INDIAN SUMMER

There were no more surprises. He had outlived all that can satisfy or disappoint—career, friends, family, health—and now each new day was not really new, but rather a diminished replica of the day before.

Why complain? He knew all along that he would end up in a chair like this one, before a window like this, in a room like this, with strangers to attend to what remained of his needs.

The only thing he had not foreseen was the squirrel.

Throughout the day it came to the birdfeeder. How many times, the old man did not know, but at any rate, so often that someone less attentive might have thought there were several squirrels. But no, there was only one. The old man knew this because there was a notch in his tail, a gap like a missing a tooth in a comb, that positively identified him. Something had happened to this squirrel. He had a history. The old man could almost commiserate with him—a great many things had almost happened to him as well.

And then there was the squirrel’s persistence, which amounted to a personality trait—for whenever the old man woke from a nap, there the squirrel would be, clutching the conical top of the birdfeeder like a steeple jack dangling from a cupola, or scurrying round and round the circular bar below the feed chutes like a lone carousel figure, or sometimes hanging upside down from it, shamelessly exposing his ridiculously disproportional genitalia like an angry flasher. Why angry? Because he alone, of all the visitors to this courtyard was denied a share of its bounty. The birds could eat there indefinitely—scores of them, but instant the squirrel breathed on the feeder, it snapped shut with the abruptness and finality of a guillotine, sealing the chutes and safeguarding the seed in its clear tubular vault.

The squirrel was illiterate; the words “Squirrel Buster,” boldly painted on the cannister meant nothing to him, but they irritated the old man, who despised braggarts, even inanimate ones. But there was truth in the slogan: the contraption certainly busted squirrels, busted them so thoroughly that it seemed less a bird feeder that frustrated squirrels than squirrel frustrater that just happened to feed birds. And the squirrel never seemed to learn this. That was another aspect of his individuality: an obstinate refusal to recognize futility. It spent hours on end fussing with the feed chutes, tampering and clawing at them, wrenching and prying at them like a man engaged in a desperate task, a man with every tool at his disposal except the very one he needs and so must shake and cajole and fight with his bare hands, knowing all along that it is useless and yet compelled to try one last time, as though he were constitutionally geared to never accept defeat. And the old man never gave up on watching the squirrel, never turned his back or opened a book. The squirrel had his obsession—that seemed to be the content of his life, and man had his fascination with the squirrel’s obsession. That seemed to be the content of his.

The old man paid no attention to the dull, identical sparrows. He found no drama in their petty gluttony. Only when the shadow of the hawk appeared did he notice them, or rather take a contemptuous notice of their sudden absence. They always ducked into the nearby boxwood hedge, where the flitting of tiny leaves marked their retreat.

The squirrel was different. The old man noticed this immediately. He did not follow the birds into the hedge. If he were on the ground, he quickly bounded up a tree, but if he were on the bird feeder, he stopped, froze, became a statue of himself, as if to trick the hawk into thinking that he was inanimate and therefore uneatable. But it was more than that. The old man sensed that the glitter of the squirrel’s black eye reflected a consciousness, a realization of his dilemma. He seemed to weigh his options and his odds: a sudden vault to the tree would expose him to danger for an instant, but if he were successful, promised him safety. Or he could remain in place, lying low and still, protected somewhat by the feeder itself and by doing so outwait the hawk and buy time, win another chance to struggle with the contraption that had been designed by superior minds expressly to “bust” him, to break his spirit and defeat him. This deliberation took less time than it takes to say “instant,” but it was as obvious to the old man as the squirrel himself was, affixed there on the birdfeeder like a catatonic gargoyle.

It was a predicament the old man understood, if only abstractly and from a distance. Had his own heart ever pounded like the squirrel’s did in those moments? He could not recall. He had always been so steady and cautious . . . But what did he have, now, to show for his steadiness and caution? A career, yes. Sixty years of plodding through half-dozen “positions,” wherein he gained a competency in a few and a complete mastery in one or two, simply because he was conscientious. But there was no accomplishment in that fact because he had no choice in the matter. His job demanded it in some cases, and his own nature demanded it in others. He saved money and never gambled, neither at cards nor stocks nor schemes. But neither had he gambled on happiness or love, never understanding until it was too late that they can be had by no other means.

