Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (36 page)

The old man looked away from their approach and took a spoonful of his stew, which starred a lot of potatoes, featured carrots and peas, and from where I was standing, it looked as if a hot dog sliced very thin had a minor role in his stew. Floating in the center of the stew was a big dollop of catsup.

He ate off the ledge of the catsup, working his way to the rim of the metal dish, so the catsup was slowly sinking into the stew like a strange red island in the middle of an equally strange sea.

After the bite, which dashed some stew down his beard like lava coming from a volcano, he returned to watching their approach.

He paused before he said the next thing.

"I've never seen people bring their furniture when they go fishing. I've seen people bring camp stools, but not all their furniture."

When he said this, it was not a form of criticism. It was just a simple observation that led to another bite from the movie on his plate called
The Old Man and the Stew.

"Maybe they like to be comfortable when they fish," I said.

"I suppose so," he said. "Wouldn't make much sense to bring all that furniture with them fishing if they didn't enjoy it."

Then he stewed up again. This time he took an extraordinarily large bite. The runoff poured into his beard like Krakatoa.

"Well, I got to be on my way," I said, so that I could be waiting for them when they got there. I liked to watch them unload the furniture and set it up from the very beginning. To me it was like watching a fairy tale unfold in front of my very eyes.

You don't see stuff like that very often and I didn't want to miss any of it, not even a single lamp. They had three of them that they set up. They looked just like any other lamp you'd see in a real house except the people had converted them from electricity to kerosene. It must have been interesting watching them do that. I wonder where they got the idea in the first place.

That's something that you just don't think up out of the ordinary.

Most people, I should say all people except them,
just used the regular kerosene lamps you could buy in the store, but that type of thing obviously wasn't for them.

I wonder which one of them mentioned it to the other one first and what the expression on their face was and the next thing they said. I tried to imagine those words, but I couldn't because I wouldn't know what to say.

Would you?

But whatever was said in reply was the correct answer, the right thing and agreed upon and done.

The old man and his stew turned like a page in my life and then they were gone with his final words echoing in my mind as I headed toward the place where I would be there before they arrived and started setting up their furniture.

"If they want to catch catfish," the old man echoed. "They should set up their living room about fifty yards down the pond, right next to that dead tree. That's the best place for catfish in this pond."

"They do all right where they set up their furniture," I answered.

"Well, they'd do better for catfish if they put their living room in front of that dead tree."

What?

I can still hear those last words now a third of a century later, and they still sound just as strange now as they did back then.

"I'll tell them," I promised the old man, but of course I didn't tell them. They liked that place best for their furniture and they caught their share of catfish, so who was I to rock the boat?

I also don't think they would have listened to me anyway, and I certainly didn't want to make them angry at me because frankly they were the most interesting thing happening in my life.

They were better than any radio programs I heard or movies I saw that summer.

Sometimes I wished there was a set of them like toys that I could take home with me and play with: Carved wooden miniatures of the man and the woman and all their furniture and the truck (it was all right for that to be metal) and a green cloth that was shaped just like the pond with everything on it the way it actually was.

I also wished that I had miniatures of the old man and his shack and his garden and of course the dock and his boat.

What an interesting game that would be.

Sometimes I tried to think of a name for it just before I fell asleep but I never could think of a good name for it and afterwhile it got lost in my dreams because I couldn't keep up with it.

I arrived at the place where their living room would be set up at the pond's edge just about a minute or so before they got there.

While the minute passes before they get here with their furniture, there will be a huge INTERRUPTION like a black wet
Titanic
telegram or a telephone call that sounds like a man with a chain saw cutting up a cemetery at midnight or just the very rude distraction of death itself, the final end of all childhoods including mine which started to dramatically begin its descent when I passed the restaurant that February rainy afternoon in 1948 and should have gone inside and gotten a hamburger and a Coke. I was hungry, too. They would have been a welcome addition to my existence.

There was not a single reason in the world for me to walk past the restaurant and look in the window of the gun shop next door. But I did and the dice were getting ready to be thrown.

There was a beautiful-looking .22 caliber rifle in the window. I had a .22. Looking at that gun made me think about my gun, and when I thought about my gun, I thought about the fact that my gun didn't have any bullets. I had been planning on getting some for the last couple of weeks.

If I had some bullets, I could go out and shoot.

I could go to the junkyard and shoot bottles and cans and any abandoned old thing that looked attractive through my sights or there was an old apple orchard that had rotten apples still clinging to its leafless branches. It was fun to shoot rotten apples. They exploded when a bullet hit them. It was the kind of effect
that kids love if they're slightly bloodthirsty for one reason or another and can dump their aggressions on passed-away objects like rotten apples.

I had a friend who liked to shoot apples, too, but he didn't like to go to the junkyard to practice the little decisions of destruction that a .22 rifle can provide a kid. But I couldn't shoot anything one way or another if I didn't have any bullets.

Some bullets. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .or a burger, a burger. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . or some bullets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . paddled back and forth in my brain like a Ping-Pong ball.

The door to the restaurant opened just then and a satisfied customer came out with a burger-pleased smile on his face. The open door also allowed a gust of burger perfume to escape right into my nose.

I took a step toward the restaurant but then I heard in my mind the sound of a .22 bullet turning a rotten apple into instant rotten apple sauce. It was a lot more dramatic than eating a hamburger. The door to the restaurant closed escorting the smell of cooking hamburgers back inside like an usher.

