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.)