chapter 36

JOHN

WE rented a twenty- foot U-Haul truck, and with help from Dave, Tony, Craig, Rick, Don, and their wives, we started packing it up. Then it was on to the van, which we packed with as much as it could hold and still have room for the kids, and we were ready to roll. We had a last good-bye with everyone and hit the road for central Tennessee—have blender, will travel.

Max, our killer dog, was sold back to the training center where we got him, and the town of Falmouth was kind enough to let us keep the money from his resale. About five hundred bucks, and we would need every cent of it. The town also ordered a police escort for us as far as the Bourne Bridge: good-bye and good riddance. We weren’t their problem anymore. I assumed the so-called “investigation” into my shooting would end as soon as we cleared the bridge that morning—and I was right.

I drove the truck and Polly drove the van. We spent the first night in a hotel in Connecticut, a small place with a pool where the kids could swim. The next day, driving through the Adirondacks, we pulled over into a rest area, and when the kids piled out to use the bathroom, Shawn ran into an old friend of his whom he had been close to in elementary school. They were on a vacation, and the kid’s dad asked where we were headed, but of course we couldn’t tell them.

It was early July, and the farther south we went, the hotter it got. The boys rode in the truck with me, and Cylin rode in the van with Polly and our cat, Pyewacket. Neither vehicle had air-conditioning. The sun coming through the windshield was unmerciful, and when we arrived in Cookeville, it was 104 degrees in the shade. The rental truck died in the driveway of the hotel.

There was some sort of paperwork screwup with the new house, so we had three days in limbo. We rented a room at the Howard Johnson’s in town; they had a pool, and we spent most of our time in it. There were no pets allowed, so we had to leave Pye out in the van, but we let him out of his traveler, parked in the shade, and put all the windows down. I had planned to sneak him in under a towel or something when it got dark, but that didn’t end up happening. Instead, Pye took it upon himself to jump out one of the open windows and waited at the front door of the hotel until someone let him in—so much for no pets! We found him wandering the hallway, meowing for us. He was practically at the door to our room; he had tracked us down, huffing and puffing and none too pleased. He was a Maine Coon cat, and his long, heavy fur was all matted and wet, and his tongue was hanging out; he could not handle the heat. Rules be damned, he curled up on Cylin’s cot in the air-conditioned comfort and recovered nicely.

Each morning, looking east was like staring into a blast furnace. I’d spent over half a year in Texas in the Air Force but had managed to miss the summer months. This heat was something none of us had ever experienced. It was over 90 degrees by 7:00 a.m. and the humidity was over 90 percent. Unbelievable. My body weight was still way down, but sweat ran off of me anytime I was out of the air-conditioning. We were used to the beach, ocean breezes, and summer temps in the seventies and eighties. Cookeville was a whole new place, and we were indeed strangers in a strange land.

Move-in day, it was 107 degrees at 3:00 p.m., so we delayed until the evening, when it was only 104 degrees. We did amazingly well getting everything in and the beds set up by 10:00 p.m. We all slept on the living room carpet since it was the only room with air-conditioning—a small unit designed for a much smaller area than it was servicing. Opening windows was futile; we just had to crank this little machine up to max and let time do the trick. The next day, we bought a monster A/C unit running on 220 volts. It weighed a couple hundred pounds and had to be professionally installed, but it kept the house cool even on the hottest days.

The house was a good size bigger than our home in Falmouth, ranch style, and redbrick, just like all the other houses in town. Bricks were plentiful here, the red dirt everywhere was proof of that. The house had three bedrooms and two bathrooms, one just off the master bedroom, the other in the hallway for the kids. Eric and Shawn would share a room, and Cylin would have the small room at the front of the house. Eventually I planned to convert the full basement into a den and family room, a game room, and a large bedroom for the boys to have some privacy.

In back of the squat redbrick house was a circular driveway that ran down to the garage on one side. You could pull into one side of the drive and circle around behind the house and come out the other side, or go straight back to the barn. Directly behind the house was a white fence and beyond that, a big red barn with four good-sized animal stalls, a small tack room, and a loft. The barns were built to air and dry tobacco crops, so the ground floor was open inside, with plenty of space, and the loft ran along either side but was open in the middle. When we bought the house, we inherited a couple of resident barn cats—an old gray female called Mitzi and her sister, Diamond, also gray but with a perfect white diamond-shaped mark on her forehead. We had no idea at the time that Mitzi would go on to have several litters of kittens every summer, starting in the early spring and continuing until the late fall. We were constantly giving away kittens to anyone who would take them. Diamond was either fixed or just couldn’t reproduce, but she would usually try to take one of her sister’s babies and keep it for herself—we had to watch her to make sure she didn’t hide them somewhere and not give them back.

Pyewacket was not a country cat and didn’t care for the weather. He went outside occasionally but mostly opted to stay inside. One night he didn’t come home, but we weren’t too worried about him—he didn’t like it outside enough to run away. But the next morning he showed up with his eye socket torn open, wounds all over his body, drooling from what looked like a broken jaw, and an ear almost ripped off. He’d been in a fight with another tomcat in the neighborhood, and it looked like he’d lost. I held him wrapped up in a towel while Polly tended to his wounds with hydrogen peroxide and Neosporin. It took him about a week or two to feel better. I was surprised to see him at the door one morning, ready to go out—I couldn’t believe he wanted more of the same. He was tougher than I thought. But this time when I let him out, he didn’t come back. We wondered what happened to him, and it was especially hard on the kids to deal with the loss of yet another pet.

Months later, when the weather finally cooled down and I was feeling better, I took up running again, along the empty country roads. I’d never do the distances I used to do, but it was a start, and I’d missed the runner’s high. Early one evening, I was trucking down the road, listening to a clicking that I heard in my head now—something that wasn’t there before I was shot. About a mile and a half down the road from our farm, I saw a Maine Coon crossing the long front lawn at a neighbor’s house.He came all the way out to the road to see me, meowing that old familiar meow. It was Pye, and he knew me, even seemed happy to see me. He looked good—fat and sassy; he’d been living well. I looked at the farmhouse. It was a nice place where I think an older couple lived, no kids. After some petting and a scratch behind the ears, Pye turned and went back to the house behind the white fence. It was his house now, I could tell by the way he walked up on the front porch and curled up in a little basket that had been set there just for him. I picked up my run, marveling at the little guy.

Sure, he’d had his ass kicked by some tomcat who let him know he wasn’t welcome. But Pye was no fool; he nursed his wounds, packed his bags, and moved on down the road. Found a place where he would be welcome and didn’t have to look over his shoulder all the time. Sometimes, it’s not the worst thing in the world to give up, pack up, and move on.