Squirrel Eyes

by Scott S. Phillips

  "What if she's fat?" Taylor asked, mouth full. He chewed those pasta ringlets thoughtfully, eyes narrowing as if he had just found the flaw in the Boston Strangler's alibi. "You haven't laid eyes on her in fourteen years – what if she's big and fat? Or married? Or both?"

  "Come on, Kelli? I protested, certain that such a fate – at least the fat part – could not possibly have befallen that incredible example of the species female.

  Taylor set the can of Spaghetti-Os down on the counter, devoting all his attention to poking holes in my scheme. "How do you even know she still lives in Albuquerque?"

  I was starting to feel like he had already given this more thought than I had. "I'll call her parents," I said smugly.

  "And how do you know they still live here – or that they aren't dead?"

  "Hey, quit crunching my buzz," I demanded. "I'll track her down somehow."

  Holes poked, he retrieved his can of Spaghetti-Os and began eating again. "Okay," he muttered, a trickle of bright orange sauce running down his chin, "so assuming you manage to track her down, and assuming she isn't fat or married or a lesbian" — I started to argue, but he held up his fork, cutting me off — "exactly how is your life going to be changed forever because you finally fuck Kelli Jean Dayton?"

  That was the dicey part. Especially since I didn't quite understand the mechanics of it myself.

  "Because it was meant to happen and it didn't," I said, actually believing it as I heard the words leave my mouth. "It would have made me a different man, altered the course of my life."

  "You would've had to have been a different man to have done it in the first place," Taylor said, continuing his crushing assault. "You didn't have sex with her because that's who you were."

  "Look, I'll admit this made more sense when I was drunk, but you're missing my point." I struggled for a second to find that point amidst the clutter, coming up with ... well, not much, actually. "I would've had to have been a different man to have had sex with Farrah Fawcett or that chick from Battlestar Galactica or something. With Kelli, we're talking about an opportunity that was readily available to me and simply not taken advantage of, for whatever reason."

  Taylor shook his head wildly. "You didn't take advantage of it because you were a frightened little nerd-boy. What I'm saying is that you would've had to have already been on this new path you're trying to stumble onto – fourteen years – hell, twenty years – too late, I might add – for the sex to have happened in the first place."

  Did I mention that I used to be terribly jealous when we were kids because I had a chipmunk name and Taylor had a cool Planet of the Apes name? I think it's colored our entire friendship.

  "And you know," Taylor said, unstoppable now, "we haven't even begun to discuss how, just ... foul this whole idea is."

  In my defense, I must say that Taylor once told me he could fuck every woman in the world but one and still be mad because there was one he hadn't fucked.

  "I'm not talking about hanging around outside a high school waiting for unsuspecting teeny-boppers to wander by – this is a – what is she now? – a thirty-two-year-old woman who, at one time, found me desirable. I'm just going to ... rekindle that."

  Taylor shoveled the last of the Spaghetti-Os into his mouth. "That was a long time ago," he said, punctuating it with a clunk as he flung the empty can into the wastebasket. "I need more food."

  We wound up at the Frontier. The sprawling restaurant occupied half a city block across the street from the University of New Mexico and was a haven for people-watchers, college students, ne'er-do-wells, skaterkids, and of course, pretty girls. Paintings of cowboys and Indians (with a heavy emphasis on portraits of John Wayne) covered every wall, most of them spattered with ketchup and other condiments. We sat under the one made entirely of nails (possibly Wayne; I'd never been able to decide for sure), Taylor wolfing down a fat breakfast burrito while I ate the huevos rancheros. We both had sweet rolls, a must at the Frontier.

  I had spent the last fifteen minutes trying further to make my plan understood, to no avail, and I was beginning to wish I had just kept it to myself. Pointing out the nearest painting of the Duke, I jokingly reminded Taylor about the argument I'd had with his ex-wife's pal (I couldn't even remember the girl's name) in an attempt to steer the conversation in some other direction, but Taylor's tenacity was astonishing.

  "Listen, Alvin, I'm all for getting you laid – you need it more than anybody I can think of – but you're putting way too much faith in the power of this particular pussy."

