Spooky Padden

Swimming Lessons

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 13:32:39 -0400

I told Pop I wanted to learn to swim in the bath. He took me down to the river and shoved me in by the back of my head. My face scraped against the rocks and the water whipped me all around. The whole time his palm was dug into my skull so I wouldn’t get drifted off and I could feel his force from crouching down on the bank and I heard tiny pops in the back of my head.

He pulled me out by my hair. I was hacking up water and blood shooting out my nose. He laughed and said, “Boy, you can’t take the water! Just look at ya!” Dangling over the current, I looked down to my feet dripping cold and soaked.

The sniffly tears were warm on my face and I tried to keep crying so as not to freeze. Pop wiped the tears away though, trying to be nice and slung me over his shoulder for the walk back. He felt bad I think that he didn’t bring a towel. I wouldn’t have told him not ever, that I just was crying to keep warm. He’d have for sure made me walk back. He stopped carrying me when I was much smaller saying I got too big and he too old, so I think he felt strong. I wasn’t going to mix this one up for either of us.

It was October in the mountains. The trees had some leaves left and Pop said the branches were waving goodbye in the wind. We were far away enough from the river that I couldn’t hear it anymore, just his footsteps.

Back at the house was where my Mom and sister were and we both knew what was coming once Mom would see my face. Back at the house, there were teams. It was my sister and Pop against Mom and me. Whether it was for likewise food tastes, a knack for either melody or remembering words to a song, we were split.

I always wanted just to be right down the middle because no one can be right all the time. They’d laugh and say you’ve got to pick a side to get ahead, though, and being Kiernin and Pop was all very happy together, I felt bad for Mom. Truthfully still, I wanted to be on Pop’s team.

The breeze was picking up and Pop didn’t throw his flannel over me he said ‘cause he was cold and I was the one who wanted to swim. I told him I understood and he chuckled, for why I don’t know. Seemed to be of perfect sense to me. I tried getting some more tears to come without sniffling, but the cold made my nose run and he heard it ‘cause he shifted his hands on my back and didn’t say anything.

He apologized again, this time for ducking me under like that. Still I didn’t tell him why I cried and kept saying it’s okay that it’s fine. He didn’t shift his hands as he chuckled another one and said “Well, you’re on your Mom’s team for a reason I guess.”

We were silent the rest of the way. The breeze died down and the branches just were hanging, trying to keep from cracking.

A Little Joke

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 00:27:35 -0400

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.

Bat Story

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 01:17:00 -0500

First time a bat happened we’d just moved in. I chased it through the hallway all night with a hamper over my head and broom-swatted at everything in every direction. Mostly I hit vases and maybe the dog by accident once. Wife made me call animal control and we waited for an hour outside the front porch awning, which leaked during summer storms and it was a summer storm. The guy, once he did come, was in and out of our house within minutes and I wanted to tackle him off the steps and shove the bat down his throat.

My kid was too young to remember that one but he still tells the story like he was there, or like it was him with the hamper over his head.

Next bat had my wife shouting divorce threats while I chased after in my underwear and popped out from behind furniture to try and ambush the thing. I practiced with all sorts of different tools. Fishing nets meant to catch bite-sized minnows for bait, a bat always skimpers through. Kitchen sink spray hose just molds up old wall paper and a wrench, I cannot even call a bad idea, though I should. Action based on such a high level of frustration should not be judged. By the time I finally caught the thing she was crying into her knees in the corner of the kitchen floor, next to the dog’s bowls. Her summer dress soaked up in the slobber water that left marks on the wooden floors in his corner of the kitchen.

The third one, I hung back for and watched a long time, which I was able to do only because she was out. My son was a teenager at the time and didn’t talk to his parents but on this night he followed me around like when he was a toddler and asked a million questions. I gave him short replies or none at all while I slipper-foot stalked it through the house till we got to the living room with the ceiling fan. They’ll follow under a fan a long time if it’s going fast enough. So what you’ve got to do is with a beach towel, keep at the edge of the spinning and whip at the little guy just before he completes a revolution. It could take a bit because he’s faster than you, but you’ll get him. The more people you’ve got to surround the fan the better, but they’ve got to be cool enough to act once he’s hit the ground. It may just be a little fruit bat, but trying to catch at a thing which should not be caught can make your heart shakey. My son’s first time alone with a bat, he tripped once it was on the floor and came crashing down on top of it. Crippled the little thing.

The sound of the bat’s body hitting the floor is worse than the pain it’s going through. Now you’ve got to get him out before he gets up to fly away again. If you’re squeamish about touching bare bat, throw the towel over him and make sure you’ve got a firm grip. Take him out the front door and chest-push the towel into the air. He’ll fly out.

I never kill them because my son loves our bats. Says they give us character, which I don’t really understand. He has gotten very good at catching them and loves seeing them fly straight out the towel to blend in with the midnight air. Growing up, the boy was afraid of mostly everything most the time, but the bats always had him laughing big when they’d start knocking into things and I was fumbling around. Also, it seems like it’d be a mess to kill one inside the house.

