by Marty Rafter
Half of the time when these kids move out, they end up having to replace the carpets, and fix a bunch of stuff, they haven’t needed to do any of that with you. They would probably make an exception”
“I don’t know” He says
“Why don’t you see if he wants to go inside with you?”
Donald sat for a moment, and thought about it, and then he reaches out and gently picks up the cat.
“I have some extra food in my apartment.” I say “Why don’t you take him in to your place, I will go upstairs and get the food”
I follow Donald into the building, and he carries the cat into his first floor apartment. Then I go up to my apartment, and call the management company. When I get the property manager on the phone, the person who was ostensibly my boss for half of the year, I say. “Hey I was talking to Donald Thigpen from apartment 1A, and he got wind of the fact that a bunch of these apartments have had some renovations done”
“The kids have no respect for anything” says the property manager
“anyway” I says “he and I were talking about it, and it turns out that he’s been wanting to adopt a cat, I was thinking maybe we could offer him a compromise…maybe waive the pet fee and get him to forget about the renovations for a little while”
“You think he would go for it?”
“I could talk to him about it.” I say
“Look at you all of the sudden, willing to go the extra mile” the property manager says
“He talked to me about it” I say
“Does this mean that you might consider the onsite manager thing again” He says
“I don’t really know how to fix anything, Ron”
“You just fixed the problem of having to renovate a whole apartment” He says
“..But if a toilet breaks”
“If a toilet breaks, you plunge it, if a light bulb burns out you twist a new one in…anything else, you call the other maintenance guys. It’s a piece of cake.”
“Then why do you want me to do it?” I ask
“Because I don’t want to send someone all the way over there every time some dumb assed kid realizes that her mommy never taught her to flush a meatloaf down the toilet”
“If you put it that way, it sounds pretty good” I say
“Think about it, would you? You’d still be able to cover the rentals in the summer, and we’d take care of your rent”
“I’ll think about it.” “Will you send Donald Thigpen an amendment to his lease about the cat?”
“Sure, if you handle the renovation thing”
“I will do it right now”
Then, I go downstairs with the cat food, and tap on Donald’s door. He opens at let me in. His small apartment is spotlessly clean. Overtop of his slip covered couch is a huge print of a pride of lions. He also has a rug with the face of a lion, a gold painted stone lion next to the door, and an afghan with a picture of a reclining cheetah draped over the back of a chair where his new cat is sitting.
“The cat sort of completes the theme” I say
“Don’t be thinking you can start coming down here now that you found me that cat”
“I’ve never been in here before”
“And you probably won’t be in here again. This is my private place. I don’t want all kine’a people coming in here”
“So, you don’t want a new carpet then?” I ask
“Man, no. I don’t want a carpet. I want those people to respect my sanctuary”
“I talked to the property manager. He said that he would waive the pet fee”
“Really? I was just thinking I could pay it.” He says
“Well, I talked to them; they said that they would waive it. I called when I was upstairs”
“Why would they do that?”
“Probably because I asked, and I’ve been keeping this building filled up for the past ten years, plus a bunch of their other buildings too.”
“I didn’t ask for no favors” Donald says
“I know you didn’t. I just thought that he needed a home”
“That cat ain’t no ‘he’. She is a lion-ess” Donald says
“Oh” I say… “Here is the food I had”
He takes it, and looks at the bag. “Oh, this is that cheap food. I’m about to go buy some of the good stuff, and get a litter box too”
“Maybe the cat prefers to be outside” I say
“Man, look at that cat.” He says. Gesturing to the cat sleeping on his chair “That cat don’t want to be outside, she came in and went right to sleep. She knows she ‘home”
“Well, good.” I say “I will get going”
“Hey, thanks, man. For calling them and all that” he says
“I’m glad the cat has a place to live” I say
I walk out of the apartment and into the hallway. Through the door, I heard Donald say, “I still ain’t helping you with that girl”
Back in my apartment, I feel good, and happy, and finally a little bit tired. I check my phone. I still had not gotten a return call from Ben’s social worker, so I try to call her again, but for the second time, the phone rings to voicemail, so I leave a similar message to the one I had already left. Then, after I eat a little, I fall into a long dreamless sleep.
