Birds and Bees

The talk-show lineup looked like a dud, and my options were growing slim.  There had to be something worth watching on at midnight.  I tried the ‘educational’ channels.  Maybe I’d catch that gem on the Romans’ use of concrete, or a survey of Canadian glaciers.  But no, tonight it was a choice between some geezer playing the bagpipes, pink-fannied simians, or Howard Hughes: Man of Mystery...  Oh, sugar, I thought.  What’s the use of dawdling?  I still had work to do (I often toiled late, so as not to preempt evenings with the wife), and there was no avoiding it.  Except briefly, for a tinkle-break.  And then maybe cocoa.  Boy, did that sound good.  A nice mug of hot chocolate with those little marshmallows floating on top—you had to have those, those were essential.  But did we have any left?  There was something squishy in the the candy drawer, behind the Blow Pops—

But first things first.  I was heading for the bathroom when I remembered a full moon, and changed direction for the terrace.  Our terrace was what everyone else called a deck, but I couldn’t abide that word.  It summoned up visions of some dork in overalls with a tool belt.  Too bourgeois, even for me.  So terrace it became in the  family parlance, and Astrid was forced to endure yet one more eccentricity in her artist husband.  (‘Artist,’ that is, in the looser sense of brayers of pop music, or those who think that animal scat belongs in a gallery.)  I’m a writer, meaning that I spend blocks of time filling in pages by quill or keyboard, even if precious little trades for cash.  (The scat-mongers score government grants.)  Anyhow, I exited the sliding glass door, and shuffled across the cool damp planks in my bare feet, marveling at the way the moonshine made neon abstracts of the aluminum furniture.  Down the steps and onto the grass (cooler, damper), I followed the juniper bushes into the shadow of the house.  Once there, I cozied up to the hedge, unzipped, and allowed my gaze to drift skyward.

And it was blissful, cathartic, a sensuous joy.  Standing tall on my own estate, the breeze caressing my manhood, and above me, vast and purple, nothing less than God’s own velvet painting.  Why, I could almost make out His signature.  And then—lo!  A shooting star!  The first I’d seen since childhood!  This was too much!  In the next instant, a mosquito tapped a nerve-center on my neck.  I slapped at it as I stumbled forward into the junipers, which, if you’re unfamiliar with them, bristle with millions of tiny barbs to make the smarter, four-legged animals keep their distance.  “Fudge!” I barked—or a word to that effect—then shot a fearful glance at the second floor window.  It was open to the summer air, and behind it lay my wife, hopefully still asleep.  She worked hard at her job as a real estate broker, and deserved a good night’s rest.  Besides which, it was her income that kept the ‘starving’ uncoupled from the ‘artist,’if you catch my drift.  I would soon turn that around with the royalties from my fictionalized account of Emmett Kelly, in which the hobo-clown was revealed to have been a protégé to Einstein, a commando in Vichy France, and inventor of the jockstrap.  But that was soon.  For now, I was a pillar of salt, waiting.  When the light didn’t come on, I breathed a sigh of relief.

My exultant mood having tanked, I was loping along sullenly (itching at both ends), when I tripped over something.  What the—there shouldn’t be anything here but lawn.  I reached down to check; it felt like a pile of dirt.  Flinching away from another vampire, I went inside for a flashlight, and came back out to look.  It was dirt, alright—a heap of it—where I sure as heck hadn’t left any.  But not regular dirt; it was firm and crunchy, like it had been moistened and baked in the sun.  There were lumps of it around my feet, and as I played the beam in wider arcs I found—another one!  There, not five feet away!  And it wasn’t just a pile, but a discernible shape: a cone, big as a dunce cap.  I stalked the yard in a wary crouch.  The mounds were everywhere: six, eight, ten—noxious warts in all directions.  Then I froze as an epiphany dawned: animals.  It was animals that had done this thing.  Invaded the sanctity of our hallowed half-acre.  Violating it, with their nasty little snouts and claws.  And this, I realized, glaring down at the earthen effrontery between my feet, was a…molehill!  But wait.  We’d had moles when I was a kid, and they only made those shallow ridges under the bird feeder that’d squash flat when you stepped on them, nothing like this.  This was…vandalism!

