Al Capone Does My Homework

As Moose and Annie head back down to #64, they share their disbelief at Piper’s foolishness in falling into the Count’s scheme. She should have known it was illicit, they think: This is Alcatraz, after all. They speculate that she didn’t tell her father about it because she knew he would tell her to stop. Still, she did use the money to help others, like paying Theresa Mattaman for little chores and (presumably) giving Mrs. Mattaman the new dress. Now they must break the news to the Mattamans that Piper’s gifts to them were the spoils of a counterfeiting plot. Theresa reacts with panic since she has spent some of the money and asks her mother if she is a “criminal too.” Her mother comforts her, telling her that she is not responsible. As for Piper, Moose thinks that she will probably not get into serious trouble because of who her father is. Still, he feels some satisfaction that she has finally been caught for one of her misdeeds; he just wishes it were for a smaller offense.

To calm themselves, Moose and Annie head down to the parade grounds to throw a baseball back and forth. On the way, they discuss Piper’s manipulative tendencies: the way she pretended to have a “secret admirer” just to make Moose jealous, and how she’s always taken the two of them for granted, only giving them attention when they start to drift away. Annie asks him if he still likes Piper, and he says he does, though not as a girlfriend. He even feels some guilt for not having kept her out of this latest predicament, but Annie argues that he couldn’t have known and that he can’t be responsible for everyone. She notes that he sometimes seems a little “desperate” about Natalie but adds that if she were Natalie, she would want a brother like him. Soon, the two of them lose interest in their game of catch and sit together on a hill facing San Francisco to watch the sunset. Moose tells her that she looks “different,” and, leaning gently toward each other, the two share their first kiss. Afterward, Moose tells her to forget that that happened, and she agrees, but they continue to hold hands. Moose tells himself that he “won’t let go” (173).

A week later, far from forgetting about his kiss with Annie, Moose thinks about it constantly, marveling how different it was from his long-ago kiss with Piper, which was much less memorable. Caring deeply about the person you kiss, he realizes, makes a great difference. Finally, the task force issues its report, concluding that Donny Caconi set the fire in the Flanagans’ apartment. Bea Trixle claims that she knew “all along”—conveniently forgetting her relentless efforts to blame Natalie. Jimmy tells Moose that Bea has rehired him at the grocery store. He also says he’s certain that Donny cheated Moose at the throwing game, and Annie offers a possible reason: Donny, according to her dad, owes a lot of money to a loan shark and needs to pay it off soon to avoid a beating. Perhaps he was “practicing” his confidence skills on them. It’s also clear that Donny was smuggling the Count’s counterfeit bills back to him through the prison laundry and that the Count chose Piper as a mark because she’s the warden’s daughter. But they still can’t figure out why Donny would want to burn down the Flanagans’ apartment. Maybe, they think, he stole money from the apartment and set the fire as a cover.

That afternoon, Moose waits for Annie on her balcony overlooking the dock, where his father and Darby Trixle are overseeing cons unloading laundry from a ferry. To pass the time, he flips a baseball into the air and catches it. As the truck takes the laundry up the hill, Lizard and Indiana stand together on the dock. Moose notices that their movements are strange and “jerky,” and all at once, the cryptic words Al Capone wrote on his FDR essay flash through his mind: “State problem.” Pondering why Capone would care about his homework, he looks hard at Indiana, who is nicknamed for a state. With terror, he sees the “glint” of a knife flash in Indiana’s hand. Unable to shout a warning, or even draw a breath, he hurls his baseball with all his might at Indiana. Just as the con darts toward Cam Flanagan with his knife, the ball strikes him squarely in the head. A second later, Moose finds his voice and shouts, but too late: His father is down. Indiana leaps into the bay, the water around him raked by gunfire from the guard tower. Moose “half flies” down the stairs to the dock, where the guards have torn open Cam’s shirt, revealing a rapidly bleeding wound. Mr. Mattaman tells Moose that the doctor is on his way and that his father will be all right. To Moose, however, each of his words is “an envelope with nothing inside” (178).

