"You got to agree," Jesse Barr said, "if it hadn't been for Ruby, there wouldn't even be a hotel to raid. You got to admit that."
"And I'm saying we would all be better off if they'd gone ahead and dynamited that place the way they wanted to fifteen years ago," said Wylie Perch. "Maybe put the new school there, or a dime store, or something useful. Instead of an eyesore and a den of iniquity besides."
"That's enough, folks, let's come to order," said Artemus Crum, rapping the table with his brassbound bookend in the shape of a stag's head. "This is the Fenton City Council, not some hog-calling contest at Saw Mill. I know we all harbor some pretty strong feelings about Ruby, and Ruby's hotel. And we all have to be upset about last week's goings-on there. Lord knows, I am. But this is not the time or place to put that subject at the forefront. There's three pretty important resolutions on the docket this morning, and I think this body owes it to the people of this town to give a just and due deliberation."
"Artemus is right," said C.L. Karriker, and the other members of the Council chimed in yes, you bet, and ditto, because C.L. always spoke with some authority (his wife Marjorie was only half-joking when she called him the "First Authority of Fenton"), but his words carried special weight today, because he occupied the Chair of Privilege. That meant C.L., from where he sat, looked up squarely into the huge portrait of Agnes Crum, late wife of Artemus, which hovered over the mantelpiece. It was, to all eyes, the most godawful picture of a woman who, as C.L. remembered her, had only been mildly plainfaced. Artemus had paid a bunch of money for a well-known artist to fly down from St. Louis to paint Agnes, and a bunch more for the black taffeta gown with the ruffled shoulders and lace bosom the Agnes posed in. The dress was about the best thing in the picture. Even if Agnes was no Miss America, she was no Old Gray Mare either. But in the picture the face sagged like it was made of slowly dripping honey; the head was tilted back so you looked right up into big black rectangular nostrils. The eyes, which C.L. remembered as warm and lively, displayed a shade of apricot he'd never seen before. The mouth flashed a menacing grimace, as if Agnes were counting to ten deciding whether or not to take a strap to Ben or Sally. It hurt to look at this picture. But if you happened to sit on the north side of the poker table Artemus Crum set up for Council meetings, you had better be prepared to gaze at Agnes for the better part of a Monday morning. Of course, Artemus loved the portrait, maybe because it cost him so much, or maybe he really thought Agnes looked beautiful this way. At any rate, you couldn't tell Artemus you didn't want to sit in the chair facing the portrait because his dead wife's apricot eyeballs nearly have you a migraine. So there arose an unspoken agreement among C.L. Karriker and the other members of the Fenton City Council--Wylie Perch, Jesse Barr, and Dolly Dreher--that they would take turns occupying this seat at the Monday morning meetings. And it came to be understood, although nobody was fully conscious of it, that the person who sat in that seat deserved extra sympathy and consideration from the others. He or she could speak a little more unbuttoned and be sure of a fair hearing, even if what came out was nonsense. It became a Chair of Privilege. And today C.L. Karriker sat in that chair.
"Ladies and gentlemen, please turn to Bill Number Seventy-Nine, which you got in front of you," said Artemus Crum. "Will the Council Secretary now please read Bill Number Seventy-Nine as it's written?"
Dolly Dreher quickly gulped down a piece of caramel candy, stuffed the cellophane wrapper in her purse, licked her fingers, and read off her mimeo copy. Bill Number Seventy-Nine provided that the license for altered dogs should be one-half the price for unaltered dogs. It was known that Mayor Welch was partial to this bill and expected it to pass.
Jesse Barr tittered and related the old story about Walter, the Messmer's dachshund. Walter was vicious and every day would attack Jesse as he made his postal rounds. By Friday, Jesse's shin would look like a barber's pole with all the bites and claw marks. And the Messmers wouldn't do a thing about it. Said it was natural for a dog to protect the house, and why else have a dog. Jesse even took to carrying a stick with him, to fend Walter off. But one day Walter bit off more than he could chew. He got into a tussle with two of those opossums that nested back of the Messmers', and they took a chunk out of Walter where it hurts most. I guess you might call that Nature's way of altering a dog, concluded Jesse.
