Never Use a Chicken and Other Stories (3 page)

It might be just as well to draw the curtain over the next few hours in the life of Berrybox Champion Gingersnap and Meg and Sam. Sam’s arrival home, unsteady of foot and bleary of eye, was not a happy homecoming. Not only that, he overslept his nine o’clock appointment with Mr. Humphrey because he was not used to sleeping on the couch, especially with a curious cat jumping on him every couple of hours to discover the source of the noise coming from Sam’s mouth. Possibly Snapper had never before heard a human snore; certainly not the way Sam did. When Sam woke at one point, groggy and befuddled, he discovered a furry paw just being withdrawn from his mouth. Snapper had merely been attempting to discover the source of the strange noise.

When Sam finally did connect with Mr. Humphrey, around dinner time, he was ready to be conciliatory. “Tell you what, Mr. Humphrey, I’ve decided to lower the ransom.”

“Oh good. I’ve decided to lower my offer.”

“Yeah.” Sam’s resolve hardened again, and so did his voice. “Well, here’s my final offer. I’ll take your five hundred. Now here’s where you leave it before you get the cat back.”

“Just a minute old chap. My offer may have something to do with that. Instead of my paying you five hundred, I’ll make this deal with you. You pay me two hundred and fifty and I’ll take Snapper off your hands. How does that sound?”

Sam hung up with a sudden jerk of his arm. He left the pay phone booth and sat down on a bench nearby. In his mind, he saw several puddles, one or two small heaps, shredded curtains, a ripped bedspread, water leaking from the waterbed, claw marks on the chesterfield and two or three chairs and he couldn’t remember what else. He did remember Meg’s anger. He remembered it very well. Sam held his head in his hands as though he had a headache. Come to think of it, he
did
have a headache.

Next morning, Mr. Humphrey left the house as usual to go to his office. As he opened the garage door to get to his car, he heard a familiar sound. Looking down, he found a familiar object.

“Why hello, Snapper old boy! You came back, did you? Good cat. Well done, Snapper. Have you had some adventures, old kitty?” He picked the cat up and rubbed his smooth head. “Didn’t lose your purr, did you?”

Twixt the Cup and the Lip

My mother was a great one for proverbs and old sayings. One of her favorites was the one that went, “There’s many a slip twixt the cup and lip.” I never really paid all that much attention to my mother’s proverbs. I figured that if she believed they were true, that was fine for her. I could ignore them if I wished, and I usually did.

Let me tell you how that favorite proverb of hers made a believer out of me. My life would have been better had I paid more attention. But then...on the other hand....

The forsythia bloomed early this year. That is not a non sequitur. My life is filled with fascinating little details like that these days. I discovered that the tiny little yellow forsythia flowers come out before the leaves have had time to bring out their rich green. I notice colors like that now. The grass is green after the snow and the contrast between yellow bush and lush lawn is comforting to the eyes. Especially to eyes that spend most of their time indoors. I probably noticed the forsythia this year more than other years because I spend so much time now sitting in my wheelchair looking out into the garden through the net curtains.

The curtains in this room have not always been net. They replaced drapes that were pale blue or some such color. Until I began living, as opposed to merely sleeping, in this room I never paid much attention to the colors and the decorating scheme. It was just a room. Now that the furniture has been rearranged to accommodate my wheelchair, the new hardwood floor laid and the new adjustable bed with the invalid rails installed, everything is different, and I notice things. I have time to notice. Plenty of time. More time than I really had planned on: Days. Weeks. Months. I suppose years, even.

A wheelchair is not all bad, though. Who would ever suspect a bank robber in a wheelchair? That wheelchair makes a perfect cover for a perfect crime. Well, almost perfect. There was one detail I didn’t plan on, but I suppose perfection is difficult to attain on a one-time shot. And I do get to notice things like the forsythia along the garden wall. It will be interesting to see what blooms next, and where. I haven’t had time to notice details like that before. There was never enough time until now.

Robbing a bank, it seems to me, is something like planting forsythia, although I have had very little to do with one and nothing whatever with the other. I mean, I have never planted forsythia and I have only planned one bank robbery. But there must be a similarity in the planning and the patience and the coming to bloom of all the planning and waiting and watching. One thing though, forsythia is prettier and lasts longer. It’s amazing how short the actual time span of a bank robbery actually is. Something like two minutes. That’s all. Just two minutes and it is all over. Then two hours to net curtain time.

