Marcel Solves All My Problems

Virginia Blare didn’t come back to the Sleep Center for her analysis until the end of last week.  I didn’t know what took so long for her to come back, but it apparently involved having tubes down her throat and claw marks down her face, at least according to Rex.  Just before Rex left for the weekend and the two of us were watching her get checked in with Marcel, I pointed out to him that Virginia didn’t have any claw marks on her face.  Rex said that’s what proves their were claw marks, since the hospital wouldn’t let her come until her self-mutilation had healed.

About a half hour after Virginia was in the private room, Marcel came and found me.  He told me Virginia refused to even try to fall asleep unless I went into the room with her and stayed a while.  I told Marcel that Rex didn’t clean the bathrooms all day, so I was going to have to spend time on that.  Marcel told me that this took precedence, even after I told him that she believed in ghosts.  “I believe in ghosts,” Marcel told me.  He told me a story about how he spent some time on an oil rig, and how all the workers knew about the ghost that haunted the outer deck, a man who was once killed by an explosion.  “So one night I was on duty and looked up, and there was this man with burned clothing standing in front of me.  He told me I needed to get out of there, that there was going to be an explosion.  So I ran down to the sleeping quarters and woke some guys up, and told them there was going to be an explosion.  Once they figured out the ghost had told me, they realized nothing was going to happen.  Don’t get me wrong—they knew the ghost was real.  It just so happens that the ghost always cries wolf about explosions.  Apparently that’s what happens to you when you get blown up in an explosion that no one warned you about: your ghost just warns everyone in sight about explosions.  Eventually, he’ll be right.”  I told Marcel that maybe that’s what caused the explosion in the Gulf Coast—the ghost kept warning people every night, so they didn’t pay any attention when he warned them right before an actual explosion.  And Marcel said, “Maybe Cyrus.  After all, I saw him in the gulf.”  My god, it’s a good thing you’re so handsome, Marcel.

When I went into Virginia Blare’s private room she was lying on the bed with her eyes open.  She asked me to sit down and tell her about the ghosts that I see.  I told her ghosts aren’t real, but she said the reason she wanted me in the room with her was that I clearly see ghosts.  I said, “No offense, but you just came from a mental institution, and possibly just had some tubes removed.”  She laughed at that, but since she was in a track suit again, her laughter didn’t come off well.  It was like the kind of laugh a friend’s great-aunt would make when she was coming on to you.  She was convinced I saw ghosts, and I tried to convince her that ghosts aren’t something to see.  “You know why I can’t sleep?" she said.  "It’s not because I see ghosts.  It’s because I can’t see ghosts.  My husband used to come see me.  Now he doesn’t.  I told them at the hospital I can’t sleep, that I’m going crazy because I’m not seeing things.  Did you know when you don’t sleep you hallucinate?  So I stopped seeing ghosts and started hallucinating.”  I told her I once had a friend named Hank who couldn’t sleep, and he died.  And maybe she’d die and then she could find out once and for all if there were ghosts.  Though I suppose if there aren’t ghosts she’ll never know because then she’s dead and gone.  So even if I dug her up and shouted into her rotting bones, “See? I was right!” she’ll never get proved wrong.  That's just the way things go sometimes.

Virginia Blare said that I probably lived in an old house that once belonged to someone else in the family.  She said it was probably that relative that I was seeing all the time.  She was really insistent on this, and I told her that I lived in my mother’s old house.  “You’re so unhappy,” she said, “I bet she was mean to you.”

Once, in high school, I was invited to a party by some of the popular kids.  Boyce and Sammy weren’t invited, and they told me to watch out, that maybe it was a trap, like the time when I brought my swim trunks to what turned out to be a hazardous material recycling day at the landfill.  I didn’t listen, so I went to the back room of this café where there was a meeting for a young communists group.  Turns out there was no party except the Party.  I actually stayed for the meeting, and after about a half hour the whole philosophy started to make sense to me.  Maybe it was because people were willing to make eye contact with me, or didn’t exclude me from a circle made of folding chairs, but everything started to fit together.  Once I left the meeting and met up with Sammy and Boyce at a Dairy Queen, the whole communist idea fell apart.  But while I was there, it kind of made sense.  I couldn’t help it.  And even though I don’t believe in ghosts, when Virginia Blare told me that, I felt like I was in that meeting with friendly communists again.

Virginia told me that I “shined” like there was a mean ghost around me, and if I couldn’t see it, it sure could see me.  I told her maybe I wasn’t unhappy because there was a mean ghost, but because a nice ghost wouldn’t visit me instead.  That I was unhappy because this was a world where there was more motivation for mean ghosts to bother me than kind ghosts to console me.  She thought about that for a second, but then got really mad and said, “Who are you, Jesus H. Christ?  I told you.  It’s a mean ghost.  Now hold still so I can sleep.”

Virginia Blare said having me in the room was the next best thing to her husband visiting me.  She went right to sleep.  Marcel came in and told me thanks, and then gave me some advice.  He said for what it’s worth, maybe if my mother was haunting me I should just move.  And if I wanted a nice ghost, I should go where nice ghosts live.  I tried to explain to him that ghosts don’t exist, since now that Virginia Blare was asleep I remembered it was a silly thing to believe.

I had the rest of the weekend off, and I did a lot of sitting around the house being very quiet.  I’d be lying if I wasn’t listening for my mother on some level.  I tried to concentrate to see if I could hear her voice, and then started walking a certain direction with my eyes closed to see if she would lead me.  I forgot I left the basement door open and walked right down them, crumbling down the steps more than falling down them.  At the bottom of the steps, clutching my knee, I realized that if my mother were leading me, she would have led me down steps with my eyes closed, so the entire test was inconclusive.  Still, I couldn’t help staying very quiet.  And I tried to hear so many voices, but in the end all I could hear were bird songs, and those were always going around my head.

At first I was angry I had paid attention to what Virginia Blare had said.  Then I got more calm about it all.  After all—no one could prove ghosts didn’t exist.  Rachel used to say that she knows her mother loves her, but she couldn’t prove it.  That example was lost on me, but it made me think that maybe it was the same kind of thing with ghosts.  Then on Sunday night I got a phone call from Rex.  Feeling vulnerable, I nearly confessed to Rex everything that happened to me that weekend.  I began with, “Rex, I know we’ve had differences, but I want to say—”  But he said, “Shut up, stupid, and let me talk.”  Then he told me that Virginia Blare had hanged herself with bed sheets in her hospital room that afternoon.  Then he said, "Burn!" but I wasn't sure what he was referring to.  Did he know I wavered in my beliefs because of her?  Or was he making a theological claim that Virginia was now in a supernatural furnace with Hitler and Sisyphus?  Or did he simply put his hand on something hot?  Hard to say, because he hung up right after.



When I told Sammy and Boyce all this they both pointed out that Virginia Blare’s suicide and the truthfulness of her story about a ghost are unrelated to each other.  Maybe.  But I bet if she had given me financial advice instead of talking about the supernatural, they wouldn’t want me to make any investments for a while.

But then I thought about what Marcel had said.  And even though I don’t believe in ghosts, I’m pretty sure he solved all my problems.  And I said as much to Sammy and Boyce—that everything was fixed—that I wasn't going to have to worry about being left behind anymore.

Questions to Ask

Sammy reported to us that two days ago an attractive woman came into Arby’s and ordered a roast beef sandwich.  When he gave her the receipt she flipped it over, then asked why she doesn’t get any great quotes from that great author.  “Charles Brockden Brown?” Sammy asked, and she said yes, that’s it.  Sammy explained he stopped doing that since the Year of CBdB was an utter flop, with no one really caring anymore who he is.  The woman leaned across the counter and said she’d like to care, and to care really badly.  Sammy got excited and she should start reading Wieland, but the woman said she’d rather start with him, then pointed at Sammy himself.  “You realize I’m not Charles Brockden Brown, right?”  And the way she said, “I don’t care about him, just you,” made everything clear to him.  It was four in the afternoon, so there weren’t any customers in line, which allowed Sammy to lean forward and say, “Anyone too good for Charles Brockden Brown is too good for me, too.”  She told him that she’d already been paid, and Sammy said he had as well, tapped the cash register, and told her to have a nice day.

Boyce said that yesterday he got a call from his realtor, Bruce Barenburg, who was very angry that a second realtor, our old high school classmate Keller Bigsby, was going to start showing the house.  Boyce told him he had no idea what he was talking about.  Bruce said that Keller told him the reason that Boyce was switching realtors is because Bruce is a lonely liar who makes up stories about drifters in closets.  Boyce told him not to worry about it, that everything was a mix-up, and to keep sending prospective buyers to the house.

These stories were told while we grilled hot dogs at Boyce’s place.  I did my best to act shocked, but both Sammy and Boyce told me I couldn’t do things like that anymore.  Sammy said he hadn’t decided if he was leaving or not—though he did admit that if our town had a fair supply of literary prostitutes interested in Colonial Gothic writers he could probably make the decision right now.  Boyce just said he was only doing this because he had to, and that I shouldn’t make it any worse than it has to be.

I tried to change the subject by bringing up Virginia Blare at the Sleep Center, but once they found out that I didn’t ask her about her supposed ghost they were even more disappointed.  Hiring escorts coached into a fraudulent interest in dead writers and impersonating rival realtors over the phone did not elicit the same confusion and disgust as did my lack of curiosity about Virginia Blare’s ghost.

Last night I found out, however, that I would get another chance to be curious.  When I went to work last night Marcel was leaving, and told me the results of Virginia Blare’s tests.  Apparently, she never went to sleep.  The entire night.  She stared up at the ceiling the entire time, and every time an attendant came in to tell her that this wasn’t going to work unless she at least tried to sleep, she said, “I can’t go sleep alone.  That’s why I’m here.  Funny, right?”

