Part IV: Spin – God’s Wild Children: #1 (Chapter 74)

“This kid’s driving me nuts,” Aunt Gwen said, holding my cousin by the scruff.

Danny O’Flaherty, brown suitcase tipped against scabby shins, blew into a Hire’s root beer bottle, making foghorn noises.

“He’s been pounding on Lenny and Jimmy all week. I’m ready to kill ‘em all.”

“He can stay maybe a few days,” Nana said reluctantly.

Nana didn’t seem to like Aunt Gwen all that much, treating her more like a daughter-in-law than a daughter.

Yet we always seemed to spend a lot of time with her and her family, mostly my gross cousins.

August 1959.

I was eight years old, almost nine, not quite believing we had just inherited one of Aunt Gwen’s headaches – now squirming in our living room, doing disgusting things with a pop bottle – for an entire weekend.

Life is so unfair!

I stifled my tears. Plans with Chrissy, my best friend, all shot: to hike the shoreline of the Missouri River, picking cattails, hunting for tiny shells, and jumping across sandbars, double daring each other to stick our toes into the water, but never quite doing it because of its dangerous currents.

The Big Muddy had a reputation for sucking under kids bold enough to swim it.

Now I had to play with him instead.

Crying, I ran into the bathroom and slapped my face with cold water. I gazed into the mirror and said to the scowling face staring back, “Damn you, Danny O’Fartface.”

I grabbed the guest towel off the rack and dried my eyes. I had a sudden urge to blow my nose into the terry cloth but thought better of it; if Danny found snot in his towel, he would know who did it, and I would suffer, one way or another.

I grabbed a tissue and blew until my nose was dry.

When I returned, Aunt Gwen was still ranting about her kids.

Nana nodded unsympathetically.

Danny poured the rest of the pop into his mouth and gargled before gulping the last swallow.

Then he made faces at me, rolling his eyes back in his head until just the whites showed and trying to touch the tip of his nose with his tongue.

“Stop that!” I whined.

Without looking, Aunt Gwen reached down with her free hand and cuffed the kid alongside his head.

“OW!” he yelled in a cracking voice. He patted his carrot-top crewcut. The bottle slipped out of his hand and onto the carpet but did not break.

“I’ll ‘OW’ you if you don’t behave. You’re not too young for military school.”

When the adults weren’t looking, I stuck my tongue out at him, and then mouthed the words “military school,” a threat that always seemed to follow him around like a distant rumble: noticeable, but not real. For me, the threat was St. Anne’s – a small girls’ boarding school in Northeast South Dakota run by the Sisters of Christian Charity.

The very thought of being packed off to the nuns, even 31 years later, throws me into a tailspin.

Danny ignored me and stood at attention, puffing his skinny chest out like a bird’s, and giving an exaggerated salute to his mother. “I’ll be good!”

“Go on, you,” Aunt Gwen said, laughing and shoving him forward.

“Sammy,” Nana said to me, “take your cousin to the garden and show him how to pick tomatoes.”

“Aw, do I have to?”

Nana sighed. “Just do it. No lip from you.”

I didn’t want to go anywhere alone with Danny, but he jumped up and down like a large slobbering dog about to lick his owner to death; I almost liked it better when he was calling me names like “fatso,” “heifer,” and “Sammy the Mammy.” At least then I could pound on him and cause a ruckus that would get the adults running over to break up the fight.

But when we were alone, I never knew what to fight.

“Go on, Samantha Anne, get the white bowl, and get your butt to the garden.”

Whenever Nana called me by my full name in that certain grit-your-teeth voice, it was time to move, and fast.

After picking up the bottle, Danny followed me into the kitchen and chanted under his breath, “Samantha Anne, Samantha Anne, go on a diet and get a man.”

I was big, outweighing my nimble cousin by about 15 pounds, although he was two years older. Also, I towered at least three inches over him, standing about five feet tall. He was quick on his feet, a clever freckle-faced boy who could run circles around me as I lumbered through life, slow on the take and as pale as a slice of white Wonder Bread.

That whatever names he called me, he was only telling the truth, so how could I possibly toss back a zinger that really meant something?

“Just shut up.” I grabbed a white bowl from the bottom cupboard, making a clattering noise. I slammed the cupboard door.

“Watch it, little missus,” Nana yelled from the living room.

Snickering, Danny held the base of the bottle to his groin and aimed the rim at me. “You ever play ‘Spin the Bottle?’” He jerked the bottle up and down.

“I’m telling!”

“I’M GONNA GET THE BELT NOW!” Nana shouted from the living room.

Danny scrunched up his face and plunked the bottle onto the countertop. This time, the glass cracked, and he tossed it into the garbage.

The clatter of a belt buckle – time to scoot.

To Aunt Gwen in a lower voice, Nana said, “I just don’t know what I’m going to do about that child....”

I blanked out the rest and ran down the backstairs to the overgrown garden in our backyard with Danny following close behind, his breath on my shoulder, our shadows one dark blur.