Al Capone Does My Shirts

“I’m sorry I can’t do more. You have no idea how sorry I am.”

  When I hang up the phone, I know I have to do something. Have to. I have no idea what. I wonder if this is how my mother feels. How she has always felt.

  Now I understand. When you love someone, you have to try things even if they don’t make sense to anyone else.

  After breakfast I march up the hill to the warden’s house. I don’t know why I’m going there, except he’s the most powerful person I know. If anyone can change this, he can.

  But the closer I get to the warden’s house, the slower my feet go. The warden will be at work in the cell house. If I want to talk to him, I’ll have to knock on that door. I stare at the big steel cell house door, unable to move forward or back. My heart beats in my ear and my hands are ice cold.

  I stay stuck until a voice calls my name. “Hey, Moose! What are you doing up here? Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”

  I spin around to see Mr. Trixle. He has a cigarette in his mouth and a clipboard in his hand.

  “Sorry, Moose. Didn’t mean to scare you. What’s up?”

  My mind is whirling. What am I doing? What am I doing?

  “Moose?” Officer Trixle asks.

  “Uh. Yeah. Uh. I need to talk to Warden Williams,” I say.

  “Can’t it wait till tonight, son?” Officer Trixle takes a drag from his cigarette.

  “Yes, I mean, no,” I mutter.

  “Yes, you mean no. Which is it?” He smiles kindly.

  “No,” I say.

  Officer Trixle grunts. He drops his cigarette on the cement and stamps it out with his foot. Then he buzzes the entry bell. The big steel hinges squeak shrill and sharp as the door opens.

  “Wait here,” Officer Trixle says, and the door slams a solid steel closed behind him.

  I wait a long time, wondering if they’ve forgotten about me. I’m considering giving up when the cell house door squeaks open again and Officer Trixle and the warden appear. The warden is as neat as ever, like he just came out of the barbershop. He smells of soap and cut grass.

  “Good morning,” he says.

  “Good morning, sir,” I say.

  He looks around as if he doesn’t know where to sit. He seems to decide on the bench, gives his trousers a tug and sits down. Officer Trixle walks back to the cell house door and stands stiff and straight, not smoking now.

  “So . . .” He folds his hands in his lap. “What’s this all about, Moose?”

  “W-W-Well, I, uh,” I stammer, my forehead suddenly sweaty. “I know you know important people . . . in San Francisco. I was just wondering if you might call some of your, you know, friends and maybe they might ask the Esther P. Marinoff to reconsider. Natalie is doing much better. She should have gotten in.”

  “Influence, is that what you’re after, son?”

  “Yes, sir,” I say.

  “I’ll give it some thought, but offhand I can’t come up with anyone who might be helpful with this.” He sighs and shakes his head. He seems truly sorry.

  We sit silent for a moment.

  The warden looks at his watch. “Now, it’s time you were in school! Bet you can make the eight-thirty if you run like the dickens.” He pats my arm and gets up.

  “Thanks, sir,” I say. “But you know, I had an idea.”

  He makes a pained noise in his throat.

  “I was thinking.” My voice cracks. The idea is crazy, but I can’t stop myself. “How about Al?”

  “Excuse me?” the warden asks.

  I clear my throat and try to say it louder, but it still comes out in a croak: “Al Capone.”

  The warden squints his eyes, just like Piper does. He makes an annoyed sound and shakes his head. “Oh, please don’t tell me this is another stunt.”

  “No, sir. I’m serious. He’s the only one who can do this.”

  “Moose, that’s nonsense and I think you know it.”

  “I think he could.”

  He sighs a long and labored sigh. “First off, that’s doubtful. But even if he could, do you really think I’d allow it? I’ve built this place on fairness. On treating all of the convicts the same. If I were to ask Al Capone to do me a favor, what kind of precedent would that be setting? He was sent here because he got preferential treatment in Atlanta. Ran his empire from prison while the government footed the bill. Brought his own furniture, Oriental rugs, silk underwear . . . treated him like royalty behind bars. Do you think I want to pave the way for something like that here? It would make a mockery of everything I stand for.”

