If house hunting is hell, moving day has to rate somewhere in the lower regions of purgatory.
Chaos, in a word. With the mess getting deeper with the addition of a seven year old son, hyperactive basset hound, and husband who is convinced, out of nowhere, that he has descended from a long line of professional moving men and knows best.
After the seventh repetition of ‘I know what I’m doing honey’ I finished taping up the boxes holding my dishes and said a small prayer. To whom, I don’t know.. I never heard that there was a patron saint of relocation.
My distant consolation was the fact that we weren’t going through all this torment for yet another undersized overused apartment. No, we’d finally found the perfect little jewel of a house, with a price that we couldn’t have resisted.
“It’s almost too good to be true,” Bart had said a few dozen times as we’d walked over the house, and a few dozen more as we hung in the limbo of making offers. By the time the offer had been accepted, he shut up, though he claimed not to be as superstitious as I am, I know that he didn’t want to tempt fate.
By midafternoon, the cap of moving day hit as it began to snow. Frustrated, seeing himself as letting down all that supposed inbred talent and skill, Bart and his helpers hurriedly stored the boxes in the wonderfully spacious garage. I wasn’t especially pleased with this, but I also had no intention of going through to see if my perfect dinner set of 12 had become a somewhat imperfect set of 300 in the snow.
By the time the rushed stacking of the boxes and odds and ends of funiture was finished, the garage had ceased to be an empty cradle, waiting to provide comfort to our vehicles. Instead, it was a tumbled wilderness, where curtains and paintings of questionable taste lurked darkly. A bad start, but I reasoned to myself that not everything can go perfectly; we were already way ahead of the game as it was, and due a drawback or two.
Sleep was peaceful and deep that night, and I can truthfully say that I heard nothing.
I continued to hear nothing throughout the next month, as I slowly began the work of moving the house in from the garage, box by box.
Its funny about the things we choose to hang on to. As I began my slow but sure excavations, I noticed a number of things that didn’t need to be in the house. In my categoric mind, I began planning a yard sale for the first week of summery weather.
It was probably just about March, when the true rainy season set in, that Bailey the Basset got the quills in his nose. “What the hell?” Bart said curiously, and I knew the situation had to be truly dire to have gotten his attention away from the Lakers vs Bulls game. With a sigh, I wiped my hands on the dishtowel and went into the den to find Bart holding one of the quills up to the light.
“Damn dog managed to find a porcupine out here in the suburbs. I didn’t think porcupines even lived in the desert.” He passed the artifact to me, and since I’ve never seen a porcupine, quills off or on, I nodded at it wisely. Bailey seemed none the worse for his attempting maiming, in fact, he was already face down in his water dish.
“Strange though,” I said softly. “It doesn’t really feel like anything animal. It feels almost.. well.. wooden.”
“Would Tony have left a little wooden spear around for the mutt to get into?”
“Be rather hard to stick a wooden spear in your own nose without opposable thumbs, no matter how Tony left it laying.”
Bart shrugged, his attention wandering back to the beckoning glow of the tv screen. “Maybe porcupine quills change to a more dried out kind of texture as they get older. Who knows? I’m not Dr. Doolittle or anything. But you might just keep Bailey indoors more, and tell Tony to watch his toys. Poor little guy was crying,” he finished, rubbing Bailey’s ears absently.
“Yeah, I’ll do that,” I said sourly, heading back to the kitchen to find the heroically wounded animal a treat.
When queried with the offending spear, Tony shrugged unknowingly. “Maybe Bailey went to Borneo and found the pygmies. It’s about the right size,” he said, squinting at it and showing me how tall the pygmies ought to be.
“And where’d you learn about Borneo and pygmies?”
“Pauline found ‘em. On the old channel.”
I sighed and sent Tony back out to get into whatever mischief he had in mind for the afternoon. Anything to keep him away from the classic movie channel and the Perils of Pauline!
The next incident was about a week later, when Bart adventured into the dark garage for his soldering iron. After opening multiple boxes and generally making a mess, he shouted for me. Of course, as the woman, I must have some divine mystic ability to place my slender hand on precisely the implement he wanted, even before he told me what he was looking for.
“Bloody hell,” he growled some snappish 45 minutes later. “The damn thing’s just plain gone.”
