Engagement Rings and Hot-Tub Flings
(July 12, 2016)
13: Meanwhile, Back at the Shack
Five of the Gnomes showed up at the Mystery Shack on Tuesday morning around seven. Teek's eyes glazed over a little. "Uh, are they gonna wear that?" he asked Mabel.
"Of course they are!" Mabel said. "How else are five Gnomes gonna pass as a human?"
"Is that what they're doing?" her boyfriend asked. For some reason, Mabel had never shown him photos of her very first crush. Well, the first one she'd met in Gravity Falls, anyway.
The Gnomes were obviously out of practice in human guise—after all, more than four years had passed since the five of them had posed as Norman, Mabel's first go-out-and-do-things-with boyfriend. And Mabel had insisted on a change of costume, so instead of the rotting old hoodie they had dragged out of the dump to begin with, all those years before, they now wore a maroon Piedmont High hoodie—Dipper probably wouldn't mind very much—and some loose gray sweat pants. She'd tried tight jeans, but you could see the outlines of Jason and Shmebulock, right and left leg, respectively, too clearly. Nobody's knees were shaped like Gnome noses, after all.
"OK," Mabel said, clapping her hands for their attention. "The good news is you don't gotta move around. All you have to do is sit on the stool and ring up the purchases. Uh—the bad news is, somebody's gotta be the butt you sit on."
"Mabel," Teek said.
"Now, you guys admittedly don't have a lot of skill at numbers."
"This is true," Jeff, the head Gnome—literally!—agreed.
"Mabel—" Teek said.
"However," Mabel told Jeff, "the really good thing is that with the register, you don't have to have skill at numbers. Look, you punch these buttons—I'm gonna show you how, don't worry—and you make change. You can just scan the price tags, like this, and then the machine shows you how much the items cost. Most of the time, the customer will just have to swipe a credit card, and the register does the rest. Sometimes, they'll hand you cash, and when you ring in the money, the register even tells you how much change you need to return! All you have to do is bag the customer's purchase, put the receipt in the bag, and—the hard part—count out the change. But to do it, you really only need to count up to ten."
"Oh, we can do that!" Jeff said.
"Mabel," Teek repeated.
"Then you have to learn the value of the different money bills and coins, but some of you know that already. I know you do, Jeff, 'cause you play cards with Grunkle Stan and sometimes you go shopping and stuff."
"Whoa, whoa. The card-playing is only for play money," Jeff said. "Nobody in town accepts Stanbucks any more."
"Mabel!"
Mabel was nothing if not persistent. "Well, if you can understand Stanbucks—what is it, Teek?"
"Nobody has to be a butt," Teek said. "And the Gnomes don't need to wear a disguise."
Mabel gave him a pop-eyed look of frustrated astonishment. "Well, of course they do! How will tourists think they're ordinary people unless they're disguised?"
"People in Gravity Falls know about Gnomes now!" Teek reminded her. "And the Gnomes even perform out on the Mystery Trail for visitors. Tourists see them all the time and think they're a tribe of former circus performers. You've been on the mystery tours, you know this—people who see them now just don't freak out!"
"Oh," Mabel said, giving herself a light blow to the forehead. "Doy! I'm stuck in the past."
"If I may make a suggestion?" Gideon said, dapper in blue polo shirt and black jeans. He had come in but found himself reluctant to play the Wolf Boy. That now hit a little too close to home, since he'd had a bout of lycanthropic flu some time back. "Let me take the register—I can tote up cash like nobody's business!—and let Jeff and his buddies do the dancin' instead of me."
"Can you guys dance?" Mabel asked Jeff.
"Well," he said, gesturing toward their hoodie costume, "not like this. We'd have to get out of the human clothes. We keep bumping into things."
"Shmebulock!" his left leg said in apparent agreement.
Jeff nodded. "Right, like he says, we can do our traditional dances, if you just let us be ourselves. Hey Steve, you want to run and bring back five girls to dance with us? Get the best dancers—let me see, that's Gnlemba, Gnulinta, Gnachama, Gnommata, and, um—oh, yeah, Mary Sue!"
"Mary Sue?" Mabel asked.
"Her parents wanted her to go on to bigger things," Jeff explained. His right arm crawled out of the hoodie sleeve and plopped to the floor as Steve, who gasped for air and asked, "Midsummer costumes?"
