LIKE A MIGHTY QUONKER, Chapter 9

     The sandwich gone, Matt was scribbling a lyrical passage about a cake with black icing that might fit into the Monochrome Interlude when someone told him “Not much in the dukey crowd today.”

     Looking up, he found Carleton Nairn, a cup of coffee in one hand, settling into the seat Linda had vacated.  “What’s the best way to drink this stuff?” the newcomer asked.  “Or should I just keep punching buttons until I get one that’s bearable?”

     Matt had never tried the vintage coffee vending machine, but he’d heard about it.  “Yeah,” he chuckled.

     Carleton Nairn sipped at the paper cup and winced.  “Urf.  Hey, I hear there’s a party Friday night.  Going?”

     Matt nodded.  “Can I give you a ride?” Nairn went on.

     “Um, no.  Thanks.”  Lest he hurt a new colleague’s feelings, he added, “I’ve, er, already got one.”

     “Be nice to see everyone,” said Nairn, attempting another sip.  “Even if most of them suddenly don’t remember me.  I heard the Silberwetters are going to be there.”

     Matt raised one shoulder to express ignorance and apathy.”  They’re always somewhere,”    

     Carleton Nairn went on, a tinge of nostalgia in his voice.  “Hey, maybe you went to their Thanksgiving do?”

     “I was at my brother’s,” Matt told him.

     “You turned the Silberwetters down?”

     “I was not invited,” said Matt, fixing his eyes on Carleton Nairn’s face.

     His companion didn’t seem to notice.  “Well, I hear it was something: one of those Turley Buffets you can have catered, you know, with owl’s eggs, goose livers, every bird except turkey.  I like a buffet deal, myself: if everyone’s standing, no one’s inspired to make a big speech.  Now, who was it told me about that?  Mr. Prince, I believe, going on about parties.  He seemed annoyed about something.”  Nairn took another sip of pseudo-coffee.  “Likely he’s annoyed about everything.”

     Matt forced a smile and a half-hearty “Heh-heh.”

     Carleton Nairn’s eyelids fluttered as though someone had shined a bright light into his face.  He cleared his throat and went on, “Not shy, is she?”

     Matt scribbled “Two bricks shy of a load” on his scratch pad, but decided he didn’t know Carleton Nairn well enough.

     “We go way back,” Carleton Nairn went on.  “She’d get her claws into any man she laid eyes on.  I guess you never even saw her before she turns up in your office.”

     Matt shuddered and tried to close his mind’s eye.  “Oh, I’ve seen her.”

     Watery eyes reflected up from watery coffee as Nairn leaned into another sip.  “Oh, that’s right.  She used to work in Streets and San.”

     “Before my time,” Matt told him, with another shudder.

    “That was back when Walter Prince still had your job.’  Nair settled back in the chair.  “And I….I knew the whole crew down Down: Thaxter, Prince, Silberwetter…but to you I guess this is as old as jellybean jokes.”

     “No, no.”  Matt set down his pen and folded his hands into what he hoped was a position of interest.  “Um, fascinating.” One hand strayed toward the apple, but came back.  Matt didn’t eat apples in front of witnesses: why force anyone to look at his teeth?

     “Not very,” Carleton Nairn told him.  “People you never knew, some dead, some hitting the bricks….”  He sucked in more coffee.  “She ever talk to you about the Good Old Days?”

     Matt’s eyes were on the apple.  “We, um, didn’t discuss that.”

     Carleton Nairn looked Matt up and down, shrugged, and checked the inside of the paper cup.  “I still remember how shocked they all were when Jerry was killed.”  He wadded the empty cup between his hands.  “Well, we all were: it was tough luck. The burglar never expected to find him in, watching TV, and had to shoot him to loot the place.  After her time, though, I guess.  She was divorcing Thaxter already by then.  Or was he her second?  Anyway, she likely wouldn’t remember that.”

     Matt shrugged again.  Carleton Nairn stood up.  “So.”  He flipped the stained wad of cardboard toward the trash can.  “Be seeing you at the party, I guess.  IF I don’t come begging for help this afternoon first.”

     “Um,” was Matt’s reply.  “See you.”  He watched Nairn cross to pick up the cup, which had missed the can by a yard.  As soon as his new subordinate reached the door of the lunge, Matt grabbed the apple and brought it toward his mouth.

     “Why, hello, Mr. Nairn,” came a chirp from the door.

     “Howdy, Ms. MacTaggart,” Carleton Nairn greeted the owner.  “Going to the party?”

     “Oh, yes!” she told him.  “It’s my first as an employee.  You’ll be there too, won’t you?”

     “Wouldn’t miss it.  Free food and drink, right?”

     Matt slowly lowered the unbitten apple as Holly sashayed past him to the vending machines.  This was all surely his imagination.  He was a writer, after all, so naturally he was practiced in imagining plots where there weren’t any at all.

     Holly planted the backs of her hands on her hips as she confronted the candy and cookie dispenser.  Matt was not the only inhabitant of the lounge watching.  Her quilted blouse had a deep golden V by way of neckline; her belt, of the same semi-metal, fastened with a crescent moon in the vicinity of her navel.  A necklace of black and gold feathers tortured into figure eights wandered over her shoulders to her chest and back again.  Tassels of red and green hung from black vinyl boots for an incongruous holiday touch.

