Switcheroo

by Robert Lewis Clark

  “Is he conscious?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Put him on!”

  There was a pause and rude comments could be heard as Mrs. Wysinski did a poor job of covering up the receiver. After some scuffling sounds I hear him answer.

  “Wysinski.”

  “Hi, this is Rust Stover. I’m the one whose unit got broken into. The one with the truck.”

  “The truck that was wrecked and then it wasn’t. Yeah?”

  “Right. I need you to go to the new unit and connect the battery on the truck. Can you do that?”

  “That truck spooks me. I don’t like it.” He whined.

  “There is nothing wrong with my truck. Look, I’ll be there soon, but I need you to do this. Please. I’ll give you fifty bucks when I get there.”

  “All right, it’s not that damn spooky. It’ll cost you a hundred,” He hung up.

  Fred Smithey slowed down. I looked at him.

  “You want your car?”

  We were about to pass Slink’s place. A clearing in the line of fall trees on the left revealed my Crown Vic parked in front of Slink’s double wide.

  “No time. Keep going to the next trailer on the left.”

  When I regained consciousness by the side of the road, I realized I had told Slink the location of Tammy’s truck at the Handy Self Storage. I remembered Slink accidently telling me that Partee lived next door. Slink had a bad habit of answering questions without thinking. He had tried to call Partee but could not reach him by phone. Now, I just knew, or at least hoped, that the truck was hidden on Partee’s property.

  I should have known, nothing could be that easy. We passed Slink’s trailer and after a few seconds the trees cleared again revealing Partee’s compound.

  On a bent pole there was a crooked mailbox that read ‘Partee’ in hand-painted letters. The short drive ended abruptly in a ten foot razor wire fence. A quick glance around showed that the fence surrounded the whole half-acre property.

  Inside the fence were several sheds, a very small barn and a 1970's era mobile home that was three different colors: dirty white, rust red and mildew.

  There were also several Camaros and a Mustang. All were in various states of decomposition, sort of an automobile body farm. The height of the underbrush growing out of the fender wells indicated the length of time each one had been sitting.

  “There. The big shed. That is where I will find the truck,” I said without looking at Fred.

  “How you gonna get in? I see a lock.”

  “You ever seen the movie ‘Fight Club’?”

  “No, I like comedies.”

  “Well, Ed Norton throws a rug over a razor wire fence to go in and steal pork fat to make soap.”

  “Great. But you don’t have a rug.”

  “No? But you do. There’s one covering the spare tire in the trunk of every rental car.”

  Feeling better now, I leaped from the car, and slapped the trunk lid twice. Fred reluctantly popped the hatch and I removed the carpet from the trunk.

  Holding the rug, I walked toward the fence, thinking about how to get my two hundred pounds over it. I snapped out of it when I saw a mongrel come running up from the back of the property. This brown and white dog was of no particular breed, but he did look hungry. He was not as big as Slink’s dog, but was showing teeth and growling in a familiar way.

  “I really shouldn’t be helping you. The agency does not want us interfering with subjects of investigations,” Fred said, walking up behind me.

  “Whatcha got?” He had something in his hand.

  “Half a bag of Krispee Creme Crullers,” he handed me the bag. “Great for stake outs and distracting dogs.”

  “Thanks.” I took the bag, laid the rug down and checked for my key ring. “This truck has been wrecked. Tammy gave me a key to both of them. I am gonna try to drive it through the gate so we can move it to another location. Then I will teleport to Knoxville as long as Wysinski got the battery on the other truck hooked up.

  I had Fred back the rental car up to the gate and I stood balanced on the trunk lid while I put the carpet over the razor wire. Partee’s uppity pooch was growling and barking the whole time I was doing this. I took a deep breath and threw the first cruller. The dog trotted to it and the cruller disappeared in one gulp and turned back to me. Damn donuts were too starchy. A slab of meat would have been better. I had been playing around for twenty minutes; soon the enemy would have the other truck.

