by Ruth Moose
I cleaned the dining room and kitchen, realized the house was quiet and started in on the canapés for the trashion show. Baby cornmeal tortillas spread with garlic cream cheese then rolled around freshly washed raw okra pods. When I sliced them the little okra wheels looked like tiny flower mosaics. They crunched delightfully. I sneaked one myself just to “taste test.” Yum.
I mixed up a pimento cheese dip that I’d serve warm though my grandmother was rolling in her grave. Warm pimento cheese. Then I did some cold cheese things, made a dip or two more, some slices of raw turnips which I wrapped in bacon for Angels on Horseback. The original recipe used water chestnuts, but this was Littleboro and our homegrown turnips were just as sweet and crunchy as canned water chestnuts and organic.
I had cheese straws in the freezer. Any good Southern kitchen always had cheese straws on hand for all and every emergency. Of course I had ubiquitous brie and crackers.
Sundays in Littleboro tended to have a peaceful feeling, quiet with almost no traffic. People went to church, ate a big Sunday dinner and took well-earned naps. Kids played in the yards, but were told to play quietly: “It’s Sunday.”
A fund-raising on a Sunday afternoon was a new thing for Littleboro and I wasn’t sure how it would go over, but it wasn’t my worry. All I had to do was make the food, show up and serve.
I had all my canapé stuff ready to go when Scott picked me up at one o’clock. He sat my insulated hampers in the back and as he drove, reached over and held my hand. Ah, I thought, and tried to send the thought his way, see how well we work together when we have a common goal. See how compatible we are as a couple. I bet you and Cedora never rode together in such companionable silence. “Isn’t this nice?” I said.
“Very,” he said and kept driving.
At the trashion show Scott helped me take my food carriers in the back door to the kitchen, then he unloaded his speakers and music equipment, went to the barn to set up and I got myself organized in that big barn of a kitchen with its land of granite countertops and gleaming refrigerators. Almost a wall of them! And an AGA stove. I drooled. This was a dream kitchen but it wasn’t mine. My own at the Dixie Dew was like a ’60s model. All white, anemic-looking and just barely adequate.
The bar was in the barn and Mayor Moss had hired two people to staff it. I was only to do the food, thank goodness. Wine bottles and ice and all that are heavy to haul.
I watched the audience arrive. People who looked like “out of towners,” not from around here, but probably her friends from whatever big city she had come from. I had seen a helicopter on her back lawn and lavishly dressed people alighting from it. Really, I said to myself. This whole event was “big doings,” as Mama Alice would have called it.
The out of towners, definitely not Littleborians, were dressed to the nines, mostly in black. Elegant, designer black but some of the men wore golf pastels and lightened up the whole picture. A few of the women wore hats! Either large, lacy “picture hats” or small flips of feathers and a veil. So NYC, so Paris, so Milano. I hoped somewhere in the crowd Pearl Buttons, our mysterious society columnist for the local newspaper, The Littleboro Messenger, was taking note. Nobody knew what the real Pearl Buttons looked like. She (or it could be a he?) seemed to be everywhere, her eyes and ears on everything going on in Littleboro. There had never been a photo beside her column in The Mess.
Mayor Moss, also in some sort of sleek black dress, stood at a podium at the head of the freshly built runway (I wondered if Scott had built it? He seemed to be doing everything but building my gazebo!), held a microphone and explained that wearables could be made from things like plastic garbage bags, bottle caps and metal soda tabs, cans and foil wrappers, paper products, anything that could be recycled. I’d been amazed and impressed when Malinda said she was going to be one of the models. Nobody had asked me to model, but then I was doing the food, little nibbles and dips, and I’d be busy. Plus one did not get paid to model and I was being paid to do food.
I had a feeling from the get-go that Malinda was going to be a hit in her long, swirling, strapless “dress” of purple plastic tablecloths covered with white 3-D polka dots, which were really prescription bottle tops. I’d helped her attach about a million of those bottle tops. We didn’t dream it would take so many. Last week we were putting it together in the living room at the Dixie Dew. At eleven o’clock that night, making that dress, we ran out of bottle tops. We only had half that voluminous skirt covered. Panic time.
