TERS
By J T PEARSON
COPYRIGHT 2013 JOSEPH PEARSON
Mr. Fats – the moniker that the other residents of Pyle’s Trailer Court had given the portly raccoon that had been vandalizing our homes – stood above my last remaining inflatable lawn ornament – the pink flamingo - with his claw raised menacingly in the moonlight, poised to strike. He’d already destroyed the jockey, the farmer’s wife, and the rooster. This was the first time that I’d actually seen him, and pathetic as it was, I found myself paralyzed with fear. Our eyes still locked, Mister Fats plunged his claw into my flamingo and the air hissed from it as it collapsed into the patchy rain-starved grass around it. Next, Mister Fats moved to the basketball that I’d carelessly left near my lawn chair. Again he made certain that I was watching before he punched a set of holes into the basketball, momentarily wearing it on his claw like a bowling ball before flattening it out beneath his substantial weight. He was demonstrating his anger toward me for securing not only my trash can lid with a chain but those of my neighbors as well, a solution that I had offered them to keep Mister Fats from coming back. I had heard about the way Mister Fats had intimidated two little girls a week before. They lived several trailers down, the Jupie girls, just two and four years old, watching from their window, as I was now, how he showed them his claw before deflating their mini-pool, then their beach ball, then took a bite out of their Big Wheel, before hissing at them and leaving, the horrible memory scored into their tiny minds forever. Mister Fats was nothing but a common bully. He stood on his hind legs and scratched at the air like he was shadow boxing. Maybe he was daring me to come out and meet him. I continued to cower and he snorfed menacingly, before receding into the darkness at the edge of the court, and then he was just a shadow waddling away. And I, I sat back in the chair near the window, my heart pounding, a light slick of sweat on my forehead, feeling humiliated by just one more bully in my life.
I’d always wanted to live out in the country as a boy growing up in the city and so after I lost my job at the post office and could no longer pay for my house I scraped together what little I had left and fled the city limits to rent a trailer in Pyle’s Trailer Court. I had sold whatever I could and then I gave away most of what remained so that I could downsize into the new smaller living space. My brother Joe loaded what I had left into his pickup and drove me out to Pyle’s. It amounted to less than two trips worth. Joe shook his head and mumbled that I had lost my mind as we drove, occasionally stopping to look over at me with disgust.
“You let your boss fire you at the post office when it wasn’t even your fault, taking the blame for somebody else’s screw up again. You let weird guys chase you out of your own apartments and now your own house and-”
“I was losing that house, Joe.”
“Because you let somebody take your job. It’s just like dad used to say before he passed on, Jeff. You need to stand up to bullies. When you’re in the right you’ve got the strength of a hundred men. You make your stand. Someday you’re going to have to make a stand. I mean…come on, Jeff!” He shook his head.
When I had told him that I wanted to live outside of town in Pyle’s Trailer Park along with other simpler, like-minded folks he thought that I was pulling his leg. He couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to live out there. When we arrived at Pyle’s he looked across the highway at LA BIRDS, notorious for being one of Wisconsin’s most raunchy strip clubs.
“What is that place, Jeff?”
“LA BIRDS? You’ve never heard of it? It’s a strip club.”
“Your trailer is less than a hundred yards from a strip club?”
“I guess.”
“Great.” He shook his head some more. “What’s with the name? Are they trying to sound upscale with the fancy French name?”
“Actually, if you were going to say THE BIRDS in French, you’d say LES OISEAUX, not LA BIRDS.” Joe raised his eyebrow at me. “Remember, I took French in high school. That’s how I know. LA BIRDS is a national franchise that started in Los Angeles, Los Angeles Birds – LA BIRDS.”
“Should’ve just changed the name to THE WISCONSIN BEAVERS when they moved up here.”
“Sure.”
