KooKooLand (8 page)

But the bookie joint was a whole other story. Even Shirley couldn't go in there. Ever since Jimmy had taught her a few things about handicapping she was picking more winners than he was. But her superior handicapping skills didn't matter. She had to fork over her dough to Jimmy, tell him what to bet, and sit in the car and wait just like me.

Wait forever.

Jimmy bopped me on the head with the
Racing Form
.

“I'll be right back,” he promised.

I nodded like I believed him.

He reached into the backseat and grabbed last week's newspaper that he kept there to wrap up dead fish.

“Here, read the funnies,” he said, tossing it onto my lap.

“Oh boy,” I said, trying to look grateful.

He slammed the door shut, jogged over to the bookie joint, and rapped on the door. Three knocks, two knocks, three knocks. I saw the sliver of a man's face.

Open sesame and Jimmy vanished.

I realized I had to pee.

I picked up the paper to distract myself and turned straight to the comics. I called them comics but Jimmy called them funnies. I figured
funnies
was an old-timey word from when Jimmy was a kid. Back then he'd had to stick the funnies in the bottom of his shoes when he got a hole in the sole, and then walk to school in the snow. I pictured those newspapers becoming all wet and maybe a picture of Blondie and Dagwood fighting getting on the bottom of his feet. Like the newsprint was now getting all over my hot, sweaty hands.

I finished the comics in a few minutes and then scanned the paper to see if there was any news about the Boston Strangler. There wasn't a mention. He was still out there and the dumb cops couldn't catch him 'cause they were too busy eating rum cakes that made their lard-asses lardier.

I read everything in the paper and was down to checking out the ads. The Wa Toy restaurant was having a special on their pu pu platter. Chink chow, Jimmy called it, and wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole. Supposedly they hid dogs and cats in the food like that maniac from
Blood Feast
hid eyeballs in his Egyptian stew.

I began to worry. What if some Chinese people came around the projects and tried to snatch our cat, Sylvester, for one of their pu pu platters? I told myself I better keep Sylvester on his leash from now on. And I better keep an eye out for slanty-eyed people. Then I closed the paper so I wouldn't have to think about dead dogs and cats anymore.

The intense heat in the car was making me sleepy. I imagined being baked alive like what nearly happened to the kids in my favorite fairy tale, “Hansel and Gretel.” Those kids got dumped in the woods by their father and then a witch tried to roast them.

I hung my head out the window and tried to catch a breeze from an approaching truck. It thundered past, a few inches from my schnozzola. I fell back into the car, my heart pounding. I pictured my head being severed from my body and rolling down the street until it got squashed by a bus. Maybe that was a better way to go than roasting. At least it was quick.

I started singing about ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, but it made me too thirsty, so I stopped. I imagined crawling around in the desert with nothing to drink and dying that way.

I imagined exploding from pee.

Somehow, death was always popping into my head even though I didn't want it there. Death was like a toothache that just kept throbbing away.

Jimmy had first clued me in about death years before. We were up in Nova Scotia, visiting Grammy and Grampy. I was picking wildflowers. I called them powers 'cause I couldn't say
flowers
yet.

They're bootiful, I cooed to Jimmy.

Jimmy stared out to where the woods began, past where the wildflowers were. He looked sad about something. I tried to hand him a power.

They're beautiful, but they're all gonna die, he said. That's the lousy thing about life. Everything goes away. Everything dies. Even your mommy and me will die.

I dropped my powers and started screaming. I wailed so loud Shirley came running out of the house.

What happened? Shirley screeched.

Nothing, Jimmy said. She's crying over a big fat nothing.

I tried to tell her what was wrong.

Powers gonna die! Powers gonna die! I shrieked.

Hush, it's all right, she said, as she rocked me back and forth.

Powers gonna die. Powers gonna die.

What a crybaby, said Jimmy. Boo hoo hoo.

Shirley carried me away from him. Carried me up past the field where Grampy had built a baseball diamond for his seven kids. Up into the fields where the strawberries were. Rows and rows of strawberries that Grampy grew and sold for money.