Perhaps I had better explain. I had planned for several months to rob the Colburne Bank. The planning didn’t begin with a whim. I needed cash, a
lot
of cash. After a broken marriage, a lost job, a new wife, a house to finance, I would have needed cash even if I had not lost my job, but losing a job that paid eighty thousand a year plus a car and mileage expenses was a blow. Coming on top of a court order to pay Celeste twenty grand a year, well, that was a second blow that I couldn’t take.

Oh they were nice about it. Carl Thompson, the sales manager, called me in several times to sympathize that I had drawn a bummer with the divorce proceedings, but he always ended the conversation with, “Fred, you can’t let that keep you from working. Your sales record is just not good enough.”

Not good enough! It was bloody awful! I couldn’t sell anything. I couldn’t concentrate. Even old friends and customers could tell I was not the same old Fred who had been top salesman in the district. But why dwell on that. It’s past and done. I took a quick way to make some easy money, even though the easy way was not really easy or the way I had planned.

I knew Colburne a bit but I thought it would be smart to know it a lot better so I spent a good deal of time there last September and October. I discovered quite a few things about villages that don’t have local police forces. The regional cops patrol on a regular basis, which makes the citizens happy and encourages people like bank robbers to make plans. I don’t know why more people don’t try it. When you discover that the cops drive through town every morning at 10:45 and have a coffee at the Star Cafe, then again at 2:30 for another coffee break, that gives you a lot of time for a hit and run. If you add to that the fact that the manager of the only bank and his secretary leave for lunch every day exactly at noon and return exactly one hour later, then you can be even more precise in your plans. By the way, he went home for lunch and she went to the school to pick up her little boy. See? I was thorough, just like the guy who planted the forsythia exactly three-quarters of the way down the garden wall.

One teller always went to lunch at 11:30 and the other an hour later when the first one came back. The assistant manager stayed until one 1:00 when he and the other clerk left for their lunch. I don’t know where they went because I planned to be long gone before they ever returned to work.

I also learned that most of the people in Colburne work at the chemical plant in Whitson, 20 miles west. From selling office machines to Oakridge Chemicals, I knew their pay day was every second Thursday. Judging by the population of Colburne and what I knew of the rates of pay at Oakridge Chemicals, there had to be a half-million dollars in pay cheques to be cashed every second Thursday and that was enough money for what I had in mind. Well, I suppose there never is really enough, but half a million would do for starters, and I can take a long time starting.

I checked the roads in and out of Colburne, too. You can bet I did that thoroughly. The road system in that part of West Alford County is a grid with east-west roads, paved and straight, running parallel every two miles and joining the two major north-south highways, one 12 miles east and the other 6 miles west of the village. In the immediate grid around Colburne, the north-south roads are mostly dirt, narrow and apt to be blocked at unexpected moments by farm tractors dragging carts loaded with whatever farmers load carts with. I had my escape route planned to get me well to the east before any police arrived at Colburne from Whitson.

The last Thursday in October was a bright sunny day. I went to Colburne all prepared. I had a coffee at the Star Cafe after the cops left and walked out at exactly twelve o’clock. When the bank manager pulled out from the curb, I parked my car in his slot and left the motor running. I patted the air-powered pellet pistol in my coat pocket and grinned into the mirror at the oversized moustache I would shave off later. Through the mirror I did a quick sweep of the street behind me, slipped on my sunglasses and walked toward the bank’s front door. So far, so good.

Just as I reached the door another customer joined me. He was a small man, a little nervous looking. “Too bad, buddy,” I thought, “you’re going to be a lot more nervous in a couple of minutes.” Inside, I walked to the desk and pretended to write a deposit slip. Actually it was to be a note that said, “This is a holdup. Put all your cash in a night deposit bag. Don’t say a word to anybody.”

I had written as far as, “This is a...” when I heard somebody yell. I turned around and couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The nervous little guy who had walked in with me was waving a gun and yelling, “This is a stickup! Don’t nobody move!”

What a sense of timing! That guy was stealing my money! I was so mad I yelled back at him. I don’t know what I yelled; I just yelled. Next thing I knew I woke up in the hospital in Whitson. I had been shot. But to my amazement, they told me the little guy chiseling in on my robbery hadn’t shot me. The assistant manager had been the shooter.

When I yelled, the cops told me, the robber had turned to look at me and the assistant manager had grabbed the gun from his desk drawer and fired twice. The first bullet hit me in the spine after it went through whatever is in front of the spine, and two hours later the doctors knew it was time to buy a wheelchair.

