How High the Moon Page 4

  When I jumped off my porch steps, I saw Charlie Fry sitting on his, his elbows propped on his round knees, his hands holding up his peach-fat cheeks. Just looking at him sitting there like Humpty Dumpty in front of that house that smelled like old people and musty newspapers made me feel sort of sorry for him. So I went over to the Frys’ steps and invited him along. “I’m getting an Orange Crush. I’ll give you a few swigs,” I said.

  While he was thinking it over, I looked down at his head. Mrs. Fry had cut his reddish blond hair with clippers because it was girlie-long and caked with enough dirt to fill a sandbox. Mrs. Fry told Teddy that she used to clip her husband’s hair, too, but I decided that it must have been so long ago that she forgot how, because Charlie’s hair looked like a lawn mowed by a blind man. The narrow paths were wobbled this way, then that, and his scalp was gouged and dotted with red scabs in the baldest patches. He looked up at me with a face so freckled that he could’ve been mistaken for a Jackson if his head wasn’t rubber-ball round. “So you want to go, or what?”

  Charlie looked nervous, like I was scaring him just by asking. “I don’t bite,” I told him. “Not anymore.”

  Charlie stood up, which I took to mean a yes, so I called through the screen to Mrs. Fry that Charlie was walking down the street with me to The Pop Shop, and that we’d be right back. Then off we went, Jolene Jackson taunting me because I was walking with a little fat boy. I didn’t turn around to see who was heckling along with her. I just flipped them off behind my back.

  “So your dad is a jailbird, huh?” I said, just to make conversation.

  “Yeah.”

  “I met a jailbird once. Back in Peoria. He stole a car, I guess. Did your dad steal a car?”

  “I dunno,” Charlie said.

  “So how come you’re not living with your ma then?” I asked.

  “She lives in heaven now,” Charlie said.

  He was waddling slow, like a penguin on ice, so I slowed my pace a bit.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, which was not only the respectable thing to say, but the truth. “What happened to her?”

  Charlie put his right hand against the fat folds inside his elbow, held his first two fingers in a V, then stuck his thumb through it. I didn’t get it at first, but then I realized he was giving himself a polio vaccine, but in the wrong place.

  “She died from getting a shot?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Holy smackers!” I said. “I didn’t know a vaccine could kill you. I got one. See?” I pulled my arm out of my jacket and yanked the neck of my shirt down over my shoulder so he could see the white puckered scar.

  I put my arm back in my sleeve. “I don’t know anybody living in heaven. Well, except for Esther Morgan. She was a kid who lived right there on the corner,” I said, pointing to the green house across the street. “She was the color of chocolate and wore short pigtails that looked like S.O.S pads stuck to the sides of her head.

  “I didn’t know her because it happened right after my ma and I moved in with Teddy. I was five years old then, and I think she was about ten or so. She got hit by a car. Right there at the intersection. I didn’t see it, but I heard the tires screech and I saw her twisted-up bike afterward.

  “Once I saw a dog get hit by a car. Not hit dead, but close to it, and the howl he let out when his back bent in a way it shouldn’t have almost made me puke. Still, that mutt’s howl wasn’t nothing compared with the one that came out of Mrs. Morgan’s mouth when she ran out on that street after she heard the tire screeches. Teddy ran out to see what happened, but he made me stay inside.

  “I didn’t know Mr. and Mrs. Morgan, but Teddy did, so he brought them a sorry card and signed his name and mine and Ma’s. I went along with him when he brought it over and I brought them a picture that I colored from my Sunday school lesson book. It was a picture of Jesus sitting on a rock, probably in heaven if they have rocks there, and lots of kids, playing happy all around Him. I colored one of the little girls with my brown crayon so they’d know which one was Esther. If they ever have a picture of ladies in heaven sitting around Jesus in our lesson book, I’ll color it for you.” Charlie didn’t say anything, so I told him that the proper response to my offer was, Thank you, I’d like that.

  “Anyway, the Morgans moved away, but their son, Uriah, stayed here. He lives on the south side now. He’s an usher and a cleaner over at the Starlight. He lets me sneak inside to catch a matinee now and then. I guess because his ma liked my picture so much that she framed it and hung it in her kitchen. Anyway, Uriah Morgan—I call him Mr. Morgan now, because he turned into a man since then—is really nice to let me see movies for free.”

