Between the Plums Page 5

  “Uh-oh,” Diesel said. “I’m not sure I like that smile.”

  “It sort of slipped out. Actually, I need you to help me with a domestic problem. I need a lock opened.”

  “Someday I should show you some of my other skills.”

  Oh boy. It’s never good when a man starts talking about his skills. Before you know it you’re in the garage watching a power tool demonstration. And after all the power tools are revved, there’s only one tool left to haul out of the box. Someday a study should be done on the effect of testosterone production in the presence of a band saw.

  Everyone was huddled outside the bathroom when I got to my parents’ house. Mary Alice was galloping in circles and the rest of my family was alternately pacing and yelling and banging on the door.

  “Pretty amazing,” Diesel said to me. “I’m always knocked out by the way a family can be at the upper end of dysfunction and insanity and still work so well as a unit. Do you want me to open the door?”

  “No.” I was afraid they’d all rush in and someone would get trampled in the stampede. I went downstairs to the kitchen and out the back door. There was a small roof over the back stoop, and the roof butted up to the bathroom window. When I was a kid I used to sneak out the bathroom window to hang with my friends. “Give me a boost up,” I said to Diesel. “I’ll bring her out through the window. Then you can open the door.”

  Diesel laced his fingers together, I put my foot in his hands, and he lifted me to roof level. I scrambled onto the roof and glanced down at him. He was impressively strong.

  “Could you stop a runaway freight train?” I asked.

  “Probably not a freight train. That would be Superman.”

  I looked in the window at Valerie. She was sitting on the toilet lid, staring at the little test strip. She looked up when I knocked.

  “Open up,” I said. “It’s cold out here.”

  She pressed her nose to the window and looked out. “Are you alone?”

  “I’m with Diesel.”

  She looked down to the ground, and Diesel waved to her. It was a goofy little finger wave.

  Valerie opened the window, and I climbed inside.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Look at my test strip!”

  “Maybe it made a mistake.”

  “It’s the fifth time I’ve taken the test. They keep coming out positive. I’m pregnant. I’m goddamn pregnant. Albert Kloughn got me pregnant.”

  “Didn’t you take precautions?”

  “No, I didn’t take precautions. Look at him! He looks like a loaf of yeast bread just before you bake it. He’s soft and white and totally without substance. Who would have thought he’d have sperm? Do you know what this poor kid will look like?” Valerie wailed. “It’ll look like a dinner roll.”

  “Maybe this isn’t so bad. I thought you were all anxious to get married.”

  “I was anxious to get married, not to get pregnant. And I don’t want to marry Kloughn. He lives with his mother, for God’s sake. And he makes no money.”

  “He’s a lawyer.”

  “He chases ambulances down the street. He might as well be a German shepherd.”

  It was true. Kloughn was having a difficult time getting his practice established and had resorted to listening to the police band.

  “A woman has choices these days,” I said.

  “Not in this family!” Valerie was pacing and waving her arms. “We’re Catholic, for crissake.”

  “Yeah, but you never go to church. It isn’t like you have religion.”

  “You know what’s left when the religion goes away? Guilt! Guilt never goes away. I’m stuck with the goddamn guilt for the rest of my life. And what about Mom? I even mention abortion, and she’ll be crossing herself until her arm falls off.”

  “Don’t tell her. Tell her the strip was negative.”

  Valerie stopped pacing and looked at me. “Would you get an abortion?”

  Whoa. Me? I took a beat to think about it. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m having a hard time relating. The closest I’ve come to childbirth is buying a hamster.”

  “Fine,” Valerie said. “Suppose Rex was never born. Suppose the mommy hamster had an abortion and Rex was bagged up along with the dirty kennel bedding in the breeder hamster cage.”

  Sharp pain to the heart. “When you put it that way . . .”

  “It’s all his fault,” Valerie said. “I’m going to find him. I’m going to track him down, and I’m going to maim him.”

  “Kloughn?”

