Al Capone Does My Shirts (2 page)

I think about going in my room now, but it smells like the inside of an old lunch bag in there. My bed’s a squeaky old army cot. When I sit down, it sounds like dozens of mice are dying an ugly death. There’s no phonograph in this apartment. No washing machine. No phone. There’s a radio cabinet, but someone yanked the workings out. Who gutted the radio, anyway? They don’t let the criminals in
here
. . . do they?

So, I’m a little jumpy. But anybody would be. Even the silence here is strange. It’s quiet like something you can’t hear is happening.

I think about telling my best friend, Pete, about this place. “It’s the Devil’s Island . . .
doo, doo, doo.
” Pete would say in a deep spooky voice like they do on the radio. “Devil’s Island . . .
doo, doo, doo,
” I whisper just like Pete. But without him it doesn’t seem funny. Not funny at all.

Okay, that’s it. I’m sleeping with my clothes on. Who wants to face a convicted felon in your pajamas?

 

 

When I wake up, I feel kinda foolish, having slept with my shoes on and my baseball bat under the covers with me. My mom’s banging around in the tiny hall outside my room. I stick the bat under my bed.

“Where’s Dad?” I ask.

“Right here,” my dad answers from the living room. He’s sitting on the floor with Natalie, holding a pile of buttons in each hand.

“Dad! Could you show me the cell house, and then maybe could we play ball?” I sound like I’m six and a half now, but I can’t help it. He’s been gone forever and I hardly got to see him at all yesterday. It’s lonely in my family when he’s not around.

His smile seems to lose its pink. He puts Natalie’s buttons down in two careful piles, gets up and brushes his uniform off.

I follow him into the kitchen. “You’re not working
today,
are you?”

“I’m having a devil of a time setting up extra circuits in the laundry.”

“Yeah, but you worked last night.”

My mom squeezes by to run her hands under the tap. “Your father has two jobs here, Moose. Electrician and guard.”

“Two,” Natalie calls from the living room. “Two jobs. Two.”

Doesn’t anyone in this family believe in private conversations?

“I could help you . . . ,” I offer.

He shakes his head. “You’re not allowed in there. Convict areas are off limits to you kids,” he says.

“I’m not a kid. I’m taller than you are.”

“Go ahead, rub it in.” He laughs. “But at least I don’t have those big feet either. They’re an affliction, those feet.” He grabs my head and knocks on it.

“I haven’t seen you for three whole months,” I say.

“Two months, twenty-two days, twenty-two days,” Natalie calls out.

“That’s right, sweet pea. You tell him!” my father calls back.

“I’ll bet you took Natalie out this morning, didn’t you?” The question comes shooting out before I can stop it.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake, Moose.” My mother looks up from where she’s jammed in the corner, scrubbing the icebox. “You weren’t even up.”

“That isn’t fair,” I say, though I know better.

“Don’t talk to me about fair, young man. Don’t get me started on that one.” My mother glares at me.

“I’m sorry, Moose,” my father says. He reaches for his officer’s hat and settles it on his head. “There’s nothing I’d like better than to spend the day with you. You know that.” His eyes look at me, then quick away.

“Wait, wait, wait . . . you’re leaving
now
?” I ask.

He groans. “Afraid so. But there will be plenty of time to spend together. I promise, buddy, okay?” He smiles, kisses my mom and Nat good-bye and heads for the door.

I watch him walk by the front window, his head bobbing like his foot hurts.

My mom glances at her watch. “My goodness, is it that time already? Moose, I need you to watch Natalie while I take the boat to the city. I have to get groceries and arrange an ice delivery,” my mother says.

“Ice?” I ask.

“We can’t afford an electric refrigerator. We got to keep this one.” She taps the old icebox.

“They have a grocery downstairs, though, right?”

“Doesn’t have much. Try to do some unpacking while I’m gone. Eleven, twelve and thirteen are all your stuff.” My mother points to the crates, each numbered by Natalie. She takes off her apron and puts on her coat, her gloves and her hat.

“You’re leaving now too?” I ask.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can. Take good care of her, okay?” My mom grabs my arm and squeezes it.

I know she’s thinking about what happened on the train yesterday. I had gone to take a leak, and when I came back, Nat was kicking and screaming. She pulled a curtain off the rod and sent her button box flying down the aisle. My mom had her arms around Nat, trying to keep her from hurting anyone. The conductor and the motorman were yelling. People were staring. One lady was taking pictures.

My mom finally got her calmed down by sitting on her right in the middle of the train aisle. I don’t know which was more embarrassing, Natalie’s behavior or my mother’s.

Sometimes Nat’s tantrums go on and on for days and nothing makes them stop. It’s impossible to know what will set her off. She looks pretty peaceful now, though.

“Sure, Mom.” I follow her to the door. “I didn’t really mean what I said about it not being fair that Natalie got to go out with Dad this morning. I didn’t. You know I didn’t. . . . Mom?”

She sighs. “All right, Moose. Just keep your eye on Natalie, okay?”

I watch her leave. A haze rises from the bay like a wall of gray closing me off from everything.

 

In the kitchen, I find a casserole dish I don’t recognize.
Thought you might enjoy some manicotti. Looking forward to meeting you.—Bea Trixle,
the card says.

The manicotti tastes like big fat spaghetti with pizza inside. I’m going for fourths or maybe it’s fifths when I hear the knock.

“Don’t answer it,” I yell to Natalie as I wade through the boxes to the front door. The last thing I want is to meet new kids when Natalie’s around. New people don’t understand about her. They just don’t.

“Open up!” a girl cries. It’s a little kid—a short person, anyway. That’s all I can make out through the window.

