There were seven balls of lent on the green linoleum floor spread out before me. I counted them over and over again, as if that act in itself would change things. Khaki, the stray cat, who had adopted us at my father’s washateria, played with one of them–rolling it over and over with her front paws like she was examining a melon. Khaki had wandered in one day from Union Avenue and looked around at the newly painted washateria and decided to call the place home. She marched up to my mother, who was not a cat-lover and instantly won her over. My father also came to hold and love this stray, sand-colored animal. I was the only one not taken by her insincere display of affection toward humans.
I knew what she wanted. Food and drink and a warm place to sleep in the winters and a cool spot to nap in the heat of the humid Tennessee summers, that is all she wanted. We were superfluous to anything else.
We were the givers. She was the taker. But that was okay with her. Her act had won her a spot in our lives and she was well-taken care of. With not a care in the world, she only played with one: a grey ball of soft lint about the size of a golf ball that day. Khaki was totally oblivious of what was going on around her at that moment.
But I continued to count the balls. Seven. Two gray. One white (or at least off-white). Two black. One blue and one brownish-green. Head bowed down staring at the floor and counting the lint balls, as Khaki rolled the gray ball around and around.
The crack of the gun brought me out of my mental exile. The two boys raced from the shop spilling coins behind them as they fled. My father lay on the hard floor, a crimson pool beginning to spread out before him, staining the green linoleum with his DNA. I sat and stared for a moment, frozen to my plastic chair by fear and by a foretold knowledge that the incident before me was going to lead to bloodshed. I was only twelve, but I knew enough to know that the gang-bangers who had appeared unmasked at just the moment my father was empting the machines of their coinage, would leave no witnesses.
I suppose they hadn’t noticed me. Someone screamed and I remember dialing 911, but I don’t remember getting up from the chair against the wall and running to the phone behind the wooden desk. “My father’s been shot. Send someone. Send someone in a hurry, We’ve been robbed.” I gave the lady on the other end of the line our address. I did it twice. And almost before I hung up I could hear the sirens racing up Union Avenue toward us.
Khaki had lost interest in the ball of gray lent and was now circling the river of blood that ran along the worn spots in the old floor. She touched it with her sand-colored paw. Touched it and then backed away.
That’s all I remember from that June afternoon in 1967. That and my mother screaming as the police captain broke the news to her. She clutched me to her bosom and all but suffocated me as she wept.
That was a long time ago. Memphis 1967. A hot spring afternoon. And whenever I see lint balls, I think of that day.
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