Land of a Hundred Wonders

  His mouth falls open and he fuschias clean up to his roots. “Why . . . why would ya think that?”

  “You smell like her specialty,” I say, showing off my perceptive investigative skills. “Green apple, caramel, and salty peanuts.”

  He thinks I won’t notice that he’s begun sniffing himself a little.

  “I’m not being a nosy Parker,” I explain. “I’m just trying to figure out why it’s so damn important to everybody that they get some of this hot sex. A course I’ve seen animals . . . but is it the same with humans or does it have something to do with love?”

  I don’t think it does. But it could. I’ve heard hot sex referred to as “making love.” On the other hand, I’ve also heard it referred to as “pounding the snow possum.”

  The reverend, even more fuschiated, asks, “Who exactly would ya be thinkin’ about in regards to this topic?”

  Well, I could go on and on, couldn’t I, but settle on, “Well, Willard, for one.”

  “Who’s Willard?”

  “Our next-door neighbor this summer. He thinks about hot sex quite a bit and tells Clever he loves her, but he’s makin’ her give her baby away to a social.”

  Reverend Jack’s mouth does not circle into a surprised O when he hears that Clever’s having a baby. Not much of what she does surprises anybody anymore. “Hot sex, I mean, sex, I mean sexual relations, that’s an awfully complicated subject.” He checks his Timex. “How about we continue this discussion next time?”

  I don’t say it out loud, ’cause I don’t want the pastor to feel like he’s falling down on the job, but I think to myself, if Sneaky Tim Ray keeps on pace—well, next time might be too late.

  A Not So Hot Mama

  The next morning, same as every morning, I’m working at my bussing job out at Top O’ the Mornin’. It’s slow right now, so I’m using the time to get caught up on my reporting duties. My legs are sticking to the plastic on the booth that sits directly across from the COWGIRLS bathroom, where I recently checked those bruises on my legs. They’re turning a sunflower color. Even though Billy thinks I do, I don’t believe I fell down at the 57 Outdoor. No. Something else happened. I don’t have time right now to figure that mystery out, but make no mistake about it, like a Ridgeback-Russell mix, I will stay on that scent.

  The smell of half a can of Aqua Net gets to me long before Janice Lever does. I’ve seen pictures of her all done up in her twirling costume before she got pregnant with Clever in high school. Janice was rosy-cheeked and red-lipped back then and was planning to pursue an acting career. She’s faded now. Her hips got a nice relaxation to them, though. She’s worked at the diner for years, but before Grampa hired her, Janice was a bar girl at Mr. Bailey’s place.

  “Ya seen Carol lately?” Janice asks me in that snippy tone she’s ALWAYS got.

  “Last night.”

  “Oh yeah, where?” She’s holding coffees in one hand, Morse coding her pointy nails against the tray bottom with the other. Tap . . . tap . . . tap.

  “Don’t remember,” I tell her, back to my writing.

  “Well, the next time ya see her, tell her I put her belongin’s in a sack on Rudy’s back porch.” Tap . . . tap . . . tap.

  Oh boy, looks like Janice and Rudy Beaumont, who owns the bait shop, are an item.

  “Ya hear me?” Tap . . . tap . . . tap.

  I slap my pencil down. “I am NQR, not deaf, Janice. I hear you loud and clear,” I shout. “Ya kicked your only child out and put her belongin’s in a sack on Rudy’s back porch. I’m proud of ya.”

  “Ya know, it ain’t easy being a mother, so you can just get off your high horse,” she yells back.

  “For cryin’ out loud, I am not on a high horse or any other kind of horse. I’m sittin’ in my usual booth at the diner!”

  Hell. On top of everything else, Janice musta started up drinking again. She’s had a bushel of trouble with this in the past. Well, not the actual drinking part, she does that way above average. But the part where she shows up half naked with her sparkling baton in front of the post office singing “Return to Sender” at the top of her lungs? That’s the part she’s got the trouble with.

  “Table three is waitin’ on these specials,” Grampa calls out the kitchen peek window.

  “I’m on it,” Janice calls back to him, giving me one of her scalding looks, which I’m returning with my steely cold investigative eyes that I hope are portraying how rotten I think it is of her to kick Clever out again, especially since she’s knocked up. But that’s Janice Marie Lever for you. I’m pretty sure nobody would ever accuse this gal of being Selfless: Showing unselfish concern for the welfare of others.

