Snow Globes and Hand Grenades (14 page)

FRIDAY ARRIVED WITH SUNSHINE and uncertainty. Sister Mathilda was harnessed to the clothesline walking back and forth plotting her escape. Through a gap in her bandage she could see blades of grass at her feet. Faking blindness she marched along mumbling, “Just a few more days.” Her plan was to escape during the upcoming eighth grade graduation ceremony, two days ahead of her appointment to have her bandages removed. Her only concern was the Cutlass engine. Would it start? The last time she turned it over was midnight New Year's Eve. It made such a load roar that the next morning the principal, Sister Helen, started insisting Sister Mathilda get cataract surgery and make plans for the retirement home. That's when she hid the keys under the rock in a rosary pouch. The Saturday night Spring Follies would provide the diversion she needed to start the car unnoticed. “Just a few more days,” she mumbled.

Mimi, Tony, and Patrick walked out on the playground talking in low tones about how well the counter investigation was going—maybe too well. It felt as though the whole thing could fall apart at any moment.

“If they find out,” Patrick whispered to Tony, “meet me at the bridge and we'll run away from there.”

Tony didn't answer. He was looking at the top button on Mimi's blouse.

“It's gorgeous out,” Mimi said skipping. The boys watched her lead the way onto the hot, crowded playground. Some of the eighth grade boys were playing Kill the Man with the Ball. It was a forbidden game that came out of nowhere that spring. Ignoring the neat yellow stripes painted on the blacktop to contain each class in designated corners, a daring boy would grab one of the maroon kickballs and yell, “Kill the man with the ball!” With that, everyone on the playground would stop what they were doing and chase after him. The goal was to tackle the man with the ball and pile up on top of him.

Jimmy Purvis, a lean eighth grader and one of the highly respected Gang of Five who had run away in fifth grade, was weaving through the crowd with the ball. Kids from every grade, boys and girls, were rushing toward him with a joyous blood lust. Mothers' Club volunteers yelled, “Let's have peace!” But no one heard them. How could they? Kill the Man with the Ball was primordial and unstoppable. The only way to escape ending up at the bottom of the pile was for the fleeing student to toss the ball to someone else at the last second. Jimmy ran by and tossed the ball to Patrick.

“Run!” Mimi yelled.

Patrick took off with Mimi chasing after him and Tony chasing after her. The three of them ran astride flicking the ball to each other when tacklers lunged.

Detective Kurtz and Father Ernst stepped outside for some fresh air and noticed the commotion. Standing by the dumpster, Detective Kurtz took a fresh red pack of Dentyne gum from his shirt pocket and put a piece in his mouth. Father Ernst lit up a Pall Mall and watched the game.

The darting, dodging, and passing of Mimi, Patrick, and Tony defied the mob.

“No one can catch us!” Mimi yelled to Patrick as he gave her the ball. And it seemed no one could. The pyramid system of getting all the students to repeat two main theories was working. One student after another had faced Father Ernst and Detective Kurtz, telling them either the snow globe in Mary's hand was a miracle somehow, or maybe Miss Kleinschmidt put it up there. But the investigators standing on the playground watching Kill the Man with the Ball had noticed a pattern. All of the students except the first three gave answers that were artless and brief, suggesting they had nothing to hide and were just following a script. But who wrote the script? Whose
answers stood out? Mimi Maloney, Tony Vivamano, and Patrick Cantwell. Their performances had been so richly detailed, it made them look guilty by contrast. The problem for the investigators was they had no evidence.

“Oh, hell!” Tony yelled tossing the ball to Patrick.

