Good Graces (26 page)

One part of me wants to rush in the front door of the house and tell Dave that he has got to drop whatever he’s doing because Troo is right this minute preparing to seek revenge, but the other part of me knows if I rat Troo out, she’ll never forgive me. Ever. Even after she’s dead. And I couldn’t really blame her. It’s bad enough to rat out your sister, but to tattle to Dave, the man who took Daddy’s place? I can’t even begin to think what she’d do to me. But what about keeping her safe the way I promised Daddy I would?

I’m still going back and forth, listening to an angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other, not sure which is which, when I come round the corner of 56th and Lloyd and one of the other places where everyone in the neighborhood spends so much of their time looms over me.

Mother of Good Hope Church.

Next to Gesu, which is downtown and so fancy that it makes you feel sorry for people who aren’t Catholics, our church is one of the most beautiful ones in all of Milwaukee. It’s got two spires, a bell that peals every hour and lots of windows with stained-glass pictures of sheep and saints and the inside is gorgeous, too. There’s row after row of pews with red leather kneelers. The confessionals are made out of cherry-colored wood. They’re where you have to go and tell on yourself at least once a week if you’re me, more if you’re Troo. The altar up front is white marble and there’s lots of gold dripping off everything and Jesus is hanging on the cross, blood oozing down his forehead from his crown of thorns. Votive candles are always flickering with ten-cents-a-pop prayers in front of statues that have got these special kinds of eyes. Like the ones in the stuffed deer head that hangs behind Jerbak’s bar, those eyes follow you around no matter what direction you go in like it’s all your fault they’re dead. The exception to that rule is the Blessed Virgin Mary. Her eyes are chipped and she’s got outstretched blue arms that, if nobody is around, you can climb between and breathe in the incense that sticks to her cloak, especially around her neck.

Behind the church is the school that’s two stories high and made of red bricks, same as Vliet Street School. Father Mickey kept telling everybody that we’d outgrown it and needed more classrooms so that’s why there’s a giant hole next to the cafeteria that has DANGER signs hanging off the rope around it, which is just asking for trouble. That hole is like putting a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting in front of kids and telling them hands off. Denny Desmond already broke his collarbone. He fell in after B.O. Montanazza challenged him to walk the plank across the hole on the first day of summer vacation.

They’re going to get busy building the rest of the school as soon as Father Mickey has taken in enough money from his parishioners, which he’ll hand over to Mr. Tony Fazio, who I recently found out in a rude way from Fast Susie isn’t exactly a silverware salesman like I’ve been thinking this whole time. Mr. Fazio owns the construction company that’s building the new classrooms. His business partner, Mr. Frankie “The Knife” DeNuzio, will be helping him. (Fast Susie also told me in a very cutting tone that Mr. DeNuzio is also known by another nickname, “Mr. Thanksgiving,” because, “Frankie is the best there is at carvin’.”)

On the opposite side of the playground is a spooky-looking old house where the nuns live, and according to Mary Lane, torture children with dripping holy water.

Father Mickey and Father Louie live together, too, in a one-story house called a rectory that’s behind the school. Father Louie’s practically an antique, but very sweet in his personality. He plays Santa at our church Christmas party, that’s how jolly and red he is, especially in his nose. He’s not here right now. He’s been taking the summer off to go on a special retreat someplace really dry and won’t be back until school starts, so that’s why Father Mickey has been living alone the past couple of months.

I’ve never been in the rectory, but Troo has. That’s where she gets her extra religious instruction. She told me the priests have got a living room with two davenports and an office with pictures on the wall of their boss on earth, the Pope. And they have a bathroom with a tub and both the priests have crosses hanging over their beds with palm fronds the same way Troo and me do. That seemed so funny to me. How those priests are pretending to live like any Tom, Dick or Harry, when they’re not. They don’t resemble normal people at all. They’re above and beyond.

I’m still staring up at the church, trying to decide whether or not I should go tell Dave about Troo’s revenge plan, when Mary Lane comes peeling around the corner, head down, legs pumping a mile a minute and skids right into me.

