Look Evelyn, Duck Dynasty Wiper Blades. We Should Get Them.: A Collection Of New Essays (10 page)

Geoffrey frowned, “No, that would be stupid.”

I stood on the rock.

“Okay,” Geoffrey queried, “is that what you are going to do? Just stand there? You don’t want to pretend you’re doing something?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, pointing at something perhaps.”

“No, just take the photo.”

“What if you jumped with your arms in the air.”

“Like an action shot?”

“Yes, exactly.”

“No, just take the photo.”

Inside the café, the man with the blonde wavy hair unzipped his big bag, took out an AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle, and began shooting patrons and staff. 

“Gunshots!” exclaimed Geoffrey, “We’re missing a reenactment. I bet a convict has escaped and the prison wardens are chasing him. Let’s go watch.”

“It’s coming from way up the hill.” I replied, “We just came from there. They will probably do another one in an hour. Let’s just finish looking at rocks and then we can walk back up. It sounds like it’s finished anyway.”

The man with the blonde wavy hair reloaded the assault rifle and stepped out of the cafe. Tourists heading towards the area hoping to catch part of a reenactment were fired upon.

“No,” said Geoffrey, “Listen, it’s still going. Quick, take a photo of me standing on the rock and then we’ll go watch.”

Geoffrey climbed onto the rock, looked to his left and held his hand to his forehead.

“Why are you saluting?” I asked.

“I’m not,” he replied, “I’m gazing into the distance. Just hurry up and take the shot. We’re missing the reenactment.”

“Ok,” I took the photo, “Now, put your hands on your knees, bend them a little, turn to the side a bit, a bit more, and put your head back and smile...”

“You really are a dickhead,” Geoffrey said, jumping down.

We were half way back up the hill when an old lady came running down past us. She was a large woman with blue eyeshadow, a tight perm and tighter white slacks. Both her knees had large green grass stains where she had fallen and skidded.

“Run!” she screamed.

We ran. The look on her face as she yelled her warning was all the convincing we needed.

“Is it zombies?” Geoffrey yelled as we passed her.

Many hours later, after police officers took our statements and contact information, we were free to leave. We hadn’t been anywhere near the cafe during the shootings so could provide no helpful eyewitness accounts. There was no discussion about driving back to Devonport, I just drove there. Both of us wanted to be home.

“I hope the wasp guy is alright,” said Geoffrey.

“I’m sure he’s fine,” I said, “I didn’t see him... you know.”

Geoffrey nodded, “They were covered though. It was pretty hard to tell. Some of the sheets were small...”

“Do you want to play Number Plate People?” I asked.

“Alright.”

My offspring told me a joke recently. Most of his jokes are terrible and I usually just say ‘ha’ after the punchline as a half-hearted nod to the effort.

"Why did Sarah fall off the swing?" Seb asked.

"I don't know, why?"

"Because she had no arms."

I was pretty disappointed at this and didn’t feel it deserved a ‘ha’ so I just said, “hm.”

"Knock knock." Seb said.

"Fine. Who's there?"

"Not Sarah."

Seb and I both laughed for a bit and I went back to ordering a fish pond pump on Amazon and he went back to yelling at his friends  online. He plays the Modern Black Ops a lot. Sometimes when Seb is in Australia and I’m in the United States, I’ll suggest we play the Modern Black Ops and he tells me that if I am not going to bother learning what the game is really called, then he’s not going to waste his time explaining to me how to connect to Xbox Love again.  I told the same joke to Holly a few hours later while she was making nachos.

"Why did Sarah fall off the swing?"

"Who's Sarah?" Holly asked.

"That doesn't matter. Why did she fall off the swing?"

"Why are you asking me? I don't know anybody named Sarah. If it was the swing at the park it's probably because the equipment is fifty years old. Did it break or was she just being careless? Is she alright?"

"No,” I answered, “she died. You know how when you are a kid and your friends dare you to get a good speed up and perform a full 360 flip around the bar? She lost her grip mid-rotation and was thrown almost twenty feet over the fence and onto the road. A FedEx truck ran over her."

"That seems pretty unlikely. Are you making this up?"

"Yes,” I told her, “it's a joke. I'll start again. Just say 'I don't know' when I ask why Sarah fell off the swing ok?"

"Fine."

"Right, so, why did Sarah fall off the swing?"

"Because she tried to do a 360 degree flip?" Holly answered hopefully.

"No, what? No, it was because she had no arms."

Holly just stared at me so I added, “Hahaha.”

