Gar Pond
A short story by Walt Foreman, from his collection, Beer in the Sun
Stub was house-sitting a radish farm. He knew next to nothing about the owner of the farm other than he had met him at the Wooly 40 right after the man bought a round of drinks for all five people in the bar. Stub had happened to be sitting a couple stools away, and the owner, who was named Clarence, had picked up his beer and taken the stool next to Stub, clapped Stub on the shoulder and boomed expansively, “How’d you like to house-sit my ranch for a month?”
The ranch had turned out to be three acres on the side of a scrub hill south of town. The uppermost portion of the parcel consisted of a dense honeysuckle thicket from which at times could be seen traces of a badly-rusted ’71 red Nova that on a sunny day might glint now and then in the sunlight but otherwise had succumbed to the vines; below the thicket was a low spot that evidently at some point had been nominated as a localized dump and now featured a couple dozen empty detergent bottles, three car batteries, a sprung sofa that had had most of its stuffing ripped out by raccoons and strewn about the surrounding hillside, a picture-shattered Zenith TV, and two washing machines, one of which had several dozen small holes that looked to Stub to have been caused by number six shot delivered from a twelve-gauge. Below the dump lay the radish patch, which consisted of five rows of rocky chert forty feet long from which Clarence asserted thousands of plump radishes would emerge any day now but at the moment bore only a single sickly, brownish-black shoot halfway down the third row that looked as though it would wither and die any second. The ranch house, which was a doublewide with warped floors and a possum family living under the foundation, sat directly east of the thicket, so that the bedroom window looked out on the thicket and the living room window looked down on the dump and radish patch. A trickle of a creek wound along the edge of the field a few feet away from the last row of chert, and on the other side of the creek was the road. On full-moon nights coyotes howled from a wooded hill on the southern-adjacent property. Stub had been living in the Polk Motel before the invitation, and the trailer had a satellite dish that got more channels than Stub could sift through in an hour, so he sat.
Mostly he drank and slept. Once a day or so he would order take-out of some sort, usually either a pizza from Honey’s Pies or the Mongolian Beef from Hong Kong Redneck. There was a cute brunette who sometimes delivered for Honey’s and every now and then she would smile at him when he tipped her so lately he had been eating mostly pizza. It was the middle of March and he had been sitting the radish farm for forty days.
He was halfway through the goat-cheese-rattlesnake deep dish Hump-day Special on his fortieth day of sitting, flipping back and forth between a replay of the 2002 Orange Bowl on ESPN Classic and an episode of River Monsters in which the British guy with bad teeth goes for man-eating goonch catfish in India, when a semi hauling a backhoe on a forty-foot flatbed turned off the road and started up the steep gravel driveway to the doublewide. Stub was just wondering how the hell the driver thought he was going to get that thing up the hill, and who the hell was driving it, when the truck stopped even with the radish patch and started backing into the patch.
Stub set down his beer and the pizza box, threw on his work boots and went running out of the doublewide in his long johns, yelling at the top of his lungs. When he had gotten halfway down the driveway he saw it was Reed. Reed waved at him from the cab window and continued backing the trailer into the radish patch.
“Stop the truck, you damn idiot!” yelled Stub. Reed hit the air brakes and shifted into neutral, stuck his head out the window with a confused look.
“I got a great idea for the field,” he yelled.
Stub came running up to the cab breathing hard. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he said.
“I’m gonna dig a catfish pond for you,” said Reed. “Six months from now we’ll be rollin in money.”
“You damn idiot, this ain’t my land.”
“Listen. I was watchin one a’ them monster fish shows and they was at this sportfishin ranch in Thailand where the guy who owns it has two ten-acre lakes with all these giant fish in them, he’s got arupayma, dog-eating catfish, Siamese carp, Mekong giant catfish, Amazon red-striped catfish, and people from all over the world pay thousands of dollars to come there and fish them two little lakes for them big giant fish ‘cause there ain’t nowhere else they can corner ‘em in a little lake like that and have a realistic shot at catchin one. Imagine bein able to catch a four-hundred-pound Mekong giant catfish in Tennessee!”
“You can’t have them in Tennessee. They’re a non-native species.”
“Alright. Alligator gar then. They can grow to two hundred or better.”
