July Heat
10: TGIF?
(June 30)
Friday set a record for the number of tourists visiting the Shack.
No one had the least doubt that the next day would set another one.
"I don't think I can take much more of this," Mabel moaned. They had just ushered the last family out and Wendy had not only locked the door, but had propped a chair against it.
"Get off the floor," Dipper told Mabel.
"Too tired. Just bring me food," Mabel groaned. She lay face-down, arms spread, on the wood floor behind the first cash register. "I can see why Tripper likes this. It's nearly cool. Oh, Tripper. Brobro, go let him out, please. He's overdue. Ask him if he's got to do Number One or Number Two. He'll bark. Oh, he may bark three times."
"Uh—OK," Dipper said. "What does that mean?"
Without rolling over, Mabel held up her hand and illustrated her points by raising fingers. "Number one, pee-pee. Number two, poop-poop. Number three, pee-pee, toot-toot, poop-poop. He thought of that last one himself. The little baggies are—"
"I know where they are," Dipper said from the doorway. "I let him out sometimes too, you know."
Wendy followed him. "I need to stretch my legs. Let's walk him together."
The instant Dipper opened Mabel's bedroom door, Tripper zoomed out and to the back door. Wendy had lingered there and opened it for him, and he tore outside. "Wah," Dipper said as he and Wendy walked out. "Brutal!"
Though it was six-thirty in the afternoon, the heavy heat weighed them down. "Hundred and five," Wendy said, consulting the thermometer on the porch. "Let's go and hold hands and jump into the Bottomless Pit."
"That's twenty-two minutes of falling through nothingness," Dipper said.
"Might be cooler."
"I don't think I have the energy."
However, he did dispose of the little baggie in the Pit. Humans and living animals eventually fell out again, but physical objects like trash and dog poop just vanished forever.
Dipper and Wendy did hold hands as they and Tripper walked a little way down the Mystery Trial, keeping to the shade as much as they could. "Man," Wendy said, "Soos is gonna have to expand the Shack and the parking lot, and he is flat gonna have to start looking for good help."
"He says all four of us can come back next summer," Dipper said. "You and I will be married, so we'll just take up one bedroom—"
"Love it when you talk sexy," Wendy teased. "Attic, I guess."
"Well—that feels like home to me, but—"
"No, dude, attic it is. Only we'll see if we can find a good affordable queen-sized bed. Your bunk's a little bit small, especially on these hot days."
"Soos says he can put a room air conditioner in there. He knows it gets hot, so with some insulation and its own air conditioner, it should be more comfortable. Speaking of which, I'll probably want to sleep downstairs tonight. When I went upstairs on my bathroom break, my room was over ninety."
"Yikes."
"Your house doesn't have air conditioning, does it?" Dipper asked.
"Nope, never has. But it's down the slope and it's well shaded. Dad does have a huge attic fan that pulls air through the house, and that helps. Not that it's ever what you'd call cool on days like this one. I think after we get married I'm gonna go all city-girl soft. Promise me that in the summer when we're out of school we'll do junk like camping and fishing and all."
"As long as we do it together."
Tripper had dashed ahead—he seemed almost weatherproof—and had vanished in the undergrowth. They saw him come back out onto the trail twenty yards away, with a Gnome perched on his back. He came dashing back, and the Gnome jumped off, laughing. "Hi," he said.
Dipper had to think. "Um—Curt, right?"
"Curt, son of Wilbur, son of Khachzar!" the young Gnome said, bowing. "I'm the best dog-rider in the clan!"
"Right, right," Dipper said. Curt was one of the youngest Gnomes he knew personally, only twenty—the equivalent of about a twelve-year-old human. True, he had already grown a modest brown beard, but he was noticeably smaller and thinner than, say, Jeff or Shmebulock.
Wendy said, "So is the hot weather rough on you Gnome dudes?"
The young Gnome stood beside a happily panting Tripper—whose back was about at the level of his shoulders—and Curt patted his sides. "It's very bad in the daytime," he said. "We've gone mostly, uh, night-walking-thing? There's a human word for it, Jeff told me—"
"Nocturnal?" Dipper asked.
Curt beamed. "Yeah, that's the one. Nocturnal. They don't let me go out collecting garbage or doing pest control yet, but the crews don't even set out these days until the sun has been down for two human hours. Hey, I can count to five hundred!"
Dipper whistled. "Impressive! I've heard that a lot of Gnomes are learning human counting."
"Yeah, it's good if you want to be a businessGnome. And more of us are learning to read. Did you know my family used to be ferals? We used to be ferals. I never even came above the soil until I was fifteen. I like it outside better. Trees are fun. We had a great big flood three seasons ago. All the tunnels got flooded. My dad and mom had been feral since before I was born, because they didn't like the Queen. But when we had to come out of the tunnels, they found the Queen was gone, and the tree-dwellers were kind, and so Dad said, 'Let's be civilized!' My favorite food is chocolate cake."
"You . . . need to talk to my sister Mabel," Dipper said. "I think you two would have a lot in common."
"I slept in a squirrel nest all day," Curt said. "Mom and dad said it was OK because the nest was old and empty. It was hot and now I smell like squirrel. Want to sniff?"
"Sorry," Wendy said quickly. "We humans are allergic to squirrel smells."
"Hey, Tripper's heading back," Dipper said. "Nice meeting you, Curt!"
"Bye!" Curt yelled. "Hey, next year Dad says I can go dance at the Shack!"
"Great!"
