Al Capone Does My Shirts (3 page)

Theresa chatters on about why she thinks Capone will really like her when she meets him, which clearly she hasn’t done, yet. The road cuts back away from the water tower. We follow it a short way up to a little cottage. It looks cute, almost like a playhouse. The sign above the glass door reads MORGUE.

Inside, there’s a bucket on the floor and a metal box. What do they do in morgues, anyway? Are they like bread boxes for dead bodies? Or do they label stuff in special compartments . . . baskets for fingers? Drawers for toes?

“So, this is it,”Theresa says. “Only they keep it locked.” She pulls on the door handle to show me.

“Yeah, I see. Maybe we should, uh, move on. Didn’t you tell the guard guy we were going to Piper’s house?” I don’t like getting in trouble. I was born responsible. It’s a curse.

Then another girl’s crusty voice comes out from the shadows behind the morgue. “What’s the matter with your sister?”

My chest gets tight. The blood rushes to my head.

The girl comes around the side of the building, flipping a flat yellow hat on her finger like a pizza. My face turns red just seeing her. She’s a looker. If Pete were here, he’d whistle.

“She retarded?” the girl asks.

“None of your business,” I tell her.

The girl has freckles and full lips like a movie star. She winds her long dark hair around her finger and looks at me through half-shut eyelids. Something about the way she does this makes me glance down to make sure my fly is buttoned. When I look up again, she’s staring at Natalie.

“Stop looking at her like that!” I say.

“That’s Piper. Remember? I told you about her!” Theresa says.

“So, not retarded. Stupid, then?” Piper asks.

“Look, could we drop this already?”

“I’m just asking a simple question,” Piper says.

“Not in front of Natalie,” I whisper.

She shrugs and walks behind the morgue. Theresa and I follow. Nat stays put.

“How would you like it if I asked, are
you
stupid?”

“I would just say no.” Piper flips her hair behind her shoulder.

“No, she’s not stupid,” I say.

“Prove it.”

“Uhhh.” I clench my fists. I’d really like to give this Piper girl a pounding.

“See, I knew she was retarded,” Piper tells Theresa.

“Will you kindly just shut up!” I roar louder than I intend.

They both stare at me.

“Follow me.” I walk back around to the front of the morgue.

“When’s your birthday, Piper?” I ask.

“November sixteenth.”

“1922?”

“Yep.”

“Natalie, what day of the week was Piper born?”

“Thursday,” Nat says without looking up.

“That right?” I ask Piper.

Piper doesn’t answer, but her eyes open wider. She chews at her bottom lip. “What else can she do?” she asks.

“She’s not a trick monkey.”

“She’d never make it as a trick monkey. She only has one trick,” Piper says.

“487 times 6,421 is 3,127,027,” Nat says.

Everything is quiet except the sound of gulls squawking overhead and wind rattling a window somewhere. Natalie inspects the ground. It’s almost as if she hasn’t said anything.

“How much is 28 times 478?” Piper asks.

“13,384,” Nat answers.

“Okay, so she’s good in math. But
something
is wrong with her,” Piper says.

“WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM?” I shout.

Theresa motions for us to step away from Natalie.

“Natalie lives in her own world. That’s what Mr. Flanagan said,” Theresa whispers. She takes a jar of jam from her pocket, unscrews the lid and offers us some. We shake our heads no and she dips an already purple-stained finger inside. “Sometimes it’s a good world and sometimes it’s a bad world. And sometimes she can get out and sometimes she can’t.”

Piper snorts. “Sounds to me like she’s just plain crazy,” she says in a low voice. “My dad isn’t going to like this. He’s not going to like it one bit. He always says the cons in the bug cage are the scariest ones, because you never know what they’ll do.”

I get a sinking feeling in my gut. There were 237 electricians who applied for the job my dad got. If it were me, I’d have kept my mouth shut about having a daughter like Natalie. What if the warden doesn’t know about her?

“She’s leaving in a week or two. Going to boarding school.

She won’t be around here at all. You probably won’t ever see her again,” I say quickly.

Piper raises her eyebrows. “I’m
expected
to tell him stuff like this. He depends on me to find out things.” She places her flat hat on her head and begins hiking up the steep road toward the cell house.

“Wait! Can we come? Can we?” Theresa calls after her.