She plucked a berry as big as my fist and handed it to me. I ate it and then ate another. The snot dripping down my chin mixed with the strawberry juice and made pink snot and I stopped crying.

She told me how she had loved berries when she was a little girl. How she would eat them when she was supposed to be picking them to sell.

I ate more berries and listened to Shirley's stories and couldn't get enough of either one.

Shirley had been born and raised right there on the farm. She picked strawberries all summer long and ate them with warm, sweet shortcake from Grammy's wood-burning stove and buttery cream from Grampy's cow.

Old Gutless is what they called the cow.

Hickville is what Jimmy called Tusket, Shirley's hometown.

Stump-jumpers, he called Shirley's family. Clodhoppers. Real greenhorns.

They didn't know the first thing about how to bet a trifecta. They didn't know where to get the strongest highballs in New York City. And they wouldn't be able to find their way around the Combat Zone with a map and a compass.

They played games with funny names. Pinochle. Parcheesi. Crokinole.

They bet matchsticks—if they bet at all—and surely not on Sunday.

They had no TV. The kitchen had a cold-water pump. And the bathroom was out in a shed that smelled like people had been doing their business in there for a million years. The curling strips of flypaper caught some of the flies buzzing around your keister but not all of them and the rest you had to shoo off with a newspaper from 1943.

In the winter it was too cold for flies or people out there and you did your business crouched over a pot with your legs trembling from trying not to move too much. Then you climbed into bed, where the brick Grampy had heated on the wood-burning stove to keep you warm was already stone cold.

The big deal of the day was going to the post office to wait for the mail. I went with my uncle Whitfield, but Jimmy wouldn't be caught dead in there listening to all the farmers talk about their chicken feed and their half-wit cousins. Instead, he spent the day hunting or fishing and getting half-lit. Then he'd sit around Grammy's kitchen at night and ask the stump-jumpers if they wanted to play crokinole for hard cash.

Not that he was serious or anything. He was just trying to get a rise out of them. He wouldn't be caught dead playing a game with a goofy name like crokinole.

Finally, everything came to a head one night when Jimmy called Uncle Whitfield's horse an old nag ready for the glue factory. Uncle Whitfield loved that horse and called Jimmy uncouth and Jimmy nearly decked Uncle Whitfield. Grampy took Shirley out to the barn and asked her if she had married an outlaw.

No, said Shirley, that's just how American men are.

Then maybe you want to come back home to Canada, he suggested.

But Shirley didn't want to go back home. Ever since she was a little girl she had dreamed of getting off that damn farm and seeing the United States of America. She had been picking red strawberries and churning white cream until she was blue in the face. Been doing it ever since she left school in the eighth grade to help out on the farm 'cause girls didn't go past the eighth grade
up there. They just married boys in baggy pants with horse manure on their clodhoppers, had nine or ten kids like Grammy, and, according to Shirley, looked like old hags by twenty-seven.

By the time
she
was twenty-seven, Shirley didn't look like an old hag, but she wasn't married either. She'd been engaged once, but that didn't pan out. Most people in Tusket thought she'd end up an old maid. She was starting to think so herself. She got a job as a shopgirl in the nearest town and spent hours gazing at movie magazines and daydreaming about the States. She talked about the States so much that Grammy saved a little money every week from selling butter and eggs and bought Shirley a boat ticket to go visit her Aunt Cora in Massachusetts.

Jimmy was working on the boat and was looking for an old-fashioned girl like in the old country. He had just gotten divorced from the one who mouthed off like Susan's mother.

He spotted Shirley right away.

She had dark hair and was tall and had a shy way of going. She was dressed real nice but not too flashy, not too much makeup and not showing too much of her pretty long legs. She was talking to another passenger, a high yaller named Birdy who she'd just met and didn't even know was half-colored. Birdy was Jimmy's pal Be-bop's girlfriend, so Jimmy went right over and introduced himself. He told Shirley to come to the back of the ship that night, to the kitchen where he worked as a cook, and he'd make her a meal fit for a queen. He mentioned a filet mignon steak and Shirley thought that sounded real fancy. She mostly had deer meat on the farm, and she was sick to death of that.

