Maye’s ears sizzled with embarrassment, although they would have burst into flames if it hadn’t been for the vodka gimlet and the two glugs of wine. The entire table had grown silent, as if waiting for Mother Superior to release her brimstone on a particularly disobedient student.
“I haven’t entered yet,” Maye said, slowly and cautiously, “but my sponsor is Cynthia McMahon.”
Rowena raised her eyebrows and put her waxy index finger on her chin. She paused for a moment.
“Is that right?” she said. “Cynthia McMahon? And how did you stumble upon Cynthia McMahon?”
“Cynthia,” Maye began, “is my neighbor. And she has agreed to sponsor me. Do you know her?”
Rowena nodded. “Yes, I do,” she said through her pinched mouth. “She held the title several years after I did. I had heard she was sponsoring a UNICEF girl from Africa who was going to dance in native costume, which was, by the way, nonexistent.”
“No,” Maye corrected her. “She was sponsoring a Peace Corps volunteer who had worked in Cameroon and caught a parasite.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” she said with an exaggerated, full-blown smile and a cackle. “With no naked, native disease-ridden girl, there is a chance for first place after all! Melissabeth is a trained opera singer, isn’t that right, dear?”
“Absolutely,” Rowena’s protégée chirped. “I got into Juilliard but went to the University of Virginia instead to be near Stuart. I did get a five-minute standing ovation for my Queen of the Night aria when I sang with the Virginia Opera. I can’t wait to sing it again.”
“She was amazing,” her ruddy-faced potato of a husband said.
“Now, now,” Rowena cautioned. “Let’s be a little careful with our cards, shall we? We don’t want to give our whole hand away.”
Maye realized that unless she had been a former prima ballerina with the Bolshoi Ballet, she couldn’t touch Melissabeth’s talent segment, and Rowena knew it. But Rowena apparently also knew what Maye had heard—that Cynthia had been one of the most regal Sewer Pipe Queens in Spaulding history, and that made Rowena nervous. Maye could tell by the way she pursed her lips tighter than usual and picked at her salad, just moving the pieces around. She was thinking. Her hooked finger was tapping against her fork.
Maye was about to whisper to Charlie to ask if she could have his pecans when one of her molars bit into something much harder than a pecan. Much harder than any nut, even if it was entombed in a glorious hard-shell candy coating. It was so hard Maye thought it might be a penny.
Suddenly, she gasped, and sucked a gulp of air into her mouth, immediately sending knives of pain into her jaw. Within a fraction of an instant, she knew what it was, covered her mouth with her hand, and hoped Charlie had good dental insurance.
Charlie looked at her, perplexed, but Maye could say nothing. She just waved her right hand discreetly but quickly to signify, “Holy shit, Charlie, that woman planted a candied concrete pecan in my salad that has now wrenched the massive filling out of my molar that was the only thing keeping it whole and in my jaw!”
She couldn’t spit it out, and she certainly couldn’t swallow it. Maye took the only avenue she saw open to her—either finding the elusive restroom or at least holing up in the hallway where she could find the filling privately. She quickly pushed her chair back, but as she did, in slow motion, her wineglass, salad dish, and silverware moved oddly toward her as if being pulled by a magic force, like she was a magician. The wineglass teetered from side to side, sloshing its contents, as the china crawled closer and closer to the table’s edge. Maye was entirely perplexed by the unexplained parlor trick as the dishes and glasses kept moving and moving as if they were on a conveyor belt until Charlie jumped up and in one sudden, heroic swoop yanked the tablecloth trapped between Maye’s two holiday belly sausages away with the precision of a bullfighter and without sacrificing a single drop of wine.
While Charlie got a mild round of applause for his magnificent efforts in releasing the hostage tablecloth from Maye’s fat rolls—whose size was clearly exaggerated and magnified, by the way, by the cheap acrylic and ill-fitting sweater—Maye stood up, the fat rolls vanished into the girth of her belly, and she tried not to choke on her filling.
“I’m so sorry,” Maye said as the chunk of silver swam around her mouth. “But we have to go. I need to find a dentist on call, apparently. Thank you for a wonderful evening.”
