Losing Joe's Place (7 page)

I shrugged apologetically.

* * *

“Kiki!” chortled Don gleefully. “The Peachfuzzes of this world can only get so far before the real Champions rise to the surface! A Kiki beats a Jessica any day!”

By the dim light of the dashboard, Don pored over a cocktail napkin. On it was written
Kiki: 555-2461
in red lipstick. Beside the signature was the glossy red impression of lips kissing the paper.

“Anybody named Kiki has to be awesome, but her — wow! And if I say so myself, it was true artistry getting this number, right under her parents' noses! Not bad at all.”

“You'd better be careful,” I advised Don. “That father looks like he patrols under her bedroom window with a blunderbuss.”

“He'll come around,” said Don serenely.

“Yeah!” I snapped. “He'll come around the corner to see what he shot!”

“Listen, it's not just the number; it's the momentum! These things come in waves, Jason! This is just what we needed.” He slapped the note for emphasis. “
This
is the break that's going to turn our summer around. Mark my words, from this moment on, everything is going to be perfect!”

Suddenly I was blinded by red lights in the rearview mirror. I craned my neck to see a police car tailing us. I pulled over, and one officer got out and examined the Camaro. When he knelt to check the license plate, it hit me in one instant of exquisite horror — we'd forgotten to call the police to report the “stolen” car had never really been stolen at all.

We were under arrest.

* * *

My gibbered-out explanation of why we were in the stolen vehicle not only made us look like criminals, but stupid criminals to boot. Even Don didn't believe me, and he knew I was telling the truth. Let's face it — “Car — Rootbeer — Florida — Joe — alligators — I didn't do anything!” wasn't about to convince the police to let us go.

We sat at the desk while the arresting officer spoke on the phone across the room.

Don craned his neck around the station house. “Don't worry, Jason. We're definitely the best-dressed guys who got arrested tonight. Good thing we wore our new clothes.”

I couldn't believe it. “Are you nuts? We're in jail! What difference does it make what we're wearing?”

“Don't be dumb. We're a couple of clean-cut guys. If we looked sleazy, they'd probably lock us up while they checked out our story.”

Our cop hung up the phone and came over, looking grim. “I'm going to lock you up while I check out your story. Empty your pockets.”

Stunned, we handed over everything we could find in the new clothes that made us so respectable, and would keep us out of the clink.

They took our wallets and watches and Don's gold chain. They even took the note on the cocktail napkin. Don pleaded with them, but the officer said rules were rules.

“You take good care of that!” cried Don.

Then we were escorted through the dingy, chaotic halls of the police station to a windowless interrogation room, and left there.

I turned to Don. “‘From this moment on, everything's going to be perfect!'” I mimicked savagely.

“If they lose Kiki's telephone number,” Don promised, “I'm going to
sue
the Toronto Police Department!”

“For what?” I snarled.

“Wrongful misplacement of an important document!” Mr. Wonderful declared.

“Napkin-napping would be more like it.”

“I can't believe they locked us up!” Don moaned. “Don't they understand it was just a mistake?”

The time dragged. I can't be sure just how much time, because our watches were with Don's napkin. It must have been at least a couple of hours. If we hadn't looked like criminals coming in, we must have by now — wild-eyed, nervous, sweaty, and disheveled.

Don sat on a small wooden chair, whistling “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” through his teeth. I paced back and forth, wondering why it took so long to find out that the car was Joe's, and I was Jason, the address matched, and we were on the up-and-up.

Suddenly the door opened, and our cop escorted Ferguson into the room. The Peach had boosted our humiliation up to the next level by bringing Jessica along. It was a moment of perfect agony. Jessica's eyes were on me at last. Sure. Everybody wanted to get a look at the idiot who got arrested for stealing his own car. And what about Don? When the guy who moved in on your girl brings that girl to visit you in the slammer, it's a special kind of pain. I figured Don was going to grind Ferguson into a useless powder in front of every cop in town.

It didn't happen. Don's purple face and my red one both had the sense to keep their mouths shut.

The Peach, with his usual perfect logic, had straightened things out for the police in a way that no one else had thought of. He explained to them that they had Jason Cardone in custody for a car theft reported by Jason Cardone. It worked a lot better than what the cops were doing, which was trying to get in touch with the owner of the vehicle.

That meant Don and I could sign for our valuables and leave. “Don't forget to take our car off the hot sheet,” I reminded the desk sergeant as I put on my watch and pocketed my wallet.

“Front pocket,” Jessica reminded me.

Don was riffling through his pile of belongings with increasing agitation. “All right!” he bellowed.

“Who took my napkin?”

