Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (6 page)

Mal just looks at him and says, “She has too many dang cats, anyway.”

Gerald, Mal’s younger brother, stoops and pokes his head in through the doorway to say good morning to them on his way to the back office. Gerald is Vice President of the company and handles all the books. He’s even taller than Mal–at 6’-9"–but he has a sissy’s way about him. He majored in accounting at Reedley Community College. He spends his days reading obituaries and bankruptcy notices and trying to collect accounts receivable. Mal gets all the glamour jobs: drawing up architectural projects, formulating plans of attack with Mike and the rest of the A.C. boys, telling the lumberyard crew what to do. But without Gerald, he knows he’d be in trouble.

That doesn’t stop Mal from hating him. In fact, he despises him so much that he didn’t invite Gerald to tag along with them to become a Hoo-Hoo. But it’s not like Gerald would ever do such a thing in the first place.

Ignoring Gerald’s greeting, Mal says to Mike, “The coffee should be ready now. Wanna go get a cup?”

“Cuppa Joe? Yeah, sure. I could use an eye-opener…” says Mike, who usually shies away from caffeine. “Mrs. Emmersen made me stay late and eat cookies with her. Fresh baked chocolate chips. But jeez, the old broad just about talked my ear off. She was going on and on about pillbugs crawling out of her bathtub and doorknobs falling off and the barking noises her refrigerator kept making. I think she wanted me to fix everything. I tried pretending I was interested, but really, I just couldn’t give two shits. She made me feel so tired I could barely walk out of there. Finally, I had to tell her I don’t know jack about pillbugs or barking refrigerators. I told her she should call a dang plumber.”

Mike keeps talking–past the key cutter with its revolving rack of shiny key blanks, past the white pegboard walls hung with shovels, rakes, push brooms, and handsaws–until they reach the coffee counter, where Paco, Leo, Ruben, and Johnny Hoss have already gathered. Johnny is explaining to his amused audience how he obtained his college degree:

“Y’all may think I’m just a dumb Okie–and it’s true, I dropped outta school in the third grade–but I bet y’all didn’t know I got me a college diploma. Not many third grade dropouts that can say that, huh? Paco, you got a diploma? Ruben?” Johnny Hoss bats his movie star eyes at them in mock concern.

“They don’t give out no diplomas in juvie, man…” says Ruben.

“Well, they don’t give out no diplomas in the Marines, neither, no matter how many gooks ya kill. But once I got out, I figured it was time I got me some education. They have this thing where the government pays you to go back to school. So I ended up takin’ me a six-week course in animal husbandry. By the time I was done I got me a diploma, which says, basically, that I’m qualified to jack-off roosters.”

Paco, Leo, and Ruben burst out laughing. Johnny Hoss laughs right along with them, but he’s not finished: “That diploma got me a job at the Albion Poultry factory. A good job, too. Paid nineteen dollars an hour. Full benefits. And all I had to do was jack-off these roosters. Lemme tell ya, they was horny little suckers. They was just beggin’ for it. I’d grab ‘em by the ankles and turn ‘em upside down, then I’d get my thumb way down in there and start rubbin’ it around, just like they showed us in class. Them roosters would start gettin’ into it. They’d ruffle up their damn feathers. They’d start cluckin’ and flappin’ and carryin’ on–wigglin’ their little asses like all get out. Then
Bingo!–tsst, tsst, tsst! –
they’d shoot their wads halfway across the room if you didn’t catch it in a cup the way you was supposed to. You wouldn’t believe all the jizz them roosters had in ‘em. And they’d do it five, maybe six times a day. It was just my first job outta college, but it was a good ‘un. I kept it for more’n a year.”

“If it was such a great job, then why’d you quit,
pendejo?”
Paco asks.

“My thumbs was gettin’ sore.”

Johnny holds out a well-callused thumb and uses it to do something vaguely obscene to the sparse black mustache under Paco’s affronted nostrils.
“¡Cabrón!”
Paco complains, lurching to get away. Then Johnny eyes Mal–while Leo and Ruben laugh–and says, “C’mon, guys, let’s get to work.” As they all head outside, Johnny turns and yells, “See ya, Gordon!”

“Bye!” says Gordon appearing from behind the coffee counter, which is taller than he is. He’s carrying a small wastepaper basket loaded with crumpled Styrofoam cups and coffee grounds.

“Gordon! What are you doing back there?” asks Mal.

“It’s Saturday,” says Gordon. “I’m supposed to be here. It’s my job, remember?”

“I thought your mom wasn’t bringing you in until later.”

