By Dwayne Phillips
February 9th, 2008, 2008-006
Go to Dwayne's Home Page
Email me at
d.phillips@computer.org
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PART 1 – Mr. and Mrs. Hayden and the Widow Easley
“Charles! Don't forget the cat,” came the screech from Ruby.
“The cat. That stupid cat,” thought Charles Hayden.
“Alright,” he stated aloud. “I'll get him now.”
Charles pushed his wobbly wooden chair back from the table and stood. Turning towards the back of the house, he started buttoning his short-sleeved, checkered brown and white shirt. He continued to button the shirt as he opened and then stepped through the sliding glass door.
Charles walked out into the back yard, shirt buttoning still not completed, and squinted at the bright spring sun poking through the cover of the pine trees. He finished the last button and started to tuck the tails of the shirt into his blue jeans when he reached the large metal shed behind his house.
This was a home-made shed, not one of those cheap pre-fab ones from Sears. Charles had built this shed ten years earlier on he slab that once was a carport for the house that stood on this lot for fifty years. The shed looked out of proportion. Charles wanted something 14 feet high so he could hang tools and put lightweight things in the rafters. The concrete slab, however, was only eight feet wide. The tall narrow shed never looked right to passersby. A few times a year someone would pull into their gravel driveway and warn Ruby that her shed was falling over. The sharply pitched roof combined with the narrowness of the shed gave that illusion depending on the clouds and wind.
Charles struggled to open the plywood doors of the shed. He would fix the doors one of these days, but not today. Just inside the door was a few sheets of newspaper wrapped into a bundle. Peeking out one end of the bundle was an inch of orange and white cat tail. It was Mabel Easley's old cat.
Mabel lived a hundred or so yards down the gravel road from Charles and Ruby. She was a widow – Mabel, not the cat – who had lived next door to the Hayden's since Charles and Ruby married and moved into their home some 25 years earlier. Mabel tended to keep a few cats around her place. Something to talk to and feed and water and give her a sense of purpose in her days.
Every few years one of Mabel's cats would die. Nothing killed them, they just sort of died like old animals do. There never was much to note about a country widow's cat or dog dying of old age and such. Mabel would walk outside one day and notice that the old plate she used to feed the cat still had food on it. A walk around the place and Mabel would eventually see the cat lying on the ground stretched out for a nap from which they would never awaken.
The next step was simple, pick up the cat, carry it out back of the house, dig a hole, and lay the cat to rest under some dark soil and green grass. That is what everyone did for years in these rural areas. That is until three years back when the County Council decided that simply would not do any longer. They passed half-a-dozen regulations about sanitation and septic fields and drainage. Widows weren't allowed to bury their dead cats out behind their houses anymore. The land would handle it. The Widow Easley had 20 acres of woods and pasture. One dead cat would somehow spoil that land.
Charles bent over and gently picked up the newspaper-wrapped dead cat. The bend pushed the buttons on his shirt near their breaking point and gave Charles a pain in his back.
“I gotta lose some weight,” thought Charles.
“Stupid cat,” Charles muttered softly. “Stupid County, stupid newspaper.”
Charles thought back to the day five years earlier when Mabel called Ruby. One of her cats had died, but she had just read in the county's weekly newspaper that she shouldn't bury cats “out back” anymore. Would Charles be able to take the cat to the dumpster?
Charles and Ruby did things like that for the Widow Easley. That's just what neighbors did in the country. Mabel Easley had a son and daughter who lived in the city an hour's drive away. They tended to their mother for the big things in life, but changing a light bulb affixed to a tall ceiling and hauling off a dead cat – these little things – well, Mabel called on her neighbors who obliged.
“Why did she have to read the newspaper that one week?” asked Charles of no one.
Charles carried the dead cat in the newspaper wrapping around to the side of the house and set it near the carport. He would spot it on the way out and not forget it.
“Perhaps,” Charles thought for an instant, “perhaps I could leave it in the yard on the other side of this big pine. During the day, while my wife was out, a roving pack of dogs would pick it up and carry it off. That's an idea.”
