The Important Matter of Sleeping
John was sitting on the couch in the living room. The couch, bought from Wal-Mart at the time that John’s mom and dad had decided to refurnish the entire lower floor of their house, was angled at roughly thirty degrees to the back wall - the same back wall that provided a structural member and division with the next house along, that was owned by an African-American family called the Davises, and faced the long front window of the house, roughly tour times as long as it was high, divided regularly into vertical bays by white-painted wooden pillars. Past the window John could see Joe Meyer and Chet Vole playing ball, and someone - a person unknown because not visible, hidden by the right hand (as John faced it) end of the window - making up the triangle.
John would very much have liked to go out and join in their game. Although he was unsure of the legality, or permissibility, of such a situation. The ball they were using looked soft enough - he was fully aware of the familial ordinance against the use of hardballs near the fronts of people’s houses, and their cars, etc - and would no doubt have bounced harmlessly off surfaces such as the front window of any house along the street, or the sharply raked windscreen of Bertha Mace’s Lexus coupe, or the shiny bald pate of Dervinus Scrope who just at that moment came shuffling along the street from Wal-mart with his weekly bag of groceries. John thought about Bertha Mace and the way she wore dresses that were too short for her, and regularly had gentleman callers, as his mom put it. Dervinus Scrope had once in John’s hearing, to Mr Davis, chuckled and said,
- The woman’s a tart. Nothing wrong with that, either.
John understood that it would not be a good idea to ask any responsible adults (or his older sister Marjorie, who was away at college anyway) what a tart was, and particularly why it applied to Bertha Mace (and why there was ‘nothing wrong with that’ when possibly there was), though it did seem odd that the woman was able to afford a shiny new red Lexus coupé when as far as he knew her job was cutting coupons. Mom forbade John to speak to Dervinus Scrope not because the man was African-American - the Davises were no way off limits - but because he was ‘a dirty old man’. Although John in later life - aged, say, twenty - was to feel mightily peeved by the fact that his parents had never warned him that Dervinus Scrope might attempt to pervert, manhandle, fondle, sodomise, or otherwise interfere with John, while his buddies, Joe Meyer and Chet Vole particularly, had been warned loud and long about the possibility of falling perverted prey to a pedophile. Although with double hindsight, John figured that Scrope probably wasn’t a pedophile anyway, there being no evidence whatsoever to that effect - it was much like assuming a shaven-headed man with a flattened nose is a bank robber because ‘that’s what bank robbers look like’. Scrope merely lived alone and spoke to people; had he been female this would have been treated as normal, but such behavior seemed to be unacceptable in a man, it being far more acceptable somehow to treat him as a neighbourhood pariah, never speak to him, and assume he was a dangerous pervert when there was actually no reason to do so. The later John would point out that most abuse happens within families so it was statistically less likely that Scrope was a molester.
Thus it was for no reason of this kind that John wanted to stay on the Wal-Mart brand couch rather than go into the street and play ball with Chet and Joe and the third player who now was revealed as the Davis’ son Kelvin. John felt a woeful lack of engagement, unconnected with uncorrelated accusations of perversion against his neighbour, or the presence over John’s corduroyed thighs and patellae of the family cat, Howler, whose large brindled flank rose and fell in contented sleep; John was reluctant to wake Howler but knew full well that the ‘useless furry lump’ (as dad called it, usually when looking at the cat with a look full of loving kindness, thus the words were clearly not intended to be taken at face value) would take to being removed from John’s upper legs and placed on the floor without breaking his (the cat’s) stride in the important matter of sleeping.
Dad’s approach to the cat had the air of desperation about it, moments seized between his apparently important work for a government agency and the desperate desire to watch ‘Jeopardy!’ on the television (a twenty-three inch JVC, bought from Cram’s Electrical in Burlington the week before it was closed down and replaced by a WalMart) or sit in the living room with a bottle of beer in the evenings. Dad’s approach to Mom had the air of a long-held armed truce. Marjorie, who was several years older than John, had gone away. In the eight years between their ages there had been another child, Matthew. Mattie had barely lived long enough to go to school, and of the family, only John couldn’t remember him. This, he felt, froze him out ever so subtly by comparison with Dad and Mom and Marjorie, but sometimes when Mom and John were in the kitchen, and Dad was elsewhere, Mom would hold John closely and he would hear her crying above him.
The ball curvetted and bounced off the sloping windscreen of Bertha Mace’s scarlet Lexus convertible. Kelvin Davis’ face appeared at the window and his fingers tapped on the window, alerting John from his cat-excused indolence.
John reluctantly shifted the cat and got up.
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