How High the Moon Read online

  “Well, maybe he can call me from work on Monday while he’s on break,” she said, shuffling papers around on her desk.

  “Oh, there ain’t no phones where he works. Only dead cows.”

  Mrs. Carlton sighed. “It’s aren’t any.” She looked up with squinted eyes. Most of her lipstick had worn off her real lips, so that the red rimming them looked like an outline that some kindergartner forgot to color in. “Give the note to Mr. Favors. If he doesn’t call me back, I’ll just drop by to see him one evening next week.”

  “Well, he’s not home much,” I lied.

  Mrs. Carlton took a deep breath, and one of her eyelids twitched. “Isabella, I’m trying to be patient here, but the school year is almost over and you are in serious jeopardy of failing fifth grade. I know you’re a bright child and could pick up what you missed in no time if you applied yourself, but as things are, I only see trouble ahead for you in sixth grade. It’s been a long time since parent–teacher conferences and I think Mr. Favors and I need to regroup and put our heads together to figure out what would be best for you. This program may be grasping at straws, but at least it’s something. I’d rather not hold you back, Isabella, but I need some assurance that you’ll not be doomed to failure next year if I pass you.”

  Her words felt like a yank on my hair and a punch in the stomach at the same time. A flunky? Me? Sure she’d harped at me lots all year to turn in my work, but she didn’t tell me I might flunk if I didn’t! Holy cow. She flunked me and she could just as well write DUMB HEAD across my forehead, because that’s what everyone was going to call me. “I promise I’ll work hard over the weekend and turn in all my late papers by Monday. Please. I’ll do anything. I don’t want to be no flunky!”

  “I hope you mean that,” Mrs. Carlton said, and I crossed my heart to show her—and me—that I meant business.

  “We need to use all the resources we have available to us, Isabella. Do you understand?”

  “Gotcha,” I said, and she told me that the proper reply was Yes, ma’am. Thank you, so I said that instead. Then I hightailed it out of there.

  By the time I got outside, the playground was empty but for a few lost school papers and smashed candy wrappers, so I had to walk by myself. I sang a few bars of a made-up song, but I never cared much for singing outside on breezy days, the wind yanking your voice off to who knows where. Nope. I liked singing in the bathroom when Teddy’s dirty clothes heap didn’t ruin the echo, or into a fan (especially if I was singing country), or best yet, in the basement where the echo was good, which I only did once, though, because that place has more spiders than The Hanging Hoof has dead cows. Nope, I didn’t care much for singing in the wind, so I stopped singing and just hummed as I watched my shoes take turns playing peekaboo from under the hem of my dress and thought about Teddy’s fixation with being respectable.

  Teddy’s desire to be an upstanding person seemed to be in his blood the way being naughty was in mine, because he talked about it the way other men talked about cars or baseball. “As long as you got your pride, you still have something,” Teddy always said. It didn’t matter to him that he had to wash his work clothes in the tub every other day because he didn’t have but two pairs of work pants and two shirts, and the motor on the wringer washer was deader than a T-bone steak. Clothes that were a bloody mess by the end of each workday, so he couldn’t just hang them up for another day after he got home, the way I did my dresses on days when I didn’t slop my lunch. So every night, he had to stand over the tub and rub the legs and arms of those clothes until the rinse water turned clear, then run them out to the clothesline hanging between two trees in the warm seasons, and over the heat register inside if it was winter. And if his clothes got even one little tear in them, he raced that shirt or pair of pants over to Mrs. Fry’s for patching, as if the shirt itself was doing the bleeding and Mrs. Fry was the doctor. That way he could walk to work clean, with his head held high.

  Every night after Ma left, his shoulders and head wanted to sag so low that it looked pitifully hard for him to lift them, but he perked them before he left the house each morning to walk me across the street, and he kept them held high until the door shut behind us each night. And when we took a walk so Teddy could run errands, it didn’t matter if Marion Delaney and Marge Perkins watched us pass from where they gossiped over the fence splitting their yards, pity in their eyes. Or if Frank Miller gave him that nasty smirk as he was opening the door to his Lincoln Continental to head to the savings and loan where he worked as a loan officer (which I guess is sort of like being a policeman of the bank’s money, but I’m not sure), or to Miller’s Sales and Service, the place on the other side of town where he sold cars so expensive that Teddy couldn’t even buy one of the used ones. A smirk that said, Couldn’t keep her, huh, Big Guy? which is what Mr. Miller called Teddy every payday when he made his deposit, even if Teddy stood only five foot four.

