got my nerve up enough to ask her why she spit all the time. She claimed she only spit after she ate chicken cutlets for dinner, because she hated the aftertaste.
It was Rory’s attention I was trying to get.
BATMAN WAS A superhero who was also human. When he was a little kid, Batman’s parents were murdered. To avenge their murder and fight crime of all kinds, Batman developed all the strength and skill of his mind and body beyond traditional limits. He didn’t get an overdose of gamma radiation or get bit by a spider in a lab experiment, nor could he breathe underwater, turn invisible or assume different miraculous forms. Yeah, he could scale walls and kick bad-guy ass like the rest of the superheroes, but ultimately, he was just an ordinary man making the best of what he had, fighting for his cause.
Every so often during the kickball games I would have to run back home when I heard the Batphone ring. A call from the police commissioner saying there was a problem the cops couldn’t handle without me. I’d run back to the game and announce that I had to get to an undisclosed location immediately to fight crime. I’d apologize to Rory for having to leave, but demonstrate a superhero’s generosity by leaving my own kickball behind so the game could continue without me. In that case my sister would bring the ball home and I wouldn’t catch hell from Mom for losing it. And it wasn’t easy to part with my ball. I was six. It was my ball.
There were times when I was able to handle the crime situation over the phone. In which case I would walk back up the street, assure everyone that everything was going to be all right, and I’d finish out the game.
When it was time to go home, our mother belted out our names from the front stoop like an ocean liner’s horn wailing during a launch. And if you missed the boat, you were in trouble. If you missed it during that particular kickball season, which started March of 1977, you were in an extraordinary amount of trouble.
YOUNG GIRLS WITH shoulder-length brown hair. That’s who we were told he went after.
“Under no circumstances do you kids go out when it’s dark out. Do you hear me?”
“How about if the ice cream man comes?”
“No. There’s ice cream in the refrigerator.”
The first murder happened in July of the previous year. Initially it was just another homicide, a story that took up a tiny space in the newspaper. But March 8, 1977, marked the fifth attack. By then he had gone after nine people. Then it drew a lot of attention. Sketches of him were on TV, in the paper, posted in Laundromats and on telephone poles everywhere. He looked as plain as anyone’s father. Except he scared the shit out of us.
“Mom, does he only go after people in the city?”
“They don’t know. He goes after people in the Bronx, where we used to live, and that’s only ten minutes away from where we live now. I want you to listen to me. If you see a yellow or a cream-colored car with a man in it, I want you to run away from it. You run home and you tell me. Do you understand?”
They were shot in parked cars, on their front porches or walking home from school. The cops knew it was the same guy because they were able to confirm all the bullets came from the same kind of gun—a .44-caliber revolver. That’s how he got his first name, which all the kids in my neighborhood called him: the .44-Caliber Killer.
“They said he hates women. And you know how the cops know he’s gonna do it again?”
“How?”
“Because his gun holds five bullets and he only shoots four of them. He keeps one for the next time.”
“That’s not true.”
“That’s what my dad said.”
“No, he keeps one bullet in his gun in case someone tries to run after him and catch him, then he can shoot them, too.”
He started to leave notes for the cops, poems about pouring lead on girls’ heads until they were dead, cats mating and birds singing. He also left drawings with circles and arrows and crosses that looked like the insignia of demonic worship. He called himself “the monster” and signed the notes with his second name: Son of Sam.
My sister once walked around the house with yellow guck in her hair and a cellophane bag over it for about an hour. Then my mother leaned her backward over the kitchen sink and washed the guck out. When my sister lifted her head up, her brown hair was now blond.
My mother was very excited. “Oh, look how pretty. Come look at yourself.”
I followed them into the bathroom. Mom sat Catherine up on the sink in front of the mirror for a second opinion.
“Catherine, it’s so pretty. You look like a movie star.”
Catherine touched her hair the way a kid fumbles with a new toy, not sure how it works.
“Do you like it, sweetie?”
My sister smiled. “Yeah. I like it a lot.”
WHEN I ASKED my mother how Mrs. Gallagher died, she told me she was sick with cancer. I was in the second grade; Rory was in the fifth. It happened in April, only a month after the fifth Son of Sam attack.
After the funeral, family, friends and people from the neighborhood went over to the Gallaghers’ house. It was the only time I ever saw it from the inside. For us kids, having to sit quietly in their strange house with a group of adults, in our nice clothes, with no game going on outside was the most disorienting part of the whole day. What I really wanted to do was poke around in their kitchen and bathroom and definitely get a look at Rory’s room.
I think I was the only one who noticed Rory walk up the stairs. I followed her. All the doors that lined the long hallway were closed; the daylight couldn’t get in. Rory opened the last door on the right and went in. I knew I was in a place I probably shouldn’t have been, but curiosity coupled with my crush kept me going. The power to turn invisible would have come in handy. I peeked in after her. The room had a huge canopy bed and two layers of curtains on the windows. Against the wall was a vanity covered with makeup cases and bottles of perfume like my mother had in her room. Also, there were bottles just like the ones my stepfather kept his asthma medicine in.
Rory opened a dresser drawer and was kneeling in front of it, her hands kneading through the clothes. She looked confused. She searched through the drawer as if what she wanted was there last time she checked. She took a green sweater out and held it up by the sleeves, but still wasn’t satisfied with what she found. Maybe Rory believed that she couldn’t have been brought to a scary place such as this earth only to be left unattended, and was convinced that folded up in that sweater she would find a perfect explanation for all this. She examined the whole thing, then reached inside and carefully read the label.
I forgot I was trying to be unnoticed and said, “What’s it say?”
My voice or my presence didn’t startle her. She seemed to know I was there the whole time. She turned her head to me; the sweater was draped over her lap.
“It says you can’t wash it.”
BETWEEN THE FIVE children in mourning and parents who were afraid to let their children out of the house, our kickball games really slowed down. A few of us would still gather in front of the Gallaghers’ house but felt we didn’t have the right to the playing
