Dead As Dutch

It was the doorknob. The tarnished, dented brass sphere shivered, clattered, and made such a nuisance of itself it was as if a horde of Mexican jumping beans had taken possession of it. The undivided attention of the Letter 13 cast and crew was directed at the rickety wooden door where the globular protrusion pulsated and shimmied like a clunker teetering down an unpaved country road on worn shocks.

  The only sound competing with the twisting menace was Dana’s ragged breathing, either a result of her brief clash with Stan, the start she absorbed from the sudden intrusion of the doorknob gone berserk—or both. Otherwise, no one spoke or dared to move—absorbed in the moment, like infants hypnotized by a rotating mobile dangling over the crib. So they all watched and waited, hoped, and maybe even prayed, that some sort of real ‘boo-boo man’ wasn’t on the other side. Five minds ganged up to will the disconcerting racket to please stop. And it did.

  The collective relief inside the shack was palpable. The now benign doorknob that had appeared so threatening seconds before had returned to its normal inert state. The group exchanged nervous titters and awkward glances, and released the pent-up streams of air locked in their lungs.

  “Okay, I want everybody to just calm down,” Stan said, his agitated voice anything but calm. “It’s probably just Munyon.”

  “Yeah, but what if it isn’t?” a jittery Bryce proposed.

  “Only one way to find out, right?” Stan shot back, but realized from the stupor still present in the room that he would be the one answering his own question.

  It wasn’t intentional, but Stan couldn’t help but approach the door on his tiptoes, as if afraid even a creak on the floor could reawaken the cranky doorknob. His stealth movements were reminiscent of a spy attempting to infiltrate an enemy encampment. He braked a foot from the door, leaned forward another six inches and called out. “Mr. Munyon, that you?”

  No response.

  Stan turned, confounded, like a fan showing up for a game at Yankee Stadium and nobody around to open the gates. “Irv, take a look out the window.”

  Irv eschewed the same precautions that Stan took. His gait was swift as he stepped up to one of the front windows, cupped his eyes with his hands and peered out. His scouting report took mere seconds to compile. “Nothing,” he stated.

  “Bryce, check the other window,” Stan instructed, a whiff of irritation wafting from his words.

  Bryce appeared to be as thrilled to hear his name associated with Stan’s request as someone being summoned into a proctologist’s office for a rectal exam. His throat constricted around a dry swallow before he commenced his slow plod ahead toward his objective fifteen feet away. Taking a more tangential route, however, he crept next to the narrow wall space between the window and door, clinging to it like an escaping jailbird trying to avoid the spotlight scanning the prison fences. He hesitated, proceeding to flex his jaws several times and rotating his neck like it was a propeller on a crop duster. Indicating with a nod to the rest of the Letter 13 team glaring at him that he was ready, Bryce curled his upper torso around the edge of the window and, in one fell swoop, grabbed an ultra-speedy peek through the glass and returned to his original upright position. “All clear, people,” he announced, as definitively as if he was pronouncing the ocean was wet.

  “You sure?” a dubious Stan asked, because sure was something he wasn’t.

  “Of course I’m sure!” Bryce responded, affronted that the accuracy of his astute assessment could be in question. “I mean, look for yourself if you don’t believe me.” Emboldened by his previous foray to the window, he snatched a second glance outside, but this time around, came face to face with the ominous specter of Munyon glaring back at him. His nose was squished against the pane and gave him the grotesque guise of a medieval gargoyle. At first Bryce’s lips flapped up and down like a dummy without a ventriloquist’s voice attached. The panicked scream arrived seconds later, as if on satellite delay. “AAAAAAA!!!!”

  While Bryce beat a hasty retreat behind the couch, Dana joined in with an eruption of her very own. “AAAAAAA!!!!”

  Stan and Irv inched their way over to the window and, wary of what awaited them, deliberated a moment on how best to approach the potential threat. “On three,” Stan proposed. A slight head twitch by Irv was enough to indicate his approval. Stan started the countdown. “One, two…THREE!”

  They leaped in front of the window and were greeted by taps on the glass by Munyon, beaming and waving as if he was the jolly uncle stopping by to visit his favorite nieces and nephews.