Wylie Perch whacked Jesse on the shoulder. "Hush up, Jesse Barr," she said. "Lord, but you have a crude way about you, sometimes."
The stag's head came down on the table with such force that C.L. had to grip the water pitcher with both hands to keep it from toppling over the side. "Now are we going to vote on this bill or aren't we?" thundered Artemus. And when they had voted, five for and aught against, to raise the price of a license for unaltered dogs to $15.00, while the license for altered dogs would remain at $7.50, Artemus thanked them all and called a ten-minute recess so they could all cool off.
As the others moved away, Dolly Dreher edged closer to C.L. "I knew that hotel was ruined the day Ruby painted it bright red," she said. "Destroyed all the dignity of the place." Dolly unwrapped a caramel and daintily held it between two fingers before flicking it into her mouth. C.L. wondered how anyone could eat caramels at ten in the morning. "You know what Lucille calls it, C.L.? Red as Sin Red, and I agree with Lucille." Lucille was Dolly's lifelong friend, housemate and business partner. For forty years the ladies had run Heavenly Freeze, by common consent the best homemade ice cream parlor east of Sidalia. Only vanilla and chocolate, and Dolly and Lucille wouldn't mix the flavors in a cup or cone. If you wanted them mixed, you'd have to take them home. There were still old diehards in Fenton who remained loyal to Dolly and Lucille and refused to patronize the Baskin-Robbins at the Plankton Mall, which offered thirty-one earthly flavors instead of two heavenly ones.
"I suppose even painting that place Red as Sin Red would have been okay, if only Ruby hadn't put in all those weird things. People coming into the Freeze have told me about it. Black commodes, black toothpaste. Sick. Very sick." The caramel clucked in Dolly's jaws as she said those last words. "And I even heard there's this one suite there, with a row of torn off dolls' arms bolted to the wall for a towel rack and...what is so darn funny, Mr. Cecil Lamont Karriker?"
"I beg your pardon, Miss Dreher," said C.L. "But those dolls' arms are a hoot, really they are. You have to have some sense of humor about Ruby's, that's all. Now, I certainly don't habituate the place. But I was there once, my senior year at Fenton High, when some friends and I spent a night there. Just to see what it was like. Disneyland is all I can compare it to. Everything at Ruby's is a surprise. Even a towel rack isn't a towel rack. I bought a little necklace in the gift shop Ruby had in the lobby. It was made of olive pits strung together, cost about fifty cents. My seven year old is wearing it now. I remember buying it to wear with my Nehru jacket."
"Well, you're a different generation from us old folks," Artemus said, placing a re-filled pitcher of ice water on the table. He wiped the sweat off the pitcher with his palms. Jesse Barr and Wylie Perch took their places again; all the members were back. "But I bet even you, C.L., were pretty shocked about what happened at Ruby's the other night."
"Sure C.L. was shocked," said Wylie Perch. "Any decent person would be, at such...such...poor deportment." Miss Perch, a retired high school geometry teacher, had a way of sounding like a report card, on occasion.
"Too bad, pretty young thing like that," Jesse Barr said.
"Your mean Mary Don Hawkes? She's not so young, anymore, two kids in school," said Dolly Dreher.
Not so pretty anymore, either, not like she was," said Artemus Crum. C.L. looked up at Agnes, whose portrait called into question Artemus's credentials as a judge of beauty.
"Mary Don's husband was supposedly involved in this too, you know. She wasn't alone," Wylie Perch said.
"Yeah, but you know Harvey Hawkes," said Jesse Barr. "You'd expect those shenanigans from a guy who can bowl with either hand.
