The Bullpen Gospels - Dirk Hayhurst [9]
“Why?” I asked, pulling the pillow from my face. “Are there terrorists in your bird feeders?”
“I’m going to shoot ’em! Give me that gun,” she said, referencing my pellet gun. I’d shoot up soda cans with it every now and then to blow off steam. Sometimes pretending the cans were her face. She’d taken it before, while I was sleeping, and tried to shoot the squirrels but ended up shooting up the whole neighborhood because her hands shook so badly. My parents had to confiscate the old shotgun she brandished for the same reason.
“I’m not giving you that gun. The squirrels aren’t hurting anyone.”
“They’re plotting something. I know it.”
I stared at her blankly. “You’ve lost your mind.”
“Oh, you are good for nothing! You get out of that bed and get those things out of my feeders if you’re not going to give me that gun.”
“No. It’s six thirty in the morning! Let them finish breakfast and they’ll leave.” I rolled over, but she remained standing there, burning holes in my back. I couldn’t sleep with her hexing me, so I rolled back to face her. “I know. Why don’t you throw one of the seventy chocolate cakes you bought on sale out there? Try and make friends.”
“I bought those cakes for you!” she wailed.
“The squirrels can have my share as a peace offering.”
She shook her head at me in a disdainful manner. “The way you talk to me,” she seethed, “after all I do for you.”
And boy, does she do a lot for me.
My laundry, for example. She still uses a wringer washer, a testament to the time period she’s stuck in, in which she threshes my clothes. The wringer sits in the basement like some beast lurking in the dark, waiting for her to feed it my wardrobe with a tall, cool jar of lye soap to wash it down. To date, that machine has mangled melted, or consumed enough fabric to cover a third-world country.
She cooks for me too, mainly because I am forbidden to use the kitchen. She’s appointed herself my personal chef, which is more akin to kitchen dictator. She oppresses me with bacon-grease-injected marathon meals chanting, “You’re a growing boy, calories aren’t going to hurt you!” The grease I don’t consume is repurposed into the soap used in her first charitable act.
Some days I don’t eat. I can’t risk getting her started. She pumps out food like a munitions factory during the war effort—high-calorie rounds of biscuits and gravy aimed directly at my heart. She’ll hold me hostage until it’s all finished, but it’s never finished. At any given time, you can find six gallons of milk, fourteen boxes of cereal, and about one hundred pounds of canned fruit spread throughout the house’s three refrigerators and eight pantries. There’s enough freezer-burned meat to reconstruct a mastodon.
She shops on my behalf because she says she’s such a great bargain hunter. She nabs great deals, and by “nabs” I mean she takes everything on the shelf in one swoop. She’ll come home with a trunkful: eight chocolate cakes, seventeen loaves of bread, and six gallons of orange juice, all “marked down for a limited time.” You could sit her down and explain it all to her, that we beat the commies and the local supermarket won’t be destroyed by a nuclear attack, but it makes no difference—she won’t stop. When turkeys go on sale, it’ll be Thanksgiving at her house for the next nine days. It’ll be for me anyway, and as long as I keep eating it, she’ll keep buying. I’d gladly invite you over to help me get it all down, but she hates you.
She hates pretty much everyone I know and is never shy about telling why. She hates all the presidents, all her doctors, the family, the guy packing groceries at the Food 4 Less, my girlfriends. None of them can do anything right. She hates the neighbors enough to aim that shotgun I told you about out the window when they set foot on her property. She’s developed colorful nicknames for the folks on the block, like the endearing bunch across the lawn she commonly refers to as “that no-good pack of lying, hillbilly Satanists!”
The Satanic hillbillies, who own three large, friendly dogs, used to mow my grandma’s yard for free until