  Bryce peeped over the top of sofa like it was the edge of an alligator pit. “Who is it?” he whispered.

  Stan spun around, placed his hands on his hips and stared at Bryce like a principal confronting the truant who pulled the fire alarm. “It’s just Munyon, you ninny. Get a grip!”

  While Irv unlocked the door, Bryce collected himself and, almost as an afterthought, let loose with a bevy of forced laughs, sounding about as natural as the chortles of a department store Santa Claus. “Ha! Ha! Ha! I knew that. Gotcha!”

  “Yeah, sure you did,” Stan muttered.

  “That wasn’t funny, Bryce,” Dana charged.

  Bryce dismissed her with a snap of his wrist. “Oh, grow up.”

  “You grow up!” she hissed.

  “Enough!” Stan demanded, as he clutched at the top of his cap in a fit of frustration.

  The door swung open and Munyon popped his head around the corner of the door frame like they’d all just finished a frisky game of hide-and-seek and nobody had found him. “Miss me?” He tromped in and surveyed his guests. “Sorry if I gave you all a start.”

  Bryce and Dana drooped their heads to avert making eye contact with Stan, who had turned in their direction. “Not all of us,” he pointed out, as if to apologize for everyone present except the offending duo.

  Munyon began to rove the cabin, extracting some rubble from one of nostrils with his pinky finger during his cringe-worthy inspection tour. He ground to a halt in front of Bryce. “Whatsa matter, whiner, got the heebie jeebies?”

  “Huh? The heebie what? No,” Bryce scoffed.

  Munyon winked. “Didn’t soil your skivvies, did ya?”

  “No!” Bryce objected, appalled at the suggestion of an excretory mishap.

  “Heard you squealin’ like a piggy missin’ his mama.” Munyon turned to the rest of the group, as if to confirm his suspicion, but was met with blank stares.

  “It so happens I just completed an extremely emotional scene,” Bryce sniffed.

  Munyon poked him with a playful jab in the stomach, robust enough to double Bryce over. “Well, hold on to your britches, ’cause I got just the thing to calm you down!”

  As Bryce clamped his arms around his gut, Munyon waddled over to a cupboard above the sink and pulled out a grubby, tapioca-colored clay gallon jug. He hoisted it like a triumphant warrior fresh off the battlefield displaying the severed head of a vanquished enemy soldier. “This’ll put some hair on your chest, boy—guaranteed!”

  Bryce glanced over at him with all the interest in sampling Munyon’s beverage as a vegan being offered a buffalo burger. “No, thank-you. I think I’ll just grow my own.”

  In a blink, Munyon’s jovial demeanor turned sullen. Stung by Bryce’s rejection, he skulked across the room, flung his right arm around the back of Bryce’s neck, and locked his head in a vise grip as if Bryce was a prisoner in a Puritan stockade. “Am I hearin’ you won’t share a man’s liquor he’s so generously offerin’?” Munyon asked, his beard nestled against Bryce’s ear lobe.

  Stan fidgeted, wary of Munyon’s erratic behavior, uncertain of a corrective move to ameliorate the volatile situation. It was as if he had spotted someone on the third floor window ledge of a burning building and had to decide whether to attempt the rescue himself or call the fire department. He realized that sometimes in directing a scene, if the actors go off script, allowing the action to play out without interference can lead to positive results, a happy accident that ends u
p superior to the original design. In fact, many directors will shoot an additional take, allowing the cast full reign to perform the scene in their own way, as they see fit, an extemporaneous free-for-all. Often it is this version that is retained in the final cut of the film. But what unfolded now before Stan’s eyes was not something he could permit to linger on without interjecting. Not as he watched Bryce sputter, his face flushed like a radish ready to detonate.

  Stan approached Munyon in the delicate manner of a stable hand about to inform the lord of the manor that his fly is down. “Uh, excuse me, uh, sir?”

  “Yeah?” Munyon barked, spittle cascading down from a corner of his mouth.

  “Well, what Bryce means,” Stan continued, with the tact of a seasoned diplomat, “is that he’d really, really like to, but he has to decline because we’ll be shooting some scenes for the movie shortly and he can’t partake of anything that might impair his performance. Uh, it’s in his contract, right Bryce?”

