Theme-Thology: Invasion

by Inc. HDWP

  Seems this high muckety-duck Congressman got the notion that drive-thru windows were somehow to blame for global warming, traffic jams, and the failure of inner-city schools, and all. And before anyone knew what was what, that damned bill of his went and got itself passed. One signature and―boom!―every drive-thru window from Seattle to Miami closed overnight. Inside dining stayed open, mostly, but without drive-thru it just wasn’t the same. Most folks took it okay, but there were a few…

  It’s funny how touchy some people get about their habits, isn’t it? Well, it seems more folk than you might think had become rather partial to the convenience of drive-thru dining. They’d established the drum beat of their lives around the daily crescendo of a Crispy Bird in special sauce or a Duck Amuck Deluxe with all the fixings, savored from the hospitality of their own four-wheeled dining rooms. So after Bill Thirty-Three, a few of those folks found themselves getting a bit twitchy for their daily road-burgers. And an even smaller few started looking up here to Canada, with a hungry look in their eyes and a fleck of drool on their chins.

  Now, Saint Croix ain’t a big place, not by any stretch. It’s mostly a farming town, really. But we’re big enough to have a few of those larger U.S. chain joints. And being just a frog-hop over the border and all, I expect that’s why we were the first to get hit, only it didn’t exactly look like a problem at the time.

  At the beginning, it looked more like a bonanza.

  * * *

  A week or three after that, me and some of the regulars were sitting in the Jimmy Hut, solving the problems of human existence over a double-double and a jelly glazed, when Marcel came in.

  “That is the second straight week,” he said, pulling up a chair from the empty table beside us.

  “Second week of what?” Keeno asked him. It’d be Sgt. Kierny to you, actually, of the RCMP, but to us he’s just Keeno. Always has been.

  “Second week of the gold rush, that’s what.” Marcel said. He wasn’t the kind who ever said boo about how business was doing out at the Burger Duck, and we weren’t the kind to ask, either. We all knew things were going real slow for him, and about how he’d put most of the money he got from his ma’s estate into setting the place up. Folks have a way of getting all quiet when they see a man’s dreams burning down around him. After all, it ain’t respectful to call attention, and most folks already know when they’re on fire, so they don’t need everyone else pointing it out for them. But here was Marcel saying the fire was maybe out.

  “Yup. Last week was the best week I’ve ever had,” he said. “Then today I did the numbers for this week, and they’re even better! Eighteen percent better! Let’s get a box of Jimmy Bites. I’m buying!”

  This really was news, then. It was the first time I could remember Marcel springing for the nibbles. Ever.

  “You know, Marcel, I do believe I should have known things were looking up around the Duck,” I said.

  “How’s that, Stu?”

  I smiled. “Well, I’ve been on groundskeep all week, and now that you mention it, I’ve been seeing a lot more signs of your work, everywhere I look.”

  “Really?” Marcel asked, looking excited and breathless, like a little kid after trick-or-treating.

  “Yup. Seems every garbage can in town is full of stuff with your Duck on it.”

  Everyone else laughed, and Marcel had the sense to look a little sheepish, too, but as I sat there sipping my coffee, I realized that I had spoken the truth. There really had been more Burger Duck wrappers and fry baskets in the trash lately. And Chick-a-Lot stuff, too, come to think.

  Maybe business in town really was looking up.

  * * *

  The apparent bonanza continued. By mid-July, Saint Croix was looking like it was into a full-fledged burger-boom. You could see it in more than just that dog-who-ate-the-meatloaf grin plastered on the faces of half the business owners in town, too. There were plenty of other signs, if you cared to look. The garbage cans on Main Street rode high by mid-day, and the ditches alongside the highway were even higher. You should’ve seen Highway 11―the south-bound side in particular. That stretch was getting near to full every three or four days by then.

  Some of the cross-border folks would drive around town a bit before heading for home, but Saint Croix wasn’t exactly a tourist destination, either. So they’d be on the road for home round about the time they’d finished scarfing down their entrées du jour. Hence the quickly filling ditches.

