Deadly Housewives Page 23

  But it was my mother’s firm policy that she wouldn’t put anyone on the list—and there is nothing more dreaded than an Irish list—until she’d given them three good and honest chances to piss her off. (Okay, she never said “piss her off.” It didn’t take a lot to translate, though.)

  After all, maybe the mother of the bully in my brother’s class had had a headache when she yelled at my mother for the turmoil her own son had caused. Maybe she had a miserable husband (she had). Maybe it was just one of those days.

  Three good and honest chances. After that, if you continued to misbehave—if, say, you were rude to my grandfather, or refused to do the job you were being paid to do, or kept my mother in line too long with screaming children while you talked to your spouse/boyfriend/girlfriend/psychic on the phone, then you were on the list. And from that moment on, you were shunned like an unfaithful Amish farmer. And if you know anything about Irish lists, you know that once you’re on the list, there isn’t any getting off without a papal dispensation. In fact, the old joke goes, “Do you know what Irish Alzheimer’s is? All you remember is the grudge.”

  That’s pretty accurate.

  So I always thought it was a rare thing that Mom was so very patient and understanding. That on the whole she tried to de-escalate situations rather than escalate them. She did, in fact, try her best to stretch those three tries out as long as she could.

  There was only one exception to the rule. One reason to miss those last two chances altogether and head straight for jail, without passing Go.

  If you hurt one of her children.

  Which is how this story started in the first place.

  My mother was tiny. She was bright and smiling and funny. But if you so much as made one of her children cry, then ducking wouldn’t be low enough to hide. Three strikes were two strikes too many. You were damned faster than a heretic at an Opus Dei meeting.

  You might be beginning to get the idea of how my mother was deadly.

  So now that you know about her, I’ll tell you my part in the infamous story. The Day Dodie Vanquished the Infidel.

  It starts with school. We attended St. Mary Magdalen School about a mile from our house. Uphill all the way. In all weather. (It never hurts to remind my children of that.) We didn’t have a second car until I was in high school, and our school couldn’t afford buses. So we walked. Then we rode bikes.

  It seems to me now that we were a bit too conscious of our travails in getting to school in those days. On the way, there was a fruit market, a shambling old wooden shack with two hanging scales and crates crammed with peaches and corn in the summer, pumpkins in the fall, and bags of salt in the winter.

  It was the scales that interested us. I remember making it a point to weigh our book bags so we could later tell our children how abused we had been by being forced to carry such a load ALL THE WAY up to school and back every day. I can’t remember now, for the life of me, what those book bags weighed. I just remember the sense of self-righteous indignation at the final tally as we tipped those bags into the tray.

  The fruit market was about halfway to school, along one of two major thoroughfares in the area. It was a road we had to ride along every morning and afternoon. It wasn’t safe by any means, but heck, that was just the way it was then. We didn’t have to cross the street, after all.

  We would leave our short, dead-end block at precisely seven-thirty every morning, and turn onto Lewis, a steep neighborhood street that emptied out onto Manchester. It was the street we rolled pumpkins down after Halloween to see them smash against passing cars.

  Lewis dead-ended onto Manchester, where we would take a right and continue the other eight-tenths of a mile to school. Uphill. (My childhood memory demands I remind you. Again.) At the right-hand corner sat a service station. I think it was Shell. It was not well cared for. I remember that the asphalt was cratered and hilly and the windows were dirty.

  Directly across Manchester sat Eberhardt’s Tavern. It was a low-key kind of tavern, a family meeting place that held picnics in the back in the summer and passed beer out the back door to good customers on Sundays when the blue laws were in effect. They had the best lunch menu, which drew neighboring businessmen, and a TV for Friday-Night Fights, which drew the locals.

  Fellow parishioners ran the place, a family with about a dozen kids who went to school with us. So we knew them well. Heck, we knew everybody in that school well. It was that kind of town.

  But back to the service station and the busy road.

