Lick Your Neighbor (3 page)

“Oh speaking of Jenkins,” Andie interrupted, “he called when you were in the shower.”

“Oh good. He must be done transcribing Alden’s diary. Toss me the phone.”

Dale caught the phone and dialed as Tommy reached for another cupcake.

“Mayflower Jenkins speaking.”

“Morning, Mayflower. It’s Dale. What’s the good news?”

“It’s a goddamn fake.”

Dale swatted away a cupcake that was being shoved in his face by Tommy. “Say again?”

“John Alden’s diary. It’s a bunch of hooey.”

“Are you sure?” Dale asked. “It looked so authentic. It was so…dusty.”

“I was up all night transcribing it. The beginning starts out all right, but it quickly devolves. Some parts of the diary are not only highly improbable they’re downright, well, nutty. I tried to give the author the benefit of the doubt, and I did some research in an attempt to confirm his account. But some things in there are so preposterous that they’re beyond confirmation.”

“What about that word you said was interesting. Auwaog.”

“I did some digging at the library. The Auwaog were a small tribe of Native Americans who lived in Massachusetts. Not much is known about them since they disappeared soon after the Pilgrims landed, most likely due to smallpox. This so-called diary has another theory on what happened to the Auwaog, but it’s so preposterous and disgusting that I don’t care to repeat it. Besides, I wouldn’t want to spoil your holiday supper with such nastiness.”

“Do you think someone planted the diary for us to find?” Dale looked suspiciously at Andie. She winked back at him from over her tea cup. “Some wiseass playing a practical joke perhaps?”

“No, I don’t think so. It was most certainly written in the 1600s. I showed the diary to a friend of mine who’s a document preservationist and she confirmed that. But if it was indeed John Alden who wrote it, then he was either writing fiction or he was completely bonkers. I tend to believe the latter.”

“Now look here, Mayflower. That’s my ancestor you’re talking about.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Dale. Fish don’t talk, men don’t dance with deer, and turkeys are certainly not…hang on, someone’s at the door. I’ll be right back.”

Dale glanced at his son. “Tommy. Tommy.”

“What, Dad?”

“You have frosting on your face.”

Tommy wiped his mouth, completely missing the gobs of frosting on his cheeks and nose. “Did I get it?”

“Yeah you got it.”

“Dale? Hello?”

“I’m here, Mayflower.”

“Dale, I’m going to have to call you back. There’s a strange fowl at my door.”

“A strange foul what? Odor?”

“I’ll call you later. Go ahead and start writing up a retraction for the paper. Toodle loo.”

Dale flipped the phone shut and looked sadly down at the paper. “Toodle loo.”

“Something wrong with your fascinating article?” Andie asked.

Dale flipped the phone back open and dialed. “Yeah, everything.”

“Who are you calling now?”

“Margaret at Duxbury Times.”

“The editor?”

“Yeah.”

A dejected Dale walked into the living room with the phone to his ear. Andie shrugged and turned up the volume on the kitchen TV. A new cooking show was on. On screen was a silver-haired Southern woman wearing a bright orange shirt.

“Hey yall! Today I’m makin’ my favorite Thanksgiving side dish, Buttermilk Biscuit Sweet Potato Bread Pudding with caramelized bacon sprinkles and hot custard cream sauce!”

Andie and Tommy’s eyes met. Their prayers had been answered.

* * *

The old black rotary phone on Margaret’s desk rang, shaking in its cradle like a child having a seizure.

No one answered the phone at The Duxbury Times that morning. It kept on shaking and ringing on top of Margaret’s unattended desk.

Unattended, unless you count Margaret’s body, which lay beneath the desk, facedown and motionless on the floor. Her grey hair was a frazzled mess, her glasses shattered on the floor in front of her, and her lifeless eyes bulged in their sockets. Wrapped tightly around Margaret’s inflamed and bleeding neck was a pair of nunchucks.

Outside Margaret’s office, in the empty writers room, a man wearing all black was reading Dale’s article in the Times. He crushed the paper into a ball, threw it into the air, and then sliced it to pieces with a sword. Behind him, another man in black was calmly pouring gasoline over everything in the office.

And as the flames rose it was difficult to hear anything over the crackle and pop, but if you listened closely enough you would swear you heard the sounds of some light, intermittent gobbling.

* * *

Dale shrugged as he hung up the phone, and returned to the kitchen, where Andie was reading his article.

“That’s funny, she didn’t answer.”

With a barely suppressed smirk, Andie said, “Maybe she was dealing with all the fans calling in for you.”

“Yeah I guess so.”

“Hey maybe The Boston Globe will pick up the story!”

“Well they might of before, but not now. Wait a second.” Dale squinted at Andie. “Are you making fun of me?”

“Me?
Never
.”

“Look,” Dale said, “if you thought the article was really lame you should tell me.”

“I thought you wanted the illusion of significance?”

“I did. But now I’m thinking I could use some constructive criticism. It might prevent me from making mistakes in the future. Mistakes that make me and the Preservation Society look like damn fools.”

“Okay if you say so. Here it goes. Your article was a bit…mind-numbingly dull, you know? But not necessarily in
bad
way.”

Dale’s jaw clenched.

“I just don’t think anyone cares enough about the history of Thanksgiving to read an entire article about it,” Andie explained. “It would have been better if you talked more about what the Pilgrims
ate
at the first Thanksgiving and less about what they
did
. Like if you found an old Pilgrim cookbook! Now
that
would be newsworthy. I’d love to know how they made sweet potato casserole back then. Like, did they put marshmallows on top?”

