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IN THE PARK (Doh-da, Chapter 4)

Tronaugh and DT sat basking in the sweltering August heat of New York City. They sprawled on a Central Park bench admiring the drooping foliage and parched grass of the rain starved city. A tired fountain splashed chlorine laden water into a pool a few feet away.
“Ah, summer in New York. The heat, the glare, the stink... Can you think of anywhere better to be?” Tronaugh asked her young charge.
DT gurgled a reply.
“Yes, I absolutely agree. Much better than reporting back.” Tronaugh grabbed at a mosquito and popped it into her mouth. “Mmmm... juicy.”
DT captured a flying pest himself and mimicked his mentor. Finding the treat agreeable he greedily caught more and stuffed his mouth full. He mumbled something between his bites.
“No, you’d get sick of them after awhile. Besides, you’d spend all your time catching them just to get enough to sustain yourself.”
DT peered at Tronaugh, not quite believing such tasty morsels could become tiresome. But it was a lot of work to catch them. He ceased his frenzied efforts, contenting himself with plucking an occasional treat out of the air when one strayed too close to him.
Their lazy reverie was broken by a child’s high pitched trill of excitement. Turning, they spotted a young mother pushing a toddler in a stroller towards them.
“Yes, DeeDee, we’ll go play in the water,” the mother cooed at her youngster. The child wiggled in her chair, eager to be free of her bonds.
DT babbled a question at Tronaugh.
“No, let’s stay here. This should be interesting.”
Releasing her child from the stroller, the young mother eyed the bench and chose a seat. Tronaugh could hear DT’s muffled cries and see his arms and legs flailing from under the woman. She cackled with humour.
“Well, that sort of thing happens. Figure out how to get her off you.”
Tronaugh watched as DT stopped struggling. She could almost hear his mind work as he thought through his options. His hand reached out to pluck at one of the wooden slats. Tronaugh saw the thin splinter of wood poised to strike and knew her young apprentice was struggling between piercing the woman’s tanned thigh (the cleaner, more efficient disturbance with the highest probability for success) or piercing her buttocks (by far the more satisfying option, from a demon’s viewpoint, though with a significantly lower probability of success due to the need to pierce through clothing as well as flesh). DT hesitated, then jabbed at the woman’s buttocks.
“Yow!” The young mother leapt off the bench and twisted around to see a two inch splinter sticking out of her right cheek. She pulled the offending piece of wood out and rubbed her backside, glaring at the bench.
DT dissolved into a fit of laughter. Tronaugh smiled down at him. “Not bad, but the thigh was a better choice. Don’t ever let your desire to get even with a human cloud your judgement on which course of action to take. Remember, we are looking for results, not personal satisfaction.”
DT slumped his shoulders and moped. He grumbled something to the ground.
“Yes, I derive a great deal of satisfaction from my work but I don’t let it get out of hand. A job well done should be satisfaction enough.”
DT made no reply and continued to mope, feeling the joy had quite gone out of the afternoon for him. A sharp slap to the back of his head broke his musings of self-pity.
“Pay attention!”
The mother and child had both moved to the fountain edge. A low wall surrounded the pool and the woman took a seat on its stone, still rubbing her buttocks. The child ran to and fro, ignoring the searing heat in her youthful exuberance. She stopped suddenly and stared at the bench, cocking her head to the side like a dog trying to understand its master’s command. Her chubby legs ate up the pavement as she toddled over.
Tronaugh smiled as she watched DT out of the corner of her eye. The young imp looked horrified at the child’s approach and he curled further and further into a tight ball with every step. His eyes bulged in his face as she drew near him until they were almost nose to nose. He babbled at Tronaugh.
“Of course I can see you!” DT shrieked and leapt behind the bench as the clear voice of the child answered him.
“DeeDee?” Trudalene McKinley (Trudi to her friends) called out to her young daughter. “DeeDee, come here. Water.” She splashed her hand in the fountain trying to entice the child with the cool droplets. DeeDee turned her head to look at her mother but wasn’t buying it. She babbled something incoherent at the bench, slapping her hands down on the seat.
Tronaugh answered the child’s greeting with a laugh. “Hello, DeeDee. My name is Tronaugh. This is DT,” she said, gesturing to the imp still cowering behind the bench. “We’re very pleased to meet you.”
“DeeDee, stop that. You’ll get a splinter.” Trudi steered the child back to the fountain edge.