  "You're right – I've changed my mind about the whole thing," I said.

  "You know what you oughta do," he plunged ahead obliviously. "You should look up that girl Augusta. Remember her? She was nuts, man – she wanted to buy you presents and shit."

  "Somehow you're just not getting it," I said. Swirling my tortilla through a puddle of egg yolk and green chili sauce, I searched desperately for a way to get my point across. "This isn't about scoring on some former flame for the sake of laying down some wool – this is about making the wrong things right."

  "We've been over this a million times," Taylor groused.

  "I feel your pain," I said.

  We ate in silence for a few minutes, both pissed off at the other's inability to grasp a simple concept. A group of "modern primitive" types (or whatever they call themselves) seated near us began comparing surgical implants – three of them actually had horns to go along with all the other metallic junk crammed through every available flap of skin. I once met a guy who told me he had so many piercings in his dick that it spouted like a lawn sprinkler when he took a leak, so he had to perform the function sitting down. Coolness aside, I prefer to stand, thanks.

  I could tell Taylor was building to something – his chewing was reaching prairie-dog speed. "You've been dumped plenty of times," he finally blurted, taking a new approach. "Why has it got you in such a twist this time around? It's not quite mid-life crisis time, is it?"

  "It's hard to explain," I said, not really wanting to explain it at all. "You never met Alison, so you don't know how it was between us."

  "Chicks, guys – I been there," Taylor shrugged, accidentally dislodging a bite of sweet roll from his fork. "It never lasts." He speared the loose tidbit of pastry and stuck it in his mouth. "You know how you deal with it? Think of shit she used to do that just drove you nuts. Get good and mad at her – then you'll be thanking Jesus that she's gone." He grinned in a way that made me want to punch him right in the face.

  "She never did anything that made me mad."

  "You're a lying sack," Taylor said, making an accusatory fork-thrust in my direction.

  "I'm telling you, being with Alison wasn't like any relationship I've ever had. She was ... absolutely cool. We never had a single argument – not a real argument – the whole time we were together."

  Taylor laughed. "So that was what, about a week?"

  "Two years," I said, suddenly realizing I'd gone from pissed-off to sad as hell.

  "Come on, there had to be something oppressive about her," he prodded.

  I shook my head. "She even liked to watch porno movies."

  Taylor looked as if he'd just seen a flying saucer land and the little green occupants had trundled over to him with a wheelbarrow full of candy bars. "That's pretty cool," he muttered.

  There was another period of silence while Taylor digested this information and shoveled the last of his sweet roll down his gullet. The last of the chewing done, he looked up at me, eyes narrow with doubt. "Don't you have any complaints about this girl?"

  "Yeah. She left me."

  He stared intently at me for a long moment, then released an earnest little sigh. Earnest and Taylor were two things I had never associated before and it was somewhat disturbing to have it happen right here in front of me.

  "If all this is true," he said, "Then you should be trying to get back together with her instead of devoting all your energy to fucking a girl you haven't seen since you were a kid
– and who might be fat."

  "Too late," I said, slightly uneasy about this heretofore-unseen tender side of Taylor. "She's traded up – some guy named Flacco or Chang-Shah or something." God damn it, what was that guy's name?

  "Well, you know my motto," he smiled. He was really giving me the creeps now. "It never lasts. You'll get your shot."

  I couldn't tell you where this stuff was coming from. In fact, I sort of suspected he was being nice simply to put an end to the discussion. I didn't bother to tell him I was planning to give up the filmmaking thing, even though that one was a hell of a lot easier to explain.

  8

  We left the Frontier after that. Taylor wanted to hit a couple record stores, but I wasn't much in the mood for shopping (and broke as I was, I figured it would just depress me even more), so I left him to it and went back to my mom's house.

  Mom was engaged in her favorite hobby – smoking cigarettes – and working on a quilt. I sat on the couch and watched Murder, She Wrote with her for awhile, though my attention was mostly on her quilting. Her fingers moved through each stitch with almost no variation in the range of motion, the routine differing only when she'd pause to take a drag off her smoke. One of those times, she noticed I was staring at her.