     She made her selection and leaned a long way forward to drop in her money and press the right buttons.  Matt-the-Writer scrawled a few descriptive notes on the scratchpad.  The pants slid along well-muscled caves to wrinkled deeply at…what part of the body?  Backs-of-the-knees?  Kneepits?

     He scribbled “Kneepits?  Real word?  New one?”  Would this fit somewhere into “Ascent of the Ruby Slippers”?  Which of his characters did he want to sport noticeable kneepits?

     Metal scraped on the floor and Holly plopped down into the chair already warmed up by Linda and Nairn.  Her little box—six Oreos–slid onto the table as she reached down to unbunch the fabric at her kneepits.  Then she adjusted cloth farther up.  For a moment she just sat on her hands, her knees together but her ankles spread beyond the metal feet of the chair.  This close, Matt thought she looked younger, more vulnerable.  She was not, after all, so very old, and still a newcomer to Down, a novice even if she did have Marshall Silberwetter for a grandfather, and could….

     That train of thought was derailed by another word question.  Matt scribbled “stepgrandmother” among his notes.

     His movement broke the spell over Holly.  She wriggled a bit and then brought her hands up to the Oreos.  “Are you going to the party tomorrow, Ma…Mr. Benz?”

     Matt was thrown off by this address.  He swallowed hard.  “Mm-hmm.  Er, free food, right?”

     She laughed just as she had for Carleton Nairn.  Her eyes did not move away from Matt’s.  “I could give you a ride.”

     Matt held up both hands, palm out.  “No thanks.  It’s…it’s been taken care of,”

     The intent look on her face informed him he had chosen precisely the wrong phrase.  “Ye-es.” She slid one finger across the Oreos.  “My grandmother will be there, won’t she?”

     Matt felt a sudden kinship with the cats in Pepe LePew cartoons.

FRIDAY FICTION: Budget Hearing

     “Military spending is at an all-time high and the Royal Treasury tells me it is not hard to understand why.  You, General, ordered 412 operations last year in which all our infantry and cavalry mounted a full assault.  That’s more than one Red Alert per day!”

     “Yes, Your Majesty.  We WERE quite fortunate that so many of them were within an hour’s ride of Headquarters.  Thus year we may not be able….”

     “And you were late for this meeting because everyone had to assemble forty-five minutes ago?”

      “Yes, Your Majesty.  The operation was a complete success.  It was our duty to help with Jolly Ollie Orange’s sunburn.”

      “Was it really important enough to call out all our forces?”

     “He was starting to peel!  I understand, Your Majesty, it IS expensive, and it’s a lot of effort, but Your Majesty’s men and horses have been dealing with bad publicity ever since that egg case.”

     “But does every single call require all of you scrambling to respond?”

     “Well, Your Majesty, we worry about the kind of publicity Your Majesty’s forces would receive if people found out that only half the king’s horses and half the king’s men were coming out to help.”

     “You can’t make an omelet….”

     “Excuse me, Your Majesty, I must take this….  Colonel, declare a red alert!  Notify all the horses and all the men: we must go.  Mount up!  We’re riding out!”

     “At least tell me what the emergency is.”

     “We MUST answer this one, Your Majesty.  Chicken Little says the sky is falling!”

     “Very well.  But if it turns out it was just her son Humpty falling on her….”

Safe To Go Back in the Water?

     One of the common paradoxes examined in old postcards is the conflict between people who go fishing in hopes of getting a bite, and then being shocked when they get one.  Dogs and mosquitoes are the usual sources of discontent, but the world of aquatic life offers creatures who get logical revenge on the people who came down in hopes of eating TTHEM.

     The water dwellers, though, understand their jobs on comic postcards, and do not limit their attention to anglers.  Go for a swim or a bathe or a dip or a paddle (or any of the other words we came up with over the years for a watery break from routine) and you risked the attentions of clawed critters.

     My research into this topic was originally aimed at checking the passage of time in these mailable cartoons.  I assumed, incorrectly, that those postcards which involved threatened or actual damage to a vacationer’s toes were the originals.

     The inventory here at fine old joke central refused to give me data to support the idea that toe-nipping belonged on the earlier postcards.  I assumed that artists moved away from the era, as in the card above with the dance of the lobster and the fat man, when the less controversial parts of the body were the center of attention….

     To a more libertine time when the same jokes could be applied elsewhere.

     But (and I use that word with some trepidation) it turned out that the move up the anatomy to other obvious targets started much earlier.  There is some evidence that the toe snap and the butt bite developed together, and may simply have depended on whether the artist could draw feet.

     After all, the audience is going to get the point even if you have only the most modest ability to draw the human form (observe how this artist has saved trouble by keeping most of these folks out of frame or underwater.)

     Not that scientific accuracy in drawing the assailant is particularly required, at that.  (What a determined crustacean!  DO they actually float around like that just to tickle swimmers?  I always assumed they crawled along the bottom…okay, let’s just move on.)

     I do not have access to every postcard ever printed, of course, but how come I’ve never seen a water creature defending its territory by nipping a finger?  Or a knee?  Perhaps toes and tushes are the only parts of the body that cartoonists considered especially funny for biting.