Haunted by the sight of his father lying bleeding on the dock, Moose wants desperately to visit him at the city hospital, but visitors must be 16 or older. At the Williams’s house, Piper tells him Indiana’s real name (Lonnie McCrae) and that he first went to reform school at age 13, their own age. Moose reflects that Piper could have been sent to reform school too for passing counterfeit bills had she not been the warden’s daughter. Piper tells him the reason Indiana knifed his father was to earn 5,000 points in the cons’ game. But she assures him that his father is tougher than he looks and will get through this, as will the two of them, together. Next, Moose visits the Mattamans and confides his guilt over not shouting a warning to his father, which might have saved him from Indiana’s attack. Mrs. Mattaman tells him that by throwing that ball, he saved his father’s life, and now at least his father has a “fighting chance.” But he still blames himself for not deciphering Al Capone’s coded words (“State problem”) sooner. He is “supposed to keep track” of the people and things in his life, he says, including Natalie, Piper, and his father, who may be too trusting and optimistic (182). He feels as if he has let everybody down. Mrs. Mattaman tells him with tenderness not to take so much responsibility for himself. She says he doesn’t have that kind of “power”: Most of it is in “God’s hands,” not his. To prove to Moose that his father would not have heard his warning, even if he had yelled, Jimmy Mattaman tries an experiment: He goes up on the balcony and shouts as loud as he can. Moose, standing on the dock, cannot hear a thing. Mrs. Mattaman tells him that, anyway, he probably read too much into Al Capone’s scribble on his essay. It was he alone, she says, who saved his father’s life. Moose, partly reassured by her tender words, still feels that Capone was warning him about Indiana. The problem is that Capone did not have the courage to warn them directly. He is not as brave as people think; his own father, Moose thinks, is far more courageous.

At the Mattamans’, Moose finds Natalie curled in a fetal position on Theresa’s bed, and, though this usually exasperates him, today he wishes he too could “shut out” the world. Gently, Moose tells her what he suspects she already knows: Their father got hurt and is in the hospital. Natalie echoes his words, as she often does, and then says unexpectedly, that she will go to visit him. Moose protests that he can’t bring her since he’s not 16, but she insists, loudly, that she is 16 and therefore can go by herself. Moose starts to object, but then he realizes that if she never tries new things, they’ll never find out what she’s capable of. Moose thinks of the paper he wrote on Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose mother had wanted him to stay at home, out of the public eye, after he was disabled by polio; if he had listened to her, he’d never have become president. He agrees to take Natalie to the hospital, and Mrs. Mattaman, after some reluctance, helps to brush Natalie’s hair and finds a blouse and sweater for her to wear. After putting them on, Natalie looks as grown up as a “teacher,” though Moose knows that it must be a great effort for her to walk and move presentably in such unfamiliar clothes.

On the ferry, Natalie does not fall into her usual behaviors, such as feeding the birds or counting the boats. When they reach the hospital, which is enormous, Moose tries to go in with her, claiming he’s big for his age, but Natalie insists on going in alone; always a stickler for rules, she repeats that Moose is “thirteen, thirteen.” He reminds her to look people in the eye, this time not as a “game,” and holds his breath as she walks up to the desk to get her visitor’s pass. Watching her introduce herself to the receptionist as Cam Flanagan’s daughter, he thinks of how hard it must be for her to “figure out” how to pass for “normal.” But the receptionist nods at her and, seeing nothing amiss, points her toward the stairs.

Waiting nervously outside the reception area, Moose sees his mother emerge, her eyes puffy from crying. Hugging Moose, she tells him his father is getting better and that the doctor said he was too “tough” to die. Moose tells her that Natalie has gone in to visit him, and she reacts with shocked disapproval. Ignoring the receptionist, she drags Moose past the desk and up the stairs to Cam’s room. Though Moose is obviously under 16, the doctor, with an “elfin grin,” lets them pass, and they find Natalie sitting by her father’s bed, counting toothpicks. She has brought her “special” four-holed button as a gift for him. She answers her mother’s stern look with the words, “I am sixteen now” (192). Her mother, fighting back tears, agrees, “You are.” Cam Flanagan is fast asleep and looks pale and drawn, but Moose has never been so happy to see anyone in his life.