I’ll try to make things up to Sammy and Boyce by getting some information from Virginia Blare tonight, since Marcel said she’s coming for another analysis.  In order to prepare, I have come up with several questions for her about her ghost:

1.    Does it walk on the ground?  If it does, does it seem to have to concentrate on its step?  To me, it seems like a ghost that walks on the ground is like a person walking on water.  As soon as that ghost puts its weight down it should sink.  I would guess ghosts are always trying to take a step on a creaky staircase and ending in some Indonesian village. 
2.    If the ghost is someone you knew, at what age does it appear?  The age that the person died?  If Sammy had murdered the prostitute I got him, and she wanted to haunt him, could she come back as herself at just twelve years old?  That way when she appeared to him and said, “You were my lover,” not only would Sammy be scared, but everyone else in the room would think he was a pervert.
3.    Does your ghost seem to be at all interested in confusing you rather than haunting you?   For instance, if I were a ghost, I would clearly come back as a bird.  I would appear on the kitchen floor and tell the living that birds can’t fly in the afterlife, mainly because the only things that fly after death are people who refused to recycle because it’s for nerds.  When they said, “Huh?  Really?” I’d tip their fridge over with my beak and scream, “Suckers!” then fly away. 
4.    Does the ghost have any power to travel backward in time?  If so, why you right now?  No offense, but if you could pull John Wilkes Booth’s pants down right before he shoots Lincoln, wouldn’t you do it?  Is it that you’re so special or that the ghost is so shortsighted?  Or is it that if ghosts can travel back in time, then Booth's own ghost would attempt to prevent it from pulling down his mortal self's pants?  Who would win in a fight between your ghost and the ghost of John Wilkes Booth?  How long into the fight before it got confused that if Booth's ghost is fighting it, maybe Lincoln's ghost could stop gazing at his monument for one damn minute and come help?
5.     Can the ghost still learn things when it’s dead?  If it didn’t know how it died, could you inform it (assuming it didn’t have an axe coming out of its head, in which case it could merely deduce the fact)?  If ghosts can learn, that would then mean ghosts could learn everything, and since they exist outside of time, they would appear to learn it instantaneously.  When you told the ghost, “My mother killed you,” it would say, “I know.”  Then you'd say, “She did it because of the inheritance,” but the ghost would say, “Duh.”  So you’d say, “Her husband helped her do it,” but then the ghost would get snobbish and say, “Did you know I can speak German now?”

Virginia Blare

By the time I got to the Sleep Center on Friday I had already been prepared for the evening by several text messages from Rex Tugwell.  Although they began very cryptically, they slowly made sense: a woman was coming for analysis that night who I would find fascinating.  Rex’s texts went like this:

--Freak!  Coming yr way and ur going to like it!

--Weirdos stick together.  Don’t get excited, she is older.  U like that?

--Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

--Read her file when you get in, unless ur illiterate.

When I got to the Sleep Center I found Rex before he went off-shift.  Since I wasn’t about to read her file due to my promise to Rachel, I told him to give me some details about the woman.  Rex told me that Virginia Blare was coming to the Sleep Center tonight, and according to her file—and he was very excited by this—she’s a regular at the local “nutbag joint.”  I had no idea what this meant.  Was Virginia Blare a prostitute or a line worker at an almond processing plant?  The fact is I still cannot rule out either possibility, but what Rex meant was that a psychiatric hospital recommended Virginia Blare to the Sleep Center.  Once Marcel entered the break room he was able to give me straightforward facts.  She is voluntarily imprisoned in a mental hospital.  When Marcel told me this Rex began an array of pantomimes of different suicide attempts, but Marcel said he didn’t know why she was in the hospital. 

We began to talk about any experiences we had with people from mental hospitals.  Rex said his uncle once ran a guy over with his semi, but no one was ever sure if he was drunk or suicidal.  I didn't even ask if Rex meant his uncle or the guy who got run over.  I told them I didn’t know anyone from a hospital like that, but my mother often told me that my father had escaped from one. 

Marcel told us about a guy he worked with on a fishing boat on the North Sea.  He had recently been released from a hospital and told Marcel and the guys on the ship that if there was something to find in the world, it was most likely to be in the bottom of a cold ocean.  No one ever knew how to take the guy, but Marcel said they sometimes stayed up together at night.  The guy would want to hear about Marcel’s adventures in the different ports of the world, but the stories he shared in return never made any sense, and often contradicted each other.  Rex and I asked Marcel what happened to that guy, and he said he wasn’t sure.  “He was only with us for one season, but a couple of the guys the following year said they saw him in an Alaskan town, buying supplies to go in-country for a year.  What I would give to know what happened to that guy.”  Lunatic or not, eaten by wolves or not, that guy is clearly awesome since he got Marcel to say, "What I would give to know what happened to that guy."  Maybe one day I'll wave goodbye to Marcel from a dinghy on Lake Erie, then, when he's not looking, hide in the weeds while the dinghy floats into the horizon.  After a month or so, I'd hide out in the bushes by Marcel's car so that when he walks a beautiful woman out for a date, he'd stop everything to say, "What I would give to know what happened to Cyrus, one of my best friends.  You would have loved him."  Whether I remain content or jump out of the bushes and say, "Wings, everyone?  I'm buying!" is undecided.

Marcel said he had already down a preliminary interview with Virginia Blare, and she was so open about where she was currently residing that he had no worries about talking about her to me and Rex.  He said if I so much as pass her in the hallway I’ll hear her whole life.  I told him I generally didn’t care what other people had to say, especially someone from a mental hospital.  Marcel said people that are called crazy have the most freedom to talk, so they should be listened to.  But Rex said if you spend any time at a gun show you’ll know the crazy people just talk about crazy stuff, and the only reason you listen is because they have a rifle in their hands.

I didn’t meet Virginia Blare when she got to the Sleep Center, but I did when she threw up when they were putting a whole bunch of the nodes on her.  They paged me and I came, and Virginia Blare apologized.  I said, “They’re not going to electrocute you with those,” and one of the attendants told me to hush.  But Virginia Blare thought it was funny and laughed.  She said I must have known where she was coming from, and one of the attendants said, “Oh god, does he ever.”  Virginia Blare laughed at that, too.  The attendants left while I mopped, but Virginia Blare just watched me do it.  She asked if I knew why she was in the mental hospital. 

“I tell everyone.  I’m not ashamed.  You know why?”  I knew it would be good for The Bird Casino if she told me, but I just wanted to pick up the vomit and leave.  “What’s your name?  Cyrus?  You know what it is, Cyrus?  Do you want to guess?  Maybe if you guess you’ll see you can’t offend me.  Go ahead.”

I leaned on my mop and told her I had no idea why anyone would put themselves in a mental hospital, but it seemed like a good way to get a free bed.  So I asked if she was just lazy.  She said no, giggled, and laughed again.  I said suicide, but she said, “Lord no, I don’t ever want to die.  One more guess.”  So I guessed that birds talked to her, but no one believed her.  She said no, and my slight hopes for caring about Virginia Blare’s life disappeared as quickly as they came.

“You want to know, Cyrus?”  This, despite the fact that I was doing my best to show I didn’t care.  “A ghost, Cyrus.  I’m in the hospital because of a ghost.”  Then she looked at me like she could read my mind, which made no sense because her track suit whooshed a little bit, and I’ll be damned if anyone in a track suit can read my mind.  “That’s right.  A ghost.”  I told her that was great, slapped my vomit-filled mop into the water, and rolled the bucket out.  I know she was expecting more of a reaction, and it felt pretty great not to give it to her. 

Once Sammy and Rachel were talking about books, and they talked about one that had a ghost in it.  We all started talking about the believability of ghosts.  Sammy said he didn’t know if ghosts were real, but if he only had one choice, he’d wish for ghosts over love.  Rachel made him explain himself, and to be honest, I don’t know how Sammy replied.  Rachel generally shredded Sammy’s clever lines, which made Sammy love her even more.  “Man, am I the biggest bullshitter or what?” he’d say, like he won a prize.  Boyce didn’t think there were ghosts, but if there were, he’d appreciate a ghost who came back and said, “You know what, I don’t want to haunt you, but I’ll help you bale some hay because what better things do I have to do?”  Rachel thought that was brilliant. 

I said I didn’t believe in ghosts because I had no reason to believe in ghosts.  I had no reason to believe that anything happens to us after we die.  Rachel didn’t believe in ghosts either.  She believed in a whole bunch of stuff, like heaven and angels, but she said ghosts didn’t make any sense and she’d like to have a few words with anything in this universe that claimed to be a ghost.  So I told her I would ask one to come.  I told her I knew a lot of dead people, that a lot of people seem to die around me, and there were plenty to pick from.  I didn’t pick my mother because if she did come back, she’d just do weird stuff like make some exaggerated burping noise when I talked to Rachel.  So instead I called out to my father to come visit us, and guess what, my father never came.  Primarily because my father doesn’t exist anymore. 

Once, in the eighth grade when I told my teacher my father didn't exist anymore, she said he’s still alive in my memories.  Rachel called stuff like that “de-balled religion.”  Even when I was in the eighth grade though I knew that was silly talk, so I told my teacher that if my father was still alive in my memories, then he’s just going to die again when I finally get killed.  What's more, if my father lived in my memories, wouldn't that have been the case when he was still alive?  Which meant that the father in my memories was actually some kind of Frankenstein-like pseudo-father built out of childish perspectives and distorted recall who probably saw my real father as an enemy; at his death, no doubt the pseudo-father of my memories rejoiced at the destruction of his nemesis, leaving him free to erase all record of the existence of the actual man.  The teacher started to cry, and when another teacher came by and asked what had happened, I just said, “My father is dead.”  It took like thirty minutes to get everything straightened out, and by the end of it I think everyone just wanted me to go away.

Which is what I wanted in the first place, and which is exactly what I did with Virginia Blare.

More News

Sammy came over to the house yesterday and asked me how I was dealing with the fact that Boyce would be leaving soon.  I told him one of the most upsetting parts about all of this is that we will be separated because of money.  It is a generic, faceless reason for the separation of loved ones.  It lacks the gentle denouement of death by old age, and the sublime spontaneity of accidentally being shot in a bowling alley brawl.  If a plague forced us into separate quarantine wardens, we could at least find solace in the fact that we were involved with an event spectacularly unique.  Or perhaps we could be separated because Boyce was placed in an Indonesian prison, and Sammy and I had to bust him out.  It would have to be a long separation, the kind that would make others in Boyce’s prison say to him, “They aren’t coming, man,” that way when we finally pulled part of the prison wall away with a chain from a pick up truck, Boyce could squint in the tropical sun and say, “What took you so long?”  Then we’d laugh and I would scream, “Come on—we’re not out of this yet!”  But really we are, because I don’t fantasize about the escape after we get Boyce.  Generally we get him out of prison and then suddenly we’re having drinks and eating pizza rolls in the backyard.

