Gristle

The squirrel flew and over the fence screaming obscenities as he came. From Lawrence Binky's yard, the small brown object flew through the air and landed in a heap at the foot of the giant oak tree in Danny's back yard.

Danny hated her real name. Her parents called her Danielle when they were upset and her friends called her Danielle when they teased her. They would make it sound sing-songy and snooty. Danielle was simply known as Danny to anyone who mattered.

She couldn't believe her ears. The squirrel's high-pitched scream sounded like a radio with the squelch set too low. A stream of unrecognizable profanities streamed from his mouth. If she ever used that kind of language, there wouldn't be a bar of soap left in the house. Her mother would see to that! Over her shock of seeing the airborne squirrel, she was torn between retracing its path to see where it had come from and racing to the aid of the injured rodent.

Noting the cursing critter licking its wounds, she sneaked to the fence and looked through a knothole just in time to see a cat twist free from Lawrence 's grasp, clawing at its captor's face as it struggled to get away. Lawrence cupped his hand over the deep claw marks and the cat disappeared under the porch. The makeshift catapult Lawrence and his hooligan friends made remained cocked and ready for the next living projectile that was unlucky enough not to avoid capture.

Seeing the pain in Lawrence 's eyes, the blood running down his cheek oozing between his fingers was enough to satisfy Danny that justice had been served. She turned her attention back to the squirrel.

The squirrel lay curled at the base of the tree cursing lightly under its breath. Danny knelt down beside it. “Are you okay”, she asked softly.

The squirrel screeched back in anger, "ARE YOU THIS IDIOTIC ALL THE TIME? Does it look like I'm okay?” it shot back sarcastically. "Look at my fur! I'm a mess. I have road rash from landing in your yard! Haven't you people ever heard of grass? I would have been fine if you had just a little!!! You know... the soft green stuff sometimes planted in the backyard of many homes!!! GRASS!

Danny was first shocked, then appalled. Her lips turned up into a grin and then she broke out laughing. When she was able to calm down she regarded the squirrel through streaks of laughing tears. Unaffected, he laid scowling and licking his fur.

"You know", she said flatly, “you're lucky to be alive! Usually Lawrence only catapults body parts over the fence and my mom makes me pick them up.” This was not entirely true. It had happened only once and after Danny's mother had talked to Mrs. Binky, and Mrs. Binky talked to Mr. Binky and Mr. Binky finished with Lawrence , Lawrence never did it again. "I wish someone would catapult his body parts over the fence", Danny muttered.

The squirrel responded with a small moaning sound.

"Oh quit your whining. Let's see if you're really hurt."

Danny reached out to the squirrel, but the rodent snapped at her as she approached. She pulled her hand back quickly, regarded the squirrel with distain and stood to leave. When she was half way back to the house, the moaning and whimpering coming from the base of the oak stopped her.

Sometimes it would be better if she cared a little less, but it just wasn't in her. She envied Lawrence a little that way. He would never be cursed with concern for the hurts and pains of others. The world would always be a harsher place with people like Lawrence living in it. Danny sighed at the thought and went back to the squirrel to examine it more closely. She could see that even though he yattered incessantly, he was badly hurt.

"I don't think you're in any shape to avoid the machine when Lawrence comes looking for you”, she said, stressing the word ‘machine'. “Do you want me to help you or not? What's your name anyway?"

“My parents call me Gristle.”

Gristle? Why Gristle?

“Why should I tell you? You think that I care whether you know how I got my name? I'm just glad they didn't call me something like Sue or Daaaannnnny.”

“Whatever.” said Danny sourly. “I really don't care. In fact, I think I'm going to get a pair of gloves so you don't bite me and haul you back to Lawrence . The cat got away and I'm sure he's already looking for something to strap into the machine.”

She turned to leave once more but Gristle stopped her with a moan and whine.

"What now?" she demanded.

“They called me Gristle ‘cause I've always been this way. My mother said it was the toughest part of the meat. She always said I was just like Gristle.”

Softened by the squirrel's sudden change of attitude and ignoring his verbal abuse, Danny convinced Gristle to allow her to pick him up and carry him onto her back porch. Once there, she picked up an old towel, shook out the dirt and laid the whimpering squirrel on it - of course, he complained the whole time.

“Your leg is broken. I need to set it”, she stated after finishing her exam.

"Set it?” thundered Gristle. "Set it where? I'm fine with it just where it is! I'm not going to be no three-legged squirrel! I'll never hear the end of it! Just like that accident-prone dog named Lucky. They still make fun of him!

