Hands went up all over the room.
“Yes, here in the second row.”
“Has your administration determined that the B.I.B is behind these falling beer trucks, and are there any plans to issue a warrant for her arrest?” asked a young reporter behind me.
“Sorry, Bill. As you know, I cannot comment on an ongoing investigation. I can say, however, that she is a person of interest in the case,” BS’ed the mayor.
Voices rang out from all over. “Have you made contact with her?”
“Let’s do this one at a time. How about you, Colin?” he said, pointing across the room.
“Is it safe to say that your administration is beginning to change its attitude toward the benevolence of the B.I.B.? And as a follow-up, what plans do you have to deal with her?”
The mayor smiled and gave a short laugh. “Colin, let me start by saying that there have been a number of incidents that have shown the B.I.B. to have allegedly helped law enforcement. However, her refusal to communicate and these recent, highly dangerous events may force us to rethink our interpretation of past events.”
“Are you saying that she is a danger to the community?” the reporter continued.
The mayor smiled again. “I can only let you decide that for yourself once justice has taken its course.” Then the mayor pointed to me.
“Mr. Mayor, haven’t you really instituted this Miner’s Beer embargo as an attempt to ‘starve out’ the B.I.B., knowing of her fondness for Miner’s Lite?”
He simply ignored me, and pointed to the chubby guy with glasses beside me, as if I had not been his choice in the first place.
“Have you made any attempts to communicate with the B.I.B. over her possible involvement in the beer truck incidents?” the guy beside me drawled out slowly.
“There has been no attempt to contact her at this point,” he answered, as if a sensitive nerve had been hit.
There was uproar from all over the room. “Why don’t you just ask her? Couldn’t this be resolved easily by talking?” I have to admit I was one of them.
“How do you contact someone who does not want to communicate?” said the mayor. Beads of sweat had formed on his forehead, and he held up his arms—it was becoming obvious that the reporter revolt had caused the mayor to lose his control.
“You all know the lengths I have gone through to communicate with that woman, the B.I.B.,” he said, looking squarely at the audience but pointing his finger to the side. “I don’t have to remind you of the newspaper ads and the plans we made for the Searchlight Event. Heaven knows how I have tried to bring that woman to the table, and every time, she’s just screwed me over.
“Whenever I’ve tried, did I get to speak with her? No. I’ll tell you what I get—crashing cars and train wrecks, and let’s not forget the planes…the goddamned planes. They’re crashing and crashing. And I’m just waiting like an asshole for someone who never shows…they just kept crashing….then the FAA’s got my ass!” At that point, Edwards, the mayor’s assistant, gestured to two large men in the wings, who came out and escorted the mayor off the stage, still babbling.
Edwards stepped to the podium and introduced Dr. Jones. “Perhaps questions about the B.I.B. could be better answered by the mayor’s expert on the subject.”
Jones rose and took over the podium. He pointed to a female reporter in the back of the hall.
“Dr. Jones, can you answer the question about communications with the B.I.B.?”
“Certainly, I can try. We have, for some time now, been attempting to locate and communicate with the B.I.B. I began this process even before I joined the mayor’s staff. We feel that, with time, we can accomplish this.”
“Do you have any idea who she is?” yelled out a reporter tired of waiting to be called upon.
“We have little to go on beside the Skelly’s photo, which we believe is genuine. From this she appears to be a female, early thirties in age, about five-foot-five to five-foot-seven inches in height, blond hair, and very piercing hazel eyes that seem to glow when she smiles.” You could tell he was drifting away, describing his love and not just the B.I.B. “But with the extensive costume, it has been impossible to determine precisely who she is.”
“You have no leads, then?” shouted a man in the front.
“Oh, no, I did not say that. We have been working on a very scientific formula to determine her identity. We expect to find her…I certainly expect to find her,” he said, becoming more animated. “And when I do, I am confident that all will be just fine and that she will help our city.”
A sarcastic middle-aged reporter held up a blown-up picture of the day care center with the beer truck that had flattened the swing set. “Is this what you mean by ‘just fine,’ letting this animal run above the law, endangering our children?”
Jones stammered something no one could hear.
“We don’t need to ‘communicate’; we need to arrest her, and now, before someone gets hurt! Do you want your child under that truck, Dr. Jones?” the middle-aged reporter continued. “Do you?”
Dr. Jones started mumbling in an Indian dialect, seemly enraged by the idea of the B.I.B. being anything but his perfect discovery.
“Believe me!” he said, finally. “Believe me, my friends, we have nothing to fear from the B.I.B.!…settle yourselves! Once under my control, she will be the perfect public servant!” Then he began mumbling again and sweating profusely. He loosened his tie and then waved his arms from over his head down toward his feet. “Calm yourselves, she is perfect; a perfect being! Not like you assholes!” Clearly overheated, he loosened his tie and unbuttoned the top couple buttons of his shirt, revealing a B.I.B. Miner’s Lite T-shirt.
Reporters in the first couple rows began to laugh and point.
“What are you looking at? You…you…idiots!” was Jones’s response. “We have new methods at our disposal, and soon we will communicate with the B.I.B. directly.” No one was listening anymore.
