A Tale of the Roaring Presses
Chapter 10
Possumhaw, Randolph County
The Big Emergency
91
Sister Missy Sue stepped away from the microphone, blew kisses to the neatly-groomed, well-behaved children in suits, scanned the fairgrounds wistfully and left the bandstand, assisted by two aldermen and Happy Dailey.
The mayor took over. “This concludes Church Day at the festival. I’d like to thank you all for coming.” He smiled for Grover’s camera. “Please remember us in your prayers on the way home.”
The children booed. “It’s only one o’clock,” protested an angry youth director.
Eugenia Brewer emerged from the wings, ran to the mike and pushed the mayor out of the way. “It’s History Day now,” she said, eyes fiery. A moppet began to cry. The Official Possumhaw Bagoo Festival Historian smiled, looking very much like the Grinch Who Stole Christmas. “Morning belongs to God, but the afternoon belongs to me!”
A giant papier-mache statue of Hamilton Makler, Possumhaw’s founder, fell over suddenly, missing her by inches. His massive head rolled onto her shoes.
“Maaaaaaaaah!” commented White Fang, stepping guiltily away from the rubble.
Taking this as a cue, a visiting Deacon Hayes pounded a lively tune on the piano. Sister Missy Sue climbed back onstage, took the mike and started the singing.
The children cheered.
92
The closing credits of “Bad Day At Black Rock” had just started to roll when the wall panel slid open.
Greenleigh finished the last of the chicken wings. “What happened to you?” he asked.
Roy Henry picked ice out of his hair and whiskers and squinted at Slade. “Call the F.B.I.,” he ordered, sliding the panel shut quickly and staggering shakily to the couch. “I’ve got all the evidence you need.”
He reached into his suit pocket and brought out a miniature tape recorder.
Slade snatched it away and crushed it in one massive hand.
“You’ll do nothing,” he said, with an expression that would have been frightening had the newsman’s eyeglasses thawed out by now. “You just go through with it and I’ll stop them.”
Greenleigh was aghast. “Through with what?”
Roy Henry tore his hair, sending a shower of miniature ice cubes to the carpet. “OK,” he said, rising to his feet. “I’ll go back to that diner and I’ll hang myself back on that meathook and I hope you all choke on that mincemeat.”
He was gone for over a minute and a half when Slade drew his gun. “That’s not in the plan,” he said gravely.
93
“Swampy!”
Sheriff Jimbo followed the wide trail of crushed weeds from the clearing, through the bramble bushes, past the poison ivy, down a forty-foot slope covered with burdock and nettles and to the side of a thick green slough ringed with honey locust and devil’s walking-stick.
Two heads floated on the surface near a decomposing cow in the center of the slimy goo.
The sheriff took off his new shades and rubbed his eyes. He pulled out his cellphone and dialed.
***
“Good thing I found him wanderin’ in the back of the freezer,” said Erlene, hugging her skillet while Randy fastened the newsman to the meathook with the some of the microfilm in his suit. She handed Randy an apple. “What’s in those old pictures anyway?”
Randy stopped raveling and held a roll to the freezer light bulb. The apple bounced and rolled its way to the frozen dessert section, where Slade was waiting, gun drawn, for them to leave. The big man swore quietly.
The convicted murderer swore loudly. “Why, it’s him!” he said, unrolling the film and squinting in amazement as Erlene wandered away. “He’s doing the twist with Mama! Back when she was young!”
Slade’s cellphone rang.
94
The sheriff swore. “No answer,” he said to himself. “I’ll try Happy Daily.”
Strained gargling came from the direction of the slough. The heads were beginning to move.
Swampy stared at the sky. “No!” he shouted through a mouthful of pond goo. “It’s quicksand!”
“It’s slow sand,” the sheriff argued an hour later, having extricated both victims with the squad car and seventy-five feet of now totally useless rope. “You’ve been in there for hours. Gotta check that freezer!”
