Copyright 2001 by Morris Rosenthal
The evening of the WhamRammer meeting, Carol planned a celebration dinner before the event. "This way we still get to enjoy ourselves, even if it goes badly," she told Eric.
"Don't put yourself out," he commented.
"Oh, I'm not," she assured him, "It's pot luck. See if you can get your friends to bring something interesting," she added. "I've eaten enough of Connie's salads to last me for the rest of my life."
Colin came with Susan, who brought a fancy homemade vegetarian lasagna. Brian and Ingrid contributed Ingrid's Swedish meatballs, made with real meat. Eric and Connie brought salad. Carol and Laura had prepared a casserole and a chocolate layer cake, respectively. A voice vote was taken in which the men were penalized for not making anything themselves and ordered to set the table and do the dishes. Eric protested that he'd helped Connie make the salad, but he was shouted down for being a liar, which was true.
While Brian and Eric were hotly debating which side of the plate the fork goes on, Colin slipped out to the car and came back with the weekly Amherst paper which had come out that afternoon. He tossed it to Eric, and asked, "Have you seen this yet?"
Eric gave a perfunctory glance at the first page, then froze, an icy tentacle wrapped around his cerebellum. The headline read 'Environmental Poet Suspect in HazWaste Fire'. His eyes flew over the text. The story was consisted of an interview with 'well known area activist' Tess Bookman, along with a few facts about his brief arrest and a skeletal biography of him, little more than where he lived and that he was a U.Mass student. Tess was unusually ambiguous in the interview, defending him at one moment, and accusing him of making her an unwilling dupe in a payoff scheme the next. Her concluding remark was, "I'm positive that Eric is innocent of these charges, but if he turns out to be guilty, I hope they compost him."
Inset into the larger story was a box with the caption 'Eric Levy to Read at WhamRammer Meeting Tuesday'. The piece had obviously been prepared several days before, and was really just a notice of the meeting and it's agenda. Eric was only mentioned once in the three paragraphs, but some bright editor had put two and two together and opted for the more flashy heading. The icing on the cake was a photograph of him reading a poem at the QSP rally that Tess must have provided. Squinting against the sun, he really looked more than a little evil.
"You're a celebrity," Brian congratulated him, reading over his shoulder.
"The Springfield paper missed the poet angle completely," Colin commented. The Springfield Post had run a story about Eric's arrest on Saturday, but it had only made page eight, along with an official apology from the police that they had acted prematurely. The paper was plumping Anthony for the prime suspect, since his car had been abandoned at Bradley Airport, and he had purchased a ticket to Texas. The lurid headline for that story had been 'Free Trade? - Suspected Arsonist Makes for Mexico'.
The contents of the original anonymous note had been made public, along with a cautious statement that the Peace Dividend Corporation had been involved in the hazardous waste disposal business and that the principals of the company were being sought for questioning. A partial set of fingerprints had been lifted from the objects in the parcel and sent on to the FBI for matching. They hadn't responded yet, leading the police to believe that either the fingerprints were a hoax, or the individual had no criminal record. The information that Colin and Eric had given Detective Plinchard was being kept confidential, pending completion of the investigation.
Carol stuck her head in the dining room and bellowed, "Get the lead out, men. I've chronic prescription abusers set a table faster."
Eric tossed her the paper, then shrugged and returned to the job at hand.
"Good," he said. "Maybe I'll get blacklisted from reading poetry tonight and Connie will let me off the hook."
"I'd be a little careful for the next few days," Colin advised him. "You'd be surprised how many people will remember a picture from a newspaper and feel they have the right to confront you on the street over whatever was printed."
"All set," Brian called heartily, observing that Eric and Colin had finished laying the table, an activity he had supervised. "I'll do the dishes," he offered, "I just have a thing about setting tables, baggage from childhood."
Another vote was taken, this time with unanimous approval, to prohibit discussion of the occasion of the meal at the table. Everyone began loading their plates up with food, and there was a minor incident when Connie tried to cut a hunk out of the layer cake.
"Not yet, dear," Laura caught her wrist and disarmed her. "After the meal." Connie gracefully gave way, then bit her lip when Laura passed the cake up the table and out of her reach. She had been planning a surprise attack.
