LOYD BURL AND THE HOOTER’S GIRL

CHAPTER 8

December 21, 1987

LOVE IS AS STRONG AS DEATH, JEALOUSY AS CRUEL AS THE GRAVE (Song of Solomon 8:6)

            The darkest day of the year was the darkest day of my life. I sat on the corner of my bed and read the note Cat had left on her pillow in the middle of the night for the umpteenth time. Like the mystery that she was, she addressed me by the nickname we had in common with each other in the very beginning. It was Pebble for me, and Pebbles with an s for her. The thing that was odd about her using this moniker, was that we hadn’t used them since our first couple of times seeing each other.

            She almost always called me K.P. in private. It was short for Kickypoo. It was a combination of two things. My paternal grandmother was a Kickapoo Indian, which came to light as we got to know each other. And I was a punter, which obviously is a type of kicker. Cat was absolutely giddy about the parallel between ancestry and what turned out to be my occupation.

            My pet name for her? It was Kitty, which derived from Kitten, which derived from Cat, which derived from Catalina. Although she had addressed me as Pebble in her Dear John letter, she had signed off as Kitty.

            “Dear Pebble. As you read this, I am on my way to California. I need is a new start in life. What you need is a new woman, a special woman, because you’re a special guy, Pebble. Selfishly, I’m a better person for our lives having crossed paths. Selflessly, I need to let you go, because I should have never engaged you in a relationship in the first place. I should have never enticed you to make love when you were trying to be a proper gentleman. But I was so incredibly drawn to you, Pebble. It only brought to light just how ugly my own soul is. It is a curse to be pretty on the outside, while being ugly and unstable on the inside. Please don’t worry. I simply need the mountains, the sea, and the Bible. I’m going to say when, not if, I get right, I will live a life of service to our Lord. Alone except for God. Move on, my love. Please move on! I’m truly sorry! With all my love, the woman briefly, and wonderfully known to you as Kitty.”

            I didn’t know grief could make you physically ill. Although Catalina hadn’t died, I was mourning the loss of her. I was also tormented by the green monster of jealousy. I did not forget that her boyfriend before me was from California. But it wasn’t only her dumping me that disturbed me. After our relationship had turned intimate, with the lack of clothes this involved, I discovered on hidden parts of her body that she had been a cutter.

            This revelation had startled me and unsettled her. It was strange how I could tell that she both wanted me to know and didn’t want me to know. Her pain hurt me to the core, especially as I held her as she gently wept as she tried to explain the reasons why she harmed herself.

            Then two nights before I received this Dear John letter, I probably made a mistake. There was one item that I had never seen removed from Cat’s body. It was an inch wide watch. In postcoital, I had gently taken her hand, and began to unfasten the timepiece.

            “No, no, no,” she had said with a playful giggle, yet her eyes looked frightened.

            “Yes, yes, yes, my lovely Kitty,” I returned with good humor. “This has been the only obstruction for me to see all of you.”

            I had meant seeing all of her physical body in her birthday suit, obviously a joke. In hindsight, she saw my statement as pertaining to her person. She put the back of her hand into my palm, and I unfastened the watch. When it separated from her wrist, it revealed a thick dark purple, pink scar, multiple times bigger than the dozens of thin hidden scars from cutting. It almost looked like her hand had been severed at the wrist and sewed back on.

            “Oh, my beautiful Kitty, what did you do?” I asked without thinking, and not hiding my shock.

            Violent sobs erupted from her, lasting a few minutes. I squeezed her hand as she squeezed mine. As tears ran down my own cheeks, I prayed her cries were releasing the demons that tormented her.

            When it was over, she calmly ran her thumb over a line of tears on my cheek and licked them. “This is why I love you. You have empathy like no one I have ever met.”

            But then the night before the Dear John letter, I woke up to hear her rummaging in the bathroom. Then it was quiet. I went to check on her and found her staring at a handful of pills. She was so entranced at her hand and the dozens of tiny objects they held that she hadn’t noticed I had pushed the door open a good foot.

            “Catalina?” I tried softly. The way she jerked, you would have thought I shouted. A few pills rattled on the floor. “Honey, we need to get you help.”

            “I was flushing them, I promise,” she said. And she did toss them into the toilet and push the lever. I know, you’re not supposed to flush medication down the toilet. But this was 1987, and we were young and dumb.

            I hugged her and whispered. “Let’s get you help.”

            “Help!” she barked as she pushed away from me. “From who? The last idiot I went to prescribed those sleeping pills I just flushed. What kind of a quack gives somebody with suicidal tendencies a bottle of sleeping pills?” 

            The bad news. The last words I heard from Cat’s mouth before she left me were ‘I should have never been born.’

            The good news. When I finally heard from her several months later, she gleefully told me ‘I’ve been born again!’

Wednesday, December 23, 1987

            At work, when I returned from my afternoon deliveries, I smiled for the first time since I read the breakup letter two days previous. It was a forlorn looking elf sitting at the warehouse desk in the back of the building. Her back was to the desk, and she smoked a cigarette and bobbed her foot aggressively as a plume of smoke emerged from her pretty lips.

