“Yes, Hunny. Blabbety-blabbety-blabbety.”
He thought this over and then winced. “I may have to go on the wagon. I’ve done it before.”
“That would help a lot.”
“For Mom. Just until she is safely back.”
“Hunny, it would do you good,” Art said. “You could slim down, too, while you’re at it.” Art retrieved two slices of heavily browned Wonder Bread from the pop-up toaster and set them on a section of paper towel next to a jar of grape jelly.
“I was off the sauce for three days when Larry Tralongo
122 Richard Stevenson
died,” Hunny said. “Larry was our first friend to die of AIDS.
I thought everything was going to be different from then on, and I might as well get used to it. But I never did get used to it, even though there were many more opportunities — too many opportunities — to do so. I came home after Larry’s funeral that day and got lit. However, Donald, I’m just a social drinker, I want you to know. I never missed a day of work on account of the booze. Oh, Artie, what time is it? Lord, I cannot
believe
that I’m not out at the warehouse right this minute punching in my time card and planning out my day of trying to grope a few of the stock boys.”
“Why don’t you just pretend,” Art said, “that this is a workday and you’re not going to have your first cocktail until after work.
Later on you can be as social as you please. Just as long as you don’t have to go on TV again.”
Hunny chuckled. “Did I really call the other Marylou Whitney Mary Cheney, the war criminal’s daughter?”
“You did. We were all so proud of you. Marylou and Antoine were rolling around on the floor, they were laughing so hard. The twins thought it was a riot, too, even if they weren’t sure who Mary Cheney was. Tyler asked if she was part of that old folk-song group.”
“Bill O’Malley must have swallowed his tongue.”
“He thinks he’s the unperturbed type, but you could tell that your remark got to him.”
“Mom would have loved it. She’d have been falling out of her wheelchair.”
“It’s good that you insisted on showing her picture. O’Malley was just going to blow her off. He just wanted to distort everything and make you look bad. And then showing Mason Doebler and saying you molested him. What a lot of BS that was.”
Hunny set down his coffee mug. “Was Mason Doebler on, too? I don’t remember that.”
“The twins taped it.” Art said to me, “The boys know how to work the vCR.”
CoCkeyed
123
“Oh. Should I watch it?” Hunny asked.
“No. Don’t.”
“What did Mason have to say? That he crashed his car while I was sucking his dick? He likes to go around making a big deal of that dumb incident.”
“He said you molested him when he was an altar boy. He’s suing you for three hundred seventy-five million dollars.”
Hunny resumed eating his breakfast. “Okay, as of this minute Mason Doebler is off…my…list. He goes into the Dave DeCarlo bin.”
“Mason and several others. You had calls earlier this morning from people we know who said not very nice things about you.
Not our friends, but people we know. People who saw you on Bill O’Malley. Or on Channel 13 the other night. Or on
The Today
Show
.”
“Don’t tell me who. Not yet. Well, at least I got Mom’s picture on TV. I can’t believe that nobody has called with news of her.
Why hasn’t anybody spotted her somewhere? Unless she has had plastic surgery. But it’s been too soon for that. And Medicare wouldn’t cover a makeover. It’s cosmetic.”
I said, “Are you sure, Hunny, that there is no one in your family or in your mom’s circle of friends who might have picked her up and given her a ride somewhere? Someone Nelson or the police haven’t contacted yet.”
“I gave them a list. I wracked my brain.”
“Somebody phoned your mom fifteen minutes before she left the nursing home. Is there anybody you can think of who might feel free to phone her at seven forty-five in the morning? That’s pretty early to call most people.”
“I know. Though since Mom eschewed the bottle, she’s been one to rise and shine with the rosy-fingered dawn. So it could have been anybody who knows her.”
“Right. So perhaps there is someone she knows that you’re not thinking of. A church friend or a work friend maybe.”
124 Richard Stevenson
Hunny pressed the sides of his head hard in an apparent attempt to stimulate thought.
After a moment, he said, “Arthur, I need a drink. One.”
“No. That would be unwise, dear one.”
“Well…Godfrey Daniels! Am I going to have to start sneaking down to the coal bin?”
