FLIPKA

Chapter Seven, Part Two

Finally posting Chapter Seven, part 2 of FLIPKA.  To recap, on the way to Nevada’s most notorious girls reformatory, former psychoanalyst  Fi Butter encounters a crusty shopkeep and then is rescued from a dangerous wrong turn by two young men claiming to be cowboys.   At the reformatory she’s made as welcome as road kill by the prickly headmistress and her suspicious staff but Fi could care less.  She is there for one reason only: to assure her boss, a powerful Vegas kingpin, that his daughter (one of the inmates) is not involved in any sort of satanic worship.  After discovering a century old journal in their room,  Fi concludes she's onto the secret of the girls’ nightly escapades. 

Chapter Seven, Part Two 

At lunch it was obvious the girls knew I had their treasure. Knew that I’d found it jammed between the mattresses of Merry’s bed (along with a pack of cigarettes and a lighter), read it while they were retrieving cleaning supplies, and then locked it in the trunk of the Nova. They sat across a long particle board table in the dining barracks, casting stones with their eyes as Winnie Peterson explained to them with undisguised relief: “Miss Butters will be leaving us tomorrow. Her elderly aunt is sick and she has to return home to take care of her.” 

“Don’t you know it’s a sin to steal?” Leticia snarled. Poor thing had a fresh outburst of zits, some of them bordering on boils, across her fragile cheekbones and on her forehead. 

“What does that mean, Leticia?” Miss Peterson growled.

“She knows.” Leticia hissed as four sets of blazing eyeballs threatened to burn holes through my skull. 

“Miss Butters stole from you?” 

“Why don’t you tell Mrs. Peterson what you think I stole?” I asked. 

“How ridiculous,” Winnie Peterson snarled. “What would Dr. Butters want to steal from any of you? Quite frankly, I just don’t have time for any of this! I have to move the four of you into different barracks. Meredith, starting tomorrow morning you and Leticia will bunk in Barracks 4; Thanh, you’ll be in 2 and Bonny, 1. I’ve decided to put an end to this foolishness once and for all.” 

My, my. The tears they did flow, and from such tough lassies too. The award for biggest meltdown would have to go to Bonny, the longest in the system and the most full of psychobabble. She couldn’t possibly be apart from Merry, her one and only friend in the whole messed-up world—it would force her further down the path to total mental insanity. 

Apparently there are varying levels of insanity—from the mild, to the severe, and finally, to the total.

“Really Bonny. You’re being released in—what is it—three months? I seriously doubt—”

“Miss Peterson, I’ve got abandonment issues, you just ask the therapist. I gotta be with Merry; I just gotta. I’m gonna live with her once we get out of here!” 

Ah, the crux of the issue. Bonny had found a mark in the sweet-natured daughter of a wealthy and powerful man. Even in a khaki prison-girl uniform, Meredith Hyman had—as Fitzgerald would say—a voice full of money, exuding the promise of a brighter, greener world. She would always be a hustler magnet and Bonny, despite her innocent chocolate brown eyes, was a streetwise hustler. 

Next up to bat was Thanh. “I can’t be separate from Merry,” she cried. “Other girls call me ‘gook.’ Hit me because I Vietnamese! And at home they beat me; tell me I’m ugly and useless. Merry take care of me.” 

Ha, I chuckled to myself, another future member of the Doug Hyman Home for Wayward Girls. Won’t he be thrilled? 

Of course their pleas were ignored; their requests denied. They were told to “put a sock in it” or risk KP duty. Miss Peterson had no more time to waste. It was movie time! Yahoo! And the movie this week? The Road to Rio. 

“Hope and Crosby, Miss Peterson?” I chortled as she rose to set up the projector. (She was apparently the only adult at the facility trusted to run the thing.) “I hope you’re planning on passing out valium! How many of these girls are going to enjoy watching men their grandfather’s age massacre the art of the double entendre while tripping the light fantastic?” 

She just stared at me as if I’d lost my mind. But I couldn’t stop laughing. It was so damned ridiculous. Showing Hope and Crosby movies to a room full of incarcerated teens! 

“You know, there is one thing funky about that movie. Right in the middle of their lame-brain cruise some Carmen Miranda type sings the little cockroach song.”

“Why is that in any way odd?”

“Course they sing it in Portuguese, so no one knows what they’re saying, still—do you think it was meant to be a subliminal message?”

“As usual, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Winnie scowled. The projector was not behaving itself. The spools refused to thread properly, and the natives were getting restless.

“You know, Hope was famous for lampooning the anti-communists. Maybe he was snubbing his nose at McCarthy: 

The cockroach says she has seven skirts of tulle. 

It’s a lie, she has one. Ah ra ra, go ro rho. 

She has just one! The cockroach says she has a velvet shoe. 

It’s a lie, her foot is hair. Ah ra ra, go ro rho.” 

I’d gotten the attention of the Days of the Week.

“A cockroach wearing skirts?” Merry asked. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“The cockroach is a code name,” I explained. “You see, the Spanish invaded Mexico hundreds of years ago and forced the natives to become Catholic. Any native speaking out against the Spanish authority would be punished, so they started making up nursery rhymes and songs about the cockroach and what a vile insect she was and how she would someday be chased out of the house, figuring that the Spanish would just think they were singing harmless children’s songs.”

“That’s dumb.” Bonny snarled. “Really dumb.”

“Is it? Say you girls were plotting to overthrow Miss Peterson. You couldn’t go around singing, Off with Miss Peterson’s head. You’d have to make up a code name for her—like, say, Weasel. And then a code name for yourselves—say, Monkey. All around the mulberry tree, the monkeys chased the weasel. The monkeys escaped from the house, pop goes the weasel.”

“Dr. Butters! What does that have to do with the movie they’re about to see?” Winnie Peterson fired back as she finally got the projector to work. “Rio isn’t in Mexico. It’s in Brazil.” 

“Oh, I don’t know. I just thought I’d give them a little background on the song—so when they heard it sung in Portuguese, they’d have some idea what was being sung,” I paused for dramatic effect. “Weren’t you ever curious why two staunch patriots like Hope and Crosby included a communist manifesto in one of their fluffy road movies?”

“Never! I’ve never heard such nonsense!”