Crazy Little Thing (12 page)

Chocolate Jesus

The
Christians turned out to be nice people. A tad on the boring side perhaps, but
nice all the same. They didn’t pillage or twerk Claire. In fact, they delivered
her right to the door of the house where she was supposed to live with Ollie
for the next three months. They even gave her one of the goody bags they were
going to pass out at their convention.

Claire
waved goodbye as their van pulled away. She turned and eyed the house warily.
It didn’t look promising.

She
pinched her nostrils together just in case it smelled as gross as it looked and
crossed to the middle of the front yard so she could see the house straight on
and get the full effect. It was lopsided. If it was a hanging picture, she’d
move it up an inch on the left and then it’d be straight.

The
windows were dirty and cloudy. The paint was peeling. The porch boards were
warped and broken. The house reminded Claire of an aging clown whose make-up
had been smeared. Not an evil clown like the Joker, but one of those crying
clowns that you just knew were alcoholics when out of their make-up.

Claire
sat on the porch steps and closed her eyes. She made herself feel better by
visualizing what the house had looked like in its prime. Then she had an idea.
Maybe they could restore the house to its former glory. What else did they have
to do for the next three months? Claire loved those old 1980s movie montages
where people did things like clean up houses in  thirty seconds or less. She
imagined herself and Ollie doing an
Animal House
cleanup on this house.
Maybe they could even buy the house from the professor who was on sabbatical.
And then she and Ollie would live happily ever after.

Claire
opened her eyes with a start. What had she been thinking?! She was here to
divorce Ollie, not have happily ever after with her!

To
take her mind off Ollie, Claire opened the goody bag the Christians had given
her and looked inside. There was a pocket-sized New Testament with the words of
Jesus printed in red. There was a cartoon pamphlet entitled, “Jesus is coming
again.” That made Claire think sexual thoughts and then she thought she was
probably going to hell for thinking sexual thoughts about Jesus. But now that
she was already going to hell for those thoughts, she allowed herself to
acknowledge that she had always had a thing for Jesus. He was a little on the
feminine side. Long hair, nice complexion, big sorrowful eyes. He resembled her
first crush, Roseanna Funghini, in the eleventh grade. Roseanna was Italian and
Jesus was some kind of Middle Eastern but their skin tones matched and they both
had facial hair.

She
pulled out the next item. Score! It was chocolate. A milk chocolate figurine of
Jesus on the cross. She hurriedly unwrapped it and bit off Jesus’s feet. She
immediately felt better. She nibbled at his ears and then nipped off his hands.
This was how she always ate the chocolate bunnies at Easter. First the
extremities, saving the body for last.

She
heard a car door slam and looked up to see Ollie sprinting across the road
toward her.

“Hi,
Ollie!” Claire said brightly. Chocolate had that effect on her.

Ollie
tripped up the broken sidewalk and stood panting in front of her. “You’re
okay?  Those Stepford people didn’t do anything to you?”

Claire
shook her head and said, “Want some Jesus?”

“Oh
my God, they brainwashed you,” Ollie uttered. “They turned you into a
Christian.”

Claire
laughed and held out the chocolate. “I meant my chocolate. I saved his torso
for you. There’s almonds in it.”

“No,
thanks,” Ollie said. She watched Claire nibble at the candy for a moment,
wondering if she really did save the middle of Jesus for her. “I thought you
were allergic to nuts.”

“I’m
not eating his nuts,” Claire quipped. “That would be sacrilegious.”

Ollie
laughed. Very few people in this world could make Ollie laugh like Claire did.
The old Claire anyway. This new Scarlet-improved-uptight-and-prissy Claire was
a stranger to her.

“So…I
see you found the place with no trouble,” Ollie said for lack of anything
better to say.

Claire
nodded. “Yup. I remembered the address.” She tapped her temple. “I never forget
numbers, remember? I can recite every telephone number that I’ve ever dialed.”

“Even
mine?” Ollie said, before she could stop herself.

“Even
yours.” They looked at each other.

“Been
inside yet?” Ollie said, breaking the spell.

“I
don’t have a key.”

Ollie
walked over to the front door, turned the knob and the door swung open with an
ominous creak.

Hawkeyes and
Hedgehogs

Ollie tied Oscar to the porch railing by his leash.
“Stay there, Oscar, until I check things out.”

G-Ray and a wide-awake EZ joined Ollie and Claire on
the front porch. The group peered through the doorway into the dark bowels of
the house.

“What do we really know about this house?” Claire
asked in a shaky voice. “This could be the Amityville Horror house for all we
know.”

