Squatters. There was something else to fear. But the building was as silent as a mausoleum, and he seriously doubted that the potential mugger who had been following him would go to the trouble of trying to unlock the building’s front door. For the time being, he was safe. He glanced back at the front door just to confirm that he’d locked it and saw there was movement in the tiny crack between the bottom of the door and the floor.
Something was oozing through the crack. It was some sort of gelatinous substance, and its movement was slow and steady. It was pink, but it was a horrible pink. Not the pink of cake frosting and party balloons.
It was the pink of some living creature’s insides.
Jack took a step backward. He knew he needed to move more quickly, but he was transfixed by the sight of whatever was in front of him. Although it had the appearance of some sort of goo, it seemed to be moving under its own power. It wasn’t an inanimate substance.
It was alive.
The sudden realization shook Jack out of his trance, and he ran down the hallway. He heard the squishy, sloppy steps behind him again, but he didn’t turn around to look. He just kept running. At the end of the hall was a door marked EXIT. He pushed on the door, but it wouldn’t budge. Was it locked from the outside? Broken?
He turned around. The thing, whatever it was, was getting closer.
It was a pile of parts he couldn’t make sense of—much of it was somewhere between solid and liquid, but there were fully solid parts as well—bundles of long, snakelike tubes; veiny bags and pouches. When Jack was a little boy, he had spent winter break at his grandparents’ farm. He remembered watching his grandpa and uncle butcher a hog once. They had hung its body from a tree. His uncle had sliced down the hog’s middle, and its guts had spilled out into a bucket with a sickening splat. This thing … that was how it sounded when it moved.
Since he had no luck with the exit, Jack tried another nearby door. It was unlocked. He quickly opened it, darted in, and slammed and locked the door behind him. He was inside another ruined office. The floor was strewn with garbage, and the window was cracked, but strangely, a plaque still hung on the wall saying EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH. An empty bookshelf about the height of Jack’s waist had been knocked onto the floor. Jack dragged it to the door and shoved it under the doorknob at an angle.
Winded, Jack sat down in the chair behind the desk. Here he was, looking like the boss he had been for years, but in a ruined office, hiding, in fear for his life.
He should have known the locked door was useless. Long, slimy tendrils were already snaking their way through the cracks underneath it. Pink slime dripped around the sides of the door and pooled onto the floor, merging itself with the creeping tendrils.
Jack looked to the window as a possible escape route, but more of the globby substance was slithering over the windowsill.
Jack looked back at the door, where the thing continued to ooze out. Is there more than one thing, or is it all the same thing? What is happening?
There was a loud slurping sound like someone trying to pull their feet out of deep mud. Rapidly, so fast he couldn’t even make sense of it, the mass of slime and solids reconstituted itself into an upright being that sat in the chair across the desk from Jack.
The thing had approximations of arms and legs and a lumpy mound that stood in for a head. It was made of the translucent pink goo, under which its organs were visible. Somehow it reminded Jack of the awful gelatin salad his mom used to make, with canned fruit suspended under the slimy surface.
It had no mouth or nose, but it had eyes. Dark eyes that stared at Jack as though the thing could see into him the way he could see into it.
“What … what do you want?” Jack asked, his voice trembling. He didn’t want to die, not when he had just had one near miss, not when he was just remembering what was important.
The creature kept looking at him. Then, slowly, it raised one arm and reached toward him. Like elastic, its arm stretched, growing thinner as it reached across the length of the desk to touch Jack’s face.
Pain like Jack had never known shot through him. But it wasn’t physical pain. He felt the pain of hurt, neglect, abuse. It was the pain of every employee he had ever yelled at or fired, the pain of his son every time he had missed one of his ball games or unfairly criticized him, the pain of his wife for every forgotten birthday or unkind word. Jack was filled with all the emotional pain he had ever caused, and it was more intense than he could bear. He doubled over and squeezed his tear-filled eyes shut, sure he was about to die from a real broken heart.
