“He trapped a squirrel.” This was Paula’s answer to my unasked question. “You looked surprised that I was here,” she said.
“I was expecting the police escort,” I replied.
Paula handed me a copy of the Altoona Mirror. “That’s what you get for flying into Blair County Airport. It saves me a drive to Pittsburg, but it also means the only paper I can get last second is the Mirror.”
“I’d rather not see or hear any news for the next week.”
Paula pitched the paper.
I only had one small carryon so we cruised through the tiny municipal airport and made our way to her Accord. She opened the door for me. I hesitated.
“Don’t be weird,” she said. I got in.
I had been to Pennsylvania before, but never in the fall. It’s a simple landscape that Winslow Homer or Fredrick Remington would never capture. It would take an impressionist (and this is from a guy who actively lobbies against the National Endowment for the Arts). Driving up 99, the Pennsylvania mountains were awash in dots of autumn colors that seemed ready to spill over. But then they hit the road, a reminder that nature does have it’s limits. Impressionism could make the demise of those limits possible.
“Yeah, he trapped the squirrel right before you were due to arrive. Like, right when you called the house, he screamed, ‘I got one of the little fuckers!’”
I nodded.
“I know I don’t have to explain, but you’re so quiet over there. Are you weirded out?”
“No,” I answered. This was true. But not because of the obvious moral quandaries. The latest campaign taught me to care little for those; my silence was due to immaturity. Paula and I had hooked up a few times in college before she and George started up. Secretly, behind her back George and I called her Sloppy Seconds.
“Look,” she cleared her throat, “I know what you and George called me.”
Well, shit.
“He told me last night.” I must have looked horrified. “No, it’s cool. It was funny. I mean, I expect nothing less from guys in college. I mean, I’m sure that like back then I would’ve been like horrified, but now, it’s funny. It’s kind of endearing.”
Our past always bothered me. It was supposed to be no strings attached, and for her part she had managed to remain free of any strings.
“You still with your girl?”
“We broke up during the campaign. She wasn‘t happy I was defending the senator.”
“That’s what you get for dating a Republican.” She looked over at me. “There’s that smile.”
“I’m not a Republican,” I answered.
For the rest of the drive she caught me up on the lives of the people from our dorm: Nate and Chrisy were married and expecting their first kid; James was down in New Orleans denying people’s claims for State Farm; Arturo was back in Venezuela working for Hugo Chavez; Jude was gay - everyone but him knew that, so that wasn’t news; and so on. Uncomfortability is best cured by rehashing the past. It makes the present less cumbersome because the people talking never get to it.
Altoona is San Francisco without the Pacific, or the culture…in fact, Altoona is what San Francisco would be if the Pacific dried up and Dan White ruled Harvey Milk’s old district. The streets of the city are lined with three and four story homes sandwiched up and down steep hills. The homes are abandoned though. The great in-town homes of those people who enjoyed lavish excess in the days of railroad booms were now barely shells of themselves. Shards of peeling paint amassed at the base of many homes.
George’s house was just outside of the city limits, an old farmhouse with a mother-in-law home attached to the original structure. A mother-in-law’s home was a brilliantly polite up-your’s and appealed to my political sense of sticking it to people diplomatically. If the mother-in-law wished to move in she got her own house. I could just imagine the son or daughter-in-law guilting the mother-in-law, “We built you your own place. Why are you always hanging around here? Get the hell outta here, you hag!”
We pulled up to the house. Paula shut off the car, opened her door, and said as she exited, “I got into law school,” and then rushed to the field behind the house.
George was in back. Pilgrim his springer spaniel aimlessly wandered the sprawling backyard that once was a field for harvest. George stood next to a ten gallon drum that was filled with water. Behind the can, an animal screeched. George reached down to the screeching and pulled up a live trap that held a squirrel. The squirrel shook the cage, and gnawed at George’s fingers, which were encased in heavy leather gloves.
George looked over at Pilgrim who kept walking into the large tool shed roughly thirty feet from George. “Get over, here,” he called to the dog. Then George noticed us. “’Bout time. Traffic’s not that bad from Blair County.” George put down the cage. “Come here you son of a bitch,” George said as he walked up and hugged me. I was still fixated on Pilgrim, gingerly finding his way over to George.
“Cataract took Pilgrim’s good eye,” he said and lead me over to the can and the squirrel. “Just let me do this really quick and then we’ll go in and get a beer. I’ve caught two of these little bastards today.”
Pilgrim found his way to George and sat quietly at his feet, head bowed, softly sniffing the terrified squirrel in the cage. In one, unflinching move George lifted the live-trap and shoved it into the water within the ten-gallon drum. He was dressed in heavy flannel, but it was easy to see that George’s muscles tensed as he fought to keep the cage underwater. “They have small lungs, so this part doesn’t last long,” he said. He was indifferent and empirical.
