Fat Tony -- Section Two

    “A meal like that,” said Tony, starting down the steps to the unfinished basement, “and you expect me to help you?”
    “You watch it, young man.”  Grandma flipped a switch and neon lights flickered alive below them.
    “The rice was good, I appreciated the salad, but that pot roast.  Remarkable.  One of a kind.  An experience never to be forgotten.”
    “I’m trying to think of a punishment enough for you, Anthony, but I’m drawing a blank.”
    “Honestly, Grandma, I think I’m still chewing it.  In fact, could I take some home?  There’s a neighbor dog I want to torment.  He gnaws through bones, couches, and steel plating, but this pot roast might be the thing to bring him to his knees.”
    “I’ll admit it was a little tough,” she said.
    “A little?  That cow was a bitter woman that ate nails and gave buttermilk.  She probably worked in a library.”
    “Libraries don’t have cows.”
    “I stand by my opinion.”
    “I’ll admit, I’ve been distracted today, and the roast may—may—have suffered because of it.  But now you’re here.  My hero.”
    “Sarcasm becomes you,” said Fat Tony.  “What exactly am I taking care of down here?  With all Grandpa’s stuff, there’s enough magic to make my throat swell up.”
    “Of course.  You, allergic to magic.  That’s a clever one.  You’re taking care of that,” said Grandma, pointing across the room.
    The lights finished blinking their way to on, and Fat Tony stared.
    “They’re glowing blue,” he said.
    “Yes.”
    “They weren’t glowing in the dark.”
    “Is that bad?” asked Grandma.
    “Can’t tell you for sure yet.  They look like rabbit droppings.  What did you have down here?”
    “They came from those boxes I knocked over.  Your grandfather had so many odds and ends down here, I’ve never been able to keep them straight.”
    Tony looked at the boxes, on their sides next to the blue droppings.  Something was off.
    “Right out of those, huh?  What were you looking for?”
    “Does it matter?” said Grandma.
    Fat Tony shrugged and picked up the broom and dustpan sitting against the wall.  Talking with his grandma was like chasing a three-year-old.  Can’t look at them head on, or they scamper away.  Grandma was definitely a scamperer, so Tony didn’t ask about the boxes.  Instead he got to work on a spell for the dustpan.  Whatever was going on with those animal droppings, Fat Tony’s hands didn’t want any of it.
    “Well, if you must know,” she said, “I was looking for photo albums.  Of our vacation.  Five years ago, to the Ozarks.”
    “And you thought they were down here?”
    “I didn’t know where they could be and they weren’t upstairs.”
    “Grandma,” said Fat Tony, “I have a serious question.”
    “Yes?” she said, looking at him square on.  Too square.  And her mouth twitched.  She’s hiding something.
    “Do you even know where the Ozarks are?” he asked.
    The change was slight, but Tony saw the tension ease out of her shoulders.  “I didn’t then, and I still don’t now.  You know your grandfather always took care of travel plans, and I always confuse the Ozarks with the Adirondacks.  Are those both mountains?”
    Fat Tony paused.  “Honestly, I have no idea.  Though ‘Ozarks’ sounds like an elite group of aged and honorable wizards.  ‘Romulthan the Ozark,’ or something like that.”
    “Are you cleaning that up or not?” she asked.
    “Would you rush Michelangelo when he was carving David?”
    “Clearly he was already in a hurry.  Didn’t even bother to dress the poor man.”
    “Exactly.  So don’t go rushing an artist at such a critical moment.”
    “You’re cleaning up glowing droppings,” said Grandma.  “Or whatever it is.”
    Right, thought Tony, or whatever.  “Clearly these are magical whatevers, so give me a minute to see exactly what we’re dealing with.”
    Grandma did her best impression of a mime—which meant frequent ‘what-are-you-doing-now’s’ and ‘did-you-figure-out-what-they-are-yet’s’—but they were quiet enough that Fat Tony could concentrate.  First priority was to make sure these droppings weren’t making children even more impossible.  Tony took a cleansing breath and dropped into the meditation he’d been using for the last five years on computers, and for the seven before that on other things.  It was like climbing into an old and familiar warm bath, but without any of the gross stuff that comes from using a bath more than once.
    Immediately the air filled with confetti and streamers, a pyrotechnic ticker-tape parade just for him.  Grandpa really had packed the basement with every variety of magical oddity, most legal, but a few that Fat Tony had developed suspicions about as he got older and more knowledgeable.  Each of those wonders and whirligigs gave off its own sparkles and sprays and streams of magic, clues to the trained eye about what they did, where they came from, even what they had been used for, and Fat Tony had a trained eye.  In fact, very well trained.
    He mentally set aside all the irrelevant visual noise and focused in on the poop, because it was clear now that was exactly what it was.  Poop from some variety of magical rodent, Tony was guessing, and it had not been sitting in Grandpa’s boxes.  First off, those boxes were clean of magical residue—a rarity in this room—and second, Fat Tony’s nose teamed up with his keen magical-eyesight to inform him that the droppings were fresh.
    “What’s the verdict, Sherlock?” asked Grandma.
    “He wasn’t a judge,” said Tony.
    “Who wasn’t?”
    “Sherlock Holmes.  He wasn’t a judge.  Didn’t give verdicts.”
    “Juries give verdicts,” she said.
    “In common law countries, sure,” said Fat Tony, “but there are plenty of places where trial by jury isn’t written into their two-hundred-year-old constitution, and there judges give verdicts, so I said he wasn’t a judge.  I certainly couldn’t have said ‘he wasn’t a jury,’ because that would have been ridiculous.”
    “And this conversation isn’t?”
    “No.”
    “What’s the verdict, Sherlock?”
    The verdict, thought Fat Tony, is that these droppings were never in those boxes.  “I wouldn’t handle them with my bare hands, but this dustpan can take it with just a little tweaking.”
    “Tweak away, my hero.  I’ll be making lemonade.”  Grandma creaked her way up the stairs—the stairs did the creaking, not the Grandma—and Fat Tony shook his head.  She was hiding something, and Tony was willing to bet her new mixer, knives, and television that whatever she was hiding had paid for the new mixer, knives, and television.
    Fat Tony pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket.  Malcolm, his business partner, mocked Tony every time he used one of the slightly-pink squares of cloth—formerly white; a laundry accident—but Fat Tony couldn’t make the jump to flimsy paper facial tissues.  Those were good for blowing a nose a time or two, and that was it.  Handkerchiefs, well, they were the Swiss army knives of nose-rags.
    Like now.  A bit of magic through the cloth—an amount that a Kleenex never could have handled—and Fat Tony used it to scoop up a few of the radiant-blue droppings.  A quick wrap and seal and they were tucked back in his pocket.  As he swept the rest of the droppings into the dustpan, dumping them into one of the empty boxes for the first time, he whistled something classical.  Something Sherlock Holmes might have played on his violin while smoking opium.  If that’s what they did with opium.
    What are you up to, Grandma? he thought as the broom scraped on the cement.  And why aren’t you telling me?