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Boomtown Guide for the Perplexed 
by Michael Reilly

“to Valerie Scott”




He heard an alarming sound and raced from the elevator — that clanking, jerking, slow-to-rise freight box — to Morton’s apartment door, which was open.

Charley stepped into Morton’s apartment, and the continuing cacophony from the stereo engulfed him like a fog. In the midst of the fog stood a beautiful woman. She waved her arms, conducted — she nearly danced — and her long black hair floated.          She had said on the phone her name was Rose Ste. Marie. “Hello,” Charley said. But she apparently couldn’t hear him over the sound. He walked around to stand in front of her.

“Oh, hi.” Rose stopped. And she smiled as though it were good to see him again. They had never, unless one counted her phone call, met.

“Where are all the plants?” Charley shouted above the din. “I’m supposed to water his plants.”

When Morton had been called out of town for his father’s funeral, packing his suitcase with eyes blackened by fatigue, turning to wood and marching through the hallway to the elevator, Charley had agreed to water his plants.

“They’re in my apartment,” Rose said. “I carried them. Two by two. Like in the Bible. It doesn’t seem like a lot if you do it that way. That’s probably how Noah got through it.”

“I can’t water the plants if they’re at your house.”

“I was afraid Barney would have another tantrum and eat them. Or dig them up.”

“Why did you bring his cat back here?”

“I told you on the phone why I had to do it.”

“Can’t we turn the CD player down?”

She turned it off. “Down,” Charley said. “Turning it down would have been fine.”

“I’m not offended,” Rose said pleasantly. She sat down on the couch, and Charley noticed her foot. She wore the footwear of archangels in Renaissance paintings. On her right foot, just above her toes, she had a tiny tattoo of a red rose. Seeing the small emblem between her crisscrossed sandal straps made Charley want to hold the foot.

“It’s just that we could barely hear each other,” he explained, turning the CD player back on and resetting it to the horrendous beginning of the disk. He kept the sound low. It was an awful sound.

“It is avant-garde,” she admitted. “It’s Gavrich’s Music of the Spheres, which of course is not his title. In his letters, he refers to it as his ‘little symphony of fear.’ I’ve never met anyone who likes the music when they hears it.”

“You do seem to hear it a little differently than the rest of us.”

“Barney behaved in an antisocial manner,” Rose said. “They called me and said I had to come get him because he was attacking the other cats.”

“Where is he?” Charley looked around for the cat that usually perched on the back of the sofa. Barney had a fat, complacent personality, but Charley could just imagine him biting other cats, upsetting their naps. The cat hotel, where cats stayed and were allowed to roam the grounds, and where each cat was presented with its own bed, wooden climbing posts and claw-inviting carpets, was billed as a cushy place from which cat owners would have a difficult time coaxing their mollified pets.

“I was hoping maybe you could feed him ... since you live right downstairs, and you were going to water the plants? He’s no more trouble than the plants.”

“The cat hotel wouldn’t agree,” Charley said and chuckled as he imagined Barney applying his exaggerated size to pin down the other cats and bite their heads. “But I’ll feed him.”

“And I’ll water the plants. It’s good to be flexible when someone’s father dies.”

Continued... 

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© 2014 Michael Reilly

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The Avatar Self
Boomtown Guide for the Perplexed
Bingo
Merrows
Crucible Invictus
Run
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