Casserole Diplomacy and Other Stories (29 page)

“
Clap for the Wolfman; he’s gonna rate your record high . . .
” The TV was off and an Oldies CD now blared from Sid Braunstein’s patio boom box.

“The Guess Who. A favourite,” said Sid. “Clap—
clap
for the Wolfman . . .” Sid laughed heartily; he did not look like a man who laughed a lot. His eyes bulged, and his face turned beet red. “Sorry.
Sorree
. Woo, hee.
Whoop-whoop, hack hack hack
.” Spit flew as Sid bent double over the bowl of clam dip. He recovered, still choking from the unaccustomed laughing fit. “Snorted . . . beer . . . up my nose. Ahh . . . hmm. Actually, sexually transmitted diseases are not a problem here in Sur la Mer as they are out in the normal world—the
civilians
, we call ’em. Leptospirosis, distemper and rabies, though . . .” He grew thoughtful, pulling on his beer. “Gotta lay off the rabbits and the squirrels. Cats, too. Stick to your own kind, that’s my motto. Disease-wise, the baddest actors are always the species jumpers. Gotta keep it in your pants—if you’re wearing any, that is. Pants cramp your style when you’re chasing a cat up a tree.”

Sid beamed. Jim beamed back, this was another laugh line—
clap for the wolfman
, yuck, yuck. Jim Schofield smiled and felt more at ease. He wondered how Sally’s interview was going. Sid ignored Jim and fiddled with his TV remote. The game was back on again.

Sally and Hillary had reached the garden’s far perimeter where a large cement toad crouched under a spreading ornamental yew tree. The toad was the size of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle fallen on its side.

“Don’t you just love him,” said Hillary. “He has a very knowing look when the light is right.”

“Very . . .
large
,” said Sally.

“Big is good,” said Hillary, “He came with the place. And he’s sitting on some of the boys’ more incriminating, ahh . . . trophies.”

Sally had lagged behind. She was scraping at a suspicious clump adhered to her foot.

“Step in something? Let’s have a look-see,”

Sally held up the afflicted rubber wellie.

“Nope. Just dog poop,” said Hillary. “Wipe it on the grass. It’s easy to tell the difference when you’ve raked up enough of the stuff—the boys get a high fibre diet. They tend to fat so we watch what we feed them.”

Sally sat on the toad to clean her boots.

“I called up the agricultural extension service. Bet you didn’t know New York City had county agents. Anyway, that is how I met Everett Castelnuovo. There’s something about a man in uniform. He was very attentive. At first I thought he had the hots for me but he smelled a research paper. You know, publish-or-perish, something for a scientific journal. Sur la Mer was going to put him on the map, career-wise.”

“He wore a uniform?”

“Well, a sleeve patch and a twill serge bomber jacket. He was quite handsome, a Mark Trail type filtered through Chiquita Banana, what with the bolero and all.”

“Was.”

“He came in over the picket wire on a bad night, intruder-wise. The boys’ night out.”

“Oh.”

“I’m expecting his replacement any day. From the Fish and Wildlife Service, an expert on ‘chemical ecology,’ whatever that is.” Hillary toyed with a sprig of bittersweet nightshade that had been broken off by another misstep. She looked accusingly at Sally and held the wounded herb under her nose. “
Solanum dulcamara
—the potato family, would you believe?”

“You mentioned Lysistrata?” said Sally, trying for a diversion.

“Going without was as hard for us as it was for them. But we were willing to sacrifice for the greater good. Now that we have them back, they are totally limp, but at least we have them home nights. Most nights . . .”

“Ahh . . . YES!” A crowd roar issued from the TV’s stereo speakers. Sid looked expectantly at his company.

Jim felt he should contribute something. “Hey . . . how’s about that Manny Ramirez?”

“Thirty-seven homers and 104 RBIs last season, but that’s not why we’re here. We are self-policing.” Sid zapped the set with his remote and the screen went black. “This is important. I’m supposed to be vetting you on life in a gated community. You’re here for a reason, you know. In Sur la Mer? Hey, that’s good!”

“Huh?”

“
Vetting
—I made a pun. I didn’t mean to—
veterinarian
—my profession and all. Have to tell Hillary about it, she’ll get a chuckle. Basically I’m not a humorous guy.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t . . .”

“Yes, you would. Baseball and animal autopsies are my area of competence, period. No stand-up. Anyway, I thought Hillary was having an affair. Some guy from the government. Now Hillary, I just love her to bits. I was hurt, chagrined, humiliated, all of the above. And I lurked. I caught him coming over the picket wire one night. He was packing a sensitive microphone—you know, the kind with a tripod and a parabolic reflector—a laptop, night vision goggles, the works. I buried him in the mandragora patch. When I was back to normal I confronted my wife. Boy, did I get an earful! The girls had to dig him up and plant him under the garden toad. Seems I had made a mistake.”

“But here we were talking about having the husbands declared a threatened species . . .” Hillary had been idly poking with her toe at a mounded planting of
atropa belladonna
. A human toe was exposed. “Oh shit.
Simply shit
!” She knelt and brushed away shredded cedar bark. A severed foot protruded from the mulch. It had been gnawed. Hillary poked the toe and its foot back under cover and patted the shredded bark flat. “Well! I thought he was late returning my call. A steep curve in their learning processes, these government men. Your tax dollars at work. Everett’s replacement, the man from the Fish and Wildlife Service. He brought it on himself—I told him to call first. He should have checked his voice mail.”

Hillary directed Sally’s attention to a particularly attractive grouping of daisy-like flowers. “
Arnica Montana
, of the aster family, actually. The popular name is ‘wolfsbane,’ good for headaches. I think I feel one coming on.”

