Stay At Home Dead

by Jeffrey Allen

  “You ever meet his partners?” I asked.

  “Didn’t know he had any. But for my sake, I hope Barnabas is the brains of the operation.”

  “Gotcha.” I looked at Carly. She was getting antsy in my lap, fidgeting. I shifted her into my left arm and stood. “We’ve gotta head out.”

  Landry stood and put his hands on his hips. “What do you do for a living, Deuce?”

  “I stay at home,” I said, nodding at Carly. “Take care of her.”

  “That’s great,” he said, seeming to genuinely mean it. “Let me ask you this, then. Would you have any interest in doing a little coaching?”

  That took me by surprise. “Here?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. We’re going to run some sports camps this summer. One- and two-week deals. I’d love to have somebody like you working the football camps. I was going to call you and introduce myself and invite you in, so when I saw you and your daughter up front there, I just figured I’d go ahead and extend the offer now.”

  He didn’t know it, but he was pushing the right button. Since I’d left the high school, I hadn’t really missed the teaching or the administrative tasks that came along with the classroom. But I missed being out on the field with the kids.

  “Don’t say no today,” he said, holding up a hand. “Think it over. We could work around your schedule, and you could set it up any way you want. But I’d love to have you if you have any interest.”

  I offered my hand. “Thanks, Jimmy. I’ll def i-nitely think about it.”

  He shook my hand and walked us back out front. Mandy waved good-bye to Carly, who waved back like Mandy was her best friend ever.

  “Hope we see you again, Deuce,” Jimmy Landry said.

  Based on Carly’s impression of Tough Tykes, I was pretty sure he could count on that.

  26

  We stopped at the park on the way home, and I let Carly play for a while. Running around did her good and left her less wound up for the rest of the day. Sitting in the sun and watching her did the same for me. Watching her sprint from slide to swing to tunnel, wide-eyed and sweaty, convinced me that the American working public would be better served if one of those monstrous play apparatuses was installed in every business park in the country. It would serve everyone well for grown men and women to spend a few minutes running around in dress clothes in the middle of their workday and coming down the giant twisty slide. There was no equal as a stress buster, and the exercise would be an added benefit.

  If I could find a company that did that, I just might consider going back to work when Carly was in school full-time.

  When she was sufficiently worn out, we headed home, and after the tiniest bit of resistance, she went down for a nap.

  As I came downstairs from her room, I saw a car parked across the street through our front window. A green Chevy Impala. I didn’t recognize it, yet it rang a bell somewhere in my head. I went to the window and stared at it for a moment. I didn’t see a driver, and it didn’t look new, as if one of our neighbors had just purchased it. I assumed it was just someone visiting one of our neighbors in the cul-de-sac, but there was just something about it that nagged at me.

  I went to the kitchen, thinking I was just being paranoid.

  I took several pieces of chicken out of the freezer to barbecue for dinner, did the morning dishes, and emptied the dishwasher from the night before. I pulled the laundry from the dryer, folded it and put it away, and started another load that had somehow materialized overnight. If there was anything that was a true surprise about staying home, it was the way dirty clothes appeared in the clothes basket at an exponential rate. As if people lived in the walls, tried on all our clothes while we were out, and then dumped them in the basket, just to mess with us.

  When you stay home, you have time to think about things like this.

  I grabbed a wire brush that I used to clean the grill and went to open the back screen door. It stuck, and I shoved it hard to get it to swing open.

  And I heard someone grunt.

  The guy was on his back, holding his nose. And I’m not sure what the most appropriate term for him was.

  Midget? Dwarf?

  He was about three feet tall, wearing jeans and a plaid button-down shirt that would’ve fit Carly. A gray fedora was askew on his small, fat head.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I asked, because “What the hell are you?” would’ve been totally inappropriate.

  He scrambled to his feet and tried to take off. I grabbed him by the back of his shirt collar. He swung his hand around, slapping at mine.

