Never Use a Chicken and Other Stories (9 page)

“Father,” Trish told him, “you really are becoming forgetful. Chuck has been to mass with me quite often for the past five years. We’ve come to the point where we’ve decided to marry, and the passport is for our honeymoon in Hawaii.”

Who could resist that smile? The old priest decided he must be more forgetful than he had thought and signed the passport guaranteeing he had known Charles Henry Steadman for five years, and the back of the photo as well. The rest was easy.

When John asked her what she planned to do about the apartment, Trish replied that one of the new nurses at the hospital had agreed to buy the furniture and take over the lease.

“I’m glad you brought that up. I hope you don’t mind making yourself scarce for a couple of hours tomorrow evening. She’s coming to look at the place and I wouldn’t want her to know I had somebody living here.”

He spent the time in a bar near the apartment, doing some serious thinking. There were some puzzling elements here that didn’t quite match up yet in his mind. When he returned to the apartment, he was greeted with a big hug and that stunning smile. She was obviously very happy.

“Everything is taken care of, darling. Tomorrow I’ll give my notice at the hospital and visit the travel agency. We can leave in about two weeks. We’ll plan a shopping trip on my first day off and get the right clothes for both of us for fun in the sun, as the TV commercials say.”

And that was exactly what happened. On the day they were to leave, they arrived by taxi at the airport and after obtaining boarding passes and passing through security, they headed for customs. They were to stop in Miami to change airlines and every passenger heading for the USA had to clear customs before boarding. But after Trish passed through customs, events began to change for him.

“The customs officer looked at his passport, compared it to a list on his desk, looked up and politely asked, “Mr. Steadman, would you mind stepping this way for a moment?” In the small room where he was taken, two other officers asked him to sit down while they made some checks involving a computer. After a short wait, the officer in charge came over to him with an obvious problem.

“Are you Charles Henry Steadman of this address? He showed him the printout from the computer.

“Yes. Isn’t that what my passport says?” He was not feeling good about the developing situation. The officer ignored the question. “And is this your Social Insurance Number?” He read off the nine digits from the computer sheet in his hand.

“Same answer. It’s on my passport.”

“Then it is my duty to hold you for the police and to advise you that you are wanted in my country for trafficking in illegal drugs, escaping custody and in this country, for illegal entry. Please hold out your hands for handcuffs.”

Thus it was that when the jet took off from Toronto for Miami, there was an empty seat and a stunning red head who was baffled by the absence of the man who was supposed to have accompanied her. Her questions of the cabin crew as to his whereabouts brought no satisfactory answers. At any rate, she had a wonderful vacation on the Turks and Caicos Islands and three weeks later returned to her apartment suitably tanned, refreshed and ready to go back to work. At the apartment, the first thing she did after unpacking was to go through the mail. Most of the envelopes were routine bills, including a whopping credit card bill which made her wince. One of the envelopes was hand-addressed in a feminine writing she failed to recognize. There was no return address. Inside, the handwriting was different. There were several pages.

“Dear Trish,” she read. “Here I am back in prison, but I was not totally surprised at what happened, just the manner of how it occurred. I had planned to leave your pleasant company when we arrived in Miami anyhow. The parting just happened sooner and definitely not the way I had expected.

“Charles Henry Steadman turned out to have ‘died suddenly at home’ all right, but the obituary didn’t say it was from a gunshot to the back of the head, a gang killing. That was in a separate story on another page. He was wanted in the USA for drug trafficking and a bunch of other things. I decided it was better to stay here in Canada as John Andrews rather than be extradited to the United States for drug charges and try to convince them I was dead.