  I look directly into his blue eyes. “Remember you said we should think hard about going against the rules? Remember you said that. Well, I have thought hard.”

  The warden meets my gaze. “I see that,” he says. “But in this case you’re asking me to bend the rules. And I’m not about to. You may think it’s the right thing to do, but I do not.”

  “You don’t have to give him anything. Just ask him. What’s the harm of asking, sir?”

  The warden takes a deep breath. “Look, Moose, you want to help your sister and that’s admirable. But I can’t help you with this. Your parents will work something out. Now, run along.”

  Run along? Run along? He can’t tell me to act like an adult one moment and treat me like a kid the next. This makes me so furious, my mouth shoots off before I can stop it. “You didn’t mean it, did you, sir? It was just a speech. You don’t really want us to think, you want us to obey.”

  I can see the anger flash through the warden’s eyes. He takes his foot off the bench and stands straight. “I know you and your family have been through a lot, so I’m going to ignore that comment. But if you speak to me like that again, I will have you and your family off the island in the blink of an eye! Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, sir,” I say. My whole body trembling.

  He continues to stare, then seems to decide I’ve gotten his point. He sighs and crosses his arms. “Look, son, it isn’t that easy. The world isn’t going to kiss your boots because you learned to think. You have your answer. It’s no. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have things to do.”

  38. What Happened?

  The weekend of June 1 and 2, 1935

  My mother calls in sick to her piano students and stays in her room. Now when the door opens, a stuffy stale smell comes out and I see her in her bathrobe, her hair tangled like seaweed.

  My father is a terrible cook. I look down at my supper plate, fried beets swimming in a pool of bright pink juice, half-cooked hash browns turned pink where they border the beets and cold oatmeal.

  My father seems to notice my reaction to his cooking. “If she’s still in bed tomorrow, I’ll bring home convict cooking. I promise,” he says.

  “Thanks, Dad,” I say.

  Natalie is quiet. She has counted the shredded beets on her plate and organized them so they are lying in a line like twenty men in sleeping bags. She seems to be trying to decide what to do with the oatmeal when all of a sudden she blurts out, “Why did the chicken cross the road?”

  “I dunno,” I say.

  “His buttons rolled to the other side,” Nat says, picking at her napkin. She looks at me and runs her tongue over her upper lip. Then she wraps her arms around herself, as if she needs them to hold her chest together, and begins to rock. “What happened? What happened?” Natalie asks.

  “Nothing happened, Natalie. Mommy isn’t feeling well. And we’re just not sure the Esther P. Marinoff is the right school for you,” my father says.

  “Mommy is angry,” Natalie says.

  My father and I look at each other. His lip quivers and his voice gets gritty. “No, she’s not mad at you, honey! You did everything right, Natalie.”

  “Not mad at you, honey,” Natalie says, digging her chin into her collarbone. “Not . . . mad . . . at . . . you . . . honey,” she repeats, adding extra pauses between the words.

  “Oh, God,” my father says. “Natalie, sweetheart, you were great! No one is mad at you!”

&nb
sp; But Natalie doesn’t look at him. She looks at the butter. Not past it, not through it, but at it, as if it is the most interesting thing in the world.

  “You won’t believe what I did,” I tell Annie and Theresa the next day. “I asked the warden if he’d get Al Capone to help us get Natalie into school.”

  “You didn’t,” Annie says.

  “I did.”

  “He said no,” Theresa says.

  I nod.

  “Well, that’s a big surprise,” Annie says. “You didn’t really think he’d say yes, did you?”

  I shrug.

  “What’s Capone going to do, anyway? It’s not like he gets out on the weekends to run around town, breaking people’s legs,” Annie says.

  “He could help if he wanted. This is small potatoes for him,” I say. “He can do anything.”

  Annie shakes her head. “The guy’s in prison. He can’t do anything. You’ve been spending too much time with Piper.”