The phone rang and Hunny picked it up. “Yeah? Who be you?” He listened and said, “Well, you’re not much of a role model either, bothering people at nine in the morning and calling them…crappy names and crap like that. Are you speaking for all the gay people in America? I very much doubt that, you evil queen!”
He hung up and said, “Verizon must be open by now. Artie, we really do need to get an unlisted number. Today.”
I said, “You should probably keep this number as long as people need to reach you about your mother. This is not the time to be going incommunicado, even if you have to put up with some cranks.”
Hunny shoved his plate aside and reached for his Marlboros.
In his desolation, he looked so unlike the euphoric Hunny that Timmy and I had seen on Channel 13 five days before that I wondered if he might ever recover from what had turned out to be a stroke of stupendously bad luck for him, winning a billion dollars.
The phone rang again, and this time it was not another gay person calling up to criticize Hunny for embarrassing the homosexuals of America. This call was from Nelson, who was now over at Golden Gardens. He said Mrs. Kerisiotis had asked him again who the Brienings were. They had phoned the nursing home and identified themselves as “business associates” of Rita Van Horn, and they said they might drop by late Wednesday with some information about her that the management of Golden Gardens would find interesting. They told Mrs. Kerisiotis to be sure to mention their call to Nelson and Hunny.
As I drove out to Cobleskill, low clouds moved in and soon I turned on the wipers to deal with a light drizzle. Swoosh, two, three — swoosh, two, three. Nissan, the waltz king. Did windshield washers Argentine tango? The temperature was up in the eighties, even with the rain. So if somehow Rita Van Horn was stuck out of doors she would not likely suffer too much from exposure to the elements, provided she was found soon.
Except, it seemed more and more likely that Hunny’s mom had not just wandered off but had been picked up by someone, perhaps whoever had phoned her fifteen minutes before she tottered out the front door at Golden Gardens. It didn’t make sense that whoever drove Mrs. Van Horn away had anything to do with the Brienings. Their investment was in keeping her in a spot where social pressure and the threat of humiliation would underpin their extortion scam. But their recent implicitly threatening phone call to Golden Gardens suggested that they might hold to their Wednesday deadline, whether or not Mrs. Van Horn was back at the home, and I needed to talk to them and buy time if at all possible.
Cobleskill looked fresh in the benign light rain, although Crafts-a-Palooza, lightly patronized on a Monday morning and smelling of what I took to be New York Thruway-restroom-scented candles, gave off a less welcoming vibe.
“You know what this is?” Clyde said, pointing a metal object at me. “It’s a glue gun, and believe me, I know how to use it.” He yelled at a curtained-off area in the back of the store, “Arletta!
Arletta, that goon working for Hunny Van Horn is back.”
She came through the curtains wielding her own weapon, a Mike Huckabee-brand crown of thorns. The wreath was still in its plastic wrapper, so if she came at me with it I would not likely be injured.
“So,” Arletta said, “did you bring Clyde and I a big fat check
126 Richard Stevenson
from Rita’s drunken son?”
“Drunken?”
“Oh, don’t think we didn’t see him on Bill O’Malley last night making an ass of himself and of every one of his sorry ilk.”
“Then you must know that Rita Van Horn is still missing.
Hunny is so upset he can’t deal with anything else right now. I’m sure you understand that. Put yourself in his place.”
Clyde said, “Mr. O’Malley thinks this missing-Rita shenanigan is all a hoax. He has proof, he said.”
“Did he? I just heard a lot of wild speculation based on nothing at all.”
“It’s all about some reality TV show,” Arletta said. “I would no sooner believe anything any of the Van Horns told me than I would believe Barack Obama.”
I said, “Hunny turned down the offer of a show on All-Too-Real TV. His entire life has turned into a reality TV show, and he doesn’t like it.”
This caught Clyde up short. “Why would he say no to that?
Don’t those people on those shows get paid a lot?”
“Since we’re so important in Hunny’s life right now,” Arletta said, “and Rita’s, also, maybe Clyde and I could be on the show, too. Of course, then it would have to come out that Rita is an embezzler. No, I can see why they would try to exclude us.
Anyway, we’ll have plenty of money when Hunny splits his lottery winnings with us. Which will be just a couple of days from now, won’t it? What’s your name again?”
“Don Strachey.”