Dr. Stern was George’s favorite professor in college for no other reason than that Stern hated squirrels. On the first day of class, George walked into the classroom to find Stern looking out the window, and experiencing one of his frequent acid flashbacks. This time, Stern kept his pants on, but he did not acknowledge that a student was in the room. George sauntered up to him to see that Stern was entranced by squirrels on the quad digging up nuts. After a few minutes, Stern noticed George was beside him. Stern lowered his head and muttered, “Fucking squirrels.” Then he turned to George, “They’re always fucking up my roof!” Stern walked back to the podium, poured a cup of herbal tea from a thermos, sat and sipped. He continued to stare out the window pretending to shoot at the rodents playing on the quad. That’s how George got an art history minor with his criminal justice degree.
Like any hunter, George had a deep respect for nature and the animals that inhabit it. But squirrels are a different classification. His hatred for squirrels began with his father, also a hunter. The rodents destroyed the family’s yard, and if there’s one thing a man from our hometown prided himself on, it was a good lawn. George and his dad’s favorite weekend activity was to spend hours on their stomachs, perched on the roof with a BB gun, taking pot shots at squirrels. Initially, they didn’t fire with the force that would kill the animals. “I want the little fuckers to tell their friends not to come in my damn yard,” his dad would say.
But word of mouth is not something to be trusted among squirrels apparently. George and his dad became frustrated, and pumped up the power on their pellet gun. In doing so, they indirectly killed one of the great icons of our town, an albino squirrel. This rare animal had never been seen on their property, but when George saw it gnawing at some of his mom’s flower bulbs, he took careful aim, and fired…right as Pilgrim ran at the white squirrel to chase it away. He took the pellet meant for the albino. That’s how Pilgrim lost his first eye. From that point on, George made it his mission to kill the squirrel that had cost his beloved dog its eye.
However, the actual demise of the albino squirrel is hardly worthy of Melville. A couple days later, George’s dad backed the car out of the garage, and as he clicked the remote to close the garage door, he noticed a pancaked white pelt: The squirrel. His dad, tanned the hide, and tacked it up on a piece of a varnished tree trunk.
The pelt was hung over George’s fireplace. He recounted the vendetta while we sipped a single malt scotch. Paula cleared the table from dinner, a sloppy session of sushi and soy sauce.
“Any word on law school?”
George paused, “I’m supposed to hear tomorrow.”
“What time’s the party tomorrow?” I asked.
“Three. I figured we’d go hunting before then.”
The phone rang. George picked it up quickly. “Hey, bebe.” He looked at Paula and mouthed the word, Janice. Paula smiled and responded by mouthing, Tell her I say, hi. George waved her off, and smacked her on the ass, grinning wildly.
Once the typical palaver between husband and wife was done, he signed off, “See you tomorrow, bebe. Jeff says hi. Yup, love you too babe. Buhbye.” He slugged back the scotch.
I stayed in the mother-in-law house that night. George warned me that others who stayed there said they heard ghosts. I only heard the muffled sounds of Paula and George making love; ghosts of a sort I suppose communing with me in a séance through the ventilation duct. I listened for a while, before turning on ESPN. But sports news did little. So I turned on CNN and my senator was the featured story. The moral indignation helped me sleep on the first night of vacation. And it drowned out the spanking resonating through the vent.
Out of habit, I left my cell phone on. At 2:00, it rang. It was Patty.
“I can’t do it anymore, Jeff. I’m sick of this. Did you see the story on CNN? Did you?”
“Patty-”
“Don’t Patty me. I’m done. I’m divorcing him. They said he fathered her child.”
“That’s speculation. There’s not proof.”
“Well, I want proof.”
“What will that accomplish? Look, this will all -”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m ruining your vacation.”
“No. No. That’s what I’m here for.” I sat up and felt self-conscious for not being clean shaven and business ready. The feature on my senator was being rerun on CNN.
“Well, I’m done with him. The campaign’s over. He won. He’s got six years to rebuild his reputation. I played - do you know the asshole didn’t even take me with the kids - I played the good wife.” Before I could respond, she hung up.
A few minutes later, the senator’s intern called. I let it ring. The other woman left a message.
I panicked for a second, but the week after an election, the senator would be in Tahiti with his kids, and he left instructions that we were not to call unless al-Qaeda struck again within the US. The last thing he said to me before he left was, No CNN, consigliere.
