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Lullaby Adventures

Henry sat on a bench on his front porch, picking the stray hairs in his beard.  The three am breeze ruffled his thinning hair.  His butt cheeks spilled through a hole where a wooden slat had once been.  He stared at all the tan houses with their carpet lawns

Henry spent many nights like this, unable to sleep. 

Two boys dressed in black tiptoed onto the Russells’ yard across the street.  They each carried several rolls of toilet paper.

“What on Earth?”  Henry mumbled.

He took a deep breath, opened his mouth, then closed it again. He stood and dodged behind one of the pillars on his porch.  He watched the boys coat the Russells’ trees with the white clingy streams of tissue.

Lately, Henry talked a lot about wanting to spice-up his life.  He mentioned hobby ideas, like re-building that ’67 Cougar he always wanted; but Craig Overton, three doors down, had already rebuilt a ’57 Chevy. He even joked with a co-worker about having an affair but decided no one wanted him.

The boys hurled a few rolls of TP over the house.  A light splashed across the Russels’ yard from their kitchen window.

“Watch out boys,” Henry whispered.

The boys ran down the street.  They dashed behind an Explorer parked beside the road.  Henry held his breath.  The light flicked off. The boys popped-up from behind the SUV and ran toward a community park.

Henry stood behind the pillar for a few minutes.  He watched the toilet paper fly around in the breeze.  He smiled, walked inside, and climbed back into bed. 

Henry fell sound asleep.

The next morning, he woke early and sat down for breakfast in his blue terry-cloth robe.

“Dad?” his son Justin asked with pleading nine-year-old eyes.  “Can you take me to the skate rink today?  It’s Mark Tyler’s birthday party.”

“Yeah, sure,” Henry said. “Clair, when you were a kid did you ever play ding-dong ditch?”

“Ding-dong what?” she called out over the splashing and spurting of hot bacon grease. 

“Never mind.”

 “Don’t forget to water the tulips after you mow the lawn.”

“They’re not tulips, Clair.  They’re periwinkles.  The Overtons have tulips, the Joneses have geraniums, and the Russells have petunias.”

“Whatever,” she shot back, rolling her eyes.  “Just give them a squirt.  And the hedges need trimming.  Make sure they’re round, not square.  What came over you last month?”  She pulled crispy slivers of bacon from the pan and piled them onto a plate.

“Yeah, what was I thinking?  Every house in the neighborhood has shrubbery shaped into round puffs.  Why would we want to be different?”

Clair served Henry three eggs, a slice of buttery toast, and two pieces of bacon.  Henry drowned the eggs in ketchup and smothered the bread with blackberry jam.  Justin hardly took his eyes off his dad.  Henry took a drink of coffee and Justin sipped his orange juice, careful to put his glass down the exact moment as his dad.

After breakfast, Henry began his Saturday chores.  He mowed, watered, clipped and swept along with the other husbands in the neighborhood.  Occasionally, someone let his mower die to talk to the guy next door.  They commented on the weather or some new fertilizer, and then went back to work.  Henry rarely engaged in chitchat.

He chuckled as Mr. Russell, across the street, picked damp streamers of toilet tissue off his trees and house.

Henry offered some assistance.

“Those damn kids,” Mr. Russell complained.  “They don’t have respect for anything.”

“Who do you think did it?”  Henry shook his head.

“I don’t know.  Last week, they got Fred Dover.  A week before that, they busted out Martha Gallagher’s car windows.  Lots of destruction going on these days.”

Justin ran out of their house, the door slammed behind him.

“It’s time, Dad! Hurry! I don’t want to be late.”

***

That night, Henry waited till Clair’s breathing slowed.  He climbed out of bed, careful not to bounce too much.

He opened the garage door and grabbed his hedge clippers.  The wooden handle slipped out of his hands and the blade stuck in the lawn.  He pulled it out of the ground with trembling hands.

He made for the Smiths’ house, like a bad actor in a TV mystery.  He hid behind trees and vehicles along the way, scanning the area for potential night owls among the neighbors.  After this stealthy stroll past three houses, he reached his victim’s home.