But then the pain left him just as suddenly as it had come, and he was awash in an overwhelming sense of relief. When he opened his eyes, the creature was gone.
* * *
Becky was in bed but awake, watching one of her shows about home remodeling on TV.
“Hiya, Becks,” Jack said, pleased to hear his old pet name for her come out of his mouth. He sat down on the bed next to her. “Can I talk to you for a few minutes?”
“Sure.” She aimed the remote and switched off the TV. “Is everything okay? You’re not sick or anything, are you?” Her brow furrowed like it did when she was worried.
“No, it’s nothing like that.”
“Good … I mean, it’s just been a really long time since you seemed like you wanted to talk to me, so I was afraid it was going to be something bad.”
“It is bad, but you’ve done nothing wrong. I wanted to say … I know I’ve been a bad husband lately, and I’m sorry.” Lately didn’t begin to cover it, he knew. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d acted like a decent husband. Maybe when Tyson was little?
“Wow.” There were tears in her eyes, which she wiped away. “I wasn’t expecting that.”
“Well, from now on, you can expect better of me. You can demand better of me.” He felt his eyes getting a little teary, too. “Part of the reason I’ve been so on edge is money. The business isn’t doing well, Becks. The animatronics keep breaking. Families aren’t showing up. I’m losing all this money on food. I don’t know how much longer the Pizza Playground can limp along.”
Becky took his hand and held it. It had been a long time since she had done that. “Oh, honey, you should’ve told me. And here I’ve been yammering away about remodeling and all this stuff that costs a lot of money. I never would’ve even suggested it if I’d known you’d been worried about money. From now on you’ve got to promise to tell me when something’s wrong.”
Jack nodded. “I will. I promise.”
“And I promise I’ll do the same.” She looked him in the eyes. “Actually, you know, I think the reason I’ve obsessed over the house so much is that I’ve been sad ever since Tyson left home. Fixing up things in the house distracted me from how much I miss him.”
“I miss him, too,” Jack said.
“Nobody tells you how hard it’s going to be when your kid goes off to college.” Becky wiped another tear away. “They act like it’s one big party, but it’s not. Actually, I’ve been thinking I might go back to work. There’s an opening at my old real estate office, and they called to ask if I was interested. I figure that way I could keep my mind active and see other people during the day.” She squeezed his hand. “Plus, if I got a job, we’d have two incomes instead of one. It might ease some of your financial worries.”
Jack tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “If that’s really what you want to do, then I support you.” Back before Tyson was born, Becky had been a successful real estate agent. He had to admit that the thought of someone else in the family earning money was comforting.
“It’s really what I want to do.” She smiled. “There’s no need to be a stay-at-home mom when there’s no kid staying at home anymore. It was either get a job or get a dog to turn into my surrogate child.”
“I think you made the right choice,” Jack said, smiling in return. “Say, do you think Tyson’s still up?”
“It’s not even eleven, and he’s a college student,” B
ecky said. “Of course he’s still up. For him, the night is young.” She snuggled down under the covers. “But it’s past my bedtime.”
“Mine, too,” Jack agreed. “But all the same, I want to give Tyson a call.”
Jack took his phone into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water. Tyson answered on the first ring, but he sounded low.
“Hey, buddy,” Jack said. “I just wanted to check in to see how you’re doing.”
“I promise I haven’t spent any more of your money if that’s what you want to know.”
“No, I wasn’t calling about money. I was calling about you.”
“Really?” Tyson’s tone had a hard edge. “Because when we talked earlier this week, you wouldn’t even let me tell you about the car emergency I had. You were too upset that I had charged your credit card nine hundred dollars to make the repairs.”
Jack felt a little tug at his heart. Was what Tyson saying true? Could Jack have really been so cold? “I’m sorry if that’s how I seemed. You didn’t have an accident, did you?”
