Bobcat's Summer of Wonders: Chapter Three, or "How does Mike feel, today?"

“Well I feel a lot better” said Mike, standing on the new porch. “Haven’t had a headache in about five days”. I giggled silently at that, and suddenly in the light of all, emotions still being raw, I felt the ghost of a need to choke Mike to death. Part of me thought about it, and part of me looked at myself from the inside, with a kind of indifferent horror.

As a tenant in the trailer house, he was afforded a kind of special status around the yard. I say this only in the sense that we tried to keep appearances in front of him, not necessarily present falsities to the man, but put everything about our family in kind of a positive light. We generally held to that no matter how ghoulish the tenant was, and we only broke the illusion as the tenant was on his way out from being evicted.

Mike, as it were, had paid twelve months in advance, having gotten some sort of settlement for something or other—Marisol and Oxcart would know—some kind of compensation for past wrongs or some kind of imagined negligence directed at him from some quarters. It was not everybody’s business, not everyone’s concern, to know the particulars.

What we knew, he did not have a job at present time, kind of whittling away the hours at his own doings inside his house, what one might imagine, from the outside, cleaning floors or dusting the furniture and drapes, but probably something more, in reality, like sitting drinking chocolate milk or diet soda with MMA tapes playing all the livelong day.

“Well that’s good” I said, but for the life of me, I kind of wish two or three more blinding headaches on him, if not for his own sake, then my own balance or the sake of the family.

This getting to know one was always such a delicate thing, and I had to be aware somewhere deep inside that I was not personally invested in this man’s health; indeed, he was just a companion in the yard to wile away the hours, and to do that, he could lose almost everything but his skull and still fill the need, in my own eyes. Selfish, I know, but I had the feeling what was deeper and more obscure of Mike, had no particular explanation, no reasoning or decision, but simply happened, like the horses going crazy on a hot afternoon, or the rooster yelling at nothing in particular.

What I mean, perhaps, is that the enigma of Mike was kind of dull, not a Broadway production or something that explained the great questions of life, not a contrivance, but just something that simply was there, sitting idly, like a large boulder that had not moved in centuries. Dull and defiant of explanation, but as real as the sunrise or sunset, as real as the death of a wayward brother in an unfamiliar part of the country.

“I think I’m gonna paint the porch” said Mike, looking down at the new timbers stretched across the walking surface.

“You might have to talk to Deddy about that” I told him. Here he would have to deal with my parents’ own peculiar tastes, and with the rental agreement being so vague, it was almost such that one marginally offensive brush stroke could get him tossed out, regardless of whether he had paid ahead or not.

He couldn’t have been rich: he drove an old truck, and dressed pretty plain. Drank generic brand diet sodas. There was no evidence of money aside from some lump of cash he had drawn from a court case that he put into his own rental costs. It was such these days and times, that people were sort of rich for a few days, and the money filled opened gaps until it was gone, any amount of money, hundreds, thousands or even millions, and money did not last indefinitely, but had its own way of spoiling itself and its owner, in the balance, if were held on to for too long a time.

The point was, it would be no good to Mike to offend the landlord, my father, whether he had some extra ten thousand or so banked away, and he could very well find himself out of money with nowhere to go: no means.

“I’ll make it look good” said Mike, “he’ll like it.”

As if summoned by our conversation, there came Deddy out of the side door with a five-gallon bucket. He glanced at us nonchalantly and turned his attention to the yard proper, from the side door to the circle-around driveway that we shared with Mike. He kind of stood there a second, vacantly, until something caught his eye, some grasshopper near the drive, or a cigarette butt, or a bottle cap, and he walked over to it, bent and picked it up, depositing it in the bucket.

It wasn’t the usual for Deddy, picking up trash in the yard, but he was still off of work from the funeral for a few more days, so he had some empty time. I wondered vaguely if he was so suddenly concerned about appearances, opting, when given an absolutely clear choice, to clean the yard: a yard which wasn’t particularly filthy anyway. I hadn’t known my own father to be so stiff about appearances in years past, but as they always said when a new thing came along, “it’s a brand new day, cuz”. I considered for the pass of a breath perhaps to help him, in his cleaning-up, and opted not to; I made a note to feel-out the old man’s thoughts on Mike painting the porch. And yes, that was me inserting myself in the delicate relationship between landlord and tenant, but I felt I could do both parties some good as a mostly disinterested observer.

Oxcart was walking towards the front yard, eyes somewhat down, scanning the ground, and it said something about the usual state of the yard that there was not a lot of trash down at that time. What would have been there, would have been destroyed by the lawn mower, anyway. With three sons at home, we keep pretty well ahead of most of the usual yard chores, almost fighting sometimes to decide who would mow the yard, except for Geffen, who usually stayed in the house, chirping with Crystal in their dialect, their “girl talk” or whatever.

