Curds and Whey Box Set

by G M Eppers

  “Yes, Ma’am. Thank you,” I said, stressing the last two words, though I think I’d already thanked her two or three times. I was just really feeling grateful, I guess.

  “Mr. Thackery!” She called as she turned away from me. I saw her pull a small blue wallet shaped object out of her pocket. Nitro came to sheepish attention as she approached, and I moved on down the tarmac.

  Chapter Five

  When we got out of the cab in front of HQ, I saw our caretaker putting the finishing touches on the yardwork. The grass was neatly trimmed, the bushes shaped, and a rainbow of petunias, marigolds, and mums lined the walk all the way to the front door. Knobby, the caretaker, was watering the flowers as we walked by. “Morning, all!” he said cheerfully. One by one, we returned the greeting and entered the house by the side door and into the kitchen. On the table, we found eight neat piles of assorted mail.

  Everyone picked up their mail and sorted through it, throwing most of it directly into the garbage can in the corner. Sir Haughty stopped in mid toss and a big smile lit up his face. “Ah, a missive from dear Sticky!” He said, opening it immediately. He pulled out a wad of pages and began reading as he retreated upstairs to his room. The rest kept an envelope or two and followed suit and soon the table was cleared off. I stayed at the table for a while, resting and enjoying freedom from responsibility, glancing through an abandoned newspaper. While we’d been gone, there’d been a major earthquake in Iceland, a volcanic eruption in the Philippines, and a commuter plane had vanished off the coast of Argentina. Here in the states, McHale’s Movie Megaplex was closing three locations in Indiana, but opening four in South Carolina, and the shift appeared to be illegally politically motivated because the governor of South Carolina had controlling interest in an imitation butter factory. Several court cases were pending. And here in D.C., three Senate interns had been caught vandalizing their opponent’s Maserati. I was looking for the story about the off duty police officer who rescued a family of baby ducks from a storm drain or the young mother who earned her nursing certificate while recuperating from a broken arm and raising three kids, but there no stories like that.

  After a time, Knobby came in, poured us each a cup of coffee and sat with me. “How did the double header go?” He asked, referring to our back-to-back missions. Knobby and I kind of have a history. At the same time that my Dad lay dying in the hospital, his wife was doing the same thing across the hall, another early victim of Uber. He’s about four years younger than me, but we bonded in the waiting room in the few days before Dad passed. And when CURDS came along, we signed up together. We went through training together. And then a horrible thing happened. In a training exercise involving rappelling down a cement wall, Knobby, who at the time was known as Benjamin Olivieri, lost control, found himself swinging wildly, and crashed into the wall, shattering both kneecaps. Now, you might find this hard to believe, but even though medical science can replace almost every other part of the human body, they can’t replace a kneecap. The shattered caps were removed to prevent bone fragments from causing future problems, but the injury precluded him from active duty.

  He gets around just fine most of the time, but has to be careful, especially kneeling or crouching. No running or jumping or stressing those joints, which without the kneecaps are more easily dislocated. He was devastated by the accident. He badly wanted to serve in CURDS to try to avenge the death of his wife. Perfectly understandable. He appealed time and again and was turned down for all three teams. Finally, and I believe our magical Miss Chiff may have had something to do with it, he was offered the caretaker job. He takes care of yard work and repairs at all three HQs, traveling between them as needed. He didn’t have to rush about, and was able to temper his movements whenever his knee joints acted up.

  I know your next question. Isn’t it cruel to call him Knobby? Some might think so, but the nickname was actually his idea. Sure, settling for caretaker over being a team member was hard, but he adjusted relatively quickly and kept a good attitude about the whole thing. Being a Harry Potter fan, he now thought of himself as a house elf, and chose the name Knobby for himself. I thought it was kind of like Anne Boleyn calling herself Neckhead, but to each his own. Only Miss Chiff, as usual, continued to call him Ben, or more often Mr. Olivieri, but the rest of us, especially those of us with their own nicknames, agreed to use his.

