Black Squirrel

During the fall, on each night before his day off from work, Jake drags his brown sleeping bag up to the roof of the apartment complex. He wedges a brick between the door and the frame, so he won’t have to use his key to get back in if he has to get up in the middle of the night to take a piss. He places his sleeping bag on the ground, strips to his boxers, and puts his cell phone and keychain atop his pile of clothes. It’s not camping, exactly, but it’s the next best thing. When dawn hits, Jake sinks deeper into the bag, digging his face into his pillow to block the light from penetrating his eyelids. He sleeps until he wakes.

After dressing, Jake rolls up the sleeping bag, and heads back down to his apartment where he pees and then starts coffee. While he’s waiting, he sits at his computer, checking his Gmail, MySpace, and other sites that he can’t resist visiting every couple hours. He feels his phone vibrating, so he picks it from his pocket and sees that it’s his Mom calling. Because it’s Friday, he thinks this is a bad sign, but answers the call anyway.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Jake. It’s your mama.”

“Hey Mom. What’s going on?”

“Well, would you mind going over to Grandma’s and raking her leaves for her?”

“Uh, I guess I could.” His spirit drops. His day is ruined.

“She’d like that. She said she left the garage door open for you.”

“Where is she?”

“She had a doctor’s appointment, but there should be a couple rakes, garbage bags, and gloves in there, sitting out.”

“Okay. I’ll go over there in an hour. I gotta eat first.”

“That’s fine. Thank you!”

Jake hangs up and says “Fuck” to sum up his feelings on the situation. He had hoped this Friday would be like every other—relaxing, looking around on the Internet, playing videogames, jerking off. Instead, he’ll be at his grandmother’s house raking leaves until it gets dark.

He pulls up his Grandma’s driveway, parks, and walks around back to the garage. Like Mom said, everything’s been laid out for him, so he gets to work. It’s still early fall, though, and the leaves are all shapes, sizes, and colors—green, brown, yellow, red, orange. It’s been raining, and the ground is soggy. Jake thinks about how many more times this will have to be done before winter sets in, and becomes agitated since he’ll most likely be volunteered for the job. There’s always yard work to be done. In the spring, the grass needs cutting. In the summer, the grass needs watering. In the fall, the leaves need raking. In the winter, the snow needs shoveling. He decides to work quickly to finish faster, but then slows down to a normal pace because he figures it’s going to take a few hours regardless.

If I was an Eskimo or whatever, he thinks, Grandma would’ve been out on that iceberg a long time ago, and I wouldn’t have to deal with this shit. He remembers the time when his younger brother Jack, who attends school 12 hours away in Texas, got a new dog named Calvin, and their Grandma kept reminding him to walk it. One day, when Jack was visiting for the weekend, he got fed up with it, and said, “She shouldn’t worry about it. She’ll be dead soon.” It was morbid, but Jake laughed anyway. Jake and Jack aren’t close to their only remaining grandparent.

He’s got one garbage bag full of leaves, and before he opens another, Jake rests for a minute, his hands, in frayed brown gloves, on top of the rake’s handle. Standing like that, the rake is as tall as he is. He sees a gray squirrel on the white fence, which encloses his Grandma’s tree-laden yard, that he helped paint when he was a kid. Jake thinks back to all the jobs he’s done that he never wanted to do in the first place, but he never regrets them.

In another hour, Jake will finish raking, and because he slept until the early afternoon, it will be near dusk. Then he’ll see another squirrel on the fence—a black one. It will be his first time seeing a squirrel of that color. This, coupled with the sense of accomplishment at having done a good job, will make the raking worthwhile. He’ll rest using his rake as support one more time before hauling the bags to the garbage can, during which he’ll realize his grandma hasn’t yet returned, and that will make him a little nervous. He doesn’t want anything bad to happen to anybody really.