Bushie the Porch Gnome

With apologies to J.K.Rowling.


Bushie the porch gnome woke up in the damp leaves and the pine needles and the mud under the front stoop of Boss Trent’s place looking out over the gulf in Pascagoula, Mississippi. God what a night. It had rained and rained. Another tropical storm had made her way across the Florida Keys earlier that week and had gained strength over the warm waters of the gulf and had come ashore on Friday night with torrents and torrents of rain. But this storm moved quickly up into the Southeast and Bushie faced a crisp Saturday morning with the sun coming up as he absently scratched at his acorn-sized peepee, made the bells jingle around his vacant nutsack and tugged at the spider who had spent the night in his ear in a futile effort to stay dry during the cold wet night.

Bushie the gnome was a sad and lonely figure these days. With only a pillowcase for clothing, and sandles sometimes. Barely fed with whatever was leftover when Boss Trent spent the weekends here in Pascagoula. He was indeed a sad figure. The Cheneybot never came by anymore to check on him. The gnome wasn’t sure since he had never read the papers or listened to the radio and of course there was no television or internets under the porch. But the gnome thought he had heard Boss Trent on the phone talking about some park rangers who had found the Cheneybot near a creek in a Wyoming reserve, fishing pole in the grip of his right hand, his servos rusted and the stroke-victim grin frozen on his face. The rangers brought him back to Jackson Hole, dropped him off with Earl the best taxidermist in the State of Wyoming who worked his magic on the Cheneybot and sent him to the Mayor of New Orleans, Dr. Paul Thibodeaux, who had him mounted in a 2nd floor display case near the bathrooms in the Garden District Museum of Hurricane Katrina.

A harsh, damp, cold autumn Saturday in Pascagoula. Bushie shivered a little in his wet sackcloth. He had a small glass of water from the downspout and remembered that he had to get the motorhome ready for Boss Trent and his family who were gonna make the 300 mile drive to Oxford to see Ole Miss play Florida late that afternoon. First he had to clean the commode and empty the tank, then he had to wash the whole vehicle and vacuum all the leftover cheetos off the floor in the back and wipe down the vinyl seats where Boss Trent’s grandsons had spit up. They always got car sick, whether from overindulgence or just plain unpleasantness they always got sick in that motorhome. Hurl and Ralph Bushie called them, the two grandsons, their names being Earl and, well, Ralph. Bushie hated them for what they made him do when no one was looking. Those two boys spent their summers tormenting the gnome in the most unspeakable ways. Hey, did ya ever see “Deliverance”, well that gives ya some idea. Except for Bushie, Burt Reynolds never shows up with that badass bow of his. 'Course that wasn't nothin' compared to the whippings he got when Ole Miss lost and they lost a lot this year. Boss Trent would wear out his right arm with that bull whip of his.

But actually, thinking of those boys makes Bushie think of his own daughters. They had actually made it out of a rough patch to become quite successful madams in the New New Orleans. Having parlayed a series of dimly lit pornographic recordings of themselves having carnal relations with the inmates at the recently reopened Angola Penitentiary into a small fortune – Jenna always said that’s why Jesus invented Paypal, they no longer had to make money on their backs like in college. They could pay other Tri Delts a somewhat less than living wage doing it with frat boys and Chinese businessmen. Bushie’s thoughts moved on.

He really didn’t think much of the past. That early September day when he stood on the tarmac at Louis Armstrong Airport joking about getting hammered in New Orleans as a youth while dehydratred babies died in their mothers’ arms in the shadow of the convention center not 5 miles away, and old diabetics sat down on the curb to die in the heat and dank humidity of a tropical afternoon. The booze and cocaine had finally burned a hole in his brain so that his waking hours were a blur of chores and discomforts and his nighttime hours were filled with shrieking and moaning of the dead and dying – his whole term, dead and dying. Bushie the porch gnome sleeps very little because of all the vacant-eyed dead who haunt his dreams.

But that’s as it should be.