by Gary K. Wolf
“Holster your peacemaker, Wyatt,” said Enigman nonchalantly, “or I’ll be forced to counter violence with violence.” His balloon curled up at either end and grinned at me. “The law requires me to inform you that I’m a master of jujitsu.”
“Black belt?”
He hesitated half a beat. “Only brown, but that doesn’t alter the fact that my hands are registered as lethal weapons.”
“So’s my gun.”
His response unrolled slowly, his words interlocked like the fence forest rangers erect to separate careless hikers from two hundred feet of straight down. “Before you make a mistake you’ll regret for the rest of your life, there’s an important fact you should consider.”
“Tell it to Saint Peter, bub.”
He exhaled two small chuckles. “Do I understand correctly? Are you threatening to kill me?”.
“Darn right.”
“That, Mr. Valiant, would be a grave, no pun intended, mistake. You see, we’re not in this room alone.”
I slid my free hand around his statement and caught my thumb on a raggedy precipice of panic. “You’re lying through your black-hearted teeth.”
His balloon came out side-on. From my perspective, I saw it as a glowing white line the height of a hobgoblin and the width of a scud. I tapped it with my gun barrel and revolved it around to where I could read it. “Prove it to him,” it said.
I started to utter “You can’t bluff me,” but I never got the chance.
Somebody, I couldn’t see who, grabbed my hand, the one with the gun in it.
“Convinced?” asked Enigman.
My mystery assailant extended my gun hand forward.
“What are you doing? Stop! Valiant!” said Enigman. The Dragoon’s front sight pointed bang-on at the tag end of the curved tail connecting his balloon to his mouth. I couldn’t see squat in the dark, but if I could, I had a hunch I wouldn’t like the looks of this. “Valiant, no!” he said out loud.
Whoever had a hold of my hand squeezed my trigger finger. The Dragoon went off with a thunderous roar.
Enigman yelled in my direction, but the white flash from the gun barrel fouled up his contrast control. His balloon whistled past my noggin way too shady to read. He hit the floor with a loud thump.
My gun hand dangled free.
I heard a snicker. I felt the vibration of running feet. Enigman’s thick carpet muffled the sound.
I lit a match.
The sight I saw knotted my stomach, lumped my throat, and dried my mouth. Enigman was spread out on the floor like the oil slick in a garage.
Drained of bravado, Enigman was only three quarters of an inch away from being two-dimensional. He looked like a squashed black olive.
I could see a square yard of matte black rug through the hole my bullet had punched in his gut. My match did me the courtesy of expiring so I wouldn’t have to watch myself get sick.
I found a newspaper, rolled it into a cone, and torched it.
I burned away the city section locating Enigman’s last balloon. I found it wedged under his sealskin sofa. It was as long, narrow, and flat as an alligator’s tongue depressor and the color of a dirty puddle. I wasted half the sports page trying to decipher its message before I realized that would take more light than I could wring out of the morning edition. I’d have to set fire to something bigger, say the house.
Rigor mortis was setting in; Enigman’s balloon was hardening fast. I didn’t relish the thought of leaving Toontown with a deathbed balloon the size of an ironing board sticking out the window of my jalop. Any cop with more than a pea for a brain would haul me over in a second. I folded it over and over again into an easily-carried-and-concealed package the size of a gadabout’s valise.
I dug my bullet out of the wall. I know, I know. Destroying evidence. Small potatoes compared to the murder rap I faced if I left it. It still shined with a faintly greenish cast, and smelled strongly of acetone and benzene. Just my luck to be carrying a load of dip-tipped. The only bullets that’ll kill a Toon.
I spent the rest of my light on a general look around. The film of Freddy was gone. I didn’t find Selznick’s box, either.
The newspaper expired between my fingers.
I weighed my options. They tallied zilch. If I wanted to stand any chance of hanging on to my license, there was only one thing
I could do. And I did it.
I beat it the heck out of there before somebody called the cops.
8
I taped the incriminating murder weapon to the folded hunk of Enigman’s final balloon—which said “Valiant! Don’t shoot me”—and skimmed them across the Malibu surf. They skipped into the sunset and sank without a trace.