     Look, there’s an exception to every rule.

LIKE A MIGHTY QUONKER, Chapter 8

     Precisely at twelve (one and one-half hours after his first break and two and one half hours before his next), Matt pulled the door of his cubicle shut and carried his brown paper bag to the nearest lounge.  He bought a can of Diet Coke from the machine and sat down at the same table where he sat every day.  He could have had his choice; the big room was at its emptiest at noon, for packing a lunch and eating it here was a certain sign of nobodiness.

     Matt didn’t notice the dew nobodies at other tables; he was intently revising his devastating putdowns of Ada Silberwetter, none of which had come to his mind during their actual conversation.  As fierce growls worked their way around his imagination, he unbagged his sandwich,  This was the last of the leftover turkey.  Pity.  It might get a little monotonous, these weeks right after Thanksgiving, but it relieved him of the trouble of making a decision about the menu.

     He set his apple to the right of the Diet Coke, just above the scratch pad.  By now his imagination had him rescuing a penitent Ada Silberwetter from a blizzard, fleeing to a snowbound cabin where they would be holed up for days.  Matt frowned over the phrase “holed up”.  He wrote it down.  Then he scratched it out.

     He shifted his mind to the mostly empty scratch pad.  Luch was for coming up with Inspired Plots and Scenes for “Ascent of the Ruby Slippers” or for some award-winning short story that would make that novel saleable.  Matt yearned to write elegant horror stories about ancient spirits of the green who menaced picnickers or sensuous women who, after a night on the town, threw off their clothes and jumped back into the sewer system.  Somehow, though, everything he wrote sounded like something he had written.

     “Too cold to go out, isn’t it?  What’ve they got for lunch in vendoland?”

     Matt glanced up into the blazing eyes of Linda Szarkowski’s parrot pen.  The eyes rattled at him as Linda moved past to the row of vending machines, cocked her hips to one side, and considered the selection.

     Matt’s eyes went back to the scratch pad.  He scratched a little more ink over the words “Holed up”.  When Linda came back to sit at his table, he put his pen across the phrase just in case.

     “So, ah….”  Linda dropped her package of cheese and crackers on the tabletop.  “Going to that, er, party, then?”

     Matt grimaced.  Smiling, Linda dug at the plastic wrapper.  “Need a ride?”

     Matt thought it over: it would save him cab fare.  But Linda lived down south.  No sense putting her miles out of her way by taking her up on what was probably just a polite conversation opener.

     “No,” he said.  “I’m all set.  Thanks anyway.”

     Lina shrugged, twice, quickly, while stabbing at the plastic with long pink nails.  “The Silberwetters will be there, I suppose.”

     Matt shrugged back at her, but she didn’t see it.  Her clawing was bringing her no closer to the cheese and crackers.  Matt considered offering to help.  But that might embarrass her.

     She glanced up at him and ran a finger through the hair at the side of her head.  “Um, you’re still a writer, aren’t you?”

     Matt had even less of an answer than for her previous remark.  “Well, um, er.” He fumbled with his pen but suddenly remembered it was camouflage.  “You heard what m…what Mrs. Lowe said, didn’t you?”

     “Once  a writer, always a writer?”  Linda nodded.  “I wish I had a job I liked that much.”  One thumbnail tore away a corner of the plastic, exposing crackers to open air.  She removed one cracker, shook her head, and went on, “I wonder how Mrs. Silberwetter knows her.”

     Matt shrugged some more.  Linda set an elbow on the table.  “I never heard Mrs. Silberwetter was interested in literature,” she said.

     “No,” Matt replied, with another shrug.

     Linda cleared her throat and leaned forward to try harder.  “You think maybe she’s going to do her memoirs?  With a ghostwriter, I mean.  I wouldn’t think Mrs. Lowe would do that, but maybe she heard you were a writer and that’s what she wanted from you.”

     “I wouldn’t know what she wants,” muttered Matt.  “She didn’t say.”

     Linda’s eyes narrowed.  She tapped her cracker on the table.  “Well, I, oh, I suppose it’s all nothing.  Who could have told her you were a writer anyhow?  I mean…I know, but we’ve been around a long time.  We’re the last ones left from that crowd: Nelson, Dick….”

     “There’s Himself,” Matt felt obliged to point out.

     “Oh, he was here before us.” Linda scratched at the plastic covering the cheese compartment of the package.  “The older generation, really.  He moved up to that office a month after I got there….oh God, how many years ago?”  She shrank away from the thought.

     Matt had heard legends of a time before Walter Prince, but he hadn’t been around Down as long as Linda.  “His, er, predecessor….”  He cleared his throat; it always made him  uncomfortable to use four-syllable words in mixed company.  “He died, didn’t he?”

     Linda nodded, concentrating on the cheese.  “Yeah.  There’s no promotion in that department except by death.”  She tossed the packet on the tabletop and gazed morosely at Matt’s lunch.

     Matt plopped a hand over his Diet Coke.  “No cyanide capsules, please.”

     “Oh, I wouldn’t go after you.”  Linda grinned.  “Himself, maybe.  I wouldn’t mind being in Nairn’s shoes either.”  She glanced over her shoulder and leaned forward to whisper, “I hear he’s got Walt Prince on his arm.”

