Friday, February 14, 2025

The Rabbit-People's Chritmas

 The Rabbit-People’s Christmas


The rabbit-people lived on a busy street.  Although the neighborhood was residential for ten blocks in both directions, the thoroughfare linked downtown with a sector of shopping malls and churches among large cemeteries on the outskirts of our city.  At most hours of the day and night, traffic on the street made backing out from garages adjacent to the homes challenging.  The rabbit-people were fortunate; an alley behind their two-story brick house provided access to their garage, also a square cottage-like structure brick-built and windowless with a pyramid-shaped roof, the detached outbuilding equipped with a two-car-wide aluminum door that rode up and down on a grooved track.  When the garage door was open, passers-by in the alley could scent ammonia and fetid vegetables inside, the stink of several obese rabbits confined in plywood hutches shoved against the car-port’s back wall.  


Sometimes, I walked my dog along the alley.  Evidently, the rabbit-hutches and the barrels of food pellets along with water troughs had crowded out the rabbit-people’s vehicles.  A pick-up truck, battered van, and a big white boat on the scaffold of a pale trailer were parked in the alley, narrowing the right of way to a slender track between garbage pails and wood-slat fences and the other dark, ruinous garages.  Normally, I hustled my dog past the garage after sunset or before dawn, the animal straining against the leash and lunging in the direction of the rabbit-hutches.  Often, the garage door was raised and I could see into the enclosed space.  In the dark, the rabbits were mostly invisible in the shadows, some tufts of moon-white fur behind wire-mesh where huge, wet eyes glinted.  In the adjacent patio, behind a waist-high masonry wall, there was a grill shaped like a metal cigar, some planters in which the spidery, tangled wreckage of winter-killed flowers made a fringe atop the stone-work, and a big, oval hot-tub entombed under cedar slats.  Plastic toys that were red and orange and blue (some of them with small wheels) were strewn about the patio – the rabbit people had two boys who seemed to be twins and a little girl.  The children had shrill voices and I heard them squealing sometimes as their mother loaded them into the old van to take them to school or, perhaps, day-care. 


One Spring day, while walking my dog along the busy street in front of the rabbit-people’s house, I observed a small blue wading pool situated near the concrete stoop leading to the home’s front door.  Chicken-wire had been stretched along the iron stakes of the rabbit-people’s fence around their front yard.  Among the shrubs, I saw two shelters made from canvas stretched taut between metal rods pounded into the leaf-litter between small lilac bushes planted along the home’s facade.  The rabbits were lolling in the grass, stretched out on the lawn.  It was the first time that I had seen the animals clearly.  There were two black Belgian giants, heavy-set rabbits with upright ears, shallow, tilted pockets lined with soft white fur.  The ears were like the antennae of an insect, vaguely grotesque, and the big rabbits had muscular hind-quarters with hoof-shaped paws.  Three smaller rabbits with frayed floppy ears were daintily nibbling grass, noses twitching.  Two of the floppy-eared rabbits were female and the little, squat male sometimes amused himself by mounting one or the other of them.  The females seemed indifferent to his attentions.  The lawn was bright with dandelions and the grass was green, sprouting in tufts from where the rabbits had fertilized it, and the scene was idyllic.  The lady of the house, wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat was trimming the lilac bushes heavy with purple grape-shaped blossoms.  


“I like your rabbits,” I said.


My dog trotted back and forth, pulling on the leash, along the chicken wire base strung along the base of the fence.  The rabbits weren’t concerned about the dog and ignored her.


“We decided to let them live out here,” the lady told me.  Her husband emerged from the side-door of the house, lugging tartan-colored bag of golf clubs.  “We are letting the rabbits be rabbits,” he said in a merry voice.  The little boys tagged along behind him.    