  “Let go!” he said, his voice much deeper than I expected. “Let go of my shirt.”

  I swung him around so I was between him and his escape route and let go. He stumbled against the back of the house, then turned around.

  His long, pointed nose was red from where I’d hit him with the door. His features were all too big for his face, and his ears stuck out like wings. He brushed himself off with his tiny hands and stubby fingers.

  “What the hell are you doing in my backyard?” I asked.

  “You’re Deuce Winters, correct?” he asked, again in that voice that was more Barry White than Munchkin.

  “You’ve got ten seconds to tell me who you are,” I said, ignoring his question. “Or I’m calling the cops.”

  He held out his hands, encouraging me to slow down. “Easy, dude. We’re cool.”

  There was nothing cool about finding a midget or a dwarf or a strange guy in my backyard.

  He reached into his back pocket and produced a wallet. I was surprised that it was the same size as mine. He extracted a business card and held it out to me.

  The bold, embossed lettering read VICTOR ANTHONY DOOLITTLE. PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR. NO INVESTIGATION IS TOO SMALL.

  I held back on the urge to ask him how he came up with that slogan. “You’re an investigator?”

  “I am,” he said, nodding and adjusting the fedora. “And you are Deuce Winters, correct?”

  “Yeah.”

  He laughed. “Good. Hate to think I’ve been following the wrong guy all day.”

  “You’ve been following me?”

  “Yeah. You really need to pay attention to the world around you.”

  I knew I would’ve remembered him if I’d seen him. “That’s your car out front?”

  “So you were paying attention a little.”

  “Why are you following me?”

  “I can’t reveal that, sir,” he said, shaking his head sadly. “My employer would not appreciate that.”

  “How would your employer like it if I put you on my BBQ and grilled you?”

  His eyes flashed with anger. “Look, pal, I understand you’re angry at finding me back here. But if you wanna joke about my size, I’ll kick your ass.”

  I’m six-four. He was three-six, maybe. I doubted that he could lay his hand on my butt, much less his foot, without the aid of a step stool.

  “You’re on my property, and now you’re threatening me,” I said, trying not to take the low road. So to speak. “I’m calling the cops.”

  He jumped into a karate stance, his small hands slicing through the air. “Good luck getting through me to your phone. It’ll never happen.” He chopped the air some more and curled his lips into a snarl.

  I lifted my leg, put my foot in his belly, and pushed. He slammed back into the house and fell to the deck.

  “Wow,” I said. “Thanks for not chopping my leg off.”

  I reached for the door, but he grabbed for my leg, tugging with all the strength of a large cat. I shot my leg out, and he tumbled off the deck onto my lawn.

  On one hand, I felt bad. He was small and I was not. I had never been a bully and had no interest in being one. Yet if he were adult size, our confrontation could’ve been a lot uglier. You didn’t just walk into someone’s backyard without permission.

  But now he was lying in the grass on his back, and I felt like I’d just taken his lunch money.

  I s
tepped off the deck and leaned over him. “Are you all right?”

  He reached up suddenly, grabbed my shirt and, with strength that surprised me this time, yanked me down. I lost my balance and fell forward, somersaulting over him.

  He was on my back immediately, his stubby arms wrapped around my neck, pulling back on me like I was a horse and he was a jockey.

  “What do you think now, tough guy?” he asked, wheezing. “Wanna put me on the barbecue now?”

  I got to my hands and knees and rolled over, pinning him beneath me. His hands relaxed around my neck, and he started kicking and yelling.

  “Get off! Get off!” he screamed into my back. “I can’t breathe.”

  I leaned back a little harder, smashing him into the grass. No more Mr. Nice Dad.

  “You want me off, start talking,” I said, laying my arms out flat to keep myself leveraged. “Or I’ll turn you into an ugly little pancake.”

  His hands were now in the small of my back, pushing. He might as well have been trying to shove a refrigerator off his body. I was going nowhere.