"That's the joke?” she asked, “She has no arms? I saw a show on television last week about a girl who was born without arms or legs and she was able to do almost everything the other kids at school did. She just wanted to be treated like everyone else. What if we have a baby that is born without any arms? Will that be funny? I'll be thirty soon and the older you are, the higher the chance of these things happening."

"Knock knock."

"What?"

"Just ask who it is,” I told her, “Knock knock."

"Who is it?"

"Not Sarah."

"Hahaha," I added.

Holly frowned thoughtfully, "She could easily knock with her feet or hold something in her mouth and knock with that. There is a local artist that paints by holding a brush in his mouth and his work is amazing."

"I've seen his work,” I replied, “and it is only deemed amazing because he paints with a brush in his mouth. If his work stood on its own, he wouldn't need to advertise the fact that he hasn't got any arms."

"Why do you hate people with no arms so much?"

"I don't. There is a famous monkey that paints and everyone says 'that's pretty good for a monkey.' It's the same thing. If a human produced the same calibre of work as that monkey, nobody would care. That doesn't mean I hate monkeys. "

"You do hate monkeys."

"Yes, but not because of their artwork. They have lice."

"What if,” suggested Holly, “a monkey with no arms painted a picture with a brush in its mouth? You have to admit that would be pretty impressive."

"Yes, for a monkey without arms. It doesn't mean I would want the picture on my wall."

"Well I better hope I never lose my arms."

"Or turn into a monkey."

"Now you're just being an idiot,” Holly said scoldingly, “Why would I turn into a monkey?"

"I don't know. Some kind of science experiment where you wake up to find yourself with the same thoughts but in the body of a monkey. Why would you lose your arms?"

"People lose their arms all the time. I could be in an accident or I could get attacked by a shark or something. We are booked for a week at the beach next month with my parents, would you still love me if a shark bit off both my arms?"

"Of course I would but as you spend the entire time under an umbrella drinking margaritas, I would be a lot more impressed by the sharks ability to walk up the beach and take your arms than a monkey dabbing randomly at a piece of paper with a brush."

"What if I did wake up in the body of a monkey,” asked Holly, “Would you still love me then?"

"Do you have arms?"

"No."

"Well it might put a bit of a strain on the relationship but I'm sure we could work through it. People would see us at the supermarket and say, 'There's David and his armless monkey wife. Love certainly can overcome all."

"God you are a liar.” she said, “Well it's good to know these things about someone before they happen I suppose."

"What things?"

"That you hate people with no arms."

"I don't hate people with no arms. It was a joke."

"Well,” Holly replied, “perhaps you should leave the jokes to people who are funny. You're not Freddy Murphy."

I’m not a huge fan of the beach. When I lived in Australia, I was only ever a half hour drive away but I rarely went. Occasionally my offspring would want to go but I’d tell him the beach was closed that day or give him a choice between going to the beach or cash.  When I was young, every family trip to the beach either ended in somebody being hurt or my parents fighting so it became something to avoid rather than look forward to.

Where I currently live in the United Sates with my wife Holly,  the nearest beach is several hour’s drive away. This makes avoiding going to the beach on a regular basis easier but it also means, for my wife Holly and her parents at least, the annual family week at the beach is a big deal. Every year, since Holly was a small child, her parents have booked a beach house at a place called Emerald Isle in North Carolina. Last summer, for months leading up to the trip, it was all her father talked about.

“Only eighty-three days ‘till we’ll be sitting on a chair at the beach; are you excited? I can’t wait. I bought a new fold-up chair from Home Depot. It has a built-in drink holder on the arm rest. My old fold-up chair didn’t have that. It’s blue. They only had green and blue.”

Family traditions are nice. They’re a way of ensuring time is spent together on a regular basis, regardless of where each member of the family is in their life. I didn’t have any family traditions growing up, unless avoiding each other counts. My first family tradition was when Holly and I bought a tree for our first Christmas together in the United States. In Australia, December is hot. It’s the middle of summer and temperatures reach scorching levels. Once, it reached 54˚ Celsius which I think in Imperial is 425˚ Fahrenheit or 11/16ths of a Cubit. Christmas is celebrated to a degree but songs about dashing through snow hold no relevance. Children’s books show Santa wearing shorts and families spend Christmas Eve in front of an air conditioner rather than a roaring Yuletide log. It snowed on my first Christmas in America, like it does in the movies, and Holly and I visited a Christmas tree farm. In long coats, with a dusting of light snow on our shoulders, we walked for over an hour among fir trees comparing height and foliage density.

“This one! It’s perfect! I love it!” Holly exclaimed.

“It’s at least fifteen feet tall. Our ceilings are about eight.”

