Stuffed

by Brian M. Wiprud

  I didn’t feel like talking, not even to ask Otto to quit smoking, which he did continuously across New Hampshire. I fumbled around through my 8-tracks. There’s a guy at the 26th Street flea markets who still sells the cartridges. Of course, I don’t exactly have my choice of any music post-1982, but there was no shortage of good music up to that point in man’s evolution—Supertramp and Foreigner notwithstanding. Hank Williams started twanging and moaning through my dash speaker—perfect.

  My thoughts were focused on Angie, and it was all I could do to keep from slipping into a stupor of dread. Was I letting my imagination go a little wild, picturing Tex and MacTeague closing in on Angie after seeing her poking around town? Could I even be sure they were in Mallard Island to take delivery of the crow? The thought of Angie being victimized kept surging to the fore. I’d already had my fill of that, and in person. I was determined not to let it happen again.

  I could picture Tex winking. Be a shame to see that purdy woman of yours get hurt.

  Can’t think about that. Better think about something else.

  Gee, what about that job offer? There was a subject I really didn’t want to think about, yet it was consuming enough to force the other from my mind, at least for a little while.

  So why was I deathly afraid of this thing? Why not take the job, and if I didn’t like it, go back to brokering taxidermy?

  Well, for one thing, after traveling around ratting out antiques dealers up and down the East Coast, my name would be mud. It’s not like I saw that many protected and endangered species around. But there were some. I saw songbirds, for example, but not whole slews of them. Most were probably killed by cars, ran into plate glass, or died from parasites. I doubt that people are shooting them for trophies in numbers even mildly comparable to the damage that domestic and feral cats do. Songbirds are exquisite creatures, and I can’t fault someone who—like me—sees a dead blue jay as art too beautiful to discard. I see ducks, which can be mounted for the hunter who shoots them but cannot be resold, and the heads from old rugs, like lion and cheetah and leopard and polar bear. They’re pre-CITES, obtained legally, but without permits it is illegal to sell them.

  This is at Mom n’ Pop stores, largely. Sure, they’re technically breaking the law, and maybe some of them even know it, but from my perspective, Mom n’ Pop antiques dealers are not the enemy. It’s people like Smiler, the chop-shop gangs, that need to be taken down. And that’s the job of someone like Pete Durban, who thrives on danger.

  So that’s that: I’m turning down the job.

  Then again, what about Angie? Didn’t she deserve someone better than a dealer, a taxidermy bum, for a consort? Someone who could provide better insurance, some financial security for retirement, maybe even vacations, a trip to Europe? One of these days, she might just meet a guy who could rescue her from contract jewelry work, a man who would afford her the ability to spend time making her own art jewelry. I’d always harbored some guilt about holding Angie back from making it in the art world. There had been times when we first joined forces when things were slow for me, and she footed the bills. It had never been the other way around. With a steady job, and raises, and if I made some money on the side brokering taxidermy, I could fulfill my obligations as partner. I might not amount to much, but at least she could reach her potential.

  That settles it. I’m taking the job.

  A gas station loomed, and signs announced the I-89 interchange just ahead. I roared into the station, showed the attendant where the gas cap was, and asked him to fill it with premium. Otto went into the QwixMart. I went to the phone booth, whipped out my calling card, and tried Angie. I wanted to make sure she was still snug in her motel. And I was going to tell her about the job and that I was going to take it.

  No answer.

  No answer again.

  No answer again.

  “Otto! Let’s go!”

  He came trotting out of the market with two coffees and a small shopping bag of jerky. “Yes, of course, Garv. How Yangie?”

  “She didn’t answer.”

  His face darkened. But he didn’t say anything. For a change.

  Chapter 19

  It was after midnight and raining by the time we exited I-95 and passed through the tollbooth.

  The elderly toll collector looked at me over his reading glasses, pausing before giving me the change.

  “The Big Top in town, is it?”

  I glanced at myself in the rearview mirror. Totally forgot about the ink and my harlequin’s disguise.

  “Sure, Pops.” I held my hand out for the change. “I’ve got the elephants in my trunk.”

  “Aw haw haw.” He handed me the change, chuckling. “Elephants, trunks . . . you fellahs know all the rib ticklers.”

