The Bernie Factor, Page 3

  Chapter 3

  Vincent was spot on about one thing. Nick did feel alone. He wasn’t looking for a wife, but he was interested in something more than a cheap, short-term relationship that had all the intimacy of speed dating.

  But a dog? Nick’s closest relationship to a canine was watching “Underdog” reruns on Saturday mornings, nestled into a duct taped beanbag chair on lime green shag carpet while comfortably encased inside his “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” footie pajamas, circa 1984. Not that he disliked pets. He loved his childhood friend’s dogs and often times begged his parents for trips to the local pet store, just to look, he always reasoned.

  But the old man, Andrew Lance Piccilo O’Fallon, refused to accept the notion that any living creature with less potential mental capacity than a human infant belonged inside one’s home. The irony of his father’s initials and his ultimate loathing of animals, especially dogs, never escaped Nick. A picture of dogs playing poker hanging on a pine stud in the basement by a foldout card table represented the closest the old man came to getting a pet. Nick reasoned a bad childhood experience or a professional gambler’s unwillingness to outwardly display emotions led to his inability to acclimate to the animal kingdom.

  When Nick was nine years old, he caught a turtle by the back fence of his parent’s property. The wooden split rail fence spanned the border of two downwardly sloping properties where water naturally drained, making a soggy mess whether there was rainfall or not. He’d grabbed the turtle that was feeding on fallen Honeycrisp apples by the fruit tree that sat on Nick’s family’s place. Nick didn’t know what turtles ate, but this one at least seem to like apples.

  “Are turtles vegetarians?” Nick asked his mother.

  “I certainly hope so,” his mother replied. “I wouldn’t want to meet a carnivorous turtle. Although, I hear snapping turtles supposedly can take off a finger or a toe.”

  Nick returned to the backyard concrete patio where the turtle meandered within the confines of three Tonka trucks and a fallen cedar tree limb. Before he inquired of a turtle’s dietary proclivities, Nick decided Melvin was a good name for a turtle because he knew a kid on his 3rd grade basketball team who possessed equivalent speed and quickness. Melvin, the basketball turtle moved away, leaving only Melvin the real turtle, so nobody’s feelings were in jeopardy. Nick examined Melvin and decided without fingers, let alone opposable thumbs, this particular turtle showed no signs of ever snapping. Nick felt relieved since he knew his father would never allow a toe munching, finger stealing pet into the house.

  Nick carried Melvin inside the house and placed him into a shoebox he found in his parent’s closet. Inside the shoebox, Nick situated a few fallen apples he picked up off the ground and fruit from Bosc pear and Shiro plum trees that grew in their backyard. Nick didn’t know why, but their yard was filled with similar fruit trees and red and white grape vines. Neighbors thought it was the greatest thing to have all of that fresh fruit at your disposal, but Nick always disliked it because the backyard perpetually smelled of rotted fruit. Who had time to pick up all this fruit and avoid the bees that came with it? And once you’d bitten into an apple that had a worm tucked inside, you lost your fondness for eating this so-called fresh fruit.

  He’d also covered the bottom of the shoebox with some of the tall wet grass that grew knee high in the mini-valley between the two yards. Nick decided Melvin appeared happy, but probably needed water and protection from the elements. So inside Melvin went, unbeknownst to Nick’s mother who surely would have halted this clandestine operation had she’d been in the know. Of course, Nick felt certain he could have convinced his mom to allow the turtle inside, if for only a short while, but Nick had much longer term plans.

  Nick wished he could tell mom about this cool, new, first-ever pet turtle, Melvin. After all, Nick’s mother had often entertained her son’s whimsy for a pet. She even willingly agreed to several pet store trips, “just to look.” He always appreciated her for that indulgence. Nick believed that his mother longed for the companionship of a dog or a cat. He could tell by the way she looked into the pet store cages. Those were never disinterested eyes, but ones that earnestly looked at each animal as a potential housemate. But a turtle doesn’t shed, scratch the furniture, need to be let out, howl, whine, screech, or bark. Nick began to believe even his father would come to accept, and maybe even love Melvin, which would inevitably open the proverbial pet store doors.

