Wham!

by Carol Marrs Phipps

  “Hey,” she said, standing up. “If you wait out here, I'll fix breakfast. It'll be a bit.”

  “Sure. I'd love a one or one-thirty in the afternoon breakfast.”

  She was inside for a good while. Drake sat on the step in the mottled shade of the burr oak, listening to the cheeping of the sparrows all about and the occasional traffic whine by in the roadway. He looked up at the click of the latch behind him to see Tess shoving the door aside with her hips as she came through with a couple of plates.

  “I made egg in the hole,” she said. “Here. Hold my plate.” She stepped back inside for a moment.

  “Perfect!” he said as she returned with a pot of tea. “Wow! This is real milk for it and everything. And it's not one bit sour. Where on earth?”

  “Maud and Mort. I don't know where they got any of it.”

  “Broadstreet?”

  “Fates forbid,” she said, taking her plate as she sat down beside him. “I don't think Maud likes trolls much...”

  “Hey! You've put on make-up and things. And you look really hot, not to put too fine a point on it. You'll have... Well. If Trent was a problem, you're going to have all kinds of others now.”

  “That bad?”

  “Well you've got that extra something to begin with, just like Nia,” he said, pausing to look away and swallow. He cleared his throat. “And now, well. I can't imagine why. I mean you never thought much of crowd followers. I just never expected. Who did it for you?”

  Tess turned her head for him to better see the fine troll swirls in the razor-cut fuzz on her scalp.

  “Broadstreet? You went and saw Maxi? All by yourself?”

  “Yeh. Well I'd 'ave asked a friend to go with me, but I don't have any...”

  “Go on!” he said. “You have me. I'm your friend at least. And you've been calling me your brother for how many months? And now, especially.” He fell quiet, cutting a bite. “And these eggs don't begin to smell bad or anything. They simply had to have come from Broadstreet. Maxi's the only one I know of with laying hens. He gets away with all kinds of things in the troll ward. When Nia fixed me egg in a hole, just like this, we went there and got the eggs from Maxi.” He squeezed shut his eyes and turned aside for a moment.

  Tess looked quickly about for the next thing to say. “Well it wasn't peer pressure, in spite of how it looks,” she said suddenly. “It's just something I had to do. So, what's this news you brought all the way over here?”

  “What happened to Bart while all this was going on? He's here, isn't he?”

  “Wow! I have no idea. They had him on his perch in Nia's room.”

  “Mind if I check?”

  “Suit yourself. I'll just stay out here and keep the flies off your plate. There's a skinny in her room.”

  Drake nodded as he handed her his plate and got to his feet. “There you are,

  Rainbow Bart,” he said as he stepped into Nia's room.

  Bart stretched out a foot under one wing and gave all his feathers a thorough shake.

  “Mort's in the hospital,” said Drake. “Did you know that?”

  Bart cocked an eye at him and shook his head.

  “That's where Maud's been all day. We're on the step outside. Want me to take you out there with us?”

  Bart stretched out his other foot, bristled up like a pinecone, shook his feathers and paused a moment before shaking his head once more.

  “If you're sure then,” said Drake before closing the door.

  Bart gave each wing a snap, wiggled his beak into his breast feathers and closed his eyes.

  “He doesn't want to come out,” said Drake as he sat down on the step.

  Tess gave a passing knit to her brow. “Now, what's this news?” she said, handing him his plate.

  “Oh. Well Maud asked me to see that the Warrens weren't a problem for you...”

  “So she thought you could just wave your wand and stuff?”

  “Well. I did agree to have a word with them...”

  “And you threatened to kill them? Or did you come here to tell me that they're out to kill both of us?”

  “I actually did get myself all ready to be as forceful as I could manage,” he said, taking a final bite and setting aside his plate. “But you know? They sounded like they might be pretty decent...”

  “Right.”

  “Their mom and dad were relocated a few years ago, so they know what you’re going through right now.”

  “You're talking about Trent and Jasmine Warren?” she said, carefully patting her napkin about her new lip ring.

