Careful What You Say

by Craig Donegan

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

Saturday morning, Freda and Randall awoke at sunrise for an early start to Houston so they couldn’t possibly be caught making their way through the city after sundown. All in a rush, Freda repaired to the kitchen to make coffee and grilled-cheese sandwiches. Through the window she saw the two bullfrogs as they sat in silence on the mud pit’s far edge.

Beyond the kitchen window, ragged rooftops prickled with bent and twisted TV antennae, cracked and rusted satellite dishes, and occasional chimneys, some made of brick. But others were fashioned from two-inch pipe, which looked like miniature anti-aircraft guns, pointing skyward. Whether brick or pipe, each one poured rancid smoke into the air from fireplaces that burned chemically treated wood.

“I swear, one day this whole ramshackle place will burn to the ground,” he said.

“Oh, you always say that.”

“Well, today’s different,” he said, as he felt for the pistol, which was stuck inside his belt at the back of his pants.

Randall went to the car while Freda stepped to the front porch. With her right hand, she pulled the door shut behind her. But before it closed, she reached around with her left hand and fired her half-smoked cigarette at the farthest coffee can and heard the ping against the metal as she quickly locked the door.

* * *

When Randall and Freda entered Glory Retirement Village, they found themselves in a lobby that glittered with chandeliers, glass-top tables, crystal bowls of dried fruits, chilled cans of Ensure, and brightly colored candy-covered licorice bits.

Suddenly, an elevator door opened and out stepped an old, stooped woman wearing a stole of flagrantly synthetic fox fur.

“So, you decided to come after all. What a surprise,” she said.

“Oh, sweet Agnes,” Freda began, but then looked at the man standing beside her stepmother and said, “Who’s this?” With salt-and-pepper close-cropped hair, he was a nice-looking fellow. Slim. Mild tan. Symmetrical smile.

“My attorney,” said Agnes.

“Lysander Farley,” said the man who carried a briefcase in one hand and held a leash in the other, at the end of which tugged a Jack Russell terrier whose cataract eyes were so far gone they looked like peeled grapes. “I represent Ms. Agnes, and, of course, Sylvester,” he added with a deferential nod to the dog. “I’m here to facilitate the conversation.”

“Pathetic,” said Agnes. “He thinks he can talk with Sylvester, but the truth of it is my dog — my dog — talks only to me. But that’s beside the point. We don’t discuss business until we’ve been to the bodega.”

Meanwhile, Freda felt Farley try to catch her eye. Must be something about the dog, she thought, as the animal pulled near and licked her hand when she reached down to greet him.

Sylvester was almost too familiar, as if he were the reincarnation of her daddy’s Jack Russell, alias Tabasco, who died defending the old man from a water moccasin that had dropped into their bateau from the low-hanging branches of a cypress tree.

“What’s a bodega?” Randall asked, as if addressing an invisible, possibly hostile, entity in the room.

“It’s a kind of neighborhood grocery,” said the attorney.

“Like a mini-Walmart?” asked Randall.

“Ms. Agnes hasn’t been out in a while, and she likes this particular bodega. So does Sylvester,” he said, leaning down and stroking the dog with his fingers. “They both know the owner. A fellow by the name of Arturo. Sylvester primarily goes for the sausage, but I think Ms. Agnes just wants you to see it. Share with her something that gives her pleasure. Something, perhaps, that she loves.”

“Oh. That she loves,” said Freda. “It would be nice to see something she loves.”

“Are bodegas dangerous?” asked Randall, patting the concealed pistol at his back.

“Of course not. Bodegas are happy places where people gather to shop, visit, just to see and be seen. A sort of mini-melting pot. America in a nutshell.”

Agnes snorted, Randall scratched his head, and Freda rolled her eyes.

“After the trip to the bodega, we’ll take care of business so you nice people can get on your way,” said Mr. Farley. “If this is to be a day trip, as you desire, then we mustn’t dawdle.”

* * *

Inside the bodega, feelings of vertigo overcame Randall. The room tilted and spun. He grappled for his gun as its barrel slipped into his boxer shorts and lodged between his butt cheeks. Then Agnes stretched out her hand, and Arturo bent to kiss it as if she were royalty. Next, he bowed and kissed her dog.

Some sort of satanic ritual, with Agnes its high priestess? Randall thought. Suddenly, Randall felt sick and, as he turned to empty his stomach, a strange man pushed past him, toward the counter with a large knife in one hand.

“Knife,” Randall said, just loud enough for Freda to hear.

“Who?” she asked.

“Him,” Randall answered as he pointed with his left hand and, with his right, wrenched the Colt revolver from his pants, giving himself a wedgie, and almost shooting himself in the leg.

“Gun!” Arturo shouted as Randall leveled the pistol at the knife-wielding man’s head.

In an instant, the man dropped the knife and, as slick as Doc Holiday, whipped a thirty-eight-caliber revolver from a shoulder holster beneath his jacket.

The two men shot at the exact same time with a huge explosion that filled the store with smoke. The Colt had exploded in Randall’s right hand, leaving him only his thumb and his forefinger. Agnes fell to the floor as Mr. Farley hid behind the counter and Arturo tripped the alarm. The knife man remained on his feet, his face black with burnt powder, his pistol clung to his trigger finger, and Randall lay face down on the floor, on top of Agnes’s squirming dog, while a pool of Randall’s own blood oozed from his blown hand and a nasty bullet hole in his right side.

