Anywhere But Here

by Jenny Gardiner

  I stare at Smoothie, aghast.

  Oh no oh no oh no oh no oh no oh no oh no

  I can’t have a man yelling at me without my fingers starting on their own volition.

  “Psyche!” He chucks me on the shoulder but it still takes me a minute to realize he’s on my side here and was just making light of the situation. I shake out my hands to relieve my fingers of their undue burden.

  “That wasn’t very nice!” I think my face betrays my emotions, my lower lip jutting out in a pout.

  “Oh, babe, I’m real sorry!” Smoothie reaches out and brushes my hair out of my eyes. “You’re right. That was shitty of me. I was just horsing around. I wasn’t thinking how that would scare you. Forgiven?”

  I nod my head. “As long as you forgive me for being such a jerk earlier.”

  “Didn’t think another minute of it. Friends?” He reaches out and shakes my hand.

  “Friends.” I nod in agreement. “What are we gonna do about the tire? I’ve never done anything like this before.”

  “No worries, Mary Kate,” Smoothie says. “My daddy’s brother was a mechanic. I spent plenty of time in his shop when I was a kid. I’m quite the professional with tire changing. The key is we want to be sure the rim’s not damaged.”

  “Are you as good at cars as you are at hair renovations?”

  “Even better.”

  We get out and scrounge around in the trunk. The good news is we’ve got an actual tire in there. Not even a temporary one, but the real McCoy. And the rim is intact. The bad news? No jack.

  We decide to try our neighbor up the road, and wander the quarter mile to the house. As we approach it looks a bit imposing: There’s a large round stained-glass window in the gable atop the house; the center of the design features a pentagram. A bit spooky for my tastes.

  “The place looks possessed. Do we have to go in there?”

  “‘Fraid so, if you want to avoid sleeping in the state trooper-mobile tonight.”

  Oddly there’s not a front door, and so we walk toward the back. There’s a screened-in porch and below it are about ten clear trash bags filled with empty beer cans. Okay. The occupant of this household is awfully thirsty. Either that or not one to carry the trash to the curb on a regular basis. Like for years.

  We round the corner of the house and come upon steps leading up to the porch. I go first, creaking up them as quietly as I can, hesitant to encounter this beer-guzzling devil-worshipper who must reside within, when I hear a gruff voice shout out.

  “Who’s there?”

  I gasp. I don’t know why. As if it’s some troll under the bridge to the enchanted forest about to try to capture us and drop us in tonight’s stew.

  My fingers on the railing begin spelling Damian 666 Damian 666 Damian 666 Damian 666.

  Luckily Smoothie explains our situation in as succinct a manner as possible (my tongue is apparently tied and I’m incapable of choking out much more than “Yeah.”)

  It’s silent for a moment as we linger on a lower step to the porch, then I hear a screech-screech-screech and look up to see a grizzle-faced old, legless man in a rusted wheelchair, a rifle draped across his lap, a parrot perched on each shoulder, staring down at us with a menacing look in his eyes.

  “Well why the hell didn’t you say so in the first place?” He asks as his face lightens. Thank God. “Come on up. You’re just in time—I’ve got a casserole in the oven and pies cooling in the window.”

  Smoothie and I stare at each other.

  “Is this a trap?” I whisper to him. What if he’s got a coven of Satan-worshippers inside waiting to sacrifice us?”

  “For the Fourth of July?” Smoothie grins. “I wouldn’t think this is high season for sacrificial slaughter. Isn’t that usually around Halloween?”

  “Oh shut up!” I whisper back as I push him ahead of me. If he’s so darned confident of our safety, I’ll put him front and center.

  On the porch there must be another seventy-five tallboy empties on all available surfaces. In addition there are three other parrots, and five monkeys of varying sizes.

  The man reaches out his hand to Smoothie, who looks wary of the two sizable parrots perched atop his shoulders. I think they are macaws, one as red as a beating heart (which reminds me of the human sacrifice I am currently fearing) and the other as blue as an Oklahoma sky. As beautiful as they are, their dramatic plumage trailing down the back of the wheelchair as if they’re deliberate ornamentation, they also possess beaks that look like weapons.

