Border City
Sentimentality was his major weakness and unfortunately for Riess Douglass this was the type of character flaw that was not easily hidden – especially in his line of work. Riess was a health inspector for a border city between Canada and the United States. The border was semi-permeable and the tourist enzyme was actively transporting many of the American elements over the river into Canada.
In recent years Riess watched a general deterioration of his beloved home. This had the effect of making Riess’s position very difficult. It made his occupation as endearing as a banker or a dogcatcher. It was a thankless job but somebody had to do it. Riess just wondered if he had to be the one that had to do it. The restaurants, the hotels, and the amusement parks were always treading on the fine line between acceptability and having their doors boarded shut.
Riess just tried to maintain the minimum amount of regulation but he found himself victimized by irate shopkeepers who called him both a fascist and a communist. They could not distinguish between the two. Sometimes their behavior fell just short of being outrightly physically aggressive.
This did not augur well with Riess. He was a diminutive bald man with narrow shoulders and rheumy eyes. He was an easy target for anybody that allowed his or her fists to do the talking.
Not everybody went that route. Some were just as willing to wiggle a fistful of dollars before Riess’s bulbous nose and beg him to forget about what he may have saw on their premises. Riess told himself that he was a man of principle but he knew himself well enough to know that the reason he did not cash in on the bribes was the fear of reprisal if he got caught.
The one who would reprise the most would be his wife Lydia. She always complained about how she had married the wrong man. She presented Riess with countless ultimatums threatening to end their marriage.
But sentimentality was the atrium of Riess’s heart. He would never close down any shop no matter how appalling the conditions were. He would give the proprietor a list of recommendations on how to improve the sanitation of his or her auspices. These would never be carried out, as Riess would invariably discover on his next inspection. This infuriated the little man. He kept all this rage inside and would not show it, as his hand would busily write out the same set of recommendations as previously. There may perhaps be even a few more as other sanitation categories would slip into the unacceptable range. He would leave the shop a shaky and embittered man.
Now Riess Douglass would seem to be a prime candidate for a nervous breakdown. Perhaps even a suicide in the making. He would definitely fit the profile for a perpetrator of a horrendous, unspeakable crime. Yet Riess was not like this. He was a sentimental man. A man with true sentiment is a man of true compassion. He can see the plight in anybody’s soul. He has understanding. And he understands himself and he feels good inside about showing these truly Christian virtues. That’s the way Riess felt about it.
He thought that he was responsible to guarantee the happiness for all – not the general happiness of the philosophers but the individual happiness of each and every person that he encountered. In creating happiness in others Riess believed that he was creating happiness in himself.
But was he happy? It didn’t matter. Riess Douglass had a god complex. He was on the outside looking in. He passed off his rage under a different label that did not have the fiery connotation that anger and hatred possess. He called it just something that he had to work out.
But Riess Douglass was not a benign soul. He was not the Good Samaritan’s Good Samaritan. You cannot measure the extent of venial pain that frustration places in a man. To counteract all of the oppression Riess Douglass had developed a very unique phobia. He was scared stiff of little children. He was certain that these little toddlers could see right through him and recognize him as a fake or charlatan. He avoided them as much as possible.
Most restaurants are family restaurants and it was this type of venue that required Riess’s closest attention. His bosses demanded that. Riess would enter family restaurants and soon encounter the little confessors by the thousands. They would leave the table and follow him as he snooped around looking for dead flies in the baseboards.
“What are you doing Mister?” they would ask him in their innocent darling little voices that Riess knew was just a put on. The tiny devils were really peering into his soul of souls and seeing that things were not in order. They would make it their mission to restore order here. They would barb him with pointed questions that were disguised behind childlike phrases such as “Why are your eyes so red? Have you been crying?” Or “Can I run my hands over your bald head?”
Riess was aware that as they asked these inane questions, their parents were not far off and were watching him closely. His natural reaction was flight. This would make him look very suspicious. It was far better just to field the questions and pretend that he was enjoying the attention.