“Of course they didn’t!”

“But how do we know for sure? These are the kinds of questions people want answered, Dale. I mean, what’s more important? The food we eat? The bread of life? Or boring old John Alden’s lame diary, which is probably pages and pages of him going on about whether he should wear grey or brown pantaloons to church.”

Dale started to shake.

“Dale? Dale? Oh Christ.”

“I knew it. You think my family’s history is a joke. Heck, you think this whole country’s history is a joke! We are the mighty trees that grew from their seeds, Andie. Remember that!”

“Oh come on.”

Dale marched into the living room and ripped the portrait of John Alden off the wall. He kissed it, put it under his arm, and headed for the stairs.

Andie called out to him. “You’re not going upstairs to make out with that, are you?”

Dale did an about face, stormed back into the kitchen, opened his mouth to say something to Andie, and then froze. Through the window he saw the cops poking around in his backyard.

Andie padded up beside him.

“What’s wrong?”

Dale eyed the window significantly.

Andie looked out to see one cop peering into their shed, another one trying, and failing, to climb their tree with a knife between his teeth, and a third cop lying on the grass at Judy’s feet.

“What in the world is Judy doing?” Andie asked.

* * *

Judy fanned the pale face of Officer Gilly with a large novelty sombrero. Little did anyone know that the faint smile on her tear-stained face came from a memory of her now dead husband wearing that same sombrero over fifty years ago while making love to her on their honeymoon. Did she really shout “Fuck me, Senor” over and over? Oh my, she certainly did.

“It’s okay, Officer,” Judy said, “it’s nothing to be ashamed of. I reacted the same way when I first saw him up there.”

Gilly brightened up a bit. He had just vomited all over Judy’s feet and was feeling kind of down about it.

“You did?”

“I sure did.”

While Gilly and Stitch shared about as tender a moment as two people could possibly share while admitting they both just threw up, Dale was in the kitchen losing his shit. He hopped around and shook his hands like a little girl.

“Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God!”

“Dale, relax.”

Dale shot an accusatory finger at Andie.

“No,
you
relax!”

“It must be something about my dad,” Andie said. “Maybe they’re looking for clues. Besides, it’s not like we did anything wrong.”

Dale got right up in Andie’s face and whispered, “Everyone has done something wrong.”

With the portrait of John Alden still under his arm, Dale darted out of the kitchen and bolted up the stairs, taking them two at a time. After she heard the sound of a door slamming, Andie went back to looking out the window. Her eyes quickly settled on the strange figure hanging from their tree.

Upstairs, Dale rifled through every drawer in the house. Frantically, he ran back and forth to the toilet, flushing down anything that even remotely seemed illegal. Items like last year’s tax forms, a novelty glow-in-the-dark condom, and Andie’s tampons were all now gone.

“What are you doing up there?” Andie shouted from the bottom of the steps. “You’re not flushing our good heroin down the toilet, are you?”

Dale shouted back, “Very funny! I’m just being careful,” as he used a plunger to force Andie’s knock-off Gucci purse down the toilet.

“Just let me know if you need me to hide anything in my body cavity.”

“I’ll do that!” Dale shouted.

Tommy walked into the bathroom dressed in a full body turkey costume, thick with polyester brown feathers, and including a bald head cap and orange turkey feet shoes. The boy had a concerned look on his face.

“What are you doing, Dad?”

“Protecting our good name.” Dale glanced at Turkey Tommy. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

“Why are you wearing that?”

“The principal said we could dress up today.”

“And you chose to go as a turkey and not a Pilgrim because…”

“Because Billy and Mike are going as Pilgrims and I thought it would be cool if they could chase me around the playground at lunchtime and try to kill me. Also, most of the girls are dressing as Indians, and Billy and Mike are going to try to kill them too. So I figure this would be a good way for me to get a girlfriend. I could like, comfort her as we’re being wiped out.”

Dale massaged his temples.

“I’ve been working on my turkey gobbling all week,” Tommy said. “Here, tell me if this sounds like a turkey that’s just been shot in the butt by a musket.”

Tommy threw himself onto the bathroom floor and flapped his wings wildly as he belted out a loud flurry of dying turkey gobbles.

“I’m kind of busy here, son.”

“Okay fine.” Tommy stood up. “But I have a question for you. It’s about that creepy dude.” He pointed to the portrait of John Alden, which Dale had propped up on the sink.

Dale sighed. “Like mother like son. His name is
John
, Tommy. John Alden. And he’s not creepy. He’s family.”

“I know. But is he like…alive and stuff?”

Dale turned the plunger around and started using the wooden end to poke the purse further into the clogged toilet. “He was on the Mayflower, son. What do you think?”

“I think he’s dead.”

“Bingo.”

“But I also think he’s sitting on your bed.”

Dale let go of the plunger. “Excuse me?”

“That creepy dude is sitting on your bed.”

“What creepy dude?”

“John Alden.”

“Tommy.”

“Dad.”

“I don’t need this right now.”

“I’m serious, Dad. Go see for yourself.”

Dale looked at Tommy, searching for the faintest sign of a smirk on his son’s face. There was none.

Dale crept down the hallway, holding the wet plunger like a baseball bat. Tommy was behind him holding the painting against his chest with his turkey wing arms.

“Are you sure there’s a man in there?” Dale whispered.

“Yep,” Tommy said.

“Did he say anything to you?”

“Nope.”

“Did he have any weapons?”