I sat down on the wooden swing next to her. Wendy was always pretty clean because Mrs. Latour paid some extra attention to her. And she had the shiniest shoe-polish black hair. “Wendy, where are your shoes and socks?”
“Nith to meet you.” She reached over and gave me one of those bear hugs.
“Okay, Wendy, that’s good now,” I said after I’d counted to ten. She hugged me tighter. “I can’t breathe.”
She let go and set her head down on my shoulder. I could smell her Prell hair. “My ath hurts.”
“That’s okay. My ass hurts too.” I’d figured out a long time ago that if I repeated back to Wendy what she just said to me, she would sometimes stop saying whatever she was saying over and over.
She lifted her head. “Right?”
“Right.”
“Troo? Mad?” She pointed across the street at her.
“She sure is.”
My sister was yelling something at Bobby, the playground counselor. I couldn’t hear what it was, but she was stomping her foot like she did when something didn’t go her way. Bobby was teasing her, waving the tetherball above her head so she couldn’t reach it. She was getting madder and madder by the second, almost ready to blow. I felt sort of bad because it was making me feel gladder and gladder by the second to see Troo not get her way, which was not a charitable way to feel at all.
“Wendy, you need to put your thinking cap on. I gotta ask you some questions.” I needed to know what’d happened over at the Spencers’ root cellar when she fell down. What Rasmussen had done to her. Even though she was a Mongoloid, she was a pretty smart one. Mother said Wendy was just a little Mongoloidish, not as bad as some of them. “You ready for the first question?”
She bobbed her head up and down.
“How’d you get that?” I pointed at the Band-Aid above her eyebrow.
She started rocking the swing slowly at first and then quicker and quicker. I stomped my feet down so it’d stop. “Wendy?”
“My ath-”
“I know.” It always took a couple of tries to get Wendy to listen to you. “How’d you get that boo-boo?” She looked at me with her head to the side like the way that RCA dog did. I pointed to her bandage again. “Did a man do that to you?”
“Fell.”
“Fell?” I yelled because I just wanted her to say Rasmussen hurt her so bad and then there would be two of us and maybe somebody would believe us. “You better not be lyin’ to me.”
Wendy started to cry because she cried real easy, especially if you raised your voice to her. “My ath-”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry… oh, don’t cry.” I picked up her stubby hand. Someone had painted her fingernails watermelon pink and there was that plastic Cracker Jack ring that she always wore on her wedding finger.
“Was it Officer Rasmussen, Wendy? Did he push you and that’s why you fell?”
“Weeeeennnndy.”
Wendy perked up. It was her ma calling her. If you had to call thirteen kids for supper every day, that would give anybody the lungs of an opera singer, Mother said, and you could tell that even though Mrs. Latour and Mother were in choir together up at church, Mother thought that anybody who had thirteen kids, even if they were Catholic, was dumb as a curb.
“Weeeeeendy.”
She got up and started toward the Kenfields’ steps. “Going to Ma, Thally O’Malley.”
“Okay,” I said, giving up, but then I thought I better try one more time. “Was Rasmussen down in the cellar with you?”
She nodded her head yes and then she shook her head no so I didn’t know which she meant, but it was too late to ask her again cuz she’d already hopped down the steps.
She stopped at the bottom and said, “Rathmuthen,” and then cut across the Kenfields’ grass toward home.
“There’s a bad man out there. Keep your eyes open, Wendy,” I called after her.
She turned and opened her eyes really big and then took off again in that crazy-legged way of running she had. I sat there for a while and rocked and felt pretty good because now at least I had Wendy Latour on my side, even if she was a Mongoloid. After all, she’d pretty much just told me that Rasmussen had tried to murder and molest her.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The first time I came down to the basement by myself was the night after Mrs. Callahan’s birthday party, when Mother and Hall were screaming so bad. Mother wanted Hall to stop drinking so much and Hall wanted Mother to shut the hell up about his drinking. Troo was sleeping over at Fast Susie’s and Nell was at a school dance. I was alone in my room reading My Friend Flicka when they started in on each other and then Dottie’s ghost began crying and I just couldn’t listen to all that. So I snuck out of bed and went on the tips of my toes through the kitchen, making sure I didn’t step on that piece of linoleum right in front of the stove that always made a sound like it had a stomachache, and down the steps past the Goldmans’ back door and down one more flight. I had my flashlight so it wasn’t as bad as it sounds.
When I got there, I sat on this hard brown suitcase that belonged to Hall when he was a sailor and had stickers all over it from faraway countries. I was gonna stay in the basement and read until the shouting coming down through the radiators stopped. I propped the flashlight up against this old lamp and made finger shadows on the wall for a while. I could do a bird and another kind of bird. When one bird was flying across the basement wall, it came across a picture of a lady in a hat sitting on a bench. Since I’d just been down there that afternoon helping Mother put shirts through the wringer, which I just loved to do because sometimes she made jokes about how she wished Hall was still inside one of those shirts, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed this picture. I got closer. When I touched it, it slid down the wall and behind where it used to be hanging was a hidey-hole. I could see the tip of something that looked like a shoe box. Then something squeaked like a mouse, which didn’t scare me, but then I thought it might be a bat and those did scare me because of this movie me and Troo saw called Horror of Dracula and it really was pretty horrible. So I waited until I didn’t hear the sound anymore and then stuck my hand inside that hidey-hole and lifted out the box and wondered whose it was. Mrs. Goldman’s? I checked the side and it said “Shuster’s Shoes, size 7,” so it had to be Mother’s because Mrs. Goldman had to wear special sturdy shoes, size 10, because her feet had gotten so bad in the concentration camp. And Nell wore a size 5. I lifted off the top. Two pictures and a little ring made out of a crinkly cookie wrapper like they put those chocolate chip cookies in up at the Feelin’ Good Cookie Factory were laying on the bottom. One picture had kids in gowns and those flat hats with the tassels on them, the kind that Nell wore when she graduated. Only it wasn’t Nell’s picture. It was more old-fashioned and the kids had funnier hair than Nell’s, which I had no idea was possible. “Washington High School… Class of 1940… Jim Madigan Photography Studio” was written in swirly letters across the bottom.
So that afternoon, after talking to Wendy, I got to the bottom of the basement steps and took the shoe box out of the hidey-hole and sat down on the old brown suitcase. I slipped the cookie wrapper ring on my finger, but it fell off right away like it always did, so I stuck it back in the shoe box under the other picture. My favorite. The one of Mother with her wavy hair and freckles sitting in a rowboat down at the lagoon. She was about Nell’s age in this picture and she had on shorts that showed her pretty legs and trim ankles and she looked so very, very happy, a kind of happy that I couldn’t ever hardly remember seeing in her since Daddy died. Seeing her smile like that made me want to cry in that damp basement that smelled of coal clinkers. Cry and not have anybody to tell me to shut up with that crying. For goodness sake, why did God give you tear ducts if you weren’t supposed to cry?