I was just standing there, staring at my dead highway and smoking my smoke as the wind blew proper for the season, crisp out of the Northeast. Its cooler tonight, I thought staring up into black and stars, it rained earlier but it was warmer before then. As the smoke began to taste hot I turned, stepped out of the shadows of the Odyssey, and made for the front steps.
I couldn’t have taken more than five or six steps when I emerged into the light, just past the Live Oak tree and then I saw it. This thing must have weighed fifty pounds or more, this beat up looking, pissed off Grey Fox. As I moved into the light, from the driveway it saw me. It started half howling and weaving, running back and forth from one side of my path to the other. My mood changed from mellow and my calm collapsed. These things can be dangerous. I worked with a man who was attacked by a rabid one. He said it latched on and he had to nearly kill it to get it to let go. It shredded his arms and gut. I thought about this, as I also thought; I just want to get back inside, feel that cool and calm and mellow again. As the adrenaline kicked in and I felt under attack, my brain began to spin. I thought immediately of the entire collection of cool tour guide pickin’s I had brought home over the years and littered the yard with. Right nearby there lay a ballast rock.
This rock may have been pulled from a river by some indentured servant two, three hundred years ago, in England or Spain to be used as ballast in a wooden ship, bound for the New World. This simple stone may have eventually been replaced by cargo heading to the old world, and turned into the cobblestone streets, still laying in some of our most beautiful cities; Savannah, Charleston, Norfolk and New York. The journey ended as did that of many souls and ships along my coast, the Graveyard of the Atlantic and North Carolina’s cash cow.
Seconds passed as I thought about all that, while the fox took a stand, right between me and my rest. I grabbed a rock that lay close by, it was about double the weight of a duckpin bowling ball, but half the size, rectangular and oblong, and rolled smooth by centuries of storm. I knew that if I threw and missed the fox would surely charge me. I also remembered that I used to be a pitcher.
Now and then I still throw things, small or large things. As I stood there, eye to eye with this mad or hungry beast, maybe ten or twelve feet away, I tossed the stone up and down. I was getting the feel, you know? I was sizing up the weight, the distance, all of the trajectory and what not. I had an idea and acted quickly. I lunged toward it, in the motion of throwing to see if it would charge or flinch. If it charged I was likely screwed, but if it gave me a “tell”, I would be the victor. Lucky for me it dropped down, and to the right, like a Collie playing with its master. Immediately I threw, taking aim just high and left of it, figuring it would run that way. I didn’t hit it, but it ran away into the shadows, past the Live Oak trees. There was no soundtrack to this. There was nothing but a heartbeat in ears, and the eventual smack spark and bushes of a stone ricocheting off of concrete and into dead underbrush. One could at once hear that and the beast running to its mellow, and calm. It was either taken by madness, or disillusioned and felt cornered. The beast felt that I was the intruder, but isn’t this the thread of meaning in life? We both felt the same, that moment.
I quickly made it for the door and was inside and safe, slowly returning to calm again, slipping into the couch’s caress. It was a draw. That little wild thing wanted me like a big oil man wants every whore’s hole in the Republic of Texas. All I wanted was to be left alone, as I put down the smoke, the one that tasted hot.
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