The big, boat, sleek and stream-lined like a space-craft was now parked along the curb on the busy street.  The van and the pickup were sheltered in the garage that the rabbits had previously occupied.   After the thaw, we had seen teenagers gathering in the alley between the garages after dark and there had been some beer bottles smashed on the asphalt.  Down the street, someone had painted the word Sur with some crooked-looking digits across the vinyl siding of one of the garages.  It seemed prudent to keep vehicles behind closed doors in the garages.  Perhaps, this accounted-for the transfer of the rabbits from the garage into the front-yard. Or, maybe, there was some sort of feud between the neighbors living next to the rabbit-people.  Transforming the front yard of the rabbit-people’s home into an open-air hare habitat seemed a bit aggressive, even an affront.  The lawns next to where the rabbits lived were very neatly maintained, sprayed with chemicals that could reputedly poison dogs and cats, and those lush green carpets were scrubbed and polished and devoid of the dandelions that grew in bright constellations all across the rabbit-people’s front yard. 


The thick green grass behind the chicken-wire in the front lawn didn’t last for very long.  Evidently, the rabbit-people didn’t know much about the actual habits of rabbits.  The creatures burrowed through the turf and reduced the grass to trampled, turd-brown dust.  After a couple months, the lawn looked an exemplary fragment of a First World War battlefield.  The rabbits had excavated narrow trenches along the fence-line, attempt to undermine the iron staves that kept them imprisoned.  In warm weather, they cooled their furry bellies in concave depressions rooted into the earth. (Fortunately, we were in the third year of a drought without respite and so the rabbit enclosure was mostly dry, but, when it did rain, the pits and craters filled up with water and the mud took on a particularly loathsome and greasy appearance.)  The rabbits chewed around the base of the lilac bushes and reduced them to bouquets of bare sticks and twigs.  Water in the toddler’s wading pool began to fester under a green-yellow scum that attracted green and black flies.  The little floppy-eared male relentlessly raped the floppy-haired females.  One of the Flemish giants lost an eye somehow and the pink socket was inflamed and oozing withe puss.  Someone saw a wild rabbit in the neighborhood and the hare had a flesh-colored growth, a stiff horny carapace above its eyes shaped a bit like a branching coral growing in the chest-deep water of some tropical sea.  People whispered that the deformed rabbit had acquired its illness from the impounded rabbits, possibly the big black and white Belgian with the missing eye.  Once, when I was walking my dog, another neighbor told me confidentially that he planned to make a complaint to the town’s animal control officer. 


“I want to be a good neighbor,” the man told me, “but...”


An old lady came twice a week and pitched raw carrots into the enclosure.  The rabbits sniffed at the carrots as if they were toxic and the vegetables, so brightly orange that they seemed to glow from within like flames on a birthday cake, were strewn all over the lawn, gradually decaying into black shriveled husks.


Then, it was Fall and the rabbit-people hung some skeletons outlined in fairy lights in their windows and set plastic pumpkins by their door illumined by small bulbs on cords plugged into an outside wall-socket.  The big white boat was retrieved from the marina on the river where it had spent the warm-weather months.  Once again, it was parked in front of the house for the season, also a violation of city ordinances.  The first snow fell and I wondered whether the white flakes would cover the ravaged lawn all pock-marked with rabbit burrows.  But the rabbits trampled and ground the snow into the dirty soil and there was never of the stuff to cover up the pellets and rotting carrots and dismal eroded bales of straw resting here and there in the mud.  


Three weeks before Christmas, the rabbits were gone.  The chicken-wire had been rolled into a bundle propped against the brick facade of the house among the shattered lilac bushes.  The droopy canvas shelters had been taken apart and the metal stakes uprooted from the lawn.  The noisome wading pool was no longer to be seen and the straw bales had been lugged off.


The rabbit-people replaced the four animals with an elaborate Christmas display. Colored lights were strung along the top of the fence just below the fleur de lis spikes crowning each iron post. Larger than life-size inflatable figures billowed up above box-shaped fans concealed at their bases.  The balloon-figures bounced slightly, pulsing as if with a pneumatic heart-beat. 


Of course, other houses along the boulevard were decorated for Christmas.  A balloon Santa was tethered to the front of one of the homes, clambering up toward the roof between second-story windows.  Some bare trees were outlined in blue bulbs and, a couple blocks away, an arc of red, flickering lights swooped upward to an illumined star hanging from the bottom bough of an old gaunt elm.  But the rabbit-people’s display far exceeded these adornments, a garish cluster of big colored balloons lit from within and wobbling precariously in the cold breeze.


