Just As I Am, Without One Flea

NUT

by Ralph Bailey

Nut the Squirrel was having a wonderful day. He saw a ray of sunlight beaming into his room from the round window made from a knot in his tree. He hopped up and stretched as if he could really touch the ceiling. He knew he could not; he was a short little squirrel. But being short made him faster and feisty, and he was very proud of that. He scooted out the door without even looking. He was practicing his bravery and feistiness.  

He was down the tree in a second. On the ground, he stopped and stood on his hind legs to survey his possibilities. He knew this was his home. What he didn’t know was that this is Piedmont Park, Atlanta’s Midtown playground. On certain days Nut could see lots of people wandering about - kids with balloons and couples holding hands walking by, and he could smell meats and vegetables cooking, and sometimes, mmmboy - nuts!

Nut saw that the coast was clear, so he scampered all the way across the yard to the lake where he lapped up a full tummy of cool, delicious water. The sun was coming up above the shiny buildings in Midtown. It was going to be a beautiful day. “Yes yes,” Nut thought, “I’m having a wonderful day.”, and he scampered toward the big oak tree. He collected as many acorns in his mouth pouch as it could hold and ran back home. He was up his tree in a second. Collecting his acorns and packing them tight in the corner, he glanced around his room. Everything seemed wonderfully in order. But a sudden thought made him stop. “Wait a minute here,” he said, “Where is Mother?”

“Where is Mother?,” George Zacker thought. He was not having a good day. He was sitting in the driver’s seat of his old Dodge Dart, with a line of cars along Briarcliff Road right at him, and he’s thinking morning rush hour. Shaking his brain from the little wooden room, he felt he hadn’t slept in a couple of days. In a panic he tried to start the car. It blasted a loud whine when he turned the key. It was already running. He put it in Drive and checked the side mirror for a hole in the traffic. A young woman, blond and dressed with clout, stopped to let him enter the street. She was smiling and Zacker returned the smile and waved a friendly thanks, and he was into action. He thought a minute at the stop light at Ponce de Leon (pronounced pons- da-LEE-on in Atlanta), and decided to turn right to go east toward Downtown and home to check himself out.

George was surprised to find no available parking spot on Charles Allen Drive. Everyone on the street had known for many years that he always parked in front of his house. After six and a half minutes (he’d been watching the clock), finally, someone across the street was leaving, pulling out. He didn’t recognize the car, so he figured it must be someone visiting overnight, someone who would not be back, at least not for a while. He jerked the Dodge through the gap in the median, and was parked and walking up the walkway to his front door. Another car was parked in the front yard. He recognized it as Sandy’s. Sandy, beautiful Sandy, was his wife’s oldest and closest friend. Beth, his wife, was beautiful, too, he thought, but Sandy was something special. Everybody in school knew it, and all her current friends did, too. He entered the screened-in front porch, not remembering that Beth must’ve painted the trimming a darkened Kelly green. He saw his keys in his hand and rattled through them for the door key. Where was his door key? Had he lent it to someone, someone visiting perhaps, maybe one of their Chicago friends? Starting to knock, he checked the door first. It was unlocked. He crept carefully into the front room. She had been rearranging again. The place looked great. Peeking into the dining room, where Beth often kept her easel and paints for work in the largest space in the house with natural light, he saw she had just cleared the table of her breakfast dishes. A large linen napkin and a souvenir coaster from London were left behind. He heard a squeak from up front, in the guest bedroom, rose-colored from the sunlit curtains that puffed upward in the morning breezes.

The door was wide open. He stood in the doorway as Beth rose from under the comforter, as Sally moaned and rolled to her side. He saw a moment of Sally’s breasts, streaming in slow motion as she turned and settled without waking. In shock for a split-second, he was suddenly amazed that he had never, in all these years, seen Sandy naked before. Surely he had wanted to, but he couldn’t remember when. George was looking at the floor considering these things when Beth tiptoed to him scowling and shushing him though he wasn’t making a sound. In fact, he had momentarily stopped breathing. Beth closed the bedroom door slowly and quietly, and pushed George all the way into the kitchen. “What are you doing here?,” she barked in a loud whisper.

He was already remembering. He was already remembering they had been divorced for well over a year. He was already remembering he didn’t live here anymore. He remembered Beth and Sandy had been together for some time now. He was silent, gazing blankly into Beth’s furious face. “George!,” she said, trying to shake him into consciousness, then, realizing what was going on, she froze for a second, then turning away she said, “Oh God, not again.”

