A strident honk-honk drew her attention away from the swear words she was writing in the dust with a stick. A shirtless Drew Corwin drove past on a tractor, waving and grinning. She waved and then she’d started wondering how a stockbroker could get a weekday off to work in corn fields.
She forgot about it when Buddy finally showed up 20 minutes later and waved her into his old red pickup truck. She climbed aboard, moving a clipboard on the seat into her lap, and Buddy pulled down on the gear shift to send them lurching on their way.
“Thanks for doing this,” he said. “I think I’m onto a nonpoisonous, nonpolluting way to get rid of pests, but I just don’t have the time to test it.”
She smiled weakly. “What is it?”
“You’ll see,” he’d answered. “What was your name again?”
“Bertie.”
They rode silently for a few minutes before Bertie asked, “Hey, that was really something about Rowley Poke’s murder, wasn’t it? Oh, and I’m sorry, he was probably your friend.”
“Yeah. Thanks,” he answered, not taking his eyes from the road, and fell silent again.
Bertie couldn’t tell if he was being deliberately rude, avoiding the subject of murder, had zero social skills or all three, but she wasn’t giving up.
“So, I bet you have a lot of plans for The End now that you’re in charge, huh?”
“What?” He turned and looked at her, a surprised look on his face. She had the feeling he’d forgotten she was there. “For now, I’m going to just keep to Rowley’s plans, maybe throw in a few new ones, like the organic condom protest.”
He turned on the radio, which was tuned to a heavy metal station, and cranked up the sound. “OK,” she thought, “I guess he’s the strong, silent type. Or just a creep.” Bertie was leaning toward the creep explanation.
She tried not to breathe in a combination of Buddy’s somewhat ripe smell and motor oil fumes from the truck. She alternated between reading what was written on the clipboard – rows and rows of numbers that meant nothing to her – and stealing surreptitious looks at Buddy when she felt she could get away with it,
He had a big, hawkish nose on a skinny face and an unassertive chin that sloped toward his stringy neck. His thin brown hair was in its apparently customary ponytail, held in place with a pink, sparkly scrunchy. He wore a blue T-shirt that was so ragged and worn it was hard to read what had once been printed on it in white letters. Bertie could just make out
I ♥ Beer
Move Aside, I Think I’m Going to Puke
“I love a really deep guy,” she thought. Faded blue jeans were held up with a worn leather belt, otherwise they’d have fallen down to his ankles past his nonexistent hips.
***
Buddy pulled up in back of a small ramshackle house. It looked like it had been deposited there by one of the huge wind storms during the Dust Bowl in the thirties. Its clapboard walls bore traces of white paint, turned gray by age, and its windows were smudged with dirt. Incongruously, a huge gray metal satellite dish sat on the roof, its weight creating a visible bow.
There was nothing for miles around except a few sheds tucked into some brush at the top of a slight rise some distance from the house.
“Wow, this is great,” Bertie said. “So private. How close are your neighbors?”
“Huh?” he asked. “Oh. There are some people living over the rise, about three or four miles away. I think they might be running a meth lab.”
“Lovely neighborhood,” she said. He didn’t react. “What’s the address here? I promised my husband I’d text him the address.” Husband sounded more official than ex-husband who’s staying with me ’cause he’s broke.
“1313 Mockingbird Lane. It’s the old ‘Munsters’ address. I actually petitioned the county to let me change the number to 1313, cool, huh?”
Actually, Bertie thought it was cool. She texted the address to Cully.
He ushered her into the kitchen, which was decorated in Late Modern Thrift Store. It was a large room with big windows that looked out onto the nothing that was the view. It was shabby but tidy.
Buddy pulled out a chair for her, and moved to the counter where a collection of knives were sheathed in a wooden block. Bertie held her breath. “Cripes,” she thought. “He’s going to stab me and filet me and skin me and … oh why didn’t I learn my lesson last night and keep my nose out of this mess?”