  “Sometime this week would be good,” Grampa hollers.

  “How come ya want Clever to give away her baby like a free sample of fudge?” I ask her.

  I’m sure she’s about to tell me to keep my nose out of her business, like she always does when the subject of Clever comes up, when sudden-like her shoulders dip, and her lips draw up, and gosh, is Janice about to start crying? Well, that’d be a first. Mad is usually what she carries around. “Next time ya see her . . . tell her . . . tell Carol I’m sorry for bein’ such a bad mama and that I promise to make it up to her someday, all right?” she says, heading off to the booth near the front door ’fore Grampa can yell at her again to get her butt in gear.

  What I don’t do is call after her, “Sure thing. I’ll go find Clever and tell her that straight off, Janice,” because her saying that? Making that promise? That might mean something if it wasn’t what Janice has been promising since the beginning of time. That someday she’ll make it up to Clever for her running around and drinking and treating her daughter like she’s a hundred-pound weight been hangin’ off her neck since the day she was born. Most heartbreaking thing about all this, even though she doesn’t let on, I believe at the bottom of her heart, Clever holds out some hope for her mama’s eventual redemption. Not me.

  I go back to my writing on the Miss Cheryl and Miss DeeDee story.

  “Our visits to Land of a Hundred Wonders have been the high point of our lives,” says Miss Cheryl. “Who would have ever thought that . . .”

  “Mornin’, sunshine,” Willard says, plunking down in the booth in front of me with the foxiest of looks. He’s got on a tie-dyed T-shirt and pink granny glasses that’re perched down on his nose like a canary on a stick.

  “Hey,” I say, borrowing some of Janice’s pissiness. Ever since I learned about Willard wanting Clever to give her baby to that social, my bad feelings for him have multiplied faster than loaves. Why, he’s even worse than Sneaky Tim Ray. Not so obvious, if ya know what I mean, more like an on-the-way-to-going-rancid piece of meat. As an investigative reporter, I’ve developed a smell for this sort of thing.

  “Have you seen Carol lately?” Willard asks.

  Before I can tell him that I don’t have time to play Twenty Questions right now, that I got a deadline, Janice Lever shows up at Willard’s booth with a sigh so long it flaps the paper napkins. “Top O’ the Mornin’. What can I get for ya?” she drones.

  Willard eyes her up and down, strokes his dark mustache. I wonder if he knows that he’s making eyes at Clever’s mama. Probably not. Can’t see Clever introducing Willard to her over Sunday pot roast. ’Specially since there never is a Sunday pot roast.

  “I’ll start out with the biggest, chocolatiest piece of cake you have,” Willard tells Janice with a lick of his lips. “And a scoop of . . .”

  Where was I? . . . in such a short time. It’s nothing but . . .

  “Come on in here, Gib.” Miss Florida beckons to me through the cracked kitchen door.

  Damnation! It’s like the whole world is in cahoots, not wanting me to finish this story so I can get going investigating the murder of Mr. Buster Malloy and Yes! Yes! Yes! That’s the important thing I’ve been trying to remember all morning. Where’s my No. 2 gone off to?

  Miss Florida shouts again in that voice of hers that could raise t
he dead, “Right this minute.”

  Damnation times two!

  When I shove open the kitchen swing door, there’s Grampa bent over the deep fryers across the kitchen, his back to me. Miss Florida’s hunched over the double sink, up to her elbows in bubbles.

  “I’m tryin’ to get the paper done. What the hell ya want?” I say to her, fuming.

  “Mind your cursin’,” she says, following it up with a swat on my arm with her warm, wet hand.

  “I was in a car crash that hurt my brain so now it’s got a blue streak runs through it. Please accept my deepest of apologies. I’m workin’ on it. It’s just that Willard’s got my goat and Janice is doin’ that nail tappin’ and ya know how that irritates my brain and if I don’t get—”

  Miss Florida leans into me. “Ya shoulda told me las’ night that Carol’s mama kicked her out.”

  “Sorry . . . I just didn’t . . .”

  “I’m gonna keep her with me ’til the baby comes,” she says, back to rinsing coffee cups clean. “So she’s gonna need some a her things.”

