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

            When morning finally came, it came cloaked in sadness and gloom, for though the sun rose as usual, its warming rays could barely penetrate the roiling thunderclouds that threatened to unleash an angry torrent upon the city.  But for the time being, they only threatened, as if some unknown, yet more powerful, force was holding them back.  And they held back, grudgingly, though not quietly, with grumbles and growls of low thunder signaling their growing impatience.

            And it was in this dismal early morning gloom that a milk truck driver was forced to stop ten feet from the loading dock as he was backing up because of the enormous pile of jumbled milk crates that blocked his way.  After letting go with a few choice curses, he climbed down from the cab and started restacking the crates.  As the pile began to shrink, he heard a faint moaning coming from its base, and he realized, to his shock, that someone was trapped underneath!  He immediately called for help, and with the assistance of a couple of B-U-T-T-S night stockers, he quickly uncovered the body of an unconscious man who was curiously dressed in old-fashioned bib overalls, over a red union suit, with brown leather huaraches covering his otherwise bare feet.  They called for an ambulance, and in a matter of minutes, the man was being hauled away by paramedics in search of a hospital that was willing to take on yet another, painfully obvious, charity case.  One after the other declined to accept the patient, saying they were “full up” or giving some other lame excuse.  Finally, the paramedics, close to panicking due to the fact that the man’s vital signs were rapidly deteriorating, decided to take him to the only place from which they had never been turned away, an obscure facility called The Blessing Street Shelter for the Chronically Hopeless that tended to the poorest of the poor, the most forlorn derelicts and outcasts of the city, where most came in such serious shape that they were beyond hope for a cure, but who were given, at least, the chance to die with a bit of dignity under the care of a gentle and sympathetic volunteer staff.

            By noon, the B-U-T-T-S parking lot was again beginning to fill up with shoppers, but the eeriness caused by the ominous and oppressive storm clouds, compounded by the mysterious absence of the grackles, caused many to decide to turn around and leave before even getting out of their cars.  Lester Guy, late as usual, began his afternoon shift by cruising around the lot on his Segway.  Because he thought they made him look cool, he refused to take off his sunglasses, but the gloom caused by the impending storm made it difficult for him to see and caused him to run into more than one stray shopping cart.  Merle Zitsky arrived shortly after Lester, went directly into the store, and shut himself up in his office.

            At the same time, more than twenty miles away, in a lush, green forest of ancient Loblolly Pines, there arose into the sky a different sort of dark cloud than the type that currently blanketed the region.  And this cloud, immense by any standards, began to move in a flowing, undulating, but nevertheless deliberate manner towards the city.  As it moved, it stretched itself into a thinner, and eventually miles-long, line of black, flapping wings.  When it began crossing over a highway, hundreds of people pulled over and got out of their cars to watch the unprecedented movement of more than a million grackles, and many of the people wept and crossed themselves as it took more than an hour to pass over them, like a biblical plague heading directly for the heart of the city.

            After crashing into his fifth shopping cart, Lester finally resigned himself to taking off his sunglasses.  And when he did so, he noticed that the few shoppers in the parking lot were standing, looking, and pointing at the eastern sky.  He looked to where they were pointing, and it was then that he saw the strange, fast-moving black cloud that was rapidly approaching.  As he stood there, mouth agape, the plague of grackles arrived with a roar of flapping wings and ear-deafening screeches.  The lead birds began to circle high above the parking lot as the rest poured in, eventually creating a great and terrible tornado-like vortex that terrified the shoppers and caused them to run for cover.  Lester was frozen with fear, and in his terror, he did not realize, until it was too late, that he had become the very center of the whirlwind.  Despite his growing panic, he remembered that he was carrying a sidearm.  He drew it and pointed it at the sky, but before he could pull the trigger, a grackle dove and knocked it from his shaking hands.  And then a devastating deluge of hot and sticky-white bird droppings descended upon him from above, coating him from head to toe, as he futilely attempted to fend it off with flailing arms.  He screamed and then began to run, but he fell before he went ten feet and was immediately covered by hundreds of vicious and angrily pecking birds.  Within a minute, his screams were silenced, but the pecking went on for at least fifteen more.  And when the feathered mass rose back up and joined the swirling vortex, nothing was left of Lester but a skeleton inside of a uniform, and it had been picked as clean as a whistle.