“There’s a box of old caps in Gaddy’s storeroom,” Malinda said. “Let’s go get them. I have a key.” She jangled her ring of keys fetched from her purple purse that was made from a plastic place mat. That purse was the first thing we made. Easy. Fold in two thirds, stitch up the sides and let the top part flap over. Instant clutch purse. And it was shiny. “Dollar Store,” I said, “we did you proud.”
We walked downtown and Malinda unlocked the front door of Gaddy’s. We didn’t turn on any lights and after we got in Malinda locked the door behind us.
“Anybody passing by sees these lights on, they’ll stop and I’ll have to sell them a bottle of aspirin or a pack of gum. Anything that could have waited until tomorrow.” Malinda led the way through the store with a flashlight she kept in the cash drawer. “Never any cash left here. Last one out takes every cent and drops the deposit bag in the night slot at the bank.”
She was standing atop a ladder trying to reach the box on the top shelf when we heard the front door rattle. It sounded as if someone was trying to get in, then we saw beams from a flashlight sweep around the store, stop and stay on the entrance to the pharmacy counter. The light stayed there what seemed like a long, lingering time.
Neither of us moved. Did we breathe? What was going on?
“Mr. Gaddy?” I whispered to Malinda. “Some emergency maybe?” I imagined a child with a fever and no Tylenol. The parents would call Mr. Gaddy at home and he’d dress, drive over and unlock the store for them. That’s what we do in small towns. We call on each other when there’s an emergency.
“He’s got a key,” Malinda whispered back. “He’d come in the front door like we did.”
The lights went away as did the footsteps.
Malinda handed down the box and we started to leave when a voice said, “Stop where you are.”
We stopped.
“Stay right there.”
We stayed stock-still.
The voice sounded very male and very guttural. I knew that voice. It made my toes tingle and not in a good way. Suddenly all the lights clicked on and there in front of us stood Ossie DelGardo with a gun drawn and pointed straight at Malinda and me. “What’s in the box?” he asked. His gun hand didn’t waver.
“Bottle tops,” Malinda said. “You want to see?” She opened the flaps and Ossie stepped closer.
“Just bottle tops?” He peered in, then with the hand that didn’t hold the gun, riffled through it. “Bottle tops,” he said and stepped back. He holstered his gun and held the front door for us to go out. “You two must have a story to tell, stealing prescription bottle caps at two in the morning.”
“What did you think we were doing?” I asked.
“With you”—he grinned at me—“I never know.”
Malinda tried to explain trashion and how she’d be wearing a purple tablecloth studded with these bottle caps. I watched his eyes glaze over. He shrugged his shoulders and grimaced, as if to say, Two more crazies in a town of crazies.
“And what were you doing?” I asked. Mr. Ossie, the big-shot city cop, on the job as town watchman? I had imagined him napping all day in his office and sleeping (or not) at Juanita’s at night.
“Only my job,” he said. “I check the downtown, every lock, every night. I walk my beat.”
Then he turned and walked one way, Malinda and I walked the other back to the Dixie Dew. At three a.m. we were still going crazy making those white bottle caps look like 3-D polka dots.
“This is the winner,” I said. “It bett
er be. We just got the Ossie DelGardo seal of approval. Ha ha.” After that I yawned and crashed on the couch and Malinda rolled up our creation, picked up her purse and went home. I knew she would win. Or at least if I’d been placing bets, I would have bet on her.
Today before the models lined up at the trashion show, Malinda and I did a fist bump. “Break a leg,” I said.
“Drop a tray,” she said.
Minutes later, I watched Malinda swish up and down the runway in the middle of the barn, get catcalls and whistles. She hammed things up, waving and throwing kisses. She looked stunning. Tall, radiating confidence, her mahogany skin glowed. She wore her signature large gold hoop earrings. With her hair in a topknot bun she looked even taller, more regal. Our Malinda had always been a “looker.”