When the children learned that he was counting the dead flies, they would invariably want to help. The little imps would be all over the dining room calling out in their piping voices, “Hey, here’s one over here! How many is that now? Seventy-seven?” The parents were not very pleased that their children were touching the filthy dead flies that could have been God knows where. The restaurant owners would cringe as the children advertised vocally the unsanitary conditions of the premises.
The kids still wanted to be rewarded for their help and Riess was stuck giving each of his helpers a few coins that never seemed to be enough for the demanding little brats. He was always thankful to get away from them. He knew that they had exacted their real cost to him and that was humiliation.
Thankfully he and his wife did not have children. It was almost a blessing to come home and listen to Lydia’s rants and raves. One Sunday morning however this would change. While Riess was doing the ironing, there was a knock at the door. This was odd since the Douglass’s never had houseguests especially on a Sunday.
He opened the door and to his horror there was a small child standing there. Riess recognized the little girl. She was Pammie, the daughter of the next-door neighbors, a truck driver and her librarian husband.
Pammie’s eyes were full of tears. It was the old ‘feel sorry for me’ ploy, Riess thought. He was one adult that was not a sucker for that one even though he often did act like a sucker.
“What can I do for you Pammie?” he asked, bending at his knees so that he could look her eye to eye.
The girl started to speak but her words were broken up by a sob that she could not hold down. She composed herself and said, “Mommy and Daddy had a big fight. Now Daddy has gone away because Mommy has thrown him out.”
Riess remembered hearing the rash of words coming from next door earlier that morning. He thought nothing of it. Alice and Brian were always fighting. He mused quietly, “Brian left Alice? He should have done that years ago. Alice was always so mealy-mouthed not to mention she looks like a fullback.”
“What?” Pammie asked. She had heard him.
“Oh nothing,” he quickly responded. He could see that she was not amused with what he had to say. “Gee, I’m sorry Pammie but what do you want me to do about it?”
Pammie covered her eyes with her cupped hands, “Can you talk to Mommy? Tell her that she should let Daddy come home again?” her voice was muffled by her hands.
Well, this to Riess was the most insidious act a child had ever dropped on him. He knew if he did what Pammie asked, her mother, Alice, would tear him apart. He would be lucky to get out of this one with only one unbroken bone remaining.
“Ple-e-ease!” Pammy whined. She employed the catchall phrase that would cause any adult to drop whatever he or she was doing and run to obey the child.
Riess sucked in his breath and marched over to the neighbors.
When he returned his wife looked at him. “What happened to you?” she asked in her uncaring voice. She didn’t care and she never listened. She was too wrapped up in her own world of science fiction novels to give a hoot about her husband’s world.
Knowing this, Riess answered, “The Arcturians landed in the front yard and they are slicing open people’s bellies and eating their spleens!”
“Oh?” she hummed and then dug her head back into one of her used sci-fi paperbacks that literally littered the floor around her chair.
‘She never listens,’ he thought as he went to the medicine cabinet. He got out some ointment. Well, at least Alice next door did not break any of his bones. It was just his striate muscles that took a beating. Alice was meant to be an Oakland Raider.
Later that afternoon while the still convalescing Riess was vacuum cleaning the stairwell, he heard another knock at the door. His wife would not answer it, so he had no choice but to shut off the Hoover. As he went down the stairs he tripped over the cord and smashed his nose against the banister.
He was sniffling out loud when he saw that it was Pammie again.
“You’ve got a bleeding nose, Mr. Douglass!”
“Yes, yes, I know,” he said, his mind mortified that the child might demand that he go back to the lion’s den once more. “Is your Daddy back?” he asked.
He was surprised at the answer. “Yes, he is!” Pammie blurted. “He wants to talk to you. He is in the backyard.”
This was horrible! Brian was no pushover either. He was as pugnacious as a warlord even though he was a librarian.
“Can you tell your Daddy that I am busy and that I will talk to him later?” He hoped that he was appealing to the child’s mercy but there was no such thing.
“He wants to see you now!” It was a direct order. Riess was off to the backyard. He was hoping that the hedges were high enough so that Brian could not get a hold of him.
Ten minutes later Riess returned to his house. The hedges were freshly clipped. Riess had to do the clipping himself with his teeth. He turned the vacuum cleaner on once more and returned to the safety of housework.
