Tommy's Novel, Part II

Tommy's Novel, Part II

(Originally written in November, to be read after part 1, if you haven't read already...)

Chapter 2

I own one suit.

There are times I say that as a mark of achievement. I don’t have to dress up for anybody, anyhow. I dress in blue jeans and t-shirts for work. I install computer hardware for retailers. Which means sometimes, I gotta crawl through the musty, dusty innards of grocery stores, department stores and Wal-Marts all around the south. Definitely not a job where you want to where a suit. A three-piece suit will ruin fairly quickly crawling in a two-foot crawlspace in a ceiling to install a wireless router.

It’s not a bad job. Keeps me on the road more often than not. But then, I ain’t here to talk about my job.

There are times it hits me, though, that I’m within smelling distance of 30, and being the civilized man that I am, I should probably pony-up and go buy myself another suit that doesn’t look like it’s nearly 10-years-old and bought for me by my folks when I graduated college as “interviewin’ clothes.”

That Saturday afternoon, a couple hours after John Waverly had visited, a smiling, well-dressed Messenger of Death, I wandered to the bedroom to see if my interviewin’ clothes still fit.

Well, right now I say interviewin’ clothes. But since the late 1990's, they’d also served as wedding, funeral and various coat-and-tie function clothes, as well. It hit me that I’d had nary a wedding, funeral or a coat-and-tie function to attend since late 2004.

I pulled the black suit jacked with matching slacks out of the very back position on the bar in the closet (just behind the glaring orange hunting coveralls that had last seen its action in early 2005, when I’d managed to scare myself senseless while out hunting boar with friends...I’d fallen asleep, and woken up nearly shitting myself, thinking the sound of my own snoring was a boar coming to get me).

I brushed the dust off the shoulders, and considered the suit of clothes, holding it at arm’s length.

My cat, Cletus, jumped up onto the bureau to join me in my study.

“Think they’re gonna fit?” I asked.

He regarded the suit doubtfully.

“We’ll see.”

Seven minutes of swearing later, I was throwing the suit in to a ball, cursing beer, Krispy Kreme donuts and every fast food joint in the Southeast. The suit ended up in a wad in the corner of the room, as I headed to the bathroom to get cleaned up. It now seemed that my lazy Saturday of college football had just gone down the pipes, as I had to go clean up and find a decent suit of funeral clothes to fit around my recently fattened ass.
Cletus watched all this with his typical smug satisfaction. I long ago realized that I was put on this Earth to feed that cat and keep him in clean litter, but I like to think that occasionally I provide him with a decent level of entertainment.

I spend a lot of time figuring that Cletus is probably a lot smarter than I am.

-----

I showered, shaved, ran a comb through my hair.

I was leaning against the vanity to pull a pair of socks on, and I saw a stack of the previous week’s newspapers sitting on the back of the toilet–while you’ll forgive me for once again returning to this area of my life, I tend to do most of my day’s reading right here.

I pulled Friday’s paper off the top of the stack. It was folded back to the comics section–I’d apparently had a long enough constitutional to make it all the way through the sports and local news, and had ended up reading Garfield and Peanuts reprints when I’d finished.

I turned the paper back to the front, and folded back the front page to find the obituaries. I scanned the names. Two names had been called home to be with Jesus, and a third had suddenly passed away at the Baytown Nursing Home at the tender age of 99. I didn’t recognize any of the names, but all were from the surrounding towns–mostly I noted that Lyndon Waverly’s obituary was conspicuous by its absence.

Folding Friday’s paper back up and depositing it in the trash bin, I pulled Thursday’s sheet off the stack. No Waverly notice for Thursday, either.

None for the remaining two papers, Tuesday and Monday. I noted that Wednesday’s paper must be floating somewhere around the homestead.

I pulled a pair of blue jeans on (these fit, without much cursing). Found a shirt and a flannel shirt to go over the top. Wandered around the kitchen, and found Cletus sitting on the counter.

“What are you doing, cat?” I shoved him to the ground. I started digging in the fridge for something to eat before I went out. Cletus jumped back up onto the counter.

“Cats aren’t allowed on the counter,” I told him, and he knew it. I tend to think he stayed up on the counter when I wasn’t there, but he usually had the good humor to stay off while I was there. A concession to make me feel like I was still the King of my castle.

I closed the fridge door, shoved him off once more, only to have him immediately turn, and hop back up.

Now, my cat and I have had a number of running arguments, but Cletus, like most cats, was more the type to hold a grudge and play a neverending game of “Gotyaback” than to overtly seek confrontation like this. Usually he understood that if I knocked him off the counter, or the bed, or the sink or the computer or the fridge...that he probably didn’t want to be there.

I turned once more and saw that his attention was down into the trash.

“Did a mouse get in there?” I asked him.

I picked up the trash can and shook it once, to see if I could garner any movement.

Nothing stirred, and I looked at the cat, who was staring down into the trash as if his next seven meals depended on it.

I shuffled the contents a little with my hand, pretty much sure that as I did so, a mouse the size of a Toyota Camry was going to bolt out and run up my arm. Again, nothing happened.

I was about to set the trash can down, when I noticed the Wednesday, October 25 date on the newspaper I’d used to cut potato peels and carrot shavings onto.

I extracted the paper as well as I could, spilling three-day old potato peels onto the floor in the process–asking why this couldn’t have been one of the weeks I could have traveled up to Bumfuck, Kentucky instead of a week where I did local jobs and was home every night by 5:30, so I could cook for myself.

I shook what I could of the detritus of Wednesday’s meal from the paper, and gingerly opened the front page, and looked at the names there.

I counted five names, but not a one of them was named Lyndon Waverly. I got stuck briefly on the obituary of a Lucy Mashburn, who’d had the interesting fortune to die while slopping the hog.

I looked at Cletus, who was still on the counter.

“Why doesn’t Lyndon have an obituary in any of the papers?” I asked him.

Cletus stared back. I’m probably giving him way more credit than he deserves, but he seemed honestly concerned in his wordless response to me.

“Get off the counter,” I told him. To my surprise, he complied.

I grabbed my car keys from the desk, and went out the front door, and locked it. I went to my truck, and I looked back at the house, and saw Cletus staring out the window at me. He’d never done that before.

“Maybe he’s actually starting to act like a real pet,” I said to myself as I backed out of the driveway.