A row of seventh graders swung like a cemetery gate on Tony, Patrick, and Mimi. Down they went. Patrick held the ball. Mimi fell on top of him and Tony on top of her. They gulped their final breaths and waited for the pain of the pile up. Ten students dove on, then fifteen, twenty and thirty. At the bottom of the pile they could only suffer and wait. Bodies blocked the sunlight. The tangle of legs and arms and school uniforms muffled the happy screams of students at the top jumping on. Under the tonnage, vital organs waited for blood no longer circulating. When would it end? When would they unload? Lungs burned like swimmers underwater who couldn't come up for air. There was no breathing, only the holding of breath at the very bottom. To exhale was to feel your lungs collapse under the push of bodies above you, and there was no drawing a second breath at the bottom.

“GET OFF!” yelled a Mothers' Club guard, running up. She grabbed students by the arms and peeled them off the top of the heap. “Someone could get killed!”

“It's Kill the Man with the Ball,” Jimmy Purvis told her.

Detective Kurtz and Father Ernst watched from a distance as Mimi, Patrick, and Tony wobbled back to their feet. The three of them laughed and smiled at each other. Detective Kurtz chewed his gum between his front teeth and looked over at Father Ernst. He nodded in agreement. It seemed Mimi, Patrick, and Tony were a unit. Somehow, they were in cahoots, but how was not yet clear. They decided to work privately on the case over the weekend and meet again next week to solve the crime.

SATURDAY MORNING Mimi got on her green Schwinn with the white basket and rode over to Patrick's house. She asked him if he wanted to go on a bike ride.

“Sure. Where to?”

It was a surprise, she said, but first they had to go get Tony. Tony was glad to see them. He sneaked away from doing dishes and off they went, two boys following Mimi to see where she would take them. They rode for a long while, watching Mimi in her pink short pants in front of them, her hair floating in the wind. Tony was right behind her, close enough to smell the Charlie perfume she had used that morning.

Mimi was the central figure in a breezy watercolor painting, Spring Day with Girl on a Bike. The background changed as they rode through neighborhoods. Green lawns, yellow forsythia bushes, deep red tulips flew by, but the boys gazed only at Mimi in the wild, bright center of the painting. It was good to see her out of school and out of uniform. When they got to the stoplight by the HiPointe Theatre, they saw Forest Park across the street and Tony figured out where she was taking them.

“The zoo? You're taking us to the zoo?”

Mimi nodded. “I decided you've both been working so hard, you deserve that field trip.”

The boys looked at each other. They should have been happy. But instead,
they were uneasy. Both wished they were alone with Mimi. Both wished they were on a date with her and could park their bikes and walk all over the zoo holding hands with her, and then kiss her over and over again under some tree. Kissing Mimi felt like an imperative. Their blood warmed. They were under a mandate of nature—kiss the girl in the painting.

“This sounds like a lot of fun,” Patrick said blankly, feeling he had to say something.

“Yeah, this will be great,” Tony said, taking a deep breath that told his DNA to wait patiently for the chance to kiss her.

The light turned green and Mimi pushed off toward Forest Park and the waiting zoo with the boys riding right behind her. A black VW waited at the light and then followed slowly behind them. Father Ernst adjusted his sunglasses and pushed up the sleeves of his light blue sweater. He was working the case on his day off, armed with a 35-millimeter camera and a zoom lens.

Patrick kissed Mimi first. It happened near the tiger cages when Tony wasn't looking. A Bengal tiger paced back and forth snarling at the zoo visitors, his claws clacking on the cement floor every time he did the turn around. The tiger in the cage wanted to get out; Patrick could see it in his eyes. That tiger was like his secret crush on Mimi. The tiger wanted to leap and roar and be free. He wanted to be a
real
tiger, not a caged attraction performing for the tourists.

Mimi was standing right next to Patrick, and Tony had stepped away to a private area to fan away some gas after eating a piece of cold pepperoni pizza for breakfast. Mimi's lips were profiled against the tiger cage. Back and forth, back and forth … Patrick was looking at the tiger and then at her lips. When she turned to say something to him, he pounced.

Father Ernst—lurking unnoticed on the opposite side of the cage—pushed the button on his camera as Patrick's lips met Mimi's.
Click
. It was now evidence in the case.