  “All right, all right,” he groaned. “Just get off me so I can breathe.”

  I pressed down hard one more time, heard him grunt; then I rolled off.

  He sighed and took a couple of big breaths, glancing at me. “You coulda killed me.”

  “Keep that in mind.”

  His fedora had fallen off in the scrum, exposing a bald pate. He rubbed a hand over his skull, now staring up at the sky. “I’m just doing a routine background check on you,” he explained, shrugging his little shoulders. “Nothing personal.”

  “Background check? For what? For who?”

  He cleared his throat and attempted to compose himself. “It’s a routine procedure. It’s a background check, sir.”

  “I know what a background check is. Why are you doing one on me?”

  “I can’t divulge any more, sir,” Victor Doolittle said. “Client-investigator privilege.”

  “There’s no such thing.”

  He sat up. “Whatever. I’m not telling you who my client is.”

  I pushed myself to my knees. I couldn’t decide if I was angry, amused, or had mistakenly ingested some sort of hallucinogenic.

  “So if you’re gonna call the fuzz, do it,” he said. “I got places to be.”

  The fuzz? Seriously?

  Calling the police was about the last thing I wanted to do. With my luck, Willie Bell would show up and turn the whole thing into my fault. I’d had enough of him and law enforcement in the previous couple of days.

  “Here’s the deal,” I finally said. “You tell me who hired you and I let you go. You don’t wanna tell me, I will pick you up, put you in my trunk, and drive you straight to the cops.”

  The anger flared again in his eyes. “Hey, dude, I already told you ...”

  “Save it,” I said, holding out a hand. “Or I’ll steamroll you again. You make the call.”

  His mouth puckered and he glared at me. Then his eyes shifted past me, and he raised an eyebrow. “What the hell is that?”

  I turned to look.

  And got sucker punched in the last place a male of any age wants to be sucker punched.

  The air whooshed out of me, and I felt stomach cramps forming in my gut as my hands cupped over my area that shall not be named.

  Victor Anthony Doolittle was on his feet, his tiny legs flailing in every direction as he sprinted out of my yard, his small middle finger high in the air.

  27

  “When you say ‘dwarf,’ you just mean ‘really small guy,’ right?” Julianne asked.

  “No. I mean like Happy, Dopey, and Jerky.”

  “Jerky wasn’t one of the Seven Dwarfs.”

  “He should’ve been.”

  We were upstairs getting ready for bed. Julianne had gotten home late from work, and Carly and I were finishing our dinner when she’d arrived. The rest of the night had been disjointed: as I got Carly ready for her bath and bed, Julianne sat at the dinner table, eating her chicken and finishing up some paperwork.

  We had a lot of nights like that. Julianne did her best to get home at a reasonable hour in order to spend some time with Carly in the evenings, but sometimes it just didn’t work out. Julianne didn’t work a nine-to-five job, and sometimes her schedule didn’t lend itself to normal family time in the evenings. So sometimes we spent the whole night playing catch-up.

  Julianne had gotten Carly into bed and had read her her story, and I was just now getting around to telling her about Victor Anthony Doolittle.

  “And he wore a hat?”

  “Probably to make himself look taller.”

  She finished her flossing and picked up the electric toothbrush. “I think they prefer to be called little people. You should’ve called the police.”

  I scrubbed a washcloth over my face. “And said what? ‘Help. There’s a small man in my backyard’?”

  “He was technically trespassing.” She pushed the button on the toothbrush and it vibrated to life.

  She was right. My not calling the cops probably had more to do with ego than any other reason I was going to toss out there. And besides being in my backyard, he hadn’t really done anything wrong. I didn’t like that he was following me or doing his supposed background check, but those things weren’t necessarily against the law.

  Jules finished with the electric toothbrush, plucked the head off, and handed the base to me. I stuck the head that was mine on and blasted my teeth with waves of vibration, still pissed off that I had fallen for the old “Hey! Look over there!” trick.

  And then I started laughing.

