Petunia Mathelby stood backlit in the pale green light of a greasy window, wearing an ivory white dress so thin it made cheesecloth look Calvinist.
She made the kind of silhouette that sears your mind like someone dropped your brain on a barbeque grill – that kind of sauce-slathered slattern that smokes out more trouble than Mrs O’Leary’s cow.
Petunia was a proud member of the Wobblies All Girl-Local 636, Foregirl in her metal shop, and I was welded on Petunia like a 40,000 psi braising rod on 3/4" steel plate.
Her long black hair draped over one eye, and then one sculptured shoulder, and kept going like a
midnight waterfall bubbling merrily through the snow-covered buttes of
Western Girlsylvania.
My eyes buttered her toned arms, her calves like upside-down bowling pins, which having been buttered, might drop easy.
I watched her now, like I'd once watched a bus driving off the Bay bridge and crashing into a passenger ferry which then hit an oil tanker which drifted into the former carnival on Treasure Island where the burning Ferris Wheel skipped its mounts and rolled into the ocean, flicking flaming fun-seeking suckers into the sea at intervals with a splash and a long “ hiss.”
When that or Petunia happens, you watch close, and the fact that the grubby little room we’d staked out now was full of swastikas, commemorative Goering ballet figurines, radioactive pastry and half-eaten
Ripple mit Schinkenkraut was a minor distraction.
The view, that sultry, slinky, splitter-Trotskyist view of Petunia was just a perq I’d have to declare on my love taxes.
We were on the job now and Petunia and I made up the spear-point of the Allies, the X you cut in the lead tip of bullet to make it explode and dig a hole in your target the size of a road-kill gopher.
Now it’s true Petunia was a communist, but she was also an anarchist, so she hated Stalin like cherry and anchovy pie. She was more the kind of ravishing Red frail who made coil pottery and resurrected folk songs from the dead and gathered crowberries in the Sierras - the Reds on the side of the angels and the Marines, and all together we were going to take down Hitler like an evil clown circus tent. (Which I'd done in some detail in the case of the Red Nose Honking; to this day the sound of deflating clown shoes sends a chill up my spine, like I’ll never smile again.)
But it wasn’t lust in the air, unless you counted the rats we’d caught in flagrant delicto under the Fleischkase in the icebox. We’d tracked down Stingy Wheels’s flop; the American Nazi relief pitcher for the San Francisco Seals, pastry chef and Uranium smuggler still stalked California like a life insurance salesman at vampire family reunion. (Get it, Pal? They’re immortal.) No one west of Wyoming was safe, including Utah, and even though I wasn't keen on Utah after that incident where I'd tracked down a book of Golden Plates in an old opium den that had been embossed with a screwdriver and everyone suddenly caught a bad case of the crazies and chased me out of town with actual pitchforks they apparently kept around for that purpose, it was still America and I'd die for my country as long as I could keep convincingly stalling on my bar tab, and without actually dying. Never returning to Salt Lake City was a very small price to pay for freedom.
Through an old contact, Bill, the Viscount Phillerph Von Van Der Pforffen the Fourth's former cobbler, we'd got a hot tip from a radioactive old shoelace and using a truck-mounted Gieger counter found Stingy Wheels' latest hideout rotting above a dive bar in the Mission district called V.P. Tango's Mortuary and Travel. A folk-music hootenanny was scheduled later that night. Petunia knew the place, sang "John Brown's Body" there just last week. I missed it, having gotten a case of the Earnest Contralto Flu.
Now we were crouched in the room, ready to strike like union Tigers. Old green and gold wallpaper peeled from the walls, vacuum tubes and electrical parts were scattered everywhere but all carefully labeled. There were piles of papers in 3 languages, all of them German. There was a big pot of cold bratwurst and cabbage on the stove, a souvenir bobble-head of Kaiser Wilhelm from the '36 Olympics; in the corner sat a music stand with Brahams concerto and a cello with a swastika. It was the Room of the Enemy. Rent weekly, daily or hourly. However long evil takes. Rent to kill!
Petunia’s expression changed, her eyebrows rising, her eyes narrowing. She partly closed the blinds in the dank hotel room and cocked her machine pistol, holding it close to her face, where a little dribble of fresh gun oil dripped down into her suprasternal notch and drained slowly down to bouncy, billowy places. The sunlight cast shadows through the blinds that wrapped around that doll like chocolate drizzles on an éclair.
