He has found every dust bunny, every rattling invisible thing, every scrap of anything small that can slide, scoot or skitter across the floor.
Mr. Lix flexes his paws in the air, waving hello and I am sleepy and i'm making my bed on you. He licks my fingers and scrambles away sideways when he wants to tease me. He loves velcro and his belled mousie and his little felt mice, which he has begun to carry from place to place in his mouth between bouts of pouncing and batting it about.
Mr. Lix sleeps with me, curled up in my robe to the side, rumbling like a rolling boil and kneading himself to sleep. He waits for me to wake up in the morning, then trails me from room to room as I get ready for work. He is on the bed when I come home. He cries when I leave the room without his permission.
As another cat lover said to me - "It's nice to have a friend to come home to."
It’s all brought on, you see, by the murders of two of our own – by four of their own.
See, nobody wants to blame the victim, but the fact of the matter is that a man and a woman were beaten and kicked to death in their own home, in the early evening of a Friday a while back, by a gang of boys who had shared the hospitality of this couple for quite some time. The kids were provided with alcohol and smokes, a contribution, as it were, to the delinquency of the minors. So when the boys (ranging in age from 13 to 21) wanted a little spending money, they knew just where to get it and they decided to do just that. I won’t go into the intricacies of the plan, or the how and in what manner the perpetrators were apprehended, and the stupid things they did before they were caught, but they were caught and are being tried as adults.
An investigator reported that they were children with “dead” eyes, who may as well have been describing a trip to Wal-mart for all the emotion involved in a tale involving some of the most vicious behavior seen this neighborhood since Desegregation. The eldest boy was on Parole and was banned from the county, had been reported, and yet here he was. The youngest was a throw-away child. He would be dropped in the middle of the Lakes with a hand full of money. He was on his own, while his parents drank and whored around and smoked crack. His mother narrowly skirted being arrested on many occasions by turning in the very people she partied with.
The shock waves that these murders have created in this seemingly abandoned subdivision (which is populated heavily with the elderly and the poor and society’s leavings) have galvanized into action the small handful of more able citizens who choose to live here, the ones with 9-5 jobs who commute and pay taxes and try to keep body and soul together in these undeniably difficult economic times. Someone makes some signs, adds some refreshments (chips and cookies and sodas), sets out the folding chairs and by cracky you got yourself a town meeting.
Strangely enough, it was a taunt from the commando, at the “get to know your candidate” meeting, that got my attention. I admit to being shallow (as well as vain) and had never envisioned myself owning property in the Lakes, much less joining an organization that was going to expect me to actually do something. But this man said “Stop hiding in your houses and get out here and do something!”
At first I smirked. Who the hell was he to tell me to do anything? With his trailer trash wife, both with babies on their hips. Loud, overbearing, tobacco spitting, red-necking know it alls - setting out in monotonous detail every wrong ever committed against them by the ruffians in the neighborhood. Then I started thinking about it.
Just what the hell was I going to do about it? Hide in my house with my firearms spread about me like Dirty Harriet? Peer out the windows in fear at the sound of every sweetgum ball hitting my roof? Every squirrel wreaking havoc at the bird feeder? Not my style. I like to be able to walk at night, I like to be able to sit with my door open or leave my windows open. I have seen these “children” on the streets at all hours of the night. I remember trying to raise my own son when I lived across the fence from the Lakes. I was terrified of their influence, their boldness, their vacant faces. At that time they were merely stealing CD players from cars, shoplifting cigarettes and setting fire to the occasional abandoned shed (yeah, my kid was in on that one). Now they have graduated to murder as easily as passing from first to second grade. And this is where I plan to live for the rest of my life. So I joined the neighborhood watch.
On the way home I passed the little red-headed kid who had been removed from the meeting. There was a group of small children playing on the corner, in their yard, in the twilight. Their dogs were romping and barking and the children were shrieking with delight, chasing fireflies in the unseasonable coolness. As I drove slowly past, trying hard not to hit anything or anybody, I heard him say to the children: “I’m going to kill your dog” as conversationally as “Hi, how are ya?”
We have much to do.
