Harry Sue Read online

  That is the same look I got from Moonie Pie, who was so grateful to be sprung, he gave me a sleepy grin that lit up the moldy corners of the room. His little feet were ice-cold. I grabbed the booties he always managed to pull off and wasn’t halfway down the stairs before the rest of the bunch attacked my knees.

  “Tell us a story, Harry Sue. Please! Tell us something.”

  “All right, all right. I’ll tell you something. Let. Go. Now.”

  On a regular day, there’d be nine crumb snatchers hanging all over me. Including the babies, Syl and Moonie Pie, there was, in order of their age: Hammer Head, Wolf Man, Princella, Beanie, Carly Mae, Tiny Tim, and Zipper.

  Granny was nowhere to be seen at the moment, and her live-in help, her nieces Synchronicity and Serendipity, were out back stealing a smoke. Of course, that left the kids to their own devices. Yes, nine children under the age of six alone in a house, completely unattended. If you can’t stomach that thought, you’d better close this book right now because it’s going to get a lot worse.

  Mostly they were a sorry bunch. Even if they worked together, they couldn’t bring me down. Maybe Hammer Head if he caught me off guard. But Granny attracted mild kids, punks who were easy to boss. Soon as lunch was over, all they could think to do was hang out at the windows waiting on me to get home and issue some direct orders.

  “Couple up for count,” I said, handing the baby to Princella and shrugging out of my backpack. I made sure I could see ‘em all, nobody off poking their fingers into light sockets.

  “Okay, okay. Wanna hear ‘The Three Little Pork Rinds’?”

  “Tell me about a princess,” Beanie said, tugging on my shirttail and gazing up at me with her big brown eyes. Beanie was all fins and gills, Fish— that’s right, a brand-new conette—and she hadn’t memorized all the rules.

  I shook my head.

  “A pretty one.”

  “No princesses. Just conettes.”

  “What’s a conette?” Beanie wanted to know.

  “Wolf Man?” I nodded in the direction of a four-year-old with a sorry mop of hair.

  “Thath a female convict,” he said, pulling his thumb partway out of his mouth. “Boyth are conth and girlth are conetteth.”

  “‘Red the Hood’! ‘Red the Hood’!”

  “‘Beauty and the Hack’!”

  “No! ‘Padlocks and the Three Bears.’”

  “I want all the traps shut now,” I said. I needed a minute to think.

  It was Beau, Homer’s home health aide from the county, who taught us all about life on the inside. Beau was fluent in Conglish, had smoked his share of roadkill, and knew the convict’s code by heart. He was schooled, Fish. And not from watching movies, either. Beau came to Marshfield directly following a stint at an MCC down near Chicago where he did an eight ball for two counts of grand larceny.

  Beau taught us the importance of telling a good story. It wasn’t enough to like stories. It wasn’t enough to read them to yourself. You had to learn to master them. A good storyteller had power on the inside because she could wound without a weapon.

  She could strike an invisible blow with her mind.

  That was the reason I told the little crumb snatchers a story every day. You see, Granny and I were locked in a war for control of the joint. My aim was to shut her down for good. Put up a Closed sign on the front door. Soon as I knew the crumb snatchers were sprung from Granny’s Lap and she wouldn’t be able to terrorize any more little children, I could begin the crime spree and the poor decision making that would land me in the joint.

  As I have already mentioned, it was past time for me to begin the running away, the life on the streets, and the petty criminal activity that is the hallmark of your average conette. I needed more contact with the system, maybe an abusive older boyfriend who sold drugs and a couple of years of eating out of Dumpsters if I was ever going to make it to a correctional facility.

  Since I had no idea where my mom was, I might have to check into two or three joints before I found her. That’s why I felt a pressing need to get started.

  I pulled Moonie Pie onto my lap, not because I’m soft, but because he was funky. His diaper should have been changed about the time I was switching sugar for salt in the teachers’ lounge at lunch recess. Bathing isn’t required in the joint, so I had to get used to funky. Other than that, touching is strictly forbidden.