"I didn't know that about Harvey," Dolly Dreher muttered, as if to herself. "I wonder if Lucille knows that."
C.L. Karriker put up his hand and all turned to the Chair of Privilege. "With all due respect, I think we should wait until we have the details of what happened at Ruby's. All we know is that the place was raided. That's all we know for sure, and until the grand jury has its turn, all we've got is hearsay evidence. Certainly nothing that would hold up in court."
"The hearsay I heard would hold up, all right," Jesse Barr said.
"I declare, C.L.," Wylie Perch said, "you're not still sweet on Mary Don, after all these years? You're not careful, I'll tattle on you to Marjorie."
"Don't be ridiculous," said C.L.
But Wylie Perch was not the sort of geometry teacher to let a pair of flirting pupils break her concentration. Not Wylie Perch, who used to rhapsodize about scalenes and isosceles as if they were compelling characters on Love of Life; who could go through three class periods with chalkdust on the frames of her glasses and never notice it or take the time to wipe it off.
In fact, she paid little attention to any of her pupils, except those she had to discipline, and those who were her pets. Her pets were always boys, and there were always two in each class. No matter what they did, whether it was prove a difficult theorem or simply dust off the erasers, Miss Perch would announce to the class, "Now you just watch Tom (or Ike, or Will, or Renny). That boy works hard. That boy's going to get someplace, someday." C.L. was not one of Miss Perch's favorites. Sometimes he wondered what she must think of him now, now that he was a successful lawyer and had got "someplace."
Why couldn't C.L. Karriker take his eyes, or at least the corner of his eye, off Mary Don? It wasn't that he particularly hated geometry class, or could so easily tune out Miss Perch's dramatic recitations about scalenes and isosceles. It was just that he never knew what Mary Don might do next. He might catch Mary Don leaning forward, both elbows resting on her desk, pressing her fingertips together to form a steeple, rolling a number two pencil between her lips as if it were a tube of lipstick. When she did that, C.L.'s bow-wow stood right up to attention. To be that eraser, for just three minutes, prayed C.L.
But what sent C.L. the most was when Mary Don clenched her hands behind her head like you do for a sit-up, and then arched her body way back, curling her spine against the back of the seat, so far back the ends of her ponytail almost touched the seat. It was like a huge, silent yawn of the body. Even the chair didn't creak. Mary Don's majestic breasts would press against the buttons of her Girl Scout shirt, just the way C.L.'s perpendicular bow-wow was pressing against the zipper on his bluejeans. Then suddenly, as if nothing important had happened, Mary Don would spring back to regard Miss Perch with full concentration, as if the mating of angles and sides were her purple passion.
Margaret White, who sat behind C.L., leaned forward and breathed against the nape of his neck, "Don't be a dope, C.L. Mary Don did that all last year in Civics, to get Danny Fifer's attention." "Did what?" whispered C.L. over his shoulder, as innocently as guilt could make him. Margaret slugged him right on the backbone, to make C.L. turn around. "You know what I mean. This," said Margaret, and she began to imitate a Mary Don type stretch, except she kept her arms folded across her chest. Margaret had no tits to speak of. She wasn't in a class with Mary Don. Geometry class, but not tits class.
Margaret White just had it in for Mary Don. She spread the story that Mary Don wasn't really all that stacked, that it was a kind of optical illusion. "It's the way she stands, is all," Margaret would say. "It's her posture. If I stood with my shoulders way back and my chest way out, like Mary Don, I'd look big, too. But I have too much self-respect to do that."
