Читать книгу Jerry Todd's Poodle Parlor - Edward Edson Lee - Страница 6

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“Is that you, Jerry?” Mother called pleasantly down the stairs, when I banged in the back door an hour later.

“Nobody else but,” I called back, giving my cap a pitch. “What are the chances around here for something good to eat?”

“The chances never were better,” Mother accommodatingly flew down and to the range. “I have some meat and potatoes all ready to warm up for you. You’ll find some jello in the refrigerator too.”

“Hot dog!” I bounded for it. “I’ll eat that first.”

“You most certainly will not,” Mother followed me and firmly took it away before I even got the first bite. “We are still observing a few shreds of table manners around this house, young man. One rule is dessert last, and another is clean hands. So run up to the bathroom and try out that new cake of soap I just put there. It may surprise you what it will do for your hands. Your dinner will be all ready by the time you get back.”

Mrs. Rail wheezed in while I was eating, sinking heavily into a chair, fanning her fat face as usual with her apron.

“I suppose, Mrs. Todd,” she began the conversation, “that Jerry has been telling you all about his morning’s trip.”

“Not yet,” laughed Mother. “It must have been a very strenuous trip, though, judging from the appetite he brought home. I can imagine how beautiful it was out in the country today—I almost wish I’d gone myself.”

“Sammy tried to tell me that the boys saw a real monkey over there,” Mrs. Rail went on communicatively. “But I think there’s some kind of a joke about it myself.”

“No, honest,” I told her, between bites. “It was on Mrs. Bumblebee’s barn.”

“On whose barn?” Mother put in, with a curious amused look at me.

“Mrs. Bumblebee’s,” I grinned. “That’s what Scoop Ellery calls her—he and Peg Shaw are working for her this summer. She’s the woman with those cabins that I told you about. Her real name is Mrs. Flora Beesaddle.”

“I know her,” Mrs. Rail snapped in, like a steel trap going off. “I met her one time at the D.A.R.—the day poor Mrs. Bailey dropped her false teeth out of the second-story window while we were watching the parade. Luckily my Sammy saw the plate falling and caught it—thinking it was a lollipop.”

“I suppose it won’t be long now,” Mother continued politely, “before Sammy and Jerry are in the lollipop business themselves, for I can readily imagine how quickly that candy store will go up.”

“Oh!” Mrs. Rail’s eyes swelled. “Then you haven’t heard, Mrs. Todd?”

“Haven’t heard what?” Mother asked quickly.

“There isn’t going to be any store. The boys had their lumber all loaded up, Sammy told me, but had to unload it again.”

“What happened, Jerry?” Mother turned to me earnestly.

“Oh,” I growled, “Mrs. Beesaddle and a hotel man over there are having trouble over the lumber and we were afraid if we brought any of it home, we’d be drawn into the trouble, too.”

“And you had your trip all for nothing!” came sympathetically. “How disappointing.”

“Not to me it isn’t,” Mrs. Rail again snapped in, beaming. “I’ve been half sick ever since I gave in to Sammy about that store. But now I’ve set my foot down. There’ll be no store in my yard—at least not in the front yard.”

“But you boys can still fix up a little stand, can’t you?” Mother suggested, knowing, from all our talk about the proposed store, how disappointed I must be.

“We haven’t decided on anything yet,” I told her.

Later Red and I got together in his barn, doing a lot of growling at first over our hard luck, but finally getting a lot of fun out of some old beauty parlor equipment that his Aunt Pansy, who had a beauty parlor downtown, had stored there.

“Say, Red,” an idea suddenly popped into my head, during our fun, “what do you say if we forget about that candy store and start up a cat and dog beauty parlor here in your barn instead? How’s that for an idea?”

Red grinned all over his impish face.

“Boy, I’d call that an inspiration! But how would you go about beautifying a cat, Jerry?”

“With a real beauty parlor right in your own family,” I told him, “you certainly ought to know more about that than me.”

