“Beg pardon?”
“In fact, it could use a perm.” A nice-looking teenager in the street let his gaze slide off the brunette's face and went back to checking out the traffic.
“What in the
Rejected by the teenager, the other one, the brunette one with nine earrings, squinted at the blond and said, “A little psychometric Kirlian photography tells me that your roots to the nether world are in place. I can see them shimmering.”
“Well, what the hell good is that? Just look at me. Nothing on but these stupid gym shorts, loaned to me by a very active friend, and this awful blouse. Mamie
“I've got my own problems,” the brunette said. He, or maybe she, pulled his or her tank top down to reveal two swollen nipples. “Six weeks,” he or she said, “six fucking weeks of both shots
“B-cup indeed,” the blond one said. “Dream on. You're talking shot glasses.”
“God, I hate Leos,” said the one with the nine earrings. She turned suddenly to me. “What sign are you?”
“I'm a Chameleon,” I said.
“In other words,” the one with the earrings said, pouting, “fuck off.”
“Not necessarily,” the blond said. “I like people who don't believe in astrology.”
“Then I'm your man,” I said, sipping at my diet asphalt.
“Wouldn't that be nice?” the blond said, leaning toward me.
“What the hell do rabbits have to do with Easter?” Jessica said loudly, sitting down and fingering the cardboard bunny stapled to the pole at the head of our table. There were similar bunnies all over the place. Someone had drawn exaggerated genitalia on the one at our table.
“Oh, my God,” the blond said, recoiling. “You're a
“Are you talking about me?” Jessica demanded, sounding like the Grand Duchess of Fredonia. “Because if you are, I don't like your tone.”
“Leave her to her sugar daddy,” the one with the nine earrings said. The two of them shifted their weight and faced away from us, their surgically improved noses in the air.
“I know a guy in school who's going to end up like those two,” Jessica said in a voice that would have penetrated a foot of lead. “Maybe I should bring him down here and give him a preview of coming attractions. It might straighten him up.”
The blond started to turn back to us, and I could feel Jessica brace herself for the collision to come.
“The Easter Bunny,” I said, plucking at the air. “That's a very interesting question. On the face of it, rabbits don't seem to have much to do with the Resurrection of Christ.”
“No shit,” Jessica said, watching the blond the way a mongoose watches a cobra.
“The, ah, the early Church took a very practical approach to the problem of getting started in places where other religions were already established. They built their churches right on top of the other religions' temples, and they did the same with their holidays.”
“Yeah?” Jessica said, narrowing her eyes to meet the blond's gaze and picking up a fork from the tray in front of her. She tested it for balance, looking like Jim Bowie's granddaughter. The blond, relegated to the role of the cobra, hissed.
“They scheduled Christmas for the midwinter solstice, the most important festival of the year in the colder countries, when everybody feasted to celebrate having made it through the first half of the winter and started to look forward to surviving the second half.” I leaned forward and removed the fork from her hand. “Easter was slotted at the time of the spring fertility rites, held to ensure good crops and big herds of cattle or sheep or whatever the hell they were herding. Rabbits are symbols of fertility, for what I hope are obvious reasons, because if they're not, I'm not going to explain them.”
“Because they screw like minks,” Jessica said in her piping treble. The blond, who probably hadn't been shocked since Halley's Comet, looked shocked. “And who's the genius who figured out that they lay eggs?” There was an Easter basket, lined with that terrible green cellophane grass, on the table-there was one on every table- and Jessica picked up the top egg in the basket and hefted it, evaluating its potential as a weapon. It had DOTTIE written on it in sparkles.
“Eggs are a fertility symbol too,” I said, hoping she didn't plan to toss it at the blond.
“Well, duh,” Jessica said scornfully. “They're also nice and heavy.”
“But they've been layered over with Christian symbolism. They represent, among other things, the closed tomb from which Christ rose.”
“Huh,” Jessica said, looking down at the one in her hand.
“Um, listen,” the blond said, “is all that true?”
“Sure,” I said. “It's not what they teach you in Sunday school, but it's as true as anything else.”
The blond looked from Jessica to me and then took a speculative leap. “You're her uncle.”
“Sure, Tammy,” the Mountain said, looming vast and horrible behind her. “Sure he is. And I'm her little sister.” His greasy hair was captured behind his head with a bright pink rubber band, and his face was oiled with sweat. He gave me a look that made my sneakers itch.
It was a delicate situation: having dispelled the cop image, I wasn't inclined to explain the relationship between Jessica and me. I tugged the extremely heavy corners of my mouth up into a rictus that I was sure looked less like Easter than Halloween.
“Heh, heh,” I said, appreciating his good-natured joke.
“He was telling us about Easter,” the blond-Tammy-said.
“Was he?” the Mountain said ponderously. He wiped his hands on the cheesecloth as a prelude to spreading me over the table like margarine. “I didn't figure it,” he said, reaching for my neck. “I didn't know what you were, but I didn't think you were a dink.”
“Oh, boy,” the blond said, happily changing sides. “Eighty-six.”
I'd chosen the little finger of his left hand as the easiest one to break and was reaching up for it when Tommy, behind the counter, yelled: “
The Mountain, not one who was used to doing two things at once, stumbled and looked up. “Nuh,” he said. He swatted my hands from his pinky as though they'd been a couple of enervated houseflies and stared toward the counter. “What, huh?” he said to Tommy. “What?”
“Pakking lot,” Tommy said in his best Okinawan English. He was the one who'd taught the Mountain sumo. “Fight. Inna pakking lot. Get ‘em. Oddawise, cops.”
“Balls,” the Mountain said. He looked back down at me. I was shaking my hands in the air to relieve the sting. They felt like a locomotive had hit them. “You sit tight,” he said, patting me on the cheek. The pat nearly dislocated my jaw. “I'll get to you.” He lumbered off toward the fight inna pakking lot.
“He really likes you,” Jessica said. “You know what? I think he thinks you're a dirty old man.”
“Isn't he?” the blond asked with genuine interest.
For the next couple of hours the Mountain was too busy to bother with me. The place got full and then it got fuller. Kids who had been hustling in the drizzle came by to dry out and fill up, and the Mountain, after a long hiatus, returned from the general vicinity of the kitchen. Around his equator he wore something I hadn't seen before: a canvas change apron, like the ones worn by the ladies who work the slots in Las Vegas. On it were stenciled the words Call Home.
As each kid came in, the Mountain reached into one of the pockets of his apron and pulled out a slip of paper with a number on it. Some kids didn't want to take them, but the Mountain exercised his unique powers of persuasion, and almost all of the kids wound up tucking a number into a pocket. Then they went and checked the Easter baskets, usually pulling out an egg after painstakingly reading the names on all of them. The ones who didn't take one of the Mountain's slips of paper were eighty-sixed. I wouldn't say they were thrown out gently, but by the Mountain's standards it was an exercise in restraint.