Charles dismissed the idea of letting dogs take care of the cat. The dogs would leave remains of the cat in the road or somewhere where his wife or the Widow Easley would spot it. He would catch hell then. Not worth the risk.
“Stupid cat, stupid County, stupid newspaper,” Charles muttered again as he entered the house from the carport door.
“What are you muttering about?” asked Ruby as she rinsed her hands from washing the breakfast dishes. Ruby grabbed a dish towel from its position hanging from the oven handle and dried her hands as she looked around the kitchen corner for her husband. They were both fully dressed standing in the kitchen. Almost fully dressed as the tails of Charles' shirt were still hanging, half-tucked into his jeans. Being fully dressed in the kitchen only happened on the weekends. On weekdays Ruby would be wearing her house coat while Charles would be dressed to go to work in a chemical plant halfway between their house and the city. It would be 5AM when the two of them were in the kitchen. On Sunday, they would be both dressed in their church clothes ready to go to the church a mile up the two-lane highway.
Today was a Saturday, so they were almost fully dressed and it was getting late for them – almost 8AM.
“Oh nothing,” answered Charles. “Its just that for all the days that cat could die he picked yesterday. You know Bo's coming to get me this morning, he's a little late already, and now this cat to deal with.”
“Oh,” replied Ruby with a sense of alarm raising the dish towel to her mouth as if that would stop her words and change the situation. “Oh honey, I forgot about that. Do you want me to take care of the cat? I think I could do that.”
“No,” answered Charles, and then he asked himself why he answered 'no' so quickly. If only he had paused, maybe he could have gotten away with saying 'yes.' Too late now.
“No,” continued Charles, “Bo and I'll do it on the way in.”
Today was the annual fishing sale at the Bass Pro Shops just this side of the city. Charles and Bo, friends since first grade, fished together whenever weekends and holidays permitted. They fished every pond, creek, and ditch in the area. They caught their share of fish, but just doing something with your friend and not your wife and kids was what appealed to them. Neither of them could afford a boat, but one new rod almost every year and a fresh supply of lures was in their reach. The annual sale provided them a chance to save a little money and live through the other people who bought boats and motors on this day. And the Bass Pro Shops store that opened three years earlier was heaven to two boyhood friends. Thousands of everything you could want. The best deals, however, were on limited items – the kinds of things that disappeared the first ten minutes after the store opened – at 9AM.
“Where is that Bo?” asked Charles as he stared out the kitchen window to the road.
“Bo is always a little late for you,” said Ruby not answering her husband's question. “But he always gets the two of you to where you want to go at the time you want to be there.”
“Yea,” continued Charles as he turned away from the window, “I don't know how that guy can break all the speed limits and never get a ticket.”
Charles looked in the cabinet under the oven for a large plastic garbage bag. He would need something like that to carry the cat to the dumpster.
“Ruby,” yelled Charles at the top of his voice, but his voice was muffled since his head was still in the cabinet. “Where are the plastic garbage bags? Aren't they under the oven?”
“That's where I keep them,” answered Ruby, “but we are all out. I'm picking up some this morning at the grocery.”
“Well,” spoke Charles as he pulled his head out of the cabinet, cutting the volume of his voice in half as his head came clear of the muffling affect of the cabinet, “what am I gonna put that cat in? I can't just leave it wrapped in newspapers. It'll blow all over the place in the back of Bo's pickup.”
“I'll get you something for that, and Bo's here now,” said Ruby as she left the kitchen and went down the hall.
“Chuck. Where are ya boy. You're late, we're gonna miss the best part of the sale if you don't get out here,” and with such Beauregard “Bo” Chambers announced his arrival, that and three slaps of his left arm reaching out the driver's side window onto the door of the old Chevy pickup truck.
Bo had slid to a stop on the gravel road – he always slid to a stop on gravel, something he learned to do when he was 15 and had continued for the next 30 years – and backed into the Hayden's drive. He didn't get out; he never got out of the truck. He was superstitious that way. He believed the engine would die if he got out. If the engine died, then maybe a part of him died. Charles never understood that one, but there were many things about Bo that he didn't understand. He had almost given up trying, but still he had moments when he wondered and even asked Bo about these things. Bo never had an answer.