A car engine came close and shut off, the engine pinging as it cooled. "He's here," Petunia said, and looked at me, her darks eyes smoldering with, what was it? Girl-lust? The prospect of icing a a for-real Nazi for keepsies? I had a horrible feeling she was already dreaming up a folk song about it. But Petunia Mathelby was a work-toned fascist-vexing vixen, fierce for the fight, and in her heart, the big gushy one right behind those awesome tits, she knew the absence of God was on our side.
"He" could only mean Stingy Wheels. The very name caused chills and discomfort and a slight stinging sensation. I slammed back a good slug of bad giggle-juice, and peeked through the blinds. The big doors on the Blue Buick slammed in succession. Three slams. One Stingy, two goons, I figured. A chance for target practice.
After three years, a dozen corpses, and a hundred dead ends, Danger had arrived, Danger German-style, accompanied by a couple of gummy-looking greasers like something you'd scrape off your shoes, their faces like pressed hams with zits instead of cloves. Maybe they were more like the gelatinous glop between the ham and the can that slopped down on the plate with a sucking sound that begged the word oleaginous. Flash!, Dumbkoff: they were a bunch of big Nazi jerks.
Violence was about to condense out of the still, hot air, like the way they distill Barney’s ‘Violent O’Paddy Whiskey in East Botswanna in the rainy season, which I polished off from the flask. It tasted like chrome tanning solution and distilled sheep.
I pulled out my new .38, the one with Brughel the Elder's 99 Netherlandish Proverbs engraved on the handle, and then my old Navy Colt, then a couple of hand grenades and set up the mortar behind the couch and readied an old rusty knife, and hid a crossbow behind the door, fitted the brass knuckles and noted where the nearest board with a nail in it was.
"Petunia, quick, get in the closet, crack the door, and keep that gun right between Stingy's beady little eyes." She went. I had to think. First thing to do would be scrape those two glops off that ham Stingy Wheels with a .38 caliber meat scraper.
The room was overheated, moldy, dark. You could see the tip of Petunia's gun barrel pointing through the crack toward the front door. I stood next to the wall on the inside of the main door. We waited for the three pairs of fascist feet to thunder up the long wooden stairs. After three years and a trail of bodies longer than my bar tab at the Rusty Hobnail, I was about to drop the boom on Stingy Wheels like a piano from a fifth story jazz club. The tension was thicker than ham gel in cold pea soup.
Then there was a light little knock, and the door, unlocked, open meekly.
"Helloooooooooo??"' said a friendly female voice. "It's Ms. Lillydale, I'm just here with the Census Bureau! Hellooooooooooo?!! Anyone home?" A pleasantly plump old bird in gingham and lace and an enormous purple hat with an arrangement of Daisies walked in, clutching a large green binder with "U.S. Government Survey, 1942" stamped on it. "Helloooooooooooo?!!" She came in the room as I tried to shrink into the wall behind the door.
The heavy sound of three Krauts storming up the stairs began to shake the hall.
Standing right next to me on the other side of the door, this Lily-Dale suddenly turned the other direction and stepped back into the hall.
"Why Jeffrey, you old dear, I haven't seen you since you worked the taffy booth at the Crystal Market ! It's your old Aunt Linda!
"Oh...Oh...Aunt Linda! I'm so...." said the voice, the menacing, hissy voice of the dreaded Jeff "Stingy" Wheels . Only a 1/2 inch of oak stood between him and the voice of St. Peter telling him to try the other door.
I caught a glimpse of Petunia peeking through the nearly closed door of the closet. Her face liplessly begged for an explanation. All I could do was shrug.
"Well, Jeffrey Dear, I was out making my little effort here for the War, you know, and I saw your name down at the Post Office, you know, where Mr. Henley started working after the accident with the combine, and I thought, well My Goodness, but I haven't seen Little Jeffrey in years - years it must be! - 5 or 6, I'm certain, and perhaps as many as seven, and since I was down here interviewing citizens for the Census I thought I should come by - and Oh! how nice you look all grown up Jeffrey! - oh but you look tired, darling, perhaps you have some tea I could make you in here."
It was hell in there, watching Stingy Wheels breathe the free air of America, with me standing a foot away, ready to plug him if he twitched an eyebrow, or thought about twitching an eyebrow, or looked at anyone in such a way that indicated that he might at some point in the future think about twitching an eyebrow, and unable to do much more than shoot him a dirty look, and barely that, because Mrs. Lily-Dale seemed like both an extremely nice person and potential witness..