Mayor Moss’s barn was long past anything ever thought of as a barn. No animal would dare step a hoof on those polished hardwood floors that I’d heard had been used for dancing when Miz Moss imported a big-name band for one of her parties. Designer chandeliers hung from the rafters.
I hoped Malinda would get the first-prize trophy—not that anyone would really want the thing since it was made of recyclables, too, a tall plastic bottle of some kind with Mardi Gras beads and odd costume jewelry glued on at random, but a trophy is a trophy and from a distance and with a squint, it might look impressive. And Elvis would be impressed his mama won a fashion show, even if it was a trashion one.
Someone from the library wore a pantsuit made of pages from an old Oxford English Dictionary glued onto some thin fabric, then cut and sewed. The model’s paper hat sported a jaunty white feather from a quill pen.
Students from Littleboro High’s home economics classes wore dresses made of plastic bags or fast-food wrappers. They carried purses made from juice boxes and gum wrappers. One darling girl wore a white tutu made of industrial coffee filters. She got second prize, a smaller trophy made of bottle caps stuck to sculptured pieces of milk cartons sprayed with gold glitter.
Malinda got the grand prize and the crowd went wild, clapping and finger whistling. Malinda gave a gracious bow in her royal attire, held the trophy aloft like it was really a legitimate prize. I bet her mama would just shake her head and wonder what would happen next in Littleboro? Me, too.
As I packed up my leftovers in the kitchen, I heard two people outside the back door talking. Two of Mayor Moss’s guests, I supposed, hiding out for a place to smoke.
I heard one male voice say, “There’s not a soul in this dead burg with an ounce of sense enough to figure it out.”
“It” what? I wanted to ask. It? “It” could be anything.
When I opened the door to see who had been talking, there was nobody there. But they had left their cigarette butts, one of which was from a cigarillo. I knew Allison smoked cigarillos, but what I had heard was two male voices. Or I thought they were male voices.
Could one of them be Mr. Moss? I’d never met him. Miz Mayor referred to Mr. Moss often as being “away on business” and that he traveled “so much” she could never depend on him to be where she needed him.
I got paid for catering, which I had not made of expensive foodstuffs, just time-consuming, cute, fun and cheesy things. Easy peasy. Scott had played the keyboard background music, jazzy at first, then something with the right beat for the models to stomp and sashay up and down the runway. I was glad the mayor had decided to keep some things local. That was in the spirit of things, this fund-raising business, support Littleboro and all that. Mayor Moss gave us both our checks at the same time, kissed Scott on the cheek and hugged me. “Thank you. Thank you both. I couldn’t have ever done this without you.”
As Scott and I walked to his truck I tried to see the figures on his check but he folded it and tucked it in his shirt pocket. Nosey me. I only wondered if he got paid more than I did.
On the way home neither of us said much. For one thing I was so tired the bottoms of my feet ached and I felt like I had bits of Brie in my hair. I knew I smelled like cheese, which is seductive only to a mouse.
Scott drove, hummed some tune I didn’t recognize, then stopped in front of the Dixie Dew and parked. He got out, collected my trays from the bed of the truck, came around and opened my door, handed them to me. “Good night,” he said. “Sleep tight and don’t let the bedbugs in tonight.” He laughed, leaned over for a soft, wet, sweet, swift kiss, then was gone. I just stood there, disappointed and tired. Maybe even more disappointed than tired and I was really tired.
Chapter Sixteen
I unpacked, washed, put back my coolers and trays in the pantry/office and made myself a sandwich of leftover pimento cheese spread. I like mine cold on either rye or dill bread. Plus I put lettuce and tomato on it. In a rare dash of bravery I’ll add a slice of Vidalia onion … one slice that’s big enough to cover the whole bottom layer. When I was in high school, Gaddy’s Drug Store, which wasn’t Gaddy’s then, used to offer toasted pimento cheese. With chips and a pickle. Toasted pimento cheese is the spread that went from mill worker’s lunches to get a bit of education. Warm pimento cheese as a dip is pimento cheese that’s gone to cooking school under the tutelage of some fancy chef in a black, button-on-the-side, name-embroidered coat with little shoulder pockets that hold personal thermometers and tasting devices. Those kinds of chefs.
