Excerpt: Jeffrey's Garden

Part 2: Dead in the Bed
It is only fitting that part two comes first, as it is the ending of a long battle of wits between two people, destined to share a life of self-destruction. The reader should be aware that there is no cause and effect here, just a chance union between the two, not of love, but of need, and you may decide on your own if there had been a way out before tragedy finally took hold.

Chapter 1: A 911 Call
Detective Orson Ray Pierce sat at his desk, mulling over some mug shots that had been retrieved from an old box in the storage room. He had heard that Jody Bennett had just been released from prison and he wanted to remind himself what this Bennett guy looked like. It had been twenty years and his memory was filled with a mass of criminals since then.
The detective did remember what got Jody put away in the first place, one little girl’s earring. It had come loose in the backseat, as she struggled in her bondage. Also, the scratches on his cheek matched her store-bought phony, glue-on fingernails. Two of the fingernails had been found in his garage by the wastebasket, where he had disposed of her clothing. There wasn’t any extensive D. N. A. testing at that time, and it was really hard to prove that the threads in the trash bin were actually those of the little girl’s sweater. Detective Pierce knew, though. Even if the little girl’s mother said the sweater was pink, and the threads were white, it took white and red threads in the sweater to make it look pink. The Judge didn’t like that assumption but he did agree that the earring matched the ones in the picture of the little girl during Christmas, on Santa’s knee.
Detective Pierce found the picture marked Jody Bennett. It was a little yellowed from age, but he knew the face. He put it into his scanner and started to play with the options button. He had heard from a friend of his that worked in Huntsville, Texas, that Jody had lost almost all his hair, and some of his teeth. The detective worked on the picture to make it have twenty more years added to it, and removed the hair on top, to reveal a very sly looking middle-aged man. The eyes weren’t symmetrical and barely visible on his left eyebrow down to his lower jaw, it looked like scratch marks from a small animal or person. More than likely the child he molested. There was a sneer on his face when the picture was taken, as if he was remembering the torture he put the little boy Jody through was only twenty when he went in for child molestation. Now, he had a record that would follow him wherever he went, describing him as a sex offender.

The picture was set aside, and another one was brought forth. This was a picture of a woman who would be released soon, if she made parole. She had been dealing drugs to High School students, when she substituted at the school. The police had found her hunched over, sitting on a porch stoop, at the back of the High School, with a needle still stuck in the vein. She had passed out, doing black tar heroin, while her students were on the other side of the building waiting for the bus. She had been in for only five years, and was now forty-three. Two of her former students were still in jail, and still hooked on the stuff.
They should have locked her away and thrown away the key.
Detective Pierce looked at the clock. Megan was late again. She was supposed to clock in at four-thirty and wasn’t here at five-fifteen, yet. She hadn’t called or e-mailed and he well knew she took her laptop everywhere.
He picked up his cell phone and called. Her phone was turned off. There was a message though, and he listened to her voice.
“Pierce, if you try to call me, I am out of range. There was a 911 call and I took it, not realizing that it was so far out into the boondocks! I will call you as soon as I can.”
“Well, that makes sense,” he spoke aloud. He could see his reflection in the glass wall, separating him from the other officers.
I am getting much too fat. I really need to do something about this.
He stood up and turned sideways and looked at his profile. He had really put on a lot of weight, right in the middle. As he was looking at the difference in his shape, and compared it to last year’s Policeman’s Ball picture, he looked ten years older. Officer Whiting came through the glass door.
“You know, you can do something about that! I play racket ball every other day and it helped me.”
“ You weren’t this much out of shape when you started, either. You never have been out of shape, have you, Bill?”
“My wife told me, Pierce, that if I started looking like you, she would divorce me! Now you know she looks to good to be staying single if we split up! I can’t let that happen; I love her.”
“You love that puddnin’tain. I know what you love,” Pierce chuckled.
“Well, wouldn’t you like Gloria much better if she lost, well, I will be quite frank with you, Pierce, your wife was really beautiful before you started keeping her pregnant.”
“That’s why she stayed pregnant, you fool! She was so beautiful that I couldn’t keep my hands off of her. Now, she is making up the difference in her looks. I don’t want to touch her with a ten-foot pole!”
“You have seven children! What were you thinking? Didn’t you know what birth control was? Good Grief! She is all out of shape because you put her there. A man has to marry a girl, knowing that she won’t always look as good as she does on her wedding night!”
Detective Pierce looked at the old wedding picture sitting on his desk. It had been sitting there for twenty-seven years, now. He was going to be fifty, next month, and his wife was already fifty. She was two months older when they were married.
Will Whiting looked at the picture, as well.
“How come you haven’t any new pictures of her in here? You don’t even have your children’s pictures or your grandchildren’s pictures, man!”
“Will, you don’t understand. I was really grateful when the last child moved out. I was even more grateful when my wife and I weren’t asked to baby-sit or help raise any more children. I just want to remember what I did that was real smart and not what I have done to screw things up. Gloria and I will always be old and fat, from now on. That is what happens to people in their fifties.”
“Not if you don’t want it to. Why don’t y’all join Carrie and myself tonight; we are hitting the gym about eight. Eat real light so you won’t get sick. I bet I can talk the Director into letting you have a few freebees there. It isn’t cheap, but you will be really surprised when you see how much better it feels to work out!”
“Let me talk to Gloria about it. Maybe so…we’ll give you a call. Hey! There’s Megan. I can leave, thank God! This has been a really long day, and a boring one!”
Will, by this time had become comfortable, sitting on the broad desk that took up most of the small room where the Detective did his paperwork. He watched as a small-framed woman, about twenty-eight, walked into the Detective’s office.
“So, what took you so long? Go to the hairdressers in California?” Pierce asked, lighting a cigarette.
“Funny! My hair looks like shit and you make jokes! No, I was taking down an interview with a woman who hasn’t heard from her mother, now, in a week. They are real close and come from a close knit family. Her mother used to call her about two to three times a day, long distance, from Lake Texoma.”
“Well, now, that isn’t next door! She should have invested in the Internet! That way they could instant message all day long. That’s what Gloria does when I have to work at night. She calls everyone in the world, from New Zealand to Portugal and stays on the computer talking.”
“That’s a chat-room, Ray. She gets bored. You should let her go back to work and do something productive!” said Megan, now brushing her long auburn hair.
“What do you suggest? She sold Real Estate a million years ago when she had to do everything with a calculator, pencil, and paper. She would have to go back to school and get a refresher course on how to use computer programs to do the same work, then, she would still be sitting at the computer all day.”
Bill was listening to all this and didn’t say anything until he noticed the pictures of the two convicts.
“Megan, what kind of call did you get? Missing person?”
“Missing persons! A mother and father have just disappeared. Well, maybe they didn’t but the woman is in her thirties and hasn’t been able to get a Sheriff to go out to the house ,because it is so remote, to check on her parents. Maybe the phone is just messed up, or maybe they took a vacation and forgot to tell her. Who knows?”
“Lake Texoma is only ninety miles from Dallas. You said that the daughter lives in Dallas County? Why doesn’t she go find out about her parents?”
“Well, maybe because she is blind, for one thing, and the other problem is that there are laws against blind, middle-aged women driving ninety miles, alone. All she has is her expensive dog, who does everything in the world for her, but drive, of course. I was totally amazed at all the things! He can open the refrigerator, take out a T V. Dinner, put it in the microwave and push some buttons to cook it! He even can wash up the dishes!”
“Megan, you haven’t eaten T.V. dinners, lately have you? The plates don’t have to be washed.”
Will and Ray just looked at each other. Ray remembered the woman in the picture on the right, now. She had been murdered two years ago in prison with a plastic spoon. One of the other inmates found out that she was the drug dealer that overdosed her son.
“Okay, I am out of here, Megan!” said Ray, “Fill me in on the news if there is any. I mean, real news! Will, I will get back with you over the Gym. I’m sure that Gloria would love to get out of the house, but, neither one of us want strangers to see our fat bodies in workout clothes.”
“Pierce, there are many fat bodies that are thinking the same thing at the Gym, right now. Call me!” Will winked at the pretty woman detective as he left the office. Megan really dressed up the room in the evening. He loved his wife, but he was glad that he had Megan there to keep him company. She was a sharp detective and came up with hypothesis of events for motives. Most of the time, she made perfect sense. Her wit was a bit dry, but then, you never knew when she was joking, like the dog. Who ever heard of a dog washing dishes anyway?
On the other hand, I used to let mine lick the plate after dinner…