  Nick kept Melvin in the shoebox during the day and let him roam his room during the evenings and nights. Nick was happy, and when he looked into Melvin’s wrinkled face, he thought he detected an amphibian smile. This happy arrangement continued for the next week and a half without anybody being the wiser. It was bound to happen sooner or later, and Thursday became the night of reckoning. Nick’s bedroom door didn’t always latch perfectly, especially during the summer months when the door jams swelled just enough to throw off the connection. The door looked closed, but it was just pushed shut. When Nick’s dad came through the front door late that night the pressure inside the house changed enough to pop Nick’s bedroom door open with just enough space for Melvin to escape. And escape he did.

  It was late at night or quite early morning, depending upon one’s perspective. Nick lay sound asleep as his dad stumbled through the front hallway and halfway up the stairs, both liquor and lack of sleep profoundly affecting each step. Melvin sat dead center at the top of the stairs, neither watching Andy nor realizing their inevitable first meeting lay seconds away.

  Andy braced himself with one hand on the wall and the other one firmly gripping the banister. He gathered himself for the next few moments and caught his breath as he readied himself to complete his vertical journey toward horizontal bliss. Andy navigated these stairs many times in much worse condition, but he never contemplated tonight would differ from those other inebriated stupors. So, he blindly surged forward, attempting to vault two steps at a time. However, his left foot did not elevate above the stair’s riser, and he found himself face planting parallel with the top stair. He didn’t even react quick enough to raise his arms and catch himself.

  The pain he felt in his lower lip which smacked the edge of the top stair was immediately replaced by the searing white hot pain he felt on his suddenly compressed nose. Andy’s hands still lay useless by his side as he tried to focus on the horrific beast that lay inches from his petrified eyes. The pain he felt belied the notion that this was just some nightmare he could escape. The scream began almost below his gut and gurgled through his stomach and into his chest. By the time it hit his throat and spit out of his mouth it was something of a high pitched female scream like those from Hollywood horror slasher films. It was just plain unnatural.

  Bedroom lights quickly came on from both Nick’s room and his mother’s. Nick saw the opened bedroom door without even needing his eyes to adjust from darkness to light. He knew the gig was up, and it wasn’t going to go down like he planned. Not that he ever really had a plan. After all, nine year old boys are more here and now thinkers than goal setters.

  “Melvin!” Nick screamed.

  Nick’s mother froze in her steps when she heard her son shout out Melvin’s name. She was already rattled and confused by the screaming, but now she stood motionless trying in her mind to compute “who the hell is Melvin?” Had she really heard that or was her brain still somewhere between rapid eye movement and the waking world?

  “Nicky?” she exclaimed with a puzzled voice.

  “Sylvia!” Andy shouted. He had managed to crawl the rest of the way up the stairs and sat halfway braced against the hallway wall holding Melvin as far away as he could without separating his nose from his face.

  Nick and Sylvia hit the hall at the exact same moment, and for different reasons, stopped dead in their tracks. Nick felt the shame and responsibility for permitting Melvin to have so much territorial nightly freedom that had led to an unsolicited att
ack on his father. Sylvia, however, had no response to this situation. There was a shelled creature attached to her husband’s face. Nothing in life had adequately prepared her for this scenario.

  “Dad, I can help,” Nick said after regaining his motor skills. Andy’s stared at his son with eyes full of appreciation and condemnation all swirled together in a surreal comprehension. Nick wrapped his hands around Melvin’s shell and begin gently speaking to the turtle.

  “It’s OK buddy. I know you didn’t mean to hurt anybody. Just open your mouth and let go, OK. Please buddy, you’ve got to open your mouth.” Andy kept more focus on his son now than he did the turtle. In his clouded state of mind he became painfully aware, both mentally and physically, that Nick and Melvin knew each other.

  Sylvia stood in the hallway with her arms crossed and watched Nick gently ease the turtle away from her husband’s nose. She wasn’t sure if she was going to be angry with Nicky for hiding an animal in the house or her husband for coming home intoxicated. She pondered the situation for a brief moment and decided that both were appropriate, but neither would get addressed this evening. Once Melvin was removed, Sylvia spun on her heels and returned to the bedroom and shut off the nightstand lamp.

  Nick stepped away with a now docile Melvin, hoping his backward movement could somehow reverse the time space continuum and all of this might never have occurred. Once he reached his doorway, he quickly shut the door and placed Melvin back in the shoebox and slid him under the bed. Just like his mother, he turned off the light and waited.

