Craig Roads
Dale
I was out on a back country road near the state line flying through the dark cornfields from tavern to tavern on hell’s own errand. I didn’t even see the raccoon before I hit it. I just heard this ka-thunk and felt a little bump. I stopped and backed up to take a look, to make sure I hadn’t just run over somebody’s Checkers or Rollo or Bandit or anything I might have to apologize for. There it was laying in the road, just a lump of fur with blood trickling from its head.
I dropped the car into gear and took off. What I really wanted at the time was more beer, and maybe to find some woman, but then I just couldn’t get that raccoon off my mind. I pictured a little masked face, wondering if maybe it was a mama, and had little ones waiting in vain for her to bring back some dinner, or maybe it was a boar: one of those ornery ones that will take a dog’s eye out in a fight.
A few miles after I got off the gravel road and onto the blacktop there was this little place, Doug’s Tap. Doug’s was crowded like it gets on the weekend, and there was a pretty decent band playing. There were a few folks from town I recognized and a bunch I didn’t, so I got a seat at the bar ordered a beer and determined to do some serious drinking. I swiveled around on my barstool, checking out the action on the dance floor. The band heavy into a Bob Seeger tune. An older couple who appeared to be unreconstructed hippies dancing to some tune other than what the band was playing. Mostly women dancing together, but a few girls had coaxed their dates into some awkward motion; dancing isn’t considered a social skill for men in these parts, with the exception of a belly-to-belly slow dance where you can grab a handful of ass. Over in the corner, a bunch of farm boys whooping it up on the foosball machine.
I had myself another beer and sipped slowly, thinking about raccoons. The masked eyes. The thick fur, and striped tail. And those little paws. Paws that were almost as good as fingers and they were smart enough to put those little hands to work at any opportunity.
Once when I went camping with my brother Vincent; we were up in Wisconsin, fishing in some state park. We had set our cooler outside the tent with our breakfast bacon, eggs, and beer. The cooler was latched, so we figured we were good. About 3 a.m. our eyes jerked open to a whole herd of raccoons outside. They were making these raccoon sounds, like they do. We unzipped the tent enough to see they had opened the latch and turned over the cooler and were having a big raccoon fiesta out there. The ice melted; we drank warm beer that weekend.
I was deep into my raccoon reverie when I got shouldered out of it by a girl trying to squeeze by to the bar. “S’cuse me. Then she double-taked at me and she goes “Dale? Is that you? How the hell are you?”
“Carla,” I said. Carla Something-meister. Kugel- Kuchen-. Something. Graduated high school two years behind me. She had put on some poundage, but she still looked good. “How you doing?”
She frowned, “Sorry to hear about the divorce. That must have been tough. After getting laid off and all, too.” She touched my wrist in gentle sympathy. I could tell by her eyes she was pretty drunk.
“I’m trying to keep a positive attitude, move past that stuff,” I said. “Been living out at my cousin’s place. He’s got an old mobile home sitting on his dairy acreage and lets me stay out there. Got it fixed up okay. I do some mechanic and carpenter work for him. Once in a while help out with milking.”
“Wow,” she said noncommittally. And then, “Buy me a drink?”
We took our beers over into a booth. The backs of her legs squeaked on the naughahyde.
“Tell me more about you. Dale. Haven’t seen much of you since high school.” Carla leaned forward, showing off some admirable cleavage in that tank top. “What you been up to lately?” She tipped her bottle up.
I just kind of looked over her shoulder and spaced out. My mind was still on raccoons. Thinking about cute little cartoon character raccoons.
We had a few more beers while Carla talked about her own self, and how she had went to the LaMolo School of Beauty Culture after high school, and was almost kind of engaged to this guy Bud but it turned out she didn’t really like being a hairdresser that much, at the salon she worked at it was all a bunch of old ladies coming for a rinse and set all the time and she dumped Bud because it turned out she didn’t like Bud all that much either and now she was between boyfriends and was thinking about going to community college and studying to be a paralegal. She figured paralegal paid better and she could move out of her dumpy apartment and maybe get a new car, too. All the while little cartoon raccoons danced around in my head, like some Bambi movie or something.
Then Carla leaned in close, rested her breasts on the table and searched into my eyes as if there might be something hiding in there. She smiled a shy smile and says, “You know I kind of had a crush on you back in high school.”
I didn’t say nothing.
“Hey, Earth to Dale.” Vexed, she waved her hand in front of my face. “I’m talking to you. Can you say something?”
“I pretty much told you all there is to tell. I’m living in the country. Working on a farm.”
Carla squinted, “So nothing just the teensy-weensiest interesting thing in your life?” She pinched her finger and thumb.
And meanwhile my mind is racing with “cartoon-raccoon”, “cartoon-raccoon” “cartoon-raccoon-harpoon”, “harpoon-cartoon-raccoon-pontoon”, playing with the words like that.
We get another beer and Carla starts going on about how she came here with her friend Shawna only it looked like Shawna had found herself somebody to go home with. She looked over her shoulder at the bar and there was Shawna hanging off a guy named Duane that I kind of knew, looking like their bodies just might ooze together. You couldn’t have stuck a piece of paper between them.
Carla traced a water drop down the neck of her bottle and looks at me and says so if Shawna hooks up with this guy she might need a ride back home.
By then I guess I was feeling kind of drunk-sad about that raccoon and how I had snuffed out its little life and how life is like that, you’re living your life and then wham – and you never know when your ticket is going to get punched. And Carla saw the glum look come over my face. Finally she puffs out her cheeks and stands up in a huff, big blobby tears at the corners of her eyes and says, “To hell with you Dale. I can see my charms is wasted on a stuck-up son-of-a-bitch like you.” And she weaved her way unsteadily through the couples across the dance floor, jostling into a few of them.
I finished my beer and left. I drove up to another little place up across the Wisconsin state line and had a couple more beers, sitting at the bar thinking about those striped raccoon tails that people used to hang on the radio aerials of their cars and Davy Crockett hats and raccoon coats in the Twenties and such. I left just before closing time because I had to get up early and do some welding on my cousin’s manure spreader the next morning: cracked frame.
It had been a long night and I took it easy going home, watching for cops, listening to the radio to try and keep my mind off this whole sorry episode. I pulled up in the field to where my mobile home sits, along with a bunch of ancient rusted-out farm implements and there I saw it: one of those little buggers sitting up on the steps, fooling with the door latch, staring at me, daring me, beady little eyes glowing in my headlights.
Craig Roads was an aspiring songwriter in Nashville before "getting a real job" as an ad agency copywriter and Creative Director. He is married and lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.