"Ingrid eats meat," Brian informed everyone, as if he were announcing their engagement.
"Are you just finding that out now?" Connie asked him, glad to let someone else look foolish. "What made you think she didn't?"
"Uh," he hesitated, then came out with a rip-off of the standard 'Bones' line from Star Trek. "I'm an adman, not a detective."
"You're a big phony," Ingrid said pleasantly, "I have the right word, yes?"
Everyone laughed at Brian's expense, and he squirmed in his chair. "I thought we already settled this," he said to her, "I mean, didn't we decide that we're both equally guilty."
"No," she chewed reflectively on a meatball, "You decided we were both guilty. I decided to hold back forgiving you until I got a chance to embarrass you in front of your friends."
Everyone laughed again, then Laura asked, "Do I want to know what's going on here?"
"Brian has a preconceived notion about Scandinavian woman being vegetarians, so he pretended to be one when we met," Ingrid explained. "I saw pretty quick that it was an act, so I thought I'd give him a spoon of his own medicine."
"Taste," Brian corrected her dourly, "A taste of his own medicine." Listening to his own words spread a rueful smile across his face.
"Whatever," Ingrid retorted, an expression she'd picked up from Connie. "It's made the dating very easy for me," she continued. "Whenever I wanted to put him in a good mood, all I had to do was suggest trying a new kind of food. Just for the intellectual experience, of course."
Laura led the laughing this time, and even Brian joined in. "That's just like what happened with me and Carol," she exclaimed.
"Carol and I," Brian defended the language.
"Ignore him," Ingrid advised, "I do."
"It wasn't food with us," Laura elaborated, "It was therapy. Here we are, both psychiatrists, and we meet at party thrown by PAM.."
"That's Psychiatrists Against Medication," Carol injected.
"And the guest speaker turns out to be against analysis also. I was trying to impress Carol that I was cutting edge, so I said something vague about agreeing with him.."
"And I didn't want her to think that I was old fashioned, so I positively got behind him.."
"So it wasn't until our third date, when we started talking about our practices, that we had too admit to each other that it's pretty hard to be against drugs and against talking and still claim to be helping patients."
"She cracked first," Carol added, "I was ready to claim I could cure schizophrenia with massage therapy."
"What's cutting edge about that?" Brian asked. "I must have at least five advertising clients who make that claim."
"I'm curious," Susan asked, "The speaker at the meeting. Was he a psychiatrist?"
"A famous psychiatrist," Laura answered, "Who really enjoyed listening to himself talk. We came to the conclusion later that he either he was laughing at us, or he's nuts."
"I second the diagnosis," Carol thumped the table, "Hey!"
"I had some of everything, and now I'm having some of this," Connie said defiantly, backing away from the table with the cake. Carol looked to Eric for help, but he just shook his head.
"Let her have it," he counseled. "That's a sharp knife, and she won't let it get taken away twice." Connie seemed to be considering retreating to the kitchen with her prize, but manners took hold, and she returned to her place. Guarding the cake with her elbows like a convict, she cut out a huge chunk and slid it onto her dinner plate. Only then did she allow the cake to return to general circulation, with a growled warning to "Keep it at this end of the table."
Eric quickly wiped her fork on a napkin and gave it to her, saying, "Please." She struggled visibly to master the grasping tendency of her hands, then took the fork and began to eat daintily. Carol applauded.
"Who would have thought you'd have a civilizing effect on the beast," she said to Eric.
Eric threw his cloth napkin at her and said, "Just tie it around your mouth," then added, "Please."
Laura applauded, and Colin, who somehow hadn't had a thing to say since beginning to eat commented, "You know, you people are really pretty entertaining. I hope you're planning on inviting us again."
"Like we don't have a weird relationship?" Susan snorted, "Get real."
"Trouble in paradise?" Brian prodded, still smarting from his own exposure. Colin put his hand over Susan's, sending her unspoken promises through the sense of touch, if she would just keep their dirty laundry in the hamper. He could have been wearing mittens for all the difference it made.