“No!” I call back. But too late. Natalie is already there. She has both hands on the knob and all her weight rocked back on her heels, trying to get the door open.

“Don’t open it!” I shove my weight against the door.

“Come on, you know you’re gonna!” the girl outside says.

Oh, great. I have little Eleanor Roosevelt on one side of the door and Natalie-the-screamer on the other. What they say about females being the weaker sex is the biggest lie in the world.

It doesn’t matter that I weigh more than both of them put together. I know when I’m beat. I let Natalie open the door.

The girl outside has black curly hair that’s flat on one side, as if she slept on it. She’s missing half of her teeth. The ones she has seem either too large or too small for her mouth.

“How old are you?” she demands.

“Twelve.”

“No, you’re not!” she says, walking right in without bothering to ask.

“Why would I lie about how old I am?”

She bites her lip, like she’s thinking about this. “You got a big neck.”

“You’re supposed to get a long nose if you lie, not a big neck.”

“No.” She shakes her head as if she’s absolutely certain I’m wrong.

“And you’re what . . . seven?”

“Seven and one quarter. Hello, Natalie.” The girl smiles her big tooth, little tooth, gap tooth smile. “Your dad told me all about her,” she whispers.

We both look at Natalie. Her hair is like mine—brown and blonde all mixed up like birdseed. Different eyes, though. Mine are brown. Hers are green like the marbles nobody likes to trade away. But the way she holds her mouth too open and her shoulders uneven and one hand clamps down the other . . . people know. They always know.

“How old is she?” the girl whispers.

“Ten,” I answer. Natalie’s age is always ten. Every year my mom has a party for her and she turns ten again. My mom started counting Nat’s age this screwy way a long time ago. It was just easier to have her younger than me. Then my mother could be happy for each new thing I did, without it being another thing Natalie couldn’t do.

“What’s your name, anyway?” I ask.

“Theresa Mattaman. I’m supposed to show you around. You haven’t seen
anything
yet, have you?”

“We just got here last night.”

“Natalie, come on! We’re going now! Run get her coat!” Theresa orders.

I’m big as a linebacker, and a seven-year-old girl treats me like her errand boy. Does she smell weakness on me?

Still, I want to get a look at this weird little island. And what do I care what a bunch of criminals think, anyway? I scribble a note to my mom to tell her we’ve gone out and prop the paper between the ketchup and the cod-liver oil.

“Come on, Nat. It’s not everybody who gets to live down the street from thieves and murderers, you know.”

 

 

The first thing I see when I walk out the door is the guard tower. I wonder what you’re supposed to do here. Should I wave?

Theresa pays no attention. The tower might as well be a tree for all she cares.

She leads us to the stairwell. Natalie’s walking behind us with her head down, dragging her left foot on the edge of every step as if she’s marking it with her toe. I want to take her hand to make sure she keeps up, but nobody touches Natalie.

“First, we’re going to the morgue,” Theresa announces with a little skip.

Sure. I’ve been to hundreds of morgues. Thousands of them, in fact. “Dead criminals . . . don’t I get to meet any live ones?” I ask.

“We’re not really supposed to talk to the alive ones, but looking for dead guys is my job.
Piper said.
”

“Dead-criminal checker. Sounds like an important position to me. And who is Piper, anyway?” I ask.

“Piper? She’s Warden Williams’s daughter. She’s bossy.”

Just what I need, another bossy girl.

“Oh, no, I almost forgot.” Theresa claps her hands, then digs in her pocket for a card folded in fours. “I made this for you. Annie did the words. I made the map
all by myself
!”

“And who is Annie?”

“Annie’s Annie. She’s twelve. She helps me with stuff.”

“Are there any boys on this island?”

“Jimmy and”—she counts on her fingers—“eleven little boys who are five, four, three, one and zero.”

“Zero?”

“Not one year yet. Do you want to know their names?”

I shake my head, but too late. Theresa is already rattling off the name of every little boy here.

“Thanks, Theresa.” I cram the card in my pocket.

“Hey,” she hollers in my face, “you didn’t read it!” She holds out her hand and wiggles her fingers. “Give.”

I hand the card back and Theresa reads it to me.

 

Theresa reads really well for a little kid, except it doesn’t seem like she can walk and read at the same time. Now we’re at a complete standstill on the steep road that leads to the top of the island. “Couldn’t we do this
after
the morgue?” I ask.

She ignores me. Clearly there’s no stopping her until she’s read every last word.

 

A baseball bat?

 

What is this guy . . . nuts?

 

“And that’s not all we have here either,” Theresa says when I look up. “There’s Machine Gun Kelly, who happens to be a world-famous kidnapper, and Roy Gardner, who has escaped 110 times, but not from Alcatraz—not yet, anyway. Oh, we have everyone who is bad. Except Bonnie and Clyde on account of their being dead,” she says.

A truck horn beeps and we move off the road. A guard in a dark gray uniform like my dad’s is behind the wheel. He brings the truck to a squeaky halt and cranks down the window.

I glance back at Natalie, who has been so quiet, I almost forgot she was there. She’s looking at the ground as if she lost something. Her arms are down at her sides, not up high like a chipmunk’s the way they usually are.

“They Cam Flanagan’s kids?” the guard asks Theresa.

Theresa nods. “Yes, sir, Mr. Trixle,” she says.

“Where you headed?”

“Piper’s house, sir.”

Mr. Trixle nods. “Make a beeline there, Theresa. You know the rules.”

“Yes, sir.”

The guard’s eyes scan me and Nat. If he gets there’s anything different about her, he doesn’t let on. The brakes squeal as the truck inches down the steep road.

Now, the cell house is looming over us like the world’s biggest school for bad boys—the kind of place where guys go in and never come out. I wish Pete were here. Pete would love this.