  The heart is too soft, remember? Cuddling babies is no kind of way to tough up.

  Moonie Pie was awful quiet, and even though he looked at me, he didn’t seem to really register. It was half-past three and he could hardly lift his head, which probably meant that the hacks were giving him cold medicine again.

  Everybody gets a nick in the joint and hacks are no exception. I called Synchronicity and Serendipity hacks because that’s another name for prison guards. But beyond that, they each got a personal nick. Your personal nick comes from the name on your birth certificate, your old neighborhood, the way you look, or your reputation from your days on the outs.

  I nicked those girls “Sink” and “Dip” because on a normal day they didn’t share a sensible thought between them. I didn’t have to look far. The girls I have to call cousins—on my father’s side—had the nicks right inside their names: “Sink-ronicity” and “Seren-Dip-ity.”

  There’s a program on TV about child development, and that psychologist says that teenagers are like one-hundred-pound toddlers. Just trying to satisfy their needs. That seemed to describe Sink and Dip to a tee. I often wondered how bad their own mom must have been to make them choose to live with Granny after they dropped out of school. Sometimes, I suspected they were just used to being pushed around. They were just crumb snatchers, plus a hundred pounds.

  Like everything else in life, you have your good hacks and your bad hacks. “Granny’s little helpers,” as she called them in front of the parents, were mostly lazy hacks. If they put a spoonful of cold medicine in the applesauce, they scored three hours of uninterrupted nap time to dish about friends, watch soaps, choose their personal fashion colors, and smoke tailor-made joes out by the swing set.

  I laid Moonie Pie down in front of me to let him sleep it off.

  I’d deal with the hacks later.

  “All right then, sit down. The first thing you should know about Red is she wasn’t little.”

  The crumb snatchers got quiet in a hurry. Carly Mae sighed and started sucking her thumb.

  “She was six-feet four, two hundred pounds, and she could press five hundred on a weak day. And she was a hood. As in hoodlum, lawbreaker, conette, not fit for decent society. When her mother gave her those cakes and that bottle of wine to take to her old granny, Red called up Prince Charming and they polished the bottle off not fifty yards from the cottage.

  “Next up, they ate the cakes and went crying back to mommy with a story ‘bout how they’d been chased by a giant rabbit until the bottle was broke and the cake was just a bunch of crumbs.”

  “I not afraid of a rabbit,” Wolf Man declared.

  “This was no ordinary rabbit. This was Peter Rabbit, and he’d done four years and change in super-max on account of he couldn’t stop breaking and entering into Farmer McGregor’s garden. Now he sharpens his teeth on a garden hoe.”

  Wolf Man looked unsure, like maybe he wanted to take back what he just said.

  “He’s your garden-variety criminal,” I told him, driving home my point. “Where do you think they came up with that phrase? Hang around that element and you’ll be sleeping on a steel bed with no mattress.

  “Okay, then, where was I?”

  “Telling a story about Prince Charming,” Beanie said, rubbing her eyes.

  “Right. They were full of hot air, of course, but Red’s mother, whose birthday was about …” I looked into the sky and tapped my finger on my chin.

  “Yesterday!” the crumb snatchers yelled in unison.

  “… yesterday, gave Red another bottle and more cake, which was only enough to make her tipsy
and sprinkle crumbs on the bottom of her stomach. So when she finished that, she stumbled down the road to see what she could score off Granny.”

  “What about the printh?” Wolf Man asked. “Wath he one of her road dogth?”

  “No, he wasn’t her road dog. You think Red would pick a crybaby like Prince Charming to be her road dog? No. Definitely not. Prince Charming was not in her crew. She just kept him around for giggles.”

  Carly Mae took her thumb out of her mouth. “We’re a crew,” she said, beaming up at me.

  She was right, of course. These little hair balls were my crew, which was a problem, really. Between Homer, who couldn’t lift a finger … literally, and this sorry bunch, I had almost no protection at all. My back was feeling the breeze.

