Randy gripped the box in his lap as the cab pulled out of the hospital parking lot. Everything out the window looked familiar, old memories, Gainesville, Florida. His stomach gurgled from the Jack and cokes he’d downed on the planes; three flights, six cocktails, no lunch, nothing since the coffee and dry muffin he’d had at Newark International early that morning. He looked down at his stomach and saw instead the small white box he was holding, smudged with black fingerprints. He wiped at them and made them worse.
The cab driver asked for directions again and Randy gave them, surprised at how sure he was after all these years. The driver tried to make small talk, but Randy ignored him, picking at the piece of tape holding the box closed. He peeled the tape away from the bottom and opened it. Inside was a clear plastic bag with a label on it just like the label on top of the box: mona rose reardon #742613. He had never known her middle name.
Ashes, gray with flecks of white, two pounds – or so they told him at the morgue – the cremated remains of his mother. Fitting, he thought, for a woman who smoked herself to death. Randy poked at the bag and his dirty finger made a print on the nametag. He closed the box, laid his head back on the seat and woke up when he heard the familiar sound of cracked shells under the tires of the cab.
The driver pulled slowly to the flagpole in the middle of the courtyard and stopped, waiting for further directions.
“This is good,” Randy said, reaching for his wallet.
He dragged himself out of the cab, the box in one hand, his duffel bag in the other, and stood in the middle of the trailerpark as the cab turned around him and headed back out to Route 21.
To a stranger, Black Lake Mobile Court might have been mistaken for a junkyard, but to the initiated signs of life were obvious: a curtain pulled aside briefly; a front door closing; a big brown ass crack leaned over into a vehicle on cinder blocks.
Most of the trailer homes he remembered were still in place, but were sunk down on flat tires, the earth slowly opening up to swallow them. Lots #7 at the easternmost point of the courtyard, #10 cater-corner from the trailer home he grew up in, and #13 at the front by the road were now uninhabited, overgrown with weeds and the broken down car.
The mechanic had a radio set up on the car roof and a deejay spewed a barrage of words ending with “Pink Floyd,” and a song played:
Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day.
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way;
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown
Waiting for something or someone to show you the way…
“This isn’t good at all,” Randy said as his eyes came to rest on lot #4, his childhood home.
A sick liver-colored Dodge Dart was wedged into the space next to the front steps; the rest of what had been the yard was piled high with rusting metal things, kids’ toys, kitchenware in drooping cardboard, mold-covered plastic things, unrecognizable lumps and shapes, here, there and everywhere, tangled with green and brown weeds, the collected “merchandise” for the Treasure Chest, Mona and Brenda’s second-hand store dream nearly twenty years in the making but never realized.
Randy walked to the trailer home and paused at the car to stuff his duffel bag into the open passenger side window then headed up the rickety gray steps with the box in his hands. The storm door was missing its bottom-half insert; the front door had ribbons of stripped veneer and stood slightly ajar. “It’s all yours now,” Randy said, recalling the conversation he’d had on the phone with Brenda a few days earlier.
He didn’t really ever think he would be coming back to this place to stay, but he had agreed to come and help take care of things if only for an excuse to get out of New York City for a little while.
He stepped into the trailer home and the smell of rot accosted his nostrils. He let out a gasp, which was answered by a whoosh of movement in the shadows of the dark room. He reached for the light switch, heart thumping, flipped it up and down a couple of times. Of course, no electricity.
Golden beams of sunlight waited anxiously behind threadbare curtains and crooked mini blinds across the room. Randy steeled himself against the unknown, stumbled across the room over clothes, paperback books, fast food garbage, whatever it was. A cat noise wound up like a siren somewhere unseen.
Randy located the cord and pulled it to open the blinds but instead pulled everything off of the windows, curtains, blinds, tinsel from Christmases past. The cat screamed like a woman then stopped suddenly. Dust particles scattered and fluttered frantically in the newly spotlighted room. The window dressing hitting the floor also stirred up the horrible smell more fully: cat piss, rotting food and mold.
Randy held his nose and breathed through his mouth for a time as the room settled and his eyes adjusted. Next door, the yard was in a similar state, lot #5, Brenda Biggett’s place.
Mona’s sofa bed was still the centerpiece of the front room, open as always, and right there in the center of the disheveled mattress and sheets where she had squirted him out twenty-nine years earlier was something, movement. Randy took a step toward the bed and the angry sound coming from underneath made him realize he was seeing a pile of newborn kittens writhing in a dark stain of blood and afterbirth.
