Pick o' the Day: The Grackle Catcher (cont.)

            “Hello?  Anybody home?”  Hank’s dream was, as usual, taking a weird twist.  The pack of tigers that were chasing him around the inside of his old elementary school had cornered him in the boy’s bathroom, and he was making a last stand by barricading himself in one of the stalls.  Since the flimsy aluminum door did not go all the way to the floor, he could see the immense paws of the tiger chieftain as it stood there, in front of his stall, peeking at him through the half-inch crack, and he could hear it snuffling at the lock.  And then it spoke again, this time much louder.  “I said, hello?  Anyone home?”   The tone of the tiger’s voice was so disturbingly nasty that it actually woke Hank up, and he realized, despite his mental  fogginess, that it was coming from outside his pop-up tent trailer and not from inside his head.  He tried to raise his body to a sitting position, but he found he was weighed-down by three very chubby cats, and one kitten, who were dozing on top of him.  “Come on, get off me, guys!” he rasped, his throat parched by a long night of sonorous mouth-breathing.  The cats reluctantly moseyed off to another corner of the tent and immediately went back to sleep.  Whoever was outside was now pounding on the flimsy aluminum door of the tent trailer, causing the whole rickety contraption to shake.  “Who is it?” Hank shouted as he hurriedly pulled on a faded Mighty Mouse t-shirt and a pair of hopelessly wrinkled khaki cargo shorts.

            “It’s me, Merle!  Is that you, Wendt?” said the rather unattractive and obnoxious voice outside the door.  “I gotta talk to you, man!  Open the door!”  It was Merle!  Merle Zitzky!  Hank’s nemesis since the third grade!  What in the world was he doing here?

            Hank opened the door and stepped out into the blazingly bright Saturday morning sunlight.  There stood Merle, in all his 400 pound, clip-on-tie glory, leering at him from behind a cheap pair of sunglasses and puffing on a Pall Mall, his huge man-boobs and doughy muffin-top waist puffing out his overly-tight short-sleeve shirt.  Merle was an assistant manager at the neighborhood B-U-T-T-S Superstore (affectionately called “Big BUTTS” by the grocery-shopping locals), a position that had taken him three times longer to attain than most other employees who had similar aspirations, but it was a position that he, nevertheless, had finally attained.  And standing next to him was one of the store’s crack security guards, Lester Guy, a skinny, pimply-faced toad, who was trying to look mean and tough, even though, as usual, his zipper was down.

            For a moment, Hank felt dizzy as a series of long-repressed memories flashed through his cerebral cortex: encountering Merle for the first time in 3^rd grade when they were both approximately the same size; Merle challenging him to a fight after school; Merle wanting to box not knowing that Hank was a skilled rassler; Hank showing Merle that rassling always trumps boxing by putting Merle in an unescapable headlock and causing his nose to bleed; Hank finding that Merle left him alone for a long time after that; Merle then proceeding to grow at twice the rate of a typical elementary school student; Merle using his gargantuan size to gleefully terrorize everyone in the school, including the teachers; Merle dropping out of school in 9^th grade (thankfully) and then disappearing for a long time, only to return to the neighborhood years later as a semi-sobered-up night stocker at B-U-T-T-S.  Hank shook his head to stop the flashbacks, then looked up again at his two unwelcome visitors and asked, “What do you want?”

            Merle was definitely there for a reason, but he was in no hurry to reveal it.  “So this is where you live, huh Hank?”  he sneered.  “I heard rumors you lived in a tent, but I didn’t believe it ‘til now.”  Hank did not respond, but he knew then this encounter wasn’t going to end well.  Merle looked disappointed that he didn’t get the response he was looking for, so he decided to get to the point.  “Look man, it’s about the birds.  You need to stop messin’ with ‘em.”  He took another drag on his cigarette, looked at Lester, and smiled.  Lester did his best to maintain his scary face.