Beth ran to the phone to call he didn’t know who, maybe the police. “George,” she shouted, trying not to be too loud, then, louder she yelled, “George!” But George was already out the door, halfway down the sidewalk to the corner of the street.

Nut wasn’t sure at first where he was, but as he stood on his hind legs and looked both ways in a jerk. He recognized Candler Park right across the street. He bounced happily through the shadows of the tall pine trees, across the cool pine needles and was up the thickest tree he could find. He paused a moment to clean his face with his cute little paws, then wondered at the newly mown grass and the tennis court beyond, where two girls were pounding the shit out of a ball with their rackets. Nut chattered his teeth and went “rrrrrr” with his tongue. Then he was down the tree again and hopping through the smell of cut grass and up to the next corner, and was on his way home. There was a whirr of cars passing, and a light wind blowing. Voices floated from the shops at the triangle beyond Moreland Avenue. He heard one man’s voice rising from the distance. “Hey, George,” it said. George, stooping to avoid whoever it was, ran to the right and stopped at the intersection a few yards north. A car pulled up beside him. A trim long-haired man rolled down the window. “Hey, George,” the man smiled and said, “Where ya goin’?”. George tried to answer but didn’t know what to say. “Get in.”, the man invited. The door opened and George got in, closing the door as the car drove away. “So, where ya headed?,” the driver grinned. “Home,” George said, “I’m going home.” They headed for Poncey-Highlands.

The driver was Mark, who was George’s friend from the theatre where they both worked backstage arranging props for plays produced at the Little Theatre north of town near Marietta. George didn’t remember this as Mark was talking about some party someone was having that weekend. Apparently, Mark thought George knew what party he was talking about, but George, for the moment, didn’t know anything. He was dazed and in shock, suddenly wishing the car would stop. It did stop, right in front of George’s house. Mark mumbled something George couldn’t quite make out, and he closed the door saying, “Yeah, right. I’ll see ya soon.” “Got cha!,” Mark announced, driving away. George pounded his forehead with his fist, trying to form a thought, as he walked into his living room. 

He heard his mother’s voice. “Doors. Doors!”, she cried. His mother had suffered a major stroke five years ago, and had ended up with paralysis on her left side, and speech apraxia. George was the only one who could always understand her. A few friends and relatives could understand her some of the time, and they were always saying how well they understood her, though she hadn’t improved since the end of a year of speech therapy. She was as well as she was going to get. Her mind was just about as sharp as ever, certainly sharper now than George’s mind had ever been. He was better now, he often thought, now that the pills were working, the pills he almost always forgot to take. He was better, too, since his therapy sessions with his doctor, whose name, ironically, was Dr. Melvin George. Dr. George recently made a diagnosis of some possible identity disorder with major depression and general anxiety disorder and a stubborn acute panic disorder he had not quite figured out. George was, Dr. George liked to say in a broad cliché, “a work in progress.” The good doctor did not deeply pursue the issue, or perhaps the scholarly doctor never knew in all of George’s lengthy years of therapy that his alter identity was a happy little squirrel.

“Doors!,” his mother called again, in her way of saying “George, wharoo have been?”. “I’m here, Mother,” George said loudly, opening the refrigerator for something to drink, “I’m in the kitchen.” There were two Diet Cokes. He opened one and got a plastic straw out of a drawer, put it in the Coke, and walked into the TV room in the back where his mother lay in her hospital bed watching a Gunsmoke rerun. She picked up the remote and tried to hit the mute button, only to change channels that persistently flashed silently one by one on the screen. “I call you,” she said, holding the black cordless phone in the air, “buh call you thish memonee fuchsia.” “My phone ran out of juice and it took forever to charge it up,” he explained, trying to escape a conversation. “Sue down say whiff me an’ temmie who the woman, no,” she attempted, and George knew she wanted him to lie on the sofa and watch Gunsmoke with her, and she wanted to know who the guest star was. “That’s Harry Dean Stanton,” he said, sipping at yesterday’s coffee cup. He laid down on the lumpiest sofa in Atlanta. “No,” she said, “the woman, no, thotherun.” “Oh,” George noted, craving milk and cookies, “that’s J. C. Flippen.” More than anything before in his life, he wanted out of this room, out of this house, out of reach from the silent scream of his mother’s neediness, far away from her co-dependency. “I could heal,” he thought, with an increasingly unbearable anxiety building in his throat. “Well, my gudniss,” said his mother. 