            It was the foot bob that made me smile. For she was wearing a green shoe that had a big curl at the toes that looked like the emblem on the Los Angels Rams football helmet. A green skirt with green and red striped tights, red sweater, and a green fedora with a big white feather completed the costume. Kristen, another gal from the office, was dressed identically to Becky. Roger, the plump service manager, was dressed like Santa. At our five o’clock Christmas party, the trio handed out presents. I got a flashlight.

            “You don’t look like a very jolly elf,” I told her.

            “Santa’s jolly, elves can be cranky.”

            “Hey now, that’s not the Christmas spirit.”

            “Oh, yeah? You’re one to talk.”

            “Huh? What do you mean?”

            “What, you don’t think it’s noticeable when Mr. Happy-go-lucky mopes around all week?”

            “Oh, so you noticed I’ve been kind of down the last couple of days?”

            “Ya think!”

            I told her all about Cat and the Dear John letter.

            “Oh, Loyd, I’m so sorry.”

            I shrugged. “It is what it is. I’m just glad I saw you in that outfit. I was starting to feel like I was never gonna smile again.”

            To my surprise, Becky lit another cigarette off of the old one. I had never seen her do this before. She was a light smoker, having started and quit off and on numerous times.

            She called smoking her stress relief. I understood her sentiment, but now that I was older and wiser, I had taken to running as stress relief. I hadn’t had a cigarette since before football season started. In the fifty five hours since my breakup letter from Cat, I probably had run more than twenty miles.

            “So what has you all mopey today?” I asked.

            With a sarcastic smirk, she said, “You noticed.”

            “Ya think,” I replied with her own comment about me. We both chuckled, despite our combined unhappiness.

            “So, as you know, Bruce asked me to marry him over Thanksgiving.”

            I glanced at the ring on her left finger and concentrated hard on not making a face. It was hard enough being newly dumped by Becky’s younger doppelganger. So I didn’t like being reminded that Becky had planned to yoke with that smarmy, creepy Bruce. Bruce with his mustache, shirts unbuttoned halfway down to show off his thick carpet of salt and pepper chest hair, adorned with gold necklace. Then the cherry on top, his mid-life crisis Corvette.

            “So, Bruce’s oldest is getting married New Year’s Eve,” she continued. “As nice as I’ve tried to be to his kids, they don’t like me, especially his oldest. But I didn’t realize that the dislike was so strong that she doesn’t want me at her wedding. But I get it. Her mother is going to be there, and I am, well, the reason they got divorced.”

            “What? How can that be? I distinctly remember you telling me he was divorced when you first started dating.”

            “I know,” she said with a shrug. Then took a long pull on her cigarette and exhaled a long plume of smoke. I eyed the bright red of the lipstick on the filter. It matched the red parts of her elf costume. I almost asked for a drag, just to touch where her luscious lips had been. But she continued and the words got stuck in my throat. “So he claims he told me they were going through a divorce, but not divorced yet. I guess it was a lack of communication.”

            “I see. Can I ha…”

            “But then his divorce wasn’t finalized until October,” she interrupted. “That’s what? Nine or ten months after he and I start dating? I don’t why I agreed to marry him!”

            She pulled off her engagement ring and tossed it onto the desk. I felt a moment of satisfaction, but then ruined it by asking, “Why did you?”

            She snorted a laugh. “Well, he is rather sexy, and, well, fun… If you know what I mean.”

            I didn’t want to ponder what she meant, and her overall comment almost made me throw up in my mouth.

            “Plus, my biological clock is rapidly ticking. I really, really want a couple children. Bruce said because of work he missed a lot of his kid’s growing up, and he’s anxious to start a new family and being an involved with our kid’s lives.”

            “But what about his current family, and the fact they don’t seem to like you?”

            “Yeah, I know,” she said, sighing unhappily. She took long drag on her cigarette, but talked before exhaling, causing little puffs of smoke with each word. “Oh well, nothing’s perfect in life, right? Just like my birthday being ruined along with being dissed at the wedding.”

            “What do you mean?” I asked, even though I happened to know her birthday was New Year’s Day, and the wedding was New Year’s Eve in another state.

            “He had promised me when he proposed that he we would celebrate by taking an extended weekend in Florida for my birthday… I don’t know, maybe I’m making a big mistake by marrying him.”

            She angrily snuffed out her cigarette in an ash tray, and as we both began to walk to the office, I almost told her that I thought she was. But then Tim Mansfield, a balding, pudgy salesman, came walking toward us wearing a baseball hat with mistletoe attached to it. He blocked Becky’s path and pointed to it.

            Becky giggled, and I would remember her words that followed in a few years when the TV show ‘Home Improvement’ aired. She said, “I don’t think so, Tim.”

            But a more vivid memory happened just seconds after this declaration. Tim grinning, complained in mock disgust. “A lot of good this mistle toe does. Apparently you still need to be movie star handsome like Loyd here.”

            Tim removed the hat from his head and stuck it on mine. Then he disappeared into the warehouse restroom. Chuckling, I took it off, and took a couple of steps toward the office when I felt Becky’s hand grasp mine. She ordered, “Wait!”

            I faced her dumbfounded. She looked left, she looked right, she grabbed the mistletoe hat and jammed it back onto my head. Before I could comprehend what was happening, her lips were on mine.