“Let’s roll,” said Swampy, boots squishing goo with each step.
The sheriff held up his hand. “Not in my car,” he said. “Not till you both take a walk in Snapper Creek.”
The nearby creek was warm and lined with sand willows and flowers. “The mud comes right off,” Petey marveled.
One, two, then four alligator snapping turtles approached.
***
The freezer panel door slid open and footsteps neared.
“We’re getting too old for this,” announced the figure in the trenchcoat. She adjusted her oversized hat and approached the victims on the meathooks.
Slade swallowed his apple core and spat microfilm. “Carmen Sandiego,” he said with a sneer in his voice. “We were just wondering just where in the world you were.”
95
“Oh, Pa!” Eldred’s wife, wearing an orange wig with thick braids and her costume from the Mary Todd Lincoln Singers, waved an oversized wooden spoon and leaned against the cardboard log cabin, crumpling it slightly. “The stew – this ambrosia – saved our lives yet again!”
Eldred, dressed in buckskins and a coonskin cap and wearing a fake gray beard, saluted the cauldron boiling near the funhouse and faced the sleeping audience. “O stew, I hereby dub thee – Bagoo!”
The cauldron flashed. Eldred choked on the magician’s smoke left over from last night’s Barfdog performance, nearly losing his whiskers.
“Bagoo, yes nectar immortal,” Duane Dee Loudermilk II whispered loudly, prompting from behind the cardboard.
“Baaaahhhh,” said White Fang, eyeing Eldred’s beard hungrily, His musings were suddenly quieted by three small figures who spirited him quickly away where a very angry historian awaited with a muzzle and a leash.
“I’ll pay you twice,” Eugenia Brewer snipped, restraining the sheep, “if you throw in a barbecue.”
***
Roy Henry studied the bonfire silently as the trenchcoated figure fed the last of the microfilm into the furnace. A pale patch of daylight shone through the windows, blocked by beds of forget-me-nots and webs of spiders.
96
This was not, Roy Henry told himself, the Bobbie Lee Gentry he knew.
The redhead faced him angrily. “Don’t play dumb with me,” she said, feeding the newsman’s notebooks to the conflagration. “You pretended to be unconscious, then dragged yourself to Sparta last night and found out everything you weren’t supposed to.”
Roy glanced at Slade, who shrugged helplessly.
“You already know,” the Dragon Lady continued, frisking him for more evidence, “that Ham Stewart was my uncle, and that Mama tried to run off with him during the election.” She found his press badge, compared the picture to the pinioned newsman, kissed it and dropped it into her huge purse. “You let my Randy capture you so the sheriff could arrest him when the contest came around. Send him back to jail. That hypocrite!”
She unfolded the hypocrite in question’s list of her Randy’s apparent victims since her uncle met his doom after Winona Tayder’s fatal attraction. Leafing through the pages, she smiled in surprise at several of the names, then quickly hurled it into the fire. Sparks flew upward.
“You’re wondering now,” she said, pocketing his wallet, “why I’m back. After building an empire of crime!”
“Uncle???!!!!” Roy mooed.
97
The Possumhaw Volunteer Fire Department, down several members due to the three-legged chicken race disaster, lost handily to all the visiting teams. They were utterly demolished by the group from Woodrow City.
“I wanted that 29-and-a-half-pound gold foil-covered chocolate trophy,” griped Eldred, watching the mayor present the half-eaten prize to a beaming Ogee, flanked by Deacon Hayes and the stupid cop who’d shot a hole in the new stationhouse roof.
“Ol’ Fatso ain’t using it anymore,” said Erlene, handing Jerry Lee his fourteenth strawberry maple shake. “He done high-tailed it outa here and ran for his life.”
Cap, bandaging Swampy and Petey’s wounds from the turtle attacks, peered over his shoulder and beamed.
“Gotta run,” he said quietly, then sprinted in the direction of the diner.
***
Sheriff JImbo stayed back in the shadows as the upstairs cellar door opened and Cap frantically ran downstairs.
