Sightings (4 page)

Ronald began shouting to me upon my return, though I could hardly hear him over the wind chimes.

“Jer! What the shit man! What the shit?”

I didn't say anything, just stared at the dog fur stuck to my palm and thought about saving lives.

After another few minutes of peering into the night we watched the neighborhood teepee teeter and crash to the ground, its long poles clattering like a pile of pickup sticks, the canvas deflating.

It was the closest thing to a premonition I ever experienced, and less than a week later, long after the storm subsided, the Indians were gone. Their father had gotten transferred to Indianapolis, and while the rest of us were out trying on school clothes and stocking up on boxes of Kleenex, their tribe worked in reverse – reforming their assembly line and passing boxes from littlest Indian brave to the biggest.

I watched from the safety of the garage, their brown arms tightening beneath the weight, their eyes sullen and twice as tired as ours. Occasionally, I'd catch Pony turning around as if expecting someone, but she never came. Not a single squeak of the brakes. Then, a sharp whistle, and the father locked the front door while the mother ushered the rest of her tribe into the truck.

An engine started. A gearshift thrown into reverse.

Pony peered out the truck window to see my hand raised high, my fingers tight.

It wasn't goodbye – not exactly. It wasn't an apology, either.

My sister Sandy always says, “Roger, you've got a mind like a sieve. You've got to make lists.”

I've got to make lists.

Today I will tell you about:

1.  Felicity Blanket

2.  My father's Hitler painting

3.  A raccoon

I think this is a good, strong list.

To begin, you may be interested to hear that a pretty sad thing happened two weeks back, though I suppose it's still happening.

Her name is/was Felicity Blanket (which is the first item on my list), and she lived three houses down from Sandy and me.

I won't try to tell you that we were best friends because we weren't. Not really. She is/was six years old, so we didn't really run in the same circles, though I worked the bowling alley during her last birthday party, and I even put the bumpers in her lane. I guess you could call us mutual acquaintances.

I remember that day like it was tomorrow. I can still picture my freckled-red-haired-glasses-wearing acquaintance quite clearly, her arms and legs flung to the air, pins crashing behind her like sports cars on a bumper car track.

When she disappeared, people figured she probably just fell down a well like lost girls always do. Like maybe her shoe got untied and she slipped on a banana peel and ended up trapped in some well. But the thing is, there aren't too many wells in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and the searchers checked all of them. Also, people don't just go around throwing their banana peels all hapdash. It's not like we're in Muncie.

I really can't tell you much about Felicity, though if memory serves, she was an above average bowler, especially when taking age and bumpers into consideration. Probably, she finished most games in the mid-fifties, which is good, I think, since my high score is forty-six and I'm a full ten years older.

Anyway, my mind is a sieve, and this is not on my list of things to tell you.

But like I was saying, Felicity rode a pink scooter, and I know this for a fact because one time she blurred past me as I was walking to work. She screamed, “Hiiiiiyaaaaaa!” so I launched myself into a sticker bush to keep from getting run over, but also because I thought I saw a silver dollar.

After the kidnapping, news reporters began camping out on Felicity Blanket's front lawn, and last Thursday, lo and behold, there was Mrs. Blanket on
The Today Show.
She wore so much make-up that she resembled a woman who obviously wore quite a bit of make-up. Also, she wore a green sweater with an American flag pin pinned to her right side. As soon as I saw it, I crushed my hand to my heart in the style of a patriot. Then I realized it was just some stupid pin, so I stopped reciting the Pledge of Allegiance halfway through.

“I just want whoever did this to know that we will catch you,” Mrs. Blanket told the camera. “That we will catch you and that my baby never deserved this, and if other parents out there can just tell their own children that they love them, tell them this very minute, then maybe you won't ever end up on national television . . .”

Holy cow! National television!

Long story shorter, I leapt out the door, hurdling two doghouses and a fence, and sprinted to Felicity Blanket's front lawn so I could get on national television and maybe even land my big break in the movie industry.