“I always get here this early.”

“Were you back there this whole time?”

“I’m supposed to empty the trash first thing,” Gordon says. He doesn’t want to mention the fact that every Saturday Johnny Hoss sneaks him his own special cup of coffee–with lots of non-dairy creamer and sugar.
“It’ll stunt your growth,”
Johnny says,
“but with your daddy as tall as he is, you’d be better off a little stunted.”
As a diversionary tactic, Gordon asks his father to explain to him what
jizz
means.

“Oh, crap,” says Mal. “It’s, um, the stuff roosters shoot out of their wieners so they can have babies.”

“Roosters can have babies?”

Gordon pretends to be so staggered by this information that the wastepaper basket tilts in his hands, dumping a few coffee grounds onto the laces of his blue suede Puma tennis shoes.

“No, but hens lay eggs, and… damnit, Gordon, go empty that trash before you spill it all over the carpet.”

Gordon takes off, leaving Mike and Mal alone. Somewhere behind them, a sales clerk rings one of the registers, making the day’s first sale (a pair of butter yellow work gloves and a Hula Hoe). “You believe any of that rooster business?” Mike asks.

“Who knows what to believe,” Mal says darkly, “when it comes to Johnny Hoss.”

The rest of the morning goes by in a blur–as they all do–with Mal answering phone calls, reading the mail, talking to customers, shuffling papers, dispensing advice, and lending a hand wherever a hand seems to be needed. Around noon, he mans the cash register while the clerks head out to lunch. A sunburnt old contractor, Hank Rasmussen, swaggers in demanding to buy 100 two-by-four studs, but he wants to go out back and personally handpick them. “Sure… go ahead. The customer is always king around here,” says Mal, as he charges Hank for Select grade lumber–instead of the stud price–without telling him. A little while later, two bandanna-wearing Mexican delinquents hit the counter–known paint-huffers. They start babbling at him in Spanish. Mal takes them around to the Paint Supplies section and opens the theft-proof Plexiglas case he recently installed to protect the spray cans of Rustoleum. He hands the boys two cans each of Metallic Copper, even though they’re pointing and waving their hands at everything, like a drunken, four-armed octopus. Mal knows what’s best for them. If they’re paying just to inhale the stuff from inside a gym sock, they might as well be discreet about it. Copper is the closest match to their skin color. Besides, metallic paint gets you higher–everybody knows that.

Mal spends the rest of the afternoon cooped-up in his office drawing plans for a swimming pool in his backyard. He and Gerald inherited a cabin in Morro Bay from their father, which they’re thinking about selling. If it happens, Mal will use his share of the proceeds to put in the pool (kidney-shaped, with a Jacuzzi, is what he’s thinking–while visions of Janice Marrsden in a bikini keep crowding his thoughts, making him half-delirious). Gordon and Cynthia won’t think it’s a fair trade–they both love the cabin–but they’ll just have to put up with it. Gerald says they can make a pile of money on the deal, and business is business.

The next thing Mal knows, it’s time to drive to Fresno for the Hoo-Hoo Club meeting. He and Mike and Johnny make the thirty-minute trip in Cynthia’s avocado green Cadillac Eldorado. Mal left Cynthia with the Pinto. He wants to show his guys a good time, and the Caddy has air-conditioning and a Quadraphonic sound system. He plays them his tape of Roger Whittaker, Mal singing along to the lyrics of “I Don’t Believe in ‘If’ Anymore” in his froggy baritone–which no one seems to appreciate. Johnny asks him if he has any Lynyrd Skynyrd and Mike wants to hear Deep Purple, but neither request can be granted. The only other tape in the car is
The Herb Alpert and The Tijuana Brass Christmas Album
. Rather than torture themselves with that, they switch to an AM station and listen to Bill Cullen interviewing Joe Garagiola for NBC Radio.

The Hoo-Hoo Club has rented out the Copacabana Room in the Ramada Inn just off Blackstone Avenue for the big shindig. Mal can tell Mike and Johnny are impressed. As he leads them through the palm tree flanked double doors, someone tries to hand Mal a brochure. He doesn’t even bother to look at it. He already knows the literature. Founded in 1892, the Concatenated Order of Hoo-Hoo claims to be the oldest industrial fraternal organization in America. Their mystic symbol–to be found on the sides of lumberyards and timber companies everywhere–is an arched black cat against an orange background with its tail curled into the number 9. The club’s membership is strictly limited to lumber merchants and their employees, but as Mal surveys the red-carpeted room he sees nothing to distinguish the people there from any other cheap-suited mob of businessmen–except, perhaps, for a preponderance of gold-rimmed aviator-style bifocals and some extravagant Martin Van Buren-style muttonchops. But even those seemingly flagrant fashion choices can’t define them as a group. The same look can be found these days on regional bank managers, State Farm insurance agents, Methodist Sunday school teachers, “Broadway Joe” Namath, and John Lennon. It’s 1973, after all….