On her afternoon walk, my dog paused and sniffed the air, still scented, I suppose, with the now-departed rabbits.  The hiss of the blowers and the twitching inflatables, writhing as the air filled them and straining against their pillowy rounded tops alarmed her.  Had the rabbits been transmuted into these giant figures tugging to escape their tethers?  My dog barked at the bobbing figures and, then, growled with fear.


The rabbit-people’s father came around the side of his house toting a pair of short, slick Nordic skis.  He nodded at me and said that my dog was full-grown now, no longer a puppy.


“What happened to the rabbits?”  I asked.


The man grimaced and said that his wife had relatives who lived on a farm and –


I nodded my head.


“Quite a display,” I said, gesturing to the inflatables.


“Well, the kids like it,” he replied. He leaned the Nordic skis against the iron fence with its spiked staves.  


At the center of the front yard, moored in a tub-shaped pit that the rabbits had dug, a balloon nativity scene flared upward like a grotesque flower blossoming from where it was rooted in a fan.  The figures were cartoonish and the Baby Jesus in the manger was an formless pale tumor, a bit like some sort of larval grub; the baby had red tousled hair in a cowlick.  The balloons were tinted in bright, primary hues, like Crayola colors.  Beside the manger, a row of nutcrackers eight feet tall with gruesomely gaping jaws loomed over the scuffed and desolate dirt.  A lime-green reptilian grinch with a broad gloating smirk hovered over a sleigh filled with gifts.  In a corner of the yard, a snowman stood near the fence.  The figure was contrived in such a way that a moving pattern of red, white, and blue snowflakes were displayed in its round belly.  Santa Claus with a team of straining reindeer wiggled a little under the impact of vertical jets of air in their torsos.  The deer had broad goofy grins as well and one of them had an inflamed nose.  The naked tree above the inflatable, a dignified, burly oak, was all tarted up with flickering loops and spirals of lights.   Close to the front of the lawn, nestled against the iron fence, I saw six globe-shaped forms, about the size of bowling balls with fist-sized protruding eyes.


“What are those?” I asked the man.


“Sugar plum fairies,” he said.


“Oh, now, I see.”  


The dog was whimpering.  The array of tremulous, wobbling inflatables was uncanny and her ears were flat against her head as we walked away down the sidewalk.


Three days before Christmas, a blizzard swept down from Canada and the Dakotas.  The snow fell, aslant at first in the gusts of wind, and, then, horizontally as the storm strengthened.  At the intersections, maelstroms of snow ascended to swarm around the streetlights and long, fin-shaped drifts formed along the sidewalk, white surf arrested just as those white waves were about to topple forward.  The wind boomed along the streets and rattled the windows in the houses and the Christmas lights in the trees flapped in the wind as if about to take flight in the storm.  


Of course, the rabbit-people’s inflatables were torn loose from their stakes and tethers and were flung against the pointed prongs of the fence.  The vinyl tore and the balloons deflated, collapsing into the snow like sloughed-off snakeskin.  When the sky cleared and the temperatures dropped far below zero, the rabbit people’s front yard was a scene of complete devastation.  Hip-deep scoops of snow covered fallen balloons.  Brightly colored scraps and pennants of vinyl peeped out from under the drifts.  The nativity scene seemed to have melted like a tallow candle into a colored puddle veined with ice and snow and the marching ranks of nutcrackers in their scarlet military coats were all fallen, casualties of the blizzard.   


The ruin was disheartening.  This was festivity’s bitter terminus, the end of Christmas and the demise of the holiday spirit.  The crushed idols were frozen to the ground, red and green and blue scuffs in the field of snow.  


Two days after the New Years, my dog paused on the sidewalk, tilting her muzzle toward something that she scented among the shredded lilac bushes.  Beyond the flattened colored vinyl, a small wild rabbit was half-concealed under the barren shrubs.  The rabbit had something wrong with its head.  It was wearing a horny crown of thorns, pink-orange lesions around thumb-sized keratinous growths extruding from its skull.  The rabbit moved gingerly, pushing its nose under the snow, indifferent, it seemed, to its deformity.    


  




   

Thursday, January 30, 2025

The Sofa

 The Sofa


1.