She came in and waddled straight to the closet and opened it to find Petunia.
"Oh hello Dearie! Jeffrey, I didn't know you had company. I'm Mrs. Lily-Dale" She thrust out her hand to Petunia, who had to shift the pistol into the other hand quickly to greet Mrs. Lily-Dale, who simply didn't seem to register that it was odd for a girl to be in the closet. "Miss...Miss Mathelby," said Petunia. Then Mrs. Lily-Dale spied me.
"I had no idea you were so popular, Jeffery, and who is this fine-looking young man?" she said, walking right to me behind the door. Stingy looked at me, turned white as a sheet, and stiffened into total uncertainty. He knew me since the incident in Barcelona with the exploding tomato shipment for Franco. But now he was a rat staring at a rat-trap with a both a big hunk of cheese and a Pan-Am ticket to Paraguay sitting on the trigger.
To greet this Aunt Lily-Dale, I had to scramble to shift hands too, but I fumbled it, and the .38 dropped on the wooden floor with a thud that seemed to echo to Twin Peaks.
"Is this your pistol, Dear? why you must be in a very exciting line of work! And you are?," she asked, handing my gun back." I could see Stingy motioning for his goons to ice it down.
"Mack, Ma'am. I'm an old business associate of Stingy's -we go way back. "
"Yes," said Stingy, giving me a worried, desperately searching look, like I was the dinner bill at the Cotton Club that he couldn't pay.
The only sound other than Mrs. Lily-Dale capering sweetly about the room and talking about a new breed of lovely Petunias - the name had set her off - was the sound of gun safeties being clicked off, muffled slightly by gabardine pockets.
The violence yet simmered, and Mrs. Lily Dale was the lid. Ironically, she was now making tea. Soon she came out with a tray, little china cups and a teapot in decorative rose-covered cozy. She dawdled like America standing by Britain in a World War. It was irritating, like trying to cash a check to get the ransom money at the bank and waiting behind some old coot trying to roll his nickels. Beads of frustration sweat rolled down my brow. The pressed cardboard faces of Stingy’s goons tried to glower, but just pinched themselves up like they were constipated. Petunia’s eyes rolled like a locomotive down an embankment. Now everyone in the room had something unusual in common: we were impatiently waiting to be shot.
"....Now I don't want to keep you boys from your fun, but have it while it’s nice and hot" she was saying now, handing out hot tea in little cups, which of course we had to take our hands off the guns to grab. It was about the time I’d raised the tea to my mouth that I realized that Stingy Wheels would not likely have a tea cozy in his kitchen and I looked up to see Mrs. Lily-Dale holding a big ugly black drum barrel.45 Thompson Submachine gun, waving it airly in our direction, and wearing a wry look.
“Keep your paws on the teacup, Suckers,” she said.
The next sound in the room was her clicking off the safety, chambering a round and the clattering of cups of Earl Grey on half a dozen sets of teeth. .
Then she lifted the gun and blasted the ceiling, the gun spitting smoke, fire and a noise like a jackhammer in a cathedral chasing a lost sewer main. Lily-Dale stood bronzly like the Stature of Liberty, except with a Thompson instead of a torch. Plaster and dust snowed on her head and shoulders, smoke curling from the barrel, the casings still rolling around the hardwood floor.
“That explains the hat. Army, OSS or Other?,” I asked her.
“Other. I’m all about the dough, Gumball. Uranium ore. Stingy may be slippery as eel butter but he’s about as sharp as a tea-towel. Now,” she gestured with the Thompson,” The uranium ore, if you please. It’s in the pastries, right, dearies? Baked goods, right, Stingy’s precious little smuggling habit?” She looked to the kitchen. “You,” she said to the lumpier of Stingy’s goons, “Get me those Apfelkuchens, or I’ll ventilate your livers.”
“Aunt Linda!” Stingy said – he seemed genuinely hurt.
“Button your pie-hole, Jeffrey. What a whiny little twerp you are. Your mother always said you were a burden.”
At this Stingy actually slumped to the floor, wounded to the core. I was about to feel sorry for him, but I decided instead to use that broken heart to sight my .38 when I had to shoot him later.
“Charming family, Wheels,” I said to Stingy. “Is your sister by any chance busy drowning kittens?”
At that Stingy buried his head in his hands and started sobbing.
“Mittens!” he wailed. “Why did Mary drop you in the well? Aaaaa!”