"No, no, no. We're not going to take the leg off. I'm going to fix it. I'll put the leg back how it belongs, and then I'll cover it up with some plaster. When it hardens, it will hold your leg in place till it heals. You'll be good as new."

Gristle looked at her skeptically.

Danny was beginning to ignore Gristles strange quirks. She went into the house and gathered the supplies she needed. She raided the medicine cabinet and her mother's art room. By mid afternoon Gristle was sporting a new left leg half the size of his body. His luscious red hair was mostly hidden beneath a white spattering of hard bits of dried plaster.

Gristle managed to lie still through the process, but nattered incessantly about the pain, discomfort, Danny's methodology and, at one point, the weather. As always, the weather is what it is - something to complain about. In this way, Gristle was no different than anyone else.

Danny worked carefully, rolling her eyes in frustration occasionally, but otherwise ignoring Gristle's constant complaining. And though she was patient, she threatened to punt him back into Lawrence 's yard more than once. This seemed to work for short periods of time, but other than those brief reprieves, Gristle complained unceasingly.

Keeping an injured pet squirrel around the house was no different than any of the other strays she brought home over the years. Some survived and some didn't and her Mom was well beyond counseling her about how she should care for the ‘pets' or lecturing her about proper hygiene.

During the weeks that followed, Gristle nearly drove Danny to a state of permanent frustration. How much complaining can any one person stand? And when that point is reached? What then? Luckily, Danny never found out.

The day finally came when it was time to remove the cast. Danny didn't know exactly how long she should keep the cast on, but it had been days since Gristle had last complained about the pain. His new complaints were the weight of the thing and the itching beneath it and the weight and the itching and how it got in the way and how heavy it was and, and, and...

"Gristle shut up and lay still or I swear I will get a hammer and crack it like a nut!”

Even Gristle, with his small brain, could fathom what a hammer might do to his leg. He sat quietly while Danny finished removing the cast.

For the first time in weeks, light fell once more on Gristle's leg. Gristle wouldn't look at it for the longest time, but when he did he let out a screech so loud that it even surprised Danny. The leg was hairless from the top of the cast to the tip of his toes. Only the exposed fur on his toes where the cast had ended remained.

To her surprise, his screaming grew louder still when he realized he was unable to move his leg. “I'm paralyzed!”

Danny didn't want to admit it at first, but Gristle's foot looked terribly odd. She studied it for the longest time before it came to her. Gristle's foot was actually turned around a full one hundred and eighty degrees. His foot was on backwards!

Though Gristle continued to rant about the bald and paralyzed leg, that was the least of Danny's concern. Limbs that had been in a cast for so long were usually stiff and Gristle would probably regain the use of it, but what was she to do about the foot! She thought about re-breaking it, but she couldn't bear the idea of having that obnoxious rodent in the house any longer. She knew she should do something, but she had no idea what. Gristle's unrelenting screeching didn't help matters.

During the next few minutes, Gristle's fate became horribly and irreversible sealed. He was never able to connect his loud and obnoxious behavior with what happened next.

It became clear to Danny during Gristle's ranting and raving that she would not have the rodent spend a moment longer in the house than was absolutely necessary. She would put Gristle through vigorous physiotherapy. Gristle would simply have to learn to live with his disability.

Danny watched how Gristle moved in order to see what she might do to help him. She noticed that there was very little movement at the knee joint, but that was not the biggest problem. She could tell that Gristle would eventually wear the hide off of the top of his foot as he dragged it around, and that was the essence of the problem.

In the days that followed, Danny's frustration grew steadily. Gristle wouldn't put any weight on his upside down foot so he kept favoring the whole leg. At the rate he was improving, Gristle would be at Danny's house forever! She had to find a solution!

To escape Gristle, Danny walked out to the back porch and sat down on the steps. As she basked in the near silence she began to watch normal squirrels scurrying from limb to limb and from tree to tree. She noticed how they used their hind feet to dig into the bark as they scrambled and jumped among the trees. It occurred to her that all Gristle really needed was some kind of an attachment that would allow him to dig into bark with his gimped leg, an attachment that would protect his foot at the same time.

Danny raced back to the drawing board in her art room. After hours of contriving, she created a number of prototypes. The successful contraption was a mechanical masterpiece. It looked kind of like a miniature upside-down leg-hold trap - like the ones used by olden day trappers. When no weight was on it, it would sit completely flat. But when Gristle put his weight on it, the little teeth would dig into whatever Gristle was standing on.

