Chapter Twenty·nine―Shootout at EAT

David made a U-turn in the parking lot of the duty-free store across the street from Cousteau’s diner and insinuated the Volvo into an open curbside slot in front of the Home Theater. The winter schedule slung askew across both glass doors hanging from a string looped over a suction cup: Features 7 and 9 PM Fri Sat Sun. G Show matinee Sat 2 PM.

There was Morgana seated on the pavement, looking like a promotion piece for the “G” show.

“But how...?”

“Please, no questions. I’m here and that should be enough; I am an artist, not a technician. Actually, I hitched a ride with the Happy Time Bread man. I didn’t talk and he didn’t ask. I just hopped in, he scratched my ears, and here we are.” She eyed the paper bag Pen carried. “You got the collar? Green?”

Affirmative.

“Good, come along and let’s get something to eat. I’m famished.” The pig trotted next door to EAT, stood before the Salada Tea screen door, and waited for the courtesy. Pen held the door and Morrissey and the pig filed in.

Harriet Hopwood was the waitress on duty. Cousteau had rules. “Seeing-eye pig?” Harriet had rules, too, number one being Cousteau’s rules seldom applied.

“Of course.”

“Nice piggy.” Harriet reached down to scratch Morgana’s ears. Pen winced, bracing himself to catch Harriet as she fell. Golden eyes looked adoringly up at Harriet and a pink tongue lolled. The woman and the pig scratched on in a rapport of mutual joy.

Pen cleared his throat and Harriet straightened, radiating a dopey post-coital glow. She rubbed her eyes and was all business again. “She’s just lovely, but you had better take a booth.”

They took a booth. Morgana hopped up onto the bench beside Pen. “Tell me the time, Pen. I love it when you tell me the time.”

“I have never knowingly told you the time in all our short acquaintance.” He flourished a $20 K-Mart digital watch into play.

“No, Pen. Not digital time. Talk analog to me, I’m that

kind of girl.” She directed her nose at the Telechron plug-in rotary clock hanging over the cigarette machine at the cash register. She jumped to the other bench and snuggled Dim Light’s tweed and leather patches. “I know they sound the same when you say the times, but to my mind analog has more bounce to the ounce. What you see is what you get... like me.”

Dinner with the ingénue.

Enter the heavy, looking confused, like a refugee from a natural disaster straight out of the eleven o’clock news, all the possessions he could scoop up gathered in his arms. A rumpled day pack dangled from a nylon shoulder strap. It was stuffed so full he hadn’t been able to zip it shut and one sock and most of a very soiled sweater, machine knitted with a nordic reindeer design, dangled to the floor. His other possession was a boxy-looking machine pistol with a shoulder-mount extension which he carried at port arms. He looked very unsure about what he was doing toting this appliance. Armed and confused, a dangerous combination. The muzzle of his weapon swept back and forth across the room in nervous arcs. He shrugged off the day pack and let it fall.

“I am a refugee. I claim political asylum. Could you show me the way to the men’s room please?” he said in a monotone straight out of the Berlitz instruction tapes. He had almost got it right, but for an international desperado he lacked the gritty competitive edge.

“Ozzie. Querida... you’re alive!” Harriet threw her arms around the young man’s neck and gave him a long, lingering kiss.

“¿Perdon? Have we met?”

Harriet’s lower lip was trembling.

Oh, my God, she’s going to hold out her hand to him and say, “Here, let me show you where the men’s room is, you poor boy. I know how it is when you have to go. Need a hand with your zipper?” or words to that effect.

“Harriet Hopwood,” said Harriet, holding out her hand.

Jesus, he’s going to blow us all to hell and back.

“Oswaldo Patricio Melendez O’Rourke y Nuñez, a sus ordenes,” replied the kid. He left off his port-arms death grip on the machine gun, cradled it on his left forearm and kissed Harriet’s extended hand, never taking his eyes away from hers all the while.

Smooth. These guys got it with their mothers’ milk. Panache. The tension in the diner eased.

At the counter were Champion and Everlast, two mounties Pen recognized from the gym. He had never learned their names but they always wore the same brand of sweatpants. They put in time jogging on the treadmill during the winter. They sat with Tim Quigley, a state trooper, evidently catching a fraternal cup of coffee on their way from a workout. They were in civilian clothes, their gym bags piled at their feet, no guns in evidence. We are lucky the Border Patrol isn’t here on break, Pen reflected, They are trigger-happy under the best conditions. These guys may not be the best, but they are, at least, the home team. Things were definitely looking up.

