Underneath Joni Mitchell’s Autographed Picture

“Now, Francine — purr, purr Francine — don’t wibble too pathetically,” the steward whispered into Mrs. Doggone’s fleshy ear. “This type of shit it happens every day.” He pronounced each syllable of “every”: e-ver-ree.

“The day I take conga lessons from a yardarm-dangling valet-parker is the day they’ll pry my pistol from my cold dead fingers,” Mrs. Doggone snapped. She turned away from the unctuous liveried gigolo and shouldered her popgun. “Pull?” she barked quizzically.

The frozen beef pie shot from the launcher with a kind of high-pitched mechanical “snizzzz,” its trail of ice-crystals shimmering as they fell to earth in the morning sun. Mother Doggone (and there were those around the Cinderbag Club who said that if there ever was a mother, it was Mrs. Doggone) tracked the beef pie stoically, her steely squint screening out every other sensory impression, boring in, envisioning the gaudy rain of gravy-shards, rock-hard beef pellets, the hail of peas and carrots after she’d bagged another one for you.

The pie neared its apex.

Mrs. Doggone squeezed the trigger.

The cork “porped” out of the gun-barrel, chariot-racing across the high-noon desert sky for its rendezvous with crust. It caromed ineffectually off the frozen pie, which wobbled slightly, but continued on its path, rocketing straight toward the tennis courts.

“Pie!” screamed the steward, too late. There was a shriek, then the sound of the pie bouncing off the hurricane fencing and skittering around on the tennis court surface like a flaky pastry hubcap weighted with grapeshot.

“Now, Francine — purr, purr Francine — don’t you think we’ve had enough fun for one cycle of the sun?” the steward asked gently.

“Like I spent two tours in ‘Nam to be shooting goddamn corks,” Mrs. Doggone spat, tossing the pop-gun to the steward casually. She knew social prerogatives would dictate he’d have to catch the weapon. “Are we goddamn old ladies?” she asked of nobody in particular. “I’ll have my regular shooting-iron, if it isn’t too terribly much trouble.”

Well, the steward reasoned, at least that way there was a chance the pies would actually be stopped. And if he changed the nagle of the skeet-launcher, then at least there wouldn’t be another unpleasant incident like last month’s, when Frau Hasenpfeffer had been rendered ineffectual by the beaning she’d taken from that box of frozen perogies which had been slung into the Ladies Tuesday Tea Circle.

“Right away, purr Francine!” he chirped brightly, scuttling out to the locker where the 12-gauges were securely buttoned up.

Mother Doggone bit the end off one of the lumpy cheroots she’d rolled that morning, hunkered down with the purple section of USA Today and gnawing on a partially-thawed Eggo waffle while slurping up a beaker of warm peach nectar. She snapped her Zippo closed and dragged contentedly on the misshapen guano-zeppelin. “Mmmmmmm,” she thought. “Now that’s good huffin’.”

Her thoughts turned to Murdstone, Laverne and that other Saperstein triplet. How sad those three sophomore sycophants had been abandoned by their parents... Well, not abandoned, so much as suddenly left all alone, without a person on God’s green earth to depend on except each other. And how she and Daddy Doggone had cherished them, their chevron flashing bright across the gulf of compromise. And to think that now they all stood on the verge of getting it on ...though not with each other, of course — more in the social sense. Mother Doggone exhaled a thin, sibilant stream of smoke. The steward’s clangings meant the long Holland & Holland blunderbuss would soon be roaring doom from its steel snout at another of those firm little pies as it slipped the surly bonds of your grocer’s freezer. Yes, that would be sweet. And she, MDG would bring it down — tenderly, sweetly...torridly, weakly meeting with...

Destiny.

Her destiny — Diana, the Huntress. What matter that the quarry was trussed in flaky pastry and frozen harder than a snapper in the January crick-mud? It was still her quarry. And it would be hers — oh yes...it would be hers.

“Fast up with it, bag-biter,” she barked. “What manner of toiler are you, to be dawdling with my death-dealer...especially when there be PIES aloft?”

The steward stammered. “Cuh-cuh-cuh-coming, uh, purr Francine.”

“Well be quick about it! Our patient can’t wait all night, now, can she?”