by Woody Evans

I'd been trying to break my own habits ¹, my good habits like not-shoplifting, and that brought me to Super K-Mart out on the new road, the one by Shipley's Donuts and that good Chinese place that looks like a wedding reception in there, on the way out of town going toward New Orleans.

The K-Mart - I went after two in the morning - had a wide, dim, empty parking lot. They were selling yard-tractors out front for seventeen-hundred bucks. I wanted no yard-tractor, but those big blue turtle-shaped kiddie pools - I could use one of them ². I parked my pickup on the side of the building, like I would park for an oil-change in the day time, around the corner from the garden stuff. They had seventeen pools stacked together like giant hats.

Here, a techie redneck came walking quickly out the store, a carton of cigarettes sticking out the top of his white plastic bag. He was ripping into them and walked to his little Dodge Neon trying to smoke. I recognized him from Radio Shack. Nobody else around, I stepped in behind that stack of pools, and took out my knock-off Leatherman ³. I noticed each of them - each pool, had four big round plastic handles that rose up out of the side, like north south east west, and a rope had been run through all on one side and double knotted at the base ⁴. I cut clean through that shit. Pulled the rope - it was a polymer job, tough and good, but I just left it laying - and got the top pool loose. It wobbled and rumbled like thunder as I hefted it up and over into the bed of my truck.

Then but guess who steps out of Super K-Mart at that hour of the morning eating brightly buttered popcorn from a paper bag, at that hour of the morning now, but Emmie ⁵. This was just as I was getting ready to drive off, so I circled right around and came up beside her as she was walking to her car, her pink wind-suit swishing. Hey, I said. She said Hey and What you doing? I just stole a swimming pool, ha ha, I said. I thought that sounded cool. But she didn't, so she said, Fuck, dude, and she shook her head. I raced my engine up, then peeled out, scorched the asphalt from zero in third gear. Mine is a sporty little truck. I saw her get in her car in my rear-view, before I turned out toward Shipley's.

No cops, no store security, no second-looks, no need for apologies, no future amputations for me, no doctors ever probably. No nothing, man, and rut-free. No nothing.

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¹ Been stuck in a rut for too long, just making my coffee, smoking a bowl, doing my at-home processing for the eye doctor's office. Wake at eight, work at the kitchen table from ten to twelve, break an hour for my carb-free lunch, work at the kitchen table from twelve to two or three. Then a soap opera, a sitcom, maybe a drive out to the bookstore or to the waffle place for an early supper. And I'd met this young lady when I was browsing at the bookstore, in the d.i.y. section. She had big, brown, dumb hair and bright lipstick. We drank some Italian sodas and talked about computers (she was a systems librarian up at the hospital), talked about the medical field and insurance scams. She had a green tattoo of a sperm cell on her left wrist, just beside her watch-band. She said she wanted to live in Iceland. I asked her why. She said she wanted to live like an Eskimo. That's Canada, I said. Anyway, I never talked to people at the bookstore. I was in a rut, but she didn't seem to be, and I hadn't laughed so much or so easily in weeks.

³ Quite a fine tool, but the steel is cheap, so the blade is starting to bend. That said, I got it as a gift from a cousin at a 'dirty santa' party over Christmas in 1997. That was more or less a family reunion, and I got sick on my uncle's rum-cake. But, I say, a decent tool for the money (free to me!) is this. Hateful fakes, my family.

⁴ I learned knots from my sea-faring step-daddy. Real pussy, as it turned out, yet an exceptional knotman.

⁵ That brown haired woman from the bookstore, see. She saw then that I was a d.i.y. kinda guy for real.

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