  The man clearly is used to this reaction. “They’re pussycats, really,” he says. “Meow.”

  Oh, God. I’m sure it’s a trap. Who would say that?

  But Smoothie trusts him and reaches for the man’s hand.

  “Arnold McGreevy,” he says with a squeeze. “And this,” he points to the red parrot, “is Rioja, and the other one is Azul. Give ‘em a shake.”

  Not me, thank you. Smoothie is a brave one, though. He doesn’t hesitate to reach his hand out to the parrots, one at a time, and each bird gingerly clasps his finger in its beak, as delicately as if they were holding a fragile egg.

  Smoothie points to me after introducing himself. “Meet my, uh, dear friend Mary Kate. Mary Kate, shake the birds’ beaks.”

  Oh, I’ll get him for that. My smile is watered down with anxiety as I shake Arnold’s hand and then sacrifice my least favorite of my pointer fingers to the birds, hoping I’ll get it back eventually. But as with Smoothie, they treat me with respect and my digits remain intact.

  “You’ve got tire troubles?”

  Smoothie explains our situation as Arnold wheels across the deck and into the kitchen. “Come along.” He waves us in.

  The inside of the house is spartan but immaculate. Despite Arnold’s outward appearance—disheveled visage (including two missing teeth), somewhat unkempt clothing, there is no sign of trash piling up or parrot poo or monkey droppings, nothing. Man must have a hell of a housekeeper.

  “It smells heavenly in here,” I say.

  “You’ve heard of tuna casserole?” he asks.

  I nod, feigning enthusiasm. Tuna casserole ranks up there with calves liver in my dining repertoire.

  “Well, that’s not what this is,” he ribs me in the side in a “gotcha” sort of way. “This is more like a lobster casserole, with risotto cakes. Made it with my own stock. Secret ingredient is saffron. Here, taste.”

  Oh, God. Here it is. They poison you first and then they kill you. I just know it. But how do I reject his neighborly gesture without insulting him?

  Meanwhile, Arnold rolls over to the drawer, where the parrots pull out utensils for three at his command. Impressive. Who’d have thought? But then again, how clean are their mouths? Are they like cats’ mouths, which are supposedly so clean you could eat off of them? Well, I guess you couldn’t really eat off of them exactly. Not without having your eyes scratched out.

  Great, now I have even more things to worry about—contracting exotic parrot saliva-borne diseases and being murdered by a convivial devil-worshipping, legless, beer-swiller.

  Arnold hands me a fork, tells me to dig in. Smoothie—saint that he’s becoming in my eyes—grabs my fork and helps himself before I get a chance to embarrass myself and behave ungraciously. Being a genteel woman of Southern persuasion, it’s awfully hard to be a rude guest. But under the circumstances, I’m not sure what protocol is in order.

  I watch as he rolls his eyes back and I think he’s going to drop dead, but instead he moans in delight. I’m bracing to administer CPR, even though I don’t know how to do it beyond what I’ve seen on television.

  “Oh, baby, try this.” He scoops a big serving onto a second fork and hands it to me. I close my eyes and think of England as I ingest the lobster casserole, or whatever it’s called.


  “Oh, wow,” I moan. “Oh, wow.”

  “See, I told you you’d love it,” Arnold says. “Let’s make this more formal. Pull up a chair and have a seat. I’ll get the rest of the dishes.”

  With that he claps his hands, and the monkeys get to work. They collect plates off of a shelf, grab water and wine glasses, and place them at evenly-spaced intervals at the dinner table. Now I am used to a high degree of cleanliness expected of me by Richard, and so part of me shudders to know that animals are setting the dinner table, but the amazing fact that animals are setting the dinner table is enough for me to overlook this potential lapse in sanitation.

  I can’t help myself and I start to clap. Smoothie cracks up at me. “You gonna tell us how you did that?”

  “Oh, Laverne and Shirley, those girls have been with me for a long time. They taught themselves that trick. And the boys, David, Lee and Roth, well, they’re prone to horsing around more than anything else, but they like to make a good impression on company.”

