Prairie Spy

by Linda, Alan

  So, I told The Ball Bearing this: “My car pulls to the right; maybe The HP knows what’s wrong with it.”

  I won’t know any more about women, but it’d be nice to at least have a car that drives straight.

  §

  Letter Alongside the Road

  I find a lot of interesting stuff alongside the road where I walk on the evenings when I don’t go swimming. Old shoes lie there solo, their other foot now in some other part of the world. Their pose—in the road, often right side up—seems to refute the knowledge that they are unwanted now, that they are of value only as a couple. Old shoes, like people, seem to ache with empty feelings.

  There are lots of empty beer cans and liquor bottles, a continuous reminder that a civilized society picks and chooses its drugs like it picks and chooses its wars, ignoring their grinding effect on human decency and mortality, relying more on the traditional basis that history in the form of our ancestors drank and warred, and if it was good for them, it must be good for us, too.

  Sometimes there’s an explosion of plastic and glass and other parts of the front end of a car, where some luckless deer stepped into some luckless car’s path and proved to someone once again that the good day you were having just a moment ago—which you didn’t really think was in fact all that good—really in fact was good, compared to the one now with the five-hundred-dollar deductible you were going to have to cough up. One tenth of a second either way, and your bad day was a good day, for both you and the deer.

  The other day, I found the torn-up remains of a hand-written letter. It was bunched up enough that I could put some of the fragments together into larger fragments, and almost read the intent behind them. Not quite. But almost.

  “Dear Jo…,” began the letter. Ah, a Dear John letter, and this time the john’s name really is John. I assembled a couple more pieces.

  “You know that I’ll…” Let’s see: “You know that I’ll…miss you?” “…pay your bail as soon as I get back from the casino with it?” “…hate you for the rest of my life, which I hope is a lot longer than yours?” “…regret not handcuffing you to the bed and….” “…always regret not leaving you before the sixth child was born?” “…miss you each time the preacher and I are ordering rum on the beaches of the Monte Carlo?” “…send you the money I stole from the kids as soon as I hit the Lotto?” “…try and not hate you while you’re dying of the Upper Japanese River Fever?” “…always regret not telling you I had AIDS?”

  Well, ok then. I read on, frantically assembling pieces for more information. This was turning out to be like a book from which someone had stolen the last ten pages; like a bad soap opera, or an addiction to “Lost,” the TV show. I quit walking, turned my back to the wind and the cars speeding by, and frantically tried to assemble some more of it.

  “When I first met you, …” When I first met you? “When I first met you, …you were a stud with your cigarettes rolled up in your tee-shirt sleeve.” “…you had just knocked up my sister.” “…your teeth needed some work, especially the ones that were missing.” “…I thought I’d never rob a bank.” “…your breath stank like a Hindu’s gym shoe.” “…you were just getting out of jail for…” “…I should have shot you then, because I’d be out of jail by now.” “…you said your band needed a singer and I should try out, but you never said it was to be the groupie.”

  I needed more information. I tried different torn pieces in different combinations. Another somewhat legible sentence popped out: “I guess I should…” “I guess I should…have known you went to family reunions for dates.” “…have guessed you weren’t a preacher.” “…have told you I was only fifteen.” “…have warned you that daddy would use a shotgun to force you to marry me.” “…have told you I had a bad gambling habit before I sold our house.” “…have told you that when I’m driving, I usually hit six deer each year.” “…that I had just had my gastric bypass undone, because I’d rather weigh four hundred pounds and be happy.”

  The last part that I managed to put together started with: “I’ll always…” “I’ll always…wonder what life would have been like if you hadn’t taken after me with a chain saw and cut off both my legs but I still love you and miss you.” “…take good care of your Harley Davidson because my cousin and I are really truly in love and we’re leaving on it.” “…be sorry that you’re in jail for that little something that I left in the car and the cops found.”

  Sigh. There’s nothing like a nice love letter.

  §

  Librarian Bar Codes

  “GET YOURSELF BARCODED HERE!” said the sign hanging in the window of the local library.

  It used to be such a nice, quiet little library, nestled semi-comatosely within the smothering oneness of a nice, quiet little town, where all the women have dainty feet, and all the students are on the honor rolls.

  It used to be. It isn’t any more. What I predicted would happen has come true: Modern data tracking devices have come and ruined everything. They’re gone and not only taken away my name—can’t sign your name anymore, young man, just your number—but then to make it worse, they’ve snatched my number now, too.

  It took them forty years to get my name away from me. Then they gave me a number. That only lasted about two years. “Just sign your number right here,” the library used to say. “We don’t want anyone to know private stuff.”

  Heck, that’s how I knew whether a book was any good, by who had read it.

  Now I have to get bar coded. Why? By the time I get up tomorrow morning, what’ll be next? It’s worrisome.

  At the time, when they wanted to turn me into a number and quit signing my name on the check-out card, they said: “It’s a policy thing.”

  `What policy thing, I asked? Why is it bad policy to want to use the name my mama gave to me, the one that I’ve gotten used to all these years. And it’s used to me. That’s a policy thing too, isn’t it? My policy.