That's a bunch of bull roar, thought C.L. Nobody else believed Margaret's theory either, and if they did, all they had to see was Mary Don at Lake Wakitan that summer, leaping over the hull of a canoe in her flaming orange two-piece bathing suit with the black tiger stripes. The deep, glistening gulch between her breasts told you they could possibly go all the way to her navel if she let them hang free. Tufts of bosom overflowed the underside of the bra cups, despite the wiring put in by the manufacturer. Seeing her in that two-piece nearly knocked the wind out of C.L. There could be no doubt that they were real, but C.L. still heard umpteen opinions, many of them based on very sound reasoning (if not experience), about what they would feel like if you stroked or squeezed them. It was all a wonder to C.L. He had no opinions, only questions. Were they shiny and rock-hard like the girls in Playboy? Was the area around the nipple dark like a prune or light like a peach? C.L. knew plenty of guys who had tried with Mary Don, but nobody had had any luck until Darryl Hantover took the matter into his own hands, so to speak, the night of Cherry Chesbro's hayride at the Atchity Stables.
For months Cherry had been talking about celebrating her sweet sixteen birthday with a "momentous" hayride around the outskirts of Fenton. Her Uncle Zeb was coming all the way from North Chanutesville to drive the team, and Cherry was quick to point out how Uncle Zeb had it all over Ed Retrum, Atchity's resident driver for most normal hayrides. Uncle Zeb was such a famous expert on wagons and horses that the people who made Wagon Train begged him to serve as their Technical Advisor. He would usually charge about twenty dollars an hour to do a hayride engagement, but as Cherry was his favorite niece and she'd showered him with pretty leases, he was doing it for nothing. The ultimate special sixteenth birthday present.
C.L. Karriker was there, with Nancy Mulvehill. When Nancy had asked C.L. if he had a date to Cherry's yet he said no, and then there was a pause, and it occurred to C.L. that the only polite thing to do was to ask Nancy. (He'd been thinking of asking Laura Smeyne, but what the heck.) Nancy was okay, but her mouth was way too small. It looked like a keyhole turned sideways. Tonight Nancy looked pretty good to C.L. All the girls did, better in this summer moonlight than they looked in winter, under the unkind glare of the fluorescents at school.
Nancy looked good to C.L. but something about her, her perfume or hair spray, smelled awful, like a mistake with phosphorus in the chemistry lab. "What's that you got on?" asked C.L., sniffing deeply.
"Crepe de Chine," Nancy said. "My mom's. You like it?"
"Yeah. Great."
"Quick, C.L., we've got to be first," Nancy said, and when C.L. had pulled her up on the wagon with him, she rasped into his ear, "Guess what I've got with me?"
Perfume remover, I hope, thought C.L.
It was a little red flashlight, no more than five inches long. As the kids tumbled onto the haywagon, with Uncle Zeb hoisting the girls up by their armpits, Nancy beamed the light into each one's eyes, saying "Lookee, lookee. Lookee, lookee."
When they first set out there was lots of jostling and tossing of hay. Girls gossiped with girls and the boys jawed intensely about MGs and the Cardinals. The gang grew quieter as the road darkened. For a spell, all you heard were crickets, the clop of Duke and Daisy's hooves, a rustle of hay and whispers, and Uncle Zeb humming "On the Wings of a Snow White Dove." C.L. wasn't sure what to do with Nancy. She shivered and burrowed into his neck, her head butting his Adam's apple back into his throat. My, it's getting chilly out here, she said. C.L. felt perfectly warm. He painstakingly traced with his index finger, just for Nancy, the Big and Little Dippers, and made some educated guesses about other constellations and planets. A gasping sound arose amid the crunch of hay.
"Let's spot them, C.L.," Nancy said. She fished the little flashlight out of her purse. By its feeble luster, and through a dense mesh of shoulders, arms and legs, they could make out Mary Don Waldron and Darryl Hantover, kissing so deep they looked like Siamese Twins joined at the lower lip. It was Mary Don who had gasped, and she continued to make little sniffly noises, like somebody fighting back a sneeze. The other girls on the haywagon were a bit more still, but C.L. could hear the soft smacking of lips and gusts of rapid breathing; a sweep of the flashlight revealed a dozen clashing bodies in silhouette. The wagon halted for a moment so Daisy could take a dump. Uncle Zeb hummed "Please Help Me I'm Falling" and then went into "Primrose Lane" without a pause, as if they were the same song. Nancy heaved a deep sigh, then another, and nuzzled into C.L.'s neck again. She wanted to be kissed, obviously; but the fumes from her Crepe de Chine gave C.L. a headache. He felt like a mosquito that's been blasted by insect repellent.
