I have to say it made me feel a whole lot better, and maybe a little cut adrift. So I wrote one last Mishap Jack for a little bit of closure. I thought about giving him a fatal accident, but decided he might come back sometime later. Who knew? So here's the last installment (if you don't know, these are about a thoroughly inept chimney sweep. In other words, these stories outline how NOT to be a successful chimney sweep):
MishapJackPt17
Jack’s Mom called up from the depths of the basement where she
was ironing his boxers. “Oh Jack dear, you got a call from the
Better Business Bureau. I bet they want to congratulate you on being
one of their better businesses. I bet you are one of the few chimney
sweeps in this area.”
“So what did you tell ‘em, Mom? I’m pretty busy building my
Minecraft castle.”
“It’s okay. They said they’d call back at dinnertime to be
sure and catch you.”
He’d heard his father discussing the upcoming BBB dinner with a
friend. Thoughts about what sort of tux he should rent for that
dinner began to invade Jack’s castle-building efforts. Maybe red
for fire would look good. And maybe a red top hat to go with it. He
certainly didn’t want something as mundane as a black tux.
It was interesting that they’d called to invite him. Jack had
recently experienced a strange dry spell in word of mouth bookings.
Ah well. One couldn’t look good advertising prospects in the gift
horse mouth.
The words ‘Pull the lever!’ split the air—his business
phone ring tone. He said a word that would have caused his mom to
wash his mouth out with soap had she heard, and answered the phone.
He had a gig. The people didn’t sound too happy about it, but he’d
recently lowered his prices a whole fifty cents, so why not? He had
to be the low bid now, even though he wasn’t offering the animal
removal services anymore.
“Wednesday at six AM? In the morning? O’ dark six? That one?
We couldn’t do it at, say, noon?”
“We all work or go to school. I hear it’s not a good idea to
leave you in the house alone, so we’ll do it when someone can still
be here.”
Jack’s voice let Mr. Boffinburger know in no uncertain terms
how unhappy with the early hour he was. He would have to change his
flier to reflect his hard and fast hours. No midnight raves in the
chimney for him. No sir. But just for this time, he’d give the guy
an exception.
Wednesday at six twenty five Jack thundered up the drive to
Castle Buffybarger, spraying gravel when his bug came to a stop. He
collected his bucket of brooms and sheets. The man met him at the
door with a frown. Clearly the guy had set the appointment too early
for both of them, since he obviously wasn’t a morning person.
Jack got right to work. After a cup of cocoa and a breakfast
doughnut. Well three. Eaten while he ogled the hot teenage daughter
in her private school uniform.
When he finally went in to survey the chimney, it turned out to
be massive. And the Bagginburper guy seemed like he was going to be a
real stickler on having a clean chimney. He even said he didn’t
want any slap dash work, as if Jack would ever slap and dash. In
fact, when Jack got out his broom, the man settled down with his
newspaper in the same room. It kinda looked like the man was
there to stay for the duration. What a royal pain in the behind.
The man looked up with a frown when Jack knocked a little soot
off before he set up the Strawberry Shortcake sheets his mom had
insisted he use. He was making the guy’s house cleaner. Mr.
Bogginflumper shouldn’t be so picky. Jack climbed inside the
fireplace and started wielding the broom, the better to get done
faster and get out of that guy’s house. Strangely, not much was
coming off. Maybe it wasn’t even really dirty. Some crazy people
were like that, wanting to nearly be able to eat of the hearth, for
crying out loud.
He climbed out, and had just opened his mouth when the
Beefinbagger man sent him a glare.
“The chimney is dirty. I can’t imagine why you’re
acting like you’re done.”
The nerve. “I was simply adding an attachment to be able to
reach higher,” Jack said, getting out a length of clothesline rope,
which he used to tie on an extra brush. Mr. Bofferbuggy’s bushy
brows lowered over his nose like a pack horse in the Grand Canyon.
Jack climbed back into the chimney, trying to get the stinking brush
attachment to go up the flute thing. No wonder they called it that.
It was narrow and a pain to get things into. Jack pushed and shoved
and finagled and scraped and angled and finally got his contraption
to go a little further up.
But then he couldn’t get the brush to go anywhere else. It was
stuck. Try though he might, he couldn’t make the thing move at
all. The yanking and thrusting and twisting was accompanied by
more caustic words that would have caused him to know what Irish
Spring soap tasted like, had his mom heard him.