  Still, they did drive around town some before they left, and the usual quiet sleepiness of our little town was soon replaced by the sort of buzz-saw racket you’d only expect to hear when you made that long trip into the city: loud crazy music blasting from windows, testosterone-injected engine roar, and car horns honking out a sort of driverly sense of entitlement every other half minute. Yup. St. Croix was getting noisy. And as the summer heat came up and the breeze died down, I could swear the air was getting detectably more “fumey,” too. A man who knew the place wouldn’t have had to see it to tell there was a boom a-brewing. He’d’a been able to hear it. And smell it, too.

  Mayor Mel didn’t seem to mind, though. From time to time―when the job of being mayor wasn’t too particularly taxing―he’d amble on over to the Jimmy Hut for afternoon chat time and a quick cup of braggery with us regulars. To listen to Mel, the traffic noise was an important part of his master plan for town improvement. Sort of a soundtrack for his mayoral success.

  “Yes indeed,” I recall him saying one afternoon, when the air had come up awful heavy and a good sized crew had crowded into the Hut to enjoy the drier, cooler atmosphere of a national chain outlet. “I do believe our council’s Municipal Development Initiative is paying off handsomely this year.” That’s the way Mel talked to us townies. Full of Capitalized Program Names and unnecessary references to him and his council, which was all fine, so long as you remembered that his ‘council’ was just Suzie Pickering, and council meetings were always held in the horizontal.

  “You saying it’s finally time to buy shares in that St. Croix Water & Gas of yours, Mel?” That was Henry, caretaker over at the school. He never missed a chance to dig Mayor Mel over that failed investment plan of his a couple of summers back.

  “Might be, might be,” Mel replied. “They’re running extra late shifts at the Burger Duck and Chick-a-Lot already, and there’s talk from some of the other owners that they may do the same themselves, soon.”

  “Ain’t gonna happen here, that’s for sure,” Denny said, a bit quietly. Den is the manager of the local Jimmy Hut. He often came out to sit jawing with us regulars when we gathered. It was a nice, neighborly thing for him to do, but to be honest, I think it rankled him that he still had the time. With the Hut being a Canadian chain, he wasn’t picking up on any of that good fortune being enjoyed by the US chains. Seemed the folks coming up for their nostalgic taste of driveway chow weren’t much interested in exploring the delights of any place they hadn’t been told about on radio or TV ads back home. Didn’t matter that the Hut had a perfectly fine drive-thru window of its own.

  “Well, it’s not all shits and giggles, you know,” Maggie offered, trying to make Den feel better. She was a bit sweet on the guy, and even though she worked all the way out at the Gas-Rite on the highway, she still came in to the Hut during her breaks, most days. “I mean, if I have to tell one more person that it’s pronounced ‘San Qwa,’” she said, “and not ‘Saint Croyks,’ I might have to smack somebody.”

  It wasn’t much of a complaint, I suppose, as bonanzas go. But give a homeless man pants and sooner or later, he’s going to start complaining about the fit.

  * * *

  Eventually, it was more than just Maggie getting chafed, but it was all pretty minor. Mostly folks griping about carloads of foreigners pointing at everything and laughing about how quaint it all was. But we just shrugged it off, the way Maggie did. A bit of belly-aching and it was all over with. Saint Croix is a practical sort of town, and compared to droughts and
floods and the real problems we could’a had, a bit of gawker stress wasn’t enough to send anybody into the twitchy bin. Especially because those gawkers kept dropping such deep piles of money in our laps on the way through, so we didn’t see any serious trouble from the locals. Nope. When the trouble started, it came from the same place the money did―our neighborly visiting grease junkies.

  It was getting late into July by then, and on that particular day, I was over at the Detachment, talking to Keeno about Mayor Mel’s plan to build a fancy new motel out by the highway. We were on our second coffee and still trying to come up with a good joke about beds built out of greasy food, when the call came in.

  “Keeno, you better get over here right away!” Marcel shouted over the speaker phone. “They’re gonna kill each other!” Then the line went dead. Sounded like trouble at the Burger Duck. Me and Keeno just looked at each other for a blink, then he stood up.

