"Ideally, yes," Darren said. "But much of the flavor and nearly all of the healing properties are in the oil of the wool. As you suck the cheese out of the wool, the chewing and sucking combined with the heat of your own saliva release the oil and its protein. One of the sad aspects of modern American life is the haste with which most people devour their food. It was easier for the ancient Incas, of course, to take the time to absorb the healing oils in their llama cheese, because they lived a much less pressured existence."
As I inserted the moist morsel into my mouth, Thad said, "Rural agricultural people have plenty of pressure on them, usually associated with the vagaries of climate. But it is true that the pace of that life is much slower a lot of the time."
"The trouble with the hectic lives we lead," Timmy said, "is that for most of us it's all too rare that we take the time to stop and suck the cheese."
Which was what I was doing at that moment. The cheese itself wasn't bad-ripe, a little salty, with a hint of smoke, and not so gluey as I feared. The wool that was marbled through it, however, was another matter. I was counting on my finely tuned gag reflex to prevent disaster. What if I swallowed this thing whole? Had that ever happened to a Berkshire Woolly Llama Cheese devotee? Were there FDA warnings on the package?
I glanced around the shop for a Heimlich-maneuver instructions poster. None was visible, although I knew Timmy was capable of successfully executing the proce-dure. Some years earlier I had seen him apply the maneuver and dislodge what looked like half a strip steak from an old lady's trachea at a Friendly's restaurant near Lake George. So adept was Timmy that upon the first upward thrust under the desperate woman's rib cage, the deadly gob was ejected and shot across the room, knocking over a little boy's Fribble®.
"What do you think?" Thad said.
"It's tasty," I replied. "But sucking a wad of hair takes some getting used to. It's uncommon in our culture."
Timmy said, "Thad, do the Amish chew hair?"
"Not in Pennsylvania, as far as I ever heard. In Indiana maybe they do, or Ohio."
Darren said, "To achieve the full benefits, you really need to eat it every day for several weeks."
Almost as if by plan, we quickly changed the subject back to Charm, Pheromone and Edward, and discussed how we would carry out a visit to them at Charm's father's house up the road.
Chapter 14
"You can ask us anything you want to ask," Charm Stanke-witz said, blowing clove-cigarette smoke in my direction. "But anything we don't feel like talking about, we're not going to talk about. Got that? It'll be up to us, not you, what subjects are covered.
If you want to talk about J-Bird Plankton, maybe we'll answer your questions, and maybe we won't. Just so you understand what the rules are before we get started with this… this whatever."
Charm, Pheromone, Edward and I were seated in the living room/dining room of the converted carriage house near the main Stankewitz house, a gorgeous federal-style former farmhouse that looked as if it had been painted white just minutes before.
The building we were in, apparently a guest house being occupied for the summer by Charm and her friends, was nicely furnished with an assortment of comfortable antique and reproduction nineteenth-century New England country furnishings. The building's current occupants had added some touches of their own, too. A large sound system and a rack full of CDs were perched on the mahogony sideboard, and an array of posters touting queer and feminist causes had been taped to the picture molding. One poster, vividly illustrated, advertised something called the
"Penn State Cuntfest."
Timmy and Thad had remained outside, out of sight. Timmy was in the car, parked at the end of the lane leading to the Stankewitz house, scoping out who came and went.
Thad was to use his FFF guerrilla skills to surreptitiously check out a barn and several smaller outbuildings on the property, whose name, according to a discreet sign hung from a post, was Beech Hill.
I had decided to use a direct approach with Charm, Pheromone and Edward. They were unloading groceries from a Jeep Cherokee when I strolled up to them, identified myself as a private investigator looking into Leo Moyle's kidnapping by the Forces of Free Faggotry, and told them that Kurt Zinsser's old FFF connections had led me to the Berkshire Woolly Llama Cheese farm and its employees. Pheromone and Edward had looked startled- near panic was evident just beneath the surface of Edward's frozen gaze-but Charm hardly blinked and immediately invited me into the carriage house. She welcomed me to Bitch Hill and handed me a case of Budweiser to carry up the steps.
"I think it's hilarious," Charm said, "that you think you might find out anything about Leo Moyle's kidnapping from Kurt, that neofascist chucklehead. Politically, he hasn't been able to get it up for about a thousand years, and anyway Jay Plankton and his gang of right-wing enforcers are cultural icons of Kurt's. Fm having a lot of trouble conceptualizing a role for Kurt in what sounds to me like an authentic act of people's justice."
Charm blew more clove-flavored smoke, and Edward and Pheromone sat and stared at me. Charm was slight and wiry in yellow shorts and an orange tank top, with a pug nose, breasts to match, intelligent green eyes and a buzz cut. Pheromone and Edward had the same basic haircut as Charm's, but both were taller, wore jeans and Tshirts, and had long faces with an assortment of studs and rings affixed to them. I could have hung Grandma Strachey's entire set of Christmas tree ornaments on Edward without having to puncture his skin additionally. All three of them were tattooed like sailors out of Jean Genet, with some of the graphics, such as barbed armbands, of the in-your-face variety, and others, among them small anthropods and amphibians, benign or even friendly.
I said to Charm, "I see your point about Kurt. Fie seems to have turned into Andrew Sullivan with wool in his teeth. But it wasn't just Kurt's history with the FFF that led me here."
I described the harassment-by-mail series of incidents that led up to Leo Moyle's abduction, including the arrival on Jay Plankton's desk of a carton of llama turds,
"excrement for the execrable." As I spoke, Charm eyed me coolly, while Pheromone fidgeted and Edward perspired and grew whiter and whiter.
"That's a riot," Charm said after I'd run through the alphabetical list ending in "//for hostage." She puffed on her exotic cigarette and added, "I hope that the / attack is
'irritants for the irritating' or even 'injuries for the injurious.'"
Pheromone and Edward both flinched at this, and I said, "Deliberately injuring someone is a felony. You can go to jail for battery."
"We really wouldn't hurt anybody," Pheromone blurted out, and her brown eyes misted up.
"And kidnapping," I went on, "is a federal crime sometimes punishable by death.
Personally, I'm against capital punishment for both practical and moral reasons, but the US government is still in no mood to join me and the rest of the civilized world in this regard. Whatever his private inclinations, Clinton goes along with public opinion, which remains predominantly bloodthirsty, and Al Gore shows no sign of deviating from the harsh party line. And, of course, should George W. Bush be elected president-which has to be considered both laughable and highly unlikely-you can be assured that he will do at the national level what he has done in Texas. Which has been to snicker as he casually balls up clemency petitions and lobs them into the nearest wastebasket.
Kidnappers, now and for the forseeable future in the United States, can frequently expect to be dispatched to kingdom come via lethal injection, electrocution or firing squad with a minimum of ceremony. Kidnappers who haven't thought about these consequences are making a disastrous mistake."
Pheromone wore a look of horror, and poor Edward, whose only word to me so far had been a barely audible "hi," seemed about to burst into tears. I was not enjoying making these two young people suffer, but my approach did seem as though it would serve to expedite the investigation I had agreed to conduct.