In his heart, Randall thought that the bungalow on 6th street wasn’t comfortable enough for White tenants.  Times had changed.  Growing up in that little house, Randall and his brothers and sisters had been happy enough.  It was crowded and smelled of fried onions and sauerkraut and the toilet as well  and there were always dogs underfoot and sobbing toddlers.  The men and boys in his family showered in the basement among spiders and house-centipedes darting across concrete block walls moist with dark continents of mold that seemed to map out the family’s destiny and Randall’s mother and sisters bathed in an old cast-iron tub in the upstairs bathroom and the ancient furnace grunted in the winter like an angry sow and the pipes rattled with hot water coursing through the radiators and cold drafts made the air feel electrified around the loose-fitting windows.  There was next to no insulation in the attic so that in January and February the space was an ice-box; in the summer, the asbestos shingles absorbed heat and the attic became so warm that creosote and tar oozed out of the pine boards and joists framing the roof.  Randall’s father died and, then, his (Randall’s) siblings went away to school or married and bought their own homes and, at last, his mother was alone in the house, still cluttered with school souvenirs, framed pictures of family members and holiday reunions as well as winter coats and sweaters worn forty years earlier but now abandoned. At the end, Randall’s mother couldn’t climb the steps to the toilet any longer and, so, she moved into assisted living and a dumpster was parked at the curb to receive the heaps trash remaining in the house and, at last, when the rooms were empty and vacant, Randall rented the place to refugees, first a family from Sudan, then, some people from Ethiopia who worked at the plant, and, at last, to a couple with their children who had fled from either Burma or Myanmar or some other steamy place in southeast Asia.  Although Randall believed that most of his friends and neighbors would not be willing to live in the cramped and antiquated house, he believed that people from deserts or from the foreign jungles, poor folk who had cowered among ferns and vines in swampy places while planes bombed them, would be happy to have a roof over their head.


But immigration policy changed.  The new administration was less hospitable to asylum-seekers and, without much notice, the family from Burma or Myanmar disappeared and the house again was empty.  Randall’s tenants had abandoned a big sofa in the living room.  It was an unwieldy piece of furniture that required Randall and three buddies to wrestle the thing out of the bungalow’s side door – the sofa didn’t fit through the front – and the task was difficult, men moaning and complaining of back sprains and fingers pinched between the davenport and the door frame.  Muttering and cursing, they dragged the sofa to the curb and left it there, hoping that some other immigrant family with a pick-up truck would collect the thing and give it a new home.  (The landfill’s charge to accept the davenport made it prohibitive to take there.)  But the sofa, with overstuffed cushions, and a high upholstered back had a disheveled appearance.  A puppy had gnawed the veneer off the squat, stiff legs under the sofa, exposing white splinters under the dark paint, and there were sinister-looking stains on the pillows and one of the armrests was frayed, the work of a dog, or, perhaps, a cat.  The upholstery smelled of cocoanut milk and curry and the sofa sat like a beached skiff on the boulevard on 6th Street for a couple weeks without anyone showing interest in salvaging it.  Randall invited some friends to his house to watch the Superbowl and, at half-time, persuaded them to ride with him to the rental property and drag the hapless couch from the curb to along the side of the house to where there was an alley bisecting the block.  Randall and his buddies were a little drunk and the alcohol made light-work of the sofa – it was like lifting a feather, someone said, and this seemed strange because all of them recalled the agony of tilting and twisting the davenport to get it out of the house.  


Facing the alley and the neighbor’s backyards (where chained dogs bayed and growled), the couch rested on an ankle-high bank of lawn overlooking the scabby asphalt, split with fissures and pocked with potholes full of ice.  The upholstery was dark, even gloomy, but the massive davenport had a regal aspect – it was like a throne perched above the alley.  One of Randall’s friends sat atop the sofa, drinking a can of beer that he had smuggled outside in his winter-coat.


“You know,” the man said, “this is pretty comfortable.  You could fall asleep on this thing.”


“If your wife made you sleep on it,” Randall said.


The man with the beer shoved the can between the cushions so that it was concealed.  Then, they hustled to the pick-up and hurried over the Randall’s house in time for the second-half kick-off. 


2.        

