The Mutual Admiration Society(81)
PROOF: Of course, my confidential informant didn’t apologize for daring me and putting me under so much pressure, because her saying she’s sorry for anything, well, that’s not one of her business policies. What she did was punch me in the arm and tell me, “I absolve you of the dare, Finley,” and then she made sure that her snitch, Linda O’Brien, who is a slave to the nuns this week for telling her mother that she didn’t know her ass from a hole in the ground the way Charlie said she was, told every single kid that passed in front of her in the cafeteria line to get two fish sticks slapped on their plates, “Finley completed the dare so lay offa her, and if ya say one word about this hairnet, you’ll be eating your perch with a busted lip.”
FACT: What’s-his-name will not be coming around and beeping the ah-OO-ga horn of his souped-up Chevy every morning, or keeping our mother out late at night, not for a while at least, because I did #4 on this list:
JUST DESSERTS
1. Find out where the numbskull lives and smear black shoe polish on his Chevy’s whitewalls.
2. Put a bag of burning dog doo-doo on his porch, ring the doorbell, and run.
3. Call him at his “alleged” job at the American Motors plant and use that impression you learned from watching gangster movies where wops are always threatening their enemies: Dis is Three-Fingered Louie Galetti and you-a better stay away from that doll Louise Finley if you-a don’ wanna be fitted for a cement raincoat, ya goomba.
4. Doctor up his food, if you ever get to meet him face-to-face.
PROOF: After all the folderol during THE CASE OF THE TROTS, if there is anything that Louise Finley does not want to be associated with it’s a bad case of diarrhea, and I mixed up so many ground-up Ex-Lax pills into Leon Gallagher’s tapioca pudding dessert when he was hypnotized by Louise’s bouncing bosom that he got too pooped to participate the rest of the night. (Joke!) He didn’t even make it to the little boys’ room. (Ha . . . ha . . . ha . . . Gotcha!)
FACT: Louise doesn’t need his “alleged” American Motors paycheck ASAP anymore, so she told Birdie and me that we can start calling her Mom again. She sang “Some Enchanted Evening”—hers and Daddy’s song—the entire walk home from the fish fry, which I found a little annoying, but I guess it’s better than having to listen to her sing the blues. (Birdie will take Louise up on her offer to call her Mom, but I won’t. I think you need to have a really bad memory like my sister’s if you want to forget and forgive somebody.)
PROOF: Louise had a very good reason to feel enchanted, because Mr. Fleming, the father of Mary Jane Fleming, who has been calling our mother every day from his desk at the First Wisconsin Bank to tell her that she better make a payment on our house or else, told Louise at the fish fry that a mysteriously large amount of dough turned up in her checking account late this afternoon, which should take care of matters.
FACT: I have already solved THE CASE OF THE MIRACULOUS MORTGAGE MONEY.
PROOF: Mr. James “Jimmy/Good Egg” McGinty got plenty of dough from his rich departed uncle to do as many charitable acts as he wants, and I’m pretty sure our godfather would really miss the Finley sisters if we had to move out of the neighborhood and into the poorhouse.
FACT: The Pagan Baby election has been called off and a winner declared, due to the niceness of another mysterious do-gooder who pleads the Fifth.
PROOF: Some genius kid waited until Gert Klement left to set up for the fish fry this afternoon, and then she stuck her weird sister in front of the Motorola television and her game shows and some Hershey’s kisses that she found under her bed. She then rode her Schwinn bike up two streets to Kenfield’s Five and Dime on North Ave. to buy the biggest piece of poster board she could find—she only paid for it because she couldn’t stick it under her T-shirt without getting caught—then she five-fingered a thick black marker and a pair of red pom-poms and she rode a block over to Melman’s Hardware. This is where she sliced open a bag of cement in aisle seven with her father’s lucky Swiss Army Knife and scooped some of it into a brown paper bag. The last stop she made was at Dalinsky’s Drugstore for more candy and Tums and Ex-Lax.
When the same smart kid finished her errands, she came home and refilled a bowl to the brim with Hershey’s kisses and set it down in front of her sister, who was happily watching The Price Is Right. Then she popped into her garage and mixed up the cement in a coffee can and printed a huge sign with her left hand so no one would recognize her excellent handwriting. After that, once she made sure that nobody was around to wonder what the hell she was doing, she ran down the block.
She was not at all worried that she would get seen by Mrs. Nancy Tate. Due to her excellent investigative skills, she knew that gal was up at Rhonda’s Beauty Parlor getting a permanent wave, when she stuck the sign in the hole she made in the Tate’s front lawn, along with some of the cement to prevent easy removal:
ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR!
DON’T BE A BIG FAT BORE!
GET YOUR POM-POMS OUT AND CHEER!
FOR THE HOOVER SALESMAN OF THE YEAR!
(MR. HORACE MERTZ MAKES EVENING HOUSE CALLS.)
Considering how strongly that kid feels about an eye for an eye, in her opinion, that patchwork-quilting, pagan-baby-torturing holy roller who slid her vicious little foot-long dog through her rumpus room window the night two snooping sisters spied her hoochie-coochie dancing for a vodka-on-the-rocks-swilling traveling vacuum cleaner salesman got off easy.