DT cautiously rose from his crouched position, his eyes never leaving the child. He gurgled a question at Tronaugh.
“Children are different from adults. They’re nearer the source.” DT stared at Tronaugh with a puzzled frown. “Children have spent less time in the human realm than adults. They still remember the in-between time. Every baby can see us, but most grow out of it by the time they’re the age of our young friend there,” Tronaugh gestured to DeeDee. “Some adults close to death can also see us.”
DT climbed back on the bench and asked another question.
“No, it’s not a problem. Babies and toddlers like DeeDee use a language adults have forgotten so the adults don’t understand them. Old people are written off as senile and the very rare adult who sees us and who is not about to die as crazy. It’s a good system.”
“Ooooo! A flower for me?” Trudi smiled down at her daughter and took the proffered daisy from the child’s hand. She sniffed at it. “Thank you!”
DeeDee laughed with glee and ran back to the grassy curb. She fell to the ground and grubbed among the roots of a bush.
“Be careful, honey,” Trudi called after her.
DeeDee chirped something and stood, a group of plants grasped in her hand. She trotted over to the bench and lay them on the seat. “This is for you,” she told Tronaugh.
Tronaugh mimicked Trudi and sniffed at the foliage. “They’re beautiful, DeeDee. Thank you.”
“DeeDee, what have you got there?” Trudi crossed the distance to the bench in a few steps. She recognised the leafy stems immediately. “Poison ivy! DeeDee! Come here!” She marched the protesting child back to the fountain. Washing both their hands and arms in the water she examined DeeDee’s limbs for a sign of the plant’s telltale reaction. “I can’t believe they’d let that grow here. Don’t they think about the children?”
Tronaugh chuckled as she teased DT with a stem. DT gurgled at her.
“No, hemlock grows where I crap. That was where I peed.” DT made a face and swatted at the leaves. Tronaugh’s mirth was cut short by a loud wail.
“DeeDee, we have to go. Mommy needs to stop and get some calamine lotion on our way home and then we need to take a bath.” Trudi struggled to get her daughter back in the stroller. The child was crying uncontrollably, great tears splashing down her cherubic cheeks. “What is it, honey?”
DeeDee gulped air and tried to concentrate. She had to make her mother understand but this grown-up talk was so difficult to master. “Tronaugh! I want Tronaugh!” she cried, her hands reaching out to the park bench.
“Doh-da? What’s doh-da?” Trudi asked.
“Doh-da!” the child cried again, her eyes fixed on the bench.
Trudi looked over at the bench, expecting to see her child’s bottle or a toy there. There was nothing. Even the poison ivy seemed to have disappeared. “What’s doh-da, sweetie? There’s nothing there.”
DeeDee screwed up her face, trying to remember the word. Something she had seen in a box at home. Children and animals... they had used the word.
“Fren!”
“Fren? Friend? Doh-da’s your friend?”
DeeDee nodded at her mother, her sobs reduced to snuffles now that she’d made herself understood.
“Well, we’ll come back and see Doh-da soon. We have to go now.”
“No! Doh-da home!”
DeeDee’s face turned red and her mother, fearing another outcry, gave in. “Okay, honey, Doh-da can come with us. Doh-da?” Trudi turned to the bench. “Would you like to come home with us?”
DeeDee thought her mother was quite stupid to talk to the empty air like that. Couldn’t she see Tronaugh and DT had moved to their side when she’d acquiesced?
“Alright, then, let’s go.” Trudi pushed the stroller ahead of her and headed for their car. DeeDee chattered and babbled away from her seat.
“You’ll like it at home. All my toys are there and Daddy too! We have a big house and my room has pink curtains and a ballerina that dances when Mommy winds her up. I go shopping with Mommy and we have a swing in back and sometimes I get ice cream to eat!”
Tronaugh let the child go on, occasionally interjecting a “hmm-mm” or a “really!” when it seemed warranted. She was quite pleased with the arrangement. It was a rare thing indeed to be invited into a human’s home. DT walked behind the group trailing Trudi’s steps. He had grabbed the back of the woman’s shorts and kept pulling them up, forcing Trudi to stop and adjust her attire every few steps. Tronaugh chuckled. DT never liked to let an opportunity slip by.
Trudi paused and pulled at her shorts for the umpteenth time. She cursed the creeping fabric under her breath and vowed to get rid of them when she got home.
