The day after Thanksgiving, Marty rode over the hill with Marge and Magical Michael to help out at the pet store. This was traditionally a big shopping day, and Pat was having a huge sale on animals. She only discounted the animals – not the supplies – because as she put it, “More pets means more pet food.” Fish were half off, too, and when Marty asked which half the customers would get – heads or tails, she quipped, “I don’t care,” lighting another cigarette with the butt of the one before it, “As long as they buy an aquarium to put ‘em in.”
As soon as Marty arrived, Captain Hook screeched, “Mart-e-e-e!!” The old buzzard hadn’t seen the long-haired boy in a while, but immediately recognized him, raising the feathers on the back of his neck in anticipation of a scratch.
“Hookie-e-e-e!!” Marty screeched back, as loud as he could. Michael groaned and disappeared into the bathroom to burn a bowl of herb before facing the world. Marty set to work getting all the critters fed and cleaned up, so that having a pet would resemble interior decorating more than farming. Pat scowled through a haze of smoke at the ledger she kept under the counter, where she recorded every penny that crawled, hopped, or flew in and out of the store. Her son Bob came in late, full of the ragged, neurotic type of vim and vigor that results from staying up all night doing cocaine. He inspected everything as if he’d done all the work himself, and pronounced the store ready for the holiday season.
Michael tried to slip quietly in the back door, but Captain Hook outed him. “Mikey-y-y-y!!”
Bob looked up from across the store where he was unlocking the front door. “You old hippie, you look worse than me!” Bob thought of himself as the tough Texas cowboy type, but lived a ragged lifestyle closer to that of a carney. He was tall and muscular, with a brown mustache that looked fake, a receding hairline, and a beer belly that bulged out of the bottom of his t-shirt. “C’mon, let’s go fix that in ‘my’ office.” It wasn’t his office at all while Pat owned the store, but he never missed a chance to be hyperbolic.
“I ain’t dead yet!” Pat yelled and playfully threw a pencil at their backs disappearing into the tunnel-like darkness at the back of the store. When they returned, they were both primed to chop firewood, or dig a ditch, but had to settle for waiting on customers.
The store was busy as soon as it opened, mostly with aquarium enthusiasts who wanted to snatch up the best fish at half price. Pat scowled at them from behind the counter (when they weren’t looking), because the newspaper forgot to put a clause in the ad that should have read “Half off fish – with the purchase of an aquarium.” She got in an argument with a man who wanted all his supplies at half price, too, and then she stalked back to her office to call and chew a chunk off “that newspaper ad salesman.”
Captain Hook got agitated like he always did when the store was full of too many people, and from his perch right next to the counter, he started screeching so somebody would put him out of the way. Nothing happened. Irritated that all the humans were too busy to attend to his view of how things should be, he screamed, “Motherfucker!” over and over, until Bob snatched him up quickly and hustled him back to the office where there was another perch.
The old scallywag of a parrot didn’t like the rough handling and bit him. Bob yelled, “Ow! Motherfucker!”
“Guess we know where he learned that from,” Michael drawled, and everyone laughed except Bob, who took longer than he should have, and was sweating and grinding his teeth when he came back.
The store remained busy all day, and while Pat’s mood gradually improved as the money rolled in, Bob’s attitude became more edgy and impatient. He yelled at Marty when he didn’t fetch what he needed fast enough, and gnawed on the ends of his fingers, which was really gross because of the sheer variety of bacteria with which they had come in contact all day. When he carelessly closed the cash register drawer on Pat’s hand, she blew a gasket.
“Robert, you get your coke fiend ass out of here before I rip a new hole in it!” the words blasted out of her mouth like bird shot. Marty had never seen her so angry, or Bob so afraid. She was in pain, and filled with a swelling rage that made her appear twice as large as her shrinking son, and the fierce mama lioness chased her squealing cub right out the back door. Customers fled in haste, and employees stood around awkwardly, staring at her broad back in awe while the flies buzzed in and out of their open mouths. When she turned around, they all immediately started cleaning something, like a choreographed scene in a movie.
After closing the store, Marty and his mom left before anyone else… without Michael. He could tell she and Michael had had a fight, and besides, Bob still had more cocaine, which made it easier for Michael to stay. There was an unspoken chemical bond between coke buddies, stipulating that once they begin snorting, they must not cease until all the cocaine within a 10-mile radius had been consumed. When the real stuff ran out, any white powder that vaguely resembled cocaine would do. Marge and Marty didn’t want to be around for that debacle, even though they were repeatedly invited. The fiends were trying to assuage the guilt they felt for being maniacs, but were actually hoping they wouldn’t have to share any drugs. Or, at least that’s what showed on their sweaty, anxious faces after Pat went home.
Being that the day after Thanksgiving was some sort of unofficial capitalist semi-holiday, Marge dropped Marty off at home, and went straight out again to dredge the “Slodge.” The Forest Knolls Lodge in those days was several social strata beneath a dive bar, so Marty gave it a name that described the variety of mucking that went on inside. Nothing good ever happened when his mom went to the Slodge. She’d either come home sloppy drunk and depressed, sobbing at the edge of her bed while trying to remove her shoes, or she’d return with a new boyfriend that would be lucky to last a week. Vaguely, Marty wondered which “mom” would come home that night, and found that he didn’t really care.
