by Chuck Redman
“How many times have you said this to your refrigerator: ‘These shelves are too short. I can’t fit anything tall in here.’? Sound familiar? Well, now there’s an answer. At Wacklund’s House n’ Home, come see our new line of extra-short disposable food storage bins, designed to fit into even the tiniest refrigerator shelf—”
I just wonder sometimes. It’s just a gut feeling and I can’t describe it, but is there anything out there that makes a sound half as tinny, or as hollow, or as dang reverberating as a small town a.m. radio station on a Wednesday afternoon in June? One of them days, you know the type. Sultry. Airless, for even the wind blows hot. The entire valley heats up like a oven that pings and echoes as it bakes whatever or whoever is stuck inside with no way out. I guess the radio waves get seared a bit themselves.
“Ridiculous,” says Kenny, as he accelerates his snazzy Aculexity SUV west on 21st Street toward home. It’s not real clear if Kenny’s referring to the radio commercial, the big elm trees all along the street which has just had most of their limbs lopped off by the City, or life in general.
“KOTT weather: continued hot over the next seventy-two hours, lows tonight in the mid-seventies, high tomorrow ninety-four with chance of thundershowers—”
Kenny turns onto Ridgecrest Drive just as Engelbert Humperdinck starts to croon After the Lovin. You know, the one that goes Da Da Dee Dee Dee Dee—. That’s the one. He parks in his driveway, wipes a speck of dust off the roof of his SUV, and looks all around the neat cul-de-sac which, but for the West Wind blowin off my Sandhills, would be still as a paintin on the wall. He smoothes the section of his hair that’s growed out extra long and blow-dried to cover the bald spot and checks his red brick mailbox at the curb. There’s a stack of mail and he shakes his head.
“Hey, guys,” calls out Kenny while he locks the front door behind him and looks round for signs of life. There’s light playin on the walls of the den so that’s where he heads to. There sits Kenny’s twin nineteen-month-olds, like bookends, watchin Looney Tunes on the portable DVD player on the floor. And his wife hunched on the couch. “How’re my little rugrats?” He’s down on one knee, kissing each one on the top of her curly brown head.
“And there’s blood,” says Liza, pointin at the cartoon antics.
“Then she will die,” says Lorna, slapping her chubby little thighs.
Kenny turns a wrinkled forehead to his wife. “Where’d they—”
“It’s not the first time you’ve heard that,” says Allie Smold, sipping slowly from a glass of ice water.
“When did I ever—”
“You just don’t remember, Kenny. You know your mind is always somewhere else.” Did he buy diapers, she asks her husband. He didn’t. The cartoons flicker across her ashy face. Didn’t he see this morning that they were almost out. She seems bent on knowing.
“Why couldn’t you just tell me,” says Kenny. “If you wanted to marry a mind reader you should have said something seven and a half years ago. I’d have taken lessons.” He snuffs hot air out his nose and bobs his head like there’s polka music only he can hear.
He stops and looks at his wife. Her used up mouth. Something washed out in her sore faded eyes. Hung up somewhere far away to dry. Around the dusky room: the designer window blinds pulled down, the swanky recessed lighting turned off. He goes plunks down on the couch and puts his arm around her only not touching just resting on the top of the back cushion. “So when did it start?” and it’s rare to hear Kenny’s voice so deep and even. Her eyes is staring nowhere, her bare shoulders ticking the smallest of tics. Has she took a Traxamig, Kenny asks. She ain’t. “I’ll get you one.” He gets up and starts toward the bathroom.
“That’s gonna be a little bit impossible, Kenny, since we don’t have any in the house.”
“Whadya mean we don’t have any in the house?” he says headin back couchward. “Why don’t we, didn’t you—” She starts to cry. “Allie! Why haven’t you gone and, gone and—”
Which don’t help the cryin any, and she flares her wet eyes at him and sputters. “Because it’s two hundred thirty-five dollars for ten pills!”
“Since when?”
“When do you think?”
He stares at her like he might cry in a minute himself. “I’m gonna sue Schenectady Mutual, I swear I am. But that’s okay, whatever it costs, you need your pills.” She don’t reply. He’ll go pick up a refill after dinner, he says. She’s awful quiet all of a sudden. “Okay?”