So Jimmy made her the filet mignon and some duck with an orange sauce and some big, fat shrimp that tasted like the sea they were sailing on and something for dessert that he lit with a match.

He got her number.

He told her he'd take her for the thrill of her life. He'd take her to the backstretch 'cause he was known at the track and could get back there. He'd show her some beautiful horses. Didn't all girls like horses?

I like horses fine, said Shirley, who had seen more than enough of them on the farm and would rather go to a Red Sox game but didn't want to seem rude.

After that, we'll go dancing, he said, and Shirley perked right up. I'll show you the nightlife. I know all the jumpin' joints.

It was sounding better and better to Shirley.

But Shirley's Aunt Cora didn't like the looks of Jimmy one bit.

He looks like a sharpie, Aunt Cora said.

Shirley didn't care what old Aunt Cora said. She went on a date with the sharpie and even fell in love with those horses when they flew past her in the backstretch carrying their jockeys in their bright shiny shirts. She loved those horses even more when she saw Jimmy coming back from the betting windows with a stack of tenners and double sawbucks and when he gave her a tenner 'cause he bet a long shot for her that paid off big.

He took her to meet YaYa and Papou and told her they owned a restaurant. Nick's Cafe.

She asked Jimmy after they left if something was wrong with Papou 'cause he didn't smile or anything.

No, Jimmy said, he's just a tough hombre. That's how you gotta be in America. You just don't know any operators like him. You grew up in Hickville.

Tusket, Shirley corrected him.

There was something about Jimmy's tone of voice that didn't sit right, but she brushed it aside. American men are different, she told herself. They talked a language that she couldn't understand 'cause she was a strawberry farmer's daughter who didn't get past the eighth grade.

On the way back to Aunt Cora's, he pulled over and kissed her. It felt pretty good, but not as good as the kisses of the air force lieutenant she'd been engaged to. The one who had turned out to have a wife someplace else and who had broken her heart so bad she couldn't get out of bed for two weeks. The one she had taken this trip to forget.

Shirley pulled away from the kiss.

Jimmy smiled. That's OK, he said, I can see you're a good girl, not like most of the broads around the clubs.

Shirley had never heard the word
broad
before and didn't like the sound of it.

You're a real nice girl, Jimmy said. Not like my first wife.

Shirley nearly fell over. No one around Tusket ever got divorced. They were all religious folk and didn't believe in it. Shirley didn't believe in it either. Except for the lieutenant—she wished he'd divorce his wife and marry her.

Shirley decided maybe Aunt Cora was right after all. She had had fun, had even forgotten about the lieutenant for a while, but she had her doubts about the sharpie. She returned to Tusket and thought she'd never see him again.

But then while she was feeding the chickens she found herself thinking about that day at the races and about the filet mignon and about how he had told her she looked just like Ava Gardner.

A month later, Jimmy came to see her when his ship docked for an overnight. He brought Grammy a box of Fanny Farmer chocolates and Grampy some
Cuban cigars he got down in Havana. And he didn't use the word
broad
once.

One night, he snuck her some whiskey out on the porch and it was the best she had felt since the lieutenant went away.

But then he went and spoiled it by making a crack about Grampy's baggy pants.

Shirley still had her doubts.

And she might never have married Jimmy or moved to the States or had me at all if it hadn't been for what happened to her favorite brothers. Albert and Ernie. They were only twenty-two and twenty-three and they drowned one day when they went out fishing. It was July 6, 1952. Jimmy's ship had come in again and Shirley cried on his shoulder. He seemed to understand. He said life was a raw deal 'cause death was just waiting there to snatch any one of us at any damn moment. He said you might as well eat, drink, and bet the ponies as much as you could because before you knew it you wouldn't be able to pee straight.

Shirley up and married Jimmy six weeks later in Nova Scotia.

She'd known him four months and had seen him five times.