            The few customers inside the B-U-T-T-S store, along with every employee on the premises, were watching in horror as Lester met his doom.  But none were as shocked, as terror-stricken, or as filled with dread as Merle, who had run out of his office to join the near-hysterical crowd of onlookers when he began hearing their screams.  As he, along with the rest, witnessed the demise of Lester, he alone knew and understood what was really happening, and why.  And he knew the birds would be after him, too.  After all, one does not keep a million grackles, swarming and swirling in a stupendously powerful whirlwind, waiting outside for long.  Already, the wind and vibrations generated by the birds were shaking, and cracking, the glass storefront.  Suddenly, one of the largest panes of glass shattered to pieces, and in flew a slew of grackle scouts, swooping and diving above the fleeing crowd, looking for one human in particular.  And that human was high-tailing to the back of the store, knocking others to the floor as he did so, including any little old lady who had the audacity to get in his way.  One large woman he knocked over was carrying an umbrella, so he grabbed it, along with her overcoat, that he had to yank off her body, before ducking through the double doors that were marked with an “employees only” sign.  He hurriedly pulled on the woman’s overcoat as he ran to the back door of the building.  Panting, he cracked the door open and peeked outside.  Seeing no birds, he opened the umbrella and, holding it close over his head, stepped out onto the loading dock.  He intended to try, disguised as a woman, to make it to his car, which was parked in the employees’ lot approximately 50 yards from the back door.

            He fought the urge to run so as to avoid drawing the birds’ attention, and he was more than half way to his car when he sensed a sudden and drastic atmospheric change.  Turning back to look, Merle watched in horrified amazement as the great and terrible grackle tornado moved with a roar over the top of the big-box store, blowing dust and debris everywhere as it came directly at him.  It moved with a speed he could not match, and in an instant, he found himself, like Lester before him, trapped in the eye of the storm.  But, unlike Lester, who had received his justice there on the ground, Merle discovered that the grackles had a different punishment planned for him.  The umbrella was jerked from his hands, and he felt his arms pulled up and out as they were tugged on by countless birds.  In a moment there were flapping grackles clinging to every square inch of his body, with more grackles on top of those, and more on top of those, until he felt his body lifting off the pavement.  He was utterly helpless as he was taken up into the air, and in seconds he found he was hundreds of feet above the tree tops.  And then they let him go.  And for the few seconds of his screaming freefall, he futilely flapped his arms in a comically bird-like fashion.  And after he came to his horrific end, they picked his broken and bloody body up in the same manner as before and dropped it from a thousand feet one more time, just for good measure.
            Then it was over.  The raging whirlwind of grackles quickly dissipated in less than a minute as the birds flew away in all directions.  And soon after they were gone, the skies flashed with lightning and crackled with thunder, and the long-threatened, but ultimately earth-cleansing, deluge of rain began to fall.


(Next week:  The Grackle Catcher concludes as Hank, struggling to stay alive, receives an unexpected visitor. )

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

            The strange feeling of urgency that had come over him kept Hank going longer than usual with his public service, and he hadn’t even noticed that almost four hours had passed since the sun had set.  He had never before caught and released so many grackles in one evening, and though he hadn’t kept a running tally, he figured it was more than 20 birds for sure.  The darkness was making his job even more treacherous than usual, and the parking lot was emptying rapidly, so he decided to wrap it up for the night.  As he struggled to fold-up his stepladder, he heard a zombie-like shuffling sound coming up behind him.  Quickly turning around, Hank was relieved to find himself face-to-face with Homeless Bob, a long-time acquaintance.  Homeless Bob, a lowly and disheveled old man with one tooth and a severe limp, who looked to be about 99 years old but who was probably, in reality, only pushing 60, was a harmless scrounge.  He scrounged the trashcans for aluminum cans and edible food.  He scrounged occasional free meals from kind-hearted neighborhood widows like “Hoolia”.  And, when he had to, he scrounged the parking lots asking people for their spare change.  Hank felt sorry for him and always gave Homeless Bob whatever he had in his pocket.  Seeing how bad off the poor man was never failed to make Hank thankful to God for how good he had it.  Once, about three years before, Hank, overcome by feelings of empathy, had even invited Homeless Bob to spend Christmas Eve night with him in his cramped pop-up tent trailer.  After they shared a meal of pizza pockets and popcorn, he let Homeless Bob sleep on the cushy foam mattress while he slept on the floor.  But when he woke up in the morning, Homeless Bob was gone.  Hank tracked him down later that day and asked him why he had left so soon, and Homeless Bob told him that he had to leave because he wasn’t used to sleeping in such luxurious digs.