Sammy told me he’d been having some dreams lately, and he wondered if I could interpret them.  He said it sheepishly, so I thought maybe it would be something hilarious.  I had no idea how terrifyingly non-hilarious it would be. He said that he’d had a recurring dream for the last few nights: “We're standing in a river holding a canoe.  Inside the canoe is Boyce and a bunch of bologna sandwiches.  We tell him, ‘You’re going to be fine,’ and he tells us the same.  Then you let Boyce’s canoe go and he begins to float away with the current.  We watch him float, but as we do the river begins to get much larger with a much faster current.  But you, Cyrus, you begin to grow enormous.  I started to shrink, though.  I scream I'm going to drown, and you say, ‘No, just take that owl out of here.’  I look up and this giant owl comes and picks me up out of the water.  You say, ‘This is the way it ends,’ and the owl takes me up into the clouds.”

I watched Sammy’s face as he narrated the dream.  I tried to hide my facial expressions to the whole thing, but when he finished I couldn’t help but blurt out, “You made that up.  You never dreamed that.”  He swore he did, and asked me what it could mean.  I told him I had no idea why he was making things up, but there was no way he dreamed it.  If he did dream it, based on the archetypes, his storytelling, and Sammy’s personality, it could only mean that he believed himself to be the life-giving messiah of a world populated by Jews and firefighters.

Sammy nodded his head a bit and said, “Right, okay.  I guess that’s it, then.  Thanks.”  I told him again he made the dream up, and he should tell me what the real dream was.  So finally he said, “Boyce came and told me you shot yourself.”  I stopped him to say he shouldn't be nervous about a literalist reading.  Often times death signifies something different, at times even life.  “Well you shot yourself, and I was traveling through traffic in a canopy bed on wheels.  Your ghost jumped on the bed and I asked you what it was like, death I mean.  You didn’t answer me, but you did grab me by the shoulders and say, ‘You’re worth three mabbits of diamonds.  Three mabbits!’”

I asked him if that’s all, and he said yes.  He told me he had no idea what a mabbit was, and he must have made it up.  I told him it didn’t matter, and then asked him if he had made up his mind or not.  Sammy knew I already understood everything, so he said that since Boyce was leaving, nothing was going to be the same.  That if either of the two of us were leaving, we would be eaten up by the idea that the other two were still together.  I told him that’s not true, but he kept going and gave me the details: the Tax Day promotion had finally caught on with some of the corporate bigwigs at Arby’s.  There were a few regional manager jobs out west, and any of them were his if he wanted them.  “I’ve lived here my whole life, Cyrus.”  Me too.

On his way out he said it wasn’t for sure yet, that he was asking for time to decide.  He told me that if things were too hard on me, that I should just come with him.  I said maybe, but we both knew I wouldn’t.  Rachel would always be here, even now.

Once, when Rachel was going through some of my father’s old photo albums, she got really excited.  She pointed at a picture of my father as a young man.  My uncle (my mother’s brother) was with him, along with a couple other people I didn’t recognize.  They couldn’t have been older than sixteen, all sitting at a diner booth.  Rachel asked me if I knew what was so special about the picture.  I said that my uncle apparently was never offered a straw by the waitress, because there wasn’t one in his glass nor an extra one on the table.  "No," she said. “Your dad is smiling.”

That wasn't the only time I saw my father smile.  Once I saw him smile when we were at the grocery store and a cart full of groceries got away from a lady in the parking lot.  It rolled right out of the lot and into the road and a minivan came by and hit it.  Those groceries blew up into about ten thousand pieces, and I thought my father's heart would explode he laughed so hard.  I also one saw him smile when we saw a Cooper's Hawk steal a tennis ball in mid-air from a couple of little kids who were playing with it.  The Cooper's Hawk carried it about two hundred yards and then dropped it in the middle of a pond.  My father smiled for about three days over that one. 

#11: The One at Graduation

I don’t think I’ve ever had a fight with Sammy or Boyce.  I didn’t know if Boyce and I technically had a fight at the casino.  We were in a fight certainly, but we were on the same side.  Can you fight with someone while fighting with them against someone else, especially if that other person was a walking beaker of molten loser like Dr. Shades?  We didn't really talk much the morning after the casino, so I wasn’t sure.  That's why this morning I called Boyce up to make amends, and without saying any kind of introduction, I went straight into #11: the eleventh time I was punched in junior high and high school.  Even though Boyce knew all these stories, I knew he loved to hear them, especially from me. 

#11 came on the very last day it could: our high school graduation.  We were all in purple gowns, the color of our school, and lined up in a hallway just outside the auditorium where our seated families awaited our entrance.  I wasn't even sure why I was there since my father was dead and my mother had informed me that when I had kids one day, I’d understand why she'd rather stay home.  Maybe I wanted to have Boyce’s and Sammy’s parents see me walk across that stage.  Even that rationale was dubious, though.  Sammy’s mother didn’t trust me, and every time he had a lady friend, his mother was convinced I was trying to steal her from him.  If we were all over at the Clifton farm, and Sammy had to go to the bathroom, Sammy’s mother would come into the room so I wouldn’t try anything funny.  Sammy even tried to tell her I was gay just so she'd relax, and while she instantly believed him, she still didn't trust me around anyone her son was interested in.  Boyce’s parents didn’t dislike me, but despite the fact that I was best friends with their youngest son, I was never convinced they actually knew who I was.  When I’d see them I would say, “Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Lancaster,” and they’d look at me hesitantly, as though I just walked out of a crashed space rocket. 

With the name Wetherbee I was one of the last people in line, and standing near me was the valedictorian Josh Elliot who was preparing his speech.  He was part of another line who would enter after us regulars, and then be seated on the stage.  He was going over his notecards and those of us at the back of the line were watching him prepare.  I certainly didn’t envy him.  Every time I had to speak in public it was a disaster.  At my father’s funeral I just played a bunch of bird songs that I recorded, and that worked decently well.  After that, every time I had to speak in public I would recite a bunch of bird calls and songs to calm myself.  When I saw how nervous Josh was, I walked up to him and we chit chatted.  Excited that my attempts at small talk were going well, I told Josh about my strategy of calming myself with bird sounds.  He asked if that worked, and I told him it always worked to calm me down.  It never made the speech go well because I never actually knew what I was saying from one sentence to the next, but at least I was able to physically deliver the verbal nonsense thanks to the relaxation technique. 

I told Josh to think of a bird he knew, and concentrate on it really hard.  He said he didn’t know any birds, but I told him to think hard.  He said a robin, and I knew he was saying that just to say one.  That’s okay, though, because the American Robin is a gorgeous, lovely bird.  When my father would see an American Robin he would say, “Cyrus, did you see it?”  I would say no, and then he’d say, “Just like the rest of them,” and hold out his hand to blow on his palm like he was getting rid of a handful of dust. 

I repeated to Josh the call of the American Robin, and he got excited when he told me he could actually hear it.  It’s a bird call he’d heard his entire life, but only now did he know he had heard it.  I sang over and over again, “Cheer-up, cheer-a-lee…cheer-ee-o, whinny,” and Josh was so nervous and so desperate for help that he didn’t even notice the people giggling at us, including the one guy who screamed, “God, Cyrus, are you shitting your pants?”  I repeated the call again and told Josh to try it himself, and he did, and for a beginner, it wasn’t bad: “Cheer-up, cheer-a-lee…cheer-ee-o, whinny.”  I told him when he was on that stage to just think hard about that call and imagine an American Robin singing in his front lawn.  He shook my hand and said thanks. 

Our line was called out before Josh’s, and I waved good luck to him on my way through the doors.  I sat in my place near one of the aisles and impatiently waited through all the ceremonial stuff.  I was excited for Josh’s speech.  When it came his turn, I watched him approach the podium with a completely bloodless head and shaking hands.  I thought he might even faint he was so nervous.  He struggled in silence with his notecards for a second, then hemed and hawed a hello and how are you to the audience.  It was awful.  It went back to dead silence, and I had to help my new friend out.  So in that silence I put my hand to the side of my mouth and called out, “Cheer-up, cheer-a-lee…cheer-ee-o, whinny.”  The people sitting next to me acted like I just threw up into my gown, and there was some chuckling in the audience.  I didn’t care though.  I was a safety line to Josh.  I called out again: “Cheer-up, cheer-a-lee…cheer-ee-o, whinny.”  Josh squinted and stared out into the audience.  He started his speech, and my god, it was terrible.  Clichéd, stuttered, and delivered in a shaky voice, I was sure Josh would never get through it.  Sometimes he’d go quiet and I’d call out again, “Cheer-up, cheer-a-lee…cheer-ee-o, whinny.”  A guy sitting a couple people down from me told me to shut the hell up, but I leaned over and said, “No one can shut the American Robin up.”  Then I did it again.  I couldn’t tell if it was helping Josh or not because he was so terrible to begin with.  Sometimes he just looked upwards toward the lights for an amount of time that must have, at least temporarily, blinded him. I tried another American Robin call, but it was interrupted by a man in a suit who approached the end of my row, leaned over toward me, and said, “If you don’t let my son give his speech I’m going to take you outside.”  Then everyone around me broke into applause and Josh’s father marched back to his seat triumphant and proud.  I’m not even sure how Josh’s speech ended because I was so afraid of getting beat up by our valedictorian’s large, mustachioed father.

