To Squeeze a Prairie Dog Read online

  “Everyone, listen up! This here is J. D. Wiswall, originally from Brady, Texas, now your new coworker here in Unit 3. He will be sitting at Melvin’s old desk.” Melvin Tell retired a few weeks before, after working for the State of Texas for thirty-three years and developing a horrendous case of carpal tunnel syndrome so severe that it rendered his hands into useless claws. He was glad to retire although he knew he would miss the camaraderie of his coworkers. “J. D. is full-time, not a contractor.”

  “G’ day,” Rita said, waving at J. D. She sat at the desk directly behind Melvin’s—J. D.’s desk now—nestled in front of windows on the wall facing the outside world. She was a black woman of portly proportions and a grandmotherly demeanor, her black and white hair neatly done in a shiny coif that resembled a small helmet of some sort. Her smile was bright and infectious while her clothes revealed that she was a lot older than J. D., the clothing’s style looking well-suited for the late 1970s or early 1980s, around the time J. D. was born.

  “Howdy!” said Deborah, a white woman of similar age and size to Rita, yet with a more boisterous hairdo of auburn and brown, lifting from her scalp with stiff peaks like a pile of meringue on a lemon pie. Her desk was also in front of the windows and to the left of Rita’s. One of the panes was cracked open, allowing the outside breeze and an occasional leaf to come drifting into the office. “Glad to meet ya. And this is Conchino,” she said, raising her hand to the young man sitting at the desk in front of her. “He doesn’t talk much.”

  Conchino appeared to be about J. D.’s age, young and in his twenties. He stood up with his hands at his side, like Frankenstein’s monster—tall and doughy and thick around the neck and arms—wearing a San Antonio Spurs T-shirt, baggy jeans, a burly, black leather belt, and high-top sneakers, like the uniform of a street thug, his hair shorn close to his scalp, and a spider web tattooed on the side his neck. He was of Japanese and Mexican descent and almost tall enough for his head to scrape the ceiling. He tilted his head back to greet J. D., as if to say, “I see you.” Then he sat back down behind his desk and continued to enter data on his computer.

  “See?” Deborah said. “He doesn’t talk much.”

  “He barely says a damn word,” Rita said, snickering. “But don’t let that fool ya. He’s a good boy.”

  “All right, all right,” Brent said. “Enough about Conchino and his lack of communication skills.” The attention from the others pleased Conchino and he smiled slyly as he continued to type. “Does anyone need anything before I go?”

  “Where are you going now?” Rita said, adjusting the papers on her desk.

  “I have to go talk to the Big Boss,” he said.

  “What about J. D.?” Deborah said.

  “What about him?”

  “Who is going to show him what to do?”

  “Thanks for volunteering, Deborah,” Brent said, opening the door to the small office. “I’m sure you will do a great job training J. D.” He quickly left before she could protest, the heavy wood door slowly closing by the spring-tension closer mounted at the top, then slamming at the last second, as it always did.

  “That son of a gun!” Deborah said, adjusting her chair so she could continue working. “J. D., sweetheart, why don’t you sit at your desk and make yourself at home. There’s not much to show you now. We’re almost done with our day’s workload anyway.”

  “OK,” J. D. said as he set his lunch box of afternoon snacks on his new desk and then sat down. His office chair was set too low for him to sit comfortably at his desk so he tried adjusting the seat with the levers underneath the cushion, but to no avail. The metal levers clicked and clacked, causing the seat to descend lower than it already was.

  “That seat never worked right for Melvin,” Rita said, typing again. “If you’re lucky, Mr. Baker will get you a new one. But I doubt it.”

  All three were entering data again, like they were when J. D. had first arrived. The sound of their keyboards clickity-clacking, the cadence of the keys, made a plastic thwack that was hypnotizing.

  J. D. examined his ancient wood desk, opening empty drawers on the left and right sides and then closing them—an errant paper clip or ballpoint pen here and there—then felt the cold, wood desktop with the palms of his hands. The last drawer he opened was the middle drawer, one for pens and pencils and papers. Inside, it was empty except for a line of sugar ants marching the width of the drawer, emerging from a tiny hole in the crease at the right of the drawer and then disappearing into thin air on the opposite side. He slowly closed the middle drawer, not disturbing the ants. On the desktop sat a sleeping computer, a metal document holder (for holding papers upright to be read), and a telephone. One of the bottom drawers was deep enough for his lunch box so he sat it in there. He looked around the office as the other three worked.

  “You can look around if you’d like,” Deborah said.

  “Feast your eyes about, my boy!” Rita said, then cackled.

  J. D. stood from his low-riding office chair, then walked over to the table where the dot-matrix printers belched paper into neat piles, the result of the data being entered by his three coworkers. Each printer sat behind a deep, metal basket where the paper piled inside, the ribbon housed within the yellowed plastic printers zipping left and right as the data seared onto the striped paper. The printers squawked a terrible racket, accompanying the clickity-clack of the keyboards in the office buzz. At the left end of the table, a blue-tinted, clear glass cookie jar sat, halfway filled with cookies. Conchino lurched to the table as J. D. examined it, quickly procuring a cookie from the antique jar and then sitting back down, eating the cookie while typing—both of his hands on the keyboard as he chewed the cookie with his gash of a mouth.