“You are very beautiful, Harriet, where is the men’s room?”

“Down the hall along the wall and past the kitchen.” That got a blank stare. No comprendo.

“Here, I’ll show you,” and she pulled him toward her.

They heard a ragged whistle and thought it strange to have commercial jet flights passing over. It was the assembled clientele taking a breath. They had been holding it for all the time of the exchange between O’Rourke y Nuñez and Harriet Hopwood.

“Well it seems that we are still alive,” contributed Dim Lights Morrissey, himself again breathing. “Our visitor from the planet Xenon has been unwontedly quiet...”

“Oh, this is so exciting—young love and action...”

“Until now.”

“And Pen, you silly, you know I am not from any old planet Xenon. Ahhh, this is even better than Harry’s movies, no flicker, no lines or roll-over.” She paused. “Unwonted... what an unbecoming thought, Pen, I’m afraid one of us does have an attitude problem. Oh dear, dinner will be late but with all the excitement, I really don’t mind. Is it always like this here? Harry never told me... I thought all those movies were just made up stories, simulations for sexual stimulation and release of potentially damaging anti-social hostilities. How gloriously psychotic... life imitating art.”

As soon as Harriet and her protégé had disappeared toward the necessarium, there was a palpable release of psychic tension in the diner. Two chatty family groups and two solitary diners reading the evening papers actually hadn’t noticed anything and continued with their trencherwork. No raised voices, no rowdy accents had marked the exchange between Harriet and the red-haired Oswaldo, a model of decorum; its underscore of sexual tension lacked the serrate edge of public contention to distract from salmon croquettes, canned peas and foil-wrapped baked potatoes from the steam table. The three off-duty law enforcement officers at the counter had unobtrusively vacated their stools. The state trooper was speaking quietly but urgently into the phone near the cash register while the mounties pooled their pocket change and fussed with Canadian and U.S. currencies to make the tab with no one at the register. They shrugged and slipped out the door, trying not to break into a run. Scrupulous honesty was a cruel mistress and even the RCMP didn’t always have the right change. The mounties were three blocks off their turf, a quarter of a mile into a friendly but foreign jurisdiction and unarmed. The trooper was most likely calling for backup.

Some of Cousteau’s more alert habitués were leaving perfunctory piles of loose money on the tables and just plain getting the hell out of there.

Why all the fuss from the minions of public order? On the surface all that had transpired was the display of an automatic weapon in a public eating place. This was indeed illegal, and sufficient to call for help from the city police force. However, Oswaldo Patricio Melendez O’Rourke y Nuñez fit a stereotype, and from that stereotype rose all the evanescence of ripe fish: overtones of the purveyors of nose candy from parts distant and foreign that pique the ever-alert interest of the law. The mounties were officially welcome when in hot pursuit. Unofficially, they would wait outside in the street and move in when the backup arrived to get in on the credit for the bust. They’d do the same for the feds on the Canadian side.

“Ahhh, Miss Morgana,” Morrissey addressed the pooch.

“Speak to me, David Lewis Morrissey.” A perfunctory nod and the pig recognized her love-slave.

“Uh, at Harry’s house you demonstrated certain powers that could have been useful in this circumstance, and I was wondering...”

Pen broke in, “What we are wondering is if you are getting transmissions from the Mother Ship, why the hell didn’t you warn us about the kid with the gun? You could have zapped the sucker.”

“This zapping, Pen, is a skill I inherited along with this marvelous body.” The pig indicated herself. “It is one of the social graces, like macrame or flower arranging. It is a skill which I, as the Fata Morgana possess, but I have never had to exercise. You and Prince are my only living subjects; I have been busy learning. Aside from hearsay and second-hand recountings, my entire education of your culture has come from cable TV and the video movies Harry rented. This zapping is a skill which I now possess. Much as a tattoo, when you’ve got it, it’s there for good and all but requires practice, like playing the mandolin. Except that mandolins wash off.” She paused, admiring her use of the idiom, turning it, finding it good.