Early in the morning, two hours before dawn, Randall walked his dog.  When it was below zero, he wore a heavy brown coat over several sweaters and a nylon jacket.  His routes varied, eight or nine blocks in one direction and, then, back home.  His house was in a subdivision that had been new thirty years before but was now folded into the city, a residential neighborhood among other newer (or older) tracts of housing.  Most of the blocks over which he traveled were lined with sidewalks, straight flat rows of pale concrete slabs lined-up like box cars between fan-shaped, sloping driveways.  Before and after Christmas, some of the houses were outlined in colored lights and the trees decorated as well, diagrams of branches and boughs above balloons shaped like reindeer or snow-men or billowy figures of Santa Claus glowing in the pre-dawn darkness.  Street lamps were scattered along the way, every couple blocks but it was mostly very dark in the sleeping neighborhoods.  Sometimes, the moon whittled to a wan curved blade hung overhead, changing location in a confusing way as Randall walked – either the moon couldn’t recall where it was located or Randall, keeping his eyes trained on the haunches of his dog and watching for ice on the concrete, lost track of either its position or, perhaps, the direction in which he was moving.  The wind swept out of the open country around the edges of town and coursed between houses and, on porches, wind chimes slapped together and filled the icy air with the sound of bells chaotically ringing.  


Sometimes when it was very cold, ten or fifteen degrees below zero, Randall felt the weight of his heavy coat and the sweaters packed around his chest and belly as a burden that made his shoulders ache and his legs feel sluggish.  The thick coat and the pace that he maintained, dragged forward by his large dog, caused him to feel winded, short of breath.  His chest ached a little, a tight feeling to the left of the base of his throat, and Randall thought that it would be prudent to pause, catch his breath, and, even, sit down.  But there were no benches anywhere along his route, no place to rest.  It seemed that the city was heartless, unconcerned about its pedestrians.  One day, Randall thought, he would be too old to walk in these neighborhoods without benches on which to rest.  The exertion would be too great.  


Randall pictured the sofa sitting along the alley next to the rental property.  The home where he was raised was across town, on the other side of the athletic fields and the High School, too far away to reach on his morning walk.  His current address where he lived with his wife and children and his dog was in a newer neighborhood, more prosperous, 20 blocks from the brick-built center of town. 


In very cold weather, zombie cars were parked along the streets, lights on and engine running, but no one inside.  As he came near those cars, Randall could see into them, the glowing console, luminous controls and displays, a faint glimmer cast on the plastic seat covers, puffs of exhaust wafted from tail pipe and dissolving in the frigid air.  Apparently, these vehicles could be started remotely from inside the adjacent houses and the zombie cars were warming themselves in the pre-dawn darkness.  A few years ago, empty vehicles humming alongside the sidewalks were rare, even unknown.  But, now, it seemed, that there were many cars of this sort and, when it was below zero, Randall would encounter a half-dozen of them idling along the sidewalks. 


Sometimes, when his chest ached and the burden of his winter coat caused him to gasp for air, he thought about breaking into one of those cars and resting there on the front or back seat, the dog panting beside him, catching his breath in the warm air gushing from the front-seat vents.   But, he presumed that the idling vehicles were locked against trespassers and thieves.  The moon was slippery, shifting position again.  When he looked up, the moon had moved into some inaccessible quadrant of the sky.  One of the purring zombie cars had its radio turned-on.  Randall heard voices inside the vehicle, then, music, a mariachi band playing in the darkness.


3.

A neighbor to the rental house, an old lady who lived alone, called Randall.  He relied upon her to watch his house when there were no tenants living in it.  The old woman had been friends with his mother when she was younger and, of all the people who lived in the neighborhood when Randall was growing up, she was the last to remain.  The other people on the block didn’t speak English or worked night-shifts or long hours and, so, Randall didn’t know them.


The old lady said that the sofa would have to be moved.  It was attracting trouble.  Sometimes after midnight, the old lady said that she glanced from her upstairs bedroom window and saw that a figure was sitting on the davenport.  


“It’s a black man,” the neighbor said. 


“You mean an African-American?” Randall asked.


“I don’t know.  It’s too dark to see.  Just a shadow, that’s all I can make out,” she explained.


Randall asked what the figure did.  


“Nothing, he just sits there,” the neighbor replied.


“How long?”