The phone rang as another old episode of Gunsmoke began. Matt Dillon once again shot the man who had drawn and shot first. The answer machine picked up the call. No one had actually answered the phone for about fifteen months. George noticed his mother was sleeping again, so he turned the TV volume way down and he could hear the hum and whirr of the oxygen generator. His mother rubbed her hands across her stomach, probably dreaming she was at work again, surveying computations by auditors who met with her office, explaining complicated projections that might correct the results they had estimated. She squinted and her brow was furrowed as she fell deeper into The Books. She had been so smart, George thought, so valuable, but she was and is, at home, so very, very needy. He started to get up to fix a tall glass of ice water. That sounded so good. But instead he rolled into the pillow he had brought to the sofa some nights before, and said with a silent sigh, “Fuck it.” And he fell into a dream, miles of genre away from his mother’s workplace.

Nut the Squirrel was so so very very happy. He had just learned he could turn cartwheels. He didn’t know he could do that. He knew of no other squirrel that could tumble end-over-end like this. Nut giggled and flip over one more time. He was so thirsty now. He knew the people at the picnic table by the lake might frighten him, or might even throw sticks at him, so he climbed up the nearby utility pole. He scooted a couple of feet across the cable, then scooted a couple more. Then, after two more apprehensive scoots, he darted all the way to the next pole, then the next. Suddenly he was at the pole nearest a large birch tree. He jumped to a close branch and flipped around it upside down to get his balance. Nut ran to the trunk of this large tree and stared down at the lake. He ran down the side of the tree opposite the table, shuffled to the edge of the lake and drank, leaning and stretching close to the water. He drank and drank, standing up once or twice to keep a lookout for invaders. He couldn’t hear people behind him, so he darted in one scoot to the side of the tree to make sure they were gone. They were, so he ran up to the top of the concrete picnic table. Nut hunkered down close as he could to the table top, sniffing for bread or nuts the visitors might have left behind. He was at the other end of the table now, closing his eyes for just a moment so that he could smell a little more closely.

George yawned and stretched and slowly looked up and then blinked three times. The rustle of leaves on the branches above him were being coaxed by a gentle wind that felt like dark early morning on his moistened face. He must’ve been lying on this picnic table for, oh, at least an hour, maybe twelve. He was soaked in sweat. George righted himself and sat at the edge of the table. Then he stood with a long, wide stretch, and he knelt at the lake’s edge for a full splash of cold redeeming water from his cupped hands. “Yes,” he concluded, “I could heal.”

He decided to walk back to Beth’s house to get his car. He thought he could sneak by her place from across the street and crawl to the driver’s side door and be out of there without anyone noticing. He would wait until the night was good and dark. He took off his shirt and snapped it at little drier, then he soaked it in the lake and snapped it again a few times more. When he put it back on it was refreshingly cool almost to a chill.
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He was crawling down the street in front of Beth’s house. He couldn’t believe there was a party going on. He had heard about this party somewhere, maybe, maybe not. He caught a peek at a young couple coming down the driveway toward him, laughing and talking, with large plastic cups in their hands. George rolled over and under his car. He saw the ankles and bright red shoes of the woman, and the split edge of the hem of her Capri slacks. He could barely see the man who was sort of dancing beside her, and George waited until they were out of sight. He heard their car start and watched its tires go by following the beam of its headlights. Crawling out from under his Dart, he reached up to open the door, and got in, slithering into the seat. The car started quickly and he was on the way out of there. He heard Mark’s voice behind him shouting, “Hey, George!” “Oh, God.”, George was thinking as he whipped around the corner, “Now they’ll talk and laugh about crazy George, caught up in Georgeworld again.” He snorted through his nose in a huff and pretended he could care less.

He drove home with the A/C on and his window down, fiddled his fingers in the glove compartment for a cigarette. There was an old hard pack of Winston Lights with one partially butt from he didn’t know how long ago. He pulled into the carnival lights of the nearby Chevron station and paid a dime for a pack of matches advertising smokers.com. He smoked the rest of his old friend Winston, A/C on, window down, his arm rested on the window’s edge. A cassette played George’s favorite new tune, The Residents’ “What Have My Chickens Done Now?”, sung eerily by an old woman in a high voice. “This is the life,” George snickered.