Freda looked at Randall, and then at the man who’d shot her husband. Without thinking, she grabbed a meat-tenderizing mallet from a pile of kitchen utensils for sale on the counter and struck the knife guy’s forehead so hard that he fell to his knees and buckled forward, face-first onto the floor. The knife, Freda noticed, had a price tag tied to its handle: “On Sale,” like the meat tenderizer. Soon the police arrived and summoned an ambulance.

* * *

Three days later, Agnes and Farley went to the hospital with a sheaf of papers for Freda and Randall to sign. Inside the room, Randall lay bandaged like a mummy in progress, his left arm cuffed to the handrail on his bed. Freda sat in a chair and looked out the window at the parking lot below. Randall unclosed one eye to see Farley open his folder and then remove a fountain pen from inside his jacket, a pen, Randall guessed, that was worth three months’ salary at his old risk-management job.

“Ms. Agnes and I need you to sign these,” said Farley.

“I’m not signing anything I don’t read first,” said Randall.

Agnes clinched Freda’s left shoulder and squeezed, like a hawk on a field mouse.

“Just sign it,” said Freda. “What could be worse than where we are now? You, half dead. Me with nowhere to go but back to the mud pit in Bison while you head off to jail for blowing up the damned bodega. And Agnes with all the power, the leverage. Our gooses are cooked.”

“I told you, didn’t I?” said Randall. “It was all a plot to get us shot. And look at me. Plugged in the side by some crazed bodega shopper, and more than half the fingers gone on my right hand. I’d say Agnes did what she set out to do.”

“Not yet,” said Agnes, as she nodded at Farley. “Not until you’ve signed these papers-three fingers missing or not.”

“And what are these papers?” asked Randall.

“Releases. Very generous releases, under the circumstances,” said Farley. “You swear not to contest Ms. Agnes’s will, which leaves all her assets — about $200-million — to her dog, Sylvester. In exchange, Ms. Agnes pays any hospital, bail bond, and legal fees you incur as a result of your time here in Houston. And one other thing. You’re never to contact — or even attempt to contact — Ms. Agnes again.”

Without further questions, Freda and Randall took the papers and signed.

* * *

One week later, on probation, Freda drove out of Houston while Randall remained behind in the county jail, awaiting his trial. Freda took her time getting home, not certain that she’d stop when she reached Bison. She might drive forever across the country, into the Canadian wilderness. But when she saw the sign, “Bison, next exit,” she slowed and took the turn.

She entered their street after dark, and her headlights were on. So, when she parked and saw nothing where the house should be, she thought that some of Randall’s vertigo might have rubbed off on her. Cautiously, she stepped from her car and walked to where the front door used to be, but all she found was blackened earth, charred wood, and neighborhood lights, which shone like stars where the walls had stood. When she heard the two frogs in the swamp begin croaking, she sat on the ground and cried.

“That last cigarette,” she said aloud. “I should have slowed down. I should have looked before locking the door.”

She knew that the ping of the cigarette butt against the wall of the old coffee can had sounded wrong. She’d burned down the house, just as Randall had gotten himself shot. Two peas in a pod, and now the pod was gone.

* * *

For the next six months, Freda stayed with one of her Bison neighbors, Mrs. Whangdoodle, who billed her for meals, plus the electricity she used to charge her phone. She also allowed a small bedroom, “rent free,” provided that Freda cleaned the kitchen after breakfast and supper daily. On the 121st day of what she called her “captivity,” Freda received her first piece of personal mail at the post office. There, the clerk placed in her hand a legal-size manila envelope with the return address:

Sylvester, aka Tabasco
c/o: Lysander Farley, Attorney at Law
Glory Retirement Village
Houston, TX

Using a bent metal nail file that she found in her purse, Freda tore open the packet and discovered inside two thirty-year amortization tables. One was for Freda showing monthly payments of $15,000.00 (from Sylvester’s $200-million canine trust) for enduring, at Agnes’s hands, “Undue Pain & Suffering,” and the other for Randall, at $10,000.00 per month, “For Falling On Top of Sylvester During the Bodega Shootout, Thus Shielding and Saving His Life, At a Moment of Maximum Peril.”

Three months later Randall was back in Bison with his new legal title: non compos mentis. And there he picked up where he’d left off. This time, however, his was serious business with a $50,000 metal detector bought on his new-found good credit, one that could discover and identify any kind of underground metal or subterranean structure down to heretofore unfathomable depths.

And though Freda continued to believe that her husband’s unceasing obsession was unfathomable itself, she no longer minded so much since she now had her own, realistic preoccupation. This included using her monthly stipend to finance construction of a new, yet modest, home, with a swamp-like bog in the back to accommodate frogs, which kept her in mind of her own true home with her daddy on the bayou.

The first night in their new home, she cooked spaghetti with habanero marinara sauce and garlic bread. When they were done eating, she emptied the leftovers into her cast-iron skillet, stepped outside into the yellow light on the back porch overlooking the bog, and scraped the scraps into the muddy water. The big frogs croaked, and the smaller ones chirped, happy to be fed such exotic fixin’s.

Before she was done, Freda loaded a half-eaten meatball onto her serving spoon and flipped it into the air. As it fell, she snatched it between her teeth, chewed, and swallowed. She rubbed her hands clean on her apron and lit a cigarette, which she smoked close to the butt. When Randall stepped outside for some evening air, she knelt to the bog, extended her arm, and the cigarette, upon meeting the water, extinguished with a definitive hiss.