“For crissakes,” she says, grabbing me up off the grass and dragging me into the familiar bushes in front of the Kohls’ house. We hide in them all the time after we go out ringing doorbells or when the Molinari brothers chase us. One of Troo’s old Dubble-Bubble wrappers is caught in the bottom of a branch. Mary Lane’s got her black high-tops on like always. And her Brownie camera is hanging off her neck. That’s kinda unusual. It’s her most prized possession. She won it in a church raffle and hardly ever takes it outta the house. She shoves me into a squat, not giving me enough time to put up a fight, which I would lose anyway.

“What’re ya doin’ here?” she says. “You’re supposed to be over at the Latours’.”

“I was on my way to the Piaskowskis’. Dave’s over there and I . . . I . . . what are
you
doin’ here?” Troo told me that Mary Lane was going to be at the powwow tonight. “And who are we hidin’ from?”

“Father Mickey . . . he’s after me,” Mary Lane says, wiping her leaky nose off with her finger and running it down her tan shorts. Her bare legs look like two soda straws. “For an old guy . . . he’s pretty quick, almost fast as you.”

It takes me less than a breath to figure out what’s going on. Mary Lane’s not here scouting out the school, thinking about setting it on fire even though she’s threatened to a couple of times. That’s just big talk. She wouldn’t really do that. I don’t think. Our little cat burglar musta been up here doing what movie thiefs always do before they break into a place. They don’t just dive right in to commit a crime. They come the night before to have a look around to see if there’s a mean dog or a night watchman.

I point at the rectory and ask her, “Were you casin’ the joint and Father saw you?”

“What?” Mary Lane says with a look on her face that reminds me so much of a monkey that’s gotten a peanut stolen out of its hand by another monkey, real astonished like that. “Didn’t Troo fill you in? Didn’t she tell ya about—”

“Over here,” someone shouts from across the street. I can’t hear the rest of what the person says, only that he sounds furious and out of breath.

“That’s him. He’s comin’,” Mary Lane says, spreading apart a couple of bushy branches. “Look.”

Father Mickey is ripping across the school playground, hollering at two boys who are working hard to keep up with him. When he comes to a stop across the street from us, he checks up the block one way, then the other, and now he’s staring where we’re crouched and he’s so close. That look on his face . . . it’s the same look Bobby Brophy used to get when we’d play chess together at the playground, when he was planning his next capturing move that I never saw coming. I can’t help it, I groan.

Mary Lane slaps her hand over my mouth and whispers, “Shut your trap. He’s got really good hearin’. You recognize the boys?”

I couldn’t at first, but now that they’ve caught up, I can see that it’s Larry Montgomery and Hank Holzhauer. If Mary Lane wasn’t cat-burglaring around, then there’s only one other reason I can think of why she’d be getting chased by Father and the boys.

I take her fingers off my mouth and say, “I know what you did. You peeped in on one of their overnight parties.” The altar boys brag about how they bring sleeping bags over to the rectory and stay up to all hours of the night snacking and playing games, and it drives Mary Lane right up a wall that there aren’t any altar girls. “What were they doin’? Playin’ checkers and eatin’ jujubes?” (Her favorites.)

I’m waiting for her to launch into some no-tripper story about how they were doing something else that priests and altar boys would never do. There would be kidnapping gypsies involved and maybe that man, Ed Gein, she told me about would stop by with a blood-dripping woman, but she doesn’t. She says, “They were sittin’ around in the livin’ room with all the shades drawn. I could barely see ’em.”

“Oh, they musta been watchin’ a movie and needed it dark.” I know all about that. I am the visual-aids girl in our classroom.

Mary Lane says, “The only thing they were watchin’ was Father Mickey shakin’ his fist at ’em.”

That doesn’t sound anything like the kind of fun sleepovers I heard they have.

From across the street, Father says, “Did either of you get a good look at her?”

None of the boys answer him.

“Hank?” The priest is singling Holzhauer out because he is the head altar boy.

“No, Father.”

When the church bell starts ringing, Father Mickey checks his fancy watch and says, “It’s getting late. I have an appointment. Go back to the rectory and tell the boys I want to see them at the same time tomorrow night.”

Hank and Larry say, “Yes, Father,” and scoot after him across the playground the same way they follow him down the Communion rail with their golden skillets in case he should accidentally drop the Host.

I wait until I can’t see them anymore before I begin belly-crawling out of the bushes, but Mary Lane’s got another idea. She grabs me by my braid and reels me back.

