The Whistle

I woke up and the room was dark. I could hear my sister talking in her bedroom. I turned on my light and checked the clock. 3am. 1974. She laughed and then said something else and then listened. I looked at the phone on my desk. We shared a line in our bedrooms with a different number than the main phone. It was something we got for getting decent grades, but we wouldn't keep it long because of other things we would get caught at in school. It was listed as "teenage phone" in the phone book, right below the main line. I turned on the light and picked up on my end and briefly heard a man's voice, older, before I said, "What are you doing?" to my sister.

            "Hang up the phone," she said.

            "Who are you talking to?" The other guy was being quiet now.

            "Just hang up. It's none of your business."

            "It's 3 o'clock in the morning. I'm trying to sleep."

            "Hang up."

            "I'm telling ma."

            "Oh, god." I could almost see her eyes rolling.

            I hung up and went back to bed. She talked quieter after that and I fell back asleep.

            A few days passed.

            I was walking home from school and this is what I found out when I got there:

            Some guy had called my mom on the main line and started a conversation with her. At some point, he asked what she was wearing. She hung up the phone and he called right back. He asked her again what she was wearing. They argued about that for a few sentences and then the guy said, "If you don't tell me what you're wearing, I'll kill your daughter."

            She got quiet for just a second and then asked him what the hell was going on and that my sister was at school and he couldn't have her. Then the guy told her things about my sister and about the family, about our past and our habits, our names, things he shouldn't have known if he didn't know us. My mom hung up the phone and called the school. The secretary checked with my sister's classroom and she wasn't there. Mom called the police.

            I was walking down the street, dry autumn leaves scratching along the asphalt, not knowing any of this yet, wondering why there was a police car and another car that looked like an unmarked sitting in front of our house. Little chainsaws of adrenaline turned on inside me. In my mind, I flipped through the things I'd done recently that I hadn't been caught for yet and hoped my excuses were good. I went in.

            There were two police officers standing in the kitchen and a guy with a thick mustache who looked like a detective sitting at the table with my mom, who was crying. The detective looked up at me like he wanted to beat the shit out me. The cops did about the same, but they weren't as good at it. They both had mustaches, too, and pot bellies and wrinkled uniforms and guns by their sides. I looked at my mom.

            "What's the matter?"

            The detective told me some of what happened. I knew right away that my sister was probably cutting class. But I didn't know who she would be with or where. The detective asked me if I knew anybody this could be. I said I didn't. He scowled at me and started asking my mom some more questions.

            "I could hear machinery in the background. Like typewriters. Like he was in a big room with a lot of typewriters," she said.

            "Like a large office?" the detective said.

            "Yes. Or a newsroom." She was crying and sobbing while she was saying this, so it was coming out kind of broken up.

            "And you don't know anyone who works in a newsroom?"

            She shook her head. My dad ran a small metal finishing factory and most of the people we knew worked blue collar jobs. I don't think many of them knew how to type.

            Then one of the cops moved his mustache and said, "Is this your only phone?"

            I told them about the teenage phone. The cop and the detective looked at each other. I think the detective was a little pissed that he hadn't thought of it himself. He told us that sometimes guys would call the "teenage phone" listing in the phone book, hoping to find some kids to seduce. If that had been the case here, he would also know the main phone number since it was listed right above.

            "Has your sister had any strange phone calls lately?" the detective said, looking at me. His eyes were bright green or blue or something in between and they froze me for a minute.

            Then I remembered the guy from the other night. I told them what I knew, which wasn't much.

            "When you picked up the phone, did you hear typewriters?"

            "No. But it was three in the morning." I was still standing with my back to the kitchen door. I hadn't moved since I'd come in. I still had my coat on. It was a waist length, tightly fitted dark maroon leather coat that I thought made me look cool and that the cops probably thought made me look like a criminal. The detective said he wanted to see the phone in my sister's room so we all went upstairs. The cops stayed in the hallway while the detective looked around my sister's room. I saw the cops looking in my room, peering around at my posters and my stereo.

