Yuri’s package arrived in Neguanee, Michigan, at the home of her parents, Ms. and Professor Shirley and Ralph Stavanger, as they sometimes introduced themselves, late in the afternoon of the first Friday in June. Instead of leaving the package next to the mail box at the road, Frank Halvorsen drove up to the house, parked by the wood shed in the least muddy place he could find and walked the package and the other mail not to the front door, but to the side door leading into the mud room. His rubber boots were encrusted with thick mud half dried by the floor vent of his Jeep’s heater and since he knew he would be invited in he wanted to be able to enter in socks.

Shirley Stavanger called out for him to come in when he knocked on the door leading into the kitchen. He walked in and saw her drying dishes at the sink and the Professor sitting at the big kitchen table coated with pages from the New York Times that were opened out and laid flat. A disassembled carburetor was spread out on the newspaper. Ralph Stavanger was slouched down in a high backed wooden chair, his legs stretched out under the table and his hands clasped on his stomach. He stared blankly at all the pieces of carburetor. Shirley Stavanger glanced up at the kitchen clock. Without bothering to turn around, she said, “You’re very late. That tells me that when you went by here hours ago at your usual time you didn’t stop, thus preventing me from receiving some important bills that I might have been looking forward to paying, because you wanted to make us the last stop of the day. And that tells me that you are standing there holding a package from our Europa.”

She opened the bottom drawer of the big gas stove and pulled out a cookie sheet, turned away from the sink and held it out for Frank. “That carburetor is probably going to put itself back together before Ralph ever does,” she said. “So you two put all the pieces on this and clear the table.” She and Frank swapped cookie sheet and package.

Frank said to the professor, “You know, you can probably find an exploded parts diagram for that thing.”

“Where would be the fun in that?”

“I guess.”

Shirley set the package on the table and then, in what had become a ritual with the three of them, put out place settings and sat down with a paring knife. The package was a large cardboard box about the size of a box that two dozen rolls of paper towels might come to the supermarket in. It was trussed up with strapping tape which she sliced through. She opened out the top flaps. Whatever was inside was wrapped inside not one but two green woolen army blankets, full of moth holes but otherwise clean. She lifted out the blankets and unwrapped them from around a smaller cardboard box that claimed to contain cans of Del Monte green beans.

The Del Monte box was crammed with wadded up newspaper as filler and two shoe boxes, each of which was wound tightly in layer after layer of clear plastic cling wrap. Inside the shoe boxes were large blobs of aluminum foil. The slightly smaller of the two turned out to contain a couple of quart size plastic bags.

As Shirley opened one, a cloud of steam and aroma fogged her glasses and Frank said “Oh my stars and little stripes. It’s hot. It’s actually still hot.”

It was beef stroganoff. The other bag contained big flat egg noodles. Ralph unwrapped the second aluminum foil blob. Kaiser rolls; one for each of them. There was a note. “I think this might turn out to be from Mesopotamia. Not the rolls, of course. Hi, Uncle Frank!” It was written in purple ink and instead of a signature she’d drawn a daisy with a smiley face.

“Mesopotamia,” said Frank. He and the professor looked at Shirley.

“Not even a clue,” she said. “But would ya smell that? Those Mesopotamians do know how to cook up some stroganoff.”

The summer before, Yuri and Phil had gone to a Mavericks game at Multnomah Stadium for the first time and she had fallen in love with the hot dogs. On the way out after the game she picked up six more and mailed them home the next day with instructions to reheat them in the oven and to be sure to leave two out in the mail box for Frank the next day.

A month later it was three large burritos from the Mexican place on NW 21st that had once been a gas station, then some time after that three dense chocolate fudge squares coated with raspberry syrup from Rose’s. Yuri’s note with the fudge suggested that they would find it tasted even better once she passed along the fact that – according to the Rose’s menu – the syrup had been drizzled on and not merely poured.

