Prairie Spy

by Linda, Alan

  The Smithsonian Museum has one of the last set of signs to exist in this country, although die-hard motorists still swear there are some left out there, way out in the boondocks.

  Burma-Shave kept their tongue in their cheek right up to the end. This set of signs was donated to the Smithsonian: SHAVING BRUSHES/ YOU’LL SOON SEE’UM/ ON THE SHELF/ IN SOME MUSEUM/ BURMA-SHAVE.

  Maybe we lost more than Burma-Shave signs.

  Maybe we lost some of our sense of humor back there, too.

  §

  Class Reunion

  So what is it we expect to see at our umpteenth class reunion? Hair with more grey in it than our own? Hair with more hair in it than our own?

  Do we go to see who aged the most, or to see who didn’t? Who got prettier? Who didn’t?

  Or maybe we don’t go at all, because no matter how hard we try, we cannot see a reason to add one more mountain to our summer climbing schedule. Over half of my class didn’t show up to one I just went to. Maybe there isn’t just one reason for people not to go; maybe there are several, and they gang up, until they become too powerful, and you just stay home and watch TV.

  What do you talk about to someone you haven’t seen in umpteen years? “Hi,” you might start out with, “how do you feel about being fatter-balder-greyer-older than the rest of us?” That would be a good conversation starter. Be sure and smile. If you’re going to point out warts, a smile might not be quite enough; better throw in a pat on the back, too.

  Another conversation starter might be: “Boy, the President really sucks, doesn’t he?” Based on current political bipartisanship statistics, that one has at least a one in two chance of not getting you into a humdinger of a debate, but plan on moving from group to group frequently. Work on your short snorts of derision, and prepare to nod knowingly, no matter what someone says, and use this one: “Well, you know what Abraham Lincoln—Albert Einstein—Mother Teresa said about that,” then move on, before they find out you don’t know what anybody said about anything.

  Maybe there are other reasons to go to your class reunion. Maybe your wife wants to have one more go at that blond tart you went with back in high school. You know the one. She wrote you those love letters that you thought were long gone, the long fuzzy rambling ones about how fine you were? The ones that your wife found the ninth year of your marriage. Remember that tenth reunion?

  Remember the year leading up to it? The year your wife started using the cutesey-wutesey pet names for you that were in the letters? “Shouldn’t we get ready for church, love bunny?” Or she would look at you over the kitchen table and say, “My, your body is fine like wine, sweet cheeks.” That was a long year. A long, long, long year.

  Life sure sends some stumbling blocks, doesn’t it. You and your wife at the reunion found your place card right across the table from your old flame, and she was looking fine. Had on that red dress she was busting out of and those high heels that said: “Ask me to dance; I’m all yours again.”

  Your wife had on a dress that said: “I’ve had three kids, and gravity is winning. You know it. I know it. I hate you. Let’s fight.”

  All you remember was the first thing she said to that hussy, which was something like: “They don’t take out the trash here at all, do they?” Whooeee. Now, that was a reunion from hell.

  But wait! Maybe–just maybe-- you go to your reunion to see the high school sweetheart that you haven’t seen in over half a lifetime, the one from whom you were separated for reasons you cannot exactly recall anymore. Maybe it wasn’t avoidable. Maybe it should have been. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Life has a lot of maybes.

  She might be there, you know. Maybe.

  She might well be there. She might show up. Maybe.

  She might be alone, standing somewhere across the room, and you might walk over to her, wondering all the hundred lifetimes it takes you to get over there exactly what in the world you’re going to say to her. You close the distance with a few final steps, and then you’re standing in front of her.

  Maybe that’s when she smiles, and you remember why you were attracted to her in the first place. Then you remember what it’s like to stand in the shine of a hundred watt smile framed by silver dollar dimples. Memories drill holes right through you. Your mouth opens, and your thoughts leak out and evaporate into nothingness, and you smile, and mutter something, and feel seventeen again.

