Sometimes There Aren't Bananas

            Bagwell had known Katie since the second grade. She had tried to sound nonchalant in a call to him the night before their rendezvous; it was a call which ended with mother looking upstairs to the telephone set as Bagwell hung up. Everyone was trying to seem nonchalant, and no one was fooled. Katie needed help, and Bagwell agreed to meet her at the beanery for dessert at noon the next day.

            Katie pawed at her crumble with a little fork and sipped her coffee with milk.

            “Remember when I was telling you that I had become a kind of a moll…”

            Then about five large men with really short haircuts wielding tommy guns burst through various archways into the dessert parlor. One even popped up from behind the bar.

            “Frankie wants to see ya,” the particularly large one with a small cigar in his mouth and a small bowler on his head said to Katie, and Katie said,

            “I don’t wanna see Frankie! Frankie’s an asshole!”

            Bagwell put his fork down slowly, and stood. And, a change came over him due to the paper-mite bite from the week before.

            He said to the particularly large one, “My. What an abundance of equipment each one in your party seems to have brought. On how many occasions, I wonder, have you actually maimed yourselves toting all of that alloyed metal about?”

            One who was just smaller than the larger boss gangster went, “Huh?”

            He was interrupted by a loud ‘pop’ nearby. A bullet from his gun had found a spittoon on the floor.

            Another goon, distinctive from the others in his five-foot-somethingness, had already pulled his trigger to no effect. He looked up and said to the others, “Say! My bullets don’t work!”

            Then, a bullet did. Into his foot. One gun safety class a waste.

            The other three, each wearing bow-ties I wouldn’t wear to a super-spreader event, and hearing undesired pops from their pieces, just dropped them on the floor and backed away.

            “We shoulda never went to Dissolute Casey for these tommies,” the big boss cried. “It’s like they’re lemons or something. It’s the darndest thing!”

            Then he put another few rounds into the floor without wanting to, and, as that happened, he cried to Bagwell,

            “What are you doing!”

            All those still holding guns dropped theirs and ran with the rest. Boss Goon followed. Bagwell sat back down. The ‘Ka-thump! kathump kathump ka thump…’ of the gang running off gunless over one of those old hotel lobby floors was heard by all dessert patrons. It could be heard even on the incredibly thick carpet they used to lay, followed by the grand opening celebration they held just after installing it, so’s everyone’s feet would push the puffy new nap down for good.

            Then the big goon’s face reappeared around an archway.

            “Couldn’t leave without sayin’,” He say’d, addressing Katie, “We just wanted to tell you that Frankie misses you.”

            The face disappeared.

            “Thanks, Thesaurus Man!” Katie said to Bagwell, then she pointed to his crumble with her little fork.

            “…You still have plenty of Cherry Crumble.”

            The rest of the patrons shrugged and returned to their crumble. And, who could blame them. The shooting was over, and the Cherry Crumble at the Beanery was that good. Now, there’s a Best Buy there.

            Bagwell became quite popular as ‘Thesaurus Man’. He didn’t need to change clothes when called to intervene around the Eastern Seaboard. He wore no cape. He found that his lack of costume made it easier for him to blend into ongoing crime scenes and thwart those bad guys who were robbing banks or snatching purses and stuff. He would dart out of work on news of emergencies sometimes, and, through that, began to understand that his secret was known at the widget factory. Namely, his supervisors weren’t asking where he’d been, in fear that he might whip out some of that bolt-like polysyllabic ordinance. Eventually Bagwell just had to look to the evening sky for the illuminated ellipse which would summon him. Once, though, it was a false alarm. He wound up finding three spotlights next to a theatre showing a premiere. (He had thought that the arrangement of that ellipse was hinky, but duty called.) He capitalized on his mistake, though, making a small but demonstrably thick speech promoting war bonds on the red carpet, and then he went in to see ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ for free. He even stopped the ‘Groundhog Day Massacre’ of ’42. You say that you haven’t heard of the Groundhog Day Massacre? That’s because Thesaurus Man stopped it before it began. He stopped it by convincing mob bosses that February the second was April Fool’s Day, and that they were two months late. On the tail-end of Thesaurus Man’s ‘salad days’, he was even brought in to stop a flood, and, although he thought he couldn’t help, he was able to divert it by sitting on a bluff and reading Melville aloud. Then he took a vacation from widgets and patrolled along Route 66 for awhile, thwarting highway robbers, and even stopping for a family whose truck had a flat tire. He confessed that he couldn’t fix a flat, asked for a manual, and as he read it, the tire somehow sealed and filled itself with air. As always, he talked a bit after the fact, perhaps a bit too much, on a ‘post-saving buzz’, up on his hobby horse about concise language, with, in this case, the grateful family of five saying, “Thank you, Thesaurus Man! Okay, Thesaurus Man! You can go now, Thesaurus Man!” The family finally drove away as Bagwell was finishing a point.

            “Thank You, Thesaurus Man! California Or Bust!”