On the opposite side, an exercise bicycle was tipped on its side, leaning against the foldout bed frame, seat and handlebars hovering over the litter of kittens in a way that made it look like they might have taken a nasty fall while attempting a daring circus act. The telephone lay halfway between them and the pillows, off the hook.
The front steps outside groaned under the strain of something monstrous. Here comes history, Randy thought, bracing himself for the inevitable. There was a rap on the Plexiglas top half of the storm door; it rattled like a snare drum with a loose strainer. A suspicious voice poked into the trailer home.
she: Hello?
he: Hi, Brenda.
He looked up from the sofa bed. She was huge, heavier than his memory of her. Her freckled scalp showed through greasy gray hair; her face was a cave, her mouth a sinkhole, the butt of a cigarette halfway sucked in, its ash protruding long and slack like a limp wrist on the outside end.
She let the storm door close against her backside and stood across from Randy staring silently at him and the small box he was holding. Randy stared back, no words at the ready; there was still more to take in. Brenda’s pink sweat suit jacket was zipped up the middle but didn’t conceal her overhang, the crumbs from lunch or the stains from other meals down in that region where pink gave way to white flesh and the tight elastic of her sweatpants cut her in half. She held a huge plastic cup between pudgy hands, her chipped red fingernails a perfect match for the flaking red Coca-Cola logo on the cup and the red lid with its built-in straw.
she: Good god, Randy, ya scared the hell outta me!
She laughed and it sounded like gravel.
he: Sorry.
He wasn’t really.
she: Them yer cats?
he: Yeah, Brenda, I smuggled them here on the plane!
she: You what?
he: I just got off a plane from New York.
Pause.
They’re not my cats.
she: Well, I didn’t know. I heard all the ruckus over here an’ didn’t know what. –Ya gotta watch out for people, ya know.
he: You’re right about that.
she: I guess you know about that from livin’ up in New York City.
he teased her: Oh, they’re everywhere.
she: Who?
he: People. People you have to watch out for.
she: Oh. Yeah.
She pointed at the box Randy was holding.
–Is that donuts?
he sighed: No, Brenda. It’s Mona.
she: What?
She whispered:
Oh, my god, Randy, is that her?
he: Yep. Two pounds.
she: What?
he: Two pounds, that’s all that’s left of her.
He held up the box and jiggled it lightly.
Brenda didn’t seem to understand. She dug into her jacket pocket, slid out a pack of Vantage, tongued the opening, extracted a cigarette, returned the pack to her jacket and brought a pink disposable lighter to her face.
she flicked the lighter, shook it: Did I tell you how I found her?
he: Yeah, on the phone.
she ignored him: When I got home from work, the light was still on over here, so I dropped in, you know, to check on her.
She flicked the lighter, shook it, flicked it again, lit the cigarette and put away the lighter.
he: Brenda, you already told me—
she: She was laying there halfway on the bed, halfway on her bike. She’d got to where she liked to go for a bike ride while she smoked, to help her get a better drag. Ya know?
Randy moved away from Brenda, set the box on top of a stack of magazines on the kitchen table. He tried to ignore her as he surveyed the mess.
She kept talking, kept smoking, kept sucking on the red straw.
I thought she was just messin’ around at first. I called at her from the door.
She wiped a tear.
I called out, “Hey, Mo’, whattya know?” Just like I always do. But she didn’t say nothin’. She just—
Brenda’s voice got caught in her throat.
She just laid there like a possum. Didn’t move a muscle. But I still didn’t believe her, ya know? I walked over to the bed and shook it a little bit.
She looked down at the kittens; her face went from sadness to pain.
I shook it… an’ she didn’t do nothin’. She just laid there. Like a possum.
Pause.
he: Brenda.
she: So I touched her… an’ she was cold.
Tears flowed. Randy moved into the kitchen so that the countertop and sink were between them.
She was cold an’ she was stiff!
She cried into her hands awhile. Randy looked down into the kitchen sink, at plastic cups and Corel plates buried under a sea green carpet of mold. He looked up again when he heard soda slurping in the straw.
