David Ohle - The Pisstown Chaos

"There's a stinker down there," she told the yard man. "Id like you to get busy and dig him up. Well take him to the Rest Home."

"I don't want any part of that business," the yard man said, fussy after being awakened from a nap atop a peat pile in the potting shed. "I told your grandmother, I said, `If a stiff comes up on this property, I'll play no part in getting rid of it.' When that happens, it's time to call in a professional disposal service. I suggest you do the same."

Rather than hire a service and squander the money her grandmother had left behind for maintenance, Ophelia took a shovel and pick and began excavating beneath the main house into the mystery tunnels. After pushing through the first dark, narrow passages, her further investigation disclosed branching, hand-dug tunnels, leading nowhere. She crawled into one of them, thinking she heard digging, and found the stinker she suspected was there.

Startled by Ophelia's candlelight, the stinker dropped his wom spade. "Look at me," he said. "I'm exhausted, dirt-covered, half naked, half dead, and I'm just digging these blind tunnels."

Ophelia pinched her nostrils dosed and tried to speak in a calm voice. "You come out with me. I'll have my servant dean you up and fit you with some of my old clothes. You'll be sent to the Rest Home. They'll take care of you there very humanely."

"You don't like my smell, do you?"

"That's right, I don't, but I understand how difficult the stinker life can be. When you get to the Rest Home, your needs will be taken cane of. I'm trying to be nice to you. I've been listening to the chum-scrape, chunk-scrape of your shovel for months and listening to the cook complain about the stink making the draperies smell."

"You got any urpmilk?" the stinker asked.

"Sorry, no."

"All right, then. Another time I came up in Istanbul. The Turks packed me in resin, wrapped me in loth and sent me by canal boat to the demarcation port on the other side of the Bosporus."

"I respect them for that. You do have your sympathizers. Now, for the last time, come out with me. You need to get to the Rest Home. We can't properly care for you here."

"What time is it? Is the sun up or down? I don't like to go up in the bright of day."

"Don't be afraid. The sun is going down."

Persuaded finally by the promise of an outdoor hose-bath, the stinker hobbled into the evening light. "Get me a walking stick before I fall."

Ophelia found a broken rake handle in the potting shed. The yard man, squatting in a corner and moving his bowels into a slop bucket, said, "Good God, that thing stinks."

"I'm going to hose it off and pedal it over to the Home."

"Not soon enough," the yard man said, wiping himself with a handfulo f peat.

When Ophelia hosed the stinker off, the few pieces of rotted clothing that were intact washed away. - — - - — - -

The butler said, "I'll get some hand-me-downs and help the poor creature put them on."

"Please get my Q-ped out of the garage."

"Yes, as soon as I can."

Ophelia struggled to make eye contact with the stinker, who kept turning away. "You're the third one we've dug up this year," she said. "Do you have a name?"

"I forget. Chuck, maybe."

The stinker leaned against the potting shed and continued his laments as Ophelia clipped his long fingernails with the yard man's pruning shears. "After floating up under the Great Salt Lake I was nearly cooked in the hot, stagnant water. Everything tastes salty now."

"You don't say."

"Then there was my coming up in the Heritage Area, so depressed all I did was lie in the gutter like a log of driftwood. People spit on me. In the mornings, if I felt enough hope, I'd go over to the Red Cross kitchen and get some urpmilk, then go right on back to my gutter. If it rained, I floated down the street. Later, in Pisstown, I built myself a cart and sold toilet goods. I would roll the City Moon into a cone and call out to pedestrians, 'I got petroleum jelly, I got witch hazel, Pearly Pink tooth powder, floating soap, talcum by the pound. I got it all.' Then, when I came up in Bum Bay, I always shopped at the Hookerite Market on Gravesend Avenue. I was on a pedal bus going there one day when I was bitten by an enraged American. 'You stiff! You stiff!' he screamed, then stepped on my foot, injuring my plantar wart. Not finished yet, he pounced on me and bit me in the face. I tell you, the punctures almost drained what's left of my life away."

"Why do you go on and on like that? None of it is of any real interest to me."

"All those years of frosty discomfort, alone, trying to dig our way out. We like companionship. We like camaraderie once we find it."

"You'll find that at the Rest Home, I'm sure."

"Will they have urpmilk there?"

"It's very likely."

"That's good. That's good."

Red rolled the Q-ped out of the garage. "Here it is, Miss. I've oiled the chains and greased the sprockets."

"All right, Chuck," Ophelia said, "You look more presentable. Let's get you to the Home."

As Ophelia pedaled out of the estate grounds and toward the Home, the stinker's bare, tattered feet went round and round with the pedals, but the legs were too weak to contribute much to the effort. "Thank you, Miss. It's good to be up on the surface, walking my body around again."

Just ahead the Rest Home was the picture of warmth and comfort. Gel cans burned in every window, Hookerite Sisters of Charity waited at the curb in starched whites to grect new arrivals.

Ophelia patted the stinker on the shoulder. "The Sisters will take good care of you." She stopped pedaling and let the car coast to a stop. "Here we are. There's the Home."

One of the Sisters approached the car carrying a tall glass of urpmilk. She unstrapped the stinker's feet from the pedals and helped him out of the car. "Here you are, my friend. Have a drink before we go in and get you situated."

"He came up under my house, Sister," Ophelia said. "His name is Chuck, he thinks."

"It's quite an act of kindness to bring him here. We'll look after him as long as we can."

"And then?"

The Sister whispered, "He'll be put down humanely."

The stinker drank the urpmilk in a few eager gulps. "Oh, that was good."

"Goodbye, Chuck," Ophelia said. "I'll come and visit."

"Remind me to tell you about the time I came up under the Indiana prairie in the middle of a grasshopper plague. The crops were ruined. All the animals were eaten. It was the worst famine you ever saw."

"I will. I look forward to hearing that."

Ophelia watched him being escorted safely into the Home, then applied her aching legs to the short but uphill pedal back to the estate. When she arrived, both the butler and the yard man were waiting at the entry gate with fresh news.

"I was in the persimmon orchard today," the yard man reported. "I could hear digging. There's another one coming up there. I'm afraid there's one under the breezeway, too."

Ophelia went inside and fixed herself a bowl of urpmeal while Red lit the pellet stove in her bedroom.

"I'm going to sleep late in the morning," she instructed as she spooned the last of her urpmeal from the bowl. "Plan on a late breakfast. After that, I suppose we have some digging to do."

"Yes, Miss, as you say."

"Have Peters lay out picks and shovels, galoshes, and pairs of gloves."

"Yes'm."

"We'll start with the one in the orchard."

A neighborhood in Bum Bay lay in awe and wonderment yesterday until the hagfish, which had gushed from a storm drain with a burst of water, had spent its force and crumbled into the gutter. The yellow, surous mist, which came in plumes from its mouth, condensed above the startled onlookers and the sun beat down through it with multiplied ferocity.