  In rapid fire, I threw four crullers about ten feet apart. Then I flipped my body over the fence, tearing my pant leg as I slid down the rug to the ground and ran for the small barn. I could see the damaged front clip of the truck. The dog had snapped up the last cruller and I could hear him coming after me. I dropped more crullers and kept running. I got to the barn and jumped into the truck bed landing with a thud.

  A fleshy smack hitting the side of the truck bed followed my thud. The dog hopped and barked but could not quite jump into the truck bed. I tossed the rest of the crullers into the yard and the pooch split for a moment.

  That moment gave me time to hop out of the bed and into the driver’s seat. I stretched my leg straight as I fished for my keys. The first key I chose turned and I prayed to truck would run. I turned the key and the engine turned over but wouldn’t catch. I tried two more times. No dice. I rolled down the window a crack.

  “Fred, the truck won’t start. You can leave now. It’s been nice knowing you!”

  Using the cheap pen I found in the dash, I changed the digital clock on the dash to three seventeen and waited.

  Chapter 31

  I realized that I was beginning to disintegrate. It was really upsetting until the disintegrating got to the part of my brain that does the worrying. Then all that was left for a second was the part of my brain that digs roller coasters and it said ‘Whoopee!’ as my mind, body and spirit broke into their most basic particles and were flushed down an interspatial quantum drain toward Knoxville.

  Recounting the teleportation journey is not possible because my memory was not intact. I do not recall arriving at the other end of the journey. When I regained consciousness, I was sitting in a stalled Ford truck in the dark drooling on myself. I closed my mouth and wiped my lip, feeling foolish, even though no one was looking and no one could see me.

  I sat forward a little and looked out through the windshield. I could see a line of light in front of the truck. My vision adjusted and I realized that the truck was now in my stock and lock garage at Handy Self Storage. It worked! It still worked. I had teleported. I was okay. Arms, legs toes, family jewels, mind, soul. All there. Adrenaline was flowing the way it does when you have swerved and avoided a head-on collision with a semi truck.

  One thing occurred to me as my heart beat slowly tapered to normal. Andrew Chandler had told me that many theories stated that if a person could be teleported, the original person would be destroyed in the process and the person that came out on the other side would be like a clone. It also occurred to me that this was silly. Of course I was me sitting here thinking these thoughts. If I was someone else I would know it. Then it came to me that if I as an exact duplicate, I wouldn’t know the difference. I wouldn’t even know I was a clone. I wanted to turn my brain off before it turned inside out with pretzel thoughts.

  Before I could untwist my brain the garage door rolled up loudly and both my retinas were burnt silly.

  My vision began to clear. I could make out two people, one bigger than the other. As I squinted through the glare I could see that the smaller person was Slink.

  The other I guy I knew I had not met before. He was tall and had shoulders that spelled farm strength. Below each of his T-shirt sleeves was a slab of beef. Above his Cotton Eyed Joe T-shirt was a bald head with two-day stubble. The lines of his nose, cheek bones and jaw all met in a way that was the opposite of handsome. He had bulging veins in his temples and piercing eyes that hoped for mayhem. He reminded me of James Carville on horse steroids. He
leered as he saw me and the truck, the way a cat leers at an insect before he chews its legs off, eats it and then chucks it up. I thought maybe that his face might be the last one I would ever see, since he was about to shoot me. Then I looked closer, and I did not see a gun drawn.

  I fumbled with the door locks and was wishing for a hiding place, when a shower of glass exploded into the truck’s interior. There was no time for surprise on my part as I was dragged by my shirt collar through the truck’s window. Bleeding from tiny glass cuts, I found myself on the ground coughing and choking. My neck was still in vise grip, he had not let go of my collar.

  “Partee?” I blurted. I was close to vomiting.

  “In the flesh. Now let’s see how you like spending time in a stock and lock.”

  He lifted me off the ground and administered two body punches to my gut, making me question my willingness to live. He dropped me in a wheezing heap and hopped in the truck. I heard the crunch as he sat on the broken glass. He popped the truck into neutral, got out, and held the steering wheel as he effortlessly pushed the truck out of the garage.