Danny had used some moleskin to make a padded area to protect the underside of Gristle's foot. It worked perfectly and she excitedly took it and Gristle outside to try it out.

Gristle was skeptical at first, but once he found that his foot had some use, he began to use his leg more and more. Within days, he was running up and down the curtains, leaping across the doorframes. The attachment reeked havoc on any surface it touched. Before long, Danny's room was a shambles.

Eventually Danny released Gristle and it was no small blessing to discover that he began to show up in the mornings less often. Sometimes he would not come around for an entire day. She savored these rare peaceful moments and felt as though her life was slowly returning to normal.

When Gristle did return he usually had some new and interesting story to tell. Danny recognized that Gristle's traits made it difficult for him to have regular friends. She felt partly responsible for his predicament and so she made an effort to listen tentatively to his tales. Eventually Danny even found that the she was beginning to look forward the Gristle's visits. Without the responsibility of having to take care of him or having him yattering twenty-four seven, she was able to see that he was actually an interesting little creature.

Once or twice, he came limping back dragging his prosthesis behind him. She found that she actually enjoyed the challenge of repairing or rebuilding whatever flaw there was. In time, the mechanism became so dependable that she rarely needed to bother with it.

It was always easy to tell when Gristle was coming because of the sound he made... scurry, scurry, scurry clunk scurry, scurry, scurry, clunk. He found there were many benefits to his new prostheses. If he pressed down with all of his weight on anything that would fit in the jaws of the prosthetic foot, the teeth on the metal foot would close together and handily clip the object neatly in two.

He could use his tool to break open nuts, clip branches and cut down pinecones. So many of the jobs that his teeth used to do he could now do more easily with his foot.

***

Although Gristle's quality of life had increased dramatically, he found himself returning relentlessly to the idea of revenge. The image of Lawrence 's nasty sneer bombarded Gristle's memory. He was becoming obsessed. His conversations with Danny were consumed by his new ideas. He became gaunt, spending nearly every moment thinking about ways he could get even with the terrible boy. He would often sit atop the large tree in Danny's backyard looking into Lawrence 's backyard. The evidence was painful to see. After all this time Lawrence was still as mean as ever. Countless other animals had suffered since Gristle had been crippled. He looked down at his prosthesis. It occurred to him that he a tool that could bring him justice. His eyes narrowed and a small rodent grin spread across his tiny face. In a way it was painful to look at. His buckteeth dangled down and the edges of his mouth were pulled back in a strange grimace. His plan for revenge was moving from a dream to plausibility.

That night Gristle clattered over the fence intent on making his revenge a reality. The catapult sat gloomily in the moonlight. The strings, rope and wire made it look like some kind of an ancient torturing device - a fitting imagine.

He had always been a skittish creature - as all squirrels are, but tonight those natural tendencies were worsened. The thought of going back into the yard of the demon boy filled him with fear and excitement. His body was shaking so badly that the prosthetic foot began to rattle on its own. He stopped frequently to take deep breaths and to listen carefully. With all the noise he was making he was sure the whole neighborhood would awake soon.

He continued towards the fence as quietly as he could, ( scuttle, scuttle, scuttle CLANG , scuttle, scuttle, scuttle, CLANG ). He made his way over the fence and into Lawrence 's yard of horror. His face hardened and he focused. He skittered stealthily to the catapult, a master of his prosthesis. In no time, it was transformed into a heap of debris. He chopped the wires and cords into pieces to small to be of any use. The basket that was once used as a launch pad was unrecognizable. The contraption would never be used to send another poor creature into Danny's or anyone else's backyard.

Satisfied with his handiwork he scrambled back over the fence and to his favorite lookout point. He waited patiently for the morning sunlight to wake the Binky household.

***

When Lawrence woke up, finished his breakfast and went out into his backyard he was horrified to find his single most prized possession transformed into a useless heap of rubbish. “Who would have done a thing like that?” he wondered. In an more abnormally deep state of grief, he ran into the house and into the kitchen where his mother was finishing with the breakfast dishes. Before she was able to turn and ask about what was the matter, he threw himself to the floor (as was his custom) and began to flail and scream at her feet.

And, just as she always did, Mrs. Binky promised Lawrence whatever he wished – anything at all – anything he wanted - if only he would stop screaming (this was the standard coping strategy that Mrs. Binky had become accustomed to). But, unlike all of Lawrence 's previous fits, none of her bribes worked.

