Early on St. Patrick's Day they started tearing up the sidewalk outside Jonathan Wlodarski’s apartment. And when Jonathan ventured out for coffee and a bagel, they fell silent and came upon him, beating him mercilessly, scalding him with his coffee and eating the bagel quickly and without joy, removing the cream cheese and scallions and the elegant dusting of paprika, until it was merely bread for a saint. Later that day they let loose into the house of Joanna and Billy Macintyre a couple of rabid squirrels, whose horrendous testicles dragged up the wooden stairs. The squirrels clawed at the fine china. Billy wept bitterly at his own inertia while Joanna sallied forth with an air rifle and started firing, not minding the considerable damage she was doing to the fine china, a wedding gift from her mother-in-law. They stole Pete's bicycle and replaced it with a 1994 Jeep Grand Cherokee, a gas guzzler.
They were all in the employ of Miss Frankie Villanova, the heiress to a vast furniture concern. She was comfortably wealthy, but worried about the economy. Miss Villanova, holding a Master’s in Economics, ascertained that her fortune would be lost to inflation, or socialism, or an evil convergence of the two. So she decided to spend her money on a series of tasteful and hilarious pranks. Jonathan was her good friend. Joanna, her cousin. Pete lived down the street.
"They tore up my sidewalk and then attacked me!" Jonathan complained to Frankie over the telephone.
“Noooo!” Frankie gasped. Money well spent, Frankie thought to herself. Jonathan was a man about town, and this offended Frankie’s sensibilities. “Load me up on Fireball,” Jonathan had said last New Year’s Eve. Six minutes later he was shirtless and dancing wildly. “Should we Door Dash Chili’s? We should, right?” Jonathan asked. It was all so innocent until Jonathan pirouetted into the street, right in front of oncoming traffic, causing a Ford F-250 to swerve drastically and take down an old oak tree that had offered shade to small, precocious, sometimes sickly children for nearly a century.
Pete was a religious lunatic who rode his bicycle 20 miles a day to rid himself of sexual energy. He wanted to make himself lethargic, despite being 24 years of age.
Pete bought another bicycle, which Frankie then had smashed up. Then he bought another. Frankie decided the only logical course of action would be to bust Pete's legs. She hired a buxom nurse for him. Pete and the nurse screwed, as Frankie had hoped. Pete became a lurid and much too honest outpatient. He admitted his feelings to Frankie.
“Marry me, Frankie. I love you,” he said.
Frankie said yes.
Joanna and Billy had a conversation after Billy had wept at the squirrels.
“I did not find your weeping attractive,” Joanna said.
“I found your handling of the airgun equally unattractive and mannish,” lied Billy. Joanna with the airgun, firing at the squirrels, yelling fuck you, you fucking motherfuckers, hell is empty and all the squirrels are here!, and afterwards cooling off with a Heineken and a cigarette on the front porch, and intimating with her fingers that she would pleasure herself before the passing foot traffic. That was grand. That was a woman.
On the eve of Frankie’s marriage to Pete, Joanna and Billy filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences.
Jonathan Wlodarski had isolated himself and started writing an unauthorized biography of Jim Leyland: Jim Leyland, The Marlboro Man. He thought of this work as penance, though he often wondered for what crimes. Jonathan did not attend the wedding, since he had become agoraphobic and brittle, which amused the hell out of Frankie. The plan had gone well enough. She had made Pete her husband, divested herself of her unfashionable fortune, or had at least begun to, and also had gotten rid of Billy. Joanna showed up to the wedding and drank beer, copious amounts of beer, but she was happy and she ate the cocktail shrimp with relish and abandonment. When challenged by the men to a shot of whiskey she readily accepted. Meanwhile Billy watched from the bushes, jealous and dissolute, but Miss Frankie had been wary of a specter at the feast and set upon Billy the same goons she had hired to take out Jonathan on Saint Patrick’s Day, a bunch of goddamn hormonal ex-girl scouts.
Avee Chaudhuri receives his mail at Jake's Bar, 101 N 14th St Suite 1, Lincoln, NE 68508.
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