rock'em sock'em backseat assassins

Last night: out with Dave, in his car (which is as wacky, in its way, as his dad's wannabe DeLorean) en route to a bookstore. Usually when he and I go out I drive, but I'd spent a head-splitting three hours at the vet's earlier and didn't feel up to it.

(Nobody's hurt or anything, just Buster's annual wow-that's-an-old-dog checkup. They had to express the anal glands. Oy, the shrieking.)

I hop in, we say hi, I offer mints from a tin, and off we go. There's baseball on the radio and Dave is telling me about journalism, which is all familiar and comforting. Dave rambles on about nothing of particular consequence, someone on the radio outs someone else, my back starts to unkink itself, and the car hits a bump.

Which makes the back seat EXPLODE WITH FUCKING NOISE.

PWIEEEEUUURRRRRRR SCUFFLE SCRATCH RATTLE WOOP WOOP WOOP RATTLE RATTLE SHAKE SHAKE POP POP POP POP YAIEEEEEE

Predictably, I jump as far out of my seat as the seatbelt will allow, curse loudly, and spin around so as to better confront the mysterious attacker from the back seat. Dave starts to laugh. The noise stops. Dave then explains that, due to an argument between his dad and his sister, all of the sister's baby's toys have been removed from his dad's house, placed in a hardcore construction-type trash bag, and stuck in Dave's car.

Why Dave's car? So that they are out of the Don's way and it's not him who has to bring them back. And you don't argue with the Don if you know what's good for you. They've been in there for almost two weeks, Dave says -- somewhere during this explanation the back seat goes off because of another bump, RATTLE SCUFFLE POP POP POP POP POP BWEEEEEE BWEEEEEE POPPOPPOP -- and by now he hears them even when they're not being noisy.

"I think it's something trying to move," he says.
"I can see it," I tell him. "It's lit up. It's right there."
"It's at the bottom of the bag! I can't get to it!"
"If that thing goes off again," I warn him, "I'm shutting it up."
"It's not if," he says, "it's when."

A tense silence settles over the car. The radio has been switched off. The tires hum against the pavement. Neither of us says a thing. And then, another bump.

AIEEEEE POP POP POP SCUFFLE SCRATCH SCRATCH WURR WURR WURR WURR

I pop my seatbelt off and ninja myself half into the back of the car. I rip the bag open with my fingernails, stick a hand in, and feel for motion. Plastic... warm plastic... there! I pull the thing (and the top half of me) into the front seat, so as to better examine it. It's got a clear plastic top, not unlike a bell jar, set into a yellow plastic base. Inside the jar part there's a ton of brightly-colored plastic balls, and on the base is a button which, when pushed, causes some mechanism inside to make the balls rattle and light up while a horrendous version of what I think is a nursery-rhyme song plays.

"Does someone hate your sister?" I ask, pushing the button and making the thing go nuts.
"I thought it was a robot," is all Dave can say.

Ignoring this -- because in the world of Dave, a robot is a perfectly normal thing to give to a two-year-old -- I wedge the toy under the back of Dave's seat.

Then we went to the bookstore and I got a comic book (I mean, a graphic novel) and we inspected his old house and saw the world's biggest spider that was not a wolf spider and started shredding wallpaper, but that is neither here nor there. The important thing is, we did this all without extra sound effects.