Chapter 2: Leaving the Phone off the Hook

Jennifer sat in front of the television and listened to C.N.N. news. She always had the television on, for the company. Kiki was company, but Jen couldn’t play with him in the house, worried that she would break something, and she knew he was bored with his job, already, watching everything around her and keeping her from falling or bumping into things. Now, she had the phone off the hook, ringing her mother and stepfather’s lake-cottage. She hoped that someone would hear the phone ring and try to get inside the house. Maybe there would be a weekend neighbor that would hear the ringing, or even a meter reader, who would be working and think it strange that the one on the phone never gave up.
Jenny wasn’t always blind. She only became that way from the Diabetes that ran through her genes. Her mother was a diabetic and that was one reason why she was so worried. Janyce had never gone into insulin shock, but it wasn’t uncommon for a diabetic to do so. Then, her natural father, Steven, never had anything wrong with his health. He could eat and drink anything and everything and didn’t have to worry about his blood sugar.
The possibilities just built up over the hours and Jenny was really getting edgy about her parents. The sweet-sounding female detective sounded kind and comforting. To bad she had to leave. Her cell phone wasn’t working and Jenny refused to hang up the phone in case someone picked it up on the other end. She picked up her clock, which had raised numbers on it. She felt the clock face and saw that it was five-thirty. She had lost her appetite but knew if she didn’t eat, her blood sugar would drop.
The well-groomed Golden Retriever went to the small refrigerator, where there was a small pedal, similar to the trashcans that open with the foot. He jumped on the pedal and the little refrigerator opened. Kiki put his mouth into the little space and took out a can of Slim-fast. He brought it to Jenny and she opened it. That was the perfect meal. She didn’t have to dirty dishes or pots, and it was fortified with all the nutrition she needed, except it had sugar. That was the only sugar she took, though, drinking her coffee, and tea, straight and bitter. She was getting used to bitter, and aftertastes of sugar-free ice cream, sodas and pastries.
It was too bad that she hadn’t gotten started earlier on this. Maybe she could have saved her eyesight!
“Oh well, Kiki, if it wasn’t for the blood sugar, where would you be, Death Row? …in the pound?”
The large, golden, long-haired dog just wagged his tail and smiled, with his tongue hanging out sideways. Jenny wondered if all this was a game to him, or if he realized that she couldn’t see. Her eyes looked normal as anyone else and she tried to focus on a person as well as she could, remembering how visually impaired people she had seen before, never looked at the person, but maybe, just past the person, or above the person that spoke to her. It was funny, as well, when someone noticed that she had a visual problem, they would raise the tone of their voice as if her eyes were defected because her eardrum was punctured.
She put her hand behind his ear and scratched him. He stopped panting for a moment to take in the luxury of the scratch. Yes, he was on the road to that doggy heaven in the sky when Jennifer asked to adopt him.
First, she had gone to a police dog training center to find out if she could buy a trained dog there. The officer in charge told her he saw one at the pound because that is where the officers picked their dogs. He noted that the animal wasn’t a German shepherd, like their dogs, but it was already trained for the blind.
Jennifer called first to see if the dog was still there, and the office asked, “What kind of dog do you want? We have two such dogs, but, I assure you, they bring a larger wad of money than the regular lost mutt!”
“I don’t care, I have to be in close contact with the dog to see if I want to spend twenty-four hours a day with him…or her.
Beverly, Jenny’s best friend since high school, gave her a ride over in her truck to examine the dog. Jenny was really excited. She had never had a dog before, only cats.
. She remembered her mother‘s snide remarks:
“Jenny, now if you don’t think you can deal with just a dog taking care of you, I will find a human…just don’t you worry! We will make sure that you can handle your newly developed problem. Your daddy and I will do all we can. We just cannot move back to Dallas. You will have to come here. We are doing better where we are. I am sure you will understand. You will have to get used to the idea that you are blind, anyway…”
“Visually impaired, mom. Kevin is not my daddy, and never will be! People don’t say blind anymore. Just like Kevin is emotionally impaired with his drinking problem.”
“Impaired, huh? I will have to look that one up in the dictionary. I do believe that alcoholism is considered a disease, like Diabetes, but in a different location. You wouldn’t want me to abandon you to your illness because you can’t play tennis anymore, or drive a car, or all the things you used to do, would you? I can’t abandon Kevin because he has a mental illness, now can I? I need glasses. Does that mean that I am visually impaired, too? Does that mean that we are the same? I don’t think so!”
“Mom, just forget it! Yes, you are visually impaired because you have to have something to help you see. The dog will be my glasses, or more correct, my eyes. And, my blindness doesn‘t effect you emotionally like daddy‘s drinking does. He steals, and fights, and goes to jail with out a free ‘get out of jail card’. Every time he drinks, he either damages you emotionally , mentally, or physically! And, as far as I know, the dog isn‘t an alcoholic!”
“He hasn’t touched me that way in years, Jen!”
“No? Then, what was that large bruise on the back of your leg the last time I saw you?”
“That is the Fibromyalgia! I can’t control my feet as well, and fell backwards off the top step by the front porch trying to open the screen door! It no longer has a handle, remember? You are getting ridiculous, now!”
“And Johnny was the one who broke the handle off the screen door, drunk, so it became almost impossible to open it. It isn’t ridiculous to see you without food, and your husband fat and eating all the time or out of money for things you need and the man has a case of beer next to him, sitting on the porch like a bum, in front of the television?”
“Jen, he does work, you know, and I can’t, and we pay the bills and if I live long enough, we will someday get ahead. What, with the garden, and the fruit trees, we can save on money for food.”
“Yes, mom, food you have to pay for extra because your husband eats up all the food stamps and spends his cash on beer and cigarettes. Maybe you should have picked more carefully a person you planned to live in the same house with!”
“And you have a dog, now, as a housemate! I have a man! When he is sober, a good man, who helps me when I can’t do things! Maybe, before you decided to scarf down all that sugary ice cream and salt water taffy, you should have tested your blood sugar!”
“Mom, I didn’t have a tester and doctor visits and lab tests are expensive! Waitresses aren’t supplied with insurance! Even after it was discovered I had Diabetes, remember, Johnny had to have that boat and couldn’t afford to buy me a tester! He said the test strips were costly than your water Will! And, he wasn‘t going without paying the water Will. Poor excuse for a man!”
“That’s right, blame your daddy on your visually impaired eyes! Blame your daddy for working all his life to go in his own boat, fishing, and you worked and made money, too, you know!”
“He is not my daddy! My daddy would have sacrificed the clothes off his back to keep me healthy! And, I had to raise Taylor by myself, mom! Her father left us, remember?”
“I remember! It was those damn leg cramps and you couldn’t make it happen between you two!”
“My legs hurt too much, mom! It was from the Diabetes, mom! I can’t help that! It comes from your side of the family! You are partially to blame, too!”
“Well, Jen, you can’t blame your father’s death on me. I wasn’t there! And, he treated you differently than he treated me. He worked night and day, leaving me alone to raise you! So, you can raise Taylor. I am sure now that she is old enough to help you out as well…just don’t want to burden her with adult problems just yet. I had to take care of my dad when he had problems with his Diabetes and I know what that is like. If you want, in the summer months, we can take Taylor and give you some free time!”
“To do what? Hit the bars and find another husband, like you did?”

Jennifer started to sweat. Her head started to ache and she knew she had to stop thinking negative thoughts about her mother and step-father. The doctor warned her that Diabetes lead to Cardiac disease and strokes. She was prime target for a stroke if she let her blood pressure go up too high. She was worried about her parents, but then, there weren’t many good words between them, anyway. She didn’t hate Kevin, but resented the way he took care of her mother. Sometimes she though her mother to think unreasonably about her situation. She did hear her mom say once, that things would eventually get much better and for her not to worry about Kevin’s drinking. Then, a whole new set of thoughts jumped into her mind:
Mom is laying on the floor beat to shreds and Johnny is at the nearest bar…They were in the car, Johnny driving and had an accident, her mother pinned inside the car with a broken neck…The house burned down from his passing out on the porch, and no one had her phone number…no…the phone was ringing…
She felt the remote control in her hand and felt the little bumps on the numbers. She found one and five, turning to the weather channel to hear if there was a power outage at the lake, possibly. Maybe a tornado! Oh God, not a tornado…but then, next door there’s a shelter…Dorothy had a shelter and didn’t make it inside…and in “Twister” the girl’s daddy…
“…And the drought just continues in the Red River Valley, not showing any signs of relief…”

Well, that idea folded. Jennifer felt for the telephone and found the numbers 411.
“What city?” asked a soft female voice.
“I need the number for Sharon Patterson, in Preston Bend, Texas, please.”
There was a short pause, a click and a number came on the phone, mechanically. Jenny thought it over and over in her mind. She made the call and Sharon picked up the phone.
“Sharon, I am Janyce Keptner’s daughter, in Dallas county. Could you please do me a favor and check on my parents? I can’t reach them and I am worried something happened.”
“ Keptner? I though her name was Johnson.”
“It is , I’m sorry, Johnny's last name is Johnson, isn’t it. Well, I am not a Johnson, and don’t even want to be.”
I sure will, Jennifer. Do you have ill will against Johnny? You sound like you are ill. Your mother told me about your eyes. I am so sorry.”
“Well, I am here and you are there and will have to be my eyes, today! I haven’t heard from her for a while and can’t get anyone to answer the phone. You know how Johnny is when he drinks…don’t you?”
“Well, I know I have called an ambulance for him before, and the police have been out here before, and your mother really has her hands full. I am just so sorry about your eyes. Can’t the hospitals fix that? Since you used to see? Like, a transplant or something?”
“ I don’t think so, and if they could, it would be out of my financial reach! Well, at least it isn’t my kidneys. Not yet, anyhow!”
“Why, I’d be real happy to check on her for you! Your dad has been a real help here, doing everyone’s yard and trimmin’ trees, you know! What is your number and I will call you back when I find out something?”
“Sharon, my dad died of lung cancer. Johnny is my step father. Please don’t call him my dad. I don’t want anyone to think that. He has never mistreated me but then, he has never done anything for me either. “
“Jen, some people can’t adapt to their new wife’s former husband’s kids. It is natural that he didn’t know how to treat you , growing up. But now, you are a woman, and should forgive his misgivings.”
“He is robbing my mother of a peaceful life. He keeps her on drugs to pacifier her and let him drink!”
“No, Jen, the drugs she takes are for her illness. The doctors keep her on drugs.”
“Anti-depressants? If she didn’t live with him, she wouldn’t need them.”
“Jennifer, Fibromyalgia causes depression. Let’s drop it, okay? I will hang up now and go check on your mother. I have your number here, and will promptly call you back if there is any foul play or if something is wrong, okay? Don’t worry!”
Jennifer thanked her, and hung up the phone. She took the clock in her hand and felt the little bumps, and decided that she would give Susan about thirty minutes, and then dial her mother’s number again, letting it ring. She finished her can of Slim-fast, strawberry flavor, and handed the can to Kiki, who promptly took it to the trashcan. Jennifer knew that she couldn’t keep chocolate in the house in case Kiki, by accident may ingest it. Chocolate doesn’t digest in a dog. She sat by the phone and felt the clock. She had an open-faced clock with the second hand on top so she could feel the time go by. She sat for what she estimated, about forty-five minutes, in deep thought, waiting for Sharon to call back. Sharon didn’t call back because all thoughts of Jennifer left her mind when she went to Janyce's cottage.

Chapter 3: The Flies

Sharon must have beat on the front door forever, so she thought. Where were they? She could hear a whimper inside. It was the dog, Captain, now hoarse from his barking, jumping at the door. First the jump and the push against the door, then the frantic whining noise he gave, was as if the dog was in sorrow or pain. The doggie door was completely closed and the air conditioner was not making its usual ticking and humming noise. In the window upstairs, where another air conditioner was parked making a wretched noise and Sharon could see the teeth of frozen water hanging from the bottom of the edifice. The window unit was completely frozen, trying to cool the whole house. She thought about that dog and the vaulted ceiling. It must be at least one hundred and twenty degrees in that house. She could see from the road, coming, that the air conditioners were froze up from the outside with icicles hanging from the vents. Suzanne, the cat, was madly scratching the window and yowling loudly, when she saw a human being through the window, and there was matted fur and feces stuck to the tail, making once a clean, well groomed feline, look terribly uncomfortable, indeed.
Sharon knocked again, and then, in order to avoid the dog. It was rumored that Captain would bite anyone anywhere, without forethought if it wasn’t Janyce or John. He even bit Jennifer, maybe knowing she was inferior because of her malady.) She walked around to the back door. She knew that Captain couldn’t get out into the yard if the doggie door was shut. She only presumed that it was because the dog would have been in the back yard, barking at her, instead of a drastic pursuit of demolishing the back door flap to his escape hatch. Captain was an Australian Shepherd/Border Collie that Johnny had found as a puppy on the side of the road in the rain. Kevin and Janyce had been doing odd jobs in the summer for the elderly, when they saw the little dog cross the road. It was a longhaired pooch but it was full of mange mites and worms. There wasn’t any fleas, but it scratched all day and half the night. Janyce had told Sharon that the scratching was due to mites that she saw examples of at the Vet’s office under a microscope.
“Those little bugs are really gross! I am glad we found a Vet. who will take care of our dog!” Janyce had said, cuddling up the little puppy in her arms, “I think it’s a pedigree, or something like that! Something expensive that someone didn’t want and abused it, poor thing!”
Sharon loved dogs, having two Boxers, herself, and paid close attention to all their needs. When she noticed that no matter how you called the dog, there wasn’t a response, she told Janyce to take the dog back to the vet and check it’s ears. Janyce scoffed at the idea, picking up a deaf dog and bringing it home. But, Sharon was good with animals and predicted there was a problem, there. Someone must have noticed the puppy had a disability and dumped it on the street to fend for itself, which apparently, was a five hundred dollar mistake. John and Janyce paid that money, meticulously, every month until it was paid and still ended up with a deaf dog.
“The dog is fine! He has a great nose and can see. Dogs go blind because of Diabetes and old age, too, you know. Just keep him away from the road, especially, show plows, hah!”
“Right,” said Johnny, “snow plows in Texas! We be damned for sure if it gets a little snow on the ground. The highway patrol would think it powdered drugs and either ignore it or roll up a bill to snort it!”
“I don’t think the highway patrol ignores powdered drugs!” contradicted Janyce, remembering when Johnny flushed his down the toilet, thinking Jennifer and Beverly, was a law enforcement agency at the door. Both girls had on matching Captain’s hats and Pee-coats.
“Well, now, they are stupid, like all the coppers around here. I can be dead drunk and joke with them and ask them if they ever got to drive a Harley on the highway while at work, and they forget about my drinking and just carry on a decent conversation about bikes and bikers.”
“It is because they all know you and figure it will do no good to fill out mounds of paperwork, just to keep you in a holding tank for an hour or two.”
“Damn straight! And they have to bring me coffee and feed me…”
“And I have to pick you up at midnight to bring you home, and you are still drunk!” Charlotte spit out her mouth, in regret, at the thought of so many times she had to wake up out of a dead sleep to run thirty to one hundred and thirty miles to pick him up, sometimes having to borrow gas money.
“Can you guys do this somewhere else, I have other patients!”
Damn fools, just picking up stray dogs, arguing about personal problems and not having the dog neutered…

When she walked through the back gate, she saw that the doggie door was shut, but the door wasn’t locked.
That’s strange. If they are gone, they left their car, boat and motor- home! And…left the animals closed up in the house, but the door, unlocked?
She knocked one more time, and pushed the door open. The cat flew outside, found a section of soft dirt, and immediately started digging there. The distressed dog ran, from the closed up doggie door at the back of the room, towards the front door, bashing into the vacuum cleaner first, then, hopping over an ottoman, and past Sharon in a hurry. Biting her was certainly the last thing on his mind today! She could hear him as he bolted into the yard, barking and running around the fenced in yard, jumping and hopping, strongly of his new freedom. She heard him lapping furiously at the water, standing in the water meter hole. Apparently, johnny hadn't fixed that leak. Her mind was drawn away from the present circumstance and remembered her friend’s last water bill, “Every time I get that damn water bill, I think of John's refusal to get Jennifer her diabetic test strips.”
Sharon felt that Janyce had been muttering to herself, so she didn’t intrude, but knew, there was a definite group of domestic problems here, besides the alcohol, kept secret to the world maybe, but apparent.

