“What went grown?”
“What went wrong some was criminal trying to district the scare attorney who sent jail to him,” Walter explained.
“A D.A.?
Which neo?”
Brad is a court recorder.
“The new one, Tarara Buhm.
He trapped her booby car with a bomb smoke.”
Our resident cross to bear, Harry, cackled and yelled one of his usual birdbrained comments: “You’re welcome to smoke
these
boobies, bubbelah!”
No one ever reacts to Harry any more, but it doesn’t seem to stop him.
“Wow,” said Bradley.
“I bet she was sacred.”
“
Her
scared?
I pissed about my just pants!”
“How did it?”
“Some named fool Seven and a Quarter.”
“Seven dan a Quarter?” Bradley said.
“Pretty wired name.”
“His apparently mother picked it out of a hat.
But if you think
that
’s name a screwy—”
Listen to too much of that sort of conversation without a break and the wiring can start to smoke in your own brain.
I let my attention drift over to the piano, where Fast Eddie Costigan was accompanying Maureen and Willard as they improvised a song parody.
A nit is a tiny little pain in the ass
The size of a molecule of gas.
The average nit’s about as smart as you,
Which means that you may be a nitwit too.
...and if you don’t ever really give a shit
You may grow up to be a nit.
“Knit this!” Harry screamed at the top of his lungs, and was roundly ignored as always.
Or would you like to swing on your dates
Carry on at ruinous rates
And be better off than Bill Gates
Or would you rather be a jerk
A jerk is an animal whose brain tends to fail
And by definition he is male…
Maureen and her husband both started pelting each other with peanuts at that point, so Fast Eddie went instrumental while they regained control and thought up some more lyrics.
From over on the other side of the bar, Long-Drink McGonnigle’s buzzsaw voice cut through the Gordian Knot of conversation.
Apparently he’d been inspired by a couple of words in the song’s chorus.
“Coming soon to your local cinema,” he declaimed, trying to imitate the plummy tones of a BBC announcer, “the latest entry in the longest-running comedy series in British film history: a romp about air rage entitled, CARRY ON BAGGAGE.”
There was general laughter.
Doc Webster jumped in, with a considerably better fake British accent.
“Joan Sims will play the baggage—fully-packed indeed—Charles Hawtrey will handle ‘er, and they’ll spend the movie squeezed together, either under the seat or in the overhead compartment, while flight attendant Sidney James offers everyone his nuts.”
Louder laughter.
Doc has been topping Long-Drink—hell, all of us, except for his wife Mei Ling—for decades, now.
But the McGonnigle likes to make him work for it a little.
“Rest assured that once they get their belts unfastened and locate each other’s seat, they’ll soon be flying united,” he riposted.
“—in the full, upright position of course,” the Doc said at once, “and setting off the smoke detectors.
The Hollies will provide the baggage theme song, ‘On a Carousel,’ performed by Wings in an airy, plain fashion while eight miles high.
As the actress told the gym teacher, ‘It’s First class, Coach.’”
Long Drink raised two fingers to his brow to acknowledge a successful hijacking, and joined in the round of applause.
As it faded, Willard and Maureen tried another take, together this time:
A jerk is an animal who’s here on Spring Break
He sure can be difficult to take
(raucous laughter)
He has no manners when he swills his ale
He’d sell one kidney for a piece of tail
So if it’s years til you have to go to work
Then don’t grow up: just be a jerk
“Jerk this!” Harry shrieked inevitably.
After a brief pause for thought, Maureen launched the next chorus:
Hey, would you like to swing on a bed
Try to moon some frat boy named Fred
And be better off when you’re dead
Or would you rather get a life?
“Excuse me,” a stranger’s voice said, when the cheering had faded enough.
It had taken that long for the newcomer to make it as far as the bar.
I’d vaguely noticed her doing a larger-than-usual amount of gawking around at The Place on her way, examining it intently enough to have been grading it by some unknown criteria.
I turned to see her now, and a vagrant shaft of sunlight pierced the crimson leaves overhead, forcing me to hold up a hand to block it, with the net effect that I probably looked as though I were saluting.
It seemed appropriate.
The short dark Caucasian woman who stood there was—in that Key West winter heat—so crisp and straight and stiff and in all details inhumanly perfect that I might well have taken her for a member of the military, temporarily out of uniform, an officer perhaps, or an MP.
But she wore her severe business suit and glasses as if they
were
a uniform, and in place of a sidearm she carried something much deadlier.
From a distance I had taken it for a purse.
The moment I recognized it for what it really was, I started to hear a high distant buzzing in my ears.
A briefcase.
With an elaborate crest on it that was unmistakably some sort of official seal.
I felt a cold clammy sweat spring out on my forehead and testicles.
Suddenly I was deep-down terrified, for the first time in over a decade.
My ancient enemy was in my house.
The others were oblivious; most of them could not have seen the briefcase from their angle.
“No, excuse
me
, ma’am,” Long-Drink said politely.
“ I didn’t see you there.
Have a seat.”
“There’s no excuse for either of you dickheads!” Harry said, and shrieked with laughter at his own wit.
The stranger ignored him, which impressed me: Harry isn’t easy to ignore when you first meet him.