“Your human mental furniture is strangely arranged. That this might be an offensive weapon had simply not occurred to me. I’m getting better at it, but you fade in and out. However, we do have more company coming and they are fighters, not lovers. I feel you should tell that young man on the telephone to lie down on the floor very soon. He has talked enough.”

“Quigley, DOWN!,” yelled Morrissey and with not a second to spare. The cigarette machine and cash register exploded in a hail of bullets.

Two men strolled in through the shredded remains of Cousteau’s Salada Tea screen door. These tourists were carrying more firepower than the National Guard; their introductory burst of automatic weaponry showed no respect for cooperative advertising. Chalk one up for boyish high spirits. In one lightweight 9mm machine pistol these dudes packed an equivalent of twenty-thousand 35mm Japanese camera nuts with inboard strobe flashes.

They struck an attitude of studied nonchalance. These flamboyant cats were movers and shakers and they wanted the world to know it. It appeared important that they share the fact of their arrival. Though tourists indeed they were, the two uglies had executed a more grand entrance than was really necessary; their hardware was imposing enough. They were the stereotypical Colombian drug runners: one pock-marked, the other smooth, and both sporting black moustaches bushy but neatly trimmed, styled haircuts square and long at the back of the neck, body-fit European silk shirts open to mid chest where olive skin, hair and lots of gold was on display. Gold, gold, gold, everywhere they could hang it—Rolex, Patek Philippe, chains, cufflinks, teeth. Hey man, you like I smile for you?

Gone forever the aloha shirts, big cigars and fishtailed Cadillacs, the pendulum had swung again to witness a new generation of international bad taste: money as a storage depot for time and effort.

Incongruously, Pen thought of them as Pat and Mike.

“Pat and Mike are their names,” said Morgana, her long nose in his ear. All three were on the floor of the booth under the table.

Morrissey spoke, a hoarse whisper, “Well, if you are reading their thoughts, could you perhaps zap them like you did Pen’s pig?”

“Sorry, but I’ve tried and the power won’t work right now. The only thing I have not mastered is doing it again. I’m too upset.”

“Ah, we have your attention. Bueno. Ladies and gentlemen,” said Pat, the one with the pock marks, “we are here today to present you with a unparalleled opportunity to make the most marvelous gesture of international cooperation and understanding, to selflessly aid two poor wanderers from a distant land to complete their business and return to their homes before their dinners get cold.” He spoke in unaccented, but syntactically bizarre English.

“This is possible,” he went on, “for we have a plane waiting.”

Uh-oh, thought Pen, Pat is either stage struck and enjoying the captive audience, or he views the attended listeners as superfluous, candidates for an imminent mass rubout. Or perhaps he is an international philanthropist with great timing and limitless resources who really does have a helicopter waiting to whisk himself and Mike away to a nearby landing strip from whence a private jet is waiting to fly them into the sunset and history.

“I am called Patricio Adolfo Ruiz y Martinez but you may call me Pat,” said Pat, cradling his weapon on one arm and fishing a silver snuff box from a slash pocket of his too-tight tailored doubleknit trousers. “My associate is Miguel. You will please notice that he is armed and, while my attention may waver during our chat, his does not. I thus sincerely caution you against any abrupt motions, which Miguel may misconstrue. We hope to inconvenience you for only a brief time. You will help us to apprehend our missing associate who has, alas, absconded with an item of great sentimental value to us...”

Here Pat paused to abstract a pinch of white powder from the snuffbox. He snorted with gusto, spilling. A tiny cloud wafted toward the floor, confectioner’s sugar from a powdered doughnut. The powdery cascade dusted the toe of one Gucci boot, leaving an outline on the linoleum. Pat ignored the spillage, leaving to the floor sufficient for a Wall Street investment banker’s productive morning, a creative day for an advertising account executive.

Pen thought, I would just bet the folks at the home office will not be happy to learn their man is dipping into the sample case. Rational behavior would not be forthcoming from Pat and Mike.

“Do not be shy. Please come out and join us, and bring your pet with you. Nice piggy.”

That meant them. The two men and the pig struggled out from under the table, trying to make no sudden movements.

“Stay seated and with your hands on the table, and no sudden moves, please.”

