September 12, 2005

• Highway Entertainment

  I made an impromptu trip to town today to relieve Greyfox of his latest
  load of scrounge.  A family living in the biggest cabin at Felony
  Flats moved out and left a whole houseful of all sorts of stuff
  including small appliances, Christmas decorations, toys… all sorts of
  stuff.  Greyfox spent yesterday afternoon trying to salvage the
  things that one of Mike’s employees was hauling over to the dumpster in
  the bucket of a front-end loader.  He was out there between loads,
  digging out what he could before the guy got back with his next load of
  stuff and mashed down what was already there.   He hadn’t
  even had time to go through all the bags, and certainly doesn’t have
  room to store it all, so we decided I’d come in and help him deal with
  it.

  I was about halfway there, right in the middle of Willow, in front of
  the fire station, doing 45 in a 45 mph zone, when some guy in a big
  shiny new silver metallic SUV passed me and a whole string of cars
  ahead of and behind me.  He was doing at least 65 in the turn-only
  lane down the middle of the highway.  By the time I’d gotten to
  the other end of town, he was long gone, but as I crested a hill a
  State Trooper with lights flashing did a U-turn from the oncoming lane
  into ours right in front of the car just ahead of me.

  I said, “Yeah, go get ‘im!” and pumped my fist in the air.  As I
  drove around the curves and over the hills, I kept expecting to see the
  speeder and the trooper on the shoulder.  A few miles farther on,
  when we hit a straight stretch, I saw the trooper’s light bar flashing
  up ahead.  We drove on like that for fifteen miles.  The
  speeder had apparently slowed down to the 55 mph speed limit when he
  saw the trooper behind him, but he didn’t pull over.  I was
  reminded of the white SUV, O.J. freeway chase in LA.

  Traffic along there usually goes at around sixty because our troopers
  will overlook about seven miles over the limit, so in the course of
  that fifteen miles a few drivers had come up behind me and the car
  ahead of me, and passed us.  Then they saw the trooper’s light bar
  and slowed down rather than pass him.  Another dozen cars or more
  were lined up behind me after fourteen miles, when a K-9 trooper unit
  pulled out from a side road ahead of us and joined the low-speed chase.

  I guess it was seeing that second trooper unit after him, and probably
  the realization that there were more reinforcements up ahead, that
  finally convinced the fellow to pull over.  I was about five or
  six cars back when our line of cars came to a stop behind the K-9 unit
  which was half blocking our lane.  We got to watch the troopers
  shove the guy over and spread him out on the hood of their car and
  start frisking him before the K-9 cop waved us on.  I got a good
  look at the miscreant as I went by.  He wasn’t exactly your
  ordinary-looking Valley Trash miscreant, but then neither was his
  spiffy new vehicle your ordinary Valley Trash transport.  He
  looked to me like military or cop:  age about thirty give or take
  five, short hair, clean-cut, military-style glasses.  He didn’t
  look happy.

  ---

  McKenzie’s Friend

  Greyfox was set up for business at his stand down at the far end of
  Felony Flats from his cabin when I got there.  I watched the stand
  while he walked home and moved the bags and boxes of groceries he’d
  gotten for me and some already-sorted scrounge, from inside the cabin
  onto the porch for me to pick up.  He said there were several more
  garbage bags of stuff on the porch that he hadn’t sorted
  yet.  

  He asked if I’d like some coffee.  I said I would, so when he came
  back he was carrying my coffee in his only coffee mug, the perfect mug
  for the curmudgeonly Old Fart.  It has a scowling yellow “smiley”
  face and says, “Have a damned nice day.”

  I was installing my new wiper blades, so he set the coffee mug on the
  roof of Streak (that’s my Subaru’s name) and told me it was
  there.  After I got my blades on, I forgot all about it and drove
  on up to the cabin.  The mug survived the trip, but was only half
  full of lukewarm coffee when I finally noticed it there.

  I schlepped the ready bags and boxes into the car.  Then I
  prepared to sort the stuff in the other bags.  There was one big
  black garbage bag filled with clothing and bedding, which I set inside
  the hatch.  The three big bags of toys and kids’ stuff I arranged
  on the ground around the passenger-side door so I could sit to sort it.

  Most of the stuff in the big black bag ended up back in the
  dumpster.  It was disgusting.  Among the clothes and sheets I
  found a few lumps of shit.  It didn’t look like dog or cat
  shit.  I am in my usual state of anosmia (no sense of smell), but
  just from the appearance of it, it looked like primate feces to
  me.  I started wondering what sort of mother those kids had when I
  found some little girls’ underpants that had obviously been pissed in
  then dried and pissed in again.  What I found in the woman’s jeans
  wasn’t much more attractive, either.

  I bundled it back up and moved around and sat down to sort the
  toys.  I was just getting started when a girl about five years old
  came over from cabin #6, two doors down from Greyfox’s.  She asked
  me what my name is.  I said, “My name is Kathy, what’s
  yours?”  She said she’s McKenzie, then she asked me what I’m
  doing.  I explained that some people had moved away and left a lot
  of stuff behind, and I was salvaging whatever was too good to throw
  away.  I told her if she saw anything there she’d like to keep,
  she could have it.

  She hunkered down and started helping me sort stuff.  I picked up
  one of the dolls and she said her friend has one just like that. 
  A little later, we found something else “just like” one of her friend’s
  toys.   The third time, I asked McKenzie where her friend
  lives. She pointed toward the other end of the strip and said Dee lives
  down there.  “But,” she said, “they’re going to move.  Her
  mama was crying.”  I told her that they had already moved and that
  these things that she thought were just like her friend’s things were
  things her friend had left behind.

  We continued to sort stuff and came across another couple of lumps of
  shit.  I asked McKenzie if Dee had any cats or dogs.  She
  said no.  I asked if she had any little brothers or sisters, and
  McKenzie said there was… and she reeled off a list of four or five
  names.  One of the things I noticed about those bags of toys was
  that the dolls and doll clothes were cleaner and in better condition
  than the kids’ clothes.  It seems that Dee’s a better mommie than
  her mama is.

  After a while, the man who lives in cabin #6 with McKenzie and her mom
  stepped out on the porch and called McKenzie.  She walked away
  with a little tote bag full of things to remember Dee by.  Before
  I was finished, she was back.  She said her mama wanted her to ask
  me if we had found any gym shoes or school shoes that would fit
  McKenzie.  There was a pair of sneakers that were too small, and
  there were three more really nice single shoes, but nothing that would
  make a pair for McKenzie to wear to school.

  As we sorted stuff from the bags, we had been tossing things we didn’t
  want to keep into a big plastic storage tub that Greyfox had
  there.  When I got back to the cabin from my shopping, Greyfox
  said that the tub, toys and all had been missing when he came
  home.  I walked over to #6 to ask McKenzie if she knew what
  happened to the tub, because Greyfox wanted it.  She solved the
  mystery for us.  Mike’s (the landlord’s) kids had taken it. 
  Greyfox found it later in their yard, empty and broken, but that’s not
  why I’m writing this paragraph.  After I spoke with McKenzie, I
  turned to her mom to thank her and say good night, and noticed that she
  had two black eyes.  And that’s life at Felony Flats.
  

  • 3:43 am
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