  Maybe then you remember how easy she is to talk to, when you start talking again, and as you talk, it’s almost like you’ve never been away, and maybe then you’re suddenly glad you came.

  High school class reunions.

  Maybe.

  §

  Cleaning the Tractor Toolbox

  It’s that time of the year when the promise of spring overrides an underlying but upsetting message that nothing is permanent. Winter isn’t permanent. Summer isn’t either. Not much is. Oh, maybe politics is permanent. That doesn’t seem to change. And the arrogance of the French. They can be counted on, mostly. But the fact doesn’t go away that summer means winter is coming, and then winter means summer is coming.

  Sometimes, at this time of the year, you need something. For me, that’s an old tractor, one that is at least fifty years old; one I can look at and say, at least to myself: “That damned thing made it. I’m here leaning on it; I must be making it, too.”

  There’s something about the assurance of an old tractor’s large solid unchanging bulk that led me out to the tractor shed the other day, led me out there a few weeks ago on a crisp morning behind the balloon that my breath formed. I plugged in the portable oil heater, and just leaned against the tractor. I missed that tractor all winter, but I didn’t miss it, if you know what I mean.

  I noticed the yawning lid of the toolbox behind the steering wheel, which came mounted on the used tractor when I bought it thirty years ago. It occurred to me that I had never been able to close it for the junk it held. I decided to clean that tool box.

  It didn’t take me long to feel what I think an archaeologist must feel as they dig down through successive layers of civilization’s remains.

  Only instead of pots and pans and arrowheads, I found, in the order that the artifacts surfaced, two empty oil cans, the old kind that you squirt oil with. One was missing its snout, and the other the squeeze handle, they weren’t much good.

  Then I found three old socks that had been used for grease rags. I had wondered where they’d went. So it wasn’t my washing machine that had been eating them after all. It was the tractor. One wonders how.

  I found countless rusty, barely recognizable and completely unusable square nuts, bolts, washers, pins, keys, chain links and such, each embedded in the hard packed bed of field soil which suspended all this stuff in a kind of prehistoric sea bed.

  I found a single gopher trap, severely mauled. I vaguely remembered the neighbor boy coming over to trap gophers in my hay field several years ago. He set six traps. Found five. I found the sixth one just when the sky was threatening rain and I still had half the field to cut. It took two hours to repair the damage to the mower.

  There was one half-inch box end wrench. In fact, it was the only functional tool in the tool box, looking out of place amongst the broken screwdrivers, cracked sockets, and three pliers rusted into petrified uselessness. Then I saw the imported adjustable wrench that I had picked up off the blacktop road a long time ago. I remembered stopping and gleefully picking it up, and then the first time I used it, having it slip on a nut and take a big hunk of skin off a finger. Due to some Law of Something, for years it was the only tool I could ever find when I needed one. For a long time it wouldn’t go away. It was a malicious metal monster that insisted on hanging around and being the only tool I could find and chewing the skin off my knuckles. There it was. Apparently the tool box had caught it sleeping, and had absorbed it.

  I found the mashed cardbo
ard tube from an empty roll of toilet paper. Signs of civilization.

  I found a really mean looking spike, one that I was sure some past farmer had dug out of a flat rear tire, just as the last of the weight-adding fluid ran out onto the ground, which is about when the co-op’s tire truck usually arrived. I’m sure that the disgruntled farmer, knowing that the toolbox never gave up its dead, threw it in there.

  Finally, clear down at the bottom of the box, I found several old wooden “farmer” matches. I really thought about them, and what they were for. Finally, it came to me: Some past farmer had struck those matches to illuminate the early search for what still is the never ending quest for the perfect farm program.

  Or maybe he smoked.

  I was done. I looked at the now empty tool box. It didn’t look right. I threw all the junk back into the box, and went back into the house. The lid wouldn’t close.

  Some things shouldn’t change.

