4

Chapter 4

The next day began just like any other, with the familiar dry yellow haze of summer weighing down the air.  The freeway picked up its agonized complaint until it was a lumbering, loaded fury.  7:45 am.  You can't sleep late in this heat.  The sun violated the afflicted sky.  It already scorched my half-clothed body as I stepped outside.  With the right look in your eye, you can almost get through a whole day in your boxers, trip to the Stop N Shop included.  I checked the mailbox. The manuscript I expected from the Agency hadn't arrived yet, a two hundred page memoir of a fella who spent a whole year living in the sewers of Cincinnati  I walked two doors down to Inolea Sanchez's front porch, dressed extremely inappropriately  'tacky', as my grandmother would say.

When I don't take her morning papers, they just stay there untouched for days, eventually collecting into a mass grave of no-longer-current events and expired department store circulars.  And that's if it DOESN'T rain.  Which it usually doesn't.  Therefore, I consider this 'thievery' more an act of societal altruism.  She'd thank me...if she were still alive.  But she's not.  Inolea Sanchez was murdered.  The kids who did it got 47 cents and 2 plastic bags of groceries from the Stop N Shop for their trouble.  That's been nearly 3 months ago.  Who knows how long she'll continue to 'subscribe' to the paper.  Accounting errors like this cost large companies millions of dollars every month.  True story.

I never read anything apart from whatever front page photos happened to catch my eye.  I have another use for the morning paper.  Back inside, I roll off the red rubber band like some literary condom, do a drive-by with it toward the TV, then absent-mindedly toss all but the business section on the kitchen table.

I didn't mention the cat because it isn't really mine.  As if a cat ever truly BELONGS to anyone.  I doubt they were meant to be domesticated at all, a feat that is wholly impossible (and distasteful), in my opinion.  And I can't tell you why I didn't haul the thing off or even discourage it from hanging around, but I didn't.  Maybe it's due to the fact that, from time to time, the hairy bag of bones and mucus and guts is, even now, vaguely amusing to me.  And the truth is, any company on this street that isn't openly hostile deserves a little bit of grace.

There's a shoe box that sits in the corner of the bathroom floor.  Theoretically, it's the litter box.  I line the bottom of the box with a page of Inolea's paper.  I change it out for habit's sake every other day.  Always the business section.  It's a thin joke for no one's sake but mine.  Then I encourage that cat to "give it all ya got!"  It never does.  Maybe one day the thing'll get the point, but it probably already has.  And it probably doesn't even care.  Colonel BB considers cats, all cats, to be the Enemy.  That's right: 'the Enemy', with a Capital E.  Whatever.  Colonel BB is neurotic.  But what's that saying about how 'art is dead without neurosis' or something like that.  And art comes in many shapes and forms, as you will soon see.

I go back outside on the front porch and survey the lay of the land.  From under the house, I hear a strange sound.  A scratching.  Carefully, I peer through one of the broken boards of the porch.  I determine that I see an Ethyl.  In shadow.  A vague but distinguishable outline of an Ethyl.  She's crawling around under there like a mouse with a stomach ache, mumbling something about ice cream.

I said this would all come together.  And I'm not lying to you. But you must be patient.