     Matt shrugged.  Linda lowered both head and voice, eyes shifting left and right.  “When I just started here, the inspectors pick him up.  Everyone said he’d spill the beans and drag a lot of them into it.  But he never did.  I expect that’s why they found him a cubicle at Down.”

     Matt shrugged again.  “Could be.”

     Linda wrinkled her nose in distaste.  Whether this was for him, Carleton Nairn, Walter Prince, or the cheeseless cracker she’d bitten into, Matt couldn’t tell.

      She swallowed and reached for the packet.  “Think this has any harmful additives?”

     “Probably.”

     The packet bounced on her palm.  “If they were going to put all this stuff in anyway,” she declared, “You’d think they’d go on putting stuff in until they got it right.”

     The possibility that Linda was too broke, rather than too cold, to go out for lunch crossed Matt’s mind.  Was there a good way to offer her half of an undistinguished sandwich without sounding condescending?  Leftover turkey: that was the key.  He could say “Here, want to help me get rid of my leftover turkey?”

     “I give up,” she said, just as he opened his mouth.  “I’ll try my luck at Arby’s, wind or no wind.  See you.”

     She nodded goodbye and the parrot head on her pen did the same.  He watched her cross the lounge, mind racing for a way to call her back and offer her half a sandwich.  On her way out, she shoved the cheese and cracker packet past the metal lid of the trashcan.  She moved on, as Matt stared at the can, pressing his hands down hard on the tabletop to force himself not to jump up.  That was a dollar’s worth of uneaten food gone to waste.  But, as Walter Prince’s assistant he could hardly be seen fishing cheese and crackers out of the garbage.  He grabbed his pen and scrawled “crackers and cheese” on the pad.  Then he decided there was no reason to record it.

FRIDAY FICTION: Fancy Meeting YOU Here

     “You here, Uncle Jack?”

     “Down cellar.”

     “Hi, what’s…um, what are you doing?”

     “Sealing these papers in stasis.  Might be safe to touch in eight thousand years.”

     “So your latest invention is a radioactive printer?”

     “Nope.”

     “Your latest invention exploded, then, and spread plutonium across your notebooks?”

     “The PJ-1127 worked perfectly.”

     “Er, that was the AI store coupon that kept up with price hikes?”

     “No.  The interdimensional travel module.”

     “Oh, yes.  How could I forget?  It worked?  You visited other dimensions?”

     “Yep.”

     “Did you meet yourself in other realities?”

    “I did.  One of ‘em had just married his third clone of a pinup model and another was getting dressed to pick up his Nobel prize for Contraptions.”

     “Oh, I’m sorry we don’t have that in this reality.  You’d….”

     “Another was a werewolf.  I didn’t see another one because he’d perfected an invisibility potion but not the antidote.  Hadn’t seen himself in five years and thanked me for curing him of wanting to.”

     “It must have been fascinating.  So these papers are from the other dimensions?”

     “Yep.  Gotta seal ‘em away so the walls between universes don’t break down.”

     “You’ll need to remember that when you make another trip.”

    “Nope.  Had my fill of it.  Disassembled the machine.  Not heading out there again.”

     “It was all too disorienting?  The vastness of the universe was intimidating?  Or did you meet evil versions of yourself who might come here and take over?”

     “Nope.  Met a lot of old coots with crazy basement labs.”

     “So, uh, nobody you had anything in common with?’

     “Plenty in common.  These papers are IOUs.  Every one of those blatherskites borrowed money off me.”

What Are Those Boots Made For?

     We seem to have been spending a lot of time lately on the sexual antics and/or misdeeds of our ancestors, and on my way to something else, I began to wonder about the old story of the walk home from the ride in the country.  You must know the drill: young man with a car takes his girlfriend out for a ride just to look at the loveliness of the countryside by a setting sun, and when he finds a spot that’s fairly sheltered, either claims he has run out of gas or just pulls over and makes a Certain Proposition.  The young lady (assuming she is not as amenable as the one seen here) refuses, the cad tells her she can just walk home from here, and she tearfully vows never to trust a man ever again as she trudges through the darkness toward the city limits.

     Maybe the joke has died in a day when a young lady has her phone and the number of Uber or Lyft.  OR maybe this is an era when she can just wrestle the keys away from him.  In any case, the story is part of American folklore, and continued for many years as a Fine Old Story.

     As such, it appears frequently on postcards, especially, for some reason, during the 1920s, when this particular artist showed sympathy with the villain rather than the victim.

     The story was already such a popular cliché by this period that it was turned around in the 1925 classic song “If You Knew Susie Like I Know Susie”, in which the hero, singing the song, recalls an occasion when he took Susie for a ride and “She didn’t balk; back from Younkers, I’m the one who had to walk.”

     The custom might just predate the automobile, though how one ran out of gas with a horse and buggy eludes me at the moment.  But there was quite a naughty joke that used the basic scenario oof the girl walking home from a ride in the country and was popular enough to be used as the basis of an adult movie made (perhaps) in 1915, and considered (by some) to be the oldest existing pornographic movie, “A Free Ride”.  I am among those who are dubious about these claims, but for OUR purposes, it is based on our essential premise, and may point future researchers to check Classic literature for stories about a man who tells his girlfriend the chariot has a broken wheel.  (There IS a reference in the Finnish folk epic The Kalevala to one of the heroes who takes a young lady for a sleigh ride with dishonorable intentions, but he doesn’t even pretend he ran out of snow.)

