Excerpt from CHAPTER 3

EXcErT from: CH. thR33...
"the chipmunk L@DY"

I found myself walking around town, during the day, and stumbled upon a small garden center that also sold aquariums and freshwater fish and hamsters, mice, rats, and dwarf rabbits. Looking into the little aquariums I recognized the orange and red swordtails and the platys. I could distinguish which were males and which were females and knew that they were live-bearers. They gave birth to live babies instead of laying eggs. They had orange and black striped khuli loaches and speckled, algae eating plecostomus. There was an albino catfish and little blue catfish of about three inches in length. There were a handful of little, whitish fish with no eyes that I had read about. They had no eyes because they lived in dark caves. It was believed that once they had eyes and could see, but the caves where they were from had closed from the light so they eventually evolved and adapted to be born without those eyes that had no use. At the store I thumbed through pages in a book about another type of fish known as a cichlid. I read and looked at pictures of Oscars and Jack Dempseys and various African freshwater fish.

Some time passed and a lady working asked from across the store, “You doing alright?”

“Just fine,” I said.

“You need any help,” she asked.

“I’m just looking.”

About a half hour later she began to pressure me with her helpful questions. The woman had grown impatient with my reading although I was the only one in the store for most of the time. She came to the back of the store where I stood reading.

“Good book there, young man?”

“Yeah,” I answered.

She then asked if I would like to buy the book. I had no money so I said that I didn’t think so.

“If you’re not going to buy anything, I have other things to attend to,” she said. Of course she was asking me to leave without saying it. She then made a gesture that I should follow her that further prompted me to leave. I set the book back on a little, white, metal rack that spun in a circle and quietly left the store. But on the weekends another lady worked the counter and didn’t care that I read the fish books.

“You keep reading that fish stuff and you’re gonna turn into a fish someday,” she’d say with a smile and a twang in her voice that told that she wasn’t originally from the Midwest.

Such stupid little things adults often say to kids, like that I would turn into a fish. Still, she was nice enough. And though the lady on the weekends would allow me to stay without paying, this didn’t exactly deter me from stopping by from time to time on Mondays or Wednesdays or Thursdays or whenever. After a couple visits of freeloading and otherwise loitering, the lady during the week would ask me at the door if I was going to buy anything that day. She started getting more and more angry with me at each visit, but still that did not stop me, which only fueled her fire.

One morning I woke and fixed myself a bowl of cereal and an apple. The old lady asked how school was going and how many friends had I made. Of course I had not been going to school. I didn’t want to go to this new school like any kid don’t want to go to school and nobody knew the better for a time that would soon end. But for a couple weeks of timeless time where things both slowed down and sped up at once, I was free of any earthly responsibilities and did what I wanted. I would eventually go again, but just not yet.

“School’s good,” I said matter of factly.

“So you like it then, Son? Everything o.k.?” She persisted.

“Yeah, it’s good,” I said.

“You’ve made some friends then?”
“Yeah… Jim, Tom, and Sheryl,” I said, and immediately froze up inside, realizing two of the names I’d falsely given were Jim and Sheryl‘s, and Tom was another family name by marriage. Oops.

But the old woman thought nothing of it. “Those are good names,” she replied.
With that I was off the hook for the time being. Still, I should have thought it through a little better, knowing those questions would eventually come.

“Well, our social security check came in a few days ago. You keep takin’ out the trash and keep up with your studies and this will be your allowance for things you need then, Son,” she said and handed me two ten dollar bills. Happily I took the money and was out the door and on my way to that small place in time.

It was a Thursday in October and the lady at the garden center saw me coming. The hag neared the entry and locked the door as I reached to open it.
“Go away. We’re closed,” she said.

I looked at her behind the glass and pretended I couldn’t hear what she had said.

“We’re closed,” she repeated. “I have inventory to do this afternoon,” she lied, and no doubt had rehearsed this little scene in anticipation of my arrival.

And still I stood there pretending to not understand her words. The hag-lady flipped the sign on the window from “Welcome, We’re Open” to “Sorry, We’re Closed.” She stood there gloating with arms folded across her chest, an underpaid coolie, but proud of this small victory that won her nothing.

“Goodbye,” she said with a sarcastic smile.