Brenda was staring at the box of ashes on the kitchen table, more wistful now than sad.
she: What’re ya gonna do with yer mama’s ashes?
he: I don’t know.
she: Ya gonna bury ‘em?
he: I don’t know.
she: That’d be weird, don’t ya thank? People don’t usually bury ashes, do they?
he: …I don’t know.
Randy swept the kitchen floor with the side of his shoe – junk mail, an empty Tricsuits box, a large wad of darkened paper towels – pushed it to the edge of the floor.
she: On tv, seems like people are always takin’ ‘em someplace. Someplace special. Ya know? An’ they sprankle the ashes, in the ocean or off a cliff or—I don’t know. Ya know? In the movies.
She considered it a moment.
An’ that’s what they say, too, ain’t it? “Sprankle the ashes.”
he: I guess so.
she: Ya thank that’s what yer gonna do, Randy?
he: I don’t know.
He shrugged.
Maybe.
She thought about it on her own for a while then whispered to herself.
she: Sprankle the ashes…
She was silent as she sucked on the cigarette and the straw. She looked around – Randy watched her – out the window, the front door, toward the kittens. She took a drag and rested her fingertips on her chin a moment then sighed.
I wonder where them kittens came from.
he: The front door was open.
she looked at the door then back at Randy: It’s broke.
he: They’re feral. The mama cat’s under the bed.
she: Under the—
She took a step toward the sofa bed. The mother cat hissed right on cue. Brenda jumped back and screamed, startling Randy.
Oh…my…god, Randy, they’re gonna take over. Ain’t they? They’re just gonna move in an’ take over.
he: Who?
she: I keep hearin’ noises. All around. I can’t tell if it’s people or animals. When Mona was here, it wasn’t as bad. Or it didn’t seem to be. But now it’s like they’re closin’ in, like they’re comin’ to get me.
Her breathing was deepening. She pressed the Coke cup against her heaving breasts.
he: Brenda, I don’t think—
she: Randy, ya gotta do somethin’ about them cats. That’s where she—passed. Ya can’t leave them kittens right there where your mama passed. That ain’t right!
he: Brenda, relax.
She took big gulps of air.
she: I can’t relax, Randy! I can’t stop seein’ your mama layin’ there dead on her bed! An’ she ain’t been gone a week and the wild animals are movin’ in to take over! I can’t live like this! I dunno know what I’m gonna do!
he: Brenda!
She yelped.
I’ll take care of them. Just please calm down.
she: Will you really?
he: Yes. Just relax.
Brenda lifted her head up and took a big breath like she was emerging through the surface of water. She let the air out slowly and her body deflated a bit.
she: Oh, god, Randy, thank ya so much. Yer a good boy. Yer mama would be so proud a’you.
he: Do you have the keys?
she: Oh! Yeah, right here.
She dug into her jacket pocket and pulled out a dolphin key ring with three keys on it.
The one with the Dodge doohickey is for the car, this other one is for the front door – but it’s broke – an’ I dunno what this little key is for.
Randy stepped out of the kitchen, took the keys, stuffed them into his pants pocket.
he: Thanks.
She tried to suck more nicotine out of the cigarette but it was out at the flattened filter. She inspected it briefly, tossed it to the floor and nursed her drink. Randy looked at where the butt landed and shook his head. He picked up the box, ready to go, but Brenda stood in his way. She slurped and suddenly lit up.
she: Hey! I got a coffee tin!
Randy took a step toward her, hoping she would move. She did not.
he: What?
she: I said I got a coffee tin. Ya know, a coffee can?
he: I know what a coffee tin is, Brenda.
she: If ya want it.
he: What?
she: I mean, it ain’t really a coffee can. Not no more. It don’t smell like coffee or nothin’ anymore. Me an’ yer mama got a few of ‘em at a yard sale a coupla months ago. She loved ‘em, thought they were purtiest thangs! They were part of a special collector’s edition set Folger’s put out back in the Sixties. I thank. They’re definitely antiques. I’m sure they’re worth somethin’. Most of ‘em got stuff in ‘em now, sewing equipment or army men or marbles – or, not marbles but those pointy little things with the bouncy balls. That game. What’s that called?
he: Brenda—
she: Well, anyways, I’d be happy to empty one of ‘em out for ya.
he: What?
she: If ya wanted it—
He had lost his patience, his buzz was long gone, and he was sick of looking at this page of his past.
he: What would I want with a stupid fuckin’ collector’s edition coffee can, Brenda?
