They Eat Their Young

by Ben Torbush

When he pulled the knob, the television hissed and crackled into life. He had twenty minutes or so before the race started, so he idled through the channels to find something else. The rabbit ears only picked up a few stations from the city: Five, Eight, Eleven, Seventeen, and Thirty-six on clear days without much wind. Most of the networks ran cartoons pretty much the whole day Saturday, so he skipped straight to public television.

It was some nature program. A guy with a British accent was narrating footage of crocodiles — or were they alligators? — Monty could never tell the difference. The little ones peeped and squawked as they emerged from the large mound of black mud and rotting leaves that served as their nest. They seemed oblivious to the fact that their plaintive metallic calls were dangerous. The voiceover continued without emotion, “The adults of this ancient species of reptiles have been known to eat their young.” There, in the water nearby, the unearthly glowing eyes of an adult sat just above the murky surface. The babies — juveniles, the British guy called them — were going to make a tasty snack.

But no, the camera cut to a second adult: Mama or maybe Papa gator come to scare away the other one. No gator snacks today; these babies get to live a bit longer, to keep making that infuriating racket. Monty wondered if the whole thing was staged. Maybe the hungry adult was really just some other footage they shot on some other night. Or maybe the film crew shooed away the hungry adult themselves. He laughed a little to himself, If they didn’t, they’d sure have a damn short show.

The sound on his old television deteriorated into scratchy static; sometimes he couldn’t hear what the British guy was telling him. A front must have been moving in. The TV reception always got bad when the weather changed. But thank goodness seventeen usually came in pretty well. The grandkids were watching those ridiculous cartoons in the den, the sound turned up loud enough to obliterate any possibility of thought. He would have to shut the door to hear the race.

Monty could almost understand why alligators or crocodiles or whatever they were liked to eat their young. He couldn’t understand why his grandkids had to make so much noise, squeaking and bellowing like the little juveniles on the nature show. When he was a kid, he knew his place. If he had carried on like that his pop would have boxed his ears. But these days you couldn’t even spank your kids without feeling guilty. If somebody saw you punish your kid, regardless of if they knew you or what your kid did, they’d jump on the phone to child protective services. They’d call just to get you in trouble. Monty couldn’t understand why nobody spanked their kids anymore. He sure as heck got whooped as a boy. Did him good; made him behave like he had some sense. He never yelled and carried on like the grandkids in the next room.

The TV continued to dissolve into static. A warped pink and green line cut across the top of the screen too. Part of the picture from the bottom, but wrongly colored and tilted jumped up top where it shouldn’t be. Monty could remember when televisions used to have a vertical hold knob where you could fix that sort of thing. But now the best thing he could do was to adjust the rabbit ears, or maybe whack it a couple of times. Hitting the television rarely did more than make the off-colors swim around a little, but that didn’t stop Monty.

He picked up the walking cane, a joke gift for his fiftieth birthday he kept beside his chair. The walking stick served as a reminder that he was getting older and only aggravated his frustration with the television. But he kept it nearby since it proved handy when the television acted up.

He hadn’t been too pleased with the whole fiftieth birthday affair. He wasn’t much for parties. He wasn’t much for birthdays either. But Lorraine loved that sort of hoopla. She had invited some of their friends from way back in high school and strung black crepe paper all over the kitchen. She had even baked a cake and covered the whole thing in black icing. Actually the icing was just a dark pond-scum green, but she announced to everyone as they arrived that it was supposed to be black. She had spelled out “Over the Hill Happy 50 Monty” in white icing. All of their old high school friends, nearing a half century themselves, had giggled and congratulated her on her masterpiece.

The gag gifts everyone brought, like the cane, just made Monty feel shitty. Lorraine had laughed until it was embarrassing at a black Over the Hill mug someone had bought him. Some bastard had even wrapped up a package of adult diapers. Monty had tried to be nice and laugh at the joke, but seethed underneath thinking it was just an asshole thing to do. Afterward he had tried to sneak most of the stuff into the garbage. Lorraine caught him throwing the black mug away and fished it back out. She had a habit of keeping bullshit like that.

Monty swung the cane against the plastic side of the television. It made a satisfying whack, so he did it again. The pink and green band at the top of the screen swam and blinked. The volume of the rushing static increased. Monty thought maybe he could hear the British guy a little better too. The third time he brought the cane down on the top. The set made a rattling noise like some loose piece of metal inside was vibrating, resonating the blow. But the reception didn’t improve.