“Relax, kid,” said the desk sergeant. “We'll get you another napkin.”

Don was red-faced. “But it
has
to be that one! Where is it?”

“
A-choooo!
”

We wheeled. Seated at a computer terminal, a constable, watery-eyed and sneezing, blew his nose into a large white —

“
Napkin
!” cried Don, wrenching the serviette away from the startled policeman's face. “It's
smeared
! Ah, but you can still read the number.…”

Jessica looked around the police station warily. “I wonder how many of these people are muggers.” Suddenly she pointed to a tall, bearded man in a black trenchcoat. “Officer!” she whispered urgently to the desk sergeant. “See that man over there?”

The sergeant whispered back, “What about him?”

“Don't you think it's funny he's wearing a long coat like that in the summer? Maybe he's hiding a sawed-off shotgun under there.”

The sergeant stood up. “Probably not,” he replied, and by now his whisper was loud enough for all to hear. “He's the police chaplain.”

We hauled her out of there before she got us rearrested.

* * *

Rootbeer was waiting up, still squinting at his stamps. “So? How was it?”

“You're never going to believe this,” I said. “We were in jail.”

“Yeah, I know. The cops called here, asking about the car. They told me they were holding you, and I didn't want to spoil everything, so I hung up.”

“
What?!
” I recalled our officer coming straight from the phone to lock us up. Now we knew why.

“Holding cells are so relaxing,” the giant reminisced, a dreamy, far-off look in his eyes. “I've done some of my best meditation in jail. I warned Ferguson not to get you out too soon. You really need a good six or eight hours to — you know — gear down. I hope he didn't wreck it for you.”

I stared at Rootbeer's earnest face. “No, it was just right,” I said finally.

The fight that never happened happened the next morning. At the police station, Don had been hog-tied. He couldn't yell at Ferguson for stealing his girl in front of said girl, nor could he go for the guy's throat in front of the cops. And Jessica was safe from his attack for her faithlessness not only because Don hadn't called her all week, but also because he held lovingly in his hand the telephone number of the beauteous Kiki. This left him only me to yell at, for forgetting to report that stolen car not stolen, which prompted me to offer to run him over with the aforementioned car.

“I can't believe you did this!” Don roared at the Peach, who was making things worse by being totally unruffled. “Haven't you ever heard of territory? You don't move in on another guy's girl!”

“I didn't,” said Ferguson. “She asked me out.”

“Aha!” Don was triumphant. “I caught you in a lie! And I can prove it! Jessica didn't have
my
number; I just had hers! So there's no way she could get in touch with you!”

“I was riding home in your uncle's limo, and we were stopped at a light, and I noticed Jessica waiting for the bus. It was raining, and I knew she lived around here, so I offered her a lift.”

“That's even sleazier!” raged Don. “Using wealth and power to impress a girl! How low can you get?”

“Hey, hey, hey,” interrupted Rootbeer. “Don't you guys know that arguments like this cause stress, and stress causes executive burnout?”

A “mind your own business” died on Don's lips. Rootbeer had been with us for a while, and all had been serene, but none of us ever lost sight of the fact that, at any moment, we could be on the receiving end of
bad luck
.

“You guys should take an interest in my stamp collection,” the giant went on. “It really gets your mind off the pressures.”

Don got his mind off Jessica by putting a call through to Kiki. It lasted about ten seconds.

“Her dad answered the phone,” he told me. “What a bonehead that guy is.”

“He didn't let you talk to her?” I asked.

“Worse than that. He said, ‘There's no Kiki here.'”

“What are you going to do?”

Don shrugged. “Keep calling until
she
answers. I'll try in the daytime, when he's at work.”

Plotnick's voice came up through the vent. “If my daughter got phone calls from such a chrome polisher specialist like you, I'd commit suicide, kill myself, and then jump off a building.”

“I'm feeling stress!” said Rootbeer warningly.

I thought there wasn't a man alive who wouldn't be intimidated by Rootbeer. I stand corrected. Plotnick could laugh off the neutron bomb if it wasn't going to cost him money.

“No wonder,” he called back. “There's a lot of pressure in the gorilla business these days. You never know where your next banana is coming from.”

I was excited. I couldn't wait for Rootbeer to go down there and rearrange some of Plotnick's lard. I would have helped, or at least called out suggestions. But Rootbeer just returned to his stamps. In his mammoth paws, he held up two tiny identical American stamps, depicting Thomas Jefferson.

“Hey, you've got two of that one,” Don commented.