  In answer to Knobby’s question, I took several minutes to fill him in on both missions. “But it’s nice to be home, Knobby,” I said. “It really helps to come back to such a beautiful yard and a well-kept house. You do a wonderful job.”

  “Thank you, Helena,” he said, sipping his coffee. “I also fixed your squeaky closet door, and replaced the washer in Badger’s bathroom sink. It was leaking.” Knobby was quite a handyman. Before the OOPS he had worked as a journeyman electrician and enjoyed carpentry as a hobby, and after his accident he took a two year course in plumbing just to round out his skillset for the caretaker job. Miss Chiff didn’t require that. We would have funded his hiring professionals for the infrastructure work. But he didn’t mind at all. Pretty much the only thing he couldn’t do was roofing, but so far we’d had no problems there. “How long you staying?”

  “Miss Chiff mandated two weeks. But I suppose it depends on if something comes up. Rennet Butler is on the loose again,” Knobby rolled his eyes, “and I’d hate to miss out on nailing his pathetic pusher hide to the wall.” Yes, I had issues with Mr. Rennet Butler. He had a real name, too, by the way, but he’d gone by so many aliases over the years there was no way to tell which one was the original. They ranged from prosaic names like the ever popular John Smith to the less popular Andrew McGillicuddy, to the genuinely unique Englentine Hassenfeffer-Pudnface (pronounced puhdfahchay; the ‘n’ was silent). He had a strong preference for Rennet Butler, so we generally called him that. He’d even taken pains to somewhat resemble his almost film namesake by dyeing his hair black, growing just the right moustache, and practicing the famous Clark Gable smirk. The one thing he’d never succeeded at was getting that one strand of hair to stray over his forehead. I’d seen him do it by hand in desperation, but the thing actually defied gravity and jumped back into place. There wasn’t enough goo in the world to make it droop.

  “How did he get out this time?”

  “Would you believe a big wind?”

  “You’re kidding.”

  I shook my head. “Hurricane flooded his prison and he escaped in the confusion.”

  Knobby shook his head in disbelief. “That was last year! There’s still water in our basement from Scarlett.” That storm had damaged DC as well, though not as severely, but all our HQs had taken on water. “But you guys will get him.”

  “Yes, but in the meantime, how many people is he going to feed Uber to and let them die? I’d rather go after him right now, but the twins have to recover.” I didn’t mention Sylvia’s injury. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Knobby’s discretion, but the walls were not exactly made of steel and I couldn’t be sure no one would overhear. “Besides, we don’t have a clue where he is right now. He was last seen in England, but he really could be anywhere. And with conjoined twins on the team, an undercover manhunt isn’t particularly going to work out for us. Miss Chiff is putting B Team on pinpointing him while we rest up, but I don’t know if I can take the wait.”

  “I felt like that after my accident, Helena,” he said. “You know how much I wanted to be out there, and I don’t even get the consolation of knowing it’s just vacation. This isn’t a break. It’s my life.”

  “I’m sorry I said that, Knobby. It was insensitive.” At least as insensitive as calling him ‘Knobby,’ I thought.

  “Don’t be sorry. Listen.” He set his coffee down and leaned toward me. “I still know I’m helping. This job is just as important as yours. The HQs have to be taken care of, or you folks would have to spend all your time doing repairs and yard work instead of research and training and tracking down the Uber. It’s the Uber that’s the m
ost important thing. Because I take care of the houses, the teams can do their jobs better and we get more Uber collected and destroyed. There’s no shame here. It took me a few years to figure that out, but I believe it. Now, you’re grounded for a couple of weeks, but you know in your heart there’s no choice here. Same deal. No shame. There’s no sense in stressing over it. This downtime is what your team needs.” He paused and leaned back again. “I know you. And it’s not about you. Don’t think of it as you waiting. It’s your team recovering their strength. It’s YOUR team, Helena. And you always take care of your things, don’t you?”

  I nodded. Knobby made sense. It wasn’t about me. And given the choice, the Nicelys didn’t want to stay here, either, at least not for that long. But going out on a mission too early after being shot would not help anyone. So despite my itchy Butler finger, I was going to have to try to appear relaxed. Unhurried. Unworried. For the good of the team. “And one more thing,” Knobby added.

