The Squirrel Hunter

Part One

Furious, Joseph stood on his front porch and gripped the railing, jerking his head this way and that, looking up into the trees for something he couldn’t quite see.

All around him the colors of fall played like happy children: the autumn sun, warm and golden, was busy yawning the world awake while a gentle breeze ruffled both the curling tips of Joseph’s white hair and the orange leaves he glared at.

The air was crisp and the bright green grass in the yard glistened with dew like baby pearls.

Joseph stared at the grass. The bright green grass. His grass, was how he thought of it.

He did not notice how the cold snap of morning air prickled the exposed skin of his short legs nor did he feel the hand — his own — that scratched the buttock held loosely in a pair of old white underwear, its elastic band familiar and worn out.

Joseph, oblivious too of the unlikely connection between the garment he wore (it was all he was wearing) and the source of his anger, scowled at the yard.

The underwear was full of the kind of holes that result from prolonged use and excessive laundering.

The yard, while neither laundered nor prolonged, was full of holes too.

Joseph leaned on the sad sagging railing and counted out loud.

“Eleven, twelve,” he said, like a judge ticking off the charges at a hearing of some tattooed criminal.

“Thirteen,” he hesitated, looking closer.

He squinted without realizing. Hard to tell if that one was a hole or a, a bare spot.

“Thirteen,” he decided.

Each count was for a little tumor of wet black earth gouged from the smooth blanket of newborn grass.

“All this work,” he muttered, scratching, counting.

It was no easy thing to bring a weed-free lawn into this fallen world. Far from an expert, Joseph made up for his lack of experience with the attentive devotion of a new father. The thrice-daily rainbow sprinkler set to timer he supplemented with several intervals of daily hand watering which he performed with a separate hose, careful to stay on the cement sidewalk lest the baby grass get squished and/or discouraged.

It was only three weeks ago he spent an entire afternoon preparing the ground for its vegetable rebirth. First, he levered the lawnmower down to its lowest height and ran the weedy yard down to nubs. It looked like a yellow bruise compared to the greener (though nonetheless weedy!) pastures that belonged to the neighbors.

After the mowing he strapped a pair of aerating cleats to his work boots with long pieces of velcro and stomped himself sweaty, poking the earth over and over with inch long stainless steel spines while his wife (he found out later) surreptitiously filmed him through a window, laughing at his devotion.

“You’ll thank me later,” he said.

“Take a shower,” she said.

It was easy after the cleating. He used a hand crank machine to spread some kind of fertilizer puported to hasten growth or nutrient uptake or both. Finally it was the seed’s turn.

He spared nothing, buying the most expensive kind and more of it than his small lot required. It gave him both satisfaction and a sort of low grade anxiety, seeing his yard speckled with the rice-like confetti, blue as pain pills, like the innards of an exploded piñata. On the upside it represented a Promise of the Good. Something to look forward to. But the anxiety came from not knowing if it would work. Joseph hated not knowing.

He put in the time and, after a few restless weeks, the harvest came round, in the form of a few hopeful shoots that timidly broke through the coffee colored humus to have a look around.

Joseph would never forget that first morning. There is no green like the green of a young blade of grass standing tall in a crowd of his fellows. The green of health, of hope.

Of fragility.

That’s what Joseph was looking at now. His precious blades of grass, which, like all babies depended on him entirely for their survival, were getting hacked apart everywhere he looked —dug up, pocked, desecrated.

And the culprits, presently hidden from view, could be heard everywhere. Chattering like gossips from their clandestine perches. Joseph stood on his porch in his old underwear and listened and the more he listened the more his indignation grew.

There were nineteen new holes in the yard since yesterday.

It wasn’t going to stop.

Something would have to be done.

There was only one solution.

He tried to think of where it was.

The pellet gun.

In the garage somewhere. But where?

The where wasn’t the problem.

The wife was the problem.

Are you a for real crazy person? She would say. We live in a city! With neighbors! You can’t just shoot animals. What if you miss?! What is wrong with you? I don’t care how small they are!

He looked at the ugly holes in his pretty yard and listened to the wife in his head while a chorus of invisible squirrels mocked and berated him and while he had no answer to her not-unreasonable position he was nonetheless seized with a quality of determination he hadn’t felt in a long time.

This thing was going to be settled and it was going to be settled with violence.

As to whether it was right or not or to what degree he’d figure out later. In the meantime he’d better go find the gun, before the wife woke up.