Cute from a Distance

I find it profoundly interesting how when we are children we can hold another individual, whether it be a brother or sister, mother or father, or even a television icon such as the Lone Ranger on such a lofty pedestal built of all of the things we hope to be when we’re older. We see them as the perfect specimen of humanity and dress like them or act like them, reveling in the attention that they perpetually pour over us. Still, more interesting is on that fateful day when we witness some profound event that mars the perspective of our heroes forcing us into the reality that they are only human after all, and one of your last childhood traits becomes changed forever. You can almost feel it as it happens. For me, the change happened when I was eleven-years-old in 1987.

We lived far out into the country and friends were slim and hard to find. Imaginations run amok when there are few others to fan the flame of ingenuity. The only other playmates I seldom saw were my nephews and it was with their help that I had converted an old hog pen into Fort Awesome: Base of operations for one of the greatest special operations strike teams the rabbits and frogs of Dublin, Georgia had ever seen. We even had matching capes, courtesy of my mother’s towels hanging on the clothesline. Our major weakness, however, was bees. Nothing was sure to scatter our ranks quite like stumbling into a hidden hive in a tree or under the roof of the shed. On those occasions it was every man for himself.

On this particularly hot July day, I happened to be sitting in Fort Awesome alone, playing with several G.I. Joe toys when I saw my father approach from the house. He strolled, as he often did, in no real hurry. His hands were in the front pockets at his hips of his overalls that, together with the old red T-shirt and abnormally thick glasses, seemed to be his uniform. His favorite cigars, as cheap as any ever made which I believe must have been comprised of a fifty-fifty ratio of extremely bad tobacco and Canadian thistle, were just visible at the top of his chest pocket. Whenever he lit up it was like someone had set fire to a sugar cane plantation and was attempting to dowse the flames with cow manure.

“Hey, bubba,” he paused to puff that vile Swisher Sweet before taking it from his lips, “what’re you up to over here?” He surveyed the area of Fort Awesome, taking in the carnage that was the many broken action-figures scattered over the ground around me. I felt that the addition of the element of scorched earth with the aid of cherry bombs and other fireworks was imperative in simulating realistic battlefield conditions. Where Cobra and G.I. Joe clashed on that morning it was Antietam, and many of the brave that survived were left double-amputees. I hoped with all hope that he wouldn’t notice the tiny burn marks in the hip and shoulder joints of the toys. If he discovered I had the firecrackers he would surely take them and leave me with a heated backside.

I found that I wanted to keep the forward momentum of the conversation in motion, leaving him little time to deduce how the genocide had taken place, “Nothing Daddy. I was just playin’ army. When are Chris and Brad and David comin’ over?” I was referring to my nephews, the other members of the special task force. Their mother, my sister Mary, had taken them shopping for school clothes and I knew they wouldn’t be coming, but I had to say something.

“Their momma’s got ‘em at J.C. Penny, gettin’ ‘em clothes for school. They ain’t comin’ today.” He tussled my hair as if to cheer me up, no doubt due to the pitiful lip I thrust outward in an attempt to garner some sympathy, as he told me this. My face looked like it had half of a life raft protruding from it, but the ploy worked magnificently. He had clearly moved on from his inspection of the battlefield, granting me some respite from being annihilated at the hands of an enraged and worried father. The mission had been a success! I had obtained a victory that would allow me to risk blowing my fingers from my hands one more day.

The left corner of his mouth lifted and the cigar dipped low in his right, as the subtle hint of a smile touched his face. “I’m gonna go take a walk. Wanna tag along?”

Walks with my dad were nothing new but I loved every second of them. As we would walk he would point out a plant that had some healing properties or could be used as a food source or a snake that was harmless and a spider that was deadly. He seemed to know everything and I always had questions aplenty that desperately needed answering – doozies like, “Who would win in a fight between a werewolf and a vampire,” or “What’s the fastest thing ever,” never being more specific than that. Sometimes he would laugh outright at the silliness in the question but he always seemed to have an answer that made sense to me.

