Woodchuck (Part III) By David Thomson        The Final Installment

The story so far:   In a galaxy far, far away, it’s May.  May in a free country.  You can do anything you want: cut down a tree, covet your neighbor’s wife.  Retired monkeywrencher Winston Larch and his family have fled the killing fields where the great virgins have been falling beneath the kinky ministrations of californicating chainsaw gangs, and holed up with a few surviving virgin trees in a strange place called The Midwest.  Winston and Anise are aliens in a strange land, and they initiate cross-cultural sexual relations with their neighbors in order to fit in.  Winston is pretty sure he understands that the dean of the university has implicitly asked him to have oral sex with the dean’s wife, Penny, so that he, the dean, won’t have to do this while Penny is pregnant.  Could Winston’s hermeneutical act under Penny’s skirt be a metaphor for how we read and interpret unconventional stories?  When Winston discovers that the dean has cut down a sacred grove of virgins, Winston resists old monkeywrenching impulses and stays in retirement—with a little help from the boys in blue down at HQ who have tracked him to The Midwest.  And what about Anise?  She has been having sex with a grad student.  Or has she? What about that odd reluctance on the part of Andrea Smith over in University Protocols to let Winston near the house that day in early May?  Anise can have sex with anyone in the galaxy.  So she wouldn’t lie about any of it, would she?  Can love survive?  Can it survive The Midwest?

May.  A whole month named after permission.  But June is fast approaching.

Here in the prairies the air is clear of trees and thick with radio snippets.  “The beans are in a leadership role this morning.”  “Pork bellies are up.”  

Winston isn’t about to answer the door at night when Trotsky starts a ruckus and it’s unclear whether someone has knocked or if the person out there figures the racket from the dog is enough and they’ll just wait, or more likely it’s nothing at all. 

In his whimsical moments Winston thinks that police surveillance, with its domestic intimacies, is just another way to overcome the “I/thou” problem.  When police had little access to your home, it was still “them” looking at “you.”  But when they can come in at will, the good burgher in such a new world order is willy nilly accepting the state into the family.  Mi casa su casa.   The good burgher’s instinct to fling wide the door in hospitality is in perfect synch with the desires of the state.  “Come in, officer.  I have your favorite.  Donuts.”

If surveillance is a camera, first it moves indoors into the home.  Then it moves into your head, pointing out.  You start seeing everything the way a constable would see it.

If that’s true, what’s sex?  It’s that doctor hauling his pants down in front of his mother.  Everyone gets to have a good look.  Imagine what a blowjob looks like to the fully digitized snitch!  The perfectly realized Ashcroftian fantasy has collapsed the distinction between private and pubic, and offers a vision of tightly-kinked foliage from inside.  Like we’re all high in the canopy of the virgins now.  Snitch snatch.  

But at 11:15 at night, Winston isn’t feeling whimsical.  On this particular night, Trotsky is more guttural and urgent than usual and he sends Anise down while he gets his prison stuff together just in case, long underwear and wool pants for the concrete and a sweater just thin enough to pass as a shirt, since if they think it’s an outer garment they’ll take it away from you and if they don’t do your check-in by 10 a.m. on Friday then it won’t come around again until Monday and you won’t even see the judge to get let go till (unless they’re threatening you with three or four years for some felony concept they’ve finessed onto your set of circumstances) Tuesday, that whole time with nothing soft for your bones but whatever fat you might have accumulated taking care of a kid and not exercising much, and here it was Thursday night, perfect for them stalling on doing your 7/40 by 10 the next day, and he wouldn’t have the sweater to use as a pillow on the concrete floor if he didn’t get it right away. 

He thinks he hears “U-- Police” or something, so it’s no longer just in case, and Anise opens the door, leaving the dog inside so she won’t annoy whichever of them is playing good cop for the night.  Winston waits a while and then comes down.  It’s like the entire apparatus of the modern security state can be understood, Winston thinks, as the quest for a good donut. 

He nearly throws up when he sees what looks like two big black guys fighting with Anise up against the old Volvo.  Even then he keeps thinking it’s the police, and he scans the bushes for uniforms, waiting long seconds before he bends for the wand of the EuroProxy Hepa Filtered.  He looks once more through the window.  The biggest guy has his hand around Anise’s mouth and the other guy has what’s left of her clothes in his hand.  He’s unbuckling his belt. 

Winston lets Trotsky out and points the wand at the men.  “Peace Officer,” he hisses, “the `freeze’ is implied.”  One of the men bolts through John and Cathy’s yard and Trotsky goes for his heels.  Winston can’t believe it when the other raises his hands.  Anise gets her dress on.  The man’s pants are baggy and he makes a move to hold them up. 