She looked around the living room and there wasn’t a light on, but daylight peeked through the back window, the way the sun peeks through rain clouds after a storm. The window appeared to be relatively new, and was also crochet in vines that covered the small window panes and climbed up the violet curtains, through the lace valance, and over the curtain rod, twisting and turning, tendrils reaching out into space looking for something new to grab a hold of to continue their journey. The tinted window was also swarming with flies, and an array of lost dirt doppers already out of supplies from the houseplants, wasps and torn spider webs, still loaded with the previous night’s kill, seemed to add to the population of this soon to be jungle of greenery. Then, she spotted the sweet potato inside a dried up jar. She saw all the house plants appeared dried up. Picking up a clean pot from the stove, she filled it with the water, which came out brown as the dirt in the garden. The water, in the house, hadn’t been turned on in a while.
Maybe she is saving on the water bill…drinking sodas instead Never saw her neglect her plants though.
The kitchen wasn’t that messy, but there was just enough rotten fruit, sitting in a bowl, to draw plenty of tiny fruit flies, that swarmed from the bowl to the trashcan. She could see them swarming like a small tornado from the front door as she filled the pot.
Graciously, she watered the potatoes and the cacti, and the Begonias, and opened the back door and saw the pond was low.
Poor fish, they might get too much air
All was forgotten about calling Jennifer for the moment, wondering why everything was left so suddenly. She turned on the water in the back yard, filling the pond, watering all Janyce's prize rose bushes, the tomato plants, the morning glories…
"My, look at the vines, they cover everything…"and noticed Captain looking through the back yard fence, from the driveway, wagging his tail at his ‘savior’.
She finished watering everything thoroughly, including the washing off of many, many spider webs from the top of the door and window facings. She opened the door completely, found the air conditioner remote and turned on the cool air. One could really tell the difference in the smell of the back yard, now, and the smell of the inside of Janyce and Johnny's house.
The dog shit…
Finding a paper towel, she picked up the feces, now quite dry in some clumps, and through the pieces out the back door. She looked into the bathroom and found more, and discarded that, as well.

The inside of the A-frame was quite open, except the bedroom. It was located in back of the living room and the door was ajar but the light was off, as well. The house appeared to be vacated, but she promised to investigate it for Jennifer, whom she knew was waiting her reply. She went to the phone, picked it up and it hadn’t a signal. The phone had been unplugged. That is why Jennifer couldn’t get an answer for so long. On her end it was ringing but on this end, there was no sound. She stepped around the ottoman that Captain hopped over and found a mound of feces, apparently from the dog, covered in flies and ants. She took her paper towel and started to remove that pile but as she looked closer and saw there was an ant trail , and it was leading to the busy trashcan, where the discarded figs from several days past, had a sweet, pungent, fermenting odor. She watched herself walk through the house because there was urine stains on the corners of every piece of furniture and occasionally more feces. All were covered with crawling flies. On the kitchen counter, was a group of once lovely flowers that had been picked from the back yard , but were now withered and droopy. The whole house was swarming with flies: regular house flies, green horse flies, black flies and gnats, and the carpet stunk of the dog urine and dog feces. More flies all over the the garbage bags, just outside the back door and one could hear the buzzing of flies, which once were maggots, living in the old food, and became trapped inside the bags before their adult stage. Some of the bags were heaping over onto the flagstone near the back gate where the trashcans appeared to be quite empty. Banana peels were shriveled and bread heals were molded in their wrappers. Eggshells littered the outdoor walkway, making a trail of organic matter, almost enough to start a mulch pile. A spider was hanging within an inch of Sharon’s nose and didn’t see it right away. She took the broom and knocked down the web and saw the spider fall into a plant that had died, with blooms on it. When Sharon tried to turn on the kitchen light, thinking that she would remove the molded kitchen garbage bag and replace it, the light bulb just sparked and went out.
She looked to the right, past the kitchen, and saw the clothes- basket sitting full, next to the washer. Susan walked closer to investigate, finding the washing machine still open and water still standing in it, waiting for the housekeeper to close the lid so the spin cycle could begin. There were all kinds of creatures in the wash water. She saw a couple of June bugs, still struggling to get out, moths, flies, thinking this was a good water supply, and three or four Palmetto bugs, floating in the dark gray liquid.. The clothes, left in the washer soaking, were starting to smell. The clothes were already in the process of mildewing. The flies were swarming in the laundry room, as well, banging up against the windows that were now quite warm with the western sun. There was more dog feces on the floor there, and she saw maggots crawling out of a half eaten wiener, lying in a small tipped over waste basket, darkened by spoilage. She guessed that the dog had chanced the food and stopped eating, when he saw what was inside of it.
Sharon walked out of the laundry room and just closed the door, not touching anything. She made her way into the living room, and then saw the two dead parakeets lying on their backs, apparently quite stiff. They had died of heat exhaustion, in the cage, when their water ran out.
The fish in the aquarium were still sucking on the small gravel, though, looking for food they might have missed. The water was cloudy from not having the filter system cleaned or the water changed. Sharon noticed that all the electricity had been left on. She remembered that Janyce said, “The bills are being paid by my blood”.
The bedroom door was ajar and the smell coming out of that room was horrendous. Sharon slowly walked to the door and shoved it open, with her foot, thinking that she found the feces mother load. She was hit in the nose, now, with a rotting odor that resembled the mice that had died, under her own refrigerator, when she put out rat poison. She had seen mouse feces though-out the house and wondered why the cat was so weak and didn’t try to feed on the mice. Maybe the mice were dead from poison, just like at her own house. Maybe that was the smell. Maybe Janyce and Kevin had to leave the house because of all the dead mice and mice feces The open door swung back, hitting a chair behind it, revealing to her what that horrible smell was. Sharon nearly jumped out of her skin when the phone started ringing.

Chapter 4: A Small-town Cop

Detective Charles DeWitt sat at his desk, playing Free Cell on the computer. He had tried three or four times to get to the small cards but every time he started the game over, all the small cards and the aces seemed to be on top. He was really getting frustrated.
“Play Solitaire, Chuck, it’s not as frustrating as Free Cell!” James, his driving partner walked in and went straight to the coffee maker. He poured out the hours old liquid that was almost welded to the bottom, and rinsed out the pot.
Wonder if my stomach looks like that?
It was six o’clock in the evening and his shift really didn’t start until seven, but his wife was at work, his teenage kids were getting on his nerves with their friends and the new set of drums he shouldn‘t have bought, so he just came in early.
“Jimmy, some old woman keeps calling from North Garland, telling me to go out to her mother’s place on the point and check on her. I kept telling her that I was the only one on duty and I couldn’t leave the office. She said, ‘Well, what if there is a robbery? Are you going to wait until someone else comes to work and let the robbers get away?’”
“Well, Chuck? Would you?” Jimmy snickered.
“If I could leave, you know I would! I have ol’ Harry in the cell, back there, and you know how he is when he gets drunk and raises hell when I am gone! For goodness sake! If the town doesn’t want to pay more than one or two cops on duty, they will have to fend for themselves if there is a burglary.”
“Well, I am here early. Do you want me to drive out there and look around? Who is it?”
“That ol ’ gal, you know, in that Green A-frame on one side and the porch and the fireplace on the other? Jan! That’s it. I knew she had some man’s name. You know! The old hag that calls us almost every weekend to bitch about her drunk husband? God almighty, she looks as if she never bathes or combs her hair. Her teeth! Did you see her teeth? Yeller as the yeller roses of Texas, they are! Remember when we told her to divorce him and she wouldn’t have to call us anymore?” He laughed…“ Should have tol’ that husband of hers to divorce her and get a real woman! This woman, that called, claims to be her kin and sounds just as demanding as Jan does. She claims that no one has answered Jan’s phone now, in over a week ,and is worried about her. Her name is Jennifer. She said that her mother used to call her pretty often, and now, not at all!”
“Isn’t that the old lady married to that tall, fat guy whenever we patrolled out there? But, that was before the County Sheriff’s office took over.”
“That woman, Jennifer, said that she had called the Sheriff and they told her that there wasn’t enough people on duty because of the Sailboat races. They refused to send someone over there. They told her that they had been called so much in the last month, that they could go there blindfolded, along that winding road and everything. She claimed that they just told her to wait and maybe her mother would call her. If her dad lives there too, something probably happened, like, they went on a vacation or something. Maybe they are at the lake everyday.”
“Or, the ol’ bitch bought herself a gun and ended the relationship. What a relationship…always at each other’s throats!”
“Chuck, I will just take a ride out there and look. What could it hurt?”
James walked out, holding his paper cup full of coffee and sat it in a cup holder in the truck as he stepped up and inside his new leather interior. He had just purchased the truck, and was trying real hard to keep it clean. He had bought the cup holder the same day as the truck and a little car trash baggie to hang from the radio knob. Already, he had an empty pack of cigarette filters in the bag, and a used up lighter. There wasn’t a trashcan outside of the Police station, so, he just looked around and tossed the trash over in some shrubs on the side of the building. He wasn’t about to keep trash in his new truck!

The drive out into the country wasn’t bad. It was July, and hot outside, but the new truck also had a new air conditioner that was cool and comfortable, although it was already smelling like the cigarettes that James smoked. He couldn’t detect the odor since he was already full of it from his hair to his socks. He smoked about four full packs a day. He knew he had to be careful where he threw his cigarette butts now that it was summer. Grass fires were caused from people throwing their cigarettes out the car windows, still smoking .
As he approached the A-frame house, peeling paint, torn screen, littered in the front yard with lawnmowers, pulled apart and tools, scattered over a large portion of the grass He saw a short thin woman, about thirty bent over in the front yard, throwing up. She was standing by a mound of dead, sunflowers, freshly pulled from a chicken wire fence. There were also mounds of weeds, broken glass and tires propped up against the same fence, with water standing and mosquito larva wriggling. This surely couldn’t be the mother sought after, by the daughter near Dallas. He pulled up the truck, parallel to gutter made by gravel, in front of the driveway.
“Are you Jan?” Jimmy asked.
“Janyce’s in there…”she said, while she dry heaved some more, pointing at the open door.
Captain, by this time recognized the fact that there were two people there that weren’t residents of his house. He started for the officer and Sharon gained her senses long enough to yell at the officer just in time, “Move! Get something to muzzle that dog with, and I will try to muzzle him. He isn‘t rabid, but he bites you in the back of the leg! He jumped back into his truck and grabbed a rope on a stick that he had to use in order to catch stray dogs. As he held Captain by the rope on the end, Sharon found a rag to tie the dog’s mouth shut. She felt so sorry for him, knowing he had been tied up in there and now was plenty thirsty. But, she didn’t want to be bit either.
“Well, may I speak to her?” Jimmy yelled from the truck, not feeling secure enough to get back out with the dog jumping at him, claws untrimmed, scratching the new, shiny paint job. He couldn’t understand what was wrong with this silver-haired woman. She was too old to be pregnant was the first thing that jumped into his mind. Maybe the neighborhood just had some kind of odd virus and everyone was in bed sick. Jimmy recalled how his wife used to throw up, periodically, all day ,when she was pregnant.
“If you can resurrect her from the dead, you can,” answered Sharon, and looked at the officer with teary eyes, “Her husband, Johnny, is in there with her. He is dead. They are both, dead! You need to come do something about this! I can’t stay here. This is too much for me…”
The phone was still ringing in the house. Sharon had never answered it, so appalled at what she had witnessed while the phone started ringing, the sound just left her mind completely, and she felt like her lunch was on it’s way to freedom, like the dog. It all made sense now. Not the death of her two neighbors, but the state in which she found the house. She used to hear Jan, Janyce’s nickname, bitching all the time about the yard, the garbage and anything else, Johnny did to trash the house. The house was certainly trashed, though.