The spoiling of Lawrence was a development that had occurred over years and with the best intentions. If the road to hell is pave with good intentions Lawrence 's parents had paved a four-lane highway there and back. The flaw in logic that led to the great disaster was that crying was some measurement of pain. No parent wants to see their children uncomfortable, let alone in pain. It was almost comical in Lawrence 's younger years to see his parents run helter-skelter to try and solve whatever ailment Lawrence seemed to be having. Later, in the supermarket, it was the deep embarrassment that Mrs. Binky felt that led to the most ludicrous payments to pacify the young Binky terror. As the years passed it became a chain reaction impossible to break. Now, Mrs. Binky was happy if her boy was not screaming and yelling. It became easier to ignore the terrible things the boy was doing rather than deal with the consequences of dealing with him. So it was with the greatest agony that Mrs. Binky watched her young son flail uncontrollably on the floor.

Eventually, Lawrence exhausted himself and lay quietly heaving on the kitchen floor, hiccupping between sobs. It was in this calm semi conscious state that the truth suddenly became clear to him. DANNY! It was that little snot nose rodent loving tomboy from the other side of the fence!

Lawrence made an oath to himself to get even with that meddlesome brat no matter what. He would get back at her in the most malicious way he could think of! How he would do it was the only question. What could he do to hurt her? He had tried revenge tactics on her before, but up until now his efforts had never amounted to much. All of that was about to change. More than ever, it was imperative that she suffered.

Lawrence stood up from the kitchen floor ignoring his mother's slack jawed questioning look. The screen door slammed behind him as he muttered over and over under his breath, “Danny, you are so dead”. Later, after he raked up the garbage that Gristle had left behind, he walked over to the fence and peered through the knothole, this time with a deep sense of clarity and determination, “Danielle, you are so dead”, he repeated, emphasizing the final word. A dark cloud rolled across his face, and at that moment the word held some much more meaning than children usually give it.

Gristle watched the scene from his lookout perch. He was quite shocked and surprised to see the strange boy's reaction to the loss of his toy. He almost fell out of the tree with laughter. He climbed to the ground and he rolled around in hysterics with his little attachment clanging in time with his fits of laughter.

With his sides aching and threatening to split wide open he focused his attention on Lawrence and listened as the evil boy vowed his revenge against Danny.

Back at Danny's house he was able to get her attention by dragging his prosthetic foot across her bedroom window creating a high-pitched fingernails-on-chalkboard sound.

Danny was sitting at her desk. A shiver ran down her spine and her entire body convulsed. She ran to window and let Gristle in. It was the only way to stop the spine grating, teeth clenching noise. With barely a breath between Gristle told Danny everything he had heard. After he finished speaking they sat together talking quietly for a long time. When their palaver was finished, she held out her hand and Gristle slapped her five with a little furry paw. There was no way of knowing what it was that Lawrence might try, but they vowed they would be ready for it when the time came.

***

Lawrence wasted no time. He attacked the very next day and nothing could have prepared Danny for it. As was her routine, she went down the street to where a large metal cabinet filled with mailbox's stood at the base of the hill just below the house. She loved to coast her bike down to the mailbox as fast as she could. Today, like every other, she got up a good head of steam. She flew down the hill with the wind blowing her hair back in long dark ribbons. By the time she saw the danger ahead, it was too late to stop. She slammed on the brakes and locked both tires up. Her bike skidded first to one side; she controlled it briefly and then it skidded to the other.

Her efforts were too late. The bike careened sideways down the street right into the pile of nails that Lawrence had expertly strewn on the street. Both tires exploded and went flat simultaneously. Her bike came to a sudden stop and Danny continued her trajectory over the handlebars. She landed on the pavement skidding first through the remaining nails and then rolling down the hill. When she came to a stop, she lay in a motionless heap in the street.

When Danny didn't return immediately with the mail her mother began to worry. There were always those envelopes that were not addressed to anyone in particular. Danny loved to pretend that it was mail especially for her. It had become a mother and daughter ritual to open their mail together. Danny was no longer as excited as she was when she was a tot, but she still enjoyed opening the Reader's Digest sweepstakes envelopes and collecting the aluminum car keys she sometimes found there. She had a whole key ring dedicated to her collection.

