Where does one get “really hot red lipstick” in Terre Bleue, Missouri?

The question vexes. It vexed Dr. Danforth Löwengruber to the point of giving him a hankering for a pass-out pitcher of margaritas.

Dr. Danny was mowing gross greenery on a gruesomely humid central Missouri summer afternoon to the out-of-season caroling of a jackass. His thoughts just had caught up to where his attention rested a spell to seek sand in which to draw a line, without a grain one found. An apt metaphor for shared domesticity, he mused. But is a jackass’s caroling ever in season? This one’s never was. Note to self: Pick up sand next trip to Lowe’s.

On that sonorous bar Dr. Danny hit the shower. Cool and damp after a steamy soak, he pulled on shorts and a short-sleeve button-up, fed the cat, slipped into go-aheads and slapped on a go-to-hell hat, hitched up the dogcart and giddy-upped down the road a piece to polish a Naugahyde barstool at La Hacienda, a local Mexican-themed cantina where he was long overdue a visit.

Dr. Danny knew exactly what condition his condition was in. He just dropped in to quiet barking puppies and rest rebellious limbs and joints in La Hacienda’s frosty cocktail lounge; he wanted to baste his cerebrum with salt-and-lime-tinged tequila and rearrange the furniture of his philosophical universe.

Javier the Barkeep, a swarthy implanted Arkansan with waxed mustaches whose name was really Dwayne, eyed the good doctor meditatively stacking quarters in descending order on the bar. The first stack was for margaritas, the next for the jukebox, a third for the tip. In the light of late afternoon and an adult art appreciation course, Javier could see, squinting toward Dr. Danny, a moneylender with scales in a Netherlandish genre painting. And though no soul was in the balance, the only actual scales were on a wall-mounted rubber fish that sang “Take Me to the River,” and no brown-cowled devil whispered in his ear, the medievalist manqué in Dr. Danny would have appreciated that image. Javier had taken the art course at the “Y” thinking it might be a good way to hook up; he kept retailing small talk and making change in quarters. Turned out to be the wrong kind of art.

A barfly in a narrow-brimmed straw fedora, a gray tonic mohair costume with marginal lapels, socks with clocks and a narrow color-bar tie, lighted alongside Dr. Danny and tried to distract him in conversation.

“Paul Dooshly tonky groozivy key,” the barfly buzzed confidentially to the good doctor, vodka in a minor key timed to the ticking of the clocks on his socks.

“Come again?” Dr. Danny said, pausing to mop a mental brow and rest a shoulder against the Berkeleian davenport he had been trying to might-could alongside a Humean highboy. Dr. Danny focused on the color-bar tie.

“Paul Dooshly tonky groozivy key,” the barfly buzzed again, rubbing forearms together.

“What a groove!” said Dr. Danny, on the second pass retrieving a Russian sentence from the dim memory of his language-learning past which made him brighten and energetically pump Paul Dooshly’s surprised hand. “I’m Löwengruber, Dr. Daniel. I’m sure we’ve met: Your tank and trucks on ice convince me that we have indeed. Now, the question prying on my mind is where to get ‘really hot red lipstick.’ Gwyneth Paltrow calls it ‘the essence of beauty.’ My consortrix—Jeez! I wish English had an expression more evolved than the ‘girlfriend’ you took to a high school hop and less transactional than ‘partner’—has a misguided friend whose jackass could use a touch-up. The word ‘misguided’ puts the friend’s circumstances mildly but there’s no getting over the jackass. In any case, I thought I might try to get my hands on some. Any thoughts?”

“Hmm: ‘really hot red lipstick?’ Is interesting question,” Paul Dooshly buzzed rubbing forearms together. “Yo, Have-a-year, where do all y’all Messikins get ‘real hot red lipstick’ at?” he asked Javier, with soured Slavic vowels in a poorly Texassed stab at what the speaker took to be the local patois.

