Niles Reddick

Cinq histoires

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My Neighbor’s New Underground Fence

 

We didn’t check with our realtor about our neighbor when we moved in, and while he hadn’t particularly done anything to us, his dog had knocked over our trash can, strung everything from plastic hot dog bags to cereal boxes in the street. 

 

I knew our neighbor smoked pot, smelled it wafting over when I grilled and heard him singing along with his Pink Floyd CD on his deck. I didn’t expect to come home and see him wearing a dog shocker collar around his neck to test his new underground fence.

 

When I got inside, I told my wife. “Look out the window. Is that dope head wearing a shocker collar? I’ve seen it all now.”

 

“You think it hurts? Looks like he’s having a seizure each time he gets close to the fence perimeter,” Sheila said.

 

“Yeah, but he’s laughing. Stoned. He ain’t feeling that pain.”  I don’t think I had ever told Sheila, but my friends and I from high school had been to a few concerts high from pot. To this day, I feel lightheaded when I hear Brewer and Shipley’s “One Toke Over the Line.”

 

“Hopefully, the underground fence will keep that dog out of our trash can.” 

 

How to Spend Christmas Alone at Motel 6

 

I bought a brown mink shawl as a Christmas present for my wife. I found it in a second-hand store for ninety dollars. The lady at the counter gave me ten percent off because it hadn’t sold in three years, and she was glad to be rid of it. Said there’d been times she forgot it was there, turned on the lights, and thought it was a wild animal that had gotten in the store. 

 

The shawl had the name Emily Chesterfield sewn onto the tag, and when I asked some local friends, they shared she’d been the wife of a merchant who owned a store downtown before the mall in the suburbs lured shoppers away. The store had closed and fallen into a state of disrepair after the Chesterfields passed away. The old building had been rented a few times: a dollar store, a tattoo parlor, and title and loan business. 

 

I figured it would be hilarious if I found Emily’s grave and took a photo to place in the gift-wrapped box. I went out at lunch and got a good shot of the granite head stone and showed it to my friends, but they cautioned me that my sense of humor was morbid and that my wife might not find it humorous at all. 

 

She was excited when she ripped into the candy cane wrapping paper, tore off the bow, cut the tape with her fingernails. When she opened the box, she “oohed and aahed” about the mink until she saw the name stitched into the tag and saw the head stone photo. “What the hell?”

 

I laughed, told her Merry Christmas.

 

She threw the box and mink at me and stormed out of the living room boo-hooing. 

 

“It was a joke,” I told her. “I thought you’d like the mink.”

 

“It’s not funny. Get the hell out of here,” she said.

 

“What about our eggnog?”

 

“Take it to the cemetery and drink it with Emily,” she said. “I’ve had it.”

 

It was sad that the clerk at Motel 6 remembered my name from the last time. I hoped my wife would simmer down and take me back in a few days.   

 

The Cat Damn It

for Anita Kay

 

This morning, I yelled at my teenage son after the third time from trying to wake him, “Get up, damn it.” I wondered how he could continue to sleep through the alarm and how many hours of sleep he needed. I didn’t usually curse, but I was rushed to get to work. Years ago, after I’d cursed people not moving quickly through a traffic light, I recalled my small son in his car seat saying “Dad, you know they can’t hear you”.  I’d lied to him that it made me feel better.

 

My cursing reminded me of Emmylou, one of the principals in the school my son attended. A fraternity brother once told me that in college Emmylou had a cat she named “Damn It” because she had never cursed and named it so she could curse when she went off to the religious college. When the cat got loose, the Dean of the college captured it, kept it in his office, and sent student affairs personnel to find Emmylou, pulling her out of class and lecturing her about Damn It. She told friends she didn’t know what gave her more pleasure—her cursing when calling the cat in front of her goody-two-shoes dorm mates or the minister turned Dean repeating the cat’s name when he lectured her about keeping a cat in the dorm. 

 

It wasn’t Emmylou’s only run in with a school official. She helped some of her sorority sisters and their boyfriends play a joke on one of the faculty members who owned a Karmen Ghia. They lifted the VW late one evening while he was teaching, carried it up the library steps, and placed it on the porch. After class, the faculty member found security, had to wake them, and get them to help him remove it. No one confessed. 