James put on his gloves. He kept a box of disposable gloves in case he had to pick up a skunk off the highway. He looked for his cell phone in the truck. He remembered leaving it on Chuck’s desk. He would just go inside the house and pick up the phone and tell the party, on the other line, that he had an emergency call to make.
James watched Sharon as she made her way back to her house. He saw the cat stretched out in a sandy, sunny place in the backyard. He saw the dog, drinking thirstily out of the pond, muzzle and all, now, instead of the meter hole. He noticed all the files swarming inside of the windows. He looked in the glove box of the truck and found a bandana. He put it around his nose and mouth and tied it over his ears to protect them from whatever was inside. He wanted to make sure that none of those bugs found the openings to his face and ears.
The phone just kept on ringing. James walked up to the doorway, and pushed it open with his foot. It swung easily and he saw the same things that Sharon did, and made his way to the back bedroom. It was actually the front bedroom, because he had entered through the back door. The bandana did keep the gnats and flies from going into his nose, mouth, and ears, but found that they were collecting in his hair and a couple crawled into his left eye. He rubbed it with the thin rubber on top of his finger, making his eye burn. The bandana didn’t keep out the odor very much, and James could feel his stomach turn. He could understand now, why he saw Sharon throwing up in the back yard. He felt like doing the same.
He looked into the bedroom and saw two very large people, laying, side by side, on a full sized bed, without a trace of clothing on, in one of the stages of decomposition. They were swollen and white. The woman’s feet and legs were stiff as the branches on a cedar tree and as rough looking, the skin ragged, and peeling. Psoriasis mounds were broken open, as with her fingernails and peeled back until they had bled, but were not bleeding now. Her scalp was a collection of sores as well, with torn skin like her legs. It looked as if she had tried to literally scrape through her skin until there wasn’t any skin left to scrape. Holes the size of pennies, and as brown, were left open, now marked with maggots crawling about. Her face was not as affected by the infection, but one could tell that scars traced the history of such occasions, when she had attacked her face in the same way.
The man’s mouth was gaping open and gnats were swarming in and out of his mouth. Many teeth were missing, and the rest, so rotten, it appeared that only a thread of nerve held the tooth in. There was a definite history of skin cancer on the man’s hands and arms, some spots with the diameter of a quarter, and others, just jutting knots of hard flesh. Both bodies appeared to have passed away at the same time, or within a small time frame of each other. And, with no blood in view but the scratched sores, and no bullet holes or knife marks present.
There were ant trails coming from the front door, the back door and cracks in the floor. The ants were quite small but up close, they seem to be gathering bits and pieces of the two bodies and carrying them back to their bed. Then James felt something biting on his left leg, then his right.
“Jesus! What the fuck?” He started slapping his legs and pulled up his pants legs to see several ants on his skin. He blocked out the ringing phone and started slapping and knocking the ants off his body. He hurried to another spot and looked closely if there were ants there, too.
James thought it was quite odd that there was no sign of foul play and both bodies were lying naked, in bed, dead. Maybe heat stroke…it is hot enough in here He had listened to the phone ring and ring, and finally picked the darn noisy thing up.
“A-hum!” he cleared his throat.
“Mom?” was a woman on the other end, anxiety in her voice.
“Officer James Beard. Is this Jennifer?”
“Have you learned anything yet, officer?” Jen asked, trying to dry her tears and wipe her nose. She was starting to have a panic attack, “ I see you are inside the house!”
“Well, can you drive up here sometime soon, Miss? It isn’t very good. You really need to come up here to discuss what has happened. I can’t discuss all this over the phone…if you know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t know what you mean, and I don’t drive. I lost my sight.”
“Oh, yeah, I remember, now. You are blind as a bat, miss!”
“Stop playing games with me, officer! What happened up there?”
“Well, hon., we really don’t know, except that your parents are both here, but appeared to stop breathing a good while ago, and there is no explanation for it. They look like they lay down for a nap and just died.”
There was a long pause on the other end.
“Lady, are you still there? Jennifer?” James was sitting now, in a huge recliner examining it for ants, facing a large television. He found the remote control and clicked it on. He turned down the sound and turned it to E. S. P. N. to check the baseball scores.
“I’m sorry,” he heard her sniffle, after a long pause, “I had to find a tissue. I must be dreaming. This isn’t true, is it. They’re both gone?”
“No, they are right here, in the bed, but not alive. I will have to call a coroner to figure this stuff out. Give me your number, and I will get back with you!”
“The police have my number, officer. I will try to find a ride up there.”
Unfeeling sack of shit! He knew what I meant when I said gone…
James heard the phone click and the dial tone come back , and he noticed that the Texas Rangers baseball team had lost their game.
“Damn! Another fifty bucks down the drain. I bet Chuck is going to gloat over this one!”
He rose from the recliner, still wearing the bandana over his nose, and felt in the back of the chair to find that he’d been sitting on a very sharp piece of a pork-chop bone. He put some fish food in the aquarium and the dog food in the dog dish. He went outside and saw the cat still lying in the sandy area by the pond. He took out some fish food and put it into the pond, and brought the cat dish with him and placed the full bowl in front of the cat. She took her paw and pulled out a little food and dragged it to her mouth.
The cat eats with her paw?
He returned to the living room and removed the birdcage, housing the two stiff parakeets. He promptly threw it towards the garbage cans. He knew from experience that he shouldn’t touch anything, but the dead bird was a health threat, he heard, and thought it a good idea to dismiss them. Maybe that’s it! that durn bird disease got them! He looked all around the house and didn’t find any natural gas, butane, or propane tanks. It couldn’t have been gas . Well it couldn’t have been anyway. The dog and cat and fish are still alive.
He rummaged through the drawers in the kitchen and the cabinets, with his glove still on, and found a little baggie and put the birds into the bag, thinking they should be analyzed. Could be the birds, but the pond… maybe the mosquitoes.. maybe West Nile Virus…
There was no asbestos on the walls or ceiling. There weren’t any sign of black mold or other breathing disorder problems in the house. He walked into the bathroom and looked into the medicine cabinet. He noticed that there were a bunch of pill bottles, with Janyce and Johnny’s names on them. They were the same pills for each. That was strange. They both took the same anti-depressants and both took the same arthritis medicine. Convenient! They both took narcotic pain medications, that were the same kind. Synthetic heroin! Maybe an overdose? The dosage was the same for each one, also. All the old, empty bottles were still in the cabinet, as if they kept them for other things. One bottle said a prescription medication on it, and had aspirin in it. Load up on these too, I guess. I had better get a search warrant before that woman in Dallas gets a ride up here.
He picked up the phone, and called the courthouse. He still was opening cabinets when he heard the recording on the phone
Damn menus!.
Another expired pill bottle had Rolaids in it. He closed the cabinet door and went into the kitchen. He knew not to touch the garbage or the food in the refrigerator incase they died of food poisoning. That theory had to be explored.
The smell was really getting to him, now. He still had on his gloves so he opened every window that he was able to open. There were four window units of air conditioners in the house, and they were all froze up. He turned them all on fan to thaw out the ice and get the cold air back into the house, full steam. Then, after locating the county clerk and explaining the circumstance, he pulled the blankets and afghans off of the big chair, sat back into it and changed the television to C. N. N. Wonder what they will do with this wonderful big-screen television? Jennifer isn’t going to want it being blind and all
He clicked on H. B. O. to see what the eight o’clock movie would be and remembered that it was Sunday. “Six Feet Under” came on.
What a coincidence…a show, about people dying….

Chapter 5: The Neighborhood Watch
Well, how long is that man going to stay inside the house?” asked Sharon, watching the front door from Brandy’s water garden, across the street.
“What could he be doing in there?” was Christina’s reply. Christina was Brandy’s cousin, who had just purchased some land, on the point.
“Looks to me like you’d need a gas mask to stay in the house that long,” muttered Sharon.
“What did they look like? I never saw someone dead before, I mean before they were embalmed . Were they rotten looking? I haven’t seen them come or go from that house in over a week!”
Brandy had been home now for a month, losing her job at a factory because of economic cutbacks. Normally, she would have been gone, every day, from two o’clock until about eleven-thirty. She was considering going back to college and getting a degree in something easy and high pay.
“ Pretty gross! They were both naked, white as ghosts and lay there with their mouths open. There were flies, maggots and ants everywhere. I was thinking that the flies were laying eggs inside of them. I saw some flying in and out of their mouths and noses. They were quite stiff!” Sharon shuddered, and then, remembered why she had gone in the house in the first place. She never called Jennifer.
“Wow,” said Christina, “makes you want to go right out and buy something to eat. I bet they won’t argue over food anymore.”
“You heard them argue over food?” asked Brandy, who was quite a big girl but healthy and cheerful.
“Well, once when I was going for a walk, I heard the woman, over there, yelling at her husband about how she had just bought two gallons of milk. He had already wiped out one of those gallons, buy pouring the milk into the tallest and fattest glass they owned, a couple of times, while he sat and watched television. There is a television on the porch, you know. And they have to talk loud to hear over it, as he watches the western movies. That is all he watches, I think , are westerns, where the shooting and horses make a lot of noise.. so his wife comes outside onto the porch and starts bitchin’ about how she was goin’ to fix the pancakes and he drank all the milk, and she decided to cook eggs and knew for a fact there were a half a carton and he wiped them out too, and now she had nothing to eat. There was no bread or lunchmeat and only whatever was in the refrigerator door and he was fat and comfortable and she was diabetic and needed to eat something. Then, he called her a fat bitch and said she could go on a diet.. that all those things were fattening anyway. He said that he, himself, was losing weight!”
“Apparently, he was just snacking and drinking and not even paying attention to the eating and drinking at all. He was just doing it automatically, to do something while he watched television. You know, the way a person will buy popcorn, in the movie theater? Someone will just eat, furiously, while they watch the movie and not even recognize that the gallon container of popcorn is gone!” said Sharon, “ I know he eats a lot because she has to go out and beg for stuff. I know she has been here asking for milk, cornmeal, toilet paper, and lots of other stuff. I don’t even work in that garden, she can pay me back for the food out of the garden, or she used to pay me back… Damn! What happened anyway?”
“So, they argued over food, so what?” answered Brandy, “My mom is always telling me that I eat too much of something. Too many grapes, too many cookies, too many chips!”
“And, Brandy! Look at you! You are wearing a three extra-large size clothes!”
“Christina, I’ll let that slide because you are blood. But, if you weren’t, I’d smack you!”
“I think we all get a little overweight as we get older, don’t you think?” asked Sharon, who wore a size seven.
“Well, that couple over there were both large. I don’t know how old they were, but they were big. Like, Jan had no reason to yell at Johnny for drinking all the milk, when she probably ate all the ice cream!” Brandy was feeling in her pocket for her lighter, to light her cigarette.
“Now, that’s not healthy! Not if you eat chips and cookies all day, and get as big as you are, and then smoke!” Christina was laughing at her cousin’s red face, “Those two argued about smoking too. I heard that ol’ bitch, over there, complain before, when I walked by a couple of weeks ago, about her husband smelling up the house with his cigarettes.
“Jan never let Johnny smoke in the house! I know that, and don’t call her an ol’ bitch. She was younger than me!”
“Everyone is younger than you, Sharon, except Nel.”
“He must have lit the cig on the stove or something. I do that sometimes,” said Brandy.
“That is why I still live with my mom and dad,” said Brandy, once getting her cigarette lit, “ They both smoke and don’t bitch about me smoking. After all, it was them that got me started! I used to sneak their cigarettes out and smoke them when I was thirteen.”
“You live with your mom and dad because you are still a virgin and fat, and a smoker, and can’t find a boyfriend!” Christina laughed.
“I have a boyfriend!” said Brandy.
“Who? We never see him!” Christina was still laughing and started to blow mucus out her nose, unrepentantly.
“Hell if I am introducing you to him, with that attitude! You will say something stupid and he will know you are my cousin!”
“He will look at me and think that you are going to be this big some day! Hee!”