Monty set the cane down beside his chair. It was about time for the race. He flipped the channel over to Seventeen. Commentators yakked about who they expected to win. They couldn’t shut up about pretty boy Jared Blake. Monty couldn’t fathom why anybody liked that asshole. He wasn’t a real driver. Monty had watched him prance in front of the cameras before and after every race; Blake just liked to be on TV. Monty liked Danny Martin Junior. Now that was a race car driver. He was third generation. His granddaddy had retired from racing at fifty-two when he was still beating the pants off all those young bucks. And Danny Martin Senior had gone out exactly like he would have wanted to: leading the pack into turn three when somebody clipped his fender and sent him into the wall. Monty had watched that race, had held his breath with every fan in the stadium, and had watched the rescue squad pull Danny Senior’s charred remains out of the beetle-black shell of a car. But this Jarred Blake guy was in it just to be a celebrity. Monty wouldn’t mind seeing that bastard go up in flames.

The announcers were just starting to talk about Danny Junior when the TV crapped out again. Monty could still see the picture, well, with the tops of their heads cut off by the intrusion of the bottoms of their ties. But the sound was obliterated in a fog of static. Damn it. Monty grabbed the cane and whacked the side of the box. It took six smacks before the sound came back. But they had already finished talking about Martin and had gone on to somebody else Monty didn’t like. Well, he ought to go get a beer before things got started.

As he made his way from the living room through the den to the kitchen. He couldn’t help but scowl as he passed the grandkids wrestling and bellowing in front of another television. He doubted they could even hear what was going on with the little blue people they were watching. They had the volume turned up as loud as it could go and they were still carrying on over it. Sometimes Monty wasn’t sure why he and Lorraine ever had kids.

He thought about those first few months as he grabbed a beer out of the fridge. He and Lorraine had been sweethearts in high school. Even though he was a year ahead of her, they had actually shared some classes. She was always ahead, the smartest girl in class. Hell, she had been one of the smartest girls in the county, always winning writing contests and spelling bees and stuff like that. He just barely made it through. The only classes he was good at were math and auto mechanics. Coach Smither had praised him for the way he replaced the carburetor in the Fairlane in one class period. But Lorraine, all the teachers loved her.

It made Monty mad the way she was so damn smart but could act so damn stupid sometimes. Like right after they got married. That first night when they were getting ready for bed he’d asked her if she was taking precautions. “Of course,” she’d said. So he thought they were both planning on waiting to have kids.

Then a month later she came up to him all excited because she had skipped a period. Damn, he didn’t even like to have to think about all that stuff. But there she was, grinning up at him like it was the best thing in the world. Why didn’t she wait to get pregnant? If he had known she was going to start squirting out babies, he never would’ve touched her.

And once she started, she didn’t stop. Just as soon as one kid graduated from diapers, Lorraine would wiggle up to him with that big cheesy grin on her face. “Monty,” she’d start in a smug sing-song voice, “I think we might be pregnant again.”

We? Shit. We nothing. Having kids was her thing. He’d told her after the second one, he didn’t want to have any more. But she was petulant, whiny in a way he couldn’t stand. And it wasn’t as though he could stop being with his wife; that just wasn’t what a man did. So he relented.

So baby came after baby until her doctor finally told her she was too old to keep having kids. He’d made her go through all these tests with the last one. A high risk pregnancy, he’d called it. Monty supported her through all that, but afterward he was through. He told her he wasn’t going to touch her again until she got fixed. With the doctor’s warning, she had to agree.

But by that time the oldest ones were already getting married themselves. Now grandkids were hanging around the house all the time. The older kids were always bringing their brats in to squall in his den. And if his kids had made a racket, the grandkids were worse. Spoiled rotten by their grandmother, they were always bellowing about what cartoons they wanted to watch or throwing tantrums ’cause Grandma wouldn’t give them another cookie or hollering for their mamas who were off doing God knows what. Probably enjoying some peace and quiet. Monty would have loved to have some damn peace and quiet. But with all the kids around it just didn’t happen.

“Why don’t you kids go play outside instead of here in the den? Go get some fresh air,” Monty grumbled at the wrestling pile of children on his carpet.

One little girl stood up from the roiling clump of cousins. She had a bubble of snot threatening to run out of her nose. She sniffed the green glob back up into her sinuses and smiled at him. “Because your yard is bor-ring,” singing the final word like a doorbell. “You don’t have anything fun to play with.”

