The Mutual Admiration Society(6)

Even though I’d gotten a heckuva shiner from Butch Seeback, the meanest and greasiest of the greasers, due to Birdie’s dawdling, I’d been having the worst time making her remember that if we suddenly found ourselves in a rough-and-tumble situation, which seems to happen to us all the time these days because of our dangerous lines of work, we had to haul our heinies away from whatever fix we were in ASAP! No ifs, ands, or buts.

I’d just about given up on getting through to her and felt doomed to spending half of my life with beefsteaks on my eyes, when the answer to my problem came out of nowhere the night Birdie and me were in the middle of playing the umpteenth game of cat’s cradle on our front porch steps a couple of weeks back.

There we were, breathing in that ripe red apple smell that’s been hanging over the neighborhood, passing the bakery string back and forth, when my sister’s most favorite song in all the world—“Rockin’ Robin”—came drifting down the block. The second she started to snap her fingers and got that irresistible smile on her face, I knew Birdie was going to take a powder, but my hands were tied. Before I could shake the string off my fingers to stop her, she hopped down the porch steps and took off like she was a rat following the Pied Piper toward where the tune was coming from, which turned out to be the Tates’ house five doors down.

When I was chasing after Birdie, my keen detecting mind couldn’t help but wonder just what in the hell stickin-the-mud Mrs. Nancy Tate would be doing up at 10:47 p.m. listening to rock ’n’ roll music when her husband was laid up at St. Joe’s Hospital with the broken leg he got when he was playing football at the yearly St. Kate’s Men’s Club game.

At that time of night, you can usually find somebody in the neighborhood up to no good, but whatever that particular gal was doing, I was positive that it would not be blackmailable or mysterious and therefore a huge waste of my precious time. Mrs. Nancy Tate, the current treasurer of the Pagan Baby Society, who our mother is running against in the election in a few weeks, was probably up doing something boringly holy. Something like humming along to a stack of 45s while she was sewing patchwork quilts for heathen African children on her Singer machine.

So all I’d been thinking about doing when I finally caught up to Birdie was scolding her and dragging her back home, but after I caught a handful of her T-shirt in the Tates’ backyard, the poor thing was looking so eager to peek into the window the music was coming out of that I caved in. Sure, I was 100% positive that nothing would come of it, but I figured as long as we were there, what the heck. I gave my sister the shhh sign and took outta my shorts pocket the two things that I always keep on me after the streetlights come on. And once I got done wiggling down over our faces the exact same black nylon stockings that Daddy used to wear when he snuck up on us in the middle of the night, the sweaty Finley sisters crept hand in hand toward the Tates’ rumpus room window, ready, willing, and mostly able.

Because we weren’t on one of our regularly scheduled missions, but on one of Birdie’s regularly unscheduled missions, I didn’t have the chance to grab our coaster wagon that’s got the soda crate in it for my sister to stand on so she can see into our neighbors’ windows, so I ended up having to piggyback her. Once we got squared away, we peered through a crack in the curtains on the Tates’ wide-open window the music was booming out of and . . . lo and behold! Holy Mrs. Nancy Tate wasn’t humming along to Birdie’s most favorite song in all the world while she was pumping the pedal on her Singer machine the way I thought she’d be. Holy Mrs. Nancy Tate was humming along with “Rockin’ Robin” and pumping something else! She was shimmying around her wood-paneled rumpus room in a white pleated Washington High School cheerleader skirt for a traveling vacuum cleaner salesman. His back was to me, but I knew who it was. One of his uprights was standing next to the chair he was sprawled out in, and he was holding in his hand the same drink he always orders at Lonnigan’s Bar whenever he comes into town. Vodka on the rocks + a Hoover machine = Mr. Horace Mertz.

Everything was going along peachy keen—Mrs. Tate was giving us real blackmailing eyefuls—until it got to the part in the song that my sister just goes absolutely crazy for. The part when the rockin’ robins start flapping their wings and singin’, “Go, bird, go.” I was so impressed by that old cheerleader’s splits that I forgot all about paying attention to you-know-who, and by the time that I did, Birdie was singing really loudly along with the song and I couldn’t slap my hands over her mouth the way I normally would’ve because I was using my arms to hold her up.

When it hit Mrs. Tate that she wasn’t performing a solo anymore, she dropped the red pom-poms she was using to cover up her long boobies, ripped open the curtains we were peeking through, hollered something at us that should get her kicked out of the Legion of Decency, and then you know what that half-naked rah-rah gal had the gall to do? She sicced her wiener dog on the Finley sisters! Slid Oscar straight through the rumpus room window!

Of course, animal lover Birdie, who was still wailing away at the top of her lungs, wanted to stay and pet the pooch instead of hightailing it out of there before we got our faces chewed off by that vicious little foot-long, so praise be to whoever is the patron saint of genius ideas for finally delivering the answer to the problem I’d been having of getting her to scram from life-threatening situations, because it worked like a charm that night and on many more snooping missions since.