Yell Love

You can see the look of oh shit in the eyes of the chicken, the last thought she must have had.

I scrape her carcass from the pavement of Needle Street.

An old woman leans over her balcony, “They just flying down the street,” she says. “Probably didn’t even stop.”

“I’ll plant a tree over her.” I want to say, “like the Indians,” but I get self conscious because she’s black and I’m white and she almost looks like she could have a little Indian in her, and I think you’re best saying Native American anyway, but even that’s not really right because it wasn’t America until people looked like me got here.

I put that hen in the back of my truck and say, (to the chicken, not the lady) “Them’s the brakes, baby, but I thank you.” Because I know everything returns to the earth. I also know that I'm not ready to return.

That was yesterday evening. Alex texts this morning to tell me there are coffee grounds ready for pick up at Lowpoint. I check to see I have room to dump in the back of my truck and am met by a frenzy of flies. Old bug eyes never got buried, and I don’t have time, so I leave her next to a Jambu planted between sidewalk and street. And I gather the grounds and think of the possums I have put at the base of paw paw trees to get the flies pollinating the flowers.

Day before the day before, I took seedlings from seeds mailed from Ohio and put them in their own pots. I called them Dirty Banks because the seeds were dirty and they came from Brian Banks, and I like to create names like that. Like Hot Boy Figs and Peach House.

I don’t know if I told you about Moo Shoe, the cat whose name I wrote on a two by four  in Korean to better remember the pronunciation, and then proceeded to lose the two by four. A woman had come by my place to tell me the black cat with green eyes that I see at my back door everyday is hers and could I please tell her if I see her girl Moo Shoe.

I said, “I see her everyday. But she’s not gonna come to me.” And she’s not gonna go to this lady either. This black cat has become a hunter, like the young girl in the Tim O’Brien story who ended up in the jungles of Vietnam. I know I mentioned the tree that fell over my fence and onto a house on the other side, how it blocked the back door.

I got the kids set up to paint and drove around to Needle Street with Angie and a chainsaw. I usually treat women in a manner more gentle than I do men, but with Angie I seem to treat her even harsher than men. I say, “Stop being a pussy. Get up on the fence. You’re fine.”

She says, “You might be fine because you’re a fucking monkey climbing all around.”

It feels pretty good to climb like a monkey at 47, to flip myself up and onto a fence to get into a yard where a big old mulberry blocks the back door. 

I pop over the fence and into the yard and try to get Angie to get down from the tree. She’s telling me I can’t and it’s too far and you’re taller, and I say, “Just shit on my shoulders.” Because that’s what comes out. Because it’s about to rain. Because I’m in a hurry.

And she laughs and she nearly falls and scrapes up her thigh, but never once bitches. 

The house is a double shotgun. The neighbors on the side not blocked by the tree come out. Kendall and Will. We’ve never met before. They tell me the only reason the woman living there wants to get rid of that tree is she put up a camera cause her cat ran away and the camera is blocked by the tree.

“A black cat with green eyes?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“That cat doesn’t want to live inside.”

“I know.”

“I see that cat everyday. Doesn’t want to live in my house either.”

Angie hacks at the tree and I pull limbs away from the door and in the middle of this rain pours down and the devil is not beating his wife because the sky is gray. We get the limbs moved and we get back to my porch and the kids are gone and I tell Angie about the chicken with the big eyes. I show her a photo.

She says, “I want to get the eyes. You think I can get them.?”

And I think…that depends. Do wild cats eat the eyes of chickens? Do those hunters wear claws around their necks the same way a dog rolls around in intestines to show his own power, and I think how Angie is a good egg, and how it’s still raining, and how everybody should be treated with kindness. And I even think this, that my shit talking is my kindness, and the best way for me to love Angie. And the cat? Well…the jury is still out on her.