The Myth of Wile E

The Works

A little while after the hunting party left, Toothless Bob came by pushing a wobbly old baby carriage, hoping to get some boxes of apples I'd promised him. Bob has a big red cooler he uses to make a cider that'll hit you like a sucker punch and make little birdies tweet around your head. He gives a lot of the cider to the guy who runs the filling station, which is probably a big reason why Bubba doesn't mind Bob living there.

I asked Bob how things were going, and he said the night crawler business was good, real good. "Always good this time of year," he said. "Folks is—" Then he noticed the truffles and pointed with a look of disgust. "Holy shit! What kind of turds are they?"

"They're truffles."

"Truffles?" He bent over and sniffed them, making a face. "Don't smell like truffles."

"They are, apparently."

"If you say so. I thought truffles were candy."

"Me too!" I said, feeling a bit vindicated.

Bob told me he'd brought some lunch to share. He reached into the baby carriage and retrieved a gigantic submarine sandwich cocooned in Saran Wrap and sealed with a Whiz-Thru Pump-N-Go sticker. He pulled out a pocket knife and began sawing the sandwich in half. "What you gonna do with them?" he said.

"What? The truffles?" I shrugged. "Don't know."

"Where'd you get 'em?"

"The ground."

"Well, I'd-a left 'em there if I were you. They stink." He passed half the sandwich to me. "Now this here's the good stuff," he said. "Best Bubba sells. The works." Bob got extravagant when he was feeling flush.

Being out in the open too long made Bob nervous, so he ducked down under the table and sat with his back against the spool. I ducked down next to him and we ate lunch like that, in the shade, with our legs sticking out. I tried not to wrinkle my nose at the diesel fumes issuing from Bob. He believed that regularly sprinkling one's clothes with a few drops of diesel fuel was key to repelling Bigfeet (fortunately, Bob does not smoke). I'm not sure whether Bob came to this conclusion before or after moving to the filling station, but in Bob's defense, has a Bigfoot ever been spotted near a filling station? Not that I know of.

"Yeah," Bob said, apparently resuming an earlier thought, "seeing all the leaves come down and the days getting short, kinda makes people think about time running out and all that, I 'spose. Nobody knows how long fall's gonna last. Everybody wants to get their fishing in while the getting's good."

"Makes sense," I said, observing that bottle collecting wasn't seasonal that way. People pretty much made throwing junk out of cars a year-round hobby.

I opened up my half of the sandwich and plucked out a slice of tomato to examine it.

"What's the matter?" Bob was suddenly agitated. "Don't like tomato?"

"I like it just fine," I said, punching out the gooey blob of tomato seeds and slipping them in my pocket.

"Then whaddya do that for?"

"Habit, mostly." Truth is, I didn't know if I'd have much use for seeds in two months' time, but I refused to think about that. Keep looking up. Don't look down. "Hey, Bob, you don't know where to get any corn, by any chance?"

"Candy, kettle, or regular?"

"Hmm . . . Guess I'll have to get back to you on that."

We ate in silence for a moment, and then I said, "Say, Bob . . . if you heard someone was maybe getting rid of some stuff, what stuff might you want?"

"Like, what kind of stuff?"

"Any kind of stuff. Anything in a house. Can openers, blankets, pots and pans . . . I don't know."

"Nope. Don't reckon I'd want anything," Bob said. And then, a moment later, "'Cept maybe, doors."

"Doors?"

"Doors. You said anything in a house. Nobody ever gets rid of doors. Wish they would. Less drafty than pallets, I bet."

"Hmm," I said. "Doors."

When he finished his sandwich, Bob loaded up two of the boxes full of apples. In turn, he reached into a plastic pail and told me to open my hands. Schlop! went a tangle of muddy red night crawlers that squirmed in my cupped palms. I'd learned from experience not to refuse this gift. Bob's feelings would get terribly hurt and he'd tell me what I could do with my damn apples while throwing them at my head and accusing me of being in league with his enemies. So I just held the mess of worms and thanked him. When he left, I'd bury them in the garden dirt and let them do their thing. I was no good at fishing and had no stomach for it anyway, as the few times I'd tried—with a paper clip and some old kite string—I'd merely ended up stabbing and drowning the worms with nothing to show for it. The fish would swim right by those poor impaled worms and just shake their silver scaly heads at me.