FSF, August-September 2009

by Spilogale, Inc

  Meera had come out of her room and was standing in the middle of the parlor. She looked pale, but red around the eyes, as though she had been crying. “What's wrong?” she asked. “What's wrong, Mama?"

  "Nothing, Meera,” Amrit said over her shoulder. “There's been a little accident, that is all. Return to your room; I shall be with you momentarily. I wish to speak with you.” She went back into the kitchen. Saavit was busily mopping up the spilled tea and rounding up pieces of broken pot, but otherwise the tableau was the same as when she had left it: her mother-in-law bent over Gloria's raw wrist, laving it, while Gloria looked on, placidly unconcerned. “The aloe,” Amrit said.

  Mrs. Chaudhury did not look up. “Thank you, Daughter. If you would be so kind as to split the leaves and scrape the gel into a bowl."

  "Yes,” Amrit said, “Mother.” She took a knife from the drawer, sat down at the kitchen table, and carefully halved the aloe leaves, revealing their glistening interiors. Scoring the gel with the knife, she took the spoon from her saucer and used it to scrape the innards of the leaves into her teacup. Then she conveyed the cup to her mother-in-law, who took it from her without comment. Amrit stood there for a moment, uncertain what to do next; then she turned and left the kitchen.

  Meera had left the sitting room. In the hallway outside of Meera's closet, Amrit hesitated, then knocked. “Meera?"

  "I'm here, Mama."

  She sounds so tired, thought Amrit. She pulled the door ajar. Meera was sitting crosslegged on her carpet. A schoolbook lay opened upon her lap. She looked up, saw her mother standing there, and burst into tears. Amrit went over to her and sat down on the carpet beside her. “I'm sorry, Mama,” Meera said. “I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Don't let them chip me. Please, Mama, don't let them, please don't let them, I'll be good, I'll do anything, only don't let them chip me, please please."

  "Hush now, hush.” Amrit took her daughter into her arms and pressed her head against her chest. “Hush, now. Nobody's going to let anybody chip anybody."

  "But Assistant Vice-Principal said—"

  "The Assistant Vice-Principal can go suck a mango,” said Amrit, “and for that matter, so can Vice-Principal Mehta. No one is going to nannychip my daughter, and that is the end of it."

  "But he said—they will expel me—and you work so hard—"

  "Yes, yes, your mama works so very hard in her foolish pride to give her daughter the opportunities she was too timid to seek for herself. There are other schools, perhaps not as famous nor as fine. What of it?"

  "But, Mama—"

  "That is the end of it, Meera. There will be no nannychipping and that is that.” She kissed her daughter upon the top of her sweet head. Then she placed her lips close to Meera's beautiful ear. “Do not stop feeling, Meera,” she whispered fiercely. “It is good to feel, however inconvenient those feelings may happen to be. For if you cease to feel, you are as good as dead, bugger the bloody Buddha. Do not forget, Meera. Promise me."

  "I won't forget, Mama, I promise,” said her daughter, who, though perhaps not quite understanding, showed no signs of inclination to break the embrace they shared. So Amrit continued to hold her, for the longest time, thinking in her own mind how many forces in her own life had conspired to deaden her own passions. Then she had another thought, which made her pull herself from Meera's grasp and hold her at elbow's length. “However,” Amrit added, in a fierce voice, “if you are going to quarrel with every bully who accosts you, you had best become more proficient at fisticuffs. While we are seeking another school in which to place you, you will resume your boxing lessons with your Uncle Saavit. Am I understood?"

  "Yes, Mama!” cried her fierce young troublemaker. “Yes!” And they held one another again until old Mrs. Chaudhury came into the room, took in the scene, and asked in a very mild tone if, now that the storm of crises appeared to have passed, anyone in this madhouse would mind if she attempted to make another pot of tea.

  Novelet: THE PRIVATE EYE by Albert E. Cowdrey

  In our last issue, Albert Cowdrey took us deep into outer space. His new story stays closer to home, but in its own way, it's just as far out. Mr. Cowdrey notes that inhabitants of southern Louisiana will immediately recognize the (late) model for Sheriff Chew, but the rest of the story is pure invention.

  Or so he would like us to believe.