“Seein’ that Troo hasn’t gotten ya up to speed yet, I guess I will,” she says with a first-place smirk. The two of them. Always trying to one-up each other. “Whatta ya think of when you hear those two boys’ names?”

Oh, this is such bad timing. Not the time to play the name game at all. But Mary Lane, just like me, has a lot of stick-to-it-iveness. She’s never going to let go of me until I answer, so I tell her, “Hank is really superstitious. He’s always throwin’ salt over his shoulder at lunch and knockin’ on Woody Anderson’s head for luck and Larry is the captain of the basketball team.”

“Not their first names, their last,” she says impatiently.

“Ah . . . Holzhauer is a Kraut and Montgomery . . . I don’t know what he is. Can we go now?” I gotta get back to doing what I was doing before Mary Lane ambushed me. Trying to decide what to do about Troo. Should I or shouldn’t I tell Dave that she’s coming up with a scary revenge plan?

“Holzhauer and Montgomery.” Mary Lane gets me by the shoulders, brings her face in real close to mine. I can smell her banana breath when she slowly says, “Montgomery and Holzhauer. Conner. Livingston. Jenkins. Put on your thinkin’ cap, Sal. What do those names have in common besides all of them bein’ altar boys?”

The split second after I say, “I don’t know,” that’s when it comes to me. “Holzhauer and Montgomery, all the others . . . those families have all gotten robbed!”

Mary Lane rocks back on her heels and says, “Give the little lady a cigar,” but when I don’t say anything else, she blows up. “Don’t you get it? The altar boys . . . they’re the cats. They’ve been takin’ stuff from their own houses!”

“I . . . I . . . what?!”

That can’t be right. Sure those boys are rowdy and full of themselves, but they’d never do something like that. Mary Lane has really gone off the deep end. It must be the heat. Or maybe the Toni Permanent fried her brain along with her hair.

I say, “But why . . . why would the boys steal their own stuff?”

Mary Lane says, “It’s not their idea. Troo told me they’re stealin’ against their will. Somebody’s makin’ ’em and then takin’ the loot. Who do ya think that could be?”

She knows who it is, I can tell by the teasy look on her face. It’s got to be one of the bad apples we got around here. They’re the only ones who could bully those altar boys into doing something so against their religion.

“The Molinaris?” I ask.

“Nope.”

“The Twomy brothers?”

“Uh-uh.”

There are more, but those are the worst of the batch. “I give.”

Mary Lane gets the gummiest smile. “Father Mickey! He’s makin’ the boys steal.”

I can hear the
wump
my jaw makes when it drops.

“Yeah, yeah,” she says, using her pointer finger to close up my mouth. “I don’t blame ya for not believin’ me. I didn’t believe Troo when she told me either.”

As much I’d like to think that I was right about Father Mickey being slippery, him being the ringleader of a gang of thieving altar boys . . . that can’t be the truth. Any kind of stealing is against the Eighth Commandment. And taking things from his own parishioners, the neighborhood people who trust and love him, put him up on a pedestal like he is God’s gift, and using innocent boys to do it, that wouldn’t be just sinful, that . . . that would be . . . evil.

Mary Lane says, “I knew they were gonna have one of their parties tonight ’cause I heard Hank tellin’ a kid at the playground this afternoon, so I came up here to eyeball it for myself. To see if Troo was bein’ honest or just screwin’ around.”

I’m not sure if Mary Lane is telling me the truth or not, but I’m not going to automatically think she’s lying the way I did last summer. I learned my lesson. She tried to warn me about Bobby and I didn’t believe her.

“Could . . . did you see anything besides Father shakin’ his fist at the boys?” I ask.

“Not right away ’cause of those pulled-down shades, but then I looked around and found a higher window that was a little more open and I dragged over a concrete block they got in the pile for the new wing,” Mary Lane says, like this is all in a day’s work. “After I got up, I could see every one of them boys in the livin’ room, not just Hank and Larry. Billy Maertz was cryin’. He was hugging that silver bowling trophy that belongs to his dad. Father Mickey ripped it right outta his arms.” Mary Lane looks down at a scratch on her arm and licks off the blood. Taps the top of her Brownie. “I woulda had a picture of all of ’em, but I slipped off the block. Father heard me fall into the bushes.”