Nancy wanted to lie back, like most of the others, but C.L. froze into a sitting position. His eyes were riveted on Mary Don and Darryl. Darryl kept sliding his hand over Mary Don's shoulder blade and onto her huge breast. Each time Mary Don, without unlocking her lips from Darryl's would push his hand away. She didn't say please stop, but it was clear from her struggling and her murmured uh uh, uh uh, how far Mary Don would and wouldn't go. Blades of brown hay clung to her blonde hair. Closing his eyes, C.L. could listen to Mary Don's sweet sounds and imagine it was he, and not Darryl, caressing and exciting her. It made his bow-wow stand bolt upright, the sound and the picture. Duke took a dump. The stopping of the wagon jolted C.L.'s eyes open. He saw that almost all the girls were going farther than Mary Don. Even Margaret White, who was flat as a home plate, was letting Bucky Bierbower pet her chest, and inside the blouse, too. Nancy Mulvehill lay sleeping with her hands folded over her belly. The flashlight was wedged tightly between her hands, with the thumb pressed to the "on" button; a speck of a ray peeped through her fingers.
The next morning C.L. received a breathless phone call from Billy Deacon. "Is it really true about Mary Don, C.L.? That she let Darryl do all those things?" Billy was laid up with the flu and had to miss out on the hayride.
"What things?" C.L. said.
"What do you mean, what things? Just about everything, to hear people talk. You know, inside the bra. Even down the pants, a certain person told me."
"Well, I don't..."
"Darryl's saying he got it bare. That Mary Don begged him for it. Says she was moaning and squirming like she had a toad in her drawers. You see all that?" Billy was shouting at the top of his voice. C.L. hoped for sure Billy's mom wasn't within hearing distance.
"Well, Billy, she did make an awful lot of noise. But..."
"Geez, I wish I'd been there. Gotta go, C.L.," and Billy hung up. C.L. felt his stomach knot, like when he told a lie. He very seldom told a lie, except to spare somebody's feelings (usually his mom's, about her cooking). He hadn't said right out that Mary Don had shoved her tits in Darryl's face, or plunged Darryl's hand down the front of her slacks, or cooed more, more, more. That would have been...an exaggeration. But who knew what he missed during that time he had his eyes closed? Mary Don could have done anything. The phone rang again.
"Forgot to ask you, C.L. How'd you do with Nancy Mulvehill?" asked Billy.
"Oh, we got along just fine," C.L. said.
"I got you," Billy said. And he hung up.
Everybody was buzzing about Mary Don. Nancy Mulvehill said she saw it all because she had the flashlight trained on Mary Don and Darryl the whole time (and what else would she have been doing, with that "cold potato" C.L. Karriker for a date?). Margaret White declared it was shameful to go that far in front of everyone; it made the other girls, your everyday good girls, feel cheap just being on the same wagon, and their boyfriends would think they were prudes, because they wouldn't dare go as far as Mary Don. Cherry Chesbro was heartbroken that, thanks to Mary Don, her sweet sixteen hayride would be remembered not for the great fun everybody had, or for how handsome Uncle Zeb was, but for that wild boy and girl who set some kind of all-time record for a public display of affection. Cherry vowed she would never speak to Mary Don again.