Originally published in On Spec, Summer 2005 Vol 17 No 2 #61

Rob Hunter
is the sole support of a large orange cat and the despair of his young wife. He does dishes and windows and keeps their Maine cottage spotless by moving as little as possible. He has been a newspaper copy boy, railroad telegraph operator, recording engineer and film editor.

Robert Weston

The conference floor was so awash with noise that Suvinder thought he’d misheard. “Sorry?” he said. “‘Sarah’? I don’t think I know any—hold on, are you from Home and Garden? Actually I’ve been meaning to call you guys about our—”

“No, no,” said the voice, “Suvinder, it’s Sarah. U of T Sarah. Remember?” She paused. Then as if it was necessary, she added, “Peter’s wife.”

Suvinder wasn’t sure of his expression, but he was grateful for the physical anonymity of the telephone. “Sarah Bateman. Or I guess I mean Milligrew, don’t I? Sarah Milligrew. I have to admit, I hadn’t heard from either of you in so long, I’d written you off. So, um. How are you? Well, I hope.”

“Actually no, I’m not so good.” She said something else, but the HBO demo started nearby and her voice was lost.

Suvinder hollered into the phone. “What? Look, I can barely hear you. I’m at this TV convention and there’s a—”

Sarah spoke slowly. “It’s Peter, Suvinder. He had a stroke.”

Suvinder had nothing to say in response. He stared at the wall of monitors that lay beyond the independent producers’ booth—a massive barricade of promotional light and sound.

“Suvinder? Did you hear what I said? Peter had a stroke, and then—and we lost him.”

“Lost him? Wait, that doesn’t—we’re not even forty. Sarah, he couldn’t’ve—”

“It was his condition. He lost his father only last year.”

“His condition?”

“The funeral’s tomorrow morning. I’m sorry, Suvinder. I’m sorry I couldn’t find you sooner.”

As abruptly as she had appeared—as an unidentified number on his cellular phone—Sarah was gone. The details of the ceremony and the news that Peter had suffered all his life from a congenital heart disease came from Peter’s older brother, someone Suvinder had never met.

The moment the phone was back in his breast pocket, Suvinder’s vision swam. He was forced to steady himself against a chunk of the feeble pasteboard that was everywhere.

“Hey, how’d it go with the Food guys?” It was Bill, Suvinder’s partner at Up-Start Productions. Bill had been off on another pitch—trying to sell a collection of skiing accidents to Xtreme TV—while Suvinder had met with two buyers from The Food Network. Up-Start’s first and only pilot was called
Street Chefs
.

Suvinder couldn’t answer. His legs wobbled, the pasteboard gave way and he crouched to the floor to keep from falling down.

To Bill, collapsing anywhere was unthinkable, bad for business. Nevertheless, he managed to make sense of it. “So it went pretty badly, huh?” he said, eyeing the HBO display. “Yeah. Me too.”

Suvinder shook his head as if he needed something dislodged.

Bill pursed his lips. “No?” he asked, his voice rising optimistically, “You mean, ‘no, it didn’t go badly?’ C’mon Vinnie, don’t fool around. Are you serious? They actually wanna buy it?”

Suvinder kept on shaking his head. Finally he said, “They didn’t buy it.”

“So what happened?”

“I got a call from a friend, an old friend. She called to tell me about another old friend of mine. Who died.”

“Died?”

“I have to go to the funeral.”

Bill put a hand on Suvinder’s shoulder. “Sure, buddy. As soon as we get back.”

Suvinder stood up and tried to moisten his mouth. “No,” he said. “The funeral’s tomorrow. And it’s in Vancouver. I’ll just have to change my ticket.”

“Yeah, okay, maybe. But listen, we still have two days here and what if—”

Bill was interrupted by three enormous security guards. They surrounded Suvinder. All three were monstrous, but they were dwarfed by the great thing that loomed behind them. “Excuse me, sir?” one of them said to Suvinder. “But is this your elephant?”

The beast’s ears flapped against its head. Suvinder looked up and remembered what his mother had told him, about seeing it for the first time. Serenity—that was her word for it. There would be serenity, she’d said. He told himself he’d have to call her and admit she was right. Oddly, he found himself smiling at the security guard. It was a listless, tight-lipped grin, but a smile nonetheless. “Yes,” he said. “I suppose that’s my elephant”

Bill backed away, holding his hands up in apology. “Sorry, buddy,” he said, “I didn’t realize it hit you so hard.”

One of the guards took Suvinder firmly by the arm. “Sir, I’m afraid we’ll have to ask you to leave. On behalf of the Las Vegas Convention Centre, we’d like to express our sincerest regret for your loss.”

January in Las Vegas was hardly the height of the tourist season. Standing outside the convention centre in nothing more than a business suit, Suvinder could see his breath, puffing out of his mouth in short-lived clouds.

He hurried back toward his hotel—the dilapidated and oft-neglected Riviera. His elephant loped quietly behind him. At the hotel, he tipped the bellhop five dollars to watch the animal while he checked out and retrieved his luggage. He swooped indoors, past the sirens of god-knows-how-many slot machines, and found the woman at the front desk to be suitably rueful and obliging, but as she handed Suvinder his receipt, he caught her gazing warily over his shoulder.

Outside again, he tried to reason with the elephant. “Listen,” he said, whispering up toward the beast’s ear. He hoped the thing would understand if he spoke clearly and with a gentle timbre. “I need to catch a cab to the airport. It’ll be a bit of a chore with you standing right beside me. So please, just wait here until I find one. Can you do that?”