He picked up an old boom box next to the knife block, opened the double doors to the storage area under the chipped white porcelain sink and put the box on the floor in front of it.
“I want you to watch for the mice’s reaction.”
“Reaction to …?” she asked.
“Noise warfare. See, I got this idea watching a History Channel program about modern-day pirates. The newest technology is to fight them off with super-loud noise. You blast them with sound and they give up and go away. And I thought …” - he tapped his head – “why wouldn’t that work on rodents?” He pronounced it row-dence.
“I got out some old AC/DC, some Black Sabbath, and some Judas Priest tapes and here we are, ready to try it.” He looked pleased.
“Don’t you have any Poison?”
“Berby, I told you, I want to try noise. I –”
“The name is Bertie and I mean Poison. You know, Bret Michaels? Poison? The group?”
“Oh, ha ha, I get it. That’s pretty funny.” When he laughed, his brown eyes – the color of mud – crossed slightly. “I’m going to leave you here for a couple of hours and I want you to watch and see if those mice budge. I had to put out bread crumbs every night till I got some but now I know they’re under there so keep an eye out. And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t go nosing around. This is my private residence, you know, but I’m willing to donate it to further the ends of … uh, The End.”
He turned on the boom box, pushed the sound dial to Full Force and shouted, “I’ll be back to get you in two hours. Here’s a notebook, keep track of what the mice do and what you’re playin’ when they do it.”
She stood staring at him as he left. “Don’t forget me,” she said weakly as “Back to Black” blared into the room and bored into her head.
She waited till he was of sight, then another 15 minutes for good measure before going outside and hitting the speed dial for Cully on her cell phone.
“Hello?” he answered right away and she was relieved. She wasn’t sure there’d be cell phone reception this far out in the country, but he came through loud and clear.
“Hey, Cully. It’s me.” She filled him in on what had happened so far.
“OK, I’ll get on the computer and get a better idea of where you are, but make sure you have your phone with you.”
“Of course. I’m going to look around the house now and see what I can find.”
“Be careful, Bert.”
She hung up and went back into the kitchen. She shut down the boom box so that she could hear if Buddy came back unexpectedly, but considering that she was going to violate someone’s privacy, break several ethics rules of journalism, and (probably) paw through Buddy’s underwear, she felt “Highway to Hell” would have been the proper musical accompaniment.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The next hour and a half was a cornucopia of snooping. Bertie moved into the living room, where wallpaper with black flowers and green vines grew on the walls. She knew it was going to be the backdrop of her nightmares for the next 10 years. She stood in the doorway and shuddered.
A shabby, overstuffed sofa in mustard yellow against one wall looked as if it was cowering in fear of being devoured by the killer black flowers. A reclining chair in soft brushed tan suede took center stage in front of a huge new plasma TV. Bertie knew it was new and a plasma TV because the operating information was still attached by a plastic cord to its massive frame. A price tag was also attached. Bertie’s eyes widened in amazement.
“Cheeze, how much money does Buddy make as Rowley Poke’s replacement?” she asked the emp
ty room.
A small, scuffed wooden desk stood in a corner. She stopped before touching anything and took a mental snapshot of how the desk looked, then retreated back to the kitchen to look for a pair of rubber gloves. Her motive – “Hey, I watch TV, I know about fingerprints – was also fueled by the thought of what germs she might pick up.
There were no gloves – “Buddy doesn’t care about chapped hands?” – so she put a couple of plastic grocery bags over her hands and returned to the desk.
She hesitated, the thought of what she was about to do giving her concern. “Am I really this kind of person?” she asked herself. But Rowley Poke’s anguished face as he died in front of her, drove her on.
In the center of the desk was a half-filled out warranty card for the TV. Bertie let out a loud snort. “Buddy’s real name is Buddha? Buddha Evelyn Laird … catchy,” she thought.
The papers on the desk were fairly innocuous: A schedule of events for The End, some literature on tax benefits given to nonprofits, some pamphlets on growing corn.