  Sure, Teddy’s hand might have gripped mine a little harder, and his step might have picked up a bit until we passed them, but still he kept his shoulders back, and his chin (what little he had of one) held high.

  Teddy never did see me slipping my free arm behind my back to flip those people the bird, which is what Jack Jackson called holding up your middle finger when you wanted to cuss somebody really bad but weren’t allowed to swear anymore. Teddy would have gone ape had he seen me, for sure. Especially about me flipping the bird to Mrs. Delaney and Mrs. Perkins, who he claimed meant well. I guess Teddy didn’t know what one of the old regulars back in Peoria knew: that sometimes the only difference between pity and scorn is which side of the coin is facing up.

  Poor Teddy. Maybe things would have been different for him if he’d used that money he was saving up to go to electricity school like he wanted to. He spent his whole twenties and part of his thirties living with his crippled ma, trying to clean up the mess she made of her finances so she wouldn’t lose her house. Tucking what little he could of his paychecks away so that after she was gone he could get a respectable trade and make a good wage. But the very week after the Lord took his ma home (which is what Mrs. Fry said you call it when somebody croaks), Ma and me rode in on the Greyhound, stopping in this town that sits like a pimple on Milwaukee’s butt-end, because she didn’t have enough cash to get us the last fifteen miles to Milwaukee.

  Teddy could tell Ma was in trouble the minute he saw her digging in the bottom of her purse and trying to count out enough change to order us a plate of french fries in the restaurant we’d stumbled into. So he hurried to her rescue and asked her point-blank if we’d like to join him at the table where he was having coffee. Ma took him up on his offer to buy us supper, calling him her knight in shining armor.

  After we ate, Teddy called for a taxicab and Ralph came to bring us to the house Teddy’s ma left him, which had the same white paint peeling like a sunburn even then, and a porch with no walls that leaned to one side like it needed a cane. Teddy’s Oldsmobile was in the shop getting a new tranny so he couldn’t take us the rest of the way. And giving Ma fare wouldn’t have mattered, since we’d rode in on the last Greyhound that Mill Town would see until morning. That night, after Teddy tucked me into his dead ma’s bed, him and Ma stayed up half the night talking and she told him her whole pitiful story. About the mean man she left down south while I was still in diapers when she couldn’t take it no more, and how her own family—her ma, her dad, her grown-up brothers, and even her married sister—wouldn’t take her in because she’d made her bed, and she should sleep in it. Just like they had to do theirs—even though she was only sixteen when she made that bed, she said.

  After Ma spilled out her story and tears, she told Teddy how all she wanted in this life was to be a piano bar singer, even if she needed more practice on her pianoing skills to get hired in a place worth her salt. “I want to be a somebody, for just once in my life,” Teddy recounted her saying. And then Ma sang for him, right there at the table, her fingertips pitter-pattering over the Formica as if
it was ivory.

  Ma and Teddy didn’t marry because Ma thought marriage was nothing but a ball and chain, but they became like man and wife anyway. (Teddy didn’t tell me that part. I just figured it out, based on the fact that they slept in the same bed, doing the “Juicy Jitterbug,” which is what the Jackson boys called it when a ma and a dad banged around in bed at night, and I sure heard a lot of banging around back then.) And after we’d been with Teddy for a month, he dipped into his electricity school savings and bought Ma the fine upright piano that sits jewel-shiny in our living room, so she could practice her playing and get a job at The Dusty Rose. A piano I wouldn’t touch, so that it would stay pristine for her. He bought her fine dresses, too. Silky ones that showed the tops of her balloons and clung to her hips like lotion. Fancy high heels with pretty rounded toes, too, and matching handbags.

