Butane City Leafs

by Pierre S. Robes

Carl looked both ways. Latitia had her earbuds in and was turned to the hot dog steamer, humming an anxiety-support song he didn’t recognize. He turned against the wall & slid a pizza out of the hot box onto a paper plate in his hands. It was Butane Valley style: oval; American Replacement Cheese in squares over red sauce. Chopped peppers on top. He folded it in half, & shoved it in. Two bites. She didn’t even notice. Eighth innings were always like this, this early in the season. Waiting for everything; and what was left, nobody wanted.

It was April in Butane City. Since the maple borer and catalpa worms came all that was left downtown were white dogwoods. The petals blew everywhere like little paper hole-punches on the sidewalk. Carl thought vaguely of marriage, every time he walked to work at the stadium: just enough to have some fuzzy memory, like the idea of ten movies.

He and Latitia got the job because they were 4F: immune to bird flu, whooping cough, measles, coronaviruses. Carl knew they sequenced it all, these days, when kids were born; his niece Piper was 4F, too, and she got advanced right away to special classes: human services. Next year, she’d go to the Academy.

Carl was older, though: born right before the first COVID pandemic. Back then, they hadn’t known what would happen. Nobody was 4F or regular. Back then, his dad told him recently, people worked jobs like these because they had to. Before the testing centers became mandated, Carl had worked as a programmer for a clothing retailer. He liked his work; he got to work from home, and spend time with his little cat Tobleröne. But once the results came in, and the draft started, everything changed.

Butane City was one of only five municipalities in the country that owned their teams; to keep morale up, once the bombing started, City Council assigned all 4F’s to human service jobs. Who else could? It was patriotic. Carl’s assignment was to the Leafs. The pay was good, and the work was easy. So every Tuesday thru Sunday, he was here: hunched over the nachos at Concession Stand #4: Leafey Leaf’s Grille & Brasserie.

Latitia had been a dentist. Unlike Carl, when she got the assignment, she was pissed. She had had a secretary named David, and a bowl of kids’ prizes. She wore a little gold toothbrush in a gold cage around her neck, she told everyone who asked ever, to remind her she was someone, before Leafey’s. And I’ll be someone after.

The day the last bombs hit, Carl was out sweeping the mezzanine with the bird corpse vacuum. There were so many these days: pigeons, mourning doves, red-winged blackbirds. He found a hummingbird once. They were supposed to be extinct. He didn’t have to wear a mask because he was 4F; but he did anyway. The birds made him sad: watching their little bodies get sucked into the sweeper.

Pierre S. Robes is a gardener and organizer who loves maple, shorebirds, bicycles, baseball, breakfast (never brunch!), treefrogs, spring rain, wooden floors, marshlands, and smooth black stones, in no particular order. Pierre’s day job does not explicitly involve the art of speculation, but they’ve found speculation to be an essential skill in surviving late capitalism, and holding open the possibility of different worlds—even as we imagine slightly (OK: maybe, very) worse ones. In addition to other equally pressing metaphysical concerns, they’ve recently made peace with the fact that there is no such thing as satisfying home-made hash browns.