“With what for money?” finally she says.
He scratches the part of his neck where he shaved too close this morning. “Is the Visa maxed?” His voice is way softer.
“Why even ask?”
“So I’ll write a check.” She slowly shakes her head at him. “Is that supposed to mean something?”
“It means,” she says, “our so-called checking account is worthless.”
“Come on. There’s at least, at least—”
“At least zero, Kenny. Less than. We have a house payment due in two days and zilch in our checking account. Just dead air.”
“That’s ridiculous,” he says, “last time I—”
“I’ve paid bills, sweetheart. There’s nothing coming in. It’s not too complicated. Subtraction without addition, pretty basic stuff.”
“Okay, it’s been slow.” He swallows.
“Oh,” she says, “slow. Well that’s okay because the foreclosure will be fast.”
“Hey Rain In Da Face,” says Bugs Bunny, scrubbing his back with a long-handled brush, “trow anudda log on da fire.”
“Fire,” says Lorna, “don’t touch!”
Kenny looks at the weak achy smile his wife is giving him and his face starts to darken up. “You know, any chance you’ve ever had to belittle me and my career you’ve, you’ve—grabbed at it like a chocolate bon-bon.”
“How did I belittle you? I’ve always supported you no matter how—”
“Yeah, that’s right, honey. No matter how stupid and blundering I am. Well, it’s like I always say: that’s whatcha get for marrying a harelip.”
“Oh, Kenny,” she says with the saddest shake of the head. “Why do you do that to yourself?”
“Ehhhhhh. What’s cookin, Doc?” sniffs Bugs.
“Cookie,” says Liza, clapping her little hands.
“I don’t know,” says Kenny. “Just born dumb I guess.” Now he’s the one with the far off eyes and, with pity and reproach mixed together in her voice, Allie Smold speaks her husband’s name once more. He stands up and announces he’s goin out. “I’m not hungry.” Kenny pats his little girls on their heads and walks out the house.
“Rabbit stew!” cries Bugs, “That’s me!”
“That’s me!” says Lorna.
Before he climbs in his SUV Kenny stops and fingers the thick black hairs of his mustache like he’s afraid they might of fell out. Well, I can’t lie: with the June sun still throwin down rays from high above the rooftops, it’s pretty plain to see, through the whiskers: that old pink scar that slants across the independent insurance agent’s left lip, while the right half jerks upward now in a twisted little smile of self-cruelty.
If I was a person wanted to retire, take it easy’n live worry-free, what I’d do is I’d get me a place at the Pleasant Prairies Assisted Living up on 18th Street and 4th Avenue, just west of the Good Samaritan Hospital and the Medical Arts Building. Well, I ain’t got that option, as you know, but that’s what Janet’s folks done, and it’s swanky. You got your nice little apartment, your fancy dining room with that chef that comes around to see if you like his creations de jour, you got book clubs, yoga, every pastime you can think of, even bus trips to Pioneer Village. What else does a person need? You’re with old folks, sure. And some ain’t in the best of shape, but the majority is pretty sprightly, you’d be surprised. Some of the gals is still—well, nevermind, I’m getting away from the main point. Which is that every Wednesday night Janet comes and joins her folks for dinner, which is complim
entary on the house, they can bring a guest along once a week. And tonight’s the night.
“Hi, sweetheart,” says her mom as Janet kisses her and comes into their snug little assisted living room, which is tidy as a model in a home furniture outlet. “I’m glad you’re early. He’s been having a bad day. Saw something in the paper that upset him, he won’t say what it was. He even shouted at the person on the phone when he called to validate his credit card.”
“Hmmh. Mom, what’s that smell?”
“What smell, Dear?”
“A weird chemical smell, Mom. Bad, I don’t know.” The newspaper gal is right. It smells of crusty nickels and pennies inside of an old soup can.
“I don’t smell anything, sweetheart. I’ve been spraying air freshener whenever we—you know. There shouldn’t be any bad odors.”
“What air freshener? When did you get air freshener?”
“That air freshener with the trees and flowers on it. You know.” Mom points to the shelf in the open bathroom.
“Mom! That’s surface disinfectant, that’s not air freshener, you can’t spray that in the air, it’s poison. That’s just for—you spray that on a surface and wipe it off!”
