"gaskin" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gaskin Emily)

The Rabid Frog

by Emily Gaskin

Commercial frogs rained down, flashing silver green in the parking lot lights -- another "Apocalypse Tuesday" and Darlene had forgotten her umbrella. Threshing amphibian limbs from the wet knot of her hair, the waitress pushed open the door to The Rabid Frog. She was wet, but not late, and therefore forgivable, not that she cared about that anymore.

Chris was already at the bar, his polymerized face animated as he chatted with the happy hour girls.

"I am Thor," he tells them. His teeth rattle like square marbles in his mouth, but the happy hour girls hear only resurrected Viking. His voice rumbles, "Want to know why they call me the thunder god?"

Darlene leaned between the girls. "Chris, have you seen Bela?"

"Has anyone?" He shrugged and went back to gesturing the size of his hammer.

Typical, she thought. For Chris and for Bela. The proprietor of The Rabid Frog, Bela rarely emerged from his subterranean office. No one was quite sure what he wanted more; a full wine cellar or a crypt beneath the bar. Darlene wanted to give him notice.

She would be a coffee-serving extension of the word processor world, quietly tapping away in a room politely forbidding cigarette smoke. Her clothes wouldn't reek of spewed tequila and slurred marriage proposals from counter- counterculture goons. She'd listen to requests for baby shower collections instead to tales of rope and the backs of trucks headed for the Mexican border, and she'd forget that ever she had once been so desperate that she walked through The Rabid Frog's doors.

But first there was Bela, and dread of him was a catfish floating belly-up in her stomach. There had always been talk of firings, but never, ever, of quittings. The battle axe hanging over the front door said it all, in gold lettering, along the blade: Abandon all hope, ye who exit here.

Darlene crept down the stairs to the basement. Air brushed against her like cold, wet hands. The coil in the solitary light bulb burned a dull orange, just enough light to cast spider web shadows on the cracked plaster wall. She pressed a hand against her stomach and started toward the office, when Bela materialized. He stepped from the shadows surrounding the bottle racks.

"It has only now occurred to me that if I were your Antichrist, I could turn all this wine to water." Bela lips curled back in a red, gummy grin. "But would it be worth it?"

Darlene stared at his mouth, thinking of frogs.

"You want to leave," he said. "They always do. Very well, then." His eyelids slid nearly shut over the thin green glass of his eyes. "You may go when you have served the gentleman upstairs wearing the purple coat. He is a valued patron and an old friend."

Was that all? Darlene couldn't believe her ears. She stumbled half-blind up the stairs. One lousy drink and she could go and leave Open Mike Prophesy Night and the hyper-pumping frog machine far behind her?

Upstairs, someone had powered up the jukebox which thundered in an unintelligible rage. She recognized it: the backwards Little Bo Peep. She had bleated the part of the sheep. And Chris had not been discreet with this information. If only she could figure out which of the regulars kept punching it up, he'd be digging for those quarters for months to come. She scanned the bar for any shade of purple, automatically editing the sea of black and silver which coated The Rabid Frog like cooled lava and glass. Her eyes settled at last on the man from the university. Darlene groaned.

Without fail, he blustered in on Tuesdays, and Tuesdays only, flinging the door open with a wide stretch of the arm, demanding loudly, "Call me Caligula!" before settling down in the corner bar stool and ordering a diet soda.

Darlene pulled out her note pad. "Your usual?"

The man in the purple coat raised his eyebrow. "Don't be ridiculous. There is nothing usual about my order."

Darlene sighed. "What can I get you then?"

He leaned back in the chair, folding his arms like a genie across his chest. "A plaid drink," he said with a lopsided grin. "Plaid on the rocks."

Something clammy crawled across the back of Darlene's neck. Her hand flew back and whipped out a stowaway frog from her collar. Caligula snatched the frog from her fingers.

"That's mine. Get your own."

"We don't serve plaid drinks here."

"That's not my problem."

"Wouldn't you rather have a diet soda --"

"You have my order. Snap to before I have your head cut off."

Cursing her luck, she knew he probably meant it. He already launched his straws at her when his soda went flat, which it always did because he took a half an hour to get around to it. And no number of refills would appease him. He'd just pull off his boots and plop them down on the bar, glowering into his drink until closing. It was why she usually passed him off to the junior waitresses when she could manage it.

She felt the office dream slipping through her fingers.

At the bar, Chris was painting imaginary murals with a dust rag. He hid the rag in his back pocket when he saw her.

"Munch?" she asked.

He grinned sheepishly. "Fuseli."

"The professor wants a plaid drink."