When we got back from hunting George’s sheriff’s department buddies stood underneath a banner that read Happy 3-0! They serenaded him with “For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow.” Janice took the two groundhogs we had shot that day, put them in the fridge. Paula had picked her up at the airport that morning while we were shooting two distant cousins of Pauxatauny Phil.
One of the deputies gave George a beer. “You hear about Deifendorf?”
Ben shook his head, tensing, while Paula discreetly passed him an envelope with his LSAT scores. He put it in his hunting vest without opening it.
“Deifendorf, was out last night, and he tazed some poor dumbass at the bar.” The deputies roared at the visual image of some drunk getting a jolt of electricity. “But Deifendorf, it looks like he’s getting fired.”
George opened his beer, “Well, cheers to abuse of power.”
“What do you care?” said another deputy. “You’re going to law school, Poindexter. You’ll get to be a G-man!”
Deifendorf was the break George needed. He’d bounced from department to department in part-time roles. George always proved to be a by-the-book officer, but in college he had been linked to a deal that gave athletes at the University of Wisconsin free shoes at a sporting goods store. It always came up in a job interview, and he had to admit that yes, he accepted free merchandise in violation of NCAA rules. After that, the interview usually ended. Deifendorf would no doubt be suspended, which meant one of the part-timers, like George, would get on fulltime until Deifendorf had his day in front a disciplinary board. And when Deifendorf had been fired, George, as the ranking part-timer, would be the logical choice, regardless of the fact that while a freshman running cross country at UW, he got a free pair of shoes.
Janice came over to where George and I were. She gave me a hug, asked about the end of the campaign and if I liked the mother-in-law house. “I’m sorry you and Paula have to share it. It’s not weird is it?”
“No. Fine. I’m on the couch downstairs. It’s pretty comfortable, really.”
“Any ghosts?” I chuckled.
Janice put her arms around George’s neck, while he chatted with a deputy. She continued talking to me. “I got to be back for a sale tomorrow. Can you believe the bastards wanted to fire me because I wanted be home for my husband’s thirtieth birthday?”
“Fuckers,” Paula said as she laid out the last bags of chips for the shindig. It had been cloudy all day, but it was just now beginning to sprinkle a bit. Janice pulled George towards the house, where they would abscond to the bedroom for fifteen minutes or so.
“Should probably get the grill going,” Paula said, implying that since George was indisposed, I was now the ranking man of the house. Paula took a seat on a lawn chair. Her hair was braided, in pig tails; it was for George. Pilgrim wandered aimlessly, sniffing, until he found Paula, and he laid down at her feet.
“You think he’ll go to law school?” I said while dumping the charcoal into the grill.
“Janice wants him to because she’s seen what you’ve done. But it‘s not a serious, like, gambit, you know. He wants to be a cop.”
I lit the coals. “You think he’ll get the deputy position?”
“Maybe. Probably not. And I think he likes being able to say he didn’t get the job because some so-and-so was the nephew of a councilman.”
“Then when they use a taser at a bar he can say, see I told you they shouldn’t have done that.”
“I overheard Janice,” Paula said. “I’m heading out tonight. After cake. So you‘ll have the house to yourself.” The rain was picking up.
“Is it because of Janice?”
“No. I miss my boyfriend, and he’s not too happy about the time I spend with George. George wasn’t happy I when I told him.”
The rain picked up. There would be no grilling. Paula jogged to the house, Pilgrim following in her footsteps. The deputies grabbed the food and beer on the table, and raced towards the house.
That night, after cake, Paula left, and the rain had stopped. The deputies were comfortably drunk and watching CSI. George was glaring at the ceiling because the patter of little rodent feet sounded above. “Fucking squirrels. Little bastards didn’t wanna get wet so they go in my attic?” He stormed into the basement.
My phone, on silent, began to blink. It was a text message from the senator’s chief of staff: Patty’s off the reservation. She’s going public and writing a book. I need a legal opinion/plan of action by Monday. I massaged my temples and closed my eyes. They opened when I heard the report of a shotgun.
Everyone jumped. George, very drunk, was shooting at the ceiling. He swore profusely and fired until he was out of shells. Janice sitting in a chair in the corner, uncovered her ears. The brief silence ended as the deputies, George, and I laughed hysterically. Janice joined in, gingerly coaxing George to put down the gun, which he did.
Pilgrim had not moved the entire time, but was now up and sniffing for squirrels. None had been hit. My phone blinked again. This time it was the senator. “There hasn’t been a terrorist attack?” I asked. Everyone assured me there had not, otherwise CSI would be preempted by news reports. I let the call go to voicemail.
“I’m going to take Pilgrim outside,” I said. The blind dog understood the word outside. He stood and followed the path to the yard by rote.