  I sped away and soon found myself on Route 1. The sloshing pond of rainwater collecting in my dented trunk distracted me; I missed the modest Mallard Is. sign and had to make a U-turn at a donut shop. Peering through the slap and smear of the windshield wipers, I wended the Lincoln over a rickety causeway and into a narrow cottage-lined lane where a painted cast-iron sign read Mallard Island Est. 1701. At a T-intersection, I found my headlights shining on the ocean, the white foam of breakers visible through the downpour.

  “Ah, beach.” Otto awoke. “Very nice.”

  Cottages overlooked either side, but larger ones. No hotels, no shops, no nothing. I made a left. About a mile up I saw a sign with flood lamps splashed over it. I pulled up to the office of the Sea Bass Motel.

  “Excuse me, is there an Angie staying here?” I looked hopefully at the porker behind the counter, whose day job was probably at the nearby donut shop.

  Chubsy stared at the clown before him, wide-eyed. I hadn’t had any luck getting that ink off my face or matting down my hair.

  “Hello?” I snapped my fingers, and he emerged from his reverie, probably a fantasy about caramel apples and circus peanuts.

  “Wan’ that I should buzz her room?” He picked up the phone like it was something to eat.

  “I’ll just stop in.”

  “I gotta buzz her first, mister. Oh, wait, she went out anyhow.”

  “Out? Out?”

  “Yeah. I seen her. With her dad.”

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah. Came by the office, said he was here on a surprise like.”

  “Did he have black hair and a mustache?”

  “Nah, red hair this fellah has.”

  “Where’s the police station?”

  “Police? Down the end the road, thataway. Why?”

  “Where’s Partridge’s house?”

  “What?”

  “The place where that guy Partridge lived.”

  “Why you wanna—”

  “It’s an emergency, I—”

  “I better call the police.”

  “You call the police.” I grabbed Lard Butt by the collar and put my angry red eye up against his scared white peeper. “But first you tell me where Patridge’s place is.”

  “J-just keep up this road. The manor is at the end. C-can’t miss it.”

  Dashing out the door, I screeched the Lincoln out of the Sea Bass parking lot, setting a new land speed record for the State of Maine, my exhaust pipe rattling so loud I thought this time it would fall off for sure. The blur of wet cottages was soon replaced with the smear of scrub and dunes.

  “Fast, yes?” Otto sucked casually on a cigarette. “Yangie?”

  “Up ahead, I think.”

  “KGB has veapons, eh?”

  “You have that gun your mother gave you?”

  I glanced over and saw he already had it out. It looked like a friggin’ cannon in his little hands. He flipped the cylinder open, held it up to the light. I looked away and heard it clack back into place.

  “Garv, men you have killed?”

  The tone of his voice was devoid of the usual impish lilt. To look over at him at the speed I was going could have been fatal.

  “None. But it’s early yet.”


  “Mebbe, please to let Otto killed men who take Yangie.”

  “There’s not going to be any killing,” I said, with little conviction. It occurred to me briefly that if I did kill them, they might just chalk it up to a John Wayne Gacy copycat.

  “Garv, very important: must to always shoot gun fast. Mother tell to me: Shoot, shoot, shoot. When gun is pizdyets, yes?”

  “I told you, there’s not going to be any killing.”

  “She tell to me: Otisha . . . today is to kill, tomorrow is to interrogate.”

  “Please, Otto—”

  “She tell me: Otisha, to take gun, they must to dig hole at grave, remove my smelly hand.”

  “Otto!”

  “She tell to me: Otisha, it is to make them meal on your projectiles. Ah, Mother very beautiful woman. Cookies very nice when to kitchen make.”

  No doubt Mother’s brownies were made from chocolate, flour, and C4. I’d hate to be the one to blow out the candles on one of her birthday cakes. Better to submerge it in a bucket of water.

  I pushed the gas pedal to the floorboard, and the speedometer surged far to the right, I guess around 120 miles per hour. I wasn’t counting.

  “Ve careful. KGB very dangerous. Yangie maybe good. Garv—” Otto poked me in the shoulder with the gun barrel. “Careful, eh? Very important.”

  “Otto, didn’t your mother say anything about not pointing a gun at your friends? It’s not a toy, for Pete’s sake! Point that away from me!”

  “Mother say to Otto: Otisha, gun not toy, but much fun.”