Heddy and Ferd owned a three-bedroom ranch house in Hobson’s Choice, a sprawling, ramshackle development built on poured slab foundations thinner than the credit it took to buy one. Hobson’s no-money-downers were split about equally between blue-collar humans and dog-collared Toons. The two traditionally antagonistic contingents lived more or less peacefully side by side, the attitude being you don’t boot your neighbor if you’re living on a shoestring yourself.
Heddy’s bad dream house was prefabricated by the same cardboard cutup who built cracker boxes for Saltine. Given light winds, no rain, and a mutant generation of toothless termites, it might last half the thirty years it would take to pay off the mortgage.
I pulled up. Heddy was outside molding hardscrabble clay into lawn. She’d do better if she swapped her grass seed and fertilizer for a paint sprayer and ten gallons of forest green. Better yet, a hundred gallons. She could coat every yard on the street and earn what she needed to move someplace nice.
She wore a long-sleeved red jersey, Oshkosh bib overalls, clodhopper boots, and a red bandanna that knotted in back and covered her hair. Give her a John Deere tractor, a plow, five hundred acres of prime farmland, and she’d still look like a city slicker playing Old MacDonald.
I honked.
She ceased her dirt scratching and gazed up at me with the same vacant, lifeless stare I’d already seen in one sibling too many.
I got out of my car, doffed my fedora, and swept it under my gut with a deep bow that set the death of chivalry back at least twenty years. “Good morning, fair damsel.”
“I beg your pardon,” she responded in a tone only slightly less grating than the metal knuckle scraper chefs use to pulverize cheese. “Do I know you?”
I grabbed her around the waist and nailed her with a big, wet smooch. “Come off it, Sis. It hasn’t been that long.”
“Oh, hasn’t it?” She rubbed my juicy welcome off her lips, replacing it with a wide streak of garden-variety dirt. “How many kids do I have?”
“Huh?”
She jabbed my stomach with the business end of a trowel. “Your nephews, jerkwater. How many are there?”
“Jeez, Heddy, you know I’m not so hot with names.”
The muddy point of her trowel stained the babe on my hand painted tie. “I’m not asking for names, just numbers. Count them off.
I made a few quick calculations and guessed two.
She cupped her hands to her mouth as soon as she saw my smug smile. “Boys,” she yelled, and three wild Indians came galumping around the corner.
“Uncle Eddie, Uncle Eddie, Uncle Eddie!” They greeted me the way a steeplejack attacks a slate-tiled roof. Rug rat climbed to my knees. Fiddle in the middle made it to my belt buckle. Chip off the old block planted his toe on my earlobe and claimed my head for Spain.
“Remember these little guys, Eddie? Your three nephews? “Ferd Junior, Ferd the Second, and Ferd the Third.”
I shook them off and lined them up at attention. They had Heddy’s face and their father’s stocky, cowbell body. They sported matching baseball caps, matching short-sleeved pullover shirts, matching gym shorts, and matching black-d
ot Keds. Poor kids. Heddy had obviously inherited Mother’s tendency toward sartorial duplication.
I debated giving them each a dime to buy clothes of their own, but not wanting to spoil them rotten, I flipped them a single nickel and told them to split it three ways. When last seen, they were hunting for their daddy’s hacksaw.
“So, Eddie.” Heddy and I walked up onto the front porch. “Tell me the flavor of stew you’ve gotten yourself into this time.”
I held open a punctured screen door that wouldn’t bar any creature smaller than a muskrat. “Why do you think I’m in hot water?”
“I know you, Eddie. You’re all give and no take.” She jerked her thumb at a sofa with more dips to it than a roller coaster. “You only come around if you need help.” Heddy possessed our mother’s classic features, and the same aversion to putting them on display. She cropped her hair unfashionably short, never powdered her face, didn’t even own a tube of lipstick or a bottle of perfume.
“This time, sweet cakes, you got it one hundred percent wrong.” I wiggled myself into a gully of cushion. “I just wrapped up a big case. I’m taking time off. Catching up on family obligations.”