  “No. My dog turd ex-husband. If he hadn’t run off with the babysitter this never would have happened. We were so happy. I don’t know what went wrong. One minute we were a family and then next thing I know he’s in the coat closet with the babysitter.”

  “Open up!” Grandma yelled from the other side of the door. “I gotta go. Lock yourself in some other room.”

  “Just because you have the baby doesn’t mean you have to marry Kloughn,” I said. Although I actually thought Valerie could do a lot worse than Albert Kloughn. I liked Kloughn. He wasn’t a big, handsome, super-cool guy, but he tried hard at everything, he was nice to Valerie and the girls, and there seemed to be genuine affection between them all. I wasn’t sure anymore what made a good marriage. There had to be love, of course, but there were so many different kinds of love. And clearly, some love was more enduring than others. Valerie and I thought we’d found the loves of our lives, and look where that took us.

  “Shoes,” I said to Valerie. “When in doubt, I find it always helps if I buy a new pair of shoes. You should go shopping.”

  Valerie looked over at the door. “I could use a new pair of shoes, but I don’t want to go out there.”

  “Use the window.”

  Valerie climbed out the window, got to the edge of the roof and hesitated. “This is scary.”

  “It’s not a big deal,” Diesel said. “Just hang your ass over the edge, and I’ll bring you down.”

  Valerie looked back at me.

  “Trust him,” I said. Trust Superman, Spider-man, E.T., the Ghost of Christmas Present . . . whoever the hell.

  “I don’t know,” Valerie said. “This feels kind of high. I don’t like the way this feels. Maybe I need to go back into the house.” Valerie turned toward the window, and her foot slipped on the shingle roof. “Eeeeee,” she shrieked, flailing out with her arms, grabbing me by my jacket. “Help! Help!”

  She yanked me forward, and we both lost balance, slammed onto the roof, and rolled off the edge, clinging together. We crashed into Diesel, and the three of us went to the ground.

  Diesel was flat on his back, I was on top of him, and Val was on top of me. The whole family came running out the back door and crowded around us.

  “What’s going on?” Grandma wanted to know. “Is this some new sex thing?”

  “If she jumps on the pile, I’m out of here,” Diesel said.

  “Call 911!” my mother said. “Don’t anybody move . . . your backs might be broken.” She looked down at Valerie. “Can you wiggle your toes?”

  “You didn’t unlock the bathroom,” my father said to Valerie. “Someone’s gotta go back up and unlock the bathroom.”

  “Frank! I told you to call 911.”

  “We don’t need 911,” I said. “We just need for Valerie to get off me.”

  My mother pulled Valerie to her feet. “Is the baby okay? Did you hurt yourself? I can’t believe you went out through the window.”

  “What about me?” I said. “I fell, too.”

  “You’re always falling,” my mother said. “You jumped off the garage roof when you were seven years old. And now people shoot at you.” She shook her finger at me. “You’re a bad influence on your sister. She never used to do things like this.”

  I was still lying on top of Diesel, and I was sort of enjoying it.

  “I knew you’d come around,” Diesel said to me.

  I narrowed my eyes. “I have not come aroun
d.”

  My pager buzzed at my waist. I rolled off Diesel and checked the readout. It was Randy Briggs. I got to my feet and went into the house to use the phone while Diesel went upstairs to unlock the bathroom door.

  My father followed Diesel to the bathroom. “Women,” my father said. “There’s gotta be a better way.”

  I was waiting at the door when Diesel came down. “Randy’s got a job interview,” I said. “He’s on the road. I have the address.”

  “What about the shopping?” Valerie asked.

  “You have to shop by yourself,” I said. “I have to find Sandy Claws. And why aren’t you working?”

  “I don’t want to see Albert. I don’t know what to say to him.”

  “I’m lost,” Diesel said. “What’s Albert got to do with working?”

  “He’s Valerie’s boss.”

  “This is like watching daytime television,” Diesel said.

  “Look at you,” my mother said to me. “It’s almost Christmas and you’re not wearing anything red.” She took a Christmas tree pin off her shirt and attached it to my jacket. “Have you bought your tree yet?” she asked.

