"Interesting."
"And so," Thad said, "there's this constant tension in the morning, with the kids their names are Charm, Pheromone and Edward-mocking and berating Jay Plankton all the time, and Zinsser refusing to change the station."
"Why haven't the kids quit? Or why hasn't Zinsser replaced them sooner?" I asked.
Timmy said, "They live up the road in Charm's father's house. He's one of Zinsser's financial backers. The father's in Provence for the summer with his new wife. But Charm can only live there and have her checking account replenished periodically if she's willing to work for Zinsser. She had academic and drug problems, and this is part of her rehab program. Zinsser has to keep her around-and where Charm goes, Pheromone and Edward go too-so he's canning the Mexican illegals who now do the field and barn chores, Darren says, and Zinsser's getting the three young people out into the open air where he won't have to listen to them dis the J-Bird all morning long."
I thought it over and said, "None of this is what I expected to find here." I described to Timmy and Thad my encounter with Kurt Zinsser, angry neolefty turned angry neocon.
"Unless his devotion to Jay Plankton is all a cunning pose, which I don't think it is, Zinsser is as unlikely a harasser of Plankton or kidnapper of Leo Moyle as we're likely to come across. These kids do sound like better bets, sort of. Certainly they would have access to llama droppings. And if they couldn't stand Zinsser and wanted to mess with his mind and get away with it, they could go after his hero, the J-Bird. Except, of course, they're… kids. Three young students in rural Massachusetts who stage a kidnapping in New York? I don't know about that."
"But," Timmy said, "we haven't met them. Darren says they're pretty out of control.
Especially Charm Stankewitz. And they know about Zinsser and the old FFE He told them all about it, apparently hoping to show how cool he once was."
"Are Charm, Pheromone and Edward their real names?"
Thad casually spat something ugly into the dust and said, "Charm's real name is Patricia Stankewitz, and Edward's is Edward Nicetwink. It had been Edward Beers, but he had it legally changed last winter when he hit eighteen and his parents in Stockbridge couldn't stop him. Pheromone's actual name, believe it or not, is Pheromone Peabody."
"An old New England Yankee family via the sixties, it sounds like," Timmy said.
"And what about Darren, your source for all this data?" I asked. "I take it Darren strikes you as a reliable source of information."
"He's got no axe to grind that's evident," Timmy said. "He's Zinsser's boyfriend, and that's clearly where his sympathies lie. But his story of these three troubled youths is plausible enough."
"Why don't you go in and meet Darren?" Thad said. "He'll give you a free sample of Woolly Llama Cheese."
Timmy said, "Yes, you haven't had any yet."
"Is it pretty awful?"
"Of course," they said, nearly in unison.
"Lead the way."
Darren, a slender, sloe-eyed man a good twenty years Zinsser's junior, was wearing a llama T-shirt like his partner's. He had a small llama tattoo on one upper arm, and on the other upper arm were tattooed the words "Robert Forever," apparent evidence of the hazards of subdermal body decoration.
At my request, Darren reiterated what he had told Timmy and Thad about Charm, Pheromone and Edward. He had nothing new to add, although when I asked him directly whether he thought these three schoolkidsPheromone was only seventeen, and Edward and Charm just a year older-were capable of pulling off a kidnapping, Darren said, "Nothing those brats did would surprise me. They are totally unpredictable, and I've always thought truly dangerous."
"But how could they kidnap anybody in New York? Are any of them big enough and tough enough to wrestle a man in his forties into a waiting vehicle? Do they possess firearms or other weapons, or drugs they could use on somebody?"
"I don't know about guns," Darren said, "but I suppose they could drug someone. All three of them have extensive experience with pharmaceuticals. They're all rather small, but if they were going to snatch somebody in New York they might have larger friends there who could help them. They go into the city at least once a week and stay with some people in Brooklyn."
"Any idea who these people are?"
"Not really. I've heard them mention Louis somebody, and a Sharon, I think, and somebody they refer to as Strawberry Swirl."
You could practically hear the wheels turn as we all made mental notes on Louis, Sharon and Strawberry Swirl.
