by Gary K. Wolf
“Deny it until you’re green in the gills, Sis. I know what I know.”
“Which isn’t much.” She slipped on her shoes, retrieved her coffeepot, and ran towards home. I galloped after her.
A Toon and a human ambled toward us. The Toon was a big mouse, five seven, a hundred thirty pounds, Ping-Pong paddle ears, and furry face. He had “Mick” stitched on the bill of his cap. The human matched him at five seven, a bit lighter at a hundred twenty, with an equally furry face. His hat called him Steve. Both wore yellow orthopedic shoes. Heddy approached them head down like a cannonball converging with a bull’s-eye. They parted to let her through.
I caught up to her, grabbed her from the rear, and spun her around. “Sis, I’m on your side. When the tango hits the fandango, I’ll dance to whatever music you play. But you’ve got to level with me now.”
“I’ll level with you, Eddie. You bet. I’ll level with you good.” She poked my chest with her pot handle. “You’re my favorite brother. I love you come rain or shine, Hell or high water, better or worse. But I’m starting to think Ferd might be right when he says you’re a few spots short of a Dalmatian.”
“You telling me you’re not a Toon?”
“That’s the looniest statement I’ve ever heard you utter. Even if such a thing was possible, why would I do it? Hi-de-ho-ho-ho. Why would anybody in their right mind want to be a Toon?”
My question exactly.
Roger stared morosely out the car window.
“Don’t blame yourself, Rog. Boys will be boys. At least you smothered the fire shy of permanent damage.”
He uncorked his babysitting wages and took a healthy slug. “I’m not disturbed by a few childish pranks. My abject melancholy stems from deeper causes. After spending an afternoon with those three delightful tots, I realize what’s missing in my life.” He cradled the bottle in his arms and crooned it a lullaby. “I want to be a daddy.”
Did Jessica have a surprise for him! “How does the ball and chain feel about that?”
“I don’t know. We haven’t discussed it. I suspect she won’t be terribly enthusiastic. Jessica’s currently slated for a number of prominent starring roles. A pregnancy anytime in the near future would seriously stall her career. A woman of Jessica’s stature can’t risk sags, professional or physical.”
I never drink and drive. I pulled over to the curb and idled before starting work on tomorrow morning’s hangover. “It’s time you and the mate talked it over.”
Roger took his bottle back. “You are absolutely correct.” His glugs produced no reflexive cartwheels, skyrocketing, cranial steaming, or bouncing off the walls. Liquor now affected him the subtler, human way, luring him into voluntary harm. “Let’s visit Jessica, and I’ll do it right now.”
“Not so fast, bub.” I eased into traffic. “Don’t forget. You’re still a wanted rabbit. You’ve got to stay in hiding. Plan your family after we clear your name.”
“It’s not the matter of children. There’s another reason.” He plucked a length of thread from a fray on the seat between us. “I’m handsome, wouldn’t you say?”
“If you stretch the imagination.” From here to Cleveland.
“Jessica won’t recognize me in a week of Wednesdays, a month of Sundays, a year of Mondays, a decade of day after Thursdays.” He wound the thread around his fingertip so tightly it cut off circulation. “I want to give her a tumble and see if she tumbles back. “
I broke my own ground rule and had a toot on the move. If I stopped for nerve tonic every time Roger dropped a bombshell, I’d roll the road forever. “If Jessica fails your test, there’s no makeup exam. School’s out forever.”
“I’m fully prepared to accept the consequences of my actions. Eddie, once and for all, I have to know the truth.”
L.A. architects practice visual onomatopoeia, designing buildings to resemble the products sold inside. Angelenos dine in hot dogs, cheese burritos, and giant milk shakes. We push paperwork in Brillo pads, RCA radios, and flatirons. We dance to, and in, a huge drum called Jungle Rhythms.
“Tarzan sent us,” I told the gorilla behind the cymbalic door.
“He should have sent you someplace else.” The gorilla curled his upper lip over his nose. “Your kind’s unwelcome here.” He banged the door.
“What does he mean?” asked Roger. “I’ve been here countless times.”