Finally, to get everyone’s attention, he ripped open his jacket and shirt to reveal his Miner’s Lite/B.I.B. T-shirt, now proud of it, and began shouting in the same dialect. Again, Edwards gestured to the two men who escorted Dr. Jones off the stage. I felt sorry for the sap. At the same time, though, I couldn't help but wonder what he'd been going on about concerning these new methods. Clearly, Jones thought he could control the B.I.B. How?
From the other side of the stage came a very large man wearing an expensive suit. He introduced himself as Vito and declared that the news conference was now over. I noticed that one of the men who had escorted Jones offstage had two Miner’s Lite bottles in the side pocket of his jacket.
“With the embargo on, where’d you get the Miner’s Lite?” I shouted, as the crowd around me buzzed with the chaos surrounding the end of the meeting.
“Hey, where’d you get the Miner’s Lite?” I screamed again.
The man dropped his hand to cover the pocket where I’d seen the beer.
“That guy’s got Miner’s Lite in his pocket! With an embargo on! Or is the embargo just for common a-holes like us?”
From the stage Vito pointed his sapling-sized finger at me. “Hey, buddy, you just made the list.”
Another voice yelled, “Where’d you get the Miner’s?” And then another and another joined the outcry.
Vito just turned and walked off the stage toward a set of doors, ignoring us all, but there was a Miner’s Lite in his back pocket as well.
I raised my fist, shook it defiantly, and yelled at the top of my lungs, “Hazel eyes, my ass!”
* * *
The old prune sat looking at me like a cat with a mouse trapped in a corner, or an old woman who’d just had a good BM. I couldn’t tell which. She rose up and began to creak her way around me as I sat in the hot seat in front of her desk.
My day just kept getting better. After my return flight from Vegas the night before, I had arrived to see all the news about beer trucks falling from the sky, a Miner’s Lite em
bargo, and the general public outcry to ‘burn the B.I.B.’. Yeah, right, like I would waste a beer truck—one of my favorite public servants—just for shits and giggles. I decided they wanted me to come out and defend myself, so I didn’t.
After getting all that cheery B.I.B. news and engaging in a little mother/daughter tiff with Paige, I’d hurried into work with an armful of files I had taken home to finish. (Took me five minutes, but don’t tell them that. I would spoil my illusion of diligence.) I had parked in the closest spot to the building’s entrance to save time, dropped off the files, then returned to move my car to the “Associates Parking Area.” Unfortunately for me, when I returned I found my path blocked by the old prune’s equally old car, built for her by Henry Ford personally, no doubt. Apparently it was her parking spot I had used for what…two minutes? So voilà! Here I was again in the hot seat in the old prune’s office, once again, for parking in an unauthorized area…blasphemer!
She looked down at me with those squinty eyes—and was that moth balls I smelled? “Sooo, here we are again. You just can’t seem to learn, can you?”
I began to stammer a defense and she waved it off with the arc of a bony finger.
“There is no defense for you now! I caught you red handed. I know,” she said moving away from me, “that you’re sorry…You’re sorry you got caught!”
“It was just a second and it was because I had taken so much work home!”
“Tut, tut, tut! I have had that parking space for ten point seven years, and in that time, no one has dared park there. But you…you’re special! Aren’t you? You think you can fly through the air and walk on water!” (Yes I can, I thought. With heels on.) “Who do you think you are, that ‘bib’ woman who runs, gallivanting all over town?”
There it was, again, ‘bib.’ It made my skin crawl to be referred to that way. I felt my hands involuntarily reaching out for her neck as she turned away—a quick snap and it would be over in a second. “It’s B.I.B. Her name is the B.I.B., not ‘bib’,” I told her through tightly strained lips, attempting to regain control of my arms.
“What?” The old prune seemed shocked that I had spoken. “Fiddlesticks! I don’t give a flaming rat’s ass what you call that loser showoff criminal! It’s b-i-b and that spells ‘bib’ in every dictionary I’ve ever seen.” (She probably saw the first one—you know, the one they carved in stone.)
It took a heroic effort to keep my hands off of her neck and get them back to my sides, still quaking with violent desire.
She reached over her desk with a grunt of effort and picked up a piece of paper, which she handed to me. “This is to give you notice that I am formally writing you up for unauthorized parking. This is your second write up. One more, and that’s where you’re going,” she said pointing at the door. “You understand?”
“Yes.”
“Good! Then we understand each other.” She looked me over. Apparently there was something else she didn’t like. “What is it with you? You are always wearing something black. I will have to check our dress code on that. There must be something. Now get back to work and prove me wrong about you.”
I stood up and left. Part of me was relieved to almost have been fired and the other half began to think about how bad the job market in Scranton was these days. I glanced back at the old prune as she hunched over a small trash basket and dug around with a pencil for something. Then I imagined her squashed down into the trash basket with just her pruney face showing as she continued to speak, “I’ve been in the trash basket for three point six minutes now…” She sensed my gaze, or maybe it was my hands about to crush her, and turned to give me a sour look. Of course, I gave her a big warm smile and again scooted through the door. In my head, I repeated the word paycheck over and over.