  “You wanna ride along?”

  “Sure,” I said, peeling myself from the cracked leather chair as carefully as I could. “Probably never see another riot in this town. Wouldn’t want to miss the only one.”

  When we got close to the highway, Keeno had to put his whirly lights on, then he blurped the siren a time or two, trying to get folks to let us pass. But when Sgt. Kierny of the Mounted Police found himself shouting a four-letter greeting at some ignorant cuss who didn’t seem to understand the whole sirens and blinking lights thing, he’d had his fill of being patient, and just pulled off the highway onto the grass. We raced by the rest of the jam-up, bouncing and shuddering over the uneven ground, tires throwing up a spray of Lotta bags and Duck wrappers behind us like some fast food garbage fountain.

  There was plenty of parking when we got to the Burger Duck, but the line to the drive-thru was packed solid, all the way out the lot and running both ways up and down the highway. I couldn’t see a single break in the bumper-to-bumper. And the noise was something awful, let me tell you. Big horns. Little horns. Air horns. People-leaning-out-their-side-windows-yelling horns. They were gesturing and pointing, as if fingers were bullets and stupidity was now a capital offense. But despite all them folks calling attention to the problem, the line just wasn’t moving. Keeno pulled into the empty corner of the lot just as Marcel came out to meet us. We stepped out of the squad car into a full July blast of heat and humidity. It was a real three-shirt scorcher of a day.

  “What’s the trouble, Marcel?” Keeno had to yell pretty loud to make himself heard over the noise.

  “It’s these idiot Americans!” Marcel shouted back, waving his hand at the long line of customers waiting to grace his wallet. “We’re out of Double-Duck patties, but they won’t order something else and they won’t go away. What am I supposed to do? I’ve got a business to run here.”

  “Um, you can’t just get more patties?” Keeno asked, trying to be helpful. Marcel shook his head. “I ordered more yesterday,” he said, “And Duck Control says they sent more. They should have been here hours ago. And meanwhile, I got angry customers and no way to feed them.”

  “So if they want a Double Duck, just ask them to pull out of line and you’ll get to them as soon as you can. Or let them go somewhere else.” This time Marcel rolled his eyes.

  “You try telling them that!” he said. “They’ve got rights dontcha know? And they won’t be getting out of any line just ‘cuz some stupid Canadian tells ‘em to. They been waiting in that line all day and they will not give up their spot to some jerkwad behind him who just wants fries and a Coke.”

  “They could always come inside and wait,” I suggested, noting that the parking lot itself was almost empty and there were plenty of open tables visible through the windows.

  Marcel laughed. “What? And get out of their air-conditioned cars in this stupid Canadian heat? Are you mad? They got rights about that, too. It’s some crazy American standoff, that’s what it is.”

  So Keeno did what any good Mountie would do. He walked over to one of the cars near the front of the line and knocked on the driver’s window. I couldn’t hear the conversation from where I stood, but I saw how it ended. An angry hand jerked out toward him, with a single finger raised, and then withdrew. The window rolled smoothly up and closed, revealing Keeno’s startled expression in its reflection.

  Undeterred, Keeno went to the next car in line and tried again, this time receiving a shouted curse for his trouble. The third car wouldn’t even open the window. Keeno returned to the squad car, shaking his head in wonder.

  “So, if you got your patty delivery, you could serve them, right?”

  Marcel nodded. “But we gotta find the truck, first, and nobody at Duck Control can tell me where it is.”

  “Is that it?” I asked, pointing down the highway to the south. In the distance, I could see a big transport that looked like it might be one of the famous Duck Trucks. It seemed to have the right colors, anyway, but I couldn’t be sure from so far away. Marcel and Keeno looked where I was pointing, but I’ve always had better eyesight than most, so it was no surprise they couldn’t see it at all.

  Keen shrugged. “Let’s go take a look.”

  So the three of us piled into the squad car and Keeno pulled us out onto the highway. Heading away from the Burger Duck, the road was clear, so it only took a minute for us to see that I’d been right. Another mile or so down the highway, the big familiar logo of the purple Burger Duck with the yellow bill was plastered all down one side of the transport, stuck in the long line of traffic, like a big purple fly in a line of syrup.

