Bum luck, p.13
Bum Luck, page 13
A black cat came out of nowhere and ran directly across my path, and immediately two leprechauns dragging a tureen of boiling snail soup off a front stove burner fell off their ladders and dumped the scalding contents, and the steaming flood roared directly toward me.
The cat howled and ran off with its paws burned and I managed to shove Sally aside while I leaped back, slamming into the wall between the in-and-out doors as a river of soup cascaded over a stainless steel table and poured like a bubbling hot waterfall over the spot where I’d just been standing.
And just like that my suspicion about where all my crummy luck of the past six hours had been coming from was pretty much confirmed.
I raced for the open door through which O’Fart had fled. I could see him bounding down the stairs and running into the parking lot.
A leprechaun pastry chef who was standing on a ladder somehow managed to twist around and swing over my head yet another stepladder he had been using to climb up to a top shelf. I limbo danced under the ladder as I ran, nearly running into the butcher knife that another chef was using to gut a particularly sizeable snail.
The leprechaun who had been swinging the ladder I’d managed to dodge struck the shelf he’d been trying to access and knocked the eight foot-long slab of stainless steel with the razor sharp edge from its brackets. A dozen 50 ounce cans of snails in garlic sauce came cascading down, each one nearly crowning me as I bounded around them like tires on an Army obstacle course. One bouncing can caught my right knee, and the sharp pain stopped me for an instant, sending me gasping in a pivoting swirl.
Sally McClatchen had been racing up behind me, and I managed to brace myself on my bum knee and block her like a linebacker before she could knock us both over.
“I hope you’ve kept count, because I can no longer remember how many times you’ve plowed into me in the past hour,” I said.
She was out of breath, and she suddenly ducked down behind me to avoid a can that had ricocheted off the head of the unlucky leprechaun on the stepladder. The little kitchen grunt was instantly knocked out cold, the practical upshot being that he dropped the ladder that was in his tiny hands and I had to block the broad side of it with both forearms to keep it from killing the two of us. The unconscious leprechaun fell to the floor, and the pair of ladders he’d been playing on collapsed on top of him.
“Does everything always fall apart around you?” Sally demanded, panting and, as usual, totally ungrateful . “You have the worst luck of anybody I’ve ever met, Banyon.”
“Yes, but the question until a moment ago was why,” I hastily replied. “The answer is a little green bastard who appears to be out in the parking lot even as we speak conjuring a rainbow between two Land Cruisers in order to make good his escape.”
My forearms were killing me. I swore I’d heard a crack, but it didn’t feel like any bones were broken. If I wasn’t dead or in the slammer by nightfall, I’d have to pick up a bottle of cheap fermented medicine prescribed by Dr. Jaublowski at O’Hale’s Hospital for the Chronically Shitfaced.
I set the stumbling reporter back to her sensible high heels, twirled back around, leaped over a couple of remaining bouncing cans, avoided the shelf which at that moment decided to come loose from its second mooring bracket and attempted to guillotine off my head, and floored it out the kitchen door.
Through the open kitchen door I’d spotted O’Fart waving his arms. Now that I was outside, I saw in the dying sunlight the sparkling yellow lights that were popping around his hands like silent fireworks.
In the sky high above appeared a multicolored light show, which congealed into a single blob that exploded out in two separate lines, each racing off in a different direction. One flew off across the sky and into the distance to a destination unseen. The second raced down to the parking lot in a brilliant arc comprised of streams of blue, red, yellow and green.
“O’Fart!” I hollered.
The panicked leprechaun wheeled around, eyes wild, and beard still smashed flat by his Le Pissoir kitchen staff hairnet.
“You don’t understand!” O’Fart cried. “This is bigger than you, Banyon! It’s bigger than everyone!”
The rainbow came crashing down into the pavement of the parking lot with enough force to set off a dozen car alarms. Flecks of colors exploded from the end like shattered ice. A chunk of green whizzed by my head and harpooned the rear wall of Le Pissoir, staining the white clapboards with a manhole-size blob of green and spraying a cascade of Skittles all over the rear steps.
