rich families, he had sworn off intoxicants of any kind. This included alcohol and certainly smoking herbs in the greenhouse, of which the brownie had no shame.
The Tarwicks watched in horror as the three drunks snaked around the mansion changing locks and securing metal grates over the windows, zip drills in hand. They were having a great time doing it. High-fives were dolled out and bottles clinked. Little booty-shaking dances were knocked out when they got half the chance.
Then other friends of the brownie showed up with bagfuls of money, which they gave the creature in an apparent exchange for a grand tour of the mansion. There were no levels of depravity to which the brownie would not stoop.
Fast forward another hour and there was the brownie and his saggy secretaries bunkered down in the library, empty bottles lined up across the desk. Airybus had what appeared to be an old fashioned quill in his hand. He signed contract after contract placed in front of him by the secretaries. His name was scrawled in a flamboyant manner with a huge lopsided B and a gigantic O struck through the middle. Even on the video it was apparent he was signing:
Βφφker Tarwick III.
The way he did it reminded Chelsea of the scrawls of a serial killer.
In repetition, he would dip the quill in the inkwell and sign again. He was so happy doing it behind those cabinetknob ears and glowing nose wart.
Booker pointed at the screen. “Those are the letterheads of my companies. He’s signing board resolutions!”
“What?” Chelsea asked. She really could care less about the many companies in the county on which Booker sat on the board of directors.
“Don’t you get it? He’s taken control of the businesses. He forged my signature!”
“That’s funny,” exclaimed Claire.
“No it isn’t, honey. That’s not funny at all. I’m not kidding.”
Booker’s finger pressed down hard on the keyboard. The images on the quartet of video monitors raced forward. He stopped after two more hours had flickered past. The monitor on the right showed images of the west side of the mansion, near the garage where the family stood.
The brownie was pounding a large sign in the pea gravel driveway.
Clunkers 4 Sale, Cats!
Little Bread!!!
Booker watched in horror as the brownie punched button after button, opening the garage doors. Sitting on each windshield of his prized collection was a white sign. Booker squinted at the screen in search of the missing zeros at the end of the prices. None of the classic vehicles were valued more than the cost of a riding lawnmower.
While Booker sat in shock, Chelsea looked out a garage window.
Outside of the Alabaster Mansion the crush of people remained. They were praising Airybus for giving away all the money of the Alabaster Mansion as he waved from an upper window. To these uneducated lethargic denizens of the county, the brownie offered hope.
VIII. The Fate of the Mansion
Booker raced to the back of the house in a fury. He was not going to get near the crowd. With both fists he thundered on the back door of the mansion.
“Get out here right now, you freakin’ brownie! You hear me? Right this instant! This is my house.”
Booker yanked at the doorknob then the metal grates over the windows. He pounded away; elbows, fists, hips, shoulders all getting a piece of the action. He kicked. Spittle flew from his lips.
For how long he raged at the back of the mansion he would never know for sure. He did it until his toes hurt and shin splints bolted up his legs from kicking the door. He did it until the joints of his fingers and shoulders ached with pain. He did it until lightning bolts shots up his neck. He did it until he could do it no more and slumped onto the slate tiles of the patio feeling useless and used.
After a few moments he noticed Chelsea and the girls crying off to the side in helplessness. None of them had ever seen Booker this way. Not even close in the way he was making—
“Hey!”
Booker thought one of the girls was trying to get his attention. He glanced over at them. They could not even look over at him.
“Hey, what’s all the racket?” they heard from somewhere up above. “Cool it, would ya?”
There sat the brownie on the third story balcony in his cheap suit, feet on the railing, round sunglasses on, dragging away on a smoke and blowing O-shaped smoke rings into the crisp fall air. For an instant it struck Chelsea that she and Booker had made love on that very same balcony last fall. And then the fond remembrance vanished—
“I was about to take a nap, dig?”
Chelsea and Claire pointed in astonishment while Jan chanted, “Airybus! Airybus!”
Booker propped himself to his aching knees and then staggered to his feet. He slowly walked from under the portico and squinted up.