  Because it was so dangerous to empty out from a fast hill onto a busy road, my mother told us to cut through the service station to gain the sidewalk up to school. This was especially important once we were allowed to ride bikes, which happened when I was in first grade.

  I was quite the big girl. My bike was blue. I remember that, and the fact that I was jealous of the bar across my brother’s bike. It was cooler than a girl’s bike.

  But I rode it to school every morning. Still at seven-thirty. There was never a question of being on time. We had mass at eight and doughnuts at eight-thirty. And no one. No. One. Was late to mass at that school. That was because our school was run by Dominican nuns.

  Now, the important thing you have to know about the Dominican nuns is that the last fun thing they had to do was the Inquisition. So they gave them small children to teach. Needless to say, they were the only entity on earth that frightened me more than my mother. After all, my mother was merely a wiz with a pancake turner. It makes a hard, stinging slap on bare skin without leaving a mark. My mother went to that after she was going to smack my brother once in the butt with a hairbrush for mouthing off. My brother turned at the wrong moment. He got a black eye. My mother went to confession five times. Then she changed over to the pancake turner. Believe me. It was just as effective.

  Yeah, my mom had a pancake turner. But Sister Mary Elizabeth had a spanking machine.

  We never actually saw it, but the school was housed in an old, dark, cavernous brick building with high ceilings, peeling tile floors and a stage on the top floor that seemed to yawn like a necromancer’s cave, behind which was the reputed spanking machine.

  Nobody misbehaved in Sister Mary Elizabeth’s school.

  So you can imagine that there was nothing short of nuclear attack that would keep us from getting to school on time.

  Such was the situation that spring morning. I know it was spring, because we’d been cutting across that service-station lot all school year. And all school year, the manager, a thin, fretful man with lanky hair and greasy hands, would yell at us.

  He hated it when we rode across his lot. He said it scared away business. Personally, I thought it was the bumpy lot and the dirty windows that did that. He said that we were trespassing. My brother asked where we should go, the street?

  But we never really paid much attention to him. After all, what was he going to do to three kids who were just riding to school?

  There were three of us around that time. Three of us in school, anyway. There were at least two back at home. I can be sure of that, because there was always a baby in that house. So there was one then.

  But it was time for school, and we weren’t going to miss it, even if the man at the station called us names I’d only heard my dad call an umpire at a Cardinals game once. So we coasted down the last half block of Lewis, focused on the speed and the descent and the need to balance the book bag on our handlebars when we swept right toward school.

  My brother Larry was in the lead. That was because he was oldest. Then Tom, who was actually younger than I was, but would never keep his place. I also thought at the time that that extra bar gave the boys some kind of unfair advantage, like a retro-rocket or something. I was just trying to keep up on my blue bike that was actually too big—like everything else I got as a child, it came with the promise “she’ll grow into it.”

  I’d gotten around the corner, missing the rush-hour traffic on the street, and had just called to my brothers to wait, whe
n suddenly that lank little man jumped out from behind one of the gas pumps screaming like an Indian.

  Then he pushed me off my bike.

  The bike went one way. I went another. I remember the shock of hitting that warming asphalt, the thunking noise of me hitting the ground. I scraped my knees and both of my palms. My books scattered everywhere.

  “That’ll teach you!” he shrieked, pointing his finger at me, much as that drunk woman would do years later. Except his nails were the color of grease. “I told you not to ride across my lot!” I think that for a long time I just lay there, sprawled like a frog on a driveway, my knees full of gravel and my sparrow chest heaving with the effort not to cry.

  I failed. I cried. I sobbed. My brothers came back for me. They yelled at the man, who yelled back. They helped me lift my bike and get it going back in the right direction. They helped me get going.

  To school, of course. If you’re not certain why, when we were that close to home, we just didn’t turn around, may I refer you back to the section on Dominican nuns. I was gasping for air and stinging like I’d taken the pancake turner, but I was not going to be late for mass.