A stacked waitress with a ponytail and pimply skin shows them to a table near the center of the room. Mike and Johnny take seats, looking a little lost among all the lumber bigwigs. Mal sees Arnie Andersen standing nearby and invites him over. Arnie owns Citizen’s Lumber, up in Modesto. He’s a ruthless son-of-a-gun who once sued Georgia-Pacific when they were late with a big plywood shipment. Or maybe he just sued the truck driver–Mal doesn’t really remember. All he knows for sure is that Arnie Andersen is always suing the pants off someone.

“Arnie! How’s business?”

“Business stinks, Mal!” Arnie says with a jovial shrug. “I just bankrupted some bearded jackass who thought he could build himself a hippie-dippy VW repair shop without paying me for my lumber first. Now I own the damn place, but what the hell am I supposed to do with it? You got any Volkswagens that need fixin’?”

“My Caddy could use a lube job.”

“Hell’s bells. I don’t know diddly about cars–especially Kraut ones. You’d think I might’ve learned something about ‘em while I was shuffling Nazis around in the CIC, but
no
. And the longhaired crumbums who drive those things nowadays don’t have any money, anyway…. How’s business up in your neck of the woods?” They start walking away from the table.

“Could be better. We’ll see how the raisin crop does this year.”

A waitress comes by and hands them drinks. Big drinks the color of Ty-D-Bol liquid toilet bowl cleanser, with little green mermaid swizzle sticks. Not something Mal was expecting.

“Cheers!” says Arnie.

They clink their glasses together and take big gulps. Mal tastes molasses-flavored gasoline. “What the heck is this stuff?” he asks with a horrified pucker.

“It’s an old Hoo-Hoo tradition,” says Arnie. “Secret recipe. Hope you like it, ‘cause you’ll be drinking a lot of this stuff tonight. It’s part of the ritual.”

Mike and Johnny are also in possession of the weird blue cocktails. They raise their glasses to Mal in a toast and shout out something obscene, which doesn’t quite carry across the noisy, crowded room. “What did they say?” Mal asks Arnie.

“‘To the Imperious Blue Thunderfuck.’ It’s the name of the drink.”

“Huh…” says Mal. He takes another huge gulp. He figures he might as well choke the stuff down. It’s bound to make the evening more interesting.

About twenty minutes later, Wayne Covington–President of Covington Lumber and Hardware in Visalia–gets up on a little stage behind a podium and asks everyone to sit down. He says they’re all in for a huge treat tonight because the Chief Executive Officer of Hoo-Hoo International–the Snark of the Universe–has flown in all the way from Alabama just to be with them.

“What the heck’s a Snark of the Universe?” asks Johnny Hoss.

Good question
, thinks Mal. It takes a minute for his brain to engage (that drink is getting right on top of him, whatever it is…) but then Mal is able to explain that the Hoo-Hoo Club’s officers are named after creatures in a poem by Lewis Carroll–the guy who wrote
Alice in Wonderland
.

“‘Jabberwocky,’” Arnie adds helpfully.

“
Whassat
–some kinda secret code?” Johnny sounds belligerent.

“It’s the name of the poem,” says Mal. “It’s a weird poem, really. It doesn’t make a whole heck of a lot of sense. There’s stuff in there about talking oysters and other things with crazy names like… well, I don’t remember the names right now. Arnie? How ‘bout you?”

“
Boojums.
I remember it has
Boojums
in it. I think those are the things you find in the bottom of your red flannel pajamas after a really bad nightmare.”

“No, those would be
dingleberries
,” Mike Shriver pronounces.

At that point, Wayne Covington helps them out with some of the terms by inviting The Supreme Nine to join him up at the podium, calling each of the Hoo-Hoo Club officers by their name and title: “Steve Emerson,
Arcanoper;
Jeff Bankston,
Boojum;
Lee Hendricksen,
Gurdon;
Fred Erickson,
Scrivenoter….
”

“Damn! I feel like doin’ the hula!” Johnny Hoss says, apropos of nothing. “What’s in these drinks?”

“I can’t believe it!” Mike chimes in. “It’s only my second one and I’m already bombed out of my skull.”