“There ain’t enough land here. There ain’t more than a acre of level ground on this hill if that. You couldn’t have more than two or three gar in a one-acre pond unless you just fed them constantly. It would cost a thousand a month just to feed them.”
“I got that part all figured out. We just plant a bunch of pine tree saplings around the bank of the pond and birds’ll come nest in ‘em and the gar will jump out of the water and eat the birds. Gar eat the hell outta birds. They said so on Monster Fish.”
Reed reached over to a twelve-pack of Kroger-brand beer sitting on the passenger seat, took a sweating can out and offered it to Stub.
“I got one in the house,” said Stub.
“Backup?”
Stub shook his head and Reed returned the beer to the cardboard box.
“So whadya say?” said Reed.
“This is his radish patch,” said Stub. “He bought the farm to grow radishes, not alligator gar.”
“What if I told you I already got permission?” Reed was grinning with all the wattage of his tobacco-brown teeth. Stub just looked at him warily. Reed whistled and the curtain behind the seat parted to reveal the ugliest woman Stub had ever seen, grinning at Stub between bites of a severely-burnt corn dog. She had matted gray hair that looked as though it hadn’t been washed in a month, a hook nose, a chin like a lumberjack. It was all Stub could do to keep eye contact as she smiled at him with a mouthful of food.
“This is Francine,” said Reed proudly. “She’s Clarence’s second cousin on his mother’s side. She said he won’t mind.”
“You talked to him?” said Stub.
Francine produced a Blackberry, stared at the screen with great concentration while taking a fresh bite of corn dog, pushed a couple keys and turned the phone toward Stub as a voicemail began playing. The voicemail was mainly rustling noises as though the caller had pocket-dialed while walking, though muffled laughter could be heard in the background here and there. After several seconds a male voice near the phone yelled, “What? Yeah, sure,” after which came vigorous rustling, after which the impersonal phone company voice said “End of Message” and Francine hung up with a declarative nod at Stub.
“That’s it?” said Stub.
“You don’t recognize his voice?” said Reed.
“I’ve talked to him twice in my life.”
“I reckon I know my own second cousin’s voice,” said Francine.
“Look, I’m watchin this place for him,” said Stub. “I’m probably liable on some level if somethin happens to the property.”
“Did you sign anything?” said Francine.
“No.”
“Just picture for a second this pond,” said Reed. “Clear blue water, a few lily pads around the bank, we could build us a nice little dock and mount one of them automatic feeders on it to throw the gar pellet food…”
“What if a gar bites off somebody’s hand and they sue us for half a million?”
“Homeowner’s policy,” said Francine.
“You gotta think big,” said Reed. “Ten years from now we could have gar ponds all across America.”
“I don’t think so,” said Stub. What was he supposed to say? Reed stared at him crestfallen. He took a big swig of his Kroger beer, looked out the windshield at the gray day. The woman leaned forward and whispered in Reed’s ear and his face broke into a wide grin.
“We’ll get you a date with Lucy,” said Reed.
Lucy was the brunette who brought his pizza. Stub felt his resolve weakening. “I’m old enough to be that girl’s daddeh,” he said.
“She likes older men,” purred Francine with a wink that nearly made Stub retch. He remembered the tight black slacks the girl wore when she delivered, the way those slacks swished as she walked back to her lime-green Bug. He barely knew Clarence. Worst comes to worst maybe he could convince Lucy to run away to Mexico with him while he was out on bail for vandalism of private property.
“I don’t know nothin about it,” he said, already regretting as the words left his mouth.
“Best decision you ever made,” beamed Reed as he released the air brake and ground the truck into gear. Stub turned and headed up the driveway toward the doublewide. He didn’t know when Lucy would be coming but he figured he probably should squeeze in a shower in the interim. He heard Francine yell behind him followed by a loud curse from Reed but he continued up the gravel drive.
Stub got showered, threw away the rest of the pizza and poured the beer down the sink, dusted here and there, dug out an ancient vacuum cleaner from a closet and vacuumed the living room. Every now and then he would look out the window at the backhoe but it was positioned such that he couldn’t see the hole, only the cab of the backhoe inside which Reed sat and somewhat jerkily worked the controls as Francine semaphored from a few feet away. He thought once or twice about going down there to see how much of a mess Reed was making but decided it would be easier to feign ignorance to the police if the mess was truly a surprise. The idea of an alligator gar pond was growing on him. People might not necessarily drive from Washington State to fish it but maybe they would drive from Kentucky or Arkansas. Maybe the overcast sky would let loose a good spring flood so the pond filled quicker. If a really good flood came the creek might back up into the pond and give those gar a few chubsuckers to munch on. Stub was setting out Clarence’s fine china in case Lucy brought a goat-cheese rattlesnake pie with her when an urgent knock came at the door. Stub went to the door to find a man in a yellow hardhat staring back at him.
