Little Red

It’s been a tough summer, and I told myself I had to stop falling in love; I’m tired of having a broken heart. Most people would think it’s silly, juvenile, and even unmanly that I keep falling for creatures, however lovely, that I hardly know. And then the disappointment always comes like the oppressive Mississippi heat with the month of June. I seem never to learn.

The first heartbreak of 2011 came with a routine bike ride I and a few buddies took out Money Road. As I rode up the ramp of the Tallahatchie Bridge going back into Greenwood at the end of our ride, I saw a cat. It is an odd place to see a cat, and I had never seen one there before. What struck me most about this feline, however, was his resemblance to a real-man tomcat named Tiger I knew from Webster County.

Tiger is a yellow tabby who works for Payne’s Country Store near the border of Montgomery and Webster Counties on Highway 404. Chris and Sheila Payne opened the store in the late summer of 2010. While remodeling prior to their grand opening, they were routinely visited by a muscular, scar-faced tom whom they eventually hired to serve as their store’s mascot. On my frequent Webster County rides, I always stopped at Payne’s store and never left until I had eaten, used the bathroom, and spent some time with Tiger.

Yellow tabbies aren’t that rare, but Tiger was a dark, dark yellow, a bit unlike any I had ever seen before. The cat on the bridge was dark like that, and I immediately thought of Tiger. I turned around that day and went back to take a second look. A walker was making his way over the bridge at the same time.

“Did you see that cat?” I asked. The cat by this time was gone, already only a memory.

“Yeah,” he answered.

“Is he yours?” I eagerly inquired.

“No,” was all he said as he power-walked up the bridge not missing a stride.

After a ride, we always stop at Bankston School just on the south side of the bridge. At Bankston, I asked my buddies if they had seen the cat. No one had and no one was even slightly interested in my concern. I felt a million miles from them all, like I was a totally different kind of person than them.

I was teaching summer school at the time, and the next day during break I dialed up Payne’s Country Store.

“Chris,” I said. “This is Zane, the bike rider. How is Tiger?” There was a slight pause before he answered, and I knew something was wrong.

“We haven’t seen him in a long time,” he responded.

I don’t remember anything either of us said after that, and I had great difficulty functioning the rest of the day. I just wanted to mourn, and I felt all alone, like no one would or could understand or care about the way I felt.

My second heartbreak of the year came after the Dragonfly Triathlon on June 18th. Young Marcus and I got up early and rode to the lower lake at Sardis. I call him Young Marcus because he is young, twenty-three, the son of one of my good friends, Brian Waldrop. While Brian has turned into a P 90 Ex-triathlete, Young Marcus has become one of my chief training partners.

On the way up, I promised him a tour of some of my northern riding territory on our trip home, and I also told him about Barney the tomcat who works security at a little store on the south side of the hamlet named Pope.

When we got to Pope, I checked the steps and not seeing Barney, I went inside to ask some questions. The girl behind the counter recognized me and quipped, “Long time no see,” she said.

“My buddy and I did a triathlon in Sardis,” I answered while I pulled a Diet Sprite out of the cooler. “Stopped by to check on Barney.” The look in her eyes said it all before she opened her mouth.

“We haven’t seen him in about four months,” she said. Then lowering her voice she whispered, “I think the new owner,” she cut her eyes hard to her right, “hauled in off.”

I was stunned and followed the line of her eyes to the back side of a fat man who was cooking on the griddle. After that I really don’t remember much. I do remember vacillating between rage and sadness. Luckily, after that Young Marcus went to sleep and never knew I cried all the way home. I have to quit falling in love with cats I told myself over and over.

My wife called him Little Red, and we saw him for the first time a couple of years ago. He lived in a ghost town, Money, Mississippi about ten miles north of Greenwood. We had driven to Money and ridden our bikes in the area. When we were leaving, she shouted out, “There’s a fox back there!”

I backed up and there he was sitting on an old concrete tire pit in front of what once was Ben Roy’s Service in downtown Money. He was grooming himself like a cat and his beauty lit up the landscape. When we got too close, he jumped down and just seemed to disappear into the earth. I stopped the truck and walked over to where he had vanished. There in the lawn of Ben Roy’s Service was an old culvert, going where I suppose only God and Little Red knew.

A week or two later, Brian Waldrop and I were riding our bikes through Money and Little Red came running across the road moving as fast as anything I’d ever seen. He was glorious in his speed, his long thin legs eating up the ground and road like a cheetah on the plains of Africa and his tail following behind like flames coming from a jet engine. I yelled out in surprise and delight, and even Brian did a double take.

I drive Money Road every Tuesday and Thursday night coming home from Masters Swim Practice at DSU in Cleveland. One night I saw Little Red’s eyes just barely in the light of my headlamps as he crossed the road right there at Ben Roy’s Service. Another night, I caught him on the first bridge north of Money. He must have been going forty-miles per hour by the time he made it off the bridge.

Then I didn’t see him anymore for a long time, maybe a year or more. Really, I thought he was dead. But one Tuesday night in June, the twenty-eighth to be exact, I was returning from Masters Swim and just when I was right there at Ben Roy’s, I saw a flash to my left and then there was a thud as my truck struck something.

“No, please no,” I cried out as I turned around and rode back to see what had happened.

But I already knew and when I got out of the truck I saw Little Red lying in the road. I put my left hand on his side and told him over and over how sorry I was. The only sign of life was a slight twitching in his back muscles. I am sure he did not suffer nor fear me, but that was little consolation. Not being able to bear the thought of other automobiles or animals mutilating his body, I took him home with me. Once there, I chose an appropriate T-shirt, my Eagleman Triathlon shirt, to wrap him in. I buried him in my wife’s flower garden. Then I went to bed and cried myself to sleep.