A Teenage Rodeo by Jeff Heal

 

I was a stock boy at the Bargain Shop in Dixie Mall. At the time I complained about working there, but thinking back, the complaints were only trying to disguise how much I enjoyed it. I didn’t want to appear uncool next to all the other kids who were my fellow workers.

One night late in October the parking lot at the rear of the store was wet with puddles, but luckily the rain had stopped, because it was mine and Darrel’s turn to take out the cardboard that had piled up waiting to be broken down and taken to the trash.

A new cardboard compacter had been added to the mall earlier that summer and both of us were excited that we were going to be able to load and crush the broken-down cardboard.

There were large plastic bins the size of small compact cars that we would load up the cardboard in and then push over to the rear of the mall and unload, but the way the mall was set up there was no direct route to this garbage dump area. We had to go out and around the back side of Knob Hill Farms, then around the bowling alley parking lot to get into the little alcove where the dumpsters and the new cardboard-compacting machine were located.

Here is where my very smart plan came into play. At that time, I was driving my dad’s 53 Ford pick up. It was in tough shape but legal for the road. Most importantly there was no need to worry about scratching the paint.

As Darrel and I were finishing loading the plastic bin on wheels with cardboard I told him this would be a pain in the ass to push over to the compacter. “Why don’t we hook it up to the rear of my pickup and pull it over” I asked. He thought that was an awesome plan.

I got the truck; we hooked it up to the rear with a rope I found behind the seat in the pickup and we started to pull the bin across the parking lot, slowly with Darrel walking beside it to steer it.

It worked great until…

Darrel hollered, “Hold on I’m going to jump in so you can get going faster so this doesn’t take us all night!” With that I stopped, he jumped into the front of the bin with the cardboard, and grabbed the rope tied to the back of the truck like the reins of a horse and hollered, “Give her Hell!”

I slowly started going again; not wanting to give the rope a sudden jerk and break it. But then noticed everything was working better then I imagined so I got the whole thing rolling along at a good speed and put the truck into second gear. 

The bin started to shake a little but I never heard anything from Darrel so all must be good. But as I turned the corner around the back side of Knob Hill Farms, I noticed about five or six cars all lined up with only one running and driver inside and they were blocking our way.

I jumped on the brakes and at that point realized the huge flaw in our plan. The pickup would stop but the plastic bin the size of a small car and way overloaded with cardboard and a 250-pound line backer named Darrel had no brakes and a lot of momentum.

With me hammering on the brakes the bin hit the back of the pickup with so much force it kicked the little pickup sideways and my buddy Darrel ended up out of the bin and face planted in the back of the pickup box.

He was not the happiest of guys when he figured out who he was again, but by that time I was occupied by some other stupidness I had never seen before. The line of cars at the back of Knob Hill Farms was a bunch of the teenage mall workers, and on Friday nights they had something called the rodeo.

Darrel explained. He said a bunch of the guys would kick, bang, and hit the dumpsters and that would scare the rats out and they would run across the parking lot and head to the safety of the creek behind the mall.

But that is when the guy in the car would start to chase them. Most of the time the rats were never hit or hurt they just got a little exercise, but that was lucky for the teenagers who thought this was a good idea.  These were no ordinary rats. They were the size of bull moose and just as solid. I didn’t know rats got that big, but I guess Knob Hill Farms garbage bins fed them well.

Well, this night as me and Darrel watched, the idiot in the car chasing the moose size rat was lucky or should I say unlucky and hit the rat in a four-wheel drift that was at a speed where the tires were starting to pull off the rims.

 As he struck the rat with his passenger door the sideways momentum stopped suddenly, and the car went airborne and flipped right over the rat as if the car did a hopscotch and then landed on its roof sliding to a stop twenty feet away from where he struck the rat.

The rat was just laying there until the friends of the guy in the rolled car came running to see if he was ok. But just as the first guy running got close to the rat, (because the rat and the flipped over car were in line of the crowd watching), the rat jumped up on all fours and started chasing him. The guy ran back past his friends at lightning speed with the rat chasing. All his other friends finally noticed what was chasing him, screamed, and started running after him.

It looked like the rat was catching up with them, but it broke off and ran towards the creek and out of sight. The guys, however, were still running as fast as they could without looking back. When they reached the first parked car all of them jumped on its hood and slid up on the roof to stay out of reach of this moose size rat coming after them, but then noticed the rat was nowhere in sight and the only sound was the laughter off in the distance, from two dumbasses who found it funny that the rat won this rodeo.

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Jeff Heal has been writing short stories and was recently published in The Canadian Stories Magazine. He enjoys camping, blacksmithing and restoring vintage equipment when not writing.

For information about submiting to Canadian Stories magazine, see here.

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