Environmentalist

Fernando speaks with Ronaldo one Saturday at the Dominion about topics great and small. The current subject was how Ronaldo knows a man named Sean Connery who plays on the sports teams at a nearby school and how his parents are certified awesome for giving their son that name. Then a vehicle pulls up and a child aged eight or ten clambers out of the passenger's side door. "Clambered" because his shape somewhat resembles a panda bear if panda bears were pasty and rust-colored instead of white and black. That boy will have diabetes issues down the road. He holds in his hands a paper cup bearing the Coca-Cola brand.

“God, I hope he doesn't bring that in here,” says Fernando.

Ronaldo is confused for a moment, since this statement is quite unrelated to the current conversational thread. He turns and notices the lad, who stands in the parking lot and leans into the minivan to speak with his parental unit. “Doesn't look like it. I think he was just holding it--”

The boy then turns and pitches the cup out into the snow next to Fernando's building. “Or he's going to do that,” says Fernando, striding around the counter and out the door as Ronaldo watches. The boy has leaned into the van again and so does not notice Fernando wading into the two feet of snow where the cup lay. Our protagonist picks it up and finds that it is still half-filled with some variety of the sweet, dark liquid for which the Coca-Cola company is famous.

The boy and his mother, by this point, have passed behind Fernando and near the entrance to the Dominion. Fernando calls out to the young litterbug, “I think you dropped something,” and waggles the snow-encrusted cup.

The boy does not show any remorse for being caught in the act and the mother is profoundly apathetic towards her offspring's maltreatment of the world. “Oh,” he says, and takes the container back from Fernando. He opens the passenger-side door and replaces the cup inside the minivan, where it does not deface the earth nor Fernando's property, then rejoins his mother inside.

They rent some movies and depart. Fernando watches to make sure a redux of what just happened does not occur out of a prepubescent boy's spite, but it does not.