I jumped to my feet. “Okay,” I said giving away my excitement as I hurriedly dusted off my breeches. He threw his arm over my shoulders and we walked, making way for a path we had trampled down over many of our previous hikes. We walked through the old peanut field lined by the dense forest that shrouded our trail to the North and West but seemed to go on eastward indefinitely. Our conversation was the usual. He asked me how I was doing in school, and of course, I would lie, deciding it best not to wander down that road at least until we received our report cards. My poor performance didn’t stem from any lack of intelligence, nor was that I simply wasn’t being challenged enough. No, I felt it far more important to prod my classmates into hysterical and uncontrollable laughter by any means necessary. With all the hard work of being the clown, there was little time left for trivial things such as writing down my assignments or taking notes. It wasn’t like I would ever need that stuff again anyway.

Once we entered the woods across the field it was as if we stepped onto another planet. The air was at once cooler and the trees were alive with the tweet of the thrashers and the whoot-whoot of the dove, the chattering of squirrels busily jumping from this tree to that one in some great hurry. The smells of the pine and honeysuckle assaulted me suddenly making my head swim a little with the wonderful fragrance of the world around me, and I could even detect the faintest odor of the swamp that lay a mile or so further to the west. By way of our walks, I had developed quite a love for the woods and nature in general. Sometimes, I walked by myself through that shaded sea of green, feeling utterly alone, yet in the company of several beings at the same time. The place was alive and it had both the power to save you or utterly destroy you. I found that feeling as exhilarating then as I do now.

After a half hour of walking and talking, a strange chattering stole our attention to a gnarled old pine. Upon first glance I had no idea what made the sound. I had never heard anything like it before and I would be dishonest if I didn’t tell you I was a little scared.

“Looky there, boy,” my father whispered anxiously.

I looked to the hollow in the base of the tree indicated by the pocket-knife-manicured finger my dad had stabbed into the air before him. What I saw there made me gasp with gleeful surprise, making my mouth contort into a weird half-open and half-smile kind of expression that would have looked much more at home on a Wodaabe tribesman. This was the first time I had ever seen a real raccoon up close and I was completely taken in by the furry little guy. He was curled into a ball as if he had just been sleeping and the eyes within that black mask looked at us as if asking, “What the hell are you two supposed to be?” It was completely calm looking and I could have sworn I could have walked right up to it and started petting it.

Dead commanded, “Stay still,” as he crept slowly to his left to retrieve a large piece of oaken deadfall. I was shaking my head the whole time, screaming in my mind NO, hoping that the animal might somehow pick up on my mental objections to my father’s forthcoming actions and run for its life. My father was moving in closer trying to remain as stealthy as an assassin. However, his sneaking was more on par with a three-legged bear with a clogged Eustachian tube, but for some unknown reason, the raccoon never moved an inch. It seemed like there was some deep-seeded trust for people that it had. I wondered if this animal had been raised in captivity and simply gotten loose. My father was within an arm’s length of the critter when he raised that wooden cudgel like an executioner raising a headsman’s axe. The animal gave no sign of fear for the malice about to rain down upon it. “Run, damn you, run,” I screamed in my head. Didn’t he know he was about to die? Where was the instinct animals were supposed to have for these things?

As that club fell with a tremendous crack, my heart fell with it, and then all went silent in the woods of Dublin, Georgia. There wasn’t even the whistle of the birds anymore, as I stood mortified at what I had just witnessed. A tear freely ran down my cheek to crash rather loudly into the fallen leaves on the forest floor. My father, a man of impeccable integrity, the bravest soul I had ever known, and a noble, kind, and wise man that I hope to emulate in every way as I grew older, turned his head back to me with a smile that bordered on insanity.

“I got him,” he victoriously announced, looking back down at the broken corpse of the murdered animal. Coldly, he snatched it up by a leg, and holding his trophy proudly aloft, brought it closer to me. “That’s twenty-five bucks for the pelt and some damn good eatin’ son! What a haul!”