  “Well, sir,” she said to me….

  No. Please, I said. I’ve just had another policy change. “Sir” was my father’s name. Don’t call me that. I’ve decided you should indeed call my by a number, and I choose “Seven.” I told her that I’ve always had a soft spot for seven. Seven dwarves. Seven seas that someday I’m going to sail. Seven pheasants used to be the bag limit before we decimated the population. And of course at the age of seven I had my first…

  She got up from her chair there behind the big counter, and huffed off to the head librarian’s office. This younger woman came out. She walked toward me a bit stiffly, probably from lugging all those books around when she went to librarian school.

  “Is there a problem?” she asked. Her tone of voice said that she knew there was a problem, ok, and she was looking at it.

  Well, yes, there might be a problem, I said. I might be related to Dewey, who invented the Dewey Decimal system. If it was a good policy enough for him, I began to say….

  She interrupted. Asked what my name was again?

  I told her my name was 1.223.0401. I just said I might be related to a Dewey. What did she expect?

  She started to say something, but I interrupted her.

  Please, I said. All my friends call me one point two.

  She said, “Sir,” (Evidently my name policy about “sir” is going to be harder to comprehend that I first estimated.) “We here at The Library are faced with the task of hauling Neanderthals such as yourself kicking and convulsing into the twenty first century. That’s why we’re bar coding you now.” There. Now she had told him. Gave him the truth. Her head ache threatened to worsen.

  I said to her: You can’t give me a barcode. Back when you gave me a number, I had all sorts of problems. The bank wouldn’t cash checks that I signed one point two whatever. People didn’t know me. It took ma six phone calls before she figured out that her son was the one point two that was calling
collect.

  Poor thing. Now look what you’re going to put her through. She’ll answer the phone and ask: “Who is this?”

  I’ll say it’s .

  She’ll say, “Who? Did you say ?

  I’ll say, no, not him. You always did say we sounded alike. I’m .

  “Who?” Her voice will be near panic. She’s not young like she used to be when we called each other names.

  I’ll say: Well, you know who. Then I’ll whisper: “one point two.” But now, I’ll tell her, you have to call me .

  The head librarian stamped one of her dainty undersized feet, and turned away to walk off. Before she left, though, she said BAR CODE THIS: !!$@%#^$&%*^!!!

  Oh my.

  §

  Mustard Plaster

  As long, cold winters like this one go slowly on and grudgingly build the extra minutes of sunshine every day that will eventually rescue us from brainlessly deciding to stay and live at this awful latitude, we all search for solace.

  Solace from what? There is one group of organisms that loves this latitude, loves bunches of people sealed up in air-tight boxes where there is always one human that believes he and he alone will enter the Guinness World Book of Records with this sneeze. You’ve seen these humans. Their faces begin The Sneeze Wrinkle. That wrinkle gives them time to develop a lung full of air. They cock their head back, look up at a bright light to more sharply trigger this expulsion of snot and air, and fire it into the room.

  Right where you are.

  The fact that murder rates drop up here in the winter doesn’t make sense.

  Something else doesn’t make sense: I haven’t had one single common cold this winter, not one. Not one sinus infection, flu germ, or stomach flu. As this winter passes the two-thirds mark, and I have a chance for a personal best at this germ-free record, perhaps murder will become an alternative, when I maul some hapless sneezer.

  As it is, all conversations with friends begins with: “Hey. Come on up (from the Twin Cities, breeding place for contagious enemies) and we’ll go sliding.” After a second more, I add: “You’re not sick, are you?”

  Unspoken are the words: “Cause if you are, you’re sleeping in the garage.”

  Of course they know I’m joking. They should also know that I’ll love them just as much in the garage as in the house.

  Back when I was a kid, germs were treated much more seriously, because antibiotics and doctor visits were pretty rare, and no one knew for sure which germ might progress to something so serious that a doctor might be involved. Grown-ups from that era, the late forties and early fifties, remembered quite well the fact that doctors used to be barbers who learned their trade while practicing taking out tonsils and teeth. They remembered doctors before doctors even had official medical colleges where they learned stuff that could really kill you.

  There are two medical treatments that parents knew which I remember. One happened when you as a child became so hoarse with a sore throat that you couldn’t even bluff a normal speaking voice anymore. Your life began to take a major turn for the worse when you came into the kitchen and saw dad with a goose feather in one hand and the iodine bottle in the other.

  He didn’t even say anything, just beckoned you with one finger. And just like that, you knew there was no place to run, no place to hide. There was nothing left to do but slowly, veeeery slowly walk over there.

  “Say ‘ahhhhh’,” he would tell you. Then with a dip of the tip of the feather in the iodine so quick that it must be magic, he stuck it down your gullet and coated all the red goopy soreness down there in one swipe.

  I asked him later, once I was grown up and he couldn’t catch me anymore, could he coat everything in one swipe, and he said: “I had to do it in one, one was the only chance you got.”

