The Cat in the Hatbox

Chapter 2

Breakfast was finished. Ed and Ernie, after stopping near the buffet table to ask Janet Murphy, PVC's head dietician, to thank the cook for a great meal, headed out, through the lobby, out through the double glass front doors of the reception area, and across the parking lot to the winding path that made its way between the two six-story condo buildings where it split, one fork going more or less south east toward the golf course, and the other north toward Cypress Street, the main street that ran along the north side of PVC. Just before Cypress, the path forked again. Straight on it ran into Cypress, but they took the east-bound fork which paralleled Cypress until it came to Wisteria, ending beside Ed's two-bedroom bungalow, which sat facing Ernie's almost identical residence on the other side of the street.

Just as Ernie was about to cross the street to his house, a Montgomery Fire and Rescue ambulance came careening around the corner from Cypress with the red lights flashing, causing him to jump back to the sidewalk. The ambulance whizzed by, south down Wisteria, and took a sharp right turn onto Maple, and was soon out of sight.

"I wonder what that's all about," Ernie said.

"Could be someone's sick," Ed said. "This is an old folks' home after all."

At the south end of Wisteria, they noticed people coming out of their houses and heading toward Maple. A small crowd had quickly formed, and, like the ambulance, it turned west on Maple and was soon out of sight.

"Think we should go take a look?" Ernie asked.

"Why don't we get our golf clubs? We have to go that way to get to the course. We can take a look before we tee off. It's probably nothing much."

"Yeah, you're probably right." Ernie started across the street. "I'll meet you out here in a few minutes," he said over his shoulder as he took his key from his pocket and opened his front door.

Ed walked up and opened his own front door, and stepped into his sparsely, but neatly, furnished living room. He walked through the living room, past the tiny dining room and through the kitchen to the back patio where his golf bag and pull cart sat, just outside the kitchen door. He marveled that he could leave an expensive set of golf clubs outside, and find them when he returned. PVC, with its geriatric residents, was sometimes boring, but the crime rate was low. The only real crime it had ever had was the kidnapping of his friend Violet Wertheim by the golf course grounds keeper the previous year, a crime that Ed and Ernie had solved, even though they'd had to put themselves into a bit of danger in order to do it. Despite the lack of crime, though, he still checked to make sure his kitchen door was locked before grasping the handle of the pull cart and starting around toward the front of the house. 'Trust but verify,' was the slogan of a politician that he'd never liked very much, but the slogan made sense. Leaving his clubs outside on the days he planned to play golf was about as far as he was prepared to trust anyone. Not, mind you, that he had anything really worth stealing inside his house. His golf clubs and silver Toyota 4-Runner were his most valuable possessions. He just believed that locks removed temptation, and kept honest people honest while making it harder for the crooks.

As he walked across the side yard, feeling the cushiony Bermuda grass beneath his feet, he looked up at the light blue canopy above him, with the sun, a white circle high up against the blue. He realized that he only ever really noticed the weather, or nature, when he was about to play golf. The rest of the time, it was just there, either good or bad—and, thunderstorms were the worst in his mind—but, not something you really noticed. It hadn't always been that way. When he was a young man, before he left home and joined the army, he'd liked nothing better than lying on his back in a field of clover, smelling the sweet aroma of honeysuckle and looking at the shapes of the clouds drifting against a blue sky. Somewhere along the way, perhaps his time in Vietnam, near the end of American involvement in late 1971 when a young Staff Sergeant Edward Lazenby had been assigned to 2d Battalion, 196th Infantry Brigade, one of the last American combat units left in Vietnam, he'd come to view the weather and nature as things to be wary of rather than enjoyed. On patrol in the jungle, rain masked the Viet Cong ambushes, and in clear weather, they just had better fields of fire. Forests and hills were ambush points, and small valleys just death traps. Now, over forty years later, he was only able to appreciate the weather and his natural surroundings when he played golf. He shook his head as he thought about that. Golf, the most frustrating pursuit known to man, and it turned out to be the thing that had helped him shake the devastating effects of post-traumatic stress disorder. No longer did stray sounds trigger images of orange and black gouts of flame or the crash of rocket propelled grenades. It had taken him nearly two decades to get past it, but for the past twenty years he'd been symptom free.