A Fence, Chicken Feed, Shoes and, oh, a Coke… Please

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“Hey, watch it. Butterflies are not for sale, buddy.”

We were sent to a store in a nearby town to buy a fence for keeping out the barbeque-eating hound and her gang of strays. They’d set up camp on our sandy lot to watch and wait for the next big steak.

The store will be helpful and honest, we were told. That was enough for us. So we drove half an hour inland to General Juan Madariaga to find Katua. There it was, just inside the town on the main drag. A blue warehouse-type structure, with a series of posts out front for, well, tying up horses. We parked out of the way of the posts just in case.

The kids had fallen asleep, so my wife stayed in the car.

“I’ll be right back,” I told her.

I went inside and looked around at the shelves piled high with merchandise, from dog food to sneakers and even chainsaws. Mop poles hung from the ceiling alongside rakes and brooms. Horse blankets, lawnmowers and rubber boots over there. And plastic trash bags and grass seed over there, along with candies and cigarettes, jeans and lassoes, horseshoes and lollipops.

I stood in line behind three shoppers.

The first ordered chicken feed.

The next a dozen of eggs and a bottle of cola.

The third ordered 20 nails and then asked how much the horse saddles were going for.

My turn.

“I’d like a fence.”

The man behind the counter looked at me and said, “Alright, how much you need? What are you looking to fence in?”

I gave him the dimensions of my garden-cum-forest and he jotted it all down. Then he opened a fat notebook with sheets and sheets of lists of items, numbers, sizes and prices.

“Right,” he said, “you’ll need…”

And he started to explain as he flipped through the sheets and jotted down items, did calculations and paused to ponder before lunging back into the fat notebook and flipping through the sheets and jotting more down.

“Here,” he said, handing me a piece of paper. “This is everything you’ll need for your fence.”

“Thanks.”

I looked it over. Gates, posts, turnbuckles, wire and another dozen items.

“So,” he said. “You want it.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But… do you really have all this stuff?”

He looked at me dully.

“Where do you want it delivered?”

I gave him my address, paid and that was that, except for one question.

“How on earth do you keep track of all the stuff in here?” I asked.

He looked at me dully.

“We manage.”

 

The Grey Ghost

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“I think we need a fence, really.”

We always liked the idea of gardens stretching seamlessly down the block and into the forest, houses here and there. No fences, no hedges. Freedom of movement, freedom of vision.

That was our dream.

That’s what I was telling a friend while we cooked a barbeque, an asado, for our families. Everybody sat inside at the table out of the autumn cold.

We took in the first course of black pudding, flank steak, ribs and sausages, and we started tucking in.

“Very well done,” they called out from the table to me, the man flipping the beef. “A round of applause for the asador!”

“Thank you, thank you,” I said. “Hey, but this is just the start. Wait until you sink your teeth into what’s next.”

I went out to the barbeque with my friend, licking our lips. Bife de lomo, the best cut. The knife goes through it like butter. I’d bought a huge piece, enough to feed us all and have it in sandwiches the next day on the beach.

“Wait until you to get a load of the size of this lomo,” I told my friend.

“Ah… what lomo?”

We looked on the barbeque.

It was gone.

Then around the corner came trotting a Weimaraner dog licking her chops. She’d wolfed down my entire grand-finale lomo! And the grey-coat dog was sniffing around for more. My blood boiled. I thought of hurtling my carving knife at her. She saw the fumes steaming off my head, and she bolted. I yelled after the bitch and then threw one of the kids’ toys at her. It fell in the dust of her tracks on the sandy lot.

She was gone.

And I was already planning where to put the posts for a barbed-wire electric fence.

Batman

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“They’re coming!”

In the forest behind us you can feel the bats swooping past as night comes, and you think next time you walk through you’re going to bring a hat. Your four-ton dog keeps her head low as they race past and as we race out, keeping our eyes from looking into the depths of the woods.

Bats!

The next day it got worse.

Our neighbor said to us, “I’ve got bats!”

He pointed to the eaves in a corner. A hole had become the entry point for a bat and then another and then another. He could hear dozens if not hundreds at night above his sofa, living and breeding and feeding in the rafters above him. So he picked up the yellow pages and made a few calls.

The exterminator arrived, an unassuming man. He told my neighbor to cover up any holes leading into the rafters to keep any more bats from going in, even if they are the tiniest of holes.

The words of the bat expert sent us scurrying back to our own house to survey the eaves for any holes, or worse, bat droppings – a sign they were living above us and with us.

But none.

Phew!

Then days later a workman hired to move our water heater to a still doorless outer cabinet said he was finished. Dusk was falling, and he told us that we’d be wise to get a man to patch up the holes he left in the walls, the holes that led into the inner workings of the house and the rafters – and us.

The bricklayer wasn’t due for two or three days.

The workman looked carefully at the holes and then at the forest and the approaching nightfall, and as if he heard the flutter of a hundred wings he told us that we’d better stuff the holes with newspaper.

We flew to stuff the walls.