I felt the familiar signs approaching, but it was too late; I had entered The Red Fog.  My face grew hot as my blood pressure zoomed to the top of the gauge.  Then I was running, all thought of quiet abandoned.  Pounding up the steps and galloping over the deck—er, terrace—clomping through the sunroom/kitchen/hallway en route to the walk-in closet, clattering past heaps of umbrellas and luggage and Christmas ornaments for the one-and-only, terror-striking, Doomsday Weapon…

Target, dead ahead!  Enemy outpost at six o’clock!  Reinforced soil construction! READY, AIM—  Whacko!  Direct hit!  Obliterated in a cloud of dust!  A giggle escaped me as I swung again.  Forehand, backhand, each blow more devastating than the last.  Thud!  Blam!  Pow!  I was drunk with power and the thrill of battle.  I could have continued forever, adrenaline and testosterone sweeping me along like a sailboat in a hurricane: the Righteous Avenger, grimly reaping in the name of all that was decent and holy, for kids and Mom and apple pie—

Then night became day as the floodlights came on and I halted, transfixed, my Louisville Slugger raised high, peering through the haze at a long-haired, nightie-clad beauty.  “Jack?” she inquired from the terrace.  “Are you alright?”

My bloodlust softened like pasta on the boil.  “Oh—hi, honey.  Did I wake you?”

The beauty stiffened and crossed her arms.  “Wake me?  I thought the house was on fire the way you were crashing around down here!  What the heck are you doing?”

Knowing that her tone was entirely justified made it all the more irksome.  I squared my shoulders and gestured with the bat.  “Just look at it,” I said.  “What they’ve done.  All this damage.”  I was proud of my accomplishment.  Beasts had attacked the homestead, and I had defended it with my own two hands.

“Damage?  What damage?  What are you talking about?”  (Teacher addressing pupil, right before the knuckle-rap.)  I saw that I’d done my job too well: the cones were so thoroughly obliterated, you couldn’t even tell where they’d been. 

“But—there were these mounds all over the place!  Huge, ugly ones, honey!  You should’ve seen them!  They were…they were…”

She was turning away now and shaking her head.  “…ugly.”  A skeeter gave me a peck on the cheek, and I smacked myself viciously.  There seemed to be a horde of them.  And when Astrid glanced back before entering the house, the last thing she saw was her crazy husband, flailing away with a baseball bat, apparently at the empty night air.

I rolled over to embrace my wife, an image of her mounds front and center in my dawning consciousness, but she had long-since departed.  The productive half of our partnership was out producing, at the ungodly hour of—I checked the clock: nine-thirty.  After a languorous stretch, I hauled myself up to start the day.

The late-night writing had not gone well.  I was working on a story about a middle-school savant named Clio, who had determined that the same intellect which endeared her so to her teachers was resented by her classmates, who gave her the cold shoulder in response.  As a result, she had ‘dumbed herself down’ to fit in, a strategy which horrified her mother, who lived for the reflected glow of her offspring.  I set the piece at Clio’s thirteenth birthday party, where Mom had assembled not only a group of her daughter’s chums, but also the mayor, the school principal and a local reporter—all of whom had children in attendance.  A decent premise, I figured, which could veer in any number of riveting directions.

The problem was that Clio wouldn’t behave herself.  Every time I turned around she was picking her nose or hiking her skirt, or flipping off one of the dignitaries.  I cast down my Bic in disgust.  I didn’t want to pen this dreck; I wanted to write real stories about monsters and cowboys and private detectives—the sort of genre fare that made stuck-up editors hold their noses while they looked down them at you (no mean feat).  And I was good at it, too!  Why, hardly a month had passed since I’d scored Third Prize over at Fiction Funhouse for a gut-wrenching tale of murder and revenge, along with a ten-dollar check on a background of bunnies and ducklings.  I was planning to have it framed. 

A squeal of brakes evoked the usual excitement, and I hurried out to the mailbox.  Authors live for their correspondence: the craft magazines, the vanity publishers, the writers’ school scams—all offering nothing for something—and best of all, those eerie missives addressed to yourself, which you’d sent out previously along with submissions.  You really know your trap is clogged when you supply some ingrate with a self addressed, stamped envelope to send you a form rejection slip—the literary version of a Bronx cheer.  There was nothing of import today, though, but a couple of Astrid’s—er, our—utility bills, and as I was passing my pride-and-joy, a 1991, mint condition Town Car, I heard a plop, and glanced over to find its newly-waxed, burnt sienna hood anointed with a starburst of avian offal.  I peered up at the canopy of maple leaves just as a blue-veined dingus, or whatever it was, burst from the leaves in a flapping frenzy.

