“Yeah…that’s a little weird,” Tyson conceded to the recently confirmed-by-witness rumor that for quarterly meetings the managers were now required to dress in clown suits.
Harker picked his nose with a tissue-covered finger. “Did you know that her Hummer has rattlesnake seats?”
“Whoo-wee!” said Chaz, “I do like the kinky girls!”
“Did you know we’re being sued?”
Julio’s knowledge of this surprised Tyson. “Because of her?” He asked.
“I dunno. Some cure we supposedly have. For that Flower Flu? Where you wake up blind?”
Chazz tossed his hands in the air. “That’s what I just said!”
“That’s some scary shit, man. I hope we’re not holding back any kind of cure for that fucking disease.”
Harker’s eyebrows squinched together. “We have biologists here?”
“They chain them up in the basement.” Tyson managed not to roll his eyes.
“Well how am I supposed to know?”
“You work here!”
“Fine, then is it true? Professor? Are we withholding some lifesaving cure developed by enslaved biologists?”
The question caught Tyson off guard. Was it true? Who was the Baroness, this new seemingly insane company president? Could she be taking the corporation in the ugly but profitable direction of so many pharmaceutical companies?
“I’ll bet it’s true,” said Julio, halting Tyson’s reverie. “I’ll bet you lunch it’s true.”
“I actually think what Ty said, it’s a media conspiracy.”
“Contrivance.”
“Whatever. You’re on. Then we’ll be even, bitch!”
Tyson envied them their levity. He wondered how they’d go about finding out…if they’d expect him to investigate for them. He concurred with Julio: he too hoped they weren’t holding back any kind of cure for that fucking disease.
* * *
Antoinette, Tyson’s wife, was already out back grilling steaks by the hot tub when Tyson got home. He watched her tuck a lock of chin-length, chestnut brown hair behind her right ear before jabbing the thick slabs of meat with the BBQ fork, flipping them against the grill to sizzle and spit.
“You’re home early.” He slid his hands around her waist. She tilted her head and he kissed her neck, happy that she was plump again, done with that stupid dieting business, he preferred her with a little belly. He’d been just the tiniest bit disappointed when the wedding pictures came back; she was so beautiful with her heart shaped face and her big blue eyes, but just a shade too thin in his opinion. He liked her better now.
Tyson nuzzled his wife’s neck. “What’s the catch?”
“We go into lockdown tomorrow.”
“Testing your rocket already?”
Annie nodded. “We’ll be celebrating if it works and holed up if it doesn’t.” She worked for Jack Parson’s Labs and headed the design team engineering some new type of hybrid fuel rocket thatTyson didn’t understand. Still, he gloated inwardly and not for the first time that his wife was a real-life rocket scientist.
“Where is our daughter?”
“Zoe is over at Rachel’s house.”
“The one with the pool?”
“Bingo. And she phoned that she would like to eat there and spend the night, to which I said yes and no respectively.”
“Uh-oh, no sleepover? What happened?”
“First, it’s a weekday, and I frown on that.”
Tyson rolled his eyes. “I don’t know about this year round school thing. Shouldn’t she have a summer?”
“That’s moot, because she doesn’t. Welcome to California. And she brought home a C on her science exam. I know it’s only second grade, but I’m a scientist. I can’t. No. At least a B, I told her. So she’ll be home by dark. How about you?”
Tyson told her about Melvina, but stopped short of mentioning the Flower Flu or the class action. Melvina was a light problem. A funny problem.
Annie stifled a grin, but said earnestly, “It’s sad!”
“What especially?”
“You said he’s—”
“She’s.”
“This Melvina person sounds nice. Smart and kind. But there’s the tragic flaw. Like the silly but requisite act of an otherwise dignified creature. Like when a cat struggles to wash its back!”
Tyson frowned in confusion then laughed. “What the hell are you trying to say?”
“That I’ve had some bourbon,” Annie giggled back. “And you should too. I can expound more on your new coworker, and maybe we can climb into the hot tub. Nekkid. Before it gets dark.”
* * *
“Do you think people think they’re talking to a woman?”
