Tuesday, December 20, 2016

Old man Ody

Old man Ody
            Old man Ody adjusted himself in his chair, grimacing from the pain of moving but more from the pain of angry thinking that had dominated his life.  Ten years before, he turned his chair away from the window towards the television.  The twenty-four hour news channel played without sound, but Old man Ody watched the attractive brunette newscaster and the scrolling news feed below her.  Mass shootings in churches.  Celebrity overdoses.  People blown up in sand.  He had been angry and miserable enough in his younger days but now he was alone with cancer with his eyes ingesting more malignancy each day, anger scrolling in unintelligible script through his brain.
            He had been looking for his cat all morning and had given up for the moment figuring it had gotten outside.  It was strictly an indoor cat and he was worried it escaped while he was putting out the garbage.  That mangy thing had been darting out the door into the breezeway the past few weeks and he had grab it and put it back inside a few times already.  He sat and breathed and watched television until a mortgage commercial came on.
            It was almost lunch time and at any moment the mailman would knock once and then let himself inside the house.  They would lunch together for twenty minutes with a bottle of Canadian Club.  Old man Ody only drank at lunch and only drank with the mailman.  They had two glasses each and spoke to each other but not with each other.  Jim the mailman would expatiate on fishing although he hadn’t been out fishing himself in years.  Old man Ody would usually complain about minorities even though his community was profoundly homogenous and he rarely left his home or spoke to anyone but the mailman.  Their conversations usually went like the one the day before:
--Mark’s got himself a fine walleye last week…twelve pounder.  Worm on the bottom, he said.  Worm on the bottom, I said.  Worm on the bottom, twelve pounds?  I never seen a twelve pounder on a worm.  Large shiners’ how ya do it.  Worm on the bottom…
--I’m telling you they need a checkpoint on Altamont Avenue.  The blacks are coming in from there.  In droves.  Nah, a checkpoint with machine guns and all.  That’ll do it.
--Getting a twelve pounder with worms on the bottom?  More like to get a pike than that.  Nah, Marcus’s full of it.  Shiners or suckers.  Twelve pounder.  You know why pikes’ so big in Europe and Germany?  Cause they don’t have finny fish, only soft fish and the pikes gobble’em up an get fat.
--Some black kid showed up at my door with a badge trying to sell me some power or natural gas or something.  Badge looked fake to me.  And I says unless you got a warrant get the fuck off my porch.  And he says ‘Warrant?’  And I said yes, to be arrested or to search my house.  Otherwise, get the fuck off my porch.
            These dueling diatribes would last twenty minutes and Jim the mailman would drain the last bit of flavor from his ice and say, “See ya tomorrow, Ody,” and continue on his route.  Old man Ody would watch the news and nod off for a few hours.
            He opened his back door and yelled, “Fucknose!  Fucknose cat!” and scanned the catless back yard.  He went back and slumped in his chair and looked back at the television.  California was on fire again.  He paused and got up and looked out the window, searching again for the cat.
            “Fucknose,” he mumbled. 
He turned his chair from the television toward the window to the position it was in ten years before when he had a bird feeder.  That did not go well.  His daughter moved out when she was fifteen and when she was twenty and pregnant she came back to visit and thought she might make a connection with her father.  She was mistaken.  She found his irritability and stubbornness impossible and gave up after three visits.  His loneliness vexed her, though, so she bought him a bird feeder and wild bird feed and set it up in the crabapple tree out in his side yard.  “Why can’t you be happy that I’m happy?” is the last thing she said to him.  He enjoyed the feeder but didn’t like the way his cat would jump on the windowsill so he drilled sheet rock crews through the bottom of the sill as needle-sharp stalagmites.  The cat only jumped on the sill once after that. 
            He really liked the cardinals.  He had been retired for three years after thirty working as a custodian at the local high school.  Although he didn’t miss work, he was bored and the feeder was active with life.  Unfortunately squirrels found and dominated the feeder and that he could not abide.  He relieved the feeder of the squirrels with his air rifle.  After a week there was an accumulation of fourteen dead squirrels tossed over his shed into the neighbor’s corn field.  When the squirrels were gone he found the blue jays to be bullies.  They were harder to shoot so he removed the sheet rock screws from the sill to steady his elbows. When he was rid of the blue jays, starlings and house sparrows arrived in droves and he focused much of his day on them.  He stopped using pellets and moved on to BB’s to save time and money.  By the time the feeder was clear of these pests, Fucknose arrived at the back door mewing plaintively with the male cardinal dead in his jaws.
He removed the feeder, dumped it in the garbage, made Fucknose an indoor cat and turned his chair from the window toward the television.
Fifteen was a portentous number for Old man Ody.  Fucknose had been around for fifteen years until that day, both his son and daughter moved out of his house when they turned fifteen, and he moved out of his father’s house when he turned fifteen.  Ody left his father’s house rather than his parents’ house because his mother was killed in Italy during World War II when he was seven years old.  His parents met in the emergency room when she was a nursing intern and his father arrived with a foot he badly mangled after setting a bear trap.  His foot became as useless to him as he was to the armed services.  His mother left father and son for the war effort and was blown to pieces by an Italian shell while dismantling a field hospital.
Old man Ody’s old man worked in a carpet mill and arrived home from work at 7 pm, and that’s when Ody was allowed to enter the house.  He’d spend afternoons with a friend or two and then wait at the picnic table in his backyard until his father arrived.  Rarely, a friend’s mother would realize his situation and invite him in at dinner time, but Ody would always decline, knowing his father’s wrath at potential embarrassment.  When he was finally allowed in the house, he had to wash up, comb his hair and put on formal clothing for dinner as his dad sat at the table, grimy and smelling of benzene and toluene as he forked chunks of butter fried liver and onions into his mouth.  His father controlled a lot.  He controlled the food with a locked cabinet, he controlled the use of hot water with a timer, he controlled the climate of Ody’s bedroom with sealed windows, and even controlled the distribution of toilet paper by allotting three squares for each trip to the bathroom.  Old man Ody’s old man was so intolerable Ody started working at the age of nine and moved out by fifteen. 
