NINE
Darla Andrews set her pricing gun on a nearby coffee table and led Exitus through her shop, Officer Welsh following closely behind either for Darla’s safety or Exitus’s. They maneuvered like three field mice in a naval ship, turning and spinning and pirouetting around and over the furniture packed so tightly in the room.
Posters, tapestries and mirrors hung on the wall, the latter causing disorienting mirages of additional aisles extending like tentacles out of the building. All manner of things draped down like spiders from the ceiling, from fans and chandeliers to petticoats and watering cans, hats and scarves, handbags and carnival-sized stuffed animals.
Darla somehow managed to save her ankle from rolling as her monumental stiletto heel caught the edge of an oriental rug. She stumbled a bit, muttered darkly, and then continued further into the depths of the retail store.
After several more turns (Exitus passing a number of suspiciously similar breakfronts, all with the same missing pane of glass) Darla stopped suddenly at a door at the back of the room. What color the wood was, if the door was wood at all, was a mystery. The door was covered in vintage postcards, multi-colored thumbtacks shimmering in the light of a gaudy carved wood chandelier.
“Right this way,” Darla said with the air of a museum curator. She opened the door—which smacked a console stereo with a thin crack—and began ascending a set of stairs.
The claustrophobic intensity of the stairwell was to some degree worse than the first floor of the store, the walls of the stairwell being wallpapered with graphic t-shirts on loud hangers dangling from protruding nails—each head covered with a thimble—and when Exitus was finally spit out from the stairs the tightness of the place did not relent.
Shoes and jewelry abounded on bookcases lining three walls, the books left to lie drunkenly on high shelves circling the room, up where no one but a basketball player could reach. And then there were the clothes…. Sweet jumping Jesus in a taco stand, the clothes.
Even with the five dozen or so clothing racks jammed into the room, which was about twice the size of the lower level, there still was not enough space for the garments. Cardigans were placed over blouses, blouses over tank tops and the overload of t-shirts which did not fit into the stairwell. Sweaters were thrown into large baskets resting atop the clothing racks, pants were folded over doweling rods which swung out from the wall not cloaked with bookcases and still—even with dresses hanging from the ceiling and more pants shoved wherever there was room—it was nigh impossible to move any of the garments on those clothing racks.
While Darla pawed through the doweling rods in search of Exitus’s pants, Exitus tried to find himself a shirt or two but, the hangers didn’t budge an inch and he only managed to exert enough force to cause his hand to slip, his stooped body to rock forward, and his jaw to collide with the rack. Strange thing to accomplish, but here was a man who could choke on air.
Officer Welsh moved away from Darla, who was creating a small pile of jeans on the floor (which looked like completed jigsaw puzzles under clear tile). “Feel free to take whatever you want,” Darla instructed. “It’s going on Adrian’s tab and he owes me big time.”
“How is that old dog doing, anyhow?” Officer Welsh asked. “Still destroying everything he sees?”
Darla groaned. “So I put him outside and he tries to eat the goats. I put him in the shed and he breaks out, goes sprinting off to who-knows-where. It’s like that Chevy Chase movie? The one where they get the Irish Setter and bring it home and open the car door and watch the thing run away.”
Exitus saw an oxford he liked and pulled it off the rack, taking five other garments with it. The clothes fell to the floor, the hangers clacking against the clear tile.
“That’s a good thing, isn’t it though? I mean, it’s not going after your home or goats anymore.”
The clothes back on the rack, Exitus reached for a basket of sweaters. He grasped it by the handle and, just his rotten luck, the handle broke and the sweaters spilled out onto the floor.
“No, but you know those stories coming out about the bear ransacking those places a few miles away? I’m telling you now that that’s no bear. That’s that freaking dog.” Darla knelt to gather the pile of jeans into her arms. She stood and turned toward Exitus, frantically shoving sweaters into the broken basket. “So cute,” she said. “And to think, he might be a cold blooded murderer!”
Officer Welsh glowered fiercely.
Exitus put the sweater basket back atop the clothing rack, smiling stiffly. “Thank you?”
Darla grinned. “How exciting.” She walked to Exitus and handed him his pants. “The dressing room is over there, to your right. Let me know if you need any help.”
“Darla Jean!” Officer Welsh was aghast. Hitting on the only witness to a homicide….
She frowned. “I was only kidding.”
“Well, that’s enough. ”
Exitus carried his burden of jeans to the dressing room, a closet nestled conveniently to the right of Darla and her doweling rods. He locked the door and set the mound of denim on the small metal chair in the corner of the dimly lit room.
Darla rapped her knuckles against the door several minutes later, as Exitus stood hopping on one leg, struggling to get into a pair of slim-cut jeans cut entirely for the wrong gender.
“How’s it going, honey?”
The scowl on Officer Welsh’s face had a noise like the hum of a silent telephone turned up to full volume.
Exitus, with his thick calf still cemented into the right leg of the unich pants, moved the metal chair under the door handle.
At a stop in a Wyoming Wal-Mart (many years ago, when his parents were still alive), Exitus had gone into a changing room to try on a new outfit. He’d gotten distracted by the large mirror and, thinking that there was a camera behind the reflective surface used to monitor shop-lifting, Exitus began to torment the poor man monitoring the camera feed. He had stood in his skivvies, one leg still in his pants much like he was now, and danced before the mirror while using his hands to stretch his face into grotesque expressions.
His mother, worried that he was taking so long and getting permission to do so, opened the dressing room door just as her son was flailing about like an octopus hooked up to jumper cables. A group of teenage girls was passing by at that precise moment.
Oh! how little Toddy Toad had been mortified, standing there in his Power Rangers underwear as everyone pointed and giggled.