  He heard his father stumble into his own bedroom and ask, “Could somebody tell me what the fuck just happened.”

  “You’re so drunk, you provoked a blood thirsty turtle into a blind fury that came close to leaving you facially deformed. That’s all I’ve got to say about this matter tonight, and I suggest you pass out as initially planned, cause Momma ain’t happy right about now!”

  As much as he wanted immediate answers, an angry wife in the middle of the night after coming home from a non-spousal sanctioned bender was not a wise proposition. Andy disappeared into the bathroom, looked at his nose and decided urination was a more important task before eventually falling into bed, still clothed.

  The following morning Nick woke to his mother standing over the bed with Melvin and the shoebox. “You know he has to go, and this has nothing to do with last night,” Sylvia said. “You know your father’s rule, and you didn’t even bother to ask either one of us. As much as I want to support you, Nicky, you disrespected both your father and me by hiding something you knew was against the rules. Maybe if you’d talked to us first, but not now. It’s seven o’clock. This turtle needs to be gone by 7:30.”

  “His name’s Melvin,” a teary eyed Nick replied. His mother stopped at the doorway. Her shoulders sagged, and her head briefly dropped down. She turned and faced her son again.

  “I’m sorry, Nicky. Melvin’s chances for survival are greater back outside than they will ever be in this house. If you’re gonna break the rules, you better have a good plan.”

  Sylvia turned and walked out into the hallway and down the stairs. Nick’s mother had never spoken of breaking the rules before, and this new advice caught Nick a little off guard. Did this good plan wash away the sins of breaking the rules? Did it apply to all of the rules or only a select few? And what made a plan good? Nick looked into the shoebox as Melvin’s head retreated inside his shell. Nick agreed with Melvin. Yes it was officially time to withdraw and plan the next attack.

  However, Andy ruled the roost and animals were meant to be outdoors and served no purpose other than to ruin possessions earned through blood, sweat, and tears, as he so often put it. Nick was certain there had never been a loss of his father’s blood or sweat when it came to gambling, although the tears probably rolled on occasion. The thought of blood and sweat loss left Nick with a comical image of his dad working in a primordial metal factory, forging iron while wielding 50 pound hammers, sparks flying off battered anvils as vats of molten steel poured between tanks. Now with this latest stunt, Nick knew that his dad’s heels were sure to be dug in solid, regardless of whom might champion his pet cause.

  But Nick was persistent. With the latest knowledge that turtles can and will attack if they feel threatened, Nick decided future turtle domestication was an unwise choice. He’d read that certain frogs in the Amazon rain forest were actually poisonous, although he’d never heard of a venomous toad in Washington. Nevertheless, you couldn’t be too certain, so he quickly and logically ruled out all amphibians. Nick drew the same obvious conclusion for reptiles. His interests soon drifted toward entomology. Specifically, the masses of bees that frequented the fruit trees, which covered their backyard. Although dangerous to a degree, Nick planned to keep the little honey bees securely incarcerated in an old fish aquarium. Ironically, he never even considered asking about getting underwater pets.

  Catching the bees was plenty easy, especially with the assistance of other neighborhood kids. All you needed was a glass jar with a lid and nerves of tin foil. Steel seemed liked overkill. Simply place the mouth of the jar by the bee as he hovered by the flowering fruit tree branches and quickly shut the lid with the opposite hand over the jar and voila! A bee held captive, ready for reintegration into the new colony aquarium where they were sure to enjoy the company of their old friends. Nick and the other neighborhood kids carefully placed bits of the backyard inside the tank, not really sure if the water bowl was entirely necessary. None of them had ever seen a bee take a drink, but they must get thirsty, right?

  Nick learned from his previous mistake with Melvin. These pets would remain outside, which alleviated the threat of a sneak midnight attack and violation of any internal family policies, thereby bypassing full disclosure of any non-human residency within the domicile. These pets were back patio creatures, exempt from the existing by-laws. He was in the clear. However, he still felt paranoid about his parents, especially dad, finding the bees. He secretly placed the tank under the stairs that led down from the upper landing. He perched the tank on two old sawhorses he found in the garage and covered it with a drop cloth that was wadded up under a workbench. He erroneously thought everything was safe, secure, and out of sight. What could go wrong?

