I looked down at my fuel gauge and noticed how I no longer owned a seven-eighths-full tank. My truck missed twice, and I said to no one, “That fucker siphoned gas when I wasn’t paying attention.”
Rajer changed the price back up to $3.65 as I coasted into his convenience store. I looked at my wristwatch to read that, just like the smart man on TV pointed out, it would be between four and five in the afternoon. I looked over to check on Ruben’s blackberry cartons, which seemed to be undisturbed. Rajer yelled out, “Hello, Mr. Finley, good to see you again! Are you going to construct a humorous diorama so that those weasels hold your special ukuleles? Very good! Very funny, when animals look like they possess musical abilities. I have seen many, many animals playing music on the Internet. Always good. Bullfrog with banjo!”
I said nothing to Rajer for two reasons. Later on I would fret endlessly that he considered it a snub. I didn’t respond to him because I pictured all those stuffed animals actually holding ukuleles for some kind of promotional advertising, maybe in the back of Taxidermy Today or Yuke and Yours. Secondly, beyond the sparse afternoon Calloustown traffic I detected the faint sputtering — at first not unlike a brave gnat entering the ear canal — that turned to distant chainsaw, then unmistakable poor cousin of a Honda 150, or Yamaha 175, or Japanese electric turkey knife.
I said, “I know the trick y’all are playing on people, Raj. The noon news can do some kind of survey saying gas prices are low, but then y’all jack it up crazy when most people need to fill up.”
Ruben Orr neared. I imagined him riding that moped with sawed-off shotguns swathed around his back. Rajer got off his ladder. He didn’t smile. “You shouldn’t drive all day long. You filled up this morning! In my city back in India, gasoline costs $5.03 all the time, no $5.01 between nine and four.”
I started to say something about how my previous purchase must’ve gotten siphoned off, but Ruben Orr veered right up beside me and skidded to a stop. He cleared his throat hard twice, unstraddled the moped, cleared his throat twice again, bent over, banged his right knee with his right palm, straightened up, walked two steps toward my truck’s bed, and petted the bobcat. He said, “I can’t leave you, Robert. I’m sorry.”
I held the gas nozzle in my right hand. I’d already clicked down that little metal arm, so I was ready to look like One, I could pump either in my tank, or Two be a probable villain. I said, “You stole gas from me.”
Raj said, “Hello, Mr. Ruben Orr.”
“I made a mistake,” Ruben said. He touched every stuffed animal and called their names: Ringo for the raccoon, for example, and Slappy for the beaver. “Oh, God, I made some mistakes.” He looked like he might cry. “This would be a good time for you to say how you, too, have made some mistakes in your life, both personal and professional.”
He didn’t look six-four or six-six anymore. As a matter of fact, he looked like the kind of man who could be a good grandfather to a ukulele-making man’s bastard child. I said, “I have sure enough made some errors.” I said, “I know this won’t make anyone involved feel better, but my own father thinks I’m screwed up, too.”
Raj went inside. I looked at what I carried in the back of my truck. Ruben Orr said he didn’t want to go through with our original plan and gave me back the cash I’d handed over for starters. “These are like children to me. You can’t just sell off or abandon children, right?”
I got it. I understood Mayley’s father’s less-than-subtle allusion.
I said, “I might want to rent out some of the animals in the future. I could use them for promotion, you know. We can talk about it after the blood tests.”
What else could I say? I foresaw our odd future connection. He asked me if I wanted Mayley’s phone number right before I asked for it. I said, “I swear to God I was just about to ask for it.”
He said, “We should all get together some time, before and after, no matter the results.”
I believed him, and put the nozzle in my tank. I looked into the store to see Raj giving me the go-ahead to pump. I pulled the trigger and thought about what I rightly owed a lot of people. What a bad person I ended up truly, I thought — I needed to call Mayley, my ex-wife, and anyone I had deceived into thinking he or she could achieve peace when strumming four strings on a miniature instrument.
Invasion of Grenada
Maybe we weren’t meant to be possible pre-foster-parents-to-be. It’s important to learn these kinds of things early on, I would bet. My wife had signed up for the entire project, and some Department of Social Services people showed up to make sure we didn’t have firearms scattered around the house or booze bottles within reach. That we didn’t keep Pine-Sol bottles on the floor, or rat traps. I’m sure they looked into our backgrounds to conclude we weren’t child pornographers, dope smokers, domestic batterers, gunrunners, arsonists, that sort of thing. I had some questionable decisions in my past, but nothing worse than anyone else. Vandalism, mostly. Trespassing. I’d been married before, too young, and the vandalism and trespassing involved her. But I wasn’t violent, or a repeat offender. I walked onto my ex-wife’s property once, spray-painted CHEATER on the side of her house, then left. I spray-painted that, plus BITCH and TWO-TIMER and WHORE and EDUARDO — REALLY? on the side of what used to be my van. I don’t want to think that I’m a racist, but it hurt my ego that she’d fall in love with a Venezuelan over me.
“It’s kind of like being on-call 24/6,” our personal social worker came to tell Bonita and me. I’ll be the first to admit, psychologically-wise, that maybe I married Bonita just because she sounded like she might be Venezuelan, too. She’s not. She’s from West Virginia, insert joke here. When I met Bonita — at the Mid-Atlantic Independent Driving Range Owners of America trade show up in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, inside the old racetrack — that’s how she introduced herself: “I’m from West Virginia, insert joke here.” When I told her I lived 127 miles from Myrtle Beach you’d’ve thought I asked her to move in with me to a five-bedroom mansion in some place like Orlando, or Knoxville.
For what it’s worth, her West Virginia daddy owned a driving range outside Buckhannon, but he couldn’t make it to Mid-Atlantic Independent Driving Ranger Owners of America because of a bout of black lung he contracted from just breathing in the vicinity of coal mines, so he sent Bonita.
She and I had no other choice but to fall in love, what with all the complimentary range balls, hand towels, ball markers, and divot repair tools handed out, not to mention the free symposiums that involved everything from fescue to front wheel pickers to tee-line turf. By the time she and I wandered toward a man about to speak about the importance of ball washers we couldn’t take it anymore and retired to my motel room where I had a good bottle of Smirnoff’s.
I’ll jump ahead and say that I visited Bonita a few times up in West Virginia, her daddy died, she sold the land to one of those mining companies. She moved down to Calloustown soon thereafter and helped me watch my hometown disintegrate into near — ghost town status once the younger kids moved away and the older ones died, once the mill closed, and so on. I’m not complaining or whining.