            “Hey, Homeless Bob!” said Hank in as energetic a greeting as he could muster.  “How you doin’?”  But Homeless Bob didn’t answer him, and Hank saw that he looked sad and worried.  “What’s the matter?”  Homeless Bob’s face went from sad and worried to really, really, pathetically sad and worried, and his eyes were red and welling-up with tears.  Then the old man spoke.  “Hank!  Listen, Hank… I…,” and then he grabbed Hank by his bib-overall straps.  “I gotta tell you something!”  “What?” demanded Hank, alarmed at the desperate look in Homeless Bob’s eyes.  He had never seen the old man in such an agitated state before, and he again demanded to know what the matter was.

            “There’s… there’s a bird, Hank.  A bird that’s hurt.  Back behind the store,” stammered Homeless Bob.  “You need to go and help that bird, Hank!”  He let go of Hank’s overall straps, crumpled to the ground, and started weeping.  He then abruptly stood up and began shuffling away.  “Hey, wait a minute,” shouted Hank.  “Where you goin’?”  Homeless Bob said nothing else.  And he kept moving at a surprisingly fast pace until he was well out of sight.  What Homeless Bob had neglected to say, what he couldn’t bring himself to say, indeed, what he was ordered not to say, was that Merle and Lester had threatened to knock out his only remaining tooth if he didn’t give Hank the message about the bird.  And Homeless Bob was so ashamed of himself for having to do what he did that he shuffled himself out of the neighborhood that night and was never seen again.

            “Now that’s weird,” said Hank to himself.  He turned back and surveyed the almost-totally abandoned grocery store parking lot.  He was exhausted and hungry, and he wanted to go home.  But then he thought about the injured bird that Homeless Bob said was back behind the store.  He had never dealt with an injured grackle before, and he wasn’t sure what he would even do with it when he found it, but he knew he had no choice but to go back there and try to help it in some way.  If he didn’t, either Lester or a cat would find it for sure, and Hank didn’t want either of those things to happen.  So he picked-up his stepladder and made his way around the store to the poorly-lit and eerily-empty loading docks.  Figuring the bird would be cowering behind something in an attempt to protect itself, Hank began poking around the ubiquitous stacks of empty milk crates that towered ominously over him.  And as he did, he listened intently with his “good” ear for any sounds that might give away the bird's location.  But then he heard something that he didn’t expect to hear, something that sounded like a sad, ghostly, whining, sighing sound that would start, then stop, then start again.  It reminded Hank of flatulent gas escaping from a person who was desperately, but unsuccessfully, trying to hold it in… someone… like… Merle!  Hank’s head jerked up just as he heard Merle’s voice, along with the thunderous reverberations of the violent release of the rest of the pent-up fart, shouting “NOW!”, and then the entire stack of milk crates, in a cascading  avalanche of plastic cubes, came crashing down upon him.  And once again, Hank’s world faded to black.

            And though Merle and Lester thought no one had seen what they had done to Hank, there was, unbeknownst to them, one witness to their violent and cowardly assault.  A witness that was silently perched high above them on top of the one floodlight that bathed the area in a pale yellow gloom.  And this witness watched as Merle and Lester snuck back into the grocery store through the back door without checking on Hank’s welfare, without knowing or even caring if he was still alive.  And this witness, after taking in the entire scene, leapt off the light and flapped into the darkness.  And that very night, the B-U-T-T-S parking lot was quietly abandoned by the thousands of grackles that had invaded and overwhelmed it for the last two months.


(Next week:  The Grackle Catcher continues as Merle and Lester experience a rather unexpected (and horrible) consequence for what they did to Hank. )           

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

            Hank had no choice but to try to salvage what he could, which was very little, from the burned-out and water-soaked hulk of the pop-up tent trailer he had called home for the last five years so that he could start the rebuilding process, for there was nowhere else he could go.  To his dismay, he found that the flames and water had destroyed his foam mattress and, worse, his cherished, though heavily drool-stained, pillow on which his head had rested for the last 15 years (which could hardly even be called a pillow since it was so flat that he had to fold it over twice in order for his head to be slightly raised).  His less-than-extensive wardrobe of irregular jeans, cargo shorts, and old-favorite t-shirts was ruined, effectively leaving him with nothing more than what he was currently wearing.  His single pair of solid white, extra-wide Adidas tennies, his only pair of shoes, was melted to the floor, but Hank considered it a bit of luck that his classic and virtually indestructible Mexican huaraches, made of thick, braided leather, with soles cut from a rubber automobile tire, had been left outside.  His tiny, 13-inch black and white TV was a total loss, but that didn’t really matter because it had mysteriously stopped receiving a useful television signal about two years before.

