COVERED UP IN BLOOMS
With the summer season fast approaching I had to move the truck off of the main drag. I parked it near Brent’s house, on a side street, and fixed a way for Toots to come and go. She had always been an adventuresome cat, able to take care of herself. And we had a deal. If either one of us ever went out on an adventure and didn’t come back, that’s just the way it was. “Let bygones be bygones.”
Then Cleo’s neighbor died. They said that he had hung himself. It’s amazing how secretive people are about things. No one had really known where Rooster lived, he just showed up at the barbershop. They say it had something to do with the way his old friends had turned on him when he said he was HIV positive. He didn’t want anyone to know where he lived, and Cleo never told anyone that Rooster lived next door to her. His knees were bent when they found him hanging from a magnolia tree, tangled up in blooms, at the end of a black rope. Someone must have found out where he lived and taken him home. They still marked it as a suicide and dropped the issue further than Rooster must have dropped. The old rigor must have tied him up long before the tree. He had a big funeral. There were over a hundred cars, a lot of motorcycles, and a ton of fragrant magnolias. They buried his ashes. It was an event. It was over. Zippideedoodah.
I came up with some money. Cleo introduced me, over the phone, to the woman who owned Rooster’s house, Saint Januarius. Cleo said that she personally wouldn’t rent anything that her family owned to me, but she wouldn’t mind having me for a neighbor. Saint lived up North in Illinois and kept the house in Carolina because her parents had died there. The house had a very large yard and a driveway, a place where I could park the truck off the road. The magnolia trees dominated the yard and wisteria dominated the periphery with a smattering of crepe myrtle. On one side of the house, Rooster had planted a fine organic garden; raised beds in full sun. Wow. The house was across the street from a cypress lake with geese and ducks, and lots of tiny lizards, Toots’ favorite game. A five story brick tower was next door, across a moat, on the other side of fifteen-foot shrubs laced with wisteria and honeysuckle. Firemen occasionally practiced squirting hoses and climbing ladders and repelling down the side of the tower. Cleo was the other neighbor, with a very large hedge between the houses. Rooster’s house was very secluded and private, but only a short bicycle ride from downtown Wilmington. I could be alone there with my buddy Toots the cat. And I could do my work there. I could visit the barbershop for haircuts at the beach.
A few days before I was to move in, Toots was run over by a car. I found her still warm body with her eyes bulging, and I wrapped her in my bandanna. I think she committed suicide. I carried her three blocks to Brent’s house and buried her deep in the rose garden underneath some blooms. She was food now. I moved into Rooster’s old house in June. That’s that. Oh.