Aunt Lily-Dale scowled like Fagin at the fifteenth extra bowl of gruel request. She looked like she was deciding whether it was worth cleaning up the mess to murder everyone where we stood.
Then there was a knock at the door. “Answer it!” She said, doing that little twitch with the gun they do at the flicks to indicate stage right. Petunia, always a practical girl, went.
“Who is it?”said Petunia.
“San Francisco Police.”
“I’ll get it!,” said Lily-Dale, brightening. And opened the door.
An old, barrel-assed ginger-haired cop with a moustache the size and shape of Crete walked in, took one look, and gave Lily-Dale a big hug.
“Darling!” he said.
“Schookums!” she said. “ Can you cover this brain trust while I get the Apfelkuchens ?" And she handed him the Thompson.
“Son of a bitch,” Stingy and Petunia and me all said at the same time. A crooked cop in San Francisco: Who would have not thought? About this point, their spirits gone, the two greasers simply relieved themselves in their pants.
“Ha!” Said Schnookums. “Now are all you boys gonna cry to your mommas now, then?” Schnookums was a walking cliché of a copper gone rotten– had a rolling Irish accent as thick as oatmeal in a cement mixer.
“I aint’ crying, O'Schnookums.” I said.
“I aint’ crying, neither, Mister.” Petunia said. Her fake bad grammar wasn’t that convincing; it sounded sort of like the Ladies’ People’s Theater Club at Vassar.
“Shut yer lip, Missy. You too, Bub.
“Mack.” I said.
”Mack?” He said.
“Mack, Bub,” I said.
Then there was a knock at the door.
Petunia answered out of sudden politeness, brushing past the field of leveled gun barrels like a turnstile.
The second the latch clicked a tall, shadowed man was in the door, and his thin lips flapped and his teeth emitted things: ”Now you look like an intelligent young woman – and a charming one at that - and I can tell you that you must know that a busy household – oh I see you have company, hi there folks! - like this can only function at the peak of it’s cleanliness and modern efficiency with a set of that apex of domestic modernity: a complete set Fuller Brushes. Now I can see by your expression that I might have intruded a bit, but I think that once you see these top-quality…”
She swung a teapot at the back of his neck, dropping him to the floor like a sack of narcoleptic bricks. I don’t think he ever knew the she saved his life, whatever joy that might bring to the world – cleaner rugs, nice suede, and well-groomed hair, I guess. At least the brushes, now scattered on the rug, would come in handy getting the blood stains out.
Then there was a knock at the door.
“You’re real popular today, Stingy. Reminds me of this girl I knew at Bennington. We called her Fast Chesty Trustfund.” Stingy stopped sobbing a bit as a flash of recognition crossed his reddened face, then he started crying again. “Aaaaaa! Aaah! Aaah!”
"Everyone stay right where you be," said O'Schnookums, painting the room slowly with the Thompson's menace. The only sound in the room was Stingy Wheels softly sobbing. The knock repeated gently and the door swung shyly open.
A scrawny tall young fellow with a huge suit and enormous overalls and a banjo walked in with smile.
“Say, fellas, I’m Pete Seeger, and I’m a-playing tonight, and is this where the ‘Send Hitler to Hell Hootnenany and Rag-Time Jambo-rie rehersal…? oh, HELLO, guns out I see, well, this here is quite a situation! And I got just the thing…” And he raised his banjo and stretched his fingers and lifted his neck in such a way that it was almost certain one of two things was coming through it: “This Land is Your Land” or a rapid series of .45 caliber bullets.
What happened now could only have taken half a second.
You could say a lot of things about Pete Seeger, but he was nobody’s fool in a room clearly full of Nazis, matronly crooks, unconscious Fuller Brush men and girls like Petunia. He’d seemed about to have launched into an unmitigated series of Spanish Civil War songs, but I’ve never seen a banjo move that fast, with righteous anger, an unstoppable round hickory slap of justice, and a sharp sting of guilt over the Hitler-Stalin Pact that drove that banjo right across Schnookums fat head and gave Petunia the opening to trip up Lily-dale with the old kitten-pump behind the door jamb trick just as the plump old battleship came back in the room with a huge tray of Apfelkuchens with uranium-ore filling. Lily-Dale fell like a deflating airship and the Apfelkuchens scattered, glowing slightly as they flew through the darkening room. By that point I had the drop on Stingy’s goons: ‘picked up my .45 Colt and the .38 and had one each massaging the back of the Nazis’ necks.