When I went across the stage to get my diploma a spattering of people booed.  There were a few applause to combat them, but it was just Sammy and Boyce doing their best.  After the ceremony when people were meeting up with their families, I walked around trying to find Sammy and Boyce.  That’s when I saw Josh approach me.  I extended my hand and said, “I hope it helped.”  I didn’t really get out the last word though because Josh punched me right in the stomach.  That’s the last time I ever saw our valedictorian.  Boyce and Sammy found me on the floor moaning, “Cheer-up, cheer-a-lee…cheer-ee-o, whinny” to myself.  They were the only ones in a large lobby full of graduates and parents to bother picking me up off the floor.  Everyone else just walked around me like I was the an epileptic piece of furniture.

As I recounted this final beating to Boyce, he laughed nearly non-stop.  He told me that during the ceremony, when he heard a bird call go out during Josh’s speech, he knew he was either going to have to fight someone or pick me up off the floor.  “My grandparents were there, so I’m glad I just had to pick you up off the floor.”  Then Boyce told me thanks for the story, but he needed to get off the phone so he could call Bruce Barenburg to begin a sale listing on his house. 

Dr. Shades

On our way out to the casino last night, Sammy took the opportunity to tell everyone in his path—waitresses at the diner, gas station attendant, drunk at the on-ramp asking for change, that we were, “On our way to the Indian reservation to gamble away our friend’s last paycheck as an employed man.”  The waitress looked at Boyce like he was on his way to a gas chamber.  The gas station attendant was horrified.  The drunk high-fived Sammy and asked if he could come along.  There was a spirit of brotherhood there, so when Sammy said, “Not a chance, man.  You stink,” the drunk just waved happily and shouted, “Brkghhhhszzz snake eyes mmmmmmphhhahh, yeah, all right!”  I’ve seen fights break out at neighborhood parks over which family reserved the gazebo first.  But tell a drunk man that you’re potentially burning money on a socially unacceptable activity, and you’ll see what real goodwill means.

When we got there I stationed myself at a craps table and explained to Boyce what our strategy was going to be.  We would need patience and some luck.  Boyce stopped me and said he’d called ahead and reserved a place at a different table.  This isn’t the Boyce I was used to.  When I looked at Sammy he had no reaction, which made me realize that he already knew what was going to happen, which also meant the two of them had consulted without me, which meant I wasn’t going to like what was going to happen.

We walked over to a room that had quasi-walls made out of fake shrubbery.  There were a few tables there and people were playing poker.  I just stared.  Boyce said, “You’re going to help,” and then walked over to one of the tables.  He patted the pocket that had an awful lot of cash, then pointed to the chair for me to sit down.  I shook my head.  “That’s against my rules,” I said.  But Boyce told me to stop messing around and come sit down.

I wasn’t going though.  I just shook my head.  Some of the people at Boyce’s table looked over at me and smiled.  One guy, wearing sunglasses to play poker like a wannabe douchebag, said, “You going to play or piddle your pants, amigo?”  I shook my head again, but instead of making fun of me Dr. Shades got real quiet.  Anyone who wears sunglasses to play poker is the gambling equivalent of a 13 year old girl singing into a hairbrush pretending she’s on American Idol, so this guy probably thought I was Rain Man.

Sammy was standing next to me when Boyce came over and asked me to play poker for him.  Boyce said he was terrible, Sammy was terrible (to which Sammy said, “Oh my, yes.  But I could take that guy,” and pointed over at Dr. Shades who looked even more nervous that we were having some super-autism conference and would soon take his money), and I used to be a very, very good poker player.  This part was true.  I used to be very good at poker, but then I made up new rules and wouldn’t gamble against other people.  It wasn’t that I always won, it’s just that it made me want to destroy other people, and most gambling tables were not full of toolboxes like Dr. Shades who rather than a conscience was just a collection of centipedes and splinters.  See?!  Even being around a poker table has made me hate my opponents.  (No.  Dr. Shades really was an unbelievable dork.  You should have seen this guy.  He wore a ball cap backward with a black, silk shirt.  The tone of everything he said was clearly based off any number of random, R-rated stand up comedians and AM radio hosts.)

Boyce made me look him in the eye.  He said he wouldn’t blame me if I lost.  I told him that didn’t worry me, and he said he knew that, but it needed to be said.  I told him about the rules, and he said, “I know those rules.  But they aren’t really yours.  They were Rachel’s.”  I started to say that just because she invented them doesn’t mean they’re not good rules, but Boyce said, “And she’s not here anymore.”  The dealer at the table said he wasn’t waiting, and Dr. Shades began to say something.  Sammy stepped forward though and pointed at Dr. Shades: “If you so much as breathe this direction I will murder your entire family.”  I had never heard Sammy say something like that before.  He always wants people to like him.  Besides, he’s like me in that if he did say something like that, he would be perpetually worried that someone like Dr. Shades would take the opportunity to murder his entire family—he is clearly capable—since a suspect has publicly been created.

I expected Sammy to be asked to leave.  I know based on personal experience that people, including dealers and security guards, cannot threaten you.  The dealer only said, “Gentlemen,” in a really non-committal way, and then waited.  Boyce apologized for saying anything harsh, but added, “These are the facts.  One: I don’t have a job anymore.  If I don’t make money fast, we have to put the house up.  That means we leave and go live with Charlotte’s parents.  Two: I can’t make money this way, but you can.  And three: I’m sorry, Cyrus, but Rachel’s not here anymore.”

The dealer said, “Gentlemen,” again, but this time it was clearly directed at the three of us.  Sammy stepped forward and said, “We’re trying to figure out the rules here.”  A couple guys at the table took that to mean the rules of poker, and told the dealer they could wait, speaking like salivating dogs.  Dr. Shades, however, must have thought that rules meant the way I was going to use autistic superpowers, because he wanted the dealer to go ahead and get started.

I told Boyce I couldn’t do it.  Boyce said please.  I said no, and started walking out of the room.  Boyce said, “She’s gone, you know.”  I didn’t turn around.  At least not then.  I did, however, when I heard Dr. Shades, newly energized because I was leaving to watch Wapner or something, say loudly, “Ohhh, she’s gone.  Bitch.  See you later!  Deal, amigo, time to rock and roll.”  There was this groan that followed and I saw that Boyce had gone apeshit.  He charged at Dr. Shades and put him in a headlock.  Other guys at the table tried to pull Dr. Shades away.  Sammy charged and leaped on top of the growing pile.  He didn’t even do anything.  He just kind of landed on everyone’s head, then rolled off to the side.  To his credit though, he got right back on again.  Even though what Boyce said was cruel, I came charging, too.  I put my shoulder down and rammed myself into the growing mass.  I pumped my legs like I was Bart Farv rushing for a touchdown.  Later Boyce told me I actually rammed him in the side, but he didn’t mind, because that made him fall and he was still clutching Dr. Shades’ neck.  Once he fell to the ground with him Boyce seemed more concerned at smashing the sunglasses into the carpet than actually hitting Dr. Shades.

Eventually security broke it all up.  Since no punches were actually thrown they didn’t call the police.  They did, however, ban us from the casino for life.  I watched Sammy when the floor supervisor told us that, because Sammy thinks banishment is the greatest punishment you can have.  I think the dealer must have told the supervisor that Dr. Shades was a real idiot, because he shaked our hands on the way out.

 It was a pretty quiet ride home.  Sammy had borrowed his brother’s car for the evening, and we tried to distract ourselves by going through his glove box or trash under the seats.  The only talking was Sammy’s occasional words.  He’d say, “I think I’ll get a car now.  It can be the group’s,” or, “Wasn’t that better than a card game anyway?”  Finally Boyce spoke up and said that he was putting his house on the market.  They didn’t have the money to wait for him to find a job with this economy.  They’d have to move south and live with Charlotte’s parents.  I felt like all those words really meant: “You could have helped if you wanted to, Cyrus.”  Not like that, though.

As we had earlier planned, we all stayed the night at Sammy’s apartment.  Right before we were going to sleep Boyce came over to me and said that after I left Rachel’s priest’s house, he told Boyce, “Cyrus can see her again if he wants.”  I said I didn’t go for that religious stuff, and Boyce said he knew, but he thought I might like to hear it anyway.  Then things got quiet for a few minutes.  Then Sammy said, we all needed to admit that even if you've lost your job and are going to have to move out of state and away from your best friends, pummeling a dumbass on a casino floor was a pretty sweet way of spending an evening.

Covering Rex

While Boyce has found his work hours completely disappear, mine have temporarily increased.  Rex knows I’ll always cover for him when he wants to take time off, so he generally waits until the last minute to call—preferably late at night, impersonating a repo man, murderer, or as he did two nights ago, a ghost.  I asked him why a ghost would call me on the phone to haunt me.  He said it’s certainly possible that as a ghost, if he can pass through walls and dimensions, he could use a telephone.  I suppose, but why would you do that?  That’s like the army using an atomic bomb by asking the enemy to hold it, hoping that the bomb's weight would eventually make the enemy’s collective back go out.  Besides, I told him, even if ghosts could use the telephone, would they argue with me about their ability to use the phone, or just get straight to the haunting?  “Shut up and go to work for me, Virus,” Rex finally said.  I told him that on Friday night I’d be heading out to the casino with Sammy and Boyce, but he said he’d be back in time.

Apparently Rex is taking his son Rex up north to do some camping.  He told me he’d bring me back a sack full of bird legs, to which I simply sighed heavily into the phone.  I have known Rex for nearly ten years, and nearly every time he leaves for assorted trips he promises to bring back some evidence of ghastly behavior to class aves.  I don’t want him to ever do it, but I am frankly tired of wondering what would happen if he did.  Would my violent reaction be the way I finally fulfill my nightmare of being sent to prison?  Rex already hunts doves which is an abomination on several levels, not the least of which is the metaphorical value.  He doesn't bring that up much, however, because he doesn't do it to make me angry--he just likes shooting doves out of the sky.  I can only imagine the kinds of things his son is going to hide in his crawlspace as a middle-aged man.