Clyde said, “But, Arletta, after we get the half a billion from Hunny, then we wouldn’t have to mention the embezzlement on the TV show. That stuff would be all squared away. We could just be there as Rita’s former employers. And as well-wishers.”
She screwed up her face. “That’s true.”
I said, “Let me run this by Hunny and get back to you CoCkeyed
127
later in the week. There is also the possibility of Oh Look! TV
doing a biopic of Hunny. His winning the lottery, plus dramatic episodes from the first Gulf War and probably some stuff about vampires.”
Clyde and Arletta perked up even more. Maybe they thought they could play the vampires.
Arletta said, “Just make sure Hunny pays us the half a billion by Wednesday. We need to put a deposit on space at Crossgates by the end of the week, and we’ll need time for Hunny’s check to clear.”
“I’ll see what I can do. You understand, of course, that at this point Hunny’s first priority has to be getting his mother back in one piece. If you think about it, that will be in your best interests, also. If anything happened to Rita — if she were to suffer a fatal stroke or heart attack, say, or become a victim of foul play — I guess both of you would in that case have to accept the fact that you are royally fucked.”
“Watch your language in the presence of my wife.”
“Sorry.”
“Well, what are the police doing, anyways?” Arletta asked.
“Are they investigating the hoax theory? Bill O’Malley is a man who knows what he’s talking about.”
“I know that the police are following every lead they can. The East Greenbush sheriff is coordinating with the Albany Police Department. The State Police are on the case, and there’s talk of bringing in the FBI.”
“The Van Horns are getting the celebrity treatment,” Arletta said, and sneered.
Clyde looked puzzled. “Why shouldn’t they?”
“Just because he won the Instant Warren? He’s a pervert and she’s a thief. This is what we’ve come to!”
Now Clyde grasped what his wife was getting at. “More of the same,” he said. “Just more of the same.”
“Obama’s America.”
128 Richard Stevenson
I said, “The threatening letter you sent to Mrs. Van Horn was found in her room. So we know she received it. Probably on Saturday, the day before she walked out of Golden Gardens and has not been seen since. It does seem possible that your ultimatum
— Hunny pays you half a billion or Rita faces exposure and humiliation — might have triggered some desperate act by Mrs.
Van Horn. If so, are you prepared to accept moral responsibility for that?”
“Desperate act, like what?” Arletta asked.
“We can only guess. I suppose she might try to kill herself. Or has already done it.”
“Oh!” they both cried.
“I’m not saying this just to frighten you, but there is also the possibility that she might try to get rid of the two of you. She is known to be distraught, and it was probably your letter that pushed her over the edge. What is your security situation here and at your home?”
Arletta was aghast. “Do you mean shoot us or something?”
“There’s a shotgun missing from the office of Mrs. Kerisiotis, the administrator at Golden Gardens. There is no evidence that Mrs. Van Horn took it. In fact, she has no history of violence.
All I’m saying is, the two of you might want to kind of lay low for the time being. And don’t do anything more to provoke Rita Van Horn or her son.”
Clyde had gone pale below his A-1 hairdo, but now Arletta was looking suspicious. “It sounds to me, buster, as if you are threatening Clyde and I. Trying to spook us and make us back off. Well, if you are, you just might want to try some other tact.
We are both stubborn, and when we are in the right we stand our ground. We have our principles, and they matter to us more than life itself.”
It was all I could do to keep from wrenching Clyde’s glue gun out of his hand and gluing his wife’s mouth shut. But I knew that that wouldn’t help in the long run. I said, “I’ll report back to Hunny what your current position is — that you all will be CoCkeyed
129
in touch again later in the week to try to work something out.
Meanwhile, you’ll be giving Hunny some breathing room to deal with his missing mom, who we all hope hasn’t done violence to herself or is perhaps somewhere planning to bring grievous harm to others.”
Clyde still appeared shaky, but Arletta’s look hardened even more. She said, “Behind this curtain is a lockbox containing Rita Van Horn’s confession of a major felony. It is a confession that will put that dirty old embezzler behind bars where she belongs unless Hunny Van Horn makes good on his mother’s theft by noon on Wednesday. I said not Thursday, but
Wednesday
. Ya got that?”