Dastardly

by Lorraine Ray

“She’s been wearing the kind of shoes she wanted, but they must have been too small. I don’t know what’s going on with her big toe on her left foot, but now it’s infected. Poor kid, she’s in agony and walking all funny on the side of her foot.”

  Blah, blah, blah is what I hear. Why does Marsha have to tell me about her daughter’s infected toe the very next time I see her? A man who has discovered that a woman with big blue eyes happens to love him is not the kind of man who is going to want to hear all about an infected toe of a child the very next time he sees this woman who loves him. Not that I remember the gory details of Bailey’s infected toe, with the wrong size shoes, especially in sneakers and her big toe being the color of a stop sign and so sore that she is limping. I am trying to forget it as soon as possible. Shit! What an unpleasant topic! Why is Marsha inflicting this upon me? Does she think being in love with me is going to mean she can inflict this kind of shit on me? If so, she better think again. I am not going to provide a shoulder to cry on! About infected toes!

  Just a week ago my landlord forgave my rent. Now I sit in torture beside Marsha at the shoved-together restaurant tables in a private room of the shabby Mi Hawaiiano Hawaiian/Mexican restaurant where the Writers’ Warehouse Get-Together Dinner is held once a month. The rambling brick home has nothing to suggest Hawaii about it except photos of volcanos cut from old National Geographic magazines and a mannequin dressed in a grass skirt and leis that stands in this banquet room. Out the sliding glass window a steep slope of saguaro cacti appear to be running toward ugly brown tract housing.

  I stuff my mouth with tortilla chips dipped in painfully hot salsa in order to keep from say anything rude in response to the disgusting crap Marsha is telling me while I’m eating.

  “She has to soak it every night in Epsom salts and dry it with my hair dryer and Q-tips dipped in alcohol. What do you think?”

  I’ve been dreading that part, the part when I have to talk. Time for me to give an opinion and I’m hella irritated. I stuff more chips in my mouth and pretend to be considering everything she’s said. “Maybe you ought to take her to a specialist,” I finally grumble. It’s the only decent thing I can think of to say. At least it’s a fact-oriented, helpful suggestion, although my voice sounds as though I wish a gaping hole in the earth would open and swallow me.

  “Oh, she doesn’t need a specialist,” Marsha retorts. “She already saw the G.P. and a nurse practitioner.”

  That spurs me. “Well, a fucking nurse practitioner is wonderful. All I am saying is you better take that kid and her bad toe to the fucking foot doctor. At least before her foot has to be amputated. Better safe than sorry, said the pain-in-the-ass.”

  Hoped I’ve left them enough money. Guilt, it’s a terrible thing to have. It makes you worry about stuff you have no business worrying about. It makes you blow your top at someone who might possibly love you when it’s fucking inconvenient.

  “Vig, are you drunk? You didn’t hear anything I said and it was you who asked about Bailey. You’re staring at the coconut bra on the mannequin. How did you get drunk this early? Did you talk Rodney into coming here ahead of everyone?” I hate it when Marsha asks me if I’ve been drinking with Rodney. It’s like she thinks I am corrupting someone better than me. She’ll find out; Rod is no better than me and in some ways a lot more superficial. And Rod never agrees to babysit Bailey; he always has an excuse to get out of it. Marsha told me this! I gloat to myself, imaging Marsha noticing that. I might mention it. How am I going to fit that in with all the infected toes she’s throwing at me? Boy, I’m drunk again.

  The mannequin stands with its coconut halves covering her breast, arms akimbo. A sad grass skirt doesn’t cover her one missing foot. How the hell did that mannequin happen to be there missing a foot when Marsha was talking about infected toes? The missing foot had made me think of Bailey’s foot rotting and that made Marsha flare up at me and it set us fighting!

  “Um, drunk, that is only a rumor.” In fact, I’d better find out what’s there for me in her savings account and how much she gets paid each month exactly, if I want to be a real creep about it and take as much as I can again soon. “Marsha, how much do you get paid every month? You never told me.” I sample more of the scorching sauce.

  “Are you planning to ask for more money? I told you what I gave you was it. The end. I’m not giving you a plug nickel more. That was a one-time thing, Vig. Maybe you can apply to be an English teacher. There’s an opening at Pistor Middle School.”

  “Ta! Pistor? He-he. They named a school that? What the fuck?”

  “Yes, Vig,” says Marsha wearily, “they did. It would be a place where you could work and earn actual money to pay your actual bills instead of hitting up old friends for cash.”

  “Marsha, this dumb-ass job of yours at swagsville as a fucking assistant middle school office ogre doesn’t pay you diddly or squat.”

  “Are you talking to me, Vig? I see your mouth moving, but the words are slurred.”

  The thousand I took had bled her dry of almost all her savings for a few months, whatever amount that was that she had, and to tell you the truth I don’t know what that was. Which explains the short temper. Of hers. Better talk her into taking a job as the top office ogre with a lot higher dinero and more responsibility and worries. I must be super evil and look after myself. “I think,” I say, addressing Marsha pedantically, “your money situation could improve substantially if you only thought of advancement for yourself. Firstly, you ought to be the main or major office ogre and not the assistant office ogre. That position is beneath you.”

  “Do you believe I would take career advice from you, Vig? You borrowed money from me. Does it make sense that you are now figuring out how I can earn more money? I have never met anyone with as much gall as you, dude. And that is not meant as a compliment. I’m not going to become the office manager. I don’t want the stress,” she says. “You know that. I have to write in my spare time and if I take a better-paying job I won’t have any quality spare time. For writing or for Bailey.”

