Boiling Frogs (fiction)

Big Mike's main chore today was to drive his wife Margie to their granddaughter’s birthday party. Poppy had turned four years-old last week but their son did not have custody of her until this weekend.

Margie gently put the birthday gifts in the trunk of the Chrysler 300. She had never cared much for the styling of the car. It reminded her of a dorky man’s shoe but she had to admit it was roomy and comfortable and the trunk was large enough to stash several bodies.

At four, Poppy was just sophisticated enough to value size, numbers AND quality of gifts. Consequently, Margie had wrapped enough boxes to carpet-bomb an orphanage and came close to filling the trunk.

Mike carefully backed out of the narrow driveway that separated his 100 year-old “Sears Kit House” from his neighbor’s 100 year-old Sears Kit House. Most of the houses on his street were identical cubes varying only in color and the ornamentation that spruced up their front porches.

When Mike and Margie had first moved in, it had been a move-of-convenience. They only planned to stay for five years before moving to their dream house. But life happened. Mike Junior came along. And then Leah. Mike lost his job and was out of work for a year before something came along. Mike and Margie’s parents got old and needed care...fortunately they lived close to both sets of parents and had been able to care for them.

Only Mike’s mom was still alive and she was in a nursing home. Margie had started talking about moving but Mike was resistant. He was comfortable here. Fixing up a house to sell was a lot of work. Finding a new house was a roller-coaster of emotion. Moving was disruptive. A "forever" home seemed like a forever house when you are in your early-30s because you expect to live forever. In his mid-sixties, Big Mike hoped he had another ten or twenty good years left. With time accelerating, it hardly seemed worth the bother to move.

Margie pointed out that all of their old neighbors had moved to Florida or into condominiums or had passed away. Margie was the more social of the two and she felt the loss of those neighbors more acutely than Mike did. Mike told Margie that she was too sensitive, that the coldness she felt from the neighbors who replaced their friends was in her imagination.

But today was not a day to be sad. It was a birthday. A day to celebrate.

Margie kept up a running commentary as Mike drove. He regretted not turning down his hearing aid and Margie would certainly notice if he did so now. Mike joked that Margie did not have a clutch between her brain and her mouth, that she could not think unless her jaws were flapping.

Traffic was backed up by construction. The governor had been trying to soften the latest recession by spending a mountain of money to re-build infrastructure. Unfortunately, it snarled up traffic and it was impossible to drive from Point A to Point B anywhere in the state without getting tangled up in it.

“Oh, look!” Margie said. “The Westside Urgent Care is closed down. How did I miss that in the Lansing Pulse?”

The Lansing Pulse was the newspaper that actually had staff that reported on local events and had mostly replaced the moribund, legacy newspaper. Margie read every issue from cover-to-cover. She liked to keep her finger  on the pulse, so to speak. Mike didn’t bother to read it because it covered mostly cannabis stores, new adult-entertainment venues and music events.

“Oh my goodness. CVS took down their sign” Margie informed Mike as he inched the big Chrysler forward in the stop-and-go traffic.

Mike ventured a quick glance at the store. The lights were off which is a bad sign when it is 1:30 in the afternoon. “Musta closed” Mike said, stating the obvious. Some local “dudes” were hanging out in the parking lot. Mike got “the stare” as he inched by.

It was totally opaque to Mike and to the angry young-men loitering in the parking lots and to Michigan's feckless governor that the "infrastructure jobs" created to "fix" the economy had vaporized the customer traffic that supported nearly all of the entry-level jobs that would have otherwise occupied those youths.

“Oooh. That is going to hurt. Lebandowski’s grocery has a For Sale sign up” Margie said. Lebandowski is where Margie purchased her kielbasa and pierogies and Polish pastries. It was also one of the anchors for the neighborhood around it.

Mike grunted. He had assumed that Levandowski’s license to sell hard liquor would have carried them through this latest downturn. Being able to sell booze was a license to print money, in Mike’s opinion.