  “So she ditched the prince,” Hammer Head prompted. He had no patience for getting off track.

  “We’re in the forest, right? And Red is stepping on every toad she sees.”

  “That’s mean,” Beanie said.

  “The criminal element,” I replied, sighing, “have a tendency to be mean.”

  “I’m telling ya to shut up,” Hammer Head leveled at Beanie. He had a way of silencing a crowd. He was five and bigger than the other kids, but there was something about the way he walked into a room and where he sat—always a few feet from the crew—that suggested he was one of those dogs who preferred life on his own to the pack. His nick came from an unfortunate incident involving a cousin and a Tetra-Tom Transformer. Don’t come between Hammer Head and what he wants or he’ll use the top of his head like a battering ram.

  “Red was so busy uprooting wildflowers and pulling the wings off butterflies that it looked like she didn’t see the big old wolf sneaking up on her. To his eyes, she was just a sweet little something out picking flowers for the afternoon.”

  “But you said she was big,” Carly Mae blurted out, in spite of herself.

  “Yeah, you can’t change the thtory,” Wolf Man complained. Even Moonie Pie was waking up now, following the sound of my voice. I waved my hand over his face and he reached up to grab it. Carly Mae had inched closer and closer until she draped herself, like a wet blanket, on my bad shoulder. I let her stay there because it hurt something terrible when she pressed down like that, and I had to learn to keep going through the pain if I had any hope of connecting up with Mom again.

  “The wolf saw Red’s big old arms and he thought, ‘Chicken wings!’ as he rushed right in for the kill. No pleasant chitchat like in the other story. That’s for little kids.

  “But Red, she’d done some time in super-max— stemming from that assault conviction on Cinderella—so she’d known the wolf was there all the time. In the joint, as you know, you grow eyes in the back of your head. In about two seconds she flattened that wolf with the brass knuckles she always wore on her right hand and as he lay there in the dirt, all mangy and twitching, fleas buzzin’ like crazy, she had a thought….”

  “Yum, yum,” said the crumb snatchers, and rubbed their little bellies.

  “Sure enough,” I said, pleased they’d remembered. “She ate him. He was a little dry going down, but he was filling.

  “‘Shame to get halfway to Granny’s,’ Red said to herself, waddling down the path, ‘and not know if she’s finished up that latest batch of elderberry wine.’

  “So Red made her way over to Granny’s. When she got there, Granny wasn’t in bed like they always tell you. No, she was lying on the couch with a beer in one hand and a racing form in the other, trying to figure out which horse to bet on in the ninth.

  “‘Granny, what a big old bum you have,’ Red said in greeting.”

  Now, at this point in the story, I used a high, cracked voice, not unlike that of our own Granny during R & D—receiving and departure—when she’s trying to act the part of a dear old lady who cares.

  “‘The better to lie around gambling and ignore my charges,’ Granny replied.

  “‘Granny, why don’t you get off your bum and get me one of those drinks you have stored….’”

  Here was where I always slowed down so the crumb snatchers could fully absorb what I wanted them most to remember and to repeat later to their parents.

  “‘… some of that caustic stuff you keep stored—in full view—of the crumb … children, right there under the sink. The Drano,’” I said. “‘Yeah, that’s right. The Drano from under the sink. I’ll take a glass of that, seeing as I’ve got a little tickle in my throat.’

  “Truth was, that wolf’s tail wouldn’t stay in Red’s stomach and get digested. It kept poking back up into her mouth.

  “‘Aw, Red, get it your own sour self, would ya? Can’t you see I’m busy?’”

  What I didn’t mention was that I always checked that the child-safety locks I’d swiped from the Rylee’s Ace Hardware Store were latched on the cabinets under the sink. So there wasn’t much chance of any accidental poisonings while I was at school.

  But my plan was to discredit her. The poison under the sink planted seeds of doubt. I was working up a lush garden of doubt regarding Granny’s abilities.

  I looked out at the kids blankly, having lost my place with my wanderings.