            “I’m just helping you guys out by encouraging the birds to leave.  Your customers are happier, and the birds are happier, too,” said Hank, calmly, though he felt his blood pressure rising fast.  “It’s better than doing nothing, ain’t it?”  Merle and Lester started snickering, and then they both broke out into full-fledged laughter.  “You ain’t doin’ nothin’ catchin’ them things,” chortled Lester, breaking his silence.  “I take care of three times more of ‘em than you every night.”  He patted the pellet gun holstered to his belt and grinned.  “Whaddya think of that?”

            Hank felt his hands turning into fists, but he kept his arms at his sides.  “I think you need to leave.”  Merle took another drag, blew the smoke on Hank, and said, “You stop messin’ with them birds.  We see you messin’ with ‘em again, we’re goin’ to kick your ass.”  He flicked his cigarette butt toward the tent trailer.  “Let’s go, Lester.”  The two of them walked away, laughing.  Hank watched them exit the backyard and then looked towards the house.  He saw “Hoolia” looking out her back screen door with a frown on her face.  Evidently, she had witnessed the unpleasant encounter, and Hank hoped he hadn’t caused her any worries.  What he didn’t see was “Hoolia” silently uncocking her Glock 19 semi-automatic as she returned to her kitchen.

            He turned and wearily sat down on a weathered lawn chair.  He put his hands over his face, feeling as if life had just sucker-punched him in the gut again.  His attempt at meaningful public service was important to him, and he didn’t want to stop doing it.  And to think what would happen to the birds if he wasn’t there to convince them to leave for a better place than the B-U-T-T-S parking lot.  Unbearable.  Tears began forming under his closed eyelids.  And then the first whiff of smoke hit his nostrils.  It smelled like burning canvas!  Jumping to his feet, he turned to his pop-up tent trailer and gasped!  It was on fire!

(Next week:  The Grackle Catcher continues as Hank risks his life in an attempt to prevent a catastrophic explosion.) 

Pick o' the Day: The Grackle Catcher (cont.)

            So Hank stayed behind to wait for his father, but not in the old family home, with its torn screens and peeling paint and leaky roof.  His mother had sold it just before she left to an immigrant Indian family, but because she felt a little bad for him, she told him he could have the old pop-up tent trailer that had been buried for years under dusty piles of garage junk, which she had no intention of taking with her, and Hank thought that it would be just fine.  He asked his next door neighbor, an elderly Mexican widow and “crazy cat-lady” named Julia, who, for some reason unknown to Hank, pronounced her name as “Hoolia”, if he could park the small trailer in her back yard and live there until his father came back, when the both of them would then join up with the rest of the family, wherever they might be.  She said she didn’t mind, and she would even let him plug an electrical extension cord to the outlet outside her back door.  All he had to do for her, she said, was catch her some more cats.  She couldn’t be happy unless she had at least 50 of them lying around, and due to natural attrition, she would need at least one or two new ones a month.  “Hoolia” also kept a perpetual yard-sale going on in her weedy front lawn in order to raise money to feed her flock of felines, selling old clothes, knick-knacks, bric-a-brac, cracker jacks, gimcracks, baubles, trinkets, and gewgaws to a local mix of neighborhood riffraff, transients, hobos, winos, and blue-haired flea-market queens who would never pay the asking price for anything and who, if they actually had to spend more than a quarter for any one item, would walk away with a disgusted look on their sour, wrinkled faces muttering, “Too rich for my blood… too rich for my blood.”  And Hank could never figure out where “Hoolia” kept getting more things to sell; if the merchandise seemed to be dwindling, she would just go into her house and bring out another box or two to replenish the stock.  She must have hoarded literally tons of stuff over the years, and she was now slowly getting rid of it, piece by piece, for the benefit of her beloved cats.      