"I don't know which one of us Colin likes better," she pulled her hand away. "Me, or the senator. I swear he started mumbling about Jason in bed once."
"That's not true!" Colin sputtered. Eric never thought he'd see Colin flush, but there it was. "Her bed is next to the chimney, and I nearly broke my head on this useless brick outcrop that some idiot interior designer thought would keep the pillows warm or something. I told her she needed a mason."
"I heard 'need Jason'." Susan was obviously enjoying giving him the needle in public.
Carol and Laura started chanting, "Come out, come out." It took Colin a moment to get it, and then he stormed out of the dining room.
"Oops," Susan said innocently, and got up to retrieve him. "He's a little insecure," she said over her shoulder in a stage whisper.
"I think we just about have enough time for a cup of tea if we're going to make it to the thing," Eric said. "I'll get the kettle going while Brian clears the table."
By the time the tea was poured, Susan had coaxed Colin back into the room by promising a public affirmation of his manhood, which she delivered so comically that there was a run on the bathrooms. Brian gathered up the dishes while everyone else relaxed, and jammed them in the machine after a desultory spray in the sink. Before the first rinse cycle began, they spilt into two groups and headed out Route #9 to Amherst.
The WhamRammer meeting was scheduled for eight, although traditionally such affairs ran about an hour late. About three hundred people were squeezed into auditorium of the Bangs Community Center, displacing the regular Grecian folk dancing group. The dancers took over the large meeting room, preempting the chess club, which ended up in the small meeting room. The little people support group bumped by the chess nuts ended up meeting in the day-care room, where they discovered that the furniture fit them nicely. They were the only winners in the evening's musical chairs.
In keeping with the usual schedule, the janitors had folded and stacked all of the chairs in the auditorium to make room for the dancers. This gave the event a homey 'set up your own chair' flavor, which resulted in several large clumps of seating with no discernible aisles. The permanent staging at the east end of the room miraculously had a podium with a microphone, but further investigation showed that the speakers had been locked away for safe keeping. The organizers decided to proceed, using the high-fidelity bullhorns that they all kept in their trunks.
Eric and Connie set up chairs for themselves on the right side of the podium, and hunkered down to wait for the fireworks. The only entertainment apparent, outside of Eric, was the ever-present food processor salesman. With a fifty foot extension cord on a spring loaded reel and a box of local produce, Vegetable Dan was the best prepared speaker there.
Susan made excuses for Senator Hardwick, who was conspicuously absent, and took a seat on the left side of the podium, along with the officers of WhamRammer and the hired guns. Their welcome was tempered by the well-founded suspicion that the senator was gearing up to cut them loose. In an outburst of spasmodic body language, they all inched their chairs away from poor Susan, who was left isolated near the edge of the platform. The sound of shifting chairs on the floor was continuous, and by the dint of being rude, Brian and Colin cleared out a nice space for their party near the front.
"Welcome to the first," a well dressed woman began speaking into a bullhorn, but the words were transmuted into something that sounded like "Well rehearsed." Connie shifted next to Eric, stifling a laugh and pinching his arm. Why pain in his arm should help her retain control, he didn't understand. The speaker fiddled with the volume control to reduce the distortion, and tried again.
"Welcome to the first public meeting sponsored by the Western Massachusetts Residents Against Magnetic Radiation for the purpose of discussing the proposed high speed rail link from Boston to Albany." The crowd shifted restlessly. Those in the front heard her voice coming around the sides of the megaphone, those in the back heard the amplified version, and the clump in the middle heard echoes. "My name is Miranda Wraithly, and I am the current president of WhamRammer, and I will be the moderator for tonight's discussion."
"That's real fair," Eric muttered to Connie, and she shushed him. He noticed that her eyes were shining and the tension was gone from her shoulders. She was enjoying this!
"Before we move on to the main presentations for the evening, I have the unique pleasure of introducing Vegetable Dan, who will demonstrate his famous turnip/parsnip dough, made from the raw vegetables." There was a collective gasp, accompanied by cheers and scattered cries of "Impossible", as Ms. Wraithly returned to her chair. One of the seated members whispered to her, and she spoke into the bullhorn again without rising, "And the poet." This time the audience responded with boo's.
