Cricket Alley
By Lou Blodgett
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Jake and Sandy had their kits in the hollow of a huge ash tree, secure in their ignorance of the cliché. The kits had ventured out a bit by the late winter, and had been schooled in sources of food- eatable on the spot, and storable. It was around March when Sandy began saying: “That branch is gonna fall.”
“What branch?” Jake The Younger would ask.
And Sandy would tell him:
“That branch. No, that branch. No, the big branch. The one that looks like it’s gonna fall. That branch. No… Never mind.”
But, it took until April, with a big rain, and during an argument that Sparky and Cly had about the edibility of worms, when all in the tree heard a ‘creeeeee!’, and Jake said,
“What is that?”
And- “Crack! Whump! Bweeebweebweebwee…”
The tree swayed and Sandy said “I told you so”.
The two parents ran out onto the trunk in the mist, and the two adolescent kits stuck their heads out of the hole, and something continued to go ‘bweebweebwee….’
They looked out at the big branch that had fallen onto a ’95 Nissan Sentra, and, then, watched the woman with the soft, wavy russet hair wearing her Mulan housecoat and fuzzy slippers, shouting:
“No!”
Sparky and Cly knew this woman more than they knew any person. They would watch her from around the trunk, and, sometimes, when she was getting into her car, she would look at them and jut her head aside, so they would have to skitter a few inches around the trunk they were on. Then, she would chuckle, but they didn’t mind. They had to elude her because they were squirrels. One day, from a branch above, they even tried to warn her against stepping in crap, but to no avail. But, she showed contrition. She said that she was stupid to have done that, as she hopped around on one foot, for some reason. Some of her speech was universal, so anyone could understand. Growls and moans and such. Then she reared back and continued to express strong regret to a cloud. Sparky and Cly looked up, wondering what was so special about that cloud, and could see no difference.
And now it was a real crisis for the woman with the soft, wavy russet hair. The squirrels listened as she continued staccato negative, but, indeed, the big branch had fallen on her car.
“The branch fell on the car, and it’s hurt,” Cly declared, above the din, and Sparky said, “I think you’re right.”
Then, others appeared, and Jake began to scold them. Cly and Sparky munched on grass seeds from the bottom of the nest and were mesmerized.
“Itt’l never run again,” Sparky said, about the car, and the woman pointed her keys at it and it stopped crying. She dropped her keys on the ground and covered her face, and the others joined her in mourning. Cly watched and, as she watched, she swallowed a grass seed which she forgot to unhull.
“Ugh,” she coughed.
“You’ll feel that comin’ out,” Sparky told her.
“I don’t care,” she told him. “It’s so sad, even if I don’t understand all that’s happening.”
Jake continued to scold, until Sandy chirped at him, but he continued to lightly chastise the group because he had to. The group filed back into the house, and the two kits rolled back into the nest, agreeing that it was more exciting than the field sobriety test on the avenue two months ago. Then, they heard their father begin to scold again, and poked their heads out to watch. The woman with the russet hair had made a curtain call, solo.
She walked about in the lightly falling rain, with her head down.
“We do that, too,” Sandy said. “Don’t scold her!”
Jake took her advice and just gave off a few barks. The woman picked her keys up out of the grass, and then looked right at the tree and at Jake.
“Aw, shatup!”
The kit siblings rolled back into the nest, amazed, and talked about it until near dusk. People scold, too. Soon after, a huge white vehicle came by, answering the question about what happens when a branch falls in Cricket Alley.
What happens is: A car cries. A woman cries. Everybody in the house comes out and cries, then a truck rolls up, disgorging a bunch of people in bright yellow vests, and they methodically take the branch apart and away.
And, the noise! One of the men reached into the truck, pulled out a thing as long as his arm, and strangled it like no one would want to be strangled. But, it wasn’t dead. Oh, no. It let off the sound of a million cats in heat. Then the man used the power of its righteous indignation against the fallen branch, which was clever. Then, other people set up a racket with other things, but that wasn’t the only racket. The truck beeped and flashed and somehow reflected the sun, which was already below the horizon, onto the branch. The people shouted to one another, and things which dangled on their hips made a high-pitched:
“Bzzzt! Hrm hrm hrm-hrm! Bzzzzzt!”
