A Little Joke
There are always in these neighborhoods, chickens and roosters and turkeys who flock from my boots and feather the rusty grassed lawns a dirty snow flurry in the August sun. They gobble tight-beaked and loud and I think how grossly convenient it must be to raise your own poultry. I have never bled an animal by the neck but it sounds like something I’d want to try.
In this backyard it is morning, and with still the wet grass and cold sun I am stopped in a stare-off with some gobble mouthed turkey. His wattle bounce-dangles from the soft part of his throat like an eel trying to choke itself around your arm tight for not to be made into striped bass bait, but that’s exactly what it is. He is gobbling at me like the bark happy watch dog who I gave a proper knock in the skull for after biting into my thigh last week.
The turkey starts to waddle-charge at me and so I grab out the good knife in my boot, wondering if this turkey has ever felt like a piece of bait. I am not sure if anyone of the family who will eat him is home to see their turkey defending the property where which he will be bled. They should be so lucky, having such a loyal dinner. Still, I know I cannot stab this turkey in the face even with how my supervisor likes my jokes and I get all the reads done when the fat old bellies do not because they are not want or able to slip through broken basement windows or just even hop a locked gate. I imagine still that she would not in her heart want to fire me and probably would have slapped her knees at me killing a turkey to read a gas meter.
I stick the good knife back in my one boot and kick the turkey over with my other so I can get my read and get out. I am halfway through a hopping stride over their high fence when there is a round little boy who by his face I can see speaks no English and is wearing nothing but an over-sized shirt that covers down to his knees. He is stopped staring at me halfway crouched up on the high fence and the turkey white hot and getting back up. I laugh my own hard lunged gobble at both of them as I hop down into the front yard. Later, he will tell his parents there was a devil fighting the turkey in the backyard and they will tell him to hush.
It’s not always animals I am fighting.
There are pleas, especially in these neighborhoods. Pleas to please not report them, that the check is coming this week, don’t turn the power off. Mostly I tell these people it’s My Job if it gets found out that I didn’t report a tampered meter. A meter turned upside down will make it go backward so there’s never a read on it. That’s the safest way. Also you can stick a jumper, any kind of a cable or metal that’ll take a heavy current. You won’t get billed so long as no one sees it, but I’ll see it. It’s not so much the cheating that gets me; it’s the way people think they’re getting one over on me. I wonder if watchdogs and turkeys try to get one over on each other, but then I remember that probably turkeys don’t think through things the same way we do, that turkeys or even those eels for bait, they’ll try to get one over on you, but for very different reasons than a person, I’ll bet.
Later I am in a better neighborhood. Its name is like having to do something with pines or greens. Here is where people yell at me, and not in the way that they in the chicken neighborhood yell because that’s just the way those people talk. In this neighborhood with the hills, you drive around thinking how pleasant they look, how nice it must be to live here, but never thinking about how it feels on a person’s back to slouch up and down steep streets all day. Never considering that maybe even once, your car’s emergency break might fail and roll crashing backward into an oak tree in front of the house with the woman who always forces sour lemonade on you and asks you to go into her attic to tell her dead husband to Please stop playing with his old trains at night and to not run the bath while she’s at Church Sunday mornings because he never listened to her while he was alive, why should he as a ghost? The next day over lemonade she is sure it was her dead husband who cut the brake cable, probably out of never forgiving her for having his brother 40 years ago. “Aren’t ghosts the ones who should be trying to make things up to us?” she’d ask.
Here is where they are still angry, four or five months having passed since some wind with a name I care not to remember left folks without power for a much longer time than the few days my supervisor told us to tell those folks. There is a man who doesn’t want to let me in. His meter in the basement of the old house he lives in, and he says my face is like a teenagers which is a thing lots of people say, but this man then tells me that my name tag for the gas company which is also the electric company is clearly a fake.
When the door slams in my face is where I give up, but when the man, vein headed and sideways stomping barefoot across the lawn to try and stop me from reading his neighbor’s meter blocks me at their fence door, this is where I want to reach into my boot. I get back into my car. With the gas company decal on the driver side door. From back on the lawn I hear that it’s so wrong, what I’m doing, but that I won’t fool him.
Later is where I’m pooping in a church; a dried up toilet in the basement. The clergywoman who lets me in knows my name and always offers cookies, which is I think why that I am always on this toilet down here without water. The working toilet is not close to the meter room. No one ever says a word to me on it and it is clean whenever I come. Sometimes the clergywoman follows me around and touches my shoulder at the joking I do on myself, feeling uncomfortable in a Church.
At the end of the day I finish off the jobs that need to be finished off, save that vein head with his old house on the hilly streets. That’s a job where one of the Bellies actually is better fit for. I find the open backdoors and the small broken basement windows to slip into, never letting left-over shards cut into me. I leave my injuries to the watch dogs who can think only one thing and I respect that.
Where I’m at now is not a neighborhood with hills or chickens. These are the houses with busted up boats, dead and sitting on rusted trailers. Their diesel engines lay out beside them and are bleeding pink. This is a house that a Belly had been assigned, which he passed over for the better part of some years. When my supervisor that morning asks him why this house on Princess Gates Drive doesn’t use electricity, the bellied out man says, no one’s home. My supervisor doesn’t fire him and passes the job onto me.
I don’t knock because I know what a house that doesn’t answer a knock looks like. Around back, the basement windows are sealed sturdy it looks like with fresh Gorilla Glue. I would have used painters tape and cardboard. As I’m standing in this yard with the oil drums and shrimp buckets, it almost being four o’ clock and me going over the probability of my supervisor hearing a compliant for a back window getting thrown out by a pair of metal encased running lights wire-dangling off the bow of an old skiff, I see the basement doors are wide open and reaching high, rusted and hot from the late sun.
I run down the steps to the boiler which is where the meters are in these houses. It is upside down and giving out a backwards read and has been for the better part of some years. I right-side up it and with my clipboard am calculating the mark up for the charges and tampering fees when a grunkled out voice asks me, “What’s the fastest speed you can have sex at?” The knife is already out of my boot when I spin around to a bath robed tub of something huge with a wart on his head that looks like a small brain. His lazy eye is I’m not sure which one, maybe both, and he is crumpling potato chips into his mouth while watching a Cowboys and Indians movie on his antennaed TV.
I don’t answer. I’ve been fixed on some feather headed warrior trying to get at a gorgeous blonde saloon maid for the better part of these last ten seconds where I should definitely not be fixed on something like that when again, Two Brains asks what’s the fastest speed I can have sex at. I look at him and now I’ve found his good eye and I think I might like to try bleeding him from the neck when he answers for me: “68 miles per hour, because when you reach 69, you’ve got to turn around.”
He has temporarily stopped his munching and is hanging on for my reaction when I hear my good knife clink to the oily floor at my feet. The man tells me he Got Me, his voice a one-lunged hack of excitement and dread that sounds probably like no one’s laughed at his jokes in years. I suddenly am bellied over and knee slapping, hanging on for as long as I can because I’d rather have gotten one put over on me than get thrown under.
