Naked Squirrel

Naked Squirrel
It was that time of year again when teachers and kids stood behind a big truck unloading boxes upon boxes of chocolate candy bars for our elementary school fund raiser. Jeff and I took home our boxes and gazed longingly at all the varied chocolate bars. On the weekend Jeff and I made the rounds around the neighborhood.
Wood edge Drive was in the shape of a Y and had no outlet. This made it easy for us to know all of our neighbors so we were allowed to go ring doorbells on our own. We had all kinds of neighbors and just about all of them were friendly. We stayed away from the ones who weren't. Like the lady who always seemed grumpy even when she was happy. She had three ugly Scottish terriers that wore kerchiefs around the neck and yapped and chased us the length of her chain linked fence. Another one we stayed away from was a man that lived on the left end. He never drove a car. He would come walking up the street sometimes always smoking a cigarette and stand by the telephone pole across the street from our house. He was waiting for his ride. Looking back I would say that he may have been a drunk living with his mother. To us back then he was creepy and we stayed far away while we spied on him. On one particular day while he was waiting by his pole my sister and I were playing with the girls across the street. This pole was right next to their drive way and we were playing in the back. When we saw him we all ran and hid behind a huge tree trunk and peeked around to see what he was doing. We saw him put out his cigarette then turn around in our direction. Quickly we ducked back behind the tree our hearts racing. I peeked out again and saw something streaming from his lower body… "He's PEEING!" I yelled in a whisper. At this point we all RAN into the basement and giggled until our cheeks hurt. One of the most interesting neighbors we had was named Roy. He lived by himself two houses down from ours on the right. He wore a black leather vest and oily jeans at all times. He had long thin golden hair that he wore in a pony tail and a thick goatee. When we saw him it was usually just his legs sticking out from under a car or bike he was working on in his garage. It is Roy that made it in our family history book that candy selling day.
Jeff and I walked up his front porch steps and stood in front of Roy's screen door and knocked. We heard rock music coming from the kitchen and then we heard Roy's voice saying he was coming. He showed up at the door smiling and said hello. We gave him our rehearsed plea to buy candy bars and he said , "Sure, come on in and I'll see what you got." Roy opened the door and we saw in his one hand a knife but that wasn't the memorable part it was the dead, limp and half peeled squirrel he was holding in the other hand. He saw our faces and quickly explained to us how he hunts squirrel and eats them. Jeff and I were amazed! We never knew that people ATE squirrel. To us they were cute furry critters that we chased up trees. We followed Roy to the kitchen where he stood by the sink and we watched as he slid the knife under the squirrel's skin and peeled off the fur as if it were an apple peel. I don't know about all squirrel's, but this one had a light brown or cream colored skin and it looked wet. Jeff and I stood and watched as he finished with the squirrel and plopped it on the counter where it lay naked. When Roy was done washing up he picked out his candy bars and then Jeff and I raced home to tell Mom what we had just seen. I've never seen a naked squirrel since and I'm okay with thatJ