  “Quality spare time, my ass. All you write are crappy romance novels with the same stupid plots over and over again and the same cold men and young vulnerable innocent girls as characters. You’re churning them out like they’re coming off a fucking assembly line.”

  “Hey, I heard that!” says Rod.

  “Shut up, Rodney. We’re not talking to you.”

  “Vig, you are drunk. And couldn’t the same thing be said about your vampire stories?” Marsha points out.

  “Horror is a respectable genre. Horror deals with life and death. When you write your dumb romances you build up all this drama into your lovers’ first kiss and you do nothing with the sex. Dude, it is so sad. Put some sex in those things and you might sell them,” I add.

  Marsha laughs. At Rodney. He’s pulling a shocked, puritanical face behind my back.

  “Sex sells when nothing else does; that’s what I say,” Rodney pipes up.

  I spin around and glare at Rod. Is he becoming a good-looking fucking jerk who is trying to move in on my Easy-Touch Marsha? First, there was the Easy-Bake Oven, and now there is the Easy-Touch Marsha. Crap! That’s a great line! I will have to remember it and use it somewhere. Where? I have no fucking idea. I can barely remember what I’m currently writing. Where’s my notebook? What crap am I turning out this week? Vampires and a mariachi band? No, the poisoned well story. No vampire for a change.

  “We aren’t talking to you, loser. We old, old friends are arguing, so buss out,” I hiss angrily at Rodney.

  Marsha cackles.

  I turn to her and my mouth begins speaking though inside my head my brain seems to be screaming “Shut the fuck up! Stop arguing with her! She is so beautiful, why don’t you tell her!” “Only the fucking settings of your novels are different, Marsha. Can’t you come up with another romance scenario? How about a woman with a child and the man who babysat that child for five fucking years. On demand. For no cash. Ever.” I flutter my
nonexistent eyelashes at her. That has a very weird effect on the onlookers who have now become most of our portion of the shoved-together tables. I know I’m making a terrible scene, but I can’t stop myself. I notice the other writers smiling as they gobble tamales and enchiladas. Fools! Prying idiots! Finally, food arrives in front of me and I fall upon it ravenously.

  “Yes, Vig. I gave you the money you wanted because you babysat for years and didn’t ask for cash once. But don’t press your luck. So you aren’t going to be evicted?”

  “It appears I have escaped that fate, Marsha. Also, I discovered my landlord is obsessed with Internet porn. I have cast him as a vampire in my next horror story.”

  “Let us know when it gets published,” says Rodney, snickering evilly.

  “Oh, it’ll be soon. I’m hitting on all cylinders now. When I get published I will blow this horn I have, that is, a stagecoach horn. It’s a tin horn, you know...”

  “Hah!” cries Marsha, “That’s so fucking perfect.” She bites her taco and it cracks into pieces. Serves her right. I chuckle in satisfaction as the taco contents fall on her shirt.

  “Dude,” I say to Marsha, “keep laughing, but I’ll have the last laugh. I keep this tin horn from a stagecoach in my room on the wall. When I get one of my vampire stories published, I’ll take that horn down and I’ll blow it hard. Real hard. I’ll wake up all the little biddies who live upstairs. The ones who keep trying to sell me Divinity candy. They give me a pain in the ass. The way they looked at me when I first moved in was as though I wanted to attack them or something and a couple of them still haven’t figured out I happen to live downstairs from them.”

  “What is this horn you’re gonna blow?” asks Marsha. “Say again?”

  “A tin horn.”

  “A tin horn! Oh Vig, how very apt. How ridiculously apt!” Marsha cries. “You are charmingly clueless in some of the ridiculous things you say.”

  Rodney joins in, snorting loudly. “A tin fucking horn. That’s so perfect. Describes you perfectly.”

  “What the fuck do you mean?” I say suspiciously.

  “A tin horn! Oh, that’s rich! I suppose you don’t even know what’s so funny, dude,” says Marsha.

  I try to control my anger, but it isn’t possible. “You in pants is funny, if you’d like to see a giant butt that can walk. And yes, those pants do make your butt look fat because it is fat, Marsha.” I regret saying that the minute I finish, but I discover this doesn’t even faze her. She is difficult to faze. It’s one thing I really like about her; she is not sensitive the way most women are.

  “You mean to tell me you don’t know what a tin horn is, dude?” This is added by Rodney, leaning forward over his plate and grinning wildly. Yeah, he has a thing for Marsha for sure. Now I know Rod is trying to get on Marsha’s good side by laughing at me!

  “What the fuck is it?” I demand angrily.

  “Vig, you don’t know? You aren’t very well educated about your genre. Here you are trying to write Westerns and you hardly knew any of the jargon or anything that’s Western! Rodney and I don’t write westerns and we know what a tin horn is. You ought to be embarrassed. Why don’t you buy yourself a book about the west and read it?”

  “Fuck off. I can fucking make up whatever I fucking need. Get off my fucking back, woman.”

  Marsha laughs loudly. “You think you can make up everything? You think so? That’s exactly the way you think, I suppose. Good grief. How stupid can you get? Why don’t you read a book once in a while or google something? Why do you insist on writing westerns set in the past when you don’t know what things like a tin horn are?”

  “Shut the fuck up. What is it, you fucking shitheads?”

  “A tin horn, Vig, is a person who’s full of himself. It’s slang for someone who has a lot of bravado. Blowing his own horn. Exactly like you,” she says, chuckling again. “You are a funny piece of work.”

  “Oh, shut the fuck up,” is my reply. My opinion of the world and Marsha and Rodney is now becoming dark and obscene. May they both rot in hell!

  “Oh Vig, Vig, you are something else. And you think you’re bothering me?”