And as Charlie and Maye left the room, they both heard Rowena chuckle and then announce, “Well, I think we all know what her talent segment should be, now don’t we? I bet there’s enough suction there to pull a tractor!”
8
Blood on the Street
M ickey’s best friend in dog school, Sammy, looked at Maye with sad, longing eyes. “Please take me home and raise me as your own,” they said. “I live with a stripper and her son, Fish Face. He’s a decent kid, but they feed me generic Lucky Charms for dinner and the only clean dish in the house is the one I wash myself. I drink out of a toilet bowl, and I would give my left nu-nu for a patch of green grass. I often pee in her stripper shoes for well-deserved revenge. She never notices.”
“Sit, Sammy, sit!” Finding Nemo instructed, but the greyhound was not a bit interested in performing a command for which the reward was a dirty chunk of a Milk-Bone the mother had fished out of the bottom of her purse.
“Please sit, Sammy, please!” the child cried again, and clearly out of pity, the dog finally obeyed, although he refused to gobble the lint-covered reward that Finding Nemo held out so proudly for him.
“Yeah, Sammy, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop!” Gwen, the dog trainer, called, winding her arm in the air as the crinkled flesh beneath it swung wildly, grazing her face several times. “Now, can Sammy lie down?”
The dog collapsed to the floor without any further encouragement, almost as if to get the show over with. “Yeah, Sammy!” Gwen ballyhooed again, and this time Maye knew what was coming and averted her eyes.
“Eat the cookie, Sammy!” Finding Nemo insisted. “Don’t you like it, boy? Don’t you like it?”
“Shh! Give me that,” Mama Nemo whispered as she grabbed her son’s arm, plucked the rotten purse turd out of his fingers with her glittery, pterodactyl nails, and placed it on the floor in front of the dog. “There, Sammy! Leave it! Don’t eat the cookie, Sammy. Don’t eat it!”
The dog wasn’t remotely attracted to the cookie, which on closer inspection didn’t look so much like a cookie as it did a mummified rabbit’s foot or a chunk of hashish or Dick Cheney’s dehydrated, rock-hard, and coal-like soul. Luckily for Sammy, dogs have sharper senses, and he probably knew that digesting the mystery lump would have most likely led him down a truly dark path, like an encounter with a tube shoved down his esophagus and a stomach pump.
“Okay, I am happy to say that Sammy has now graduated from obedience school! Congratulations, Sammy!” Gwen cheered as she handed the stripper a diploma at the same time that Sammy launched his body over the volleyball net that surrounded the class and tried to find another family on the adoption aisle to take him home. “Who’s next? Grand Duchess Anastasia?”
Lady, the one and the only, had already had her turn and successfully responded to every command with a nice little spray from her bladder, and Mad Dog had been expelled from class several weeks before when he showed up with blood on his face that had not yet dried.
Maye was not really even sure if Grand Duchess Anastasia, the bichon frise show dog, even had a heartbeat. She had never seen it so much as blink, and it never once in the course of the class left its treelike perch in its owner’s arms. Maye and Charlie had speculated that the dog was not so much a stuffy dog as it was a stuffed toy made in an Asian sweatshop by child workers, and that there were some deep-rooted loss and abandonment issues taking place behind those BluBlockers.
“Okay,” Gwen started. “Can Grand Duchess Anastasia sit?”
“Yes,” the owner said in a rusty, deep voice.
?
??Oh, good, that’s good,” Gwen agreed. “Can we see it?”
“You’ll have to take my word for it,” she said from behind her windshield of sunglasses. “She can sit.”
“Can she lie down?” Gwen asked, getting frustrated.
“Of course,” the owner said, completely unflinching, as was her dog, both of them staring at Gwen like prey.
“All right, we’ll come back to you,” Gwen said, moving on to Mickey, who sat, lay down, stayed, shook, rolled over, and left his cookie (a real cookie, not some leftover narcotic residue Maye found at the bottom of her purse) when he was supposed to, and ate it when he was given a reward.
“Congratulations, Mickey!” Gwen announced when Mickey finished his last test. “You’re the valedictorian of your class!”
