‘Comeuppance’

Serge Lecomte was born in Belgium in 1946. He came to the States where he spent his teens in South Philly and then Brooklyn. After graduating from Tilden H. S. he joined the Medical Corps in the Air Force. He earned an MA and Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in Russian Literature with a minor in French Literature. He worked as a Green Beret language instructor at Fort Bragg, NC from 1975-78.

Comeuppance

I watched from my wooden swing near a rose of Sharon, several of which formed a dense boundary between my house and our newest neighbor. Sunlight dappled the area where I sat, and southerly breezes off Lake Erie rustled my Alice’s red roses and stretches of lavender, their aromas mixing in with the faint but present slew of dead fish being feasted on by gulls and vultures along the shore. Some of the fish had been mummified by two weeks of temperatures in the upper nineties, their carcasses tough like jerky, their eyes long gone. I’d wanted a closer look than standing on a cliff but found the burning sand and spreading waves of water untenable, even if the fish jerky caught my interest.

I gazed, I stretched, I swatted a bee having the temerity to buzz too near my face. Without my paying too much attention, doors opened and closed in the houses around me. The day had been uneventful so far – a load of mulch for the young, uppity couple beyond my fence, workers in orange vests using small slats of tired wood to designate placement of shrubs and hedges in uninspired landscapes. And Roundup – my real nemesis. The uppity couple had sprayed their grass with Roundup from a hose for the past four years, decimating their weeds and morphing our young Joe-Pye and delphiniums into twisted, cattail-resembling crooks. Alice complained many times. I didn’t tell her about the altered states of squirrels (no fur!) and toads (three eyes?) that even felines ignored.

A screen door slid open on the porch of the adjoining house. I craned my neck to see. Yellow Toes took one rude step and then another, his burly physique a splatter on the day’s pleasant scenery.  He intrigued me, this disaster of a human the likes of which I’d not encountered before he bought the house next door. He strode barefoot across the bricks, placed hairy fingers atop his patio rail and surveyed his realm. He coughed, cleared his throat and spit. Sputum pooled on his curly beard, and he wiped it off with sausage-like digits. His hirsute torso resembled a half-moon, and I recalled the paper bags of empty beer cans sitting by his garbage bin on trash day. He was perpetually slack-jawed, appearing as stupid as I believed he must be. Like my Alice, who enjoyed the horror of slasher movies and witches, I relished the disgust his presence engendered in me, wallowed in his gross, physical presence. 

“Hey, don’t throw it so high!” Little Sara, who lived on Yellow Toes’ opposite side, screamed to Dickey, her 7-year old brother. Blond braids hung low on her shoulders, and her skinny arm with open mitt stretched to catch Dickey’s errant toss. The baseball tipped off her mitt, went rolling behind her.

“Sorry! I’ll be more careful.” Dickey missed her return throw. He sauntered among the underbrush and hedges bordering his family’s property.

I stiffened with alarm. My neighbor instantly leaned over the wrought iron rail, a scowl indicating that Dickey better not intrude on his land. The boy scrabbled among the ivy and came up with the white ball. Yellow Toes leaned back, relaxing his shoulders. He snorted like a bull.

My breathing settled when he went inside. Within a few minutes he returned, clad in camo pants and red muscleman shirt. One hefty hand held a mug steaming with hot liquid. He dragged a weathered Adirondack chair to the railing and sat, facing the children’s back yard.

He was a recent newcomer to the neighborhood, having arrived in a white, dented van, alone. I’d watched him haul a stained mattress and pile of unfolded blankets into his garage, his heavy breathing and grunts coming through my living room window, where the open curtains and screen gave me vantage. He tugged bulky green plastic bags in lieu of cardboard or plastic boxes. Later I heard Dickey and little Sara’s mother tell Alice she wondered where he was born, arriving as he did like a feral cat from a back wood. “Swarthy,” my Alice replied. “Heard him muttering words in a strange language,” another neighbor replied. No one brought him a homemade pie, no Welcome Wagon representative with a big smile stopped to acquaint the foreigner to his new community, no greetings of hospitality from families on the street. 

Too unkempt, too crude, we all agreed. 

“Good throw!” Little Sara screamed derisively. 

“Hey, ya gotta run and catch it sometimes.” Dickey moved closer to our neighbor’s yard, waving his mitted hand to Sara who backed up to further the distance between them. He caught Sara’s next toss, but tripped and fell down. “Ouch!” He bent his knee, rubbed the grass off.

“Hah!” Yellow Toes lifted his head, ran a hairy hand through his hair. He smiled.

The brute enjoyed Dickey’s pain!

I almost hissed.

I liked those children, their funny, silly games. Sometimes I went over to play with them, and I’d hide in the bushes until they found me, or hunker down near the hydrangeas in what had been my special safe place before Yellow Toes bought the property. Especially good at subterfuge, I usually waited the kids out and they’d end up quitting the game. One time, when I tired of watching my Alice pull up invasive weeds in our garden, I trespassed the brute’s backyard to where the siblings sat on their grass, eating DQ chocolate dipped cones. I strutted back and forth, making enough of a fuss that Dickey allowed me the last lick of his ice cream.