Henry worked quickly, chopping the shrubbery with clumsy jabs.  Mr. Smith had trimmed them into big green puffs.  Henry sculpted them into sharp triangles of all different sizes.  Next, he lopped off the red geraniums blooming along the sidewalk.

“Take that,” he whispered.

Henry opened the fly of his cotton pajamas and relieved himself onto one of the Smiths’ faded garden gnomes.  He strutted home and performed a touchdown dance on his porch.

“What a rush,” he exhaled.

He climbed into bed and slept soundly for the second night in a row.

Over the next few weeks, Henry thuged-around the neighborhood almost every night.  He launched an egg-the-car mission on Tuesday. Operation “Glue a Mailbox Shut” went down Wednesday.  He dumped several economy-size jugs of bubble bath into someone’s swimming pool on Friday. 

He didn’t merely sleep.  He hibernated.  No snoring.  No tossing. No turning.

At the plastic molding company, where he supervised hundreds of employees, people complained he spent a lot of time in his office, staring at the walls and laughing out loud.

One Sunday, after church, he hummed through the house and kissed Clair while she talked on the phone to her mother.  He played “Mortal Kombat” with Justin. 

Justin told a visiting friend he worried his dad might be sick.

Clair kept asking, “What’s gotten into you?”

“A good night’s sleep,” his only response.

When Clair and Justin were tucked-in and securely fastened to dreamland, his plan went into action.  He found his electric hair clippers, Clair’s red hair dye, and a package of weenies.  He slid open the heavy glass patio door and stepped out.

He strolled out the gate and into the alley and snuck over to the Martins’ house on the next block.  When he reached their yard, he slid one of the weenies out of the plastic package. He took a deep breath, and slowly opened the gate.  Roxy, a white miniature poodle, released a sharp bark as she bounced around sporadically.

“Here poochy, poochy,” Henry whispered.  “It’s okay.  Uncle Henry’s gonna give you a little makeover.”

He tore the weenie in two and threw one to Roxy.  The poodle swallowed it whole.  She leapt to him and stood on her hind legs to beg for more.  Henry knelt down and opened the hair dye bottle.  He squirted the entire bottle on Roxy’s bony back then fed her the rest of the weenie.

“Haaaaaaaaackkkkkk.”

The poodle erupted into a ghastly hacking noise.

Henry jumped backwards and stared at Roxy.

Then another “Haaaaaaaackkkkk.”

 It sounded as if this demented little dog was summoning dead doggy spirits.

  “Haaaaaaackkk.”

Henry dropped the weenies, hair dye, and trimmers in the dirt and began the Heimlich Maneuver on the peppermint poodle, smearing red dye all over the front of his bathrobe.  The dog let out an even more disturbing noise as the back porch light turned on and Mr. Martin stepped into the backyard.

“Roxy, is that you girl?” Mr. Martin called with a shaky voice.

Henry, on his knees in his red-stained robe with Roxy in his arms, froze. 

“Henry? What in the hell…?”

Henry stammered, “Umm… Tom… it’s not what it looks like.”

“What in the hell are you doing to my dog?”

Henry gave Roxy one more squeeze, sending the weenie flying across the freshly cut grass.

Mr. Martin yelled, “I’m gonna kick your ass, you sick son-of-a-bitch.”  He grabbed a baseball bat and lunged at Henry.

Henry ran.

Later, the police knocked on Henry’s door.  Mr. Martin stood there holding a near-red poodle.  Clair locked herself in the bathroom and cried.

For a few days after the incident with Roxy, Henry refused to make contact with the neighbors.  He didn’t go to church. He made Justin take out the trash and collect the mail. 

Then one Saturday, Henry stepped-out and cranked up the mower.  He mowed in a circular motion, leaving a swirly track in the lawn.  Henry moved like a contestant in a gardener’s relay race.  He swept all the clippings into the street instead of scooping it into a bag.

The other neighborhood men collected into a group in front of Mr. Russel’s house.  They laughed, pointed and shook their heads.

Henry grabbed the hedge clippers and trimmed the bushes into squares.  He threw the clippers into his lawn and turned to the group of neighbors across the street. 

He flipped them off and yelled, “You dull, conforming bastards.  You’re all a bunch of tools!”

Henry walked inside his home with a brilliant grin.