It was such a funny feeling, watching my neighborhood on
TV
like that. Or maybe, it was less funny than sad. I don't know. I'm no comedian, but I do know that emotions can be complicated, like a Rubik's Cube or a pinsetter or the Foxtrot.

None of these things are on my list of things to tell you.

As I ran I cried out, “I'm coming!” catapulting through the snowdrifts in the style of a sure-footed mountain goat. I only fell once (that mailbox came out of nowhere!), but by the time I arrived all the cameramen were already lugging their cameras by their sides. I tapped one of the camera lenses, shouting, “Testing? Is this thing on?” until one of the flannel-shirt-wearing men told me to knock it off with the tapping.

“Or what?” I asked, smugly snapping my fingers.

He said a word that I will not repeat here, followed by “you up.”

Needless to say, I knocked it off with the tapping.

Mrs. Blanket must've seen me, because she gave me this really funny look, like maybe she was trying to say hello or something else entirely.

I waved to her even though we'd never formally met. I was grinning like an antelope, but then I started thinking about other people's feelings like Sandy always says, so I started frowning like an aardvark, instead. I blew her a gentle kiss – almost – though what she probably needed was a bear hug (minus the claws).

Then, as Mrs. Blanket retreated inside her house, I walked up to a beautiful woman in a pantsuit and grabbed her microphone and stuck it into my face, pretending it was a metal ice-cream cone.

“Could you repeat the question?” I asked, taking a lick.

The woman reached to retrieve the microphone, which is a poor reporting technique if you want to get the full story.

“Yes, of course I knew Felicity Blanket,” I said, dancing away from her (in the style of the Foxtrot). “We were mutual acquaintances.”

The camera was rolling. I could feel it in my cheeks.

“Sir, if we could just have the . . .”

“In fact, I remember her like she was yesterday.”

“Sir, please . . . the microphone . . .”

“Well, first off,” I began, boxing her out and smiling at the camera, “you have to understand that she was an above average bowler and . . . and her scooter was . . . her scooter was pink in coloration.”

The woman looked helplessly to her cameraman, but he was too busy blowing smoke rings to make good on his promise of fucking me up.

“And if you want to know her exact bowling score, I regret to inform you that I cannot release that information at this time. That's confidential, and we have to respect her privacy, I think.” I nodded solemnly, adding, “Though I can report that she wore a size five bowling shoe. In fact, I can report that she wore
two
size five bowling shoes. Simultaneously. Thank you.”

A few people started snapping photos, so I shielded my eyeballs with my eyelids. Still, my eyeballs sizzled and my head rang, like maybe I'd gotten locusts lodged in my ear ducts or birth canal or something. My mind said: Move your rear, Roger, before these people blind you! so that's exactly what I did. I moved it. Side to side (in the style of the Macarena).

Then, I began feeling awful dizzy.

Maybe dizzy isn't the right word for what I felt. I guess it was more like the inner lining of my stomach had thickened into some kind of rubbery material, like a worn tire or a yellow rain slicker or a . . .

“This . . . this interview is over,” I cried.

More flashes.

More sizzling eyeballs.

Locusts, everywhere, and none of them were respecting my privacy.

I leapt the fence and the doghouses and returned home, and it is not important to the story whether or not I cried over stupid, old Felicity Blanket.

Home is a funny thing, and while some say it's where the heart is, for me, it's just where we keep our Hitler painting. Which brings me to the next point on my list, my father's Hitler painting and why it is a good example of modern art. Now, when I say “my father's Hitler painting” what I mean is, the painting that Hitler painted – not a portrait of Hitler himself. Also, when I say “my father” I mean “my dead father” (heart cancer) which really isn't important to the story except that he got the painting from
his
dead father (also heart cancer), whose name was Nathaniel Silverstein, one of the heroes of World War II. Rumor had it old Nathaniel liberated some kind of summer camp, and then he found the painting and hid it under his coat, calling it a “plunder of war.”

