Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man - Lawrence Block [11]
More honking behind me. The tailgate dropped and the girls in the luggage compartment moved to make room for me. “We’ll give Mad Poet a ride,” one of them said. “Hop in, Mad Poet. Hop in, M.P.”
“Military Police,” said a voice from the front.
“No, Member of Parliament. Laurence Clarke, Member of Parliament. Where are you going, Laurence Clarke?”
“To hell in a handcar.”
I got inside, and got the tailgate shut behind me. The station wagon lurched forward just as the light turned red. The honker behind us didn’t make the signal and went on honking his distress at us as we sped away.
“Where are you going, Mad Poet?”
“Call him Larry. Can we call you Larry? Where are you going, Larry?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t you have a home?”
“I don’t think so.”
“So we’ll take him home with us.”
“Oh, wouldn’t that be brittle!”
“Utterly peanut. Should we kidnap you, Larry?”
“No one would ransom me.”
“Then we could keep you forever, and feed you peanut brittle and marmalade.”
“And treacle, and weak tea with cream in it.”
“How super if we could kidnap him.”
“Go ahead,” I put in. “Kidnap me. But treacle makes me ill and weak tea with cream in it is very hard to find. I’ll have jam tomorrow and jam yesterday, if that’s all the same to you.”
“Mad Poet knows Alice.”
“Mad Poet knew Alice long before you ever fell down any rabbit holes,” said Mad Poet. “And Mad Poet feels the same way about little girls that Lewis Carroll did.”
“Oh, super! Mad Poet’s a dirty old man.”
“But not that old.”
“How old are you, Mad Poet?”
“Thirty-two.”
“We’re sixteen. Except Naughty Nasty Nancy, who is fifteen.”
“A mere child,” murmured Naughty Nasty Nancy. She was one of the two in the back seat, and wore a peaked witch’s cap and granny glasses.
“Hey, Mad Poet! Where do you want to go?”
“Wherever you’re going,” I said.
A forest of giggles. “But we’re going to Darien!”
“Excellent.”
“That’s Darien, Connecticut!”
“Only Darien I know,” I said.
“Do you really want to come with us?”
“Wherever you want to go,” I said, “that’s where Mad Poet wants to go. Be it Darien or Delhi or Dubuque. Whither thou goest, Mad Poet shall go. Mad Poet loves you.”
“All of us?”
“All of you,” I agreed. “Mad Poet loves one and all, including Naughty Nasty Nancy, who is a mere child of fifteen. Mad Poet loves the daughters of Lancaster.”
“And the daughters of Lancaster love Mad Poet,” said a small voice at my side.
“How nice,” said Mad Poet. “How nice indeed.”
How nice, friend Steve. How nice indeed to be the Mad Poet, at once disarmingly drunk and brilliantly sober, joyously kidnapped by six winsome refugees from the Convent of the Holy Name. For six little maids from school were they, Steve, six little maids from one of those cloistered mausolea to which the Catholic aristocracy condemn their most nubile daughters for the duration of their delicious adolescences. They had stolen away that night shortly after bed check (bed check!) and had borrowed the car of their algebra teacher. Merry Cat was doing the driving. Merry Cat’s name is Mary Katherine O’Shea, and she possesses a license which allows her to drive in the State of Connecticut during daylight hours. If anyone had stopped Merry Cat, she would have been in a whole lot of trouble. No one did, and she wasn’t.
Merry Cat is sixteen, as are all of them but Naughty Nasty Nancy, the fifteen-year-old witch-girl whose last name is Hall. Merry Cat does have a feline face, with sharply sloping eyebrows and a quick grin. Her hair is black and her skin very fair, and what she looks like is a very classy Irish girl, which is what she is.
It is also what most of the rest of them are, Irish or Anglo-Irish or Castle Irish or Ascendancy or whatever. Shall I describe the rest of them for you?
All right, I think I will. But only because you insist, Steve-o.
Let’s return to the station wagon and do it geographically. Merry Cat, as I said, was driving. Sitting beside her was Dawn Redmond, a soft and quiet girl, soft of face and soft of body, with hair the color of a freshly opened chestnut and a slight complement