Dennis the Menace by Patrick Sean Lee (read after TXT) 📕

Rocky Mountain News headline. Page 2. April 10th, 1957.

BLAZE ERUPTS IN WESTSIDE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

I said a hundred prayers of supplication to every saint I could think of after reading that, but Jimmy McGuire and I decided against finding that little rat Dennis and stringing him up by the thumbs...or the balls. Local investigators somehow failed to add up two and two, to our greatest relief, and so the mysterious fire in Mr. Kintzele's weed-infested vacant lot, the girl with the incinerated scalp at the Comet Theater, and the roaring blaze in the auditorium at Barnum Public School remained isolated incidents. We thought.

We decided to forevermore curb our fascination with pyrotechnics…well, kind of. Jimmy boasted that he’d nearly solved the problem of the amount of gunpowder needed to propel his broom handle rocket into orbit.

Meanwhile, a certain detective familiar with my neighborhood began to apply basic arithmetic to the possibility of a connection regarding the fires…

                               ***
Detective Ryan did indeed visit the home of the Peterson family. I learned much later that the youngest of the two boys, Butch, answered the door with the ever-present cigarette dangling out of his mouth that day. Unlike me, he did not make a good impression on Detective Ryan. But he did make a lasting one. Being stupid, Butch’s vocabulary was limited to sentences which made little sense, were contradictory, or else splattered with four letter words—and that did not set well with the detective. All told, his explanation of the events that terrible day at the Comet Theater sounded very much like a lie to Ryan. Suspicion concerning who committed the crime of shooting the match into the girl’s hair fell immediately onto his and older brother Inky’s shoulders.

Still, the matter was easily settled now that a battery of suspects had been tracked down. Ryan requested that my parents bring me, and that Mrs. McGuire bring Jimmy, down to the home of Dennis to star in a line up. All hope in my heart vanished when Mom informed Pop at the dinner table in tears that her son would likely be going to juvenile hall soon—if not the state penitentiary. Afterward she left the tear-stained room and marched next door to awaken Mrs. McGuire from her continuous drunken stupor, if such a thing was possible, and inform her that Jimmy must accompany us on the death march. Our buddy Mickey’s name was never brought up.

“Did you do it?” Pop inquired calmly after mom had disappeared in her breast-beating, doloroso veil.

I did not lie. “No, sir. I had nothing to do with it.”

                       ***

We walked; Mom two steps in front of Mrs. McGuire, Pop bringing up the rear, Jimmy and me sandwiched in between. Down past Clifford Childs’ big house, past Allen Young's tiny one, then across Ellsworth Avenue we walked. Midway down the street we passed the dancer’s front door—the girl I was stricken in love with—and a sort of hellish feeling welled up in my stomach. She sat on the porch swing with a friend—or maybe the other girl was her sister, I didn’t know. I tried not to glance over at them, or at her I should say, but a morbid impulse latched onto me, and I turned my head. She’d noticed the parade, and she must have known it was more a procession of calves to the slaughterhouse, or murderers to the gallows. I dropped my eyes and cursed the moment.

When we reached our destination, I saw detective Ryan standing on the doorstep of Dennis’ house, the door ajar, the boy’s mother halfway in and halfway out, holding a handkerchief over her mouth and nose. At her side peeking out at us stood the bane of creation himself. I shot a look at Jimmy. He was sweating bullets this time around, and he whispered to me, “By his little balls.” Dennis eased farther behind his weeping mother’s skirt.

“Ah. Here they are, Mrs. Humboldt,” Ryan said when we came to a halt at the foot of her porch. “Terrence, can you step out here and take a look at these two boys? Do you recognize them as the ones who gave you the matchgun?”

Dennis, or little Terrence as it turned out, poked his head out from behind his mother’s broad posterior. He wasn’t looking at me, I’m certain. His eyes locked onto Jimmy’s immediately, and the necessary words were quickly communicated. Even little Terrence valued the jewels he had not yet had the opportunity to use. He crumbled in the face of Jimmy.

“No.”

“No?” repeated Detective Ryan.

“No. I never seen these guys afore. They ain’t the ones. There was three of ‘em.”

Detective Ryan’s brow fell at that lie. He addressed Pop matter-of-factly. “Wait by my car.”

And so the five of us turned and marched back out to the street. Ryan, Terrence, and his mother had disappeared by the time I took a seat on the curb and looked back at the house. A few moments passed in that state of Limbo out in the silence of the street. Then Ryan exited the house alone and strode down the steps, down the sidewalk, and came directly to me.

“You told me yesterday that you’d given the boy a matchgun, Daniel. Now he tells me he’s never seen you before. What’s up here? Did you or did you not give that boy the weapon that enabled him to start a fire at school?”

I stood alone in the universe after that question. A concept I’d never truthfully encountered on a real level surfaced in my head. A moral dilemma. I had two options, and neither of them was particularly palatable. Deny my involvement, or tell the truth. I answered Detective Ryan.

