Al Capone Shines My Shoes

After school on Tuesday, Moose goes to the canteen to visit his friends. Jimmy, who still feels guilty about taking his eye off Natalie, acts standoffish, but Moose joins Annie and Theresa in helping Bea unpack boxes.

Later, Moose, Jimmy, and Annie sneak into the passageway to spy on Bea, Mrs. Caconi, Mrs. Mattaman, and Mrs. Bomini, who have been secretive about a group baking project. The women discuss the serious illness of Piper’s mother, who has been rushed to the hospital. Bea Trixle, in particular, believes that Mrs. Williams is at death’s door, and blames the warden, who is obsessed with having a son. The women decide that Moose, as Piper’s closest friend, should visit her to offer support. They also gossip about the attraction between Moose and Annie, embarrassing the listening children.

As the women leave the apartment, Moose rushes out of the hideaway and runs into Mrs. Mattaman, who tells him and Theresa about Mrs. Williams’s life-threatening illness. Theresa, still angry at Piper, groans that, because of this, the older girl will once again get away with her misdeeds. Her mother, shocked, orders her to wash her mouth out with soap. She then begs Moose to offer whatever comfort he can to Piper, reminding him that the Alcatraz community is a “family.” She overcomes his objections by saying that whatever Piper has done in the past, friends always disappoint you sometimes, but holding grudges leads to a “lonely life.”

Resentful at how often he is enlisted to comfort others, Moose goes to Piper’s house. Trying to cheer Piper up, he asks what her parents will be naming her new sibling. She says she’ll be calling the baby “It”—short for “Idiot Williams.” Tearfully, she confesses that she wanted the baby to die, not her mother. Moose tries to console her by putting his arm around her, but she reacts angrily, accusing him of looking forward to his sister’s absences, and of “pretending” to be nicer than he really is. Her father really wants a son, and she is upset at the favoritism boys are given. Moose, hurt by her words about Natalie, retorts that life is not fair, but she cries, “Everything should be fair!” (212).

Finally, he convinces her to accompany him to the Mattamans’, who he says do not hate her, regardless of what she has done. At their apartment, Mrs. Mattaman warmly embraces Piper, who starts crying. Piper confesses to Mr. Mattaman that she lied about seeing him drink and chokes out a tearful apology. Theresa enters, and, after some hesitation, follows her parents’ lead and forgives Piper.

Three days later, on Friday, the warden returns from his days-long hospital vigil in an exuberant mood, proclaiming that he now has a son. Handing out cigars, he makes no mention of his wife. Later, Mrs. Mattaman tells Moose and Jimmy that Mrs. Williams has just barely pulled through, but will be OK. The warden, she says with disapproval, has brought the baby home to Alcatraz without her, and is planning a big celebration. Nevertheless, the good news about Mrs. Williams and the baby brings a convivial mood to the island, almost like a holiday.

Piper, however, has not joined in the merriment, and a concerned Mrs. Mattaman asks Moose and his friends to go check up on her. Moose, Annie, Theresa, and Natalie trudge to the Williams’s house, which is dark and silent, but Piper is there, and eventually she opens the door to them. She tells them her mother is better, and that she wishes she were home. Minutes later, Mrs. Caconi arrives with Walter, Piper’s new baby brother, whom she is caring for. Piper calls him “It,” saying she doesn’t want a brother. Asking the kids to watch the baby while she rests, Mrs. Caconi stretches out on a bed and falls asleep.

Minutes later, they hear what sounds like Jimmy at the door, calling for Moose and Piper. The thick fog makes the outdoors invisible. Buddy Boy does not answer Piper’s call to let Jimmy in, so Moose volunteers to go, and Piper insists on going with him. Indignantly, Theresa orders Piper never to take her eyes off the baby, so Piper reluctantly picks Walter up and carries him down the stairs after Moose and Natalie. Outside, the swirling fog makes it as dark as night, and the outdoor light seems to be broken. There is no sign of Jimmy. Instead, something cold and “clammy” seizes Moose by the throat, and a voice whispers in his ear, “Shut it […] or you die” (224).

