Дебора Хоу - The Celery Stalks At Midnight

“Here,” I said, jumping up against the side of the pail. “I’ll pull you out. Just grab my neck.”

Chester backed away. “Be careful you don’t pull the whole thing …” he was saying when my foot slipped on a banana skin Howie must have thrown out earlier.

“Whoops!” I cried. I fell back as Howie and the garbage pail came tumbling down. Howie flew past my head. The pail’s contents spilled all over the floor.

And Chester.

And me.

Nervously, I shot a glance to the front of the truck to see if the driver had heard the crash, but he must have been playing his radio really loudly, because he didn’t even turn around.

When I turned back, Chester was staring at me. A watermelon rind sat on the top of his head like an oversized beret. His face was plastered with seeds.

“Gee, it looks like you’ve grown some freckles since I saw you last,” I joked.

Chester wasn’t in a laughing mood. He shook off the remains of the watermelon and suggested I do the same with the tea bags and coffee grounds that adorned my head.

Howie, meanwhile, was contentedly chewing on a steak bone that had landed at his side.

“Any more where that came from?” I asked eagerly.

Howie didn’t reply; he was too busy slurping over his find.

“Later, Harold, later,” Chester muttered. “Right now, we’ve got to see if we can find those vegetables.” He gazed into the overturned pail. “Wait a minute,” he cried suddenly. “There, next to those cans, doesn’t that look like a … I’m going in to take a look around. Harold, start checking the other pails.” And he disappeared from sight.

With Chester out of the way, I was all set to root through the garbage that was strewn about to see if I could find something good to eat, when the truck suddenly swerved to the right and my stomach lurched to the left. I groaned. There’s nothing like a sudden case of carsickness, I thought, to knock the appetite right out of you.

“Boy, this bone is great,” Howie remarked just then. “It could use a little seasoning though. Would you pass that jar of peanut butter, Uncle Harold?”

As the truck veered around a bend in the road, I moaned and batted the peanut-butter jar toward Howie. Nauseated, I made my way toward a still-standing garbage pail and began snooping around. What do dead vegetables smell like? I wondered as I poked my nose under the lid. The odor of freshly cut grass greeted my nostrils.

Oh, no! I thought, a sudden rash of panic running through me. My hay fever! I could feel that familiar tingle in the end of my nose.

“Aah … ah … ah-choo!”

The lid of the garbage pail flipped over as hundreds of blades of grass sailed into the air. After riding the currents for a brief, liberating fling, they tumbled down, one after the other, to nestle into their new home on the top of my head, sticking to the wet spot the coffee grounds had so recently made ready for them.

Howie looked up from his repast and chuckled at what he saw. “Gee, Uncle Harold,” he said, “you’d make a great title for a spy novel: The Dog in the Green Toupée .”

“Ha … ah … ha … ah … choo!” I replied.

Chester emerged from the pail just then, dragging in his teeth a stalk of celery.

“Boy,” I said, trying to shake off the stubbornly clinging grass, “you smell terrible. What’d you get into in there, anyway?”

“You don’t smell like a rose yourself,” he said, dropping the celery. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter what else is in there, the important thing is that I’ve found the white vegetables. Or some of them, at least. I’ll bring out the rest and then we can get to work.”

Chester withdrew once again into the inner recesses of the pail only to return several times with various specimens of vegetable specters. He laid them out neatly on the floor of the truck, his appraising eye passing over each in turn.

“How do you know that celery’s one of the culprits?” I asked. “After all, celery is white to begin with.”

“Sometimes,” Chester said. “And sometimes, it’s green. Anyway, we can’t be too careful. We wouldn’t want to leave a killer celery stalk on the loose, would we?”

“Well, I hope you’re right,” I muttered. “If not, we may be getting a phone call from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Vegetables.”

“Thank goodness we found them in time,” Chester went on with a sigh. “Howie, bring the toothpicks over here.”

Howie glanced up from his bone, a look of bewilderment on his face. “Toothpicks?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Howie, his lips covered with peanut butter, smiled weakly. “I think I forgot them, Pop. I must have left them back at the garden behind Max’s house. Gee, I’m sorry. I … uh …”

The tip of Chester’s tail tapped the floor nervously.

“Great,” he said, “that’s just great. Now what’re we going to do?”

“Well,” I replied, “before your heart palpitations start up again, I think I have a solution. Inside that pail over there,” I went on, indicating the one that had exploded its contents all over my head, “there are a lot of twigs. They’re a little big for the job, but I don’t see any reason we couldn’t use them instead of toothpicks.”

Chester considered my suggestion and, after a moment’s reflection, nodded solemnly. “I like it,” he said. “It’s … it’s natural, organic, back-to-the-earth. Thoreau would have been proud of you.”

Well, I wasn’t sure what Thoreau had to do with it (in fact, I wasn’t sure who Thoreau was, though I had a sneaking suspicion he’d once pitched for the Yankees), but I decided to accept Chester’s response with modest appreciation. After all, a compliment from Chester is something like a shooting star: rare, and if you blink, there’s a good chance you’ll miss it.

We picked out several likely candidates for stakehood from among the twigs and, with great ceremony, drove them through the hearts of the vampirical veggies.

We were admiring our work when all at once we heard a loud BANG!

“They’re shooting!” Howie cried. He covered his ears with his paws. “Don’t let them get me, Uncle Harold,” he whimpered. “I’ll give them back their steak bone. I didn’t mean to take it, honest I didn’t. Just don’t let them shoot me. I’m too young to die. I’m too nice to die. I’m too me to die.”

“Will you cut that out?” Chester snapped. “Nobody’s shooting.”

“How can you be sure?” I asked. “Maybe there’s a law against stabbing vegetables with twigs in the back of a moving pick-up truck.” I lowered myself to the floor, getting out of the line of fire.

I became aware then that our ride had become very bumpy. And that we were slowing down. The truck pulled off the road and rolled unevenly to a complete stop.

Before we could figure out what was going on, the driver jumped out and walked to the rear end of the truck. “Great,” I heard him mumble, “a flat! Just what I needed!”

He lowered the tailgate. “Well,” he went on, “I’ll just get the spare and … well, well, well, what have we here?”

I looked up to see him staring straight at me. I tried to smile.

“Where did you come from?” he asked, startled.

Don’t ask me, I thought, they’re the experts on reproduction.

He stood there scratching his head. “Boy, what a mess you’ve made. Come on, get out of there. Let’s go.” He swatted at us, indicating in his unsubtle way that the ride was over.

For my part, it didn’t take much persuading. I was relieved our little adventure had come to an end. Between the garbage and the hayfever and the carsickness, I was delighted to say goodbye to the truck and feel solid ground underfoot once again.