  Arnold pulls out snowflake rolls from the oven then uncorks a bottle of Spanish tempranillo. “Haven’t figured out how to get the monkeys to pour for me yet without spilling,” he says, adding with a wink, “Or drinking it.” He lights two red, white and blue pillar candles, and pulls up to the table himself.

  “Welcome to our table,” he says, his hand outstretched to his menagerie, which has gathered around, including the additional parrots who have swooped in from the other room like low-flying bombers in a World War II movie. It’s a veritable zoo in here!

  “If you don’t mind my asking, how do you maintain this place with so many animals? I couldn’t keep my house clean with one animal.” I don’t mention that the animal in question was actually a beast of the human variety.

  “Well, I guess the answer to that question begins with this,” he says, pointing to his legs. Rather where his legs should be.

  “You don’t have to explain that if you don’t want to,” I say. Of course I’m nosey enough that I really do want to know.

  “No, no, it’s fine. I’m used to it. Happened long ago. I was just a stupid punk. I’d dropped out of high school. Gotten a job cooking at a diner. I actually found out I liked cooking. I’d gotten to know my regular customers, they called me Baby Huey because I was so young and didn’t look like I belonged behind a hot skillet burning myself all day long. Well, I worked there for almost two years, while I worked things out that were troubling me. And I was getting my head together. I’d decided I was going to apply to culinary school. But before I had a chance, I got my letter.”

  “Draft notice?” Smoothie asks, pursing his lips.

  Arnold nods. “My number came up. Off to Hanoi for a three-year tour of duty.”

  “See a lot of action?”

  Arnold chuckles. “You don’t want to know the kind of action I saw.”

  “That bad?”

  “Bad? Depends on your views. Back in ‘Nam, hell, ‘anything goes’ was the rule. And it was all good, when you consider it was wartime. I saw plenty of action, but it was all in Hanoi. I never went out into the jungles, on maneuvers, any of that stuff. But there I was in a city overrun with prostitutes, drugs, any sort of diversion you could wish for.”

  My eyes are so wide I’m afraid they might not shut if I try. Smoothie puts his finger to his lip discreetly, hoping that I won’t beg Arnold to stop the story for discretionary reasons.

  “In Hanoi life was fine. I cooked for the officers. Back in the kitchen, we got high, had a lot of sex with a lot of women and drank all the good liquor intended for the officers’ club. But then came the accident.”

  “So it wasn’t a bomb?”

  Arnold bursts out into a belly-laugh that the birds and monkeys proceed to mimic. It’s like he’s got a built-in audience for his jokes. A laugh-track all his own.

  “Nothing so glamorous. I was run over by a military jeep crossing a busy road during rush hour shortly after I’d dropped a tab of bad acid. I’d have bled to death if they didn’t lop ’em off.” He makes a chopping motion below his lap. It curdles my stomach for a moment to think of it.

  “I woke up in a military hospital next to guys who had had things blown off. I could tell right off the bat that my pain wasn’t nearly as horrific as theirs was. They had burns, ear drums blown out, vision exploded away in a flash. Shell-shock from the violence they’d witnessed. I’d been a partying loser, I almost deserved what I got. So while the natural reaction to losing your legs is to take pity on yourself, I took it as a sign that I needed to straighten up my act.”

  He takes a sip of his wine, which is in stark contrast to my imagining him sloshing through case upon case of cheap beer, judging by the can collection he’s amassed. Of course I don’t dare ask him about that.

  “Obviously my life as I knew it came to a screeching halt. After a long time in the hospital and then in rehab, I got sent home,” Arnold continues. “Learned how to deal with my new reality. My sister and her husband took me in for a long while. They kept macaws, and that’s how I first fell in love with the birds. I eventually moved out on my own. It got lonely all on my own, though. So finally I started collecting my menagerie. I kept a monkey back in Hanoi, and I had a hankering to find one for me here. Next thing I knew, I was taking in wayward monkeys from all over the tri-state area. But, as you can imagine, there is a good bit of cleaning to be done with this gang. I needed to teach them to be self-sufficient. Potty-trained every last one of them.”