 

When Emmylou was called in, she knew the “someone shared he’d seen you” tactic, but she simply told the Dean, “I was with Damn It all night in my third-floor dorm room. It was foggy when I looked out the window and I couldn’t make out what people were doing.” 

 

Emmylou had also been suspected of orchestrating the removal of a drunk and passed-out baseball player from his dorm room to the baseball field still in his bed. She’d also been accused of stealing jockstraps from the locker room and flying them up the flagpole. 

 

There was never any proof of Emmylou’s involvement, but when she graduated, the Dean shook her hand, leaned forward, and whispered “Congratulations, I’m happy to see you go, damn it.”  Emmylou had smiled and had a long career in Education, dealing with deviants. 

 

When Emmylou called our son in her school office for having excessive tardies because of sleeping late, he told her I had cursed at him. Blaming was his number one deflection tactic. She smiled and said, “Young man, there is absolutely nothing wrong with your dad cursing at you as long as he doesn’t curse you.”

 

Sugar Bowl Prowler

 

We’d had a few beers and caught a ride to the French Quarter in New Orleans with some sorority sisters we knew from Florida State. We were all pumped that we’d beaten Virginia Tech. When they dropped us by one of the cemeteries near their hotel, we walked a few blocks to our friend’s house to spend the night. There were a handful of drunks, drug addicts, and prostitutes out, but they were either caught up in their worlds or didn’t see what two undernourished and poor college students could do for them, except one crumpled by a fence who repeated, “Got a light?” The night was mostly quiet in the Big Easy, even after a Sugar Bowl win by Florida State and even with winners and losers staying in the same hotels. A lone siren wailed in the distance headed to a wreck, robbery, or murder and was not nearly as frightening as the screech of a startled black cat in an alley or a rat (known as nutria) scurrying across the road.

 

Though historical, the row houses looked similar, some with porches, balconies, or gates with draping vines, and I was confused about the house number.

 

“This is it,” I said.

 

“You sure?” Mark asked.

 

“Yeah.” I reached in my pocket for the spare key. Our friend Kevin wasn’t at home and shared his parents would be asleep. He’d instructed us to tip toe up the wooden stares and his room was first on the right. They key wasn’t a perfect fit, but they’d not locked the door. I figured they’d given me the wrong key, and when Kevin realized it, he’d told them to leave it unlocked for us. I’m not sure I would have done that for anyone, even family.

 

When we got upstairs, the moonlight through the antique window highlighted the second story, and we opened the door and found two girls fast asleep in the double beds we assumed were Kevin’s. Given the room was Pepto Bismol pink, and there were posters of the Red-Hot Chili Peppers and the Foo Fighters, we quietly closed the door, stepped across the hall, and opened the other bedroom, where the husband snored on his back and the woman was draped in a quilt and curled in a fetal position. I stepped closer, and the snoring man didn’t seem to resemble Kevin’s dad. Before I tapped him, I had the sinking feeling we were in the wrong house and might get shot. 

 

I signaled Mark to back away, and we tip-toed out and went down the stairs, across the porch, and onto the sidewalk before I breathed and noticed Mark wasn’t there.

 

“What the hell?”

 

In a moment, he came out, a handful of chocolate chip cookies. “Here,” he said.

 

I took a couple. “What the hell, man?”

 

I could smell them, saw them cooling on a plate on the counter, and had to have some.

 

“We were in the wrong house. It’s a miracle they didn’t have some mean-assed dog that bit us or we didn’t shot, and you lingered for cookies?”

 

“Dude, my heart is still pounding.”

 

We stepped down the sidewalk, and two doors down, we saw an identical house with Kevin’s last name on the mailbox. “This one.”

 

The key unlocked the door. Again, we tip-toed up the stairs, opened an unoccupied bedroom door with Seminole posters, and found a note from Kevin: “Make sure you don’t mess up my room.” 

 

I locked Kevin’s bedroom just in case there was a prowler. We’d sleep off the beer and our close call, and in the morning, we’d walk around the French Quarter, eat lunch, and catch a cab in the early afternoon to the airport to fly back to Tallahassee. We felt luckier than the Seminoles.