  I could see the Taxi Stand Ladies up ahead, and I pointed them out to Charlie.

  They both had long blue-black hair, pulled back at the sides and swaying halfway down their backs. The rest of what they had didn’t look the same, though, with Walking Doll having blue eyes instead of brown, and a round face, while The Kenosha Kid’s face was fish-skinny. Close up, you could see how they were different, but from even a block away it was hard to tell them apart since they were about the same tall and had the same-sized hips and balloons, and wore each other’s clothes so often that I don’t think they even knew whose clothes were whose anymore, though sometimes they thought they did and argued about it.

  Charlie and I got closer, and I could see that it was Kenosha Kid who was wearing the pretty kimono-style red silk dress, one arm resting on the big mailbox bolted to the sidewalk, her other hand on her hip. Walking Doll was wearing the silky black that hung a tad off her shoulders, like the neckline was too big and in need of Mrs. Fry’s sewing machine. She was swinging the foot of her dancer-tight leg over the edge of the curb as she watched traffic go by.

  “Whoa,” The Kenosha Kid said when we reached them. “Looks like somebody got in a catfight. You okay?”

  I only remembered my bruise when she touched my right cheek and it was sore. I’d had to fib, telling Teddy that I tripped and whacked my cheek so he wouldn’t get miffed that I was fighting again.

  Walking Doll stopped dipping her foot and looked up. “I hope you left whoever it was bleeding.”

  “No, but I got my marble back,” I told her.

  “Way to be,” Walking Doll said.

  The Kenosha Kid looked at Charlie. “You’re not the one who roughed up Teaspoon, are you?” she said with a bit of tease in her voice, probably because she could tell that even though Charlie and me were the same height, I could have outrun him in a heartbeat if I couldn’t hit hard enough to flatten him.

  I rolled my eyes. “She was just funning you, Charlie,” I said when he tucked his head like he was a turtle and his shirt was his shell.

  “This is Charlie. Mrs. Fry’s great-grandson,” I explained. “He thought you were serious. Anyway, he’s living with Mrs. Fry now because his dad is in the clink and his ma is in heaven.”

  Walking Doll and The Kenosha Kid exchanged glances, then started fussing over Charlie. Patting him and cooing at him like he was just the cutest thing on earth, even if he was way fat and had scabs on his head.

  “Do I look like a boy?” I asked when the fussing slowed down.

  The Kenosha Kid laughed. “Well, you don’t have these yet,” she said, giving her pointy balloons and her little hips a pat, “but you’ve got the face of an angel. And I don’t mean Michael, either.”

  “Did someone call you a boy?” Walking Doll asked, her head snapping up.

  I nodded.

  “Who?”

  “Jack Jackson.”

  The Kenosha Kid laughed, “We’ve been called worse. Probably even by him.”

  Walking Doll’s face got tight with mad. “The kid who gave you the bruise?”

  “Yeah.”

  Walking Doll, who was more hotheaded than me and Joey Jackson put together, looked so mad I was expecting steam to blow out of her ears like on the cartoons. “That limp-dicked little bastard!” she said. She put her hand on my sh
oulder. “Listen, kid. Anybody tries to cut you down, you stand up for yourself. You hear? You’re just as good as anybody, no matter who they are. And don’t you ever let a boy rough you up. You’ll never be as strong as one, but you don’t have to be. You’ve got a tongue, and honey, there ain’t no lash that cuts deeper than the tongue. If you know how to use it. Got it?” I nodded.

  “And you,” she said to Charlie. “Don’t you grow up to be one of those mean bastards who roughs up women, you hear?” Charlie nodded his head hard and his fingers started do-si-doeing.

  I blinked up at Walking Doll, but the sun was so bright behind her I could barely make out her face. “I know I don’t look like a lady yet, but do I look like a boy now? I don’t want to look like a boy.”

  “Hell, no!” The Kenosha Kid said, “Here, we’ll show you how much of a girl you are.” She pulled a black pencil from her purse and told me to close my pretty baby blues. The Taxi Stand Ladies always called my eyes my “baby blues” and every time they said it, I smiled because it was like they were saying that I had music in my eyes.