  She’s right. I know she is. The man’s locked up. But this one sentence keeps floating around in my head. He could if he wanted to. He could if he wanted to.

  It’s when I see Piper that I realize what I’m going to do.

  “I’m going to write a letter to Al Capone,” I tell her.

  She rolls her eyes. “They don’t let just anyone write to Capone, you know. You have to be a relative and then it’s censored.”

  “Yeah, but it’s your mom who censors his mail, right? Couldn’t I just drop a letter in the stack of already-censored mail?”

  “I’ve tried that,” Piper says, running her fingers through her long hair.

  “You did? What happened?”

  “Nothin’. Never answered back. I told him to check out Jane Eyre from the convict library and put his answer in it.”

  “Jane Eyre? Maybe that was the problem. Can you imagine Al Capone reading Jane Eyre?” I ask.

  “That’s the point, Einstein. A book like that would never be checked out. What con would read Jane Eyre? And besides, then my dad wouldn’t give me grief for wanting to read it because I had to get him to check it out from the con library for me. I figured Capone could write back in the book—you know, underlining very faintly in pencil the way the cons do.”

  “No, I don’t know.”

  “Let’s say you want to say, ‘I need your help.’ You go carefully through the book and look for an I and underline it. And then an n and underline it and an e and so on until you’ve spelled your whole message.”

  “Did he get it?”

  Piper shrugs. “Who knows. I never got an answer back.”

  “What was the message?”

  “I asked him if he’d autograph a baseball and hit it over the wall. I told him I’d auction it off. Said we’d split fifty-fifty.”

  “Don’t you think he has enough money?” I ask.

  “No one ever has enough money,” Piper says.

  “But you didn’t get in trouble for this, right, so what’s the harm?” I ask.

  “Easy for you to say. The only thing your parents did was take away your baseball glove. Not exactly a hardship.”

  “You’re one to talk. You didn’t get punished at all.”

  “Yes, I did. You think I wanted two months with my grandma? She’s always crabby and everything she eats is boiled. Boiled cabbage. Boiled turnips. She even boils hamburger.”

  “I thought you said it was fun.”

  She rolls her eyes again. “Ever heard of saving face?”

  “That’s what Annie thought,” I say.

  “Yeah, well, you should listen to her. She’s right most of the time,” Piper says.

  “Even if you did get in trouble, it doesn’t seem to have made any difference to you.”

  “Oh, yeah? Have I gotten in trouble since then?” Piper asks.

  “No,” I admit. “Still, wouldn’t you like to be Big Al’s pen pal? This could be the start.”

  She snorts like she doesn’t care. But her eyes are so bright, I know this isn’t true. “What’s he going to do to get Natalie in?” she asks.

  “Beats me,” I say, “but if the guy can fix a whole election, he’ll figure out something.”

  In Piper’s room the next day, she brings out the special duplicate carbon letter paper her mom uses. “Can you type?” she asks.

  “Nope.”

  “Me neither. Just, you know, hunt and peck. You don’t need to worry if you make mistakes. My mom makes them too. And every once in a while type three dots. That’s what she does when she leaves something out. Then, if she happens to glance at your page, she’ll think it’s a letter she’s already finished.”

  I roll the brown page into her typewriter, click the carriage over and begin hunting down letters with one finger.

  Dear Mr. Capone,

  I live on Alcatraz. I am Officer Flanagan’s son. My sister Natalie Flanagan is a little unusual . . . (Ask Onion 105 about her. He’ll tell you how nice she is.) She needs to be in a school to help her, but they won’t let her in. It’s the Esther P. Marinoff School in San Francisco . . . Could you help? The guy who runs it is named Mr. Purdy. I would be so grateful if you could help me with this. Thank you, sir.

  Sincerely,

  Moose Flanagan

  PS I like your mother very much.

  “ ‘I like your mother very much’?” Piper says when she reads it.

  “You got to say something about the guy’s mother.”

  “Why?” she asks.