One afternoon in the early fall, the old man did a terrible thing. The squirrel was on the bird feeder, of course, trying to force the feed chutes open—just as desperate and frustrated and accustomed to his frustration as always. And then the shadow of the hawk skimmed across the dead leaves in the courtyard. The sparrows fled to the hedge. The squirrel’s body convulsed once, then stiffened; the familiar mixture of terror and yearning sparkled in his eyes. Then, for some reason he never understood, the old man rapped his aluminum cane against the window. The noise turned the squirrel inside out. He seemed to implode with sudden alarm and confusion. Here now was a second fear from a different quarter, a new and unknown fear, intruding on the first, vying for his sense of panic, tearing him apart. He sprang from the feeder, but not cleanly—he tripped or slipped or somehow snagged himself on something—and rather than arc neatly to the live oak, he tumbled, losing in the six-foot drop all of his grace and physical cunning. He clawed at the empty air, and for once his vainglorious silver tail failed to buoy and balance him; instead, it followed him to the earth like a failed parachute. Just then the old man saw the hawk strike the squirrel with a body blow. He saw no more; the azalea bushes obscured his view, but a second later the hawk rose with empty talons and flew away more slowly than usual, as though subdued or maybe embarrassed by its failure.

The old man noticed a slight but insistent drumming in his chest, and remembered, for the first time that day, his high blood pressure medicine.

What happened next amazed him. Because at once the squirrel climbed the live oak, then bounded to the bird feeder; while it still swayed like a silent bell, he began to claw at the feed chutes with a manic intensity, as if this tussle with death had reinvigorated him. The old man was not sure what to call this: Determination? Habit? Stupidity? Or was it something else? He wondered: had he not, by nearly precipitating the squirrel’s murder, unwittingly super-charged his will to live? He knew this was a long stretch and probably would not withstand logical scrutiny, but he chose not to scrutinize. With each passing day, he questioned less and wondered more, and to wonder was easy. He simply looked closely, for the first time, at the things he had so far taken for granted.

That was how he discovered the lock, by looking. It was on the left side of the window, hidden from view by the folds of the curtain. A simple lock, with a simple lever that simply flipped from one side to the other. And having done so, he next discovered the hinges on the right side of the window, hidden in the same manner. He then realized that what he had so far considered a window was actually a glass door, and that the bottom half of it and the threshold as well, had been camouflaged by the low side table that until now he had barely noticed. This window now unmasked as a door altered his conception of the room. It no longer seemed so small and final. Now that he could leave by his own secret route, the old man felt—he could not deny it—almost hopeful. But his hope was tinged with humility. That such a modest adventure as sneaking outside could enthrall him only accentuated paucity of his existence.

But the instant he stepped out into the courtyard his humiliation gave way to astonishment. The window-door which had seemed so large when he was inside, was reduced to anonymity and insignificance when viewed beside others just like it. The only difference lay in his own mind, because he now recognized his door as a door, while his neighbors, invisible behind drawn curtains, probably still thought of theirs as mere windows. And the row of doors, the entire south wing of the building, the whole facility itself seemed petty and toy-like compared to the trees, the wide, sloping lawn, the chain link fence, the parking lot, the broad, busy street, the towering clouds, the immensity of the sky. He was tempted to walk away, disappear into the world and finish his life like a stray dog, roaming, scavenging, simply existing from one second to the next. He might sleep in underpasses and spend his days pan-handling at exit ramps. He might think of something clever to write on a scrap of cardboard. He might become a character. Even a character was something . . . But he knew better; he knew that by having given up his place prematurely, by having surrendered himself too soon, by having betrayed himself with the promise of security, he had lost his chance. The world he left only a few months ago now refused him readmittance, even as a vagrant who asked nothing from it.

Late one afternoon, following several overcast days, the old man noticed a change in the sunlight. During the cloudy interval, the temperature had dropped a few degrees, and the sun’s rays had shifted, so that now the space between the bird feeder and the door was illuminated like a miniature stage set—raked and suffused with a melancholy light that reduced the twigs, the curled leaves, and the shrubbery to abstract forms, then raised them to an elemental significance worthy of a drama. This sudden, unexpected beauty made the old man grieve for all the other afternoons like this one, grieve and mourn for them as though he had actually possessed and not ignored them at the time.