  “Yes?”

  “Call your mother.”

  I sighed and saluted. “Yes, sir. Right away, sir!”

  Knobby went out to finish some weeding and I pulled out my phone and dialed Mom. Mom is kind of a hypochondriac by proxy. She’s always telling me about her friend Shirley whose life is simply fraught with incident. I’d never met Shirley, but I knew more about her history, especially her medical history, than I did about Mom’s. Shirley had a miscarriage at 36, hemorrhoids at 42, and contact dermatitis from her first experiment with wrinkle cream at 49. She hit menopause at 53 and was plagued by bunions on three toes. I had begun to suspect that ‘Shirley’ was actually Mom and it was her way of telling me about her health without having me worry overmuch. Then Shirley got a DUI and, though I was ashamed even as I did it, I used my authority to look up her mug shot. It wasn’t Mom. It might have been Martin Van Buren, but it was definitely not Mom. After that, I put my suspicions to rest and listened patiently to the continuing adventures of Shirley Van Buren.

  “Hi, Mom,” I said into the phone just as Billings came into the kitchen.

  He went to the fridge and pulled out a soy milk chug. “That grandma?” He asked.

  I nodded, raising one finger to shush him. Mom, of course, never suspected. “Helena, when are you going to settle down instead of gallivanting all over creation? Knobby told me you were in Paris. Of all places! You never even told me you were leaving. You need to get a normal job. My dentist’s receptionist up and quit last week. I bet you could do that. I can put in a good word for you when I go pick up my new bridge.”

  “No thanks, Mom. I’m happy working for CURDS. It makes me feel good to get Uber off the streets.”

  “Who cares about the streets way over there in France anyhow?”

  “The French do,” I said. “You know as well as I do that Uber doesn’t obey borders, Mom.”

  “Pooh on borders. It’s too dangerous.” I knew where this was going. “I heard someone got shot.”

  “Yes, Mom. The twins. But they got shot in Wisconsin, not Paris.”

  “Pooh on Wisconsin, too. You need to come home to Illinois. No one gets shot here.”

  “Mom, you’ve heard about Chicago, haven’t you?”

  Billings motioned to me that he wanted the phone. I didn’t want to do that to him. “Give, Mom. I’ll talk to her,” he said quietly.

  “Mom, Billings wants to talk to you,” I said. She would love that her grandson just volunteered to speak to her. I thought about putting Billings in for a medal or extra combat pay as I handed over the phone and went for another cup of coffee.

  Billings held the phone against his ear with his shoulder as he opened his soy milk. “Yes, Grandma, I’m here. How’s Shirley?” Now, asking Mom about Shirley is like asking a Jehovah’s Witness if you can be saved. I got Billings’ attention and ran a finger across my throat. I tried to mime opening a can of worms, but I don’t think the message got through. I don’t think I’m a very good mime. Billings finally turned his back on me, sipped his soy milk, and dutifully listened to his grandmother for several minutes. There followed a series of “uh huh”s and other non-committal sounds. I sat back down and sipped my coffee, this time with cream and two sugars. Billings took a gulp of the soy milk, swallowed, and went back to his job of acknowledging my mother. A few minutes later he finally said, “love you, too, Grandma. Bye,” and hung up.

  “What did she say?”

  “Shirley has diverticulitis. It only took her doctor three months to rule out Uber, even though her main symptom was diarrhea, not constipation. She said she told Shirley to get a new doctor.”

  “Gotta agree with her there. I hope she reports the guy to the AMA.”

  “Also, her hairdresser’s son, Rob, is having an affair with his secretary’s best friend’s cousin.”

  “Again?”

  “No, last time it was his secretary’s best friend.”

  “Oh, that’s right. I forgot. Anything else?”

  “Um…” he said, trying to remember the conversation. “Her favorite brand of hand lotion went up twenty five cents and she went to their website and wrote them a chapter.”