“Are you the landowner of that field?” said the man.
“House-sitter,” said Stub. He looked past the man’s shoulder and saw a white phone company truck parked in the yard of the doublewide. Down the hill a phone company semi was parked next to Reed’s semi and a tall man with blonde hair was backing a backhoe off its trailer as Reed and Francine stood by and watched.
“Your buddy down there with the backhoe dug these up,” said the man. He held up a tangled mass of severed wires as fine as human hair. “We’re gonna have to dig out his hole a little bit to get it fixed.”
“He ain’t my buddy,” said Stub but the man just gave him a look and shook his head and walked back to the truck, gesturing over his shoulder with the cut wires as he went.
Stub put on his work boots and headed down the driveway, rehearsing his best surprised act as he went. Although he realized he had probably missed his chance for that when the man came to the door. Maybe he could feign ignorance of digging laws. As he approached the excavation Reed came running over and took him by the arm, led him off to the side.
“We gotta figure out a way to get them away from the hole for about ten minutes,” he whispered.
Stub watched as the blonde man sunk the bucket of the backhoe into the chert, scooped out a ton or so and dumped it twenty feet away in a pile he was making. He had dug out an eight-foot-diameter hole next to the twenty-foot-diameter hole Reed had dug which was slightly less symmetrical than the smaller one. Stub could see a large clump of the fine wires protruding from the red dirt at the end of Reed’s hole where it met the phone company hole. Reed’s hole was a foot or so deeper and had muddy brown water standing in the bottom of it. Stub could see current flowing into the hole from the direction of the creek.
“What the hell are you talkin about?” said Stub.
“We lucked out and hit groundwater tied into the creek,” said Stub. “The hatchery truck will be here in thirty minutes with the gar so we gotta come up with a distraction.”
“Are you fuckin out of your mind?” said Stub. “They’re fixin to have men down in that hole workin on them wires. We cain’t put no damn alligator gar in there now.”
“Look. We just make sure to put ‘em in the deeper hole and they’ll never know they’re there. Besides, gar is afraid of humans. The guy on Monster Fish got in a tank and swam around with ‘em and they swam the other way. And they ain’t nothin but babies about a foot long so they couldn do much damage noways.”
Stub was just about to explain to Reed in no uncertain terms what a champion moron he was when the lime-green Bug turned up the driveway honking its horn. The Bug pulled up next to them and Lucy stuck her head out the driver’s-side window. She was wearing a horseshoe ring in her lower lip and had on purple eyeshadow and lipstick.
“I’m here,” she said.
“Hi,” said Stub who had suddenly forgotten all about Reed and the gar.
“You want a ride up to your trailer?” said Lucy, and Stub walked around to the passenger side and got in. The stereo was blasting a Katy Perry song. The car smelled of glue.
“Thanks for coming,” said Stub.
“Money talks, bullshit walks,” said Lucy. She handed him a document while piloting the Bug up the driveway. The head of the document read “Gar Pond Contract,” after which came several lines of terms and conditions.
“I get twenty percent,” said Lucy. She handed him a purple pen with a tiny plastic skull on one end. Stub looked over at her as she drove. She was wearing a very short, lime-green vinyl skirt that showed enough of her pale white legs to give Stub fear of cardiac arrest. He found the blank line at the bottom of the document and signed it just as they reached the doublewide.
Stub held the front door for her as they entered the trailer. Lucy sauntered over to the couch, tossed Stub’s favorite blue suede pillow onto the floor and sat, crossed her legs and stared at the ceiling. Stub stood at the threshold a moment trying to work up the nerve to sit next to her on the couch, decided to be a gentleman and sat in the rocker by the door. He smiled at her but she continued to stare at the ceiling.
“So how do you feel about Mexico?” said Stub.
She looked at him then. “What?” she said.
“We should just take our share of the pond and run away to Mexico,” said Stub.
