KooKooLand (11 page)

If one of the mothers was the Project Snitch, I thought maybe we had even won her over and she wouldn't squeal on us anymore.

H
ank asked Jimmy to check on his goddamn lawn. The thing was, it wasn't really his lawn anymore. Doris had gotten the house in the divorce and was planning to sell it and move to KooKooLand. But Hank was still all worked up about that lawn. Jimmy had put it in for him a couple of years before and now Manchester was stuck in the worst drought in fifty years and the lawn had some brown spots. Hank had seen them when he drove by.

“Let the goddamn lawn rot,” Jimmy had told him. “And Doris along with it.”

But Hank wanted the lawn green as a rube so the house would look better and sell for more dough.

“More dough for her to spend at that Jew clip joint Neiman Marcus,” said Jimmy.

Hank told him to quit being a goddamn pain in the ass and go over there and check on those spots.

So that was how, a few days after the fishing expedition, Jimmy and I ended up at Hank's old house.

Jimmy walked around the lawn throwing down new seed and watering those brown spots with a hose.

I saw Susan watching him through the window. I stuck my head out of the car so she'd see I was there and maybe come on out.

It worked like a charm. She walked right up to the car and asked if I wanted to come in where it was nice and cool.

“You poor kid. What does he do, drag you all over the city?” she asked.

“Just about,” I said. “Everywhere except the bookie joint.”

Susan just shook her head and opened the door for me.

She told Jimmy she was taking me inside and he told me not to break anything or he'd golf me one.

I followed Susan inside, staring up at the back of her head and wishing I was as tall as her.

The house was dark. Most of the shades were down. Susan poured me a glass of Pepsi. The glass was made of real glass, not plastic like our free
tumblers. I gripped it tight with both hands so I wouldn't drop it and break it and get golfed.

My eyes darted around, looking for bullet holes. I'd once heard Jimmy tell Shirley that Hank had shot his gun at Doris in the house. Jimmy insisted Hank had only done it to scare Doris, to get her to straighten up and fly right. He didn't want her to keep driving her Cadillac out to KooKooLand, spending money at every Jew joint along the way every time they had a little fight. After all, little fights were something husbands and wives had all the time, especially when one thought the other was cheating or when somebody was spending too much dough or when the husband's hamburger was burnt black as a nigger and not all nice and bloody.

I didn't see any bullet holes around. I figured maybe they had hung a picture over them or covered them with a fuzzy throw rug.

I took a sip of soda and found myself once again staring at Susan's gold cross.

“I like your necklace,” I blurted out.

People ate up compliments. I had learned that from Jimmy. When he wanted something from you, you were a beautiful doll or a stand-up guy. I wanted to be Susan's friend and I was willing to use any means—including Jimmy's—to achieve my goal.

“Do you go to church?” Susan asked me.

“Oh yes,” I lied.

It wasn't a total lie. It was a white lie as opposed to a full-out whopper. The truth was when we were in Nova Scotia the previous summer Shirley had dumped me at Sunday school, which was like church only you got to color pictures of the Three Wise Men.

“Then you know Christ died for our sins?” Susan continued.

Right away I was getting into deep water. My knowledge of churchy stuff beyond the Three Wise Men visiting baby Jesus and bringing him toys was strictly limited.

But suddenly a word my friend Tina had mentioned floated into my head.

“You mean our venal sins?” I asked, certain this would impress Susan.

She laughed.

“
Venial
sins,” she corrected me. She spelled it—V-E-N-I-A-L—like it was a spelling bee. “He died for all of our sins, mortal and venial.”

“Yes,” I said, trying to figure out a way to change the subject but not coming up with anything.

“My friend Tina is a Catholic,” I announced. “There are lots of Catholics in the projects.”

Susan's face got all sad-looking.

“There are a lot of people in need in this world,” she said. “That's why I want to be a doctor. To help those children.” Then she started talking about other bad things in the world, like people fighting each other with A-bombs and prejudice against black people, which confused me 'cause I thought they were colored.

“Life's a raw deal, I guess,” I said. “ 'Cause people are starving and we all die—even our parents.”