The second bullet hit the robber, the other robber. They told me later that he died, but not right away, and before he died he had fired at the assistant manager and hit him right in the head. Now you aren’t going to believe this, but when they did a routine audit on the bank’s books, they found that the assistant manager had taken them for a couple of hundred thousand.

Three bank robbers all at the same time, but I’m the only one who knows about the third one. I’m not telling. I’m suing!

This is almost as good news, bad news bit. I sued the bank for damages and won. No contest. Their employee, while doing something illegal with their money shot at somebody doing something illegal with a gun and hit me, an innocent bystander. The fact that I was cheated out of my own illegal attempt at something illegal with a gun is my own private irony. My bank account, in a different bank, got a boost of more than one million five hundred thousand beautiful green dollars, over and above the legal fees and medical costs.

So I’m a celebrity. Not only that but I’m a rich celebrity. And I don’t have to pay Celeste any of that nice money. Once I lost my job and became a resident of this wheelchair, the judge said I shouldn’t be forced to pay Celeste another cent.

Now I’m rich, “retired early,” I tell people, and I sit here behind the net curtains and admire the forsythia without having to worry about Celeste or Carl Thompson or even the tax man. Early retirees like me, in wheelchairs, have lots of ways to beat the tax man, and like I said, living in a wheelchair is not all bad. Nobody ever suspects a bank robber in a wheelchair.

And I have plenty of time to think about my mother’s old proverbs.

Carrots and Cadillacs

Cornelius Henderson Smith was surprised to discover the price of carrots. In 43 years, he could not remember having noticed the price of these common vegetables before. Who cared about the price of carrots? You ate them when they appeared on your plate, and more than likely somebody bought more when the supply ran out, but the price of them? Cornelius Henderson Smith knew about the prices of stolen cars, particularly those popular models that are easiest to sell once driven away from wherever the unfortunate previous owners had thought
they
were going to drive them, but carrots? Who knew? Who cared?

Cornelius Henderson Smith was not actually in any danger of a reformation from his established position as the city’s fastest, most efficient collector of cars left parked with keys in them. Nor had he any intention of doing major research on the price of carrots or any other vegetables for that matter. Cornelius Henderson Smith simply found himself trapped in the supermarket because of one more in a continuing series of unfortunate events that had dogged him that morning since long before most citizens were even out of bed. Once in the supermarket, he had been maneuvered by circumstances yet to be revealed, to head for the produce department where the mirror at the rear of the display of carrots proved to be best for his immediate needs.

Cornelius Henderson Smith’s name tells you something about his parents. If your last name is Smith and you have an intellectual sense of humor, don’t you want to name your son something more subtle than John or Zachary or Robert, or even Archibald? The sense of humor had partly been passed on to the son, but his humor was usually tinged with sarcasm.

Some hours previous to his finding himself in a supermarket gazing at carrots, in fact at five o’clock on the cold, snowy and altogether miserable February day in question, Mr. Smith awoke in his nice warm bed beside his nice warm wife in his nice warm bungalow on a small farm exactly six miles north of the city limits. He woke at that dreary hour because he had to go to the bathroom. When he pulled open the bedroom door to begin his sleepy journey, he jammed his big toe partly beneath the door, which caused him to swear in order to express his pain and annoyance. His voice woke Rufus, a Great Dane, that woofed and headed for the back door of the bungalow indicating that he would like to have the same relief that his master was seeking. The voices of man and dog together woke Cornelius Henderson Smith’s wife, a very large lady who rejoiced in a very tiny name; she was known as Dee.

“Check the water, love,” Dee called sleepily. “Make sure the pump isn’t frozen.” Cornelius Henderson did not answer, mostly because there was nothing to say. The damned pump had frozen twice in the last couple of weeks, and the thawing process was a frustrating one that he really didn’t want to think about at that moment in the early morning. He paused at the sink as he passed through the kitchen on his way to let Rufus out the back door. After the initial spurt of water from the tap, the trickle decreased to nothing. The pump was undoubtedly frozen. Mr. Smith swore again, though not as loudly.

Muttering curses at pumps and dogs and cold mornings, he pulled on a parka over his pajamas and stuck his bare feet into a pair of boots. Then he remembered the kettle. By this time, Rufus was nagging.

“Shut up, dog. We’re both going out. Just a minute, will yuh!”