He spent a few too many of his formative years in a whorehouse, where the competition for attention must have required strong measures.
“Welcome to The Place, dear,” Mei-Ling said.
“What are you drinking?”
“Nothing, thank you,” the stranger said.
She had ignored Long-Drink’s invitation to sit, too.
Her voice sounded eerily like synthesized speech on a computer, the audio equivalent of Courier font.
“I am looking for the parents of the minor child Erin Stonebender-Berkowitz.
Would any of you know where they might be found at this point in time?”
My friends are pretty quick on the uptake.
By the time she was done speaking, everyone present had grasped the awful truth.
A bureaucrat was among us
.
Nobody flinched, or even blinked, but I knew they too were all on red alert now, ready to back my play.
The small comfort was welcome: I was so terrified it was hard to get my breath.
*
*
*
She was short, not much over five feet, and fashionably anorexic.
I guessed her at fifty-five years old, but could have been low: her greying brown hair was yanked back into a ballerina bun so tightly that there might have been some incidental face-lift effect.
Her skin was paler than average for a Floridian, and I could tell by the incipient sunburn on her left arm and the left side of her face that she had just driven down the Keys that morning.
But no part of her that I could see was shiny with perspiration…even though a business suit is at least two layers of clothing more than is desirable in Key West.
The best way to lie is to tell
part
of the truth, in such a way that your listener fills in the blanks, incorrectly, for herself.
That way if you get caught you can always play dumb.
“Her mother’s not here right now,” I said.
“Is there a message I can pass on when I see her?”
“No.
Do you know exactly where she presently domiciles?”
About fifty yards away, in the nearest of the five houses within the compound.
“Have you tried the phone book?”
“What about her father?”
I wasn’t the only one who could answer a question with another question.
“Never met the guy,” I said, still miniskirting the truth.
I was very glad I still had all my hair, at age fifty-mumble, and still wore it Beatle-style: those greying bangs concealed the icy sweat dripping down behind my sunglasses now.
So far, I was still speaking the strict truth—my wife Zoey was a few weeks pregnant with Erin when I met her—but I was beginning to pass beyond the area where I could later claim to have innocently misunderstood what this woman was asking.
And I already didn’t like the direction this was going.
She looked around at the others, one by one.
This was a little more complex than it sounds, because she did it like a poorly designed robot: instead of moving her eyes from face to face, she kept her eyes fixed straight ahead and moved her entire body slightly each time.
You had the idea she was taking a mental snapshot of each face.
“Do any of you know where I might find either of the parents of Erin Stonebender-Berkowitz at this point in time?”
Maybe Mei-Ling guessed my problem.
“No offense,” she said, “but who are you, and why do you want to know?”
“My name is Czrjghnyczl—”
I hastily began drawing her a glass of water to clear her throat—but stopped, because she went on:
“—Field Inspector Ludnyola Czrjghnczl—and I am from Tallahassee.”
My heart was already hammering.
Now it started flailing away with a maul, putting its shoulder into it.
I had taken her for a town-level bureaucrat, or at worst someone from Monroe County.
But Tallahassee is the capital of Florida.
Ms. Czrjghnczl was state level trouble.
“I am a senior field inspector for the Florida Department of Education,” she said, confirming my worst fear, “and I have been tasked with determinating whether Erin Stonebender-Berkowitz is being properly and adequately home-schooled, or is in fact in need of immediational custodial intervention and/or removal from her parents’ custody.”
*
*
*
Pindrop silence.
The thing to do when you’re terrified is to take a step forward, and smile.
I did both, and when I was done, I had pretty much shot my bolt, so I just stood there smiling and trying to understand what had gone so horribly wrong.
It was my understanding that Zoey and I were
cool
with the state education people regarding Erin’s home schooling—we certainly had been for the past seven years.
And the idea that her education could be deficient in any possible way was ludicrous.
To be sure, every single thing we had ever told the state of Florida about her home-schooling had been complete and utter bullshit.
But let’s be fair: the God’s honest truth could only have confused them—at best.
Thanks to the intervention of a cybernetic entity named Solace (now deceased) during Erin’s gestation, our daughter was born with a higher IQ, a better vocabulary, and a broader, deeper education than either of her parents.
Try explaining
that
to a state functionary with a fill-in-the-blank form, sometime.
I wished Zoey were there so badly my stomach hurt.
She was our family’s designated Speaker-to-Bureaucrats, not me.
She spoke fluent Bullshit.
I speak only American, some Canadian and a smattering of English, and I’ve learned from painful experience how dangerous that is around a civil servant.
It would be three more years before Erin would turn sixteen, and become immune to the dark powers of school boards; in the meantime she was, in the eyes of the law, just like any other child: a slave.
Zoey
wasn’t
there.
We owned no cell phone.
I couldn’t recall the last name of the lead singer at whose place she was rehearsing, if I’d ever known it, so I had no way to look up his phone number.
It was up to me.
I cleared my throat, and said, “Listen, Field Inspector Czrjghnczl, I…excuse me a moment.”
The brain behaves oddly under stress.
A penny finally dropped.
I turned away from her for a moment and directed an accusatory glare down the bar at Walter.
He grimaced back, probably with shame.
“The district attorney’s name was Tarara Buhm?” I asked him.