Chaz yawned openly, reminding Tyson of a corpse.
Tyson responded mildly. “Why would they?” He’d been avoiding the boys since Tuesday, when they’d sung “Devil with a Blue Dress On,” every time Tyson came in ear shot, as prompted by Melvina’s multi-blue tank-dress and matching shawl.
Three weeks had sped by. Melvina took to the phones fearlessly and with ease. S/he was bright and friendly, caught on quickly, and was humble enough to admit when s/he didn’t know something. The issue of the mysterious class action and the Flower Flu vaccine had been forgotten, and the boys were back to more important things.
“Plans for the weekend?”
Harker grumbled, “Ahh, my kids wanna see that new animated thing.”
“Yeah, mine too.” Chaz’s tone matched his friend’s. “But I’m making the wife take ‘em.”
“It’s not bad, actually,” Tyson said, rolling his chair into the cube aisle. “I enjoyed it. Zoe loved it. She jumped when the crows attacked, giggled at everything the blue jays did—”
Chaz rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah. Your life is a goddamn Disney movie. What about you, Julio?”
Julio grinned. “I thought I’d go see the animated thing, too.”
Harker shot a paper clip at him. “You bastard! When are you going to settle down like the rest of us? You think you can just go on having hot hoochie sex till you die?”
“That’s right!” Chaz pointed an accusing finger. “It’s time to have some kids and buy a house you don’t like!”
Harker gawked at him. “You don’t like your house?”
Tyson rolled back into his cube. Their familiar litany bored him. He gazed at his photograph of Annie from the week they’d spent in Wildwood, New Jersey. Zoe couldn’t get over the saltwater taffy or the suckers, wound like braided rugs, as big as her head.
Behind him, his office mates fell into bitter laughter. Tyson wished his phone would ring. Instead, Harker popped his head over Tyson’s cube wall. “Chaz is food slave today. You want anything?”
“I’m good, thanks.”
He opened his lunchbox and proudly displayed his sandwich.
Harker smirked. “Your wife packs your lunch?”
“Only on Fridays.”
Chaz’s head came over the cube wall. “That’s nice. Kinda whipped. But nice.”
Tyson gazed from him to Harker. “Did you ask Melvina?”
Chaz slid back out of view.
“You work with him,” Harker countered. “You ask him.”
“Her,” Julio corrected.
Harker fell into his usual giggle fit. Tyson swore at him.
“No, you have to be real careful now. Some girl in accounting nearly got fired for accidentally calling her him.”
“What, she just slipped up?”
“That’s what she says.” Julio shrugged with flourish. “Why would she lie?”
“To keep her job?” But it was not, Tyson recognized, a completely outrageous scenario. Three weeks of Melvina’s cinnamon-musky aftershave. Fifteen work days
spent listening to Melvina’s just-swallowed-a-Buick voice. All while seeing gaudy dresses hang awkwardly from Melvina’s fading linebacker body. Tyson became amazed that he hadn’t slipped up himself.
This pride, of course, served to undo him.
A week—the week Annie was out of town, down in Florida, awaiting the reentry of her successful prototype hybrid rocket and Zoe with the Grandparents—and a half—Tuesday. Lunch. He couldn’t even blame the boys—they’d gone out without asking if he wanted anything. So he visited the Survivanoia cafeteria.
“What a spread!” Melvina was saying to some cringing fellow from production. “I just started eating in here last week. I had no idea it’d be so good!”
Tyson stepped on line just behind Melvina, who scooped a mountain of homemade macaroni and cheese onto the cafeteria tray. Tyson reached for the salad tongs, smiling at Melvina’s enthusiasm. “Go easy, man, that homegrown stuff will kill you.”
That’s how simply it happened. A casual, stupid epithet. Go easy, man.
As during a car wreck, when everything seems to slow, Tyson saw every crease and wrinkle as Melvina’s face contorted into a mask of betrayal-fueled animosity. The plastic tray and its mound of mac and cheese hit Tyson dead in the chest. Melvina huffed away, click-clacking in a pair of noisy slides. Then the spell broke, and Tyson grew aware of the laughter and mockery surrounding him.
