Cackling Hens, Half-baked Plans, and One Surprised Dude
We’re all still hovering in a tight little circle, staring at the offensive letter. I consider it a tribute to my resilience and unflappable nature that I’m the first to recover.
“That does it. Everybody is spending the night here.” There is a general hubbub as Fayrene and Mama start talking about night gowns and sleeping arrangements. “I have plenty of night shirts for everybody, and we’re all sleeping upstairs,” I tell them. “That way we’re all together, and if he breaks and enters downstairs, we’ll have time to put our plan in action.”
“What plan?” Lovie asks.
“Whatever you can come up with, Lovie.”
“Weapons,” Mama says, and I picture her shooting up everything in my house.
“We are not going to use lethal weapons, Mama. Somebody is liable to get killed.”
“Ha!” she says, but I choose to ignore her.
“I have it!” We all turn to look at Fayrene. “We’ll set up the downstairs like that little boy in that movie, Home Alone. If that crazy lover tries to break in, he’s going to be knee deep in deadless traps.”
“That’s a really wonderful idea, Fayrene,” Mama says. “Callie, do you have any rat traps? And maybe some hot tar and boiling oil.”
“Good grief, Mama!”
I have a sudden horrible vision of Jack Jones returning home in the dead of night, without notice, which is the way a Company man does things, and then ending up covered in hot tar with his feet in a rat trap. I don’t even want to think what he would do.
“We can’t even think straight without snacks.” My cousin goes to the kitchen and comes back with an armload of junk food.
“Holy cow, Lovie! That’s enough to feed everybody on the Titanic.”
“Hush up and eat, Callie. Nobody’s going down with this ship.”
We spend the next two hours forming a half-baked plan and putting it into action. I don’t claim to have a psychic eye like Bobby Huckabee, but I do have a very strong intuition. Let me tell you, the way my stomach is churning, I figure that before the night is over everyone of us will end up in jail. Or maybe I just ate too much buttered popcorn.
~*~
A loud crash jerks me out of sleep. While I grab a hold of Lovie, who is sleeping with her baseball bat on the other side of my bed, Elvis bolts off his guitar shaped silk pillow and down the stairs.
“He’s in the kitchen, Lovie.”
“What?” She sits up, groggy, and begins to grope around for her bat. I could kill her. I told her not to eat so much fudge.
“He came through the back door, Lovie.” I know because we’d set a barrier of pots and pans at the back. We shoved the sofa against the front door. “Hurry.”
I grab my weapon of choice, a can of hairspray for each hand, and crash into Fayrene, who is coming out of the guest bedroom across the hall. She’s in my nightshirt that says “Ride a Cowboy, Save a Horse,” and she’s wielding a mop.
“Is Mama awake?”
“How could she sleep in all this promotion?”
It sounds like World War III downstairs. Elvis is barking, pots and pans are still rattling, and the intruder is saying words even Lovie doesn’t know. And speaking of the half-awake, where is she?
I hear more cursing and footsteps heading this way.
“Come on, Fayrene. We don’t have time to wait.”
We hustle down the stairs just at as he intruder emerges from the kitchen. I nearly wet my pants. His face is covered with a stocking and Elvis is hanging onto his pants legs.
The only good thing I can say about him is that his hands appear to be empty.
“Stop right there!” Fayrene yells. “I’m a crackpot.”
She points the mop at the devil in disguise and he comes to a screeching halt. A split second later, he’s identified her weapon and is laughing his fool head off.
“Stand aside, you old biddy,” he yells. “I’ve come for my sugar plum.”
“Not in my house!” Holding my hairspray at eye level, I launch myself toward him with both cans blazing.
The stocking on his face is no protection from Sebastian Shaper Plus. He commences screaming, and Fayrene races forward to beat him with the mop. Elvis has a good grip on his leg and is shaking him like a bone destined for burial in the backyard.
“Hold him,” I yell, then race off to the kitchen for a roll of Duct Tape and a length of clothesline I’d meant for Jack to hang in the backyard.
I don’t know why I didn’t think to have those things upstairs with me. My hands shake as I fumble through my everything drawer. Judging by the sounds coming from the living room, Fayrene and Elvis are more than a match for the late-night intruder.
I glance at the kitchen clock and see that it’s actually five in the morning. I take that as a good sign, too. If it took the evil lover that long to work up his courage, then he’s afraid of the women he so blithely dismissed as cackling hens.
Finally I find what I need and head back to truss him up. The sight in the living room stops me in my tracks. Mama is standing there in my nightshirt that says Keep America Beautiful, Stay in Bed, and she’s got her gun pointed right at his private parts.
“Holy cow, Mama! I said no lethal weapons.”
The intruder sees me and screeches, “Get these hags away from me!”
“You call me that again and I’ll shoot off your family jewels.” Mama rams her gun into his privates and he screams like a stuck pig.