“Or it could be like one of those Scooby-Doo
houses,” G-Ray added.

They looked at G-Ray with puzzled expressions. He
explained further, “You know, in the cartoon there were always these haunted
mansions and bleep. The meddling kids were always solving ghostly mysteries in
houses just like this one.”

“Well, I think it’s the perfect backdrop for our
film,” EZ said.

Ollie tried to put a good spin on the situation. “It
is a nice neighborhood.” That came out sounding more fake than sincere, but she
couldn’t help it. What did they really know about this woman who owned it?
First off, not to be ageist and sexist, but when G-Ray had said he’d gotten a
house-sitting gig from a film professor at the college, she’d envisioned a
hipster thirty-something man with a goatee and long hair. Like a really hip
Robbie Benson, actor turned professor. Not a crazy cat lady living in a haunted
crap hole.

“Who wants to go in first?” Claire asked.

“Not me,” G-Ray said. “I turn all Don Knottsy when I
come face to face with my own mortality.”

EZ shook her head. “I have to stay un-stressed or
I’ll fall asleep. If I fall asleep in there I might get eaten alive by feral
cats.”

Ollie reached one arm through the doorway and groped
around until she found a light switch and flipped it on.

They gasped in unison. It was decidedly worse in the
light. Newspapers and magazines were stacked floor to ceiling. Sofas and chairs
were buried under the papers with only their legs and arms visible. Wallpaper
was peeling. Cobwebs dangled from the overhead light and were draped in the
ceilings corners. And Ollie wasn’t sure, but that looked like a dead cat in the
corner. It was all very
Grey
Gardens.

“Let’s get a hotel room,” Claire said.

“We don’t all have fat bank accounts,” Ollie said
testily.

“And that’s my fault? You’re the one who wanted to
paint crabs for a living,” Claire said back twice as testily.

“We can’t go to a hotel, man. I promised to take
care of the place,” G-Ray said.

“Forget it. I’ll go in,” Claire said much more
bravely than she actually felt. “If I don’t come back tell Scarlet I love her.”

G-Ray saluted her. Ollie watched Claire step inside
the house and weave around the stacks of papers. After a minute, she was gone
from view.

“Maybe we should’ve given her some breadcrumbs so
she could leave a trail,” Ollie said.

“Wouldn’t work,” EZ countered. “The rats would just
eat them.”

“We could poison the breadcrumbs. Then she could
follow the trail of dead rats back to us,” G-Ray said.

Claire screamed from somewhere in back of the house.
It wasn’t a little girlie scream either. This was a full-throated
I-just-saw-Freddy-Krueger type of scream.

Ollie didn’t think twice. She charged into the house
full-steam ahead. “I’m coming, Claire! I’ll save you!” she said as she darted
around the stacks of papers.

*

As it turned out, Claire didn’t need saving. What
she needed was to stop screaming. Ollie was damn near deaf by the time she
arrived in the kitchen to find Claire doing a great impersonation of the
Home
Alone
kid. Ollie struck a threatening pose – hands fisted and raised, her
feet shoulder-width apart just like her dad taught her. Ollie looked around the
kitchen but didn’t see anything except a sink full of dirty dishes and the
grossest room she had ever personally witnessed. True, that was enough to
frighten your average person, but to actually make them scream?

Claire pointed at the thing that had made her go all
bat shit. Ollie saw a tiny furry butt sticking out of a tipped-over box of
Captain Crunch cereal.

“What is that thing?” Ollie asked. “Is it a rat?”

Claire didn’t answer. She was too busy re-filling
her lungs for the next scream.

“Please don’t scream,” Ollie said. “My ears are
ringing.”

Claire pointed one finger at the furry thing and
said, “It’s a rodent.”

G-Ray and EZ appeared in the kitchen. G-Ray’s helmet
cam was on. “Check it, Doods. That must be the elusive hawkeye.”

“What’s a hawkeye?” EZ asked.

“It’s the Iowa state rodent,” G-Ray said. “At least
I think it is.”

The furry critter backed out of the cereal box,
turned around and looked at them. He had a pointed nose and longish whiskers
and was absolutely adorable.

“Awwww,” EZ said. “He’s a cutie patootie.”

“You won’t think he’s so cute when he’s chewing on
your toes in the middle of the night,” Claire said.

“You know what that is?” Ollie said. “It’s a
hedgehog.”

“Hedgehog?” Claire said.

Ollie nodded. “They’re domesticated. They won’t eat
you.”