  Sometimes fame comes unexpectedly, to unexpected people. That was certainly the case with Jimmy John (JJ) Link.

  JJ's hometown of Bougalou, Louisiana, was once the obscurest of hamlets—so quiet that when he was six, and the first stoplight appeared at the intersection of Main Street and Huey Long Avenue, he'd sit on the curb all day to watch the colors change. But then on- and off-ramps were built to nearby Interstate 12, truck stops appeared on both Main and Huey, and the air brakes and shifting gears of the big rigs hissed and gnashed at all hours. A few more years, and hurricane refugees swarmed into the Parish of St. Genevieve from the squashier regions to the south, bringing with them casinos, hookers, meth labs, battered-women shelters, fast-food outlets, and the inevitable Wal-Mart.

  Urban culture had reached Bougalou, and everybody was affected in one way or another. JJ's Daddy copped a FEMA contract and profitably filled his Ox-Bow Trailer Park with formaldehyde gas chambers housing the homeless. JJ's Mama ran off with an Atlas Van Lines driver, severely traumatizing her son, who was already a practicing eccentric but became more so after her desertion. JJ dropped out of college and began to hang around the new casino, the Shore-Win, where he was amazed to discover that he could read the face of a card while looking at the back. He cleaned the clocks of several men older and richer than himself, used his winnings to buy a big shiny Winnebago that he parked at the Ox-Bow, and began making plans to leave the parish and see the world.

  Meanwhile Bougalou's social elite had formed a krewe called Fortuna, and in 2008 gave the town's first carnival ball on Lundi Gras, or Fat Monday, in the lobby of the Delta National Bank. Well-to-do men with red faces and large hands rented formal attire from a new shop called Tux for Bucks, while their ladies bought flashy gowns from Clothes for Does. The bank's CEO, T. Christian Rapp, reigned as King, and his newly acquired Internet bride Marsha (who resembled Dolly Parton in her heyday) as Queen. The Bayou Stompers provided zydeco music until the wee hours of Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday, when the most durable revelers took off with a screech of tires and headed for New Orleans.

  They were still nursing hangovers on Ash Wednesday when news began to spread of a crime never before seen in Bougalou. JJ was dressing to visit the casino when his Daddy burst into the Winnebago to tell him that Rapp's twelve-year-old daughter Sarah had been abducted and was being held for ransom.

  "But don't you worry none,” he assured his son. “Big Russ'll take care of it."

  * * * *

  He was referring to Sheriff Russell Chew, a 300-pound Chinese-American whose wide form, sharply pressed uniforms, and brushed-back white hair embodied law and order in the Parish of St. Genevieve.

  Between killing deer in and out of season and having his wife convert them into andouille, a kind of Cajun sausage he much preferred to sweet-and-sour anything, Sheriff Chew rode herd on the urbanization crisis. Though every year the crime statistics shot up, people reelected him again and again, saying, “Just think what things'd be like if we didn't have Big Russ!” When the local media (meaning the weekly Bougalou Bulletin) harassed him about the number of murders, he growled, “Ah'm just an ole slant-eyed country boy doin’ his best.” People loved that line. Whatever Sheriff Chew's faults, such as incompetence and rampant corruption, he was not politically correct.

  But now folks expected him to solve Sarah's kidnapping, do it quick, and if possible kill the kidnapper to make sure no slick lawyer from New Orleans or Baton Rouge got the sucker off. For the first time in his long tenure, Sheriff Chew had to produce results in a major case. That was expecting rather a lot, and a week went by with no visible results, while Sarah's parents—after posting a reward on their own
—barraged him with demands for action.

  That same week JJ had a personal disaster that brought him his first taste of fame. In a letter to the editor of the Bulletin, he complained that the Shore-Win Casino had banned him on a charge of card counting, when in fact he merely had ESP, and was that fair? The editor was a relative—second cousin to the husband of JJ's Daddy's half-niece—and for that reason the letter appeared on the Op-Ed Page under the headline Has ESP, Says Banned Bougalouan. There Big Russ noted it. And reached for his phone.

  It was ten in the morning. JJ was in the Winnebago, wallowing in his bunk and comforting himself for the casino fiasco in a manner that was habitual with him. Cursing softly, he wiped a fragrant film of Aloe Vera Thick ‘n’ Creamy Skin Lotion from his right hand, flipped his bleating phone open, and heard an unmistakable gravelly voice ask, “That you, JJ?"