I wake up at 5:30 in the morning, and thrilled that I had actually managed to sleep for a normal amount of time, decide to try to press my luck, and lie in bed for a little longer. I could not fall back to sleep though, for some reason, my thoughts kept cycling back to the library, and Ben, and all of my books. I think for a long while about taking the superintendent job, and how that might allow me to buy some of the books that were now mostly out of reach, but then consider all of the time that I would be off of the streets and the fate of all of the unhidden heads, and so I then try twice as hard to put that out of my mind.
And for some reason, my expulsion from the library, which really hadn’t bothered me before, pulses in my brain like a drum, and I lay in bed and think about how I could never again stand in the stillness of the stacks and smell the books, or hide a face where it could be found by someone who was already actively searching for wonder. And I think of how the tables feel, the huge wood tables with the sturdy legs, and the way that the serious books feel with their bindings raw from the hands of readers. And I think about Brian Folz, who loves books, who loves books so much that he has made them his life, and somehow his life has ceased to be about books, and is now about something else, like the priest with his first parish who has found that his pastoral duty now chiefly extends running the finances of a disorganized social club, and has a lot less to do with sheparding a flock. And all of those thoughts build on each other, and fall apart, and build again into new and stronger buildings considerate of the faults of their predecessors.
So, I think about making some heads, but when I do, I notice how many I have to give, and I can’t make any at all, and in frustration, I turn to the quiet of the earmuffs, and lay on my bed, and breathe and wait to dream. And I do, and it is dawn and I am in a field, and it is already unbearably hot. In the distance I see a woman crouched down with her colorful dress pulled up around her using a corner of the field as a latrine, and as I gaze around, I see others doing the same, each one alone in search of a little privacy. Then I walk with them back to a hand pump well where they wait to bathe. And I watch as the bathers walk quietly to homes where they sit or crouch together near their doorways and drink small cups of tea with a pleasing smell that I cannot place. Then, I walk with some men to the field where I arrived; they talk a bit, but cannot see me. I follow one man, as he walks into a low crop of some sort of broad leafed grass, and he crouches down and begins to pull out small weeds. I crouch with him, and even though I can feel the heat in the air, and the humidity collecting against my skin, my hands cannot pick the weeds, so I just watch. As he works, the day becomes hotter and hotter, and the man’s pace slows. At the end of one of the rows of his crops, he p
ulls a weed, and when he does, he upturns a rock about the size of my fist. He picks up the rock, and holds it in his hands. I stand, and walk behind him, and watch as he cleans it off with his thumb. As he does, I see the face appear. It is hairless, and eyes are gone, but it is a head all the same. He stands and walks to his bucket where he drops the object in and returns to his work.
In the afternoon, I follow the man to his home, where his wife waits near a low open kitchen. He hands her the bucket, and she looks through it, and removes a few things that I assume to be onions. As she prepares the lunch, I walk to look into the bucket. There is no trace of the head, and I cannot see it among the foods laid out for preparation. So, I watch as the woman cooks, but there is still no evidence of the head, so I return to the field to look for it. As I walk to the field, I start to notice that my heavy boots are leaving deep marks along dirt trail. A trail that is used to the gentler traffic of bare feet. I also notice that I am sweating. I am no longer just hot, I am actually sweating, a deep stinking sweat that rolls into my eyes and collects onto my shirt, and am holding my eyebrows high to divert the sweat, while at the same time squinting to fight the sun, and then I pass a group of men. And those men…. Those men can see me. And they look at me with a mix of confusion and disgust and I walk past them sweating and overdressed in my heavy boots, and long pants, and one of them says something to me, but I cannot understand him.
Then a second group of men come along the path, and those men