It wasn’t until nearly dusk I remembered Robert Redford. The missing mister bunny.
I had to round up that rabbit, who surely couldn’t have hopped very far. I knew though that I had to find him. I only hoped nothing happened before I did so. Somebody strange to Littleboro could see him and immediately think barbecue or hasenpfeffer. I can live with a lot of baggage but a whole knapsack of guilt is tough to tote around. Didn’t want to add any more to what I already had. I had to find that rabbit or Verna would never forgive me.
Somehow I kept thinking Robert Redford had to be in or near Verna’s house. But shortly after I finished clearing out the breakfast things, I had checked outside, around, about and underneath the Dixie Dew as well as both yards and saw no sign of him. I had ruled out inside because I couldn’t figure out how he’d get himself inside. But, knowing Littleboro, some kind somebody could have found him, knew who he was and that he lived with Verna and taken him home, opened the door and let him inside. Then I got rushed for time and had to start on the doings for the mayor’s shindig.
Frankly I forgot about him until almost dark. That’s when it hit me. Plus a big white rabbit should be easy to see in the dwindling twilight.
I went next door to Verna’s, had to part my way through towering shrubs that had grown untrimmed into scraggly trees, through backyard grass gone to seed so high it fell over, then up Verna’s back steps that looked as old and rickety as the rest of her house. I walked very carefully, lest one board be so thin from rot I’d fall through and there I’d be, one leg dangling and the rest of me hanging on to whatever I could grab to keep from falling the rest of the way.
On her screened-in porch I threaded my way past boxes and newspapers piled to the ceiling, an old wringer washer, tin washtubs on legs, a clothesline still hung with dresses and nightgowns, and long-legged bloomers that had been out there so long all color had faded. They hung in a line of tan-colored depression.
In the back hall, I peeked in the kitchen, which didn’t seem quite as cluttered as the rest of the house. Then I saw an open door just inside the kitchen, some steps down, and darkness. A rabbit could have stood where I’m standing, started down those steps and hopped the rest of the way into what I now guessed was an old-fashioned root cellar.
“Rabbit,” I called. “Robert Redford, honey.” Secretly, I liked the intimacy of calling Robert Redford “honey,” as though we (the movie guy, the famous one) and I actually knew each other and I could call him “honey.”
I felt for a light switch and flicked it on. It was either a forty-watt bulb or so covered with dust and grime it didn’t help all that much. Calling the rabbit again, I started down the steps while a thick dark sme
ll got stronger and stronger. A smell like the bottom of the earth.
Halfway down, I heard the root cellar door slam shut behind me. A hard, final sort of clunk sound. Clunk, like the door to a jail cell. “What?” I yelled. “Wait. I’m down here.”
Then I heard a bolt slide into place.
“Help,” I yelled, ran up to the door and began to beat on it. Wham, wham, wham. A hollow desperate sound. “I’m in here!” I yelled.
The door was metal and my wham, wham, whams only echoed back, rocking but not loosening. Probably this metal door was the only thing in the house not headed toward rot and decay.
I banged and yelled and banged some more. Listened for footsteps of someone coming back. Nothing. Maybe whoever shut that door and locked it had known I was down here and had done it on purpose. But who? Surely it was an accident. There was no one in Verna’s house but me. Maybe a breeze blew the door shut? Except a breeze wouldn’t have slid that bolt into place. Not long ago I had been locked in a mausoleum on purpose, only then I had Robert Redford shut in there with me. This time I was alone.
Behind me I saw the last bit of natural light coming from the small window near the ceiling. “Hey,” I yelled. I saw feet and legs walk by very fast. “Help!” I yelled. Then I thought, Whose feet were those? Whose legs? “Hey,” I yelled again. “I’m down here.” The feet were quickly out of sight.
The window was too high for me to reach and bang on it. And too high for me to climb out.
I went all the way down to the bottom of the steps where I saw a water heater that must have been in Noah’s Ark, and a furnace that took up most of the wall and looked medieval. The water heater clicked on. The furnace looked so rusty it probably had not worked in years.