“God dammit. I knew we should have bought a bigger house.”

“We could cut it in half and just use the top bit,” I suggested.

“No, let someone with a nice house have it. We’ll just take the sticky one you liked.”

An old man wearing flannel and denim cut the sticky one down for us with a chainsaw and tied it to the roof of our car. On the way home, the rope slipped and we dragged the tree along the freeway for a quarter mile or so until we could pull over to secure it. Later, we positioned the side without any branches against a wall and after Holly decorated it with forty strings of lights, several hundred baubles and a skirt, the tree wasn’t really visible anyway.

“It looks good but what’s that thing around the bottom?”

“It’s a tree skirt.”

“Is that an American thing? What’s it for?”

“To hide the tree stand. And look nice.”

“Does it need the skirt?”

“You don’t like it?”

“It’s just a bit big. It looks like the Christmas tree is standing in the middle of a really big rug. A really big round rug with snowmen and Santas dancing together on it. It’s not the kind of rug we’d usually have in the living room.”

“We wouldn’t usually have a fucking tree in the living room either. It’s Christmas.”

“I like the tree. And the red stockings on the mantel and the laurel with the red bow on the door, but do we need a giant Christmas rug? It’s a bit, I don’t know, goodwilly.”

“Goodwilly?”

“Yes, like it came from a Goodwill store. It’s the fabric I think. And the pattern. And the size.

“Fine. Sorry for trying to make it festive around here. Maybe we should take down all the other decorations as well. Actually, I don’t even want to have Christmas anymore. Thanks for ruining Christmas, Uncle Scrooge.”

“The duck?”

“No, the grumpy old man that made Tiny Tim sell matches on Christmas Eve. You really need to read the classics.”

The day before we were due to leave for the beach, we packed our vehicle with bags, chairs, cooler and an inflatable killer whale. I’d gone shopping for beach attire a few days earlier and bought my very first hat and a pair of ‘flip-flops’ - which are called ‘thongs’ in Australia.

“Marjorie, this gentleman wants to know if we sell black rubber thongs. For men.”

“No. He will probably have to try a sex shop.”

“That’s what I told him.”

I’m not a hat person so when I tried my Indiana Jones fedora on later at home, I paraded in front of a mirror for about an hour before deciding it looked pretty good. I tried the hat with my new flip-flops and was pleased with the combination. I threw them in a bag with a pair of board-shorts and a couple of t-shirts and was done. Holly packed three large suitcases. Two were for shoes.

Holly’s parents drove their own car because they had to take their cats. Cats love the beach and long drives. One of them died on the way. There were tears. After we arrived at the beach house that night, Holly’s father Tom gave ‘Bob’ a service and burial by flashlight.  Holly’s mother Marie realised she didn’t have a photo of Bob so before Tom shoveled sand into the hole, she took a close-up flash shot of his face.

The beach house was nice. It was well-appointed and had a wraparound deck. We sat outside listening to the waves crash in the darkness while Tom talked about what a good cat Bob had been and Marie quoted something she had read about dead cats sitting on a brightly coloured bridge waiting for you to die and join them. I went to bed early.

The next morning, Holly and I woke before her parents and had coffee on the deck. Neighbouring beach house occupants were already setting their umbrellas up on the beach and two boys were building a sand castle. One dug up Bob and chased the other with him.

“Oh my god. Is that Bob?” asked Holly.

“Yes. I knew your dad should have dug a deeper hole.”

“He tried but the sand kept falling back in. What are they doing with him?”

“They’re chasing and throwing him at each other.”

“Well do something about it.”

“They’re having fun.”

“Go down there and take it off them. And do it quick, my parents will be up soon.”

I made my way down to the beach and recovered the dead cat from the boys. Looking towards the beach house and raising the cat in triumph, I saw Holly frantically pointing to the sliding door behind her. Thinking her parents might step out onto the deck any second, I threw the cat into the ocean. I’d assumed it would sink but instead, it caught the first wave and bodysurfed straight back in. I quickly searched around for a decent sized rock, secured it under the cat’s collar and threw it out again. Bob bobbed for a moment then sank head first, his tail pointing up like the stern of the Titanic before disappearing. On my way back up to the beach house, I kicked over the sandcastle and leveled the sand with my foot.

Holly’s mother, Marie, made pancakes for breakfast. I didn’t eat any because I saw one of the surviving cats jump up on the counter and lick the batter bowl while she was making them.  I’m pretty much against cats being on kitchen counters, or in the house, or anywhere in general. I pretended I wasn’t hungry and ate a Snicker’s bar in the bathroom.