  Ahead was a rocky bluff where waves crashed and lightning shimmered on the horizon beyond. The dune scrub cleared, and I could see the manor silhouetted ahead. It was perched alone at the top of the bluff like it wanted to take a dive off into the sea.

  The rain had passed, suddenly, and a quarter moon was veiled in clouds above as I raced the Lincoln past a vacant gatehouse, over a downed chain and a stone bridge, and toward the spooky mansion. Dark Shadows meets the Indy 500.

  I took my foot off the accelerator and pumped the brakes. The exhaust stopped rattling. Dousing my headlights, I snaked the Lincoln up the winding drive through tall hedges, the kind of bushes from which they make mazes. That gave way to cypresses, and I could see the manor’s cupolas above them. Close enough. Grinding to a stop, I threw the Lincoln into reverse and backed her between two cypresses, the car’s bumper hitting a statue, one of those knockoff Greek nudes. The white goddess gyrated and glowed in the dark like a Finnish belly dancer, but wobbled back into place without falling over.

  We got out, closing the doors quietly.

  We listened.

  The only sound was the crashing ocean to our right.

  “I stay, lookink.” Otto gestured with the gun, for me to take it. “Otto come to help, mebbe.”

  I couldn’t read his face in that light but didn’t much care what he did. For me, it was all about finding Angie, making Angie safe. It’s at a time like that when you really come to understand how much your own life is intertwined with your mate’s. It’s not just about companionship, about eating and sleeping together. And it’s not so much about being in love. There’s something about loving someone deeply for a long time, where the love becomes part and parcel of your own consciousness, of your being. Your sense of self is no longer me. It’s us. Perhaps the most apt expression for this is raison d’être. Roughly translated: If she dies, I die. We die.

  I waved away the gun and trotted toward the circular driveway. The crunch of my oversize shoes on the gravel made me wish the weather was still stormy to cover the sound of my approach.

  Partridge’s darkened manor loomed before me like a sleeping dragon, the row of peaks on the roof so many scales on the giant lizard’s back. It was a hulking and ominous shadow that a sneeze might awaken into a fire-breathing mood. Where the house hung over the cliff, dimly lit windows looked like the monster’s sleepy eye.

  It was like being faced with a house designed by J.R.R. Tolkien, though I was afraid any hobbits I ran into were likely to be pygmies.

  Gripping the ten-pound iron ring that passed for the front doorknob, I gave it a push and the massive oak door swung in.

  Hands sprang from the darkness and latched on to my lapels.

  I fell to the side, pulling my attacker with me, kicking frantically. I tried to hit some kind of soft spot. My thrashing quickly unseated the assailant and I found myself perched on top of MacTeague. By the light of the quarter moon, and my wet sticky hands, I realized he was covered in blood.

  “Stop, clown, stop!” he rasped piteously. “Help me, an ambulance, help me!”

  “Gack!” His chest was spongy with blood. Did my pseudo-bozo judo do that? Who’da thought my hands could be lethal weapons just from watching all those Bruce Lee films?

  “Anything, jes’ ’elp me. I don’t want t’die,” he whined.

  “Where’s Angie? The girl?”

  “Inside, with Tex, with the raven . . .” MacTeague jackknifed in pain and I jumped off him. I could see dozens of small arrows sticking out of the Scotsman’s flank.

  “Is she all right?”

  “I’ve been stabbed, shot with arrows, man! That double-dealin’ freak . . . Help me . . .”

  “Where’s Angie? Is she all right?”

  “Flip . . . stabbed me. Wanted the finder’s fee to himself. Please . . .” he sobbed. “I’m . . . I’m bleedin’ t’death, can’t ya see? An’ the wee devils got me with poison. . . .”

  “Police are on the way.” Car 54, where are you? I sure hoped the local constabulary had tossed aside their claw crackers and lobster bibs and scrambled for their squad cars when Blimpo at the motel buzzed.

  I left him groaning in the flower bed and slipped past the front door into the manor, my hands cocked like fists of fury. Steven Seagal had nothing on me, except, well, most of the guys he subdues haven’t already been stabbed. Hey, even golfers get handicaps, don’t they? I was ready to kick some more butt. Specifically, Tex’s. My raison d’être was in there somewhere, and I was trying to hold on to the idea that she hadn’t been harmed. If she had—my brain churned with adrenaline, and the very idea that they’d so much as touched her made me feel superhuman, ready to throw lightning, rend limbs, crush cars. Pummel pygmies, if need be.