“You were of a different persuasion.”
Roger flicked his eyelids, like a switch-hitter clearing his vision after being bopped by a bean-ball. “Let me make certain I understand how this works.” He tick-tocked his index finger between us. “I can’t go in your establishments when I’m me. I can’t go in my establishments when I’m you.”
“That’s the gist of it. Next time I stop by the Auto Club, I’ll pick up a guidebook so you can keep track of where you can enter when.”
“I already have one, Eddie. It’s called the Golden Rule.”
I knocked on the door again. In exchange for a few bananas, which he stuffed in his mouth for safekeeping, Cheeta let us in despite our heritage.
The gorilla was right. We didn’t belong. I counted on two hands the patrons who walked on two legs. As we made our way to the watering hole, rhinos, lions, hyenas, leopards, and wildebeests made me feel like the first clay pigeon of spring.
While the resident taxidermist worked up an estimate for skinning us out and nailing us to a wall, the elephant bartender squirted me a healthy snootful of gin. It reeked of peanuts, but I kept it anyway. Better that than gamble on what might dribble out of his only other spigot.
The self-drumming conga, snare, bongo, bass, timpani, kettle, tymbal, and naker orchestra launched into a ditty short on melody, long on beat. A herd of beasts charged the dance floor and launched into a cheek-to-cheek four-step laden with plenty of tusk-tusk.
Jungle Rhythms poured short on whiskey, long on atmosphere. The juice-ware started life in the upper branches of a coconut tree. The grass tablecloths made the room look like an assembly of kneeling hula dancers. I angled my thatched palm chair toward the entrance. Roger sat facing a wall mural called “The Mutiny on Noah’s Ark.”
“I am positively outraged by the bestial way these Toons glare at us,” he said. “Why did we have to meet Jessica here?”
“No particular reason.” Except Jessica specified it. She said she felt like dancing. In a recent MGM musical, I watched her perform a solo tap-stepping routine that Gene Kelly couldn’t have duplicated wearing steel-soled shoes on a soapy floor. Maybe she intended to hoof it without a companion tonight. Maybe I’d change my name to Yul, and ascend to the throne of Siam.
Jessica entered wearing sufficient diamonds to etch her name on a five-foot-eight, hundred-and-twenty-five-pound hourglass. Her slinky green dress fit her closer than the tanning butter I slathered her with on the beach. It had lust written all over it, literally, in sequins. She peeled down one of her long green gloves the way a sea serpent sheds its skin before hopping into an oyster’s bed.
I waved to attract her attention, standing so she’d see me over the heap of animals falling on top of one another for a glimpse of her.
Gorgeous women turn heads. Jessica spun them in circles until they snapped off. Swiveling her way across the club she left behind more loose noggins than the French Revolution.
“Good evening, Mr. Valiant,” she said in a balloon smooth as a satin pillow. “I’ve been hoping you’d call.” I held her chair. In the process of plunking her posterior on the palmetto she rubbed me with more body parts than other women own. “I’ve been in great need of male companionship lately.” Her balloon wrapped its dangling stalk around my middle and refused to let go.
A snake waiter slithered to our table. “The usssssssual?” he hissed.
Jessica nodded. “Plus a late supper. You know what I like.” She toted her vitals inside the front of her dress
. She reached down and pulled one out, a slender ruby-red cigarette. She inserted it between her lips, making that straight, hard cylinder the envy of every male in the joint.
Roger materialized a wooden match. He ignited it with his thumbnail and extended it to his wife. “You come here often?” His hand trembled like a wedding night virgin.
“Only for evening rendezvous with handsome strangers.” She steadied Roger’s shaking member while she sucked in his heat.
“Lets me out,” I said.
“But not your attractive friend.” Jessica pursed her Cupid’s bow lips and blew on Roger’s torch. “Introduce us, Mr. Valiant.”
“Jessica Rabbit, Roger Rabs.”
The snake crawled up with a plate of chocolate-covered cherries balanced on his head.
“Mr. Rabs,” said Jessica. She mounted his hand and pumped it. “I’m pleased to meet you.”