“Yes,” he laughed, “but we couldn’t work on cats like my Aunt Pansy works on her women customers. She gives them mud packs for their complexions, and finger waves and henna rinses. But if we gave a cat a mud pack, the poor animal would be so scared by the time we got the mud peeled off that it never would stop running.”

“How about the finger wave you mentioned, and the henna rinse?—whatever that is.”

“Don’t you know what a henna rinse is, Jerry?”

“No.”

“Henna is something you put in the rinse water, and when you rinse your hair in it your hair turns red.”

“Is that what makes your hair so red?” I laughed.

“No—mine’s stork red,” he ran his fingers through it, grinning. “Wherever the red came from it was all there when the storks brought me. But some women do use a henna rinse, Jerry, to redden their hair.”

“We could work it easy with a cat, too,” I told him. “We could mix up a pailful of rinse and take the cat by the tail and dip it in.”

“We’d have to be more careful than that,” Red waggled.

“A red cat!” I laughed, picturing how the cat would look when we got it out. “It certainly would be distinctive—especially with a finger wave, too. How do you do that, Red?”

“I don’t know exactly, but we can find out easily enough from Aunt Pansy. She pours something on the hair, I think, and then twists it around with her fingers into fancy waves.”

“That’s two things we could do to a cat to beautify it,” I summed up. “What do you think we ought to charge, Red?”

“Ten cents for each operation ought to be about right, don’t you think?”

“Can’t we think of something else to make it a quarter? Then, if we beautified ten cats a day, we’d make an even two dollars and a half. Boy, I’m beginning to think we could make more money with this kind of a business than a store anyway. With a store we’d have to buy stuff to sell, but with a beauty parlor we could get all the stuff we needed from your Aunt Pansy. But let’s get something more besides the finger wave and henna dip.”

“Not dip, Jerry—henna rinse is the right name for it.”

“What’s the difference?” I grunted. “It’ll be a dip the way we’ll do it.”

“Let’s be professional anyway,” he talked big. “Aunt Pansy calls it a henna rinse, so let us call it the same.”

“Can you think of anything more that we could do to a cat to beautify it?”

“We might de-flea it,” he laughed.

“Suffering snakes!” I squawked. “Does your aunt do that to people, too?”

“No,” he grinned, “that’s my own original idea. We could build a little bath cabinet, with a hole for the cat to breathe through, and steam its fleas to death over a tea kettle. We could call it our Special Swedish Steam to make it sound big.”

I got out a paper and pencil.

“Let’s get this down on paper,” I went at it in a businesslike way. “Henna Rinse, ten cents; Finger Wave, ten cents; Special Swedish Steam, five cents. There! How about some fancy tail trimming, Red? We ought to get as many things down as we can. With a little practice, we could turn out some pretty nifty tails.”

“Put it down then,” he nodded. “Fancy Tail Trim, five cents.”

“How about toenails?” I asked. “Women have a lot done to their fingernails.”

“Sure thing—Toenail Tint and Polish, five cents. Put that down, too.”

I looked at him and laughed.

“Shall we really do it, Red?” I asked.

“We’d be chumps not to,” he encouraged. “It’s going to be a lot more fun than running a candy store.”

“What’ll we call it?”

“It’s your own idea—why not call it Jerry Todd’s Beauty Parlor for Cats and Dogs?”

“Something snappier would be better.”

“All right! How about Jerry Todd’s Poodle Parlor?”

“But that just takes in dogs,” I objected.

“They sell mops, too, in grocery stores, but the grocer doesn’t think he has to print ‘groceries and mops’ on his window. Jerry Todd’s Poodle Parlor is a swell name, I think. Anybody with good sense would know from it that we beautified cats, too.”

“Well, what’ll we do first?” I asked eagerly. “Get up some fancy advertising signs?—or get some stuff from your Aunt Pansy and experiment on a few cats just to see how well we can do it?”

“Maybe we better let the whole thing rest for a day or two,” Red suggested. “I just happened to remember that Aunt Pansy and I aren’t on speaking terms right now.”