“I’m sending this letter to the apartment because I knew you’d be back. You really ought to have made more of a convincing effort to prove that you sold everything to another nurse. You left entirely too many things behind for someone who didn’t plan to return in a short time. Was the evening you sent me away for a couple of hours the time you arranged for the insurance policy? I guess I forgot to mention the visit I had one day while you were at work from the insurance salesman and the company nurse who gave me a physical. Insurance companies usually do that when they want to sell a policy on a person’s life valued at a million dollars. You would have been a rich woman had you collected! You might want to remember that next time. What did you intend to do with me in the Caribbean, anyway? Were you going to drown me, shoot me or inject me with poison and throw my body into the ocean?

“By the way, Trish dear, I didn’t tell you a lie that day in the hospital when I said that my problem was ‘S-S-M: schooling, skills and money, lack of.’ I had plenty of schooling, an MA in Philosophy to be exact, but that really doesn’t give a person skills for making a living, so what I was lacking was money, for a while. Robbing banks proved quite profitable until I made a stupid mistake. My mother looks after my investments made during more profitable bank visits, under my real name and my real social insurance number. John Andrews is just my working name, you might say. She smuggled this letter out after a recent visit. She also addressed the envelope.

“Maybe next time you’ll have better luck. I regret that we didn’t ever, what shall I say, ‘connect,’ but you may be pleased to know that I am now completely physically healed. I’ll have to be here for an extra year, but the month with you was almost worth it. I didn’t give you away to the cops, but if I were you, I would certainly be much more careful in the future.

“Oh yes. Do you remember the day you told me you had talked with my legal aid lawyer and he told you about my background? ‘He’ was a ‘she’ and she didn’t work for legal aid. My mother paid.

“So long. It was good to know you.

“John, A.K.A. Chuck.”

Secret Smiles

“It is a wise father that

knows his own child
”

Shakespeare
,
The Merchant of Venice

When Tom and Tim Lodge married Laurie and Dorie Hodge, there was a big celebration. After all, identical twin sisters and identical twin brothers do not have a double wedding every Saturday afternoon.

Two years later the couples were still inseparable, living in side-by-side apartments, still firm friends. Laurie was married to Tim and Dorie was Tom’s wife. Both wives were graduates in commercial art, worked at desks side by side in the same advertising agency. Tom and Tim, both holding degrees in commerce, were successful salesmen for the same manufacturer, and drove to work together every morning. The wives also drove together. They shared the same friends, the same interests in bowling, skiing, movies and vacation trips, attended the same parties and enjoyed the same music without becoming bored with each other or seeming to want to make any lifestyle changes. Their friends believed they had the twins separated and catalogued in their minds.

“Laurie’s eyes arch higher than Dorie’s,” a wife would say to a husband after an evening in their company.

“And Tom is a bit more outgoing and his hair line is a bit higher than Tim’s,” the husband would reply.

They were fooling themselves. Each twin discovered early that it was easier to reply as though he or she was the correct one when wrongly addressed and if the mistake were later discovered, respond, “Oh you must have been talking to my sister,” or “my brother,” as the case might have been.

One early May evening when the brothers came home from work and entered their apartments, after exchanging the customary hello kiss of welcome from a customary smiling wife, Tim sat down to read the paper and wait for dinner.

“That’s odd,” she thought. “Why isn’t he sitting in his usual chair? Oh well, a person is entitled to make changes.” From the kitchen she called, “Honey, will you come and make the salad?”

“Sure,” and he did, but for some reason he was forgetful and kept looking in the wrong cupboards and using the wrong utensils. She wondered, but conversation engaged her thoughts and she forgot about it. After dinner, the dishes washing themselves in the automatic dishwasher, they busied themselves with their usual casual “at home” occupations. Tim read the rest of the paper and watched some TV. She talked with a couple of friends on the phone and worked at some fancy work she was making for a cousin’s birthday. About nine o’clock, Tim got up, stretched and turned off the television.

“I think I’ll turn in early,” he said. “I’m tired and tomorrow is going to be a heavy day. You coming?”

As they got ready for bed, her mind again registered small things that were puzzling. He brushed his teeth before he washed his face, he put his shirt on the back of the chair instead of in the laundry basket, and there were other small things that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. He was first in bed while she was still in the bathroom.