"Were Charm, Pheromone and Edward in the city yesterday?" I asked. "That's when the kidnapping took place. Late morning sometime."
"Actually, I think they were," Darren said, his eyes widening. "Or Charm was anyway. We weren't making cheese yesterday. We won't make cheese again until Tuesday. By then Kurt thinks he'll have some new people to work for us who are less obnoxious to have around."
Timmy said, "Don, you haven't tried any cheese yet."
"No," Thad added. "We have but you haven't."
Darren got up from his stool behind the counter. "This stuff will change your life," he said, with no trace of irony. His was supposed to be the generation steeped in irony, but apparently that had all gone by him. Using a small square of parchment paper, Darren retrieved a sample-sized portion of Berkshire Woolly Llama Cheese from the refrigerator case. It was grayish, and it resembled a mouse minus its extremities.
"You're serving this cheese chilled," I said. "Shouldn't it be allowed to warm to the task of being eaten, to collect its cheesy thoughts for a while?"
"Ideally, yes," Darren said. "But much of the flavor and nearly all of the healing properties are in the oil of the wool. As you suck the cheese out of the wool, the chewing and sucking combined with the heat of your own saliva release the oil and its protein. One of the sad aspects of modern American life is the haste with which most people devour their food. It was easier for the ancient Incas, of course, to take the time to absorb the healing oils in their llama cheese, because they lived a much less pressured existence."
As I inserted the moist morsel into my mouth, Thad said, "Rural agricultural people have plenty of pressure on them, usually associated with the vagaries of climate. But it is true that the pace of that life is much slower a lot of the time."
"The trouble with the hectic lives we lead," Timmy said, "is that for most of us it's all too rare that we take the time to stop and suck the cheese."
Which was what I was doing at that moment. The cheese itself wasn't bad-ripe, a little salty, with a hint of smoke, and not so gluey as I feared. The wool that was marbled through it, however, was another matter. I was counting on my finely tuned gag reflex to prevent disaster. What if I swallowed this thing whole? Had that ever happened to a Berkshire Woolly Llama Cheese devotee? Were there FDA warnings on the package?
I glanced around the shop for a Heimlich-maneuver instructions poster. None was visible, although I knew Timmy was capable of successfully executing the proce-dure. Some years earlier I had seen him apply the maneuver and dislodge what looked like half a strip steak from an old lady's trachea at a Friendly's restaurant near Lake George. So adept was Timmy that upon the first upward thrust under the desperate woman's rib cage, the deadly gob was ejected and shot across the room, knocking over a little boy's Fribble®.
"What do you think?" Thad said.
"It's tasty," I replied. "But sucking a wad of hair takes some getting used to. It's uncommon in our culture."
Timmy said, "Thad, do the Amish chew hair?"
"Not in Pennsylvania, as far as I ever heard. In Indiana maybe they do, or Ohio."
Darren said, "To achieve the full benefits, you really need to eat it every day for several weeks."
Almost as if by plan, we quickly changed the subject back to Charm, Pheromone and Edward, and discussed how we would carry out a visit to them at Charm's father's house up the road.
Chapter 14
"You can ask us anything you want to ask," Charm Stanke-witz said, blow
ing clove-cigarette smoke in my direction. "But anything we don't feel like talking about, we're not going to talk about. Got that? It'll be up to us, not you, what subjects are covered.
If you want to talk about J-Bird Plankton, maybe we'll answer your questions, and maybe we won't. Just so you understand what the rules are before we get started with this… this whatever."
Charm, Pheromone, Edward and I were seated in the living room/dining room of the converted carriage house near the main Stankewitz house, a gorgeous federal-style former farmhouse that looked as if it had been painted white just minutes before.
The building we were in, apparently a guest house being occupied for the summer by Charm and her friends, was nicely furnished with an assortment of comfortable antique and reproduction nineteenth-century New England country furnishings. The building's current occupants had added some touches of their own, too. A large sound system and a rack full of CDs were perched on the mahogony sideboard, and an array of posters touting queer and feminist causes had been taped to the picture molding. One poster, vividly illustrated, advertised something called the
"Penn State Cuntfest."