            As was noted earlier, he had made a point of saving his microwave from the calamitous conflagration (since being able to eat was important to him), as well as his precious treasure box.  This small, intricately carved, walnut-stained box, which he had designed and built himself in high school shop class, contained everything that meant something to him, including (among a myriad of other small artifacts of his childhood) a fire agate he had found on a hike, some of his baby teeth the tooth fairy apparently didn’t want, a Lincoln penny from the year of his birth, a two-dollar bill, a curiously striped feather, an arrowhead he had dug-up from the dirt while playing cars and trucks on the side of his house, a wrinkled wallet-sized picture of his mother, and the intricately-folded, tear-stained, and yellowed-with-age note from Evangeline.  He had literally walked through fire to save this box, for there was no way he would have left it behind.  To him, it was the record of his life, the only real proof to himself of his existence on this planet.  He was heartened by the fact that it was safe, and for this reason, he believed he could go on.                       

            Because he had so few real friends, which was understandable since he was not on Facebook or anything, no one but “Hoolia” knew what had happened to him, and she offered what humble help she could.  She gave him a blue tarp and some rope so that he could improvise a crude shelter over his head.  She also gave him an ancient air mattress to sleep on.  Unfortunately, it had a slow, almost imperceptible leak so that it gradually deflated during the night, and Hank awoke each morning flat on his aching back on the cold, hard floor.  She also offered a box of her deceased husband’s clothes for him to wear until he could get to Goodwill to buy some newer, more up-to-date replacements.  Hank was a bit mystified when he opened the box, which consisted of two pairs of more-than-fifty-year-old, pin-striped, train-engineer-style bib overalls, four musty-smelling plaid long-sleeved shirts, and an obviously well-worn red union suit.  But he was plenty warm when he put them on, so he was grateful for the gift.  To show his appreciation to “Hoolia” for helping him rebuild his home and wardrobe, Hank spent the next two evenings after work catching her some extra stray cats from the vacant lots in the neighborhood.  “Hoolia” seemed genuinely touched by his efforts and, with teary eyes, accepted the cats saying, “Gracias..., gracias!”   She even gave Hank a hug.

            And now that he was set back up in relative comfort, Hank made a momentous decision.  Despite the fact he was threatened with bodily harm by Merle and Lester if he did so, he resolved to continue his efforts to relocate the thousands of grackles that still overran the B-U-T-T-S parking lot.  He could not imagine ending his efforts to do this public service, for this was his way to give back for all the wonderful things his country had done for him.  And he also did this for the grackles, too.  He was disappointed in them hanging around the local grocery stores and fast-food outlets, scrounging and fighting for dropped French fries, Cheetoes, and ice-cream cones, and terrorizing the shoppers as if they were overly-aggressive transients or hoboes.  It hurt him to think that such magnificent creatures would stoop so low, like sea gulls at the local landfill, as to behave in this unnatural manner.  And he shuddered to think what Lester, with Merle’s blessing, was doing to them every night with his pellet gun.  He had to convince the birds to leave, one way or another, even if the best he could do was help only one bird at a time.

            So that evening, Hank returned to the B-U-T-T-S parking lot with his step ladder, resolved to catch as many grackles as he could and order them to fly to the woodlands outside of the city where he believed they truly belonged.  As long as there were store customers around, he reasoned, he would be safe from any attack by Merle or Lester.  And he was right.  Lester, who was cruising the parking lot in his rather dirty and beat-up looking Segway while simultaneously picking his nose, spotted Hank right away.  He immediately scooted over to the store entrance and ran in to find Merle.  A few moments later, they both walked out together and watched Hank from behind the display of cheap charcoal grills.  And as they watched, they spoke to each other in low, evil-sounding tones that were interspersed with cackling laughs.  Together they formulated an ingenious plan that, if it worked, would ensure that Hank would get it good, and there would be no pesky witnesses around to complicate things for them.  All they had to do was wait for the sun to go down, and if Hank was still there, they would do it then.  “This is gonna be great!” snorted Merle.  He turned, spat something green and disgusting onto the wall, wiped his mouth on his shirt sleeve, and casually strolled back into the store.  Lester just grinned and patted his gun.

(Next week:  The Grackle Catcher continues as Merle and Lester put their evil plan into action.  But despite their careful preparations, there is a witness to their assault they did not expect. )