  “I haven’t had time to get a tree.”

  “You have to make time,” my mother said. “Before you know it your life will be over and you’ll be dead and then what?”

  “You have a tree,” I said. “Why can’t I use yours?”

  “Boy, you don’t know much,” my grandmother said.

  Diesel was standing back on his heels, hands in his pockets, smiling, again.

  “Go to the car,” I said to Diesel. “And stop smiling.”

  “It’s Christmastime,” Diesel said. “Everybody smiles at Christmastime.”

  “Wait right here,” my mother said. “Let me pack you a bag for lunch.”

  “No time,” I said to my mother. “I need to get moving.”

  “It’ll only take a minute!” She was already in the kitchen, and I could hear the refrigerator open and close and drawers open and close. And my mother returned with a bag of food.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Diesel looked in the bag and extracted a cookie. “Chocolate chip. My favorite.”

  I had a feeling every cookie was Diesel’s favorite.

  When we were both in the car, I turned to Diesel. “I want to know about you.”

  “There isn’t a lot to tell. If I hadn’t gotten dropped into your kitchen we wouldn’t be having this conversation. If you met me on the street you’d think I was just another guy.”

  “So you’re strong and can open locks. Anything else you’re especially good at?”

  Diesel smiled at me.

  “All men think that,” I said.

  Diesel pulled onto Hamilton Avenue and turned left. “What happens when you find Claws?”

  “I hand him over to the police. Then my cousin Vinnie probably goes to the lockup and bails Claws out a second time.”

  “Why would Vinnie do that?”

  “He gets paid more money. Claws has a local business, and he’s signed his house over for security, so it’s a good risk for Vinnie.”

  “And what if Claws doesn’t want to be handed over to the police? Do you shoot him?”

  “I hardly ever shoot people.”

  “This should be fun,” Diesel said.

  I cut my eyes to him. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

  “Lots of things.”

  I put my finger to my lower lid.

  “You have a problem?” he asked.

  “Eye twitch.”

  “I bet that would go away if you got a Christmas tree.”

  “All right. Okay! I’ll get a Christmas tree.”

  “When?”

  “When I have time. And you’re driving too slow. Where’d you learn how to drive, Florida?”

  Diesel stopped the car in the middle of the road. “Take a deep breath.”

  “What are you doing? Are you nuts? You can’t just stop in the middle of the road!”

  “Take a deep breath. Count to ten.”

  I took a breath, and I counted to ten.

  “Count slower,” Diesel said.

  The guy behind us honked his horn, and I cracked my knuckles. My eye was twitching like mad. “This isn’t working,” I said. “You’re giving me heart palpitations. People in Jersey don’t do slow down.”

  “We’re sitting in traffic,” Diesel said. “Notice that the car in front of us is less than a car length away and not moving. The only way to drive faster would be to drive on the sidewalk.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “I can’t fit on the sidewalk.”

  “So do something supernatural,” I said. “Can’t you tip the car sideways or something? They do that in the movies all the time.”

  “Sorry, I flunked levitation.”

  My luck, I get a guy who flunked levitation.

  Twenty minutes later, we parked across from a hole-in-the-wall storefront office. The makeshift sign in the window advertised IMMEDIATE OPENINGS FOR MASTER TOY MAKERS. I wanted to take a closer look, so we left the car and crossed the street.

  We stood on the sidewalk and looked through the dusty plate-glass window. Inside, the place was wall-to-wall little people.

  “Are they elves?” I asked Diesel. “I don’t see any pointy ears.”

  “Hard to tell at this distance, and I heard somewhere that elves don’t necessarily have pointy ears.”

  “So elves could be walking around in our midst, disguised as normal, everyday, vertically challenged citizens.”

  Diesel looked at me and grimaced. “You don’t really believe in elves, do you?”