He didn’t follow Melvina, sobbing apologies as he’d been told the accounting girl had. He did get a large salad and a big round roll and he sat and ate, leisurely, by himself in one of the small conference rooms. Not thirty minutes from the time the tray splattered three cheeses all over his storm-blue linen shirt, Tyson packed his desk and left his fifth job since graduation, before the boys even returned from lunch.
* * *
At roughly noon on Wednesday, Tyson’s phone rang, pulling him from his TV-and-tortilla-chip-induced stupor. He wasn’t able to find the receiver before his voice mail picked up. Once the stuttering dial tone indicated a message, he checked it: Encludsmo’s rough English came through, shouting as if he thought the machine were far away. But then Tyson heard the background and realized his friend was calling on a cell phone.
This concerned Tyson. All of it. He’d just seen Encludsmo yesterday, stopping there before heading home. Encludsmo had been confused about how to use his voicemail and was awaiting an answer from Survivanoia on the purchase of one of his inventions. For his friend to call him again so soon meant something was amiss. The Doctor seldom used even a conventional telephone. He didn’t own one. When he needed to make a call he made use of the phone at the Romanian restaurant he frequented. Where had he acquired a cellular phone? And why?
“I have left living under the overpass,” Encludsmo’s message said. “I am fine, do not be worrying. I will phone when I am again alive somewhere.”
What the hell did all that mean?
Tyson put on clothes and hit the freeway.
The first indication something was amiss was the billboard. It was gone. Not blank or changed: Collapsed. Encludsmo had resented the billboard, a banal salute to American cheese exclaiming simply “Put Cheese on Stuff!” Its dimensions had exceeded those of The Doctor’s house.
A dirt road which The Doctor had blasted out himself led Tyson underneath the freeway, where the 110 and 105 met. At the end of the road, half obscured by tagger symbols, had just yesterday sat a dumpy box with boarded up windows serving as The Doctor’s home.
Not wanting to return to an empty house after having been fired, Tyson had come here instead. He’d met Encludsmo’s new watchdog, chatted for a while and reminded him how to check his voicemail—for which Encludsmo borrowed a phone—in case Survivanoia had called with an offer.
Encludsmo had surprised Tyson by speaking of the Baroness with admiration, describing her as having presence, as “a tree on fire.” Poetic words from his logic-ruled friend. But today the house lay flattened under the giant cheese sign.
As Tyson stood gaping at the rubble, a white jeep-like vehicle came to a creaky halt at the top of the embankment. Tyson frowned at it. Unbelievably, it was a mail truck.
A broad-faced man with a thick, black pompadour that made Tyson jealous came trotting down the hill. “You the occupant?”
“Friend of the occupant.”
“Good enough.” The young Filipino flashed a perfect smile and thrust a letter and a cushioned mailer at Tyson. “Like what you’ve done with the place,” he said, then jogged back up the shallow hill and restarted his rattling jeep.
Tyson stared after the mail truck until he could no longer hear it. Only the items in his hand convinced him that he wasn’t dreaming. He peered at them, saw the mailer carried Survivanoia’s return address, and the letter was from Encludsmo’s sister Lucretia. He then committed a felony and opened them.
The package from Survivanoia contained scribbled notes, some of them on napkins in illegible script Tyson recognized as Encludsmo’s. There was a cover letter from a Sydney Scaliamogna, which Tyson scanned and from it understood that his friend had been turned down, though not by the Baroness. Did Encludsmo know this?
Lucretia’s letter was a single page, one side, her writing a more flowing version of Encludsmo’s. Unlike her brother, Lucretia spoke good English, or at least wrote it. The letter contained flight information—dates and times. Apparently she was visiting. Tomorrow.
So Tyson’s friend was missing, possibly dead, and said possibly-dead friend’s sister was on her way for a holiday. Oh man oh man oh…. Tyson did what he always did in a crisis: He called his wife.