     Moving in the other direction, the joke had a hearty revival after World War II, as more and more Americans found themselves with big cars and cheap gasoline.    

     And the joke was well enough known that simply referring to a young lady coming home late from a date with very sore feet was understood.  But, with the passage of time, do we still tell the story?  Some people have suggested this may slip into stories of predatory males, but, after all, as seen at the top of this column, sometimes the young lady was perfectly willing to go along with the gag.  (Or came prepared, as in another fine old joke where the man says he’s run out of gas and the young lady produces a hip flask.  “Well, that’s the spirit,” the man says, “Is it Scotch?  Rye?”  “Premium Unleaded,” she says, “Get moving.”)

     And, speaking of the passage of time….

LIKE A MIGHTY QUONKER, Chapter 7

     Matt very slowly eased his head out the door of his cubicle.  His mother wore that grey suit he’d seen a thousand times.  Ada Silberwetter had an orange-brown ensemble that flowed with her.  They stood with their backs to him.  Walter Prince faced them, and had obviously not expected to encounter so warm a woman on such a cold day.

     “What a pleasant surprise!” he said, his voice devoid of pleasure.  One hand groped madly at the air in Maryann’s direction.  “Er, Maryann.  You remember Mrs. Silberwetter, don’t you?”

     Walter Prince had very likely been out there berating Maryann for some infraction of his iron laws; it was practically the only reason he ever addressed her at all.  Her voice showed none of this.  “Of course!” she said, her voice pure “welcome-to-our-humble-abode.”

     Walter Prince swallowed.  “And this is….”

     “Lowe.”  Mrs. Benz reached down to shake Maryann’s hand.  “Felicia Lowe.”

     Maryann was startled out of city employee mode.  “Oh!  Are you…are you related to the mystery writer?”

     Matt’s mother shrugged.  “A little.”

     Ada’s chuckle rippled.  “She is the mystery author, Love.”

     Maryann stood up to shake Mrs. Benz’s hand again.  Ada went on, “I told her I could show her around here to get some background for her next book.  She’s calling it ‘Miss Skull’.”

     Barring short story collections, there had been no new Felicia Lowe book in four years.  So Maryann was probably justified in asking “Oh, are you still writing?”

     Mrs. Benz’s lips drew into a disapproving little knot. “I’ll be writing until I die,” she said.  “And if I can manage it, I’ll write my own obituary.”

     Walter Prince’s eyes suggested he had been kicked, hard, in the stomach.  He opened his mouth, but the sentence, like Matt’s view of the little comedy, was cut off when Holly stepped from her cubicle.  Today she wore a quilted red blouse and pants whose legs did not match except in the way they adhered to her skin, stating boldly what Ad Silberwtter’s outfit only insinuated.  Matt wondered if she had to shave her legs to wear them in public.

     “Ah, oh, this is Ms. MacTaggart, of course,” Walter Prince informed his guests.  “You know Mrs. Silberwetter.  This is….”

     Matt pulled back into his cage, grinding his teeth.  That two-bit…tadpole.  Tadpole: he must write that down.  Tadpoles also lived off their tails.

     Scrawling this on a dead draft of a cover sheet involved extra thought.  Writers, of course, lived off their tales as well.  He considered turning this pun into an article, but the only place that would print it was Scavenger’s Newsletter, and they were still overstocked.

     Anyhow, he now had other concerns.  “And this is Linda Szarjkowksi,” said Walter Prince, his voice nearer now.

     Silly to hope they wouldn’t stop at his cubicle.  What would he say?  More important, what would THEY say?

     “Carleton Nairn, our latest recruit.”

     “Mrs. Silberwetter!  I haven’t seen you since….”

     The key to dealing with Ada Silberwetter was to stay calm.  She liked to see people squirm.  He did have one advantage.  He’d seen her coming, so she’d lost the element of surprise.

     “And this is my assistant, Matthew Benz.”  Walter Prince waved a hand through the door.  “Benz, this is Ada Silberwtter, Marshall Silberwetter’s wife, and Felicia Lowe, the mystery writer.”

     Matt, an utterly insincere smile on his lips, started to rise.  “Oh, don’t stand up,” his mother told him.  “I can see you’re busy.”

     “Yes,” growled Walter Prince.  “Everyone here stays busy.  It’s a wonder we don’t get more work done.”

     He gestured toward his own office, and Mrs. Benz followed in that direction.  “I do like that Mr. Benz,” Matt heard her say, as she moved from his view.  “It’s a pity he looks so overworked.”

     Matt was up and at the door by now, in time to intercept the third member of the part.  “Excuse me,” he murmured, at the last minute setting his hand on the door frame instead of her shoulder, “But I am really furious and would like to share this with you at your earliest convenience.”

     Ada’s eyes glittered with appreciation.  Bright red lips pointed into the depths of dimples.  “Have we been introduced, sir?”

     Not waiting for an answer, she sauntered into his cubicle.  Matt stepped way back.