Lucy looked back to the ceiling. “I don’t do dick,” she said.
Stub stammered. “I’m sorry?” he said.
“I’m lesbo,” she said. “No dicks.”
They sat a few moments in silence then. Lucy sighed, picked up the remote from the coffee table.
“Do you mind?” she said. Stub shook his head that he didn’t and she switched on the TV. The British guy had just boated a seven-foot alligator gar. Stub was pondering whether to comment when a loud curse echoed up the hill and the fishing show was replaced by gray static.
Stub looked out the window. Several men in yellow hardhats had gathered at the lip of the phone company hole and were looking down into the hole while gesturing gravely.
A loud alarm burst into the room and Stub jumped. Lucy took an iPhone out of her lime-green vinyl purse, eyed the screen briefly as the phone made the sound Stub realized was the radioactive alert from Silkwood. She hit a couple keys and replaced the phone in the green purse.
“Can I go now?” she said.
Stub shrugged and she was past him and out the door before he could stand up to try for a hug.
Stub sat in the rocker a moment pondering the cursedness of his life. He got up and fetched the remote, switched off the static, went into the kitchen and got a fresh beer from the fridge. When he got back to the living room window a cable company semi with a backhoe on the flatbed was turning into the driveway from the road. He took a long swig and headed down the hill.
Two men in cable company blue jumpsuits were conferring with two of the phone company men as the driver of the cable company truck backed into the field beside the other two semis. A third cable company man stood at the edge of the phone company hole looking down into the hole while scratching his head worriedly. Reed came running up and grabbed Stub by the arm, led him off to the side.
“I got the gar in,” he whispered with giddy excitement. “I just told ‘em the hatchery truck was bringin us radishes and then we snuck the fish down to the far end of the pond and slipped ‘em in. They swam off real good. Toothy bastards, look what one of ‘em did to my arm.”
Reed displayed his right forearm which bore a just-coagulated gash running from the back of his hand nearly to his elbow.
“You are a fuckin idiot,” said Stub. “World-class.”
“If you want me to buy you out I can,” said Reed.
Stub glared at him. Reed grinned and punched him on the shoulder. “How’d the date go?” he said with a wink.
Stub was still glaring at him, trying to find the right words to communicate the depth of his annoyance when a man in a blue jumpsuit came up and handed Stub a clipboard with a one-page document attached along with a pen on a string. “This just says you got homeowner’s that’ll cover all this,” said the man.
Stub started to tell the man he was merely house-sitting but decided it would only complicate things. He took the clipboard and signed. Mexico was definitely in his immediate future. As he was handing the clipboard back to the man he saw two phone company men climbing down into the hole with heavy toolbelts and long rolls of the hair-fine wire. Thirty feet away an obese man wearing a Titans jersey began backing the cable company backhoe off its semi.
“Don’t ever have children,” said Stub.
“I’m sterile,” said Reed. “My sperm don’t swim. The doctor’s got me takin extra vitamin E and a protein supplement.”
“Don’t take it,” said Stub.
“You wanna help plant the saplings?” said Reed but Stub had already turned away from him and started up the hill. He heard one of the phone company workmen yell from down in the hole something about the water coming up but he kept his course for the doublewide.
It was raining by the time he had called Hong Kong Redneck and taken the new twelve-pack from the fridge so he got his truck keys and an umbrella from Clarence’s closet. He wondered if he should call back Hong Kong Redneck and tell them he would be waiting at the bottom of the driveway next to all the semis but decided the driver could figure it out.
The rain was coming down vigorously as Stub sloshed through puddles to get to his truck, fumbled to get it unlocked while maintaining the umbrella over his beer. He had just gotten the door shut when the bottom fell out. He had to run his wipers on high and take it slow down the hill for fear he might go sliding into the hole which now had sufficient activity and people around it that someone passing on the road might have thought a new mall was being built in the middle of the field. He could see the hardhats of the phone company men as they worked down in the hole, a few yards past them the fat man in the Titans jersey digging the second annex of the hole, and coming and going from both holes and standing under umbrellas by several company trucks were men in hardhats and jumpsuits, rubbing their chins and shaking their heads, every now and then pointing down into the hole. A few of them had retreated to the cabs of their trucks to wait out the rain but most went about in the mud of the field under umbrellas.
