Rayne & Delilah's Midnite Matinee(8)

All I know is that I want him to see.





Arliss claps. “What’s next?”

I nod at the twins and Lawson. “Doggy wedding, and then dance party so these guys can leave.”

Tater the beagle looks decidedly unhappy to be wearing a skirt and blouse. Behind me, Buford whimpers as Delia pulls his suit on him. We also make him wear a bat costume sometimes. He hates it.

“Is Tater okay with us taking him for this segment?” I ask.

“He’s pretty chill.” Lawson kneels beside us and scratches Tater’s tummy. Lawson smells like bodywash from neon orange bottles that are all AXE XXXXXXTREME ATOMIC FRESHBLAST MOUNTAIN ICE ODORPUNCH and also mentholy kicked-in-the-face bruise medicine, with top notes of WD-40. It’s not an appealing-sounding combination, and yet it works, strangely.

I lead Tater by the collar over to the set. Delia has the container of chicken livers in one hand and Buford’s collar in the other. Buford whines at the suit he’s wearing and tries to get at the chicken livers. His normally sad eyes always convey utter despair at these times. Kill me, they plead. Even if it’s painful.

Delia and I get set up on the floor, and Arliss takes his place behind the camera.

“This segment goes after a part in the movie where the acting troupe digs up a corpse in a suit and takes it back to this cabin on the island, and then they stage a wedding between the corpse and the leader of the troupe,” Delia says.

Arliss stares and blinks.

“Oh, and we’ll need you to perform the dog wedding,” I say.

His face grows stonier.

“I know,” Delia says. “Your life is very hard.”

“Tight shot on the dogs,” I say.

Arliss fiddles with the camera. “Not my first rodeo, sweet pea. Rolling in…five…four…three…two…one.”

I grip Buford behind his front legs and make him gesture (I hope PETA never sees this). I speak in a deep, comically broad Southern accent. “Why, I say, aren’t you the most lovely creature? My name is Colonel Buford T. Rutherford B. Hayes. What’s yours?”

Delia holds Tater by his front legs and makes him cover his mouth with a paw coyly. She giggles and speaks in a high-pitched, equally horrific Sookie–from–True Blood Southern accent. “Why, sir! How you do flatter! My name is…” Delia looks to be racking her brain. “What name did we decide on for her?” she whispers in her normal voice.

Delia can never keep our character names straight in skits. “Magnolia P. Sugarbottom,” I mutter back, trying not to move my lips, like a ventriloquist.

“Magnolia P. Sugarbottom,” Delia says, returning to Sookie voice.

I put the container of chicken livers on the floor and use Buford’s paw to slide it over to Tater. “Ms. Sugarbottom, I own the largest chain of chicken liver restaurants in the world, and I offer you some of my finest chicken livers in exchange for your paw in holy matrimony.”

Tater whines and licks at the container. “Colonel, I would be honored to be Mrs. Magnolia P. Rutherford B. Hayes. Do you promise that you can handle me at my worst, so that you deserve me at my best, which is also quite, quite bad?”

“Ms. Sugarbottom, I promise.”

“So you know, Colonel, I’m super hard to deal with almost always. I’m really a giant pain in the rear.”

“I will love and cherish you anyway and apply a healing salve to my buttocks.”

“Then I shall wed you this very moment, Colonel, before you can change your mind.”

I make Buford wave to the camera. “Wonderful! Simply wonderful! Oh, Professor? Professor Von Heineken?”

One guess how Arliss picked the name Professor Von Heineken. He put exactly as much work and thought into it as he puts into every aspect of the show.

Arliss pulls his goggles down over his eyes and ambles onto the set, looking exactly as happy as you’d expect a grown man forced to perform a dog marriage on public access television would look. He’ll cut in some wedding music that Jesmyn recorded for us.

Arliss clears his throat. He’s supposed to do a German accent, but he always forgets. (We get letters; he doesn’t care.) “Okay, uh, do you, Buford, take…”

“Magnolia,” Delia says. Arliss is even worse at remembering character names than Delia is.

“Yep. Her. To be your lawfully wedded wife, so help you God?”

“For as long as you both shall live,” Delia says.

“For as long as you both shall live, so help you God?”

“Professor! You gotta get the words right or it’s not legally binding,” I say.

“Oh no,” Arliss says. “Anyway, I now pronounce you…dog and dog wife, I guess. You may sniff the bride’s butt or really whatever you’re into. Just go nuts. Who cares?”

Delia and I clap and push Buford and Tater at each other. They whimper and turn their heads. We let them go. Tater runs off set. Buford sort of melts to the floor like a scoop of ice cream licked off the cone onto hot asphalt. Arliss slinks back to the camera. We clap until we see Arliss signal that he’s not focused on just the dogs anymore.

I make a great show of wiping my eyes and sigh. “I always cry at weddings, Delilah.”

“Me too, Rayne. I love happy endings. But, viewers at home, to see if our friends—the children who play with dead things—have a happy ending, stay tuned!”