Part Five and Finale: The Whole Thing’s on Fuzzwald; or, To Err is One Thing, To Forgive, Fe-Line

I push my fork into an asparagus spear and turn my somewhat blurry attention to Liza Bean. 

Liza Bean Bitey, of the Minneapolis Biteys, co-owner of the last two winners of the Kentucky Derby and volunteer fireman, contemplates the extended claw upon which rests the last deep-fried cheese curd.

“Thanksgiving was a full house.  And the turrabster,” she intones, “was, of course, wonderful.  The hamsters, especially, were a juicy and, if you don’t mind my saying, unpretentious bit of genius on my part.”

“Turr—“

She smiles.  “A little invention of mine, with a nod to the turducken.  Hamsters stuffed into a rabbit stuffed into a turkey.”

I am lukewarm on the subject of rodents, roasted or otherwise, and carefully arrange my face to convey this sentiment.  “Yum.”

Liza Bean laughs.  “It was off-putting, you know, seeing Fuzzy.  The cat is incorrigible, of course.  One so often finds musicians – and drummers in particular! – difficult, but in the end, so clever, so handsome.”  She shrugs. 

I stare at her.  “Please tell me you made him beg.”

She holds her drink up, moves the glass so that the ice cubes swirl, clock-wise.  “When Fuzzwald and I broke up, I blamed him.  I ranted. I carried on.  How dare he be attracted to someone else?  Who did he think he was, anyway?”

I lean forward, peer at her intently.  “He stole $400 from you!”

The cat shrugs.  “I once lit his tail on fire.”

“He got drunk at the Christmas party and did the most inappropriate impression of Helen Keller I’ve ever seen.”

“I put a deceased goldfish in the hem of his good jacket.”

“He taped,” I counter, “your paws to the bar.”

The cat is dismissive.  “And I dropped his cell phone into a beer stein and then put it in the freezer.”

I bark gleefully.  “Ha!”  I sip at my gin and tonic and shake my head. 

She gazes past the bartender, through the expanse of glass doors that leads out to the tiki deck and from there to the Mississippi River.  The tip of her tail whips from side to side.

“He told me he’d made a mistake.”

She turns to me, emerald eyes sparkling.  “From the look on his face, one would think he’d never used the word before.”

Nikki appears at the booth with another round.  Liza Bean slips her a five every third round, and the server takes the bill with a big smile. 

I beam at the cat from across the table.  “Specifics, please.”

“Wellll,” she says, squeezing one lime after another into her fresh drink, “For starters, he said the beginning of the end came when he found out she didn’t know who was in The Beatles.”

I smile.  “Horrors.”

“He said she considers Red Bull a mixer.”

“A complete lack of couth.”

“The kicker, he told me, was the night that she told him that she hadn’t heard hide nor hair from someone.”

I laugh into my drink.  “So that’s it?  You feed Fuzzy turrabster, he tells you what a child What’s-Her-Lips was, that he made a mistake and all is forgiven?”

Liza Bean Bitey, of the Minneapolis Biteys, sets her drink on the table.  She reaches into her backpack and pulls out a black leather wallet from which she pulls several one-hundred bills. 

“Let’s just say,” she says, “that Fuzzy put his coat on my bed with all the other coats on Thanksgiving Day and I took it upon myself to emancipate a bit of his property.” 

She smiles at me from across the table.  “Dessert?”





In answer to a question yesterday:  A Brown Sugar Baby is a bacon-wrapped smoky (little smoky wiener) in a bourbon brown-sugar glaze.  :-)