  Course, Teddy could have saved the money that piano cost him, because by the time Ma got a job as a piano singer at The Dusty Rose, her and I had seen the inside of the Starlight Theater on Bloom Avenue, and the rest is history, as they say.

  I was so busy thinking that I forget to watch my feet, and where I was going, so I didn’t realize that I was crossing the road without looking until I heard tires screech and the honk of a horn. “Watch where you’re going, kid!” some high school boy yelled. I wanted to flip him off, but I didn’t because I saw that I was already on the corner of Fourth and Washington, and Mrs. Fry was coming out of her door with a pitcher of water for Poochie.

  “Hello, Mrs. Fry,” I called. She grabbed her reaching stick that was leaning up against the slate siding. “How was school today, dear?” she asked.

  “Fine,” I said, because if I told her it stunk because I had to stay in at recess and that I might become a flunky, she’d have gone tattling to Teddy. “Say hello to Teddy for me,” she said, then she disappeared around the side of her house, her support stockings the color of bandages rolled just under her knees, her slippers flapping at her heels. I heard Poochie snarling at her as I zipped up my front steps.

  The gold lid of the mailbox tacked alongside the front door was open and shoved with envelopes and junk papers. I didn’t empty it out, though, because Teddy didn’t allow me to get the mail. He was afraid I’d lose something important, like I guess I did once when I was little. I stepped over an IGA flyer lying on the porch, and went into the house to grab my jump rope and marble bag. Then I raced across the street to find some Jacksons to play with.

  I swear, sometimes I didn’t know why I even bothered being friends with any of the Jackson kids! Well, yes I did. They were the only kids on my block, but for a fat baby named Heloise, whose mother, Jack Jackson said, was a whore because she was a mom but not married, and now that timid, lazy new kid, Charlie Fry.

  Jolene had to go first, and she picked “Apples, Pears, Peaches, and Plums” for her jump rope rhyme. I don’t know what she was thinking, picking that one, since Mrs. Fry could probably jump faster than her. Right after you say, “Tell me when your birthday comes,” you have to jump peppers until you get to your birthday month. Jolene’s birthday was in May, but she didn’t even get past March when her feet tangled like hair in a tornado. “You’re out!” I shouted. “I’m next.”

  Jolene, who had more freckles than she had regular skin, put her hands on her hips. “You were turning too fast. That’s why I tripped. It’s still my turn.”

  “Stupid!” I yelled. “That’s a pepper-jumping rhyme. If you can’t jump fast, why’d you pick it?”

  “Who you calling stupid? You’re the one who’s probably going to flunk fifth grade, not me! And I can too jump fast, but you were turning high-waters.”

  “I was not! The rope was scraping the sidewalk the whole time! And who says I’m gonna flunk?”

  Jennifer, like her sister, was plastered in freckles. She had thin blond hair that when braided wasn’t any thicker than three cooked spaghetti noodles twined together. And every time she got scared she’d tuck a braid into her mouth and chew on it, because her spine was as noodley as her hair. “Jennifer? Was I turning high-waters? Was I?”

  Jennifer shrugged, that skinny braid stuck sideways in her mouth like a dog’s bone. “Fine then. Have your way. Jumping rope is for babies anyway.” I yanked my jump rope out of Jolene’s hand and went into the backyard to see what Joey was up to.

  Joey was my favorite Jackson. He was eleven years old, a tad on the hotheaded side like Jack, but he always played fair.

  Joey was playing sword fighting with his brothers. “Want to play marbles, Joey?” I asked.

  “Why don’t you go play with the girls,” James said. “We’re busy.”

  Jack, whom I liked even less than school, was on one knee, winding the handle of his homemade cardboard sword with electric tape so it would stop flopping. He looked up and eyed my marble bag. “You got your steelies with you?” he asked. I knew he wanted to know because the week before, he lost all three of his steelies to James.

  “A couple of them,” I said, even though I only had one on me. Jack tossed his sword down. “I’m in,” he said.

  We always played marbles underneath the clothesline. On the patch of bare ground that Mrs. Jackson rubbed free of grass with her feet, her having so many kids that she had to wash even more often than Teddy.

  Jack didn’t hardly have the circle cut into the dirt before Joey and James were running back with their marble bags.