“No, but I could have easily. My car broke a belt on the interstate and just stopped dead. It was a miracle I didn’t get hit. All these cars were just whizzing past me, and I was right int the center lane. Finally, a police officer helped me get the car moved to the side of the road and called a tow truck. I was really scared, Dad.” His voice broke with emotion.
“Anybody would’ve been scared in that situation, son.” Jack felt the full weight of guilt bearing down on him. “I’m just glad you’re okay. Did the mechanic get the car fixed okay?”
“Yeah, it’s running great now.”
“Good.” Jack knew that the mechanic had overcharged Tyson, taking advantage of the fact that Tyson was an inexperienced boy who didn’t know what a fair price was.
But the important thing was that Tyson was safe. You couldn’t put a price on that.
“Listen, buddy, I’m gonna let you go,” Jack said. “I’m sure you’ve got way more interesting things to do than to talk to your old man. If you need anything, let me know, okay? I love you, buddy.”
“I love you, too, Dad,” Tyson said, sounding confused.
As soon as Jack ended the call, he sipped his water and ate one of Becky’s delicious homemade oatmeal cranberry pecan cookies. In the morning, he thought, he would make some phone calls. He would tell the kids he’d fired—because that’s what they were, just kids—to come back to work as usual. He would make things right with them.
Jack climbed the stairs, put on his pajamas, and brushed his teeth. He slid into the cool, clean sheets beside Becky, who was already asleep. As soon as Jack closed his eyes, so was he. It was a deep, peaceful rest.
* * *
Porter didn’t have much of an appetite, but he nibbled his toast and sipped his coffee. He couldn’t face the two sunny-side up eggs on his plate and wasn’t sure why he had ordered them, except out of habit. It felt like the eggs were staring at him judgmentally.
He knew that what was bothering him was the same thing that was bothering everybody else in their booth in the Golden Heifer, where they were having their traditional late-Saturday-morning breakfast: They had all received the call from Jack, all agreed to report back to work at the Pizza Playground, but they were fearful about what might happen when they got there.
Angie was toying with her pancakes. “So on a scale of one to ten, how bad a mood do you think Jack will be in today?”
“An eleven. Definitely an eleven,” Sage said, picking at his fruit plate.
“I’ve got a job interview at that fancy new steakhouse on Monday,” Edwin said. “They’re still hiring, I’m just sayin’.”
“I don’t think I’d ever get hired as a server someplace fancy,” Angie said. “I’m not ladylike enough, you know?” She crammed a whole strip of bacon in her mouth, as if to illustrate her point. “I’m doomed to sling pizzas at preschoolers.”
“Yeah, I don’t guess the fancy steakhouse has animatronics they need somebody to service,” Porter threw in.
“Yeah,” Sage said, laughing, “but wouldn’t it be weird if they did? There’d be all these rich adults eating steak and lobster and singing ‘Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes’ along with Baron von Bear and his friends.”
Edwin smiled at Sage and shook his head. “You are weird, man. But they’re hiring cleaning staff for the night shift. You ought to apply. Fancy places need their bathrooms cleaned just like regular places.”
“That’s encouraging to hear,” Sage said. “You know me, student and novelist by day, toilet scrubber by night.”
They paid their bill and walked together to the Pizza Playground with all the enthusiasm of condemned prisoners.
When they reached the building, they saw the outside had been decorated with dozens of brightly colored balloons. A sign read, Special Today: Large Cheese Pizza, Four Drinks, for $10—includes 25 FREE game tokens!
Porter couldn’t imagine Jack ever voluntarily giving away anything for free. “That’s actually a pretty good deal,” he said.
Apparently other people thought so, too. A family of four paused and looked at the sign. The dad reached into his wallet, pulled out a ten-dollar bill, and said, “Why not?”
The family went inside.
“Wow,” Porter said, “I feel almost hopeful.”