"Ain't no Irving Berlin ever tried THAT,” said Seeger, again, an overprecise Harvard tone coloring the “ain’t.” It was just a little irritating. On reflection, I was being too sensitive.
But that was a pet peeve. The Blitzkrieg of Peeves, the still-blubbering, emotionally vulnerable Nazi collaborator Stingy Wheels – (sheesh, what a galoot) was making a break for it, stepping on top of fat, prone Lily-Dale in such a way that she squeeked, and trying to evade the scrawny but determined folk singer at the door.
I fired a round from the old Navy Colt in my left hand to make a statement. The Powder and Ball Civil War veteran spoke. It said: “Stop crying!” The enormous lead ball slapped into his shoulder. So, he started crying again.
“What is the square of the chanteuse?” He shrieked, or perhaps, being a Kraut-lover, schreiked.
“What?
“I’m making applebutter with ox gravy!” he delineated.
“What?” said everyone but me.
“There is no revolution but da-da-dada-daddadada!” He grabbed his shoulder, breathed hard, struggled to free associate.
Too bad, Stingy. He blew it here, tipping his hand. He was clearly spouting off Dadaist poetry. That was Stingy’s plan: escape in the confusion. The Nazis, having shut down the Bauhaus, studied the techniques. It had worked in Stuggart, and once in Pasadena. He escaped the FBI at the Smithsonian by pouring chocolate on a portrait of Teddy Roosevelt. But I’d known enough artist types to recognize a desperate, self-aggrandizing, insincere attempt at Dadaism, enough to wonder if there was any other kind. I made a note to ask André Bréton after the war. But now I lifted the Colt and put the sights smack on Stingy’s broken, shriveled excuse for a heart, if I could find it. No better cure for it. I pulled the lever back.
“So beg, Wheels, beg for your pathetic, fascist, murdering, weasely, .137 lifetime batting average with the Seals before I drill into that beef jerky ball you call a heart.”
“O, Mittens!, Mittens! ” he said, and went for something in his pocket.
So I fired, pity overtaking justice. And the ball hit his chest with a loud clank.
“Clank?” said Petunia.
“Ha! Hah! Ha!,” said Stingy, his tears transforming into a sick laughter. “That’s just it! I don’t have one! Ha! Ha – Look!” He tore off his shirt to reveal his chest, or what was supposed to be a chest, but instead looked more like a dashboard, maybe nine dials, and a bunch a blinking lights. You could hear a soft clunking noise.”
“By Jing! He’s some kind of Mechanical Man!” said Seeger, helpfully.
“Ewww,” said Petunia. “Mister, you are some kind of messed up.”
“Well now that doesn’t surprise me one little bit,” said Lily-Dale, her face still on the floor. "Such a disappointment to the family."
“My heart, my heat was broken, literally. After the 1938 season with the San Francisco Seals...."
“And your .097 batting average that year, you mole-eyed bum,” I added
“My country would not see the new way which Herr Hittler,- Heil Hitler! -”
“Oh, cripes,” I said with bitter internality. “Such a Hitlerheimer sob sister.” Crack that queer Nazi marble and they usually blubbered like an 8 year old girl.
“...the fuhrer was to lead us, out of poverty, out of misery, into the glory the Reich, and it should happen in America, and then I learned my heart—my heart, so broken by the loss of Mittens, as a child, all because I threw out Mary’s Pookie Dolly! Why?! Why!? ...But....well, Well I learned in Vienna that my heart would stop in a three weeks.”
“That’s the least convincing argument since Napoleon offered to let Wellington be the Emperor of Antarctica if he took a dive at Waterloo. ” I said.
“Did that really happen?” whispered Petunia to Seeger, who looked thoughtful.
Stingy kept going. “I remember Dr. Krapsenpanzer – he says to me, he says:
‘Jeffery. You will not see the liberation of Poland by either side. You’re heart- it is kaput.‘
"And then Dr. Krapsenpanzer says to me, he says:
‘..but zere is one way, although you may not like it. And Dr. Krapsenpanzer, he is at the famous Vienna Blintzenpuffer Clinic, you know, he looked at me like love for all mankind had filled his heart. But he says to me, he says: 'we will remove your heart and replace it with a new radium powered vacuum pump! It is a miracle of Science!” And so, you see, here it is: I am a man with a mechanical heart. “
It just looked to me like he'd dived for a foul ball at full speed into the back of someone’s gas range.
"And I thought he was only a disappointment,” said Aunt Lily-Dale, into the rug, as we’d place the equally larger, unconscious Schookums on top of her. "Now I see he has disgraced us all with his worship of Science."