I shook a fistful of junk mail at it before spotting my bald and beetle-browed neighbor across the street, Igor Schnitzel, where he stood behind his lawn mower, gaping.  Feeling silly, I dropped the arm at once, trying to convert the motion into a kind of tortured wave.  He replied with an expression that could only be described as: Ugh.  Igor and I did not get along, and it was wholly my fault.  Soon after we’d moved into the house, I’d taken the initiative to go over there and introduce myself.  The huge man had extended a friendly hand as he gave me his name, and I had laughed in his face, thinking he’d made a joke.  Further mistaking his subsequent sour puss as an extension of the gag, I was fairly doubled over with hilarity when the shouting began.

“WHAT ARE YOU?” he roared.  “SOME KIND OF A SCHMUCK?  GET OFF MY PROPERTY!”  Then he was looking for something, which I very much feared might be the axe that was leaning against a tree.  I skedaddled, and that pretty much formed the template for our relationship.  Over time, I had managed to convince myself that Igor was not only the misshapen golem that he appeared to be, but quite possibly a dangerous criminal besides.  I fully expected to see him hauled away in handcuffs any day now.

Determined to reclaim positivity, I settled onto the terrace with a cup of coffee, a microwaved breakfast sandwich and the newspaper.  I decided that if I couldn’t make any headway on the story today, I’d file it in my Fragments Folder and outline something else.  I’d devote a solid two hours—well, one hour, anyway—to work before lunchtime.  You couldn’t force these things, any more than you could will yourself to be pregnant, or lucky at the track.  The important thing was to relax, to offer the spirit of inspiration a nice clean slate, a warm, receptive, phosphate-rich loam, from which it could send out its icky-white tendrils in all directions.  Or something like that.

Enjoying my resolve, I helped myself to a generous lungful of crisp, clean, morning air.  Though it was barely still morning, and a trifle muggy if the truth be told.  Still, it was grand to be sitting out here with nothing in view but the pleasing sight of our very own yard, and the lush green woods beyond it.  Once you came around back, you couldn’t see any other houses.  And the peace was profound; no yapping dogs, no road noise—

VRRRROOM!!

—though, through an arcane law of physics, Schnitzel’s lawn mower did manage to come through loud and clear.  I felt myself tensing and shook it off.  None of that, I thought.   Think positive.  Good karma, one with everything, all that hogwash.  Behold this perfect spread of lawn!  Our stately apple tree!  That opulent stand of—I reached around to scratch at a bite.  The lawn wasn’t perfect at all, I saw now, but marred by the remnants of those blasted cones.  And one or two of them actually seemed more prominent, as it they’d begun repairs—

I recoiled from a hovering yellowjacket and spilled coffee on my shirt.  I waved the paper at him, and he disappeared under the wicker table.  I waited expectantly—poised to swat him when he emerged—but he never did.  Soon another one arrived and went under at the same spot.  Hmmm…  Standing up, I removed my breakfast things, put a hand on either side of the table, tilted it slowly onto two legs, and—   

They came at me in a rush and I leapt back, dumping the table on its side.  Now I could see the softball-sized sphere on the bottom, like a wasp motel with a flashing VACANCY sign.  This time I didn’t feel the Fog approaching at all; it was just there, like a toothache.  “That’s it!” I shrieked.  “All you vermin, buzzing and pooping and fluttering around like you own the place!  Well, you listen to me!  This is MY house, not yours, and I’ve got—DOMINION!!  You wasps!” I appended, jerking a thumb over my shoulder, “Go over there and play tag with Igor!  Leave me alone!”

And the hornets—the dozen or so that were milling about the nest—gathered into a tight little knot like a squadron of fighter planes, shot past me over the railing, and were gone.  Just like that.  I stood there gawking for perhaps a minute before I noticed that the sound of the lawn mower had changed.  First it was sputtering, then it stopped.  Next came the most horrible noise I had ever heard in my life: it sounded like an animal caught in a trap, though heaven knew what species this could be.  I flew around front to the driveway.  From there I could see Schnitzel, bouncing from point to point on his lawn like a pinball.  Obscuring his head was an electron cloud of hornets.  He smashed into a tree and went down—then he was up again like a Jack-in-the Box and charging for the house.  When the door slammed behind him, it echoed like gunfire.