  J. D. noticed a bulletin board above the printers. It was covered with an assortment of fliers, brochures, and notices, many of which advertised nearby restaurants and cafes and pubs, their menus catering to the measly budgets of the thousands of underpaid state employees in the surrounding blocks.

  “The burger place is pretty good,” Deborah said, not looking away from her computer screen as she typed. “If that’s your kind of thing. Do you like to eat out or bring your lunch?”

  “I like to bring my lunch,” J. D. said.

  “You must like to watch your weight then. That’s why you’re so skinny.”

  “We bring our lunch, too,” Rita said. “Why we not skinny?” She cackled again.

  “Good question!” Deborah blurted.

  One notice on the bulletin board caught J. D.’s eye, printed in glossy color on speckled paper with a blue award ribbon attached to the bottom right. It read with gold embossed letters at the top:

  STATE EMPLOYEES COST-SAVINGS SUGGESTION PROGRAM

  $10,000 REWARD

  For the best suggestion that saves the State of Texas

  money and time.

  Do YOU have any ideas?

  J. D. unpinned the notice and read the rest of it.

  “We been trying to come up with ideas for years,” Rita said. “We wants to win that money!”

  “We have a pact,” Deborah said. “If any of us comes up with a cost-savings idea and wins that money, then we all will share it. Maybe you will come up with our winning idea.”

  “I don’t know,” J. D. said, pinning the notice back on the bulletin board. “I just started working here. I have no idea what I’m doing.”

  “Who does?!” Rita said, then cackled.

  Rita always cracked herself up. It was her way of lightening the mood. She wanted to lighten the mood for everyone. No one ever seemed to mind since no one complained about her cracks, so she continued to make light of things.

  “Besides, if we don’t win that prize, maybe we’ll win the lottery. You gonna contribute to our office pool?” She stopped typing and pulled a Ziplock sandwich bag from the middle drawer of her desk. It was filled with dollar bills and coins and lottery tickets. “The jackpot is $7 million this week. That’s crazy money!”

 
“How much do I contribute?” J. D. said, patting his pockets. “I don’t have much money on me.” He pulled a ragged, cloth wallet from his back pocket. He separated the velcro holding the wallet together, dust spewing from it. There was one wrinkled, sad dollar bill inside among folded pieces of paper, business cards, and movie theater tickets. He pulled the limp bill out and offered it to Rita.

  “That’ll do. Anything helps,” she said, putting the sad bill in the Ziplock bag. “All for one and one for all, I always say. Ain’t that right, Conchino?”

  He nodded silently.

  “We have a lottery jackpot pact, too. Whatever money we win, we share. We won $72 once!”

  “That’s great,” J. D. said, sitting back down at his desk. He surveyed the small office, pleased with what he saw, feeling the camaraderie from his coworkers. “I hope we win, then.”

  “Me too!” Deborah said, typing again, smiling. “Me too.”

  Most people would have felt disillusioned and saddened sitting in that cramped office engulfed in noise with those lowly state employees, but not J. D. For the first time in his young life, he felt he was on his way to fulfilling his dream, branching out from his small-town family and their struggling small business, becoming a man in the big city all on his own. He was on his way to bigger and better things and this was the first step. He knew he was where he was supposed to be. To celebrate, he ate a pecan log from his stash of snacks in his lunch box as his coworkers furiously entered the last of the applications for unemployment so they could wrap up for the day, then go home.

  3.

  J. D.’s landlord initially assumed he was a college student when he applied to rent the miniscule, one-bedroom, cinder block house in the backyard behind her house because he looked so young and owned a bicycle. She was surprised to learn that he was a salaried employee of the State of Texas. The neighbors in Hyde Park called the tiny, backyard shack with gray walls and a metal roof the “slave quarters,” although in reality it was built in the 1960s for the immigrant housekeeper—a wispy brunette from Spain with dreams of earning a bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas but never did—who died a few months before J. D. leased it. He wanted to live there because of its close proximity to his work, allowing him to ride his bicycle since he didn’t own a car. His landlord advised him against riding his bike to work.

  “You’ll get run over,” she told him flatly.

  “I’ll make sure to wear my helmet,” he said.

  She shook her head as he signed the lease agreement. She also told him to take care of the place since it reminded her of her beloved housekeeper. She was still quite sad that “her friend” was gone. He assured her he would take care of it the best he could.

  After J. D.’s first day of work at the Texas Department of Unemployment and Benefits, he rode his bike the twenty blocks from downtown to his home in Hyde Park—a neighborhood whose houses were originally built in the 1920s and '30s (mostly of pier and beam construction in an arts and crafts style) and were very desirable to students and employees of the University of Texas, its campus straddling the southern boundary of the neighborhood—with cars and busses and trucks angrily honking their horns at him the entire way. Miraculously making it home without getting run over, he navigated up the gravel driveway of his landlord’s house to his cinder block shack around back. After locking up his bicycle with a bike chain—using an elaborate braid of twists and loops through both spoked wheels as well as the body frame and around the handlebars, secured to a large ceramic pot filled with succulent plants that must have weighed two hundred pounds—J. D. noticed a package emblazoned with UPS stickers and labels sitting on his front porch. A feeling of joy consumed him.