* * *
“He wouldn’t have phoned you if he were dead,” Annie told him. Reasonably. “He told you he was fine. Just wait. He’ll tell you where he’s at once he gets settled.”
“And the sister?”
“That’s tricky. Was he supposed to pick her up? I mean, he’s got no car.”
They decided Tyson should meet her plane.
Then he told Annie about his job. He dreaded it. “Don’t make fun of me.” He pouted, feeling embarrassed and guilty.
“Oh baby. You know I won’t.”
But sometimes she did, though she never got mad, ever, when he was fired. And she didn’t this time either. She thought it was hilarious.
“You called him man?” She laughed until she gasped for breath and complained that her sides hurt. “My only regret,” she told Tyson, “is that we won’t get to see Melvina at the Survivanoia summer picnic.”
The warmth of Annie’s humor put things in perspective. Hearing her voice and her laughter buoyed him up through the next afternoon. He started down to LAX at 3:00 on Thursday to meet Lucretia’s 5pm flight. L.A.’s rush-hour airport traffic is enough to make a nun find a rifle and a bell tower, but Tyson reminded himself (repeatedly) that it was for his friend.
When he got there and checked the flight number she’d written, it didn’t even appear on the board. He stood in line at the service counter for the better part of an hour, only to have an attractive if weary looking black woman tell him sorry but this was a morning flight.
So much for Lucretia’s good English.
That meant she’d had 14 hours in the city alone, during which time she’d probably discovered the crushed shell of her brother’s house. What now? Tyson had no idea how to find a stranger in a city as big as Los Angeles. He’d already called his wife once, and she had long ago in their relationship relegated him to one crisis per week.
What were his options? Phone LAPD? Ha! In this town 911 put you on hold. LAPD didn’t have time to deal with a lost foreigner. Unless she posed a threat.
He ended up back at the demolition site that had been Encludsmo’s house. Did it appear picked over? Encludsmo and Lucretia came from an obscure country whose inhabitants cared not who was in charge but only that the bombing stopped. Lucretia might ver
y well have a stomach for picking through burned out edifices. Tyson, however, did not.
He sighed, irritated by his own inability. He supposed the thing to do was to follow Lucretia’s probable trail. He knew Encludsmo had written to his sister about his favorite restaurant, a Romanian place, to which he had walked. So it seemed logical that Lucretia would have made said eatery her next stop.
Tyson had visited the Romanian place with Encludsmo, but couldn’t recall its name; it had no sign. An odd building housed it, though, a long white box with a sharp peaked roof, and this he identified. Inside proved cool and cozy, the hostess as charming and kind as he remembered, and Tyson decided to have a meal before he harassed the staff with questions about his friend.
While he was waiting on his plateful of organ meats, munching an appetizer of sweet bread and overripe cheese and enjoying their unique black vodka, his cell phone rang. Encludsmo!
Wrong.
“This is Baroness von Worthington,” she told Tyson after confirming his identity. “I’m trying to get in touch with Encludsmo Stuckhowsen.”
“You and me both!”
A pause. “This is a complicated situation, isn’t it?”
What the hell was she talking about? “Sure is.”
“Best to meet in person, I think.”
“Fine.”
“Still, it would be nice for his sister to know where he is. She’s here, you know.”
Tyson stifled a sigh, afraid of losing the leverage he seemed to have. “He’s okay, tell her that.”
A silent pause answered; the Baroness must have muted the phone. A moment later she came back on line and decreed to Tyson: Ishmael’s coffee, six the next morning.
“Fine.”
* * *
Ishmael’s—“Our Coffee’s Not Good But It’s Strong!”—opened at five, and kept up with patronage until seven-ish, when the line typically stretched out the door. Its South Valley location made Tyson wonder where the Baroness lived. He’d expected a café either near Survivanoia or somewhere in Brentwood. The Baroness was assuredly the Brentwood type.
Curious about his friend’s sister, he had hoped to meet Lucretia, but he found the Baroness sitting at a window table alone. “I didn’t see a need to get the girl up at such an hour,” she explained. “She’s a night person.”
Baroness Von Smith Page 4