  “Of course not,” I said. But the truth was that I didn’t know what I believed in anymore. I mean, what the hell was Diesel? And if I believed in Diesel . . . why not believe in elves? “Do you see Briggs?” I asked him.

  “He’s at the back, talking to a big guy with a clipboard. And I don’t see Claws.”

  We watched for a moment longer and then retreated to the Jag and worked our way through my mother’s food bag. After a while Randy Briggs came out, walked halfway down the block, and got into the passenger side of a waiting car. The car pulled away, and we followed. Before we’d gone two blocks my cell phone buzzed in my bag.

  “Cripes, is that you behind me in the Jag?” Briggs asked. “You bounty hunters must do okay to be riding around in a Jag.”

  “Diesel isn’t a bounty hunter. He’s an alien or something.”

  “Yeah, whatever. Man, I’ve never seen so many little people in one place. It was like they came out of the woodwork. I thought I knew everyone in the area, but I didn’t know any of these guys.”

  “Did you get hired?”

  “Yeah, but I’m not going to make toys. I got a job in the office, setting up a Web site.”

  “What about Claws?”

  “Didn’t see him. No one said anything to me about anyone named Claws. I start work tomorrow. Maybe I’ll see him at the factory.”

  “Factory?”

  “Yeah, that’s what this is . . . a small toy factory. They’re going to make handmade toys and advertise that they were made by elves. Pretty cool, hunh?”

  “Do you suppose some of these little people today actually were elves?”

  There was a pause where I could imagine Briggs staring open-mouthed at the phone. “What are you, nuts?” he finally said.

  “So, where is this factory?” I asked Briggs.

  “It’s in a light industrial complex off Route 1. You aren’t going to screw up this job for me, are you? This is a dream job. The pay is good and the guy who hired me said the toilets are all made for little people. I won’t have to climb up on a stool to take a crap.”

  “I’m not going to screw it up for you. What’s the address?”

  “I’m not telling you. I don’t want to lose the job.” And he hung up.

  I looked over at Diesel. “When the car in front of us stops and Briggs gets out, I want you to run
over him.”

  “I’d really like to do that, but then he’d probably be dead and we couldn’t follow him to work tomorrow.”

  I glanced at the almost empty bag of food sitting between my feet, and I had an idea.

  “What does Elaine do with all her cookies?” I asked Diesel.

  “Is this a trick question?”

  “She said she bakes cookies every day. Lots of cookies, if yesterday’s batch was any indicator. So what does she do with them? They don’t have family in the area. Sandy wasn’t at home. Does she eat them all herself?”

  “Maybe she gives them away.”

  “Turn around,” I said. “Go back to the employment place.”

  It took less than five minutes for us to get back to the storefront office. “Wait here,” I said. “I’ll only be a minute.” I jumped out of the car, ran across the street and into the office. It was still wall-to-wall little people but now the little people were all wearing fake elf ears. I was about ten feet into the fake elves when I realized the room had gone dead silent.

  “Hi,” I said brightly. “I saw the sign in the window, and I’d like to apply for a job.”

  “You’re too big,” someone said behind me. “These jobs are for elves.”

  “That’s not fair,” I said. “I could report you for height discrimination.” I wasn’t sure exactly who was in charge of height discrimination, but it seemed like there should be some agency somewhere that would address the issue. I mean, where are the protections for the masses? Where are the protections for people who are average?

  “We don’t want your kind here,” someone else said. “Get out.”

  “My kind?”

  “Big and stupid.”

  “Hey! Listen to me, shorty—”

  A cookie came flying through the air and hit me in the back of the head. I looked down at the cookie. Gingerbread!

  “Where’d this cookie come from?” I asked. “Do you have any more? Did Sandy’s sister, Elaine, make this cookie?”

  “Get her!” someone yelled, and I was hit with a barrage of cookies. They were coming from everywhere. Gingerbread, peanut butter, chocolate macaroons. The elves were berserk, yelling and swarming around me. I was hit in the forehead with an iced butter cookie, and someone bit me in the back of the leg. I had elves hanging on me like ticks on a dog.