He came out of the night
He came upon my wife
I never feared but came not near
He took her in the light
“Hey, aren’t you The Ferret?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The man flinches, narrows his eyes and then withdraws in the direction that he’d been walking. It’s broad daylight, and people are rushing in and out of every kind of shop, absent-minded, preoccupied.
The Ferret continues along the same sidewalk in the opposite direction, hiking up his baggy blue jeans with two hands, darting short, furtive glances here and there, too fast to focus on anything.
“Look, it’s The Ferret,” cracks a small, spry pensioner. His wife has hold of his arm from the other side as she tries to make out the price on something in a shop window.
“Stop spreading rumors,” barks The Ferret into his chin, then picks up the pace. He’s shoved his hands deeper into his shapeless pants pockets and is forcing his face to look at anything else.
“I’m not spreading rumors,” shouts the old man after him.
“Keep your voice down, you old fool,” rebukes the wife.
“I tell you, I read about him on the Internet…”
The Ferret tries to cross the road at the nearest intersection but the light goes red and he’s nearly flattened by a bread truck.
“People are so immature,” he mumbles to himself on the curb. Small beads of sweat have appeared over The Ferret’s eyebrows. His skin looks clammy in the sun.
Not that The Ferret was averse to levity, wholesome adult entertainment sometimes bordering on derision of others, childish bantering with the thinly disguised intent of sowing confusion, escaping blame, the manipulation game, pin the tail on some idiot, hide and sneak, boldfaced lies presented like story hour, just before the afternoon nap, when some kid wakes up without his lunch money…
“Hey, you’re The Ferret, heh, heh” cries a small boy, who starts poking his small finger into The Ferret’s five-dollar sports jacket.
The woman makes a severe face and begins leading the child away forcibly by the upper arm.
“I WANT A NEW DARTBOARD!” the child’s voice carries over heavy traffic and other afternoon street sounds.
The boy, barely 10, had received a Flying Ferret Black Moon Riders Dartboard just this last Christmas as a gift from his economically minded father. But to the latter’s chagrin, the cork had splintered and broke in half after slipping from a nail on the child’s bedroom door. The father cobbled together the sundered remains to the best of his skill, but then the points of the darts started breaking off.
“I’ve got a good mind to call up that editorial office and tell them a thing or two.”
“I told you to get him the Welsh Losser punching bag that he’d asked for but you always think you know better…” scolded the mother.
The Ferret makes it to the safety of the other side of the street where he pulls up his pants toward his chest, then starts rifling through the inner pockets of his sports jacket for that crumpled packet of sissy cigarettes with the lighter stuck in it.
Smoking makes him nervous, or the other way around. But there’s something about having something in his mouth, on fire, the paper burning down upon one’s fingers, fumes billowing from the face, pacing back and forth in between hurried, hushed, clandestine conversations at work on the stairwell with a well-meaning moron or hapless co-conspirator… shit, where did I put my lighter, dude, I’m not kidding, there’s something really wrong!
Then there were the smokes on the balcony of his flat, long after dark, when his wife was supposed to be sleeping in the other room. But she wasn’t and thought that he was still out at some basement bar, sloshed and talking tough with men in embroidered smocks.
So she steps out of the cab and Publowsky – for who else could that be with that scrub-brush head of hair and wide slab of ass hanging over the trousers, fully illuminated in firecracker red by the cab’s headlights – catches up from behind with outstretched arms like some kid on a prom date. He pulls her around (being three time’s her size and then some) to face him and then forces a full-faced kiss while holding her front and center by the shoulders. But it’s not like she resisted, twisting to one side, much less pulling away and slapping him. It even seemed to The Ferret that the clownish brute of a librarian science major might try and drag his wife into the hedges, tilt her against a small tree, clumsily bare his loins and proceed to hump her until her face was stained with wet bark.
The Ferret wanted to jump out and beat her when he finally heard her key in the door. Instead, he stayed under the covers until she entered their bedroom, finally rebuking her in feigned half-sleep for not turning off his laptop before going out for the night.
“The name ‘ferret’ is derived from the Latin furittus, meaning ‘little thief’, a likely reference to the common ferret penchant for secreting away small items. The Greek word ictis occurs in a play written by Aristophanes, The Acharnians, in 425 BC. Whether this was a reference to ferrets, polecats, or the similar Egyptian mongoose, is uncertain.”
‘What the hell does any of this have to do with the ancient Greeks,’ thinks Kyiv-based detective John Smith.
It’s late, and Smith is doing background case research on Wikipedia.
“Ferrets spend 14–18 hours a day asleep and are most active around the hours of dawn and dusk, meaning they are crepuscular. Unlike their polecat ancestors, which are solitary animals, most ferrets will live happily in social groups. A group of ferrets is commonly referred to as a ‘business’. They are territorial, like to burrow, and prefer to sleep in an enclosed area.”
“Well that at least makes sense,” says Smith.
“Like many other mustelids, ferrets have scent glands near their anus, the secretions from which are used in scent marking.”
Smith makes an ugly grimace and opens another window on his computer.
“When excited, they may perform a behavior commonly called the weasel war dance, characterized by a frenzied series of sideways hops, leaps and bumping into nearby objects. Despite its common name, this is not aggressive but is a joyful invitation to play.”
“He’ll dance all right,” says Smith, now leaning back into a straight-backed wooden chair. “At the end of the rope.”
Dirk Dickerson, Senior Editor, Graveyard Shift, March 17, 2016 (Midnight, Saint Patrick’s Day)