Read Online Stuffed by Brian M. Wiprud - Free Book Online Page B

the crow got all futzed up,” Angie pouted. All I could envision was someone with a hacksaw cutting up my tusks, or my beautiful tiger rug sitting in the mud on the bottom of the Connecticut River. I had dismissed the loss of the fifty-dollar crow, not to mention the issue of whether anybody would go to such extremes to possess it. Until, that is, we reached the Massachusetts State Police barracks. My possessions were all there and in good condition, even the tusks. Everything except for the crow. I looked up at the officer holding the pen and clipboard out to me.
    “Is this all of it?”
    “Yessir. Damn lucky they were inspecting the bridge this month and that net was there, I’ll say.”
    “But there was no crow.”
    “A what?”
    “A crow, a white crow in a bell jar?” Angie chimed.
    The trooper looked suspicious and jabbed the clipboard at me. I took it.
    “Just what you see here. Sign the top, bottom, and middle. Press hard.”
    Angie and I stowed all ten leaf bags of beasts in the Lincoln and drove off to find an early dinner. Along the way, we crossed a bridge over the Connecticut River.
    I pointed to a sign. “Hey, this is the bridge.”
    “French King Bridge?”
    “Yup, that’s the one he said.”
    “Pull over.” Angie waved at a rest area on the far side of the bridge. It was connected to a pedestrian walkway that followed the length of the bridge. There was a terrific view up the river, and the bridge seemed monstrously high. I had trouble looking down without vertigo kicking in. But I looked long enough to see the net where my taxidermy had been found, about forty feet down. Five’ll get you ten Liberty Valance and his thugs dropped their ill-gotten gains at night and didn’t even see the net.
    Back on the road, we quickly found one of those humdrum middle-America places called Bob’s Family Restaurant. The kind of die-stamped joint that’s in every mall from Miscoganie to Missoula. Once outside New York, the eateries are so repetitive from Palookaville to Palookaville, you’d swear you were driving in circles.
    A young waitress came by and took our orders, and when I asked if I could have my fries well done, she said, “Sure, mister.”
    As she sauntered away, I turned to Angie. “I ask you, why am I suddenly
mister
? Not
bub,
not
fellah,
not
sir.
But
mister.
Do I look like a
mister
to you?”
    “This is weird, Garth.”
    “I know. I don’t feel like a
mister.”
    “Could you stop obsessing for a moment? I was talking about the crow. The crow is weird, id-jit.” She straw-slurped her cherry cola.
    “I’ll get you another present.” I gave her my squinty, vexed look. “The point is that—”
    “I know: You got your treasures back. What I mean is—”
    “Right, right—that the crow was missing. Nothing to do about that. I feel damn lucky to have gotten any of it back. I’ll assume the loss as a sacrifice to the gods.” I knew where Angie was trying to go with this train of thought and vainly attempted to steer her away.
    “Lucky, sure, but you should feel spooked too. Those guys obviously came all the way from somewhere up here to swipe that crow. Like Jim Kim said.”
    “There are at least a dozen other explanations—”
    “Name ’em.”
    “Okay.” I held up a hand and began pointing to my fingers. “They threw the crow in the river separately and it missed the net. It was heavy and tore through the safety net. They dropped the crow somewhere else. One of the construction workers who found my stuff kept the crow. The burglars decided to keep the crow. . . .”
    She grabbed my pinky. “That net is meant to catch hefty construction workers who slip and fall, ya big dummy. Can’t see how the bell jar would tear through. Don’t you think it might be that they took the other mounts just to make it look like they weren’t stealing the crow?”
    “Like the crow was packed with cocaine or something? Microfilm? What?”
    “Garth, don’t get like that with me.”
    “Like