He laughed.
I mean, please!
she: For yer mama’s ashes, so she won’t have to end up in a dirty donut box.
Randy slumped and set the box on the table again. He turned back to Brenda and wished he could give her a hug. But he just couldn’t bring himself to do it.
She seemed confused.
Randy, are you okay?
he: I’m just tired, that’s all. I’ve been up since early this morning, and I’m a little under there weather or something.
she: Yer sick with sadness, that’s what. I know exactly how ya feel, Randy. I’m sick, too. We gotta stick together, you an’ me.
He sighed and faked a concerned smile. Brenda touched his arm.
Do ya want me to go an’ get the coffee tin for yer mama’s ashes?
he: Yes. That would be nice.
Brenda plodded to the door. The room shifted; it was noticeably lighter. She turned slightly sideways through the doorway, uncapped the cup and tossed its contents into the junkyard ahead of her; ice hit the hood of the Dodge Dart. She turned back into the trailer home briefly.
she: I thank she’d really like that, Randy…!
She let the storm door go and it thwacked against the trailer home, waking the kittens and recharging their fretful mews. The mother cat stayed silent under the bed, waiting with Randy as the stairs finished their creaking and moaning.
A less distracted scan of the front room revealed a still life of Mona’s forty-eight years. tv dinner cartons with bright photographs belying what was ever inside them; McDonald’s drink cups and half-eaten sandwiches in yellow or blue wrappers; partially empty boxes of powdered Donettes and Wheat Thins; plastic and paper grocery bags, small ones, medium ones, large ones, some folded, some wadded, some standing open with garbage in them or lying on their sides; empty Vantage cartons, lots of them, stuffed with wadded-up empty packs.
The small round kitchen table was stacked high with romance novels and women’s magazines; advertising circulars in their plastic sheaths cascaded from table to floor, some held precariously aloft by the marble-print vinyl backs of the two chairs pushed tight against the table, their chrome frames fuzzy with grime. And there on top of all of it was Mona in a little white box.
A large, weathered shadowbox leaned against the wall on the far side of the table, six compartments across, four down, the bottom three rows obscured by the stacks of stuff. Randy lifted Mona’s cremains while he swiped everything else from the top of the table to the floor so he could get a better look at the shadowbox. The mother cat complained.
The shadowbox compartments housed an odd assortment of treasures, mostly salt and pepper shakers: a pair of pigs, a rooster and hen, station wagon and travel trailer, a single garden gnome with an s on its outfit (missing its p mate), a pair of what Mona would’ve called “jigaboos,” male and female, etc. But it was the curious pair in the second compartment from the left, third row down, that caught Randy’s eye: Cubes on top of jagged clumps, all of it tan-colored, split down the middle, alcatraz across the left half, island across the right.
Randy reached into the space and took out the set. How bizarre, he thought, Alcatraz salt and pepper shakers! He placed them on top of the box of ashes in the middle of the table and said in a voice as close to Brenda’s as he could mimic, “I’m sure they’re worth somethin’.” He smiled at himself and read the words aloud again: “Alcatraz Island…”
Brenda was digging through the junk in her yard; something tapped against the back door at the end of the hallway. Randy’s attention was drawn back there, and he suddenly remembered his bedroom.
He ventured down the hall past his half-sister Rona’s bedroom (filled with collapsing stacks of treasure-filled boxes), past the bathroom, spotless as ever, stocked with miniature bars of soap and miniature bottles of shampoo and conditioner stolen regularly over the years from the Keystone Inn where she worked as a housekeeper. At the butt end of the trailer home was the never used washer hook-up. To the right of that was the back door out – the window darkened by the junk in Brenda’s yard leaning against it – and across from it was Randy’s bedroom. His door was padlocked shut. That momentarily caught him off-guard. He reached into his pocket for the keys.
The dolphin on the key ring had a half-melted face. The smallest of the three keys had master engraved on the head, as did the small padlock on his bedroom door. The key fit comfortably in the slot and with the slightest jiggle the lock popped open.
Randy removed the lock, stuck it with the key still attached into his back pocket, worked his bedroom door open and peered inside. It seemed exactly as he’d left it in the fall of 1981, all the way down to the flip-flop he couldn’t find when he arrived at his college dorm room in Gainesville; there it was, sole facing upward, leaning against an aquarium that contained the bones of an iguana named Abraham that he had starved to death.