After breakfast, Tom and I carried gear down to the beach and set up the umbrella while Holly and her mother went to buy ice from a 7-Eleven. I was wearing my new outfit and feeling pretty good about it.

“Is that a new hat?” Tom asked.

“Yes, it’s a Fedora.”

“That’s not a Fedora, a Fedora is a little hat without a brim. Like a flower pot. Except it has a tassel on the top. You see guys driving around in little cars during parades wearing them.”

“You mean a Fez?”

“A what?”

“It’s called a Fez.”

“Is it? Well you need to get yourself a cap like mine,” Tom said, “It’s got ventilation.”

He took off his blue trucker cap and pointed out the mesh.

“See? You lose ninety-nine percent of your body heat through your head. Your Fez is going to trap all of that heat and make you sweat. The mesh serves a double purpose - it lets the breeze through and the heat out.”

“I doubt that it’s ninety-nine percent,” I replied, “It’s probably closer to thirty. Which is still a lot seeing as the top of your head probably only accounts for about three percent of total surface area.”

“No, it’s ninety-nine percent. Heat rises. You’re going to sweat.”

“Yes, probably, but you know, form over function.”

“What?”

“Form over function. It’s a design thing. I’ll put up with a sweaty head because I like the hat.”

“You should put slits in it. For ventilation. I’ve got a knife in the cooler somewhere for cutting limes... here it is. Pass me your hat.”

“No thanks.”

“You don’t want ventilation? You need ventilation. Keeps your head cool.”

“Yes, I understand the concept, I just don’t want you to stab holes in my new hat.”

Tom opened his Alcatel flip-phone and punched in numbers.

“Marie? It’s Tom. Are you at the 7-Eleven yet? Okay, as you go through the door, to your right, there’s a shelf with caps on it. The ones with mesh on the sides. Get one of those for David. He needs ventilation.”

“No I don’t, Marie,” I shouted, “I’m fine.”

“Blue I guess,” Tom continued, “No? Hang on...” he turned to me, “There’s no blue, would you prefer red or green?”

“Neither. I’ve already got a hat.”

“Marie? Just grab the green one.... no, it doesn’t matter what it says on it... Okay, bye.”

Even though it was early we had a beer because Tom wanted to try out the built-in drink holder on the arm of his new foldup chair. He took off his shirt and moved his chair into the sun. I plugged a foot pump into the inflatable killer whale and began pumping. I haven’t pumped a lot of things up in my life. I’d assumed it would take thirty or forty pumps.

“You haven’t got that pumped up yet?” asked Holly when she and Marie returned.

“Yes,” I answered, “but it was so enjoyable, I deflated it so

I could pump it back up again. I’m actually on my third go.”

“Here’s your hat, David,” said Marie.

She passed me a green cap with ‘I’d Rather Be Fishing’ written across the front. I glanced at Holly, she avoided eye contact.

I have no interest in fishing whatsoever. I’ve only ever been fishing twice. Once with Greg Norman and a guy who rollerskated in
Xanadu
, and once with my friend Geoffrey many years before.

Geoffrey had borrowed his father’s small dinghy and fishing gear and we launched, mid morning, in a small bay protected from large waves by outer reefs. He rowed around a bit for no particular reason and we threw the anchor over. The first few minutes of fishing were ok. It became a bit boring after that.

“I should have bought Scrabble.” I said to Geoffrey.

“Fishing is about relaxing,” he told me, “Take your top off and get a tan.”

“I might just do that actually. It’s very sunny and nobody is going to see me out here.”

We both took our tops off and made ourselves comfortable at opposite ends of the dinghy. 

“I should have brought a hat,” I commented.

“What hat? I’ve never seen you wearing a hat.”

“No, I’m not big on hats. I should buy one though. For fishing on sunny days. Maybe a Fedora.”

“A sombrero would work a lot better.”

“Would you wear a sombrero?”

“No.”

“Well there you go then. I should have brought a hat and Scrabble. Or my Sony Walkman. ”

Geoffrey dug around in a pocket of his cargo shorts, “I bought a joint.”

I’m not sure if it was strong marijuana or a combination of the marijuana, sun, and how boring fishing is, but we both fell asleep. Geoffrey woke me five hours later by yelling. I bolted upright and also yelled. From our knees down and waist up, we were both scarlet red. Yellow blisters had formed and some popped, leaking clear fluid, as I watched. We sat at each end of the dinghy sobbing with our arms outstretched.

“Is it on my face?”

“Yes, is it on my face too?” It hurt to speak.

“Yes. Can you bend your arms?”