Stub parked the truck beside the cable company semi, facing east so he could see both the driveway and the hole, sat back and drank his beer. The rain and the drab sky were hastening dusk and Stub wondered if the crews would continue working into the night. He had just put in a Little Jimmy Dickens CD when a tortured scream erupted from the phone company hole, followed quickly by several high-volume curses. Arms could be seen waving for help above one of the hardhats in the hole, and three or four men in hardhats standing under umbrellas by the phone company semi went running over to the hole. Several more curses, along with exclamations of disbelief, drifted over to Stub and he watched as a man was hoisted out of the hole while continuing to scream as though his dick had just been cut off. The man had something dangling from his calf that initially Stub could not identify in the weak light but after a few seconds was able to make out as a fourteen-inch alligator gar flopping about wildly as blood from the man’s calf ran down its snout and writhing armored scales. The man was slapping maniacally at the gar but the gar seemed to consider its bite a death grip and was loathe to release it.
“How the hell did a damn alligator gar get in that hole?” yelled one of the men helping the man with the gar on his leg.
“Must’ve come in from the creek,” yelled another as they sloshed through the rain with the gar-bitten man between them. They got the man to the bed of the phone company semi and leaned him up against it. One of the men fetched an umbrella from the cab and held it over the bitten man.
“Damn thing is on there good,” yelled one.
“How we gon’ get it off?”
“Better call an ambulance.”
Stub looked around for Reed and saw him and Francine skulking down the driveway toward the road under a bright-orange umbrella with the Vols logo on it.
“I think I’m goin into shock,” yelled the bitten man dramatically from the phone company semi.
“Help is on the way, Donnie,” said one of the other men.
Stub saw a pink Focus out on the road, making its way around the long curve just before the road straightened in front of Clarence’s place. The car was partially obscured by trees but then it came clear and he could see the Hong Kong redneck logo on the driver’s-side door and his stomach growled happily. The car was slowing to turn into the driveway when to Stub’s horror and disbelief the orange Vols umbrella ran out into the road in front of the pink Focus and four arms began waving frantically from beneath the umbrella. The Focus swerved to miss Reed and Francine just as a closed-cab John Deere tractor hauling a thirty-foot trailer bearing what Stub estimated to be roughly fifty tons of six-foot-diameter sodden hay bales materialized from the opposite direction and began vainly attempting to turn away from the Focus that was now skidding right for it. The trailer jackknifed against the tractor just as the Focus plowed into the cab of the tractor. The Focus slid up under the cab as the hay bales listed toward the far ditch, the rear near-side tire of the tractor cab lifted off the wet pavement and then followed the lead of the hay bales that were now airborne and heaved the cab of the tractor onto its side in the road as the trailer whiplashed back towards the driveway. It was then that Stub heard and saw the ambulance. He realized he must have heard it for at least a couple seconds beforehand but somehow it didn’t register in his consciousness until it was skidding to avoid the twisted wreckage of Focus and tractor, immediately after which it plowed into them at what Stub judged to be about forty miles an hour.
Stub sank down into the seat of the truck. He thought about going to help but decided it might be best to minimize his visibility in the whole ordeal. Mexico was looking more and more like an imminent necessity. Though he realized at the moment that plan was significantly complicated by a thoroughly-blocked road with several possibly-injured people in the middle of it.
A handful of men in hardhats and jumpsuits were jogging down to the road to help but they stopped in their tracks as Stub heard the fat man yell from the cable company backhoe. “LIVE WATER!” he yelled urgently. “BLACK LINES IN WATER!” Stub looked toward the hole and saw bright sparks rising upward from the hole, followed briefly by thin, brownish smoke. Within a couple seconds the smell came to Stub of burnt flesh. The smell grew stronger as several of the men who had been jogging down to the road came jogging back up the hill cursing under their breaths. They gathered at the lip of the hole and looked down into it while shaking their heads in wonderment.
“Son-of-a-bitch,” said a man in a jumpsuit.
“Look at all them dead gar,” said a man in a hardhat.
“How many you reckon?” said a second jumpsuit man.
“Gotta be at least two hundred,” said a second hardhat man.
“Guess we better call the power company,” said a jumpsuit man.
“Have to shut down the grid,” said another.
Stub sank down lower in his truck seat as one of the men took out a cell phone and dialed, argued briefly with the person on the other end, cursed a couple times and hung up. Stub opened a fresh beer. On his third swig the doublewide and every house within sight in either direction went dark.