“Leave that to me, Aunt Ruby Nell.” Lovie marches down the stairs like the Queen of Everything. The way she’s moving in my one-size-fits-all nightshirt that proclaims Diva, there’s not a single doubt in anybody’s mind that she loves to make an entrance. “I plan to cut them off one at a time, and then cook them up for the dogs.”
Good grief! How did she sneak that lethal looking butcher knife up the stairs without me seeing it? I was very specific about no violence. Nobody listens to me around here.
Still, I can’t argue with the results. By the time I start trussing up the intruder with clothesline and tape, he’s meeker than Alice Ann Street over at Mooreville Video after she cut her own bangs and then sidled into Hair.Net for me to repair the damage.
Fayrene gives our unwelcome guest one last whack with the mop, and then helps me truss him up.
“He’s scrawnier than I thought,” Fayrene says.
“When the chips are down,” Mama says, “cowards always shrivel.”
In fact, the man is not as tall as I am, and I have better muscle tone, to boot.
Finally, he’s sitting in the floor with arms taped to his sides and his legs wrapped like the King Tut mummy.
“Now, let’s just see who you are, Honey Bunny.” Lovie jerks off his stocking cap to reveal a pimply faced, middle-aged man with lank hair that could use a good wash and trim.
Furthermore, I don’t recognize him. I thought I knew every one of Lovie’s boyfriends.
“Who is he, Lovie?”
“I don’t know,” she says.
“Holy cow! You don’t know!”
Fayrene picks up her mop. “I’ll beat his name out of him.”
“Wait a minute, Fayrene.” Mama rips the Duct Tape off his mouth and he screams bloody murder. “You can start beating now.”
“Hold on!” Lovie leans close to inspect his face. “I know him. He looks different without his cap, that’s all.”
“Who is it?” We sound like a Greek chorus, all shouting at the same time.
“It’s my new postman.”
Frankly, I’m relieved. Though Lovie’s taste in men runs from the sublime to the ridiculous, she would never date a man like the scumbag on my living room floor.
“We’ve just attacked an employee of the U.S. Government.” Mama jumps off the floor like a woman thirty years younger. “We could all do time.”
“Good grief, Mama. Let’s not go all dramatic. He’s the one who wrote those threatening letters to Lovie.”
“Prove it,” he says, and Fayrene smacks that smug look off his face with the business end of the mop.
“Try this on for size, honey bunny.” Lovie grabs his chin and leans in close. “Breaking and entering.”
“You invited me here,” he whines. “You’ve had the hots for me ever since I started the mail route. That come-on outfit you wore to the Stables was the final touch.”
“Now what, Callie?” Mama’s looking at me as if I have all the answers.
“I’m fresh out of ideas, Mama.”
“This calls for a powwow and some Prohibition punch.” Lovie heads to the kitchen.
“Bring me some, too,” the postman says. “I don’t know how I’ll explain to my wife and children that I stayed out all night.”
Everybody yells, “Wife and children!”
Lovie comes to a screeching halt and Mama aims her gun at the enemy.
“Let me just shoot him now, Callie, and put his out of his misery.”
Elvis takes matters into his own paws and pees on the man’s leg. While our captive is spouting off a string of words hot enough to boil water, we all traipse into the kitchen.
We’re a motley lot sitting there with our uncombed hair and not a speck of makeup. We’re tired, to boot. Besting a spurned lover is tough business.
“We can’t just let him sit there in my living room. What if Jack comes home?”
“We could call the law,” Lovie says, “but who wants to make a federal case out of a few letters, especially since the postman’s the one sporting the bruises?”
She leaves the table to get fudge and Prohibition punch. Nobody says a word. We just sit there eating as if it’s our last meal as free women.
When the doorbell rings, I jump six feet into the air.
“Holy cow! What if it’s Jack?”
“Well, don’t just sit there, Callie. Go and let my favorite son-in-law in.”
I hurry out, but I can’t get to the peephole because my couch is blocking the door.
“Just a minute,” I yell, and then struggle to scoot the sofa aside. You could knock me over with a Kate Spade purse when I see who’s on the other side of the door.
“Billy Jessup.” I am so relieved I swing the door wide open. Billy has never looked this good to me. “What are you doing out so early?”
“Going fishing. I just stopped by to say I’ve got your tires repaired and your truck’s sitting over at the feed and seed store. “
“Already? My goodness, you’ve been busy.”
“I could say the same for you.” Billy shoves his sunglasses to the top of his head then strides over to Lovie’s postman, all wrapped up in silver tape. “Kinky, Cal.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” the postman says. “Help me out here, kid.”
I grab the Duct Tape and slap a strip over his mouth then lead Billy Jessup in to the kitchen.
“What’s going on here, Cal?” Billy says.
“You’re going to need this, Billy.”
I hand him a glass of Prohibition punch, and then tell him the story, with a lot of help from Lovie, Fayrene, and Mama. Billy’s grinning like he’s just landed in the middle of the best time of his life.
The only good thing I can say about that is, thank goodness, Billy knows how to keep his mouth shut.