“The question vexes,” Javier replied, mimicking Sir Lawrence Olivier and quoting the narrator at outset to respond to what he took for Paul Dooshly’s disparaging manner. “You can get anything you want at Emmazon Restaurant, excepting Emma,” he came back, adding an “I should know” under his breath with a sly wink to himself in the mirror behind the bar. “I guess it comes down to what you mean by the word ‘hot’.”

“I am guessing lipstick with jalapeño flavor. Am I right?” Paul Dooshly buzzed.

“Jalapeño works for me,” Dr. Danny said. “Works real good, in fact.”

“Or you might ask my cocktail waitress Mickie Lifshitz when she gets in,” Javier said. “You could ask Mickie’s dad who sits in yonder corner cerebrating in a mushroom cloud of poppy-rosa smoke, but he don’t like small talk and don’t parley the anglaze s’ hot,” he continued, letting Dwayne peep through an outhouse door moon with a localer accent.

Hold on: Cigarette smoke? In a restaurant?

“McHale Lifshitz was grandfathered in,” Javier said over his shoulder to the narrator on a Naugahyde stool behind a stagey purple velvet curtain Javier called “The Wine-Dark Arras,” twirling waxed mustaches before picking up another stack of tip quarters and swabbing the bar with his towel. “He was a former no-goodnik ant-apologist come over from Russia, whatever the Sam Hill all that hoo-ha comes to. A bug-hugger, I guess, apologizes for ants or some gol-darned thing. Seems to be apologists for everything these days. Anyhow, what we got us going on over there is McHale Lifshitz’s Filler-Buster. So long as McHale fills that spot, the law can’t bust him nor me and the cloud stays. Gives my place an old-timey feel. But when granddad goes, it’ll be a new era for La Hacienda.”

Dr. Danny footnoted to the narrator that what Javier called a “filler-buster” was actually the longest roadside picnic on record.

“And that’s no science fiction!” Dr. Danny added, winking toward the narrator behind The Wine-Dark Arras, clinking glasses with Paul Dooshly, and signaling Javier for a bowl of Strugatskys salt peanuts.

“Paul Dooshly and Professor Lifshitz are homeboys from the old country, way I heard tell,” said Javier. He warmed to the notion that he might-could elbow his comments into print in colorful, folksy asides to the narrator as free advertising while he dispensed drinks and collected tips with a bar towel over his shoulder. This seemed to work with The Media and would help show he hadn’t taken any American’s job.

“Who do you-all think you’re talking to there, Dew-wayne?” twanged a young woman who burst through the saloon’s double doors, sashayed to the bar and dropped her heavy leather handbag on it.

“Just trying to put the place on the map,” Javier said. “I got a business to run here, in case you hadn’t noticed, and you got a bird suit to fill.”

“Ah, dostoprimechátelnosti!” replied the woman, who was Mickie Lifshitz, the cocktail waitress arriving to start her evening shift. Mickie had quoted a character in an Austrian movie she had seen who used that melodious Russian word for “local attractions” to tease a non-Russian-speaking local. Mickie unintentionally also steamed Paul Dooshly’s glasses, he imagining her own scenic peaks and valleys.

Mickie had come to the U.S. as a child with her parents from the Soviet Union before it was Russia again. Her father, Mikhail, adopted locally as McHale, originally came to the area seeking signs of the Winnebago trickster Wakdjunkaga. Legend has this Native American mythological figure enjoying his last meal where the Missouri River enters the Mississippi, which puts it somewhere near St. Louis; the rock where Wakdjunkaga took his last repast is said still to bear the imprint of that worthy’s balls and buttocks. Lifshitz had taught ancient and classical mythology at a small college until his retirement when he began his locally-famous filler-buster at La Hacienda. His ex-wife Marina, Mickie’s mother, long since left him for a new life in Israel. Paul Dooshly had started out as Lifschitz’s KGB minder though over time took the place of his actual shadow, inseparably connecting these dialectical contradictions.

“The shadows grow whenever harmony between society and nature—historically possible during a ‘normal childhood’—passes into cacophony, freeing all demonic forces of both savagery and civilization,” Lifshitz had consoled himself in his writings. He bowed to the judgment of fate, rueful that his own specially-assigned pocket edition happened to be this diminutive vulgarian.