Fortunately there was water in the kettle. Dee had prepared the night before and had left the pump-thawing device ready. Cornelius Henderson Smith and Rufus stood on alternate feet and waited a couple of minutes for the thing to boil. Together they headed toward the pump that was located in the crawl space under the house at the rear of the bungalow.

Getting at the pump involved lying down in the snow and sticking the head, arms and upper torso through a small door into the cramped area under the house, which protected the pump from freezing in summer, but did little to perform the same function in winter when protection was needed. Cursing again because he had forgotten to bring something to lie on, Cornelius Henderson Smith dropped onto the snow, squirmed himself into a position where he could pour the hot water onto the pump mechanism, and began to do so. About the same moment, he felt warm liquid trickling down inside his boot. With a roar he raised his head and banged it sharply on a beam located near the frame of the opening under the building.

“Rufus!” The bang on the head hurt worse when he yelled. “You dumb dog! Go pee somewhere else!”

He kicked out with his foot but hit nothing. Just then the hot water treatment succeeded, the pump started to pump and Cornelius Henderson Smith backed gingerly out of the pump house and headed wet-footed, snow covered, cold and shivering back to the house. He gloomily noticed that the combination of north wind and overnight snowfall had drifted the lane over again, all the way to the road. That would mean a couple of hours with the snow blower to get the cars free. Snarling to himself, he once more headed to the bathroom to do what he had awakened wanting to do some time previously.

Even though the house was dark, Cornelius Henderson didn’t bother to turn on the bathroom light. He should have. He sat down on the toilet seat but it wasn’t there. Managing to stop his descent before experiencing a second wet disaster of the morning, he raised himself slightly and reached behind himself to lower the toilet seat. The thing slipped out of his cold fingers and fell of its own accord. Unfortunately he had not moved quite far enough before reaching for the seat and the front edge struck him on two of the most tender parts of his already suffering anatomy.

The pain of this latest accident pitched Cornelius Henderson forward to the bathtub where his shins banged hard against the porcelain with yet another horrible pain. The resulting noise from Mr. Smith’s loud swearing and groaning served to bring the mountain of woman that was Dee to the bathroom door to ask in her high-pitched little voice what was the matter.

His pain was not helped when Dee collapsed in quivering mirth on the floor while he attempted, between spasms of agony and bouts of profanity, to explain to her the evils of trying to accomplish anything at five o’clock in the morning when one lived a life of luxury in the country, far from the annoyances of city discomforts like unfrozen water pipes and no pumps and dogs that used neighbors’ lawns instead of their masters’ boots, driveways drifted over with snow and why in Hell don’t we live in Florida or the Bahamas or some other civilized place where we don’t have to put up with.... He stopped because he realized the futility of it all. They enjoyed their country home where he could escape from the pressures of city life and police and the need to find buyers for stolen cars. The barn made a good paint shop for cars that needed some quick camouflage, and the lack of watchful neighborhood eyes allowed some freedom of action when potential buyers came around.

After a few luxurious minutes under a warm shower, during which he was surprised that nothing untoward happened, Cornelius Henderson Smith decided to eat some breakfast before he tackled the snow-filled lane. Dee had a very conventional job in a department store and would need to get her car out so she could get to work. Eating breakfast was also a calm enough affair. Preparing breakfast was not. He spilled hot bacon fat on the front of his slacks and the heat affected the skin beneath. It also affected his vocal chords that again revealed his limited vocabulary of anguished expression and once more set Dee off into a paroxysm of laughter.

When he was relatively calm again, Cornelius Henderson Smith cleared the driving portion of the lane. Again, no problem. He was very careful. The little tractor with the snow blower attachment, which Dee had proudly bought with her department store employee discount worked just fine. Pity one couldn’t say the same for Dee’s car. The battery was dead. Boosting the battery with cables from his own car was another chore that went without a hitch. Perhaps the day was looking up.

“I’ll get you another battery today,” he promised Dee as she drove away.

He watched her car move through the still falling and blowing snow. Mr. Smith noticed that the list to the driver’s side was becoming more pronounced. “No wonder, he thought. “The springs must be shot just hauling her around. I’ll get her another car.” For the first time that day, Cornelius Henderson Smith smiled. “A truck might be an even better idea,” he thought.

Shortly afterward, following another cup of coffee, which he managed to drink without spilling, Cornelius Henderson got into his own car, a heavy Chrysler sedan, which had once been a different color and had legally belonged to a lawyer. It now legally belonged to the insurance company that had replaced it after the lawyer reported it stolen from the parking lot where he had left it with the keys dangling from the ignition. Cornelius Henderson Smith had a rule:
never steal a car that does not have the keys in the ignition
. That would be too much work and too much trouble. He had a rule about that, too:
never look for either work or trouble
. That rule explained his reactions to the events of the morning so far.