     “Nice place you’ve got here.”  She picked up the little brass name plaque and set one hip against the desk.  “Matthew C. Benz.  What does the C stand for?”

     “My middle name.  What are you doing here?”

    Ada slid back to sit o the desktop, and crossed her legs, running the name plaque along one knee.  “Oh, in the halls of government, the floors are paved with clues.  I wanted to show our perpetrator that we’re on the job.  That’s how it’s done in all the books.  You scare the naughty criminal into doing something desperate.”

     Matt’s lips drew back to show all his teeth.  He was not smiling.  “And what if they do something desperate to my…to her?”  He pointed at the cubicle door.

     Ada wriggled backwards on the desk, ruffling stacks of paper.  “But no one knows her real name, or where she lives.  Unless YOU did it.”

     Matt opened his mouth, shut it, and opened it again. “How can you know you want someone at….  And get off my desk!”

     “You be nice, or I won’t let you help me at all.”  Ada slid back, further crumpling documents, and leaned a shoulder on his wall calendar.  “Oh, my!  Don’t I remember that ceiling!”

     Matt started forward, and stopped.  He had no useful idea how to slide those papers out from under her, and her pose offered her rather too much perspective on what art writer Thomas Craven called “mature female amplitudes”.  An image rose unbidden of a dessert covered with whipped cream.  But though a child might fantasize about diving headfirst into a bowl of whipped cream, an adult could think of a dozen reasons to resist.

     While he was trying to think of one, she went on, “Anyway, I came for my pictures.”

     “Oh!”  Matt turned redder.  “Oh, er, ah….”

     A naturally rosy face leaned toward him, not helping matters.  He stammered on, “Um, well, they aren’t here.  I lent them to a friend at Water Tower Place.”

     Eyelashes bounced at him.  I knew you’d be a perfect Watson.  Misplacing the vital clues already?”

     Matt held both hands between them, palms out.  “I…I didn’t know….”  He cleared his throat and, deepening his voice a bit, went on, “I was going to pick them up tonight, on my way….”

     Ada hopped down from the desk.  “Huh!  You’ll leave them on the bus!”  Slow steps brought her toward him; his back was already against the doorframe.  “I’d better come with you.  Shall we meet there at, say, five thirty-seven?”

     That smile melted a perfectly proper appointment into a sticky assignation.  Matt couldn’t turn away from her eyes; those eyes knew everything there was to know about him, barring a few specifics Ada Silberwetter was menacingly eager to learn.  She knew he could be had.  Matt was NOT sure, and would not be until she exerted herself to prove it.  The suspense was murderous.

    She was now only eight inches away.  “What if a woman kissed you?” she breathed.

    Calm, keep calm.  Matt snarled, “I’d kiss her back.”

     She blinked at him.  “What if it was a very tall woman?”

     While he was working on that, she laughed and bounced from the cubicle.  “Oh, here she is!” called Felicia Lowe.  “Never mind, Mr. Nairn.  She was in the office of that nice Mr. Benz!”

     “We really need to look over the rest of the building,” Ada told Matt.  She turned her gaze on the two men with Mrs. Benz.  “Thank you so much, Walter.  And it was nice to visit with you again, Carleton.  And that nice Mr. Benz, of course.  Ta-ta!”

     Matt could feel the glare radiating from the face of Walter Prince, but could not help following the pair of researchers as far as the door of Down.  He then retreated to Maryann’s desk to make sure the pair actually moved off down the corridor.

     Once things appeared to be safe again, he turned to go back to work.  But one long impeccable arm stretched out to rest a hand on his wrist.  Matt looked down into the face of Maryann, whose eyes brimmed with suspicion.

     She withdrew her hand.  “I have all Felicia Lowe’s books,” she said, her voice casual.  “And I happen to know that her real name is Katharine Benz.  Are you related?”

     Matt shrugged.  “A little.”  He moved off back to the cubicle.

HERE It Is

     You will recall, from our last thrilling episode, that we were discussing a wildly popular postcard theme we discussed in this space some years ago: the “How Come You Haven’t Written To Me?” cartoon.

     The expectation that when you wrote a card or letter you expected one back by return mail (an expectation which has only increased in the era of email and text) led to another theme that was almost as popular as that one: the “Sorry I haven’t written” postcard.

     The sender of such a card admits to the minor crime, but is, after all, making amends.  The essential message is “You are not forgotten.  I’m just a little behind.”

     In fact, as sometimes the card points out, its very existence shows the sender did NOT forget to write.  It may be arriving a little behind its time, but  here is the message you have earned.

     There were even cards which were suited to being sent a LONG time after they should have been, insisting that the sender feels a perfect…fool for not sending something sooner.

     Others admit that you might, by this time, have given up hope.  Finally receiving a message from the delinquent may come as a shock.

     A goodly number of cards apologize for another crime we would fid hard to understand (though I think some senders of electronic communications would get the general theory of it.)  Our ancestors were looking for not just response but parity.  Sending a card in reply to a letter was felt to be inadequate, so some cards made a promise the pay the debt in full when possible.

     Quite a lot of cards subtly apologize for how little can be said on a card, pointing out (that fishing gag gets a lot of mileage) that this is very short, implying that more will be forthcoming later.

