Reginald Boone was a man. A small man, of small means and small ambitions. The kind of man who buys Wonderbread at the Thrift Shop, but only if it's on sale at five loaves for a dollar. His desire at Bank of America, where he worked, was to balance to the penny each day for a year, thus ensuring his rise to Head Teller.
He was thirty-seven days from his goal when the term "teller" was removed, as was his coveted position. He had no desire to become "Lead Banking Guest Liaison".
Melinda Cromwell, on the other hand, was vivacious, attractive, ruthless and had been voted "Best Equipped By Nature to Overthrow a Small African Nation" five years in a row by Senseless Awards for Self-Centered People magazine. Melinda overlooked the fine print, merely seeing the overly large "People" on the magazine's cover, and only occasionally wondered why Tom Cruise wasn't featured anymore. She assumed it was a because he was getting old.
These two people were about to collide in the way that George Pal envisioned heavenly bodies meeting. Or was that Rudolph Maté? And sadly, only one of these bodies can be called heavenly, though strictly speaking Reginald had more mass and, therefore, slightly more gravitational attraction than Melinda.
This fact may have accounted for the curious incident at the metro.
The incident was curious because that was its nature. It had several brothers and sisters, also incidents, who basically served out their lives with no wonder or desire, falling into one situation after anther. We're all aware of these incidents--dropping your last quarter, which then rolls under the vending machine you were using, buying a drive-through burger that has pickles ("No pickles please!") and only discovering it when you get home, burping up cheese--these are the everyday flotsam of incidents that are just marking time. They get a little bored, they burn your cake two minutes before company arrives.
But the incident with which we're concerned ran with a different pack, so to speak. It was a dragonfly of a different hue. A bagle with fresh lox. The malus pumila of one's ocular mechanism. Our incident has, in fact, so much impact on the lives of M and R ("Put me first, damn it!" screamed Melinda) that we must name it.
And its name was . . . Herbert.
Herbert had recently caused two trams to somehow become entwined in a death grip rivaled only by Godzilla and Rodan. For giggles, he had accomplished the same feat on two different continents a week earlier with four prams: two sailing in New England, and two being pushed in London.
The baby prams had been pushed by two Pams, but that was considered a coincidence.
The metro had pulled up to the curb, a great organ of manhood rooting through the city streets. Its wonderous doors opened as the voice of the traveller's deity echoed among the concrete buildings, "Salmoney and Brittles Town Express". Reginald politely allowed himself to be pushed aside. One kind hearted little girl tried to let him ahead of her, and was later spanked by her mother and told to read more about Ghengis Khan. "Would he let little men get in his way?"
Melinda was running toward the bus. Not jogging, not careening, and--importantly--not shouting and waving like a maniac. She was running as the tabby cat runs toward the pillow feather that erupts when the master lies down, and with somewhat similar disasterous results. In the case of the tabby and the master, however, there is always a question of which head will strike the wall.
It was sick, really. Even Herbert, who was riding on the right front wheel, later claimed the driver must have seen her, then put on his signal, peered at his left side mirror, and slowly counted "three . . . two . . . one. . . ." and shut the doors.
"Mommy, that lady looked just like Daffy Duck!"
"Hush, dear. It was Monsieur W. Coyote."
Pronounced "coy oat,", with a firm spit on the "t".