“No? What’s the matter between you and your aunt?” I asked curiously.

“Oh, some old sweetheart of hers sent her a fancy basket of wax fruit and I had one of the apples half eaten up before I discovered what it was. Aunt Pansy said I was a little pig. I told her if I was a little pig she must be a big pig, for she was my aunt. Since then she’s been looking at me across the dining table as though I was something the cat had dragged in. But her beauty parlor windows downtown are about due for a washing—my usual job—so she’ll probably sweeten up in a day or two and call on me. We’ll get what we want then, and get some pointers from her.”

“It might be a good plan,” I continued thoughtfully, “to find out just about how much cat and dog beautifying business we could naturally expect from around here. We wouldn’t be so smart to get everything fixed up and then find out that there wasn’t as much business to be had here as we thought.”

“Well,” Red suggested briskly, “let’s go out right now and find out. I’ll go from door to door on one side of Main street and you can take the other side.”

“And ask the women at the different houses if they want to have their cats beautified, huh?” I quickly fell in with the idea.

“We really aren’t in business yet, but we can find out if the women with pet cats would like to have them beautified—at from twenty-five cents to thirty-five cents per cat. But give me your pencil, Jerry, and read off that list—I’ll want a copy of it myself to show the women I call on.”

When Red finished writing he had a list like this:

JERRY TODD’S BEAUTY PARLOR
(Cat Beautifying Department)
Henna Rinse	10¢
Finger Wave	10¢
Special Swedish Steam	5¢
Fancy Tail Trim	5¢
Toenail Tint and Polish	5¢

We set out then on opposite sides of the street as he had suggested, calling at every house, but when we got together an hour later we hadn’t the name of a single cat owner who was willing to pay even a penny to have her cat beautified, to say nothing of thirty-five cents, the full price. One woman offered us a dime to wash a dog as big as the side of a coal house and ten times as dirty, but we soon saw there wouldn’t be enough beautifying business in the cat and dog line to keep the inside of the henna pail wet.

We were laughed off at most houses and at one crabby woman’s house we were threatened with arrest if we ever dared to touch the cat belonging there.

So that brilliant scheme died, too—at least Red and I thought it was dead when we separated for supper that night, Scoop later calling me up from the pet farm to tell me that he had some kind of an itch on his hands.

“What do you mean?—a cat itch?” I asked him curiously.

“I’d sooner think I got into some poison ivy while chasing that crazy rat terrier around in the woods.”

“How are you and Peg getting along?” I further asked.

“Oh, swell—except for my itch. We’re sure kept on the jump, but it’s fun—we’ve been getting some nifty tips, too. And, boy, do we ever get the eats over here! Um! Fried chicken almost every meal. They don’t give you just a little piece on your plate either, but set down a whole dishful of it to pick from. Mrs. Beesaddle is dandy, too. We like her better every hour. I suppose you fellows are busy as beavers getting your store up.”

“There isn’t going to be any store,” I growled.

“Well, listen!” he came back excitedly, when I completed my account of our hard luck. “Why don’t you come over here and get a job? Come on, Jerry! Please! I’ll tell Mrs. Beesaddle what a swell worker you are. She’ll find a job for you.”

“Did you know that Bid Stricker and his gang are working at the Woodlawn Bay hotel now?” I asked him.

“Sure thing. And that’s something else, Jerry!” he went on excitedly. “Already Bid has sent word over here that if his gang ever catches our gang in the woods around the old hotel, he’s going to turn us inside-out and pack us with sawdust. Don’t you see the fun we’ll have, Jerry? Come on! Boy, what you and I and Peg couldn’t do to that crummy gang! Can we figure on you?”

“I’ll have to ask Mother first,” I hesitated.

“Oh, she’ll let you,” Scoop laughed confidently. “But I’ll have to go now—someone’s buzzing for ice water. See you in the morning, old timer!—I hope!”