  “Well did you know that I used to date Jasmine? I was dating her when I met Nia. And Nia's the very reason I broke up with Jasmine.”

  “So that's why she and her creep brother hate Nia and me.”

  “No doubt. But as I said, Jasmine and Trent lost their folks like everyone else, so they know what it's like. I was seeing Jasmine when they did, and it was really hard on her, in spite of her mean streak. But she swears that she and Trent will be nice to you.

  You'll all be 'family,' as she put it.”

  “Maybe you don't know what I've seen out of both of them. 'Mean streak' is putting it mildly. Or maybe they sneaked up and hit you on the head.”

  “Well they were awfully upset when I didn't believe them either. And the more I thought about it, why would they ever lie about it? Circumstances do change. And their moving in here certainly changes things. And I swear I'd never put you at risk.”

  “I know. I know you're looking out for me. Drake, you're the best brother there ever was.”

  “I hope so. A person's just got to keep on having family, even when... Damn it!” he said with a sniffle.

  A streak of mascara raced down Tess's cheek. “I don't know how Drake, but we're going to get Nia back, I swear,” she said, giving his arm a determined shake. “And Mom and Dad too.”

  “Oh I hope!” he said. “Say. You never told me why you had Maxi do all that. I know very well you didn’t cave in to peer pressure.”

  “It's because the face in the skinny said that the school reported my nonconformity. And Children and Family decided that Mom and Dad were bad parents. So I reckoned that if I gave into as many things as I could stand, maybe they'd let everyone come home.”

  “I feel terrible telling you this, but nobody ever comes back...”

  “So there’s no way I can make it right?” she said with a sob. “They took them away because of me and nothing I do will ever help?”

  “Whoa!” he said. “Wait a minute. Those yapping mouths in the skinny tell lies all the time. Anything to crush your will and spirit. I'll bet anything that there's no connection at all between what he said and their decision to take your family...”

  “But why do they do it?”

  “To have total control. Families give us strength they don't want us to have. They let us have children, but that's about it. And then they step in...”

  “Nobody ever, ever comes back? But you said you hope.”

  “Well I do. But if you ever manage to bring anyone back, you'll have to come up with something that no one's ever thought of before. And you'll have to bide your time and make your plans for a very long while.”

  Chapter 5

  Mort was thrashing about, white as a sheet. When Maud took up his hand, he began looking about with blank eyes, mouthing something inaudible. “It's me Morty,” she said. “I'm here.”

  He squeezed her hand and began trying to talk to her at once, but was so faint and wheezy that she could not understand a word that he was saying. Even so, she was certain that he recognized her before his attempts to talk set off a long seizure of coughing.

  “Burns here,” he said between gasps for breath as he thumped his chest.

  “Your lungs hurt?” said Maud. “And your throat?”

  He nodded as he went into another fit of coughing.

  “You're certain about the spray?” she said, turning to Dr. Wells. “His very breathing sets off convulsions of coughing
.”

  He was already nodding. “Absolutely,” he said. “We did an endotracheal intubation to prepare him for surgery. We removed the tube when we brought him in here. And the removal caused some irritation. It's quite common. Purely routine...”

  “But his chest burns. Couldn't that be from herbicide? A tube might bother his windpipe, but how could it make his lungs burn so bad that he mentions them instead of the injuries to his head or arm?”

  Now Wells was shaking his head. “I'm afraid we've already been through this,” he sighed. “Herbicide is simply not an issue here. Well. I shall see that he's given something to make him comfortable at once.” And with that, he turned on his heel and walked out, leaving Mort in the midst of a fit of coughing.

  Maud drew in a breath to object before Wells got beyond hearing, but stopped short at the sight of a skinny fastened to the stand which held Mort's intravenous glucose. She had just taken up Mort's hand again, when a nurse appeared in a light waft of armpit and began hanging a bag of liquid on the stand beside the glucose.

  “What's that?” said Maud.

  “Something for his discomfort,” said the nurse with a tennis shoe squeak here and there on her way out.

