note: it’s with much regret that while I’ll be having Thanksgiving dinner at the neighbors’, it’ll be my first primitive-free Thanksgiving in five years, as “Auntie,†described in previous Thanksgiving stories, departed this time and place over the summer, no longer imposing a burden upon the hard-pressed taxpayers of Missouri; her ticker finally gave out.
“Auntie†was 59 years old, two months shy of 60, and a textbook example of the destructive legacy of the Age of Aquarius, specifically all this free love and drugs and body-mutilation nonsense.
So in lieu of the Thanksgiving with a primitive, I offer this, which happened a few weeks ago. I don’t know the rest of the story.
franksolich has an overnight primitive guest. When I woke up one night to empty the bladder and to let one of the cats inside, as I walked from the kitchen into the dining room to get to the front door, looking over to the living room, I saw a phenomenon that stopped me in my tracks.
There was a big heap of something on the recliner there, in the living room.
It wasn’t stirring, and didn’t seem to know of my presence, so in the near-darkness I approached the recumbent thing on the chair.
Yikes.
It was a femme, and a quite monstrous one at that. About 40-50 years old, pretty dirty, stank rather badly, her eyes shut and her mouth wide open, crummy teeth. About half the size of a filled waterbed mattress, her upper arms bigger than my thighs.
Yikes.
I purposely knocked over a large brass-and-copper brazier, a souvenir from Egypt, hoping the clattering sound would wake her up. It didn’t. I assume she was snoring, although I had no way of knowing.
Oh man. Problem.
I wasn’t about to touch her, to shake or poke her awake, because she was a strange woman, and I being a man unfamiliar to her might seem threatening, and scare her. If nothing else, franksolich is a gentleman, sensitive to the sensibilities of women.
I picked up that large brass-and-copper thingamajig, and knocked it over again, this time harder so as to make a larger noise. The great body mass slumbered and snored on.
Damn.
I did not want to deal with this.
It was the middle of the night. Now, usually in case of a home invasion, one’s supposed to call “911.†I’ve never in my life called “911,†but have been told that if I have to, all I need to do is dial the number and leave the receiver off the hook, nothing more. And then in a few minutes, there’ll be all sorts of state, county, and local law-enforcement, EMTs and paramedics and an ambulance, some volunteer firemen and a few fire trucks, a van from the natural gas company, a truck from the electrical utility district, and a few dozen curious citizenry, out in the front yard.
Well, this was an emergency, but nothing that demanded all that fuss. About the only way my life was threatened was that if I slipped and fell underneath her, and she being twice my weight would’ve smashed me flatter than a pancake, but there was no chance of that.
Instead, I picked up the telephone and dialed the number of the ranch-hand on call these particular twenty-four hours. He lives in town, but whoever’s on call on is supposed to be contacted when I need someone.
I of course can’t hear, and after slowly counting to ten, assumed the telephone had been picked up at the other end, and said, “This is me. There’s a problem. I need help.†I uttered the message three times; the guy knows me, and knows the deal, that I have no idea if a message is being “received†at the other end, and so I have to do it that way.
While waiting for him to come, I dropped the brass-and-copper thing a third time, in fact slamming it down onto the floor so as to make an even louder noise, but this, uh, big blob on the chair rippled on, unawakened.
The ranch-hand on call lives about ten minutes away, and finally drove up to the front. He got out of his truck and came to the door. It was obvious he was packing heat, because a rifle’s a difficult thing to hide.
He glanced at me, seeing no harm, and so looked where I was pointing in the darkness, illuminated only by the shadow of the yard-light outside coming through the picture-window.
He had the same reaction I did, upon seeing the sight of a breathing, fluttering mountain.
“Whew, she stinks like she crapped in her pants,†he commented. “Where’d she come from?â€
I said I had no idea, and I wanted to get her out of here.
Well, he didn’t want to touch her either, and as she wasn’t going anywhere, we went into the lighted kitchen, where he used his cellular telephone to call the sheriff. It seemed to me he was asked a lot of questions from the other end; after all, no one likes to have to get out of bed in the middle of the night.
When the conversation was done, he shut off his telephone and looking at me said, “Okay, the sheriff’s on his way here now; it’d probably be a good idea for you to at least get some underwear on.â€
The sheriff came about fifteen, twenty, minutes later.
I stay out of the way of medical and law-enforcement personnel doing their job, and so retreated back to the kitchen to smoke a cigarette while the sheriff and the ranch-hand dealt with the intruder.
They finally awoke the beached whale and questioned her.
Both the sheriff and this ranch-hand are EMTs, and made some sort of professional evaluation of her condition, apparently evaluating that it was safe to take her to town without having to bother anybody else, and so they did that.
After they left, I dragged the reclining chair out to the front porch. It wasn’t soiled or anything, but given her odor, one had no idea what sorts of germs and vermin she might’ve left in it. It was just a five-dollar thrift-store chair anyway, and easily replaced with another one. The property caretaker and I broke it apart and burned it in the incinerator later.
Before that though, towards morning, the ranch-hand came back from town. He told me she was from Omaha, and had run out of gas up on the highway. Her cellular telephone didn’t work as she hadn’t recharged it, or paid the bill on it, or something. The car, a big sedan from back when Reagan was president, was cluttered with dirty clothes, fast food trash, and other junk. And some unprescribed chemicals.
She had been out of her mind with drugs, and confused, so she’d just headed towards the first house she could see from the highway. “She was so out of it by the time we’d gotten to town she’d forgotten she’d been here.†There were some warrants from Omaha (shoplifting, forged checks) on her, so she was Omaha’s problem now, not ours.