The biggest package of them all contained a stack of pancakes from their 2nd wedding anniversary breakfast at the Original Hotcake House; a BLT from their 2nd wedding anniversary lunch at Quality Pie; and a roast chicken from their 2nd wedding anniversary dinner at Henry Thiele’s. The professor and Ms. estimated the cost of the meals, added in the postage, calculated how many hours of packing pickles into glass jars at her job it would have taken Europa to earn that much, and sent her a check. She sent back a thank you package containing the check and three servings of spanakopita from the Alexis.

She once sent her cousin Margaret a corn dog. It arrived with one very small bite taken out of it. The note just said, “I lost control just before I closed up the box.” Her father’s bachelor brother Jens got a half dozen spring rolls and dipping sauce from The Pagoda along with elaborate reassurances that they didn’t require reheating. But never before had she ttempted to send a hot meal.

“The insulation was very well conceived,” said Ralph while they ate. “She has the soul of an engineer.”

Shirley arranged her face into the international give-me-a-break expression and said, “And the diploma of a music theory major.”

“I suppose it must have been done before, sending hot food through the Postal Service” Frank said, more or less to himself. “I mean, it has to have happened, but it’s never come up that I’m aware of. At least not all that distance.”

It was by the merest chance that at that very hour a colleague of his two thousand miles from the Upper Peninsula was delivering through the mail slot in the front door of the Eddie Haskell Bunker the latest in a series of death threats written to Yuri by her husband Phil.

 

Everyone at the Eddie Haskell Bunker went in and out of the house through the back door just off the kitchen. The front door was more of a formality and like most formalities, seldom used. So when the mail arrived on Friday afternoon it contributed to an existing pile of bills and fliers that had been forming, ignored, for days.

It also contributed to the daily torment of Bow Wow the dogs. When Polly Nomial the African gray parrot heard the sound of the metal mail slot cover falling back into place he did what he always did: he emitted an acoustically faithful rendering of Phil’s truck pulling into the driveway, complete with the sound of tires crunching gravel and the engine revving and then going silent and the truck door opening and slamming shut. In response Bow Wow did what they always did: a DSM-worthy bout of hysterical barking, yelping and standing against the kitchen door, tearing at it with their front paws. This they did with one pointed concentration until Phil kept failing to show up for long enough that they lost track of what they were excited about and went back to the living room to nap.

Poly Nomial always did this three times, with a few minutes breather in between. Who knows how many times he could have jerked their chain like that before they stopped reacting? But he limited the prank to three reps a day and Bow Wow always obliged with great enthusiasm and joy.

To the side of the front door, beneath one of those tall narrow slots of a window and against the short alcove wall where a coat rack or umbrella stand must have stood when the house was built in 1912, was a stack of mail at least two feet high and wide enough at the base to be structurally stable. Each piece of mail in the stack was addressed to “Resident.” Next to the stack was a galvanized bucket full of water.

Yuri had decreed that nothing mailed to a non-resident of the house, even if his name was Resident, would be received or in any other way, managed. “Rat Own!” said Phil. Bekka asked Yuri how she knew that Resident was a he. “Because women are unjustly burdened with the majority of housekeeping, and what conscious woman would contribute to a sister’s further uncompensated labors by forcing her to deal with someone else’s heaps of misaddressed mail?” Bekka grinned and pumped her fist.

The water bucket was a later addition, placed near the pile just in case junk mail shared with piles of oily rags the ability to self combust. The death threat lay near the top of the smaller pile of current mail, neatly sandwiched between a Tom Peterson flyer and the water bill. Its envelope was a bright yellow, square and about the size of a greeting card. On the front side in the lower left corner was a beautifully executed pen-and-ink miniature of Cat Stevens’ Teaser and the Firecat album cover.

It’s possible that someone that evening might have been curious enough about the addition to the mail pile to look through it and see if there was anything in it worth looking at. But when she got home, Yuri went straight out to water her wheat field along the side of the house and to see if any of the sewer tomatoes were ripe enough for dinner. And when Phil and Bekka got home they went straight to the kitchen since Friday was Student Food Night at the Eddie Haskell Bunker and there were quantities of spaghetti and Ragu and garlic bread to get ready – as Yuri had complained bitterly about having had Top Ramen two Fridays in a row – and the big wooden picnic table to set and the ash trays to empty. And by the time June got home from job hunting she barely had time to go into the bathroom and throw up before it was time for everyone to sit down and eat.