  “It's supposed to make you comfortable,” said Maud, not one bit sure that he even heard her in the midst of his frenzy of coughing.

  Soon he was settling down to a rasping labor of breathing.

  “Is he asleep just like that?” she said, looking him over closely. She drew up a folding chair and sat beside him. “Are you feeling better?”

  He made no response.

  “No way I'll find out anything from him as long as he's in here,” she thought with an angry glance at the skinny. “And that thing! A person couldn't even pass a note in front of it.” She shuddered from her chin to the metal seat. “They'd be up here in a flash and I'd never see Mort again.”

  With a great sigh of resignation, she shifted about, trying to get comfortable on the folding chair. She looked about at the concrete walls with their peeling paint and faded curtains. “Some recovery room!” she thought. “I'm afraid that Wells has me so that I'm not the least bit comfortable with what ever it is that he decided to let drain into poor Mort's arm. Is he secretly allowing for the herbicide poisoning? Or is he being monitored so closely by the authorities that he's willing to let Mort die in order to give a flawless performance for the skinny?”

  The chair was never going to be comfortable. She stood to stretch her back before it got painful. “I wish that you could wake up and talk to me,” she thought as she took up his hand. “I'm going to starve if I don't eat, but I surely don't want what ever it is that the hospital kitchen's spreading around.” She kissed his cheek. “I'm going to Tess's to fix something to eat,” she said aloud. “I'll be back soon. I love you.” And with a squeeze of his hand she walked out and down to the curb to wait for a bus.

  “I hate buses,” she said as she settled herself on the iron bench to wait. “They're always running over people and crashing into things.”

  She didn't have long to wait before a Fairy Valley Road bus appeared. With a screech of brakes ending in a hiss, the folding door came open before her. She paused on the top step to press her thumb against the glass window of a rubber clad tablet fastened to the top of a polished pipe.

  “Destination, please,” said the tablet.

  “South Barrack, Fairy Valley Road Compound,” said Maud, looking at the faceless police in their plastic helms, sitting on either side of the isle at the front, middle and back of the bus.

  “Please be courteous to others and promptly take seat R-11,” said the tablet. “Travel shall not resume until you are seated and have your safety belt fastened.”

  “Thank the Fates it's well away from the coppers,” she said as she found her way down the aisle. The instant her buckle snapped, the computer raced the engine and steered the driverless bus into the roadway. The pink haired woman across from her tossed aside her wordless magazine of male athletes and looked out the window.

  The swaying bus felt recklessly fast to Maud, so she closed her eyes to avoid getting sick until the speaker in her seat announced: “Maud Baxter. Next stop: South Barrack, Fairy Valley Road. Please gather your things to avoid delays during your exit.”

  Maud pressed her thumb against the window of the tablet and stumped down the steps to the curb. As the bus pulled away, she swore that she got a whiff of roast beef.

  “Oh that crazy girl,” she said, laboring up the steps to the kitchen. “What kind of trouble do you suppose she's gotten us into by now?” She opened the door and stopped short with a wide-eyed gasp at the heady aroma of a perfectly baked roast and dripping pudding.

  “Maud!” said Tess, looking up from the broth she was ladling into a skillet for gravy. She closed the oven at once and set the skillet on the back of the stove. “We've got a badly plugged toilet. Can you go back there with me and help?”

  “Mort's going to be all right, isn't he?” said Tess the moment Maud shut the door behind her.

  Maud closed the lid of the toilet. “I just don't know,” she said, sitting down heavily upon the lid. “There's a Dr. Wells there who lays odds that he'll make it, but I'm not sure that I trust anything he says.”

  “How badly was he poisoned?”

  “That's just it. He had to have been. But Wells won't even admit the possibility.”

  “Maybe the people in the car had it wrong.”

  “And Morty's lungs are burnt so bad he can hardly breathe,” she said, breaking out with a whooping sob. “I'm so scared!”