She opened the belly drawer in the center and found an electric bill. “OK, now we’re getting somewhere.” It showed the usual blah-blah-blah that no one really reads and on the second page, a huge amount owed for the previous month, almost double what Bertie paid for practically the same amount of time.
Bertie looked around for anything that could account for the huge bill, but couldn’t see anything but the black eye of the huge TV staring at her. “And how much electricity do you chew up per month?” she asked it. But then she realized that if it was new enough to still have tags attached to it, it probably couldn’t have accounted for last month’s electric usage.
There was a large water bill – “Buddy doesn’t look that clean to me,” she said – and paperwork for delivery of propane. Her great-grandparents used to power their farm with propane and Bertie knew it came in big tanks, but there was no sign of any tanks that Bertie could see.
She stood for a minute, staring at the hideous wallpaper while trying to make sense of the information. The big bills didn’t seem to tie together with the simple way Buddy was living. No swimming pool, no big electricity eaters, no propane tanks. And, like the new TV, the satellite dish looked too new to have created the energy and water usage Buddy was running up.
Meth lab? Marijuana farm? Those were the two obvious answers, but Bertie shook her head and moved on to the rest of the desk. Three of the other four drawers opened to show the usual contents of a desk, stapler, staples, paper, envelopes, stamps, and other office necessities, but the fourth drawer wouldn’t open. It was the only drawer with a lock and apparently Buddha “Buddy” Laird used it.
“Where are the records for The End?” she asked the empty room. “Where are tax returns, receipts, address book, all the other bills and junk that people accumulate?”
She retreated back to the kitchen and picked out a small knife from the wooden block. She could finally draw on all that useless information on how to pick locks she’d picked up after years of watching bad movies.
Again, she hesitated. This was even worse than looking through bills. Absentmindedly, she began picking her teeth with the knife. “Ewww!” she said, finally realizing what she was doing. She turned back to the kitchen, rinsed and dried the knife and put it back in the wooden block. She couldn’t do it; it was too big a leap into breaking the law for her. The lock remained mute and unpicked.
Stymied for the moment, she turned to the bedroom where she found a large stack of porn magazines under the unmade bed. “Men!” she said, and rolled her eyes. But then her eyes were drawn to the sheets. They looked new and made of black satin. “Gulp!” Bertie said out loud. A drawer in the bedside stand was heaped with unopened condom packages. “Ribbed for her pleasure,” one read. “Move aside, I think I’m going to puke,” she said. She noted that, despite his hype to the contrary, Buddy preferred ’tex condoms.
The floor of the lone closet was heaped with dirty clothes while work shirts and T-shirts hung above them. Bertie pulled out a T-shirt. “Work is the curse of the drinking class,” it read. She shoved it back in and pulled out another one: “Beer: It’s not just for breakfast.” She was sensing a theme here.
The dresser yielded raggedy underwear – “Cheeze, lay off the expensive new TV and buy some new man-panties,” Bertie thought – jeans, shorts, and in the bottom drawer, photos of a boy and two adults who were apparently a young Buddha and his Mom and Dad.
The bathroom had the usual over-the-counter medicines as well as a number of hangover remedies. Off the bedroom was a small, tacked-on room with a washer and dryer, then it was back to the kitchen, where she turned the boom box back on again.
Bertie stood on the back porch, staring off into space.
“I need to read more Sue Grafton books,” she said. “Kinsey Milhone would’ve gone through this place like a tornado.”
Sans a fictional sleuth to help her out, she was stuck. Obviously, Buddy hadn’t left anything remotely interesting out where anyone could see it, which was interesting in itself.
“I don’t care if anyone sees my phone bill or address book, unless it’s an identity thief and I don’t think even an identity thief would come the whole way out here,” she thought.
Bertie was struck by how quiet it was out here in the middle of nowhere. This is what it would be like if there was an apocalypse and she was the only one left in the world. There weren’t even any birds chirping. But then there weren’t any real trees around to house birds’ nests, only the scrubby bushes surrounding the sheds on the hill.