“Death isn't a bad thing,” she said. “There's something better after we die if we don't sin. There's heaven.”

Heaven. I pictured it like a planet in another galaxy but without the bloodsucking aliens. I sure hoped it existed, but Jimmy said there were no guarantees. It wasn't a sure thing like a six-to-five shot.

I heard Jimmy's voice boom out from the other side of the screen door.

“That goddamn lawn looks like hell,” he said.

It sounded like he wanted to blame somebody but didn't know who.

“It's my fault,” offered Susan. “I'll take better care of it from now on.”

“A lawn's a living thing,” lectured Jimmy. “If you don't take care of it, you're killing a living thing.”

“You're right. I'm sorry,” said Susan. After a moment she added, “I remember when you put that lawn in.”

“C'mon, Dracula, let's go,” he called out. “Hop to it.”

I jumped up. I hopped to it.

I was almost to the door when Doris appeared from a back room.

I stopped in my tracks.

She looked so different.

Different from the ladies I saw around the projects and different from my teachers and different from my mother even though I once heard Jimmy tell Shirley they looked like sisters when he was trying to butter her up.

Maybe it was because Doris had been hanging out in KooKooLand that she seemed so different. Hank said she looked like a movie star and I had to agree with him. Her shiny dark hair was done up like she'd just come from the beauty parlor and her nails were painted the color of the reddest red in the Crayola 64 box.

I suddenly felt bad for my mother. She had never even been to a beauty parlor. She just gave herself a Toni home permanent every couple of months, and her nails were usually split from doing piecework and dotted with bits of Scotch tape to keep them from splitting even more. Besides, Jimmy wouldn't let her paint them anyway.

“Hello, Jimmy,” said Doris, blowing the smoke from her cigarette out between her red lips that matched her red nails.

“Yeah, hi,” said Jimmy, barely looking at her. “C'mon, Dracula, get a move on,” he snapped at me again.

I realized I was still holding my Pepsi and gulped down the rest of it because there were starving, Pepsi-less kids in this world and I didn't want Susan to think I didn't care about them.

I handed the empty glass to Susan, but she barely noticed.

“You feeling better, Ma?” she asked Doris, a worried look on her face.

“Yeah, sure,” said Doris, not sounding like she meant it.

Doris walked closer to the screen door. “So how's Shirley?” she asked Jimmy.

“She's OK,” grunted Jimmy. He was not making the least attempt to shoot the baloney with her.

“You letting her get behind the wheel yet?”

Jimmy didn't like the question one bit, and Doris looked like she knew he wouldn't like it.

I hurried over to Jimmy so we could leave before he got all riled up and maybe smacked my best friend's mother in the kisser.

“I don't need my wife driving so she can take off on me,” Jimmy snapped. “Take off to KooKooLand.”

“KooKooLand?” Doris laughed. “If you ask me, this whole city is KooKooLand.”

“Good. Then you can just drive your ass right outta here,” he said. “And as for Shirley, she don't want to drive anyway. She's a good woman. She knows who's boss in our family.”

Doris moved a little into the light and I noticed that there were dark circles under her eyes like Shirley had from never getting enough sleep.

“Well, thanks for checking on the lawn, boss,” she said before she turned her back on Jimmy and disappeared.

O
n the way home, Jimmy wouldn't shut up about Doris. She had done the worst thing anyone could do. She had called the fuzz on poor Hank more times than he could count instead of toeing the line like Shirley. She had made Hank's life a living hell and now Jimmy just wished she'd hurry up and sell that house with the bad lawn and take the dough and get out of Dodge and never show her face again.

And about that kisser of hers? Did I see how much face paint she was wearing?

I admitted she was wearing lipstick and maybe some rouge.

She looked like a damn Injun, he said. Or like she belonged in the Combat Zone.

I suddenly felt bad for Susan. She had a mother who wore too much face paint and a father who had shot up their house. Maybe being a millionaire's daughter wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

I wondered where Susan would live when Doris sold the house with the bullet holes and the bad lawn and moved away. Susan very well might move out to KooKooLand too and I would never see her again.