  “Red wath going for the Drano,” Wolf Man prompted. “She wath gonna get rid of that plug in her throat.”

  I patted Wolf Man’s head. He must have passed on the applesauce at lunch because he was all there. Wolf Man remembered every line of my stories. If he lived on the other side of town, he might be enrolled in one of those Young Five programs they advertise on the cable access channel, with music and art and circle time. Maybe some nice speech therapist would help him with his lisp.

  “‘Get it yourself, Red!’” I cried out, pushing away the thought of Wolf Man with a decent haircut and a backpack and taking on Granny’s lunatic voice again.

  “‘Climb on the counter and get your own glass….’”

  “Oh, children,” came the sickening voice of the real Granny, wafting into the room like a bad cooking odor.

  “It’s that blessed time of the day when you depart from me. Goodness, look at the time. Synnnnchronicity! Serrrrrrendipity!” she howled. “Get in here!”

  It was time for the Greatest Show on Earth and nobody’d changed into their costumes yet. A collective shiver went through the little crumb snatchers at my feet. I took in their stunned, wide-eyed stares as Granny swaggered into the room smelling like cheap cigars. She had a can of lemon-scented furniture polish in one hand and a cashmere cardigan in the other.

  On the face of it, she looked like your garden-variety old lady: white hair pulled back, wrinkly arms, red cheeks from a bunch of busted-up veins. When no parents were in view, she kept her wardrobe simple: black sweats and a sweatshirt that read Riverside Athletic Club.

  See, for an old lady, my granny was built. She lifted weights and walked on her treadmill four times a week, not to mention all the upper-body work she got dangling crumb snatchers over the toilet.

  But when the parents came around, Granny yanked on some hose and threw on a dress that looked like it came right out of the 1950s. Yes, she looked to all the world to be a proper, pearl-chokered little old lady. But at that moment, as she stood in front of the crumb snatchers in her sleeveless dress, her eyes and her biceps bulging, my granny looked like the dragon lady, who, at any moment, might belch fire.

  With a practiced “grab and pull,” she lifted Carly Mae to her feet. I tensed, ready to spring, as Carly Mae burst into tears. This would most definitely have earned her a clout if Sink and Dip hadn’t entered stage right.

  “You stink!” Granny howled, aiming the spray at their hair.

  Pssst! Pssst! went the can. Granny dropped Carly Mae and swooped down. The crumb snatchers ducked in unison.

  Grabbing a balled-up apron, she swatted at Sink and Dip.

  “How many times I told ya, watch the clock!”

  Dip shrank away as Granny landed a fistful of apron on her head. Then Granny grabbed a thick book of nursery rhymes that also doubled
as a blunt instrument when she was mad. Sink scurried after Dip.

  Struggling into her cardigan, Granny belted out directions:

  “Put that cinnamon crap in the microwave! Where’s the art project?”

  Her eyes cruised past me. “Something stinks in here! I want it gone!”

  As if I were what was wrong with this picture.

  I just smiled and stayed where I was.

  “Where’s the art project?” Granny repeated, spraying more polish into the air. She gave Sink and Dip a withering look as we heard the first beater turn onto Granny’s gravel driveway. Smoothing her skirt, she yanked back the curtains.

  “Here it is.” Sink came flying back into the room with the stiff pile of painted sunflowers that Granny’d scored off the kindergarten art teacher at the end of last school year. But Granny barely glanced at them. She threw the sheaf of sunflowers in the direction of the kids, who ducked again before hurrying to pick one up and step back in line.

  “But my nameth not Bob,” Wolf Man had the poor sense to protest. Granny’s eyes narrowed in fury. She looked like she was going to knock the girls’ heads together.

  “You didn’t cut off the names?” she asked in a low, controlled voice. Which was actually worse than when she was screaming. She took the sunflower out of Wolf Man’s trembling hands and tore it in half, looking into his eyes with her look that said, Make a comment like that again and I’ll tear you like this picture.