Timmy and Thad had remained outside, out of sight. Timmy was in the car, parked at the end of the lane leading to the Stankewitz house, scoping out who came and went.
Thad was to use his FFF guerrilla skills to surreptitiously check out a barn and several smaller outbuildings on the property, whose name, according to a discreet sign hung from a post, was Beech Hill.
I had decided to use a direct approach with Charm, Pheromone and Edward. They were unloading groceries from a Jeep Cherokee when I strolled up to them, identified myself as a private investigator looking into Leo Moyle's kidnapping by the Forces of Free Faggotry, and told them that Kurt Zinsser's old FFF connections had led me to the Berkshire Woolly Llama Cheese farm and its employees. Pheromone and Edward had looked startled- near panic was evident just beneath the surface of Edward's frozen gaze-but Charm hardly blinked and immediately invited me into the carriage house. She welcomed me to Bitch Hill and handed me a case of Budweiser to carry up the steps.
"I think it's hilarious," Charm said, "that you think you might find out anything about Leo Moyle's kidnapping from Kurt, that neofascist chucklehead. Politically, he hasn't been able to get it up for about a thousand years, and anyway Jay Plankton and his gang of right-wing enforcers are cultural icons of Kurt's. Fm having a lot of trouble conceptualizing a role for Kurt in what sounds to me like an authentic act of people's justice."
Charm blew more clove-flavored smoke, and Edward and Pheromone sat and stared at me. Charm was slight and wiry in yellow shorts and an orange tank top, with a pug nose, breasts to match, intelligent green eyes and a buzz cut. Pheromone and Edward had the same basic haircut as Charm's, but both were taller, wore jeans and Tshirts, and had long faces with an assortment of studs and rings affixed to them. I could have hung Grandma Strachey's entire set of Christmas tree ornaments on Edward without having to puncture his skin additionally. All three of them were tattooed like sailors out of Jean Genet, with some of the graphics, such as barbed armbands, of the in-your-face variety, and others, among them small anthropods and amphibians, benign or even friendly.
I said to Charm, "I see your point about Kurt. Fie seems to have turned into Andrew Sullivan with wool in his teeth. But it wasn't just Kurt's history with the FFF that led me here."
I described the harassment-by-mail series of incidents that led up to Leo Moyle's abduction, including the arrival on Jay Plankton's desk of a carton of llama turds,
"excrement for the execrable." As I spoke, Charm eyed me coolly, while Pheromone fidgeted and Edward perspired and grew whiter and whiter.
"That's a riot," Charm said after I'd run through the alphabetical list ending in "//for hostage." She puffed on her exotic cigarette and added, "I hope that the / attack is
'irritants for the irritating' or even 'injuries for the injurious.'"
Pheromone and Edward both flinched at this, and I said, "Deliberately injuring someone is a felony. You can go to jail for battery."
"We really wouldn't hurt anybody," Pheromone blurted out, and her brown eyes misted up.
"And kidnapping," I went on, "is a federal crime sometimes punishable by death.
Personally, I'm against capital punishment for both practical and moral reasons, but the US government is still in no mood to join me and the rest of the civilized world in this regard. Whatever his private inclinations, Clinton goes along with public opinion, which remains predominantly bloodthirsty, and Al Gore shows no sign of deviating from the harsh party line. And, of course, should George W. Bush be elected president-which has to be considered both laughable and highly unlikely-you can be assured that he will do at the national level what he has done in Texas. Which has been to snicker as he casually balls up clemency petitions and lobs them into the nearest wastebasket.
Kidnappers, now and for the forseeable future in the United States, can frequently expect to be dispatched to kingdom come via lethal injection, electrocution or firing squad with a minimum of ceremony. Kidnappers who haven't thought about these consequences are making a disastrous mistake."
Pheromone wore a look of horror, and poor Edward, whose only word to me so far had been a barely audible "hi," seemed about to burst into tears. I was not enjoying making these two young people suffer, but my approach did seem as though it would serve to expedite the investigation I had agreed to conduct.
