Chapter Five: The Perfect Crime
I had no idea what sort of “deal” he had in mind, but I was already starting to worry about it. I mean, the last couple of “deals” he’d pulled had gotten me into trouble and had even made me look silly, if you can believe that. Any time you’ve got a loose coon on the place, bad things start to happen.
Yes, I was concerned, but what can you do about a loose coon? A loose coon is like a genie with light brown hair that has escaped from its bottle. Once the genie is out, it’s hard to put it back inside the toothpaste tube.
The point is that I didn’t have much control over Eddy, once he had gotten out of his cage. I could have barked and sounded a General Alarm, but I didn’t see any need for such drastic measures. Not yet, anyway.
It appeared that my best course of action was to wait and watch and see what kind of mischief Eddy got into—and then remove myself from the scenery of the crime, far, far away, so that I couldn’t possibly be blamed for it.
That was a good plan. Or it should have been. How was I supposed to know that he would go inside the chicken house? I never would have dreamed it. I mean, what a crazy thing to do!
On our outfit, if a guy wanted to stir up some real serious heavy-duty trouble, all he had to do was mess around with Sally May’s chickens.
We’re talking about a Shooting Offense, fellers. When it came to chickens and eggs, Sally May had no mercy and zero sense of humor.
When I saw Eddy stick his head inside the door of the chicken house . . . the little door that the chickens used, not the big one . . . when I saw the so-forth and realized what he had in mind, I tried to stop him.
“Say, Eddy, I don’t think I’d . . . Eddy, you’d better stay . . . hey pal, you’re fixing to get yourself into more trouble than you ever dreamed of!”
It was too late. He didn’t hear me or didn’t listen or didn’t something, and in a flash he was gone—inside the Forbidden Place.
Well, he’d really done it this time. All I could say was, “Bye bye, Eddy. It was nice knowing you,” because I wasn’t about to set foot inside that place.
No way. See, I’d been there before and I’d gone to school, so to speak, on the subject of chickens, and I sure hated to think of poor little Eddy getting hauled in front of the firing squad. But in the Real World, we sometimes pay a terrible price for our mistakes.
And that was too bad because . . . well, Eddy was new to the place and didn’t know all the rules. And he wasn’t a bad guy, really, just a little on the ornery side and too curious for his own good, and it didn’t seem fair that . . .
He might not have even known that it was a chicken house. Had you thought about that? He might have blundered in there thinking that it was a storage shed or something and, oh well, maybe I could save the little stupe before he got in over his head.
And so it was that, against my better judgment, I slipped up the little ramp runway and stuck my head inside the door. Don’t worry. I had no intention of going inside. A warning, that’s all he would get from me, and that was risky enough.
It was dark inside. I cocked my right ear and listened. Not much there, so I switched over to Smelloradar and . . . whoa, just about blew out the control panel! I had forgotten about the powerful odors that gather inside a chicken house.
Smelloradar is calibrated to pick up the tiniest of odors, don’t you see, and there are no tiny odors in a chicken house. Just a lot of big ones, and if you’re not careful, they can fry all the circuits in your Smelloradar.
Anyways, so far so good. I knew Eddy was in there somewhere, but at least he hadn’t started a riot. As long as that condition held, we had some hope of getting him out and saving his life.
I realized that talking would be risky, but it was a risk I had to take. I whispered . . .
“Eddy?” No answer. “Eddy?” Still no . . .
Holy smokes, all at once there was this horrible masked face right in front of me, and I mean only inches away from the end of my . . .
Okay, it was Eddy. You probably thought it was a Night Monster or a ghost or something. Ha, ha. Even I was fooled there for a second, but just for a second.
Not for long.
Just a brief moment of time, and then the voice of reason prevailed and said, “It’s only Eddy.” Of course. Who else could it be? It was no big deal, no runaway.
“You called?”
“Right. Eddy, I’ve come to save you. You don’t know where you are.”
“Chicken house.”
“Well . . . yes, but I’m sure you don’t realize what it means to be inside this parchickular ticken house.”
“What?”
“Chicken house, this particular chicken house.”
“Yeah? Come in. We’ll talk.”
“Ha, ha. I don’t think so, Eddy. See, the whole point of my being here,” I squeezed through the little door, “is to get YOU OUT, not to get ME IN. You see what I mean?”
