“All right, Cecil, this here’s the place. Get out that shovel I toldja to bring.”
A lot of things happen at 6 a.m. in my neighborhood: birds sing, newspapers arrive on doorsteps, several roosters start competing for morning dominance, and the Johnson’s hound dog starts howling at God-knows-what.
Digging up a neighbor’s front yard isn’t on the list of normal, even for us, so when I heard Lumpy Pete’s scratchy whiskey voice when I opened my eyes, it took a second to register.
Loretta was gone for the weekend. I knew that because everyone in this neighborhood knows everything, and leaving the confines
“Well, well—who do we have here?”
Millie Lane lived about three houses down in our small community and had a voice that made me cringe, like when you bite a fork or watch some guy take a baseball bat to his privates.
Millie was the last person I wanted to run into, which is precisely why I should have expected her first. Still, when her voice came floating across to me, I groaned.
“Poor Jerry, do you need some help?” she said in the sweetest tone she could manage and flashing me a smile. “You look a little tied up.”
All I wanted to do was try out my dad’s new parachute. I knew how to use it
His body reminded me of an action figure I broke once. I dropped it from a ten-story window just to see what would happen—it ended up splayed out and missing a few limbs. That’s what I saw when I almost tripped over a man’s corpse on my walk this morning, just with more blood, and he was only missing a few fingers, not a whole arm.
I knew him, too; sort of. I only knew him as Mr. Pigeon. I’m not even sure anyone knew his real name despite everyone knowing him or knowing of him. Pigeon walked the neighborhood every day, always with his floppy, wide-brimmed straw hat and always pushing a baby carriage.
The thing about