Danny mother waited impatiently for the small dust cloud that accompanied Danny's return when she slammed on her rear brake and swung her rear tire around in the dirt just outside the house. Normally, she would run up the front steps letting the screen door slam closed behind her as she raced into the kitchen. Her patience turned to frustration, transformed to anger and then changed once more into worry when a chore that normally took a few minutes turned into more than a half an hour. After calling from the front porch produced no response, she walked down the driveway to the street.

The color ran from her cheeks at the carnage she saw at the bottom of the hill. The bike lay twisted in the middle of the street. Danny's still form lay in a heap farther down the hill. Danny's mother raced down the hill, her first thought was that her daughter had been struck by a car. Her mind blanked and instinct carried her at her own breakneck speed down the hill to her daughter. She was barely aware of the nails that littered the road as she raced passed the bent frame of the bicycle. It wasn't until she reached her daughter and could see her chest rising and falling in regular succession that any clear thought found its way through her cloud of terror. Besides the normal abrasions associated with a bike accident, there was a deep gash on Danny's forehead. She had picked up several nails as she slid through them. Danny's mother's stomach lurched as she pulled them out of her daughter's skin one by one. She picked up the limp form and carried it back up the hill to the house.

The cause of the incident never occurred to Danny's mother. In her mind's eye she visualized a pickup truck barreling down the hill with a box of nails left precariously on the tailgate. She imagined the nails falling onto the road creating the dangerous situation that Danny had become a victim of.

***

When Danny awoke, she found herself in her own bedroom. She tried to get up, but her head pounded. She could feel the beating of her heart in her temples. She lay back down weakly.

Gristle looked sadly through the window as Danny's mother came in with a bowl of water and a cold compress. Danny's hands were cut and swollen. Her mother removed the bandages and put her hands in the cool water to soak. Band-Aids peppered her legs covering the effects of road-rash as well as a variety of puncture wounds caused by the nails.

It was a shock for Gristle to see Danny lying helplessly there. Generally, he was not one to spend much time worrying about the plight of others, but two things became clear to him in that brief moment at the window. The first was that Danny was hurt terribly and he was not at all certain she would recover. The second more important realization was that it wasn't just a neighbor girl who was lying injured in the bed; it was his best friend. In fact, his only friend was lying there. It was his turn to look on and hope for his friend to recover.

It was a much longer healing process that anyone had expected. Danny was severely bruised and in many places nearly broken. She spent some of the time visiting with Gristle and discussing what had happened. Lawrence had to be stopped. The boy was not just an angry spoiled little hooligan. He was psychotic. He was a menace to society. He belonged behind bars. Maybe they couldn't manage that, but maybe they could stop him just the same.

***

Mrs. Binky would never believe that her precious son would do such a thing. It was time to take control of matters. All great plans are simple and Gristle began to put it into action straight away. He started by talking to the other animals. This in itself was a supremely difficult task because every animal in the animal kingdom hated him and to boot, they were also deathly afraid of Lawrence . But if Gristle was anything, he was persistent. He kept at the other creatures until finally one after another began to listen. Soon the entire rodent population had been recruited into Gristle's service. Explaining began immediately.

At night, the raccoons were assigned to make a racket outside of Lawrence 's window so that he couldn't sleep. When he opened his window to shoo them away, it was the pigeon's jobs to swoop down on him. Whenever Lawrence left the house, the neighborhood dogs were to worry him wherever he went. For the next few weeks, Lawrence got little sleep. He began to live in fear of going outside.

If life became miserable for Lawrence , for Mrs. Binky it was equally as bad. Her son began spending more and more time in the house. He began to loose weight. For the life of her, she could not figure out what was going on. A mere week earlier her son would hardly come in from outside for his lunch. Now he would rarely go outside at all.

For the first time since Lawrence and his family moved to town, the birds once again began singing in the trees and many other animals returned to the nearby forest. It wasn't so much the animals that created the worry for Lawrence . It was the thought that they had finally come back to haunt him and get back at him for all the pain he had caused them, and in many ways he was right.

Then one day Danny walked by the front of Lawrence 's house and noticed that the house was dark inside. On the front lawn, a Remax sign waved on its post. The driveway was quiet and forsaken. Not toy lay in the tall grass.

***

Over the years Danny grew ever fonder of Gristle's eccentricities. Eventually she changed his name from Gristle to Griz because of his immense bravery and audacity. Griz made no complaint and the two became inseparable. Griz gained a new respect with his fellow squirrels. Young squirrels grew up wishing to be just as brave and wise and the magnificent Griz.