Morgana hopped up on the bench next to Morrissey again. She cocked her head toward Pat in eager attention. The base of Pen’s spine was numb as he struggled against a blind, screaming panic. Did they really have a helicopter coming for their getaway, or had the constant imbibing of cocaine make them think it would be nice if some airborne transport arrived from a magic somewhere to get them away after they had massacred everything in sight? Much had been written about the positive benefits of cocaine, but nowhere in the writings of its most fervent apologists could Pen recall a claim that it helped the user do simple arithmetic, butter toast or shoot straight.

Pat’s eyes got watery as the jolt hit his brain. He wanted everything and right away. The snows of Christmas—shop early and shop all the time. Everything—at least the stuff imparted a sense of perspective; his dust-driven ever-shifting enthusiasms just hadn’t fixed on any particular location where reality might be just now.

Pat held the stage all to himself. Through his funk Pen noticed Mike had found a focus. He was intently studying a small wall poster announcing a Spring retreat weekend on Prince Edward Island by the local chapter of Women’s Aglow, an evangelical sodality. What could be so fascinating about an interdenominational charismatic outing to hold the attention of a gunman from a Colombian drug smuggling cartel? Morrissey sat in a posture of rapt, respectful attention while Pen silently debated letting himself slip into complete paralytic terror. A nonsense song started running through his head.

Armageddon to know you,
Armageddon to know all about you...

Julie Andrews in The King and I. Well, it took his mind off the present problem.

Across the table, Morgana was giving him a strange look, her head cocked to one side, one ear up the other flopped over. In the face of death violent and sudden, his racing mind framed a dump-a-pet want ad, you saw a lot of them in the weekly paper, adorable collie pup free to a good home...great with children...

Both ears went back and she gave a low, throaty snarl, the kind that means trouble.

Whoa!... He got it! The powers were back. Perhaps they would live through this day after all.

She nodded her head and lolled a pink tongue telling him yes. Nice piggy.

Pat rambled on, an amorous psychotic haranguing the wallpaper. He finished elaborating a fine point at the end of a forensic string that only he could have followed. He paused for audience reaction. There was none. Too bad: the tale was a tear-jerker.

“Pardon me. Thank you.” He lifted a glass of water from a terrified diner, gargled, spat. “...and with the hundred thousand dollars this child has also taken my name... Patricio. It was my father’s name.”

Well that seemed to say it all, whatever it was.

Through Pat’s hortatory exposition flowed nuances of gesture and emotion imploringly inappropriate to his words; scrupulously refined points of argument became howls, deep chest tones fizzled into squeaks. The Iberian rolled “r” became more Teutonic. From his lungs a stream of dreamy mediterranean air drove Pat’s ululating uvula against his hard palate like the pith ball in a traffic cop’s whistle, drying it. “...betrayed by a viper we have nurtured to our own bosoms for all these years since the unfortunate event of his unhappy parents’ deaths by the gelignite I, myself, had attached across the ignition terminals of their Mercedes. I had told Paco and Do¤a Inez it was too early to leave, but no, they were hot for the bedroom and they would have enjoyed so the antipasto. How could I have told them this device was only a joke, a little something intended for the valet parking attendant or perhaps the casual automobile thief. But no!... they got antsy and hot to trot. ¡Qué lástima! Ay caramba, what an admirable explosion! And poof! our beloved associates are gone. Like the snows of yesteryear, a mountain jonquil poking through the melt of early Spring, crushed and trampled... extinguished by the careless footfall of the passing Caballo Apocalíptico.

“And now, grown to full bloom of ungrateful manhood, their child, our associate, raised by tender, tearful bachelor fathers who have manfully borne on their own shoulders the responsibilities of his education—for what is he but a poor orphan carelessly left behind by an act of God that claimed his parents as they rushed to indulge a passing fit of passion? ­Madre de Dios! What contumely is not too strong to heap upon such a mendacious, pusillanimous child, his little fouled nappies changed at ruinous expense by the blessed hands of the little sisters at the lycée of St. Dominic? Why, we scoured the cantons to find the finest home for unweds in all Switzerland.”

Patricio wiped his nose on his sleeve.

“A certain sum has been abstracted from our traveling resources and a note has been left by the pequeño Oswaldo who bears my name as godfather—Oswaldo Patricio Melendez O’Rourke y Nuñez—with those of his departed Mama and Papa. And what writes the ungrateful child? ‘Adios uncles, but I go to seek the woman I love and, failing that, I will go to Chicago and learn to play the guitar like Charlie Christian.’ He would abandon the land of his parents of blessed memory and live in the EE. UU.”

