“The police? What—”
It was my turn to do the poking, hard under his sternum. It gave me almost as much satisfaction as the punch to the pudgy guy’s jaw. “The police. Now.”
He spluttered some, but he went.
I glanced at the blond woman, who was clutching her daughter and staring at me with one eye as round as a half dollar; the other, where the guy had slugged her, was already puffy and half closed. Then I returned my attention to her attacker. He was lying on his side, moaning a little now, his legs drawn up and both hands clutched between them; there was a smear of blood on his jaw and his pain was evident. I felt mildly sorry for the woman. I didn’t feel a bit sorry for him.
Carjackers are something else I have zero tolerance for.
The cops came pretty quick, asked questions, put handcuffs on the pudgy guy, and hauled him off to jail. The crowd that had gathered gradually dispersed. And I was alone once more with a calmed-down Amy and her calmed-down mother.
The woman hadn’t said a direct word to me the whole time, and she didn’t say anything to me now. Instead she pushed the kid into the van, hoisted herself in under the wheel. Well, that figures, I thought. I walked away to my car.
But before I could get in, the woman was out of the van again and hurrying my way. She stopped with about four feet separating us. Changed her mind, I thought. Thanks or an apology coming up after all. I smiled a little, waiting.
And she said, “I just want you to know — I still think you’re a jerk.”
After which she did an about-face and back to the van she went.
I stood there while she fired it up, switched on the headlights, swung around in my direction. The driver’s window was down; I saw her face and the little girl’s face clearly as they passed by.
Amy stuck out her tongue.
And the mom-thing gave me the finger.
Right, I thought with more sadness than anger as I watched the taillights bleed away into the fog.
Zero tolerance night in what was fast becoming a zero tolerance world.
The Fatted Goose
by Hoyford Peirce
© 1997 by Hoyford Peirce
Many authors who write about exotic locales rely on reference books to fill in necessary details. Not Hayford Peirce. The author lived in the place that inspires his fiction for many years, and when he returns on holiday nowadays, he has the added aide to on-the-spot research of a son-in-law who is a Tahitian Inspecteur de Police in the vice squad.
Unlike many Tahitian women who grow noticeably stouter — though no less high-spirited — with age, Angelina Tama had retained her youthful slimness in spite of having borne four children and, even more burdensome, being married to French Polynesia’s most noted trencherman.
Part of her slimness was due to genetics; the rest could be attributed to caution.
“She read the menu,” grumbled her husband, Alexandre, who was easily three or four times the size of his diminutive wife. “Nothing on it but goose and foie gras, so she decided she wouldn’t come. Imagine that: a wife of mine who doesn’t like foie gras.” His great belly shook with mirth as he waggled his massive head in mock dismay. Wearing a long-sleeved white shirt, dark blue trousers, and shiny brown sandals, the chief of police of Papeete, Tahiti’s capital city, ran his eyes curiously about the kitchen of this just-opened inn deep in the island’s mountainous interior. Chez Ma Mere l’Oie — At Mother Goose’s — was at the far end of a dozen kilometers of nearly impassable road and Tama wondered how it would survive, even if its cuisine was as good as its owner promised it would be.
“So get yourself another wife,” shouted Michel-Pierre LaRochelle, the restaurant’s owner, above the sudden roar of a torrential downpour crashing against the roof, “like I’m going to do one of these days, one with some meat on her bones, not like little Miss No-tits over there.” The burly, white-clad Frenchman jerked his head contemptuously in the direction of his graceful but undeniably boyishly svelte wife as she disappeared through the kitchen’s swinging doors.
Tama stared coldly at the walrus-moustached Alsatian whose protruding belly was nearly a match for his own. In spite of his own occasionally Rabelaisian nature, the Commissaire de Police detested gratuitous vulgarity, especially when directed at so noticeably gracious — and highly attractive — a person as the wife of this loutish goose farmer and innkeeper. Pockmarked and bulbous-nosed, with dirty gray ringlets of greasy hair spilling from beneath his stained chef’s toque, this relatively recent arrival in Polynesia was far from being sympathique. “You say there is a room ready for us?” demanded Tama, casting a dark scowl at the sheet of water cascading relentlessly down the kitchen windows.
“Just the one. I don’t know how anyone ever gets anything done on this damned island with nothing but these Tahitian monkeys working for you. Instead of the eight rooms they promised to have ready last month, there’s still just one.” Scowling ferociously, LaRochelle yanked open one of the many glass doors of a gleaming new commercial refrigeration unit and peered suspiciously at a closed compartment holding a dozen or so small dishes filled with curlicues of butter. “But don’t you worry, Monsieur le Commissaire, your room is just waiting for you, with two fine beds. If you and your Chink friend here are up to those kind of tricks, you can always push them together—” he chuckled coarsely “—or I can send my own sack of bones up for the two of you since you didn’t bring your own.” His chuckle became a guffaw.
Tama glanced at his companion, a muscular little Eurasian male in neat white shorts and a hideously garish Hawaiian shirt. Did Colonel Yashimoto understand anything this ghastly goose farmer was saying? He hoped not. If it weren’t raining with all the fury that only a tropical rainy season could provide, he certainly would never contemplate spending the night under the roof of so gross a bigot and vulgarian. Tama turned back to their host just in time to see the Alsatian poke a hairy finger into a piece of soft butter, then wipe his finger against his already richly stained white tunic. “Isn’t that butter supposed to be refrigerated?” asked Tama, always willing to talk food with even the most loutish of creatures.
“And it is — perfectly. Look: separate butter and cheese compartments with their own temperature controls. Haven’t you ever noticed how the butter in this damned country is always too hard or too soft? Not at Chez Ma Mere l’Oie — at least here the butter’s going to be just the temperature it’s supposed to be.”
“Excellent, I detest butter that’s too hard to spread.” Tama waved a gigantic mahogany-colored hand at another compartment in the refrigerator. Here were silver platters with thickly sliced pieces of creamy beige foie gras. “You’ve numbered the platters on the bottom so no one will know which foie gras we’re eating?”
“Just like a wine tasting,” agreed LaRochelle in his thick Alsatian accent. “Not even a professional snoop like Monsieur le Commissaire will be able to tell which is which — except by tasting, and then you’ll know which one is mine — the best one.”
“I certainly hope so,” said Tama with complete sincerity, for only the purported excellence of the inn’s homemade foie gras could keep him any longer in the company of this appalling restaurateur. “When does the judging begin?”
“As soon as the last of the judges gets — Hey there, you, Cherry Cheeks, what the devil are you doing with that aspic?”