“Good idea,” Piper calls over her shoulder. “Then my father can meet Natalie
himself.
”

My stomach sinks. How am I supposed to know if Nat’s a big secret or not? Nobody tells me anything.

“Natalie,” Piper calls out sweetly, “would you like to meet the warden?”

Nat says nothing.

“Hey! Come on!” Theresa motions with her whole arm. “Piper said it was okay!”

“I’m going back, Theresa. My mom will be home soon.”

“Oh, no!” Theresa cries. “You haven’t seen
anything
yet!”

I shake my head. “Maybe tomorrow.”

Theresa stamps her foot.

I can’t help smiling at this. “I’m sorry, Theresa.”

“Ohhhhkay. We’ll finish tomorrow,” Theresa says in a small voice.

“We gotta go back,” I tell Natalie. She doesn’t look up, doesn’t seem to hear.

“This way.” I motion for her to follow. She ignores me.

Oh, swell. Now Nat’s acting up.

“Come on, Nat.” I try walking down the hill, hoping she’ll follow.

She doesn’t.

I walk back up to the morgue and sit down on the cement slab by a little dab of something red. Blood? Or is it Theresa’s jam?

I figure I’ll just wait Nat out when I hear footsteps on the road. “Natalie, come on,” I plead.

“Moose!” My mom’s voice. She’s half running in her high heels. “What in heaven’s name are you doing out here?” My mom stops, her chest heaving from the climb. She looks at me, then Nat, then me again. “What happened?” she asks.

“It’s okay, Mom. Nat’s fine.”

“I didn’t know where you were.” Her voice goes up and down like hiccups. She grips her arms like if she doesn’t they won’t stay on. “It scared me when you were gone like that.”

“I left a note.”

She nods. I don’t know if this is because she saw my note or because she didn’t.

I touch her elbow and try to sound like Dad. “Everything is going to be all right.”

My mother nods short and fast. She pushes at the corner of first one eye, then the other, and keeps nodding. Nodding and nodding and nodding.

 

The next morning when I get up, I’m happy to find my father at the table, reading the paper.

I can feel how pleased he is to see me. This isn’t something you can fake. “Hey,” he says.

My mother is checking my sister’s suitcase. I can’t believe she’s going today. I thought it was a week away at least.

Nat has the kitchen chair pulled into the living room, wedged between three crates. “Hey, Natalie, the sun get up okay this morning?” I ask like I do every morning.

She never answers, which used to really bug me. I hate being the brother of a stone. One day last year, I got so mad, I just walked right by her, didn’t say anything. Not one word.

That day, after I left for school, my mom said Natalie sat outside my room and cried for two straight hours. Natalie isn’t a crier, she’s a screamer. You never see her cry for plain old hurt. I’d say my mom made it all up, but she didn’t know I’d snubbed Natalie. My mom had no idea why Natalie had cried.

Now I ask Natalie about the sun every morning and it only bothers me a little when she doesn’t answer.

“So, what would you like for breakfast on this very special day?” my mother asks her.

“Lemon cake,” Natalie says. She says this every day too. And every day, my mom says, “Silly sweet pea, you can’t have lemon cake for breakfast.”

“Why not? On a special day like today, lemon cake sounds like a fine idea. What d’ya think, Moose?” my mom asks.

“Sure,” I say. My voice comes out high like a girl’s. I never know whether I’m going to sound like Mickey Mouse or the giant on top of the beanstalk.

Natalie turns all the way around and looks me straight in the eye in that weird way she has of suddenly being present after weeks of being somewhere else.

“Don’t look at me, this wasn’t my idea. If it were up to me, we’d be in Santa Monica right this very minute,” I say under my breath.

My father reads Natalie headlines from the newspaper, adding numbers to every one. “Work resumes on the Golden Gate Bridge. 103 men are put back to work, two quit, seven scratch their heads, five have their feet up, two eat sausages for supper, three do not . . .”

“Breakfast!” my mother calls.

Natalie holds her face two inches from the plate. She eats so fast, it gives me a stomachache. When my dad’s not around, I don’t eat with her.

“Natalie Flanagan’s whole family,” Nat says when I sit down.

I wonder if she knows what’s happening. We’ve built the Esther P. Marinoff up like it’s quite the place, like maybe the king and queen of England are sending their kids there too. But somehow in all this talking, we ignored the major thing.