  “Good for her,” I put in, knowing it hadn’t done any good. Those ‘contact us’ links are never really attached to anything, sort of like the buttons at traffic lights.

  Later that evening, long after Knobby departed to serve House Team C, Sylvia, Roxy and I sat watching the late news. Billings was reading on his Kindle in the recliner, a floor lamp shining behind him. We were playing Yawn Tag and I was designated yawner. I’d lost the previous round, when Sylvia was yawner. As I gave an exaggerated yawn attempting to pass the urge onto either of the other two, on the TV, a newswoman named Hannah Barlow stood in front of our recently vacated grocery in Paris. The broken window was boarded up, and caution tape was strewn over the front of the store like toilet paper on Halloween. She said, “CURDS agents raided a grocery on the south side of Paris today, confiscating 413 kilos of known Uber Cheddar, and several hundred packages of various suspect cheeses. It’s one of the largest recoveries in recent years. Miss Chiff, Director of CURDS, said they were led to the stash after dealing with a crazed gunman who had taken hostages inside the store. The gunman shot himself after a 39 hour ordeal. One hostage was injured, but a total of 17 hostages escaped unharmed, and 41 protesters were arrested when they rioted following the suicide. The store owner was taken into custody and is being charged with counterfeiting and possession of Uber with intent to sell. Members of the CURDS team were unavailable for comment, but we have a representative from WHEY, Worldwide Handlers of Energized Yeast, Mr. Butte Montana.”

  Hearing his father’s name, Billings came over from the recliner and stood next to the couch, holding the Kindle at his side.

  I sat up straighter, forgot about the yawn game, and grabbed a throw pillow to bite down on.

  “Thank you, Ms. Barlow. This travesty is a result of,” Butte stopped here to shudder and twitch, his nerves still reacting to being stunned, then continued, “nothing more than the forced nanny state that CURDS and other progressive groups have been pushing for years.” Butte was still wearing the clothes we’d seen him in, but his hair had been combed, sprayed, and fluffed, and I’m pretty sure his face was powdered.

  “Would you care to expand on that?” Oh, please no, I thought. Never ask Butte to expand on anything! The fact that he had a global forum for his lunacy was giving me an ulcer.

  “Certainly. You see, Mr. Ferruz would still be alive if he had simply been allowed to go into the store,” and his last three words were distorted by more shuddering and twitching, “and purchase the cheese, instead of being forced to get it at gunpoint.” Clearly, Butte’s understanding of the situation did not include the part about Rennet Butler supplying the cheese, or the relationship Butler likely had with Ferruz. To Butte, it was simply a matter of a consumer being denied a purchase because of the Uber laws.

  “But not for long,” replied Ms. Barlow. “Since the Uber would have killed him.
” Yes! Go Ms. Barlow!

  “Only if he ate it,” said Butte, with authority. “And that’s his responsibility. It’s not up to society to tell him he can’t. Freedom. It’s the WHEY way,” he quipped, barely suppressing another shudder, and those of us watching all winced. “For example, he has the right to buy rat poison, right? And if he chooses to eat it, that’s up to him. The American Constitution, and all Constitutions of the free nations, guarantees everyone personal freedom.”

  “So the store owner should have the right to mislead his customers?”

  “That’s the beauty of all this! He wouldn’t have to! If he could legally sell the cheese, there’s no motivation to counterfeit or mislead.” His torso twitched as if his back had a sudden, unreachable itch. “See? Freedom all around and no one gets hurt. That’s America. That’s how all free countries should operate.”

  Ms. Barlow turned and faced the camera, as it zoomed in on her, excluding Butte from the picture, her microphone under her mouth. “And in this reporter’s opinion, that’s insane. Thank you for talking to us, Mr. Montana. This is Hannah Barlow for Universal News. Back to you, Charlotte.” She said, and the news anchor came on to introduce the weatherman.

  From the shadowy section of the couch, Sylvia asked, “What was with all the twitching? Does Butte have a thing?”

  “I stunned him,” Billings said with pride. “The protesters rioted and we had to.”