Every morning, a white-haired leprechaun wobbles up the road in front of my house on a push-brake bicycle with two milk crates tied on to hold his groceries. I don’t know his real name, so I call him Bicycle Charlie. He makes his shaky ride each day to visit Big Rita, my name for the cat lady who lives across the street. I don’t know her real name either.
At seven each morning, Big Rita lumbers onto the porch decked out in a crocheted purple-and-red poncho and knitted green cap. Sometimes a stray cat will nip at her ankles and she’ll kick it out of the way just far enough so she doesn’t trip on it while she’s coming down the steps. Then she shambles up the hill to the Kroger deli to buy breakfast.
Half an hour later, Big Rita hobbles back and disappears inside her shabby house. When she reappears with a metal pan overflowing with chow in each hand, hundreds of stray cats swarm her yard like a wriggling sea of larvae. The craftier cats are already lined up shoulder-to-shoulder when Big Rita steps outside. Some of the hungrier or less experienced strays press forward in the queue and a lightning-fast paw slap soon re-establishes the feline pecking order. A cacophony of yowls greets Big Rita when she rocks out the door in her bad-hip gait and sets down the first pan of cat food. She totters back inside and returns with the second, third, fourth servings – however many it takes to satisfy the beggars.
When the feeding frenzy is over, one by one the cats leave in a strangely choreographed routine. Reinvigorated by their meal, the first ones energetically sprint away holding their tails high. Next, the battered and scarred old toms lope off to make their whizzing rounds, invigorated enough to defend their territory one more time. Then the nursing mothers slink away, hugging the shadows on the edge of Big Rita’s house until they fade from sight. The stragglers -- the chronically hungry ones -- won’t leave until Big Rita goes inside.
Bicycle Charlie usually weaves his bike up the hill in between the toms’ departures and the mothers’ retreats.
Charlie and Rita chat for a few minutes every day after feeding time. I’ve never seen Charlie bend down to pet any of the cats, but they still weave between his feet and the wheels of the bike, making kitty love to his ankles, ever hopeful for a stroke or another scrap of food. Charlie brings Rita two sacks of cat chow every morning and she gives him a little money. Sometimes I wonder if he manufactures cat food in that wacky house of his.
Bicycle Charlie lives down the hill, around the corner and a couple of blocks away in a tiny white cottage protected by a three-foot-high chain link fence and a No Trespassers or Salesmen sign. The gate is secured with a loop of neon-pink jump rope slipped over the metal fencepost. Inside the fence are myriad stacks of ritually hoarded…objects…that he’s toted home in the milk crates. The five-foot-high mounds seem neat enough on first glance, yet the individual components are curiously unrecognizable. Looking at Bicycle Charlie’s yard is like looking at a sea of people from a distance -- you can’t make out specific faces.
Only Charlie and maybe God knows what’s inside that little house. I imagine there are oh-so-neatly stacked piles of…more things…that Bicycle Charlie collects. There could be a million dollars in ten-dollar bills wrapped in recovered typewriter ribbons inside, but no one will ever know. When he dies, the city will tack a condemned sign on the front door and after 45 days the wrecking crew will show up. By the end of the 45th day, Bicycle Charlie’s house and all his collections will be a chaotic pile of rubble. By the end of the 46th day (unless it’s a Sunday), the little postage stamp lot will be reduced to a bare earthen square.
I imagine that when Big Rita dies, no one will dare enter her house for fear of being eaten alive by the cats. Once I stood at the door and chatted with her. As far as I could see into the shadowy recesses, the house was full of boxes stacked to the ceiling. There were cardboard boxes stacked upon paper cartons, piled up on more boxes. The window blinds were closed. There’s not even a curtain hanging oddly with a permanent grimy section from being pulled back so she can peer outside. For all I know, Big Rita clones cats and stores them in all those boxes.








* * *
















* * *
[Tomorrow: Our Dreams]
No comments:
Post a Comment