“It varies,” the woman said.  “I never see him coming or going.  I just look out, down into the alley, and there is someone sitting right in the middle of the davenport.  Not every night, no, no...but sometimes twice or three times a week and always after midnight when decent people are in their beds sleeping.” 


“Well, you’re up,” Randall said.


“Have to go to the bathroom,” she replied.  “You need to do something.  We can’t have birds like that roosting in the alley in the middle of the night.”


Randall said that he would respond.


4.

A couple days later, Randall screwed a floodlight with a motion sensor onto the garage next to where the sofa sat.  He had been meaning to install a floodlight in that place for several years. At night, kids roamed the alleyway and graffiti in Spanish was smeared on the garage siding across the way. 


After dark, Randall came back to the alleyway in his pickup truck.  The floodlight snapped on as he slowly drove by the sofa and the bright beams made the couch shine brightly as if it were on the display floor of a furniture store.  By the time, he had reached the end of the alley and was turning onto the street, the floodlight behind him snapped off, and the narrow lane between the houses was dark again.  


Why didn’t he just enlist his friends again and haul the sofa to the dump?  That would have made more sense, but, of course, it was good to have additional light in alley, a bright, white glare that shone mercilessly, raking against the peeling paint on his rental house, casting a halo across the basketball backboard and rusting metal hoop hanging off the old garage.  (He recalled shooting hoops with his father from the driveway when he was a boy.)  Intruders would be frightened.  And the sofa could remain in case some wayfarer in the night needed a place to rest.


5.

Someone was seated on the sofa, half-reclining in the cold darkness.   The old woman living next to the alley looked down from her upstairs window.  Then, she glanced at the clock on her night-stand: the digital numerals told her that it was 2:45 in the morning.  The figure on the couch must have approached stealthily, moving so slowly that the motion sensor on the floodlight had not triggered.  Now, the shadow was completely immobile – a deep breath or a tremor in the hand or foot would have activated the light.  But it was dark and the figure seemed inert, an inanimate thing.  For a moment, the old woman thought that her eyes were deceiving her, that there was no one sitting on the couch, and that the bulbous, misshapen shadow was the product of an optical illusion, moonbeams and starlight interacting with the trunk of a tree or a pipe piercing through a shingled roof.  But, peering into the darkness, she thought she made out a torso with arms like flippers under a heavy coat and, perhaps, even a glint of a stray ray of light on an eyeball or tooth.  The thing’s legs ended in thick boots that were like tree-trunks embedded in the ground.  Sooner or later, the figure would have to move, shift position or, perhaps, cough or sneeze.  So she waited for some twitch or flicker of movement to illumine the scene.  But nothing happened.  The thing didn’t even seem to be breathing – she saw no sign of breath condensing in the icy air under the head of the figure.  Her eyes hurt from peering into the darkness and, after a few minutes (the digital display now said 2:52), she decided that she would call Randall in the morning and went back to bed.


The next day, Randall spoke to the elderly woman who lived across from the rental house.  He asked her what had caused her to look out the window.  It wasn’t the floodlight, she assured him: that never triggered.  


“Was it dogs barking?”  Randall asked.


“You know, that’s an odd thing,” she replied.  “I didn’t hear any dogs at all.  They never barked and that’s strange because the dogs here are always yipping and yapping.”


“What caused you to look out the window?” Randall asked.  


“I don’t know.  I was up to go to the bathroom and, then, I had a sense that something, you know, wasn’t quite right and, so, I looked out my window and saw what I saw.”


Randall said that he understood and would check on the motion-activated floodlight after dark.  When he drove down the alley a few hours later, the light triggered and spilled bright, white radiance on the couch.  


6. 

The temperature was almost 20 below, but Randall was well-bundled and his morning walk wasn’t too uncomfortable.  As people say, it isn’t the cold but the wind that pierces through you that makes winter-walking unpleasant and, in the pre-dawn dark, not a breeze was stirring.  