  “Because then he remembers he has one. And he knows we know her too. Makes him act better. It’s The Mom Rule—all guys use it.”

  “This is Al Capone we’re talking about. I don’t think he’ll fall for a cheap trick like that.”

  “I’m not taking it out,” I say.

  “Suit yourself.” She takes the letter and presses it in thirds with her thumbnail, making two perfect crisp folds. She disappears with the letter. In less than a minute she’s back.

  “Piece of cake,” she says.

  I get up to leave. “Hey, Moose? If this doesn’t work, you going back?”

  “Back where?”

  “Santa Monica, stupid. Not that I care or anything, because I don’t,” she says.

  “Well, if you don’t care, why are you asking?”

  “I’m not asking,” Piper says.

  “Oh, now you’re not asking. Okay, then I’m not answering.”

  Piper bites at her bottom lip. “Well, are you?”

  “I dunno, Piper.”

  I walk down the stairs. When I get outside, I see Piper watching me through the window of her dad’s library. When she sees I see her, she closes the curtain quick and disappears.

  39. The Warden

  Tuesday, June 11, 1935

  This last week, things have been better at my house. Natalie is back at Mrs. Kelly’s. My mother is teaching piano lessons again and she and my father are beginning to discuss what they will do next. And every day I wonder if we’ll be going back to Santa Monica. It seems so long ago that we lived there now, I’m not even sure I want to anymore. And I know moving back will be bad for Natalie.

  When I say good-bye to Scout and them on the last day of school, I get a stomachache. I don’t know if it’s good-bye for the summer or good-bye for the rest of my life. I feel so lousy, I don’t say three words to anyone on the boat ride home. I hardly notice anything until I get off the boat.

  And then all of a sudden there are my parents, Natalie, Theresa and Warden Williams.

  My parents never wait for me like this and it’s really strange to see the warden here. He’s hardly ever down at the dock. The boat waits for the warden. The warden doesn’t wait for the boat. Actually the boat isn’t supposed to wait for him either, but it always does.

  “What’s your dad doing here?” I ask Piper.

  “Beats me,” Piper says like this is no big deal, but she’s chewing her gum at twice the usual speed.

  “Guess what!” My mother jumps up the second we’re close enough to hea
r.

  “No, wait.” Theresa elbows in front of her. “Let Natalie tell.”

  Natalie frowns down at her feet.

  “Go on, Nat, tell him,” Theresa says.

  “Eleven gulls,” Natalie says.

  “No, Nat.” Theresa shakes her head.

  “Eleven gulls!” Nat says, louder this time.

  “No, I mean . . . yeah, you’re right. Eleven gulls,” Theresa says. “But what else?”

  Natalie’s shoulders are hunched up like she is stuck in a shrug. She says nothing.

  “She got into the Esther P. Marinoff,” Theresa announces with a big grin.

  “Natalie!” I wrap my arms around her in a spontaneous bear hug.

  “I don’t like that! I don’t like that,” Nat says, and I let go.

  “Sorry, Nat,” I say.

  “Sorry,” she says, moving her shoulders now like she’s trying really hard to get them to fit. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she mutters.

  “Mr. Purdy called,” my dad explains. “He’s decided to open another branch of the Esther P. Marinoff for older children and he wants Natalie to be the first student.”

  “You’re sure? I mean, this is for sure?” I ask.

  My dad nods. “Apparently he’s been planning this for some time—been waiting for the right moment to launch it.”

  “How come he didn’t tell us that before?” I say.

  My father looks sideways at my mother. My mother shakes her head. “We don’t know,” she says.

  The warden clears his throat. I can feel the heat of his eyes on me. I glance at him and then away. A patch of sweat breaks out on my forehead.

  “See, Moose?” the warden says. “Didn’t I tell you your parents would work it out?” He winks at me and smiles out of one side of his mouth. Then he turns his attention to Piper. “Sweetheart, just wanted to tell you how proud I am of your grades. Straight A’s again.” He waves her report card in the air, like he wants us all to see.