  Bryce tried to respond, but the words were waylaid deep in his throat by Munyon’s stranglehold and spattered out of his mouth a jumbled, unintelligible hodgepodge.

  Munyon squinted at Stan for several seconds, suspicion burning in each eyeball. “Contract, huh?” With the reluctance of a fox releasing a juicy hen, he eased off on the fleshy tourniquet he was applying to Bryce’s neck. He immediately collapsed backward onto the couch in a heap, massaging his Adam’s apple like he’d just been cut down from a hanging tree.

  Munyon lapsed into a state of deep contemplation, including the requisite chin strokes and pensive gaze off into the distance, as if he was scanning the vast reserves of his prodigious mind to probe any potential legal loopholes in Bryce’s contract. “Hmmm,” he pondered, before he reemerged with the look of a man just smitten with the bright idea of the century. “Well, what about you then, big cheese?” he said, directing his attention to Stan.

  Stan was as taken aback by the suggestion as he was about Munyon’s nickname for him. Rescuing Bryce was one thing, replacing him as Munyon’s drinking chum was quite another, and not a train he preferred to board. “Me?”

  “Why not? You ain’t no sissy actor,” Munyon pointed out, cocksure in his logic.

  Stan stammered like a tenderfoot forced to dance around the bullets being fired at his feet by a trigger-happy drunkard. “But, but…I am the director.”

  “So? Anybody can do that,” Munyon claimed. “It’s settled then.” He uncorked the jug, chugged a gulp, and discharged such a colossal belch it could have moved the needle on a seismograph. He slapped Stan on his shoulders and extended the vessel toward him, nudging Stan in the ribs. “Go ahead, big cheese, you’ll be wantin’ a whole lot more once it hits your lips.”

  Stan accepted it with all the enthusiasm an offer of hemlock would engender. He lodged his nose down next to the opening, inhaled a whiff, and jerked back from the backwash of the odor like it bit him. “Whew! What…is it…exactly?”

  Munyon tucked his thumbs under the straps of his overalls, rolled back on his heels, and spouted his answer as though he was unveiling the eighth wonder of the world. “Genuine homemade hooch!”

  “Moonshine,” Irv noted, his acerbic monotone undercutting Munyon’s grand proclamation.

  “Right you are there, string bean. Good ol’ corn liquor!” Munyon enthused.

  Once again, Irv countered Munyon’s pitch-man ardor with a passion equivalent to the dreary recitations of an economics professor breaking down the GDP of Bolivia. “Essentially pure ethanol. You could fuel a car with this stuff.”

  Despite Irv’s negative appraisal, Munyon’s fervor didn’t wane an iota. His chest puffed out like a vacuum cleaner bag with the revelation that his hand-crafted libation could double as gasoline. “Yep siree, Bob, she kicks like a mule with a bee up its behind. Get it? BEE-hind?”

  Munyon exploded in a deluge of fitful laughter over his own joke as the Letter 13 team, prompted by his glower, chipped in with a few polite chuckles.

  Stan stood by and cradled the container as if someone had stuck him with a bag of grenades and expected him to dispose of it. “Uh, well, not that I don’t appreciate your generous offer, Mr. Munyon, but I don’t—”

  Munyon rammed the jug a pinch from Stan’s chin. “Don’t what?” he snapped, the threat of harrowing repercussions from a wrong answer dangling in the air.

  “Don’t…think it’ll be a problem,” Stan replied, as he opened his mouth, tilted back his head, and prepared to pour the potent grog down his gullet.

  Before a drop could touch his tongue, however, Keisha swooped in, snatched the jug from Stan’s grasp, and sloshed down a hearty swig. Her plucky intervention pumped the eyebrows of her stunned teammates as she smacked her lips and calmly handed the jug back to a stupefied Munyon like she’d just polished off a belt of sweet lemonade instead of his stout mix.

  “Well,” Munyon chirped, “I’m glad someone’s got some acorns around here!”

  Keisha wasn’t impressed. “Could have used more sugar in your mash.”

