10

Chapter 10

Bufford had heard the commotion from my front yard where he was napping in the aforementioned chair.  At the noise, he jumped up, startled.  The warm beer he was nursing spilled all over his faded blue jeans.  He threw off the newspaper shielding his face from the sun that had, until recently, been hidden by the full moon at mid-day, and rose from the chair.  Bufford was not exactly sure where the ruckus had come from, but he ran in the general direction of the Colonel's house, the obvious and usual suspect.

Upon arriving, he was shocked at the scene which I've already described to you.  Using caution, he gingerly side-stepped the ice cream carnage, made his way through the gaping hole and into the smoking, smelly shed.

"Colonel?"  he inquired, as the dry ice finally dissipated.  "Colonel BB?"
"Err?  Bufford, you useless dodger.  'That you?"  came the reply.
"Um, yeah.  It's me.  Where are you?  Are you OK?"
" 'Am I OK?' Are you serious?  We were just attacked, boy, and you ask if I'm OK!" Colonel BB screamed as he tore a piece of gnarled corrugated tin off of him and emerged, trying desperately to steady himself on his one leg which was shaking like middle-aged Elvis on amphetamines. "No one's OK!  We're all going down this time!  This specific enemy is crafty, I tell you!  What in the Sam-Hill...have you EVER seen this kind of trickery in all the history of modern warfare?!  Have you?!  Look around you, man!"  and then: "Don't touch anything.  I've got to secure and cordon off this area for an immediate LZ dust-off."

With that, he hopped madly and urgently out of the shed.  The screen door slammed behind him and Bufford was left dumb-founded and alone with Tikki who suddenly recognized one less olfactory presence and whimpered pitifully.

A commotion outside.  Bufford made his way through the rapidly melting ice cream product and swung around the doorway to inspect.  It was a strange group approaching, the likes of which would immediately conjure a mental image of a herd of elephants on the warpath.  Out in front was Ethyl, ranting and raving about 'the state of the nation', waving her hands above her like a crazed air traffic controller. Close behind was Edgar. He loped forward in an off-balanced rage, doing a sort of sidestep such as you would see pee wee football players doing during calisthenic warm-ups. Engaged in this clownish method of propulsion, he was also angrily and repeatedly thrusting his finger into the face of poor Ethyl. (His speech was emerging at a pace and timber that rendered it largely unintelligible, so I'll not take pains to recount it here to you. Suffice it to say that it was not friendly in nature.) And here I was, in the midst of it all, trying desperately to keep up and keep peace.
"Everybody needs to keep their heads about this! Relax! Let's just take it easy, Edgar. Ethyl-lower your voice! You're disturbing peoples' peace...in Tai Pai!"

As they reached the yard of the Colonel, I jumped in front of them, admittedly not the wisest thing to do. But I stretched forth both my hands in a traffic cop-type manner and screamed at the top of my lungs, "For Pete's sake! Stop yelling!!"

Quiet. To my surprise, quiet. No movement. They both stopped. And since I was already stopped, that meant that everyone was stopped. Then everyone looked around. They realized their mad quest was at an end, anyway. There was no more reason to move due to the fact that in front of them-behold!-was the crippled shed, bombed-out by the dramatic intrusion of the ice cream wagon and all that meant and entailed.
"Ohhh..." Edgar moaned. Everyone turned his way.
Eyes going heavenward, he hugged himself and began to sway back and forth, mourning the death of his ice cream cart and his livelihood. Ethyl shuffled tentatively over to him and, after much consideration, placed 2 tiny mustard seeds into his ice cream-stained apron pocket, kissed him on the cheek, and exited the scene. Edgar was much too lost to even notice. Feeling confident that the altercation was over for now, I went about the ludicrous task of salvaging any of his artificially-sweetened dairy products. I know it wasn't too practical a thing to do, but it seemed appropriate at the time. I took a metal bucket from the shed and began gathering each salvageable ice cream product with plans to take them to my freezer at home. Perhaps Edgar would find this comforting, if not useful. Speaking of Edgar, he still stood there, no longer swaying but having lapsed into a sort of trance. He seemed to be somehow re-booting. I didn't feel right about leaving him there like that, but I had that bucket of ice cream products and it was stiflingly hot outside, as you might remember, and I was thinking of Frosty the Snowman and banana cream pies.


end of book I