Backyard (5 page)

6

Sprinkling

G
eorge occasionally enjoyed the backyard for its value as a latrine.

For some time, he had been in the practice of urinating alfresco when the urge overtook him. In matters such as these, George felt the community standards of acceptable behavior didn't really apply. What was the harm? Going through the doorway, walking across the dining room, negotiating a hallway, and having to open another door seemed like a long way to go and a lot to do to perform such a simple act of nature.

The strip of woods, though farther away than the bathroom in terms of the usual measures of distance, had the advantage of
seeming
closer, and the thought of spattering his bodily wastes all over the underbrush held a particular fascination for him. If he happened to hit an unsuspecting rabbit or squirrel, then so much the better! In fact, once he got to his spot, he would unzip, unravel, then wait for a minute, still and quiet, in case one of the backyard's offending pests would come within range.

To Nan, it was utterly incongruous that someone could pay homage to the aesthetics of a place—a place he had been instrumental in creating!—then deface it in such a crude manner. And how weird! She would no more squat in their outdoors than she would in the middle of Chalmers Square in downtown St. Anthony during summer lunch hour. It was hard enough to imagine the members of the animal kingdom doing their business in sheer ignorance of what they might be befouling. She always tried to stop George before he committed such a desecration.

“It's the woods I'm going to, not the hosta, or the roses, or any of the arbors,” George said. “I'm technically out of the backyard. When I go to the bathroom
in
the bathroom, I'm not messing up the living room, am I?”

“It's still disgusting,” she said. “Our woods are the backdrop to our beautiful backyard setting. And now, when you do this, it's like squirting mustard on the
Mona Lisa
.” George pondered this a moment, not at all sure he caught the gist of the comparison, other than urine and mustard having a sort-of-close color connection, and wasn't there a ficus in the background of that masterpiece? Soon, Nan recognized the telltale signs of an impending pit stop. George bounced the balls of his feet on the cement patio floor, cast nervous glances from side to side, and fingered his zipper.

“No way,” she said firmly. “You can go straight to the bathroom, which is closer anyway. You're not an animal, George. What would someone think if they saw you?”

“Nobody will see me,” said George, rising from the chair, determined not to give in to Nan when control over his manly discharges was at stake. “I'm discreet. I make sure no one's walking by on the street. I walk a little ways in the woods so I can be screened from the backyard. It's perfectly private.”

“What if there are children back there in those woods? The neighborhood children have been known to play there, you know.”

“If there are, then I will return, and repair to the bathroom. Anyway, what's the harm in watching a responsible adult perform a natural function? Why should that be threatening to anyone?”

“Not threatening to
any
one. Threatening to you, who could be charged with exposing himself to small children.”

“We should live in France. I understand that in France, they're not so uptight about a simple matter of urinating. They do it wherever they need to without being squeamish about it. I've heard they have little kiosks in Paris, right on the sidewalks where you can just stop and relieve yourself.”

“When you live in France, you can urinate like Frenchmen do. When you're here, you need to pay heed to our uptight morality and sense of decorum.”

“Not now, if you don't mind. I've really got to go.”

“George . . .”

“No, I'm going to unload like a free man. I am a child of nature, doing things the natural way. I'm headed to the outdoor privy.” Off George strode, leaving Nan shaking her head in dismay and disgust.

“Animal!” she grunted after him.

George was never one, no matter what his free-spirit proclivities, to just cut loose and let 'er rip. He knew he was being a little too daring for the neighborhood and did whatever it took to make sure that when he pulled down his zipper and prepared for action, he would be the only witness to the endeavor.

He walked a good ten paces into the woods, making sure he was being at least partly shielded on all sides. There were no cars coming down Sumac that he could hear, no noises from next door, which wouldn't have been relevant anyway because the Grunions couldn't see him through their fence, and no sign of life in the woods apart from the rustlings of a few birds and squirrels. Down came his zipper and out came the instrument of his purpose. Soon, a line of deep yellow arced across three feet of forest clutter. The relief seemed so much better, so much more palpable, here in the woods. George sighed as the stream subsided into a few final drips he wagged off onto the leaves of a sapling immediately under him. Just as he felt one last, unexpected discharge coming up, and prepared for a final shake and a return to the confines of modern convention, he saw them: two young children, appearing like elves out of nowhere, and staring at him. The sudden apparition startled him into wetting his pants and his hands.

“Hi,” he said. They kept staring at him, frozen into a stonelike stillness. He could see that they were a boy and a girl, but not the neighbor kids, and not anyone he knew. Suddenly, their faces puckered and off they ran, screaming through the woods, in the opposite direction. Quickly, and with trembling hands, George resheathed, and fumbled with his zipper, then walked backward slowly toward the backyard, as if retreating from a dangerous animal he'd been warned never to turn and run from. Nan was waiting for him at the fence.

“What on earth was that screaming about?”

“Some kids saw me,” George whispered as if afraid anything spoken at a normal volume might he held against him as incriminating evidence. “They're not the Fletcher kids; they're kids from somewhere else. They saw me.”

“In the actual act?”

George nodded, then sighed.

“No big deal,” scoffed Nan, suddenly, it seemed, reconciled to George's free-spirited bathroom practices. “The Fletcher kids are at camp, I think. These are strangers. They will probably run home and not say anything at all. Or they might say they saw someone tee-teeing in the woods, and that will be that. They probably won't even tell their parents.”

 

They were sitting down at the table again, George having sworn without Nan's prompting to always use indoor plumbing in the future, when they saw the police cruiser approach on Sumac, disappear behind the barrier of their house, then reappear and slow down just short of where the strip of woods met the road and the Fletchers' driveway.

“Uh-oh,” said George. “Maybe I should go inside and hide somewhere.”

