Twanged Read Free Page B

wasn’t enticed within seconds, like a child with a new toy, the program on the screen was passed over for the next offering.
    Tonight he felt positively peevish. Peevish and restless. “And miles to go before I sleep,” he kept thinking. “And miles to go before I sleep.” I won’t rest until I have that fiddle, he thought. I know I won’t.
    Normally he enjoyed the nice feel of his Brooks Brothers pajamas and “one hundred and ten” percent cotton sheets, as he liked to call them. But all he could think about was the stick of wood from a dead tree back in Ireland that was enjoying its incarnation as the Fiddle of the Cliffs. It intrigued him that not only did it bring good luck, but it also carried some kind of curse. It only made him want it more.
    Zap! went the remote control. “Good evening. On werewolf hour we have as our special guest—”
    Zap! “ . . . To find out about your hidden potential, call our operators at 1-800-. . .”
    Zap! “ . . . When I found out he liked to wear my nightgowns around the house, I must admit I got a little worried. . . .”
    “How distasteful,” Chappy muttered. But it was the next zap that changed Chappy’s life. At least temporarily.
    “ . . . Country Music Cable is here in Nashville, and we’re talking to Brigid O’Neill, who with a heated performance won the fiddling contest at Fan Fair just yesterday. Brigid, tell us how that feels.”
    “Oh, it’s just the greatest, Vern. My mentor in Ireland gave me his fiddle. He’d won the all-Ireland fiddling contest over there with it. It’s a very old, magical instrument, and when I got up there at the contest yesterday, I felt like I was being swept away by its power. Legend has it that this was made from the wood of a special tree. . . .” As the bubbly redheaded chanteuse held up the fiddle for the camera, Chappy let out an ungodly moan.
    “I’ll be right there,” Bettina yelled from the bathroom. “Every year this takes longer and longer.”
    Chappy sprang from his bed as the initials CT jumped out at him from the fiddle on his enormous-screen TV. With trembling fingers he quickly pressed the RECORD button on his ever-ready VCR. “This is it,” he mumbled. “This is it!”
    “We’ve heard that this fiddle is supposed to have a curse on it if it leaves Ireland,” the interviewer said to Brigid.
    “Well, isn’t that the silliest thing, Vern? I just won the Fan Fair fiddling contest with it. If that’s a curse, then I want to be cursed all the time. . . .”
    Vern laughed. “I suppose you’re right, Brigid.”
    When the brief interview, which in his excitement he had barely focused on, was over, Chappy yanked the tape out of the machine and ran like a man possessed from his room and into the hotel-sized hallway, nearly bumping into a table that had been moved by the feng shui expert. In a blur he raced to the wing where Duke was now dead to the world, resting up in his room for the trip to Ireland he would no longer have to take.

3
    AT A DINER ON THE ROAD BETWEEN
    BRANSON, MISSOURI, AND THE HAMPTONS
    H e stared down at the little article in USA Today that heralded the addition of Brigid O ‘Neill to the Melting Pot Music Festival in the Hamptons on July the Fourth.
    Nervously he slurped his coffee. “Hey, waitress,” he called in a squeaky voice. “How about another cup of joe? I’m running low here.”
    “No prob,” she called back as she added up the check she was about to plunk on the counter where another lone diner had just partaken of his breakfast. Scooping up the coffeepot without even looking, she walked to the booth and started to pour. “So, hon, can I take these dishes away for you?” She asked.
    “Not done yet,” he said.
    She looked down at the thick white dinner plate, practically licked clean except for the thinnest coating of egg yolk she ‘d ever seen in her twenty-odd years of slinging hash. He’d mopped it mighty hard with his English muffin. It didn ‘t faze her,