“What are you doing?” Mimi asked.

Patrick heard the question and knew right away he had no good answer. “I don't know,” he said, looking back at the tiger.
How could he have done such a thing
? Right away, he blushed, embarrassed and ashamed. He had betrayed his friendship with Tony like it was nothing. He hated himself and got quiet.

“You guys are my two favorite people in the world,” Tony said walking up. He hadn't seen what happened. He put his arms on their shoulders.

“Let's ride our bikes some more,” Mimi said. “Around the park.”

They ended up on the top of Art Hill, by the Art Museum where Patrick went inside to use the bathroom. That's when Tony struck. He kissed Mimi as they stood by their bikes beneath the statue of The Thinker.

Father Ernst got a picture of that, too. He was leaning by the Statute of King Louis XIV on horseback, sword in the air. No one saw him. Tony tried to kiss her a second time, but she turned away.

“What are you doing?” Mimi said.

“What am I doing?” Tony laughed. He was enjoying a love feast in a starving land. He pointed to the statue. “I'm doing what he told me to do.”

Mimi looked up at The Thinker. He seemed to know the heart of every mortal who passed by. He knew that for Mimi, kissing Patrick and Tony was boring, like tasting some goulash recipe on a spoon her mother would stick in her face when she wasn't hungry. She had no interest in kissing boys. Not today. She had done plenty of kissing, and more, with her boyfriend on the golf course. After the hand grenade incident, all she wanted to give Patrick and Tony was her friendship and thanks for saving her life. There was more to life than kissing. There was something you couldn't see unless you were blind, something you couldn't afford unless you were broke, something you couldn't know you already owned unless you almost lost it. If only the stone lips of The Thinker could move. He would tell the boys that Mimi had reckoned herself dead, and reckoned it wrong, and woke up to be alive again.

“Why don't you guys go on without me,” Patrick said. He walked out of the Art Museum ready to go home. He had washed his face in the bathroom and resolved to bow out.

Mimi looked at Patrick. “We need to stick together. I have something to tell you about tonight.”

“Tonight?”

“Wait,” Tony said touching Mimi's shoulder, “I got something to say.”

Mimi and Patrick looked at him.

“Mimi, will you be my date at the graduation dance?”

His date? Tony was so eager, she didn't want to hurt his feelings. She looked at both boys, then rested her gaze on Tony. “Would that make you happy?”

“Yeah,” Tony said.

Mimi looked at Patrick and he blinked, a letting-go blink.

“All right then, Mr. Vivamano,” she said in a playful formal tone, “I will be your date at the graduation dance.” She held out her hand and curtsied. Tony dumped his bike and danced with her beneath the statue. Patrick watched and felt better about it all, but at the same time, he realized his plan of escaping the future on a freight train with Tony was slipping away.

MIMI WAS OUT RIDING her bike when Detective Kurtz parked his patrol car in front of her house and got out. He stood there, chewing on a piece of spent gum, hitching up his weapons belt, and looked around. It was a fine spring day. Birds singing. Lawnmowers humming. He looked up the hill of the front lawn where the two masked boys had robbed the mailman. This was it. This was where he was going to crack the snow globe case. He could feel it. This was the day he was going to start solving all the other nagging juvenile crimes in this sector. He spit out his gum and walked toward the house. The gravel crunched under his shiny black shoes as he walked up the driveway and rang the doorbell. He pushed so eagerly on the button it left a little dent on his fingertip.

Inside, Mimi's older sister was practicing Chopin's funeral march. Mrs. Maloney was in the kitchen chopping green peppers to mix into a bowl of ground beef for tonight's barbecue.

“I'll get it,” Mrs. Maloney said wiping off her hands and rushing to the door. She opened it and saw a police officer.

“Ma'am.”

She brushed away a strand of hair from her face with her backhand. “Yes?”

Detective Kurtz introduced himself and said he was following up on the mailman robbery. “May I come in?”