“There’s a valedictorian?” Maye asked incredulously. “Wow, Mickey! That’s amazing! What a good boy!”
“I will even write a letter to the post office to let them know how well he did,” Gwen said. “Mickey was a joy to have in class. I wish I had more like him.”
“We had fun,” Charlie agreed. “I know we arrived by dubious means, but it turned out to be a good thing for all of us, even though Mickey still goes ballistic when the mailman—I mean letter carrier—comes. There’s something about him that does not agree with Mickey.”
“That’s so odd, Mickey is such an agreeable dog. Actually, I think Mickey should continue his training,” Gwen added. “He’s very bright, loves a challenge, and is quite responsive. And he can sing! I would like to see Mickey go on to our agility-training course, in which he will not only jump hurdles but learn how to drive a doggie car and play a piano!”
“I don’t know if Mickey needs to know how to play a piano,” Charlie began.
“Are you kidding? Yes he does!” Maye interrupted. “What if he’s a canine Mozart or Elton John? We can’t just stop his education now, when it’s going so well! Consider him in.”
“Class starts next week,” Gwen informed them.
“We’ll be there,” Maye said, smiling.
“Mickey does not need to learn how to play a doggie piano,” Charlie said as they drove home. “We fulfilled the post office’s demands. Let’s just leave it at that.”
“Charlie,” Maye said sternly. “Are you insane? There is only one way I’m going to beat Beverly Sills singing one of the most difficult arias in all of opera, and that’s singing a song accompanied by my dog, at the piano.”
“Ahhhhh,” Charlie said, nodding and grinning wide as he pulled to a four-way stop sign. “I see your dastardly plan now! That’s true. If you could incorporate the element of fire as well, you’ve got it hands down, baby.”
“I have to beat them,” Maye replied as the driver of a VW bus at the south stop sign, whose turn it really was to go, motioned for the Honda at the west stop sign to go ahead. “It’s become a whole thing for me now, it’s taken on a completely new meaning. I went in and filed my pageant paperwork today and paid the five-dollar entry fee. It’s official now. I have to beat Rowena Spaulding.”
“You have to beat Rowena Spaulding at her own game,” Charlie agreed as the Honda waved to the bicyclist at the east stop sign to go ahead. “Dean Spaulding has always been nothing but kind and generous to me, but that crone of a wife of his is so awful she comes complete with her own opera-singing henchman. You have to beat her, Maye, there’s no two ways about it.”
“Well, certainly, the name of Cynthia McMahon sent a shock through her system,” Maye said as the bicyclist waved to the VW bus to go first. “Did you see her? I thought I heard a train whistle blow as steam came shooting out her ears. She has the kind of self-esteem you only see in people like Genghis Khan or a housewife in Orange County.”
“‘I’m Dean Spaulding’s wife and I have been for fifty years,’” Charlie mocked her, scrunching up his nose and squealing in a high-pitched voice as the VW bus made a run for it, then stopped when the Honda did the same. “She thinks she runs this town. You need to show her she can’t have everything.”
“I just don’t know why she hates me so much,” Maye added as the Honda started to go a second before the VW bus got a hit of gas, too, then both stopped short, just inches from the center of the intersection. “Does the woman really hate me because of a sweater? How can you hate someone because of a sweater? You can hate the sweater, but hating the person inside of it is ridiculous!”
“There’s something about you she can’t stand,” Charlie agreed as the Honda waved at the VW bus to go, the VW bus waved back, and in the meantime, the bicyclist shot through the intersection clear to the other side. “That is very clear. Maybe you remind her of someone she knows or used to know. I’ve met people like that before, haven’t you?”
“Sure,” she complied as the Honda waved to Charlie and the driver of the VW bus threw up his hands. “But I wouldn’t aggressively pick on them at a dinner party in front of their husbands’ colleagues!”
“Well, that’s true, but you didn’t help your cause much with the sweater of cows pulling a blind Santa,” Charlie chuckled as the VW bus, the Honda, and a new arrival, a Subaru, all turned and waved Charlie on at the exact same moment. “That stab was a bit obvious, if you ask me.”