“Just hold one second more,” said Charles as he walked out the carport door, across the carport, and into the gravel. “Ruby's getting a bag to put this dead cat in that we have to drop at the dumpster.”
With that statement Charles turned his body to shield his face from the house. He stared at Bo, furled his brow, and opened his eyes as wide as could be. That expression from one lifelong friend to another shouted, “Don't say anything about a stupid dead cat, not in front of my wife. We'll deal with this as soon as we get out of here.”
“Here we go,” announced Ruby as she came out the carport door. “This will work.”
With great pride, Ruby held up a red JC Penney's bag. The kind that was made of shiny material that had more plastic than paper in it, but a little of both. It had a sturdy cardboard bottom and two twine handles.
Charles saw the bag and winced. “A ladies shopping bag,” he thought. “I'm going to miss the annual fishing sale because I'm carrying a dead cat in a fancy ladies shopping bag.”
Charles then considered the utility of the bag. It was plastic enough to keep any fluids in place, it was sturdy, and it had handles. This would probably work.
Ruby lowered her prize bag to the ground next to the newspaper-wrapped corpse of Widow Easley's cat. She delicately lifted the cat and newspapers up over the edge of the JC Penney' bag and laid it down into the bottom of the bag. She touched the outer sides of the bag to push the cat's body back into the shape of the bag, so it would look right. She did this neatening with her wrists instead of her hands. Her hands were now soiled with something invisible, but nonetheless present. She then took a red piece of lightweight wrapping paper and placed it on top of the cat and newspaper bundle, so that the packaged looked like a present at a church wedding shower.
“There,” she exclaimed proudly, “that will do it.”
She turned towards her husband, looking and leaning upwards, and kissed him slightly on the lips. All the while, she held her hands out from her sides with fingers stiffly straight and spread so as not to touch anything with whatever it was she felt was on them from the cat.
With that, she let her husband go. She turned him loose from the bonds of a 40-something married man back to the freedom of a 15-year-old with his buddy Bo off on a treasure hunting adventure.
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PART 2 – Chuck and Bo
“Chuck, while you're up, get me some chicken wings,” requested Bo.
“You've got a pile of them still on your plate,” noted Chuck as he pushed back his chair and stood glancing at his friend's plate and then to the short line of people at the buffet area.
The China Garden buffet was a ritual for Chuck and Bo when they went to Bass Pro Shops. Chuck liked Chinese food, something he was able to eat only a three or four times a year. His favorite were the fried dumplings. He had read one time that dumplings were the national food in China – not egg drop soup or egg rolls as most Americans thought. The dumplings were the equivalent of hot dogs and hamburgers. Chuck loved the hot pepper soy sauce that sat next to the dumplings on the buffet. He liked to cut dumplings in half and dip them into the sauce. The sauce would fill the cup formed by a half dumpling. Delicious. Too many, however, and the pepper kept him awake for half a night.
Bo liked the buffet as well, but not so much for the Chinese food. He liked the fried chicken, especially the wings. He also liked the soft serve ice cream machine that came with the buffet. Bo easily ate a couple dozen fried chicken wings and three or four servings of ice cream.
Chicken wings and ice cream at a Chinese restaurant. That was one of the things that Chuck wondered about Bo, but never bothered to ask.
The China Garden was a fancy Chinese restaurant – at least in Chuck and Bo's eyes. It had red vinyl upholstery on the benches in the booths and ornate wooden chairs at the tables. The light was a little dim and seemed to grow a little dimmer each of the last three years. The dimming light was okay because they never read the menu. They simply walked in, told the little Chinese girl “two buffets and two Cokes” and went to the buffet line.
There was a Chinese buffet in the small town ten miles from their homes. It, however, was in a little shopping center with big glass windows in the front. The booths had brown vinyl upholstery and the tables had metal chairs with green vinyl padding. The selection wasn't as good – no fried dumplings – but they did have fried chicken and an ice cream machine. The ice cream machine, however, had a scrawled “OUT OF ORDER” sign taped to it the last time Chuck and his wife ate there.