He said it that way—eh eh, oy oy—contemptuously; disparaging a North American international axis: the Estados Unidos, the gringo norteamericanos.

“He would turn his back on Mama Coca, and marry a woman in whose veins flows none of the blood of los indios.”

The gunman wept and, shoulders heaving, became intimate, “I have raised him as my own son and he would couple with a gringo virago, some whore who will make him wash his own socks, a faggot guitar player.”

Morgana hopped off the bench. “Pardon me, I have to powder my nose.” She vacated her seat by Morrissey and with the aplomb of a Park Avenue debutante strolled to the door.

“Hey cochinilla, nice piggy gotta go, eh?” Pat followed her retreating curly pink tail with the terribly steady muzzle of his machine pistol and Pen and David shared a vision of spattered blood and bristles plastered to the floor. Morgana passed through the shards of the screen door, now dangling by one top hinge, and daintily squatted to pee in the street outside.

There was no fusillade of bullets. But Pat’s momentum kept him going. “We had thought a Swiss education under the gentle sisters would raise a fine son for Mama Coca and, sure to say, there in the clean mountain air, young Oswaldo passed his infancy—an uneventful drybed training free from Jesuitical casuistries and...and...and...”

Patricio stared fascinated at the spreading puddle forming just outside the door under Morgana’s daintily poised bottom. They prayed he wouldn’t see this as a criticism.

Morrissey kicked Pen under the table and jerked his head toward the rear. There was Harriet. Back from her tryst with Oswaldo Patricio Melendez O’Rourke y Nuñez, fugitive orphan. She had caught the toss of the cosmic dice. As soon as Pat turned around her number was up. They were all going to get it. Harriet took in the tableau, started blinking rapidly, and then went all glassy-eyed. She held her hand against the wall as though lost, steadying herself.

“Freeze!” cried Harriet Hopwood and, throwing herself to the floor, started slapping the linoleum. “Don’t anybody move!”

God bless her contact lenses.

“¡Madre de Dios!” Pat spun around and emptied his clip of bullets into the air where Harriet had been standing, chewing up Cousteau’s ornamental frieze. A Greek motif dinner plate and a genuine oil painting of a bait shack with nets drying fell to the floor.

“¡Maron! ¡Hijo de puta!” Pat was having trouble fitting another clip into the pistol’s magazine.

Trooper Quigley scooped a heavy glass pour-spout sugar cellar from the counter top and, charging to where Pat struggled with his gun’s mechanism, fetched him a roundhouse slam alongside the ear. Pat went down like a sack of onions. As Pat crumpled, Quigley snatched the gun and turned his attention to Mike. Mike hadn’t moved through all the ruckus. He appeared lost in a world of newly discovered pentecostal sensibilities, pondering on the charismatic women’s outing to P.E.I.

He looked silly. If he ever got home, he would have some hard explaining about how the gringos got the drop on him. There were tears in Miguel’s eyes as his unresisting hands surrendered his weapon to the trooper. Quigley pried Mike’s thumb away from the stock and gingerly withdrew his index finger from the trigger guard. Miguel was motionless but for the tears that trickled down his cheeks. The passing of his dreams of retirement paraded toward the horizon, the price of failure. The best he could expect was a geriatric repatriation, in his sunset years a withered towel boy at a Club Med nude beach—watching, dreaming, as string bikinis were loosened, fell to litter the glistening coral sand. An enfeebled hand reached out, alas in vain.

“What’s wrong with him? Damnedest thing I ever saw.” Quigley shrugged, popped the clip and bent to manacle Pat.

Champion and Everlast, the mounties, stormed through the door as the city cruiser pulled up on the sidewalk, lights flashing. The hot pursuit clause of the border treaty was satisfied and just in time for pictures. There was a pop of a strobe flash as the bureau chief from the Bangor Daily News limbered her camera.

The Happy Time Bread man had missed the big one. His gun rolled tight in its cartridge belt, chambers empty, Bob Sawyer was stocking muffins at the Red and White where Libby Pease shopped. That afternoon she would buy two loaves of cracked wheat.

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