His boasts fell on deaf ears. The animal I saw dangling lifeless from the iron grip of my father’s fist had a bead of blood drip from its nose to the earth beneath. I was horrified. “Stupid animal,” I yelled out in head. “If you would have just kept quiet, we would have walked right on by!” Neither my father nor the dead innocent knew my pain and inner torment at that time. I clenched my teeth and stared at the killer with hatred I never fathomed I could feel toward him and I think he could sense it. He tussled my hair once more, trying to disarm my ire.

He stepped past me and said, “Come on, bubba. Let’s get home.” He began whistling as we made our way back to the house. I never spoke a word to him. I could only replay that traumatic event over and over again in my mind, wishing each time that I had done something to stop him; tackled my father or something. I hoped that the occasional sniff that slipped from my tough façade of masculinity I tried to maintain would go unnoticed. I had to remain tough and composed in the presences of the old man, regardless of how nightmarish I found the affair, but it didn’t take an expert eye to tell I was quietly bawling.

We had just reached the center of the old peanut field not two hundred yards from home when there was an explosion of teeth, claws, and a scream that chilled me to the bone. After everything, it seemed that my father had only been successful in knocking the creature unconscious. Now, I don’t know if the thing had a powerful headache or if the thing was running solely on a survival instinct, but I would swear that the animal was livid and it was pure piss and vinegar that guided its actions from there on. It was payback time and a single sentence escape my lips that I’m sure my father would have heard had it not been for that piercing shrill emanating from that once helpless creature. “Oh shit!”

The two of them were locked in a primal struggle rolling this way and that kicking dust into the air that choked out much of the evening’s twilight. There was no method or strategy, only shear chaos and howls from both the raccoon and my father. My father yelled words that would have made a sailor blush and ask for forgiveness and I guarantee that if that animal could speak English it would have been throwing curses just a vulgar right back. All I could do was stand there, shock freezing me to immobility. That raccoon was like a blur as it dashed from my father’s arm to his hip, then back to the other arm, and then to a leg. The speed and ferocity of the attack was ridiculous. Had an adult lion stumbled upon the seen and witness the brutality set loose in that little bundle of tooth and claw, I’m positive to my core that it would have coward and turned the other way. Just like that, my pity for creature was transferred in an instant to the man being ruthlessly and unremorsefully punished in that dusty field.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity and as quickly as the whole thing started, the animal retreated to the tree line in a flash that made it’s form almost impossible to follow. My father lay very still on the ground before me and I could feel my heart in my throat as I trembled. Sure, I was mad at the guy, but did he really deserve to die at the paws of a scorned raccoon? Of course not! And what would I tell momma? “Hurry momma, call an ambulance! I think a crazy raccoon just killed daddy!” I shook my head vigorously, trying to dislodge the morbidly negative thoughts.

After another several heartbeats and worst case scenarios playing out in my head, the quiet was broken by a wild fit of coughing and the most forlorn moan I had ever heard. Thank God! Daddy was alive! I managed to regain control and rushed to kneel beside him, then slowly helped the old man to his feet. The destruction left in the wake of that vicious animal attack was completed by an overall strap torn asunder and hanging limply beneath his left breast that had somehow became exposed through a rather large rip in that T-shirt. His breathing came rapid and heavy; his hair a mess and he was caked in a mixture of blood and dirt. With a shaking chin and his teeth chattering a little he asked me to help him home.

I put his arm over my shoulders, acting as his crutch, I replied, “Yes, sir,” and we set off slowly. Nothing more was said as we walked, for we had both been rendered speechless by the calamity that had just unfolded. Later that evening my mother took my dad to the emergency room for a three hour wait in a crowded room and some terrible rerun playing out on the television. For all the wounds he accumulated that day, I believe the wound to his pride to be the worst by far. Until his death four years ago, this story was a forbidden topic for discussion, but for me, it was the day my hero became forever changed in my own perspective, however, as they lowered his body into the earth I knew without a doubt that the love I felt for that man never did.