My next recollection is of sitting on the terrace steps, deep in puzzlement.  Or, up to my ankles, say—that’s about as deep as it gets with me.  Anyway, there I am, trying to make sense of what I’ve just witnessed.  Lets’ face it, we rationalize.  If the round pegs don’t fit the square holes, we keep on banging away till we drive those suckers home.  But this time, I couldn’t do it.  I knew what I’d seen, and that was that.  I’d ordered some bugs to assault my neighbor, and they’d done it.  As of course they should in a perfect world, my being their evolutionary better and all.  Not to mention squire and kahuna of all the land for as far as the eye could see.  Which, from my current vantage point, was about forty feet.

My attention narrowed to the pockmarked grass.  “Yo, moles,” I ventured.  “It’s your turn.  Staighten up this mess you’ve made, and be quick about it.  Chop, chop.  The master has spoken.”  Brown bodies appeared from a dozen holes at once, and I started violently, thumping my head against the newel post.  They went to work at a feverish pace, moving so quickly I could hardly follow them.  Only after a while was there enough change to see what they were about.  Cleaning up the mess is what, just as I’d wanted.  Tiny brown mammals, somewhere in size between a field mouse and a hamster, dashing hither and yon, pushing, pawing, scraping—doing moley stuff—and in their wake: nothing but level ground.  No piles, no clumps, no ridges—no grass, either, where the mounds had been, but you couldn’t expect miracles.  Why, they were even carting away leaves and twigs! 

When they’d finished, they commenced to form a hairy mob in the center of the yard, and I thought, oh boy, here it comes.  They’re massing for an attack!  “Uh, thanks, boys, you can go now,” I stammered as I scrabbled backwards up the boards, and before I’d drawn another breath, they were scampering off in all directions.

“Oh, no,” I muttered.  “No, no, no.  This is impossible.  This can’t be.”  A bird came sailing over the roof, and I fixed it with a finger.  “Hold it!” I yelled, and it sort of skidded to a stop and hovered there as best it could, frantically treading air.  I called out, “Dismissed,” and it zoomed away.

So what happened next?  Well, I went a little goofy with my new-found skill, I admit it: having the rabbits weed our flower garden and the squirrels shine my shoes.  I had a ‘coon riding deerback, a fox doing the foxtrot, and I even coaxed a black bear out of hiding for a display of brute force—moving that boulder that Astrid wanted centered between the yew bushes.  (I toyed with the concept of dispatching Smokey to Schnitzel’s place for some good-natured roughhousing, but managed to restrain myself.)  Around lunchtime, I prepared a smorgasbord for the gang by emptying the contents of every kitchen cabinet onto the lawn.  In the process I made an important discovery: wild animals will eat anything.  You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a turtle gumming a Ring Ding, a red-tailed hawk with a pickle, or a teary-eyed possum wrapped around a Bermuda onion.  The ants and termites seemed satisfied with the crumbs. 

When I heard Astrid’s Pathfinder trundle up the driveway, I had just enough time to shoo the menagerie off stage; it wouldn’t do to have my secret revealed until the moment was perfect.  I jogged on over and opened her door.  “Hi, honey,” I beamed.

She was frowning.  “Well don’t you look—soiled.  What on earth—”

“Oh, just doing some calisthenics,” I explained, pinwheeling my arms for emphasis.  “So, how was your day?”

She gave me an odd look.  “Frustrating.  The McHenry deal is dead in the water.  Now they’ve decided they want—what’s that smell?

“Just my manly musk, dear,” I winked.

“Smells more like bull—musk,” she said.  “Better check your sneakers.

You must have stepped in something.”  We started up the walk.  “How’s the epic coming?”

“It seems to be morphing into something unexpected.  A sort of a whimsical fantasy piece.  I’m going to need your help with it.”

“My help?” she asked incredulously.

I nodded.  “I need your input for the ending.”

“Well—O.K.  I’ll take a look.  So.  Are you ready for some culture?”  She had come home early for a visit to the new museum. 

“Sorry, sweetie, we’ll go another time.  I have a special treat lined up, and I won’t take no for an answer.”

She stopped short and turned to face me, a nascent smile forming.  “Oh, you do, do you?  And just what sort of treat is this, pray tell?”

“Something you’ll never forget,” I boasted confidently.  “We’re going to the zoo.” 

This story was first published in WordWrights magazine.