"Good thinking, that would be great!" Jeff said. "Have the girls bring our Midsummer Dance clothes, too! Oh, and get the Gnazz Trio to come in with their instruments. Hey, wait, wait—Mabel, will we get the same amount of mushrooms for dancing as for working the register?"
"You bet!" Mabel said.
Gideon added, "If you make 'em laugh, they'll throw money at you guys. You can use it to buy even more mushrooms!"
"Hotcha!" Jeff said.
"I help?" Ulva asked. She was a genuine werewolf, who could even change form at will if she wanted to. She was literate, though not accustomed to retail work.
Gideon took her hand. "Darlin', I don't want you doin' what you can really do just for a show. I don't want you changin' to wolf form for people to take pictures of you. That would be degrading to you."
"I get a grade?" she asked, knitting her brows.
Gideon kissed her cheek. "No, darlin', I mean it's not something a pretty girl like you should do. But what you can do, you can help keep all the things on the shelves in order. Now, mind, if somebody picks up somethin' meaning to buy it, that's OK, let 'em do it. But human folks, 'specially kids, will handle things and put 'em down in the wrong place or the wrong way around sometimes. What you'd do is to go through the shop every now and then and straighten everything up they left behind 'em. You wanna do that?"
She nodded eagerly. As the Gleefuls had discovered, Ulva had an unerring instinct for where things went—and she enjoyed tidying up a lot, and she reveled in their praise. Mabel said, "That sounds good to me! But Ulva, don't let it bother you if they keep you real busy—there'll be a big crowd."
Ulva laughed. "Packs don't bother me!" she said proudly. She turned and looked around the gift shop, her eyes narrowed in concentration, her pert nose twitching. "Let me see. Is all in the right places now?"
"Yep, this is just how it should look," Mabel told her.
"I memorize." Ulva prowled through the gift shop, not only eyeballing, but also sniffing everything.
"She's a wonder at this," Gideon said. "She'll do you proud."
"'Sup?" asked a deep voice from the outside doorway.
Mabel spun around. A very bulky figure had just come into the shop. "Geetaur!" she squealed. "Thanks for helping out—my, how you have grown!"
The young Manotaur had obviously hit puberty, probably so hard that he'd left it somewhere sprawled and gasping on the ground. He now stood more than six feet tall, had stylishly tattooed curved horns, and, instead of the traditional Manotaur loincloth, he wore leather jeans—well, sort of jeans, tight riveted trousers, obviously hand-stitched to follow the contours of his bovine legs—and a tight black tee shirt with a white symbol of a bull's head and the legend "A LOT OF BULL" in Gothic letters beneath that. The fabric stretched itself over a broad chest and a hard-looking six-pack of abs.
Geetaur beamed. "Hello, Mabel. Where's Dipper?" He and Dipper were blood bros, or the Manotaur equivalent—anyway, they had stuck their hands in the Pain Hole together at the same moment when Geetaur's initiation time came and the young Manotaur needed encouragement, there's a story behind that, never mind right now. And even before that, Dipper had defended Geetaur when others protested against the young Manotaur's participation in Gravity Falls' summer baseball tournament. Nowadays the two friends saw each other only rarely, but they were good buddies all the same.
"Oh, Dipper's off in another town with his girlfriend," Mabel said, running her eyes up and down and halfway back up the muscular young male. "Now, what can we have you do? I wonder what you'd be . . . good at!"
Geetaur struck a pose, elbows out, forearms up, and bellowed, "The human leader will point me out on the trail! I will show the people displays of strength! Yes! And pose for photographs at twenty dollars a pop. Why are you swinging from my biceps?"
"Just testing," Mabel said, her feet clear off the ground. "You are gonna be so popular with the ladies!"
"Mabel—" said Teek.
Though short-handed, they managed to run the Shack surprisingly well. The Shack was crowded, people oohed and aahed and bought, bought, bought, bought, bought. Gideon was no longer a fake psychic, but he'd lost none of his insidious charm and relentlessly, cheerfully, and successfully upsold customers.
