Perhaps I had brashly overreacted to the proffered dirty-poo finger? After all, I was a stranger in upstate. Perhaps thrusting doo-doo sticks through holes in toilet stalls constituted a local backwoods custom akin to a mild flirtation. My Nana Minnie once told me, “Boys only tease the girls they like.” In response, I’d quoted Oscar Wilde, saying, “Yet each man kills the thing he loves.”
Nonetheless, upstate being upstate, it’s not impossible that I’d just now thwarted an amorous country swain. If, indeed, waving caca logs at young girls was some rural prelude to romance, then I’d lost myself a potential suitor.
Whether I’d foiled a rustic courtship or escaped a murderer, my heart still struggled high in my throat, and the cold sweat of shock washed down from my forehead. The mysterious ejaculate that had sprung from the Beagle book hung heavily, in coagulated lumps, on the bosom of my shirt. Sans my eyeglasses, everything in the world was either too close or too far away for me to see it clearly. I was in no good condition to fling myself into the clockwork tangle of dense traffic, but if a poo-wielding madman were to emerge from the cinder-block building, I felt I’d have precious little choice. Here my bleary gaze fell upon the glass tea jar I’d grasped and lifted, the walls of which now showed themselves to be studded—nay, fairly paved—with black houseflies trapped by the thick residue of sugar. Recoiling from these vermin, I dropped the jar and watched it bounce in the grass. As it had before, the cunning naturalist within me formulated a plan. Carefully, I once more stooped and lifted the empty jar, gingerly avoiding its carpet of gluey bug life. With a few steps I carried it to the margin where the parched lawn met the asphalt parking lot; there, a curb awaited, the white concrete fairly shimmering in the day’s heat. Granted, my nana needed this jar to brew her windowsill tea, but my self-protection seemed a higher priority. In the future, if my Nana Minnie missed her homemade swill, I’d simply telephone Spago and have them FedEx a single serving of their delicious blend. For now, using both hands, I lifted the sticky, insect-laden vessel over my head. With a cathartic yelp, I hurled it against the curb, where the glass burst into countless shards. The largest, cruelest, most daggerlike of these jagged glass pieces I selected as my weapon.
Lest my course of action seem overly dramatic, please understand that I’d written my name within the end pages of the Beagle book. Even if I quickly fled the scene, that book—and my eyeglasses—remained with my foe. The psychotic fiend would see my name. A poop-brandishing nutcase would discover my name and begin stalking me to exact his revenge. To protect my hand I wrapped the hilt of my glass dagger in euro notes. Thus armed to retrieve my book, I crept soundlessly back toward the dingy cinder-block toilets.
Scattered around me on the grass were doodie dog logs so like the one that had recently been thrust at me, and I could tell that for the rest of my life the sight of a dog boo-boo would make my heart stumble with terror. My eyes would see inflating doodie-cacas lurking in every shadow. Every future nightmare would be an echo of today.
At the building’s entrance I turned my head sideways and placed a listening ear to the brown-painted door. No sounds emerged from within. From that stance my flawed peripheral vision included the rest-area parking lot, the sun-toasted lawn, the endless riptides of motor vehicle traffic. Only a single automobile waited, unoccupied, in the lot. It was a dented, rusted truck of the type known as a “pickup.” A crack bisected the windshield lengthwise. My poor eyesight might’ve been mistaken, but a taillight appeared to be repaired with layers of red-colored adhesive tape. My deranged nemesis, I deemed, had arrived here in that sad, mud-dappled, well-scratched truck.
World’s Best Dad…
My brain belched up something I refused to taste. I choked back the possibility, the as-yet-unrealized horror that lodged itself within my throat. This new idea was like seeing an Asian person speaking Spanish. It was too impossible a concept.
Without question, I was in a state of shock. As an animated zombie, clutching my glass knife, I shouldered open the door and reentered the reeking public toilet. The movement from blazing day to dim interior blinded me, but I could hear the plink-plunk of dripping water. In that catacomb echo I heard a man’s raspy breathing. My eyes beheld, in the next blink, a figure sprawled on the filthy concrete. It was a man, his head resting on the floor. His wrinkled skin and gray hair had matted together until you couldn’t, in surety, vouchsafe where his face ended and his scalp began. At first I wouldn’t swear whether he lay faceup or -down, but then I saw his knees were together, pulled to his chest in a fetal pose. His slacks were still wadded around his ankles, and his belt with its WORLD’S BEST DAD buckle was splayed open. Of his naked legs, the exposed flanks were so white they glowed, pearlescent, hazed with small, black hairs. Between his knobby pink knees stretched the empty hammock of his dingy underbriefs, and one of his hands disappeared into his crotch, where it appeared to be cupping his shame. His other hand had reached the full length of his extended arm and clutched the air near my dropped book. As bright as a spot of sunlight in this stony traffic island tomb, a gold band circled the base of his ring finger. It was, to my handicapped vision, nothing better than nine-carat.
Even my bad eyes could see a stream of crimson running from the man’s withered loins. This rivulet of red rolled down the slight slope of the floor, collecting his discarded flecks of tobacco spit and edging toward the rusted central drain. There, all of his various fluids were disappearing in sizable amounts. Following his gaze, his reaching hand, my worst fears were confirmed, for he certainly intended to examine the book.
With my next step my Bass Weejun foot found my lost glasses. Under my baby-fat weight they weren’t anyone’s glasses; they weren’t even eyeglasses anymore. A loud pop and the crunch of glass and plastic turned the old man’s head in my direction.
The Beagle book had fallen, facedown and open, so its precious pages were pressed flat to that awful floor. A pathetic assortment of dried flowers and leaves had fallen from their hiding places deep inside Mr. Darwin’s narrative. After being safely preserved for decades, these tiny blossoms were scattered and sprinkled over the body of the fallen pervert. In a panicked impulse I lunged forward, closing the short distance, and leaned down to seize my paper property.
As my fingers closed around an edge of the book, likewise did the hand of the psycho grasp the volume. For a terrible eternity he held fast. We endured a dark tug-of-war, me and this anonymous Other. I still could not see his face, masked as it was by the disarray of his hair. As his arm strength failed, his grip did not, and my efforts dragged the man closer. He was old, an old man with gaunt sunken cheeks and glazed, rheumy eyes. His cheekbones and chin were as craggy as the totem sculptures people carved with chain saws and sold in vacant lots next to upstate gas stations. The dried flowers, ancient violets and pansies, age-old foxgloves, sprigs of lavender, desiccated marigolds, and fragile four-leafed clovers, all of these still retained their colors from long-vanished summers. From summers before I’d been born. These preserved daisies and asters formed a bier under his body, and a final, fading breath of their long-ago perfume sweetened the fetid air of that profane setting.
My arms tugged the book free, and I backed away a step but could not bring myself to take flight. Strewn among the flowers and broken eyeglass lenses was a scarlet butterfly, dead and pressed flat. It was the blaze-colored butterfly of my greatest naturalist dreams. My own species: Papilio madisonspencerii. But on closer examination it was neither scarlet nor a butterfly. It was merely a white moth newly saturated in this stranger’s rapidly issuing blood.