  §

  Gopher Burn

  Well, it’s spring, and it’s gopher trapping time again, out here in the country, where the little buggers, full of energy after sleeping all winter, are building dirt mounds steep enough to tip over a tank.

  One breeding pair of gophers can produce up to 88 more in one summer. They’re a simple little animal. They can’t see. They can’t run. Don’t fly. Don’t vote. Can’t tie their own shoelaces. Probably have an IQ comparable to a stick.

  Then why can’t I catch them? It should be an embarrassingly lopsided contest, me with a couple of college degrees against a blind rodent. But it isn’t. Oh sure. They stick their sick and lame in my traps on a rare occasion so that I don’t escalate and use the nuclear option, but that’s about it. According to my math, they’re gaining on me 80 at a time.

  This war with gophers goes back to the first 10 apple trees that I planted. Word spread underground, fresh apple roots, and they came by the busloads. Some of them came up from China through a tunnel exchange program, just so they could get in on the fun. The day after the trees were planted, they’d poke their heads up every few minutes, spit out a fresh mouthful of tunnel dirt onto my lawn, and go back down for more. Every day when I got up, one more apple tree was tipped over, its roots gnawed off.

  One day, when no one else here was home, I declared war. Usually, if anyone else is around, I don’t let the real me out, the gopher-hating, tunnel-invading, rodent-war-mongering madman. No one was home. For this first action, I needed guns, lots of guns. Shotguns. Rifles. Pistols. I had twenty rounds for the .22; 11 rounds for the .410; and three shells for the 12-gauge pump shotgun. I grabbed them all.

  Hitting them with the .22 was impossible. A little bullet like that, even a faint breath of wind probably blows it off course. Maybe the barrel was crooked. Those rounds were gone pretty quickly. It was like a carnival, little heads popping up here and there, popping back down, over here, over there, behind me.

  I loaded the .410. It also seemed to have a crooked barrel.

  I tried different tactics. Pretended to be picking apples, but instead whirled and fired at retracting heads. There were so many of them. All the whirling about made me dizzy.

  Then I pretended to be going back to the house—the old “I’m giving up” strategy, and then firing over my shoulder. I got the rear tire on the riding mower. Finally, I was down to the three shells for the 12-gauge. I laid down on the ground, lined up three little pop-up heads in a row, and fired. Fired again. Gave’em another one.

  An examination of the battlefield revealed no gopher corpses. They must take away their dead. My side had two casualties: the riding mower tire, and one apple tree, sliced off by the shotgun.

  I put away those deadly tools of destruction, and went and got a can of gasoline and a can of diesel fuel. Oh, and a lighter. Here’s how this works. First, you dig open the end hole in a line of holes. Then you dig open the far hole. Into one hole, you pour a slug of gasoline. Into the other, you pour diesel fuel. Once the diesel fuel is lit, the draft pulls gasoline fumes into the tunnel, through the enemy’s living room, along with enough air to provide a combustible amount of oxygen. When the two meet, there’s a most satisfying “WHUUUMMMPPPP!!!!”

  I lit off three of these, and went in to lunch. Before I even had the grilled cheese sandwich done on both sides, their troops were digging again, in the very holes which I had just burned.

  I raced outside with more gasoline and diesel fuel and opened up at least two dozen tunnels, and this time poured in enough gasoline and diesel fuel to set the entire township on fire. I raced around with the lighter, but in the smoke and flames, I became confused and as I was crossing one tunnel opening, it exploded and set my pants on fire. I spilled the last of the gasoline as I was beating on my legs. It caught fire. That scorched my hair and took off the eyebrow on one side of my face. Two more secondary tunnel explosions went off.

  About then, the mailman came up the driveway, which he does when he has a large package. He turned the bend at the top of the driveway and looked around. He saw guns laying all over the lawn, and me dancing around trying to put out my pants. I saw him and tried to suddenly act normal. Around me, it looked like someone had invaded the Iraqi oil fields and set them on fire. There were dozens of oil well smoke plumes rising thickly in the air.