  Once again, Keeno got out and went over to chat, though this conversation seemed more productive. He came back a few minutes later, laughing to himself.

  “He’s your delivery, all right,” he said to Marcel, as he climbed back into the car. “He’s been there since about 9:30 this morning.” It was now almost 1:00 in the afternoon.

  “That’s when we finally ran out of patties,” Marcel confirmed. “Why is he still sitting here?”

  “Well, the driver says he asked the cars ahead of him to move so he could come ahead, but they started talking about their rights again and closed their windows, so he decided to just sit and wait it out.”

  “What?” Marcel yelled. “Doesn’t he know that I’ve been waiting all day for him? Doesn’t he know that if he doesn’t get me those patties, none of these idiots will ever leave?”

  “I told him that,” Keeno said. “He was surprised to hear what the lineup was all about. He thought there was a contest or something going on.”

  “But! But!” Marcel was sputtering now, although whether in anger or just confusion, I couldn’t say. “But the other side of the highway has been open all day!” he finally shrieked. “You saw for yourself when we drove down here. Why didn’t he just pull out and come up the open lane?”

  “Because that would be against the rules,” Keeno said, with a chuckle. “And he’s Canadian.” To emphasize his point, Keeno pointed at the double solid line running down the middle of the highway. Sure enough, we were in a no-passing zone.

  The solution, of course, was now obvious, and with only a bit of coaxing from Keeno, the Canadian truck driver agreed to pull his Duck Truck out of traffic and bring it the last mile up the southbound lane. But only if he had a police escort. He didn’t want to run the risk of another Mountie coming the other way and giving him a ticket.

  Eighteen minutes later, the Double Duck patty blackout was over, and the drive-thru line was moving smoothly once again.

  The first real skirmish had been averted.

  * * *

  The next morning, I went by the Jimmy Hut to get my morning fix. I was standing in line when I noticed Doc Calader, sitting in the corner, white as a sheet and clutching his coffee with two trembling hands. I decided my own breakfast could wait a bit, and I went to pull up a chair at his table.

  “Hey, Doc. You all right?”

  “It’s madness,” he said, although his voice was all quiet like, and his eyes had that staring off
to the horizon kind of look about ‘em.

  “It’s okay,” I said, patting his arm. “Hockey’ll be back in just a few more weeks, and training camp coverage starts in August. You know that.”

  Normally, a hockey joke would be enough to get a grin out of Doc Calader, but today it barely even registered. He just gave his head a slight shake. Then he turned to look at me and his gaze bored holes into my skull.

  “They’re all suicidal,” he said. “Completely certifiable.”

  “Who are, Doc?”

  “Them,” he said, with a wave of his hand toward the window. “The… Invaders From Below.” I still wasn’t following. “The Americans!” he said, a bit louder than he’d maybe intended, and when a few people looked at us crossly from the nearby tables, it seemed to settle him down. “The Americans,” he said again, this time more calmly.

  “You want to talk about it?” I asked. He nodded and took a deep breath.

  “Today’s Wednesday,” he said. “On Wednesdays I go out to see the big stock. The ones too big to come see me.” Doc Calader was the town vet, not a people doctor. “Anyway, I promised Ned McKenzie I’d stop in to see his herd before the heat got up, so I made an early start of it. I was heading south, down by the old gravel pit, but even at seven o’clock in the morning, the traffic coming north was already unbelievable.”

  “Heavy, was it?”

  “Heavy?” he asked. “It was insane! Like a stampede. They were coming at me three lanes wide!”

  “Couldn’t have been. Eleven’s only a two lane highway, Doc.”

  “I know, Stu. That’s what made it so unbelievable. They were coming fast, well over the limit, and bumper to bumper all the way up the northbound lane. But there was another line of them coming up on the shoulder, too. Just as fast and just as close together. And there was a third line, coming toward me in my lane, going even faster and passing all the others. Pure craziness!”