Chuck and Bo had been chowing down in the China Garden long enough that their eyes had adjusted to the dim light. It was noon and a bright sunny day outside. The restaurant had offset double doors so that the level of light only raised slightly when people entered and exited. At this time of day on a Saturday people were mostly entering.
Chuck picked up two plates and a small cup at the buffet area. He placed half a dozen fried dumplings on one plate. He then spooned hot pepper soy sauce into the small cup. Chuck felt a rush of saliva into his mouth as he looked at the dumplings.
Despite the temptation to return to the table and start eating, he stayed in the buffet line until he reached the far end. That is where the fried chicken was placed next to the crinkle-cut french fries and onion rings – the end of the buffet that attracted probably a third of the customers on weekends. Chuck passed by the pan of drumsticks and on to the pan of wings. For a moment Chuck wondered about the use of chicken at the China Garden. Wings and drumsticks went onto the buffet in American fried style. The rest of the chickens, surmised chuck, were cut up into the dozen or so Chinese dishes on the buffet. Whatever. Chuck placed a dozen chicken wings on the second plate he had. He counted these carefully as later he could tell Bo exactly how many chicken wings he had eaten. Bo always claimed to only eat 20, but Chuck's counting always passed that number by at least ten.
By the time Chuck returned to his and Bo's table Bo had pushed his plate of chicken wing bones to the side and was gulping his Coke in a glass.
“Alright Chuck,” announced Bo. “Thanks for bringing me the wings. I love this Chinese food.”
“Chinese food,” replied Chuck in a voice feigning astonishment. “All you eat is fried chicken and ice cream. You could get that at KFC.”
“What? No way, KFC doesn't have an ice cream machine,” explained Bo as if the lack of soft serve ice cream at KFC transformed chicken wings and ice cream into Chinese cuisine.
“Besides,” continued Bo, “this place fries its chicken in Chinese oil. That's a completely different flavor.”
Chuck thought for a moment about that logic. He also thought about continuing this line of questioning with Bo, but that thought quickly disappeared with Bo's next interruption.
“How do you think this looks Chuck?” asked Bo.
Chuck looked up from his dumplings to see Bo posing with his new pair of fishing sun glasses. Even in the dim light of the restaurant, Chuck could see the aqua marine lenses and shiny black frames. Bo had leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms on his growing midsection in a defiant pose, and gave a slight pout expression. The pose attempted to express a strong attitude that you see during football games on TV when the cameras show players celebrating on the sidelines.
“Bo,” answered Chuck, “you look like a Chinese bass fisherman.”
“You're jealous Chuck,” replied Bo. “You're just jealous cause I raced straight to the glasses area as soon as we got inside Bass Pro. You wasted your time with those spinner baits. I keep telling you those things don't work. You should go with the soft baits like worms, grubs, and craws. Besides Chuck, it's the annual sale. You gotta go to the big ticket items if you want to save any money. That's the whole point of getting there when they open the doors. It's a good thing we waited on the...”
Bo stopped short.
“Waited on the what?” asked Chuck.
“Ooops,” thought Bo. “I shouldn't have let that slip. I gotta cover this one quick.”
Bo put a hand to his midsection, puffed out his checks, and feigned a belch. He was good at that as he had been practicing the technique for decades.
“Wait?” answered Bo with a question of his own. “Wait a minute Chuck. I think they added a chocolate ice cream machine this year to go along with the vanilla. Damn! They did. Alright Chuck this is great.”
Bo stopped faking his belch and let real excitement overcome him for a moment. He pointed the the wall where there were indeed two ice cream machines. A boy finished topping a bowl of vanilla ice cream with an equal serving of chocolate on top.
“This is great Chuck,” exclaimed Bo. “We hit the big one today. I got these Sea Striker Bridgetender shade at two-thirds off and the old China Garden here has a chocolate ice cream machine now.”