“It was obvious, but I was trying to make a point,” she replied. “But I am worried that she hates me so much that she’ll make it difficult for you at the university.”
“Listen,” he said, turning toward her. “As long as you play fair and square, which I know you will, I don’t think there’s anything to worry about. I respect Dean Spaulding, and I really doubt that anything will happen to my position because of his meddling wife. When it comes to the department, I would be surprised if he let the workings of it become disrupted because of a beauty contest. That hardly seems professional.”
Charlie gunned through the intersection, and Mickey began to make a forlorn groaning sound.
“Why are you singing, Mickey?” Maye asked. “We don’t have the radio on.”
“That’s not singing,” Charlie said. “He’s not singing. I’ve never heard him make that noise before.”
Mickey continued to moan, and when they were four blocks from their house, the groan became a full somber howl.
“What’s the matter?” Maye said as she turned and tried to comfort her dog, but Mickey was inconsolable, his howls taking on a higher pitch.
“Oh God!” Charlie cried. “You don’t think he ate that hashish brick from Pebbles’s purse, do you?”
“He was the valedictorian of his class, Charlie,” Maye shot back. “If Sammy wasn’t going to eat a stale chunk of hallucinogens, Mickey wouldn’t either.”
“What’s wrong, boy?” Charlie asked Mickey. “What’s the matter?”
Charlie and Maye simply needed to look up to answer that question. What looked like a flashing parade lined and blanketed both sides of the street in front of their small, English-style cottage. Revolving red lights of fire engines whipped quickly across their front windows, alternating with flickering blue lights from the squad cars that silhouetted the towering pine trees and created a strobe-light effect. The bright, white lights of the ambulance lit up the usually darkened street like it was a movie set. There were so many emergency vehicles clogging the street that Maye and Charlie couldn’t even get close to their house.
“Oh my God,” Maye said as she looked at Charlie. “What is it? Can you see the house? Is it still there? Is it on fire?”
“I don’t know, I can’t get a good look from here,” Charlie replied, trying very hard to stay calm. “It looks like it’s standing; I can’t smell smoke. Do you smell smoke?”
Maye shook her head and got out of the car. They left Mickey in the backseat, now oddly and mournfully quiet, and started up the street. Even as they got closer it became hard to tell what was going on, and although there were dozens of people milling about, the street held an eerie silence, broken only by the static and garbled conversations of emergency radio broadcasts.
N
ow, in front of their house, which was indeed standing, Maye and Charlie stood and watched the scene for several moments, still unsure of what had happened, until Maye saw John Smith, the plumber cop, getting out of his police car.
“John!” Maye called into the stillness of the night, waving her hand, and walked over to him with Charlie by her side.
“Hey, Maye, Charlie,” John replied, nodding. “Sad thing. Sad, sad thing.”
“What happened?” Maye asked anxiously. “We just got home, we don’t know—what happened?”
John dropped his head and shook it again, this time more slowly, as if trying to collect himself. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he finally said, looking up at them. “There was an attack. It was murder, you could say.”
Maye and Charlie were too stunned to say anything. A murder. On their street. Dead. Someone was dead, possibly someone they knew.
“Someone’s dead?” Maye finally squeaked out. “Who? What happened? Someone on the street, one of our neighbors? Who was it? What happened, John?”
“We think it happened a couple of hours ago when it was still daylight,” the plumber cop explained. “She must have looked at him funny, is all we can figure, but when the husband came home, she was lying out in the backyard and there was that masked bandit, clawing at her face like it was trying to eat a Fruit Roll-Up. Doesn’t look like there was much of a struggle, maybe she was caught by surprise, but her neck is broken. In any case, she was dead by the time we got here. Nothing we could do. Not a thing. Like I said, never seen anything like it.”
Maye gasped and covered her mouth.
“A masked bandit? Did you catch him? Is he still out there?” she whispered.
“Probably up in one of these trees,” John said, pointing above them. “They can climb pretty fast once they get spooked.”
“What? Um, I’m sorry, if there’s a murderer in these trees, I think you guys should try to catch him now,” Maye said sternly. “What if he strikes again? What if there are more killings?”