The Mutual Admiration Society(5)
There are so many sounds in our neighborhood this morning, the same ones there always are: WOKY AM blaring rock ’n’ roll songs out of the car radios that belong to the fathers on their way to their shifts at the American Motors plant or the Feelin’ Good Cookie factory, milkmen delivering their clanking bottles, the Milwaukee Sentinel landing on front porches, St. Catherine’s “St. Kate’s” church bells clanging, dogs barking, and moms and dads hollering at their kids from their front porches to get outta the street.
None of those everyday noises have ever kept the Finley sisters from running over to the cemetery before, so what is Birdie picking up on that I’m not—oh, dang it all!
FACT: The kid’s got better hearing than Lassie when that pooch goes looking for Timmy Martin in an abandoned well.
PROOF: I didn’t notice the way she did that Trouble with a capital T is up much, much earlier than usual, brushing her teeth and gargling in the bathroom down the hall, which is probably why Birdie is digging in her heels.
In a tiny portion of her tiny brain she might be remembering our mother’s #1 Commandment that we’re never, under any circumstances, supposed to go over to the cemetery. If she is, we could wait a half hour or so and my sister with the terrible memory would probably forget that rule, but I don’t have that kind of time on my hands this morning. Louise will be breathing down our necks soon, and I’m almost positive a murder has been committed in a neighborhood that hardly nothing goes on in without somebody finding out about it in five seconds flat and spreading it around even faster. You spit a loogie around here and before it hits the sidewalk you’ll read about it in St. Kate’s Weekly Bulletin.
One of our nosy neighbors had to have heard the ruckus going on at Holy Cross last night the same way I did and they might’ve already called the cops. I didn’t hear any sirens or see any flatfeet from the Washington St. police station stomping around the cemetery when I checked about a million times this morning out our window while I was waiting to wake up Birdie, but I’d bet dollars to donuts the cops are over there somewhere doing their jobs, the same way the snooping Finley sisters oughta be.
I don’t want to ask Birdie if the reason she’s refusing to go over to Holy Cross with me this morning is because she’s remembering that our mother who she loves so much doesn’t want us to, because if she isn’t remembering that, I would’ve blown it. I just quickly tug the brown T-shirt over her head and say, “C’mon. Don’t be a wet blanket. We got plenty of time to run over to the cemetery.” The church bells are letting me know the time, but I double-check Daddy’s watch that I keep on me at all times, and sure enough, it’s 6:45 a.m. on the dot. It takes Louise at least a half hour to get dressed and fix her hair after she’s done brushing her teeth. “No sweat.”
A person wouldn’t have to be a detective to see that my sister doesn’t go for that idea.
She starts flapping her arms like crazy and if I don’t soothe her ruffled feathers, she’ll do the next weird thing she does when she gets really riled up or very hungry. She’ll throw her head back and squawk. Louise will hear for sure. The whole neighborhood will hear for sure. This little kid has got such a big set of lungs on her that she could be an opera singer when she grows up. If she grows up. I’m not sure how long somebody with her condition lives.
“Okay, okay, simmer down, honey,” I tell her sotto voce, which means very softly in the Italians’ language. (You go to school with as many wops as I do, live four houses down from Nana Cavallo, who only listens to Sicilian funeral music on her record player, and watch as many gangster movies as me, ya pick things up.) “I really, really, really, really want ya to climb the cemetery fence this morning with me, but . . .” I have to tie on my thinking cap and come up with another idea to get Birdie to do what I need her to do. Believe me, it’s for her own good. “How about if we . . . hmmm . . . hey, I know! Instead of going all the way over to Holy Cross, how ’bout we just head down to the back porch and see if we can see from there the great-good-luck something I wanna show you that you’re really gonna love?” We might be able to catch the cops dusting gravestones for fingerprints or tripping over a fresh corpse with a dagger sticking out of its throat from the porch that overlooks the cemetery, which isn’t nearly as good as being at the scene of the crime, but better than nothin’. “Whatta ya say?” I stick my hand in my pocket and furiously rub my fingers on Daddy’s Swiss Army Knife for luck. “You in?”
Things can change minute to minute with my weird, loonatic sister, but I’m currently having very high hopes that I won’t be heading down to the back porch alone to see what I can see in the cemetery. Even though Birdie has parked herself on our bedroom carpet with that you’re-not-the-boss-of-me look on her face, I have one more trick up my sleeve that’s been working like a charm lately to get her going full speed ahead.
Our parish is full of juvenile delinquents nicknamed “greasers,” and busybody neighbors nicknamed “killjoys,” so if you’re the kinds of kids who are snoops and blackmailers who are on their own because their mother doesn’t like them very much and they don’t have a father anymore who would beat the living daylights out of anyone who dare lay a finger on his “babies,” you better be fast on your feet around here, and unfortunately, only one of the Finley sisters can make that brag.