When she started to slip her nightgown over her head he protested, “You won’t need that.”

“Oh really? You feel that way, do you?”

“Yup. It will only have to come right off.”

“I thought you enjoyed taking it off.”

In bed, she turned to him for a kiss and a cuddle. Instead, his hands began to move over her body.

“Whoa!” she thought. “That’s not the way we begin love-making.” Then her mind remembered and everything clicked. She literally jumped out of bed and picked up the phone on her night table, dialing quickly while holding up a hand to silence him as he began to protest.

“Dorie,” she said when her sister answered, “are you in bed?”

“Just getting ready.”

“Well send my husband home. I’ve got Tim over here. Those creepy rotten so and so’s have tried a switch on us.”

She slammed the receiver down and turned to the man in the bed. “It was the blue undershorts that did it.” She picked up the offending undershorts and flung them at him. “Tom always wears white ones.”

There was more as she jerked on her nightie and marched into the bathroom and firmly shut the door, and more after Tom sheepishly appeared in the apartment, but we won’t go into that. Next morning, as they stopped at a traffic light on the drive to work, Tom, who was driving, turned to his twin.

“That was definitely a bad idea.”

“You got that right.”

The light changed and the car moved forward. There was no more conversation as Tom concentrated on his driving and Tim thought his own thoughts. Things were still noticeably frigid when the brothers returned to their apartments that evening. In both places there was no attempt at conversation, no interchange of ideas, not even very much eye contact. About eleven o’clock, Laurie and Dorie, each on their own initiatives, turned off the TV and headed for bed, Tom and Tim silently following. Each wife changed into her nightie, each husband into his pajamas, and each turned back to back, eventually going to sleep without any good nights.

Next morning, Tom was somewhat surprised that Laurie got up first and began to dress in the same outfit she had worn the day before. That’s odd, he thought. I haven’t noticed her do that before. He was about to comment, but thought better of it. When the bedside phone rang, she snatched up the receiver.

“Okay,” she said to the caller. “Unlock the door and I’ll be right there.” She turned to Tom, still in bed. “That was Laurie. I’m going home to have breakfast and to change my clothes. She’ll be right here.”

“But...but...
you’re
Laurie.”

“Nope. I’m Dorie. See you.”

Less than an hour later, Tim, doing the driving, was stopped at the same traffic light. “Things still frosty at your place this morning?”

Tom nodded and as the car moved forward, sighed and said, “Worse. It was so cold I almost had to cut ice in order to drink my coffee.”

“Me too. Do you think we’ll ever know for sure?”

“Hard to say.” He held his head in his hands. “It was definitely a bad idea.”

Relationships did improve, and quite quickly. Exactly [[twelve]] months, four days and six hours later, on a snowy February morning, Laurie and Dorie lay in side-by-side birthing rooms at the city maternity hospital. Their husbands spoke the soothing words they had learned at pre-natal classes and both were appropriately snarled at by their panting and perspiring wives. The obstetricians and nurses gave encouragement and in due time, the babies were born. Tom and Laurie named their six-pound one-ounce daughter Elizabeth Jane. Tim and Dorie named their six-pound one-ounce daughter Jane Elizabeth. They gave their six-pound two-ounce son the name James Arthur. Tom and Laurie named theirs Arthur James. Nobody commented on the fact that Elizabeth and James were white and that Jane and Arthur were black.

After all, the fathers were identical white twins and the mothers identical black twins. They had genetically perfectly balanced families.

Later, toward evening, as the husbands sat with their wives, now lying side by side in the hospital room they shared, the pink and blue bassinets beside the beds, Tom and Tim cooed and cuddled their new babies as new fathers do. From time to time the wives noticed their husbands giving each other quizzical and furtive glances. Tim and Tom remembered the attempted switches. Could the wives have done the same and the husbands not noticed?

The wives exchanged secret smiles.