"You ain't drinkin' this balloon juice?" I said.
"Thanks to Dr. Krapsenpanzer....I can continue to serve the Reich!" said Stingy Wheels.
"He got a robot that can hit a slider?" I said.
“…..Wait,” said Petunia, looking at something on Stingy’s back – she walked right over to him and started undoing something. Petunia was no shrinking violet. I got a little jealous.
She undid a leather strap of some kind off Stingy, who looked aggrieved but didn’t resist, and she pulled off the mechanical chest unit.
“My heart!” said Stingy. "Mein..."
“It’s a cheap prop. See? Steel case, cardboard and a battery. You got a cape and a funny hat to go with this, Mister?”
“Well, you’ve all seen through my little disguise, but that was only to infiltrate the real robots, like Roosevelt, and Churchill. And the Air Force! And here, it is you! You are the robot!” screamed Stingy, pointing a finger at O'Schnookums.
“I’m aboot as much a roo-but as I am a stool softener, ya pig’s tit.” said O’Schnookums.
“Are we speaking metaphorically, or..?” asked Petunia.
“Robot!” Stingy emphatically emphasized.
This really wasn’t the conversation I’d been looking forward to. I preffered the “Beg for death, you slime-licking Nazi traitor!,” followed by a brief burst of gunfire where his part of the conversation was supposed to be “Aaaaagggghhh!” But instead, we were arguing about who was or wasn’t a robot.
“I once wrote a song about a robot man…how did it go?,” said Pete Seeger, tuning his banjo.
“Back off that A string, Seeger. I don’t want to have to shoot you too,” I said. “Petunia, get on the blower and call downtown.”
“Ok, where downtown?” she asked, brushing back her long black hair to get the receiver next to her ear.
“The cops, the army, the works. The FBI.”
“Oh, not the FBI, friend, they’re a-gunning for me,” said Seeger.
”Me, too, said Petunia.”
“Robot!” said Stingy.
"Alright, but it can't be just the local heat. Who knows what favors the flatties owe O'Schnookums here? "
"Call me O'Schnookums again, and I'll pull off your leg and stick it up your behind. "
"Only a Robot could do that!" said Stingy.
"I'm calling downstairs, then," said Petunia, and hollered out loud to the gathering Hootenanny below, where we could hear guitars and fiddles and washboards being improperly tuned.
"Hey Fellas! It's Petunia! Free Beer Upstairs!" She hollered just like the metal shop foregirl she was, and having seen her before, about 50 hungry folk musicians pounded up the stairs, carrying their gitfiddles, dulcimers, lutes and penny-whistles, random notes getting plucked in the rush, making a sound not unlike what they were planning to do on stage in twenty minutes anyway.
"Welcome Everybody!," piped up Seeger. " And I got a little ditty for ya."
"Grab a Nazi,
Tie Him A-tight!
And then we'll drink
into the night.
Ol' Mister Hitler,
Ain't got no soul
And Folks Aplenty
will smoke a bowl.
For Freedom, Men!
Freedom, A-Ahoy!
We'll stuff them Nutzis
Into Bok Choy
And then Freedom, Men
Freedom, A-Hoy!
A World of Love
For Girls and Boys!
It was a German hideout, so there really was free beer, courtesy of the Third Reich. We tied up the bad guys good and drank long and hard like it was coming out of Hitler's wallet. The two greasers were wrapped like butterflies, and about as dangerous, and were hanging from the shower curtain rod. The Fuller Brush man woke up, but he then he started eating some of the uranium-filling Appflekuchens and after a while he seemed to light up the room. A few girls showed up from the factory shift, and Petunia rang up a few more, and then someone inflicted a square dance, and there formed a happy swirl of steel workers, Reds and ethnomusicologists. A good time. Too good.
O'Schnookums and Aunt Lily-Dale seemed to have forgotten their nefarious scheme and and sang lustily along with "Captain John's gone Slobberin'" and "The Fishwife's All A-Wormy" and "If I had a Nine-Iron" and "Four Kings in Mary-Belle's Hollow", and the six people actually there for the show came up for the party and about the time I was pitching woo with Petunia on the Swastika-themed red comforter, and one of the folk-boys had started wearing an brown mop on his upper lip and goosestepping around to everyone's amusement, Stingy Wheels, having slipped his binds only to wander around in emotional distress and accuse the autoharpists of being robots, slithered away in the black night.