  "You got something you want to say?" she asked.

  "Not me."

  She stubbed her cigarette into the ashtray. "I sure wish you'd move back here." The crumpled butt continued to smolder, putting out a terrible stink.

  I pointed at the ashtray. "That's still burning."

  "You could have your old room back," she said, crushing the butt fiercely and snuffing it once and for all. "I'd hate to lose my sewing room, but I'd do it."

  I hadn't told her that I was giving up the filmmaking thing, either. "I'm thirty-four years old, Mom – somehow I doubt moving in with you would do much for my self-esteem."

  "Aaaa," she grumbled. "I like having you around."

  "I don't know," I said. "Do you have a gun I can borrow?"

  "Don't start that shit," she said, pulling another cigarette from the pack.

  I went out back then, partly to avoid starting that shit, but also because the concept of moving back in with my mom was something I really didn't need to think about and I could tell she was ready to give me the hard-sell.

  The yard hadn't changed too much over the years; Daniel had cut down the big cottonwood tree, fearing that it would fall on the house, and while Mom didn't do as much gardening as she used to, there was still a small plot filled with tomato plants and cucumbers and whatnot. The waterfall and pond were still there, but the pump hadn't worked in years; what water was left in the pond was stagnant and mossy.

  I wandered over to the garden and plucked a radish the size of a golf ball from the ground. Brushing the dirt off, I chomped into it. The thing burned like a snakebite – my eyes started watering like crazy and I huffed and puffed a bit before tossing the rest of the radish into the bushes. I turned the hose on and gulped water, spotting Mom's gardening implements – including her shovel – as I did so.

  Leaving the water running, I tossed the hose into the garden and picked up the shovel. It was the same damn shovel we'd had when I was a kid. Touching it was like that scene in The Dead Zone when Christopher Walken shakes hands with Martin Sheen and sees the apocalypse – only I was hammered with visions of Tonka trucks and miniature waterways and lunar vistas overrun with multi-colored Major Matt Mason dolls – and Kelli and Gina in their bikinis.

  I held the shovel up, sighting down the cracked and gouged wooden handle like a samurai examining his sword. The shovelhead itself was rusty in places, dented and scraped.

  I turned to look at Gina's house. Of course, it wasn't Gina's house anymore – hadn't been since I was about eighteen. I had no idea who lived there now. I walked to the wall and stared into the yard. The swimming pool had been removed, but the hole remained – sort of a sunken area of the yard, grassed-over, flowers and other plants encircling the perimeter. There was a bench at the bottom of the hole with a small shade tree nearby.

  Gina and her family moved away shortly after Gina had made a suspicious and prolonged "visit to her grandmother." She was sixteen, I guess, and a boy – some meatneck-type – had been spending a lot of time over there, especially when her parents were out. One day the boy stopped coming over. A couple months later, Gina went off for that quality time with grandma. It was pretty obvious what had happened – for one thing, I've never seen anybody as embarrassed and unwilling to talk about their vacation as Gina was.

  It was right around that time that I started dating Kelli.

  I picked out a spot near the old apple tree and gave the shovel a good stomp, driving it into the soil. Turning that shovelful aside, I dug in for more, every mound of earth bringing another surge of memories. I'd cleared a hole about eighteen inches across and maybe a foot deep when Mom hollered at me.

  "What are you doing?" She was standing at the edge of the patio, cigarette between her fingers.

  It was a question I think I'd heard a million times while engaged in this same activity; the answer always seemed obvious to me. I stopped digging, wiped my hands on my pants and thought about it for a second.

  "Just ... looking for something."

  "Well, don't dig up my whole damn yard," she said, flicking her cigarette into the grass. "And don't forget to turn the hose off when you come inside."

  She disappeared into the house, leaving me to ride out yet another flashback moment. They were the exact same words she used when I was a kid, I swear to Christ.

