Mrs. Doubbet-Harlen had seen her clearly in the light from the corner streetlight-disappeared in the shadow at the base of the fire escape, and Harlen hid behind a poplar across the street. Even from two blocks away he could hear music as the main feature started at the Free Show.
There came the sound of heels on metal stairs and Harlen caught a glimpse of pale arms as she climbed the fire escape to the second floor. A door up there scraped open. She's got her own damn key.
Harlen tried to think of why Old Double-Butt would go into Old Central at night-on a Saturday-in the summer-after the school had been emptied for possible demolition.
Shit, she is making it with Dr. Roon. Harlen tried to use his imagination to see Mrs. Doubbet stretched out across her oak desk while Dr. Roon slipped it to her. Harlen's imagination wasn't up to the task. After all, he hadn't actually seen anybody having sex . . . even the magazines in his closet just showed the girls alone, playing with their titties, acting like they were ready to have sex.
Harlen felt his heart pounding as he waited for a light to come on up there on the second floor. No light came on.
He moved around the school, staying close to the building so she wouldn't see him if she was peering out one of the windows.
No light.
Wait. There was a glow here on the northwest side, a slight phosphorescence coming through the high windows of the corner room. Mrs. Doubbet's old room. Harlen's room that past year.
How could he see what was going on? The doors downstairs were padlocked, the basement windows covered by metal grilles. Harlen considered climbing the fire escape and going through the door Old Double-Butt had just entered. Then he imagined meeting her on that fire escape or-worse yet-in the dark hallway upstairs, and then he abandoned that idea quickly.
Harlen stood there a moment, watching the glow move from window to window as if the old biddy were carrying a jar of fireflies around the classroom. From three blocks away came the sound of laughter; the movie must be a comedy tonight.
Harlen looked along the corner of the school. There was a trash dumpster that would get him up oh the narrow ledge six feet above the sidewalk. A drainpipe with metal brackets would take him to the ledge above the first-floor windows, to that stone molding along the corner of the school. All he'd have to do was continue up the drainpipe between the stone windowframe, shinnying where he could, getting his sneakers into the grooves of that molding where he had to brace himself, and he'd be up there on the ledge that went around the second floor a few feet under the windows.
The ledge was about six inches wide-he'd stared out the classroom window at it enough to know, even fed pigeons out the window with junk from his pockets when he'd been kept in for recess. It wasn't wide enough for him to stand on alone . . . walk around the school on or anything . . . but it was plenty wide to balance on while holding the drainpipe for support. He'd just have to scoot over about two feet and then lift his head to peer in the window.
The window from which the faint glow gleamed, faded, grew again.
Harlen started to clamber up on the dumpster, and then paused to look up. It was a high two stories . . . well over twenty feet. The ground here was mostly flagstone sidewalk and gravel.
"Hey," whispered Harlen, "ef it. Let's see you do this, O'Rourke."
He began to climb.
Mike O'Rourke was taking care of his grandmother on the night of the Free Show. His parents had gone out to the Knights of Columbus dance at the Silverleaf Dance Emporium-an aging building set back under silver leaf trees twelve miles down the Hard Road toward Peoria-and Mike was left with his sisters and Memo. Technically, his oldest sister, seventeen-year-old Mary, was left in charge, but Mary's date had shown up ten minutes after Mr. and Mrs. O'Rourke left. Mary was not allowed to date on evenings when her parents were out-and she was currently grounded for a month due to recent infractions Mike didn't know about and didn't care to know about-but when her pimply date showed up in his '54 Chevy, she was out and away, swearing her sisters to secrecy and threatening to kill Mike if he squealed. Mike shrugged; it was another bit of blackmail he could use against Mary someday when he needed leverage.
Fifteen-year-old Margaret was then in charge, but ten minutes after Mary left, three high-school boys and two of Peg's girlfriends-all too young to drive-called from the backyard darkness and Peg was off to the Free Show. Both girls knew that their parents didn't get home until long after midnight on dance nights.
Officially, that left thirteen-year-old Bonnie in charge, but Bonnie never took charge of anything. Mike sometimes thought that no girl had ever been so misnamed. While all the rest of the O'Rourke children-even Mike-had inherited beautiful eyes and an Irish grace to their features, Bonnie was overweight, with dull brown eyes and even duller brown hair, a sallow complexion now mottled with the early ravages of acne, and a bitter attitude that reflected her mother's worst side when sober and her father's bitterness when drunk. Bonnie had stomped off to the bedroom she shared with seven-year-old Kathleen, promptly locked the younger girl out, and refused to open the door even when Kathleen burst into tears.
Kathleen was the prettiest of the O'Rourke girls-red-haired, blue-eyed, with a rose-and-freckle complexion and stunning smile that made Mike's dad tell tales of the village girls in an Ireland he'd never visited. Kathleen was beautiful. She was also borderline retarded and was still in kindergarten at age seven. Sometimes Kathleen's struggle to understand the simplest thing made Mike go off to the outhouse to fight back tears in solitude. Every morning, as he helped Father Cavanaugh serve Mass, Mike said a prayer that God would fix whatever was wrong with his younger sister. But so far He hadn't, and Kathleen's slowness became more and more apparent as playmates her age solved the riddles of reading and simple arithmetic, leaving the bewildered child further and further behind.
Now Mike calmed Kathleen, cooked stew for her dinner, tucked her into Mary's bed under the low eaves, and went down to take care of Memo.
Mike had been nine when Memo had her first stroke. He remembered the confusion in the household as the old woman ceased to be the verbal presence in the kitchen and suddenly became the dying woman in the parlor. Memo was his mother's mother, and while Mike did not know the word matriarch, he remembered the functional definition: the old woman in the dotted apron, always in the kitchen or sewing in her parlor, the problem-solver and decision-maker, the thickly accented Irish voice of Mary Margaret Houlihan lilting up through the heating grille in Mike's floor as she jollied his mother out of one of her cynical depressions, or scolded his father out of another evening of drinking with his friends. It had been Memo who had saved the family financially when John O'Rourke had been laid off from Pabst for a year when Mike was six-he remembered overhearing the long conversations at the kitchen table as his father protested, it was her life's savings, and Memo insisted-and it was Memo who saved Mike and Kathleen physically when he was eight, Kath-leen four, and the mad dog had come down Depot Street. Mike had noticed something strange about the animal and had hung back, calling to Kathleen not to go closer. But his sister loved dogs and could not comprehend that one could hurt her; she had rushed toward the growling, foaming animal. Kathleen was within an arm's length, the dog was focusing its caked eyes and preparing to charge, and all Mike could do was cry in a high, shrill voice that didn't sound like his own even to him.
Then Memo had appeared, her polka-dotted apron flying, broom in her right hand, and her graying red hair loose from her kerchief. She had swept up Kathleen with one arm and swung the broom so hard that it had lifted the dog off all four feet and deposited it in the middle of the street. Memo had thrust Kathleen at Mike, ordered him to take her inside with a voice that was calm but incapable of being defied, and then turned just as the dog got to its feet and lunged again. Mike had looked over his shoulder as he ran, and he would never forget the sight of Memo standing there, legs apart, kerchief around her neck . . . waiting, waiting . . . Later, Constable Barney said that he'd never seen a dog killed by a broom-especially a mad dog-but that Mrs. Houlihan had almost taken the monster's head off.