  The Kenosha Kid stretched my right eyelid so she could draw on it, leaving my left eye free to watch Walking Doll. “You got your mole on the wrong side today,” I told her.

  “Now, how do you know that?” Walking Doll said. “You got your eyes closed.”

  “I only got one shut,” I said. “Your mole is always on the right side. Right here.” I tapped my cheek on the right side where her Marilyn-Monroe-drawed mole usually sat.

  “Yeah, well I’m changing it up a bit,” she said as The Kenosha Kid let go of my lid. I opened both eyes as she dropped the pencil back into her purse and took out a small red, rectangle container. She slid the lid back with her fingernail. Inside, there was a little square that looked packed with pencil lead shavings, only darker, and packed tight. She spit on the lead part, then rubbed a little brush across it and told me to close my eyes partway. I did like she told me, and after a couple more spits and swishes, my spitty-wet eyelids felt almost too heavy to lift. “Don’t blink too hard until it dries,” she warned.

  Then right there, with folks walking by and gawking, The Kenosha Kid rubbed my cheeks with a sponge, swiping creamy pink over my cheeks, and painted my lips, staying in the lines.

  “Take a look,” she said, shoving her flipped-open compact in front of my face.

  Wow, I couldn’t believe it. Any bit of boy I had in me (along with the bruise I got from one) was painted over and I looked as pretty as a Taxi Stand Lady. “Holy cow!” I said.

  The Kenosha Kid grinned. “You were a bit older, you’d be giving us a run for our money. Now let’s see that little bastard call you a boy.”

  “Hey, you forgot my mole,” I said, and The Kenosha Kid took her eyebrow pencil out and twisted the tip above the right side of my lip. Just then, Brenda Bloom and two other girls came walking by. All three of them were wearing poodle skirts, and pink anklets peeked out the tops of their saddle shoes. Brenda walked two steps behind the other girls, her hands clasped behind her back, her head down.

  Brenda Bloom was the eighteen-year-old daughter of Gloria Bloom, the owner of the Starlight Theater (and a whole lot of other places in town). Brenda was going to graduate from high school in two weeks, same as Johnny Jackson, though he’d just turned nineteen.

  Every time I ran into Mrs. Bloom at the butcher shop where Teddy sometimes sent me for hot dogs or sausage (because they didn’t bleed in the pan), ladies were always swarming her, asking her questions about Brenda. Mainly if her and her boyfriend, Leonard Gaylor, the rich lawyer’s son, were going to get married right after Brenda graduated, or if they are going to wait until Leonard graduated from the university in Madison where he was studying so he could be a lawyer like his dad. Those ladies always gushed on and on about what a fine job Mrs. Bloom did raising that girl on her own—Mr. Bloom being the late Mr. Bloom (another word for dead people—like they left the house to run to the store and were just a little late getting back) when Brenda was just two years old, probably because he was older than the hills when she was born, which is what I’d heard.

  Even when Mrs. Bloom was nowhere around, they still talked about Brenda like she was a star plucked from the silver screen. They gushed on and on about her beauty and her fine piano- playing and singing skills. Yep, everybody loved Brenda Bloom and spoke highly of her.

  Well, except the Taxi Stand Ladies, judging by the way Walking Doll glared at her, and The Kenosha Kid said “Well, la te da” in a nasty voice as Brenda and her friends passed.

  Brenda glanced up, just for a second, but she didn’t glare back at the Taxi Stand Ladies. Instead, she looked at me.

  I’d never seen Brenda Bloom up close before, but when I did, I knew why she’d been crowned the Sweetheart of Mill Town. She was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen, with big blue-green eyes and curly lashes that touched her eyebrows. Her skin was as creamy as French vanilla, and her lips and cheeks look like they’ve been dabbed with strawberry juice. She was prettier than either one of the Taxi Stand Ladies.

  “Oh my gosh,” one of Brenda’s friends said. “That little girl is wearing makeup!” Brenda grinned and a dimple sank in her right cheek. Her teeth were so tight together you couldn’t even squeeze the ace of spades between them. I wanted front teeth like hers someday, not ones with a space between them so big you could stick the whole tip of a pencil between them without snapping the lead. Teddy promised me that mine would move together when I grew some more, just like his did, but I couldn’t count on that because Teddy still had a little gap between his front teeth, whether he knew it or not. Course, he hadn’t grown much, either.