“I don't mind telling you now,” spoke Bo in hushed tones while he leaned foward. He pushed the sunglasses up on his face revealing one but not both of his eyes. He glanced side to side twice and continued quietly as if revealing a national security secret to an accomplice. “I like this place you see, but really only vanilla ice cream the past couple of years. I had half a mind to complain to the management about that, but I knew how much you liked this place and didn't want to make a scene on account of you.”
“Gee thanks, Bo,” added Chuck. “That is might neighborly of you old buddy.”
Bo returned back to his regular posture with a smile on his face and his newly acquired sunglasses back in their place. Bo was relieved. He had avoided Chuck's question about waiting. He was happy that they hadn't stopped on the way to Bass Pro Shops to drop off that dead cat at the dumpster. Those 15 minutes would have cost him his pair of sunglasses.
What was really troubling Bo was that Chuck had forgotten the cat. Bo noticed this as they were returning to his pickup after shopping in Bass Pro Shops. He had glanced quickly into the pickup bed as he usually did – never know what someone might put into your pickup – and noticed that there was no red JC Penney's bag in the truck bed. Chuck must have forgotten the cat in the hurry to get on the road. Chuck was going to catch hell when he returned home. Ruby would be furious, and saving ten bucks on spinner bait wouldn't calm her any. Yes, Chuck was in for it.
The two friends exchanged boyish barbs for another half hour as they ate chicken wings, ice cream (both vanilla and chocolate), and fried dumplings dipped in hot pepper soy sauce. It was quite a day for them, a day that didn't come often enough for either.
Eventually they reached a point where neither stood to go to the buffet area anymore and their Coke glasses didn't need refilling anymore by the young Chinese waitress.
“This has been a good day Bo,” stated Chuck in a matter-of-fact manner. “I hate to cut it short, but the sun is moving into afternoon and that cat will start getting ripe.”
“That cat?” asked Bo hoping the subject would go away. He dreaded what was to happen to Chuck when they got home.
“Yea, that stupid dead cat,” answered Chuck. “We still have to drop it off at the dumpster.”
“Oh yea, that old cat,” stated Bo, this time removing his sunglasses altogether. Bo sunk back into his chair and puckered his lips as if to whistle. He merely blew out air in a silent whistle. “Well Chuck,” said Bo slowly trying to delay the inevitable fury of Ruby.
“Yea, that old cat,” interrupted Chuck. “I knew we were running late, so I didn't make a point of it to stop on the way here. I figured it would be alright. Last night was cool for this time of year, sort of refrigerated the dead cat, and this morning was cool as well. The cat was covered in that silly shopping bag and shaded a bit by the walls of the pickup bed. With all that, I figured it wouldn't ripen on us and start to smell up your truck.”
“Well, yea,” stuttered Bo trying to decide if he should tell Chuck that he didn't bring the cat. “Well, yea cool weather and all. That was good thinking of you Chuck, and I sure appreciate you thinking of keeping my pickup from smelling like a ripe old dead old cat. That was mighty nice of you.”
“But,” continued Bo in a slow a speech as he could muster. He was stalling and afraid that it would be obvious that he was stalling. How was he going to tell Chuck that there was no dead cat in his pickup, that Chuck had forgotten the cat, that Chuck was going to catch hell when they got back home. Maybe they could think of a way to sneak back in the driveway, snatch the cat in the red bag, and sneak back to the dumpster without Ruby noticing. Maybe there was a way out of this mess. That was it, they could sneak their way out of this!
“Hey Chuck,” Bo said as he interrupted his own thought. “I've got an idea. I know how we can get out of this mess.”
“What mess?” asked Chuck as he twisted his face and squinted his eyes.
“I hate to tell you this about that cat Chuck, but,” started Bo.
“But what Bo?” demanded Chuck. Sometimes Bo just wore out his friend. Sometimes Chuck just wanted to pop Bo on the head to snap some sense into him. This was one of those times.
“Chuck, you...” started Bo.
A scream broke Bo's word in the middle. A loud, harsh, scared scream. It came from across the restaurant from a booth. It came from the gut in a horrific shriek.