  “Yes!” he said to himself as he picked up the package, unlocked his door, then went inside.

  The front door led into the kitchen and dining area, a space barely large enough for two people to stand side by side. J. D. set the package on his dining table and then hung his bike helmet on a hook on the wall. The kitchen was hardly equipped enough to be called such, being that it contained the minimum required appliances: an electric hot plate, a two-slice toaster, a microwave the size of a shoebox, a sink without a garbage disposal, and a compact refrigerator barely large enough to hold a gallon of milk and a package of bologna. All of these things were lucky to occupy counter space. He had to make do without a dishwasher or conventional oven or regular-sized refrigerator, basic modern conveniences most people had in their homes or apartments. Even so, J. D. was content in his miniscule abode—it was exactly where he wanted to live in the city—and he examined the package as he sat at his tiny dining table. The package was addressed to him from his mother—her delicate, cursive handwriting neatly inscribed on the shipping label. He had high hopes for what the package contained, and, as he ripped it open, his hopes were fulfilled.

  “Yes!” he said, again to himself.

  Inside the box was an assortment of pecan snacks and a letter from his loving parents. He set the letter on the table as he inventoried the snacks: pecan logs (his current favorite), pecan pralines, pecan cookies, pouches of roasted pecans, coffee cake with crumbled cinnamon and pecans on top, and more. It was the ultimate care package for him, a thoughtful reminder of what he loved most about his hometown of Brady, Texas. He debated about which snack to eat for dinner—especially since his refrigerator only contained a can of soda, a package of hot dogs, and a jar of mayonnaise—then grabbed the letter from his parents, and a pecan log, and retired to his bedroom for the night.

  Half of his house consisted of his bedroom and a bath area, separated by a curtain. The bedroom was large enough for a twin bed, a squat night stand, and a small dresser. The bath area had a small porcelain sink with a beveled mirror attached to the wall, a round galvanized steel washtub on the floor with a chrome showerhead suspended from the ceiling, and a composting toilet. Hot water was supposed to come in the shower from a water tank on the roof of the house—theoretically heated by the afternoon sun—but sprinkled lukewarm water recently because of the unseasonably mild weather. The composting toilet scared off all potential tenants who wanted to rent the tiny house except for J. D., who had spent plenty of time in cow pastures around a variety of manure piles, cow chips, and poop pucks. He wasn’t scared of composting his own turds; neither was the housekeeper who had lived there before him for over forty years. That made him the ideal tenant.

  He laid on his bed, eating his pecan log, and reminisced about his hometown. When he thought of home, he usually thought of the same good things: tipping cows at night with his high school friends, riding his bike by himself down the gravel roads outside of town, and buying treats at the drugstore on the weekends. His favorite treats were from the pecan farmer (of course), just like the one he was eating in bed. As he devoured it—plucking stray, sugary crumbs off his shirt and licking them from his fingertips—he opened the letter and read it. The sight of his mother’s handwriting brought an unexpected feeling of comfort and joy, wringing a small amount of salty water from his tear ducts. This is what the letter said:

  My Dearest J. D. –

  Oh, how we miss you, your father and I. We hope your new life in Austin, Texas is as grand as you’d hoped. Your Aunt Ethel complains that Austin is infested with hippies and fears that you will be corrupted by their marijuana-smoking ways. I keep insisting that you would never befriend hippies or smoke marijuana, but she is inconsolable. She is difficult to reason with when she’s crying but you know that. Your father insisted I tell you that he wishes you well, although I can sense that his feelings are still hurt from the argument you two had before you moved away. Your father wants everyone to think he’s tough as nails but, really, he’s an old softie. I’m certain he will forgive you one day. He always does, whether you know that or not. He does love you very much! Your father and I are also dealing with the loss of the new girl, Joan, who worked the front desk. Remember her? We hired her just a few months ago to greet customers and answer phones but she up and v
anished yesterday, not coming to work or returning our calls. Hopefully, we will find someone soon to replace her. It is difficult wearing all the hats we business owners have to wear—your father and I. Sometimes, it just gets to be too much to bear. We hope deep down in our hearts that you will one day return to Brady and help us run the family business. That is what we truly feel is your destiny. One day, it could be all yours. But, until then, please take care and enjoy your favorite snacks we sent you. We bought them just for you. And we hope this letter finds you well.

  Sincerely, Your Loving Parents, Mom and Dad

  P.S. I refuse to send you emails as they are not very personal. More letters to come.

  J. D. felt pangs of guilt in his heart as he finished reading the letter. He felt so bad that he didn’t even want to eat another pecan treat. The one he just finished upset his stomach, so he sat up and wiped the tears from his face. He wasn’t sure he’d ever return to his hometown of Brady, Texas. It just wasn’t in his plans.