Roger bowed, a maneuver ill advised while sitting down. “I’m equally delighted, Miss Rabbit.”
She stroked his gash, the one he acquired when he smacked his forehead on the table. “Mrs. Rabbit.” She exposed her naked truth. “I’m a married woman.
Roger’s throat throbbed. Judging from the largeness of his bulge, becoming human hadn’t diminished the size of his larynx a whit. “What a shame.”
Jessica laid her essentials out on the table for all to see. “Only on occasions when I meet an attractive man.”
The snake returned balancing a bucket of champagne on ice. He was flanked by two armed guards. He gave me the bill before the bottle. I don’t know if Jessica came easy, for sure she didn’t come cheap. I authorized Mr. Wiggler to pull her popper.
Roger reached under the table, tore off a piece of grass, and used it to wipe his brow. “Does your veiled intimation of unhappiness at being a married woman mean you would venture on a date with me?” He indicated himself with his sweaty clump of grass.
Jessica ran her hand along his sodden stalk and relieved it of seed. “I love men with big vocabularies.”
Roger went limp. “How about…your husband?” he ejaculated.
She leaned forward, giving Roger a close-up view of her round and firm tête-à-têtes. “What he doesn’t know…” She climaxed with “…won’t hurt him.”
Roger toppled over backwards onto the dance floor. A foot farther left, and he’d have been rumbaed over by a rhino. He stood up and faced his missus. “I beg to differ.” A single impotent teardrop dribbled from his eye. “It would hurt him immeasurably.” He turned and ran out the door.
“An odd man, your friend.” Jessica filled my coconut with bubbly.
“He’s adjusting to a difficult change.”
“Change of the proper nature can be quite pleasurable if inserted directly into the animus.” In terms of fizz, her balloon out-spumed the fluid in my nutshell.
“I wouldn’t know, toots. I flunked the four main ologies: psych, bi, phisi, and the.”
Her wavy hair fell across one half of her face, turning her eye into a peep show. “That lets out conversation.” She tongued a bit of spume off her quivering upper lip. “We’ll have to find another means of stimulation.”
“How about a parlor game, twenty questions. I’ll start. Why did you tip the Telltale to you and Gable?”
She fumbled into her bosom for another cigarette, exposing a part of herself that few rarely see, her reddening fluster.
“Who fathered the Tiny Toon you’re incubating? How’s a pregnancy going to affect your chances to play Scarlet O’Hara? What were you and Carole Lombard huddling about at Selznick’s place? Oh, yeah. Lest I forget. Does the light go out when you shut your icebox door?”
She French-kissed her cigarette. “We’ll have to play a less taxing game, Mr. Valiant. I find this one far too difficult to follow.” She invited me to light her fire.
A tough choice. Stay and swill expensive champagne with the world’s most beautiful woman, or chase after a dumb bunny who had just learned what puts the “mort” in “mortal.”
Call me concerned, call me caring, call me stupid. To settle the bill, I spiked half the contents of my wallet onto the waiter’s fang. He flicked his tongue for more. By the time I finished, the evening cost me every cent in my pocket, and I didn’t even pop my own cork.
As I left, Jessica put her hand, the one that should have been wearing a plain gold wedding band but wasn’t, on my forearm. “What about my husband, Mr. Valiant? That’s the reason I came. You said on the phone you had news of him.”
“Indeed I do.” I shook her loose. “The news is that he’s too darn good for you, lady.”
I tracked Roger to the Crying Towel, a cut-rate gin joint catering to weeping Willies.
The Yellow Pages includes a separate listing for places like this—dark, dank, dives where men drown their troubles with women. They’re found under the heading of “Grief Relief’ and run on for more pages than I ever cared to count. I’ve patronized plenty, in the company of others inflicted and on occasions when I’ve caught the malady myself. I’ve yet to set foot in one that wasn’t jammed, winter or summer, day or night. Sob sisters say a good man is hard to find in this town. Bull. There’s an overabundance if they know where to look.
