Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [57]
“Maybe. My grandmother was very frugal. She wouldn’t let go of anything.”
“Some people are like that.”
Larry wears a cloudy expression of love. Everything about me that I find dreary he finds intriguing. He moves his silvery token (a flatiron) around the board so carefully, like a child learning to cross the street. Outside, a cat is yowling. I do not recognize it as one of mine. There is nothing so mournful as the yowling of a homeless cat. When a stray appears, the cats sit around, fascinated, while it eats, and then later, just when it starts to feel secure, they gang up on it and chase it away.
“This place is full of junk that no one could throw away,” I say distractedly. I have just been sent to jail. I’m thinking of the boxes in the attic, the rusted tools in the barn. In a cabinet in the canning kitchen I found some Bag Balm, antiseptic salve to soften cows’ udders. Once I used teat extenders to feed a sick kitten. The cows are gone, but I feel their presence like ghosts. “I’ve been reading up on cats,” I say suddenly. The vodka is making me plunge into something I know I cannot explain. “I don’t want you to think I’m this crazy cat freak with a mattress full of money.”
“Of course I don’t.” Larry lands on Virginia Avenue and proceeds to negotiate a complicated transaction.
“In the wild, there are two kinds of cat populations,” I tell him when he finishes his move. “Residents and transients. Some stay put, in their fixed home ranges, and others are on the move. They don’t have real homes. Everybody always thought that the ones who establish the territories are the most successful—like the capitalists who get ahold of Park Place.” (I’m eyeing my opportunities on the board.) “They are the strongest, while the transients are the bums, the losers.”
“Is that right? I didn’t know that.” Larry looks genuinely surprised. I think he is surprised at how far the subject itself extends. He is such a specialist. Teeth.
I continue bravely. “The thing is—this is what the scientists are wondering about now—it may be that the transients are the superior ones after all, with the greatest curiosity and most intelligence. They can’t decide.”
“That’s interesting.” The Bloody Marys are making Larry seem very satisfied. He is the most relaxed man I’ve ever known. “None of that is true of domestic cats,” Larry is saying. “They’re all screwed up.”
“I bet somewhere there are some who are footloose and fancy free,” I say, not believing it. I buy two houses on Park Place and almost go broke. I think of living in Louisville. Stephen said the house he wants to buy is not far from Iroquois Park. I’m reminded of Indians. When certain Indians got tired of living in a place—when they used up the soil, or the garbage pile got too high—they moved on to the next place.
—
It is a hot summer night, and Larry and I are driving back from Paducah. We went out to eat and then we saw a movie. We are rather careless about being seen together in public. Before we left the house, I brushed my teeth twice and used dental floss. On the way, Larry told me of a patient who was a hemophiliac and couldn’t floss. Working on his teeth was very risky.
We ate at a place where you choose your food from pictures on a wall, then wait at a numbered table for the food to appear. On another wall was a framed arrangement of farm tools against red felt. Other objects—saw handles, scythes, pulleys—were mounted on wood like fish trophies. I could hardly eat for looking at the tools. I was wondering what my father’s old tit-cups and dehorning shears would look like on the wall of a restaurant. Larry was unusually quiet during the meal. His reticence exaggerated his customary gentleness. He even ate french fries cautiously.
On the way home, the air is rushing through the truck. My elbow is propped in the window, feeling the cooling air like water. I think of the pickup truck as a train, swishing through the night.
Larry says then, “Do you want me to stop coming out to see you?”
“What makes you ask that?”
“I don’t have to be an Einstein