  All four of us agreed that we were playing keepsies, and that we had to put one of our most favorite marbles in the pot. And sure enough, when Jack won my favorite cat’s-eye—the eye twirled with cobalt-blue like the sky at the Starlight Theater—he scooped that marble up along with the scuffed, milk-colored plain marbles I didn’t care if I lost. But when it was my turn and I flicked my shooter and it clicked against his favorite agate, he changed the rules the second his aggie even looked like it was leaving the circle.

  “You can’t do that!” I yelled. “We already called keepsies!” Joey wasn’t noodley like his sister, so I turned to him. “Tell him to give me my winnings!” I said. Joey stood up for me, saying I’d won that aggie fair and square, but Jack didn’t care. He said he wasn’t giving up his favorite aggie to a girl, and he gave me a shove that toppled me over. That got me ear-pulsing mad and I hauled back and slugged him. In one second Jack had me flat down, his legs straddling me so I couldn’t get up, and he was whacking me, James egging him on. I couldn’t reach high enough to pull his hair, but I managed to get a few scratches on his arms before someone shouted, “Hey!”

  Jack stopped swinging, and twisted his trunk around to see who was yelling. I lifted my head the best I could with a thirteen-year-old sitting on me, and saw Johnny Jackson striding across the yard, his car keys swinging from his hand. He marched over to us and lifted Jack in the air, dropping him on the ground.

  “You, shit head,” he said. “You don’t whale on girls.”

  “Like hell!” Jack spat. “She’s as nasty as a boy, and she looks like one, too. She hits me, I’m gonna hit her back!”

  “That’s right!” James said. “She slugged Jack first. She was trying to steal his aggie, saying that—” James didn’t get the chance to finish, because Johnny cuffed them both, one hand for each head. “Ouch!” Jack yelled when Johnny’s car keys caught him on the temple, which according to Mrs. Fry could kill a person, which in this case wouldn’t have been so bad.

  I always did think that Johnny was the best looking of all the Jackson boys, him being the one with the least lightbulby-shaped head. Still, I hadn’t noticed until that very moment just how much he looked like James Dean, the dreamy movie star I saw in East of Eden at the Starlight. Johnny had the same long legs, and the same hair with waves rising on top. That is, when he didn’t have it slicked oil-shiny because he was heading out to drag race on River Road and wanted to be noticed by the girls. Then he combed it sideways from the temples to the very back, the sides meeting in the middle to make one of those little tails called a Duck’s Ass. Jo
hnny’s eyes had those little pouches underneath like James’s had, too, like he needed to go to bed, but Johnny’s eyes were a little closer together.

  “Only sissies fight with girls,” Johnny said. Then he turned to head to the house. Jack smirked his lips like that Teddy-insulting Mr. Miller always smirked his, and he said to me, “Maybe you should go look for your ma so she can teach you how to be a girl. It might keep you from getting your face punched in, tomboy.”

  I pretended I didn’t hear him. Or James, when he added, “No wonder her ma ran off. I’d run off, too, if I had a kid like her.”

  I hadn’t cried in front of anybody but Teddy since I was six years old, and I wasn’t about to break that record. So I just swallowed hard and snatched my marble bag off the grass like they weren’t even saying mean things about me. That’s when Johnny turned around.

  “You little bastards,” he said to James and Jack as he hurried back to where we were standing. The boys ducked, like they were going to get their temples smashed in good this time, but Johnny didn’t hit them. Instead, he ripped their marble bags out of their hands. “Hey, what are you doing, asshole?” Jack shouted.

  Johnny handed me their bags. “Here. Take what you want. Compensation. Might help the little sissies learn how to be gentlemen.”

  I knew I could take every single marble in their bags if I wanted to, but I didn’t. I only took my blue cat’s-eye back from Jack’s bag, then I walked away.

  CHAPTER THREE

  There was nothing to do in the morning since I couldn’t play with the Jackson kids until I stopped hating them (well, except my make-up schoolwork, but it was only Saturday, which meant I had plenty of time)—so I grabbed a dime from my Sunday school offering stash to take to The Pop Shop for an Orange Crush.