He carried on his father’s parenting tradition after his own wife died giving birth to his daughter.  While the doctor was performing a cesaerian an artery was nicked and that was it:  Ody became Old man Ody.  He began with his son who was ten.  The boy needed structure with no mother and he needed to grow up fast and help with his family.  The boy moved out five years later, the girl ten years after that.
Still no Fucknose.  He boiled some egg noodles, drained them and dumped in a can of Hormel chili.  He hunched over his bowl at the kitchen table and munched in silence.  When he sat upright too quickly the pain pierced in his back again and he gasped.
He’d been to the doctor a few weeks prior because the pain was something worth discussing and his urine clouded the toilet water with red.  In the outpatient clinic which fit snugly between a Chinese restaurant and a Payless shoe store, he sat snugly between a coughing woman in a large coat and a heavy man with a soiled white captain’s hat, the television on the wall garish with a morning show.  Captain hat was sharing loudly his history of back pain to the receptionist as she was assisting someone else on the phone, although he said he was really there because of the diabetic sores on his forearms and calves.  The woman coughed violently into a paper towel, rattling the phlegm on her lung walls.  The perky hostess seated at a coffee table rolled her eyes in an exaggerated gesture as her cohost and the studio audience burst out in amplified laughter.  When he was called to the examination room, he stood eagerly.  He hated being examined in any way, but he would have been just as eager to leave that scene if he were going to a proctologist.  The doctor’s fingers were soft and cold like his stethoscope, but his manner was soft and warm.  After some questions during the examination, the doctor seemed not concerned but serious.  He wanted an X-ray and they brought Old man Ody to a back room for imaging.  He returned to the waiting room, but the two other patients were gone and he sat in the corner next to a dusty ficus and under studio laughter.  Back in the examination room a half-hour later, the doctor showed him a mass on his kidney and had the receptionist make an appointment for tests and a meeting with a specialist at the hospital.  When he stepped out into the strip mall parking lot the air was cold and the sun was glaringly noon-bright.  He never went back to that doctor and never met with the specialist.  He disconnected his phone a week later after getting too many follow up calls from the clinic.  He rarely made any calls on his phone anyway and only used it to tell telemarketers to “Fuck off.”
Still no Fucknose.  He sat in his chair.  The television did not change, in fact, it never will he thought.  California will always be on fire and people will always die in sand the same way those in Louisiana will fret over pederasts and floods.  There will always be sinkholes in Florida that swallow chlorine pools and Volkswagens.  Alligators will eat Jack Russell Terriers and mountain towns in Vermont will become islands in need of food drops.
Old man Ody took out the Canadian Club and the ice tray and quickly drank the bottle dry.  He fell asleep in his chair as the television glared silently in front of him and he dreamed he was a boy again but living in his present house.  He heard whining, a dog’s whine, and pushed open the back door and stepped from the breezeway into a bleak back yard.  The whining became louder and more acute as he tried to locate it.  The sound did not hurt his ears but rather the whole of his being.  He was in a panic when he realized it was coming from behind the shed and it was a puppy.  Although he couldn’t see it, he knew it was a yellow lab with brown eyes, a big nose and little puppy teeth.  He went behind his shed and found not a neighbor’s cornfield but an immense cement wall.  In the space between the wall and the back of his shed was a pile of blue dock barrels stacked high.  The whining from underneath the barrels turned to yelping as he desperately tried to lift them and the sharp edges of the rounded ends of the barrels cut into his soft young hands.  The cries grew louder and felt like they were coming from himself as he pulled uselessly and realized they were all bolted together in a complicated pattern, the bottom barrels lag bolted hopelessly in the concrete below.  He woke vomiting onto the front of his shirt.  He trudged into the bathroom, bumping against the door jamb and colored the toilet water and spattered the toilet seat and linoleum floor with crimson urine.  He was in a blur and would not remember anything past dinner.  “Fucknose cat,” he mumbled and stumbled out the back door into the open yard. 
The grass was a light blue from the moon and a 3 am stillness and quiet prevailed, not just an absence of noise but a vacuum of sound with the stillness of eternity.  The barren branches of the black crabapple tree posed cracks in the starless sky, the bright moon cancelling all other light.  He plodded to his shed and leaned his forehead against the splintery cedar shakes, staying in that position half asleep for several minutes, his bare feet insensitive to the frozen grass.  He wheeled around with his eyes wide looking back at his house, light glaring from the open back door.  He thought maybe the cat went in the house, but instead of checking he stumbled towards the back of his shed.  The line of staghorn sumac that delineated the space behind his shed was as empty as the cornfield.  He pushed through the branches and fell onto the frozen earth.  The field was barren, endless dirt furrows like a lesson in perspective, frozen clods with chopped cornstalk poking out like rebar.  Raising himself he stumbled towards the middle of the openness, the moon lighting a disconsolate blue his breath and useless hands that palsied in front of his useless eyes as he began his useless screams in that vacuum of silence and the farther he stumbled from his house into the middle distance, the farther he was from the distant invisible tree line as his screams became immense jabberings lost in the skin of atmosphere and the coldness and immensity of all.

Draft December 2016

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