I’d already sold Dad’s truck, and the money from that was gone. The two oil wells had slid lower and lower on my fridge as the magnet lost its stick. It was almost winter. I daydreamed about jumping into a Florida swimming pool, my body cold all over and weightless. I’d keep a waving cat in the window where I could see it from the pool, reminding me that the times I worried about money were over for good.
When Jenny didn’t come by to pick up rent a few days later, I went to check on him. He answered the door with his rattail in his hand. Its fat body curled over his shoulder like a snake. The planter of cigarette butts had been tipped onto the ground next to the porch. Someone had tried to peel the Cherokee man off the mailbox and failed, or the weather was slowly undoing whatever made it stick.
“Jenny,” I started. I was going to tell him they’d fired me.
“You call your mom? Bet she’d like to hear from you.” He was slurring. He seemed to be having trouble walking and took my arm. With his free hand, he put his rattail in his mouth and chewed. He chewed and stared at me and opened his mouth, using his lip to flap the end of the braid. He removed the rattail and held it in his hand, and we both looked at it. Up close, the hairs were all squiggly, like he’d been electrified.
“I don’t talk to my mom,” I said. “Never have. You knew that.”
He wanted me to come inside. He went into the back room where it was dark. He kept sheets nailed over his windows to keep out the light. I heard him take a big huff of something, moving around. I found him in his bathroom, pants down, lying on the floor. I decided for his pride to leave him there.
The next day I went again to tell him about getting fired. I wouldn’t be able to pay rent that month or maybe ever. I’d brought the last twenties I’d saved to give him, but before knocking I’d tucked two or three back in my pocket.
We were standing on his porch. That morning I’d found a white, worry-doll-shaped mummy of hair the size of my thumb. One of Koda’s hairballs. No matter how much I cleaned, parts of her remained.
“You know, maybe your dad did kill himself. Maybe it’s best to think that. Man, I think about going that way, taking a rifle and going out back into the forest here, maybe on the river. I’ve lived a good life, you know. I’m about ready to give up.” Jenny spit into the planter. “I think Koda maybe went that way too.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said. “She ran. She was trying to get away from the thing. I saw it.” But I did believe him.
Jenny looked in his mailbox. There was nothing inside but a few crumpled papers. Someone miles away was burning trash.
He pulled his rattail over his shoulder and arranged it in the middle of his chest. “I’ve been feeding him,” he said. “The cougar.”
He told me he’d been setting out meat for him for a while now. “I know he killed Koda, and I’m sorry, but being hungry’s no one’s fault. Everyone’s hungry, everyone’s got to eat.”
I could taste the burning garbage on my tongue.
“I’d like you to keep feeding him for me, when I’m not around,” Jenny continued. “That’s one thing I need you to do for me.”
He got me a cold beer with a soggy label, which I took but did not drink.
Jenny told me I reminded him of a son he once dreamed he had. He squeezed my armpit. It was horrible, standing there, listening to him. I remembered an old man I’d seen in the restaurant trying to get the plastic wrapper off his straw. You could tell it was important to him to get the wrapper off, and he kept trying. Finally, he set the straw down, and the waitress came over and undid it for him.
Jenny pulled open his mailbox again, and still nothing was there but those crumpled papers.
A few nights later I saw the cougar again. He was walking about twenty feet from my living room toward Jenny’s trailer. His eyes were the size of clementines—big, black clementines. He was moving slowly, swinging his head low to the ground, looking toward my trailer and away and back again. I didn’t want the cougar to have killed Koda, to have given my dog a scary, painful death. But there it was. I couldn’t believe the way this lone thing walked, placing each foot heavily down, shifting one shoulder bone, then the other. His fur was gray in the dark. His tail was as big around as a bull snake. I could make out a pink smear on his flank where a wound might have healed. He made his way to Jenny’s trailer, paused outside, and continued on into the trees.
Jamel Brinkley
A Family
from Gulf Coast
Curtis Smith watched from across the street as the boy argued with Lena Johnson in front of the movie theater. She had probably bought tickets for the wrong movie. Or maybe Andre didn’t want to see any movie with his mother on a Friday night. Her expression went from pleading to irate. The boy said nothing more. With his head taking on weight, hung as though his neck couldn’t hold it, he followed as she went inside.
It was a chilly evening in November, the sky threatened by rain. Curtis blew warm breath into his cupped hands. Obedience, he thought, he could talk to the boy about that. He’d been making a list of topics they could discuss. The question of obedience was right for a boy of fifteen, when the man he would become was beginning to erupt out of him like horns. Though sometimes it was important to disobey. Curtis had known this since he was younger than the boy was now. Twelve years in prison hadn’t changed that, and so Curtis was here, doing what his mother had asked him that morning not to do anymore. He’d been seen watching Andre and Lena, and his mother’s friends were gossiping about what they saw. Maybe Curtis still had a grudge against Lena, they said, or maybe he simply couldn’t let go of the past. He didn’t care what his mother or her friends said. A man decided his own way, and there came a time when a boy growing into his manhood had to as well. Unless your balls haven’t dropped yet. Curtis could say that to the boy, teasing him the way he and the boy’s father, Marvin Caldwell, used to tease each other when they were young. Marvin dreamed most vividly of everything he would do for his mother one day, but even he knew to disobey her.
Curtis took a last look at the names of the movies and tried to guess which one Andre might have wanted to see, which one Lena would have chosen instead. He counted his money. He’d only spent twelve of the forty dollars his mother had left for him, so he decided to get a bite to eat while he waited for the movie to end. At the Downtown Bar and Grill, an old favorite, he ordered a hamburger and soda. Refills were no longer free, so Curtis kept asking for glasses of water. From where he sat he could still see the brilliance of the marquee.
The rain began before Andre and Lena came out of the theater, but they took a walk anyway. Curtis followed them. Lena opened an umbrella that was large enough for two, but as they strolled along the promenade Andre kept drifting away from her, exposing his body to the cold drizzle. Lena stopped at a bench and used a piece of newspaper to wipe it dry. Andre maintained a distance from her when they sat. Curtis stalled for a few moments, and then settled near the middle of the next bench. A large trash can partially blocked his view of them, but he could hear their conversation.
“Your daddy liked to come out here,” Lena was saying.
“You told me that before,” Andre said. Curtis had been following them for weeks, but had rarely been this close. He’d never heard them talk about Marvin.
“Well, it’s nice, isn’t it? Look at that view.”