Nothing to It

Swiveller and Weatherby headed off through the fog. Weatherby had his Adidas bottle in hand, and sipped from it from time to time. Ernie skittered alongside. Bare apple trees suddenly appeared from out of the mist, the skeletal branches reaching up into the fog. Castle Rock Park was built on the grounds of the old prison apple orchard. The grim sandstone walls of the abandoned prison still stood at the northernmost edge of the park. Just past the trees they arrived at the concrete pad upon which Weatherby’s grill and some small tables were anchored.

“Now isn’t that some repulsive motherfucking shit?” said Weatherby, indignant. “And look around you—no paper! You can bet your boots that Luther used paper.”

“Far out, man,” said Swiveller. “It’s like modern art.”

Two long gnarled turds lay frozen side by side on the grill, looking like some sort of ancient rune.

Swiveller looked around. “Fortunately that’s all they did. Nothing’s broken. There’s no graffiti. It’s probably a good thing Ernie didn’t hear whoever it was and start barking. They’d have found your place. Hell, they might even have come over and squatted over you. Or set you on fire. That’s been known to happen, you know.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” said Weatherby. “I guess I was pretty lucky. You think those damn things are going to come off?”

“Sure,” said Swiveller. “It just might take a while. I’ll need to get a few things from the truck.”

Swiveller disappeared into the fog and reemerged a few minutes later with a square-point shovel and a wire brush. Weatherby had his Adidas bottle in his dirty paw and was singing in a cracked, wheezing voice:

“If I weave around at night

Policemen think I’m very tight

They never find my bottle though they ask.

“’Cause Plastic Jesus shelters me

For his head comes off you see.

He’s hollow and I use him like a flask.”

“What? Are you singing hymns now?” asked Swiveller, setting to work on the grill. Ernie squatted under the table, gnawing away at a dog biscuit made to resemble a T-bone steak. He looked up from the steak occasionally and growled as if somebody was going to take it away from him.

Weatherby took a long drag of wine. “Hymns? What are you talking about? That’s Billy Idol.”

“Billy Idol?” said Swiveller. “I didn’t know you liked Billy Idol. You’re always telling me you hate rock music.”

“I know,” said Weatherby. “But a guy I know made me a CD with all kinds of stuff on it. I like that song.”

“Well, the turds are coming right off. They must have frozen just as they hit the metal. A couple of minutes with a wire brush and it’ll be like it never happened.”

“I’ll be goddamned,” said Weatherby, watching Swiveller shovel the shit into a black plastic bag and brush the grill. “You’re an amazement to me, Dick.”

“Nothing to it,” said Swiveller.

“I don’t suppose a skill like that pays too well, though,” said Weatherby.

“No.”

“Probably doesn’t get you much action with the women either.”

“No,” said Swiveller, picking up his tools and the plastic bag. “But it’s all I’ve got.”

It wasn’t long after Swiveller left that the sun came out and burned away the fog. Birds chirped in the bare branches of the trees. A brown squirrel rooted about on the frozen ground. Weatherby got a fire going in the grill and cooked up a rasher of bacon. He then used the grease to fry up some sliced potatoes. He got his old percolator out and made some strong coffee. With Ernie asleep in his lap, he ate and sipped his coffee. It all seemed so easy.

Jerry Wilson lives in Boise, Idaho, where he worked as a Park Ranger for many years — a job which inspired his first collection of short stories, ‘A Kind of Kaddish’, published in England by Leaky Boot Press. His stories tell of the lives and deaths of a homeless gang that lives in the park, centered around the striking figures of Weatherby, the wise tramp, and Swiveller, the Park Ranger who has befriended him.

(‘Nothing to It’ was originally published by Leaky Book Press in Jerry Wilson’s short story collection, ‘A Kind of Kaddish’.)