“Aren’t you finished with that yet?” his wife railed. At the same time a paperback flew at him and gouged a hole above his eye. “Give me back my book!” Lydia screamed, “And don’t you lose the page!”
He gave it back to her and shut off the vacuum cleaner. He would have to pick up the remaining dust by his fingers. After that he still had a myriad of chores to do around the house. It was 8:30 at night when he finally finished all of the waxing and buffing and his body was stiff and sore. His hands were succumbing to arthritis. A hot bath would cure everything.
He looked over at his wife who was sitting in the living room under the lampshade. She was reading yet another one of her cheap novels. What made those poorly-written digests of fancy more preferable to her than living a real life with him?
He went upstairs and found that the bathroom door was locked. He rattled it a few times before he heard a child’s voice cry, “Stop that! You are scaring me!” It was Pammie’s voice. He could hear some water splashing. She was in his bathtub.
He stormed downstairs and pulled the book from his wife’s hands. He never had done this before. He soon learned the reason why.
He doubled over on the floor with his hand covering his groin. Even through the pain, he knew he had to ask his question before his wife got into her book again.
“Why’s Pammie in the bathroom?”
Lydia became very cross with him. She snapped, “While you were busy doing nothing today Alice and Brian stopped over. They asked if we could look after Pammie for a while while they go on a holiday.”
“How long is a while?” he dared to ask even though he saw Lydia’s eyes grow in degree of magnitude and heat. She hated being interrupted.
“Until they work things out!” she growled. “You should not have stuck your nose into their business Riess! They had thought that they had a solution to their problem until you ruined everything. Now, they have decided to try and make their marriage work and the only way that they could see to make it work is to take an extended vacation alone and they will hopefully patch things up. Meanwhile while they are gone we are stuck looking after their kid! I’m not happy about this Riess! I have enough to do!” She buried her head back into the tiny smudged scrawl of her book and that was it for communication between husband and wife.
Riess rose to his feet. He walked off to his bedroom. Children were killing him. He couldn’t take it any more. He pulled a pen from the drawer and found a scratchpad. He wrote a note on it.
Nobody would ever read it but what did that matter?
If children could do it, then why couldn’t he? He was going to run away from home. He was going to go to the big city and lead a carefree life where the only person that he would cater to would be himself. He would not have to be sincere to anybody and he would never have to deal with children.
But at that moment, Pammie came out of the bathroom. She was in her jammies and her hair was wrapped in a towel. “I wish my Daddy was like you Mr. Douglass,” she said. “You are so nice. You remind me of Jesus. I know that you will go to heaven when you die.”
Riess thought about it for a moment. He was taken aback by the girl’s innocence and felt deeply her pain concerning her parents’ troubles. Who was he to cast judgment upon her? It was his sacred duty to try and make the world a better place for her and he swore to himself that he would not let her down.
She said that he reminded her of Jesus. Was that what everybody thought? He thought of the Lord in heaven. He was constantly bombarded by a continuous barrage of pleas and cries from an entire species of unsatisfied souls. Jesus had tried to make the world a better place for humanity. It seems that he may have failed in this quest but the Lord kept on trying. And if he kept on trying then Riess could do so as well. He could face his demons and pray that they do not destroy him. No, he would not pray. Jesus had enough to do. He would do it on his own. He could make his own heaven where he wanted and there was no better place to make this heaven than at home. “Want me to read you a story before you go to bed?”
“No,” she said. “I want to talk to you about real things. I don’t want to pretend any longer.” Her eyes were tired. The impish play spirit that were in the eyes of most children was not present in hers.
“What can be more real than the happy emotions a good story provides?” he answered. “We only have so much time in this life and every moment that we can fill with happy thoughts is a moment that makes life worth while. You are a little girl Pammie. It is the time that we should be at our happiest.”
“Then does that mean that as we grow old we are supposed to grow more and more unhappy?” It was a very astute observation, Riess realized.
“No,” he said. “All that that means is that we try to spread our happiness with others and we find a different kind of happiness in doing that that way.”
“Will you try to make me happy while I am here?”
“I swear it,” Riess said. He looked down the stairs at his wife Lydia. “I am going to make everybody happy!”
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