It was a steamy summer day. The humidity was so thick that you’d swear the air was ten percent banana pudding. And another five percent might have been cigarette ash, judging from the layer of grit that dusted our sweaty skin. By the time we had locked up the apartment and set foot on the street, we already felt like we had been camping for days without showers.
I had finished a raspberry Tootsie Roll Pop a few minutes earlier, and the aftertaste of seemingly real raspberries coated the inside of my mouth. It tasted like I was returning from picking fresh berries in a green, leafy patch. Like I had stood there in the sun for hours, sneaking every fifth berry in my mouth and carting the rest of the fragrant, bleeding fruits homeward in a heavy, shallow cardboard box. I could make pie with them, or scones. Instead, I was just heading out into the city on a humid day, a few minutes after finishing a sucker.
As our four slick arms collected their layer of city grime, I rolled my tongue in the berry taste on the roof of my mouth. It’s strange that the raspberry Tootsie Roll Pops taste like real fruit, while the cherry and grape and orange and chocolate always taste like chemical facsimiles. Somehow, Tootsie only got raspberry right.
We left my apartment, which was on the second floor of a building that held three other apartments. The building was made with bluish-green bricks. It had been built before 1900, and now some of the bricks had a tendency to crumble apart. When they crumbled, they looked just like soft, blue tofu.
Sometimes the building had strange problems. Like the doors wouldn’t shut in hot weather because they swelled. There was a leak in the ceiling over the toilet, so sometimes when I was sitting on the can I would feel a drop of rainwater in the part of my hair.
I touched the rusty, cast-iron bannister with my hand as we went down the front steps to the sidewalk. Cody started leading the way up the street. The day was so hazy that you almost had to call it cloudy, simply because you couldn’t see the outline of the sun.
I had lived on this street since my nineteenth birthday—almost a year and a half. Sometimes I lived alone, sometimes with a boyfriend. Since moving into the blue tofu building, I’d had four boyfriends, including Cody. All of them had dropped out of something: there had been one high-school dropout, two college dropouts (one Community, one University), and a perennial quitter named Ted who worked at twenty-seven different bars before getting his name and picture in the paper with the caption, “DON’T HIRE ME.”
None of the relationships had lasted more than three months.
They all looked the same, too; like I said, it was a phase I was going through back then. They all had long hair, and smooth faces, and almost hairless arms. They all had bad breath in the morning. They all had the same good smell behind the ears, like the felt lining in a guitar case. They were all skinny. They were all alternately wimpy and aggressive.
“Are you sure about this?” Cody was asking me.
I looked up at him and caught a whiff of that guitar-case scent. Behind him the sun, dissipated by haze, made his edges more defined. The crisp edges made him seem strangely flat, like a cardboard cutout. I smiled. “Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?”
Cardboard Cody and I kept strolling up my street. “I just don’t think when you actually see one, it will be what you expected. I think it will be depressing, kind of.”
“Look, you don’t know me very well if you think I want to protect some childish belief. I’m curious, and I want to see it. Period.”
“Okay, okay. But…”
I snapped: “But what?”
“Maybe I just wanted to protect you, you know?”
“Well, maybe we need to talk about that. Because I don’t need to be protected. Besides, this was your idea in the first place.”
“God, fine. You don’t need to yell.”
I could already tell whatever romantic connection we had would soon scatter for good, like a handful of sugar thrown into a windstorm. I sighed. ”I’m sorry. Look. I know we haven’t known each other that long. I just don’t like to be seen as weak because I’m a girl.”
“Okay, okay.”
He was a bad conversationalist, and I was crabby. So we walked in silence for about five minutes. He walked with his hands in the pockets of his cargo shorts. I followed his lead and put my hands in the pockets of my bias-cut skirt. There were nail scissors in the right pocket, and I played with their tiny sliver of a blade as we walked. My left pocket held six cents and a plastic lighter. I tried to guess the color of the lighter by touching it.
We went up my street, and turned at the park where I read my books. There wasn’t the slightest breeze, and the trees in the park stood still as if holding their breath. Not a leaf moved.
Then we continued up a steep hill, into a neighborhood of friendly, middle-class houses.
“So where is he, anyway?” I asked. “Or it?”
“We’re almost there,” he said, left side of his mouth and left nostril twitching upward at once in a cocky, bemused smile. He tiptoed around to the back gate of a large, lavender house. There was no car in the driveway, and no light on inside; whoever lived here was at work, or school, or pilates class, or lunch. He tiptoed nevertheless.
The backyard of the purple house was pretty big. There was a birdbath and a tire swing and an empty doghouse. There were blueberry bushes heavy with taut, ripe berries. I swished my tongue along the roof of my mouth, to get at the last of that disappearing Tootsie Pop taste.
Cody knelt over by the birdbath. Surrounding its base was a clump of stones.
He pulled up one of the stones. In a hole beneath it, bound in dental floss and gagged with a three-inch piece of yellow yarn, was the leprechaun.
The little leprechaun wore a Sex Pistols T-shirt (dirty white) and Converse high-tops (forest green). His hair (dishwater blond) was shaved and spiked into a mohawk. He looked pissed. Cody grinned, kneeling in front of the birdbath. He untied the little scrap of yarn. A robin landed in the birdbath and made a little splash. Droplets landed at the leprechaun’s feet, but he didn’t get wet.
“Fuck you, you ugly swine! Who the fuck do you think you are!” said the leprechaun, thrashing. Its voice was tiny and furious. The robin was startled and flew away.
“Chill, little guy,” said Cody. “Now, I tricked you fair and square, and I have a right to know where your gold is.”
The leprechaun snorted, spat a flea-sized loogie on the side of the birdbath, and collapsed into derisive laughter.
“Gold, you bastard. Gold? Do I look like I’ve got money, you piece of shite? I’m fuckin’ broke! Now untie me, I’ve got shit to do.”
Cody smiled condescendingly. “Ah-ah-ah,” he said, wagging a finger. “You won’t trick me that easily.”
Now the leprechaun looked worried. “You gotta help me, miss,” it said, tiny eyes pleading with me for help. “He’s been keepin’ me here with no food, right? And no water. It’s cruel. You gotta let me out.”
I knew someone was tricking somebody, but who? I didn’t trust either of them, and I didn’t trust myself. I collected Codys and abandoned them to write sad songs and complain to new girlfriends about my neuroses. Cody collected leprechauns and abandoned them. The leprechaun might be manipulating us both, might scarper with the gold Cody had fairly won as soon as he was set free. But wasn’t leprechaun gold always fake, like fool’s gold?
I only knew one thing: un-trapped was better than trapped. I had to do something, and only one thing was obvious.
And so, taking a deep breath, I reached for the leprechaun with my left hand, and pulled the nail scissors out with my right. I snipped the dental floss quickly and stepped back from our little circle on the grass.
image: jbrownell on flickr
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