Outside Allentown, on 81, traffic snaked around concrete barriers and potholes. Legless slouched in the front seat, unhappy that he couldn’t find any thing but static on the radio. In the backseat, Aunt Sue explained the concept of a stool pigeon to Glimmergroin.
“So, you see,” she continued as she scratched her wig, “Little John wasn’t really a crook, after all. He intentionally got himself put inside the State Pen to get the inside scoop on Pit Bull fighting.”
Stu gripped the steering wheel with both hands and tried to force his body, which refused to cooperate, to relax. He’d developed an eye twitch and his right leg jiggled and bounced, the speed and frequency increasing exponentially to his Aunt Sue’s lurid tale of make believe characters living out surreal fantasy lives.
Legless sat up. “There is one thing that I do not understand.”
Stu snorted. “Only one?”
“Beloved, I’m trying to make sense of all this and you are not helping.”
“Legs, there ain’t no sense to be made. It’s make believe.”
Legless blew out an exasperated breath and ignored his bonded. “Why did no one tell Mable that her sons were not really in trouble?”
“Because it would have ruined the plot,” Stu answered, cutting off his Aunt Sue in mid-sentence. He brought the Lincoln to a dead stop while a front loader backed up in the middle of the highway.
She harrumphed, but the ringing of her Razr prevented her from speaking further on her favorite topic. She retrieved her phone, ignoring the teeth marks along the top edge, and stared myopically at the read-out. “Oh, good. I’ve been expecting this call.” She hit a button with her index finger and shouted into the phone. “Hello?”
In the car next to them, a couple turned and frowned as her voice carried over the sound of road construction and idling cars.
“Speak up! I can barely hear you!”
Stu made strangled noises in his throat. “Try holding the phone closer to your head, Aunt Sue.”
“What?”
“Hold the phone closer to your ear!” The woman leaned from the blue Nova and shouted at the Lincoln.
With one hand clapped to one ear, Aunt Sue leaned forward so that she was precisely shouting in Stu‘s right ear. “Louise? Louise, is that you? With all this blamed noise, I can’t hear myself think!”
The woman in the car next to them began climbing out of her window and waving at Sue. “You’re a menace! People like you are why cellphones should be banned,” she shouted and waved her hands. Other motorists began turning their heads and staring as she climbed through her window and screamed at the Lincoln. She pounded on Sue’s window with her palm.
“Louise, hang on a second.” She pushed the button the rolled down the rear window and leaned out at the woman in the next car. “What are you screamin’ about?”
“You! You crazy old bat! I’m screaming at you! Every one can hear your conversation for miles around. No one needs to hear you on the damn phone! It drives me nuts! Every where I go, people shouting into their cellphones like they are the only people on the planet and they are so damned important that every one wants to hear what they have to say!” The woman shouted and frantically waved her hands in the air, nearly over balancing in the process. She shrieked as her body tilted precariously forward and reached out a hand to save herself. The first thing she came into contact with was Aunt Sue’s hair, which promptly came off in her hand. The woman screamed and waved the brown frosted wig around in the air and kept on screaming.
Aunt Sue screamed as her precious hairpiece was ripped from her head and she lunged out of the car window to retrieve it. Glimmergroin bellowed and followed Aunt Sue so that they were both wedged firmly in the Lincoln’s rear side window. All around them, people bailed from their cars, some shrieking, certain they were under terrorist attack. Others were just curious and stood, arms crossed as the two women played tug-of-war with what looked like a dead Cock-a-poo. Stu clamped both hands over his ears and squeezed his eyes shut.
“Beloved, do something!” Legless shouted as he, too, joined the fray.
“I am doing something!” Stu shouted back, hands firmly clamped to his ears. “I’m protecting my hearing.”
“Give that back!” Aunt Sue yelled.
“Oh, my God!” The woman frantically waved the hair around in horror. “Oh, my God!”
Somewhere, some one yelled, “Fight!”
Within minutes, along the small stretch of 81, just miles from Allentown, Pennsylvania, a crowd of motorists began chanting. “Fight! Fight!”
In desperation, Aunt Sue reared back her hand, smacked Legless in the nose, and swung with all her might at the woman hanging from the Nova. Her palm connected with a loud thwack. Enraged, the woman stopped shaking the wig and proceeded to use it as a weapon against her attacker. The two hung suspended from their respective car windows, slapping and cursing and spitting at each other. Aunt Sue struggled to retrieve her wig while the woman continued to pummel her with it. Legless, his nose bleeding, retreated to the safety of the front seat. Glimmergroin, out of shear desperation, grabbed his axe.
Stu finally took notice. “NO! NO! No weapons!” He shoved his body against his car door and nearly fell out onto the pavement as it fell open. Only his seatbelt kept him from landing on his ass. He struggled to climb back into the bench seat and undo his seat belt while behind him, the screaming grew louder. With a quick glance in his rearview mirror, Stu happily noted that the chanting motorists had changed their tune when the bearded dwarf, replete in blue satin and brown corduroy, fell head-first from the car, his double-headed axe proceeding him by nearly two feet.
As he finally got his seat belt unbuckled, Stu climbed from the car just in time to see his Aunt Sue literally pull the woman from her Nova by her long, blond hair. Both women landed in a heap on the ground and beneath them, Glimmergroin wheezed and his legs thrashed. Stu waded in just as the Nova’s driver leapt from the car. The smaller man, who was missing two key elements of the strange scenario unfolding on the road, unwittingly joined the fray.
The first element was that Stu, by nature, was not a violent man and only wanted to pull his beloved great-aunt out of the fracas, return her wig to her balding pate and pretend nothing had ever happened. The second element he knew nothing about broadsideed him just as he wrapped his scrawny arms around Stu’s waist.
“Legs! Sit! Heel!” Stu bellowed as the three of them bounced off the right quarter panel of the Nova and landed in a heap in the road. They wriggled and squirmed in a tangle of arms and legs and Elf.
“Help! Save me! Help!” The man from the Nova tried vainly to pull himself away from the sharp teeth gnawing on his ankle by using the car‘s bumper for leverage. “I’m being attacked by a piranha.”
“Legs, dammit, leggo!” Stu rolled to his feet and clasped his beloved in strong arms and pulled. Legless’ body cleared the pavement by several inches, but neither his teeth nor his hands released the ankle attached to the screaming man.
Stunned, the man’s companion sat in the middle of Glimmergroin‘s chest, her mouth open and eyes wide with shock. Taking advantage, Aunt Sue snatched up her wig and clamped it firmly back on top of her head. “It’s just Legless,” the elderly woman declared as she got to her feet. “Stu, get him offa that poor man. You should feed him.”
Stu cut his aunt a look but he refrained from speaking directly to her on the topic. “Legless, leggo, dammit. I mean it. If you don’t leggo, I won’t get you any more hotdogs or Swiss cake rolls.”
Blue eyes shifted over the pale, hairy flesh and long fingers loosened their grip. His cap was askew and his leg warmers were scrunched down around the tops of his cowboy boots. He grinned around a mouthful of hairy leg, indicating he might not be all that interested in hotdogs or Swiss cake rolls when he had something else so tasty.
“Fuck me!” Glimmergroin put his hands beneath the blond’s butt and heaved her off of his chest. She crawled away toward her companion and the dwarf joined Aunt Sue beside Legless and Stu.
“You people are crazy,” the man whined as he was released. He examined his ankle and noted that, while the skin wasn’t broken, there were deep teeth marks all along the ball and socket.
“Fuckin’ A, laddie,” Aunt Sue nodded as she straightened her wig.