As Rex was about to hang up the phone, I told him to be careful about bears.  He told me if he saw a bear he would shoot it in the face.  I asked him if he wanted to hear how I would escape from a bear attack, and he said no, and hung up the phone.  I’ll say it now, though.  If I ever come across a bear, and I’m with someone else (Everyone in the woods is with someone else.  Either because they are hiking with someone, or burying him), my plan is to attack my partner in the most maniacal, grand-mal-seizure way possible.  By my calculations, the bear’s instincts will identify me as  rabid, and not a hilarious way to spend five minutes.  This probably wouldn’t work if we accidentally came across a mother’s cub.  If that happens, I think I’ll turn to the person I’m with and kiss them really deeply.  At some level their mind will suddenly focus on the kiss.  Then I will quickly say that I have several cold sores.  All this will hopefully distract the person from the fact that their arms were just removed.  Even when you know you have only seconds to live and those will be spent in fear and physical agony, part of you will still think, “Cold sores?! Oh god.” 

On my way out the door today to cover Rex's shift, my neighbor stopped me and asked me when I was going to do something about the camaro.  I informed Reginald, who lived next door when the house was still my mother's, that the camaro doesn't belong to me, and I'd be happy to have someone take it away.  "Drive it away, then," he said, despite the fact that Reginald knows good and well the only thing under the hood of that car is a family of raccoons.  When I told him this, he completely ignored me.  "Just get rid of it.  Don't think I didn't see you and your friend ramming it with that van of his."  Reginald has some kind of sports car hidden in the garage behind his house, and I think it offends him to see the car just rot there.  No one knows where the car came from.  For the first two years it was there I expected it to be associated with a missing person.  Then I went through a phase where I was sure money was hidden somewhere inside it.  As of late, I've been using it when I can't sleep at night, and I need something to lie on top of to wait for any owls or whippoorwills.  Once, Rachel and a few of her girlfriends came over to Boyce's house in what turned out to be a disastrously awkward night.  To break up the discomfort, Rachel asked everyone a parlor question: if they were allowed one piece of information, anything at all, what would it be.  One of Rachel's friends said the cure to cancer, and Boyce said, "You've got to be kidding me," but then we found out her mom had just died of breast cancer.  So I spoke up really quick to help out Rachel and I said, "I want to know where that camaro in front of my house came from."  For a few minutes--if you ignored the young woman fighting back tears and scowling at Boyce--it looked like things would get fun as we imagined different possibilities for why the car was there.  All of them turned really dark though, and in some way all led back to a missing person who by now has long been presumed dead.  And then Boyce said, "I'm so sorry," and Rachel's friend just started crying again. 

Last Days of a Locksmith

It’s been a over a week since I went on a ride-along with what proved to be Boyce’s next-to-last locksmith call.  The one I went on was memorable to me, and necessitated another break from the blog (if Charlotte thought about her reputation more, she would say again to me, “It’s getting worse.”  But since she’s awesome, she says instead, “Would I be the only one to eat biscuits if I made them?”).  Boyce’s last call, however, proved memorable to him and stunning to the rest of us, so maybe I should start there. 

It was something of a routine call.  New homeowners needed to change the locks, so Boyce got the call.  And like Boyce says every time he gets that type of call, he told this happy couple, “It would be cheaper to buy and install new locks.”  The couple didn’t care, though, and told him to go ahead with the job.  While Boyce was changing the locks, he watched the couple talk to each other.  The way the wife sometimes used her hands reminded him of something, and Boyce started looking around the house.  It was his last day, so he thought what the hell, and asked the couple if he could see upstairs.  They didn’t care at all to show him.  Boyce was sure he could have asked them for three pairs of soiled underwear, their passports, and a shovel, and they would have asked, “May we bring the lime?”  When he looked into each of the rooms he said he started to smile really big, and told the couple if they answered the right way he’d finish their locks and walk away without charging them a dime.  He didn’t even bother saying how it was going to sound weird.  He just said, “Tell me something that has come out of one of these closets.”  They told him a story about how a homeless man walked out of one of the closets, put a knife on the window sill, and told them, “My sister is deaf.”  Boyce didn’t ask them to explain anything more.  He told them he’d finish those locks in just a few minutes and then be on his way.

When Boyce told us that story, Sammy asked him what he would have done if that couple had said nothing has ever come out of those closets other than dust and cobwebs.  Would he have assumed he had the wrong couple, or even more hysterically pleasant to Sammy, would he lie to us about what they said?

That call was Boyce’s last, but the one before that was mine.  Boyce was sure that we were going to end up at Sammy’s parents’ farmhouse or Dr. Keegman’s office.  When he picked me up, however, he said he didn’t recognize the address at all.  Even when we pulled up to the house it didn’t seem familiar.  We had to walk through a bit of mud because of all the rain we had, and when Boyce got up to the front door and saw the busted lock, he looked back at me and asked me whose place this was.  I told him I didn’t know.  That’s when the door opened, though.  All three of us involved had different expressions on our faces.  Boyce looked angry, because he was sure he was going to jail for this.  He said, “Cyrus…?” But I didn’t answer because I was busy getting burned up by the smirk on the face of Rachel’s priest.

He came out to meet us on the porch and shook Boyce’s hand.  He told me it sure was pleasant that I should be on his doorstep, but I told him the only thing pleasant about any of this was that the mild flooding of his front yard due to rain would soon bring many songbirds to feed on the insects and worms.  Rachel’s priest told Boyce that this must be an odd case for him.  He pointed out that his lock had been completely disabled with minimal damage to the door.  “But would you look at this,” he said.  “Whoever it was didn’t come inside.”  He showed us there wasn’t a single muddy print in his house.  “They just wanted to take apart the lock.”  I pointed out that perhaps the thief took his shoes off before entering.  When Rachel’s priest asked me what kind of thief would do that, I told him a polite one.  “Nothing was taken,” he said.  But I replied that maybe the thief saw that everything inside sucked and figured he was better off robbing a homeless shelter.

I thought Boyce was going to abandon me right there on the porch.  I know he suspected me of this, but I shook my head, shrugged my shoulders, and gritted my teeth as best as I could to wordlessly convince him I had never been to this house.  Rachel’s priest invited us inside, and Boyce declined.  But then Rachel’s priest sort of hinted that maybe this was a police matter instead of a simple locksmith matter, and Boyce agreed that we would come in.  I didn’t know what to expect in a priest’s house.  I thought there would be a lot of furniture made out of crosses and apostles, but it looked pretty normal.  I would have been weirded out by the fact that there were kids toys strewn about, but Rachel told me a long time ago that she wasn’t Catholic, and that priests could marry in her Christian conference.  Not just marry, Rachel, destroy lives, too.

I think Boyce wanted to avoid it, but he couldn’t help noticing the record collection on the shelves.  He and Rachel’s priest talked for a few minutes about music, and after a few tries, Boyce finally got him to understand that he wanted a list of his favorite album covers, not albums.  Once they swapped lists, and Boyce described Led Zeppelin by ramming his fist into his open palm, Rachel’s priest invited us to sit down.  He told me he was happy to have us over, and that he still remembered Rachel talking about not just me, but Boyce and Sammy, too.  Probably while he was listening to his secret recordings of Rachel’s confessions, and she told him she was struggling with me having two best men. 

Once we sat, Rachel’s priest smiled at me for a moment, like the way my high school pyschology teacher would when he thought he was intepreting us based on our handwriting or the way we held our hand up in class.  (Nice try, Mr. Randall, official school weirdo.  You made the mistake of telling our class one of your dreams: you were wearing a football jersey made out of pineapple wedges and threw lava rocks at kids who were on your lawn.  Everyone else might have laughed at the absurdity of that, but at least one of us wasn’t shocked when you wound up six years later prohibited from being five hundred feet from schools and churches.)  Rachel’s priest asked me very slowly how long since Rachel’s been gone.  I told him, and he asked me if I blamed him for that.  “I do,” I said.  He said, “You probably blame God even more.  I wonder if you even find a way to blame yourself.”  I told him he had no idea.  Just no idea. 

I didn’t want to be there anymore and stood up to leave.   Boyce explained he still had to fix the lock.  I told him I would walk back by myself and he could pick me up on the way.  Rachel’s priest asked if there wasn’t anything I wanted to say.  He stared for a while.  Boyce nearly had his entire face in his hands.  So I said, “I miss her.”  I could have added that he would bring in a lot of Evening Grosbeaks with a couple feeders, but I decided to stick with the dramatic.

My exit destroyed that momentum, however, since I had to put my shoes on, which we had taken them off because of the mud.  I got a knot in one of the laces so I tried to just shove my foot into the shoe, but all I could do was push the back of the shoe down on the sole.  Boyce started telling me to just take his shoes instead, but I told him he couldn’t fit in my mine.  Man, I really got my ankle rolling back and forth trying to get into that shoe with the knot, but I couldn’t, so I just walked out with my heel on the back of it, limping like some peg leg sailor who lost his leg from cutting bread.

I tried to listen to the birds as I walked but it was hard.  Sometimes when I went with my father on one of his walks he would tell me to be quiet so he could hear the birds, even though they were extremely loud.  Since I had often just come from having spent a weekend with my mother, I just assumed he wanted me to shut up.  But maybe it was because he couldn’t hear the birds for all the noise in his head.

Eventually Boyce caught up to me in the van, and he wasn’t very happy.  I tried to get him to understand that I didn’t do anything to that guy’s house, and that it could have been a coincidence.  Or if he was determined to see a conspiracy, maybe Rachel's priest did it himself, undoubtedly right after he closed down his poisoned milk stand next to the elementary school. Boyce just kept saying I owed him big.  I told him that’s fine, knowing he meant at the casino.  When he dropped me off at my house he asked me if he could back the van into the camaro.  I told him it was the least I could do and he put the van in reverse and rammed it with the van’s fender, right where it was roped on due to Janice’s mailbox.  He got out and we both stared at the damage, which was actually minimal.  It is a shame that the emotional abyss which comes to a man when his family’s welfare is in jeopardy cannot be soothed by slamming a van into an abandoned car.  I told Boyce that I would need a week, and he said that’s fine, that he could use one, too.