With amazement, Moose recognizes Buddy Boy’s voice, and smells the foul breath of Seven Fingers, who holds a gun to his back; as his eyes adjust, he sees that Seven Fingers is wearing a guard’s uniform. Also dressed as a guard, Buddy Boy has his left arm locked around Piper and the baby, and his right hand presses a gun into Piper’s back. Willy One Arm, with his pet mouse perched on his shoulder, has grabbed Natalie. Angry that Piper has brought the baby with her, Seven Fingers shouts at Buddy to “snap” its neck. Willy protests that they can’t kill a baby. Piper calmly pleads with Buddy to let them go. Angrily, Buddy slaps her and tells her to shut up.

While the cons are thus distracted, Moose spots Jimmy going into Piper’s house, but cannot think of a way to attract his attention. The baby starts to cry, and Willy One Arm, to protect him from Seven Fingers, takes the baby from Piper and runs off, while Seven Fingers seizes Natalie with his free arm. Moose realizes that this hostage-taking is part of a jailbreak that Buddy Boy and the other two cons have been planning for a long time. He guesses that they chose this night for the thick fog, and because most of the island’s guards will be at the warden’s party. Desperately, Moose comes up with a plan to alert Jimmy and Theresa: Appealing to Buddy’s vanity, he praises the con for the perfect impression he did of Jimmy’s voice earlier, and asks him to do it again. Buddy complies, and Moose hopes that the real Jimmy will hear it and raise an alarm.

Soon, Willy One Arm returns without the baby, and the three cons shove Moose, Piper, and Natalie toward the dock. Natalie begins counting aloud: “Three men, five arms, no guns” (229). After she repeats this a few times, Moose guesses her meaning: Perhaps the guns at their backs are fakes, carved out of wood. Natalie, who pays close attention to details, may have spotted this; after all, real guns would be almost impossible to smuggle through the ferry’s metal detector. However, the cons also have a boat key, which is also metal.

As the cons push them onto the gangplank that leads to the boat, Moose knows he has only a few seconds to act. Remembering that Natalie is “never wrong about counting” (232), Moose takes his life in his hands and screams to the guards for help.

With a crack like “splitting wood,” something strikes Moose in the head, and he almost loses consciousness. He sees clouds of flies all around him, lit up by the guards’ spotlight, and Janet Trixle’s voice, amplified by her handmade megaphone, bellows, “Stop!” Moose shouts that the cons do not have guns, and Seven Fingers and his friends break and scatter.

Janet and Theresa emerge from the fog, along with Annie, who pelts the cons with rocks. Dozens of guards, including Darby Trixle, swarm the dock, and Natalie yells to them, “No gun!”. Paying attention to Natalie for once, Darby tackles and subdues Seven Fingers. Buddy Boy and Willy One Arm start the boat’s engine, but it is still moored to the dock, and they cannot get away. Finally, Buddy waves a flag of surrender: Mae Capone’s hummingbird handkerchief.

As Mr. Mattaman tries to console the children that the danger is over, Piper screams at him that her brother is missing: “He’s my brother. I have to find him” (235). Wildly, she insists on searching for him herself. Moose tells his father that Willy One Arm carried the baby off in the direction of the cellhouse. With the “whole island” looking for the baby, Cam sternly tells Theresa, Jimmy, Annie, and Janet to stay by the dock, while he and Darby take Moose, Piper, and Natalie up the hill in a truck so Doc Ollie can look at them. Outside the warden’s house, Piper collapses into the arms of her father, who appears stunned by the evening’s events. Moose looks around for Natalie, who has disappeared.

Cam tells his son to go into the warden’s house, but Moose insists on searching for Natalie, who he thinks went looking for the baby. Dashing toward the cellhouse, he sees a flash of blue like that of Natalie’s dress darting into the hospital entrance. Inside, a guard lies unconscious on the floor. He finds Natalie peering into the locked cell of Capone, who cradles “Little Walt” tenderly in his arms.

Cam enters and orders Capone not to hurt the baby. Capone scoffs at the idea, saying he’s been rocking the baby for almost an hour. Natalie points to Willy One Arm’s mouse, which is on Capone’s bed, and the gangster says that Natalie was “smart” to follow the mouse. It returned to his cell, he says, because it took a “liking” to him, just as the baby has. Capone reveals how the baby got into his locked cell: With a “sly smile,” he directs Moose to pull out a section of the bars, which have been sawn through. Astonished, Cam grills Capone about how this happened, but the gangster refuses to name names, allowing only that “somebody” cut the bars with dental floss and cleanser. He hints that he refused to join the cons’ escape plan, but that he’s no “rat”: With only three years left in his sentence, he’s not going to make trouble for himself.