At last, with a huge yank, the broom came free, the tip of the
broom hitting and cracking the brick he was standing on.
“Hey! You’re making a terrible mess. And I don’t like your
tone, young man,” the Beefinblogger man whined.
Jack looked down to see the Bufferbuggy man’s face glaring up
at him. The guy had come out of his seat and was now scowling up at
him like he’d smelled a skunk. His voice rang through the confined
space, giving Jack a towering headache. “Well, chimney sweeping is
a dirty business. Thus the sheet.” Jack hauled the broom out, but
it came free without the hand broom. That one was still stuck up the
chimney. Jack went back in. He stared up into the darkness that
looked like the inside of a cast iron skillet. He could just make out
the form of the brush. He would have to go get the thing.
Jack was not the poster boy for starving third world children.
His mom was a fairly decent cook and his customary thirds and fourths
showed. But he was fairly certain that if he didn’t get that stupid
brush out of the Barginbanger’s chimney, the guy would produce a
litter of cougars.
What Jack also knew, was that if he tried to go up that chimney
with his jeans on, he was going to get as stuck as that brush up
there. So he sank down and took them off, along with his size 15
boots.
The paper rattled and there was a shout. “What are you doing,
young man? I say. This is rather untoward.”
“Untoward what? I’m just making sure I don’t get stuck in
your chimney.”
The man leaped up and ran to the door. “Eunice, are you sure
Melva got off to school?”
The wife said something Jack couldn’t hear.
“Don’t you come in here. I’ll take care of it,” her
husband yelled back. What a noisy family.
By that time Jack was snickering to himself in nervous relief
that the teenager girl wouldn’t see him in his Christmas dumpster
fire boxers and socks. He dove back into the chimney and started to
edge his way up. Now he remembered why he preferred to wear pants for
this part. You would think a chimney would be all smooth, but it
wasn’t. There were all kinds of sharp bits and crumbly bits and
scrapey bits that scraped on his—well never mind. He crawled and
edged and tried his darnedest to reach the brush, but couldn’t. In
fact, he was beginning to regret eating that third doughnut.
At least he seemed to be knocking a goodly amount of soot out of
the chimney and onto the Strawberry Shortcake sheets. He reached up
and up but still couldn’t even touch the brush, let alone grab it.
To top it off, he was swelling up like a large toad. The more he
thought about how tight it was getting, the further he swelled, until
he was starting to have a rough time grabbing a breath. If he could
just seize that brush and leave.
Four things happened at once. His fingers touched something that
felt furry, not smooth like the brush handle. He squinted up into
darkness as deep as the Marianas Trench, to see two round, glowing
orbs. And third, just as he realized he was stuck, fourth, his boxers
started to slip down.
Whatever that was up there staring at Jack reached closer and bit
him on the middle finger! He screeched and tried to get the heck out
of Dodge, but it wouldn’t work. And because of his screaming, the
thing up there shrieked as well.
Jack kicked his legs wildly, trying to un-wedge himself, to no
avail. In fact, his frantic kicking led to a bellow from Mr.
Bobbinbaffer, who had come to see what the hullabaloo was about.
“What is all this? I come to help you and you kick me in the
face?” the man yelled, the rage evident in his voice even from way
up the chimney.
“Sorry sir, but you need to get an animal control person out
here, as some kind of critter just bit me. Also I may be just a
little bit stuck. This sort of thing has never happened before. I’m
usually in and out in around an hour.”
Jack’s explanation didn’t seem to appease the Boggybanger man
at all, perhaps because Jack was mooning the poor man something
fierce. Jack could barely bring himself to care. Was he going to
suffocate to death in that chimney? Was that animal thing up there
going to eat off his face? Would Jack still be stuck up there by the
time the hot chick came home from cheerleader practice? What if he
suddenly had to go to the bathroom? Surely emptying his bladder would
help get him out of the chimney faster. Maybe he’d better hold off
on that last thing, though, just in case the cheerleader came home
early.
“I’ll tell you what, instead. How about I sue you for
destroying my home and exposing yourself in front of my family? Hmm?
How about that?”
Just as Jack might have answered the man, some of the clinker
he’d kicked off the chimney fell into Mr. Buggybumper’s mouth and
he gagged and spat all over Jack’s mom’s Strawberry Shortcake
sheet. At least that was what it sounded like to the guy stuck in the
chimney. Also, the dumpster fire boxers slipped a little further down
his legs.