Joe helped me get set up in my trailer and then he left, after shaking his head some more, of course. I must confess that the romance of living a more rustic existence wasn’t the only nudge that sent me packing for well water and crude septic systems. I was a catchall it seemed for disenfranchised personalities, an unfortunate lot of on-the-fringe acquaintances that I had collected over the years. Men with unsettling views of society and highly irregular histories. For some reason they all wanted to pull me into their delusions. Men like Mims May, the Texan bounty hunter who I had met at a party during a brief stint in college. It turned out that no one at the party had actually known him. He must’ve just seen it as he was passing and joined it in progress, sidling up along the frat boys who were throwing the party and singing the school fight song. The man had to be somewhere in his forties, maybe even fifty, dressed in hunting bibs and boots singing with an accent far too southern for Wisconsin, but nobody seemed to notice or care. His long blond hair spilled out of a black cowboy hat with an emblem of a confederate flag and a skull on it. He had a matching blond beard that was deep enough to camouflage several missing teeth and one prominent gold replacement in the front. The bear tooth necklace that he wore could’ve possibly been mistaken for an intentional effort to be kitschy. He took horks of rum from his canteen, occasionally offering a swig to the college boys. I, half in the bag that night, have a vague memory of leaving the party with Mims, his arm around my shoulder so that I didn’t spill into the street and remain there. I woke up the next day in my apartment on my couch and reconstructed the night of the party to the best of my ability while I watched this wild creature in my open floor apartment standing naked at the stove, except for his cowboy hat, preparing scrambled eggs and singing something in Russian. He finished cooking, plated the eggs, and dropped them on the glass coffee table, one before each of us, my eyes still struggling to focus, my mind frantically trying to make sense of it all. I was grateful that his heaping plate blocked the view of his member through the glass table while he ate. He told me as he wolfed his food down that he was recruiting me to help the south rise again, that yankee or not, he liked the cut of my jib, and that having a man that naturally spoke like a northerner in the southern army would be most beneficial. He had also decided that my apartment would make an excellent post right there at the top of the country. He paused to brush some egg out of his beard that had fallen in and gotten trapped. I wished that I could escape this man as easily as the eggs just had. His gold tooth sparkled along with his eyes while he explained that he was going to send for reinforcements, and that he would have them there within a month.
Three weeks from the night that I had met Mims, still unable to shake him, the walls of my apartment covered with maps full of pins and notes, recruits supposedly on their way, I took my essentials and left the apartment while he slept in my bed. We hadn’t been sleeping in it together. At first he had been content with my futon but after a while he told me that he needed to swap it for my bed because of his bad back. I ran out on my lease and quit school, leaving no forwarding address.
There were a series of other strange acquaintances that were difficult to shake. As I stated, I was as a magnet to them. But none of them compared to the last of these bizarre encounters, Scotland Steibers. I met Scotland just after I’d lost my job at the post office. He was at a flea market where he was arguing with a man over the authenticity of some materials that the man had claimed were genuine NASA constructed. Scotland was tall, six five, wore camouflage pants, a dark pea coat, and sunglasses. He wore his brown hair combed neatly to one sid
e and had a handle bar moustache, tips turned upward like a pirate. He kept poking the shorter squat, dark-skinned man in the chest and calling him a liar. I watched this go on for the better part of five minutes before the man reached over his table and snatched Scotland’s outstretched finger. He twisted it until Scotland was down on his knees. The man told Scotland to call him a liar just one more time. Scotland did and I winced as I heard the finger break.
I helped Scotland to a bus and then paid his fare. He had explained to me that he rarely carried pocket money. I told him that I understood. He called me a good Samaritan and assured me that my gesture would not be forgotten as he boarded the bus. I thought that it was the last I would ever see of the peculiar man but I was wrong. He showed up on my doorstep the very next day.
“Scotland Steibers, at your service.” He held out a gloved left hand for me to shake. His right hand had the broken finger encased in some sort of homemade cast. “I know that offering a gloved hand is bad manners in the majority of the societies in the world but I have a fear of germs – not a germ phobia, mind you, but a healthy and reasonable fear of germs, just