“Sheds, you big dummy!” she said out loud. She actually could see the one, two, three sheds on the hill. Potential troves of information, instead of just part of the scenery.
Just then, the alarm on her wrist watch went off, scaring her enough to let out a small shriek. She’d set it to remind her of Buddy’s return time so she could fake up a “diary” of the noise warfare experiment before he got back.
She hurried back to the kitchen, turned on the boom box, sat down in the chair in front of the sink with her notebook and stared.
Four little brown field mice – their whiskers jittering in tune to the music – were staggering around as if drunk while “Crazy Train” pounded away on the boom box.
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
Bertie’s hearing was slowly returning as she negotiated rush-hour traffic on her way back to the apartment. For the first time in memory, she didn’t mind sitting in her idling car for 10-minute stretches while the snaky line of vehicles inched its way along the freeway.
“If anyone had ever told me I’d rather deafen mice than go home at the end of the day, I’d have thought they were crazy,” she said out loud. She wasn’t looking forward to seeing Cully, not after their night of … she wasn’t sure what to call it. Twerking for old time’s sake? Doin’ the giggity-giggity?
How about survivors’ therapy? “Yeah, I like that, survivors’ therapy. We were just expressing our entirely natural joy at still being alive,” Bertie thought. “We could’ve been killed and when we weren’t, well, who wouldn’t want to celebrate?”
In hindsight, Bertie wished they’d just opened a bottle of champagne and smashed the glasses into a nonexistent fireplace rather than have sex. It raised too many unsettling old feelings. She hoped Cully wasn’t taking it too seriously.
She opened the apartment door to a big greet – jumps and kisses from Bling – the smell of spaghetti sauce and a cheery, “Hey, Bert, how did it go? Did you find out anything?”
Bertie stared at Cully. She collapsed on the couch, still staring at him, her eyes wide and mouth open in jaw-dropping shock.
Then a storm of laughter overtook her and she curled up in a ball, holding her stomach and pointing at him.
Cully stood there, a look of hurt on his black and blue face. He’d cut a raw potato in half and anchored it to his forehead with a ragged strip of cloth tied around his head. He looked like he was ready to whip out a flute and tweet
le “Yankee Doodle Dandy” while limping around the room.
“What the hell … what the hell are you supposed to be?” she managed to gasp out.
“I don’t think it’s funny, Bert.”
“You’ve got a frickin’ potato tied to your forehead and you don’t think that’s funny? Gimme a break!” Her laughter finally slowed to a series of gasps and snorts, enough that she could ask, “I’m sorry for laughing at you, Cully, but why do you …” she started to laugh again and couldn’t continue.
“For your information, I’ve had a headache all day.”
“And?”
“When I was little and I had a headache, my mom would tie a raw potato onto my forehead to draw the pain out.”
“Ohhhh, it’s a home remedy,” she said, the light finally dawning. Bertie had been the survivor of various home remedies perpetrated on her as a child by her grandmother. It was an “old country” alternative to going to the doctor’s office.
“Wait a minute,” she said, alarmed, “you have a headache? You’ve probably got a concussion then.”
“Even if I do,” Cully replied, “I’m doing what they’d tell me to do at the hospital: Take it easy, don’t sleep for awhile, and monitor the situation. It’s fine, Bert, come on, let’s eat. Did you find anything at Buddy’s?”
Bertie was uneasy about treating Cully’s possible condition with a raw potato and a strip of cloth, but sat down to eat. Apart from the tater carbuncle on his forehead, he seemed unnaturally natural and determined not to mention their night together. She took her cues from him and settled into uber-casual.
“Wow, thanks for making dinner. Did I find anything? Well, I found out that Buddy’s real name is Buddha, that he needs new underwear, that he uses latex condoms, not sheepskin – don’t ask – and that he’s got enough money coming in that he can buy a new plasma TV that’s bigger than this apartment. Oh, yeah, there’s a locked drawer in his desk.”
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