Chaos, Inc.
Butters, the other South Park characters, and South Park itself belong to Trey Parker and Matt Stone.
Chapter Five: Things Are Looking Up
Butters told the taxi driver to let him out at the U.S. Capitol building.
He was still feeling a little fragile. Between the sudden trip, and then being screamed at by Cartman, and then being screamed at by Wendy, and having to figure out why Cartman was being accused of espionage, and worrying about jail, and whether or not his Mom would remember to feed the hamsters, he was, not to put too fine a point on it, a nervous wreck.
He sat down on a bench and shivered. Why had he asked the taxi to put him down here? It was well after business hours, and while surely a lot of staffers must still be working in the office buildings, it was much too late to go back to Cartman's office and start figuring things out, especially if he was trying to look like an innocent tourist from Colorado or some annoying constituent with an axe to grind about regulating gas stations.
And gosh darn it, he'd forgotten to call his Mom, too. She must be worried sick.
He pulled a cell phone—just an ordinary one—out of his pocket, and dialed his Mom.
"Hello?"
"Hu-hi! Mom, I'm su-sorry I forgot to call earlier," he began.
"Oh, that's all right, honey," she said, and oddly, she sounded as though maybe it was.
Years of not saying what he was thinking and knowing his Mom never did either had given him very sensitive antenna for figuring out the difference between "Oh, that's all right," meaning, "It's not all right and don't ask me about it," or "It's not all right and I'm going to sulk until you guess what it is," or sometimes, rarely, "Oh, that's all right." This one sounded like it might be the last one. He'd missed something in the conversation.
"--just got back," she said.
"I'm sorry?" he said.
"I said, I just got back from a meeting. Your friend Filmore wants me to be on the new Arts Council. He says he's always admired my use of color in the house and thinks I could be a real help."
Well, Mom had certainly painted the house enough times, but always the same shade of pale green.
"So we met and we split up into subcommittees, and I'm on the visual arts one—that's the one that's going to be working on starting the art museum—and meanwhile we're going to be taking classes and things, trying to encourage more people to get involved. And afterwards I got talking to Liane Cartman—your friend Eric's mother, you know, the one that's a Congressman. Did you know he was arrested yesterday?"
"Uh, no, really?" Butters said.
"Terrible. He's in jail and everything. Well, she feels just awful, you can imagine, but I couldn't help but think how absolutely wicked he was when he was a little boy. The language he used! I feel just terrible for her, but I am so proud of you, sweetie, because thank goodness I'll never have to worry about you."
"Uh, I su-sure hope not," he said.
"Well, of course not. Butters, I hear outside sounds. Where are you calling from?"
"Outside the Capitol building, Mom."
"It must be late there. Are you sure it's safe for you to be wandering around Washington so late at night?"
Actually, he wasn't sure. "I'm just gonna grab a quick bite to eat, Mom," he promised, "an-an then I'll go straight back to the hotel. Bu-bye, Mom."
"Bye. Love you." Huh. Well, at least Mom was keeping busy. That was one thing off his mind.
Wendy had been much too upset to go out to dinner, and she hadn't been hungry. In fact, even though she had eventually believed him, her mood hadn't improved much, and it hadn't occurred to her to offer him anything to eat. And he was hungry.
He began to wander around, looking for a place to get something to eat. Nothing big—a sandwich would be fine. He passed some office buildings, and the Supreme Court Building, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. He noticed that Terrance and Phillip were actually performing together there, live—The Comedy of Errors, it looked like. Wow, that might be worth suffering through some Shakespeare to see, if he had time.
Aha. A twenty-four hour Harbuck's. That seemed about right. He trotted over and went in.
There weren't that many people in Harbuck's at that hour. Probably first thing in the morning and at lunch it was mobbed, but now, mid-evening, there were just a few people drinking lattes and reading papers and a young woman behind the counter.
He looked down into the glass case of sandwiches. Ham or turkey? Ham or turkey?
"Can I help you?" the woman asked.
He straightened up and smiled apologetically. "Oh, uh, su-sorry, ma'am," he said, "just tryin' to make up my mind."
"Take your time," she said. "There's no line behind you. You should see this place at 12:30—it's nuts." She crossed over to refill the napkins on the self-serve counter. He bent back down to the sandwich case.
Ham. No, turkey. No, ham.
She stopped behind him, frowning. "Have you been in here before?" she said.
He straightened up again. "No, ma'am, I just got here today. I'm just a tourist," he added hastily.
"Oh," she said. "Well, do you know what you want yet?"
"Yu-yeah," he decided. "I guess I'll take the ham sandwich."
"Anything to drink?" said the coffee girl, who was wearing a name plate that said Carrie. She turned to the machines, ready to start doing mysterious things with coffee. "Espresso, latte, double –shot? Kenyan? Kona?"
"Uh, no," said Butters, apologetic again, "I—um—I really don't like coffee all that much."
She whipped back around, light-brown hair whipping behind her. "You—excuse me?"
"I don't care about coffee, really," he said. It occurred to him that this might be an impolite thing to say to someone whose life, presumably, revolved around coffee. "Um—sorry."