“No sir. I didn’t. Jimmy did…but I was there. And it was us who shot the match inside the Comet…”

Mom let out a sound that was not a wail, nor a screech. I had kicked her in the stomach and her response was a muted bellow, a groan, a whimper. I knew she was thinking, Oh God, My son’s headed up the river to the Big House...

Pop remained quiet.

Mrs. McGuire merely seemed confused.

                                 ***

I thought better of speaking at the dinner table that evening; of even being there in fact. But, my presence was requested, and my replies to the questions pitched at me were duly noted, as if Detective Ryan had seated himself with his notebook and pen at the ready directly across from me. A rancorous veil was thrown across me, this time not only by Mom, but also by Pop.

“Even if it’s true you didn’t actually shoot that match in the theater, or have anything to do with handing the gun to that boy,” Pop lectured me waving a finger in my face, “you’re still guilty by association.”

“Yes, and I’ll tell you another thing, and it ain’t two…” Mom began.

“Be quiet, Rosie, I’ll handle this,” Pop said. The color in his face deepened to incendiary red as he continued, at long last not the least lost for words. Mom sat back in her chair, defeated, or content with his command, or waiting—but in silence.

“So here’s the deal. I’ll drive you to school for the remainder of the year, and pick you up at 3:30 every afternoon. I can’t stop you from talking to Jimmy or that Fumo boy while you’re out of my sight, but by God if I hear even a whisper that the three of you have done anything—anything—that would make me raise an eyebrow…do I make myself crystal clear?”

Like looking through a window into God’s home on high. “Yes, Pop.”

“Good. You’ve shamed your family and yourself. Don’t ever let it happen again. Understand?”

“Yes sir.”

“Alright, then. You’ll stay in this house until I say you can leave. Now, finish eating, get the dishes done, and then go to your room.”

I looked up. Mom had placed her hand on Pop’s forearm, and though I’d pierced her side with a spear a few hours ago down at little Terrence’s house, I saw her mouth curl upward into a tiny smile. She remained silent as I rose and took my plate to the sink in the kitchen.

“And one last thing,” Pop added. “You’ll go along with me to that girl’s house and you’ll tell her you’re sorry. God help you if her folks decide to press charges.”

“What about Barnum School?” I asked in dread.

“We’ll wait and see there.”

At last Mom decided it was probably safe to interject her feelings on the matter.

“Skippy, that was a courageous thing you did…telling the truth. I’m proud of you.”

                               ***

The smoke cleared two weeks later, and I heaved a sigh of relief. The girl at the Comet whose hair Jimmy’s match had started on fire had a name, I discovered. Marilou Jenkins. She was very pretty—an honor student at a private school for girls on the eastside of town. As promised, or as threatened, we visited her.

Jimmy, Pop, and I drove to her home one morning when the sky had abandoned itself to a somber rug of gray. We pulled up to the curb, and at first I was shocked and disheartened when Pop checked the address he’d written on the back of an envelope, and then announced, “This is it.” He cut the engine of our dusty old truck, emitting a cloud of smoke out through the tailpipe thicker than the dreary sky above us. We had driven to another planet.

“Je-sus H. Kee-rist,” Jimmy remarked, and I had to second the invocation.

The home, sitting in Versailles elegance on the corner lot, looked more like a grand museum or an important public monument, except for the park-like expanse of golf course lawn, and the English gardens meandering through the acreage spanning the distance to the mansion that would have made Mom explode with envy. Bordering the broad parkway, towering elms stood, perfectly aligned and spaced. They were trimmed as if a small army of tree barbers spent innumerable hours each day manicuring them, until even the squirrels and birds donned tuxedos before entering the branches.

The three of us exited the truck in a state of awe—Jimmy and me, anyway—and hiked up the meandering flagstone walkway to an entry as imposing as that of Monticello. I glanced nervously at my ragged sneakers as Pop pushed the doorbell button.

We waited.

The door was opened halfway by a predatory-faced woman dressed in the attire of a maid instead of what in my mind should have been spots, or stripes. She smelled strongly of lemon oil mixed with mothballs, and she showed us into a foyer the size of our entire house, where we were politely instructed to wait. She then padded silently across the black and white checked marble floor into an adjoining gallery lined with ten foot-tall paintings and milk-white statuary. Standing in the foyer peering in, it seemed to me none of it had any practical use beyond its grandiose statement of sinful wealth and extreme snobbery. Undoubtedly, Mom would have agreed. And, the statues were naked.

But such was not the case with the occupants themselves.

A middle-aged gentleman dressed in a Lord and Taylor-looking black suit strode across the floor several minutes later as I stood gawking at the smooth, sculpted, firm breasts on one of those statues. He was followed by a much younger woman, fashionably attired, who at first I mistook for Sophia Loren. Miss Marilou Jenkins, sporting a blonde, pixie cut hairdo, followed her beautiful black-haired mother. My eyes fixed on the young woman immediately, trying to imagine