  “What?” Julianne asked, watching me in the mirror.

  I started laughing harder, toothpaste leaking out of my mouth.

  “What?” Julianne asked again, laughing only because I was laughing.

  I shut off the toothbrush and spit into the sink, still laughing. “His legs. They were like small pinwheels when he ran off.”

  We stood there for a few moments, laughing like fools.

  When we’d finally let the giggle fit pass, we crawled into bed.

  “Why would someone be doing a background check on me?” I asked.

  She turned off the light and slid across the bed next to me, wrapping me up in her arms. “I have no idea. That part is odd.”

  “That part.”

  “Okay. The private eye midget is odd, too.”

  “I’d say.”

  She snuggled in tighter against my chest. “But I don’t know about the background check. I can’t think of anything that we know of that would require it.”

  More than anything, that was what had been bugging me the most. We weren’t applying for a loan, refinancing the house, or anything else I could think of that would cause anyone to be checking me out. I couldn’t decide if he’d been telling the truth or just trying to bluff me. Was he there for another reason? The whole fifteen-minute confrontation had been the strangest of my life.

  Julianne started shaking against my chest, and I could tell she was giggling.

  “What?” I asked.

  Her giggle turned into a full-blown, body-rattling laugh. She somehow got the word “pinwheel” out of her mouth, and then I started laughing.

  We lay there in the dark, laughing, for quite some time.

  28

  I woke the next morning in a surprisingly good mood, given my confrontation with the midget PI and my impending engagement with the WORMS.

  One of the things that I missed about coaching was the thing that I missed most when my days as a football player ended. I loved the thrill of competition as a player, and though I had doubted that it would be the same as a coach, I found it to be greater. Having to stand on the sidelines, exhorting my players to do what we were asking them to do, proved much more exciting than I’d ever imagined. And when they did execute and I could see them putting to use what I’d taught them, that turned out to be a much bigger adrenaline rush than anything I’d ever experien
ced as a player.

  So while I was angry at the reason for the showdown, a small spark of excitement over the emergency meeting was percolating in my gut.

  Carly’s and my first stop for the day was her ballet and tap class. It was held in a small studio in the middle of town, and she’d been attending for about six months, and much to my chagrin, she loved it. Julianne could complain all she wanted about how I dressed her, but Carly was showing plenty of signs that she was all girly girl.

  I dropped her at the hour-long class and took the opportunity to walk a block up to the Rose Petal police station, which was nothing more than a small office at the end of the strip mall that housed the dance studio, a sandwich shop, and the station.

  Cedric was sitting out front in an aluminum beach chair.

  “Keeping the town safe?” I asked.

  “As long as I know where you are, seems most folks will think we’re all safe,” he retorted, adjusting his sheriff ’s hat to block the sun.

  “You wanna cuff me? In case I try anything?”

  “Naw. Don’t feel like getting up.”

  Since he’d been forced into his mostly ceremonial position, Cedric spent most days in the beach chair, drinking his coffee and waiting for something to happen. Usually he didn’t have to move much from the chair, other than to hit the bathroom and find some lunch. He tried to act like it didn’t bother him, but those of us that knew him well understood it irritated him greatly and it sucked to see him relegated to watching traffic from the beach chair.

  “You know a guy named Victor Doolittle?” I asked, falling into the chair next to him.

  “The midget? Sure, I know Victor.”

  “He’s really an investigator?”

  “And a royal pain in the butt,” Cedric said, shaking his head. “Annoying, abrasive, and a justified little man’s complex, which I suppose you’d expect. Lives down in Dallas but tends to hang out here, because he thinks people got more money up here. Which they do.”

  “He’s legit, though? As an investigator?”

  He raised the silver coffee thermos to his mouth for a moment, then nodded. “He’s legit. And, to be fair, from what I’ve been told, he’s actually decent at what he does.” He cocked an eye at me. “Why? You lookin’ to hire that penguin for something?”