Laughter erupted from Chris's throat. His arms bent at his sides and rolled back a hardy guffaw, as if he stood watching as a thatched roof burned, and a streamer of monks in their night shifts ran shouting from the building. Darlene pounded the bar with her fists.

"It's not funny! I know he's a nut off the far branch, but I've got to serve him. I've got to."

Chris sobered. "That's not it," he said. He looked at her. Did Darlene imagine sympathy in his smile?
"You forgot your umbrella today, didn't you?" he said.

"Yes, I did, but I hardly see --"

"And it's Tuesday. You were probably hit by the frogs, and Bela's advertising schemes can be a bit . . . unpleasant. You probably thought you wanted to leave us."

Darlene sighed. "Yesterday, if at all possible. But I've got to serve this drink first. I don't want any trouble from Bela --"

Chris shook his head. "This isn't France, you know. Plaid drinks don't come cheap around here."

"I'm not in the mood, Chris." She grimaced. "It's not some kind of nickname is it? Like Sex on the Beach? A Buttered Nipple?"

"Not that I know of."

Darlene slumped onto a bar stool. "I'm stuck here."

"Come, don't look at it that way. Think of it as an extended opportunity to hear about my hammer. You might not think it as good as an umbrella, but it has its merits."

"Waitress," the man in purple crooned. "I'm waiting! I was led to believe this was a quality establishment -- fit for an emperor! This place isn't fit for a politician!"

Darlene jumped off her chair. She brushed past the man in purple and headed for the back kitchen. She ran up the stairs to the roof and threw open the door. Her feet slipped on rainwater, skating her toward the edge of the roof. Car alarms answered the frogs showering the parking lot like meteorites. The frogs hit the ground hopping, scattering away from the bar in staggered green pulses. They, at least, got away, if only for the drainage ditches or the highway. Bela's machine even gave them a little push.

Darlene laughed, then caught her fist in her mouth. Rain whipped up her hair in stinging lashes against her face. She scanned the roof until she saw the frog machine shooting up a perpetual mushroom cloud of flailing amphibians. If she couldn't leave, the frogs wouldn't either.

Burying her head protectively against her shoulder, she charged the machine. The frog geyser battered her body as she reached the plug. She yanked it from the socket, but the frogs kept coming. She kicked the casing, again and again until she felt her toes bleeding in her shoe. With a primal scream, she threw her arms around it and heaved it, flying frogs and all, over the roof.

The frog machine hit the pavement and split open along the seams. The last of the frogs tumbled under cars in the parking lot. Then, from the wreckage, lurched a fat toad, bloated brown and green -- almost the size of the machine itself. It dragged itself from the broken metal and into the mud of a pot hole. The thin, glass membrane of its eyes glistened in the rain as it stared, in silent consideration, at Darlene. It blinked, and with a kick of its legs, pitched itself forward and burrowed into the earth, disappearing under the water softened layers of mud.

Heart flying on the ceiling of her skull, Darlene marched triumphantly down the steps and into the bar. She was not prepared for what she saw.

Bela spun around in the bar stool next to Caligula.

"Ah, Darlene," he said, "we were just talking about a new advertising campaign to bring our little bar into the next millennium. What do you think of locusts?"

His eyes burned feverishly. Did she, for just a moment, imagine perspiration on the smooth, white line of his brow?

"That depends," she said slowly. "Do I get the rest of the night off and a hot shower to think about it?"

Bela's did not bat an eye, but something in his face relaxed. His pupils widened. "You're soaked. Of course, go home. You'll catch cold and sneeze on the customers."

"She sneezed on me once," Caligula said. He sucked noisily from a straw. "Absolutely mortifying."

"Really." Bela's gaze did not stray from Darlene's face. "We had better get you another drink in honor of your generously forgiving nature. On the house of course."

Darlene felt her face flush. "I'll be going home, then," she said quickly.

"Do you need an umbrella? You may borrow mine."

"No," she said, a sudden smile creeping across her lips. "No, I think I'll borrow Chris's hammer instead."

Chris looked up from his bar painting. His eyebrows topped his forehead. "Really?"

When she nodded slyly, he shrugged and pulled a three-foot sledgehammer from behind the bar. It sank in her arms when he handed it to her, but she thanked him.

"A hammer has its merits, after all," she said, and bid them all good night. In the parking lot, she took one pass at the frog machine with Chris's hammer before going home. The metal resonated oddly in the rush of rain, but not without harmony with the thunder. A small frog fled from the wreckage, but Darlene caught it up in her hands. She held it before her face, and with a malicious grin, dropped it in the pocket of her apron.

She needed a pet, anyway, if she wasn't going to get flowers in an office cubicle.