About six blocks from his home, Randall encountered two idling vehicles, both of them unmanned.  One of the vehicles was a compact SUV, parked along the curb.  The nearby houses were all dark, windows dull and black.  Perhaps, someone was eating breakfast or dressing for work in an unlit room.  The red tail-lights of the SUV grimaced at Randall as he and his dog approached.  A half-block farther along, a white pickup was parked illegally, facing the wrong direction along the side of the street so its bracket-shaped white headlights cast their light in Randall’s face.  The dog prancing ahead of him cast slender, elongated shadows back against the boulevard and sidewalk, the silhouette of a giant long-legged spider tugging him forward.  The glare of the lights falling directly on Randall’s face made it difficult for him to see ahead of him.  


The dog pulled up short and whimpered slightly.  Something was approaching, emerging out of the blinding glare thrown toward Randall by the zombie truck.  A figure backlit by the headlights was approaching on the sidewalk.  Who could be out this early in such lethal cold?  The form was heavily bundled, almost spherical and small straps and ribbons flopped around the edges of the approaching figure.  It approached silently, without so much as a breath sounding, and its feet, somewhere beneath the globular form, didn’t seem to be touching the pavement.  Randall couldn’t see a face; the bulge at the top of the round bundle was hooded and the darkness seemed deepest there.  The dog didn’t bark and didn’t strain at the leash.  Randall stepped to the side, taking four paces into the frozen lawn so as to let the figure pass unmolested on the concrete sidewalk over which it was gliding.  Perhaps, this was a homeless person, someone condemned to sleep outside in the deadly cold.  At that thought, Randall felt a nauseating sense of horror and grief.  


As the figure approached, Randall averted his eyes.  The dog was motionless, in a state of suspension.  There are some things that it is best not to see.  


After the apparition had passed, Randall returned to the sidewalk and passed the idling truck.  Exhaust spurting from the tailpipe of the truck parked the wrong way along the curb was blood-red.  The moon was somewhere overhead but Randall couldn’t quite locate it.  He wondered if he should turn his head and look over his shoulder to see where the figure had gone.  But the scarf at his throat restricted his motion and the heavy coat, hanging from him like armor, made it difficult for him to turn.  So he didn’t look in that direction.


 


Monday, January 13, 2025

Quality Control

 Quality Control




Kenny retired from quality control at the factory after 43 years.  Two pictures of him were printed in the Thermotech news letter – in one he was young and, in the other, old.  He told everyone that he enjoyed his work for the company.  In the last couple years, the job had become a bit tedious but this was because Kenny had become so expert, had solved all problems, and performed his duties effortlessly.  Quality control work required attention to detail and Kenny possessed this characteristic to an extent that, sometimes, his wife and children held it against him: “Must you always be so persnickety?” his wife sometimes asked.  It was non-union position, exempt and classified as management and, so, you always had to be on your toes.  There weren’t any contractual protections, no collective bargaining agreement and, in some respects, Kenny’s QC work was like walking a tightrope without a net.


He and his wife planned to travel after his retirement.  They had children on both coasts and Kenny thought that he and his wife would make a circuit to see the grandkids.  But Kenny’s wife was diagnosed with cancer, suffered, and died and, when he saw the grandchildren, it was at her funeral in the wintry Midwestern state where he lived.  His children said that they were unaccustomed to the cold and had forgotten the bitter rigors of the weather.  The cities where they lived were more temperate and, although there were sometimes typhoons and hurricanes, it didn’t freeze and there was no ice.  After his wife was buried, and family members departed to the airport, Kenny packed a duffel bag with a few pair of underwear, some socks, and his medications and, then, drove southwest to the mountains in Arizona.  At the upper elevations, snow covered the ground and the pine trees were dark, green needles twitching in the wind; it wasn’t much of change from the climate back home.  When he slipped on ice outside his motel in Flagstaff, Kenny bruised his back and decided that travel was pointless without his wife.  So he went back home.  The house was empty, silent, full of memories that gnawed at him like rats in the wall chewing up insulation and electrical wires.  He tried to take naps, the longer the better, but found that he couldn’t sleep in the day.  Kenny still rose long before dawn, a relic of his work at Thermotech.


One day, a manager at the plant called him and said that there had been some sort of nasty disagreement at work.  The QC worker who had taken Kenny’s job had quit without notice and the government contracts that required careful scrutiny as to quality were in breach.  The manager said that they were negotiating with the man who had quit, and, in fact, had another applicant waiting in the wings, as it were, to take the job if the discussions with Kenny’s successor were unavailing.   The manager said that Kenny could step into the job without any delay and, that, it would be very helpful if he would return to the position for just a few days while the problems were being sorted-out.