And, like a good little boy, I turned and walked away. I stood in a nearby alleyway for a few minutes with words in my head like BITCH and phrases like STAIN OF A WOMAN, and gathered the nerve to challenge her anew. I peeked round the corner to find she’d switched the sign back to “Welcome, We’re Open” and I could see the hag seated behind the counter with her face buried in a newspaper and not doing any kind of inventory. I did not know what she read but what she did read was of no importance to anyone so of course it made the little, local paper. The hag was deeply involved in an article about a local pie baking contest. She smiled a thin smile and her nostrils flared like a chipmunk as she read. She then turned, inside my head, from a mean, old hag of a woman who wanted any sense of authority she could grab onto to a little, chirping chipmunk. So I bolted for the door, quickly opened it, and briskly walked to the back towards the books, as quick as I could without actually running.

“Hey,” the chipmunk chirped angrily. “We’re closed for you!” she exclaimed in a foreign animal language I could not decipher.

So I ignored the bitch, quickly turning the cichlid fish book to page one hundred and seventy-four where I’d left last and had bookmarked. The woman stood looking down at me with red cheeks and nostrils flaring wildly.

“Put the book down and get out!” she chirped loudly. When I continued to ignore her she threatened emptily, “You have to leave now or I’ll call the manager. You don’t want me to call Mr. Thompson.”

At that I began reading aloud so that she could fully grasp that I did not care about her the way she did not care about me. And I really didn‘t give two shits or a rat‘s ass if she did call this Mr. Thompson character. I didn‘t know who the hell he was, but figured he must have been a bigger, fatter chipmunk.

So I read aloud, “The less aggressive, smaller cichlids may be introduced to community tropicals -” but before I could finish the sentence the enraged chipmunk snatched the book from out my hands and cocked it back with a chipmunk fist and wanted so very badly to hit me, to smack me, to beat me again and again and again. I didn’t whence or cower. I didn’t even flinch.

“Well go on then,” I laughed. “You wanna hit me don’t you? Then hit me, you stupid bitch.”

I sounded like my father with the words I spoke but something inside of me was terribly wrong at that moment and I felt strangely distant, like I was watching the scene of myself and this woman from bleachers like a spectator watching dancing monkeys or seals balancing striped balls at the circus. She squeezed that damn fish book so tight her knuckles turned blue and white beneath her fingernails. She began to yell in a high pitch little voice that must’ve driven dogs mad from distant neighborhoods. Some people are so very funny when they’re angry and she was a prime example. I pictured her whole body as an overgrown chipmunk and I couldn’t help but laugh. The more she screamed the more I laughed. I fell to a knee and grabbed at my ribs. They ached I laughed so hard. The more I laughed the more she yelled and the more she yelled the more I laughed. Tears streamed from my eyes in laughter but still she did not hit me. Instead, to my surprise, her death grip on that little book lessened and it fell to the floor. She returned to behind her counter. Unable to accept defeat, she said she was calling the police. I picked up the curled book, walked slowly to the counter where she stood with phone in hand, and slapped a ten dollar bill on the counter.

“Keep the change,” I said.

She slammed the phone on the hook and buried her head in the newspaper, not reading but hiding her face from the world as she cried.

“You little shit, get out!” she cried as I was already leaving.

I never did go back to that little garden center, not even on the weekends when I wasn’t unwanted. I took the book down to the basement later that day after a walk down by a small pond covered partly in scum, whose shores were nearly surrounded in cattails. I skipped a couple nearly flat stones across water and at a frog croaking before dormancy of winter’s coming.

“Get out, you little shit!” I hollered and laughed as I skipped those stones and mocked her.

In the basement, later, I finished the book on cichlids. There were only, roughly, forty pages and I finished it in a couple hours. I still wasn’t a very quick reader; still I’d have finished much sooner but the mind kept straying from the pages, thinking mostly of how much better it felt to have had the money to pay for that damn book. It was the exclamation to the sentence and it felt better than sliding a comic down a pant leg. Maybe somewhere in this all I’d really learned a lesson. For a moment this idea of having money was a real turning point within me. I still had another ten bucks but it was gone by the next day on chips and soda and nothing really. When the money was spent I had nearly a month remaining before social security. When the money was gone I thought that I had really learned a lesson, but just exactly what I couldn’t place for certain. So maybe I was just a little shit. But I pushed that thought away. I was tired of reading about fish and the garden center had run its course. I wanted more money, but didn’t know how to get more. I needed more money and would learn how to get it.

Like a snake I was shedding the skin of my youth, although I was still young. Only weeks ago, weeks that could be counted on one hand, I was a docile boy, taking it all and holding it all in. But I was changing within myself, like a marriage, for better or for worse.

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