“Whoa, you gotta chill, Daddy’O.”
Booker tried to refrain his speech. As a result, the order came out with reserve. “Let us back in our house. This little joke has gone too far.”
“Your house? Joke? I got news for ya, Daddy’O, this is my house now. You don’t live here anymore. Out of the goodness of my heart I’ll let you come by once in awhile.”
Booker heard Chelsea whimpering behind him and that’s when he lost it again. “This is OUR house! We invited you to stay with us, remember? Do I need to remind you? It wasn’t all that long ago when you pranced up the lawn with that little parade of yours to announce your entrance. You tore up lawn in the process. You sprayed the armpits of my shirts so it looked like I was sweating profusely. You peeked in on Chelsea in the shower and then made her underwear smell like fish.”
The brownie tossed his head back and tittered at this.
“You’ve been smoking who knows what in the house and in front of the girls. In doing so you caught the place on fire and you bounced the basketball at all hours of the night so we couldn’t sleep and then got out the golf clubs and . . . and put a hole in the greenhouse window. And we saw you on that talk show—don’t ask me how a joker like you got on it—and you were yucking it up like you didn’t have a care in the world, making fun of mentally handicapped people while you did it—”
“Man, Booker, don’t be so serious.”
Chelsea interjected, “You told the world about our financial situation.”
That’s when the Tarwicks noticed a figure inside the mansion. It was peering from the presidential bedroom on the third floor. They recognized him as the grisly specter of the mansion. A wry grin was stamped across his face and he wagged his tongue at the family. It seemed that even the specter had defected. This pained the family despite Chelsea’s ongoing intuition that the ghost was not as loyal to the Tarwicks as he led on all these years.
Booker took to pacing in short bursts—off in one direction and back the opposite way—hands clasped behind him. “And you commandeered the company jet. When you got back you fired my CEOs and changed ownership of my companies. In celebration you invited your buddies over and drank cheap beer throughout the house. You sold my seven figure collection of antique automobiles for pennies on the dollar. You called them clunkers.”
“Uh, look . . . the only reason I called them clunkers . . . was because . . . they got low gas mileage. Terrible for the environment, Daddy’O. How are those greenhouse . . . gases, by the way.”
Booker heard none of the responses as he paced. “You’ve locked us out and miserably failed on all of your promises to make the mansion a better place. You’ve ruined all my hard work. You’ve caused so much anger and strife.”
“Uh, look . . . can’t be too much . . . the county gave me a peace prize while you were gone.” The brownie fished out of his suit pocket with his left hand (to wit: he was a lefty) a round medal that glinted in the sun as it twisted on its ribbon.
“This is useless. Come on,” Booker said to his family.
The Tarwicks left the Alabaster Mansion in disgust that day with full intentions of wresting ownership back into the family by various political and social mechanisms to w
hich Booker Tarwick had access. He would soon learn, however, that he had been forced out of his feted positions within the county, replaced by Airybus to the delight of the poor and the pompous. The Tarwicks would never return to the Alabaster Mansion and lived in relative obscurity in Texas, or perhaps it was Tennessee.
There are those in the county who claim the Alabaster Mansion started to fall into ruin on the day of the Tarwick’s departure and still others claim it happened years before under the negligent watch of Booker Tarwick himself. The split is equal among the residents.
What is for sure is that to this very day the brownie can be seen through the barred windows of the mansion strutting up and down the halls, cigarette in hand, laughing and smiling. Occasionally a window will fly open and a fistful of money will be tossed out. The shutters of the mansion are coming unhinged. Shingles have fallen into the rickety gutters that are detaching at the roofline. The columns of the porticos are streaked in filth. The once shimmering alabaster façade has become mottled and stained from lack of care.
And if one listens carefully from the street, the brownie can be heard tittering in an evil way from one of the rooms of the decaying Alabaster Mansion.
November 4, 2009
The Brownie
of the
Alabaster Mansion
Afterword
It is now February 2011 and I have heard from a somewhat reputable woman who is intimately associated with the brownie that he has stopped