The old man moved quickly. He pulled the curtains aside and dragged the night table away from the door. He unlocked the door and carried the small chair outside. He placed it in the circle of light and sat down, almost within arm’s reach of the bird feeder. The sparrows came first, and he watched them closely—tried to commensurate with their gluttony, tried to understand what it meant and how it felt to feed oneself to satiety—and beyond. To know how to accept what was offered. To get one’s fill.

But this made no sense to him; he could not grasp it. Besides, he was really waiting for the squirrel. Finally, after the sun had moved on and the man sat in shadow, the squirrel made one nervous and futile foray, as if to show the him the measure of his courage.

The next day, however, he came more often, and by the third day he behaved as before, as though the old man were still unseen behind the window that they now understood was a door. For his part, the old man was both relieved and discomfited. He wondered. He wondered if the squirrel truly appreciated their relative positions. Or was he flaunting them? Was his nonchalance genuine—or was it the product of a deeper communion between them, one that called for no expression? He wondered.

There was a vending machine in the facility. It was in the staff breakroom and therefore off limits to the old man. But he persuaded the housekeeper, a kind, lumbering woman from somewhere else—a place where rules, and even consequences, mattered less than intentions—to bring him peanuts from this forbidden vault. They were forbidden because, like everything else in that glass Pandora’s box, they were too salty for an old man with a weak heart and bad kidneys, but he correctly sensed that this barely intelligible woman saw life as a thing to be lived, rather than saved and so, at the risk of her job, she brought him the peanuts. She did not give them directly to him. No. He left two dollars under his pillow before he went to breakfast, and when he returned found the peanuts in their place. Every few days, they managed to exchange a conspiratorial nod that amounted to an illicit tryst for him and for her merely an acknowledgement of just one of the many small benisons she dispensed without discrimination to everyone. The old man did not agonize over the inequality of their respective sentiments. He possessed a mighty talent for comprehending life’s essentials once they ceased to matter, and so now resigned himself to the painful and consoling fact that two hearts are never balanced in perfect equilibrium.

He fed the peanuts to his squirrel. First by putting a few on the ground near the live oak roots, and then a few more each day, closer and closer to his spot in the sun, so that over the course of ten days, the squirrel, enticed by the promise of immediate gratification, advanced, step by step like a naïve child in a Nordic fairy tale, beneath the contraption designed to bust him and his entire species, then through a small grove of liriope, and finally arrived within inches of the old man’s left foot. All the while old man never moved. He waited with the patience that only an octogenarian habituated to chronic boredom can bring to such a task.

Three days later, the old man did something rash. He placed a single peanut on the tip of his white tennis shoe. This was a challenge. Several times it rolled off before he could straighten up, but finally he succeeded by starting with a half-dozen peanuts, and assuming, correctly, that from them, at least one might remain. So it was. The squirrel ate the fallen peanuts, but regarded the toe-peanut with a mixture of galvanized suspicion and nearly intolerable desire. The old man recognized the look. He had seen it in the squirrel’s eyes whenever he crouched in the shadow of the hawk, and he had seen it in the mirror since the day he first began to shave. So he understood and waited.

Eventually the squirrel took the toe-peanut, and having done so, he changed. The next day, he took a peanut directly from the old man’s palm. And then he gave himself over to peanuts, like a woman who having resisted for so long, finally abandons all pretense of modesty or regard for consequences and gives herself over to a man. So the squirrel abandoned himself. He ran up the old man’s shin as though it were a tree trunk. He climbed to the old man’s shoulder. He sat for hours on the old man’s knee, nibbling peanuts, twirling them between his incisors, just as farmhands eat corn on the cob.

So it went through the long, mellow Indian summer.

It was the housekeeper who found him. He was slumped in the chair that she never suspected he could move, outside the door that even she never suspected was a window, in the courtyard which was really only for looking at and not for being in. His mouth was slightly ajar, and his right arm dangled close to the ground, where she found a half-dozen peanuts. These she quickly hid in her pocket.

There was a gash across the old man’s palm, which, unlike the peanuts she did not understand, nor could be attributed to her or anything else in sight. She and the others looked for clues that might explain the mysterious wound, but found nothing.

The small tuft of silver fur near his feet blew away without attracting their notice.

Chad Poovey is a sculptor and printmaker who occasionally writes fiction. His first collection of short stories, Banana Taffy and Other Tales of Love, Madness, and Revenge (Horse and Buggy Press) was published in 2023 and was nominated for the Sir Walter Raleigh Award. Most recently his work has appeared in Maudlin House.