  I couldn’t see a thing at first. Feeling along the wall to the right, I came to a door and hallway. Dimly lit windows on one side, large oil paintings of ships on the other. Yellow light leaked from a room at the end of the hall. I jogged along the carpet as quietly as I could.

  It was a cavernous, oak-vaulted room overflowing with head mounts of every conceivable exotic deer, antelope, and goat. For Garth the collector, it was like finding a secret grotto piled high with gold booty. A truly awe-inspiring collection of museum-quality taxidermy, and for a millisecond I was Ali Baba. Hartebeest, nyala, blackbuck, kudu, impala, gerenuk, steinbok, springbok, waterbuck, aoudad, axis, suni, fallow, mouflon, muntjac, gobi, chamois, tahr, roe, gray duiker, blue duiker, red duiker, bushbuck, eland, grysbok, dik-dik . . . Every twinkling glass eye seemed trained on me as I gradually brought my face around the door frame. Keep those eyes peeled, fellahs, Ali Baba is gonna do some serious kung fu fighting.

  The flicker of lamplight shone from behind the door, shadows of antlers cast black snakes on the ceiling. My giant shoes seemed to sink into the rug as if it were new-fallen snow, my gentle footfalls an audible hush as I rounded the door.

  “Don’t do nothin’ dumb, Scarecrow.”

  I pivoted left. Tex was sitting on the edge of a desk holding a large whaler’s lantern in one hand, a hefty revolver in the other. Next to him was my crow, the lamp glow on the white feathers lighting up the bell jar like a hundred-watt bulb.

  I froze when I saw Angie. She was behind Tex, to the right, gagged and duct-taped to a thronelike chair. Her eyes bulged and watered at the sight of me. This was her knight in shining armor, come to the rescue? I glanced down at my absurd costume apologetically. Where were the
lightning bolts when I needed them? My heart and brain were aflame with the urge to destroy. Monster clown!

  “C’mon in, hava seat right over here, nice an’ easy, that’s it.” His toothpick waggled nervously as he motioned me toward the chair next to Angie’s. “What’re you supposed to be? Some kinda clown? Well, come on in, Bozo. Been an excitin’ night, what with everybody gettin’ jumpy. We could use some laughs.”

  I sat dumbly in the chair, Angie blinking anxiously next to me. I suppose I should have attempted a reassuring gesture of some kind, but I didn’t want to get shot patting her knee.

  My throat was all sand, but I managed to croak “Whatever it is you want here, it’s all yours. All I want is Angie.”

  “Aw, that’s sweet.” Tex drew a forearm across his brow, checking his perimeter. I noticed that he was favoring one leg—the other had one of those pygmy arrows stuck in it and was matted with blood. “But you can’t tell me that you didn’t have some kinda deal, some kinda angle on the raven. I mean, why else you been so keen on that ol’ bird? MacTeague an’ me wasn’t stupid neither. Think we din’t know you’n Bret had some kinda deal in the makin’? Just too much coincidence, is all.”

  “Fletcher? He tried to kill me. I don’t even know what all this is about.”

  “If you din’t know nothin’, then just why did your li’l missy come to Mallard Island? We know Fletcher tol’ you somethin’, tryin’ to cheat us outta the prize.”

  “Prize?”

  “Pay dirt,” he mocked, spitting his toothpick on the floor. His face welled up with a mass of mean-spirited squinty wrinkles. “Buyers comin to take that ol’ bird offa our hands to the tune of three hundred grand. Be surprised what folk’ll pay good money for.”

  “You stabbed MacTeague over a couple hundred grand?”

  He checked his perimeter again. I looked around too, for the first time. The room was a library. Tex was backed up against a stately desk, beyond which was a wall of hanging tapestries. Right and left, walls were filled with bookshelves and another array of taxidermy. You don’t suppose any of the shelves concealed a hidden staircase? There was a chandelier overhead, a vaulted wood ceiling above that—way up in the stratosphere. Behind Angie and me, opposite the desk and entrance to the room, large multipaned windows covered almost a whole wall. I could hear the ocean through them.