Jack
Saturday, June 5, 1:58 a.m.
This reminds me of a scene from one of my favorite films ever.
“Did you ever see the movie Home Alone?” I ask Hallie.
“The one where the kid’s parents go on vacation and forget him, and he has to defend his house from the two incompetent burglars? Of course. Why?”
“Do you remember the scene where he sets up all the mannequins to make it seem like there’s a party going on so the burglars wouldn’t think he was there all by himself?”
“Yeah.” Her eyes dart to the bags, and then her face lights up as she realizes where I’m going with this.
I yell through the slider window to Dale, “Hey, what’s the story with all the mannequins?”
“Did they escape? I worried they might break loose and create a panic.” He chuckles. “My friend makes things out of them—mermaid sculptures for gardens, coffee table bases, all sorts of wild stuff. She’s very creative. Got a deal on them for her from a warehouse that was going out of business.”
“Would you mind if we liberated the rest of them? It’s dark, so I’m thinking if we set them up around the truck, it’ll look like there’s more of us and we’re not messing around.”
Dale snorts. “I like how you think. Have at it. If you dig in the corner there, you’ll probably find some old ball caps. Feel free to throw some of those on them to make them look more authentic.”
Hallie and I set to work taking the mannequins out of the bags and setting them up along the perimeter of the truck bed. We discover Dale’s stash of ball caps in the corner under a folded furniture pad. The first one I pick up is red with a white cross on it and says “Orgasm Donor” in thick, black letters. Classy. There’s no time to be judgmental, so I stick it on a mannequin head and grab a few more. The sayings on them are equally creative. It’s like he bought out the clearance section of a Spencer’s Gifts. Judging by the contents of his truck bed, Dale clearly has a sense of humor.
I toss a few caps at Hallie, and she follows my lead. There are just enough of them to go around. I turn a couple around backward for good measure because in every gang movie I’ve ever seen, there’s always those one or two guys who wear them flipped around, too cool for shade. As long as it’s dark and no one has stellar nighttime distance vision, it’s definitely passable. The only problem is, the mannequins are still naked. Nothing says “quake with fear” like potentially having your ass kicked by a bunch of nudists in suggestive baseball caps.
“How about if we put the garbage bags over their heads like ponchos?” Hallie suggests. “Maybe in the dark they’ll look like commandos.”
“As opposed to going commando,” I joke.
By the time we’ve finished, we’ve successfully created the illusion that we are an army of badassery descending on these car thieves to take back what’s rightfully ours. Hallie and I fist bump. Dale pulls down Lucille from the gun rack overhead and places it on the seat between himself and Oscar, ready to spring into action. Even I wouldn’t want to screw with us.
Suddenly Oscar shouts excitedly from inside the cab, “There it is!”
We turn around and peer through the windshield. I spy the giant Buddha head peeking back at us from the driveway of a small, dilapidated house. There are at least eight other cars crammed onto the driveway and on what was once a lawn before the drought and neglect took over. Dale turns off the headlights as we slowly make our approach.
There doesn’t seem to be anyone around. The car is parked in plain sight as if we pulled into the driveway and left it there ourselves. It’s anticlimactic.
Dale stops the truck and cuts the engine. Somewhere, a dog barks and pierces the silence.
All four of us cautiously and quietly get out of the truck, looking around in all directions for any signs of life.
The car appears to be in perfect condition—no dings or scratches or signs of forced entry. Oscar walks up to it and peers in the driver’s-side window. He tries to open the door and finds it unlocked. He lets out a loud sigh of relief and ducks in, then turns around and straightens up, holding up his phone like a victory prize.
“Phone’s here. No keys,” he reports.
We spread out and check the perimeter around the car—on top of the tires and underneath—to see if they were dropped, but no luck. Oscar pops the trunk, and we follow him anxiously as he opens it. Our bags are there, seemingly intact and untouched. Weird.
“At least all our stuff is here,” Hallie says as she unzips her bag, checking it. Oscar shakes his head and starts pushing our things to the side and then lets out a sigh of relief.
“Thank god.” He pulls out a black urn etched with paw prints—it easily could have been a cookie jar for dog treats—and pops open the lid, checking to make sure its contents are intact.
The dog starts barking again, but this time more urgently, and moments later the front door to the house cracks open. The porch light flicks on, drenching us in light. A guy stumbles out. He’s in maybe his midfifties and wears a faded flannel shirt over an old white tee, a pair of gray sweatpants, and stained construction boots that look like they’d hurt in an ass kicking. In fact, it’s hard to tell in the light, but the stains might even be patches of dried blood. Or ketchup. Hopefully ketchup. A loud, yippy Chihuahua spills onto the porch in front of him, baring its teeth at us.
“Settle down, Princess,” the guy says to the dog in a warning tone, then cups his hands over his eyes like a visor. “What the hell’s going on out here?”
Oscar closes his eyes and whispers repeatedly to himself under his breath, “This is just an audition. This is just an audition.”