G-Ray spoke next, “I dunno.  I’ve heard stories
about pet dogs eating babies. They’re supposedly domesticated, too.”

EZ reached out and picked up the hedgehog. She
nestled him to her chest and tickled his whiskers with a finger. “He’s so tiny.
No way he could eat a whole baby.”

“Sssshhhh,” Claire said. “Listen.”

They all cocked their ears. Sure enough, they heard
what sounded like the front door squeak. Shuffling feet. Heavy breathing.
Rhythmic tapping. As if on cue, they all dove under the table and huddled
together.

The noises stopped. After a moment of silence, Ollie
whispered, “Why are we hiding?”

“Because that was the noise of an intruder. Or a
ghost. This house gives me the creeps,” Claire answered. “It’s haunted and or
it could be a hideout for a band of killers.”

A shadow appeared through the kitchen doorway and
loomed over the table. It was the shadow of a tall, skinny maniacal killer with
Einstein-esque hair.

Ollie held her breath.

The shadow moved further into the room. And was
slowly followed by a small, wrinkled woman with gray, unbrushed hair, holding a
white cane.

Ollie could breathe again. Unless this eighty-pound
old lady had an AK-47 hidden in the waistband of her Depends, she didn’t think
she was going to turn out to be a maniacal killer.

All four watched closely as the old woman shuffled
into the kitchen. She tapped her cane lightly in front of her as she moved. It
dawned on Ollie that the woman was blind. They watched the woman move around
the kitchen with her cane. She bent, opened a cupboard, and reached inside.

Claire elbowed Ollie in the ribs and whispered. “Say
something to her.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Introduce us or something.”

“How do I explain us being under the table?”

Claire rolled her eyes. “She’s blind. She doesn’t
know we’re under the table.”

Claire had a point. Ollie cleared her throat to get
the woman’s attention. The last thing she wanted to do was scare the woman into
a heart attack. Or make her bleep her support hose.
“Hello,
ma’am? My name’s Ollie. And this is Claire, G-Ray and EZ. We’re the house
sitters.”

The blind woman didn’t acknowledge Ollie’s
introduction. Ollie spoke louder in case she was hard of hearing. “Hello?
Ma’am? Did you hear me?”

There was no response. The blind woman opened a bag
of dried cat food. She filled a bowl with Kit-n-Kaboodle and set it on the
floor.

“Ma’am?” Ollie said, again.

The old woman tapped out of the kitchen and back the
way she came.

“She didn’t hear me,” Ollie said. “She must be deaf,
too.”

“What should we do?” EZ said.

“My tocks are cramping,” G-Ray said. “Can we get out
from under the table now?”

“Oh, yeah,” EZ said. “Good idea.”

They climbed out from under the table and brushed
off their hands and knees. As soon as the front door squeaked shut, Ollie
looked out the side window and narrated like a sports commentator: “I see the
blind deaf lady. She’s cutting across the yard. She’s walking up the neighbor’s
sidewalk to the house. She’s opening the front door. She’s going inside. She’s
gone.”

EZ snapped her fingers. “Aha! That means one of two
things. She’s either the neighbor lady or she’s a serial cat feeder that roams
the neighborhood pouring kibble into bowls.”

“Your deductive reasoning powers are stupendous,”
G-Ray said.

“Thank you,” EZ replied.

“Blind
and
deaf,” Ollie said. “What’re the
odds? How do we tell her that we’re here now and she can stop feeding the
cats?”

“I’m glad you asked that,” Claire said. “I once played
Helen Keller in
The Miracle Worker
at Eastman Junior High. What we need
to do is learn the deaf alphabet and spell it into her hand.”

They mulled that over. Finally, Ollie said, “Or we
could ignore her and let her continue feeding the cats.”

“I vote for that,” G-Ray said.

“Me, too,” EZ said.

“What cats?” Claire asked.

They looked around. Claire was right, there were no
cats to be seen.

“There is a bowl of kibble and no cats. Either
they’re hiding or they’re… gone,” Claire said.

“By gone do you mean…?” EZ asked.

Claire nodded and whispered ominously, “Over the
Rainbow Bridge.”

“Then who’s eating all the cat food that the blind
lady dishes out every day?” Ollie asked.

“See, man, I knew there was a Scooby Doo mystery in
this house,” G-Ray said.

At that moment, the hedgehog spied the cat food and
leapt from EZ’s arms to the floor. With his nose quivering and his whiskers
twitching, he ran to the kibble bowl and dove in face first.

“Mystery solved,” Claire said.