  “Finer than frog hair and knows her white lightnin’ to boot!” Munyon appeared so enamored with Keisha’s insight that if there was a fiddler in the house, he might have broken into a jig. Instead, his mood digressed to a more lecherous avenue of pursuit as he swayed over to Keisha like a sailor on shore leave in a Singapore dive bar and burrowed his face in the nape at the top of her spine. “Plenty more where that came from, darlin’, know what I mean?”

  Keisha stiffened and pursed her lips, but before Munyon’s hands could

  wander into any forbidden territories, Stan shoehorned his way between them like the third person in a telephone booth. His face was squished against Munyon’s breast, Keisha wedged behind him and shielded from any further salacious advances. “Uh, excuse me, but Mr. Munyon, about that firewood?”

  Munyon glared down at Stan for a few uncomfortable seconds then backed off, miffed by the interruption, as disappointed as a boy who’s just had his new pony taken away. He set the jug on the table and began to carve an arc around the room, finding his normal mien once again after the diversion of a lustful encounter gone astray. “Gonna need me some volunteers. Help carry it in,” he growled, in the usual gruff manner to which the Letter 13 cast and crew had become accustomed. “Unlessin’, of course, you all just want to use our body heat to keep warm and we can all cuddle together tonight.”

  Munyon gazed around the room, a twinkle in his eye, hopeful his proposal would find traction. The answer, however, was swift to arrive and not likely to lead to him sandwiched in the middle of a group snug-fest: the entire crew chimed in with a resounding chorus of no.

  His suggestion rejected, Munyon regrouped and without any further delay pointed at Keisha and Dana. “All right then, you and you.”

  “Uh, they can’t. Sorry, uh, sir,” Stan stated, more sheepish than insistent.

  Munyon sighed, as if worn down by head-butting the numerous barriers Stan erected in front of him. “Now what’s your problem?”

  “Well, uh,” Stan explained, “because they were just out and Bryce and Irv have to, you know, go…”

  “Tinkle?” Munyon suggested.

  Stan nodded. Munyon broke into a mischievous grin, paraded over to Stan, and drilled him in the arm with his elbow in the way a best bud might at a club as they checked out the fresh meat strolling through the door. “I get ya. Want both these wildcats to yourself, eh, big cheese?”

  “Dana’s my sister!” Stan protested, appalled by the raunchy intimation.

  “Nothin’ wrong with that!” Munyon chortled, oblivious to the moral implications of his incestuous innuendo. He eyeballed Bryce and Irv and motioned to them. “Come on, you two. Time to drain the little dragons.”

  He proceeded to the door, waited for Bryce and Irv to pass through, and blew a kiss back at Keisha and Dana before departing.

  Dana sprinted to the door and slammed it shut. “Eeewww! He’s SO disgusting!”

  Keisha snickered. “I guess cud
dling’s out then, huh?”

  Dana paced from one side of the shack to the other like a tiger provoked by a loudmouth airhead badgering it outside the cage. “I swear, if he comes anywhere near me, I’ll kick him right in the—”

  “Acorns?” Keisha proposed. “Which apparently I now possess.”

  “Which, by the way,” Stan interjected, “reminds me that I owe you a big thanks. It was pretty ballsy what you did.”

  Keisha shrugged off the compliment. “Not really. I spent a few years in rural North Carolina growing up. Drinking rotgut sort of came with the territory.”

  Dana folded her arms and smirked. “Stan would have chucked his cookies.”

  “Would not have.” Stan shot back.

  “Would too have,” Dana countered. “Just like at Uncle Nat’s wedding when you drank too much punch.”

  “I choked on a cherry!” he protested. Stan recalled some major hurling in the restroom, too, but wasn’t prepared to admit to that in front of the present company.

  “Duh. Same thing.” Dana asserted, not allowing the facts to get in the way of her conclusion.

  Before Stan could offer up any further counterpoint, a chainsaw roared to life somewhere in the distance. Stan and Dana froze as Keisha was drawn to a front window. “Dear god, I hope Bryce didn’t open his mouth,” she fretted aloud.

  As her words sank in, the trio rotated to face each other, fearful of what they couldn’t see, more frightened by what they could…in each other’s eyes.

  Chapter 13