“We should be asking you the same thing,” Hallie pipes up, squaring her hands on her hips.
“You stole my car,” Oscar says boldly, immediately in the scene with total focus. He’s convincing as hell.
And now the guy really does not look happy. “I didn’t steal nothin’,” he says. Princess starts barking furiously. “Get off my property.”
My heart is pounding a mile a minute. I’m fueled by pure adrenaline. “Not until you give us back our property,” I say in what I hope is an equally intimidating tone. The guy turns his gaze on me, laughing. He doesn’t take us seriously. Not that I blame him. We’re not exactly what you’d call threatening.
“Like I said, I don’t have anything that belongs to you, so you best be on your way back to the middle school or wherever it is you came here from.” He crosses his arms, puffing out his chest and standing his ground. “Tired of you punks knocking on my door all hours of the night.”
Sticks and stones. I’m not naive. I know things could easily change on a dime here. But…he doesn’t appear to have a weapon, and given the circumstances, he seems like the kind of guy who might have pulled one out by now if he had it. There’s also only one of him and four of us. Twelve, if you count the mannequins. God, I’m hoping he’s counting the mannequins. I roll the dice that my instinct is spot on.
“Oh yeah? Then how do you explain his car sitting in your driveway?” I ask as I notice Hallie out of the corner of my eye reach into Dale’s truck and grab Lucille off the seat. She holds it up toward her ear like she’s at bat. She looks very convincing, but what the actual fuck is she doing?
“Who told you to come here?” the man asks with a jerk of his head.
“We’ve been watching you for a while,” Oscar says, channeling every detective confronting a suspect in every crime drama ever. This seems to make the guy nervous.
Hallie takes a step forward. “If you hand over the keys, we’ll happily be on our way with no trouble. Otherwise, we’re not making any promises. Don’t make the rest of us have to come out of the truck.”
She doesn’t seem the slightest bit worried that he might call her bluff.
The guy’s eyes flick behind her to the silhouettes of bodies in the pickup truck bed. He looks them over suspiciously. They are rigid and unmoving, which makes perfect sense because they’re made of fiberglass and plastic. He boldly takes a step toward the truck, squinting for a better view, and for a moment I worry he’s going to walk over there for a close inspection. Then Dale moves the mannequins ever so slightly as if they are getting restless and are champing at the bit to jump into action. He throws his voice from behind the truck bed, dropping it an octave. “Just say when, and I’ll take him out.”
I have an uncontrollable urge to start laughing. It’s a weird reaction I have sometimes during moments of high stress. My therapist, Carole, says it’s not that uncommon; it’s the subconscious mind’s way of negating fear and attempting to restore emotional balance. This would be the actual worst possible moment for that to happen.
So naturally, it does.
Hallie looks at me like I’m a weirdo, and Oscar widens his eyes in this what-the-fuck-are-you-doing-man-he’s-going-to-snap-and-kill-us sort of way, which only makes me laugh harder. I bite at the inside of my cheek to stop it, but I can’t.
“What the hell is wrong with him?” the man asks Oscar, wide-eyed.
Oscar, in the role he’s been waiting for, improvs and says, “He’s unhinged, man.”
It sounds like a line from a poorly scripted episode of Criminal Minds, and it amplifies the sheer ridiculousness of the situation, thus causing yet another nervous burst of laughter to escape. This, in turn, causes Hallie to completely lose it, and then I’m laughing at her laughing, and we both can’t stop laughing. Then Oscar joins in, and I imagine the three of us must look seriously baffling.
Hallie winks at me, and that’s when it hits me: they think I’m acting, and this is part of a plan I’ve come up with on the fly, and they are following my lead. It’s so brilliant, I wish I’d actually thought of it.
It seems to be working unplanned magic. The guy looks more than a little freaked out, unsure what to make of us or how to respond, and I sense his bravado is weakening.
I seize the moment and step forward, grab the bat from Hallie, and say in my most menacing tone, “We can keep this simple, or you can make this difficult.”
His jaw tenses, and he holds up his hands in surrender. I guess me laughing while holding a bat in my hand makes him take me more seriously. “Hey, whoa—look, I don’t want any trouble here.” Even Princess lets out a whimper.
“Excellent. Then give us the keys and we’re on our way. No further questions.”
“Right.” The guy’s brow knits together. He throws a tentative glance toward the cars and asks, “Which one is it again?”
“You’re kidding, right?” Oscar pipes up and points to it. “The one with the giant Buddha head that says GoodCarma on the side?”
The guy’s gaze settles on the last vehicle parked toward the back with its visible-from-space-because-it’s-so-huge Buddha decal as if he’s noticing it for the first time. I give the bat a swing, and then the guy swallows hard and says, “Hold up here a second.” He reaches down, tucks the yippy dog under his arm, and disappears inside the house, the front door creaking shut behind him.
The four of us are left standing in the driveway looking at each other dumbfounded. The guy is gone, and we still don’t have the car. None of us are laughing anymore.
What the hell just happened?