Keith, Geffen’s twin, had not been able to be contacted by the family. No one knew anything about where he was living or even, for that matter, if he were alive. Geffen might suspect a prison forwarding address, but Geffen’s radar in regards to his own twin was way off, and generally based on past mistakes and indifference, and not much else. And poor Chad they knew was institutionalized and on Limited Visitation, as per doctor’s orders; they wouldn’t let him out to come to Andrew’s service.

Grandma and Aunt Rachel(Oxcart’s sister) were the only two outside of the immediate family unit that came and put in their condolences, as otherwise, the family unit as it had been for several years held true to form. Those without stayed without, generally, and Grandma might as well have not been there, as well, because she came unprepared and in her Alzheimer’s haze, thought every man at the funeral was Andrew, even the preacher that had been tasked to speak.

She gave that preacher a twenty dollar bill, and no one stopped, no one bothered arguing the fine points, but let her run as she chose without dispute, in mismatched clothes, plaids and floral prints, but luckily her shoes matched, and her socks: she only had a lot of one variety of sock, so no possibility of mistake. Her attitude towards socks had been her in fairer weather days, that when something did the job, she relied on it, and that four good pairs of socks were met with more of the same on subsequent shoppings. But in the days since her short-term memory began to fail her, things had went remarkably weird with her, with mood swings and all sorts of senseless repetitions, things that would confuse and frustrate a person with an ordinarily healthy mind.

They were free, such as it was, to pick up Grandma at their discretion; so no doctor interference, but the subject with Chad was more severe, even in the face of short-term memory loss. Indeed, it was felt that in the throes of Heroin pangs, he was capable in the short-term of that one vain repetition of dosing himself, and that, with everything else put to service to that. Thus his presence was verboten and he was referred to simply as “getting well”: a process that more people could see to, probably.

So there was Free To Visit If You Cared, Limited Visitation, and Zero Contact in the offing, with Aunt Rachel remaining cool to the family, not even speaking much, but touching Oxcart’s shoulder before and after the little quaint funeral—maybe that singular act spoke volumes between them, owing to something in their upbringing, balances owed and old debts screaming across the chasms of the years, wordlessly reminding them that they in fact, were family, and all the old days were somewhere etched into the lines in their aging faces, like a roadmap, but in no way indicating a direction forward, but marking instead the past happenings, little hurts and laughter, shared empty moments and the common worries of a household that had long ago went defunct: that much they shared between them, without a word.

But Mike was feeling “alright”, and I told him that was good, without much offering a fig branch since the nervousness and anxiety of the unexpected funeral; but assured he had no headaches in a few days, and must be, indeed, “alright”. Part of me cursed him to Grandma’s fate, that short-term random quality she had, like a toaster oven about to catch on fire, or one of the old televisions with blown tube. It was only half the story, because he was still Mike, and the worries still that were not uncommon to Mike, but that withdrawn in a trick of perspective, that he was so indolently calm about the lack of headaches.

Were I of consequence in the offing, I would have tasked Deddy to watch MMA with Mike, maybe, and tossed Grandma in the corner to make interesting commentary about the whole thing. It was such that Deddy thought of the appearance of something, for some reason, that something had wiggled into his ear that made him think of the outward curb appeal of his own house, and me hoping he had not did a new mortgage or anything for Andrew’s funeral. Though the specter was real enough, of debt and burden, the way new births could be debt and burden, and adult children, whether they travel the country preaching, or fiddle-faddle around like Thomas, or even the running gibberish commentary track that was Geffen: all debt and burden, in the meantime, until balances are redressed in the hereafter, at the notated White Throne of Judgment, with Andrew getting noted as the best of us all, that the best was elsewhere and not sitting out front for the world to gawk and fawn over.

I myself was not notably bad, but conversely, had not much to my own credit, no acts of mercy or charity, nothing besides answering my own odd internal questions about Mike, and that being mostly to mark time. For that matter, the matter of marking time, I might has well had been a prisoner in a debtor’s prison of old, but not institutionalized like Chad with a decided goal in mind, for I had no real goals or causes of my own, and only for that lack, might I feel in any way cheated by the universe for a deficit of cause.

And Mike, with or without blinding concussion-derived headaches, might yet be a headache for the family, set about on our property, becoming, in some senses of the words, our problem, and in some dismal respects, a cause for concern.

But three days after Andrew’s funeral, whom Mike didn’t even know anyways, and five days after Mike got assaulted at Bojangles, he proclaimed himself “alright”, of his own initiative.