The muscles in Monty’s arm twitched. He had half a mind to backhand the obnoxious little twit. When he was a kid they didn’t have all these toys and cartoon videos and shit. And he was never bored in his life. “Go tell your grandmother to give you a tissue.” He went back to the living room to watch the race.

In the other room the kids kept on bellowing and screaming. And they kept turning the TV up louder and louder just so they could shout above it. It pissed Monty off. All this noise for no reason. He couldn’t even hear the announcers getting ready for the race to start. There was too much static and way too much extra noise in the house.

Monty caned the side of the television a couple of times for good measure, but it didn’t seem to help. He stood up and fiddled with the rabbit ears, trying to get the sound to come in, but only fuzzy static emanated from the speaker. Then he whacked the box with the flat of his hand. The picture blinked and tilted and a loose metal rattle came from inside, but the sound didn’t improve. The pace car began its first circuit of the track with the rest of the field crawling behind it. In a second, the pace car would tuck back into pit row and the race would really start. The kids’ racket reached a fevered pitch in the other room. He couldn’t even hear the static that well.

“Why don’t you kids shut the hell up?” Monty shouted against the wall of sound coming from the other room.

He gave the idiot TV another whack with his palm. Nothing. He smacked it again, harder this time. Still nothing. He banged the top of the box with his fist repeatedly until the plastic began to fracture, cutting the side of his hand. Nothing at all. Monty whacked it one more time with his bleeding fist.

This time the TV gave a static pop and the whole picture went green and wobbly for a second before blinking out all together. Monty stared at the dead grey box, allowing the rage to bubble up inside him. The box stared back accusingly with a tiny white pupil in its dusty glass eye.

Monty picked the television up from its stand and walked toward the front door. It only resisted for a second when he reached the end of the cord still plugged into the wall socket, but that too came loose. The worthless rabbit ears trailed behind — jangling against the coffee table and the arm of the couch — as he dragged the TV out the door.

Monty stomped out to the trash can by the sidewalk. He managed to get a finger under the lid and flipped it up. It crashed onto the curb and rattled like a giant coin in the street. He heaved the television onto the lip of the can. Too big to fit inside, it bounced off the edge, rebounded against his leg, and crashed onto the lawn. Monty howled in pain. The TV just glared at him.

He stomped inside to retrieve his cane and returned to his silent nemesis. Monty delivered blow after blow to the fragmenting plastic cover. When big chunks fell off he tossed them victoriously into the trashcan. Finally the black plastic cover came entirely off the back of the television, revealing the fragile picture tube within. Monty pounced on it, whacking the burnt grey glass repeatedly with his cane. Fragments of broken glass and plastic sprayed into his lawn and the street. After a few minutes of battering, pieces of his cane started flying too.

Monty stopped to catch his breath. His lungs were heaving, and both his hands were bleeding. There seemed to be something warm trickling down his face too. He wasn’t sure if it was sweat or blood or both. A thousand glass eyes blinked up at him from the sidewalk, the street, and his lawn — even from Lorraine’s marigolds. Casualties of wire and plastic also lay scattered here and there.

Monty looked up from his defeated foe to see his neighbor, George, watching him from the other side of the chain-link fence. George seemed to have forgotten that he was in the middle of watering his hibiscus bush. The hose idly spilled water onto a random patch of grass.

“Good evening, George,” Monty heaved, trying to force a pleasant note into his voice.

After a blank few seconds George responded, “Hi Monty,” and paused, “Everything alright?”

“Fine, fine. You going to watch the race? I think it just started.” Monty smiled as if he weren’t brandishing a fractured cane, bleeding from multiple wounds on his hands and face, and shedding splinters of broken glass.

“Yeah,” George started carefully. “Just finishing up watering. Are you going to watch it?”

Monty looked down at the broken shards of what used to be his television and thought for a minute. He finally sighed and said, “No, I don’t think so. You know, the grandkids are visiting. You know how much they love those cartoons. Think I’ll probably just spend some time with them. Guess you’ll have to catch me up on how ol’ Danny Junior does at church tomorrow.” Monty hazarded a neighborly grin resembling the half-submerged smile of an alligator.

“I’ll do that.” George turned back to his flower beds as Monty stooped to pick up a coil of wire at his toe.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Ben Torbush has worked as a newspaper reporter and taught high school English in the United States for several years. His fiction has also appeared in Poor Mojo's Almanac. He now lives and writes in Barcelona, Spain.

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