As they stop-and-goed to the party, Margie kept noting the business that had closed and the pawn-shops, weed-joints and titty-bars that had opened.

Mike let it wash over him. Even with the hearing aids his hearing wasn't all that great. He lived mostly in his mind and Margie's chatter quickly faded to background noise.

It took them almost a half-hour to drive the three miles to the Danny Dairy Company on M-43. Danny’s was Mike Junior’s go-to destination when he had Poppy for the weekend. He bought a hat-full of tokens. Poppy was enamored of Danny’s costumed mouse mascot and loved the games and the bland pizza. Mike Junior appreciated that he could have a discreet beer or four and watch football on the large screen TVs that lined the walls.

The other reason that Mike Junior gave Danny’s his patronage was that Margie watched Poppy on those Saturdays when Mike Junior had a date. Danny’s was conveniently located between his parent’s house and his apartment in Grand Ledge.

Danny’s had been one of the original businesses in a strip-mall built at the outer edges of suburbia when Big Mike was in his twenties. Urban sprawl built up around it because that was the place to be. Apartment complexes sprang behind Danny’s strip-mall to house the twenty-somethings who were starting out in life and who worked in the hot-bed of commerce that new suburbia created.

Over the last forty years those trendy apartments had back-filled with subsidized housing tenants and the up-scale businesses had seen a steady, downward glide-path. The only up-scale business in the entire stripmall was the jewelry store next to Danny’s. In light of the habit of the locals, the jewelry store had windows that were barred and it was locked up like a fortress.

Helping Margie carry the gifts into Danny’s, Mike Senior noticed that Mike Junior was not the only single-dad there. Most of the clients were beaten-down, tired, discouraged looking young men who were keeping a lackadaisical eye on their errant spawn.

The party really got started when Leah showed up. Leah and Austin didn’t have any kids. Judging from Leah’s career ambitions, she probably never would. She made up for the lack by spoiling Poppy.

The waitresses at Danny’s delivered the birthday cake and sang “Happy Birthday”. Danny really understood his customer base. The waitresses were beautiful and their outfits showed lots of cleavage. The waitresses also wore mouse ears and round, red squeeky-noses for the kids.

Poppy squealed as she opened each box.

Mike nudged Margie with his elbow. “Why so many outfits?”

Margie replied “Mikey doesn’t wash any of her clothes. She wears them one, maybe two times and then he pitches them.”

Mike frowned. “Why doesn’t he wash them. Doesn’t his apartment building have washing machines?”

Margie looked to see if anybody else was listening but they were all engaged with Poppy. “You know how things are now days. Mikey is afraid he will be accused of being a pedophile if he is seen washing little girls’ clothes.”

Big Mike shook his head. Everything was different now.

The party was winding down when Margie was coming back from the drink counter with a Royal Crown-and-Coke for him and another beer for Little Mike when he heard fireworks going off in the parking lot. It barely registered with him that the 4th of July had been almost two months ago.

Then several young men, boys really, burst through Danny’s front doors. They were wearing all black hoodies and face-masks and they were hauling ass. They were moving so fast that he never really got a handle on how many there were.

As they charged through the crowded restaurant, they ruthlessly knocked Margie over.

Big Mike was old. Big Mike was sixty pounds overweight and his knees were shot. But Margie was his and his to protect. Mike was old, but he was still a man.

He rose to his feet and angled to confront the men.

He heard a blast and it felt like he had been kicked in the back. A pain even worse than when he passed the kidney stone in ‘17 smashed into his left side.

He looked down. His hands had moved of their own accord and where bunched up below his short-ribs, about six inches below his nipple.

Blood was starting to leak between his fingers.

“Oh my. Oh my sweet Jesus. What have I done?” as his knees buckled…

***

Hat-tip to Lucas Machias for the story idea. He asked "Why are people oblivious to creeping risk?"

Second tip of the hat to Bayou Renaissance Man who marvels and is dumbfounded by people's blindness to the risks of living in certain places and their naive denial that anything bad could happen to them.