No further noises came to Jack in the chimney for quite some
time. At least not from the room. The creature above was definitely
unhappy about sharing the chimney with Jack and chattered and bit him
again on his birdie finger.
At Jack’s yell, a new voice raised itself in a squawk. “Young
man! Pull up your underpants at once.” Mrs. Baggybuffer. If only he
could. Suddenly he felt ice cold fingers yank up his chonies and snap
the band for good measure. “I don’t know what you did to my
husband, but you come down here right this instant and face me like a
man.”
He was going to insist that the firetruck with its jaws-of-life
come to help him get out, when something seemed to give. In one huge
WHOMP and a cloud of soot and bits of masonry, Jack fell out of the
chimney and into the arms of the amazing Mrs. Bittlewhimper. She
dropped him giant hot potato-style.
“Well at least that cleaned most of your chimney really
nicely,” he said with a chuckle.
The black-faced Mrs. Biggieblunder was not quite as cheerful.
“You’d better have gotten that raccoon out of there. He’s the
neighbor’s pet and they’ve been missing him for days now.
Hopefully you didn’t hurt him, poking at him like that.”
“Hurt him? I’ll probably have to have rabies shots. You
should stop keeping pets in your chimney.”
The Bundlemonkey woman handed Jack his pants and threw his boots
at him, clipping him on the chin. “You’ll need those when you go
up on the roof to finish the job. I want that coon out of there,
along with anything else you might have left in my chimney. And take
your sheet with you. She said that last with a snicker. Jack,
however, wasn’t going to take the sheet until the raccoon was out
of the way. No one could say he hadn’t learned his lesson from
before.
Boots on and put back together, Jack took his scraped-up self up
on the roof, using the little step ladder he’d borrowed from his
dad. When he got up to the chimney, he found that it was taller than
he was. He would have to use the step ladder to get the rest of the
way up to the opening. But what should he lean it on? Luckily there
were two sides to the ladder. Maybe the legs could straddle the roof
line. He would still have to lean over to get to the chimney from
there, so he’d have to stand on the topmost step—the one that
says ‘Don’t stand on here.’
He finally got that all set up and even tied a rope around one of
the ladder legs and around his waist. Up he climbed to the tippy top
and leaned over, barely able to catch the edge of the chimney. He
gazed down the hole and was just able to see two beady little eyes,
at first round, and then slitted, as the coon made a sound distinctly
reminding Jack of an angry cheetah. Did coons normally make such a
sound? It almost looked like the animal was going to squeeze further
into the chimney.
Jack couldn’t have that. If he didn’t get the coon out, he
was pretty sure Mrs. Buggybumper would chew off his right hind leg. A
black brush of a tail flaunted itself just barely within Jack’s
reach. He gulped and grabbed it, yanking the critter as hard as he
could. With a sound roughly like the mix of a champagne cork popping
and the scream of a puma, the raccoon, along with Jack’s brush
gripped in a little black hand, came free and sailed into the air.
The action pulled Jack with it in an arcing trajectory off the roof.
All of which left him swinging upside down from the rope he’d tied
to the ladder leg. The ladder had disappeared down the back side of
the house somewhere.
Jack narrowly missed a tree in his mad swing, which luckily
calmed quickly to a mere jiggle. Jack yelled his head off, and
pounded on the window he could just reach, but could get nobody out
to release him from his rope. Where were all the nosy neighbors who
had watched him carrying his brushes and sheet into the house?
Somehow they all had stuff to do? Where were the Buddieflumpers?
They’d watched him like a mama hawk all afternoon and now they
couldn’t bother to even come release him? Didn’t they have other
stuff to do?
The blood had all rushed to Jack’s head as he hung there, his
leg aching like a freak. The thought suddenly occurred to Jack that
he wasn’t quite so enamored with his job anymore. The learning
curve seemed quite steep. Plus he wasn’t making enough money to
keep him in Jalapeno chili Cheetos and computer hours, according to
his mom.
His friend had mentioned wanting to join the Navy so he could
scrape barnacles off ships for a living. That might be a
thing. Probably wasn’t quite as exciting as chimney sweeping, but
he might have fewer women chucking boots at his face. Maybe he could
switch with his friend—bequeath the Strawberry Shortcake sheet and
brooms to the guy in exchange for going into the Navy. Yeah. That
might work. There were still people who wanted a chimney sweep. It
just wasn’t going to be Jack.
If only he could get his leg out of that noose.
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