The kits watched as multiple laws of nature were broken. Father certainly had reason to scold. Mother even joined him. The best part, the kits agreed, was during a rare, quiet moment, when their dad told the workers:
“You can be seen a mile away wearing that yellow!”
The kits rolled back into the nest with glee, but they had to go back to look after they’d had a good laugh. Cly pushed her head through the entrance and asked Father,
“Dad. Is this is what you call a ‘pellet shower’?” She referred to what he would call something that he was surprised to have lived through in one of his stories. More things were to be seen with the kits going back to their stations. The woman was back, and had changed her pelt, perhaps in mourning. The squirrel parents had discovered that one of those in a yellow vest was female. She could be distinguished especially since she wore every bit of the armor that they used to protect themselves against the crazy things they were doing. The others were missing some here and there. One got a gash on his hand from a roughly sawn log, but told everyone that it didn’t hurt. The same with another who dropped a log on his foot. But the others scolded him anyway.
Then, something happened that the squirrels couldn’t quite understand, but which defined ‘The Day The Big Branch Fell’.
The woman in yellow talked a bit to the russethaired sad one. Then the man in yellow who started all the commotion stopped and said a few words to the sad woman too. And then he looked right at the tree all the squirrels were in and on, and gave his head a little shake. He helped others lift what was left of the branch, respectfully, off the car. Then, the kit’s view was blocked by mother coming in. She pushed them back as she did, muttering,
“Sparky, Cly, Sparky, Cly, Sparky, Cly…”
“Yes, it’s us,” Sparky said.
“Who else would it be?” Cly added. “That man said something while he looked at us. Did he say that he would attack this tree?”
“No,” Sandy said. “He said that he wouldn’t.”
Sparky and Cly dozed where they’d tumbled, and there was still some noise outside. The truck beeped, their father chirped, the people used, as father said: ‘ten words for our one’, so the two, as they drifted off, didn’t hear their mother mumble:
“He won’t tonight…”
But, the tree didn’t come down. In the summer, with the family busy harvesting and scrounging with glee, the two adolescent kits were fascinated by the hum of the city proper to their north. Their parents had warned them of the time of the bright explosions, and Jake confided that it can leave squirrels pelletless. But, he said, it got squirrels thinking about the future, and not in a complacent way.
Cly enjoyed the hum and the music that came from the north. If she found something shiny, she said that it had to have come from there, despite Sparky differing. Sandy declared that Cly had so many shiny things, that she might as well build another nest to put them in. And, so Cly did. Further up the ash tree, despite Sandy’s protest that the tree would be gone soon. It was a big leaf ball.
Meanwhile, Sparky turned out to be the one who had wanderlust. And he was attracted to the amount of human activity to the north. More activity meant more scroungeable edibles. Life could be easy there, he thought, even with competition from pigeons, which he’d heard about.
So, it was Sparky who ventured far first, of the two kits. He planned to cross the busier roads on the wires, like his free-ranging aunt who got tired of scrounging near the Bed and Breakfast across the street. It was, she had told him back when he was chipmunk size, dangerous, but a calculated risk.
Squirrels aren’t very sentimental. Sparky was told that the nest in the hollow was his to come back to if things didn’t work out, and his mother told him to send word back if he found peanut butter. But Cly said, “Never mind that, bring the peanut butter back here!”
Sparky left at the time of the bright explosions. His father ran with him as far as a pole that had lines that crossed the avenue. As he climbed the pole, Jake shouted to him, “Stay alive, son, and try to remember where you’ve been!”
He made it across the busy avenue to the weird just-grass field, as people were preparing to make things go ‘boom’. Some saw that he was on a mission and stomped at him. Others scolded the stompers but threw good smelling things at him, which he didn’t want, even as good as they smelled. As dusk came, and Sparky went in one direction slowly, he understood what going far meant. A good place was getting smaller behind him, and there seemed to be a lot of ‘noisy, oily, unknown, hostile, absolutely nothing worth being in or having’ ahead. But, he wouldn’t let it ‘not work out’ at this stage. It could ‘work out’. It had worked for his grandparents, and others.
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