  “Welcome to solitary, you dumb mother.”

  With that, the garage door came down. Lying on the concrete, I heard various noises outside the stock and lock. I tried to guess what was happening. It sounded like a lock or screwdriver had been run through the latch on the door. There was the sound of a diesel engine, probably Partee’s truck and as the revs increased and then faded I figured they had towed Tammy’s Ford Ranger truck away.

  This had not been a good day. Both trucks were gone. Bad guys - two, Rust - zero. I would have to explain it all to Tammy and she would be crushed. I would have to explain it to my small intestine, who was also feeling crushed right now.

  Maybe it was the darkness -circus tents were dark. Or maybe it was the smell of elephant poop which I imagined coming from the center of the tent that this garage had turned into (later I saw that it was rodent pellets that I had smelled). I felt I was lying in the middle of a three ring circus. A spot light was shining into one eye. I could vaguely make out the crowd waiting quietly for the next act. I began to look around and saw the ring master and the lion tamer had entered the spot light. The crowd began cheering loudly. The ringmaster was praising the feats of greatness that we were about to witness. I could not make out the details though due to the roar of the crowd. The ringmaster stepped up, a silhouette against a bright spotlight.

  “They’re gone,” Said the ringmaster, leaning over me.

  “The lions? That’s too bad. I’ve got an excellent seat.”

  “Are you okay?” Said the ring master.

  “I’m fine. Don’t you have twenty clowns in a VW bug or trapeze dare-devils you can show me?”

  “No. You must be sick or hurt. Sit up.” The ringmaster grabbed my hand while the lion tamer watched.

  I sat up and realized where I was. I was in the Handy Self Storage garage. Without Tammy’s truck. Smelling rat-poop smell. My ribs and abdomen were killing me. I looked at the ringmaster and was embarrassed when I realized it was Fred Smithey.

  “I got punched. In the gut. I’m dying,” I groaned, slumping back to the garage floor.

  “You aren’t dying. You just got beat up. Help me get him out of here, this shit stinks.” Smithey said to the lion tamer, who turned out to be Wysinski. I was messed up.

  They lifted me and walked me out of the garage and up toward the office. One of them on each side, I was like an injured football player being walked off the field only without the sympathy applause.

  “They stole the truck. I’ve got to act fast if I’m going to get it back.”

  “Mr. Stover. It’s over now. They got both trucks and now they’re gonna disappear with them,” Fred Smithey said.

  “No,” I was still trying to breathe properly.

  “Look, you’re out of danger now. This is a good thing. You need to go back to doing your inspections and drop this Tammy girl’s case before you really do die. Right now you just feel like death, but you’ll be fine.”

  Wysinski opened the office door and I collapsed on the vinyl couch in the lobby.

  Chapter 32

  “You’ve been following me. That’s how you knew I’d end up here, right?” Now I was gaining composure but still about to hurl.

  “Yeah. Really I was worried about you. I knew you’d need help and since I had already interfered I figured there was no harm in making sure you were okay.”

  “Or making an anonymous call to the cops if I wound up dead?” I wondered.

  “Yeah, that too, I guess.”

  “Well, I guess I‘m tougher than you thought. Now why didn’t you stop them?”

  “The big one was really mean-looking and I’m sure they were packing. I’ve already done more than I should and I’ve got a broken arm to show for it. Just because I have health insurance doesn’t mean I like to use it. Really, this is the end of the line for me. I’ll take you home since you’ve got no car.”

  “Oh shit, my car is still parked at Slink’s.” I groaned.

  “I wouldn’t worry about that anymore. I’m sure it’s gone now,” Fred said with the smirk of a grade school tattler. Then his face softened a little. Even though I had broken his arm by tripping him on the metal stairs in Knoxville several days earlier, he still had some sympathy for me.

  “How’s my face?”

  “Bad.”

  “Any blood?”

  “Yeah, and some black and blue places. What happened?”

  “Well, I was drugged with truth serum and dragged through a smashed truck window and beaten by Partee.”