“Girls, I think we should change the conversation. I see another police car coming. I don’t know why they have the lights on…I mean, the two people are dead and stiff! It is not like there is a burglar that needs chasing,” Sharon watched, with the others, as the new police car pulled up in front of Janyce and Johnny’s house.
The policeman who stepped out of the car wasn’t wearing a uniform, and was rather tall and thin. He had on a polo shirt, a pair of tan slacks, some shiny lace-up shoes, and a cowboy hat.
“Boy, is he in a fashion crisis,” said Brandy.
“Go get him, cous…maybe he likes fat virgins that smoke! Look, he is pulling out a cigarette as we speak!” said Chris.
“Shhh!” said Sharon, “That is the coroner, I think. He comes to the crime scenes now so he won‘t miss anything. He is the one that examines the bodies at the hospital for the policemen, in Preston.”
“You know him?” asked Brandy.
“Not personally, but this didn’t look like a crime scene. This looked like a scene in a Science fiction story… no marks on the body and nothing amiss except the neglected animals and yard. Didn’t look like anything was missing or broken into.
“He looked at my husband after he died. Frank was shot, remember? That wasn’t what killed him, though. He died of a heart attack. I thought the bullet killed him but it was his heart. I guess the first cop called the coroner to examine the bodies because they didn’t look as if they were met by foul play.”
“ Fowl play! Hah! The parakeets killed them!” laughed Brandy.
“That isn’t funny,” said Sharon, “ The parakeets died from dehydration in the cage. They ran out of water and there was no one there to feed or water them, when Janyce died.”
“Who fed the cat and dog? Didn’t they have a bunch of fish, too?” asked Brandy.
“No one fed anything! The dog and cat were both trapped in that house, because the doggie door and the windows were closed up to keep in whatever cool air they could retain. The fish fed on the algae in the pond, and there was enough food in the aquarium for those fish. Johnny always over fed the fish. The house is unbearable!”
“Well, is he married?” asked Christina.
“Who, the coroner? No, I don’t think so. Look! He is posting a search warrant on the telephone pole in front of the house.
“ Why? Do you want me to introduce him to Brandy?” Sharon was looking at Brandy when she spoke to Christina.
“I have a boyfriend! He drives a truck and we are very much in love. I just can’t see him real often!”
“What are you going to say, Sharon?” Christina giggled, “Hey, don’t look at those bodies, look at this one!” and pointed at Brandy.
“Screw you! Maybe he isn’t married because no one wants to go with a seven-foot tall, thin man who smokes and plays with dead people! I’m tall, and maybe that is to my advantage! At least I don’t have to say, “Honey, would you reach this and that for me?”
“Yeah, Janyce was only five foot tall. Johnny was a good foot and a half taller than her, “ thought Sharon out loud.
“Boy, did they look strange together. But you could tell they ate the same foods.”
“Brandy, that is cruel! Have some respect for the dead!” Christina looked back at the man leaning against his car, now, dragging on the cigarette, real slow, and blowing out smoke-rings.
“Why doesn’t he go inside?” Sharon muttered to herself, again, “ Now, I feel bad about not giving him the rider to mow with. Look at that yard and how he tried to fix Tony’s old lawnmower. Bet he spent all their money on the lawnmower cause I wouldn’t let him use mine.”

The coroner answered her question for her. He put out the cigarette, with his foot, on the black tarred street, and walked to the front door, after posting the sign.
“ He doesn’t smoke in people’s houses or the car! He is a gentleman!” smiled Brandy.
“Well, he certainly can’t smell up the house any more than it already smells!” added Sharon, “Janyce told me a story once about when her husband and herself went to Oklahoma and worked on a pig farm.”
“Yuck! When did they do that?” asked Christina.
“A long time ago…anyway, Janyce said that there was this couple that lived on the property where the pig barns were, and they had this beautiful home. It was a log cabin and there wasn’t a hair on the counter or a piece of lint on the floor. It was really clean and smelled nice. Both, the man and the woman smoked. They had a smoke eater inserted into the ceiling or something that drew out the smoke. You know, like in a bar.”
“I quit going to bars, after Calvin killed that guy in the parking lot last month. Did you hear about that?” Brandy was lighting up another cigarette with the old cigarette she was finished with, and his wife just erased it from her mind and still works at the supermarket everyday and he can’t keep a job too far ‘cause he has that bracelet on his ankle. He has to blow into a gadget before the truck will start. He can’t be caught with any alcohol!”
“Are you listening to the story or what?” asked Sharon, now quite annoyed.
“Well, what about it? Two people raised pigs and lived in a clean home. So what?”
Asked Christina.
“Well, Janyce had already quit smoking years before and the smoke really aggravated her when she smelled it. Like, it made her real sick! When she was in the house, she felt okay but when she went out to the barns, whew! The pig shit and piss was awful because there was a little river under the pigs and when they pooped and peed, it all went into the river! The river was like a sewer that moved the waste materials away from the barns and over to a little canal. Janyce told me that the canal had irrigation ditches running into the garden that was planted besides the clean log cabin.
She told me that the vegetables were huge! The tomatoes were the size of cantaloupes and so were the green peppers. All the eggplant and other squashes were quite large as well!”
“Sharon, are you telling us that the pig farm owners were eating vegetables that were fertilized from the pig waste? … Not dried up fertilizer, but runny, slimy pig waste?” Christina made an ugly face at Brandy, who looked quite calm.
“Yeah,” said Brandy, “those tomatoes were full of pig piss and pig poop.”
“Well, I am sure that the veggies were okay, or the people there wouldn’t have eaten them,” Sharon replied.
“ Well, that wasn’t all. The two owners were teaching Janyce and Johnny the trade, thinking that they would stay and work the pig farm. Janyce said they had been promised a large mobile home about one hundred feet from the barn, for free, and all the utilities paid!”
“Who would want to live that close to pigs?” asked Brandy.
“Janyce said that while she had to do the dirty work, Johnny was doing artificial, test tube breeding with the boars and sows that were in another barn. Janyce was in charge of feeding the pregnant sows, pulling the little trapped pigs out of their mother, and washing the poop and pee into the river below the pens. She had to take the little pigs, when they were only a day old, and grind their tusks down to the gum-line. She had to brand them, give them their shots, cut off their tails, and as soon as she learned all that, she would have to castrate them!” Sharon had both girls’ attention, now!
“Well, so, they didn’t take the job because of that?”
“ No, they didn’t take the job because Janyce couldn’t stand the smell of the pig pens and had quit smoking. Well, she really didn‘t like hurting the little baby pigs. You know how she is with little animals.”
“What does this all mean to us?” asked Brandy.
“If Janyce hadn’t quit smoking, it would have been alright! Johnny was like the couple. He just smoked the whole time he was in the pens and the pig smell never penetrated the nicotine. Janyce said the couple who owned the pig farm just smoked cigarette after cigarette and the smell didn’t bother them. Now, look what the coroner did! He smoked a cigarette before he entered the house. Maybe he knows, from experience, that he needs to plug up his nose before he goes in, to keep from smelling the dead bodies!”
“So, you’re saying that the coroner smokes to deal with his job, the smell of his job. How many people has he diagnosed that died from Lung Cancer? I bet none! Or he would change his mind on the tobacco thing.”
“ Why doesn’t he do his job at the hospital?” asked Chris, “I watch television and never see the coroner inspecting the bodies in the houses where they die.” She was watching the front door. There was no activity there. The coroner had come in his own car, and not an ambulance to carry the bodies away. This seemed strange to her.
The three women just sat around the pond and watched, quiet now, and listened. They faintly heard the television from inside Johnny and Janyce’s house.

Chapter 6: Finding a Ride to the Lake

Jennifer and Taylor sat in front of the phone, waiting for more news. Jennifer had called everyone she knew to give her a ride from Garland to Lake Texoma, but everyone was either at work or too busy with their own problems.
They both jumped when the phone finally did ring.
“What has happened to your parents? I didn’t actually get the message straight in my head. Please explain it to me.” It was Robert Denning, Jennifer’s neighbor across the street.
“We don’t know,” answered Jennifer, “I didn’t hear from them for a long time, and now, I hear that they were found dead in the bed! Both died and there doesn’t seem to be any foul play, from what I heard. But then again, I am not there, and I need to go up there. I can’t find anyone to take me. Will you?”
“Taylor doesn’t need all that, with her grandparents. Maybe if you find someone to watch her, then, maybe I will take off work to take you. I have really been busy, and there is nothing you can do if they are already dead, now, is there?”
Jennifer remembered a few years ago…seemed like yesterday…
Jennifer listened to Taylor, only three and one half years old, playing in the cove with her grandmother. Janyce sat in the shallow water and would spin Taylor around in a small inner tube, that was bought at the nearby second-hand store. Taylor was giggling every time Grandma Jan spun her around and the water splashed up in Janyce’s face, making her grimace and grunt a little noise at Taylor.
Jennifer giggled to herself, “Wonder why mom does that if it bothers her to have water splash up in her face?”
She could hear the spinning, the splashing, and then the grunt…it was so funny.
It was July and quite hot. Robert and Johnny had gone fishing at the pier and the girls had decided to swim until the boys returned with their catch. Life was so easy, up there, at the lake. The veggies were coming in at the garden, and the okra was already cut up, waiting to fry, the fresh plucked spinach leaves were already in the salad bowl with the hand picked cucumbers, tomatoes, radishes and carrots.
Last night, the boys brought back five crappie, four catfish, two stripers and a perch. The cornmeal left over from the fish fry the night before sat in the freezer, waiting. The sun was hot, but the water was calm and relaxing. Jennifer moved her beach chair into the water and just let the soft waves trickle over her legs as she put on more sun-block.
The laughter and the splashing returned to her immediate attention and Jennifer noticed on top of the water, about five yards away, two turtle- heads poking out to see what all the commotion was about.
I hope Taylor enjoys every moment spent up here and continues to come here and visit this place if anything should ever happen to me…

“Hey, you! Did you hear what I said?” Robert was talking rather loud now, into to her ear.
“I’m sorry, Robert, I just drifted off a little. I am still a little in shock. Maybe you are right. Taylor doesn’t need to see the way things are right now, up there, at the lake. I will check around. Maybe one of Taylor’s, friend’s mom would watch her. I will have to check. I need to be there. Who else is going to take care of the house, the…”
“You don’t know what that house is like. You haven’t been up there in a while. Your parents were found together, both dead. What if someone came in and killed them, and ransacked the place. You will be tripping and falling everywhere, the place probably needs cleaning…who knows. Get someone to watch Taylor and we will go and investigate together. I will try to take off work for about two weeks and we can take care of all the arrangements, then.” Robert was silent for a moment, Jennifer, I am truly sorry for your loss.”
“They were both taking a lot of medicine.. maybe it didn’t agree with them after such a long time!”
They were good parents to you. It’s a shame something should happen like that. I need to go back to work, now. Be sweet and say hi to your precious little girl. Bye.” There was a click and Jennifer hung up the phone. She wondered whom she would call. She had lied. Taylor didn’t have any close friends.