Which was when the phone rang and when June answered it any possibility of anyone noticing a death threat lying in the pile of mail fell to zero. It was June’s son Danny calling to say that the Red House had just burned to the ground and everyone was OK but maybe she and the others should sort of get ready for an influx of refugees. June, who had lost her job and was herself crashing in the Bunker’s basement, took in this news the way that deer are said to take in head lights, lifted the phone off the counter, set it on the table and stuck out her hand with the receiver in it in case anyone else wanted to talk to Danny about getting five more roommates.

They planned over dinner. Yuri would drive the truck up to the house to see if Quinn and Sheila’s teepee had survived the fire and to bring it back since a teepee in the back yard would mean one less nonexistent spare room for them to worry about finding.

Bekka said, “They’ll need towels and soap and tooth brushes, at least. We can do a run to Freddy’s.”

Phil pointed out the flaw in this line of thinking. “They’re sure to want money when we try to leave the store with all that stuff. Anyone have any cash to speak of?” Shrugs all around.

June offered, “I broke a dollar bill for bus fare today. I have the change.”

Bekka got up, walked upstairs to her room and returned with a small rectangle of hard plastic and set it down in the middle of the table. Phil stared down at it and cocked his head. “V-I-S-A. Wow, I’ve heard of those things but I never thought I’d actually see one.”

It wasn’t until almost 7 the next morning that Phil saw that the big yellow envelope had arrived and showed it to Yuri. It came as a bit of an anticlimax under the circumstances, of course. It wasn’t that she didn’t appreciate another death threat and the obvious amount of care that had been taken to create it. For instance she made sure to save the envelope with its beautiful little drawing before displaying the threat itself on the refrigerator door alongside the others, using a Schludwiller beer bottle refrigerator magnet. And she made sure that Phil knew that she thought it was the best one yet, even though she secretly thought that topping the first one was going to be hard. And normally she would have spent more time admiring it, because men do need their egos stroked, even the better sort like Phil. It’s just that there was still so much to do.

By 4:00 Saturday morning all the refugees and any personal effects not reduced to ashes had been brought down off the hill.  By 4:10 every cubic inch of the Eddie Haskell Bunker smelled of smoke. So out went the personal effects to be spread out on the amost-lawn next to Yuri’s tiny wheat field in order to air out. And off went the refugees’ smoke-saturated outer garments, which Yuri tossed into the laundry, their under ware being deemed smoke free. Then it was shower time because smoke permeates hair as readily as it does fabric.

With the washing machine going, the ancient water heater simply stopped trying to keep up halfway through the first shower, leaving Quinn and Sheila yelling the way people do when they’re suddenly sprayed with cold water. Danny and Arline, dressed from Phil and Yuri’s closet, decided to heat some water on the stove and wash their hair in the kitchen sink.

No one had slept, and they were all too shell shocked to try to process what had happened and all their losses. With the final who’s-going-where details still to be decided, Quinn and Sheila went to crash in the living room and Danny and Arline went down to June’s unfinished room in the basement – three walls of which were India print bed spreads hung from two lengths of clothes line – and fell asleep together on her monastic size bed. George was still on shift and no one had thought to call his dispatcher and warn him not to bother going home.

It was Polly Nomial who suffered most from the disruption. All the new voices during the night, the disrupted morning routine, the sheer mass of volatile energy. By sunrise he had started pulling his own feathers out with his beak and imitating the spin cycle on the washer and Yuri had had to stop everything and comfort him. Since she was in the middle of her Morning Has Broken phase, she sat with him and sang that a few times, to provide a sense of continuity. Then she put him on her shoulder and the two of them did another load of laundry.

Bekka had gone up to bed, but Phil found himself wide awake. He made coffee for him and June and some toast with peanut butter, and sat down at the table with the Saturday Oregonian. June came back from the morning’s first vomiting and sat down. Phil looked up from the paper. “How’re you doing?”