“Break out the generators and the arcs,” said one of the men. A few moments later two Honda four-stroke generators roared to life and a half-dozen arc lights lit up the hole and surrounding hillside like noonday. The fat man, who apparently all this time had not left the cab of his backhoe, cranked up its engine and sunk the bucket once again though this time he went straight into the water rather than the mud. He brought up a bucket full of muddy water which he dumped a few feet away in a tremendous splash that washed out a foot-deep rut in the hillside as it rushed toward the now-swollen creek. He plunged the bucket a second time into the water which had by now nearly crested the lip of the hole and heaved it upward sloshing full, dumping it in the same spot so that the rut was deepened as the muddy water tore down the hillside to the creek. Stub was watching the bucket splash again into the muddy brown water of the hole when a coyote howl echoed down the hillside. Stub thought it sounded closer than usual but then the supplemental ambulances arrived and he forgot about it.
The five new ambulances parked in the road by the wreck and four of them tended to the farmer and the Hong Kong Redneck driver and the crew of the first ambulance while the crew of the fifth sloshed up the mini-streams running down the gravel driveway to get the phone company man with the gar stuck on his leg. A tow truck semi arrived just as the ambulances were pulling away and almost skidded off into the ditch but got it corrected, waited for the ambulances to get past and began winching the tractor upright and onto the flatbed. The power company semi arrived the same time as the tow truck sent for the pink Focus and the power company semi ended up briefly in the grass just above the raging creek but the semi tow truck winched it back on the road and it made it up the driveway. Its driver, a man shorter even than Stub and wearing a two-piece yellow rainsuit, parked beside the other three semis and began backing his backhoe off the trailer.
Stub looked at the clock of his truck radio. It was nine twenty-three p.m. His stomach growled angrily and Stub wondered if he should call the new Thai place at the edge of town that delivered or head for Mexico now and stop once he was in Mississippi. A startled yell went up from the direction of the power company semi and Stub looked that direction to see the short man in the rainsuit backing slowly away from a sopping-wet coyote that held two dead gar in its mouth and was growling at the short man. The coyote had the man treed halfway between the cab of his semi and the backhoe. Stub thought he saw white flecks around the coyote’s mouth amidst the dark blood oozing out of the two punctured gar.
“Watch out, Larry, it’s rabid!” yelled one of the cable company men.
“Somebody shoot it!” yelled the treed short man.
“Left my pistol at the house,” said the cable company man.
“Me too,” said a nearby man in a hardhat standing under an umbrella. A second hardhat man ran to his white truck, opened the passenger side door and looked behind the seat.
“Damnit!” he said. “I had a brand-new synthetic-stock AK-47 in here yesterday but my wife musta took it out.”
“Kill it with your bucket,” yelled another cable company man. The fat man in the Titans jersey worked the levers inside the cab of his backhoe, turned the backhoe to face the coyote, lifted the long crane arm, plunged the bucket down hard. The coyote leaped to the side and the bucket sunk deep into the soggy brown mud. Stub heard a hard metallic crunch and the fat man cursed as a two-foot-diameter geyser of clear water erupted in front of the backhoe and soared thirty feet into the air. The backhoe was just downhill from the waterline it had hit and Stub watched as the torrent rushing down the already-soaked hill got under the backhoe and then the next thing he knew the backhoe was being borne down the hill past the semis and company trucks and then it was washing into the raging creek and slamming against a pin oak that normally stood three feet on land but at the moment strained against five feet of surging brownish-red water. Stub watched as the fat man clambered onto the roof of the backhoe’s cab and yelled up the hill for help, then grabbed awkwardly for the tree trunk as the heavy current swung the backhoe around and began dislodging it from the tree as dozens of phone company and cable company and power company men went running and sliding down the muddy mess of the hill to save the fat man from certain death in the roiling flooded creek. Stub had started his truck and input “Mexico” into his Tom-Tom when the grinding ’89 Civic that belonged to Clarence appeared out on the road, came out of the long curve, slowed in apparent recognition of the arclights and semis and a backhoe in his creek with thirty men running toward it, and turned up the gravel driveway.
Gar Pond appears in Walt Foreman’s short story collection, Beer in the Sun, published by Dymaxcion and available from Amazon. Foreman is the author of the novel Fairy Tale.