  “Who is Partee?”

  “The big guy with the shaved head.”

  “Yeah, he was a real bruiser,” Fred Smithey winced as he thought about it. “Come on. We’ll get you some trucker vitamins.”

  I was afraid to ask what trucker vitamins were. I slowly followed Smithey out to his rented Ford without even acknowledging Wysynski’s drunken plea.

  “Hey, you owe me a hundred bucks!”

  It turns out that Smithey’s ‘trucker vitamins’ were sold at the Golden Churn Quick Shop. This one-time farm store, now sold gas, beer, eggs, firewood, motor oil, toilet paper, rolling papers, condoms, and corn dogs, which were under a heat lamp. A lot of things that the Golden Churn sold were self canceling. The beer could give you a hang over, but hot corn dogs, a coke and some Goodies Powder could make you feel better. Too many corn dogs could give you the trots, but relax, they sell toilet paper, too.

  And, of course, there are the trucker vitamins. These are in tiny, single serving plastic bags hanging on a rack beside a white vase that has roses, wrapped singly, in it. The flowers are to patch up anything stupid the beer made you do. The vitamins are to heal your mind and body after being doped and beaten by a massive hick.

  “How ‘bout a corn dog?” Fred asked as I paid for an orange sports drink and my pack of eight multicolored vitamins and trucker uppers.

  “No. You know what I really need? Waffle Hut. Please take me to Waffle Hut.”

  “Okay. But then I gotta head back.” He was jangling his keys nervously. That was the way he did most things.

  Fred Smithey was a walking contradiction, as Green Day would say. Is it possible for someone to be skinny and fat at the same time? Looking at Fred straight on, his sweater was baggy and his slacks poorly tailored. From the side he looked like a pencil that had swallowed a baseball. That gut had been accumulating over the years. Stake out food, donuts, and lack of exercise, coupled with take-out pizza and his wife’s fried cooking, all added up to a pregnant paunch that would give a lesser man a slipped disk.

  As small as the rest of him was, his gut touched the Formica table as he leaned back in the booth at Waffle Hut.

  “What can I get cha?” said our sugary southern waitress.

  “Coffee,” Smithey said in his weary tone.

  “Me two. That’s, three in all,” I snapped.

  The waitress frowned but obliged, br
inging back three cups and putting two in front of me.

  “And to eat?”

  “This picture,” Fred pointed at the menu.

  “The same, but with a side of hash browns.”

  “How do you want them hash browns?” The waitress asked, boredom beginning to harden her syrupy persona.

  “How can you make them?”

  Now it says right on the menu how they can make them and a code name for each type of topping. Covered equals cheese, chunked equals ham, etc. Only someone who’s been living in a van down by the river would not know this. I just wanted to hear her say it.

  “Well you can get them ten different ways: Scattered, smothered, slimed, covered, chunked, kinked, inked, diced, topped, and peppered.” I could tell she wanted to stab me.

  “Just scattered and covered,” I smiled, satisfied. I drained one of the coffee mugs.

  “Inked?” Fred wondered.

  “Yeah, for the kids. They cook ‘em in food coloring. Hot pink or neon green. It taps into the whole gross-out your mom factor. Elementary school kids love it, I’m sure,” I answered.

  “If you knew that, why did you ask her?”

  “I just wanted to hear her say it.”

  Fred just sat quietly and waited for his food, leaving me to think my thoughts.

  I needed something.

  The punches to the head, the sodium pentothal residue and the potent Waffle Hut brew were working me up into some kind of fit. The tiredness left me and was replaced with the jittery bliss of a college mushroom trip, only without the guilt of missed classes.

  I usually ran to a woman when I was feeling like this, but most of the chicks were onto my line of shit these days. I tried to decide if Wendy liked me enough to put up with a visit right now. Probably not, but I wasn’t thinking clearly.

  “Fred, can you drop me off at a friend’s house after this?” I said, trying to keep scrambled egg in my mouth.

  “Don’t you think you should just go home? You’ve done enough for one day.”