Hitler was an artist, which is something a lot of people don't know, including Felicity Blanket, most likely. In fact, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, his paintings can be found in reputable museums throughout Europe. Also, one of them can be found hanging above our microwave in the kitchen, alongside a painting I once did of a schooner.

This fact is not mentioned anywhere in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Hitler's painting has a schooner, too, only his schooner floats in the Rhine River while my schooner bobs in a swimming pool beside a teepee next to an upside-down monkey. I guess you could say me and Hitler are just a couple of schooner-painting fools.

In case you're wondering, the trick to painting a schooner is to work on the concave shape of the schooner's hull. Also, maybe what I mean is the convex shape. But the good news is you don't have to know the name of the shape in order to paint it. All you need are some brushes and some paint and a good, steady hand.

And I'll tell you something else – Hitler's painting is worth a lot of money (more than mine, even!), which is funny since Hitler's isn't very good. Now, I'm no art critic, but in my expert opinion the brushstrokes look pretty thick, especially for watercolors. Whenever I paint with watercolors (every third Tuesday), I always try to brush the paint on as lightly as possible to avoid making the same mistakes as Hitler. But what do I know about mistakes? I'm no lawyer. And besides, everybody knows that pressing harder on the brush doesn't necessarily make for a better painting. In fact, it can sometimes make for a worse one. A good rule of thumb is to pretend that your paintbrush is as delicate as a dove feather. Sometimes I feel sad that nobody ever bothered to tell that to Hitler.

If you're interested in painting schooners, consider taking some art classes at your local community college. Or if you want, you could try painting a raccoon, instead. Because I guess what I want to talk about mainly are raccoons (the third item on my list), though the Encyclopedia Britannica makes no mention as to whether or not Hitler ever tried to paint one himself. But the strange thing about raccoons is, last Thursday, on the night all the reporters began camping out on Felicity Blanket's front lawn, I was out on the porch thinking about raccoons, and all of the sudden, out of nowhere, here comes this raccoon gallivanting just a few feet away from me. Lo and behold! The thing was about the size of a normal raccoon – yea high – and he really wasn't doing anything out of the ordinary except for gallivanting, which I guess I already mentioned. He had these tiny, annoying-looking claws and sort of stood on his hind legs staring at me, batting at the air – really teaching it a lesson. Then, he pushed himself right into our aluminum trash bin like some kind of rhinoceros or battering ram or rhinoceros with a battering ram attached to his back. Then, he just helped himself to half a hotdog bun. And here's the crazy part: it appeared to be the very same hot dog bun that I had been eating just two days before!

“Oh, don't think I can't recognize you behind that mask!” I told him, but it was like he couldn't understand a word I was saying. Or if he did understand, he was holding his tongue, probably because his mouth was overflowing with hotdog bun.

The funny thing about raccoons, and maybe life, generally, is that sometimes when I think about something hard enough, then that thing will just happen. Or appear. For instance, as I explained, I was thinking about raccoons and then one just came out of nowhere, gallivanting.

Here's another example:

Once, I wanted an ice-cream cone, and then an ice-cream truck pulled magically to the curb.

These sorts of things happen to me all the time, but I'm not sure if I'm the only one who can do it, or if everyone possesses this skill. Sometimes I even wonder if I'm strong enough to harness such power.

My mind started thinking:

Roger, if all you have to do is think really hard to get something to happen, then maybe you should think really hard about Felicity Blanket coming home.

Holy cow! My mind had come up with a pretty good idea for a change, so that's exactly what I did. I started thinking really hard about Felicity Blanket until my head felt like it was either going to explode or implode or do nothing.

Sometimes I wonder what Sandy would say if she knew about my power.

Probably, she'd say, “Roger, whatever you do, don't go using your powers for evil!”

She brings up a good point, and I bet Hitler wishes his older sister had given him the same advice. That she had said, “Adolf, darling, don't go using your watercolor powers for evil!”

But what do I know? I don't even speak German.