What was I to do?

I was twelve years old and the decision was as big as the Grand Canyon. I should have gone to neutral territory to think it over instead of just standing right there in the battleground of their beckoning.

I could have gone across the street to a magazine store and looked at comic books while I thought about how seriously I wanted a box of apple-splattering bullets or a delicious hamburger with lots of onions on it.

I could have thought about it while looking at comic books until the owner of the store started giving me the evil eye because obviously I was not a potential comic-book purchaser. I was just a kid hanging out with Superman and Batman while I made up my mind.

Too bad Superman couldn't have told me what to do.

 

SUPERMAN: Kid, go get a burger.

ME: Yes, sir!

SUPERMAN: And don't forget the onions.

ME: How did you know that I liked onions?

SUPERMAN: If you're faster than a speeding bullet and more powerful than a locomotive and able to leap tall buildings with a single bound, onions aren't that hard.

ME: Yes, sir!

SUPERMAN
(flying away):
Be kind to your kitten!
(I would have to think that one over because I didn't have a kitten. Anyway, not one that I could remember. Maybe Superman knew something that I didn't know. Of course he did!)

ME: I promise, Superman!

 

What did I have to lose?

Yeah, everything would have been different if Superman would have told me to get a hamburger. Instead I walked across the street to the gun shop and bought a box of .22 shells. The hamburger had lost. The sound of instant rotten apple sauce had won.

I have replayed that day over and over again in my mind like the editing of a movie where I am the producer, the director, the editor, scriptwriter, actors, music, and everything.

I have a gigantic motion picture studio in my mind where I have been working constantly on this movie since February 17th, 1948. I have been working on the same movie for 31 years. I believe that this is a record. I don't think I will ever finish it.

I have, more or less, about 3,983,421 hours of film.

But it's too late now.

Whereas I could never find a name for my pond game, I've always had a title for my movie starting with the day I bought the bullets instead of the hamburger. I call my picture
Hamburger Cemetery.

After I bought the bullets, I didn't have any more money for a hamburger, so I started home. The box of bullets felt very good in my pocket. When I got home I would show them to my gun. I would load and unload my gun a couple of times. That would make
the gun happy because guns like bullets. They are nothing without bullets. They need bullets like a camel needs the desert.

My gun had an interesting story about how it got into my life. I knew this boy whose parents didn't like him because he was always getting into trouble. He was fourteen, smoked, had a reputation as a well-known masturbator and had been picked up by the police half-a-dozen times though he had never been formally charged with anything. His parents always got him off.

His father had some thread-thin political influence that was left over from having had a bright future in local politics about ten years ago. He had lost his political future when he was arrested the second time for drunk driving and running over an old lady who broke like a box of toothpicks being stepped on by an elephant. She was in the hospital so long that when she got out, she thought it was the Twenty-First Century.

But he still had a few political debts owed him—before he ran over the old lady there was talk in high places about him being the next mayor—and he collected them whenever he went and got his son out of jail.

Anyway, the boy's parents didn't like him and after the last time he was arrested they decided not to let him sleep in the house any more. From now on
after that, he was to sleep out in the garage. He could take his meals in the house and bathe and go to the toilet there, but those were the only times they wanted him in there.

To make sure that he got the point of their dislike, they did not provide him with a bed when they exiled him to the garage. That's where I come in and the gun comes in.

The boy had a .22 caliber pump rifle. I had for some unknown reason, I can't remember why, a mattress.

Just after his parents Siberia-ized him to the garage, he came over to visit me. I'll never totally know why because we were not that good of friends. In the first place, his reputation as a prodigious masturbator did not weigh well with me. I had jacked off a few times you know, but I was not interested in making it a career.

Also, he had eyes that were born to look at things that he could steal. I of course stole a few things, but I wasn't interested in stealing everything. And, finally, I didn't like his smoking all the time and trying to get me to smoke. I just wasn't interested in smoking but he kept insisting that I smoke with him.

Though he was fourteen and I was twelve and he was bigger than me, for some strange reason he was almost afraid of me. I encouraged his fear by telling him a few gory lies about my prowess in hand-to-hand
combat with other twelve-year-old kids. I also told him that I had once beaten up a seventeen-year-old. That really registered with him.

"It doesn't matter how big they are. You hit them in the right place and they all fall. You just have to know that place," I said, finishing up my tale of Jack Dempsey-like heroics that convinced him into being a minor coward around me, which I enjoyed enormously but not enough to have him for a friend to bully.

As I said earlier, he just had too many things going that were not in his favor.

And then he arrived one day and told me his story of parental rejection and how he had to sleep in the garage and he didn't have anything to sleep on.

The cement floor was cold.

"I don't know what I'm going to do," he said.

I knew what he was going to do. The words had barely escaped his mouth when I had it all planned out. What was to form an eternal breach between him and his parents and eventually lead him to doing three years in the pen for stealing a car and then a marriage with a spiteful woman ten years older than him who had five children who all grew to hate him, causing him to gain his only and ultimate solace in this world by buying a telescope and becoming an extremely incompetent but diligent astronomer, was to work to my brief advantage.

"
Mommy, where's Daddy?
"

"
Looking at the stars.
"

"
Mommy, do you hate Daddy, too ?
"

"
Yes, child. I hate him, too.
"

"
Mommy, I love you. Do you know why?
"

"
Why?
"

"
Because you hate Daddy. It's fun to hate Daddy, isn't it?
"