The Mutual Admiration Society(30)
If I’d been staring out of any other upstairs window of the house, that dastard wouldn’t have noticed me in the shadows, but dang that powerful nightmare-repelling night-light I stole for Birdie from the five and dime! It lights up our bedroom like it’s the Miss America stage, and that murderer had a front-row seat!
Could I now be #1 on the perpetrator’s hit list?
With a bullet?
Of course, the bad guy would have no way of knowing for sure that I saw his face, and I have no way of knowing for sure that he saw mine, but I got to BE PREPARED for the worst.
Too crafty to come out in the open to knock at our back door so he could kill the kid who saw him out of her bedroom window last night, if I was him, I would bide my time and hide behind Mr. Gilgood’s final resting place and wait for me to show up to satisfy my curiosity so he could end my life before I could turn him in to the cops who would end his and . . . and my poor little sister is running straight into his murderous arms!
9
NO GUTS, NO GORY (NO JOKE)
I’m screaming, “Birdie! Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop!” but she keeps ripping toward the mausoleum that the kidnapping murderer could be hiding behind. I’m close enough to tackle her, but just like when I shove her through our milk chute to open our squeaky back door when Louise locks us out because she wants to have “a few minutes of peace,” this is one of the times in life when my sister’s featherweight tininess really pays off. The kid’s got fancier footwork than Daddy’s favorite boxer, Rocky Marciano. She’s bobbing and weaving so fast through the gravestones that erupt out of the grass that I can’t catch up to her until after she smacks the front of Mr. Gilgood’s final resting place with both of her hands and yells, “I win!”
I do not tell her, “Congratulations,” and dig a Hershey’s kiss out of my pocket.
I slam the Red Owl bag down at her feet, stomp on it, grab her T-shirt in my fist, and quietly hiss out, “Goddamnit all, Bird,” because the murderer could be right around the corner waiting to silence me for good. And then, of course, he wouldn’t stop there, would he? He’d need to murder my sister next, because she eyewitnessed him offing me. Daddy would roll over in his grave, if he could, if I let anybody harm one blah-brown hair on the head of his precious tweetheart. “I’m warnin’ you, ya run off like that on me again, cross my heart and hope to die, I’ll . . . I’ll . . .”
“You’ll what, Tessie?” Birdie smarts back.
“I’ll . . . I’ll . . .” I’d die for her—might even be about to—but the only thing I want to do right this second is slap the smirk she’s got smeared across her face all the way to 84th St.!
I’m so bent out of shape that I even forget about the danger we might be in, and I let my temper do the talking. “Say you’re sorry!”
She sticks her tongue out at me, digs her hand deep into my shorts pocket, helps herself to a heaping handful of chocolate kisses, and singsongs, “I’m so, so, so, so sorry, Tessie, for not listening to you and running away,” but believe you me, the kid is not sorry, not even a smidgeon. Usually meek and mild Birdie is looking about as repentant as the gargoyle that’s glaring down at us from on top of the Gilgood mausoleum, because she is in the grips of #6:
SURE SIGNS OF LOONY
Seeing, hearing, and smelling stuff that nobody else can.
Acting more high-strung than a Kentucky Derby winner.
Wearing clothes that don’t go together.
Not understanding what’s going on in movies or television shows or the neighborhood.
Wetting the bed all the time sometimes.
Wild-streaking.
Extreme stubbornness.
Having a leaky memory and a drifting brain.
Not getting jokes and the ones they tell are lamer than Tiny Tim.
Murdering.
Drooling, when not asleep.
I hate it when she does this!
10:20 a.m. The famous saying “Life isn’t fair” couldn’t get any truer. Birdie is having a gay old time, throwing chocolate kisses up in the air and catching them in her wild-streaking smart-aleck mouth like they’re salted peanuts at Lonnigan’s Bar, and I’m left holding the bag in the graveyard, sweating bullets to come up with a they-went-thatta-way plan to escape a kidnapping killer who is probably already behind the mausoleum practicing his choking.
We could try to outrun him, but short-legged Birdie could never beat out a stork-legged man with murder on his mind, I don’t care how Marciano her footwork is. We could scream, but a fat lotta good that would do us. Mr. Gilgood avoided people like the plague when he was alive, and he must’ve put it in his Last Will and Testament that he be buried as far away as possible from everybody else, because Birdie and me are on the very edges of the cemetery. Nobody would hear us yelp for help. Even Gert Klement with her powerful hearing aids would be, pardon my French, shit outta luck. Not that she’d come running to rescue Birdie and me, no way, no how. That bad Samaritan would just smile to herself and mutter, My, oh, my. That sounds like the Finley sisters desperately yelling for assistance in the cemetery. I’d rush right over to save them, but they made their beds and now they can lie in them . . . at St. Anne’s Home for Wayward Girls and the county loony bin, and then she’d throw her head back, laugh evilly, and cut herself a great big piece of that devil’s food cake.