  “Janice just told me she left a belongin’s sack for Clever over at Rudy’s. I gotta go up to Tanner Farm right now, but I could pick it up afterward.”

  With one eye, she throws off a withering look through the peek window at Janice. “Sack shouldn’t be too heavy, knowin’ her.” While I wouldn’t say the two of them were enemies, I would say they got cold shoulderin’ down to an art form. Miss Florida’s other eye is watching Grampa move from the fryers to the flat grill and back again. “Maybe we better keep this baby business on the QT for a while,” she says. “We don’ want him gettin’ even worse upset, do we?”

  No, we do not. He’s called me Gibson all morning. And been bossy as hell. That’s how ticked off he still is that me and Clever went AWOL the other night over in Browntown. And if he finds out that Clever’s gonna have a baby, there’s no telling how he’d react. Besides loco, I mean.

  “Charlie?” I call over to him. “I gotta go get my briefcase. Be back quick as I can.” Gonna have to get my scissors out tonight. His hair is curly round the collar. “Charles Michael Murphy?” Not even a shrug.

  Well, the heck with him if that’s the way he’s going to be.

  “On the QT,” Miss Florida whispers at me when I rush past her on my way outta the kitchen.

  The slam of the back screen door jolts Keeper awake. He can’t come into the diner because there’s a law, so when I’m bussing or writing, he spreads out back here beneath the pin oak with a mixing bowl of water and his beloved fetching stick. Grampa took that white bandage off Keep’s head last night and smeared Vaseline across the wound to keep it dry, so this morning, the top of my dog’s head looks a little like Elvis’s. Swept up like that. Debonair: Carefree and jaunty.

  Bending down to give him a lively scratch behind his ears, I tell him, “Look sharp, you ain’t nuthin’ but a newshound dog. We’re on assignment.”

  The Odd and the Otter

  There’s a shortcut to Tanner Farm through the woods behind the diner that empties out into Cubby’s Curios and Cool Drinks. Like I previously mentioned, Mr. Cubby St. James is well known as a taxidermist. That’s a person who plumps critters’ insides up once they are dead. He told me once he’d be happy to do that to Keeper after he moved on to that great kennel in the sky, no charge. “Ya know, like Roy Rogers done with Trigger.” I, of course, thanked him for his kind offer despite the fact that I was having a hard time not losing my peanut butter and honey all over him.

  Scattered about Mr. Cubby’s backyard showroom, in no particular order, there’s all sorts of stuffed stuff, including a grizzly bear lying down on a webbed recliner and reading a newspaper. (Mine.) A wide assortment of writhing snakes. An otter with a trout in his paws. Interest in taxidermy must run in families because Mr. Cubby’s brother, Mr. Owen St. James? He’s the proprietor of Owen’s Oddities out near the highway. Mr. Cubby’s business runs a tad on the slow side, but his brother’s place is thriving. That’s ’cause along with his stuffed animals, Mr. Owen’s got a pettin’ zoo with a five-legged pig that is a real crowd pleaser.

  Keeper, who normally goes pretty nuts for shortcuts, has not followed me through the trees into the showroom, but instead has chosen to take the long way around. (Don’t think he cares much for the way Mr. Cubby eyes him.)

  Weaving fast through the attractions, I am already waiting for Keeper next to the stuffed squirrel Mr. Cubby’s got sitting on top of his mailbox. “We don’t have all day,” I shout out to the part of the road that I know my dog’ll be coming down. “Ya better get on it, son. Looks like the weather’s turnin’.”

  That’ll get his attention. Keeper doesn’t care much for storms, and sure enough, here he comes, whipping down Tanner Road, neck and neck with a black VW bus.

  “Why did you run off?” Willard asks, when he slows at my side. He’s slouched up against the van door, chocolate frosting dotting the corners of his mouth and a cloud of hemp smoke riding shotgun. “Can I give you a ride?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “You never answered me back at the diner,” he says. “Have you or have you not seen Carol lately?”

  “Ready-set?” I say, acting like it takes all my concentration to throw Keeper’s fetching stick for him.

  “She’s got something of mine that she needs to return immediately.”

  Could he mean the baby? Has he changed his mind about giving it up to the social? “What’s she got that you need so bad?”