She placed her hands together and rolled her eyes towards the ceiling. "Thank God."
"Huh?"
"A man who doesn't care about coffee. Please tell me," she said earnestly, "that you don' t care about wine, either."
Butters was completely confused now. "Well, no," he admitted. "I mean, I'll d-drink it if Filmore—that's my friend back in South Park—if he says I g-gotta have it with something he just cooked, but most of the time I'd just as soon have g-ginger ale. It makes him kinda mad."
"So, then, you'd like. . . "
"Oh, just cocoa. If ya got it."
"Oh, we got it," she said cheerfully, pouring some out. "Hey, where did you say you were from?"
"Uh—I d-didn't, exactly, but South Park. C-Colorado."
"Never heard of it," she said, and slid a paper cup of cocoa over to him. "Watch it, that stuff's hot. With the ham sandwich, that's 7.98," she said, ringing him up, "although," she added, "it's funny you say that—I just got back from Colorado myself. But I never heard of South Park."
"Well, it's k-kinda small," Butters said, picking up some napkins from the self-serve counter. "We're 'bout an hour and a half north of Denver."
She slopped water on the counter.
"Oh my gosh," she said. "You're the mechanic who looked at my car."
He looked more closely at her. He hadn't noticed her hair before, because it had been up in a scarf, but---yeah, it was the same lady from—geez, was it yesterday? Kinda pink face even without a cold wind on her, band of freckles across the nose, eyes—well, that was gettin' kinda personal, he thought, he shouldn't stare, but it was definitely the same girl. "Y-yeah," he said, "you were in the gas station—gosh, yesterday!"
"Wow! Yeah! You were the mechanic!" she said happily.
"Y-Yeah!"
"Who didn't do anything for my car!"
"Um," said Butters, "well, yeah. . .su-sorry about that," he said, unwrapping his sandwich. "Uh, did Kenny. . . " he trailed off and decided just to chew.
"Oh, Kenny was super," said Carrie. "He just reached on in there with a coat hanger and some newspaper and some Gummi worms—well, who knows what he did, but it got the car back to my friend's house in Denver and we made the airport ok."
"Mmmph," said Butters, mouth full of ham sandwich, and swallowed. "Su-sorry, I mean, glad to hear that. Sorry I wasn't more helpful."
"You say 'sorry' a lot, did anyone ever tell you that?" she said, handing him some extra napkins.
"Su-so---I mean, really?"
"Well, yeah," she said, "not to get personal on you or anything. It's just that you don't have to apologize. You couldn't fix the car. You said you couldn't. You didn't lie about it and pretend you could. You filled up the gas tank and told me where I could get it fixed, and it got fixed. No big deal. You did pretty much everything you could do."
Butters blew on the cocoa and sipped it. "I never thought of it that way," he said, but he thought, whew. She must be the only person all day who hasn't expected me to fix something impossible and then yelled at me for it.
Usually, he thought, you do expect that a garage mechanic ought to be able to fix your car. Maybe you don't expect someone to get you out of jail or fix things up with your furious ex-fiancée or make your gay ex-husband decide to be straight and to come back to you, but you do expect that a garage mechanic can fix your car. He looked up at her and smiled, and it felt like the first non-anxious, easy, untwisted smile in a very long time. She smiled back. She had a nice, friendly smile.
"So you're Carrie, then," he said. Carrie. Something went "ping" in the back of his head, but he couldn't place where he'd heard that name before.
She shrugged at her nameplate and laughed. "Good guess. I'm sorry, I don't remember your name, though."
"Leopold," he said, "but nobody ever calls me that. Everyone calls me Butters. Butters Stotch."
"Butters Stotch? Like—butterscotch or something, is that why they call you that?"
"I dunno," he admitted, "either that or the hair, probably, but everyone's always called me that for as long as I can remember."
"Butters Stotch—like butterscotch; pretty easy name to remember," she said.
By now his sandwich was gone, and his cocoa was gone, and he couldn't think of any excuse to stay any longer. He stood up.
"I better be going," he said awkwardly, "it was nice runnin' into you. Thanks for the sandwich and the cocoa."
"It's what we do around here," she said, and added, "Hope you have a nice time in Washington."
"Oh, I will," Butters assured her, forgetting for the moment what he was in Washington for. "Well. . . .bu-bye." He pushed at the glass door.
She waved at him. "Bye, Butters!"
He walked down the street until he reached the corner, stood still for a moment, and smiled. Life sure seemed so much better when you had a ham sandwich inside you. He took a deep, deep breath of damp, muggy, polluted Washington air and walked all the way back to the hotel.
He took the elevator back to his room, took another hot bath—just because he could; ate some of the ridiculous fruit basket Dougie and Filmore had sent him—just because he could; and slid into that nice bed with the comfy sheets. He curled himself up in a ball like one of his pet hamsters and slept: without screaming himself to sleep, and without screaming himself awake, either.
Author's note: "Things Are Looking Up" is the title of a song by George and Ira Gershwin. Fred Astaire sings it in Shall We Dance Go check the lyrics.