NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
I find Lou unexpectedly, outside Jake’s mansion, on my way up Oval Street to visit Diddlie. He is on his way down the sunny hill with his jacket over his arm. We stop.
“Lou! Have you seen Jake lately?”
“Yeah, remember, I had a chat with Liberty too.”
Lou takes off his aviator sunglasses and looks down at the road.
“Another dead squirrel.”
The skull protrudes from the skin and fur. Two paws are up near the flattened snout. The rest of the squashed carcass is undifferentiated fur but for the tail, and has dried enough to start curling up slightly from the road surface. Two crows call to each other. One from the utility pole between Jake’s and Diddlie’s properties, another hidden among the branches above.
“Road kill!”
“Keeps the crows going.”
“Yeah, we don’t know half of what is going on out here.”
“The Barred owl we saw last week, was hooting first thing this morning.”
“Traffic is getting heavier. These streets looked so quiet when I first moved here, Lou.”
”I think it’s getting busier and noisier every year.”
”I see more and more squirrels too. Why aren’t the foxes keeping the population down?”
“They get run down too. Saw a dead one on the side of the Parkway the other day.”
“Have you seen those big houses going up along there.”
“Yup, I don’t think there is a vacant lot within a mile of here.”
“No, they’re tearing down the small older houses to make room for more big ones.”
Lou looks up at two squirrels chasing each other past the garage doors in the granite-faced wall of Jake’s house. He puts his glasses back on.
“You know Jake and Gale are divorcing.”
“No, someone told me she had moved out West to be near Liberty.”
“Well, that’s part of it.”
The small garage door opens about half way.
“Well, look who’s here!”
Liberty Trip ducks under and walks toward us, leaving the door half way up.
“How are you doing, Liberty?”
“Hi, LouLou” She looks at me, “Fred, how are you?”
Her red jeans match her red shoes. She looks down at the road kill.
“What was that, a squirrel?”
Our shadows merge on the blacktop, covering the road kill, and then separate as I move to keep the sun out of my eyes.
“It is dangerous on our streets, Liberty.”
She looks up, pushing back the brim of her white baseball cap with the Snaz logo on the front.
“Well, guys, I guess it is. Did you hear that owl this morning?”
“Who Cooks for You? Who Cooks for You?”
“That’s the Barred, Liberty. Is it fun being back home?”
“Lou, it’s good to be back, hearing that owl and all, but it isn’t.”
“So what’s wrong?”
“Well the situation isn’t easy…my parents are splitting and I really don’t feel comfortable around the house any more. I don’t even know if it really is ours.”
“I thought you had left for good.”
“Fred, I just came back again thanks to Dad’s plane.”
“So you got a nice free ride.”
“Well, he was on the phone or computer when he wasn’t sleeping. Yes Fred, I didn’t have to pay an airline.”
We move into shade from the broad trunks of Diddlie’s white oaks, growing on the edge of the roadside ditch and not yet in leaf.
“Liberty, what are you doing out West?”
“Oh, Lou, I got a bull-shit job at a call center.”
“Doesn’t Jake have any helpful connections out there?”
“Those connections get complicated.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, not sex or anything … well one time it might have been, but I was out of there before lunch.”
“Propositioned you?”
“Not in so many words…I could see where lunch was going, you know.”
“Oh, yes!”
“See Lou, if Dad gets me a job, at some point I am always asked to tell him, or ask him something, and that puts me in the middle of, of, you know…I don’t want any part of it…I am going to make my own way!”
“So what’s the job like?”
“Fred, it is machine-idiocy!”
“Sounds impressive, it used to take a person to be an idiot.”
“Right! Now I have the help of a computer terminal.”
“To do what exactly?”
“I sit in a big room. We are kind of warehoused. There are lots of other people in little booths. We answer callers’questions, and a lot of the questions are outside the scope of the script I have to follow on the screen.”
“So what do you do then?”
“I’m not allowed to answer, Fred.”
“But isn’t that your job?’
“No, my minimum wage job is to move the caller on to the next question on my script. That is, sell them another product.”
“So, what if the caller persists?”