  I went back to my digging, hauling out another six inches of dirt. Then the shovel hit something hard – not a rock, but some sort of solid object. I got to my knees and cleared the loose dirt away, revealing a tiny arm jutting from the ground. I recognized the hand; the index finger pointing at me accusingly, the others bent.

  It was GI Joe.

  Excited, I ran to the gardening tools and scrounged up a trowel, then hurried back to my excavation. I began carefully digging around the buried soldier.

  He'd been badly mutilated – both legs and one arm severed, but I was able to identify the remains. It was Real Hair Joe, the one with the flocked hair and beard. I had given him a shave at some point; the razor blade had gouged furrows into his plastic cheeks.

  While I knew this Joe, I couldn't recall how America's Movable Fighting Man might've suffered this terrible fate. Daniel was always screwing around with my stuff when we were kids – he could've been behind it. He always had expensive toys, things like radio-controlled airplanes and ham radios, stuff I wasn't allowed to play with. I think he liked my toys only because he didn't feel bad about breaking them.

  I thought about Daniel, and his auto parts, and how successful he was. The auto parts store was a wild hair he got up his ass because he didn't know what the hell else to do with himself. I've always known what I wanted to do with my life, ever since I saw Night of the Living Dead, anyway. I often wondered if it isn't easier to be one of those people, like Daniel, who don't have the slightest idea; kind of flounder around for awhile after high school, maybe attend college long enough to realize they don't want to go to college anymore, then stumble into something that becomes their life.

  Then it struck me: maybe I'd been doing that very thing without even being aware of it, and I didn't have a fucking clue what was going to become my life. Or worse yet, that this was it.

  GI Joe and I sat by that hole for a very long time. I remembered to turn the hose off before I went inside.

  9

  That night, I tried looking Kelli up in the phone book. The first listing I went to was the one that used to read E.L. Dayton, and the address. I spent a lot of time staring at that listing when I was sixteen, running my fingers over the ink and imagining the lust-filled missives I'd send to Kelli now that I knew where she lived. Finally acting on those fantasies, I sent one letter to her – more of a note, actually: it was written on a piece of paper about the size of a gu
m wrapper. In it, I suggested (in a roundabout manner, mind you) that I'd be more than happy to lick Kelli's feet — the most polite, vaguely sexual act I could muster the nerve to offer. I spent hours tossing in bed the night I mailed it, wishing to God that I could somehow retrieve the letter before it went out, scheming as to how I might lay in wait for the mailman outside Kelli's house and snatch the letter as soon as it was deposited in the mailbox. I sweated it out for three days – frantic as a murderer who knows the law is about to swoop down – before Kelli, adrift on an inflatable raft in Gina's swimming pool, told me she got my letter and would be happy to take me up on the offer. And I did make good on that one, thank you very much (of course, it didn't happen until we'd started dating).

  The listing now read: Mrs. E. Dayton.

  Hoo boy. So Kelli's dad was dead. Or at least I took the listing to mean that – it doesn't seem, if they had gotten divorced or something, that it would be worded that way – "Mrs." – does it?

  The next listing that rung a bell was Kendra Dayton – no address, just a phone number. Kelli had a little sister named Kendra, and since the only other person I could think of named "Kendra" was a porn star, I assumed this must be the sister in question. There was no listing for her older sister Donna (whom I used to torment by calling "Donna the Dead") or for Kelli herself. Great, I thought, she must be married. Or she had moved away. Or maybe she and her dad had been killed in a boating accident or a plane crash or had simply beaten each other to death during one of their frequent and heated arguments.

  I decided the best approach would be to call Kendra – she always kind of liked me, for some reason, and it seemed less terrifying than talking to Kelli's mother. However, I also decided there was no way I had the guts to make that call tonight, so I watched some more TV with Mom (which might seem like a poor substitute for making the phone call that could potentially alter the course of one's life, but these things just don't happen all at once). This time it was one of my favorites, Emergency! Firefighters Gage and DeSoto were called to the aid of a guy who had eaten two loaves of unbaked cinnamon-bread dough that his mom was making for his birthday, causing his stomach to swell up as if he had swallowed an antelope.