Calls for Boyce

Sammy gave me a call yesterday afternoon that Boyce would probably be on his way to the Sleep Center, and he probably wasn’t going to be very happy.  I knew Boyce would be on his way to my work, but I had no idea why he wouldn’t be happy.  Sammy told me that when Boyce got to his “commercial lock repair” call that morning and found out it was the Arby’s that Sammy works at, he was none too pleased.  Sammy was waiting for him at the back door holding the dead bolt in his hand that he had dismantled an hour earlier and then threw at the side of the dumpster several times.  “Oh, sir, glad you’re here.  I think there’s something wrong with the lock,” and then Sammy let all the pieces fall out of his hand.  Ever the consummate professional, Boyce replaced the dead bolt on Arby’s back door, though all the while informing Sammy that one extra call wasn’t going to let him keep his job, and might get Sammy fired from his.

That same morning I had gone behind the Sleep Center and unscrewed the deadbolt.  I didn’t know what to do with it so I heaved it back into the forest where the nesting boxes are for the Eastern Screech Owls.  I called Boyce’s company and tried to play it casual, asking for, “Your best man.  Perhaps that excellent locksmith, Boil Limpderder.”  The secretary asked if I meant Boyce Lancaster.  I wasn’t sure how I should play it, so I said, “Hm, could be.  And yet I’m fairly certain his name is Boil Limpderder.”  The secretary said there was no one by that name at the company, nor any one on this planet by that name.  So I said, “That was my dead brother’s name!”, and hung up the phone.  I had to wait a few minutes before I called back.  Luckily someone else answered the phone and I asked for a Boyce Lancaster to come out to fix the Sleep Center’s lock.

When Boyce got to the Sleep Center he told me how stupid my plan was, for no other reason then if Rex Tugwell sees him, he could put two and two together.  Besides, he informed me that he didn’t have the size of dead bolt that would fit in the door.  That meant the two of us had to go into the forest and look for the dead bolt I heaved out there.  We never found it, and we had to run out to Home Depot really quick in order to buy a right-sized lock. 

While Boyce installed the dead bolt into the back door of the Sleep Center, he asked me if I’d like to go gambling with him at one of the Indian reservation casinos.  I understood what Boyce was hinting at and told him that Sammy and I both would contribute seed money.  I asked him if he was going to keep gambling one of his last paychecks a secret from Charlotte, but he said it was her idea.

Just as Boyce was finishing the lock Rex Tugwell came around the side.  He stared at what was happening, and then got a big, mischievous smile.  When he approached us, though, he shook Boyce’s hand and they talked for a couple minutes about drills and motorcycles.  When Rex left us he looked at me and said, “I’m going to shoot some extra doves for this one,” and I told him that’s fine.  This is Boyce we’re talking about.

When we all got together in the evening for dinner, we began to discuss what our dream jobs were.  We’ve had the discussion before, and Sammy’s answer changes every time.  Yesterday his dream job was to be one of those divers who goes into rivers and lakes looking for dead bodies or murder weapons.  He said there’s probably no pressure to actually find anything, “Because, my god, look at the size of that lake!”  Plus it’s dark under there and that could some lead to some really trippy experiences.  And if you do find the body or the weapon, all of your colleagues would be incredibly impressed.  You’d have some drinks while you watched the local news about how the cops caught the bad guy, and then you’d all raise your glass and give knowing looks about who really solved the case.

Boyce said he would be a hay farmer.  Boyce always chooses hay farmer.

I said I was perfectly content with my job, but I wish I could be a security guard somewhere.  Except the place I was securing would have to be dangerous enough to need three guards—a spot for Sammy and Boyce, of course—but not so dangerous that I’d actually have to do anything.  I’d just stand outside the door and sometimes people would stop by in their cars and say, “Do you know where Hartwell Street is?”  And I’d tell them and they’d say thank you, then I’d go home and pick the kids up in my arms, and Rachel would tell me dinner was almost ready.  Chicken breast, again?  My god, how about some variety? (In my fantasies I generally sew small seeds of discontent so that later during dinner, having sensed my reticence, Rachel will ask me what's wrong.  I then sigh and explain how it's nothing she did.  I tell her, "It's funny.  I never thought I'd take you for granted, but I think sometimes I do."  Then I look at her and it all comes back to me, how I was before her and how I was without her and how I am with her now on this endless tape loop of realized dreams, and I say the chicken is delicious, and I love her, and she pats my hand and gives our son a little piece of green bean on his high chair tray.)

Whenever this question of dream job came up with Rachel she always said she was perfectly content being a receptionist.  She said she wouldn’t want a job that would make her spend even two seconds in worry or thought.  “You know what a job is for?” she would say, “To make me enough money so I can do things that matter.”  Sometimes, if she said that around one of her girfriends who was in business or something, she would hear, “Don’t you want to do something you love?”  Rachel would say that’s something guidance counselors invented to make kids not kill themselves when they realized how many years of their lives would be spent working for people who weren't their family or friends.

Charlotte didn’t say what her dream job was, and it’s probably for the best since it might have made Boyce feel bad.  I know what it is, though.  She wants to write songs.  She doesn’t want to perform them, she just wants to write them.  One day when she’s long dead Boyce Jr. is going to tear open some floor board and find an entire evolution in music in old old shoebox.

After dinner we discussed going out to the casino this weekend.  Boyce is a terrible gambler, and I told him I'd do all the leg work for him.  The house always has the odds, but that doesn't mean the house always gets to win.  Boyce told me he'd pick me up in the morning for a ride-along.  I asked where we were going, and he said he wanted to ask me the same thing.

A Last Week

This coming week is Boyce’s last few days on the job, and he’s agreed to let me go with him for at least one of his calls.  Since I only work part time at the Sleep Center, and that often happens at night, I have plenty of time to do ride-alongs with Boyce.  Boyce said he might only have one or two calls the entire week, but I told him that he was bound to get some good business as a farewell.

I used to go with Boyce on ride-alongs a lot more than I have lately.  People began getting uncomfortable when a second locksmith, dressed without a uniform, would stand around and scope out the inside of the house.  Once I asked Rachel to go with me to deflect any weirdness my presence might cause with Boyce’s customers.  She asked me why anyone would want to do a ride-along with a locksmith, besides just to spend time with Boyce (Rachel used to say that even if I was a horrible person, she’d still like hanging out with me because of Sammy and Boyce.  Compare this to my mother who constantly dared Boyce and Sammy when they were teenagers to lie on the railroad tracks and let a train pass over them).  I explained to her that often times a ride-along with a locksmith was like getting to be the first witness to an epic disaster that you are under no obligation to clean up.  Think driving in a motorboat down the canals of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.  A lot of Boyce’s customers had locks broken due to domestic disturbances, and that meant the homes were mind-boggling.  Say what you will about my mother, but you never had a cockroach fall on you from a hole in the ceiling when you were in the house.  Sure, she might have called your father a piddling disaster with a backbone made from rabbit ghosts, and she may have scared all the guests the one time you had a birthday party by telling all the other eighth graders how she thought they were going to die, but she never let vermin take over the house.  Besides, if you go with Boyce on a ride-along and you go to a nice house, they might make you lemonade.  That is, unless they spend their time on the phone with their husband saying things like, “No, honey, I don’t think he’s a locksmith.  He’s just staring at our stuff.  No.  I wouldn’t call him scary, but there’s something not right about him.”

Rachel did go on one ride-along with Boyce.  She didn’t say much about it, but Boyce told me that when they first got to the house the woman was crying and talking to family on the phone about “finally leaving him.”  Boyce said, “By the time we left that woman had given Rachel lunch and they were smiling about cities they thought were beautiful, even if they hadn’t been there before.  She gave me lunch too, but I think only because she really wanted to give Rachel something.”  Certainly not the experience of my ride-alongs which generally ended with Boyce asking me to wait in the van.

I called Marcel yesterday to see if he could talk to some of the higher-ups at the Sleep Center to see if Boyce could get some hours doing janitorial work with me.  He told me he would do what he could.  I even called Rex Tugwell, too, because this is Boyce we’re talking about.  Rex was fairly civil on the phone and told me the only way he could give Boyce hours is if he took some from me.  I said that was fine.  Rex explained that he couldn’t really do that because Boyce would have to be hired by human resources, but he was really nice when he said it.  For the amount of times I have had people explain how much pleasure they would get in causing me both physical and emotional harm, I have never heard someone complain about Rachel, Boyce, and Sammy.

I’m certainly willing to give Boyce what limited hours I have.  I have very little need for money because a) I do not have a family, b) my house belonged to my mother, and is paid for, c) I have already purchased all bird-related paraphernalia I might need, and d) although it's never yet come to it, I could probably just make a living at casinos.  Plus, I don't need health insurance yet because I am relatively healthy, although Rachel would said she doubted that sometimes, and then she’d touch my arm.  Once I was so energized when she touched my arm that I picked up a chair in a room full of her friends.  I just held onto it because I didn’t know what to do with it.  I did the only thing I knew how to do in a crowd full of women and their husbands, which was to tell them something about birds: “The penguin has the strongest wing relative to its size.”  Then I put the chair down.  Then a couple of Rachel’s girlfriends laughed, which they always did once they were convinced Rachel was never going to be romantically interested in me.  The husbands would sometimes say something a bit mean, because they didn't ever know what to think of me.  Rachel would tell me, "So what?  They play golf and grow goatees and wait for their bellies to come in."  Then I'd tell her about how beautiful the European bee-eater is, and maybe some day I could see it.  That's the closest she would let me come to telling her that she was my soul mate.

When you see the European Bee-Eater though, you realize how close she let me get.
 