  “What you looking at, Prissy Bitch?” Walking Doll hissed, and Brenda lowered her head again and kept walking, while her friend whispered, “I told you we shouldn’t walk down this way.”

  I watched Brenda as she passed, her golden ponytail and the hem of her skirt swaying as she glided by. She still had her hands clasped behind her back, and they weren’t even twitching like she wanted to flip off the Taxi Stand Ladies.

  After they were gone, Walking Doll opened her purse and started rummaging around. I dipped my head over her purse. “What you digging for?” I asked, thinking maybe she’d forgotten to put something on my face.

  “A couple of dimes. For you and your friend,” she said. “So you can get a soda pop.”

  “Oh, Charlie’s not my friend. He’s my neighbor.”

  I uncurled my fist and showed her the dime I already had. “That’s what we were gonna buy. Soda pop. We were gonna share.”

  She pulled one dime out, like that’s all she could find, and put it in my hand. “Well, here. Now you can each get one. Go on now,” she said as Ralph’s taxi rounded the corner.

  Charlie and me got two Orange Crushes from the vending machine butted up against The Pop Shop, and man oh man, did it taste good, all fruity and cold and fizzly on my tongue. I took a long swig and was about to wipe my mouth with the back of my hand like I always did, but stopped myself. “Did I just smear my lipstick from the bottle?” I asked Charlie. He shook his head.

  “Hey, we should walk over to the theater and see what’s playing,” I said. Charlie glanced toward the direction of our houses, like he thought we should head back there instead, but then he followed me.

  “The Starlight Theater,” I began, as we headed over toward Bloom Avenue, Mill Town’s main street. “Now, there’s a place with more magic than Houdini! It doesn’t look like much from the outside, but inside? Oh man! The walls were made to look like a castle, and there’s tall pillars with gold trim—probably real gold, too—clinging to them. And balcony boxes with red drapes. It has eleven hundred seats, wood ones with red velvet butt and back cushions.

  “With all that splendor alone, the Starlight Theater would be special enough, but those fancy things aren’t nothing compared with the ceiling. I’ll tell you, Charlie, not even God Himself ever created a night sky as grand as the one in there.”

 
My stomach rumbled and I started thinking about the candy they sold at the Starlight, and how me and Charlie should have shared one pop, then bought candy with the other dime. I suppose it was thinking about candy, and walking with Charlie, that had me suddenly singing the Good & Plenty jingle about Choo Choo Charlie. Whatever it was, it made Charlie perk right up. “You like music, or just Good and Plenty?” I asked.

  “Both,” he said. “But music best.”

  “Me, too. Do you sing?” I was hoping he’d say yes, because I needed someone to practice singing harmony with. But he said no. Shucks.

  When we reached the Starlight, there was a movie poster in the NOW PLAYING slot, with two cartoon dogs sitting at a restaurant table slurping spaghetti noodles from one plate. “Hot dog, Charlie! Look at that!”

  Charlie looked up, his empty pop bottle dangling from his pudgy hand. “Walt Dizzies’s Lady and the Tamp… Tramp”—leading me to believe that he did even less schoolwork than me.

  “Wow, Charlie,” I said, “we gotta see this one!”

  I shouted to a man walking down the street, “Hey mister, you got the time?” He scooted his jacket sleeve up to look at his watch and said, “Twelve fifty-seven.”

  “That’s grown-ups for you, Charlie,” I said. “Always giving the time like that so you have to count up to the next tens, then picture the face of a clock to know what time it really is.” Which is exactly what I had to do. I grabbed Charlie’s arm. “Come on!” I told him. “Fast! Mr. Morgan comes around one o’clock.”

  When we got to the alley, there was no sign of Mr. Morgan, but I knew it didn’t take us more than three minutes to cut between the theater and the dress shop, even if Charlie was running at about the same speed as Jolene Jackson jumped peppers.

  I drained the last few drops of Orange Crush from my bottle and gave it a toss up into the dumpster, scattering the flies. I told Charlie to do the same. He couldn’t throw any better than he could read, though, so his bottle clanked against the metal side and crashed to the pavement. “I ain’t feeling so good,” he said, like he was trying to blame his toss on something besides his wimpy arm. “Must be from the pop.”