He collected several roaches Michael had left in various ashtrays, and got stoned in a most unsatisfactory way on their remains. Then he drew cartoons and read one of the paperback Louis L’Amour books Bob had given him. Instantly, he was hooked on the Western format of traveling through wilderness, handling danger as it came, and prevailing in the end. The vivid descriptions of the rugged American back country, studded with insights on how to survive in the wild, appealed to Marty on many levels. First, it was a real eye-opener to discover that the beauty of nature could be described in very simple terms. Next, it awakened in him a sense of wanting to explore the wild places that few men had seen. Those cowboy books were predictable, simple in prose, and clumsy in plot, but there was an undeniable authenticity about them that deserved careful reading and consideration.
The next day he got up early (as usual) and enjoyed the stillness of the forest from the deck outside, before the weekend parade of cars began on the highway. Every dawn was a new beginning, and a chance to overcome the darkness and return to the light. Marge wasn’t up yet, so he still didn’t know what her mood would be. Her truck had knocked over one of the garbage cans in the driveway, and Marty picked up its contents. Later, he noticed some activity across the creek that indicated new neighbors moving in to the house they now called “the shipwreck.” Julie was out back with her horse, so he wandered outside for a better look. There was a very animated short woman with frizzy red hair yelling at the moving guys while they carried boxes and furniture back and forth. “Excuse me! Are those leather belts you’re wearing?” She nipped at their heels like a feisty Pomeranian. “You shouldn’t be adorning your body with a piece of animal skin,” she yapped, “How would you like it if somebody tore a piece off your body and used it to hold up their pants?” The moving guys were practically running back and forth, trying to elude her acrid pestering and finish as quickly as possible so they could escape.
Marty was standing there with a big grin on his face from watching the real-life cartoon unfold, when she noticed him across the creek, and redirected her diatribe. “You, boy!” She pointed a skinny arm out of the lumpy natural fiber sweater she wore, which appeared to be woven from lichen and moss. “Do you see what these men are wearing?” Her face reminded him of a monkey, and was stern and willful like a lawyer; not at all the way a new neighbor introducing herself might behave. Then she saw Manuka in the back yard. “Do you have a permit for that horse?” She was so comically belligerent (like Yosemite Sam) that Marty burst out laughing, which incensed her even more.
“I’m going to report you to the authorities, young man!” Her face flushed crimson. “A horse should be roaming free, not fenced in like that!” Frustrated in her hostile righteousness, and hemmed in by the creek, she stamped her little feet and yelled faster and faster as he walked away, trying to get in as many words as possible before he was out of hearing range. Marty was still shaking his head when he reached the deck where Otter was nursing a cup of coffee, and he voiced the caption for the cartoon.
“There goes the neighborhood.”
Inside the house, his mom was having breakfast with some guy he hadn’t seen before. Marty was getting used to meeting new crew members who randomly beamed down from the Enterprise. This one reminded him of a friendly, bearded dwarf from The Lord of the Rings, except he had thick glasses. “Hi, I’m Tim,” he said quickly, “That’s short for Tim.” Marty liked him right away.
Marty helped himself to some fried potatoes. “There’s a new neighbor across the creek,” he reported, “She’s a nut job. She was yelling about animal skins, and wants to arrest Julie for having a horse, and she’s dressed like a tree. I guess that’s why she’s nuts.”
Tim laughed, “Hey, I like this kid.” He turned to Marty and arched an inquisitive eyebrow with a gleam in his eye. “And what would you call her?”
“The Animal Witch.” The name just came to him, and it stuck.
The next day was Sunday, and Tim was still around, which was a good sign his mom liked him. He made a show about chopping some wood for his meal – as he put it – and his cheeks turned red from the exertion of trying to carry armloads of firewood with his pot belly getting in the way. He refused any help, and proudly stood and surveyed his work afterward, as an excuse to try and get his breath back. Then he remembered something. “Hey, we saw the Animal Witch at the ‘Slodge’ last night,” he intimated, “You wouldn’t believe it if you saw it. She had a third eye painted right in the middle of her forehead, and was putting hexes on everyone.”
Marty guffawed in astonishment. “Oh man, she really is a witch!”
“Or a kook,” Tim continued in earnest, “She wouldn’t stop, but the bartender didn’t care because people kept laughing and buying her drinks, and it was hilarious.” He had the storytelling acumen of a dwarf, too. “It was like watching a zany comedian on open mic night. She got so drunk and angry she climbed up on the table to ‘rescue’ the deer head they have on the wall.” He laughed and described the scene with his hands. “Then she fell off and they had to call an ambulance. She’s okay, though. She was yelling at the ambulance drivers for having a leather medical bag.” His eyes crinkled in merriment behind his thick glasses, and he rubbed his hands together gleefully with the conclusion of the tale.
“Wow.” Marty was speechless. Only images could convey what he was thinking. He got some paper and a pencil, and drew a cartoon of a witch flying through a bar on a broomstick.
“Say, that’s pretty good,” Tim chuckled, scratching his beard. “You ever think about selling these?”
“Only 25 hours a day,” Marty replied dryly, and they cracked up. Tim was holding his belly with both hands as he laughed, and that somehow made Marty think of Santa Claus, and that soon they would celebrate their first Christmas at the Rusty Bucket Ranch. Then he remembered they hadn’t heard from Good Ol’ Dad over the entire Thanksgiving weekend. It must have been a particularly difficult holiday for him, but Marty only felt sorry for the waitresses at Denny’s. He wondered if their father would invite them over for another painful present opening ceremony. He couldn’t wait to see the face of G.O.D. when he had to drive his Porsche over that hungry dirt road, which ate small cars for breakfast!
