The Booth

by Donna Schoenkopf

I was staffing the booth by myself. I had the 11:00 to 1:00 slot. I reeked of onions when I spoke. (I had stopped off at the Sonic Drive-In for a quick burger because I knew I’d get hungry during my watch. WHERE has my discrimination for healthy food gone?) As I greeted my environmental sisters in the booth, they backed away from me just a tiny bit when I opened my mouth.

“It’s fine!” they exclaimed when I asked how bad my breath was.

Our environmental booth looked pretty good. Our banner was up. There was plenty of literature about water conservation, some photos of rain barrels, some shopping bags for sale, and lots of sapling trees in the corner, their roots wrapped in plastic bags.

Mystery Trees. Free to good homes, the sign next to them said.

I think the trees were mostly cottonwoods and willows. That’s what they turned out to be when I brought some home last year. We get them from a woman in our club whose father digs them up from her backyard.

The women I was replacing said their good-byes and I began my tour of duty.

An interesting older man came into the booth. We began talking and he told me about his home, a semi-underground house he had built in the 80s.

“Would you be interested in speaking to our environmental group about your experience?” I asked.

He would be delighted. I took his name and number.

An older woman came through and said in a no-nonsense way that she would join our club if we finally would admit what the REAL problem with the environment was.

“What would that be?” I asked.

“Disposable diapers!” she replied.

I told her I would bring that up at the very next meeting and would be expecting her to help me out.

A sharp laugh exploded out of her as she turned and walked on.

I’m going to call her. She gave me her name. HAH!

After an hour of hanging out in the booth—just my bad breath and me—I glanced over at the booth next door.

That booth was really great looking. The sponsor was a pond company, located north of town, that I had visited a few times looking for plants that would pretty up my pond. The booth had a huge outdoor fireplace diagonally placed in one corner and beautiful glazed pots ranging in size from small to huge, all artfully arranged on graceful wrought iron shelves. A pretty mosaic table stood in the center of the booth with an interesting pot on it in the shape of a man’s head. Plants sprouted from its crown.

A delectable place in which to sit and relax.

A really big guy with a friendly smile, probably in his late twenties, was manning the booth. And I mean manning. He was huge. It turned out he was an employee at said pond shop.

We began talking, as our area seemed to be pretty much empty of human beings at the moment.

The conversation began with me telling him how much I liked his pond store and that I had been out there to buy hyacinths and lily pads for my own pond out in the country.

He smiled and nodded and said something pleasant.

When I told him that none of those plants had survived and that I thought it might be because of the fish getting them or maybe turtles, his eyes brightened and our conversation got meaty.

“Yeah, turtles will do it,” he said.

And then the turtle stories began.

It seems the pond store gets vagabond turtles who, after wandering around on the plains of Oklahoma like the Jews Moses led from Egypt, find the Promised Land at the pond store.

And boy, do they ever love to make mincemeat out of pond plants.

Jack (the pseudonym I have bestowed upon him), had loads of experience with the little fellers. When they made their way to the big pond at the store, it was one of his jobs to deter them or fish them out of the water. He said the sliders were particularly destructive.

“They just bite the stems and let the plants die. Don’t even eat the plants.”

Jack said this with a smile on his friendly face. I could tell he didn’t begrudge the little guys their fun. He knew it was the nature of the beast, if you will. I could also tell that he, too, had a nature that sometimes might be a leedle bit destructive, but, hell, it was all in the interests of having a good time.

He told me that he never killed them. He took them to a guy who liked turtles. He’d show up at this guy’s place with a turtle and the guy would happily take it home to Turtle Paradise—a huge pond he had on his own property.

The turtles, Jack said, came in many sizes ... from little bitty ones the size of a walnut to the granddaddy of them all, the size of boulder.

The boulder-sized turtle he had made the acquaintance of had been particularly hard to corral. As it slowly moved across the driveway, Jack thought about his options. First he stuck his foot under it and tipped it over on its back. But in a trice it had righted itself by craning its long neck around and thrusting its legs over its body. And it just kept on going toward the luscious pond ahead.

What to do?

Jack said he finally stood over it, spread-legged, and grabbed it on both sides of its huge shell, even though he was really, really scared. In his mind he saw his hand being chomped off in one bite by that monster turtle.

Carrying it straight-armed in front of him, he secured it in a box and made a note to visit his friend, the Turtle Guy.