Some Days are Better than Others

A couple nights ago I asked Sammy and Boyce if they wanted to save a Northern Mockingbird.  There is generally a silence on the other end of the line when I ask these things, as though they’re both saying, “Another bird thing…okay.”  Boyce’s silence, however, went a little longer than usual and was accompanied with a sigh, though he agreed to pick up Sammy and I around 9 pm.  It’s not true that mockingbirds sing only at night, but dusk is around the time people really begin to notice their song, just as everything else is getting quiet.  Of course, we were all in Boyce’s van by the time I realized I had no idea where Janice lived.  I called Marcel, which as you can imagine was very exciting, but he didn’t know where she lived.  You know that Marcel is a really cool guy when you’re never entirely convinced he knows who anyone is who isn’t standing right next to him.  “Janice…” he said, like maybe I was bringing up a Janice from my fourth grade physical fitness award ceremony.  Even when he answered the phone and said, “Hey brother, what’s up,” I felt like I needed to say, “It’s Cyrus.  Cyrus Wetherbee.  From the Sleep Center.  I’ve been in your apartment.”  Sometimes I try to pretend like I don’t remember people’s names just so I can seem like I’m cool enough to forget those kinds of things, hiding under a nonchalant, “Oh, yeah, right—I’m just not good with names.”  It never works, though, and I am generally exposed as a cool-fraud.  Both Sammy and Boyce can tell you about #3, the third time I was hit in junior high or high school.  It revolves around an exposure of cool-fraud when I tried to pretend like I didn’t remember the name of Francine Bruhm, the popular-by-pity, wheelchair-bound diabetic girl.  When she asked me one day how I was, I awkwardly said, “Do we know each other?”,  as though we were in a bank line rather than sitting next to each other in English.  She said that we’ve known each other for quite a while, and I replied, “Oh yeah, the one with the wheelchair.”  She leaned forward in her wheelchair as best she could and slapped me across the face.  I don’t know why, but Sammy loves to hear that story every Fourth of July.

After Marcel said he didn’t know Janice’s address I called Rex Tugwell.  Rex begins most conversations with me by laughing, and I always half-expect him to lunge at me like some kind of rabid wolf.  Even on the phone.  When I said why I called, he asked me, “You gonna put salt in her garden?”  This confused me intensely and made me feel like a sexual deviant, so I told him I was going to steal a mockingbird by her bedroom, which confused Rex intensely and may have made him feel like a sexual deviant.  Apparently, Rex’s son, Rexford Tugwell VI, told his father that Janice’s son, Lucas, is a very unlikeable freshman in high school.  Janice’s home is constantly terrorized by hoodlums, whether it be egging, toilet papering, or pouring gasoline on their asphalt driveway and setting it on fire.  I told Rex all I wanted to do was snatch the bird, and he said, “You go get her, Typhus.”  Maybe part of the reason Rex is so mean to me is because he thinks everything I say is code for horrifying acts of perversion.

We drove to Janice’s house which wasn’t terribly far away from where Boyce lives.  It’s on the east side of town where it opens into farm country.  Boyce’s house is a small farmhouse on a few acres, and so was Janice’s: plenty of space for ne’er-do-wells to practice their art.  We parked Boyce’s van down the road a bit, and walked along the property line to the side of Janice’s house.  I wasn’t sure which bedroom window was hers, and since there were big maple trees on both sides, I chose the northern side first.  We sat against the house, which was already dark despite the fact that it wasn’t yet ten o’clock, and I told them my plan of catching the bird.  I explained that I would climb the tree first and see if there were signs of a nest.  Unless there were feathers or eggs I wouldn’t be sure whether a nest belonged to a Northern Mockingbird, but it was worth a try.  I had brought a butterfly net to catch the mockingbird.  Mockingbirds are notoriously unimpressed with people, and you can actually get very close to them without inducing fear.  In fact, the only fear will be yours as the mockingbird may attack you for intruding on its territory.  Therefore, while I distracted the mockingbird, Sammy or Boyce could catch it with the net.

I climbed the maple and looked around for a nest but couldn’t find one.  Northern Mockingbirds generally don’t make a nest more than ten feet off the ground, but I kept climbing just to see what I could find.  Lo and behold, I discovered a nest the right size, though with no feathers or eggs.  I called Sammy and Boyce to climb up and both joined me about twenty feet in the air.  They didn’t even ask how long we had to sit in the maple tree.  We each found a comfortable nook to lean into and talked.  We were almost even with the bedroom window, and while Boyce began to speak I looked in at the decorations on the wall.  Maybe if Boyce hadn’t talked about what he did I would have noticed that Janice wouldn’t have so many hearts and rock posters on her bedroom wall.

While sitting in the tree Boyce told us that he was getting laid off.  His hours as a locksmith had been reduced so low that the company couldn’t justify keeping him on staff any longer.  Add to that the family’s only transportation was through the van, which actually belonged to the locksmith company, and Boyce was feeling like he forgot to bring a rope with him.  Sammy patted Boyce on the arm and I told him that if it made him feel any better, we could go hide in the bushes and watch the mockingbird get shot with a pellet gun.  Boyce said he was glad he was in the tree with us, because ever since he told Charlotte it’s been tough to be around her.  “She doesn’t have much reaction to it because she thinks I’ll work it out, but that makes it even harder to work it out,” he said.

We both told Boyce that we’d help him out where we could, but sometimes a man just wants to say the world sucks, so that’s what we were letting him do.  At about that time we heard a voice down at the bottom of the maple tree.  Sammy whispered, “Can mockingbirds do that?”  Although the mockingbird can imitate the human voice, along with cell phones, alarm clocks, and barn animals, it cannot imitate the pubescent voice of a punk who shouts, “Dani!  Dani!  Open the window!  I’m here!”

We did our best to look through the branches, but all we could see was a teenage boy dressed in black standing underneath the bedroom window.  That’s when the bedroom window opened, and a blonde with black streaks in her hair leaned out.  Apparently, this was Dani, Janice’s daughter, and that wasn’t the right bedroom for catching a Northern Mockingbird.  We heard her whisper, “I’m coming!”  Dani climbed out the window and we realized she was going to use the tree we were in to get down.  The three of us scrambled to get down that tree, but there wasn't room, and since it was dark we had to reach out our feet to find good branches to step on.  I reached for the bird nest and grabbed it—just in case—and took it down with me.  I was climbing down first, followed by Boyce, then Sammy.  I hit the ground with a thud, but about that time we could hear the screams of Dani in the tree.  She nearly ran into Sammy on that branch as he waited for space after Boyce.  It probably didn’t help that Sammy held up his hands as though to say “Don’t scream!”, but that only exposed his missing fingers.  Dani kept screaming, and Sammy thought better of reasoning with her, so he just dangled from a branch and let himself fall.  The boyfriend was staring at all this happening in shock: first I came down holding a bird nest and butterfly net, then Boyce, then suddenly from nowhere Sammy fell all the way straight to the ground.  To give Sammy time to recover from his long fall I threw the bird’s nest in the boyfriend's face.  Boyce immediately burst into laughter when I did that, and when Sammy screamed, “Okay, run!” I thought Boyce was going to hyperventilate from joy.  We ran across their front yard as fast as we could and jumped into the van.  Boyce floored it out of there and it wasn’t long before we were just driving around country roads wondering how many months until Dani was pregnant with a daughter she would name Karma or Destiny. 

It was close to midnight and we asked Boyce if he wanted to go home or drive around some more so he could talk about his job.  He said he was going to lose this van in a couple days so we should keep driving, just to put some more miles on it before it’s gone.  I’m not sure who it was, but one of us proposed going back to Janice’s house to see if there was any aftermath.  We looked from the road but couldn’t see anything different.  I asked Boyce if there was anything we could do to make him feel better, and he said, like he’d been thinking about it for a while, “I’d like to rip that mailbox out of the ground.”  Sammy and I didn’t question it so we helped Boyce get a chain from out of the back of the van and wrap it around Janice's mailbox and then to Boyce’s fender.  When he put the van into gear he looked at both of us and said, “I needed this,” and then floored it.  The van jerked really hard.  Apparently, Janice’s mailbox has been destroyed so many times they put some concrete into the ground.  We still managed to tear it out, dragging some of the concrete, but it did nearly tear Boyce’s fender off.  We got out of  the van to inspect the damage and Boyce smiled at the fender that was going to scrape on the ground all the way home.  I unhooked the mailbox from the chain and dragged it into a little trench by the road.  I think Rachel wouldn’t mind tearing out Janice’s mailbox if it made Boyce feel better, but she would want me to return it.  And since that thing had concrete at the base, the best I could do was roll it into the trench.

Boyce drove us home and we didn’t tell him again that we’d help him out where we could.  He already knew that, and he deserved forgetting his problems for a moment to bask in the glory of tearing out the mailbox of a stranger whose daughter sneaks around with the biggest, pimply tool you’ll ever meet.

Monsieur Moriarty, Bird Expert

It’s rare when someone solicits my advice for something.  It occurred this morning, however, at the Sleep Center when Janice stopped me while I mopped one of the rooms.  She asked me how to get rid of a mockingbird that lived outside of her bedroom window.

Even though I was thrilled with the question, I asked Janice why she didn’t ask God to get rid of the mockingbird for her.  Janice is very religious, which I don’t mind.  Rachel always talked about God, too.  When bad things happened around, Rachel, though, she’d say, “Glory to God” and then shrug her shoulders.  When bad things happen around Janice, she says, “It’s not my fault,” even though both her God and I saw that tupperware of spaghetti blow up in the microwave.

Janice told me God had more important things to do than worry about her mockingbird, but I told her I doubted that, since he cared more about a mockingbird than most kids on this planet if I was judging by nutrition, and some times, even life spans.  I always like saying things like that to Janice.  I used to say the same things to Rachel but she’d tell me I was full of crap: “See, Cyrus, you believe in God.  It’s just a really stupid God you’ve picked up from really stupid people.”  Then she would offer me something in the room and explain it was better I believed [said object] was God.  Once when she said that she picked up a stress ball on the coffee table.  Then she looked at it a second and said that the stress ball really was what most people thought God was.  Whatever, Rachel.  Sometimes it was a lucky thing she was so pretty.

Janice must have been having a lot of trouble with that mockingbird because she said, “Oh Cyrus, one day you’ll see.”  Then she asked me again about the mockingbird.  She told me she tried hanging a strong magnet she bought at an outdoors store.  I asked her why she would do that and she had some convoluted explanation about magnetic fields and a bird’s sense of direction.  That was one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard.  I told her that she should try hanging a whole bunch of blueberries in the tree.  I told her this because the Northern Mockingbird loves blueberries.  Plus they are a very expensive fruit.