               Now Hank had never been on his own, and though he couldn’t imagine what it would be like to live alone; to come home at the end of a long workday to a room devoid of human life, to eat his dinner in utter silence, to go to bed without being able to say “Good night!” to anyone, to wake up the next day without being able to say “Good morning!” to anyone…  if he would have spent any amount of time really thinking about this, he would have been absolutely terrified.  But his naturally optimistic nature would not allow him to think such negative thoughts, and instead he began to think of his new situation as an “adventure”, and that, for the foreseeable future, everyday was going to be a “camp-out”.  He remembered fondly the summer of his tenth year, when he and his friend Roger would camp-out in his backyard: the two of them working all afternoon to create a tent made out of an old, paint-spattered visqueen dropcloth, using straightened wire coat hangers to roast wienies and marshmallows over a small campfire, drinking warm grape Kool-Aid out of a dented Army surplus canteen, lying on their backs in the dark, gazing at the starry night, and feeling lucky when they witnessed a meteor flashing across the sky.  That was a great summer.  But Roger drowned the next year while on a school picnic at Lake Travis, and Hank had never felt much like camping again after that.

            “Hoolia” wouldn’t grant him permission to have a campfire in her backyard, but she did give him an old microwave oven that she had planned to sell at her yard sale so that he could heat up his food.  That pretty much limited what Hank could cook on his “camp-out”, making roasted-wienies-on-a-stick out of the question.  He once tried an experiment to see if he could brown a marshmallow in it, but the Jet-Puff just turned into a sticky, white goo that stuck permanently to the oven’s bottom.  So he resigned himself to a diet that consisted primarily of Cups-O-Noodle, Pizza Pockets, and Orville Redenbacher’s “Gourmet” popcorn.  Ah, to Hank, there was nothing like Orville’s beautiful popcorn.  Light, fluffy, and buttery.  Perfect everytime.  He usually had at least five cases of the stuff stacked up in his tent trailer, for he was worried that the local grocery store would run out of it.  He thought this because he had read in the paper a while back that Orville had died tragically by drowning in his Jacuzzi, and for many, many days after reading this, Hank felt devastated.  He had come to think that Orville was a friend, and now he was drowned, just like Roger.  And soon, his popcorn would run out and be gone forever, too.

            And so it had been five years now, living on his own in a pop-up tent trailer under a spreading oak tree in “Hoolia’s” back yard, working as a carpenter’s helper for minimum wage, catching and releasing grackles for the benefit of his community, occasionally catching stray cats, expecting his father to show up any day now, and still waiting for his mother to write and tell him where she and his brother and sister had all ended up.

(Next week:  The Grackle Catcher continues as Hank is paid an unexpected visit by Merle, his nemesis since childhood.)                     

Pick o' the Day: The Grackle Catcher

     One more step up, and he would be able to reach a grackle.  He had climbed the electrical pole slowly, almost sloth-like, so as not to startle the birds, and he made no sound at all except for the short, raspy breaths emanating from his mouth (breathing through his nose was nearly impossible thanks to a frustratingly deviated septum and its inseparable BFF, chronic sinusitis).  As he took the final step up, he inhaled deeply and then grabbed for the nearest bird in a quick, darting movement, snagging one of its panicked legs with the thumb and index finger of his right hand as it exploded in a black flurry of flailing and flapping wings.  Pulling the bird to his chest, he tucked its tail into his armpit, hushing it into a calmed, almost catatonic state as he began making his way back down the pole.  