“The book says they're different,” said Rootbeer, squinting his eyes into slits. “One's supposed to have ten and a half perforations, the other only ten.” He began to count with an index finger three times the width of the stamp. “One, two, three, four — hold it, I think I missed that one. One, two, three —”

Suddenly he slammed the album shut hard enough to fuse the pages, and bellowed, “It's washday!”

In one lightning motion, he had the poncho over his head. An avalanche of stuff rained to the floor — an eggbeater, three pairs of sunglasses, one scuba flipper, a few crumpled bills and the odd coin, an Aztec fertility charm, a New Orleans city bus pass good for October 1981, an alarm clock with only one hand, a toilet brush, a mummified liverwurst sandwich, a Bulgarian-Greek pocket dictionary, a lime-green Nerf ball, and a diploma in the name of Gavin Gunhold from the University of Iowa. That was just the highlights. The pile was up to his knees, and things were still appearing. There were elastic bands and paper clips by the hundreds, a tangle of electrical wires, miles of string, wads of tape, random magnetic chess pieces, lint-covered raisins, and something that was either the Hope Diamond or a great big glass bottle stopper.

The three of us just stood there with our mouths hanging open as Rootbeer stepped out of the town dump, and proceeded to rip off the rest of his clothes, a sight that would make a summer all on its own. Then he filled up the tub, shook in half a box of Tide, and dumped all his clothes in. With the toilet brush (I wondered what that could be for) he pushed his laundry back and forth, like a witch stirring her brew. And by this time, the suds were on the ceiling. Then, satisfied that everything was moving along, he climbed into the tub himself, and began scrubbing his back with the toilet brush. (Why didn't I know that was coming?)

The phone rang. “Hello, darling.” It was my mother. “Anything new?”

“It's washday.”

* * *

Since I had to go get the newspaper anyway, for the Employment section, I was in charge of the shopping.

On Monday, I was in the grocery store, filling up my cart with our usual instant everything, when someone called my name. I looked up. There was Jessica, smiling and gesturing. Didn't it figure? I strut myself all over the neighborhood with absolutely no results, and now that I've finally written her off, guess who finds
me?

“Am I ever glad to see you!” she said, waving a clipboard under my nose. “I'm totally confused.”

“Well, first you have to get a cart —”

“No, no, I'm not shopping. This is an assignment for school.”

I stared at her.

“Summer school,” she said distastefully. “I flunked a course this spring, and my mom says I have to make it up.”

“Yeah?” The wondrous Jessica got pushed around by her mom, too. How human of her! “What course?”

She looked ashamed. “Home ec.”

“Home ec!?” I laughed in her face. It felt great. “How do you fail home ec?” Even Don had managed a D-minus in home ec.

She looked at me belligerently. “If you put salt instead of sugar in the soufflé, and you sew the waistband to the bottom of the apron instead of the top, and you set fire to your recipe book, you flunk.” She shrugged sheepishly. “Especially if you cut a lot of classes, and forget to show up for the final exam.” She showed me her clipboard, on which she had written exactly one word:
Beans
.

“What's this?”

“My homework. It's a cost versus nutrition chart on at least twenty-five different products. You can help me.”

What an honor! For this bright shining moment, I found myself wishing I had Plotnick's mouth. I mean, what had she done for me lately? All I said was, “Well, I'm kind of in a hurry to get home so I can start looking for a job —”

“This'll take two seconds!” she assured me, grabbing my arm and dragging me down the canned vegetables aisle.

Very quickly, I learned why Jessica had flunked home ec. She didn't know a pea from a carrot, and it was because she didn't want to know. I've never seen anybody care so little. I ended up doing the whole assignment.

When the chart was complete, I handed her the clipboard, and she looked at it in disgust. “This course is so stupid! What a waste of time!” was her comment.

I nodded in agreement. A waste of
my
time.

She glanced at her watch. “Oh, no! I'm late for class!” And she and her homework galloped off.

“You're welcome,” I called sarcastically. But I was a coward. I waited until she was out of earshot.

An hour and a half behind schedule, I started the shopping. But it didn't go very well. Every time I picked up an item, I kept seeing it on Jessica's stupid chart. Our usual groceries were among the most expensive and the least nutritious items in the store. Maybe this home ec assignment wasn't so stupid after all. When you buy instant and prepared stuff, it costs a whole lot more than when you buy the ingredients and make it yourself. Plus instant food is full of tons of chemicals. In fact, when I checked all the labels on the stuff we'd been eating the last few weeks, there was monosodium glutamate and polysorbate 60 in every single thing!