The next morning George made breakfast while the TV squealed, seven feet from his mother’s bed. She had the volume up all the way all the time. And the TV was on always, all night, all day, day in, day out. If George was a madman, the persistence of this noisy drone made him madder. He put her breakfast plate on her rolling hospital cart, pulled her outstretched good arm so that she was standing, and inched her closer to the head of the bed. She always slipped down way below the elevated head of the bed, so that she was always flat on her back. She liked flat on her back. That way she could strain her neck with her chin to her chest so she could worsen her problematic neck, already stiffened by osteoporosis. She liked to eat in this position so that she could choke and cough and spew food all over her messy nightshirt.

George’s mother was in the position now where she could be raised up toward the tray. Her increasing fatness kept her at arm’s length to her plate, but nothing could stop her from shoveling the food in, and wheezing under the oxygen tube in her nose. He brought her another Diet Coke with a straw and filled his own plate with bacon, scrambled eggs and toast with three gulps. He surmised that, at this rate, someday he might be as healthy as his mother. He smiled at his ever-hardening sarcasm.

A car was driving up. George put his plate on the floor and wiped his mouth on a napkin from the table as he passed through the dining room on the way to the living room where he slowly parted a curtain. A police car was pulling up behind his. Two uniformed officers were coming up the drive. George picked up his plate from the floor and was immediately out the back door. He flung the plate over the next door neighbor’s fence and ran as fast as he could in through the woods between his house and the back yard of the house behind it. He leaped into the street from the drive that circled like a cul-de-sac in front of this house, and was out into the fresh new day of city streets and park benches.

Nut the Squirrel was happily practicing his cartwheels. He was getting out of breath so he darted under the nearest picnic table and stood up waiting. He waited and waited and waited. He waited as the traffic gathered and slowly dispersed. He waited, still standing there as the sun flickered through the trees that outlined the park. He waited, not moving a flea’s inch, until the moon shone over the high-rises behind him. He skirted up the tree next to the picnic table. He had been in this tree before, many times before. “Yes yes,” thought Nut, “this is just about my very favoritest tree.” And he strattled a limb with his tiny arms and his tiny legs, and drifted off to sleep on his tummy. He had had a long, happy happy day. “Yes yes,” Nut dreamed, “my favoritest tree.”

George awoke at first light. It took some forty-five minutes to get sleep out of his eyes and ears. Finally, he could tell he was in the park. It must’ve been about 6:30 in the morning, he figured. He had to get something to eat. There was a total of eight dollars and sixty-nine cents in his pants pockets, left over from his mother’s social security check he had cashed the previous week. He turned on his heels to face to Krystal’s restaurant at Peachtree and 5th Street. The day was the coolest since last Spring. Now it was suddenly September, finally comfortable outside, and George needed comfort. His outside time would surely increase. Something deep inside him
was telling him it would be a long time before he would be able to relax indoors.

He finished three Krystal hamburgers, a Diet Coke and a small order of fries and stood looking north on Peachtree Street, deciding to take MARTA bus 23 to Brookhaven in North Atlanta, a thirty-minute ride. George paid the driver and looked for an empty seat next to a window. There was only one; it was near the front. He could look out to the east at the various shops down Peachtree. He thought that, through the years, he must have been in every one of them at one time or another. A young woman got on at the next stop and she quickly swung around the silver pole up front like Elvis and was sitting beside him. He reckoned he would get off at the same stop she did, not to follow her, but to have a goal. Otherwise he might ride this bus forever. Bus 23 followed its course stop after stop, and was slowly emptying morning workers into their jobs stop after stop. The woman next to him still hadn’t left the bus when they reached Buckhead, about twelve miles from downtown. George thought it fortuitous that she stood up to pull the string, ringing the bell to get off at the next stop - Brookhaven in North Atlanta. He swung around the silver pole and was out in the dark, slow suburbs. A Huddle House restaurant lit the trees just beyond the corner where he left bus 23, which whirred and belched as it squeaked North. The woman, her red hair purple under the fluorescent streetlight, followed behind it, crossing nonchalantly the empty intersection, checking her small leatherette purse, as the 23 disappeared into outer Metro Atlanta. George headed South on the sidewalk toward the only living thing he could see in this direction, the Huddle House, for coffee. Through a line of shrubs as he walked, he could make out the outline of a Mac truck under a streetlamp in the parking lot.