Have Spacecat, Will Travel: And Other Tails by John Hartness (top ebook reader .TXT) 📕

ago, had seen its ups and downs, and was currently on the beginning of one of the up periods, which was to say that there were a lot more people living there at the moment who could be considered down than up, but in general they were hard-working people who didn’t cause too much trouble. The people on the tv liked to talk about it as a neighborhood “in transition,” but Jeremiah just thought that was a fancy way of saying there were some poor people that lived there, some white people, some black people, and some Mexicans thrown in for good measure. There was some crime, sure, but in general it was decent place to live. But when he heard somebody rattling around in his garage, he didn’t run out to go look and see what they might be stealing.

It’s not that he was afraid that whoever was in his garage might hurt him. He’d known pain at different times in his life—you didn’t make it past fourscore years on this earth without getting hurt more than once—but he just really wasn’t that interested. And as the day wore on and the noise in his garage continued off and on, he finally decided that if there was something worth taking out there, they should have already took it and left him alone, so he went to the back door and stuck his head out to yell at whatever hooligans were back there.

But by this time whatever perpetrators there had been were already gone, so all he saw was a closed garage door and a quiet back yard. He went back inside and dozed in front of his tv for the rest of the afternoon, watched a little football, not that he knew or cared anything about any of the schools playing, but it was something to pass the time, and napped a little more.

Along about seven o’clock, he started to listen for Helen’s sister Mary’s car, and then remembered that Mary didn’t drive anymore after she got so blind they took her license away last summer, and besides, she wasn’t going to be dropping Helen off tonight anyhow. But as he stood in his kitchen alone, feeling once again the lost feeling of someone who is missing something that he just can’t quite put his finger on what it is, there was a knock at his front door. He had left all the porch lights off to keep folks from coming by to check on him since he didn’t really feel like sharing another afternoon of how you holdin’ ups with somebody who he didn’t really give much of a damn about and he figured didn’t give much of a damn about him either, so the knock was a little surprising. He figured it was a kid, since they weren’t usually smart enough to figure out that when the porch light wasn’t on it meant that the body inside didn’t want to be bothered.

So he made his way through the darkened house to the front door, and pulled it open to find an empty porch. He looked around for a minute, confused, before he saw it laying over to the right of the door. It was an orange extension cord with a red bow tied to the end of it. On the bow was a card, and Jeremiah reached down and pulled the card off the end of the cord and read it.

Dear Mr. Jeremiah,

We are sorry that your wife died. We are sorry that you are sad, and that you didn’t want to put your pretty lights up this year. We hope we did it good and it will make you a little happy.

Feliz Navidad,

Jose y Hector Garcia (from across the street)

Jeremiah stood there for a minute looking around, not really knowing what to think, when he looked up and saw two boys looking out of a living room window across the street. The bigger one looked like he was about thirteen, and the little one looked to be maybe eight. The big one just watched him, but when the little one saw him looking, he waved excitedly, indicating that Jeremiah should plug in the cord.

So he did, and he walked out on his lawn to see his house lit up just like it was every year, with white lights on the little cedar tree by the driveway, on the porch railings, on all the bushes on the front of the house, and even on the roofline, although how those little boys got all the way up there he had no idea. Until he saw his ladder leaning up against the side of the house just like it did every year until after he got everything working just right. He stood there for a minute imagining he could feel a smaller hand in his own as he stood there on his lawn not quite as alone as he’d been a couple hours before, then he turned around, nodded to the two boys in the window, one waving like his arm was on a spring, and one nodding back solemnly, gathered his ladder, and put it away in his garage until after New Year’s.

20

Red Dirt Boy

I am the red dirt boy

running barefoot down the gravel road

in the middle of summer to momma’s house

fighting and throwin’ dirt clods at my cousin

cause it’s my turn to sit on the ice cream churn

and you done it last time

and I’m gonna get a switch for yo ass if you don’t straighten up.

I am sunbleached hair and brown skin

splashing in the creek,

catching crawdaddies in a jar

and throwing mudpies at each other

while we walk through the thistles home

dodging cowpies and horseflies

hitchin a ride

on the tailgate of Uncle Ed’s pickup truck

bouncing across the ruts in the hayfield.

I am a dirty bar of Ivory soap on the window ledge

round back of the house by the spigot

scrubbing all that red mud off my feet into puddles

before momma’d let me back in the house.

I’m that skinny