  “No way!” I blurt out.

  “Sure did. You wanna see?”

  Even though we’re in the middle of eating dinner, he backs out from the table, gets the birds to mount his shoulders and wheels down the hall to a large bathroom. Smoothie and I follow obligingly.

  “Time to go potty, girls,” he says. The birds climb down his arms onto the sink, then walk that pigeon-toed bird walk across the counter single-file, and one at a time settle onto a wooden rod that Arnold has attached on a hinge to the nearby wall, so it can project out, suspended over the toilet.

  Smoothie whistles out loud. “Mighty clever piece of engineering there.”

  “My own invention,” Arnold says with a wink.

  Sure enough, the red bird perches, does her business, climbs back off, and the blue one takes a turn.

  “I am so impressed!” I tell him. “This was all your own idea?”

  He goes on to explain that the monkeys don’t need a perch and instead just hover over the seat, but for all of the animals it took a bit of training. I plug that into my memory, though, in case I need to use the bathroom here: remember to line seat with toilet tissue. After all, you never know what kind of simian diseases one could catch off of a toilet seat.

  We return to the table and finish up our dinner, then eat double helpings of blueberry pie with fat scoops of ice cream on top. Arnold takes us into the living room, which is set up like an enormous workshop. There’s a table stacked high with yet more cans of beer. Then a circular saw, large blocks of what looks like wax, two of those portable chef-type propane stove tops, and an assortment of what appear to be tools of some sort.

  The next table over holds the key to the mystery. About forty empties, their lids decapitated, and the cans filled with wax that froths on the top like a head of beer. With a wick in the middle of it.

  “They’re candles,” he says, explaining the obvious.

  “For?”

  “It’s what you might call a cottage industry.”

  “Beer candles?”

  “Well, I had to do something to earn a living. You ever try to be a line cook in a wheelchair? I told you, I had to reinvent my life. I had a little lady friend who made these candles with coke bottles. She’d cut the top off, pour the paraffin into the bottle, froth it up and put fake cherries and straws in them so they looked like ice cream sodas. I decided to
make it more efficient by eliminating the bottles. We could cut a hundred times the number of cans as bottles. Plus they’re cheaper. Economies of scale.”

  “Who buys them?” Not to be rude, but what is the market for a beer candle, you know what I mean?

  “We sell them mostly to the big carnivals, amusement parks, that sort of thing. Make enough to keep these folks in bird and monkey pellet.”

  I guess it just goes to show you, things aren’t always quite as they seem. My demented Satan worshipper is nothing like that at all.

  We notice the sun has sunk low in the sky, and Smoothie reminds me that we’ve got to fix our tire before dark. Arnold directs us to a shed out back where we find the needed jack, and we stroll the distance back down the road to the car.

  When we return with the jack, Arnold is in the other part of the living room with his little beasties. He’s got several trees of some sort set up in one area of the room, and the monkeys swing from a few of the trees while the birds perch high upon the branches. All he needs is an automatic mister and a couple of pythons and I’ll feel as if I’m in a tropical rain forest. Arnold insists we spend the night, and sets us up on two couches in the living room, amidst the beer candles and jungle accoutrements.

  He closes up the birds and monkeys in several large cages in a nearby bedroom and covers their cages with sheets, then retreats to his own bedroom.

  Beneath their sheets, the birds continue to talk in broken sentences.

  “Shut your piehole, ya pipsqueak!” Says one.

  “Get the fuck outta here!” says another.

  A third one is humming the refrain from “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” I can’t help but giggle. Here and there a monkey screeches, but eventually they all seem to quiet down for the night.

  Finally tucked beneath my scratchy wool blanket, I half wish all these candles in here were lit. Sure, it might feel too much like a séance, but it could be sort of cozy to drift off to sleep by the flickering of hundreds of candle lights.

  As I lay there, staring out at the bright full moon just beyond the pentagram stained-glass window, Smoothie whispers to me. “You still awake?”