June gave a small shrug. “Well, let me see. I’m homeless, unemployed, divorced, forty-three years old and pregnant, I have morning sickness and my son has just moved to the same place I’m crashing. So all in all, I’d say I’m doing pretty darn good.”

“Atta girl! Now, what you need is some stimulating reading.” He reached back and took the death threat collection off the refrigerator door and lay it down in front of her, pointing to the latest one. “Hot off the presses. I’m really sorry the envelope isn’t here. It had a great drawing of the album cover.”

“I didn’t know you could draw.”

“No, Bekka’s the artist. She wanted in on the action.”

Down the narrow hall in the tiny laundry nook, Yuri was singing, “Morning has broken, like the first morning. Black bird has spoken, like the first bird.”

June said, “You have to admit she has a nice voice.” When Phil didn’t respond, she added, “And she doesn’t always sing. Sometimes she just hums.”

“Yeah, and sometimes she goes la-la-la instead of humming.”

“How long has she been doing this?”

“Do you mean, how long has she been in there folding the laundry, or how long has she been singing that same song each and every morning over and over and over?” June gave him an exaggerated ha-ha-very-funny grin. “Since just before you moved in, I guess” he said.

“Praise for the singing, praise for the morning…”

“I’m not praising the fucking singing!” Phil called out. June thought Yuri’s laughter sounded like wind chimes.

June set her coffee mug down. “I’m going to have to stop drinking this stuff. Switch to decaf.”

Phil made a cross of his two fore fingers in front of his face and hissed.

“On the other hand,” said June, picking up the mug again and taking another sip. “Later would probably also be fine.”

The death threat was on regular white type writer paper. On it were two stick figures. One had long black stick figure hair and was being strangled by the other stick figure. The one being strangled had a word balloon next to its circular head. It was full of quarter notes and eighth notes, each of which had its descending line broken. Below the stick figures, the caption in large all-caps block letters said IS IT WORTH YOUR VERY LIFE????!!!!

Yuri came into the kitchen with an armload of folded bath towels. She stopped beside the breakfast table. “I like that one,” she said, “it’s funny. She held the load of towels in one arm, bent over the table and put her index finger on a death threat near June’s right hand. “This is nice too. See how the composition and layout style are Early Modern Ransom Note? All the different fonts and colors and sizes– there must have been a dozen magazines used. That took a little thought, a little time. It wasn’t just dashed off“. She walked away and sang “Morning has brooookennn…”

“That’s not all that’s going to get broken,” said Phil to her back.

“My sweet blackbird has spooooken” sang Yuri.

It was made of cut out letters glued to the paper. It just said, “Yuri! This is your final warning! Ignore it at your peril!” Below it was an exceptionally ornate pen-and-ink dagger – the sort of dagger that Aubrey Beardsley would have drawn if he had indulged his dark side more often. It was pointed blade down, with drops of red ink blood dripping of the point of the blade into a red ink pool.

The phone rang. Phil answered it. A soft, slow voice said, “They say there be great happenings during the night.”

Phil silently mouthed “George” to June. “That’s one way of thinking about it. Nobody got hurt.”

“’Cept maybe in the metaphysical sense.”

“In the long run, the metaphysical pain will probably be pretty bad. It looks like Trix must have made it out. The fire department didn’t find her in the ashes.”

“Might of missed her.” There was a pause. “But no. She know how to take care of herself. She got out. She layin’ low and scheming on some field mice.”

“Yuri brought back what she could in the truck. It was pretty hard to tell what was whose. She’s washing the smoke out of everything now. In the mean time, you’ve got clean towels and a tooth brush here. But possibly no clothes.”

“Don’t need no clothes. Got me a emergency room right here with all kinda scrubs in it. I tell the people I got burned out of house and home, they say take whatever scrubs you need. I say that’s mighty white of you folks and they laugh nervously.  And then I stop joking and thank them properly.”

“Just as long as you didn’t confuse them unnecessarily.”

“‘Fraid I always do that, boss.”