‘Doodle-deedle-doodle.’
In less dangerous times – which fortunately included virtually all of his life to date, until he’d encountered the lunatic with the syringe – Dylan had occasionally endured these fits of repetition by playing a rhyming game with whatever concatenation of meaningless syllables currently obsessed his brother.
‘Doodle-deedle-doodle.’
I’d like to eat a noodle, Dylan thought.
‘Doodle-deedle-doodle.’
And not just one lonely noodle—
‘Doodle-deedle-doodle.’
But the whole kit and caboodle.
Bound to a chair, full of stuff, sought by assassins: This was not the time for rhyme. This was a time for clear thinking. This was a time for an ingenious plan and effective action. The moment had come to seize the pocketknife somehow, some way, and to do amazing, wonderfully clever, knock-your-socks-off things with it.
‘Doodle-deedle-doodle.’
Let’s bake a noodle strudel.
4
In his inimitable green and silent way, Fred thanked Jillian for the plant food that she gave him and for the carefully measured drink with which she slaked his thirsty roots.
Secure in his handsome pot, the little guy spread his branches in the soft glow of the desk lamp. He brought a measure of grace to a motel room furnished in violently clashing colors that might have been interpreted as a furious interior designer’s loud statement of rebellion against nature’s harmonious palette. In the morning, she would move him into the bathroom while she showered; he reveled in the steam.
‘I’m thinking of using a lot more of you in the act,’ Jilly informed him. ‘I’ve cooked up some new bits we can do together.’
During her performance, she usually brought Fred onstage for her final eight minutes, set him on a tall stool, and introduced him to the audience as her latest beau and as the only one she had ever dated who neither embarrassed her in public nor tried to make her feel inadequate about one aspect or another of her anatomy. Perching on a stool beside him, she discussed modern romance, and Fred made the perfect straight man. He gave new meaning to the term deadpan reaction, and the audience loved him.
‘Don’t worry,’ Jilly said. ‘I won’t put you in goofy-looking pots or insult your dignity in any way.’
Whether cactus or sedum, no other succulent plant could have radiated trust more powerfully than did Fred.
With her significant other having been fed and watered and made to feel appreciated, Jilly slung her purse over her shoulder, grabbed the empty plastic ice bucket, and left the room to get ice and to feed quarters to the nearest soda-vending machine. Lately, she’d been in the grip of a root-beer jones. Although she preferred diet soda, she would drink regular when that was the only form of root beer that she could find: two bottles, sometimes three a night. If she had no choice but the fully sugared variety, then she would eat nothing but dry toast for breakfast, to compensate for the indulgence.
Fat asses plagued the women in her family, by which she wasn’t referring to the men they married. Her mother, her mother’s sisters, and her cousins all had fetchingly tight buns when they were in their teens, or even in their twenties, but sooner rather than later, each of them looked as if she had shoved a pair of pumpkins down the back of her pants. They rarely gained weight in the thighs or the stomach, only in the gluteus maximus, medius, and minimus, resulting in what her mother jokingly referred to as the gluteus muchomega. This curse was not passed down from generation to generation on the Jackson side of the family, but on the Armstrong side – the maternal side – along with male-pattern baldness and a sense of humor.
Only Aunt Gloria, now forty-eight, had escaped being afflicted with the Armstrong ass past thirty. Sometimes Gloria attributed her enduringly lean posterior to the fact that she had made a novena to the Blessed Virgin three times each year since the age of nine, when she’d first become aware that sudden colossal butt expansion might lie in her future; at other times, she thought that maybe a periodic flirtation with bulimia had something to do with the fact that she could still sit on a bicycle seat without requiring the services of a proctologist to dismount.