Roger sat alone at a back booth drinking out of a snifter so large chipmunks could use it to bob for olives. “I’m surprised to see you here,” he said. He hoisted his empty at the waitress. As if he needed a refill. He already had more sheets in the wind than a three-masted schooner. “I assumed you would stay with Jessica.” The waitress dragged over a garden hose and topped him off with the house specialty, a Southern Suffering Sympathy, a potent mixture of embalming fluid and essence of Everglades. He tossed it back like swamp water over the dam. “I thought you two would be drinking and dancing the night away.”
“Why waste time with her when I can hang out in a swell place like this with my best buddy?”
Roger signaled the waitress again. “That’s most likely an unmitigated lie, but I appreciate the sentiment.” The waitress poured him another hit. Roger had turned into such a steady customer, she left the hose with instructions to yank it when he wanted her to turn the spigot. Roger held his glass to the light. A baby alligator paddled around inside. “Eddie, I think we ought to swear off.”
“Booze?”
He swallowed his medicine, reptile and all. “Women.”
“I second that motion. All in favor, bottoms up.” I ordered the Crying Towel’s unique bottomless bottle of bourbon.
Roger scooted his empty glass aside and stuck the tarnished brass nozzle directly in his mouth. He yanked the hose, but the waitress refused to play. He stuck the nozzle into his glass and yanked again. This time it worked as advertised. “Did Jessica talk about me after I left?”
“You mean you the way you are now, or you the way you were before?”
“Either one.”
“Nope.”
“Oh.” He uncased his harmonica and climbed onto the table. That spelled trouble. Unlucky-in-lovers came here to cry in their beer, not laugh up their sleeves. They weren’t going to take kindly to a guy blowing comedy harp.
I needn’t have worried. Roger wailed it straight, soulful, lowdown, and mean. When he finished his lick, the only rummies who weren’t in tears were the ones in comas.
“I didn’t know you played that well,” I told him when he came down off the Formica.
“I never could before tonight.” Roger signaled the waitress to resume his flow of rotgut.
“What made the difference?”
“A substantial infusion of cyaneous, cerulean, amethystine, and Prussian.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Those, Eddie, if you’ll pardon the pun, are the major blues.”
25
I rousted Roger off my couch. “Rise and shine, tiger.”
He rose fine, but his s
hine fell a pallid pale short of luster. “I feel p-p-p-positively p-p-p-putrid.” He had opted for my typical bedtime attire, whatever I happened to be wearing when I passed out. “My head’s exploding.” He yanked his earlobes. “Oooooh, that only makes it worse.”
“Naturally, rum dum. What did you expect?”
He gave his danglers another tug with equally painful results. “Pulling my ears normally activates a factory steam whistle that releases the pressure caused by over-imbibing.”
“You’re in a different union, chum.” I handed him an ice bag. “Here’s how humans signal a hangover that it’s quitting time.”
He squished the bag and heard water sloshing inside. He unscrewed the metal cap and tilted the bag to his mouth.
I felt like a foster father to a man from Mars. I relieved him of the bag, resealed it, and laid it across his cheekbones. “Leave it there until the pain goes away or your brain freezes solid, whichever comes first.” Since the bag covered his eyes, I guide-dogged him to my kitchen table. “Sit down. I cooked us breakfast.”
Roger peeked out from under the red rubber cooler and stared at the T-bone I forked unto his plate. He crinkled his nose. “I can’t eat that!”
“Try it first. I might not be a gourmet chef, but I know how to fry a steak.”
He scooted the plate away with his fingertip. “I’m a strict vegetarian. “
“No stomach for meat?”
“No teeth.”
With my untucked shirttail, I polished the shiny bottom of a steel pot, and held it to his face. “Check what’s protruding from your gums, horse. Courtesy of Toon Tonic you now come equipped with a full set of Grade-A choppers. Put them to the use for which they were intended.”
Roger ran his tongue across his newly sprouted incisors. “I don’t know.”
I sliced a tiny hunk of well done, stuck it on a fork, and airplaned it toward his mouth.
“One bite,” I said.
He opened wide.
We climbed the stairs to my office.