The brightly colored light show completely enveloped Finnegan O’Fart, and he spun around to face me and stood rigidly at attention, arms pressed tight to his sides and peering out through the band of yellow. He was there only for a moment before he was gone in a flash. It was as if he’d been sucked up by a pneumatic tube. I looked up and saw him sailing up the yellow beam of the rainbow’s arc.
I started after him, but Sally McClatchen grabbed my arm.
“You’re not going to Leprechaun Land,” she snapped. “Even you can’t be that stupid, Banyon.”
“Oh, it’s still relatively early in the day,” I informed her. “Given enough time and the unlimited bar tab of Leprechaun Land, I guarantee you that I can be much stupider.”
The end of the rainbow was starting to fade. In a second it’d be gone for good, along with all hope of following Finnegan O’Fart. I wrenched myself free of Sally’s deeply concerned talons and raced towards it. By then, O’Fart had become an insignificant speck in the yellow stream before vanishing completely from sight.
A couple of black cats came running out from under a Volvo, crossing my capital T and unmooring the distant Dumpster which raced on wobbly wheels directly for me. I ducked back and let it wham into the side of a BMW.
I noted as I ran by that somebody had spray painted “Big Green Is Coming!” on the Dumpster’s side, which was ironic since the guy I still thought might be the bastard himself had just disappeared a mile over my head, then I took a running leap and slid into home plate in the dying rainbow light.
I jumped up and turned back to Sally, who was running like hell to catch up.
“That asshole named Big Green!” I shouted, pointing at the graffiti on the Dumpster. “Just in case I get caught up in the unlimited, booze-fueled joy of Leprechaun Land, he’s your story. He’s behind everything, whatever everything is.”
I could barely hear her muffled reply. Standing at the bottom of the rainbow was like being submerged underwater. Sally McClatchen’s face, her clothes, and every fancy bucket of bolts parked in the lot behind Le Pissoir was coated in a veil of red.
I do know that she got a real funny look on her face all of a sudden, and I could have sworn she started to say, “Joy? In Leprechaun Land? Are you out of your mi--”
And then she was gone.
My head felt as if it was being pulled like a wad of taffy. My body followed suit, and the soles of my shoes suddenly fled the parking lot.
I saw the roofs of a bunch of expensive cars; the smashed and overturned Dumpster; the roof of Le Pissoir; the multi-storied library where Mannix was probably still slaving away. Far beyond it all was the million sparkling square windows of the city; and reflected in every one, the blinding, orange light of the dying sun.
And then it was the entire tri-city area, then the state, then the horizon, and then I was rocketing across the sky in streams of red and green and yellow and hoping like hell that my beautiful goddamn rainbow elevator didn’t intersect with a flock of geese flying south for the winter or the inconvenient flight path of a random Boeing 747.
CHAPTER 11
The deceleration process when traveling by rainbow registers somewhat as negatively on the human body as getting thrown into a brick wall negatively impacts a raw egg.
That stretched-taffy feeling I’d enjoyed at liftoff grabbed onto my head once more and kept right on yanking for the entire trip down the far end of the multicolored arc.
Leprechauns must be nimble little bastards to land on both feet. I only figured three-quarters of the way through my flight that my feet and head had effectively switched locations relative to the ground at the top of the arc and that I was zipping back to earth headfirst. By aid of much strategic swearing, I managed to twist out of my stream of red, and by crossing several primary colors I somehow got my feet more or less in the vicinity of below my sorry ass.
Just in time. A vast stretch of land abruptly appeared beneath me, tinged in green and looking ominous for a dump with such a happy reputation. I shoved my arms out like an eagle coming in for a landing, I guess figuring that they’d somehow slow my descent which seemed to be a lot faster than the FAA, AMA and NTSB would recommend for organisms that had their girlish dreams pinned on breathing for any amount of time longer than another sixty seconds. I hoped like hell that there was no one on the ground with a camera to record what I was pretty sure would be my spectacular splatting death.
