He opened the well that held his tire-repair kit and took out the socket wrench without thinking about it or knowing why. He slammed shut the lid of the trunk. It thudded like a kettledrum in the humid air.
He crossed the parking lot, nervously gripping and renewing his grip on the shaft of the tire wrench, to a walkway lit at intervals. If you went right, the walkway led past the swimming pool that served this end of the complex. To the left, it wandered around the back of the cluster that included his own two-bedroom unit to a service area with a charging station for the carts that village residents used to get around. Past the service area, you came to a fairly wide strip of lawn backed by a running wooden rail about a foot high. After that, things became primeval.
My grandfather’s leather sandals, imitation Birkenstocks of Israeli manufacture, slapped against the pavement. It was an angry sound. He was annoyed with Ramon, whom he pictured lean and cross-eyed, skulking into the Jungle to meet his death, just for a taste of rat or nutria. He was annoyed with Ramon’s owner for coming out to look for Ramon when it was still pitch-dark and there was, at any rate, nothing to be done. There was nothing to be done, and yet off he went to try and do it; my grandfather was annoyed, most of all, with himself. The louder his sandals slapped against the pavement, the angrier he became. He found himself hoping that when he reached the edge of the Jungle, he really did encounter the alligator so that he could beat it to death with the socket wrench. That was the purpose, he now understood, for which he had taken the tool out of his trunk.
He crossed the northernmost of the lawns serviced by the groundskeepers of Fontana Village. The soles of his sandals kicked up pinpricks of dew that stung his shins. He was wearing khaki shorts, one of seven identical pairs he had purchased at Kmart, to go with the seven polo shirts and seven pairs of white tube socks, which he always wore with sandals, that constituted his daily uniform after my grandmother died. If it was somebody’s birthday or some function he could not avoid, he would put on a Hawaiian shirt, decorated with bare-breasted hula girls, that I had given him as a joke. The shirt had scandalized some of his fellow villagers, but my grandfather had no regard for anyone who could be scandalized by a shirt.
Out here past the service area, it was too dark to see. My grandfather took out Aughenbaugh’s Zippo and struck a light. Tiny beads of moisture in the air trapped the light before it could travel very far. Light enveloped his hand like a ball of St. Elmo’s fire.
“Hello?” said the woman. “Who’s that?”
“Your neighbor,” my grandfather said.
The lighter grew hot against his skin and he snapped it shut. Retinal fire swam across the darkness. Then his eyes adjusted, and he found that he could see. Dawn was an abrupt business in Florida; in another ten minutes or so it would be morning.
“Mrs. Winocur claims to have seen it. She calls it Alastair,” said the woman. My grandfather heard her introduce herself as Sally Seashell; later the last name turned out to be Sichel. “But do you think it’s really out there?”
“Something’s there,” my grandfather said, never one to give false comfort. He thought Phyllis Winocur was full of shit, but he doubted that the cats and lapdogs of Fontana Village were vanishing voluntarily into the swamp in a bid for freedom, banding together out there like four-legged Seminoles. “How’d he get out?”
“My fault,” she said, “I was dumb. I took pity on him. Back home he used to range so freely. He and I haven’t been here long.”
“Where’s home?”
“Philly.”
It crossed my grandfather’s mind to observe that Philly could be tough on cats, too, but then he would have to explain. It had been a long time since he had attempted to explain himself to a woman. It felt like an insurmountable task.
“What part?” he said.
“Bryn Mawr.”
“Bryn Mawr ain’t Philly.”
“Aha,” she said. “Yes, I can hear it in your voice.”
As it grew lighter, my grandfather came to see that Sally Sichel was a good-looking woman, tall, slender, but full-breasted. Dark complexion, long nose with a bump, a touch of Katharine Hepburn in the cheekbones. Maybe a couple of years younger than he was, maybe not. She wore a pair of men’s pajamas, the kind that buttoned up the front, and duck boots coated in rubber the color of a New York taxi. She had not troubled to lace them up very well.
“Does he usually come when you call him?”
“Always.”
“How long has he been gone?”
“All night.”
“Hmm.”
“I probably shouldn’t say this,” Sally Sichel said. “We just met. But that piece-of-shit cat is more or less my only reason for living.”
My grandfather fought against an overwhelming impulse to say something along the lines of In that case, maybe you ought not to have let him out of your house to be eaten by a half-ton reptile or For Christ’s sake, lady, it’s just a motherfucking cat. He revised downward the favorable impression he had begun to form of her, an impression shot through with a surprising vein of lust; it had been a very long time. Anyway, you had to have reservations about somebody who walked around with her shoes untied.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “He was only a cat.”
“Not at all.”
“It’s just, I lost my husband very recently. And Ramon was really his cat.”
“I see.”
“They were very close.”
“I understand,” my grandfather said. “I lost my wife.”
“Recently?”
“Fourteen years.”
“Oh. Well, I’m sorry.”
Sally Sichel started to cry. Standing there in her pajamas, arms crossed under her commendable breasts. Looking out at the Jungle that had taken her husband’s cat, the architecture of her cheeks glazed with tears. Her nose began to run. My grandfather took a chamois, which he used to wipe his camera lenses, out of the back pocket of his shorts and passed it to her.
“Oh,” she said, blowing her nose into the chamois. He remembered—as much in his loins as in his head or heart—the circus girl who had spread her legs for him in the cottage at Greenwich Yard, Creasey’s bloody chamois clutched in her hand. “What a gentleman. Thank you.”
He knew that it would also be gentlemanly to put a consolatory arm around Sally Sichel’s shoulder. Not just gentlemanly; it would be humane. But he was afraid of what might happen down the line. A widow and a widower, easing each other’s passage from grief to passion in the autumn of their lives: The very triteness of it seemed to ensure its likelihood.
From the time he’d moved to Florida in the mid-Seventies, the available women of Fontana Village had been giving my grandfather their best shot. While he turned out the beautiful and high-priced scale models that NASA and private collectors had commissioned, and explored the labyrinth of LAV One as it grew in intricacy and size on the dining room table, the available women of Fontana Village came to make their case. They sent scouts and embassies, plates of cookies and brownies and blondies, pots of soup, potato latkes at Hanukkah, cards, knit goods, pies, poems, oil paintings, cuts of meat, bottles of wine, and a dish of macaroni and cheese. I happened to be visiting when the macaroni and cheese showed up, and I thought it made a pretty strong case for its author, who had followed a recipe adapted from Horn & Hardart’s.