A nice gray-haired lady would bring an item up and murmur that it was a gift for her little grandson. Gideon would beam. "Well, aren't you a sweet Nana! He's gonna love this li'l model of the Mystery Shack! Oh, did you see the li'l old tram and track kit? It's the Mystery Tour tram, just like the one you and your handsome husband rode on! And in the box there's some miniature scenery and li'l figures of Mr. Mystery and some visitors to go with it. But this that you're buyin' is nice, this is real nice. What? Yes, the tram does run just like a li'l old electric train, hours of fun for kids! They're right over yonder, third shelf down from the top, and they're in the same scale as this model of the Shack. Why, yes, ma'am, I'd be proud to hold this here until you pick one up, and I'll let you back in line soon's you come back! You are truly a sweet Nana, and he's just gonna love you to pieces!"
Hard to believe, but it worked every single time. Gideon had an undisputable genius in some ways, even with no magic amulet hanging around his no longer pudgy neck.
A little later, as the day wore on toward noon, a fezzed and eyepatched Soos returned from a Mystery Trail tour and happily reported that Geetaur, who had taken up his station at the spot where normally the Gnomes put on a brief little show, was indeed a tremendous hit.
"I, like, tell the tourists, 'Dawgs, we are so lucky today! Over on the left I just spotted a rarely-seen Manotaur! He looks like he's exercising. Let's pause to admire this wonder of paranature!' And Geetaur picks up this, like, massive oak log and does overhead push-presses with it! One-handed! And he even picks up two full-grown women at once, one sitting in each hand, for pictures!" He chuckled. "You oughta see them squirm, sittin' in those big cupped palms of his! They're just eatin' it up, dudes!"
Mabel had just discovered Geetaur's clothes, hanging on the staff room floor (same system that Dipper had used when he was twelve—it hangs where he tosses it). "Uh, Soos?" she asked, holding up the black tee shirt, "Is Geetaur uh, you know, naked?"
"Ow, no, Hambone!" Soos exclaimed, looking shocked. He chuckled anyway. "That would make the show, like, family unfriendly! No, he's wearing this traditional Manotaur thing, I guess it's like a loincloth dealy? Only it's more like a thong, I'd say. Small and real tight, but it covers the subjects, if you know what I mean."
"Whoosh, it's hot in here," Mabel said, fanning herself with both hands. "All these crowds! This body heat! I think I'll take a short break and go for a refreshing walk outside."
"Mabel—" said Teek.
The Gnomes were equally popular. They had cleared off the little raised stage where first Dipper and then, years later, Gideon had done the Wolf Boy act, and on it the Gnomes were dancing for the customers.
It's true that most of the tourists were convinced that the Gnomes were exceedingly cleverly constructed audio-animatronic figures, but they clapped and laughed and tossed money anyhow. The three-Gnome band had set up off the rear left corner of the stage—one Gnome played the tym-panics, a kind of horizontal drum kit fashioned from hollowed-out tree trunks, another the stambeck, an acoustic stringed instrument remarkable for the sheer volume it could produce per square inch of its size, and the third the tubercula, a piercingly loud brass horn shaped like a sweet potato and keyed somewhat like a trumpet.
Gnome music is hard to explain. It has rhythm—the beat did go on, lah dee dah dee dah—and notes, though some of these go beyond G and up as high as M-sharp, and Lord knows it has volume. The sound produced by the Gnazz Trio was somewhat of a mash-up of a classic minuet, death metal, ska, and Custer's last stand.
The five Gnome couples danced tirelessly and extremely athletically, and the customers clapped along and tossed enough change and even bills to keep them in mushrooms for months. As to the dance itself—well, we have to pause for a bit of history here. Some of this is necessarily speculation, but bear with it, please.
In the third century A.D. a minor Roman philosopher, Abies Molendus (Abies the Abrasive), studying at an isolated spot in Greater Gaul, recorded in his work De Mysteria Canabia* various legends of the natives, including this one regarding a race of diminutive humanoids that may well have been ancestors of modern Gnomes:
Quod sub terra cuniculos habitant Gothi minutis terrarum. Absconditi fuerint in hieme, vere comisatum exaudiantur. Hoc dicitur quod est a strenuus receperint sol in parva ludere ludum dicitur, "Non sentio felix, punctus?"