“What, Georgia? You were playing with that blind lady’s kid? …and a Jew? I don’t want you going down the street and playing, unsupervised!”
“But mommy! She is there, her mother. Maybe she can’t see but she can hear! She knows what we are doing.”
“She can’t see what you and your friend are doing! She is blind!”

“Shanna, I would prefer that you go to Georgia’s house. Taylor’s mom isn’t the ideal person for you to be around!”
“But I like Taylor, and she is real smart! She knows a lot of games to play that are fun!”
“Go to Georgia’s house. Her mom is there to watch and make sure you don’t get in trouble. She makes sure you are safe!”

“Caroline, don’t go over there! I am warning you, if you do you will be grounded! I don’t want you hanging around that blind Jew!”

Taylor never spoke much to her mother about all the prejudice, but instead, found refuge in reading and learned about children that had it a lot worst off than herself, but her mother knew, as her very own friends were lax in visitation since she went blind.

Chapter 7: The Neighbors

Mr. Devon was driving his brand new red Dodge Ram down the small two-lane road, when he noticed the Sheriff’s car parked outside of Johnny’s house. Oh, they were always calling the law on each other. He wondered what it was this time.
One time Johnny got drunk and went off in his motor home with the family dog. They hadn’t had that dog but about eight months, finding it in an abandoned garage, infested with tics and fleas. It was a little thing, full of energy. Well it was after numerous trips to the vet, putting Janyce deep in debt to kill the bugs and worming the dog, his shots and his nails clipped. They named it Pogo because it loved to jump straight up! It could jump right into Johnny’s arms and he was every bit six foot three! That was the cutest little mutt! Then, Pogo was digging holes under the fence to run about, chasing cats and crapping in peoples’ yards. He managed to tear up everyone’s garbage, as well. Johnny was pissed at always having to change the fence around by putting stones under the wood, or wiring it up with chicken wire to hold the dog in. Then, the dog would find something to use as a springboard, and jump over the fence. He learned how to open the screen door on the porch, so, that wasn’t an option.
Johnny had specially put in a little doggie door in the back so it could go outside to do its business. The dog knew how to use his own door and still pissed in the house. There was a new pink and green carpet that Johnny and Janyce received as a gift where they worked on a little old lady’s house. Janyce was so proud of the carpet, putting it in the middle of the living room floor. Well, one day when I was over for a visit, I noticed a bad odor coming from the carpet.

“Johnny, do you think that maybe something died under the house? Can’t you smell that odor?”
“Well, no…”
“You can’t smell it because you smoke so damn much!” Janyce yelled from upstairs, “I can smell it! But I bet I know what that odor is! It’s that damn little dog! Look under the carpet!”
Will picked up the bound edge of the pretty carpet and under it, there were ammonia stains on the vinyl tile and the carpet had wide dark spots where the dog had urinated repeatedly all over the entire expanse.
“My God! That dog has pissed everywhere, no wonder!” yelled Johnny back to Janyce.

That night, Johnny went on one of his drinking binges and took the dog. No one ever saw that dog again.
Janyce cried for weeks.

“The coyote got him! We was sleeping out by the lake and when I woke up he was gone!”
“That dog hardly ever lost sight of you, you damn liar! You took him out there, killed him, and threw him in the lake!” Janyce whined, teary eyed, “You do nothing but lie every chance you get, asshole! You took the dog and killed it or sold it for beer!”

Every time Will came over, there was that look on Janyce’s face. “You took him and killed him or sold him for beer…”
After that incident, whenever Johnny pulled a drunk and started to do something, like run off with one of the family pets, Janyce would dial 911 and report a dog theft.
Johnny quit taking the dogs with him, leaving them at home. Instead, he found tools to take that would bring him money to drink on. Janyce never gave Johnny money lest he should spend it unwisely.

Will looked to his left and saw the women sitting together around the pond gossiping. He still idled his truck at the corner looking at the extra car there.. The Coroner’s car.
“That car looks familiar,” he said, looking at the government plate on the license tag.
That’s all they do is talk about each other behind each other’s back. This one is screwing that one’s husband or that one is leaving her husband in two weeks with nothing to wipe his ass with…damn bitches and none of them gals have a husband, hah!
Will picked up speed and looked in his rearview mirror, just catching the ambulance coming to pick up the two bodies.
“Someone is sick, reckon,” he spoke aloud to himself. Better if those two just left the neighborhood and gave us some peace. Rednecks, both of them.”
Janyce’s Demons

Part 1: The Writing of Janyce’s Manuscript , “ Jeffrey’s Garden”

Chapter 1: From the Window

The first time I ever lay eyes on Jeffrey was through a two by four foot window, from my loft, which is only suitable as a storage facility. I have managed to stuff most of my treasures into the little pyramid of a space, including my computer, four chairs, five small two drawer file cabinets, two dressers, one end table, and a double bed as my essentials. Plus, I have a small dollhouse with tiny little furniture, and an enormous dollhouse filled with my childhood Madam Alexander dolls, porcelain dolls, imported dolls from Europe, dolls made in China and every imaginable miniature piece of furniture, and finishing touches that only a well established interior decorator from Home and Garden Television could provide. Also, packed into the loft space is the metal shelving that once housed books, then tools, replaced by small treasures, broken or found, waiting for the other lost parts to show up.
I couldn't keep it at that, having to buy a new sewing machine to sew all the saved fabrics that were, at one time, pleasing to the eye and now unraveled, buttons lost from clothes already hanging at the church resale barn, doll dresses from the fifties that needed work, and piles of sparkling, sheer material that I was hoping that one day, would stream from windows to window that hadn't been installed yet.
I positioned my computer in a location where I could gaze out the window and watch the neighbors like the “fool on the hill” described by the Beatles, years ago in my youth. Maybe I am the fool on the hill after all, since my neighbors have viewed all my challenges as a direct motive to love thy neighbor as it is written, and without these small-time country people, my life would have been useless to save.
That day, looking from the second floor, Jeffery was struggling with a rather large tiller, allowing it to drag his tall but thin, small-framed body here and there, while gouging up chunks of clotted dirt, rock and root. I watched this young, handsome man, with the determined look, fixed on his face, that nothing would stand in his way to reorganize mother-nature's plans. His feet were crunching over the black walnuts from the large tree near the street, the broken glass and squashed up blackened cans that once were the foundation of a well used up burn pile. The loud, vibrating machine was slinging bits and pieces of old tattered plastic, rusty nails and chicken bone, Styrofoam and tin, slinging rubble everywhere to mix into and litter the soil that would be used to plant an organic garden.
Some of that stuff isn’t organic, Jeffrey…
The old rotten peach seeds were flying hither and thither and one barely missed the small orange kitten jumping and chasing all the debris as it slung out of the backside of the tiller. The young man had tilled only a section approximately twelve feet by five feet and turned off the vibrating, growling machine, to wipe his brow with the base of his shirt. He looked around at the four huge lots, full of fire-ant beds, boulders, tree-stumps and broken glass. I watched as he slipped his now wet T-shirt off his thin but muscular chest, wiping his neck off with what appeared to be a small, dry spot left, on the shirt, just for that purpose.
I stepped back so he wouldn't see me watching him. He was my newest neighbor, after all, and I had no intention of making him feel that a dirty old fat woman was drooling over his youthful stature. He left the tiller in place and walked back into the house. That was the only time I saw Jeffery that year. I had so many health issues of my own, it never occurred to me that he had moved with his family back to the city, from which they came, and the house belonged to someone else.

Chapter 2: My life in General

I am a dysfunctional person. My family was not dysfunctional, as my childhood was really a typical “Leave it to Beaver” family: middle class, white, educated, and in debt over our heads. I never realized how dysfunctional I was until I moved away from big, busy, suburban Dallas and realized that it was no one's fault. I became dysfunctional all by myself.
I chose not to listen in school, I chose to run around with all the wrong friends, I chose to partake in the drug revolution and I also chose to disobey my parents and get pregnant before marriage. I also chose to marry the first one who asked me, and, if I didn't think I made the right choice, I divorced the man and found someone else. I seemed to be addicted to attention and as a short, somewhat average girl, I needed to know that someone actually looked down at their shoelaces and discovered me standing there.
My mother and father always wanted a house by a lake and in the sixties, they built one. I waited until I was desperately broke and disgusted with my chosen profession to decide to occupy this lake-house. Both parents had found another home, in heaven with all their former loved ones, so I thought it natural to keep the house traditionally in the family. No one else wanted the house anyway. It was in such disrepair that no one wanted the headaches of making it livable.
So, moving back to my beloved lake-house of the sixties, I discovered that a lot of the neighbors had reinvented themselves. Most of the old-timers were with my mother and father, and a new generation had remodeled, landscaped, and moved into the newly invented triple-wide mobile homes with almost the life expectancy of a real house. Mine was a real house but the side shingles climbing up a narrow A-frame roof had rotted, and somewhat reinvented themselves as well. I used them for kindling in the fireplace. It gets rather cold here in the winter.
The house had been rented to at least half of the irresponsible population in the region and all the typical problems existed. The plumbing had leaked and the floor was completely weather-rotted. The roof had leaked and was still doing so. The floor needed replacing, walls had invited Virginia creeper to move in, and water-roaches, mice and other little critters had decided to homestead the property. The good news was the house was paid for. We only had to figure out where to urinate, defecate, how to cook (no stove or refrigerator), sleep (no heat or air) and pay to fix (no jobs) all the problems.
We managed, with our faith in God and ourselves until I was treated for an illness that I wasn't ready for: Hepatitis C.

Chapter 3: The Long Road Though Hell

It was when my latest husband Johnny, (not to be confused with my first husband Johnny) and I were sitting in the Department of Human Services to legally beg for food from the government, when he noticed Sharon. She was sort of looking around at the nearly empty room, not noticing or recognizing me or where she was, exactly. There was another woman with her that I haven't seen before.
“Look, honey!” Johnny said, “There is your neighbor!”
“Our neighbor.”
“Sharon?” I asked, trying to act innocent, knowing I felt guilty as hell for not paying her a visit after she lost her husband.
“Well”, she answered, “Now that I am alone, I only get $500.00 from the government and I need food.”
“Well, that is why I am here! I need food!” I brightened up, knowing that someone in Afghanistan could live on my body weight for years.
“They are allowing me $10.00 a month after I fill out twenty forms and come back with proof of residency.”
Sharon's eyes were still in that fixed gaze that seemed to examine the dirty spots on the walls of the welfare department. Papers were covered in glass advertising from the Health Department, to get yearly checkups, and other signs flooded the walls in Spanish for those who hadn't been in the United States long enough to learn English.
I watched as she meandered her way though the door and made a pathway to the black truck that awaited them in the parking lot. I wondered then if she was in good mental health. Her eyes showed the same symptoms as the Mexican addicts in Espanola, New Mexico that Johnny had been chummy with, as they were trying to kick the Heroin habit.
Poor Sharon! She had a neighbor who lived one block away who hadn't paid her a visit. Maybe I would go see her after all and tell her about my problems. Then, maybe she would forget about her own.
The interview for the food stamps was grueling but we managed to receive two hundred and forty-eight dollars, monthly. We would have to wait a month though since our timing for filing was late. Our refrigerator contained a half a jar of jelly with swirls of old butter spread, and some vinegar. We contemplated holding up a sign but I was too embarrassed, maybe seeing my daughter-in-law drive by in their new car, so we decided to hit the local food bank instead.
We did end up with canned goods, stale bread and some frozen blueberries. I was thanking God for His generosity, when we pulled up to the mailbox and found my long awaited retirement check from New Mexico Independent Schools. We dumped the groceries and drove to Kentucky Fried Chicken and had a feast we had only dreamed about.