Kenny returned to the Thermotech plant before dawn.  The parking lot was lit by halogen lights equipped with motion detectors and mostly dark.  It was unsettling to see the lights blazing suddenly overhead as he walked under them.  As always in the winter, the surface of the lot was smeared with ice polished smooth by the tires of the cars and pickup trucks.  The fall on the ice in Flagstaff had unnerved Kenny and he walked with small, mincing steps, a gait that made him uncomfortable.


The factory smelled of hot metal, coffee, and aromatic chemicals, an insistent odor that made his eyes water a bit. Kenny found his sampling cup and began checking the parts in their upright cardboard containers.  Almost all of the parts were made to specifications but he found a few that were defective.  He spoke to the foreman and, then, checked the QC logs from the last inspections.  The ledgers weren’t up-to-date and this meant that he couldn’t trace the defective parts to the machine that was misfiring to produce them out-of-spec.  It was irritating to Kenny that the quality control protocols that he had developed had been ignored.  He found several machines making the type of part that was defective and had to stand near the hot presses for several minutes, watching them cycle to see if there was some hitch or stutter in the process.  Retirement had deconditioned him a little and it was tiring to stand next to the big machines, shifting his weight back fact and forth on his feet on the concrete while the presses fumed and huffed, the die slamming shut with a percussive bang and the injection head hissing a little like a snake as it injected plastic into the mold.  He identified the problem and, then, redtagged the machine, throwing the panic switch to shut it down.  The foreman argued with him about meeting quotas when the press was down and unproductive.  


“There’s no point in hitting quota if the parts are bad,” Kenny said.


The foreman was new to the position and looked at him skeptically.


Kenny, then, found the mechanic.  He was sitting in the break-room eating a doughnut.  Kenny told him that one of the presses was misfiring and producing, maybe, 12 bad parts per thousand.  


“Who cares?” the mechanic said.  He also was a new hire and didn’t know Kenny.


“It has to be fixed.”


“Then, you fix it.”


“That’s not my job,” Kenny said.


“It’s a government contract,” the mechanic observed.  “Twelve in a thousand is close enough for government work.”


Kenny said he disagreed and that he had redtagged the machine and that it would stay out-of-commission until fixed.  He had forgotten about this aspect of QC work, the fact that management didn’t like the machines tagged-out and that supervisors tended to take Kenny’s observations as to product not-to-spec as a personal affront.  


The mechanic shrugged and said he would get to it when he could get to it.


His eight-hour shift seemed very long and Kenny found himself frequently glancing at the clock on the wall.  It was dark after work as well and the parking lot was black until his motion lit the overhead lamps.  Without someone moving under the silver light posts, all would have remained dark, possibly forever.   It was dark until something moved and cast a cold glare on the ice and, then, it was dark again. The sun had set and there was no sign of light in the western sky.


Kenny worked another couple of days, returning home with aching muscles and burning eyes.  It felt like he was getting sick.  The stench of burning plastic in the plant made him sneeze and cough.  


At the end of week, the plant manager told him that they had persuaded the QC worker to return to the job.  


“We’ll be sorry to see you leave,” the manager said.  “You know, Kenny, no one does this job like you.”


“It has to be done correctly,” Kenny replied.


Nothing had changed at Thermotech.  The people were different, perhaps, but the processes remained the same.  The pale plastic parts in their bins were exactly the same as the pieces made by the machines during the previous forty-three years.  Kenny had never know exactly how the parts were used or what they were for.  He still didn’t know these things.  


After work, Kenny went to a liquor store and bought a small bottle of Windsor whisky.  He cooked a frozen pizza and sat in front of the television watching the news and sipping the whisky.  


The quality control job was tedious, rife with acrimony, and the conditions in the Thermotech plant were harsh. Kenny wondered how he had managed to perform that work, not for a week, or a month, but for 43 years.  


Another thought occurred to him but it was disturbing and he didn’t dare think it to its conclusion.


In the middle of the night, Kenny sat up in his lonely bed.  


“I have wasted my life,” he said.