“You call the supervisor, then you lose points for taking too long.”
“What are you supposed to do?”
“Don’t try to make sense of it…you can’t…the thing was kind of put together on the fly. They’re always tweaking it. Sometimes even the supervisors don’t know what’s going on.”
“Sounds like the pits!”
“You have to earn a certain number of points a month to keep the job. You get points for getting the customer to buy a new service and points for answering them from the script, and so on.”
“There’s been growth in minimum wage jobs like that.”
“Lou, I thought they did that work in Mumbai.”
“They do Fred, but poverty-stricken areas here are now competitive.”
“Liberty, can you get by on a job like that?”
“No Way,Fred, Mom has a house, I’m staying there. It’s a long drive but gas is cheap…Anyway I’ve probably lost the job by now, being here this long… it will be four days by Friday when we fly back.”
“So what brings you back?”
“I still have some stuff here, you know…I want to get everything of mine out of the house, use the free flight back and move on.”
“On to what?”
“Maybe start another band.”
“Well! Are you going to visit, or just hang out on the street?”
It’s Diddlie looking down through the bare branches and shouting to us from up the hill. Standing outside her front porch in her wide brimmed straw hat and gardening gloves like big gauntlets. She holds a leaf rake by the handle with the green plastic tines spread out in a fan above her head as if it is waving.
“Hi, Liberty waves back, and starts moving up the hill towards Diddlie’s porch, and Lou and I follow. We step across the ditch, cut through the ivy past the big trunks, step over a jagged fallen branch with pale brown lichens on the bark, and then crunch across her gravel driveway towards her.
“Lou, I thought you were going to the hardware store for me.”
“Right, you see what happened? I’ll get those half-inch screws and put them in later.”
“Yes I can see. Fred, were you coming up to see me? I thought we had a date! Where have you been?”
“Diddlie, are you our area supervisor or something?”
“Well sorry, but I’ve had a hell of a morning!”
“I called you just now Diddlie, and you didn’t pick up, so here I am.”
“Yeah I heard the phone, but I was changing the straw for Mr. Liddel.
Then saw a snake and chased him off.”
“Its way too early for snakes.”
“Lou, you can tell him that when you find him. It’s been hot lately you know. That wakes them up! And the cherries are all coming out too, and the Bradford Pears.”
“Diddlie, are you sure it wasn’t a hose?”
“Yes, Liberty, I saw a black snake. Have you ever seen a hose that moves itself across a cement floor and out into the grass? I don’t mind snakes around here. They keep the mice down for one thing. I just don’t want them around Mr. Liddel. I figured you’d see it when you were coming up through the ivy.”
“No, didn’t see anything.”
“What’s that sound?”
“What sound Liberty?”
“It’s coming from your house?”
Diddlie turns to look back at her house.
“Listen…there! Hear it?”
“It’s the Red Queen I left her in her cage and she wants her morning fly around.”
“Oh your parrot! Can we go in and see her?”
“Not right now. There’s too much going on… I was thinking of you this morning. Liberty.”
“You were?”
“I’m trying out internet banking… I don’t really trust it but the teller talked me into it last week. Any way, you know, there’s passwords and security questions and all kinds of stuff. Then, you know, I click on this and then that and then five other things but it never does what I want, and you know what?”
“What, Diddlie ?”
“I called the help number.”
“The line was busy, right?”
“How did you guess, Lou?”
“Because when ever I call those places the voice says they have an exceptionally high call volume and ‘you are now tenth in the que’ or something.”
“Well, it was six thirty this morning, so I just waited until some one came on, probably after 7. Then the line went dead. So I called back, and after another wait, they wanted to know about my mortgage payments, my auto loan, my insurance, and just kept burrowing into my business.
“Right, its called help, but it is really sales.”
“Liberty, I wasn’t getting any help!”
“The company helps itself. The call is an ideal opportunity. Diddlie, you are a captive audience.”
Oh I know! I was so mad, and I am sorry, Liberty, but I just told them to go to hell!”
“Ah right! and…ah, did you solve your problem?”
“Hell no!”