When Darby Trixle arrives, Moose and Cam tell him that it was Natalie who found the warden’s baby by following Willy’s mouse. Amazed, Darby notes that she’s also the one who told him the kidnappers were unarmed. Cam and Darby put Capone in “the Hole” (solitary confinement), though he protests that he was only doing a little “babysitting.” Cam puzzles what to do with a slippery customer like Capone, who does both good and bad things.

In the wake of the thwarted jailbreak, the seven children are lionized on Alcatraz, especially Natalie, whose unexpected resourcefulness has given the Flanagan family renewed hope for her. In the days that follow, an investigation of the escape plot reveals that Mae Capone smuggled the boat keys onto the island by wrapping them in her hummingbird handkerchief, which she dropped onto the dock before going through the metal detector. This was arranged by Capone, even though he knew the escape scheme was ill-conceived.

The warden, suspecting that one or more of the guards was complicit, subjects each of them to a lengthy interrogation. However, many on the island feel that the warden himself is partly to blame, since he gave two of the plotters (Buddy Boy and Willy One Arm) the run of his house in order to use them for free labor. Darby is under intense scrutiny since his daughter was found to be using a bar spreader to decorate her “pixie jail.”

To prevent Darby from being (falsely) implicated, Moose valiantly tells his father how Natalie was manipulated by convict 105 into smuggling the bar spreader onto the island. Convict 105 was working as a gardener at Natalie’s school, a job he got by faking his references. He was fired after he wrote a “love letter” to Natalie. Over the objections of both Moose and his mother, Cam insists on diligently reporting 105’s and Natalie’s involvement to the warden. The warden, he thinks, probably will not act on it, since it would draw attention to his own errors of judgment. However, he asks Moose why he didn’t tell them about the bar spreader right away. His wife points out that Moose was only protecting them from public disgrace and from getting kicked off the island; only in a “perfect world,” she says, would total honesty be the best policy. Nevertheless, Cam insists on telling the warden, saying that they’ll “get through this the way we always do…by doing the right thing” (252).

Within a few days, things have settled down, and it appears that the Flanagan family will suffer no consequences for Natalie’s indiscretion. Moose, Natalie, and their friends bask in a renewed sense of fellowship for having supported each other and unraveled the convicts’ plot: Janet with her bullhorn, Jimmy with his flies, Annie with her rocks, Theresa for spotting Mae Capone dropping her handkerchief, Piper for learning to love her new brother, and Natalie for spotting the cons’ fake guns and then finding the baby. Their resilience proves what Mrs. Mattaman told Moose earlier, that “everybody disappoints you at one time or another and you have to forgive people” (254).

At the parade grounds, the friends (minus Piper) play a game of baseball, with Natalie flawlessly calling strikes and balls. Afterward, Moose apologizes to Jimmy for faking interest in his hobbies (such as fly training), and Jimmy, in turn, says he’s sorry for showing Scout their secret hideaway without permission. Annie teases Moose about her mother’s mistaken belief that he “loves needlepoint,” and Jimmy reiterates that it’s hard to tell what Moose truly likes. Annie replies that this is part of what makes Moose so likable: “[H]e tries so hard with everyone” (255). Moose reflects that, as agreeable as it is to keep everyone comfortable and happy, sometimes you can only save a situation by “making trouble.”

Monday morning, as the family prepares for Natalie’s return to the Esther P. Marinoff School in the city, her mother bakes her a lemon cake, to calm her in case Darby sprays the bay with bullets again. Despite everything, Moose fears that Darby will never outgrow his prejudices against Natalie.

As Natalie proudly runs her fingers over the buttons of her yellow dress, Moose notices that the newest one looks strangely “ordinary,” like a button from a man’s shirt. When he asks her about it, she hands him a note, presumably found in her laundry. It reads, “Good job,” in Capone’s inimitable handwriting.