Read Online Pipsqueak by Brian M. Wiprud - Free Book Online Page B

walked out on us.”
    “Well, I know a guy who might help you out. Alan Peden, he’s at Middle Village Exotica, in Queens, snakes and bugs a specialty. But can I ask why there would be a live tarantula in a sports shop?”
    “Oh, different scene altogether. Dream sequence.”
    “Ah, I see. So anyway, I’ll bring the stuff over right away.”
    Next call: the Big Weevil.
    “Hi, Stuart, Carson here. Let’s hear about this whatsits.”
    “Gotta see this thing, Professor. Come on out.” He always wants me to come charging out to New Hope every time he gets a piece of taxidermy, and he’s never able to identify even the most rudimentary of animals. I once went up there to check on what he said was an eagle only to find it was a turkey. Then again, he drew me out there with a story about a mean-looking black chicken and it turned out to be a capercaillie, an exotic Siberian game bird I scored for a mere thirty bucks.
    “A big bug, huh?” Could he be talking about a
Dynastes hercules
, world’s largest beetle? Approaching seven inches long, the olive-colored males have a pair of long pincers as big as a raven’s beak. They originate in Central America, and as a kid I was forever searching bunches of bananas at the supermarket in vain hope of finding a stowaway. Needless to say, young Garth never did collect a Hercules beetle, a critter I reckoned big enough to qualify as taxidermy. “You open tomorrow?”
    “At eleven.”
    “Maybe Angie and I’ll pack a picnic, make a day of it.”
    “A day of what?” Angie said as I hung up.
    “Stuart’s got something. . . .”
    “And he doesn’t know what it is, I’ll bet. Wants you to come out to New Hope to look at it. Now you’re thinking picnic, right?” Her smile was pained, teeth clenching her lower lip.
    “Right.”
    “Forget it. I’m stuck showing Peter what the gosh-dern beads will look like posted to the titanium.” Angie has the cutest ways with expletives.
    “And tonight?”
    Angie gave me a sidelong look. “Tonight?”
    “Yeah, I told Dudley we’d go out to celebrate his engagement.”
    “Engagement to the Beast?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    I got a knitted-brow smile, and I clasped her shoulders.
    “Save your bad humor, Angie, for Peter. Look, we’re going to hear music, a swing band at the Gotham Club.”
    “Dancing?” The clouds began to part.
    “Yes indeedy. And it’s dress-up night. We’re supposed to dress forties or fifties or something.”
    The clouds darkened Angie’s brow again, and she struck me a blow to the shoulder.
    “Ow!”
    “How could you, Garth?”
    “What?”
    “You know I don’t have anything to wear to something like that.”
    I reflected on the two closets filled with her clothes.
    “Surely, Sugar Cube, you have something you could throw together—”
    “Ha!” Angie stalked to the back room and I heard the closet door almost fly off its hinges. Angie’s usually very even-tempered, really. Just Peter drives her nuts. Which meant my next move was to assemble the best-of reptile squad and run them out to Brooklyn.
    “C’mon, Otto. Help.”
    Otto dropped his brush and scurried after me into the basement. “Vhat I help, Garv, please, tell to me?”
    The snakes are pretty fragile, so we put them in an oversize Rubbermaid storage tub in a vat of styro peanuts, squares of shirt board to separate them. The caiman and monitor I bubble-wrapped and rolled into moving blankets. A crocodile skull the size of a small dog I merely wrapped in a blanket, and we put a couple of iguanas in a box of shredded paper. I have to store not only the critters but all the supplies for transporting them. Packing is one of Otto’s talents. He has a near perfect sense—esoteric as it may be to some—of how to fold paper, bubble wrap, or cardboard over toes, claws, and muzzles in such a way that a rigid cocoon is formed around the delicate bits most likely to get snapped.
    “I ever tell you you’re good at packing, Otto?” I knew what the