     After reaching the weedy ground of the parking lot island, Hank Wendt turned and scanned the area thoroughly before stepping onto the pavement.  He was extremely cautious when walking through parking lots or crossing streets, relying on his eyes to alert him to approaching dangers since his ears could not.  He was almost totally deaf in his right ear, due to an unfortunate incident that had occurred when he was a child, though he rarely spoke of it.  And after years of working as a carpenter’s helper, enduring without protection the screaming screeches of power saws and the blunt-force sonic trauma of pounding hammers, he had probably lost about half the hearing in his “good” ear.  But it was an invisible disability, and as long as he was able to position himself to the right of someone who was speaking to him, he could generally hear the bulk of a conversation.  And if, due to heavy background noise, he could not, he would simply smile and nod his head as the other person spoke.  It usually didn’t matter much, for the conversations were, as a rule, one-sided, for there weren’t many who were much interested in anything he had to say.  There were even some acquaintances who thought of him as a “good listener”, and they would walk away with a warm and therapeutic feeling after talking to him, as if they had confessed to a priest, though, unbeknownst to them, he had only pretended to hear.

     Hank began to walk, or rather, limp, with his tenth grackle of the afternoon still tucked under his arm like an avian football, into the cold, easterly breeze blowing up Blessing Street.  After coming to the end of the second block, he stopped.  The chill wind and the frigid humidity made his left leg, held together with screws and plates due to a life-shattering break a few years back, ache unmercifully, so two blocks was about as far as he could go.  Taking the bird out of the snug nest made by the crook of his arm, and holding it carefully with both hands, he whispered these words into its ears; that is, where he assumed the bird’s ears should be, though he couldn’t see them: “Fly to the woodlands, away from the city!  You’ll be much happier there!”  He then released the bird into the gusty headwind, and it flapped noisily away.  “Catch and release,” chuckled Hank.  “Catch and release.”

     Since that was just about all he could take for one day, he decided to head for home.  Catching grackles in the grocery store parking lot and humanely releasing them in another location gave him a good feeling inside, for, to him, he was doing an important act of “public service”.  He had long been disturbed by the immense flocks of grackles that, at certain times of the year, would invade the neighborhood airspace and roost on the power lines and in the trees that encircled the local shopping centers.  The sheer numbers of birds, and the accompanying cacophony of cries and caws, were horrifying to many of the residents, especially the women and children, who would hurry to the store entrances, hands clasped over their heads or ears, hoping against hope they would not get pooped on.  And good luck finding a shopping cart that had not been sullied, at least a little, by the drippy droppings of these otherwise friendly and good-natured animals.  The store owners did nothing about the problem because they thought there was nothing they could do.  But Hank Wendt did not think that way.  He did not like to hear anyone say, “Someone should do something about that.”  He believed with all his heart that problems were meant to be solved, and if he could do something about a problem, then, by golly, he would do it.

            For the last five years since his beloved mother, brother, and sister moved away, he had regularly dedicated a significant portion of each week to this humble and largely unrecognized volunteer service for his community.  And doing so went a long way towards easing the silent, but nevertheless raging, river of loneliness that relentlessly ate away at the aging infrastructure of his optimism towards life.  He had known heartbreak literally as long as he could remember, for his father left home when Hank was only three, just one month after his awakening from babyhood, and had yet to return.  His memories of the man were dim, but certain features of his father stayed with him to this day: his jet black hair, his scratchy face (straight out of Hank’s favorite book of all time, Pat the Bunny), the smoke of his Lucky Strike cigarettes wrapped around his head like a Sikh’s turban.  Precious memories.  Where his father had gone, he did not know.  His mother, if she knew, never told him, and whenever she spoke of the man she would close every sentence with the words “da bum!” as if they were a new type of end punctuation mark she had invented because neither periods nor exclamation points felt quite right.  And it was his father’s absence that had made it impossible for Hank to accompany his mother and siblings when they moved away.  “Somebody’s got to be here when Dad comes back.  Otherwise, he won’t know what happened to us!” he tearfully explained to them as they packed up the family Rambler with all their belongings.  His mother just shook her head and said, “Hank, you’re an idiot,” jammed the stick into first, and roared away into the night.  “Be sure to write!” Hank yelled, and then fell into a coughing fit from the acrid smoke left behind.

(Next week:  The Grackle Catcher continues as Hank is forced to find a place to live after his mother sells the old family home.)