(The Goths say that small human-like beings inhabit burrows beneath their land. They are never seen in the cold months but appear in spring and summer. They welcome the sun with a strenuous game that the small creatures call "Do you Feel Fortunate, Punctus?")
Without further presenting the Latin original, which tends to be tedious and is frequently interrupted by Abies' complaints of the low pay philosophers command and observations that "omnia nocet" ("everything hurts"), the patient reader eventually learns that the little humanoids are burrowers; they are not exclusively subterranean, but do retreat into their burrows when the weather is inclement or people are hunting them for meat or revenge; they are quarrelsome, secretive, and mistrustful of people; and they fight "like twelve dogs and twelve furious cats stuffed together in a bag."**
The spring games sound more like free-for-all battles, the tiny people's way of getting rid of all the irritations and frustrations of living in close quarters for months with relatives they don't much like while getting rid of not a few of those relatives at the same time, apparently.
Anyway, the point is that nowadays the Gnomes, possibly descended from the creatures Abies described elsewhere as "insanus paulo simiae ludus" ("crazy little dirt-monkeys") have in Gravity Falls moved to the surface and live in trees rather than remaining in burrows year-round and have sweetened their natures to the extent of dancing rather than fighting, though to an observer the athletic Fortunatus midsummer dance is nearly indistinguishable from an Irish football riot: lots of swinging and tossing and struggling for partners, accompanied by high-spirited yips and playful cries of "I'll rip yer feckin' ears off!"
The tourists loved it. A happy Gnome dance has the same kind of morbid fascination as a ten-car pileup on the freeway in which you are not personally involved. And Gnome stamina is so great that one dance—not a day of dances punctuated by rests, but ONE dance that lasts all day—goes on for six hours straight, or until the last two survivors fight it out and one is finally pinned to the dance floor, whichever comes first.
That afternoon, Dipper called Mabel around five, but the Shack was still contending with not only the tourists, but also the Gnomes, and she told him she couldn't really hear and had no time to talk. Finally, though—finally!—by half-past six they had closed. Soos happily paid Geetaur in jerky (the Manotaurs' favorite medium of exchange) and had given a delighted Jeff a whole bushel of mushrooms. Mabel offered to walk Geetaur home, but he politely declined and strolled off into the forest, munching and flexing. She watched until he was gone, sighing deeply.
And then she called Dipper back. "How's it going, Brobro?"
"Finally finished everything up. We got Wendy's car back just a minute ago."
"Is it OK?" Mabel asked anxiously. "And does Helen Wheels miss me? Tell her I miss her!"
"Slow down," Dipper said. "Wendy's car needs a little work, but it's OK mechanically and runs fine, so she'll take care of it after we get home. Our Carino's fine, nothing wrong with it—"
"When are you guys coming home?"
Mabel heard Dipper grunt the way her mom sometimes did when conversing with her. He said, "Sis, if you'll just let me talk, I'll tell you. The police say it's OK for us to leave Portland, but we're both too exhausted for night driving, so we're thinking of staying over and getting some sleep until early tomorrow morning. We'll leave here around five, five-thirty, drive back separately, and I'll plan to get there by eight at the latest. Wendy will go home first for a shower and a change of clothes, and we can both work tomorrow."
"Aw," Mabel said. "If you guys are so tired, we can struggle through one more day without you."
"No, no, Wendy feels guilty for missing work and we'll report for duty. How'd it go today?"
"Well—the crowd wasn't as big as just after the Fourth, but there were still lots of tourists, and they had a great time and spent lots of money. We at least tied our best one-day take for the summer, and Soos is happy. Oh, and by the way, Geetaur says hello."
"Was he there?" Dipper asked, sounding pleased but surprised. Manotaurs were notoriously shy of most human contact, except for the very few who'd befriended humans. "He didn't let the tourists see him, did he?"
"Oh, they saw a lot of him," Mabel said, grinning. "A whole lot of him!"
"Mabel!" said Teek.
*Of the Mysterious Secrets of the Small Hut. The title is evidently a reference to the temporary dwelling Abies established somewhere in Europe while he performed his studies.
** Literally, "Sicut per unum duodecim lapides sacculi male canes feles, et quod multi furore." One wonders if he personally experimented with live cats and dogs to derive this estimate. That could possibly explain his frequent repetition of "everything hurts."