Chapter 16
We Consider New Possibilities
For me, the news conference was a frustration and a disappointment. It caused me to reconsider and take inventory of the things going on in my life. I realized I’d been spoiled by the rapid changes in the last few months. I thought everything had to just keep going up and up from here. Listening to myself say that now, I can see how deluded I’d been by a little taste of success. Being saved by the B.I.B. on B.I.B. rescue wasn’t the same as in reality.
I found myself drifting off into thoughts of her several times a day. At night while I waited to fall asleep, I would replay the time I had been so close to her at O’Malley’s and imagine it turning out differently, the two of us chatting and laughing together…Crap, was I pining again?
When I got home, I started to take inventory just by noticing what was there. The apartment once strewn with dirty T-shirts and jeans was now strewn with silk shirts, expensive shoes, and underwear that had been worn only once. A new large-screen TV stood where old reliable had once been. When I checked the website, I now had a new site; and I was in for another surprise. When I took the time to check the online store sales, the advertising revenue, and the hit counts, the numbers were through the roof—I had no idea how successful the site had become. So there was a reason I was writing all those big checks to Rebecca!
I had allowed myself to become separated from the site, trusting in Rebecca, and being lazy. It was like seeing it for the first time. It was a great-looking and popular site. Some of the same idiots were still posting trash, but ordinary people were adding their supportive comments. Everyone wanted to believe, so today, most of the comments were those refusing to believe the B.I.B. could have dropped beer trucks on us or, if she had, it was her idea of a practical joke. No one had been hurt was the catch phrase.
I took off my silk shirt and dress pants, put on a B.I.B. T-shirt and jeans, popped the cap off of a Miner’s Lite, the last one in the fridge, and began to write a blog I had not updated for days. The theme was that the B.I.B. was innocent of the truck drops and someone wanted her discredited. The mob and the mayor seemed prime suspects—or could they be one in the same? It started out mostly as an intuition based on what I had seen at the news conference and the presence of Vito there, who seemed to have become a permanent fixture in the mayor’s office. but then inspiration hit and the blog became quite convincing. Hell, even I believed myself.
When I was done, my thoughts turned to where this whole thing had started. I needed to get back to my research on the women born during the Super Bowl. It was the only way I could think to find her. None of the glitz, none of the glamor, none of the fame had lured the B.I.B. to show herself. I was sure that Dr. Jones had not shared his Super Bowl theory with anyone else. It was the one connection he and I had left. The appearance of Jennifer Lowe at the Searchlight Event and her melted pen at the coffee shop made me feel certain Dr. Jones’s theory was correct. But at that time, I still didn’t know if Jennifer was there to help me or hurt me.
* * *
That night I purposely stayed late at work. First, to earn some brownie points, and let the prune know how sorry I was (yeah right), and second, to watch her leave. She was almost always the last to go; vampires and witches traveling best in the dark, I guess. I followed her out and watched from the lobby as she worked her slow, deliberate way out of the door, down the sidewalk, and around the small, treed corner to her car with her key remote in hand. Seeming to be on autopilot from having done it for some many years, she arrived at where her car should have been. She reached out with the remote to open the door, but there was no door. She paused, then looked up to see a Miner’s Lite beer truck standing on end, having squished her vintage Ford like an accordion.
Somewhere below in the twisted metal was the lock the remote opened, and she bent over to try to find the door, apparently unable to conceive that anything such as this could have happened. The old biddy pushed the remote over and over, and the car gave off an occasional mournful beep of recognition. She began pacing to the front of the mess and then to the back of her ex-car, where she stood with a look of disbelief. That was when the Miner’s truck creaked and gravity dropped the front end down with a
bouncing crash over her car. The old prune stared at it for a minute, looked at the key remote in hand, pushed it, and then collapsed to the ground as a security guard ran to investigate.
He was quickly standing over her asking, “Ma’am, are you okay? Ma’am!” When he got no reply, he said to himself, “Man, she looks like she’s been dead for years.”
Suddenly her eyes popped open, shocking the poor security guard, who must have thought she was rising from the dead. She looked at him and was instantly herself. “Young man, I have had this car for fourteen point two years, and never has my remote failed to open the door properly!”
When I knew she was all right, I strolled over to her. “Oh my god! You okay?”
She sat up and gave me a snarling look. I’ll bet that I was the last person she wanted to see her having a problem.
“Boy, I’m glad you made me move my car, or that would have been my Ford under there… squashed like a bug…destroyed beyond recognition. I hear these beer truck are dropping everywhere. Glad you’re okay… maybe you should write that truck up for double parking.” Then I walked away with a cocky smile.
“I believe I will do just that!” she yelled after me. “Help me up, you fool,” she yelled at the security guard.
I got in my car and was home in seventeen point three minutes.
***
Being Jennifer Lowe had its advantages, my quiet penthouse being one of them. Rebecca and I sat across from each other on leather sofas before a small gas fireplace whose flicker and glow calmed me. I had my legs tucked up under me while I sipped from a long-stemmed wine glass. To anyone, I would seem the image of relaxation and comfort. Anyone would be wrong.
Super Born: Seduction of Being Page 14