There was only one scream, and it was cut short by a clank and a thud. Chuck and Bo stopped and turned to see what had happened. The young Chinese waitress had run over to a booth. Right behind her were two Chinese men. By their age they could have been the father and grandfather of the waitress. The two men began gibbering to one another in excited tones – at least it sounded like gibberish to Chuck and Bo.
“Backup, everyone back up,” shouted the waitress in clear English. “This lady needs some air and water.”
“Do you want to move her outside for fresh air?” asked a man who had been sitting with his wife one booth removed from the fainted lady.
At that question, Chuck and Bo both stood and took a step towards the commotion. For all their boyish pranks and acts, they were two gentlemen and they would help someone in need if they could.
“No, no!” shouted the Chinese man who looked like the waitress' father. “No move, never move person. You could hurt more. No move.”
“Why did she faint?” asked the wife of the man who asked about moving the lady. “What caused her to faint?”
The inquisitive wife turned around and got up on her knees so should could peer into the fainted woman's booth. She saw the back of the woman slumped over onto the table. She had screamed, fainted, and fallen face first into her plate of fried rice and beef with broccoli. Her fall added the clank and thud noises to her scream.
The inquisitive wife then noticed a boy sitting across the table from the fainted woman. The boy, only 8 or 10 years old, had a shocked and scared look on his face. The kind of look you would expect from a child who had just seen his mother faint in a restaurant.
“Son,” asked the Chinese waitress. “Is this your mother?”
“Yes,” stammered the boy in a frightful tone as he edged backwards in the booth away from the growing crowd of adults.
“Is your mother ill?” continued the waitress in an attempt to learn what would cause a patron to faint in her family's restaurant. No one had ever fainted in this restaurant. What would this do to business?
“Momma's alright,” answered the boy nervously.
The inquisitive wife then noticed a shopping bag on the bench next to the fainted woman. She stuck her hands down in the bag to inspect its contents hoping something in the bag would give them a clue about the fainting woman. He short inspection was halted abruptly as she jerked her hands back out of the bag.
“Little boy,” stated the inquisitive wife. “Where did your mom get this bag?”
“Well,” answered the boy as if he was required to answer any question from any adult in the restaurant. “We were walking through the parking lot at the big fishing store and momma picked up the bag from a truck. I reckon it belonged to one of her friends at the store cause when I asked momma about she told me 'never mind son, Momma's just getting a discount here today.'”
The commotion continued in the restaurant for a few more moments. In the midst of it, Bo motioned to Chuck to pay their bill while he checked on the source of the noise. Chuck was alright with that as they had agreed that Bo would drive and Chuck would pay for lunch. Chuck walked towards the door and cash register. Another Chinese waitress was next to the cash register in a guarded stance. This was a family-owned restaurant and one of the family was sure to be near the cash at all times – especially when something odd was happening.
While Chuck was paying for lunch, Bo edged closer to the source of the noise. There was still the chance that someone needed help, and he and Chuck would assist if they could. By the time he arrived near the booth the fainted woman was starting to regain consciousness. The Chinese waitress was holding a cold, wet napkin to the woman's forehead while another young Chinese kitchen worker was sitting next to the woman's son assuring him that his mother would be fine.
In the midst of this recovery, Bo caught the eye of the inquisitive wife in the adjacent booth. She didn't look right. In fact, it looked to Bo as if she was fighting a gag reflex and suppressing a vomit.
Bo gave her a look that asked, “Are you alright? Is there something wrong?”
Without Bo needing to voice those words, the woman looked at Bo and pointed to the bench where the fainted woman was recovering.
“There,” started the inquisitive wife, “there is a dead cat in this woman's JC Penney shopping bag.”
Bo pursed his lips, took in a deep breath through his nostrils, let it out the same passage, and swung his eyes from side to side.
“Hmm,” was the only sound Bo could make.
Bo turned from the booth and walked to Chuck at the cash register.
“Everything okay? Anything we can do?” asked Chuck with heartfelt concern.
“Naw,” answered Bo quickly. “Let's hit the road. I want to try out these new sunglasses on the interstate.”
Go to Dwayne's Home Page
Email me at
d.phillips@computer.org