“Perhaps Comrade Dooshly is simply lesser demonic force,” he mused, gloomily lighting a fresh poppy-rosa from the end of one he then stubbed out.

Mickie, who had stepped into the backroom to change into her work attire, reappeared in a white bird suit.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Dr. Danny said, with a reflex slap on the bar.

“Only posterity will know that for sure,” came a whisper from behind The Wine-Dark Arras.

“Shut up, you!” Mickie shouted at purple velvet curtain. “What are you looking at!” she challenged Dr. Danny when she turned around.

“Boy oh boy, do you ever fill a bird suit! I must say, I’ve never seen a tail like that on a cocktail waitress,” Dr. Danny gamely gambitted in the manner of a genially ingenuous Mr. Pickwick.

“Better a tail than a cock, I always say. This cockamamie hillwilliam was all into Tropicalismo when he opened the joint but he can’t tell a cockatoo from a cock-a-hoop. At least he gave up on the Hawaiian shirts and tiki torches. Heaven help what crackpot cockteasers Dwayne would have buffeted up with a mariachi theme. I shudder to imagine pink flamingos with castanets—flamingo, flamenco: It’s all espanyole to him. But I’m working my way through school. The hours suit my class schedule, the bird suit keeps me warm in this air-conditioned nightmare, and Dwayne keeps his hands to himself; the tips are good and I can keep an eye on Dad,” Mickie said. “Anyhow, I don’t have the heart to tell Dwayne that cockatoos, cockatiels, whatever, are really from Australia.”

“What I’d like to know,” Dr. Danny said, “that is, what we were discussing before you got here, is where to find ‘really hot red lipstick’ in Terre Bleue.”

“‘Really hot red lipstick?’ Hmm. You mean, like what Gwyneth Paltrow called ‘the essence of beauty’—undoubtedly with no little personal irony?”

“Precisely, and undoubtedly correct!”

“Cool. And may I ask—No, that’s all right, forget it: It’s none of my business.”

“No, no, no, go ahead, ask away! I need it for a jackass. No, seriously,” Dr. Danny said, raising his right hand as though to swear an oath. “My consortrix—Jeez! I wish English had an expression more evolved than the ‘girlfriend’ you took to a high school hop and less transactional than ‘partner’—boards a jackass that brays sunup to sundown like a sour-mashed tenor-castrato duet. It keeps her everloving horse company but she’s away at work all day. I write or translate at home during the day, or at least try to, but the braying drives me hee-honk bonkers. So Ms. Paltrow’s ‘essence of beauty’ got me to thinking. It seemed worth a shot.”

“You mean, kind of like belling the cat?”

“Belling the cat: Yowza! That’s it! You’re sensational, Mickie Lifshitz! Muzzling the mule. Dumbfounding the donkey. Jingling the jackass, by jingo!”

“Don’t forget jalapeño flavoring,” Paul Dooshly timely buzzed, rubbing forearms together as the hour struck on his socks.

“High time to put ol’ Dosty-whosky on ice,” Mickie said.

“But it’s tank and trucks that go on ice,” Paul Dooshly buzzed in protest, referring to his confidential watchword to Dr. Danny.

“Señor Javier...” Mickie began.

“All right, all right! I go over, brood with Mikhail,” the dispirited shadow conceded, wiping his spectacles with his color-bar tie as he blinked disconsolately in Mickie’s direction.

“Dr. Danny, you want to get in touch with my friend, Gretel Guck-in-das-Handy. Here,” Mickie said, pulling her device from a bird suit pocket, deftly twiddling thumbs across its keyboard and setting it down on the bar. “Hang on a sec.”

“Buzz! Buzz! Buzz!” the device vibrated on the bar.

“That’s Gretel,” Mickie said, looking at it. “They’re in the neighborhood and on their way over.” 