Chapter 4: The Last Real Job

Somehow in the paper trail of bureaucracy, I received a phone call from a school in a town that I never heard of, looking for a teacher. I went for the interview and sat on pins and needles for three weeks until I was hired. I honestly believe that no one else in the whole world wanted that job and so they called me back. I fell in love with one hundred and forty-three young children who made me happy and sad, nervous and depressed, and since I was becoming more ill as time wore on, I was asked to resign and take my place in the ranks of the unemployed. I was again, waiting at the food banks for the stale bread and borrowing toilet paper from the neighbors. I wrote a manuscript about my teaching experiences and only one person read it, Sharon. I thought it wise to ask her to review my material before I submitted it to an agent since no one else in my neighborhood read. She never commented on the script, as she had once substituted , herself, and had made an issue of her long experiences as a teacher thereafter, putting her in the same ranks as myself.
Wait, the dog is barking wildly at the door, be right back.

“Barbara!”
“Jan, do you mind if I use your computer for a little while?”
She's holding one of those sheets of notes in her hand, again. What is she up to?
“Something on Schizophrenia?”
“No, Jeffrey has a paper due soon and I was going to look up the information for him.”
“Don't you think that Jeff should do the looking up since he is taking the class?”
She is getting that bewildered look on her face.
“I just thought I would do this for him since he probably can't make it up the stairs or even sit where your computer is located.”
“Not now, Barbara, I am starting a new manuscript and I really think that Jeffrey should do his own schoolwork. I am ..er..was a teacher, remember? That looks like cheating to me. If I was Jeffrey's teacher and found out that his mother did his homework, I would give him a big red F.”
“Jan!”
Damn, these stairs are either getting steeper or I am getting fatter, one.. Good, she is turning around and leaving with her little piece of paper … guess I will try again. .

Chapter 5: Sharon
Since Sharon and I were both in the restaurant business, so to speak, her father running a grill in North Dallas, and my father running a grill about fifteen miles north of that one, we were food servers in a much needed food service market. So, we had a lot in common that way and the fact that she fell in a restaurant and got her fiifth and sixth discs in her back out of whack, and I did the same thing a few months later made us twins, sort of, since neither of us can now turn our heads to back up a motor vehicle. I don't really disapprove of Sharon , it is just that she is too approving of everyone and everything. I am terribly jealous of her temperament. You will never hear her complain very much about how her childhood was a mess living with her stepfather who is still somewhat a perfectionist, and how her mother's liver cancer has her on edge everyday. You never hear how I encouraged her to start walking with Barbara and I to loose weight, and as Barbara and I lessened our walk, Sharon continued and added stretching exercises to her daily lifestyle, cut back on her food consumption, and lost a whopping thirty pounds. As it should be for every young widow, everyone loves Sharon and I have felt that her friendship has been a warm and comforting asset to my life.

Chapter 5: The Cure

The long, regimental therapy I had to endure, to get over the multiplication of Hepatitis C Virus was boring, irritating, and disgusting. First, I had to convince my husband that he could no longer go on weekly binges with his whiskey and beer, leaving me alone to flounder around for food in a disarranged living condition. He is, as will always be, an alcoholic, not admitting to it, and not admonishing it, but everyone around here knows it and leaves it alone. He is too well loved by the single, divorced and widowed women in the neighborhood to be condemned for his genetic makeup.
When I had to prepare myself for the ultimate cure (which there isn't one as we have learned at this time) I was going to doctors week after week, taking loads of vitamins to build up my blood for the new medicine I would be testing. I couldn't afford to buy the medicine on the market so I signed up for a drug testing program, putting me in the same category as The Rats of N. I. H. M., hoping for the great escape from my past lives.
I was stupid in the sixties as most of us were, and injected drugs with used needles, and syringes made from baby pacifiers and eyedroppers .Well anything I could inject, I did. So now I live with a trashed liver and am awaiting the same fate as Sharon's mother.
I started the Peg (as my therapist called it,) Inferron and took Ribavirun with it to insure the fact that not only did I make myself so ill that the virus didn't want to live inside of me, or that I made myself so crazy and ugly, dying would be a relief. I broke out in the most horrid rash I had ever dreamed of, covering my back, legs, stomach, face and scalp. I had it on my arms and was so embarrassed, I only left the house to see the doctors so they could see if the medicine was killing me or just the virus. I had to inject myself with the inferron (should have been named inferno) once a week with the low cost of two or three hundred dollars an injection but since I was in the Test Program someone else paid for my misery.
The only other side effect beside the rash, and a little anemia, was the inner feeling of hate and despair that makes one want to either commit suicide or murder. I had the latter and started to create enemies out of telemarketers and postal clerks.
God saved me from killing Johnny, as he had a hard time telling his friends that he couldn't buy them beer, and let them get drunk in my living room because his fat, scabby wife was up in the attic shooting her daily dosage of hate medicine. They soon learned that if they even smelled like beer (and I could smell beer on someone in the lake, fishing three miles from the house) that I would appear on the stairs in a manic rage and throw things at their person.
Soon, it was very clear that Johnny would have to resign himself to his fate, taking care of his sick wife, now that the doctor decided to add anxiety medicine and sleeping pills to her diet.
Honey!
Damn, doesn't he know I am doing something?
What?
(save)
I am going to mow Brandy's yard, so I need some money for gas!
Is Sharon's mower fixed yet?
That's right! I filled that tank up before it quit on me, thank you!
Now, where did I put my stash of four dollars? Here it is!
(throws down the money from the loft)
I will be back in a few.

Chapter 6: Brandy
Brandy, now that is another story. She lives a little down the road and was born too late. I mean, she should have been born in the forties giving her the chance of a lifetime to enjoy her artistic hobbies in the sixties. The first time I saw her yard was in the spring, after we moved back home. She had all her Christmas lights draped around every tree and shrub. I was amazed at the beauty. She had an abundance of hanging baskets, concrete statues, chairs of every design and hundreds of tropical plants one could get lost in, and a double deck pond, almost like having a bed for the fish and a trundle that pulls out for guests.
Immediately, I decided if I didn't do anything else, I would build a pond, or dig a big hole and fill it with water.
Brandy lives with her mother and boyfriend, now, because her dad passed away, and I am sure it is cheaper to all live together for financial reasons. She is a Certified Nurse’ aid and is real informative. Her boyfriend is really nice but doesn't stay there all the time since he has chosen to drive a big truck for a living. When he does come home, though, no one sees Brandy much. She is with her Bobby. Brandy is bigger than me but has always been a big girl, from her own lips, saying that even though she is big, she has kept herself fit. She does go white water rafting every year, and has admitted to fishing occasionally, if she didn't have to bait her hook, take off the fish, clean the fish or fry it. I think she does eat fish, but I am not sure. Barbara's boyfriend, Will, has fried fish on many occasions, served it on the backyard deck, and never have I seen Brandy come over to taste it. But then, her Bobby was there.

Back to "the cure"
Well, I took the cure for a year, taking many medications with it, hiding in my attic and writing dirty novels that no agent or publisher wanted to put in print. Occasionally, I would get in the chat-rooms and tell everyone I had the dreaded H.C.V.. When everyone wrote to me they were sorry and would pray for me and really helped me with my depression, I would go back to writing another dirty manuscript, and hope someone would publish it before the H. C.V. would kill me or turn my liver into a huge living scar. I imagined that on the back of the novel cover there would be a little excerpt saying, “Mrs. Cummings was an exceptional writer who died, prematurely, before she reached the peak of her performance.”
Finally, I called the doctor's office and begged for something to help my anger and the nurse said if I needed anger management, to go to Mental Health/Mental Retardation.. I did go and was told by a counselor there that I was completely sane and I should change my environment (the one that made me angry, depressed and anxious) and my mental health would magically restore itself to the age of eight, when the world was on my side, or before my neighbors found out my family was Jewish.
(save)

“Give me some money, Jan! I need to go get some tobacco!”
“Oh yeah? I don’t fuck with you when you are busy! I am writing. All I have is a twenty!”
“Then, give me the twenty!”
“You had better only get tobacco!”
“Damn it! It is my money! Mine! I will get what ever the fuck I want with my money!
I had better hide the purse, now… just in case he comes back home late and drunk.”
Gotta stop to do this , gotta stop to do that… boy will I be glad when that divorce goes through. Will he be surprised!
There he goes, down the road with that tire real low. Hope he makes it back or forward or whatever…
Oh. Where was I…
Soon, I was taken off the "Peg" because I threatened everyone who talked to me. I had my blood tested and the virus had become invisible. In it's path, it left me many benefits: Fibromyalgia, Diabetes, Insomnia, Psoriasis, Depression, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Restless Leg Syndrome, and Edema. What a tradeoff! Now, I could live in peace, knowing that my liver wasn't going to rot anymore, just my muscles, tendons and ligaments. By the way, it is painless to have H. C.V. because you cannot feel it when your liver is becoming scarred, but, Fibromyalgia is not painless and it is forever in your system as is Diabetes. I did quit smoking, though, so I could enjoy all my benefits of the cure!

That damn noise behind me.. Barbara’s husband, Will, and the tall weeds. OOPS! Bad mistake! They aren’t married anymore. I wish they made lawnmowers that were quiet. That is it! A moneymaking invention! A quiet mower, a quiet chainsaw and a quiet string-trimmer!
AWoof! Grrrrrrrr Woof! GrrrY
A quiet dog
Damn! Down the stairs, up the stairs, down the stairs, and I don't loose any weight!
“Who's there?”
“It's me, Rebecca. Is it a bad time?”
No, just that my legs ache all to hell, I have a dog that barks and bites and you interrupted my writing...and my husband will more than likely pull a drunken binge…
“No, Reba, just a moment and let me do something with the dog! 'Into Johnny's room, Captain, into Johnny's room!' (nudge, nudge).’
GRRRRRRR
‘Get back, go into Johnny's room!’
Thank God he understands English! ...but then he is an Australian Shepherd! Thank God I didn't get a French Poodle...
“Come on in Reba, watch the birdcage, Johnny has added another room to it and doesn't realize that we are not all six foot, three!”
A Well, it is Johnny who I really want to see I am having family over this weekend and need the yard done again. Oh, he doesn't have to do the back, it isn't bad, just the front and around the trampoline.”
“Well, he went to get tobacco and he is supposed to mow across the road, there, Brandy's yard. You could tell him when he gets back. I am upstairs and you are truckin’ around in that little golf cart. You will see him first, I imagine.”
“I tried to, Jan. I was on my golf-cart and waved and hollered and he just waved back and held up his pitcher of drink and went on driving. Did you know he mows in circles a lot? I mean, I have seen him just continue mowing in a circle after the grass is cut!”
“It depends on what drug he takes. Now, if he takes the Attention Span Deficit Disorder Drug, he doesn't do that. If he takes the pain pills for his knees, he gets in a rut, sort of, and can't pull himself out of the circle.”
“ Actually, I think he is making ruts, don’t you think? Well, what do you do? Just let him drive the mower in circles until he runs out of gas?”
“Sometimes he quits to use the bathroom because he drinks that tea all day and has to stop about every twenty minutes. If he drinks Mountain Dew, he doesn't stop as often but I think he has only water right now, since he has wiped out all the rest of his favorite choices. He will probably be going in circles for a little while longer. I will tell him to head on out to your place if I see him first. He should have plenty of gas.”
“Well, my yard is too small for him to go in circles, thank goodness. It doesn't make you nervous?”
“I don’t get nervous. I take anti-depressants. “