  “Hi there,” I said to him. Another explosion went off behind me. He flinched.

  “Package,” he said. He threw it out the window and reversed all the way back down the driveway.

  Everything is cleaned up again. Except for the fresh mounds of dirt that come every day, things look normal.

  When no one is looking, I practice whirling and shooting.

  §

  Guy Stuff

  In a confused daze, I decided to call the Head Psychoanalyst of The Tribe of Guys. I didn’t know where else to turn. I thought by now I’d have a lot more answers than I do. I thought by now that even slow learners would have figured out the basics about this particular subject.

  I wanted The Head Psychoanalyst to explain women to me. I’ve tried on my own. I’ve decided aliens would be easier to understand. At least they wouldn’t use the same alphabet, and lead you to thinking you heard what they said.

  I dialed. His secretary answered. It was a woman. When one calls up the Head Psycho of The Tribe of Guys, one expects a man. Now a woman.

  “Whaddya want?” she asked, and the sound of her voice reminded me of a ball bearing I once had go out on the front wheel of my car.

  “Well,” I replied, “I called to ask The Head Psycho a question.” I didn’t tell her the question. A sudden thought came to me. “Say,” I asked her, “you’re not The Head Psycho, are you?” That’d be a kick in the butt, have The Head Psycho of The Tribe of Guys be a woman.

  “No,” she said, “but I screen all his calls.” She was smiling. You know? You can tell when someone you cannot see is smiling. They’ve got this kind of sneer to their voice.

  “I need to talk to him,” I said. I tried to keep desperation out of my voice. Women sense fear, and move right in.

  “What’s the subject matter; you have to tell me that at least,” she said. Suddenly, I remembered the time I went to the doctor with what I thought was a prostate infection. It turned out it was a prostate infection. The doctor found that out. The doctor was a she. When I’m The President of The Tribe of Guys, there’ll be some laws about what and what and when and where a she doctor can probe.

  It was bad enough when I walked into the clinic, and the receptionist asked me what was wrong. I told her I wasn’t sure. I really was sure, but I was stalling. Then she asked me where it hurt. I told her it hurt at home, in the car on the way here, and now it hurts in the waiting room. I finally convinced her I was an idiot, and she let me sit down.

  I think there was A Guy Doctor in the house, and she gave me to The Girl Doctor just to be mean. There are a lot of bad things to
be said about the male prostate; another one would be having aliens inspecting it.

  Now I’m on the phone, I need to talk to The HP, and it’s kind of the same thing. If I tell this female what I want to know, well—there’s such a thing as too much truth. I’ve lived my life by this “Too Much Truth” creed. I’ll give you an example. Once, the drummer’s girlfriend kissed me. I’m the piano player. Everyone wants to kiss the piano player. Or shoot him. One of the two. This time I got kissed.

  Now, the problem is: If I go home and tell The Old Girl I’ve been kissed, then by the very telling it means it must be important, for after all, you wouldn’t tell something to someone if it wasn’t important. Now you’ve gone and made something that wasn’t important, important. Just bear with me.

  On the other hand, if you don’t tell her—because it’s not important, right?--, then it’s become important because obviously to the opposite sex it appears that you thought it might be if you told it, so you didn’t. You see the dilemma here? So I usually opted for the path of least output. In other words, I didn’t say anything.

  The next day, she found out somehow, and it became Real Important. Even though I used my creed logic on her, and took Guy Logic to new heights, she still got pretty chilly.

  I’ve tried this logic out on other people, and it seems to work. It works real good on other guys. Other guys actually appreciate it. Matter of fact, other guys often say: “Just cut to the bottom line here, so I can go fishing, or snow mobile riding, or drinking, or whatever.” They don’t see the need to make stuff complicated.

  If there’s something they don’t think you need to know, great.