Eleven days later, Cam Flanagan comes home from the hospital, much thinner and a bit shaky on his feet. Moose has assumed that he would step down as associate warden, but his father says that he has no such plans. He’s not a “quitter,” he says, adding that Indiana’s attack on him was part of the cons’ points game and was nothing “personal.” Moose finally confesses to his father that he fell asleep while watching Natalie on the night of the fire, but his father shrugs it off, saying that he and his mother never expected him to stay awake. He congratulates Moose for doing so well with Natalie, which was a “big step”—harder, he says, than being a warden. He says Moose was right to inspire Natalie to be her “best self,” which his mother could never have done. Moose, deeply moved that his father has known, all along, what he was going through, wishes he’d told him weeks before about his falling asleep on the night of the fire.

Moose answers a knock on the door and is surprised to see Janet Trixle, who is clutching a new pixie house she has made from a hatbox. She tells Moose that her pixies “know something” that he needs to hear. Searching for a scrap of food to offer her, Moose only half-listens, until she says that the pixies know who set the fire. Moose tells her that “everyone knows” that Donny Caconi set the fire, but she shares a secret: Donny was paid. Remembering, with a shock, the $50 that went missing from Bea Trixle’s grocery shortly after the fire, Moose asks Janet if her dad, Darby Trixle, stole the money to pay Donny. Janet says indignantly that it was not stealing since it was from her mother’s store. She adds, before leaving, that it was the pixies who said this, not herself.

Moose immediately tells his father, who responds with skepticism, telling him not to jump to conclusions. A seven-year-old’s imaginary friends, he suggests, are not the best witnesses. Moose insists that Janet must have overheard her parents talking about it, but his father says that, even if it’s true, they need to leave it to the lawyers and police. The most he will do is mention it to Warden Williams as a possible lead. He grants that the story makes sense, in a way: Darby has never liked him, especially since his promotion, mainly because Cam believes in rehabilitating the prisoners, not just punishing them. In Darby’s eyes, this makes him a “threat,” along with Natalie, who Darby thinks has never belonged on the island. By burning down their apartment and blaming it on Natalie, Darby may have been trying to drive them from the island. However, Cam tells Moose to honor his promise to Janet not to spread the story around. Moose reflects that his father, unlike Darby, is “fair, thoughtful, and even-tempered” (199). This, he thinks, is why he was made associate warden instead of Darby.

A week later, the cons have finally finished the work on #2E, and Moose looks forward to moving back the next day: No longer will he and Natalie have to go back and forth between the apartment and the Chudley place. Natalie has been reinstated at the Marinoff School, and Piper is being sent off to a boarding school; from now on, Moose will only see her on summers and holidays. Piper tells him she has to pay back $285 for the purchases she made with counterfeit money. She says that to raise the money, she tried to get Al Capone to autograph a baseball for her, which would be worth a fortune, but he scratched a message on it for her instead: “Do your own time” (201).

The kids spot Donny Caconi on the dock, carrying luggage for his mother, who is leaving for North Carolina to live with her sister. Speculating that Donny must be out on bail, they wonder how he raised the money; probably through his crooked “connections,” they decide. Moose, Jimmy, and Natalie approach him, and the boys share their theory of how he cheated them in the throwing game: The bottle cap he threw was heavier than Moose’s and was slightly bent to make it more aerodynamic. Donny ignores this, instead focusing on Natalie, whose “genius” for numbers, he says, combined with her deceptively aloof manner, could make her very useful in his line of work. Seeing Donny work his charm on her, Moose feels an overwhelming urge to punch him. Natalie looks Donny straight in the eye, and says repeatedly, “Alcatraz three hundred and seventeen” (204), which Moose recognizes as the number of the next Alcatraz prisoner. He tells Donny that that will be his “new prison number” (204), and the grifter squirms uncomfortably. “When it comes to numbers,” Moose tells the reader, “Natalie never makes a mistake” (204).