before you know it.”

I nodded. I didn't know where Rad Cliff was, but I thought it sounded wonderful—high up and far away. Possibly it was in KooKooLand.

“Radcliffe doesn't want a little greaseball like her. They want Yankee blue bloods,” Jimmy butted in.

I wished he'd butt the hell out.

“She can go wherever she wants. Things are different. The world is changing.”

“There you go again with that Martin Luther King utopian baloney. I keep tellin' you it's a divided world, Injun, and just 'cause you want it to be all hearts and flowers don't make it so.”

“You'll see.” Susan smiled, like she had some secret information.

“Those crackers down south are never gonna let little Elly Mae learn her ABCs with a nigger.”

Susan's smile disappeared.

“Why would a smart guy like you use a dumb word like that?”

“C'mon, everybody said it in the merchant marine, even the niggers, and I oughta know 'cause I was drinking buddies with most of them.”

“I don't see a merchant ship around here, do you, Jimmy? We got every other kind, so why don't you pick another ship to sail on?”

Jimmy cracked up. His mustache made a dashing smile on his upper lip.

“You're all right, kid. You're all right in my book any day of the week.”

“Great. Put me down for Sunday. We can go to church together. You can give the priest a hot tip on the horses.”

Jimmy laughed harder. She had him eating out of her hand like a racehorse with a cube of sugar.

I stared at the cross hanging around her neck. I begged God to let me be just like her. I vowed then and there to go to church. Even though Jimmy was dead set against churchgoing of any type and thought churchy people were squares. But Susan was a big Catholic and she didn't seem like a square, not even to Jimmy. So, by damn—no, by darn—I'd become a Catholic too. And then Susan and I could hang out at church together.

“Speaking of horses,” I heard Jimmy say to Susan, “you still riding?”

“I just went riding with Mom,” said Susan. “She's a great horsewoman. She's got a way with the most skittish horses.”

Jimmy grunted, unwilling to concede Doris was good at anything besides aggravating Hank.

Just then a guy waddled up to the counter. He had a beer belly that made him look like a pregnant lady.

“Hey, Susan,” he said with a snorty laugh, “gimme a pair of balls.”

“Yeah, me too, Susan. What about my balls?” said his buddy, like it was the funniest goddamn thing in the world. Like he was goddamn Groucho Marx.

Balls were what hunters called a certain type of ammo when they wanted to be wise guys. When they wanted to make a girl get all red in the face. They seemed to like that one little word could get girls all bent out of shape.

I knew what balls were. Sort of. Besides being something fun and round you bounced against a wall, they had something to do with Down There. Something round Down There that guys thought was fun and funny. The shape is what threw me. I thought it was supposed to be long like a maple cruller.

The pregnant guy wasn't done having fun.

“You ever fired up any balls, Susan? You ever seen 'em shoot off?”

Jimmy stepped in. Right in the pregnant guy's face. The red-hot end of his cigarette butt was an inch from the guy's schnoz.

“Leave the kid alone. She's a good kid, a decent kid. Don't talk to her like that.”

“I was just kidding around. I didn't mean anything by it.”

“If I tell Hank what you said to her, he'll belt you so hard in the schnozzola you'll see more stars than Wile E. Coyote.”

“I didn't mean anything by it,” the guy repeated.

“Then maybe you want to open your stupid piehole and apologize.”

“Sorry,” the guy mumbled to Susan, staring down at the ammo.

“Maybe you wanna look at the person you're apologizing to so you at least give the impression you mean what you say.”

The guy looked up at Susan. His stupid piehole was all twitchy.

“I'm sorry. Real sorry.”

Susan gave him the ammo and he thanked her very much and slunk the hell out of there like a cat that had peed where it wasn't supposed to.

Jimmy had showed the guy who was boss. He had protected my best friend. He was the best goddamn father in the world.

“Any jerko bugs you, you tell your uncle Jimmy,” he told Susan. “I'll straighten him the hell out.”

“That's what I'm afraid of,” she said.

A door banged open and a gruff voice boomed out.

“Look what the cat dragged in. A goddamn Greek.”

It was Susan's father, Hank. The millionaire.

He didn't look so hot. He looked like he might've just gotten up or had tied one on the night before. I caught a glimpse of a makeshift bed in the smoky back room he had come out of. And a whole bunch of empty beer bottles. It made me think of a song I sang in the car to pass the time while Jimmy was in the bookie joint.

Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall

Ninety-nine bottles of beer.

Take one down, pass it around.

Ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall.

You kept going until you had gone through all the bottles of beer or until your father came back.

I could smell the beer on Hank's breath when he got closer. He was puffing on a cigar as usual. Cigar smoke made my stomach do flip-flops worse than Jimmy's Lucky Strikes. I turned my head to the side and tried holding my breath. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi . . . I couldn't hold it long enough.

Hank handed Susan a wrench. He told her to go straighten up his place in the back, then finish putting that boat trailer together, then stock the shelves, then go buy him some more goddamn cigars, he was almost out. Susan took the wrench like she knew what to do with it.

Before she left she spoke to me again. “Don't forget about Rat Cliff.”

“I won't. I won't forget.” Rad or Rat Cliff, now I wasn't sure. I hoped it wasn't Rat Cliff.

Susan went into the back and closed the door. I could hear beer bottles being tossed into a garbage can.

Jimmy pulled Hank aside and started whispering to him.

I couldn't hear what they were saying, so I spied on them like Nancy Drew, trying to pick up clues.

Hank kept puffing away on his stinky cigar. Except for the cigar, he didn't look anything like I imagined a millionaire should look. He didn't wear a top hat or swill champagne like the swells in Fred Astaire movies. He wasn't even handsome like Jimmy. He was really old—forty-six, twelve years older than Jimmy—and a couple inches shorter. He had a bowlegged walk, but he had a swagger about him, and Jimmy said women were always throwing themselves at him.

He's like a bantam rooster, Jimmy explained. A cock of the walk.

Unlike Jimmy, Hank didn't like to throw the baloney. He always acted like he had someplace more important to be. If he thought a guy was full of shit, he'd turn his back on him and walk away. Like the guy didn't even rate a see-you-later-Charlie. If some rube took too long deciding between this rifle and that rifle, he'd order the greenhorn the hell off the premises. But if a guy knew which end of a gun was the business end, if, like Hank, he could track the biggest deer anyone had ever seen for three days until it gave up and said shoot me, he'd give him the goddamn gun for a test run. Or if a guy was like Jimmy and knew how to navigate a canoe through a hurricane to get to the biggest trout anyone had ever seen, then he was in the inner circle and got invited to Hank's hunting camp on the Allagash River, which was way the hell up near Canada in God's Country.

Big wheel or working stiff, judge or jailbird, they all wanted to go to God's Country with Hank.

“Everyone wants to be his buddy,” Jimmy had once told me, “but nobody really knows him. Hell, I'm as close to him as anybody. We were both merchant seamen, we're goddamn brothers. But you can't cross a line with him. You can't get too chummy. I think that Polish mama of his has her claws into him pretty
good. I did some landscaping for her. She's a tough customer, just like YaYa. I know the type. ‘Go to church or else.' Nothing's ever good enough for them unless you're a goddamn choirboy. Well, that ain't me and it ain't Hank.”