So I got this brilliant idea. Instead of buying microwave chicken nuggets, I'd buy chicken; instead of TV dinners, I'd buy real food. And while saving a dollar or a dollar and a half here and there didn't seem like much, you've got to figure on three people eating three meals a day, each consisting of at least four or five elements — we could save twenty-five bucks a day! Seven hundred and fifty bucks a month! More, if you calculated it against Plotnick's deli prices! Maybe Jessica was going to get nothing out of her course, but to me it was the answer to our economic prayers.

Since the cash value was going to be enormous, I didn't feel bad about spending two hours filling my basket with exactly the right foods according to
The 90s Cookbook for the Woman on the Go
, which I bought, too. In fact, by the time I got all that stuff home, I realized that I'd forgotten to buy the paper. Oh well, at savings of $750 a month, job hunting could certainly wait until tomorrow. And I owed it all to that ingrate, Jessica Lincoln.

I didn't want to start off too fancy, so I figured I'd make hamburgers. Wouldn't you know it — there wasn't one word in that stupid useless cookbook about hamburgers. So I phoned the publisher. Turns out they wouldn't refund my money, but the lady talked me through her own recipe. I'd save time by cooking them up now and nuking them in the microwave at dinner. The problem was, I hadn't had lunch yet. So I ate mine for lunch, and I have to say it was great.

While I was working on a fourth burger to replace the one I'd eaten, Rootbeer came in and scarfed down the other two. Then I was out of ground beef. So we split the last burger, and I settled on roast chicken for dinner. The book said “Put the chicken in a 325° F oven and forget about it for two hours.” That left me time to make soup. I couldn't wait to see the look on Ferguson's and Don's faces when they got home to find a meal fit for a king waiting for them.

I was slicing onions, and weeping delicately into a paper towel, when there was a loud buzz behind me. A small model World War I Fokker triplane whizzed past my ear, and landed with a resounding
kerplop
in the soup. I wheeled, and faced Rootbeer. There he stood in the center of the living room, remote control in hand, looking annoyed.

“What a place to put soup!”

“Sorry.” Here I was, apologizing for preparing dinner in such a ridiculously unexpected location as the stove. Fear of
bad luck
does that to a person.

Rootbeer fished his plane out of the pot and licked the propeller experimentally. “Not bad. A little oily.”

I examined the soup. It was a lot oily. “Rootbeer, what —?” I indicated the Red Baron in his hands.

“I'm into model planes now. Stamp collecting isn't a real hobby. It gives you a headache.”

I looked over to the corner, where the stamp albums now rested against the tripod, the boxes of Kodak paper, and the developing chemicals. The camera was gone, probably to the pawnshop to finance the
Luftwaffe
.

Rootbeer placed the plane on the floor and manipulated the remote control. The engine spluttered, then labored, then died. He tried again. This time the propeller spun around a few times, the craft moved forward an inch or two, and
then
died. Try number three didn't yield a peep.

Rootbeer shook his head. “You go into something for relaxation, and you end up more stressed-out than before because they sell you a piece of garbage.” With that, he stormed out of the apartment.

Dinner shaped up deliciously. The chicken was smelling great. The new pot of soup, sans motor oil, simmered on the stove, the salad was crisp and fresh and, as a special treat, I was baking a cake. It wasn't one of the top items on Jessica's chart. It was a D-Lishus chocolate fudge cake mix, but I hadn't been able to resist buying it.

I was about to put it in the oven when an unseen force took me over. When I was a little kid, my mother always used to make D-Lishus cakes. Being allowed to lick the spoon and scrape the bowl was the biggest thing in my life. D-Lishus cakes were pretty good, sure. But nothing was better than D-Lishus cake mix before it got baked. I always used to say that, if I had my way, that glorious stuff would never get near an oven. It was only my mother's presence that kept me from eating the whole thing. And today she was in Owen Sound. The real point of being on your own was getting to do stuff you normally couldn't. I started with a tiny little bit on the end of my finger. It was ten times better than I remembered it. I found the biggest soup spoon in the place, and went to work. When the dust cleared, there was enough mix left for three cupcakes.

That's when the phone rang. It was Don. “I'm going to be working late tonight, Jason, so don't wait for me.”

I was crushed. “But I cooked a great dinner!” A crackle of laughter came through the receiver.

“Yeah, right. Sure you did. See you later.” Click. It wasn't thirty seconds later that the phone rang again. Ferguson.

“Get your butt over here,” I said. “Wait'll you see what I've made for dinner.”

“I'm in New York,” said the Peach.

“What?
Why?
”

“Mr. Robb needed me to meet some people from the U.S. operation. They want me to tour their plant, so I won't be back till late.”

“But — but I've been slaving over a hot stove all day!”

“Sorry. Gotta go. I'll see you tonight.”