I looked out the window and tried not to think of anything 'cause everything I could think of made me feel like blubbering.

I was making a friend and losing her at the same time. It just wasn't fair. It was a goddamn raw deal.

The more Jimmy said mean things about Doris, the faster he drove, until we heard a cop car's siren wailing behind us.

“Oh, Jesus. A fuzzmobile,” Jimmy said.

There were some pancakes on the dashboard. Jimmy grabbed them and stuffed them under the seat next to his butcher knife.

He swerved over to the curb and watched in the rearview mirror as the cop made his way toward us.

“We're living in a police state,” he muttered. “Big Brother, here we come.”

The cop asked for Jimmy's license and registration and Jimmy handed them over with a
go ahead and arrest me, lard-ass
expression.

The cop saw Jimmy's name on the license and broke into a grin.

“Well, well, Jimmy Norris. The one and only. You've got quite a reputation.”

“Yeah? Says who?” Jimmy shot back.

“All the guys at Hank's. I hear you're the best duck hunter in New England.”

Jimmy leaned back and took a slow drag off his cigarette.

“I do OK,” he said, acting like he didn't want to toot his own horn, but you knew he thought so too.

“I hear you do better than that,” insisted the cop.

I could tell he didn't want to give Jimmy a ticket anymore. He wanted a few duck-hunting tips.

“So, you think it's going to be a good season?” the cop asked.

“There's always a lotta ducks if you know where to look. It's the damn quotas that are a pain in my ass.” Jimmy smiled, almost like he was letting the guy in on a little secret. The little secret being that Jimmy broke the law by shooting too many ducks almost every time he went into the marshes, but the dummkopf wardens could never seem to catch him doing it.

“So, where you headed?” the cop asked, making a stab at doing his job.

“I'm just coming back from Hank's house,” Jimmy said, knowing that would make the right impression.

He cocked his head in my direction.

“I was just trying to get home in time to watch
The Three Stooges
with my kid here. She's crazy about the Stooges. Aren't you, kiddo?”

I thought the Stooges were pretty lame, but I played my part and nodded like I was the biggest Stooges fan in Manchester, possibly all of New England.

“My kids love the Stooges too,” the cop said.

I wondered if his kids lied about being Stooges fans too.

“Well, you better get going then,” he finally said. “I don't want to disappoint a little girl.”

Jimmy fired up the engine.

“But take it easy, OK?” the cop told Jimmy. “You don't want to get in an accident and miss opening day.”

Jimmy agreed he sure didn't want to miss it, and off we went.

When we were back on our way, Jimmy said the guy was OK, that once in a while you found a flatfoot that was OK, not too often but once in a great while.

“But I bet he can't hit the side of a barn,” he laughed. “Put us both out in the woods and he'd have nothing on me. He couldn't touch me.”

W
e didn't make it home in time for the Stooges because we had to drop those pancakes off to some guy who lived in the North End, some mucky-muck Jimmy knew from Hank's who called himself a hunter. The mucky-muck's lawn was big and bright green, as if the worst drought in fifty years had bypassed his house completely. Jimmy said the mucky-muck had a bunch of deer and elk heads on the walls in his mansion, but that he'd bought them for a couple of C-notes from a guy like Papou's ex-fighter Norman. I asked Jimmy why he didn't shoot a few deer for some of these big shots himself and make some easy dough. I was still angling for those bunk beds. But Jimmy said he didn't believe in that kind of killing. Just like he didn't believe in jacking deer, which was when you turned a big light on in the woods and the deer froze and you could blow them away like nothing. There was a Law of the Woods, Jimmy said, just like there was a Religion of the Sea. And knocking down a beautiful buck just so some freeloader could stick the buck's head on his wall was not in the rule book.

After the mucky-muck's we went to the lowlife section around Lake Avenue and met up with Sad-Sack Barney, who was standing on a street corner waiting for us. Barney was a Greek guy a little taller than me who was one of Jimmy's business partners. I was surprised Jimmy had a Greek business partner since he said Greeks would steal the eyes right out of your head and sell them as diamonds. But Barney was different. Barney was like family.