“Hide-ho-ho-ho. That’ll be the day.” She ducked into the bedroom and came back a minute later wearing a lumberjack shirt, Army fatigue pants, and worn leather moccasins. Heddy prided her self on her ability to assemble outfits out of odds and ends, a fact which enhanced her reputation as family eccentric. Pop referred to Heddy as Harpo. Every Christmas he threatened to buy her a bicycle horn.
She uncorked a fresh fifth and poured me a snootful, fixing it exactly the way I like it, big. Then she settled into her one good piece of furniture, Grandmother’s pressed-oak rocking chair, picked up her knitting, and draped it over her lap.
“Good looking bedspread,” I told her.
“It’s a sweater.” The whole family could fit inside it with room left over for their coal furnace. “Can you stay for dinner?” she asked.
“You making anything good?”
“Pot roast.”
“Mother’s recipe?”
“Naturally.”
Mother cooked pot roast you couldn’t slice with a fireman’s ax. I loved it. “Set me a plate.”
“How’s Doris?”
“Happy, contented, not a care in the world.”
“She tossed you over, then.”
“More or less.”
Heddy leaked some juice into the radio, and we caught the last half inch of Glenn Miller’s String of Pearls platter. Heddy hummed the tune. Her needles clicked harmony.
I struck a match on a sprung spring and set fire to a cough.
“Where’s your lesser half?”
She played roulette with the radio’s tuning dial and won a serenade from Vic Damone. “Do you really care?”
“I want to pay my respects. Nothing strange about that.”
“Except you’ve never gone an inch out of your way to say boo to him before.”
“I’m mellowing in my old age.”
“Sure. Like Daddy did. Hide-ho-ho-ho.” We both laughed. He’d mellowed. From raw sulfuric acid to crumbly quick lime. Either way, he’d eat you full of holes, the only difference being the older he got, the longer it took, and the more you suffered.
The radio announcer sliced Damone’s throat for an important news bulletin concerning the murder of a famous screen star. I leaped to the RCA and strangled the story before it strangled me.
“Hey! I wanted to hear that,” Heddy complained.
“I’ve had it to the ham hocks with this city’s crime wave. I’d rather listen to you play the piano.”
“Really?”
I lifted the keyboard cover and pulled out the bench.
She stood and laid her knitting across the rocker’s rear slats. The weight tipped the chair over backwards. She left it for the maid.
Heddy took a seat at the family upright. “Real or otherwise?”
“You pick it.”
“I’m kind of rusty for real.”
“I’ve got nothing against otherwise.”
“Hide-ho-ho-ho.” She smiled sweetly at me. “You always were my favorite brother.” She opened the double doors above the keyboard and read aloud the legend on the roll. “I’m Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage.”
“Number one on my hit parade.”
She shut the doors, threw the play lever to “automatic,” and pumped the foot pedals to beat the band. The roll started to move, and the piano tinkled out its honky-tonk melody.
For practice, Heddy moved her fingers above the eighty-eights. Try as she might, she remained a good four bars behind the bobbing black and whites. Twenty years of piano lessons, and she couldn’t keep up with a piece of paper full of holes. But you had to admire her gristle. She never stopped trying.
I leaned against the side of the piano. That put me eye level with a long lace doily showcasing a framed display of happier times. The Kodachrome hitting hardest pictured me with more hair, less weight, and two live brothers.
I picked it up.
Like every photo in the Valiant family album, a black, nickel sized half-moon obscured the lower left-hand corner. Mother’s finger over the lens.
This shot had been snapped the day Teddy graduated from high school. He held his diploma proudly at chest level and flashed the Devil-may-care grin he’d swiped off an Army Air Corps recruiting poster.
I wore my only suit, equal amounts of shoe polish and hair oil, and a suitably serious expression.
Freddy, rakishly attired in newsboy cap, cotton twill shirt, sleeveless argyle sweater, arm garters, and pleated gabardine trousers, stood between us. He’d been trying for weeks to grow a beard, but freckles still outnumbered his chin whiskers five to one. He had his arms draped over our shoulders. His extended first and second fingers formed V-for-Victorys above our heads. The family cutup, Freddy. He took after Pop.