     Some cards MIGHT appear to be less apologetic, but this is probably a result of our suspicious modern natures.  I am sure that, back in the day, only the most skeptical recipient would see a subtext of “Okay, HERE’S your message, nagger.  Now the ball’s in YOUR court.”

     You can find, though, a certain number of cards along those lines.  THIS young lady, whatever your filthy mind imagines, is explaining how she always answers her correspondence immediately, barely pausing to dress.

     In fact, some of them express this as a matter of even greater urgency.  I have a few things to say about people who brag their desks are always clean, and what this suggests about them, but I will save that for when the Nobel Committee is ready to consider bloggers for their prizes.

Waiting at the Mailbox

     One of the nice things about doing a blog for years is the chance to go back to blogs which have appeared hereintofore and revisiting a topic with new information.  So postcards with wardrobe mal…no, no, come back.  We are ACTUALLY going to discuss one of the most popular of postcard sentiments: “Wen are you going to write to me, you deadbeat?”

     It isn’t so much that I have anything new to say, see, but I DO have new postcards in inventory which cover that wildly popular theme.  As always, there are basically two “line” jokes in the arsenal of the angry correspondent: one involving fishing….

     And the other involving drying your clothes.  (THIS, by the way, is British postcard cartoonist D. (for Donald) Tempest doing his version of the round children postcards made bestsellers through Grace “Campell Kids” Drayton and others.  D. Tempest became legendary more for the antics of his grown-ups.)

     Of course, though the sending of postcards has dropped off considerably as the telephone became more common, the sentiment remains to this day. It would be nice to have some picturesque way of asking “You haven’t answered my e-mail of forty-five seconds ago!”  (Beyond just adding another forty exclamation points, I mean.)  Or maybe there IS an emoji which communicates the wistfulness of this daydreaming typist.

     Or covers the seductive command of THIS young lady.  (It may be masquerading as a “my new address” card, but that opening, which was also the way to government opened its draft notice letters at this time, makes matters clear.)

     Plenty of cards disguised the sender as the patient dog, loyal to you, you faithless creature who won’t put your pen to that paper to write a letter, or even a simple postcard.

     Better make it a letter.  LOOK at that face.

     Other cards show the matter as more urgent.  You may not think a card or letter would be this vital, but MANY people have associated my blogs with laxatives.  (I forget their EXACT words, though I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be allowed to use them here.)

LIKE A MIGHTY QUONKER, Chapter 6

     Matt replayed his conversation with Ada Silberwetter until 3 A.M., coming up with a number of blistering responses which would have put the flouncing fluff in her place.  A sunny mood, therefore, accompanied him through the frigid gray morning that followed.  He couldn’t use the comebacks on their target now, of course, but with a little tweaking, he could work them into “Ascent of the Ruby Slippers”.  This was one of the meagre advantages of his secret career.  Anything unpleasant that happened to him could add to the book.

     Swinging his briefcase, mouthing a polished riposte he’d perfected on the bus, he marched into Down.  “You’re looking mighty cheerful on such a glumpy day,” said Maryann.

\     “Where’s your pen?” asked Linda, shuffling off her coat as she passed him.

     “Hmmmm?”  he glanced at his fellow prisoner.  He shook some snow from the coast over his right arm and was turning back toward Maryann when one eye was struck by a flash of green from Linda’s dark blue suit.

     A fierce and red-eyed parrot glared from the top of a pen clipped to Laura’s collar.  “It’s all the thing for people on the inside track,” she explained, as Matt stared.  “Don’t YOU have one?”

     Matt opened his mouth, but Maryann was quicker, pointing out, “Oh, he had one on yesterday.”

     Matt looked the secretary up and down.  She had never been particularly malicious before.  “Um,” he said.  “Un, just got here.  Heh.  Not really dressed yet.”

     He hurried back to his cubicle, fishing out the key.  The teddy bear pen was where he’d left it with the other pens.  He tossed the coat onto one of the extra chairs and sat to study the bear.  He put a hand on the desk.  Then, cursing himself for cowardice even as he did it, he picked up the pen and stuck it into his lapel.

     Sighing, he opened his briefcase and transferred his lunch to the lunch drawer, taking quick inventory to make sure it held no surprises.  Then he took up his “List of Things To Do” and added “Pick Up AS’s Pix” to the profound and persnickety errands listed there.  He frowned.  What did the pictures have to do with a party guest dead in the soup?  She hadn’t said.

     Matt shrugged.  Plenty of other chores sat ahead of that on the list, commencing with “More Paper Clips”.  He started out of the cubicle again, list in hand.

     He was halfway to Maryann’s command post when someone roared, “You here, Benz?  Come look at these!”

     Only one person in Down dared to roar.  Matt did an about face and marched back to Walter prince’s lair.  The occupant could be heard snarling, “Some people think he’s nothing but a big dumb jerk.  Not true: he isn’t so big.  Bust his head open, but I don’t want all that ignorance getting loose.”

     Bracing himself for his first bawl-out of the day, Matt stepped into the doorway of the Chief Cubicle.

     Walter Prince sat behind the desk, with Carleton Nairn occupying the chair angled like a witness stand to the right.  The rookie was chewing a pencil, his face painted  with rue.  Matt felt sorry for him.