            Our house was very clean. Mom was always cleaning. There were ashtrays in every room, even in my bedroom, and there was always smoking going on, but she kept the house spotless. She would smoke a cigarette while cleaning my room and as soon as she finished it she would dump the extinguished butt into the trash can and wipe out the ashtray with a tissue.

            She was always cleaning something. When I got home one day after being suspended from school for the third time that year before Thanksgiving, she was cleaning the oven. Her head and her arms were inside the oven and one of her arms was scrubbing furiously. She didn't stop cleaning when I came in, but she did turn her head to look at me and said, "Who the hell do you think you are?" in a voice low and husky with anger, her eyes narrowed. Then she went back to cleaning the oven. After that, whenever my sister and I wanted the other one to know that Mom was in a bad mood we would say, "Ma's cleaning the oven." And then we'd laugh.

            The fourth time I got suspended before Thanksgiving–junior year was a bad one–Mom found out while I was washing dishes at The Plantation, a restaurant where I worked two nights a week. She picked me up around midnight. I smelled like food. She smelled like smoke. "Are you on drugs?" she yelled through tears as she drove. "No, Ma." And I really wasn't yet. I had no reasons for what I was doing.

"Does your daughter keep a diary?" the detective asked.

            "I don't think so," Mom said. "I don't know."

            The detective looked at me and I shrugged. After a few minutes, they all went back downstairs to the kitchen. It was starting to get dark, so I turned on my bedroom light. I heard my mom ask if anyone wanted coffee. All we had was instant. The two cops said they had to go, maybe to join the search for my sister, and left. The detective stayed. I heard my mom making coffee.

            I sat on the bed, looking across the room at the phone on my desk. Maybe the guy would call this phone again. Somewhere, cops were out looking for my sister. I felt like I should be doing something. I just knew she was out with some of our friends, or something. I called a few people but they didn't know anything and they all kept me on the line too long, wanting me to explain everything and tell them about the cops. When I hung up from the third call, I heard my father come home. There was some talk of the what-the-hell-is-this variety and I waited for my father to come to my room and grill me. I fell asleep waiting and was awakened by yelling from the kitchen.

            “Where were you?!” I heard Mom say.

            “I was in school!” It was my sister’s voice.

            “Bullshit! I called!”

            “I was in the nurse’s office.”

            “You’re full of shit, too,” my father said. The detective wasn’t saying anything.

            The yelling continued as the mood changed from daughter in danger to daughter in trouble. I heard my father apologizing to the detective, who said it was okay and good that nothing terrible had happened. He asked if we had a whistle in the house. My father said he still had his Navy Shore Patrol whistle. It was made of heavy-duty plastic and had a cork ball in it. Very loud. The detective suggested my mother keep it by the phone and use it if the guy called again.

            “Blow the hell out of it.” He said a guy’s not going to call back if his ears are going to get shattered. She made good use of it the next day when the guy called back and then never called again, but that whistle would hang by the phone for years.

Things got a little quiet and I thought I might drift off again, then I heard my father say, “Get up to your goddam bedroom. And stay off the phone!”

            I heard my sister coming up the stairs before she opened my bedroom door. She was still wearing her rabbit fur coat that reminded me of cotton balls in shades of white and brown.

            "I need a nurse's note from Di."

            “Is the detective still here?”

            “No, he left. Will you get me the note?”

            Di was our source for successful class cutting. She could forge the nurse's signature and had once stolen a pad of printed nurse's notes. She sold them, signed, for a dollar apiece. After a while, the nurse's office would figure it out when the attendance records showed far more students in the nurse's office, recuperating from this or that, than could possible fit in that tiny office on any one day. They would switch out the handwritten signature for some custom-made stamps of the nurse's signature, one of which Di would also steal. But for now it was still regular signatures.

            "Okay. I'll see if I can get one tomorrow."

            "In the morning. First thing. I'd do it, but ma's taking me to school."

            "Then how am I going to get it to you?"

            "Give it to Frazier. He can give it to me first period."

            “It’s kind of after the fact. I don’t see how you’re going to get away with it if Mom’s taking you to school.”

            “I’ll get away with it.”

September, 2026