After Cherry's hayride the boys seemed to lose their curiosity about Mary Don. Their parents instructed them to avoid her because she was "fast," which meant you could get into deep trouble, and she could, too. C.L. noticed a change in Mary Don once school started again. She no longer smiled at him when they passed in the halls; she never lingered at her locker. She dropped out of Hestia, the homemakers' club, even though she was a great seamstress and a shoo-in for club president. Now she went out with boys from Rubidoux College in Saw Mill, beer-bellied guys who would speed around with the top down and one arm curled around Mary Don. Somebody told C.L. that one night Mary Don got drunk on beer and took on the whole pledge class of PI KAPPA ALPHA. Bull roar, said C.L. He still liked Mary Don.
C.L. should not have been surprised that, by the time the Senior Prom rolled around, nobody wanted to ask Mary Don. But he was. After all, Mary Don was still a doll, even with that heavy eye shadow, and the guys from Rubidoux. If only for old time's sake somebody should ask her, thought C.L. He took it upon himself. He had nobody else to ask; he didn't even want to go to a damned Prom, but his mom kept pushing him, said it would be the most romantic night of his life, til he got married.
Mary Don was surprised to hear from C.L. He had never talked to her on the phone before, and her voice, separated from her gorgeous body, sounded deep and strong, kind of businesslike. I'd be happy to go with you, Mary Don said. One thing, though, you mind very much if we leave early, say eleven? I've kind of got a date with Rob, he's from Rubidoux, for his frat party. I made that date a long time ago. Okay?
That was fine with C.L. It might be exciting for people to see him leave early with Mary Don. They'd think...well, they'd think something. Mrs. Karriker's face sagged when he told her whom he was taking to the Prom. C.L. assured her he would be home before midnight, and that eased her mind.
The kids at the Prom shied away from C.L. and Mary Don. The girls looked resentful, as if they wanted to call out to C.L. the names of the girls he could have asked, who were staying home miserable this night. Some of the guys were snickering, and he caught his supposedly good friend Benny Crum making obscene gestures in his direction.
Nothing mattered to C.L. but Mary Don. She looked beautiful. Her blonde hair was tightly braided and piled on top of her head. Her satiny pink gown was cut low to expose the crests of her breasts, which were as white and perfectly formed as two giant scoops from the Heavenly Freeze. With all the other girls made up, Mary Don's mascara and eye shadow didn't seem cheap at all. She didn't seem like a fast girl, either. C.L. had forgotten how nice Mary Don was to talk to, once you got your mind off those tits, and saw how close she listened. As if she cared.
Did she care that C.L. was going to Plankton Junior College next year, and wanted to be a lawyer some day? Like Perry Mason? asked Mary Don. Sure, C.L. said. Mary Don was taking a job as cashier at Pemberton's, the stationery store. No more school for her. Mary Don didn't want to dance the fast dances, because of the dress. She would bounce too much. They danced the slow ones. At five minutes to eleven they danced to what Mary Don said was her favorite song and, with her breasts quaking just inches from his chin, C.L. felt her jaw moving as she mouthed the words "To know know know him is to love love love him, and I do." C.L. knew she was probably thinking of this Rob, not him. He knew he would be taking her to Rob in less than five minutes. But C.L. felt happy. His bow-wow nestled calmly in his pants, complacent and unpressured. For the first time this century, his mom was tight about something. This was the most romantic night of his life. At least til he got married.
Maybe Wylie Perch had watched C.L. dancing with Mary Don that night and noticed how sublimely happy he was. Maybe that's where she got the idea he was sweet on Mary Don, way back then. At any rate, it was the voice of Wylie Perch that snapped C.L. out of his revery. "I don't think you can entirely blame Mary Don for what happened at Ruby's. It's Ruby's hotel. A proprietor is the one responsible for propriety, eh?"
"You're right, Wylie," said Dolly Dreher. "That hotel's been jinxed ever since Ruby took it over and redid it. The wonderful old Blackstone. Remember she brought all those hippies here? Bad seeds, all of them. Smelled bad and did bad things. `Smellpots,' Lucille used to call them, and I agreed with her."