Five hundred feet up, the colors began to evaporate around me, and all at once the wind was attacking me full force like I was in a plane that had lost cabin pressure. Except no oxygen mask dropped down in front of my ugly mug and there was no panicked stewardess running up the aisle I could trip as a final act of vengeance for refusing me service because I’d already gotten loaded enough before takeoff on my doomed flight.
I barely had time to suffocate from all the oxygen being inconveniently ripped from my lungs before the distant curve of the land I’d been rapidly approaching exploded into a broad countryside which stretched out wide in every direction. The land was dotted with thousands of crooked little chimneys and weirdly shaped roofs, which I had virtually no time whatsoever to see before I’d dropped below every roofline. My stomach was lodged firmly in my throat and I was suddenly tumbling out of the faded remains of the dying rainbow at a hundred miles an hour and out onto an ancient dirt road.
I dug in with both heels because that seemed like the brightest thing to do. It, of course, wasn’t, and I promptly flipped up and over.
The only thing that stretching out my arms in flight accomplished was ensuring that they weren’t in near my body protecting my face and torso like they’d been hired by my shoulders to do since before my auspicious birth. The worthless shirker limbs just kind of flapped around uselessly as the rest of me executed a tumbling somersault that ended with me cracking the back of my head against a mailbox post and falling over sideways into a brackish puddle at the bottom of a weed-choked culvert.
“Ta-dah,” I announced to a terrified muskrat.
The little furry son of a bitch bit my finger and ran off into the underbrush.
I wrapped my bleeding rabies in my handkerchief and stumbled up the road on wobbling legs, but not in the good, middle-of-the-night snootful way.
I didn’t know which direction O’Fart had scurried off in, and I made a conscious decision not to try to follow him.
It doesn’t take more than a couple of two-by-four whacks to the back of my head for me to get the point. Once I’d reached work that morning, I’d assumed that the portent department had been working overtime to warn me en route that my viperous ex-wife was coiled on a chair in my office and ready to strike. It was a logical assumption, given the fact that the reappearance of the ex-Mrs. Crag Banyon was itself as likely a portent of the imminent Apocalypse as a quartet of airborne equestrians. (All of whom, incidentally, she had cheated on me with at one point or another, even spending a weekend living it up in Miami with Pestilence two weeks before our divorce was finalized, which sunny holiday she thoughtfully charged to my maxed-out Discover card.)
Throughout the course of the day, however, it slowly dawned on me that each time I resolved to find O’Fart was precisely when the bad luck omens reappeared and presaged events that were more spectacularly horrible than the more run-of-the-mill horrible bullshit I am forced to endure on pretty much a minute-to-minute basis.
I had been momentarily distracted at Le Pissoir by girl reporter Sally McClatchen and the stampede of unheroic restaurant staff, but the minute I’d spotted O’Fart in the kitchen and resolved to take off after the little runt, the portent world -- along with the entire kitchen of Le Pissoir -- started collapsing around my ears once more. Leprechauns were supposed to be lucky little twerps, but every single time I set out to rendezvous with Finnegan O’Fart, whether consciously or not, it was bad luck that came charging my way.
I figured my best chance for catching him was if I landed on top of his head when I fell out the far end of the rainbow, but the hard-packed dirt road with the wagon wheel ruts was devoid of any living thing but me. (Assuming Webster’s has broadened its definition of “living” to include delightfully foggy, persistent waking comas). As it was, I resolved to back burner Finnegan O’Fart, and if I stumbled upon him while I was snooping around Leprechaun Land, so be it.
The instant I hinted around to my brain that I’d consider nabbing O’Fart if I happened to bump into him, the bushes at the side of the road rattled menacingly and vomited out a scrawny black cat which made a beeline for the far side of the path directly in front of me.
I quickly insisted to my brain that I, in fact, never wanted to see Finnegan O’Fart again and that if I ever came across him I would run like a French waiter in the opposite direction.