Randy held onto the doorframe, afraid he would get sucked in. There was an odd texture under his left thumb. He held his thumb to his face and saw a powdery brownish-gray residue. He leaned closer to where his thumb had been resting. In the half-light he could just make out a chain of tiny mushrooms growing around the doorway with a squished outline of his thumb in them. He took a step into the room, still holding onto the doorframe; the paneled walls were all discolored and bubbly.
Next door, glass shattered and metal tumbled as Brenda continued her quest for an urn for Mona’s ashes. It suddenly struck Randy that he had to get out of this place. He tromped up the hall, came face-to-face with the glowing orange eyes of the feral mother cat as she jumped from her litter and pounced swiftly out the storm door. “No, no, no!” Randy said as he leaned over the sofa bed, pushed the exercise bike upright, tossed the phone to the floor and gathered the four corners of the top sheet together in a big knot, the kittens tumbling and crying inside.
“No, no, no!”
He swung the clump of kittens over his shoulder, moved to the kitchen table, crammed the Alcatraz Island salt and pepper shakers into his front pocket, scooped up the box of ashes, and kicked his way out of the trailer home. He bounded down the stairs, tossed the box into the passenger seat through the open window and pushed the noisy kittens in after it.
“No, no, no!”
He ran around the Dart and pulled at the handle but the door wouldn’t open. There was a huge dent in the side of the car. He climbed in through the driver’s side window like a clumsy Starsky or Hutch, worked the lock and key out of his back pocket, separated them, threw the lock out of the window into the yard of junk, started the engine and sped out of Black Lake Mobile Court, spewing broken shells from all four tires. As he turned south onto Route 21, he glanced at the rearview mirror and caught sight of Brenda in the courtyard, halfway back to Mona’s trailer home, chewing her cud, holding a bright-colored coffee can between fat hands, suspended forever in time. He honked the horn three times: No, no, no.
The kittens would not shut up. Randy considered tossing the whole mess out of the car window, but he would have to find a place to pull over first because a sports car was bearing down on his back bumper. He spotted an opening in the barbed wire fence running along both sides of the road, a side road.
Randy put on his left turn signal, applied the brake. The Mustang peeled around him on the left-hand side, the passenger screaming “Faggot!” as they passed.
Randy was shaken, felt like he was back in high school. The kittens wouldn’t shut up! He drove a hundred yards on the sandy road away from Route 21 before he pulled over. There was a vaguely familiar water tower in the field on the left next to a cluster of leafless trees draped with Spanish moss and looking like a gaggle of crazy old ladies in tattered, moth-eaten party dresses.
The water tower signaled that there was a pond in the field, in the middle of the tree cluster. He pulled to the soft, grassy shoulder, climbed out of the car, dragging the kittens behind him. He was in a daze as he climbed through the barbed wire fence. The sheet caught on a barb and tore as he pulled it through but he didn’t let it slow him down much. The confused mewing grew more frantic as he dragged the sheet along the ground behind him.
At the water’s edge, Randy swung the sheet into the air and let it go; it arcked beautifully to the center of the pond – the judge gave it a perfect 10; the judge was an alligator, unseen until the moment his jaws hinged open at the surface of the water and snapped down on the sheet. The kittens were quickly silenced as they were pulled under; Randy could hear the snapping and cracking of what he imagined were hundreds of tiny kitten bones in the alligator’s teeth. He stood numb, horrified as the sheet began to hemorrhage. He fell to a sitting position on the bank of the pond, tears filling his eyes and streaming down his cheeks, hot and huge. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d cried – in New York with Anita after the positive test results? And now he was back in Florida murdering kittens. It just didn’t make sense. A corner of Mona’s bed sheet danced on the surface of the pond. Randy talked to himself, tried to convince himself that a quick death was better than a long drawn out one. But then he wondered if he was talking about the kittens or himself?
Something jabbed his right thigh. He traced the outlines of the salt and pepper shakers in his pocket with his fingers then lay back, stretched his leg out and removed them. On the way back to the car Randy tumbled the shakers in his hands. Inside the car, he set them upright on the center of the dash. He read the words again: “Alcatraz Island. Hm…”
After a moment, he picked up the box that contained his mother’s ashes from the floor and said to her, “So, Mona, you up for a road trip?”
He started up her old Dodge Dart, turned around and drove toward the setting sun.