Reaching the white Range Rover (the family car; her husband drove the Mercedes to work) she hunted for her keys, managing to drop them twice before unlocking the door. Feeling her annoyance mount she strapped DeeDee into the child’s seat, stowed the stroller in back, and gratefully thought of the car’s superb air conditioning. She’d feel much better out of this heat.
The engine purred to life and Trudi cranked up the air, demanding its cooling reassurance. The vent in the dash sputtered a few drops of tepid water at her. She lifted her hand to the flow but rather than meeting a cooling stream of air her fingers felt an intensified heat adding to the stuffiness of the cabin.
“Damn it, not today!” She fiddled with the panel controls, trying to correct the problem. Giving up she switched the air conditioning unit off and settled with rolling the windows down. The button for the front passenger window stuck and her only option was to leave it completely up or completely down. Always a cautious individual, she was not foolish enough to leave the passenger window completely down in New York; it was only silly people who did that and ended up as a one inch column filling carjacking article in the evening paper. In the end she inched into traffic with only the three remaining windows cracked, feeling like a rotisserie chicken slowly cooking.
Tronaugh relaxed back in the plush passenger seat. So this was an automobile. Having drunk the Water of Knowledge, a special draught First-class demons consumed that conveyed all scientific advancement humanly possible, she knew all about them, of course, but she’d never had occasion to ride in one.
DT curled up in the back seat next to DeeDee who had promptly fallen asleep the moment the car entered traffic. DT’s eyes rolled in his head with fear and he whimpered something. Tronaugh turned in her seat to speak to him.
“No, this isn’t a monster. It’s an automobile. It’s a machine made by humans to take them from place to place. See? It’s made of metal and plastic.” She patted the dashboard. Trudi, frustrated at the heat and the clogged streets, revved the engine at that moment. DT jumped and squealed, convinced the monster was responding to Tronaugh’s attentions.
Tronaugh sighed and shook her head. DT didn’t have her level of clearance; human advancements such as automobiles and airplanes remained an unsettling mystery to him. He’d just have to get used to such things the hard way.
She occupied herself by staring at the many sites around her. So much had changed since her day! Tall buildings reached up to the clouds, casting shadows on the crowded road and pavement. Everywhere there was movement and noise and humans upon humans hurrying to get on with their lives. Tronaugh spotted a few of her own kind in the crowds; she saw an investment banker walk by with a particularly nasty looking beast wrapped around his shoulders. Tronaugh waved a greeting at him and the demon responded by lifting a seven fingered appendage in reply before being lost in the melee.
Trudi pulled into an underground parking structure near the pharmacy and looked for a vacant spot. Finding one quickly, she thanked the powers that be and pulled in. She opened the back and yanked at the stroller. One of the wheels seemed to have wedged itself into an unseen crack. She tugged harder, failing to free the cumbersome thing. Her struggles woke DeeDee, who babbled something to the empty car.
“It’s okay, honey. Mommy’s just trying to get your stroller out.”
DeeDee turned to Tronaugh. “What’s going on?”
“Oh, DT’s just having some fun with your mother,” Tronaugh replied. She watched the young imp as he held onto the stroller, a smile on his face. He let Trudi’s face turn a brilliant shade of pink before releasing his grasp. She staggered back a step from the force of her pull. “You should have held onto it longer. Another tug or two and she might have landed on her butt.”
DeeDee laughed at the mental picture of Mommy falling on her butt.
Trudi smoothed a stray wisp of hair out of her eyes and heard her daughter’s chortle. “That’s right, honey. Just a quick stop here and then we’ll go home.” She was so lucky to have a child with such a sunny disposition.
DeeDee watched as Tronaugh and DT scrambled out of the car to stand next to her mother. DT swooped down on the stroller and bent to fiddle with one of the back wheels. He stood and winked at DeeDee, holding a finger to his lips. DeeDee laughed and clapped her hands. She had never met such fun people before. It was a pity Mommy didn’t seem to see them.
“Come on, DeeDee.” Trudi lifted her daughter from the car to the stroller and strapped her in. Satisfied the child was secure, she turned to head to the pharmacy. She had almost made it out of the parking structure when the stroller gave a lurch and tilted to the left. The rear left wheel had come loose and was currently rolling its way underneath a line of parked cars.