Curt scurried back into the brush, and Wendy and Dipper went to open the door for Tripper. Abuelita had started to vacuum inside—that was her chief form of exercise, and she said it gave her time to meditate, too. With all the tourists out, taking their body heat with them, the AC was finally cooling the Shack down to tolerable levels.
Melody, looking wilted, was feeding Harmony her dinner, while Little Soos happily fed himself from a plate with baby carrots, salami, hummus, and apple slices—what he called a Some-more-gus Board, one of his favorites on very hot days.
Soos had evidently showered and changed clothes, because he came in wearing shorts and one of his big question-mark tee shirts. "Hey, dudes," he said. "Listen, it's so hot, me and Melody don't want to turn on the stove and junk, so what would you say to me going in and picking up dinner for everybody?"
Mabel, who had crawled in—literally—from the gift shop, sprang to her feet. "I say go for it! What restaurant?"
"I was thinking, like Hermanos Brothers?" Soos said. He raised his voice: "Abuelita's food is better, but she can tolerate the Hermanos Brothers!"
In the next room, over the whir of her vacuum cleaner, Abuelita called, "Sí! For me, gazpacho and two of their chicken tacos, mi hijo!"
"Got it," Soos called. "OK, let me get the grocery list pad—here it is—and everybody, like, tell me what you want. And it's on the house. Oh, we've got sodas, so I'll get food but, like, no drinks, OK?"
That was OK. Teek, who had just closed out the registers and worked up the day's accounts, came in. "I guess I'll head home—"
Mabel seized him. "Don't leave me! Stay and eat with us. Please! I beg you!"
"Uh, OK," Teek said.
"It's a good thing I love you, 'cause you're about as romantic as the Antelabbit," Mabel said.
"The what?" Teek asked.
"I keep telling her it's a jackalope," Dipper said.
Mabel said, "That just sounds stupid."
Eventually, Soos took a massive order, phoned it in, and he and Mabel set off in the pick-up to collect the food.
"That means she'll eat all the corn chips on the way back," Dipper said.
"Price you pay for food delivery," Wendy told him. "I'm gonna shower and change."
"Me, too," Dipper agreed. "Hey, Teek, if you want to freshen up, you can have the shower after me."
"Lend me a tee shirt?" Teek asked.
"Sure."
"OK, I'll take you up on that."
The food run took about half an hour, and by then everyone was starting to feel a little cooler. When they heard Soos pull into the lot, Dipper went out to help carry things in. It was still sweltering out, though the sun was so low that the lawn lay in the shade of the trees. "It's a mess out there," Mabel reported. "We saw a couple of fender-benders. I think everybody in town's all nutso because of the heat."
"Yeah, hambone," Soos agreed. "And they said in the restaurant that we may have a brownout tomorrow. All the air-conditioning's putting, like, a big load on the electric grid. Oh, by the way, we saw Dr. Pines and Mr. Pines—Stan, I mean—driving in. Guess Stan's back from his trip, so I hope he'll be able to help us out on Saturday and Tuesday."
"If I was them," Mabel said as she lugged in a cardboard box with salsa and two partially depleted bags of corn chips, "I would've stayed away until it got cooler. And I would have taken my wives! Both of them! Wait, is that legal?"
Wendy met them and held the door for them. "Oh, hey, Mabes," she said as Mabel passed, "Package came in from Cheap Jack's, addressed to your attention. We were so busy all day, I forgot to tell you."
"Oh, that's great!" Mabel said. "Teek, why are you wearing Dipper's Ghost Harassers shirt?"
"I took a shower and he let me borrow it," Teek said. "My shirt's kind of sweaty."
"Yeah, well, change back before we go out. I don't care it it's a little smelly. Smooching you would be weird if you wore Dipper's shirt!"
"Young peoples," Abuelita said with a contented smile.
A little desperate for a cool evening, over dinner Mabel and Teek planned to go see a movie they had already seen once, in the multiplex theater known for having no sense of proportion when it came to ramping up the AC. Thompson, the manager, was himself sensitive to heat, and so on blistering days he kept the theaters cool enough to preserve meat.
But before leaving the Shack, on the pretense of taking a quick shower, Mabel took a little extra time to open the package from the Shack's supplier of tourist junk, tchotchkes, souvenirs, knick-knacks, bric-a-brac, curios, and the odd legitimate and possibly lethal supernatural article. She opened three of the bags—they had little cinch-strings to close them—and spread the arrowheads on her makeup table. She had borrowed a file from Soos's workbench, and she moved the arrowheads across the finer surface.
The first three were duds, but the fourth and sixth both struck orange sparks. She put those aside and went through the next bag, finding three flints in that one. She assembled the remaining arrowheads into five full bags and one that held only seven, not a dozen.
She made a mental note to pay for one bag of arrowheads—ten dollars would be worth it if she could really break the heat wave—and then got ready for the movie date. Before leaving, she checked half a dozen arrowhead bags in on the stock ledger, noted that one was sold, and wrote herself a reminder to put ten dollars into the till tomorrow morning.
Gah, tomorrow, Saturday—another scorcher. Well that was the first of July. With any luck, she might be able to do something about calling rain tomorrow or the next day. If they got rain on Sunday and Monday, then Saturday—the Fourth of July, when Soos always threw a great big town picnic—would be cool enough for everyone to enjoy it.
"They'll thank me later," she told herself.
She left the five flints on her nightstand, and then she and Teek went out to see a so-so movie for the second time, hold hands and—this was the important thing—soak up the air-conditioned chill for two glorious hours.