TWO VERY SHORT STORIES

Jim, my little brother, was a hyperactive kid. It was hard for our mother, Reba Mae, to keep track of him even when he was only four years old because he was always running off somewhere on his own in the neighborhood to play. And he would sit at the dinner table “side-saddle”, as Reba Mae used to say, with one foot under the table and the other doing a little jig to calm his nerves until he could wolf down his food and get out of the house again.

Brothers

He grew a real personality from the time he was old enough to talk, and when he didn’t get his way, he would throw the most horrifying tantrums. These included prolonged and sustained, bloodcurdling screams and he would lie on his belly on the floor and pound the parquet with his fists and feet while simultaneously banging his forehead again and again on the hardwood.

As an adult Jim always said that if he’d been a kid today instead of back then, the doctors would have made a Ritalin addict out of him by the time he was ten to keep his hyperactivity in check. But back in those days, Reba Mae went to our family physician, Dr. Berry, desperate for a solution to the problem, and was told she should simply ignore him when he was like that. Dr. Berry was Old School, a former colonel in the Army Medical Corps during World War II. Let’s just say he’d seen things there was no cure for. Anything else he tended to think of as a hangnail.

“But he bangs his head on the floor!” Reba Mae protested.

“He won’t do it hard enough to really hurt himself,” Dr. Berry said.

“But he makes knots on his forehead!”

“That’s because you’re giving him an audience. You’re spoiling him. Just let him be when he’s like that. He’ll get tired of doing it on his own if he knows nobody cares.”

But he kept right on, even though Reba Mae did her best to follow the doctor’s orders. And she worried that he might really injure himself, get a concussion, fracture his skull, for pity sake. Besides, what would the neighbors think when they heard the kid screaming bloody murder?

On top of that, it drove you nuts to be in the same house with him when he threw one of these fits. It was so loud! So strident! So shrill! So, one day, a nice warm sunny day, when Reba Mae told little Jimmy he wasn’t allowed to do something he wanted to do, and, not taking “no” for an answer, he went into full-throttle hysteria, our mother jerked him off the floor by one arm and escorted him out onto our screened-in back porch.

“Scream all you want!” Reba Mae told the white-headed little tyke. “The answer is still ‘no’! “And then she went back inside and closed the back door.

As ordered, Jim persistently screamed his lungs out while hammering the hollow wooden porch floor with hands and feet and making a really satisfying pumpkin-like sound by walloping his forehead against it. This went on for a very long time. And it was so loud that a man in a delivery truck who heard it as he was driving by, quickly pulled to the curb and came running up our driveway and up the steps to the hooked door of our screened-in porch.

Jim hadn’t noticed the man and went right on screaming and pounding unabated, until the man knocked frantically on the frame of the screen door shouting, “Are you hurt, sonny? Are you hurt?” To which my little brother stopped screaming as abruptly as he had started, sat up cross-legged on the floor, looked with abashed surprise at the man’s worried face and shouted, “No!”

The baffled delivery man climbed back down the steps and left. Jim got up off the floor, went inside, and never again threw that sort of fit.

***

When my dad, Whitie, said he had a packrat in his restaurant, the Teddy Bear, I thought he was talking about a sticky-fingered employee. But he wasn’t. He was talking about an actual rodent. Packrat—until then, I never knew that was a real thing.

Anyway, this rodent played cat and mouse with Whitie for a long time. It purloined the oddest things: little cellophane-wrapped packages of crackers for soup, bright-colored matchbooks, tinfoil-wrapped peppermint patties from the candy rack, a set of plastic-pearl pop-beads from the lost and found box, just about anything shiny and attractive.

Whitie at the Teddy Bear

Whitie searched and searched to try and find out where the little animal was getting in and where it hung out. But to no avail. So he went across the back alley to the hardware store and bought traps. A number of them. And he started baiting and setting them in a variety of places at night. He tried to think like a rat, like, “If I were a rat, where would I go, what would I do, what path would I take?”

For a while, Whitie knew that he’d failed to catch this nemesis, this elusive rodent. He knew it because he was obsessively well-ordered, and he would find things messed up and out of place wherever the packrat had been rifling through the merchandise.

But then, suddenly, the thievery stopped. Whitie waited awhile, thinking it might just be a lull. Maybe it would start up again. He realized he maybe subconsciously wished it would. He realized that he admired the packrat, its ingenuity and survival skills, how, until now, it had been smart enough to pilfer him blind while managing to find its way around his traps.

But no. The packrat was definitely gone. So Whitie went back to check all of his traps. Eventually, he found the one that had snapped the packrat’s neck. And right nearby, he found the packrat’s stash, with all of the little objects it had stolen neatly tucked away.

I wasn’t very old when all this happened. I only overheard him telling my mother about it. The day he caught the packrat, he told her about it with no glee. When he got to the part about “finding the little bastard” and seeing its stash, his voice cracked and I heard him sniff.

That was the first time I realized Whitie had a heart like mine.