It Looked Different on the Model - Laurie Notaro [50]
That made him sit up.
“So who do you want me to call?” I asked again. “Your caseworker, parole officer, or the police?”
“I’m getting up,” he said, and he shot me a dirty look with his tiny pinhole pupil eyes as he wobbled to his feet. “I’ll find another place.”
“Not on this block you won’t,” I said with a shake of my head. “Two streets down there are trashy people who have had a couch on their curb for three months now. It’s the People’s Couch. Go sleep there.”
“You should chill out, Grass Lady,” he said, as walked down the street with the legs of a newborn calf.
“Oh yeah?” I said, leveling the field, and then quickly added, as if my mother was whispering in my ear through an earbud, “I can call the police if you don’t feel okay! ’Cause you don’t look okay! Mister!”
“I’m okay!” he yelled back, and gave me a very discourteous wave of the hand.
“I know you’re on drugs!” I yelled. “I can tell! Normal people don’t collapse in strange yards and fall asleep! You should try doing that in the woods in Germany in a witch’s front yard and see what happens to you! You’re lucky you didn’t wake up in a cauldron! Because I have one!”
Then I realized that it is never a good idea to piss off a drug addict whose rationalization skills aren’t as sharp as they could be, even though I seriously doubted Hansel could find his way back to my house with a handheld GPS he had just stolen from someone’s car. And my cauldron isn’t really that big, by the way, only big enough to dump a two-pound bag of Hershey’s Miniatures in it and leave it on the front porch for some Type 2 teen dressed as a Dungeon and a Dragon to pillage on Halloween.
So even though I’d successfully chased the carcass out of my yard months before, his bony crystal-meth face was the first one I thought of when I ran down the list of possible suspects who might have nabbed my trees. Actually, it wasn’t a list; there was just one entry, called “Hansel.” But when I really thought about things, I ruled him out: You can’t sell trees at a pawnshop, and his muscle-atrophied arms of string cheese probably would have pulled right out of their sockets like a boiled chicken’s had he tried to use them for anything except putting a test tube up to his lips and flicking a lighter.
I, however, was still struck by the insidiousness of the treenapping and was examining the crime scene when I heard someone walk up behind me.
“That is just terrible,” I heard my neighbor Gloria’s voice say as I turned around. “And they were in full bloom. Terrible time to uproot a tree.”
“I can’t believe anyone would steal trees,” I said, dumbfounded.
“There was a rash of plant robberies last year on the next street,” she informed me. “We thought the worst was over. This is clearly bringing it all back.”
I was puzzled. “I never heard anything about that,” I said, surprised. “When was the last theft?”
“In the fall,” Gloria told me, and I nodded.
“No one wants a tree that’s going bald,” I surmised. “But who doesn’t want a tree with a healthy headful of purple hair? I think the plant bandit has rebloomed.”
“Did you follow the trail?” Gloria asked, motioning toward the sidewalk.
“There’s a trail?” I said, getting immediately excited, to which Gloria pointed.
“Right there on the sidewalk. It’s not much, but it is dirt, and it leads right up the hill,” she confirmed.
And sure enough, there was a line of soil—admittedly not a direct line, but a clump here, a splash there, definitely soil that had fallen from something being hauled up the street, which amazed me. The perpetrator was so brazen that there wasn’t even a getaway car or an escape wheelbarrow. The whole exit strategy involved pretty much nothing but one asshole dragging two trees by the neck up a hill. And I guess that in a place like Eugene, where I routinely have to wait for a person lumbering on stilts or carrying a ferret in a BabyBjörn to cross the street before I can make a left or right turn, not much fills the definition