The Turtle Guy LOVED that turtle.

We continued talking about ponds. I told him I was really scared of snakes and knew that there were three kinds of poisonous snakes in Oklahoma—rattlers, copperheads, and water moccasins—and that I was scared of there being water moccasins in the pond.

He said the rattlers were mostly in Western Oklahoma (whew), and the water moccasins were mostly in Eastern Oklahoma (whew, again), but that there were TONS of copperheads in our area. (Oh, great.)

Visions of my rocky cliffs filled with copperheads popped into my head. Ugh! It seems copperheads LOVE living in rocks.

Then Jack told me how his granddaddy had a big piece of land east of Tecumseh, almost to Pink, and he and his brother always spent a month in the summer with him on his farm, and that there were so many copperheads out there that every third rock you turned over had a copperhead under it. Granddaddy’s dog loved to catch snakes. He’d bark and scratch at a rock and then granddaddy would turn it over and bam! There would be a copperhead.

One time he found a copperhead and killed it. He noticed it had a funny little bulge in its belly. Being curious, he slit open the stomach and found ... three baby copperheads, almost ready to be born.

He precisely and carefully cut off each of their heads, one by one, with his knife.

It’s brutal out there, folks.

More stories.

His granddaddy had a huge garden. Tomatoes and okra and potatoes and sweet corn for his chickens and guineas. Because granddaddy didn’t use pesticides, the tip of each ear of corn had a worm in it. Worms, Jack said, eat their way down the ear, circling each layer as it goes. And, Jack says, the corn doesn’t have to be boiled. You just eat it fresh out of the garden. It’s sweet as sweet can be. You just pop off the tip and throw it to the chickens and guineas, a special treat with that worm in it, and then you finish off the rest of the ear yourself. Granddaddy raised that corn for the chickens and guineas. He dried it and used some of it for feed and some of it for seed. And some of it for his grandsons.

I watched Jack’s face as he talked. He was reliving his happy days bit by bit as he talked.

I told him my sad tale of my own guineas. (I shall not reiterate it. It’s much too horrible.) He said his granddaddy fed his flock at the same time each day. Hit a pot with a big spoon and the chickens and guineas came running in from wherever they had been. He put their feed in the coop, they ran in, lickety-split, and then he locked the door.

Everybody safe and tucked in.

I told him I’d love to try that but that I had a couple of dogs who were really into establishing their dominion over the property and that they had even scared my cat, Rosie, off, and that she now lived at Orval the Neighbor’s house.

He said his granddaddy’s dog did that, too, to the chickens. Granddaddy had gotten a bunch of chicks which went missing one day and Jack found them all in the field with only their heads missing. The dog began killing the chickens and guineas. Jack thought the dog was jealous of the chickens. So, to keep the dog from being a chicken-killer forever, granddaddy beat the hell out of that dog with any dead chickens he found and tied them around his neck until they rotted off. After that the dog never did it again.

But the dog also chased granddaddy’s pickup, and when that happened granddaddy would swerve and fishtail until he hit the dog. He did this until the dog stopped chasing the truck.

It’s a wonder that dog stayed there at all.

But then, again, maybe it’s what Rocky said once to me after I confessed in my column that I had hit my own dog, Diego. I had slapped him hard, across the face, after he had menaced and chased and tried to kill my cats one too many times. Rocky said that the great thing about dogs was that they forgave you instantly.

Yeah. That seems right to me.

A little update:

I still feed Rosie the Cat over at Orval’s work yard every day. She has now begun to run out to greet me, meowing and shimmying her tail (her sign of pure delight) and the last couple of days she has been so happy and unafraid that I sat down on the ground with the bowl of food in my hand and she came right over and looked at me with love beams in her eyes. NO fear. I put the bowl on the ground and PETTED her while she ate. It’s the first time I’ve touched her since she left home, months ago.

She purred and purred and purred as I stroked her pretty head and back and belly. She would stop eating every couple of minutes and look up at me with such pleasure that it made me cry inside. Then I picked her up and held her in my arms (it’s never been her favorite thing) and she let me hold her for almost a minute before I felt her squirm a bit. I put her down and she didn’t run away. She loves me, or her version of cat love, anyway. I am the only one who has touched her since she’s been a kitten.

I imagine bringing her home someday. Maybe soon. I have many plans about how to keep Diego the Dog from threatening her.

And not one of them is tying a dead cat around his neck.

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