I couldn’t keep up the charade though, and told her the best thing she could do was to wait out the mockingbird.  It’s spring so he's probably nesting or still looking for a mate.  Her best chance was to hope he moved on.  She wasn’t going for that, so I told her she could buy a fake owl and put it in the tree, but there’s no way the mockingbird will be fooled by it.  The best thing she could do, even better than waiting for him to move on, is to fall in love with the mockingbird.  It’s actually a very intelligent, comedic bird prone to dive-bombing animals and chasing off larger birds it should, by all measure, be terrified by.

“Yeah well, we need our sleep.  I’ll just have my husband shoot it with a pellet gun,” Janice said.

“That’s a great solution, Janice.  I suppose that’s what you did when your kids were babies and they cried at night.”  She walked out of the room, though, mumbling under her breath that I was either a "madman monster" or "Monsieur Moriarty."  I feel like that bird had a better chance of survival if I had just never said a thing to Janice.  I should have stopped with the blueberries suggestion.

I think maybe I’ll see if Sammy and Boyce want to save a mockingbird.

What?!?

Are you aware there’s been an oil spill in the Gulf Coast?  I asked Sammy and Boyce why they didn’t bring it up.  Boyce said he didn’t know.  Sammy calls him an event-medievalist, because the only way Boyce allows himself to be informed of current events is either by his next door neighbor, a man four acres away who is obsessed with his lawn, or if armed men come riding on a horse demanding he join the king’s army.  Anything that doesn’t make his neighbor run four acres or cause his forced entry into an infantry unit, Boyce says isn’t worth knowing.  This means Boyce actually knows more about birds than he does American Idol and the stock market.  Once when he was on a locksmith call the homeowner had the tv on in the background.  The tv announced that celebrity Anna Nicole Smith’s baby’s father had received permanent custody, and Boyce threw his tools down on the carpet and screamed, “Damn it, now!”  He didn’t want to waste a single moment of his life on that piece of information.  The homeowner, however, brought him a ginger ale and told him to sit down for a bit, saying that it was all in the child’s best interest.  The ginger ale was apparently homemade, but Boyce said it wasn’t worth the cost.  Sammy said he knew about the oil spill but didn’t know how to break it to me with all that was happening with Antonio.  No argument, there.  Overload.

In the break room of the Sleep Center we watched a bit about the spill on tv, and I informed Rex Tugwell that those birds down there have never seen oil and may think it’s harmless or even nesting mortar, like spider webs and mud.  Rex said any bird dumb enough to take a beakful of crude deserves to have its stomach come out its backside.  That got a few people to laugh, but I asked Rex what he’d do with a pygostyle if I put it in front of him.  He said, "If that's a bird, I'd cook it on the grill and eat it."  The joke, however, is on Rex: the pygostyle is the ossified end part of a bird's spine.  People still laughed at what he said, though.  God, I hate him.

I’ve actually been to some of the Louisiana wetlands to do some bird watching.  I rented a car at the airport and asked the clerk the best place to see the "wild life."  He gave me directions to an over-populated, tourist-soaked beach.  I wandered around but all I could see were pathetic terns and gulls eating garbage and sitting in flocks on dock posts, undoubtedly wondering—like some momentarily contrite junkee weeping at the foot of his anemic daughter’s bed—why they are unable to resist popcorn and sand-covered Sun Chips.  On that beach I saw a couple kids heaving Alka-seltzer into the air for the terns and gulls to eat.  I watched them do it for a while and then informed them that what they were doing made no sense.  They were emphatic that Alka-seltzer makes birds explode.  I said, "First, a bird will never eat that.  Second, birds can release gas just like you.  And, you know Alka-seltzer is perfectly safe for people, right?  You're not throwing antifreeze up there."  It took five minutes but I eventually convinced them.  So instead of heaving Alka-seltzer tablets, they began throwing stones and shells they found.  I was so angry I spent nearly the rest of my trip gambling on a steamboat.  I won over four hundred dollars, and used that money to take a private wetland tour for exotic birds.  If I had a dollar for every time gambling saved a vacation gone haywire, I would have six or seven dollars.  But I would then gamble that, and get even more.

It’s a good thing my father isn’t around to see this spill.  He died only three weeks after the Exxon Valdez spill occurred in 1989.  He was very old and weak at that time, but I’m convinced that’s what finished him off.  All he did for three weeks was wander around the house calling out the Latin names of birds.  He’d say, “The Histrionicus histrionicus…the Phalacrocorax auritus.”  He was so sad he even called my mother.  I got on the other line because I had only known my mother and father to interact a few times.  He whispered into the phone, “Oh, Teresa.  They made the sea kill the sky.”  I was young and didn’t understand what he meant, and apparently neither did my mother, because she just burped loudly into the phone and hung up.

I told a lot of stories to Rachel about my mother and father, neither of whom she ever met.  I think it was that story though that finally made her say, “How were you even born, Cyrus?”  I told her, “That’s exactly what my mother used to say!”

My uncle finally came over for the last week of my father’s life.  My uncle was actually my mother’s eldest brother, but he and my father grew up together.  So he came over and drank with my father.  I think my father knew, whether it was because of the Valdez spill or not, that his time was up, because he let my uncle tell stories about traveling the country on a motorcycle, and my uncle would let my father tell stories about Ragnarok, the unstoppable apocalypse in Norse mythology.  Rachel never met my parents, but she did meet my uncle.  I warned her he would be very drunk, and he was, but after we spent the evening together she kissed him on the cheek and told my uncle he was a good man. 

Another Burial

I took the two owl pellets we found in the nesting box to the Lancaster house the next day.  I had told Boyce Jr. on the telephone that I’d let him dissect the pellets in order to pull out as many of Antonio’s bones as we could find.  Boyce Jr. was excited about the whole thing, and sometimes he’d point the tweezers and Xacto-knife in the air and tremble all over.  I hadn’t seen him this excited since Boyce bought him a sticker for his guitar case that read, “THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS.”  Boyce Jr. didn’t know what that means anymore than I did, but he knew the word “kills,” so he was thrilled. 

An owl pellet is a clump of hair, bone, plant matter, and other assorted debris that the owl can’t digest.  He has to vomit it in order to avoid a bowel obstruction.  Boyce Jr. was therefore, under my tutelage, separating small parts of several animals in order to get what there existed of Antonio.  To the right on a white piece of paper we assembled an Antonio skeleton and feather pile, and every time we got an easily recognizable part like an upper beak or part of the skull, Boyce Jr. made a kind of nutso laugh from deep in his sinuses. 

It made me think of disassembling owl pellets with my father when I was a little child.  I wouldn’t get to laugh like Boyce Jr. did, and to be fair, I never really wanted to.  My father had his thick glasses on and was huddled over the pellet.  He’d pull the bones out of the pellets and ask me to assemble the animals, whether it was a mouse, chipmunk, or bird.  Then I’d go to school and my kindergarten teacher would ask me what I did over the weekend.  I always said, “I played football,” because that’s what my father told me I should say.  Once, in the second grade, I heard some kids talking about whether their fathers could slam dunk a basketball or not.  I mistakenly thought one of them made eye contact with me in order to invite me into the conversation, so I blurted out that my father and I regularly disassembled the regurgitated materials of owls.  One of the kids took my shirt off and choked me with it.  Other than that, I always said, “I played football.”

While Boyce Jr. was trying to figure out some of the bone patterns from the pellet, Boyce asked me why I tied Antonio up.  I only had a matter of hours before I returned him and altered The Thunderbirds for the better.  “The options are either you didn’t want to see that group banning bird ownership, or you really wanted Antonio to die.  You didn’t have to give him back to that lady.  You could have tried harder to find him a home.” 

I told both Sammy and Boyce that I knew what was best for Antonio, and that he wanted to go.  There wasn’t any way better for him than those Eastern Screech Owls.  Charlotte waited for Sammy and Boyce to get distracted by smelling the pellet to say to me, “It’s getting worse.”  Maybe I would have got mad at her for saying that—I don’t know, I’ve never been mad at Charlotte—but she said right afterward, “I could use some Pizza Rolls,” and god, I could, too.  So I ignored what she had said and listened to Boyce Jr. cackle and shake a leg bone in the tweezers.

When Boyce Jr. was put to bed and I had eaten my fill of rolled pizza goodness, the three of us took Antonio’s remains out to Roger Malvin Country Club.  We buried him next to Hank’s tombstone and I pulled out of my bag some drinks and a book that Rachel had given me.  It’s called Bright Wings, and it’s a book of poems about birds with paintings by the bird-maestro himself, David Allen Sibley.  I gave the book to Sammy and told him to read one because he could do it better than me.  He tried to find a poem about a lovebird but there wasn’t one, so he did the next best thing and found one about an owl.  “Antonio was a sport.  He wouldn’t mind,” Sammy said.  Then he read “The Owl” by Edward Thomas:

Downhill I came, hungry, and yet not starved;
Cold, yet had heat within me that was proof
Against the North wind; tired, yet so that rest
Had seemed the sweetest thing under a roof.

Then at the inn I had food, fire, and rest,
Knowing how hungry, cold, and tired was I.
All of the night was quite barred out except
An owl’s cry, a most melancholy cry

Shaken out long and clear upon the hill,
No merry note, nor cause of merriment,
But one telling me plain what I escaped
And others could not, that night, as in I went.

And salted was my food, and my repose,
Salted and sobered, too, by the bird’s voice
Speaking for all who lay under the stars,
Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.

When Rachel got me that book I really only paid attention to the Sibley art, despite the fact that she wrote on the first page, "I know you're only going to look at the Sibley art, but poetry is people trying to sound like birds."  I've never heard a bird song sound remotely like a person saying big words in strange order, but it was a gift from Rachel so I didn't mind the inaccuracy. 

I couldn't concentrate to understand the poem but I did like the sound of Sammy reading it.  I raised my bottle and said, “That’s nicer than anything we read at my mother’s funeral,” and we drank.  My mother’s funeral was just my uncle and I in the middle of the night burying her ashes by the flagpole of a Ruby Tuesday’s as she requested.  She also requested me to read the following note when we finished: “Nothing but crabgrass going to grow on this patch.  Up your ass, Applebee’s.” My uncle and I were unsure if my mother was confused about which restaurant had wronged her, or if she simply wanted to defame another eatery after her death. Either way, the poem for Antonio was a lot nicer.