Into The Empty Space
Johnny Woodman said if I heard any shooting it would be him and his young son, Benny. It wasn't exactly deer season yet, in North Carolina, so I wasn't sure what it was Johnny and Benny would be shooting. I guess they could be hunting the abundant squirrels which populate the area.

We were watching a man named Bruce, and his partner, Pizza, loading my metal junk from Johnny's trailer onto their trailer, for redemption across the state line in Virginia. Johnny has been trying to help get rid of my junk and had loaded his trailer from the pile in my yard a few times several weeks before. He had cashed in on two loads but this third load had been sitting in the yard for awhile now. As he needed the trailer for a Halloween hayride at his church, he hauled his trailer back to the local scrap metal yard but they said they weren't taking scrap anymore. Evidently it is another market out of which the bottom has fallen. On the way there and also on the way back he had seen Bruce and Pizza alongside the road, extracting from the weeds an antique hay rake, and asked if they would be interested in the metal and they said yes.

I was marveling at the amount of junk Bruce and Pizza were loading onto their rickety trailer, which to begin with already had the large hay rake and some other heavy looking metal. Their truck was a well dented Ford Ranger, a small truck, and looked to be sagging considerably from the weight, but they just kept piling it on. A heavy, 40 year old riding mower I thought would be the coup de grace but they just kept loading until Johnny's trailer was empty and theirs was what I would consider full. But then they came over to survey the diminishing but still substantial pile of crap in my side yard. As they tossed some lighter material--sheet metal roofing, broken down swing set parts, smashed flat gutters, etc.--onto the trailer, I told them I had a 500 gallon oil tank in the basement, a broken arc welder in one shed, and some metal toolboxes behind another shed, and a side by side refrigerator/freezer in yet another shed that they were welcome to as well.

There was still a flat tongue extending from the back of their trailer that was empty but seemed unsuitable for any of that which I had just mentioned. They took a look at the refrigerator/freezer though and decided it would be a nice final touch to the heavy junk sculpture they had created in barely thirty minutes of work. At first they considered the possibility that the shed had been built around the fridge but I assured them that the shed was there first. They took the door off the shed and while Pizza contemplated the necessity of taking the doors off the fridge itself, Bruce was inside the cramped shed figuring another way. Open the left door, he told Pizza. Pizza did this and Bruce shoved on the heavy unit while Pizza pulled on it. This ain't gonna work Bruce, said Pizza, but Bruce said yeah it is Pizza, twist it this way, and then, no, I mean the other way. And they got it out and shimmied it over to the trailer. It looked like Pizza, who is considerably thinner than Bruce, was going to try to lift that heavy thing from the bottom and place it on the low-lying tongue. I cringed.

But then Bruce said, no Pizza, we just gonna lay it flat like this, and with one swift push it was doing just that, laid longways across the tongue, with the doors facing up. I looked at the bald tires on the sagging trailer attached to the sagging, dented truck, but said nothing. Bruce opened up the refrigerator/freezer doors and said we can fit some more stuff in here, Pizza. Pizza went over to my junk pile and brought back a few little items and dropped them into the empty space.

Johnny and Benny had long ago disappeared into the woods and I waited for the crack of gunfire. I remembered then talking to Johnny the day before about a deer that had almost run into me while I stood daydreaming in a thin ray of sunlight out in my woods two days previous. I told him it had scared me, which prompted him to tell me that he thought there was some kind of large, mischievous, two legged animal roaming the woods surrounding his beehives. I did not know what he meant and wondered if he was talking about Danny Claypool up to no good as payback for Johnny's recent building of a fence. The sole purpose of the fence was to keep Claypool from trespassing. He said no, it wasn't Danny, it was something much heavier and I suggested it could be a large buck. He pretty much ignored that and said, no, this thing was throwing rocks at me, and shaking trees. I didn't want to insult him by again suggesting a big buck, maybe rutting his antlers against the base of a tree, and anyway, that would not explain the throwing of rocks. Johnny, his son Benny, and wife, Ivana, had all heard these strange, heavy-sounding noises on separate occasions.

So it struck me then that maybe this is what Johnny and Benny were out hunting. I never heard any shots though and later that day I left to drive back to Virginia (half expecting to see Bruce and Pizza broke down alongside a road scattered with scrap metal, appliances and heavy machinery).

Johnny is a pretty sober guy and not really much of a kidder so for now I am just taking him at his word. I don't know what to think of this supposed Bigfoot-type creature taking up residence in the woods surrounding my North Carolina home. I guess mostly though it gives me a little thrill. And for little thrills and Bigfoots--I say, the more the merrier.
- jimlouis 10-29-2008 7:47 pm [link]