  That’s for sure. I remember long minutes of gagging, which I’m sure I accentuated for extra pity. There was no pity. They’d grown up with the medical feather; they were happy to get the chance to use it on someone else. “Let’s have kids,” I can hear my parents telling each other, “so we can gag them with The Feather.”

  Seriously, they also knew that, without antibiotics, kids got sick and died, even though the same parents ended up with a bill for removal of tonsils. Better the feather.

  Or the mustard plaster. Now, there’s a method for making errant foreign terrorists cough up the truth. Let’s restrain’em, and slap one of these on their chest. They’d talk.

  The only good thing about the mustard plaster was that at least, mom did it. With dad, you kind of felt that you could as easily be a calf or baby pig. He apparently didn’t care which, just went ahead with a certain calm, stoic attitude.

  Mom knew, and you could tell. “This will feel hot, but it’ll make you feel better.”

  Hot? Hot is fire. This was way past fire. Which was why she sat beside you at your bedside, and sympathized with you while she held you down, saying things like: “Just think how much better you’ll feel when you’re able to breath and run around again.”

  Uh huh. The thick, mustard-plastered cotton cloth must have been warmed up to a thousand degrees. You could feel it burning your chest skin, you could smell the skin puckering and turning black, and when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, then the mustard began to prickle and itch and burn. Ohhhhhhhnooooooooooi’mdyingma!!!!!

  Then you woke up the next day ready to run around again. Coughed up about a bucket full of snot the first hour, marveling at the colors of your expectorations while they froze in a snow bank. Instant recovery time.

  I hope I don’t catch anything. Remedies like that would kill me now.

  Call before you come, so I can hear if you’re dripping, or coughing, or plugged up.

  §

  Old Shoes

  Someone said to me the other day: “How come you only see one shoe lying on the side of the road?”

  Huh. I hadn’t thought much about that, until it was brought up. Really. Now, I can’t get it out of my mind. Things like that bother me. Stuff like overdrafts from the bank and unpaid bills for new tires just have to wait their turn, faced with choices such as this to worry about.

  If I could just get this important stuff figured out, life would be oh so much grander.

  About the one shoe, there has to be some good reason it’s there. Maybe those of you out there who are missing one could e-mail me and let me know how one got away, and one got to stay. That’s assuming you know.

  If you don’t know how one got away, and one got left behind, it could indicate shoe aliens, or foul play of some sort, like shoe terrorism. After all, airports are highly suspicious of shoes these days. Shoes therefore must be up to something.

  When I renewed my home owner’s insurance the other day, the nice lady who peers over the huge pile all this paperwork makes on her desk asked me if I wanted to keep the “terrorism rider,” or exclude it.

  “What kind of terrorism does this cover?” I asked her. There are, after all, all kinds of terrorism. There’s psychological terror, like if the septic system inspector comes out and says you’re out of compliance and it’s going to cost you five grand to get back on the right side of the smell.

  There’s even the terror of your homeowner’s insurance going up twelve percent, which it had.

  It turned out that apparently she’s gotten a lot of crap over this terrorism exclusion, because she got a bit brittle with me and I signed off on it.

  Now I’m a victim of insurance agent terror. Next thing you know, I’ll need medication. I hope I’m covered by my policy. I don’t dare call her, though. She sounded like maybe she was a terror victim of some sort herself.

  What I didn’t ask her was if she was aware of any shoe terrorism in the neighborhood. After she snapped, I didn’t dare, but I wanted to.

  Maybe shoes don’t get along ‘til death do they
part. Maybe they’re a lot like the people who wear them, and stuff happens. Maybe they change. Maybe they don’t. Maybe shoes have disagreements. Maybe one shoe is male, and the other is female. Maybe there’s a lot we don’t know about shoes. I could see one shoe saying to the other:

  “You philanderer, your tongue was hanging out at that red pump!” This said while laced to the feet of a guy who is at the moment viewing a flat tire on his car.

  “I was not. You’re the one who’s been stepping out, never letting me lead off. I am the right foot, right?” This is an old argument, it’s easy to see. You’ve either got the right stuff, or the left stuff.

  “You’re the one who walked out, not me. Once a heel, always a heel.”

  What if the two shoes discover one day that they have completely different philosophies of life, and she says to him: “You don’t have a sole.”

  He says back to her, in a sing-song voice: “There was an old lady who lived in a shoe.” That might have quieted her. Not “shoes,” just “shoe.” Next thing you know, the guy who had the flat tire is changing shoes, and she sees an opportunity, and kicks him out.

  It gets even more complicated. Now there’s a whole bunch of single shoes abandoned by the side of the road. What are the chances that any of these lost soles are going to find a mate? Who’s going to want them? After all, they’ve worn out their welcome where they were, and now they’re old and pretty tattered, beat up, unable to make any new starts. Even if they find another old shoe, they’ll worry about matching up.

  What if, after lying at the side of the road watching life go by for years and years, they’re found and matched back up with their mate? Will they still be a pair, like they used to be? Will they be able to reside peacefully beside one another in their old age, taking it easy in the closet, content to talk about the kicking and pinching and scuffing they’ve seen while they were apart?