 

Madame Tussaud’s

 

I didn’t know that one of the first wax models Madame Tussaud made was when the famous French writer Voltaire modeled for her. She taught votive making to King Louis XVI’s sister Elizabeth and lived at Versailles for years. The brochure read that her legend lived on in museums across the globe, but we didn’t want to spend nearly one hundred fifty dollars to see wax figures of famous people and characters conjured by Hollywood.  When we couldn’t score free tickets to The Ellen DeGeneres Show or Jimmy Kimmel Live, we decided to splurge and visit the wax museum anyway because of our son who pleaded he could get pictures with Aquaman, Spiderman, and Superman, heroes to him from cartoons, films, and X-box games.

 

Making our way down the star Walk of Fame, we had to step over a homeless woman sleeping next to the star of Lois Lane from Superman. We also had to fend off tour salesmen, a woman who would create a star in the sidewalk for tourists, and people dressed like Freddy Krueger, Batman, and even Mickey Mouse. We also had to shoo “I Ride Like a Star” Ferrari tour up Mulholland Drive salesmen and vendors selling food and drinks. We felt like fish swimming upstream, but the fading sun and lights from Griffith Observatory shown bright on the infamous Hollywood hillside sign but were no match for the lights on Hollywood’s star walk. We bought our tickets, masked up, and were encouraged to take plenty of photos.

 

We were exhausted from walking miles from our hotel to see various tourist attractions, to eat at famous restaurants like In and Out and Fat Sal’s, and from jet lag from losing three hours from Eastern Time to Pacific Time, so we blinked several times to make certain the wax figures were indeed wax. They seemed even more real than the real people seemed on TV whether it was historical figures who were no longer living such as Audrey Hepburn from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Patrick Swayze from Dirty Dancing, or Clark Gable from Gone with the Wind.

 

Clothing, hair, expressions, and even eyes seemed perfect, as if they had been simply stopped and were preserved in time. 

 

There were moments when I felt like the wax figures might be watching us, as if their eyes followed us around the room, and several times, I walked back just to doublecheck. I took photos with Tom Hanks as Forrest Gump on the park bench with his box of chocolates on his lap, Patrick Stewart who played Jean Luc Picard on Star Trek the Next Generation from the Captain’s chair on the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise, and even with ET in a basket on the bicycle, and my photos seemed as real as the shows and films I had watched. Suddenly, I’d gone from the sidelines of our living room to front and center.

 

When we got to the second floor and found other wax stars, our amazement didn’t fade, and as I stood next to the iconic Betty White, I heard a whisper, “Hey there.” I know my eyes opened wide, and my wife said, “Come on, smile. Get closer to her. Maybe give her a kiss on the cheek.”

 

“Yeah, baby. Give it to me.” I turned and looked at her, and her eyes glistened.

 

“What are you doing?” my wife asked.

 

“I thought I heard something.” 

 

“Hurry up. I still want a pic of me with Marlon Brando. I always wanted to play Stella in the school play, but that slut Stephanie got the part. I want Jack Nicholson, too.”

 

I turned back, smiled, and then, I felt someone pinch me on the ass. Betty had the same look on her face as if she’d done nothing and I turned around. There were no other tourists near the exhibit.

 

“Do you think there are actors playing the part of wax figures?”

 

“How many Xanax did you take for the six-hour cross country flight?”

 

“I only took four.”

 

“How many were you supposed to take?”

 

“I could take up to two per day.”

 

“Per day, right?”

 

“Well.”

 

“No wonder you’re so damned loopy. Come on.”

 

As we walked out, I turned back, and Betty White winked at me. I smiled and blew her a kiss.

 

Niles Reddick is author of a novel, three collections, and a novella. His work has been featured in over 500 publications including The Saturday Evening Post, PIF, New Reader, Forth, Citron Review, Right Hand Pointing, Nunum, and Vestal Review. He is a three time Pushcart, a two time Best Micro nominee, and a two time Best of the Net nominee. His newest flash collection If Not for You has recently been released by Big Table Publishing. Bienvenue à Danse, Niles.

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