Sage wasn’t as enthused. “Be careful. Remember that Jack has given us plenty of reasons to be pessimistic.”
Porter had to admit that Sage was right.
They entered the dining area. Jack was standing next to the table with the family who had just come in and was chatting with them as he filled their glasses and set the pitcher with the rest of the soda on the table. Porter was shocked to see Jack pleasantly interacting with—and actually waiting on—customers.
“Did you see that?” Angie whispered to Porter and Sage. “Since when does Jack hand out free refills without customers practically begging for them?”
“Since now, apparently,” Porter said. “And look at his face. What is he doing?”
Sage was similarly in shock. “I think … he’s smiling.”
Seeing Jack smile was like seeing a dog dancing on its hind legs. It wasn’t physically impossible, but it seemed highly unlikely.
“There’s my stellar staff!” Jack said, giving them a friendly wave. “Edwin, would you be willing to go into the kitchen and make these fine folks one of your delicious pizzas?”
“Sure,” Edwin said, looking at Jack like he had just sprouted an extra head.
“Angie, Sage, Porter, how are you guys doing today?” Jack said, grinning at them. “It’s getting close to final exams, isn’t it? Are you studying hard?”
Porter looked over at his equally confused friends. “Y-yes, sir.”
“That’s good,” Jack said. “I’m proud of you.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Jack grinned warmly at the trio, taking them aside. “I do hope that all of you will accept my apologies for my behavior yeterday. I also hope you’ll accept a two-dollar-an-hour raise.” He gave Porter a chuck on the shoulder. “And what’s with all this ‘sir’ stuff? There’s no need for formality. This is Pizza Playground. We’re here to have fun!”
Porter and Sage shared a look. In the past, Jack had always demanded that his employees call him “sir,” as if he were their drill sergeant in boot camp.
Another family of four came in, perhaps also lured by the ten-dollar special. “Welcome, welcome!” Jack called, like an enthusiastic game show host. “Who’s ready for pizza, games, and a show?”
All the kids cheered while their parents smiled down at them.
Angie seated the new family and took their drink orders. Porter went behind the stage to make sure that the animatronics and sound system were in good working order. On the other side of the curtain, he could hear children talking and laughing, the games in the arcade beeping and blipping. He wasn’t sure what had caused the change, but whatever it was, Pizza Playground had started to fe
el like what it was supposed to: A place for families to have fun. A place where the employees helped create an atmosphere of entertainment and even enjoyed themselves in the process.
But how could the place have felt so bad yesterday and feel the opposite today? How could Jack have fired the whole staff yesterday, then rehired them and showered them with kind words and a raise today? It didn’t make any sense.
Porter remembered something his mom used to say: “When good luck happens, don’t question it.”
It was sound advice.
He programmed the show to start. He stepped backstage so he wouldn’t be seen by the audience. The canned music started to play, and the sparkly red curtain parted to reveal the two patched-together, barely moving animatronic figures—the bear and the weird bird thing—that now made up the “house band.”
Even with just two “performers” on the stage, the kids in the audience screamed like rabid fans at a music festival.
Porter chuckled. It was nice that they were enjoying the fruits of his labor. Later tonight, he thought, I should tinker around some more with the Puppet Carver and see if I can figure out what went wrong. Maybe if I can get it fixed and, if Jack’s still in a good mood, he’ll be willing to watch another demonstration. A successful one this time.
* * *
The ten-dollar special had been a success. Families had trickled in over the course of the night to take advantage of the cheap dinner offer, and business, though not booming, had been steady. Jack felt encouraged. No, he felt more than encouraged. He felt great.
Tonight, as he looked around the restaurant, he saw not a doomed money pit but a place full of possibilities. He just had to think harder about ways to bring people in, and tonight had been evidence that when he put his brain to use and tried something new, his efforts would be rewarded. Making the place a success was a challenge, but it was a challenge he could rise to.
The Puppet Carver Page 4