"I'm Just a Pig on a Mission" - Part 2 (the end)
Read Part One
I sucked in dry white air. The door stood ajar, looked alone, frightened, as if it kept secrets. I felt the rush of salt air through the hall. It met my feet, my legs, and my heart sank as I strained to look through the front window, hoping to see Frankie munching grass or a wax-leaved potted succulent. Nothing. No pig. I heard the electric rattle of toy trains and my youngest boy imitate the call of the conductor.
"Frankie! Fraaaaaaaaaaaaankie!" I yelled into the cul-de-sac, but my voice bounced off the empty asphalt, echoed and rolled down the hill, didn't hit a runaway pig.
I knocked on my oldest son's room, made him remove his iPod headphones and join the living room fray. He sighed long and hard and hit the couch hard with his butt. His younger brothers continued operating the train, taking turns with the whistle and striped engineer's hat. I grabbed my cell phone and shoved it in my front kilt pocket and slammed my front door behind me.
"Frankie! Fraaaaaaaaaaaaankie!" I ran as fast as I could, passing locked gates and manicured lawns. No sign of hungry swine on a grocery rampage. At the bottom of the street I hovered. Right or left? I hustled up a brick walk belonging to an old woman who once bought six bottles of Imari perfume.
"Hello? Mrs. Frazier? Are you there? It's me, Birdie. The Avon Lady. Hello?" I banged the door knocker hard against her pine door. "Hello! Please open up!"
The steady slow thump of Mrs. Frazier's walker against Mexican tile frustrated me. I kept twisting my head right and left, looking, listening, hoping to take in some outlying radar ping of pig frenzy. The old woman opened her door and greeted me with a huge smile.
"Birdie! It has been so long. Please do come in." She spoke with the careful articulation of her generation, turned her back, and lifted and clunked her walking device in a methodical pattern toward her paisley couch. I took a deep breath and interrupted her concentration.
"Mrs. Frazier, I'm so so sorry, but I can't sit down. I'm here to see if you saw a runaway pig? My potbellied pig ran away just a few minutes ago but I don't know which direction he took. Did you see him outside your window at all?" I made running motions with my hands as if I were a pet control mime. Mrs. Frazier stared at me through rheumy gray eyes.
"Birdie, I have not seen any pigs unless you count the chorizo defrosting in my refrigerator. Now let us sit down and you can take an Avon order from me. I have gone through those six bottles of Imari and could use a few more." She scooter the walker once more, and I realized with a start that the house absolutely reeked of Avon fragrance. I began breathing through my mouth and beads of sweat broke out along my hairline.
This is what my life has come to, I thought. I can't even smell the damn stuff anymore.
"Mrs. Frazier, sorry! I have to go!" I hiked my kilt and high-tailed it outside, gently closing the door, then sprinting from her house to the next. I didn't know the old lady somehow set the psychic stage with some kind of strange thought pulse that sent beauty desperation in concentric circles through my neighborhood.
Some kind of Imari-challenged Mrs. Frazier greeted me at every house along the street. Come in, Birdie, each woman said, old and young. I haven't seen you in forever! I need Avon! Let's chat about the summer colors! I tried to bring the conversation around to my missing pig, but no one heard.
I must have Glimmerstick tattooed on my forehead, I mused. I've been in the land of the missing, but all anyone wants is the load my arms carry."
I promised each woman I would return with my backpack and the latest samples. I promised each woman I wouldn't stay an Avon stranger, I would help her life be beautiful and fragrant. I was promising one woman - a spry chick of seventy-six with a long blonde wig - that I would bring her wrinkle cream and lipstick and six shades of blush and, and, and.... and as my hand cramped with speed ordering, I saw a fat little beast saunter through her backyard, saw him stop and sit and eat two pink roses from a bush.
"Holy crap! Mrs. Belvins, I have to go! Sorry! I'll come back tomorrow to finish this!" I crammed the order in my back pocket and twirled to run, but Mrs. Blonde Wig grabbed my arm with surprising strength.
"You know what the trouble with you is, Birdie?" She stood eight inches shorter than me, but she met me eye to eye in mental martial art combat. "You don't take your Avon seriously."
She dropped my arm and gave me a wry grin. "Your pig is safe in my backyard. Now let's finish up this order, shall we?"
So I took her long order, and drank chamomile tea and ate crackers and cheese and thought about my boys and the pig and the snack and Avon and my long list of neglected customers. She's right. And she's wrong, too. And she's right. But she doesn't know, will never know the hurricane sideways one-hundred-mile-per-hour wind that blew through my year. Ah, life is damn complicated. I glanced outside to watch Frankie dig and root through a patch of ice plant.
"Thanks, Mrs. Belvins. You're right. I haven't been a good Avon Lady. But I can try again, hey?"
I hauled my pig home, my pocket full of neighborhood orders. Frankie stopped every sixteen feet, sat and belched. The scent of roses lifted from his snout, and I remembered the day someone dropped him at my home.
"It's me and you, pig. We're both runaway nuts. C'mon. Let's go home and eat some cookies."
2:34:52 PM 
|