“Sure. Listen. Got a deal. You like eggs?”
I stared at his masked face and wondered if he had actually said what I thought he’d said.
“Are you out of your mind? Listen, bud, you’re standing in the most dangerous place in Ochiltree County. I mean, a missile range is like a garden compared to this, because a missile is like a flower compared to Sally May when she’s on the rampage.”
I got the feeling that he wasn’t listening, so I poked him in the chest and whispered louder in his ear.
“Do you hear what I’m saying? You haven’t seen Sally May in one of her thermonuclear moments, so you’ll have to take my word for it. When she’s mad . . . well, listen to this.”
It happened that I knew a little song about this very subject, so I did it for him. Here’s how it went.
When She’s Angry
When she’s angry, when she’s wrathful,
The trees run for cover.
And when she speaks of her displeasure,
The mountains hide their faces.
It is not that she’s unreasonable.
It is not that she’s unkind.
She can be as warm as sunlight,
Soft as flowers on a vine.
But if you summon up her displeasure,
Prepare yourself for winds and tempests.
For her anger is like a blizzard,
A hurricane, volcano, and tornado.
She despises all injustices,
Inequalities and lies.
And she knows when there is wickedness
Just by looking in your eyes.
When she’s angry, when she’s wrathful,
The trees run for cover.
And when she speaks of her displeasure,
The mountains hide their faces.
Eddy listened to the song but I wasn’t sure that he’d gotten the point. He shrugged his shoulders. “She’ll never know.”
I stared at the outline of his masked face. It was the face of a bandit or a robber. “What do you mean, she’ll never know? She knows everything. Knowing is her business.”
“Got a plan. Can’t miss. Fresh eggs for both of us.”
I must admit that the mention of “fresh eggs” caused me to, well, lick my chops, so to speak.
“Eddy, your plan won’t work. In the first place, the hens are sitting on their eggs. Did you notice that?”
“Right. They’re asleep.”
“They’re asleep now, but when you reach your cold little hand into a nest, they’ll go off like thirty-two burglar alarms.”
He shook his head. “Got that covered. No problem.”
“In the second place, used eggs leave shells behind. When Sally May comes to gather her morning eggs, she’ll find shells. Do you suppose she’ll think they’re clam shells? Shotgun shells? No. She will know exactly what they are and why they happen to be shells instead of eggs.”
“Got that covered too. No problem.”
“And then do you know what will happen? She’ll pull out her list of Prime Suspects, which will contain two names: mine and mine. No thanks. Let’s get out of here.”
I started toward the door but Eddy caught me by the collar and pulled me back. “You hungry?”
“No. I’m stuffed, couldn’t hold another . . .” At that moment, my stomach growled and my mouth began to water. “. . . bite. In other words, no. Or not very. I’ve seen hungrier nights.” I licked my chops. “Okay, maybe I’m hungry but I’m not crazy.”
“This’ll work. Magic.”
I cut my eyes from side to side. “Explain that.”
“Magic. Now you see it, now you don’t. Now it’s broken, now it’s fixed. Now it’s shells, now it’s an egg. Bingo.”
“Wait a minute. Are you trying to tell me . . . magic, huh? I’ll be derned. That’s one I’ve never tried. And you can make the shells go back together, is that what you’re saying?”
“Right. Easy. No problem.”
I licked my chops. “Well, by George, you did okay with the dog food trick. Maybe . . .”
Eddy thrust a finger into the air. “Watch.”
With that, he crept to the nearest nest, upon which a big fat hen was sitting—fast asleep. The hen was asleep, not the nest. He rubbed his little raccoon hands together, perhaps to warm them up, and slipped them beneath the sleeping hen. He lifted her out of the nest and set her down in an empty nest nearby.
And I’ll be derned, she never even cracked an eye. Those coons could do amazing feats with their hands.
A little humor there. Get it? Feats with their hands? But no kidding aside, they really could do a lot with their hands.
Well, at that point I found my eyes drawn to the six or seven fresh eggs sitting in the . . . mercy, it took a lot of chop-licking to control the flow of . . . and my stomach was growling like crazy by this time, I mean it had been days and days since I’d had a decent meal, and by George . . .
You’ll never guess what happened then. Even I was surprised.