  Painting the outside shed that housed their mower and other various lawn equipment proved to be what could go wrong. It was late fall, and Andy O’Fallon was nobody’s handyman. He was not inclined to general household maintenance and painting the back shed was something he’d put on the back burner for some time. But Sylvia stayed on his case, and he knew that winter was rapidly approaching and this job had to get done before the neighborhood home owner’s association sent their spies with cameras to take pictures of the shed’s deteriorated external features and send out their nasty gram messages. He deplored the HOA with their pickiness to the upkeep on people’s houses, but at the same time appreciated their ability to keep cars up on blocks, storage trailers, 10 foot high grass, and neon purple houses out the neighborhood. They were a double edged sword.

  “Sylvia, where the hell’s that drop cloth?” Andy shouted from the garage through the laundry room one late October Saturday morning.

  “What drop cloth?”

  “The one on the workbench,” Andy barked back. By now he was tossing items across the garage as if this would make the missing drop cloth readily appear. He wasn’t eager for the painting job, and this was just another sign that they should pay somebody to handle jobs like this. Exasperation this early on in a project was a bad sign.

  By now Sylvia stood at the doorway from the laundry room into the garage. “Throwing everything from one end of the garage to the other isn’t going to make it magically appear,” she stated. “Why don’t you get set up in back, and I’ll look for it.”

  “Fine,” an irritated Andy muttered under his breath as he stomped out of the garage, nearly tripping over a fishing pole that was
the victim of his latest tirade. Sylvia rolled her eyes at her husband’s inability to maintain composure away from a gambling table and began picking things up before beginning the search.

  Andy turned the corner of the house and bounded down the worn slope into the backyard. Still muttering to himself, he stepped onto the back patio and caught his reflection in the basement window. As he walked along he noticed his stomach protruding more than he remembered. Crap, on top of everything else, I’m getting fat he thought to himself. As he passed the window, his head remained turned that direction while going by the stairs. Right before redirecting his eyes forward, he caught the sight of a paint splattered white canvas under the back stairs. Andy stumbled as he brought himself to a stop, eyes focused on his missing drop cloth.

  “What the hell is it doing out here?” Andy said to himself. The irritation at the lost time and aggravation of searching for the drop cloth boiled over as he reached for the paint splattered material. With both hands firmly gripping the canvas, he yanked the drop cloth with all of his fervor and pent up frustration.

  What happened next was best described by the next door widow, Mrs. Whitaker, who was tending to her planter box flowers just off her back porch. She claimed to have heard a crash of glass followed by an unholy litany of profanity from Andy. She looked up to see Andy back pedaling off the patio and fanning the drop cloth in the process.

  “I didn’t rightly know what to make of it,” she relayed in her slow, southern Georgia drawl. “It was like he was trying to fan a flame while running backwards with his pants on fire. I can’t hardly say I’ve ever seen a man move like that before. He never even let go of that canvas. Not even when them bees just kept a comin’. I gotta tell y’all, it looked like he was waving the white flag of surrender, but them durn bees just weren’t having any part of it.”

  Apparently the bees were none too pleased with their dramatic prison break. The survivors decided it was an assault, and they reverted to basic survival instincts and went into fight mode. Andy wisely choose flight mode. In a moment of high stress it’s funny what your hands will do. Fists usually clench and anything you were holding goes into death grip mode. Even if he wanted to, Andy’s hands were never going to let go of that drop cloth until the adrenaline rush subsided.

  Although not allergic to bees, nobody reacts well to over 23 stings. Sylvia decided Nick should not accompany them to the emergency room. Nick was thankful for the momentary reprieve, but he knew this would play out worse than the Melvin incident. He decided then and there that he and pets were just not compatible, no matter what kind of animal they were. The family’s eventual move from Washington to Las Vegas, NV solidified his beliefs. The desert was not a hospitable place to raise outdoor animals, Nick further reasoned.

  But here he was seriously considering buying a dog. Despite all of those years of learned behavior, a small part of Nick still dreamed it a viable option. Others did it successfully, so why not him? However, negative thoughts of past lessons learned raced through his mind as he pulled into the Fairview County Animal Shelter parking lot.