  "Yes, suh,” he replied.

  JJ's education had ended after three semesters at the University of South Louisiana (Sorrento), whose acronym USLS was pronounced “useless” by its graduates. Yet he was no fool. Knowing where the power lay in St. Genevieve, he added still more subserviently, “What can Ah do for you, suh?"

  "Come on down and see me,” the sheriff growled. “Maybe you can he'p me out. Like the Latinos say, Ah got me a problema, so to speak."

  Since the Rapp case had been the town's sole topic for a week, JJ was able to review the basic story while cleaning up and dressing. Every afternoon a chauffeur driving the family's enormous SUV picked Sarah up at the door of St. Mary's Academy to take her to ballet or riding class. On Ash Wednesday the familiar vehicle arrived, she parleyed for a few moments with the driver—a dim figure wearing a billed cap—then obligingly got in. And that was it. No more Sarah. The chauffeur, an elderly black man named William Wood who'd been with Mr. Rapp approximately since the dawn of time, was found lying in the banker's vast garage between the Cad and the BMW with a concussion and no memory of who had slugged him. A gardener named Alferd (sic) W. Finch was missing, and hence presumed to be the kidnapper.

  Later on, the Bulletin reported that Mr. Rapp had paid a substantial ransom by wire transfer to a numbered account in a Cayman Islands bank, whence it vanished into cyberspace. But the information he'd purchased about his daughter's whereabouts turned out to be false. Sarah remained missing, and the FBI—which by now had been called in—assumed that the banker was being set up for additional payments. Or that Sarah was already dead. Or both.

  In short, the situation was more than a problema: it was an impending disaster. Though baffled as to how he could help, JJ hastened to the grim redbrick building that housed police headquarters in front and the jail in back. He entered the sheriff's opulent office—with its broad desk, draped flags, bronze plaques, framed photos of Chew with dead beasts and live notables, and an autographed pre-incarceration portrait of former Gov. Edwin Edwards—and listened with a sinking heart as the sheriff informed him that his mystic powers were the last hope for finding Sarah Rapp alive.

  "You got you a talent, JJ, and it's time you used it for somethin’ worthwhile, stead of just knockin’ down,” said Big Russ (whose whole life had been devoted to knocking down).

  "Suh, Ah never done nothin’ like this before,” JJ protested. The sheriff cut him no slack.

  "Well, Ah think you better do it now,” he said, fixing the younger man with a basilisk gaze.

  He assigned JJ a small office filled with battered green metal furniture. Across the hall on a folding chair he planted a deputy named Wade Garmish, who'd missed a career in an SS Death's-Head Unit solely by being born too late, and in the wrong country. Garmish had orders to keep JJ where he was until he came up with something useful.

  For the best part of an hour, balancing precariously on a busted swivel chair that dumped him twice before he got the hang of it, JJ tried to figure how on God's Earth he could go about finding Sarah. After all, being able to spot a king of hearts through the bicycle pattern on the back of a playing card had nothing whatever to do with locating a missing twelve-year-old. Fortunately, he spent a great part of his existence watching the Sci Fi Channel, with its eclectic cargo of starships, aliens, ghosts, zombies, vampires, and werewolves, and sometime or other had seen a story about a psychic who found missing persons by fondling clothing, shoes, etc. that were saturated with their aura.

  Hmm, thought JJ. He rose cautiously and opened the door. Deputy Garmish raised his eyes from a copy of Penthouse and gave him the sort of glance a hammerhead shark bestows on a human leg.

  "Ah need somethin’ that was close to Sarah,” JJ told him. “Say a piece of her clothes."

  "So's you can jack off with it, Ah guess,” said Garmish, a remark that for him was practically a bon mot.

  "Maybe,” JJ suggested, “Ah should talk to the sheriff. Maybe he can get me what Ah need."

  Wade growled—literally: like Grrr—but rose and lurched away, the size-twelve feet he used for treading on suspects thundering upon the linoleum-coated plywood floor. An hour passed during which JJ lay on the desk in his office leafing through Penthouse and wishing he had a tube of Aloe Vera with him. Then the door crashed open.