Mom looks pretty hurt. “Well, I’m sorry dear. It has trees and flowers on it, I thought—. I won’t do it anymore.” For ten or twelve seconds it’s pretty quiet in the apartment except for the TV over in the bedroom. “You better go in and see him, maybe you can settle him down a little. Oh, for dinner they’re serving chicken fried steak.”
“How funny,” Janet says, with her eyes tilting off just a hair right of center.
“Chicken fried steak is funny?”
“No, not really, Mom.”
The feller watchin the six o’clock news in the bedroom might be thought, at a glance, to have fell asleep and forgot to close his eyes, except one thing says he ain’t: the left forefinger is busy rubbin the cuticles of the left thumb over and over, never stopping, almost like a piston in a old steam engine. And, once or twice we see them crinkled eyes blink. But his daughter comes in, asks “Whatcha thinking about, Dad?” and kisses him, and it’s like a old black and white photo somehow comes to life. He is that feller in the photos. Them photos on the wall of Janet’s office? Only the crew cut’s turned gray and the short-sleeved dress shirt and tie fit a little too loose on the old news man.
It’s commercial break on the TV, and there’s an ad for that new improved pill for type 2 diabetes. Mr. Hinderson has one of them faces with a brand of wisdom written on it as he smiles and squints up at his daughter. “There’s only one thing to think about, sweetheart,” and the shortest word was the one he hammered. Janet, before she sits down on the bed, puts hands to hips, blows out a deep gust of air and gives him one of them “Now, now” looks. She tries for a few minutes to buoy up his mood somewhat, but Dad’s got a burr in his bonnet about somethin. Turns out he thinks the credit card company is out to get him.
“Dad,” she tries to reason, “credit card companies are big impersonal things, why would they have anything against—”
“I’ll show you why,” he says and, while the TV flashes pictures of the Sky High Bacon Double Burger from Bargain Burger, the old feller scoots his chair just a bit and leans over his tiny glass-top desk and rustles through some papers spread out there. He fishes up a letter and hands it to his daughter. It’s one of them letters with gummy stuff where the credit card stuck.
She reads silent for twenty seconds or so and then “Dad, they’re not trying to pull a fast one on you. They say that your account number may have been illegally stolen as a result of a merchant database compromise. So they’ve issued you this new card with a new account number. You just have to call this number and—”
“And that’s where the scam comes in, doll.” By golly, thanks to a new once-a-day inhaler medicine for COPD, the feller on the tube can take his grandson river rafting like he used to, that’s certainly a—anyway Doll, I mean Janet, exhales another lungful before she can muster up the energy to get to the bottom of what’s eatin her dad. He’s got a theory they made the whole thing up. “How do I know there was a security incident? Tell me that.”
“Dad, why would they—”
“It’s all about selling insurance, doll. It’s about ripping off an old man.” While Janet tries to get through to her dad and understand how insurance has came into this credit card situation, the TV’s got one of them snazzy cars racing around tight curves while a deep voice says “German engineering” like he’s tryin to seduce somebody. “They tried to sell me insurance,” Dad repeats, “they tried to sneak it in there because I’m an old man and they think we’re all senile.”
Out in the living room Mom sets on the plaid sofa and straightens things on the coffee table that was already straight to my eyes, while she listens to the sounds from the bedroom and tries sniffin the air for somethin that ain’t trees and flowers afterall.
A short and kinda elderly bundled-up lady tramps into the Foodway Supermarket and stands gaping at the checkout gal for pert’ner five seconds. “Theraflow,” is all she finally croaks out, like old codgers lost in the desert call for water in them corny old flicks.