    The High Cockalorum slapped a sheaf of paper onto the desktop.  “Benz, look at these spreadsheets!”

     Matt leaned forward to do so, but refrained from comment until told HOW to look at them.

     Both Walter Prince’s hands came down flat on the pages.  “Why can’t we get more results like this around here, Benz?”

     This was not much of a clue: sarcasm was one of Walter Prince’s favorite blunt instruments.  Still, Matt felt it was time for him to say something about Carleton Nairn’s first effort.  He ventured that the data seemed to have been competently assembled.  This meant there were no coffee cup rings visible on the top sheet.

     “It looks competent because it IS competent!” Walter Prince informed him, slapping the pages again.  “This is the way I want work done around this joint!  Why it should take a newcomer to show the whole gang of you how it’s done….”

     Carleton Nairn shifted the pencil he was chewing and said, “Well, now, I just remembered how the sheets Sil….”

     He wilted under Waltr Prince’s gaze and his superior went on, “I don’t set up discord in my department, or I’d send copies to every one of you as an example.  If I thought anybody was going to look.  You’re all going to have to pull up your socks, Benz; we’ve got someone who knows what he’s doing now.”  He pushed himself back from the desk to where he could glare up into Matt’s face without craning his neck.  “MacTaggart can’t handle the work at all.  She’ll have to go.”

     “Oh!”  The monosyllable broke from Matt’s mouth.  Since Walter Prince’s attention was focused on him now, he decided to go on, “Well, er, she’s still just new.  Inexperienced and…really, you know.  Er…she’ll get the hang of it.”

     “And you’re a booby, Benz,” Walter Prince reminded him.  “I don’t even know why I bother with you.  Get back to work.  Try not to screw things up so much we can’t fix them later.”

     Matt turned.  Carleton Nairn made as if to rise and follow.  He put a hand toward Matt’s elbow.  “Sorry about….”

     “Get back here, Nairn,” Walter Prince barked.  “I didn’t say it was perfect.  Tell me what this is supposed to mean.”

     Holly was just sneaking in and unlocking her cubicle.  Matt wondered if he ought to pass along some warning.  Would it be more merciful to let her get settled in first?  She might be embarrassed at being caught ducking in late.  He wandered across to the tallest row of file cabinets and meandered for a few minutes, glancing now and again at the list of things to do in his hand as if he didn’t already have all the work he’d need for the rest of the year piled on his desk.

     He came out of the maze at the far end, insuring that he would have to pass Holly’s cubicle to reach his own.  His care was wasted: she wasn’t inside.  He heard her voice coming from Watanabe’s…no, Carleton Nairn’s now, of course.

     “Oh, that’s just Prince.  I’m not afraid of him.”

     “I could see that,” a low whisper replied.  “But it’s not just Mr. Prince.  Mr. Benz was saying that you just don’t have it yet: that you’re young and don’t have the experience.”

     Matt blinked twice and slid back into the cabinet maze to take the long way to his enclosure.  He understood about Carleton Nairn a little better: the city veteran was an employee after Walter Prince’s heart.  And probably after Matt’s corner cubicle as well.

     Matt sat down and set his elbows on the desk.  Carleton Nairn could have the cubicle, as far as Matt was concerned.  But there was no way to sign a deed and transfer the real estate.  Cubicles could not be swapped.  No, there had to be convoluted maneuvering, resulting in a loss of cubicle and job as well.

     A spot in city bureaucracy was not the height of Matt’s desire but he did need the salary.  He aimed for no four-window office with two secretaries; all he sought was a congenial way to make a living wage while he wrote his stupid little stories.  (He knew they were stupid or they’d have been published by now.)  What a pity there was no grant or trust fund to support harmless creatures who frittered with fiction, to the annoyance of their families.

    Matt’s relatives were the lenient sort.  He owed his job and his apartment to relatives who had found these for him.  Matt paid the rent, but his older brothers had examined the lease, checked out the neighborhood, and told him where to sign.  Their excuse was that it was their duty to be sure their mother had the right place to live.  Matt wasn’t fooled.  They were creating a sanctuary for two waifs at once.  The apartment was a little trophy case for useless items with too much sentimental value to be thrown away: a place where Matt and Mom would be sage from harm and no one would be tripping over them.

     Matt wondered, sometimes, if he ought to resent this.  Too much work, really, to seethe over something so insubstantial: besides it was a nice apartment.  And someday the Great Thing would happen and prove his value to the world.  The Great Thing varied from daydream to daydream.  He rescued someone’s lovely daughter.  He talked some poor, unloved being out of suicide.  Sometimes he just made a great deal of money.

     “I made $48,382 this morning,” he murmured, trying it out.

     None of these things had so far happened, for which he was profoundly grateful.  Any of them would be time-consuming and conspicuous (mortal sins).  And Matt was burdened with a daunting streak of realism.  Even in daydreams, he couldn’t shake the conviction that, being handed fame and fortune on a silver platter, he would fumble the platter.

     A familiar voice cut through the gloom.  “See?  I told you they’d all be here at this hour.”

     Matt frowned.  Identifying the voice, he felt his heart sink.  “Oh,” someone replied.  “By this time of day, everyone knows what time it is if they just look at the lock.”

     Recognizing this second voice, Matt felt his heart die.