            The prospect of becoming ‘Private Thesaurus Man’ had entered Bagwell’s mind. It was wartime, they’d brought back the draft, and here he was, eighteen. As much talk as there was of ‘widgets building the nation’, Bagwell knew that being an Assistant Picking Manager of them probably wasn’t going to keep him out of it. The thought never entered his mind to use his ‘Thesaurus Man’ skills to finagle an easy, or no, assignment. And then there was that damn Hitler. Plus, he was becoming more and more tired of saving people. He never got laid through it. Perhaps that was because he talked too much. In his calculations, ‘Private Bagwell’ sounded so much better to him. That’s because it does.

            Then came the telegram. A striking summons to a meeting at the nearest post office. It looked like it was written and printed by machine. In fact, it was, but to Bagwell, it really did. What was missing, though, was the ‘bring your medical records’ and ‘leave all modesty behind’ part. He was greeted at the post office by a man Bagwell knew wasn’t an army inductor, and guessed was probably a spy. That was Captain Walters, who took him through the smallest door adjacent to the lobby, and talked as they walked.

            “Bagwell, what you have is what we would classify as low-grade superhero skills. I mean, Wonder Woman’s out there bouncing bullets back off her gold cuffs, and Captain America’s doing whatever with his shield. Lemme ask ya one thing. Are you confident that you can, say, stop an asteroid?”

            The gig was up, but Bagwell was glad that things were out in the open, after all these months. The two went down a stairwell.

            “I couldn’t even stop myself from sliding down the stairs last New Year’s Eve.”

            The two laughed.

            “Ya see! You’re our kind of low-grade superhero. Betcha it was fun at the time, though.”

            “At the time,” Bagwell said, reaching down and rubbing his ass as Walters took him into a freight elevator on the second sublevel that, by Bagwell’s estimate, was already beneath the avenue east of the post office.

            “We need you, Bags. With time, you may be able to control whatever it is that you have, but now it’s July, 1942, and we’re pressed for time. The guy upstairs has taken notice of you.”

            Bagwell looked up quickly and pondered the ceiling of that elevator as it went down and down.

            They stopped at sublevel Waydown, at the end of a long hallway, and they both hitched a ride in a mail sorting box piloted by a man in green coveralls. They all went roughly two blocks west. Bagwell figured that they were now 50 feet beneath Bob’s Soda Shop, which was way over near the park.

            The man in the green coveralls then took a detour and rolled them what seemed to be a mile north as the two talked, sitting on bags of letters, which was quite comfortable and cushioned the bumps. There were long steam pipes snaking beside them as they traveled, some leaking. Some were in the process of being fixed. Other than a failing stationery shop halfway down, everything was painted light grey. Which made everything dim to dark. They didn’t use that trick that we use now-a-days, in dim, sad places, to paint a mural depicting things far from dim or sad.

            “After we beat this fascism, we’ll go back to prosperity and calm,” Walters said, as they both decarted, and he opened the door to his office, inviting Bagwell in. “We, and those like us will define the parameters of that. Are you in?”

            “All I have to do is prove myself, I figure.” Bagwell told him, taking an offered chair before Walters’s desk. Walters referred to his file.

            “Good,” he said, checking one more page of twenty, then closing it. “Then we understand each other. We’re sending you to Chicago first. You’ll only work for us, but you’ll hold the official title of Crucial Assistant Widget Picking Manager for the rest of the war. But, we need you now. Nothing against widgets. Don’t get me wrong. I mean, it’s widgets that build a nation. Do you know your way back?”

           

            Bagwell was now framed against red, and said:

            “It occurs that the tenets of your organization, or club, are just a bubbling vat of ordure!”

            The Nazis were sitting and standing about a desk in conscious tableau. One near the flag pulled out a gun, pointed it at Bagwell, and

            ‘click. click.’

            And Bagwell began to, like, totally wail on the Nazis.

            He hip-checked one into a decorative cactus, shoved another into the lap of the leader, and he used yet another as a punching bag. And, that one kept getting punched in the face and kept pushing it back for more, like he wasn’t sure what he was seeing and was trying for a better look, and he was suffering greatly as a result. Then on another one wearing exactly the same uniform Bagwell even made use of the ‘club fist’, later popularized in the 1970’s detective drama ‘Mannix’.

            That involved Bagwell raising his right hand a foot aside his ear, and pulling his left across the chest to the corresponding wrist. The Nazi in the crosshairs realized that it might take awhile, so he looked to the desk and found a leaflet that he’d read a thousand times before. Bagwell, meanwhile, laced his fingers together carefully, making a tight fist, and then began to swing forward. The Nazi licked a finger and leafed through the tract. Then, bang! Bagwell got the Nazi good with the club fist! That’s gotta smart! The Nazi went down, and stared at an upside down swastika on the wall, which happens to be the same thing.

            The other Nazis sat on the floor, propped against the paneling, holding frozen cuts of meat to their brows and the sides of their faces.

            “Disbanding the cell and doing something constructive, like building a barn, seems like a very good proposition right now,” one said.

            “You can say that again, brother!”

            “My whole face hurts,” another said, “and, ya know? That Trotsky wasn’t all bad.”

            Others nodded, and another said,

            “Neither is FDR.”

            The others stared, and there was a beat.

            The one behind the desk sighed and said,

            “Neither is FDR. Hey! That barn ain’t gonna build itself!”

            And off they went, on their way to barn-building fun.