TROUT AND PEE WEE

Episode 1 — The Groundhog

The groundhog was by the side of Route 11 near the Esso station, which was closed on Sundays. Pee Wee saw it first because he was taller. It had been there at least a day. Maybe two. The flies had found it and the smell had found them and they stood over it for a while without saying anything, the way you do when something dead is more interesting than whatever you were doing before.

“Carol’s chicken died,” Trout said. Pee Wee looked at him.

“She buried it out behind their barn. Tuesday I think.”

Pee Wee looked back at the groundhog. The heat came off the road in slow waves. Somewhere down the street a screen door opened and closed. Neither of them moved.

“We’d need a shovel,” Pee Wee said.

They told Carol they had learned something in school. This was technically true. Trout had learned it from Danny Reese who had learned it from somewhere else and it had arrived already missing some pieces but the core of it held which was that when something died it could come back as a different thing depending on how the universe felt about it. Carol was nine and took most things seriously and her chicken had been a good chicken by her account and she had been sad about it for four days. She listened with her arms crossed.

“So Dottie could come back,” she said. “That’s the thing about it,” Trout said. Pee Wee nodded once and looked at the barn.

They went back that night before supper while the light was still long and flat across the field. The groundhog was heavy and neither of them had thought about that part. Pee Wee carried it. Trout carried the shovel and walked upwind. The chicken was not far down. Carol had done a respectful job of it. There was even a small cross made from two sticks and a piece of baling twine. They worked fast. The groundhog went in. They packed the dirt back carefully. Trout replaced the cross exactly as it had been. Pee Wee wiped his hands on the back of his jeans and looked at the mound.

“Even,” he said. It was.

They left before the fireflies came up.

Carol came and found Trout two days later. She was not crying. Her face had the specific expression of someone who has seen something they cannot explain and has been thinking about it ever since.

“It worked,” she said. Trout waited. “It wasn’t Dottie in there.”

“Huh,” Trout said.

“It was something else. Something big.”

Pee Wee was sitting on the porch steps behind them. He looked out at the road while Carol looked at Trout for a long time.

“Do you think she’s happy,” she said. “Wherever she is now.”

Trout thought about the groundhog by Route 11. He thought about the flies and the smell and the two days it had been there in the heat before they found it.

“Probably yeah,” he said.

Carol nodded slowly and went home. Pee Wee watched her go down the road until she turned at the Hendersons’ mailbox. “She dug it up herself,” he said.

“I know,” Trout said.

They sat there in the heat a while longer. The locusts were going in the trees across the road. The tar on Route 11 had gone soft again. Somewhere a few streets over someone’s mother was calling a name that wasn’t either of theirs. It was a good summer so far.

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