The checkout gal points over her right shoulder while she scans TV dinners with her left hand. “Aisle nine, Mrs. Curtis.” The lady wends her way in that direction, each step weaker than the one before. She passes aisle eight which is the baby aisle, and two-thirds down it stands Kenny running his index finger over all the glittering varieties of the latest in disposable diapers. Kenny’s cooled down some, I would imagine, after driving up and down the highway a few times, and he ain’t cussing out loud but I can see his lips moving kinda indelicate. Just as that supermarket announcer alerts us about firm, succulent avocados from sunny Paraguay which are now two for a dollar on aisle one while supplies last, Kenny throws up his hands and yanks a jumbo pack of Scampers from the shelf and heads to the front. He stops short when he gets to the line cause the two fellas at the end of it are Cosetti and Laertes Norris. They each got a six-pack and are tryin not to let on that they recognize the guy with the diapers. Kenny don’t let em off so easy and starts up a conversation, but they manage to get their beer paid for and make their getaway before the word “underwrite” ever has a chance to pop up. This second brush-off don’t do much to enhance Kenny’s mood, so when the checker asks him if he found everything okay Kenny ain’t the pleasantest guy in the world.
“Not really, Maria. I wanted the Googies with the Supersleek Lightweight Material, the Safe and Comfy Fit Design, Cozy-stretch Waistband, Designer Graphics, Extra-absorbant No-leak Pads, Triple-grip Reseal Strips, and the Color-code Wetness Gauge. But you don’t have em.” What can a checker do with a regular customer like that except stand and blink and pull her jaw back up?
“Vern!” she yells out the corner of her mouth in the direction of the assistant manager’s counter next to the charcoal briquettes. Right behind Kenny shivers the bundled-up lady with her Theraflow, coughing up a fit all over his ninety-five dollar dress shirt.
By the time Kenny comes out into the muggy parking lot, darkness has fell and he squints against them bright pinky white lights overhead. His keys are out and his thumb is ready to beep-beep his car open when he looks to his left and the limo’s there at the far end of the lot and somethin ain’t right over there. There’s voices, coupla strangers movin about, and by gad there’s a robbery goin on! Things is kinda turvy and goin down fast so it ain’t too easy to make out what’s what exactly but. The driver’s door is ajar with the window down and Laertes and Steve is both in the front seat with their hands up and lookin remarkably calm like they’d practiced this for weeks, and tryin I think to pacify them two robbers somewhat. You’d think these two particular strangers was a pair of expectant hens, as nervous as they act, speakin Spanish and English so fast and so mixed that what comes out is jambalaya. The rascal with the gun wears a bright Harvard T-shirt and his trigger hand quivers like an arrow in the breeze. His partner has go
t the two six-packs under his arms, and is lookin around every five seconds to make sure they ain’t surrounded. His shirt says Alabama Crimson Tide, and has old blood stains front and back. Both fellas got red gunk wedged deep under their fingernails.
Kenny don’t yell or nothin but I guess his fast-approaching footsteps with them diapers under his arm distract the two rascals, and whilst they turn to look Laertes makes a move for his gun stashed quite handy under the dashboard. Now: I wisht I could somehow or some way tell you what exactly happens next, but I can’t. It is too quick and too hectic for an old sodface like me to figure out with any degree of accurateness. All’s I can tell you for sure is that there’s a whole lot of fumbling of weapons and somehow—again, I haven’t the foggiest—Harvard ends up with Laertes’ gun and Laertes ends up with Harvard’s. Then, what comes next is a blur, but there’s at least two, maybe three, flashes and explosions and yelps of pain, grunts, shouts, and things that sound like splat. Then—and this is the only part that ain’t in doubt whatsoever—them diapers, the whole jumbo pack, is suddenly flyin through the warm night air toward Bama’s icy face with all the fury that a riled-up independent insurance agent can summon.
When Janet gets home from dinner with her folks she grabs the mail and sets down on her couch under the yellow lamp while Scoop flops at her feet and plants his grizzled chin and paws upon them. The junk mail pile is big and the proper mail pile is small when Janet comes upon a letter that looks awful familiar. She sets up straight and stares at the envelope, and in a low breathy voice she says some words that don’t sound so nice, but they ain’t really meant for anyone’s ears, so I’ll disregard. Anyways, she tears open that envelope and, well I told you she’s a fast reader. About forty-five seconds later she’s callin the activation number on the card, and it don’t take long before Janet’s out-and-out screamin at the customer service rep and threatenin to lodge a complaint with the FTC in Washington. And I got a pretty good hunch that tomorrow morning Peg Rossiter’ll have a brand new assignment: some kind of story on credit card companies. And how they’ve been pullin a bunch of fast ones on people in the cities, across the prairies, and everywhere else there is.