  Tess had her arms about her at once. “He'll be all right if the doctor says so,” she said. “Doctors are never wrong as often as ordinary people. The school says so. And they even say that it's a disservice to everyone around us, if we ever go to questioning the judgments of a doctor...”

  Maud drew back at once and looked at her. “If you say so, dearie-do. But some of them are so full of shit that their eyes have turned brown. They've got skinnies everywhere you look in the hospital...”

  “I don't get it.”

  “Yes you do. You brought me in here where there's no skinny so we could talk.

  And with all the skinnies about, the doctors don't have the spine to tell the truth about sprays. Mort and I went all through that with them when we wanted kids.”

  “Wow! What happened when you and Mort...?”

  “Now. That's one grand smelling beef roast you have in the oven, dearie-do...”

  “And I've got a dripping pudding that I think is turning out perfect,” said Tess with a bounce.

  “Yeh. But it's not a sanctioned holiday. The skinny hasn't said anything?”

  Tess shook her head.

  “You didn't do anything scary with it, did you?”

  “Nah. I've just been cooking. Skinnies can't smell, can they? If we don't say anything, we could just go right on and finish fixing everything and have a whole picnic on the front step and talk and everything. But I'm not so good with gravy. Could you do the gravy? I've got peas and carrots ready to put on. And the 'taters are all ready to mash.”

  Gravy, potato mashing, carrots, peas and tea do not take long and soon they were sitting on the steps with a checkered table cloth and all of their feast. “I swear dearie-do,” said Maud, savoring a bite of pudding, “this is the best roast beef I've had in I don't know how long.”

  “Well I knew you'd had an awful day, and I sure need a mom these days, so...”

  “Aw!” said Maud, setting aside her plate at once and giving her a watery-eyed hug and a pat. She picked up her plate and went back to her meal. “So where'd the roast come from?”

  “You'd just heard about Mort, so I don't reckon you noticed, but Maxi brought it.”

  “That awful trollbrute?”

  “Well he brought it for us. And he's sweet if you knew him.”

  “And where'd he get it?”

  “Well. Some place a long way away. I know that much.”

  �
��Those curses are always rustling cattle,” said Maud. “They'll go right into a feed lot in the middle of the night and butcher cows right where they were bedded down. And they almost never get caught. So they eat like the elite while the rest of us are lucky to get a good meal a day.”

  “The elite?”

  “Yeh. Most of the cattle they slaughter go to the capitol. Mort knows because he's acquainted with some of the hands at the feed lots there at University Farms where he sprays. We're probably eating stolen meat in spite of your good intentions.”

  “Well if the government's getting all the meat, aren't they stealing out of our mouths?”

  “I suppose they could be, but you don't want anyone overhearing you say such a thing.”

  “And if Maxi stole it from the government, wouldn't that be a kind of justified payback?”

  “The government sure wouldn't think so.”

  “Yeh. But do you?”

  Maud chewed for a while and swallowed. “'Way down deep maybe,” she said at last. “But if either of us is caught merely a-thinking so, there'll be nothing left of us but our last belch in the air.”

  “So maybe Maxi's a hero and we should help him by eating the evidence. Isn't that what friends are for? I mean helping out each other. Right?”

  “Mort and I've always thought so,” said Maud with a roll of her eyes and a grimace as she helped herself to another nice piece out of the roasting pan. “You're a persuasive young lady, sweetheart.” Suddenly she looked up. “We're forgetting Bart. I'll bet he'd like some. Have you checked on him any time today?”

  “Drake did, and said he didn't want to come out, but I can't imagine how he could've known exactly what Bart wanted, like that.”

  “Oh Bart has no problem letting y' know these things,” said Maud, rising to her feet. “Let me go get him.”

  Tess gave a polite chuckle with her puzzled look as Maud stepped inside. Maud returned shortly with Bart, who hopped off her arm onto the step, shook his feathers and began preening as she put a pinch of roast on a saucer and set it before him. When Tess turned aside to see how a crow might like roast beef, she found him studying her carefully with one curious black eye.