Storytelling

The crowd had surged to the yellow tape line, but could still feel the heat of the blaze and smell things they’d rather not think too hard about.  Two homeless men, escorted by police from inside the disaster zone, joined the cordoned crowd.

            “I’m telling you, it was her mad cat,” Old Homer screamed to the gathering masses over the sirens, roaring fire and public commotion.  The whole town knew both of them; Old Homer was the town’s folklorist, a local treasure and rooted wanderer.  General consensus stated he was harmless as well as ancient.

            The train cars lay asunder across the track: the passenger trains had been thrown about like toys, the tanker car still burned away at full blast.  One engine car lay on its side, intact, in the neighboring parking lot.  The other had been spread across the area.  Fire trucks shot arcs of water, controlling the blaze.  The fire rescue prepared for the recovery stage after pulling the last of the survivors from the wreckage.

            “Shut up, man,” Shaky Eddie said swatting at Homer’s sleeve.  “Show some respect.”

            “No more respect in the world than the truth,” Old Homer said.  “You’ve know no force of destruction until you seen that ole bitch’s cat.”

            We were hooked by the chemistry of the situation.  The audience, the spectators in a horrible but fantastic reality, watched on.  An Old Homer was our narrator in this twisted version of a news story we would normally view from our couches.  A network would be smart to grab him to make ratings.

            “You talking shit, man,” Shaky Eddie yelled, our antagonist.  We loved him for no other reason than keeping the fire going.

            The crowd remained silent, not condemning or condoning either of them for fear of what we might not hear.  We listened to every word while watching the black body bags getting hauled out of the windows of downed passenger cars.

            “Nah, Old Lady Thetis mourned the loss of her son, blaming herself like any mother worth her salt would.  So she’d hit the bottle, scream at the moon, but it’s too busy shooting moonbeams to listen, so you know what the old lady’d do?”  He paused for affect while taking a long swig from the bottle bought from our story donations.  “She’d down that nectar ‘til she was blind with laughter and wander over to the river with one of her little pets under her arm.”  Another swig tempered the climax.  “The she’d spin that cat around by the tail and launch it into the Styx.  Out the other end came one pissed off, indestructible cat with a grudge against the world.”

            Rescue workers had switched to the bright yellow bags specifically used for unidentified body parts.  The bags bulged differently that their black cousins, like sacks of potatoes or lunchmeat.

            “Where does an impervious cat with a grudge like that sleep?”

            We waited even though we heard the punch line countless times under different circumstances.  He took a long drink and then started laughing. 

            “Anywhere it goddamn pleases!”  He kept laughing as tears ran down his cheeks.

            “Shut up!” Shaky Eddie cried.

            “Wait until they find the conductor or a witness, brothers and sisters.  He’ll tell you this was no collision but one lazy cat lying on the rails.”

            “You talkin’ shit, man!”

            “Purring the whole time, I bet.”  And as though he had seen all this before – the fire, the body bags, the smoke, the spectacle- he wandered through the crowd toward Third Street where he could sleep the rest of the night away under a Hunter’s Moon.