“What part of freeze,” Winston begins in a patient voice, and the man lets the clothing go.  His testicles are plumped up by his underwear, and his penis is gunmetal gray in the streetlight.  He directs the man to turn around.

“Duct tape,” Winston says to Anise.  It’s the spring of duct tape.  Winston has Genuine Duck Tape and real duct tape and shreds of plastic all over the porch and front yard, little art installations inspired by the Homeland Defense Minister’s Duct-and-Cover anti-terrorism campaign, where you’re supposed to duct tape your windows against bio-terrorism.  Anise grabs a roll from the porch and runs out a length.  She pulls the man’s arms back and makes his wrists and hands into a tight ball of tape, then she wraps up his forearms as well.  From the way she yanks the man’s arms, it doesn’t seem like she’s being too sentimental.

“We all have to make some sacrifices for our country,” says Anise.

“Tupperware,” says Winston. 

He spits on his hand while Anise goes to the kitchen.  When he touches the man’s penis the man bucks a little, but Winston urges the wand more deeply into his lower back and continues stroking.  He works him a little harder.

“We don’t really call 911 around here,” he says into the man’s ear.  “Certain complications.”

He presses the man’s head against the Volvo, and when Anise returns he positions the tupperware under his penis.  “Don’t worry,” he whispers, “we’re not going to hurt you.  Relax.  Think about the Red Sox.”  When the man comes he pushes the head of his penis into the tupperware.  Like playing with his son’s water balloons.  The ejaculate glistens onto the dull surface of the plastic.

Trotsky returns with a swatch of pantleg in her mouth.  “Can’t hurt,” Winston says, popping the fabric into the tupperware with the ejaculate and closing the lid.

The man eyes Trotsky.

“Keep it away.”  He seems really frightened for the first time.

“Not an it,” says Winston.  He passes the wand to Anise and runs out a few feet of tape and binds it around the man’s penis, swaddling it into a phallus with forty-five degrees of ascent.  Now it’s like the man has a three-foot erection.

“African-Americans are more afraid of dogs than white people,” Winston says, gesturing Trotsky to sit.  “Because they treat them worse.”  Still, he thinks, you have to feel guilty about a whole race of people who think “peace” is “police.” 

Anise is wiping throwup from her chin where she’d forced herself to gag as one of her Rape Awareness Defense skills.  There are small animals moving in the hedge. She suddenly takes the long tape end of the man’s upraised dick and slams it in the passenger door of the Volvo and leaves it there a moment.  The gesture is mostly conceptual, but it seems to register on the man.  Perhaps this makes her accessory to the sort of thing that the State’s Attorney had in mind the last time he had Winston jailed for something that was both a crime and not a crime.  The long cylinder of tape is stiff but it begins to sag where Anise has crushed it in the door.

“We’re going to keep this cum sample in a freezer at an undisclosed location across town,” Winston tells the man.  I want you and your buddy to get together and talk about why that means you don’t want to think about coming within ten miles of here again.  Go.  Now.”

The man runs off as best he can with his pants at his ankles and a cartoon erection in front of him.  He overtakes two fraternity boys who are lugging a beer keg between them, and continues on down the street.

“Any part of you not alright?,” he says to Anise.

“Are you still the man who cries when his son plays the harp?”

He’s just come back from the co-op,  where he’d double-packed and labeled (imaginatively) the tupperware and stored it in the back of the big walk-in freezer, where no one will notice it until they defrost in a couple of years.  Anise is eating yogurt to try and settle her stomach.

“Sure you’re okay?  Should you see a doctor?”

“Not like we want anyone else in on this,” she says.  “I’m fine.  But I want to say this.  I lied to you.”  She is starting to shake.

Winston says: “The theater grad student.  Lisa, I guess she is.  You already told me about that. You’re happy, I’m happy.”

“No.  Remember seeing Andrea last week, and she was cleaning up the yard after she’d had that tree cut?  You figured she was feeling guilty about it.”

“She should have been.  That tree was fine.  People use the sickness thing as an excuse.  She knows it, too.  She’s not an idiot.  But whatever, you know I’m retired from all that.”

“Winston, there is no Lisa; it’s only been Andrea.  She had the men park the truck down the block to give me time to get my bike out of there.  Trotsky came running up to me.”

They let that sink in.

“Well, did she feel guilty about the tree?”

He takes her out to the Volvo and fucks her on the hood, handling her a little roughly.  Her clothes have had a long hard night, and in the end he throws them into the hedge.  Her nipples stand up in the cool night air.  “What’s next?,” he says quietly.  He moves his cheekbone along her face.  It’s a nuzzle, if she wants it to be.  The lights along Indiana are out, and the only sound is of  June bugs in the trees and something small and persistent in the bushes.