A huge fist slammed into the cook from the landing, knocking him into the splintered railing. “You let him go!” hollered Randy, seizing him by the shoulders and shaking him like a pit bull would a mailman.
“W-who?” The grizzled veteran, frozen with terror, fought horrible memories.
“Cap, quit beatin’ up on Randy!”
Mama had arrived.
98
Randy replaced his brother’s baseball cap. “Just funnin’, Mama,” he said. “We’ll settle this later,” he warned his brother softly, punching him in the gut hard enough to induce vomiting.
“Randy, my angel,” Mama continued sweetly. “Got a job for you. I want you to find Ham Stewart and bring him to me, you understand?”
The convict grinned. “How many pieces?”
“Tell him to wear his suit and bring candy.” She purred to herself. “He knows my favorite.” She left, humming “Misty.” Randy and Cap exchanged horrified glances. Cap choked.
Shivering near the blackberry cobbler, Sheriff Jimbo nearly vomited himself.
***
Having finished with Roy Henry, the Dragon Lady straightened his suit, doused the bonfire and glanced over at the huge pile of criminal apprehension hardware she had taken from Slade Jackson.
“Cops are stupid,” she said, approaching him at the stairwell with a box of blasting caps. “All the weapons in the universe are no match for the human mind.” She raised Slade’s huge boots and placed the box underneath, then shoved a stick of dynamite down the front of his military jacket and unwound the fuse back to the worktable where Roy Henry lay. “No match!”
Her lighter failed.
99
Ogee ripped off the duct tape and much of the newsman’s whiskers. “You’re sure lucky we showed up,” he said, slicing his bonds with one hand and devouring the chocolate trophy, foil and all, with the other.
The Dragon Lady sat heartbroken, weeping in the corner, flicking her defective lighter over and over and over again.
“Yea,” said Deacon Hayes, helping the newsman off the worktable while a squadron of Legionnaires released the other prisoner, “He who giveth mercy shall receive mercy. Good thing we saw the museum on fire and sprang into action.” He grinned at the smoldering furnace. “Someone was sure looking out for you today, Brother Roy.”
“Heyyyy,” said the stupid cop, discovering the box under Slade’s bound feet. “I can’t read this. Give me her lighter.”
It worked. For two-and-a-half seconds, before Slade crushed it quickly in his hand.
***
“I knew it was you!” screeched Eugenia Brewer, fingernails flashing, hurling herself on the hapless newsman as he emerged from the whitewashed Federal-style building, rescue party in tow. “What have you done to my museeeeeeeummmmmm?”
“We only used the furnace,” Roy protested as she pounded his skull into the hand-carved antique welcome mat for the fourteenth time.
100
This week’s broadcast of the “Sing With Me Hour,” sent live to farms and Legion halls all over Southern Illinois, Missouri, parts of Kentucky and Arkansas and even northwestern Tennessee on a clear-weather night, was underway on the Ham Stewart Memorial Bandstand when the crowd stopped mid-“Row Your Boat” to applaud at the small throng of people approaching from the wings via the backstage trap door.
Your host, faded early sixties rocker Tristam Shout, seized their bedraggled leader and steered him to the microphone to thunderous applause. “I caught your act last night,” he said, handing him a uke. “Roy Henry, I challenge you to Sing With Me.”
***
The nurse turned up the sound. “This OK?”
The coroner nodded weakly. “Ham Stewart, as I live and breathe,” he said, grimmer and grayer than usual.
“Mmmmmgmgmnnnnh!” said the patient in the body cast in the other bed.
The music began. “Shut up, Earl Boy,” said the coroner.
***
Randy stopped throttling his brother. The image of Ham Stewart filled the living room’s large-screen TV.
“What th-…?” Randy said,
Cap beamed. “He’s singing ‘Misty.’ I hate that song.”
***
Mama stopped brushing her hair and put it on backward.
She reached for the Obsession.