“You're going to stay right here,” Nan said. “It's probably nothing. They're probably just cruising the neighborhood on routine patrol. You don't know that they are
stopping
next door. But just in case we do receive a visit, you need to be out here to explain yourself. Otherwise, I'm left here to try to account for your absence.” The slow-moving cruiser was blocked by the woods now.

“You could pretend it was someone you didn't know,” pleaded George. “You could say your husband is out of town.”

“Then they'll just have those kids' words for what happened, and they'll be looking for a guy who exposed himself, and we'll be holding neighborhood watch meetings, and everyone will know the perpetrator is someone who matches your description.... Oh, and you probably wouldn't ever want to wear that T-shirt again.” George looked down despondently at his gray-and-green Muskies T-shirt, which had a caricature of a big, semi-human, muscle-bound fish wielding a giant bat. “It kind of stands out.”

George let out a whimper.

“Someone's coming.”

There was a disturbance in the woods. Leaves and saplings were shaking, and the crunching noise of dead leaves, small twigs, and other forest debris being stepped on signaled the presence of something big out there, and getting closer to their yard. Soon, two light-blue-uniform-clad Livia police officers, flanked by the two children and two distraught-looking adults, broke through into the yard.

“Oh, shit!” George muttered.

“Keep your ‘oh, shits' to yourself, George,” said Nan, trying to smooth out the tremor in her voice. “It sounds bad . . . and you haven't done anything wrong . . . have you?”

“What?”

“Shhhh!”

“What?” George whispered this time. “What do you take me for? I was only out there relieving myself, and these two little kids popped up just as I was about to zip up. They're not going to check my computer, are they?”

“Your computer?”

“Yes, they won't be checking it, will they?”

“What do you mean, George?” said Nan, suddenly alarmed. “What do you have on your computer? Kiddie porn?”

“No! Certainly not! Swimsuit models . . . maybe a few lingerie models.”

Nan shook her head.

“George, they're not going to be checking your computer and, even if they did, they don't care about swimsuit models and lingerie models. What kind of lingerie?”

As the approaching posse drew nearer, detouring around the arbor, George and Nan thought it best to rise and walk toward them, affecting surprise at seeing a couple of police officers emerging from their strip of woods.

“Are you the neighbors here?” asked one of the officers, whom George and Nan noted were a man and a woman.

“Well, yes,” Nan said, suppressing a chuckle. “We are neighbors.”

“Well, you could have been someone else,” the male officer retorted severely. “You could have been visitors temporarily residing in a neighboring residence.”

“That's very true,” said George, who felt complete, unquestioning accord with whatever the police officers said was, given the circumstances, the best policy to follow at this point. “You're absolutely right.”

“Well,” continued the officer. “We have a report of a male about your age and wearing a similar T-shirt exposing himself in the woods to these young children. These are the children's parents. Kids, is this the man?” The father stooped down and spoke quietly to the children.

“James, Priscilla, is this the man who pulled out his pee-pee and was watching you?” The little girl wiped a tear from her eye and nodded. The boy, who looked older, also nodded, but he was smiling mischievously and appeared to be on the verge of laughing.

“He was pissing,” he said. The two parents frowned.

“James, I've told you not to use that word,” the father scolded. “You say tinkle, or wee-wee, okay?”

The policewoman stooped over toward the children and adopted an almost childlike tone that sounded as if she were making a joke out of the whole thing.

“James, was the man wee-weeing when you saw him? This is very important now, was he tinkling? Or was he holding his . . . er . . . pee-pee, and looking happy?”

Priscilla wiped another tear from her eye and began to smile. James began to giggle. The giggling was slow, and intermittent at first. Then, it erupted into full-blown laughter. Priscilla joined in. Soon, much to the consternation of their parents and the confusion of the police officers, James and Priscilla were almost doubled over in uncontrollable hysterics. Nan wondered if this family was British, having detected what she thought was the hint of a British accent in the man, and figuring that only in Great Britain would you find a girl called Priscilla. The kids were still laughing when another loud disturbance in the woods marked the appearance of Jeri and Tom Fletcher.

“What's going on here?” said Jeri, a brash young woman who took on the role of neighborhood organizer and community scold to the mayor and city council. Jeri was well known to Livia's elected officials as the one who bombarded them with e-mails, letters, and phone calls at the slightest provocation or delay in a public service schedule of any sort, and who had once taken a bag full of goose poop and dumped it on the carpeting at a city council meeting.

Nan sighed in relief. When Jeri arrived, and as long as she was on your side, you knew you were safe. She was like the cavalry galloping to the rescue. But was she on their side here?

The mother of the two children stifled a sob, then stood up all ramrod straight, confirming in Nan's mind that she was indeed British.

“The children say this chap exposed himself to them in the woods.”

“Chap?” said the male officer. “What's a ‘chap'?”

“That's Brit talk for a guy,” said his companion.

“What's a ‘Brit'?”

“What?” Jeri cried, after a brief pause to digest the news.

“Yes,” chimed in the father. “Exposed himself while tinkling in the woods.”

“Tinkling?”

“Peeing,” sniffed the father. “Ur-i-nating.”

“This is ridiculous,” Jeri said, as Tom, whose soft-spokenness was the perfect foil to Jeri's chattering extroversion, nodded furiously in agreement. “A guy was pissing in the woods.... What's the big deal?” The policeman folded his arms and looked sternly at the two children, who were still giggling.

“Now, listen closely, kids, 'cause this is an important question: Was he already peeing when you saw him? Or did he start peeing . . . excuse me,
tinkling
. . . after he saw you?” The policewoman, who had pulled out a notebook and pencil and was busily scribbling away, pursed her lips. Jeri rolled her eyes. George's shoulders were hunched in the posture of abject misery. Nan couldn't help but wonder what exactly it was that the policewoman was writing in her notebook.