Things can change minute to minute with my weird, loonatic sister, but I’m currently having very high hopes that I won’t be heading down to the back porch alone to see what I can see in the cemetery. Even though Birdie has parked herself on our bedroom carpet with that you’re-not-the-boss-of-me look on her face, I have one more trick up my sleeve that’s been working like a charm lately to get her going full speed ahead.
Our parish is full of juvenile delinquents nicknamed “greasers,” and busybody neighbors nicknamed “killjoys,” so if you’re the kinds of kids who are snoops and blackmailers who are on their own because their mother doesn’t like them very much and they don’t have a father anymore who would beat the living daylights out of anyone who dare lay a finger on his “babies,” you better be fast on your feet around here, and unfortunately, only one of the Finley sisters can make that brag.
Even though I’d gotten a heckuva shiner from Butch Seeback, the meanest and greasiest of the greasers, due to Birdie’s dawdling, I’d been having the worst time making her remember that if we suddenly found ourselves in a rough-and-tumble situation, which seems to happen to us all the time these days because of our dangerous lines of work, we had to haul our heinies away from whatever fix we were in ASAP! No ifs, ands, or buts.
I’d just about given up on getting through to her and felt doomed to spending half of my life with beefsteaks on my eyes, when the answer to my problem came out of nowhere the night Birdie and me were in the middle of playing the umpteenth game of cat’s cradle on our front porch steps a couple of weeks back.
There we were, breathing in that ripe red apple smell that’s been hanging over the neighborhood, passing the bakery string back and forth, when my sister’s most favorite song in all the world—“Rockin’ Robin”—came drifting down the block. The second she started to snap her fingers and got that irresistible smile on her face, I knew Birdie was going to take a powder, but my hands were tied. Before I could shake the string off my fingers to stop her, she hopped down the porch steps and took off like she was a rat following the Pied Piper toward where the tune was coming from, which turned out to be the Tates’ house five doors down.
When I was chasing after Birdie, my keen detecting mind couldn’t help but wonder just what in the hell stickin-the-mud Mrs. Nancy Tate would be doing up at 10:47 p.m. listening to rock ’n’ roll music when her husband was laid up at St. Joe’s Hospital with the broken leg he got when he was playing football at the yearly St. Kate’s Men’s Club game.
At that time of night, you can usually find somebody in the neighborhood up to no good, but whatever that particular gal was doing, I was positive that it would not be blackmailable or mysterious and therefore a huge waste of my precious time. Mrs. Nancy Tate, the current treasurer of the Pagan Baby Society, who our mother is running against in the election in a few weeks, was probably up doing something boringly holy. Something like humming along to a stack of 45s while she was sewing patchwork quilts for heathen African children on her Singer machine.
So all I’d been thinking about doing when I finally caught up to Birdie was scolding her and dragging her back home, but after I caught a handful of her T-shirt in the Tates’ backyard, the poor thing was looking so eager to peek into the window the music was coming out of that I caved in. Sure, I was 100% positive that nothing would come of it, but I figured as long as we were there, what the heck. I gave my sister the shhh sign and took outta my shorts pocket the two things that I always keep on me after the streetlights come on. And once I got done wiggling down over our faces the exact same black nylon stockings that Daddy used to wear when he snuck up on us in the middle of the night, the sweaty Finley sisters crept hand in hand toward the Tates’ rumpus room window, ready, willing, and mostly able.