Up ahead, the black cat veered off at the last instant and turned back around before it crossed my path. It sat back down in the shade of the bush from which it had appeared. I don’t think it completely trusted my intentions, because it stared at me like a mall security guard eyeballing bigmouthed teenagers at The Gap while, unlike most mall security guards, it made a little busy work for itself by retching up a hairball.
I managed to wander past the puking feline without another safe dropping out of the sky, and it made no further move to dart out in front of me.
The sun was dying over Leprechaun Land, and the clouds that brushed the horizon had been stretched thin across the sky as if by a baker who’d run low on frosting and was having to make do with whatever vanilla he could scrape out of the bottom of the can.
The road on which I was stumbling was lined with tall weeds broken up by occasional flagstone paths. There were a few more mailboxes which my skull hadn’t cracked in half scattered along the road, as well as ancient split rail fences that rotted amongst the weeds on either side. I caught only glimpses of the dwellings as I passed by.
The road climbed up a little hillock a couple dozen yards beyond where I’d landed, and when I crested it I finally got a pretty good view of the village.
The scene wasn’t as spectacular as the panoramic image I’d seen from above but couldn’t enjoy because at the time I assumed I was hurtling to my death. When I was airborne, I’d seen a huge swath of countryside, but here I was limited to only a couple of neighborhoods. Whether whole cities or just a small slice of a single village, all the landscape was pretty much the same.
The crooked chimneys stuck out of every roof, like they’d been built straight and then professionally twisted during installation. The weirdly curved roofs I’d only glimpsed before seemed even more dramatically misshapen in close-up.
I’m a roof snob. My eye has been trained to expect them to be straight lines; either flat or angled. Okay, maybe a dormer or gable sticking out here and there. What I don’t want them to be is fungus, which was what every roof in Leprechaun Land was as far as I could see. The fungus roofs were just an extension of the fungus that comprised every building, including sheds, public johns and even a phone booth on a nearby corner.
The giant mushrooms in which the leprechauns of Leprechaun Land lived and worked and got hammered off their little asses were architecturally famous. I.M. Pei had tried to incorporate giant mushroom elements in his initial work on the Dallas City Hall and the Javits Center in New York, but got discouraged when he couldn’t grow them in squares. Also, the soft fungus had a hard time supporting all the rods and glass, plus he had to put up with the added complication of hippies eating the ground floors during initial construction. Goddamn hippies. (Those fascinating little nuggets courtesy a hundred year old Architectural Digest discovered in a hospital emergency room while sitting around waiting for a team of doctors to remove a plastic hair curler from Doris’ throat which my genius, topflight secretary had mistaken for a Cheese-It.)
Finnegan O’Fart’s rainbow had dumped me out near the center of town, and the structures I’d glimpsed through the weeds were giant residential mushrooms. The path opened into a town square which was lined on all four sides with two-story business mushrooms, with windows and doors set into the walls of thousand year-old fungus.
Most of the mushrooms were pubs. Old wooden signs hung over doors, and on one side of the street alone there was McTipsy’s, O’Mara’s Boozing Magoo’s Pants-Pissing O’Stinkery, The Staggering Pony and a lone neon sign for some techno dive called Drunkz. There was an AA center on the ground floor of the corner mushroom. I admired the pigheaded optimism that had opened the joint, and I wasn’t a bit surprised that it looked like it had been shuttered up for ten years.
What I didn’t figure on was that there would be boards nailed over all the doors and windows of every pub in the town square on which had been spray painted slogans like “Big Green Knows Best,” “Hail Big Green” and “Big Green is Watching.”
Leprechaun Land had a reputation for being a happy place of stumbling dipsomaniacs, but I didn’t see a single open gin joint in the whole town square.
The ancient realm was also known for its bright palette of primary colors, mostly relying heavily on green. But the part of it I’d landed in looked like the ruins of some crummy Midwest industrial city a couple decades after all the factories had closed.
The weeds were brownish and the mushroom buildings were grayish. The only suggestion of happier colors came from the sky, where the thin clouds were turning brilliant shades of yellow and green as the dying sun hurried to get below the horizon, probably to put off looking down at such depressing scenery for another nine hours.