  I have to admit that Sister Mary Elizabeth surprised me. I always remember her as a tall nun, but, heck, at six, everything was tall. She had a white habit with a black veil that always seemed to be in motion. And she had great, clacking rosary beads hanging from her belt that warned you a block away retribution was coming.

  That morning, she took one look at me and gathered me right into those nun arms.

  She smelled much nicer than I thought she would. Starch and roses, I think. She patted me on the back and made cooing noises, and ushered me right up to her office to wash off my knees and be interrogated.

  It’s one of the reasons police don’t really scare me. After getting hauled up three flights of dark stairs and behind that black, echoey stage and then grilled by that old nun, you’d have to pull out an iron maiden and thumbscrews to scare me.

  She took me right back there, back behind the lurking shadows, the endless echoing of her hard-soled shoes against the hardwood floor. She sat me down, and then she sat in front of me.

  “Mary Eileen?” (You expected her to call me something else?”) “What happened?”

  I was still a bit fuzzy on that. After all, what really happened made no sense. Why would a fully grown man push a six-year-old off her bike? What did he think I was going to do to his parking lot?

  There was much sniffling and a hiccup or two, but the story came out, and I was distressed to see that certain frown gather on Sister’s forehead.

  Usually that frown meant that someone was going to serve detention. Someone was always serving detention, standing at parade rest along the wall by her office with their books in their arms. Even as I told her what happened, I was trying to figure out what I’d done to warrant such a fate.

  “Is your mother home?” she asked.

  Oh no. That was even worse. The only thing scarier than getting into trouble at school was having my mother find out. She’d double what ever the punishment was. I was going to be standing against walls till I drove.

  “Um, yes, Sister.”

  Sister gave a brisk nod that sent that veil to shuddering again. “Good. Now, I want you to go down to Sister Maria Suzanne and let her clean off your knees. I’m going to talk to your mother.”

  I never did it intentionally (well, not often), but I’m told that at that age, when I leveled the injured innocent look on adults, they were prone to melt. I leveled it for all my worth. “Am I in trouble?” I asked, managing not much more than a whisper.

  Sister seemed genuinely astonished. “In trouble?” she demanded, sounding outraged. “And what would you be in trouble for? It’s that man who is in trouble, child.”

  Nobody told me nuns could be prophets, too.

  Now, this is the part I could only get secondhand. After all, I was stuck in school. (Although I did get an extra glazed doughnut for being brave. I would have let them remove my appendix with a kitchen knife for a second doughnut.) But this is, to the best of my knowledge, what happened.

  Sister Mary Elizabeth waited only long enough for me to leave before she started dialing. When my mother came on the line, Sister didn’t even give her the chance to ask what her children had done this time.

  “A very distressing incident,” Sister told her. “Have you heard that your children had trouble with the manager of that Shell station on the corner by your house?”

  “Yes, Sister. My husband and I talked to him about his behavior just last week. There’s no excuse to be yelling at any of those kids who ride through his lot.”

  Sister sighed. “Well, it’s gotten worse.”

  According to those who knew, my mother did not act right away upon getting the full story. She did, after all, have at least one baby at home (although I’m pretty sure it was at least two). She had no car, and my father was out of town. So she needed to wait long enough to get somebody to watch my younger siblings before she could venture forth from the house.

  Not that she did much venturing. She marched like a legionnaire. She took those three blocks down to Manchester with murder on her mind.

  It is said that at about that time, Englehardt’s was packed with the usual lunchtime crowd. It was pretty much a normal day, as few had witnessed the earlier contretemps, the room noisy, smoky, and thick with men trying to grab a bite in a congenial atmosphere before heading back to hard work.

  Suddenly one of the men did a double take. Blinking, he leaned closer to the front windows, which faced the service station across the busy street.

  “Hey, you guys,” he said. “Isn’t that Dode Helm?”

  Several other men gathered, one being the owner, who was co-coach with my mom of our softball team.