You don’t come home from the Esther P. Marinoff. Every morning when the sun comes up, that’s where Natalie will be.

My father wipes his wide mouth with his napkin. “What fun you’re going to have, Natalie, with kids your own age.”

What age is that, I wonder. But I know what he means. Maybe she’ll meet other kids like her. Maybe they’ll recognize each other and communicate in their own peculiar way.

When my mom has Nat ready to go, my father picks up her suitcase, hands Natalie her button box and opens the door.

“Moose,” my mom says as if she’s just now noticed I’m here. “I don’t think you need to come along.”

“Fine with me. I don’t want to go, anyway.” I don’t look at her, or my dad or Natalie.

“Helen!” My father’s voice has a sting to it.

“I just didn’t think he’d want to, Cam,” my mother says.

“Of course Moose is coming.” He hands Nat’s suitcase to me and pats me on the back. “We can’t do this without him.”

This reminds me of the time when I was six and my mom shipped me off to live at Gram’s. She packed every pair of underwear I owned and she made it all seem like a big treat. When we got there, my gram had an awful scowl on her face. She gave me a big hug and glared at my mother like I’d never seen her do. When my mom left, I heard Gram and Ed talking. “Some cockamamie psychiatrist decides the problem is Natalie doesn’t get enough attention, and Helen ships him off! Our Matthew! I’m happy as a pig in mud to have him here, but it’s a darn fool thing. What child doesn’t have a brother or sister? Half the world has seven or eight. Having a brother didn’t make Natalie the way she is. One look at the two of them together and that big-shot psychiatrist would have known that. He’s the one ought to have his head examined. It’s going to make Nat sicker just having Moose gone.”

Early the next morning my father woke me. “Get your pillow, Moose,” he said, snapping the buckles on my suitcase. “We’re going home.”

 

We’re walking down to the dock now. Natalie is going extra slow. I worry we’ll miss the boat, but maybe that’s her plan.

I like to think all these years have been part of her plan too. And one day Nat will tell me it’s all a crazy game she made up to see if we really loved her.

My father jogs ahead. Yesterday the boatman told us, “We don’t wait for nobody. Even God himself has to get down here on time.” But somehow the big ex-army steamship called the
Frank M. Coxe
is still there.

My mother walks through the snitch box—a metal detector designed to make sure no one is bringing guns on the island.

“This new school is a good opportunity for you, Natalie,” my mother tells her as I watch the boat guy unwind a rope, as thick as my arm, from the cleat. “You are such a lucky girl to have this chance.”

Natalie says nothing. Her eyes are trained on a gull wiggling a potato chip out from the wood slat bench. I look up at another bird high in the blue sky. And another skimming low over the green blue sea.

My father has a book with him,
McGregor’s Illustrated Animal Book.
He’s brought it because it has a good index. Nothing pleases Natalie more than having him read the index of a book to her.

“American Leaf-Nosed Bat, page 48,” my father reads. “American Quail, page 232, American Spiny Rat, page 188 . . .”

Tons of gulls are flying above our boat. We watch them, Natalie and I. Natalie is rocking more than usual, but it doesn’t look out of place here. The boat rocks anyway.

“I count 229 birds,” I say, pointing at the gulls.

“Bad Moose,” Natalie says. “Nine birds. Nine.”

I smile at her. “I count forty-seven people on the deck.”

“Bad Moose, eleven peoples. Eleven.” Natalie loves catching my mistakes.

Once when I was seven or eight, she started bringing books to me—big old ones like the dictionary and the encyclopedia. She’d turn to the back and plunk the book on my lap. I couldn’t figure out what she wanted. One day, just to get her to go away, I started reading the page she had opened. It was a history book, and the index was full of names of people and places. I got to this one, Machu Picchu, and I said something like, “Mack-who. Pick-you.” “Bad Moose,” she said. “Ma-chew, Pee-chew.” I thought she was nuts until my mom informed me that is how it is pronounced. My mother went straight to the library and checked out a big stack of history books for Natalie. But it didn’t take long to realize it wasn’t history Natalie was interested in. It’s indexes she loves. Any subject will do. We still don’t have any idea how she learned the correct pronunciation of Machu Picchu, though.