Chapter 5: The Government Offices
Don’t ever get sick. Really! If you do, make sure you have an illness that goes away and you fully recover from it. Government employees don’t like people with serious, chronic illnesses. It makes them do loads of paperwork and they don’t understand why you don’t do all the paperwork for them and they collect the money for you doing it.
Lucky for me I had a loving aunt who scrimped and saved her money, investing it in stock so, after her death, she had a trust set up especially for my family in case of dire need, we would not be without life's basic needs: food, clothing and shelter. But, the trust officers of a bank where the trust was located would make all the final decisions about where the money would go. At this time, the money was sent to pay for electricity, water and taxes on the house. The phone Will was also paid for which was a Godsend since every important call I made put me on hold for an unlimited time period. I heard every kind of music and every recording there was and the bank paid for it. Thank you, Aunt Esther!
I filled out enough information to have my identity stolen by the government and still can't figure out why other people go to prison for the same thing. How do we, poverty stricken, poor, ill fated Americans know that the government employees think that our pitiful, wretched lives aren't actually better than their own and steal our identity? We don't!
The Social Security office had every marriage, every address, every job, every relative, every duty I ever performed, every nick-name, every bad credit reference, and every location of each and every mole on my body, in writing, in front of them in triplicate copies. Then, they had every doctor visit, with every diagnosis and every pill listed that I ever had to take. They had a list of aches and pains, tremors and syndromes. They had the myalgias and the phobias in front of them and the lists of things I couldn't do anymore. The case worker still shook her head and said that it was a very slim chance that the government would help me because there were more needy cases than mine and they had been filed first! And, I had an education and should be able to find something to do to make money.
I could, but my body wasn’t as pretty as it used to be.
I went home, stopping at the food bank on the way, and picked up more canned goods, soured juice, stale bread, and a lot of sweets I couldn't eat because I am diabetic. Johnny ate the sweets first, since he hadn't had his blood sugar checked and the alcohol from the last binge had worn off. His philosophy is that if you don't have your blood checked, you aren't diabetic.
The following day, Johnny and I went to turn in his application for S. S. I. (Supplemental Security Income) [told by a Social Security Counselor: WELFARE] and they were nicer to him!( different social worker).
He had me to fill out all his paperwork and I even wrote an eight-page letter to post with the application in order for the social workers to see that Johnny really needed help if not so from the government, from someone. I figured that maybe he would luck out since he hadn't held a real job in twenty years (or owned a driver's license).
I had learned all the symptoms of Attention Deficit Disorder from my teaching years and I recognized learning disabilities in youngsters, so I knew right away that my husband displayed all these same symptoms and figured that someone who was a professional would recognize them as well. Well! That didn't happen.

In a matter of days, he was scheduled to see a Psychologist for some testing and a General Practitioner for his knee pain.
From my experience, the doctors that diagnose for disability are not paid enough by the government. They are careless in their judgment on many, unconcerned about the problems of many, and don't care if these poor souls are helped or not. They save the government millions of dollars in disability claims everyday by being slow on their transcriptions and diagnosis, only examining the minimum of complaints and lack compassion for the ill. The disabled are only one steer after another, in a herd of cattle, going through one door and out the other with a claim justified in the eyes of the government. It has become a huge scam for Attorneys.
If you aren't given disability from the government on the first attempt, you try, try again. When you are denied, you have to go to an attorney, to help you get re-evaluated. This means that you have to go back to the doctors, over and over. You see different doctors who don't know your case, personally. They probe you, mash you, bash your joints, X-ray you, stab you with needles and write reports on you, month after month, year after year, while you hang on to that lottery ticket hoping eventually your number will be drawn. If and when your number does come up, the government has to give you back pay for your waiting time. The attorney gets one fourth of your back pay. If you are granted one thousand dollars, you give away two hundred and fifty to the attorney for filling out some paperwork, collecting records and sending out letters. I could do that, but then, if I did, it would look as if I could work. With Johnny, his number was drawn immediately! Mentally retarded, his paper read. He was deemed mentally retarded and would receive a monthly paycheck of three hundred and seventy-two dollars from the government every month of his life until he died. After all, the mentally retarded don’t need food, adequate shelter or clothing…do they? Of course, he would have to be re-evaluated occasionally to see if his mental retardation became cured and then they could take his money away!
When the Department of Human Services (food stamp program) caught wind of this fortune that came our way, they decided that we were now as wealthy as one of their social workers and reduced our food stamps one hundred and twenty dollars. Now, Johnny had some cash but we had less food, still hitting the food bank for extras. My case was on hold and still is. The backup in our state capitol was so horrendous that they sent my case to another state and I had to literally start over with the process. I grappled and begged the trust fund for more money so we could feed ourselves. Beans and cornbread are great for a meal or two but not a steady diet for a diabetic. I still couldn't lose weight because I had to buy bulk, filling foods, like potatoes, rice, beans, and red meat. Soon, I discovered that my husband was reaching a whopping three hundred and eight pounds. Something had to give!
I know people in the grocery store would stand in line and look at me with the food and the food stamps and think,” Wow, she really eats a lot and is on food stamps, and my income tax pays for that! What a pig!”
I went to a doctor to help me regain my sanity with food. I was becoming a paranoid food consumer. I would worry in my sleep that there would be no food in the morning and fight with Johnny over his breakfast of six eggs, two potato patties, a slice of sausage the size of a half- pound hamburger and three slices of toast.
I settled for Grape Nuts thinking that it was healthy to eat carbohydrates and found my efforts to save money with the food purchases only gave me a whirlwind of sugar in my diet. I was told to eliminate potatoes, breads, cereals, rice and anything that had cooking oil and white flour. I couldn't eat sweets unless they were sugar free and couldn't eat protein larger than the palm of my hand. I have small hands.

I needed medicine. I needed periodic blood checks to keep the Hepatitis in check. I wasn't working so I applied at another government agency called The County Health Department. There, I received insurance called Indigent Care. I was certainly indigent, but not as indigent as others, since I had a house and a car. I could have my doctor's and hospital bills paid for up to thirty thousand dollars. I could have three prescriptions a month and I was quite pleased. I was now on many medications, some of which helped me sleep, some took away some of the pain, some took away the seizures in my legs, some relieved depression, and some had some purpose which I can't remember, at this point, but I took them because one of the four doctors I saw recommended that I did.
The Health Department had me fill out a mound of paperwork that was exactly like the mound of paperwork I filled out for food stamps. I should have made copies! They were quite aware of the trust fund and the food stamps and had learned about Johnny's government check and was pleased that the government was giving him Medicaid. This was a relief for a little while until I asked for extra help from the Trust to pay for my car repairs and buy me a window unit air conditioner. Then, the Health Department believed that I was hiding extra cash and could pay for my own medicine with the hidden money and shut me off.
They left me with doctor visits to go to and medicine to refill and no insurance. So the next step was to go to the Medical Assistance Program.
This is a volunteer program where the patient has to wait in a room with other patients and bring every piece of paper that was used in every other government office to fill out more forms to request help from the laboratories that produced the medicine. Some medicine I couldn't get that way but I did wait in line for hours once every three months to get what I needed. Then, I had to share it with my husband, who took the same prescription drugs, and couldn't find a space on his medical card sheet for all that he needed.
(save)
“No kitty, I am busy!”
“mew”
“No, Suzanne, I am busy.”
Don't walk on the keyboard, Suzanne
srpnwo
“Johnny! What are you doing? Can't you feed the cats so I won't have to go downstairs?”
“I am almost finished with the bathroom floor! I can't move! I am down on my knees!”
Shit! His damn knees! He needs another cortisone shot!
Damn stairs! Why couldn't Daddy have built a larger house so I wouldn't be in the attic loft?
BUZZZZZZZZ
Maybe I should take some more pain killer…down the stairs and Captain is at the bottom, spread out asleep. Thank God I saw him. …bad move to step on him!
“Okay, Suzanne. Here is some turkey and giblets! Wait! Hey Pretty Kitty! Don't growl at Suzanne!”
Better pick her up and feed her on the porch damn, she's getting heavy, too the whole family is obese! Grab the little red bowl and the bag of food… There, the porch! The only problem here, is smelling Johnny's cigarette smoke while you eat! Wonder if cats get cancer from second hand smoke?
“Hi Dutch! No, you can't eat Pretty Kitty's food, you have to come with me!”
He's getting heavy too must be that he is growing again.. I see him eat nearly as much as Johnny probably would if he was a cat. Wow, that black fur can sure attract lint!
“Here, you share with Suzanne!”
Gotta take Pretty Kitty some water. Gotta find the pink glass bowl for her water. She only drinks from glass bowls…odd. The sink is full again! Where does Johnny put all the food? Three big pots, the skillet, two bowls, five big spoons, and none of them are mine. Every glass is dirty with milk at the bottom, curdling. We should go into the cottage cheese business.
“Johnny! Did you feed the turtles?”
“No! I have been on my knees working on the bathroom floor! Do you want a toilet or not?”
I'll feed the turtles. Oops! Pretty kitty's water . Her tail is in it…better bring some of that canned food too. Her teeth look bad and I bet they hurt to chew dry food.
“I just asked! No, Suzanne! Get off the turtle tank! Eat the food in the bowl!
“Janyce?! Bring me some ice water! I am dying of thirst here!
You have that big tank of water right in front of you, dear
“Okay, after I bring the cat's food to the porch and feed the turtles.
We know who is more important here!
Where are all his big plastic containers? Does he have them scattered all over the neighborhood again? Oh, there is one outside on the fence post. Now if there is ice in the ice trays, it will be a miracle.

“Here is your water, dear. Nice work! You're almost through! What kind of flooring are we going to have in here since all my tile work has been ripped out?”
“Let’s do one thing at a time! You don’t let me rest from one project and you find me another!”
“Oh, maybe have a garden room, with pebbles on the floor, you know, like small pea gravel, and plants crawling up the walls. Can you plant morning glories inside? We can put the grow-lux lamps on the ceiling and grow flowers in the bathroom!
“Hummm…not me! You do all that! I pee out the front door.”
A good idea for once! Maybe I will!
“You hang the lamps and I will do the flowers. But what about the bees and butterflies? We will have to have them to help propagate the plants!”
“We can just get bees and sell the honey. We can put the hive right above the commode, there. You can take care of the bees, and the cats and the dogs, fish and turtles and the pond! I have mowing to do!
Johnny is grinning at his own joke. He forgets that he is the one who stands in front of the commode here... or, the front porch steps, peeing, naked.
“Funny! I have things to do. Think about what kind of floor you can afford on your whopping S. S. I. money and we will do it.”

Chapter 6: The Test (manuscript continued)
The psychologist was an attractive lady, and I felt that she was doing her best, as my helper, for Johnny, and my husband, to test him for A. D. H. D.
Idiot can’t keep his attention on anything for very long
Johnny spent all day taking test after test and I came back over and over to the doctor’s office to check on him and he was still taking tests.

“What did they say on the S. S. I. Decision?” she asked, when the results were finally in a week later.
“Mental Retardation.”
“Well, maybe borderline, but he has brain damage from something in his childhood. I am pretty sure of it. He can’t help it that he can’t make decisions and he can’t help it if he doesn’t remember what he reads or forgets things quickly. He can’t read efficiently, it is a learning disability. I can recommend his doctor medication for the Attention Deficit Disorder, because , he has that, for sure. Just be more patient with him.
“He is your patient, not mine. I have to live with it. We will try the medicine.
Medicine after medicine.. he is still hyper…

Chapter 7: The Return of Jeffrey ,