Like Mandarin - Kirsten Hubbard [50]
“Are you insane?” Mandarin said. “I don’t even want to look at it. The poor guy.”
I’d suspected she would react like that. “Well, it—”
“Did you buy it from the souvenir shop? Because that’s just, like, supporting the whole industry!”
“It’s not from the souvenir shop. And I didn’t buy it.”
“Well, how’d you get it? The only other place I’ve seen one …” She paused. “Oh no you didn’t. You stole it? Did you really? You are insane!”
“So are you busy later tonight?”
“Why? What did you have in mind?”
I brandished the jackalope head under the bar lights. “We’re going to liberate the trophies.”
The success of the liberation rested on two conditions.
The first was Mandarin’s father’s truck. Solomon Ramey owned a 1959 Studebaker Scotsman farm truck, pale green, with a wooden cage in back: the kind of contraption you saw stuffed with chickens or bawling baby goats on the highways. It had chubby bumpers, faded old tires, a front windshield dotted with chips. Maybe it would have been worth something fixed up—if it didn’t look wind-blasted and drop-kicked and spit out. Even so, I expected that Solomon would be possessive about it. Washokey men loved their trucks.
Luckily, when I met Mandarin on her porch at two in the morning, she was twirling the keys on a silver ring. It looked like a jailer’s key chain from an old western film.
“You got them?” I asked anyway.
In reply, Mandarin tossed the key ring at me. I held my hands over my face. The keys bounced painfully off my shoulder.
I leaned over to pick them up, wondering if she was still angry. But then she hopped from the steps and practically tackled me, hurling an arm around my waist. “This is going to be so much fun!” she exclaimed, towing me toward the driveway. “What a great fucking idea. You’re a genius, Gracey.”
I practically glowed.
“So what does your dad use his truck for?” I asked as we climbed in.
“Kegs,” she replied, turning on the ignition. The engine came alive with an exasperated roar. I glanced at Mandarin, concerned.
“What if somebody hears us?”
“I can deal with them.”
The second condition of a successful liberation might have been an even bigger gamble if I hadn’t known Washokey so well.
Townspeople tended to trust one another. Not that crime didn’t exist. While misdeeds behind closed doors generally went unreported, the weekly paper recounted occasional shenanigans: cars rammed into mailboxes, rocks through windows, fistfights in the parking lot of the Western Bar or the Old Washokey Sip Spot. But with the exception of the fights, there wasn’t much person-against-person crime. No robberies, no burglaries, despite what Earl Barnaby claimed. The single break-in I could recall had been blamed on a drifter by the town’s notoriously lazy police.
So I knew there were no alarm systems protecting Washokey’s businesses.
I was counting on Mandarin’s lock-picking skills.
Picking the lock had been Mandarin’s idea. My grandiose plans hadn’t taken locks into account. Fortunately, Mandarin’s roommate at the Wyoming Girls’ School had been an expert in forced entry, and eager to impress besides.
Mandarin went through a paper clip, a coat hanger, and three bobby pins before the padlock on the back door popped open. The whole while, I darted around anxiously, peering around corners, scanning the streets for nocturnal pedestrians, until Mandarin grabbed me by the back of my shirt and made me sit.
We slipped into the stockroom. Pallets were stacked to the ceiling, piled with shrink-wrapped cans of SpaghettiOs, green beans, Spam, neon boxes of macaroni. Mandarin used a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon to prop open the door into the store. I noticed four tiny nail holes—perfect for hanging a jackalope head.
Inside, we had a moment of silence, our eyes roaming from trophy to trophy. Their shadowy faces gazed sightlessly over the tops of the aisles. I hadn’t cared much about them either way. But now they seemed somber and lonely, anchored