“Oh, geez, Sara!” Dickey missed her throw. The ball bounced, rolled and kept rolling until it caught in a bunch of myrtle and dandelions in Yellow Toes’ overgrown grass. Dickey would need to squeeze through the brute’s hedges and walk into his yard to retrieve the ball.

“Hey, ya gotta run and catch it sometimes, ya know,” Sara mocked her brother. She threw down her glove and did a cartwheel. Being a sweet child, she didn’t realize the peril her brother faced.

“Eh!” Yellow Toes shouted. His menacing frown and dark, overarching eyebrows reminded me of a hairy-faced Stalin, whose cruel countenance covered a history book on my Alice’s bookshelf. He’d been a brute, too, territorial and mean. Holding tight his mug, Yellow Toes’ ogre-like feet walked down the steps and into the grass.

He hummed, a menacing tune I was certain. I’d heard it before, maybe on the TV.  

Dickey and Sara needed protection.

I rose from my chair, jumped from my patio steps and lingered behind the rose of Sharon. If the brute seized the ball or menaced Dickey, I was witness. I’d hidden from Alice on his property before; I knew the nooks and crannies, dark places behind a bush where I might avenge the children should he try to hurt them. 

Dickey paused on the cusp of safety, one foot set to land on enemy territory. He scanned for poison ivy, wary of the weed that had placed him in the ER with a ventilator the previous year. My Alice had sent a get-well card from both of us. 

“Hurry it up, Dickey!” Sara shouted.

I heard a guttural clearing from the brute’s mouth. He sang words to the melody he’d been humming. The tune pawed my memory, my focus momentarily blurred. Then Yellow Toes stooped and picked up the ball, turning it over by the tips of his fingers. 

Poor Dickey. His zoned-out focus on avoiding poison ivy brought him just five feet from Yellow Toes. Dickey startled and stopped, blue eyes wide.

Now was my best opportunity. I skittered to a stop opposite the brute, flora camouflaging my presence. Like the fog in one of my Alice’s favorite poems, I moved silently on little cat’s feet to get a clear, unobstructed view. A yellow and black garden spider, seeing the intensity in my eyes, scuttled from its prey and found safety within the curled frond of a fiddlehead.

Yellow Toes stood sideways, his beer distended stomach a righteous landing pad. Still singing (what was that song?) he faced Dickey. 

He spoke loudly, crassly. I wiggled my haunches, secured my stance. A chipmunk skittered past me, paused to blink. I held fast. The brute spoke louder, repeating his word as my back feet rocketed me forward. 

I saw Dickey’s face too late. He chuckled as he pointed to the ball.

“I think you mean baseball, not baas baal.” Dickey mimicked the brute’s words. 

“Aaaah! Yah, Yah!” Yellow Toes chortled.

I couldn’t stop midflight. I missed the brute’s paunch and landed hard atop one hairy foot. He dropped the ball. His mug jarred, overturned. Hot liquid emptied like muddy rain on my body. I rolled over, found myself trapped under a callused, grass-stained heel. I screeched. 

“Hey, Millicent, what’s happened? You okay, girl?” Sara thrust herself between Dickey and the enemy. She reached for me just as Yellow Toes scooped me up, held me above his head. I stopped wriggling, defiantly glaring into his eyes. His scowl melted, became a wide smile under his thick, sputum-speckled beard. His brown eyes glimmered with joy. He was Puss n Boots   transformed!

“Kitteeee. Lil kitteeeee.” I squirmed. Yellow Toes waved his arm at the kids. “Me and kitty getza baas baal. Yah?” Snuggling me against his torso, he retrieved the ball and handed it to Dickey

“Thanks!” Dickey turned it over in his hand. He stepped carefully through the myrtle to his yard. 

“You’ll be okay, Millie.” Sara raised her hand to touch me. My neighbor lowered his big arm. Sara stroked my crown and kissed me on the nose before bidding us both goodbye.

Yellow Toes rubbed my chin with a friendly, gentle thumb. “Kittee, I give you milk ‘other day?” He placed me down. I dashed to my swing and gave myself a moment to compose myself. I licked myself clean.  

My Alice slid open the patio screen. “Millicent, here kitty kitty. Time to come in.”  

I rushed toward her pretty pink toes. She lifted me to her shoulder and frowned. “You smell like coffee and sour milk.” Wrinkling her nose, she forced me under a soapy wash cloth smelling like freshly-picked lavender.

In the evening I stretched along the living room window sill. Random crickets chirped outside and late summer’s remaining male cicadas played their tymbals in a final serenade to the females.

I heard a door open. My ears perked up. I looked outside. My friendly neighbor carried a paper bag and set it by his garbage bin. His hooded sweatshirt covered the warm landing pad I’d missed in my folly earlier that day. He cleared his throat. I heard his strange, lovely words again. I recognized the tune this time: Take Me Out to the Ballgame. 

I purred.

Later I dreamed of his baas baal. 

Pamela Cottam is a fiction writer with an MFA in Creative Writing from Cleveland State’s NEOMFA program. She has written a mystery novel, children’s stories and adult short fiction. Her writing has been published in Across the Margin, Better than Starbucks2, Active Muse, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Creepypasta (Audio) Constellate Literary Journal, the Pennsylvania Literary Journal and The Write Launch. She was a nominee for the Best of the Net, a runner up in the Gordon Square Review Fiction 2022 contest and Gival Literary Contest, 2023.