"Uppity Negroes, too," Jesse Barr said. "In those jungle get-ups, dancing those native dances and smoking dope, right on the steps of the hotel where Teddy told us to make the world safe for democracy."
"That was Woodrow Wilson, Jesse." C.L. had corrected Jesse Barr on this point at least seven times. "Teddy Roosevelt was never here. It was Wilson who did a stopover at the Blackstone, so they say."
"What aggravates me," said Artemus Crum, "is the clientele Ruby caters to nowadays. Any decent folk will pass us by and go to the Ramada Inn in East Carpenter. It's these ads Ruby puts in those East and West coast papers, that draws all the weirdos here. And then they look at us as though we were weird. Remember that skinny old fellow, a year or so ago, carrying around that cardboard sign of Laurel and Hardy, lifesize? Said he was toting it all over the USA to take photos of it in weird places, and Fenton was one of them. I bet he wouldn't have even heard of this town, if Ruby's fame hadn't spread far and wide."
"But isn't that a good thing, Artemus?" asked C.L. "How many towns in Missouri with only 2100 people can attract visitors from all over the country?"
"You've missed my point, boy, but we're getting behind schedule. Dolly, what's the next item on the official Council agenda?"
It was an ordinance concerning parking meter rates for the purpose of increasing the meters to forty cents an hour on Market Street and twenty cents an hour on the east side of Parkview Lane. Jesse Barr had opposed it through all the Council's lengthy debates the past few months, and he opposed it now. Bad for Fenton Business, he argued. Folks will drive to the Plankton Mall to shop and park free. You'll see. But Jesse was overruled and the ordinance was enacted.
"Here's one we can all agree on," Dolly Dreher said. "Resolution Number Four hundred seventy-one: Congratulating Benjamin and Ernestine Rayl on the occasion of their sixtieth wedding anniversary, July 22."
"Hear hear," said Jesse Barr, and the members of the Fenton City Council all rose a one to clink their glasses in tribute to the Rayls.
As they seated themselves, Wylie Perch said, "I feel that we on the Council ought to go on record as condemning the kind of deportment that went on at Ruby's last week. I hereby propose a resolution to that effect."
"I'd second that, Wylie. I bet Lucille would, too," said Dolly Dreher.
"Hear hear," said Jesse Barr, raising his glass. Jesse seemed to be getting tight, although all he'd had to drink was ice water.
"Wait, we don't really know for sure what happened there yet," C.L. muttered, so softly that Dolly Dreher had to say, "Come again?"
But Wylie Perch had heard him, and pointing her finger at C.L. as if her were one of her unruly geometry pupils, she said, "Now look here, young man, we all know what Sergeant Willoughby saw them doing at..."
"Well, Willoughby's lying," shouted C.L. To everybody's amazement, he stood up suddenly, knocking the Chair of Privilege hindwards, his face red with a rage that seemed to come out of nowhere. Leaning with both hands flat on the table, his eyes scathed the Council members and even the overhead presence of Agnes Crum.
"She didn't do it, I tell you. She didn't do a damn thing," C.L. kept
repeating, until the stag's head came crushing down just inches from his fingertips.
Mr. Rabicoff spent his buoyant childhood and Era of Non-stop Potency in Kansas City, Missouri. He poached a diploma from Washington University, then moved on to 13 years in plenitudinous New York City, earning various graduate degrees and ending up in public relations. He now lives in Baltimore with his wife, cat, PCjr and (at this writing) a 5-month old fetus named Fortunoff.
For a copy of the issue that this story appeared in please use the on-line order form or email sott_backissue@unclemarkie.com
and ask for Volume 2, Number 3.
The cost is $5.00, plus $2.00 shipping and handling for each order.
| Return to top of story | Return to SOTT Home Page |
| Move onto other stories in this issue | Move onto other stories in this volume |
©1981-1998 Studio 403. All rights reserved.
For reproduction or retransmission rights, please email sott_rights@unclemarkie.com.