  “What’s that she’s carrying?” he asked.

  “It’s an umbrella. What the hell’s she doing with it?”

  It was, in fact, one of those lethal black umbrellas with a metal spike on the end about a foot long. My mother was wielding it like Boadicea with a broadsword. Arm out-stretched, the umbrella zeroed in on a certain skinny chest, she was pacing the station manager back step-by-step, jabbing the umbrella into his chest with each step.

  “Asshole knocked one of her kids off a bike today,” somebody offered.

  The owner whipped around. “You kiddin’ me?”

  “Should we help her, you think?”

  There was silence as every man in the room heard a shrill cry from the station manager. Then, to a person, they shook their heads.

  “Nah.”

  Not one of them had the courage to come between my mother and her prey. Instead, they all piled out the front door, beer and cigarettes in hand, to watch the show.

  Not even the cross traffic could drown out the sound of my mother’s outrage.

  “How…dare you!” she roared. “You brave, big man. Did you feel brave shoving a little girl off her bike? Well, did you?”

  She kept moving forward as he moved back, his eyes goggled, his skin ashen, his hands up. Each step was punctuated by a fiercer and fiercer jab, until shirt buttons flew.

  “Well, how do you like it now, big man? How do you like somebody else bullying you for a change?”

  “Help!” he screamed like a girl, still trying to bat away that umbrella.

  “Should we tell him to run?” one of the men asked, taking a drag off his cigarette.

  “She’ll just follow him.”

  “Probably beat him to death with the thing.”

  My mother backed that man all the way into his own work bay and up against the wall, the umbrella still striking like a snake, her voice carrying just fine over traffic noise.

  “You’re a dead man, do you hear me? You won’t have a pot to piss in after I finish with you. You’re not going to hurt one more little girl ever again! Do you understand me?”

  “She’s crazy!” he shrilled to whoever might hear. “Get her off me! She’s gonna kill me!�
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  Not a soul moved.

  “Police should be here soon,” the tavern owner mused.

  There were nods all round.

  “Just in time to pick up the pieces.”

  The police showed up five minutes later. By then she’d cracked one of the man’s ribs and made him wet himself. By the end of the day, the police had run him out of the city, and my parents had convinced the oil company to yank his job. He was never heard from again.

  Long after my mother stalked back up the street toward home, the umbrella resting on her shoulder like a spent rifle, the men at the tavern watched the empty street in awe.

  “I could have told him what would have happened if he bothered her kids.”

  The owner shook his head. “I don’t think he would have believed you.” And then he grinned.

  They all grinned. And then, that Sunday when they saw her at mass, they ribbed her unmercifully. But they did it with respect. Everybody had heard how my mother fought like a tiger for her children. Nobody had ever told them she also fought like a Cossack.

  Deadly. That’s what she was.

  And sometimes, when you’re a very small child who finds herself at the mercy of capricious adults, having a deadly mother can come in handy.

  Still, even with the bits I didn’t see, it’s a good story.

  Biographies

  Nevada Barr was born an hour east of Reno, Nevada, and raised on a small mountain airport in the Sierras. Being a sufferer of the Seven Year Itch, she has changed careers many times from waitress to actress to ranger to writer. The marriage of the last two, ranger and writer, spawned her award-winning mystery series featuring Anna Pigeon. The most recent in the series is Hard Truth, set in Rocky Mountains National Park. Nevada now lives in New Orleans and is working on a stand-alone thriller that will be published in 2007. That done, she plans a glorious reunion with Anna in a park yet to be selected.

  Barbara Collins is one of the most respected short-story writers in the mystery field, with appearances in over a dozen top anthologies, including Murder Most Delicious, Women on the Edge, and the bestselling Cat Crimes series. She was the coeditor (and a contributor) to the bestselling anthology Lethal Ladies, and her stories were selected for inclusion in the first three volumes of The Year’s 25 Finest Crime and Mystery Stories.