Those events were not completed. Mr. Smith’s journey was a very short one. He gave the engine too much gas as he swung out of the lane onto the road, which was still unplowed by the county road crew and was drifted in just such a way as to cause the sedan to skid and bury itself in the biggest snowdrift for fifty yards. His attempts to extricate the car by lurching it forward and backward revealed how badly the lawyer had treated the vehicle, because on the fourth change of gears, the transmission went “clunk.” Nothing further was possible except to telephone Murphy to come tow him into town.

Murphy sent a tow truck and by ten o’clock Cornelius Henderson Smith was telling the little Irishman, “Keep it. You can get rid of it after you’ve fixed it up and that will square the towing bill.”

Murphy nodded. “If you can find a late model Caddy, I have a sale for one. She won’t need it for a week. She wants a light blue one, but I imagine you can paint whatever color you get.”

“Yeah. OK.”

Cornelius Henderson left Murphy’s Garage with another item on his shopping list that had now expanded from a battery to a replacement car for himself and a Cadillac for Murphy. So far, carrots were not on the list. Mr. Smith took a taxi to a shopping mall where he frequently had been able to find cars with convenient keys. As he parked the taxi that he had picked up in front of the coffee shop next door to Murphy’s, carefully locking the keys inside, he looked around, reasoning that on such a cold morning, he might find a car with the engine left running while somebody got careless and made a quick dash through the snow into the store.

Cornelius Henderson Smith’s expectations were met. They were more than met! By the curb just outside the supermarket at the south end of the shopping mall was a blue Cadillac with the engine running and nobody inside. He looked in all directions as he stepped around to the driver’s side. Nobody. He jumped in and was adjusting the seat, thinking that the owner must have especially long legs, when he heard a yell, several yells. A tall man was running from the front door of the bank next to the supermarket. The man, carrying a brief case, was running and slipping on the snow-covered sidewalk. Cornelius Henderson’s eyes also took in the fact that the running man wore a ski mask and that people on the sidewalk were not only yelling and pointing but also ducking for cover because the man’s other hand held what was obviously a gun.

Even as he was taking in these ominous details, a new rule for stealing cars was entered on the list of rules that had become Cornelius Henderson Smith’s code for success. That new rule with capital letters was
Never Get In The Way Of A Bank Robber While He Is Robbing A Bank
. He resolved that he would unfailingly keep that rule from that point on.

Simultaneously with the formation of the new rule for successful car theft, the first act of complying with that new rule was to abandon the Cadillac immediately. The man was running to the front of the car. Smith exited and ran to the back, leaving the open driver’s door as a shield. He scrabbled on two feet and one hand for the protection of the van that had just parked behind the Cadillac. Getting around the van, Cornelius Henderson ran into the supermarket.
That’s
how he happened to find the carrots in the produce department.

Cornelius Henderson Smith stood in front of the shelf heaped with carrots, breathing heavily from exertion and fright. He kept his head down as though examining the orange things and actually did notice the price. Most of the time he looked up under his eyebrows into the glass at the back of the display shelf that made a mirror and gave him a view of the entrance to the store. The view was in the process of being distorted by the approach of several blue-jacketed policemen who all seemed to want to buy carrots. Immediately he forgot what he had learned about the price of those vegetables. What, or who, the policemen really wanted was Cornelius Henderson Smith himself, although they did not realize that until a very large woman pointed toward Mr. Smith and said something in a high-pitched voice, something so awful that Cornelius Henderson could not believe what he was hearing.

“There’s the man, officer. I saw him. He was the getaway driver.”

Dee.

She worked in that mall. She had made the morning trip from the department store to the bank. Her husband was such a law-abiding car thief that she never expected to find him involved in a bank robbery and had not recognized him. How could he explain to the police that all he was doing was stealing the bank robber’s Cadillac? His only chance was to turn around and hope that Dee would be able to think quickly enough to explain to the police that she had made a mistake.

Cornelius Henderson Smith turned around, a smile on his face, and looked directly at his wife. She didn’t deny him. She didn’t say anything more incriminating. She didn’t say anything at all. Dee just quietly fainted in a great heap of surprise.

Her new battery, their new cars and Murphy’s Cadillac will have to wait a couple of years.