The Weather Station

 

I have a problem.

Well, I have lots of problems; but the problem de jur is this pack of dogs that are not ruining my life, but are surely running it.

For instance, I will be very inconvenienced today by the necessity of cleaning my house.  You see, a repair person is coming tomorrow; and I refuse to be mortified when he looks around and perceives a hoarder’s home.

I am not a hoarder; I’m not, I’m not I’m NOT!  Keeping nine animals in the lap of luxury does not qualify me as one of those pathetic elderly pensioners with nothing better to do than to cater to Fluffy and her twenty companions.

Back to the problem.

Do I leave twigs, shredded plastic, toys, toy fragments, dead birds and dogshit lying about?  Do I bury six or seven bones under the couch cushions?

I do not.  It’s the Mutt Brigade; and the Loki of the animal kingdom--Winston—the competition orange Balls of Fur.

Crap.  Another cleaning day looming ahead.  What am I?  Maids-A-Coming Incorporated?  What?

Crapoola.

Mabee I ought to bundle them all up and drive to Petsmart for Obedience School.  Yes!......No!......Wait!  No-no-no-no!  Practicality triumphs over impulse for once.

I see myself in Petsmart, sitting on one of those plastic chairs-in-a-circle, with five other pet owners and the in-house dog whisperer.  My six dogs are showing the rest of the class their penchant for mayhem, while Winston prowls the aisles looking for his next Fluffy victim to screw with.

Silliness aside, no animal of mine is entering a pet store on a string behind Fluffy; who has just tracked distemper, mange, fleas, tics, and intestinal worms over the threshold.

When you enter the Emergency Room with a hangnail, don’t you risk leaving with influenza, Beriberi or French Foreign Legionnaire’s disease or something?  How is your stupid exposure to the evils of a hospital any different to the evil that Little Fluff-fluff brings to the Pets-R-Us store?

Back to the problem.

(I keep making these interjections because some of you readers out there have complained that you can’t follow my reasoning.  Your first mistake is confusing my jibber-jabber for reasoning.  Can’t you perceive that insanity is King Incarnate around here? So stop your damn whining and carping!   Either read on or scroll away—your choice.)

Back to the problem.  Here is the kinda dysfunction I have to put up with:

1.   Momma: Un-housebroken and never will be; pig for treats, now overweight, going for morbidly obese

2.   Jypsi: Un-housebroken and doesn’t want to be; thief, runaway after squirrels, obsessive-compulsive disorder big time (see ‘squirrels’), squeaker, shrieker, leaper, little freaking pest

3.   Scooter: submissive urinater of carpets, sofas, bath mats and bed sheets: crotch sniffer, takes his walk like a lead dog running  the Iditarod

4.   Clancy: mentally challenged, chest-high leaper, toy hoarder, leash jerker, chickenshit

5.   Drumstick: nose licker, eternal attention seeker, dominatrix humper, all round little bitch, plays the cripple card with every passing stranger

6.   Goofy: sofa chewer, fabric chewer, bed hog, overeater, vet tech biter, dog killer, recalcitrant ‘I’ll do whatever the fuck I want’ artist

7.   Kali: lap sitter, laptop sitter, overly affectionate, Winston hater

8.   Miss Tree: agoraphobic, underly affectionate, Kali hater

9.   Winston: amoral hunter, dog chaser, dog teaser, closet sitter, attic prowler, Kali stalker (He is in thrall with her)

There is my problem: I don’t get no respect!  (My muse is whispering I should do a Rodney Dangerfield routine about here; but I need to get on with the monologue).

All these 600 word prologues pertaining to my pets, politicians, pokes and droll sarcasm have a purpose.  It is my way of cracking wise in dark places.  It is what I must do in preparation for gingerly drawing a single thread from the fishing-line-bird’s-nest of my memories in-country.

It forestalls my fear and guides me into overcoming it.

Some of my friends and I chose fear as a topic last night.  Using the premise that fear is a perception of events real or imagined, I sat, silent for once, and played on whether my fear was real…or imagined.

Placing my hand on a Bamboo Viper was real.  Considering the various consequences of that moment are imaginations.

Which is more terrifying?  Sigmund Freud would probably hold that imagined fear has more lasting impact on the mind.  My uneducated guess is that it depends on the experience evoking the fear.

This next story is so innocuous on the surface of it, that I must color the thread with the real fear I felt at the time; and the imagined fear it has harbored inside my soul ever since.  It pays homage to Tennessee William’s ‘memory’ plays, like Glass Menagerie: an illusion created from the author’s retention.

Here we go.

Earl came up to my hooch on one of our rare days off and plopped himself down on the double bed across from me, sitting in the solitary chair with a book and an open beer.  “Think you could get hold of one of the skimmers?” he asked. “Think maybe I can wipe my own ass?” I rejoined.  “Where do you want to go?”