Vegetable Dan already had his food processor plugged in and set up on the platform floor, right in front of the podium. He pulled the box of vegetables over next to it, then hopped down onto the floor, giving everyone a big Bill Clinton smile. "Hi, friends," he called.
"Hi, Vegetable Dan," they gave made the full-throated response.
He reached into the box, pulled out a couple big raw turnips, and tossed them to random people in the crowd. The biggest one he knocked against his head a few times, while hitting the stage he behind him with his knuckles. "Hard as rock," he announced, and tossed it to Ingrid. She bounced it hard off the floor, and it careened off on a crazy angle. "Hard as rock, Dan," she cheerfully confirmed.
"All right, send them home," he called out. The turnips came sailing in at him, and as he caught each one, he threw it back into the air again, until he was juggling them all in a lazy arc. "Now," he said, when the applause died down, "No tricks, no sleight of hand," he made the turnips perform an intricate crossing pattern as he said this, "Just the finest food processor under the sun." The top was already off the receptacle of the machine, and he carefully lifted one foot off the ground and used the tip of his shoe to turn it on, juggling all the time.
"Here's one," he said, and a turnip broke the pattern at the top of the arc and dove into the food processor as if of it's own accord. It sounded like a branch thrown into a wood chipper, and something that looked like damp sawdust appeared in the bowl. "Two," he pronounced, and two turnips broke the circle at different points, entering the food processor about a two seconds apart. A big branch going through a wood chipper, it almost drowned out the cheers. He let the excitement heat up and the motor to cool down for a minute, before joyously declaring "Three."
At just that moment, a bored looking chess player with a vinyl chessboard rolled up under his arm, stuck his head in the room and called, "There's a bomb in the building, the police say we have to evacuate." The announcement must have affected Dan's timing because the three turnips touched each other in mid air, and plummeted into the food processor in one clump. Crowbar going through a wood chipper. The chopper section blew apart, and the motor shorted and caught fire, blowing the circuit breaker for the about half of the room's lighting.
Despite the lack of aisles and general confusion, the audience remained remarkably calm, and the room emptied in minutes. Colin would later say that they were in shock at seeing the infallible Vegetable Dan fail to deliver. Outside, it began raining heavily, and many of the attendees, figuring that the best part of the evening was over anyway, drifted off to their cars. Connie and Eric had exited with Susan, and they went to find Ms. Wraithly to find out what the plan was. She was standing with a group of policemen when they located her.
"This is your fault," she pointed a finger at Eric. "The bomb threat was directed specifically against you!"
"Me," Eric cried, "What did I do?"
The ranking Amherst policeman on the scene asked him, "Are you this Eric Levy, the poet?"
"I guess," he responded, "I mean, yeah."
"We'd like you to come down to the station, sir," the cop said politely, "See if you can give us some leads on this incident."
"Is there really a bomb?" Colin asked, crowding under Susan's collapsible umbrella. The police immediately recognized him. "Everyone else is waiting in the cars," he added in an aside to the others.
"We won't know that for certain until we finish searching the building," a different cop responded. "The State Police will lend us some officers and a dog to assist, but it will be a couple hours before we know for sure."
"Well, that's that then," Ms. Wraithly concluded furiously, and wandered off into the rain with her bullhorn. "Go home everyone. Go home. We'll reschedule as soon as possible."
"Mr. Levy?" the first officer asked again, "We can provide transportation home afterwards if necessary."
"We'll bring the car," Susan offered, "I'm sure Colin wants to come along anyway."
"All right," Eric acquiesced. "But I'd still like to know what the threat was."
The officer hesitated, then said, "The caller claimed to be a member of a group called 'Avengers of the Earth', and uh," he hesitated, "They seem to have tried you in absentia and found you guilty of, uh, crimes against the environment." Colin nodded in recognition of the group.
"I remember them," he said, "They're the loonies who blew up all that construction equipment for the new mall a couple years back."
"We're taking this very seriously," the policeman said. "The man who planted those bombs, Richard Markey, was just released on parole."