James McKew

I’m standing in the middle of a weed-choked backyard. The August heatwaves shimmered before me like the air had turned to quicksilver.

“Jim, you really know how to pick ‘em,” I said to myself.

Amos invited Honey Bee and myself to his son’s birthday party. I said yes because Amos is willing to go along with my silly ideas from time to time.

Honey bee, of course, questioned my sanity, asking if I was really intending on going.

“Heck yeah, I go to every toddler party I’m invited to. My job is to bring the booze.”

She did one of those things where she lowers her chin and keeps her eyes fixed on me, never blinking. She said, “Lil’ Sampson is turning four years old. You don’t bring hard liquor to a toddler party.”  

“The booze isn’t for him, it’s for me. I’ve seen that kid turn grown men into blubbering slobs. No, sir, that kid’s a bona fide psycho-billy, anti-hero who can sprout wings on demand and fly around the room.”

Hearing this, Honey Bee gave me a different look, one like a parent waiting for a child to finish a lie, then she said. “Sprout wings? There you go again with those idiotic exaggerations. Always making stuff up.”

“You’ll see, I told her…you’ll see. I promise you that kid will be hovering over the crowd.”

Out at the curb of Amos’ house, his wife had tied colorful birthday balloons to the mailbox, giving the place a festive feel, but in the backyard, it was a different story.

In the middle of a dirt patch stood a rust-covered fifty-gallon barrel with a piece of chain-link fencing laid over the top. Smoke billowed up through the charred remains of a half dozen blackened wieners. Next to the barrel was a green wading pool that sat three grown women, all large, all in colorful Lycra swimsuits that gave the impression that the world’s largest Easter eggs had grown celluloid legs. Every time they moved, water would slosh over the pool rim, turning the backyard into a mudhole. Suntan oil mingled and merged with spilled transmission fluid and engine oil, giving the ground a bio-hazardous shimmer in the sunlight.

From an open window blasted Mariachi music, the trumpets so loud they shook the paint off the walls. A long-haired mutt of a dog wove through the crowd, eating burnt wieners and stopping to lick the suntan lotion off the bather’s faces. A group of naked toddlers ran loose inside the fence, pausing every so often to pee in the pool. To top it off, Lil’ Sampson, the birthday boy himself, stood on the rooftop, his wispy blonde hair blowing in the breeze as he tossed rocks the size of melons at the pool ladies down below. Not a single one of the women told him to knock it off for fear of his violent temper. I looked at Honey Bee, “Sorry, but we just stepped into a post-apocalyptic postcard that was meant as a joke, but unfortunately, was now all too real.” 

She turned on her heel and said she’d wait in the car until whenever I was ready.

“You’re not going anywhere,” I whispered, gripping her arm tightly. “You take off and who knows what’ll happen next. They’ll probably try to roast me over the fire.”

About then, a voice yelled “fore!” from somewhere in the garage as a dart whizzed by my ear. The dart arched across the yard and stuck into a life-size cardboard cutout of the local game warden that was taped to the side of the house. I recognized the warden as Smoothie Gunderson, a five-eight, three-hundred-pound charmer of a man. The dart caught Smoothy dead center in his manhood. Smoothy took it alright, but I flinched hard as the tip sank all the way in.

“Why, hey there,” Amos called to us, poking his head out the garage door. He came right over and wrapped his arms around Honey Bee in a friendly embrace that lasted long enough for me to count to ten Mississippi.

“That’s enough,” I said, swatting him off her.

He gave her a wink, stepped back, and pulled his dart from Smoothie’s crotch.

“Wanna tell us how you came to have a life-sized Smoothie in your backyard?”

The story was that Smoothie had recently arrested Amos on foreign terrorism charges. Amos explained that he captured the cellphone picture of Smoothie just seconds before Amos found himself face down and handcuffed to the bed of Smoothie’s truck.

“Why the terrorism charges?” I asked.

Amos eyed us suspiciously while grabbing a can of Schlitz from the depths of the wading pool, shaking the water off, and popping the top. He said, “If I tell ya, you won’t be able to claim plausible deniability at the trail. You sure you wanna know?”

Apparently, Amos had spent the last two winters performing an illegal tagging operation using Canadian Geese. He would go out to the river, like the local hunters do, but instead of shooting birds out of the sky and cooking them, he nailed them with a tranquilizer gun and placed a single steel band around each bird’s leg, similar to the U.S. Fish and Game bird surveys except that Amos was running the world largest bingo tournament using tagged geese instead of numbered ping-pong balls. You see, hunters from all over the country were willing to send him a hundred dollars apiece to enter the contest and see if they could get B-I-N-G-O by shooting the geese.  

Checks were rolling in, birds were dropping, a few winners were announced, and Amos figured he was maybe two years away from quitting his job and retiring to South America when a nincompoop from Bismark, North Dakota, accidentally sent his bingo band numbers to Fish and Game and tipped them off. The feds began an investigation into the mysterious bands and traced them back to Amos. After months of surveillance, Fish and Game fell under the spell of believing Amos was a foreign operative engaged in an under-the-radar campaign to send bird flu-infected geese into North America to cull the American poultry industry.

We all looked at Smoothy, his sweaty hair pasted to his forehead. Amos gritted his teeth and wacked another dart at Smoothie’s manhood just for good measure. The wacking sound made my knees snap together like a clamshell.

I asked if Smoothie had seen the cardboard image of himself.

No, and he never will. I got another six months of community service to go, I don’t need him finding excuses to add more time to it.