  "Sarah's Mama, she thinks you're crazy as hayull,” said Garmish, slamming a cardboard box down on the floor. (Meaning, of course, Sarah's stepmother, her own mother being with Jesus.)

  The deputy snatched back his magazine and stomped out again. JJ went through the box slowly and carefully, fondling an array of pathetic child's attire, no less pathetic because the little dresses and whatnot had been expensively purchased in Houston and New Orleans at upscale shops for fashionable pre-teens. Every item had been meticulously cleaned, and not one emitted the slightest frisson. Then at the very bottom of the box he found a teddy bear—a surprisingly old and beat-up bear. Maybe a favorite that Sarah just couldn't sleep without? He touched Teddy and—wow! It was like touching a live wire.

  He balanced on the swivel chair and held Teddy against his chest with both hands. He'd never felt such intense longing. Somewhere Sarah was alive but in fear, maybe in the dark—yeah, he felt certain she was in the dark—terrified, needing her security bear as never before. Intermittently fear gave way to rage, when she thought about Alferd W. Finch. The son of a bitch, back when he was weeding rose beds and gaining her confidence, had often given her flowers. “They nearly as pretty as you are, Honey,” he'd say—she remembered that. Remembered with hatred. And this little lady, JJ realized, knew how to hate.

  Yet Alferd hadn't acted alone. That was something JJ hadn't known until now. As soon as he and Sarah were well away from the school, they stopped and a bulky ski-masked man entered the SUV. He smelled of Brut and tobacco and he overpowered her, wrapped her in a rug, laid her on the floor, and sat with his feet upon her. There she lay for a long, long time, maybe hours. The rug was stifling hot and dusty—JJ sneezed half a dozen times, so vivid were her memories—and eventually Sarah had been obliged to pee on herself. She'd felt such embarrassment and rage that if she'd been telekinetic both her kidnappers would have been vaporized, as they richly deserved to be.

  Eventually Alferd stopped in a wilderness area, unwrapped her, and gave her a drink of iced tea while the accomplice stood guard. She darted several glances at the guy in the mask, enough to memorize the fact that he was short and wide and his Nike knockoffs were also short and wide, as if they contained the feet of a very large duck. Then—the tea must have had some kind of drug in it—she fell into a deep sleep, and woke some unknowable amount of time later lying on hard wooden planks in the dark. Feeling around, she touched a plastic bottle of water and a loaf of bread. She thought she was in a cabinet—she could feel the lid over her head. It was hot and stuffy in there, and the only fresh air seeped in through a flexible hose. From time to time she either slept or passed out; her head ached unbearably; she began to fear she'd die by slow suffocation.

  JJ was fearing it too. This was not the first time he'd been inside somebody else's head. That strange experience had been happening
at unpredictable moments since he was maybe four or five. But being in the dark prison with Sarah was different by several orders of magnitude. In the first place it was agonizing, and in the second place her life depended on him. Yet he couldn't tell where she was, because she didn't know herself.

  In his distress JJ unbalanced himself and the chair deposited him on the floor again. He scrambled up, still holding Teddy, and began to stumble around the room, bouncing off the walls and banging into the old green furniture, totally disoriented and completely at a loss.

  And then he noticed something. The intensity of Sarah's anguish wasn't exactly the same everywhere in the office. Near the north wall the sensation was a tad stronger, near the south wall a bit less. It was like playing one of those children's games where somebody says, “You're getting warm; you're getting cold."

  Hah!

  He exited the office. Deputy Garmish was absent from his post—toilet, probably, since the Penthouse had vanished too. JJ headed down the hall, found an outside door, and started weaving in and out among the big gleaming cruisers in the parking lot. The sensation fluctuated more noticeably. No doubt about it now—Teddy wasn't just a lightning rod for Sarah's emotions, he was a compass pointing to her whereabouts.

  JJ slammed his way back inside and barged into the big office where Sheriff Chew sat conferring with half a dozen sleazy-looking characters who collectively formed St. Genevieve's governing Police Jury. JJ didn't care. Clutching Teddy to his breastbone, he gasped, “Ah need me a driver. Ah think Ah can lead you to Sarah Rapp."