“Damn it!” Trudi exploded, the sound echoing down the concrete structure. She was faced with a dilemma: if she let go of the stroller she could retrieve the runaway wheel, but the stroller tipped precariously and threatened to topple over with her child when she did. She thought for a quick moment. She’d be damned if she was going to walk away and forget it. Not when the stroller retailed at $229.95.
Resigned to the delay, Trudi carried her daughter back to the car and strapped her into the seat. She hunted among the parked cars, hoping against hope that the wheel had stopped its adventure in a visible spot. No such luck. She bent low, her shoulder length hair falling towards the ground and brushing the edge of an oil spill.
“Eeew!” Trudi straightened up and tried to wipe the greasy filth from the ends of her stylish locks. She only managed to coat more of her hair with the grime and now had greasy hands as well. At least she’d glimpsed the wheel.
Surrendering her dignity she knelt down and reached her arm under the car as far as it would go. Her hand found cold concrete. She moved in closer, wedging her shoulder around the tire. Her searching fingers closed on the wheel and she rose quickly in her triumph, snagging her blouse on a metal edge. The thin fabric gave easily and before she could stop her momentum a wide rip tore open along her shoulder revealing her bra strap.
Trudi was glad her daughter was too young to understand many words: she had promised herself she’d try not to swear in front of her children but this was just too much. She let loose with a searing string of oaths that bounced off the walls and made fellow shoppers parked two stories up scamper from their car to the cool cleanliness of the mall.
DeeDee heard her mother’s voice. She didn’t understand the words but the feeling was clear. She turned to Tronaugh. “Why is Mommy mad?”
“She lost at a game DT was playing with her. My word! Your mommy sure is a sore loser!” Tronaugh cackled.
DeeDee didn’t know what Tronaugh was talking about. She and Mommy played games together often. DeeDee always won, and Mommy was never a sore loser. But she sometimes heard her mother use that tone of voice with her father, late at night. It was always followed by a moment of silence and then Mommy would come into her room and pick her up out of her crib and hold her. Anticipating the cuddle and the secure feeling it gave her, DeeDee listened carefully. As always, a moment of silence. And here was Mommy right on cue. But Mommy didn’t come to pick her up. Instead a loud clank sounded near the back of her head and startled her so much she began to cry.
Trudi didn’t offer any consolation to her daughter; she had thrown the broken stroller into the back and still not vented her anger. She slammed the back door shut and pulled unnecessarily hard on the driver’s door, denting the car next to her. She groaned, thinking of what her husband would say. Finding paper and a pen, she wrote down her name and phone number with a quick apology and left it under the car’s windshield wiper. DeeDee’s crying had advanced to a full tantrum and her daughter’s jagged sobbing grated on Trudi’s already thin nerves.
“Stop it, DeeDee!” The command held the full force of Trudi’s anger and frustration and took DeeDee so much by surprise that she ceased her blubbering immediately.
“Better watch out,” Tronaugh said to DeeDee. “When mommies get too mad at you they take you away to trade you in for another baby.”
“Mommy-wouldn’t-trade-me,” DeeDee said between hiccoughs.
“Oh, yes she would! I’ve seen it a hundred times before. She’ll take you somewhere and leave you with strangers while she goes shopping for a new baby. When she finally finds a new baby she likes she’ll just leave you forever and ever and never come back.”
“No!” DeeDee yelled defiantly.
“Don’t you ‘no’ me, young lady,” Trudi said, turning to face her daughter. “You be a good girl. We’re going home now and Mommy will call Daddy and tell him to pick up some calamine lotion on his way home.”
“You’ve done it now,” Tronaugh said. “I’ll bet she takes you away real soon.”
“No!” DeeDee screamed at Tronaugh, kicking her tiny feet.
Her daughter’s piercing scream reverberated in Trudi’s skull. Her head throbbed and she lost her frayed temper again. “I have had it today, DeeDee! No more park, no more shopping. We’re going home!” Her daughter still struggled in the child’s seat. “I said no!” She punctuated her outburst with a light slap on her daughter’s flailing feet.
“Aaaah! Mommy don’t trade me in! Mommy-y-y!” DeeDee pleaded with her mother but Trudi ignored her, shifting the car into gear and heading out of the lot.
“This is how it starts, you’ll see,” Tronaugh told the child when her screams had subsided. “But don’t worry. DT and I won’t leave you.” ×