Here the narrator timed out behind The Wine-Dark Arras to quick-search “Gretel Guck-in-das-Handy.” In addition to trying to sell him everything from German cell phones, nicknamed “handies,” to discount prescription and recreational pharmaceuticals and a gingerbread house in the Ozarks, the irritatingly ever-cheerful and efficient search prompts indicated only a “Hans Guck-in-die-Luft.” This was the title character in a story in an old-time German children’s book, who nearly came a calamitous cropper going about with his nose in the air, paying no mind to his route.

“I can guess where this is going,” the narrator said to himself, restarting the story clock after resettling himself on the Naugahyde barstool behind The Wine-Dark Arras.

Moments later, a small-framed figure came through La Hacienda’s double saloon doors as though drawn by a device they held in both hands which brought to mind an Ouija pointer. They piloted the device as though dowsing for water, mesmerized by its blue screen, never looking up, a blur of thumbs across a tiny keyboard.

Mickie’s device again buzzed from its place on the bar. She quickly twiddled thumbs across the keyboard.

Several more such exchanges followed.

The newcomer’s young life’s legend was lovingly illustrated in multicolored flashes and filigrees covering both arms, starting from the left wrist running to the right. This was Gretel Guck-in-das-Handy.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” was all Dr. Danny could say, again lightly slapping the bar.

The narrator behind The Wine-Dark Arras, chastened earlier by Mickie Lifshitz, kept his concurrence to himself.

Glancing over Mickie’s shoulder, Dr. Danny saw a series of figures on the screen of her device that looked like cherce words rendered in an old-time comic strip.

“Easy-peasy!” Mickie said, to Dr. Danny’s ongoing amazement. “Gretel said to go to sevenleagueboots.com. ‘Emmazon is for lamps, lemurs and lingerie. Koogle is cabbages & kings’. Sevenleagueboots.com offers lipstick in jalapeño, bellyburner, super jalapeño, super fireball and, the Internet being the Internet, triple x-rated and super quintuple x-rated flavors. The site plugs Gwyneth Paltrow’s secret tin roof formula made by barefoot indigenous virgins in the disappearing Amazonian rain forest, the proceeds of which purchase microwavable lean cuisine for properly compensated workers and their incomparably adorable children.”

“That’s simply amazing!” the gobsmacked Dr. Danny said, to which Gretel Guck-in-das-Handy made no reply. Looking at them in the mirror behind Javier’s bar, they looked up from their device with myopic eyes enlargened behind thick spectacles.

“We’re, like, umm, not into the whole interpersonal thing,” their reflection croaked at Dr. Danny’s in their little-used voice. “We like majored in queer poststructuralism and texted the entire curriculum remotely.”

However, in a series of deft keystrokes between the two adepts and a vast network of unseen parties, numerous arcana and a 16-digit credit card number, expiration date, and security code were exchanged and verified. Shortly thereafter, both super fireball and Gwyneth Paltrow’s secret tin roof formula lipstick coursed through cyber- and other spaces to Dr. Danny’s shared brick-and-mortar Terre Bleue rancher from opposite ends of the earth faster than electric lines woop-woop past the windows of a speeding train.

The super fireball lipstick was just the job for jingling the jackass.

Dr. Danny was elated to discover that applying it to the jackass’s lips resulted in the latter soundlessly hee-hawing hot lips across his teeth. Ms. Paltrow’s secret tin roof formula just made the brays beautiful: This jackass’s caroling was never in season, at least as far as Dr. Danny reckoned. So he put by the secret tin roof formula for the pig his consortrix had set her heart on. It occurred to the good doctor that this may have been the brand used proverbially by handlers of a one-time Western governor with presidential aspirations.

Moral: When a question vexes, opposable thumbs rush in where once the fingers did the walking.

Peter Geier has reported and written features for local, national, and international news publications. He reviews films for http://moompitchers.blogspot.com His published fiction includes a localized Odyssean episode in Arkansas Review and a speculative piece in Lumina about an earring figurine that comes to life. He lately finished a bildungsnovella set in Eastern Long Island.