Charm was unimpressed by my theatrics, however, and said so. "You talk such a load of shit, Strachey. If you're trying to get us to confess to assaulting anybody or kidnapping Leo Moyle, you're wasting your time and ours. As much as I savor the picture of that misogyno-fascist Moyle strung up by his tiny balls in some cellar full of rats, I can promise you we wouldn't do it ourselves, and we didn't do it ourselves, or with anyone else. What do you take us for? Do we look like the Tupac Amaru, or what?"
This denial was couched with such exquisitely evasive calculation-Charm Stankewitz was going to make a great White House chief of staff someday-that what should have been obvious for some time now hit me like a ton of Woolly Llama Cheese.
I said, "So the three of you carried out the harassment of Jay Plankton, but not the kidnapping of Leo Moyle? Is that what you're telling me?"
"We're not telling you anything? Charm said emphatically, "but if you want to draw the harmless conclusion of your choice and then be on your way, that would be so-o-o-o cool. Am I making myself sufficiently clear?"
Pheromone and Edward watched me with a look of hope. I said to them, "Your friend Charm is a brilliantly precocious advocate for your various good causes. I just hope she doesn't lead you into… well, I'm sure you've given it a lot of thought. Some remote cell block in the Peruvian penal system, or-more likely-the newly redecorated federal execution suite in Terre Haute."
"Shit!" This was Edward.
"Oh God!" That was Pheromone.
"Charm's right, we didn't kidnap that guy," Edward said plaintively.
"Fuck, no," Pheromone added, underlining the declaration.
"But you sent menacing and repellent notes and substances to Jay Plankton through the mail?"
Charm sat examining her dark cigarette and looking blase, while Pheromone and Edward gave their final freeze-frame look of fear.
"And you filled Plankton's SUV full of toilet paper during a party at his manager's house in Mamaroneck?"
Before Pheromone and Edward had the chance to faint, or shriek and bolt out the door, Charm said, "Sure we did, and so what!"
"I'm no fan of Plankton's either, but you may have broken a few laws."
Charm sneered. "Plankton and his stupid little boys are floaters in the malfunctioning toilet of American broadcasting. What we did was good for the J-Bird and Leo Moyle, and I think it is totally terrific that somebody obviously took our cue and went after these rotten turds in the manner they deserve. Down in the cheese room, we had to listen to these assholes day after d
ay after day, while Kurt ha-haed and hee-heed. I mean, what were we supposed to do, call OSHA? Yes, we did it, and we're proud we did it!"
This last statement may have been too sweeping for Pheromone and Edward, who still stared at me apprehensively. I said, "And you lobbed the tear-gas canister into Plankton's studio yesterday?"
"No way!" Pheromone exclaimed. "We, like, mailed in that shit and stuff, but we didn't throw tear gas, and we never kidnapped that guy, no way!"
Edward also became more vocal. "We just wanted to fuck with Kurt's mind. He's a Republican now, but he talks about his FFF days like he's some Greatest Generation hero, wiping up the floor with Nazis. I mean, like, the movie about the FFF will have Tom Hanks in it playing Kurt. This guy is totally fucked up, and we were just giving him a hard time about it, that's all."
"Then you might or might not be happy to know," I told them, "that until Leo Moyle was kidnapped, Jay Plankton thought of you all as brothers and sisters under the skin, and admirably insolent and hugely entertaining. He talked about putting you all on his show-pending the outcome, of course, of a pre-interview and probably an exhaustive strip search."
"Well, that sucks!" Pheromone said.
"What a bunch of perverts," Edward added.
But Charm had grown thoughtful. "And now he's changed his mind?" she asked.
"Because of the Leo Moyle thing?"
"That would be my guess."
"Oh."
"You can ask him yourself, if you're interested. I'm sure he'll be wanting to be in touch with you. His attorneys will, anyway, along with the police and the FBI. If you didn't do the kidnapping, or even the tear-gas job, it'll probably be easy enough for you to prove it. And if eventually you do go on the air with the J-Bird, I know I'll be sure to tune in."
Pheromone said, "Going on the radio is for shit, so don't try to drag me in on this one, Charm. But I suppose we'll have to tell them we didn't do it. The tear gas or the kidnapping, I mean. We can give them some of our DNA- though I'll bet it's hard to prove a negative unless the J-Bird was, like, raped."
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