Bedeviling the Bedbugs

The man in the hat owned one toque, a red and blue stripped one with a cowbell tassel on the top. It was given to him by his grandmamma’s hairstylist, a woman with fencer’s teeth and a puckish mole on the knob of her chin. She gussied up his grandmamma’s hair every Saturday at 9 sharp, as anything his grandmamma put her wits to after 10 was doomed to failure. Her memory was so frail and piecemeal that even her own name escaped her after 10:15. She made good fun of herself when she forgot how to brush her hair or throw a throw-rug, which she did every morning at exactly 8:27½ before eating breakfast. His grandmamma thumped all the rugs in the house, putting all her energy into bedeviling the bedbugs from the thrown-stitches and frills. Had she known about the friar’s toque goodness knows what she would have made of it. As his grandmamma had a disfavor for wool and friars (her granddad had worn a Carmelites’ cap with heavy wool lining summer winter and fall) she would have bedeviled the devil out of them.

One Saturday morning at 10:17 his grandmamma threw a throw-rug out the front door onto the porch and proceeded to jig and smithy on top of it like a crazed dervish. His mamma, laughing to bust a stitch, figured that her mamma was on the cliffs of madness and would surly fall into the deep hole of Bedlam sooner than later. The next day his grandmamma was taken away by two men in chimney sweeper’s hats on the back of an oxcart, his mamma smoking a roll-your-own on the front porch, her face crinkled like cake-paper. The day he overheard Dejesus talking about the fable of the friar’s toque behind the Waymart with two men in chimney sweeper’s hats, he rushed to the Seder grocer’s and stole the newest edition of Popular Mechanics, tore through the pages to the back, and found the postbox number for the company that sold real-life submarines.