“What’s worse than that,” I answered, “is that I could swear that a bunch of things have been moved around. Not the big stuff,” I said quickly. “And not the stuff that you were digging through either. But that picture.. the horrible one of the orange sails heading into the sunset. I could have sworn it was all the way against the far wall last week.”
And now it sat, still against the wall, but halfway down it. As though the picture had tired of its exile and was trying to escape into the house. There was also an old coleman camping lantern that had somehow been removed from its shelf, and the matches were missing entirely.
“That lantern was too high up for the kid to reach. And I can’t imagine him taking the matches or moving the painting,” Bart said, shaking his head thoughtfully.
Then the picture crashed noisily over on its side, and Bart and I decided that the soldering iron wasn’t that damned important. Or that we were very much out of shape and a sprint to the door was a good idea. The spookyness of the garage had won out for the day.
That night, the chanting began.
Our bedroom was directly over the garage, or I’m sure the kids would have long since alerted us about the phenomenon. Adults tend to sleep more soundly, and give less credence to the soft night sounds that would immediately get the full attention of a child. I listened to the chants for over a week before mentioning it to Bart, putting it down to some new, interesting perversion on the behalf of the hot water heater.
“No,” Bart said when the subject finally came up. “It’s more like those monks that do the backup for those Pure Moods bands.”
“Monks,” I said meditatively, tapping my nails against the stem of my wineglass. “So you think monks have moved into our garage?”
“I’d rather have monks than mice,” Bart frowned.
“Monkly mice, then? Involved in rites for the glorification of God and garaged housewares?”
Bart laughed, the whimsical laugh of little boys and men that have had too much to drink and too little sleep. “I’d prefer mice monks to rat chanters, dancing around the fire with spears.”
And suddenly, it wasn’t funny anymore.
Picking up the big flashlight, the kind cops carry in lieu of batons sometimes, Bart headed for the door to the garage, then thought better of it. Instead of entering through the house, he stepped out the front door. I heard the grinding whir of the garage door opener, and curiousity overcame good sense.
By the time Bart had begun to step in, I was beside him, peering mistrustfully into the sea of our junk.
I couldn’t have remembered the placement of all those boxes precisely.. and yet…
I could have sworn that Tony’s toy box had been taped shut. Now it was open, contents strewn all over the place. Bart grunted, obviously ready to shift the blame to a boy that wanted just one plaything in a box of hundreds of nearly forgotten toys.
When the light hit the surrounding cartons, even Bart had to concede that Tony didn’t have any reason to disarm the GI Joe’s and rip off their heads. A set of Lincoln logs had been broken into and scattered about as well.
By following the path of debris, we found a small hole in the wall of the garage. I remembered when we had first seen the house, there had been an old deep freeze covering this spot. It had looked old, and awkward to move, so I hadn’t thought anything about it.
Now it looked like I should have.
Shining the light in the hole showed us nothing. The darkness was too absolute for a mere flashlight. Bart straightened, shrugging in what I’m sure was meant to be a nonchalant way. As the beam cast over into the corner by the maligned hot water heater, the shrug turned into a shudder.
For in a tidy little path marking the way to the pilot light, we found the GI Joe heads… mounted on tiny pikes. “They honor the firekeeper,” I murmured softly, drawing a look from Bart.
“They?” his voice came out in a squeak.
“Pygmies. The hole goes to Borneo, really Bart, didn’t you ever watch the Perils of Pauline?” I thought I was making a joke, but the longer we stood there, looking at the precisely placed pikes, heads, and the slightly spooked ‘this isn’t happening to us’ look in each others’ eyes, the less funny it was.
“Humph,” Bart said thoughtfully as he took my hand and tugged me from the garage, very carefully watching all the dark corners. “I always saw myself as a live and let live kind of guy.. what do you say we have a truce over the garage, and always remember to knock? I mean, anything that can mangle a GI Joe like that has to be hell on mice.”
And the garage door closed.
A few nights later, I was tucking Tony into bed. “Mom,” he muttered sleepily, “you left the window open.”
“So?”
“So, if it’s open, the flying spleen eating weasels could get in.”
I started to tell him there was no such thing. And then I had a startlingly clear mental image of pygmies, mounted on flying spleen eating weasels, and shut my mouth with a snap.
I closed the window and kissed him goodnight.
Curiouser and Curiouser 