Pop didn’t make it. He had better things to do than sit in a hot gym and applaud the first Valiant to graduate from a school that didn’t have the word “reform” in front of it. One of his old circus pals came by the morning of the ceremony and begged Pop to unretire. They needed a sub for a guy with a hot appendix. Pop promptly hauled his zebra-striped clown suit out of the rag barrel, dug through Heddy’s toy box until he found his fuzzy green wig, stole his red rubber nose ball back from the dog, grabbed his Big Bang backside paddle off the mountings over the fireplace, and made a beeline for the klieg lights.
Pop spent Teddy’s graduation day cruising the Big Top, crammed inside a teeny car with twenty other bozos.
Next morning, Pop gave Teddy a Kewpie doll he’d won knocking rag cats off a shelf. That naked Kewpie decorated Teddy’s mantel right up to the day he died. It’s on my bureau, now.
Heddy caught me wiping my eye. “Salt water,” I told her. “Left over from my last trip to the beach.”
“I go to that same sand dune myself quite a lot.” She stopped pumping, and the piano wheezed to silence. “Hide-ho-ho-ho.”
Heddy held out her hand. I gave her the picture. She looked at it squinty eyed and close up, the same way she used to study the drawings in her fairytale book about Oz. “We had great times together. You, me, Teddy, bless his heart, and…” Her moist, warm breath formed a misty halo on the glass. She wiped it away with her thumb, leaving Freddy’s face an island of sparkling purity in a rectangle of dust. She looked up at me with that sweet innocence that had been wrapping me around her finger ever since she realized I bent. “Are you having any luck finding Freddy? Will I ever see him again?”
“You know the old saying.” I took the picture, cleaned the rest of it with my elbow, and returned it to the piano top. “No news is good news.”
“Wrong. No news is no news.” She took hold of my hand and pulled me onto the bench beside her. “Do me a favor, Eddie.”
/> “Name it.”
“Be careful.” She held my hand so tightly I couldn’t have pulled it loose without leaving a finger behind. “I lost Teddy, I lost Freddy, I don’t want to lose you.”
“The danger in my line of work comes highly overrated. I’ve got more of a risk falling in the bathtub.”
“Hide-ho-ho-ho. Save the fog for killing mosquitoes. I’m a cop’s wife. I know how you make your living.”
“Catch the sudden concern for my health and welfare. I never heard you utter a word of protest when Pop shot me out of a cannon.
She flicked open my suit coat, exposing my empty gat holder. “Now you pack a cannon of your own, and a stubborn inclination to shoot back.”
A word balloon snaked under the front door, manacled itself to my ankle, and yanked. “Move your flocking rattletrap, scum frugger,” it said. “You’re blocking my frigging driveway.”
“How can you not love a guy with that kind of command over the English language?” I whacked Ferd’s balloon with a brass ashtray. It shattered to pieces except for the blue words, which congealed into lumps. Heddy scooped them up with a piece of sheet music before they stained the carpet. Judging from the indigo patterns blotting the broadloom, she didn’t always succeed.
I sauntered casually outside and stood on the sidewalk.
Ferd sat in his heap, craning his neck to see over the heavy, dark cloud of fuming, angry impatience that rose almost to his chin.
I loved to watch Ferd steam.
He reversed his defroster. Twin jets of heated vapor whooshed out of his side air vents. The smoke inside his car descended to the level of his shaking fist.
I gave him a jaunty wave, eased into my six-banger, punched it to life, and slow-poked out of his way.
I goosed the engine once for luck and shut it down.
Ferd welcomed me to the neighborhood by yanking my car door off its hinges.
“Careful,” I said. “I wouldn’t want my favorite brother-in-law busting a gut.”
He scaled my door into the street, where it skipped once and decapitated a trash can. “Cut the farking sludge, shamus.” Ferd sported a snorter the size of a watering can. He aimed it at me and flared the dual wheat fields he used for nostrils. “What the frick are you doing here?”