  Leaves are juddering. Branches vibrating. There’s another storm coming and it ain’t dawdling. “You remember that map I showed the two of you a few nights ago?” he asks, so reasonable.

  “N-o.”

  “Well, I showed it to you.”

  “What was it a map of?”

  “It’s a . . . treasure map.”

  I hadn’t realized how far we’d come on account of us conversating, but here we are already on the edge of Miz Tanner’s property. The Smith brothers are jogging horses back up to the barn from the paddocks. Teddy sees me, points up to the whirling dervish clouds. “Hurry on up here,” Vern hollers.

  “Be right there,” I yell back, attempting to cross to the other side of the road.

  Willard guns his engine, cuts me off. “How about if you and I make a deal? I’ll give you part of the treasure if you get that map from Carol and bring it to me.”

  I think real fast, much faster than I thought I was able. If there really is a treasure, then Clever and me could find it and then she’d have some money to buy diapers for her baby and some food. Everything could go back to the way it was before. Even better maybe, because I’ve always liked babies’ toes a whole lot. “Okay, it’s a deal. If I see Clever, I’ll get her to give me that treasure map and bring it to you straightaway. Swear on a stack.”

  (Boy, when I get my briefcase back, I’m giving myself two, no, three gold stars. I’m becoming a crackerjack liar!)

  “You find that map and bring it to me or else I’ll have to report Carol to the authorities for stealing and she’d have to go to jail,” Willard says, not sounding so reasonable anymore.

  The kind of thunder that turns tonsils into a tuning fork rumbles overhead and with a look of apology, Keeper takes off, butt scraping up Miz Tanner’s drive. (Lightning’s the only real thing that seizes him up.)

  “Already swore I’d bring ya the map, didn’t I?” I say, scooting behind the bus so he can’t run over me. I wouldn’t put anything past him at this point. He’s got a look of desperateness about him.

  “I’m warning you,” Willard yells. “Bring me the map tonight or there’ll be hell to pay.”

  Standing there, watching him take off down the road under the threatening sky, I’m left to thinking that man’s got an even darker side to him than I’d previously perceived. In fact, it’s clear as can be that Mr. Willard DuPree of New York City has got a whole lot more sympathy for the devil than he does for my Clever.

  By the time I stagger thro
ugh Miz Tanner’s barn doors, the storm has shared half of itself with me. “Keeper?” I call out, swiping the wet off. Popping his head out of the tack room, he gives me a nod, but slinks back fast under a saddle rack. (I’d go and comfort him, but he doesn’t go in for that sort of thing.) “I’m gonna get the leather-like, be right back.” Because no way am I waitin’ until the sky has finished throwing its hissy fit. I need my briefcase back NOW. I’ve been feeling as unbalanced as a tightrope walker without a pole. Inching out beneath the barn overhang, when I get to the bushes where I left it, I steady myself against the soaked barn wood, reach in and grope for the worn handle, but it’s nowhere there.

  “Gib? What . . . rain . . . doin’?” Miss Jessie yells. I didn’t notice her on my way up, but I shoulda known she’d be out on the porch in her bentwood rocker since she and I have more than once enjoyed watching a good gully washer together.

  I wave, but go right back to searching. Where the heck is it? With slipping feet, I try further down the side of the barn, around the evergreen bushes. Oh my God of heaven and earth. Did I put it somewhere else and don’t remember?

  Next I look up, here comes Miss Jessie jogging across the yard with a red umbrella. Adjusting it over both our heads, she says, “Well, this was sure unexpected.”

  I’m not sure if she means me or the rain.

  “What are you doin’?” she asks.

  “I’m lookin’ for my briefcase. I set it in these bushes when I came for the egg order and went home without it. My blue spiral’s in it and some film that I need to get right over to Bob’s Drug Emporium for developin’.”

  “I guess you and me are in the same boat. I can’t find Tim Ray and I need him to do some fence mendin’ once this storm passes. A couple of the herd broke through that back pasture this mornin’. Ya haven’t seen him, have ya?”

  I slide toward the hedge closest to the barn door and hatchet my arm straight down, but my hand comes back with nothing but scratches. “Can’t recall exactly,” I say, worried sick.

  “Be best if we come back and look for our lost items once this lets up.” It really is coming down almost biblical. “Let’s make a dash for the house,” Miss Jessie says, tugging on my arm.