I thought of where the Pearl might want to go: a taxi ride to the Stone Elephant side, over to Korean Piers for a look-see, down to the Son Han river ferry to fart around back and forth on the ferry boats.

The ferry crews knew us and were quite willing to let us take on their duty stations.  We would play Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn carrying gook civilians on the ferry while the duty crew played with their girlfriends and tried to hook up with more ‘girlfriends’.

“I got a bud of mine from the Mekong stationed at an outpost near the harbor mouth.  There’s two guys out there, my buddy and another guy.  They’re stuck for another two weeks before they get relieved for R and R.  They run out of cigarettes and pogey bait. Asked if I could run some out there to them.”

Young men are brainless twerps, by and large.  Ask any girl as she attempts to rearrange her pantyhose after yet another lustful grope for her virtue.

The blonde headed twerp from Texas answered the grease monkey twerp from Texas: “Sure, let me go tell Scott I’ll be out for a while.”  Crap, I thought; that puts the kibosh on an early start to tonight’s hooch party.  I never permitted beer on my boats and I never stoked a doogie in broad daylight.

I had principles.

Ten minutes later, the outboard warmed up, we set out for this so-called outpost.  “What they do out there?”  Over the engine noise, “Carl said they run a weather station.”

Weather station?  What the fuck?  But the twerps just took it on faith.  Twerps have a lot of faith, as a substitute for brains.  No mental exertion for faith; as in, “I just know she won’t wear her goddamn pantyhose tonight!”

And so, we rushed to the weather station.  It was farther out than I had ever been, with the exception of the Leper Colony.  It was a good three miles beyond where we anchored the YG-56 to take our toxic dump over the side.

We almost ran past it, the beachfront was so small.  I beached the skimmer and killed the motor. (In my dreams, I never kill the engine.  It is left running for a flying getaway from something crashing through the dark)

Carl and the other guy (another blank) came out to greet us.  They emerged from a hooch on stilts, no larger than my own.  I stared at the hooch.  I took in the jungle, which didn’t just surround it. The hooch appeared to be an outgrowth of the impenetrable green flora.  It took an instant longer to tune into the Johnny Weissmuller soundtrack broadcasting from…everywhere in there.

The two Robinson Crusoe’s shook hands and invited us inside. (Why aren’t you shouldering your M-16’s?  Can we look at your Claymore layout?  What else defends the perimeter? Where are your grenades, your flares? your ALAR’s?)

“Hey!  Look at this!”  Other Guy unpins a Polaroid print from the wall; hands it to me.  On the beach, is a Monitor Lizard stretched out next to a six foot shovel; it reaches past the shovel on both ends.  “We took that yesterday!” says Carl with the prideful grin of the Big Game Bwana.  They say no more, but I wonder if this isn’t more than a one-time bag.

Once a week? Every month? Every lunar cycle?  How often do you have to shoot a reptile large enough to swallow a grown pig or the two of you before the thrill of killing such a thing on your doorstep becomes passé?

Do you dress for the occasion de rigueur; or do you grab your rifle, locked and loaded; to run pell mell for the door in your skivvies, to answer a scratching from something obviously larger than a spider monkey? (What…or who…might come scratching at the door in the night?)

I smile and shake my head in familiar disbelief.  “Hey Earl, I gotta get the skimmer back.  Scott will have my ass.”  Earl for once in his life becomes totally compliant; begins making his goodbyes to Carl.

The Crusoe’s try to keep the desperation out of their tones, urging us to stay for chow, for beers-not-in-evidence, for a tongue-wag—anything. (I wouldn’t drink or drug out here.  I would never sleep out here)

Ignoring their pleas—protestations, really, we climb into the boat and shove off.  Before long, the Monitor Beach and the jungle hooch have passed from view.  We Texas twerps wordlessly speed for home and the warm safety net of the hooch.

I put some things together, later; when this twerp had a little moment of clarity.  Weather Station?  Where were the wind cups, the barometers, the rain gauges, the boxes of weather balloons; all the stuff one might expect to see at such a facility?

We left and noticed halfway back the cartons of cigarettes and bags of candy still stored under the console.  They hadn’t even asked for them.  We hadn’t really thought about them, in our survivalist panic to get the hell out of there.

I reviewed their faces, their body language in my mind.  I thought I could see an encroaching lunacy there; but I would be the last to draw any conclusions in fucking Viet Nam about another’s state of mind.

 I gave Carl and the other guy no more thought until 1993, while watching Jurassic Park: the scene with a goat tied to the stake, as bait to bring the T-Rex forth from the jungle.

Then, I thought about them. (What were they doing out there?  What?)