This is the sixth or seventh bat of the summer though, and the first to find its way to the ceiling fan of our bedroom. While my wife still sleeps I silently knock it out of the air and take the squeaking towel outside. The night’s rain has stopped but still I get drizzled on from the porch awning when I step out the door. I have fixed it several times. I bring him to the street and slam the towel down to the concrete. The sound he makes is a painful one to hear and I know that this one is hurt. I am still in my slippers and I stomp the towel, sunset and beach-blue colored and I feel little crunches under my feet. The first stomp is not as forceful as the next one will be and so on. By the fourth or fifth, he has been dead for some time. I give him one more, hoping his friends will hear. I leave the towel in the street and turn to go inside, when I see my neighbor. She is the younger and prettier of the lesbian couple that just moved in across the street and she is staring at me, frozen half way into her car. I know the hair I have left on my head looks like electricity and my underwear is slipping from my belly. I know also that she is scared and angry and probably disgusted at what she’s seen. I will not be telling my son this story. I point to my house that I’ve lived in for twenty-one years and I say: Bats. We get them sometimes.

Intermediate non-fiction piece about a goose trying to kill me

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 11:44:00 -0400

I can always come up with great insults in my head when mentally preparing for a situation that will most likely not arise. When a conflict happens however, that actually calls for one of these insults, there is no preparation. It’s all instinct. I’ve got no instinct in this department.

I was riding my bike around Belmont lake yesterday. It is a lovely lake and a great bike ride. Half the ride, you’re in a trail surrounded by trees, and then when you come out you can ride right alongside the lake. I just merged onto the lakeside path when a Canadian goose who was in the water last-second jumped out and crossed over the lakeside path just as I was right in front of him. I braked hard. Also I turned to the right, toward the lake. I didn’t have to do that, but I’ve got the wrong instincts so that’s what I did. He hustled across the path and jerked his neck forward to get a little more momentum. As I passed him with my headphones in, I probably sounded like a deaf person when I shouted to him “You fucking dick!” Only, it came out “fckn dook!”

A completely vowel-less “fucking,” and a far too heavily voweled “dick.” What is a dook?

I turned around and there was an old man walking down an adjacent path who clearly saw the whole thing. I do not know if the look he was giving me was astonishment at the animal’s balls for hopping out like a boss and making me almost launch myself into the lake, or questioning what exactly it was I just mumble-yelled at that stupid goose.

First Words

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 21:34:00 -0400

It was Alan bet me I wouldn’t cut it out and nuke it. Drove the knife straight in the sack, and the blood when it hit was cold on the inside of my wrist. I heard a soppy flop and my left ball was sitting on the kitchen floor while my right was cowering inside me, though for a second I could have sworn it was swinging, like the swinging part of a grandfather clock. If Mom were there, she would have said I’m thinking too much and everything is ok. Actually, if Mom were there she would be in her high shriek asking what the hell have you done to yourself, and I would not have an answer. To see what would happen, I guess. I never did anything before, so how could I know?

I screamed. It took all the paper towels to soak up the blood, but I had a new slave to clean the microwave. Alan was supposed to just be slave for a year, but I upped the ante to life by betting it’d blow up like a marshmallow. First I made him reverse all the pictures on the fridge, so Gramma and Grampa would be facing frozen peas instead of my cooking nut.

It wasn’t the pain that made me cry, but the fact that there were Mickey Mouse ears on the handle of the knife. That, and once my parents told me my first word was microwave. So me saying that was probably years ago and now here’s the same microwave on high doing just what it does to my bacon Sunday mornings. But it smells like the opposite of bacon. They say it’s better for you, bacon in the microwave, but you still have to be careful or else it’ll dry up and go to burnt-black shit. Mom likes her food burnt black and shitty. If my ball was a food Mom wouldn’t like it because it just blew up like a piece of beef stew. I can’t tell if that makes me happy or sad.

I didn’t cry for that long, though. I didn’t have time. That’s what men say and that’s what I am now so I did. My parents were gonna be home soon so we used bleach, which I thought smelt like a Christmas tree compared to my ball. Alan thought it smelt worse, I think because it could kill you if you drink it. He wouldn’t try any, even though I bet him, and that kind of ticked me off, considering.

I told my parents I snagged and lost it hopping a fence. Said I squanked it like when Dad breaks his glasses. One time we were leaving the eyeglass shop where he just bought a new pair. He was holding my hand because I can’t really walk a straight line. Mom says I drag my feet but I don’t see how that makes sense. Either way, I kind of tripped my dad and he stumbled and the brand new wire frame glasses that made him look so smart fell on the ground and his next tripped-up step landed right on them. He didn’t cry but I wanted to. He rubbed my head and said it was fine even though I could tell he really did want to cry. I would not have cried if he yelled at me then or slapped me or threw me in the middle of the street, which is just where I wanted to be at that point in time.

So I didn’t cry in the ambulance because not only am I a man but also I did it to myself. I did hold onto my crotch the whole ride, even when the ambulance doctors asked to see it and said it’d be fine if I let go. I was not losing the other one. A kid at school said you only need one, and if you have both it means you’re gay. I didn’t want to take any chances. My parents in the ambulance didn’t even yell. Just stood over staring and not saying much, which I thought was surprising. As we pulled up to the hospital I saw my dad was crying. I told him to stop and that I’m sorry for lying but I did it because I needed to know. And he said know what and I said what happens when you do things. They started to roll me away and I shouted to my dad that also, now, I have a slave for life.

coming!

Thu, 26 May 2011 00:52:16 -0400

Soon I will post some stories that I write here and maybe you will read them.