Bobcat Men

This morning I awoke early, after a night of uneasy sleep. There were dreams, of a disturbing and bizarre nature. More about those later. Today I’d be entertaining the Bobcat people—excavators utilizing a machine called a Bobcat. This is a brand name, applied loosely to that configuration of excavator, and those who operate and spend time around these machines understand the reference. This one, however, was a real Bobcat, not just a generic one.

A little before seven-thirty, as the day was still getting its first light in the sky, they rolled in with a large flatbed truck, a dump-truck, and of course the Bobcat itself—the star of this whole production—taking the place of honor on the back of the flatbed. They got the machines in place, had a brief consultation with me to go over the area of work, and had at it. There was not a lot of talk.

I stood back, held my breath, as I watched the tracked excavator approach a corner of the massive concrete patio. It slid the toothed digger underneath, started to lift. I had no idea of the thickness of this slab, knew only that I’d tried to strike it with a heavy, long-handled maul a few times. The blows simply bounced off, making scarcely a scratch in the surface. I knew it was thick, that’s all. We watched, the foreman and I, as the corner of the patio slowly groaned into the air, the more than ponderous weight held by a few inches of the digger’s front shovel. The operator then let it go, slammed it to the ground, broke the huge piece into large chunks. That was the death knell for the patio. Maybe a little more than two hours later, the thing was history, the pieces scooped into the back of the dump-truck, and a load of fresh topsoil spread around where the patio had once been. That area of the backyard is now ready for me to make my mark on it, to build the new deck, possibly an arbor at ground level—below the deck. Whatever I want to do. With their equipment, their experience, their ability to work quickly and efficiently, these men accomplished in a few hours what would have taken me several weeks to finish. It’s unlikely, however, I would have been able to do a thorough job of it: The slab was just too thick for a do-it-yourself project. The mighty Bobcat, pictured small in the less-than-adequate photos that accompany these writings, is deserving of reverence, humility, and the respect often accorded only to diggers of a much larger stature.

“How’re the stairs going?” The man appeared to have the genteel appearance of the popular chicken promoter, Colonel Sanders. How could he know about the stairs, I thought?
“Seems you’re spendin’ an awful lot of time rippin’ stuff apart, ain’t doin’ so good at putting things back together.” This Colonel Sanders was mean. He took a long puff on a fat cigar, the end glowing red with his inward breath. It’s true, the front steps, object of my nighttime thoughts, occupier of my daytime fantasies, were coming to naught. The front walk was finished, however. I thought maybe the Colonel had mistaken me for someone else, had gotten me confused with another person who’d confided in him about THEIR stairs.
“Ummm, okay I guess. Uh, what stairs are you talking about, please?”
“FRISKY!” He shouted across the dim space to an ink-black cat. “Get down off of there at once!” The cat made straight for the cigar-smoking chicken promoter, tore at the leg of his white trousers. Instinctively, the frothy-haired man dropped his hands to his crotch, guarded his most treasured anatomy.
“You nearly cost me my manhood, you fucking cat! It ain’t gonna happen again!” he bellowed. The cat let go, batted at the lit cigar, made the colonel flinch and burn a hole in his pants leg. Now I knew who the man was, realized as he hopped about, swatting at the neatly fringed hole and the reddish skin of his ancient leg. This was the priest in the fable of Reynard the fox, the man who’d arrived, all naked, to flog the cat who had so terribly been tricked into being trapped as he tried to get at the many mice promised by Reynard. The cat perched itself on a dusty case inside the museum of random regrets, licked delicately at a front paw, minding not in the least the priest—I mean, the colonel.

While the colonel put some distance between himself and the cat, I went over to the case where the cat was cleaning itself. I rubbed at the dusty glass, saw through the dim illumination this random regret: Why weren’t there more peas? There were other regrets in there, but with time and neglect the papers were yellowed, some could no longer be read, and others were turned over---their regrets a mystery played out to the floor of the wooden and glass cases. I thought it best not to ask the proprietor, the colonel-looking man, if I could please see those other regrets. It didn’t seem like that kind of thing was done.

I wandered around, the cat remaining as before, watchful of the curator, but giving no outward appearance of concern. Grooming first one paw, then the other, Frisky acted as though he had not a care in the world. There were other cases, some of which looked to have had visitors recently. The dust was wiped away a little, and there were some smudges that appeared to be from hands, people leaning over, trying to get a better view of the contents. This one, printed on a piece of scrap paper, read: I should have left the roast in longer. Then, leaning against the inside edge of the case, on a torn three-by-five lined card, printed neatly: Maybe asking Jim would have helped.

I remembered my other visit, the one to the museum of random thoughts, thought that I’d try the gift shop—even though this museum looked different and darker and altogether more frightening than the other one. Also, this was a dream museum, so I didn’t know if they’d have a gift shop. I asked the curator, the Colonel Sanders man.
“It’s up front, next to the door,” he said. “Can’t miss it.” This was offered in a tone that suggested if I did miss it, I was every bit the moron. I went up front, wandered into an empty room, thought immediately I’d made a mistake. I came back out, looked at the curator, expecting him to start yelling at me or Frisky.
“That’s it! That’s it!” He shouted. “Go ahead, look around!”
“There’s nothing in there,” I said. Even for a dream gift shop, this one was really lacking.
He was darning his torn trousers, closing the burned hole with yellow thread that contrasted sharply against the white pants.
“We had a tour bus Thursday,” he said in a disinterested way. “They musta bought up everything.” He looked around, grabbed a plain drinking glass from a shelf.
“They didn’t get this, though!”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Museum glass, just ain’t got the writin’ on it yet. But it’s same as the one’s got the writin’. Only one we got, ‘til we get more.”
Frisky lunged from behind, knocked the one plain museum drinking glass with no writing clear across the room, smashed it into a million pieces. The curator jabbed himself with the sewing needle, bellowed while his face filled with red.

“You were asking about the stairs,” I said, edging my way towards the door and the empty gift shop. I felt I needed to offer an explanation, a reason why my progress was so slow. I was leaving anyway, so now was as good a time as any to explain myself to the beleaguered and fuming curator. “It’s just that, you know, sometimes I’ll have a job, I can’t always spend all the time….”

I wanted to tell him that I’d hired some men, good men who would be coming next day, but my speech became molasses-slow, impeded by that dream-goo that makes it hard to say anything. I wanted to say that I was working on the house, doing what I could, but that sometimes I had to get help, get experts—people who knew what they were doing.
“You know, I have to do that sometimes,” in my speech that sounded like my mouth was being held shut by rubber bands.

“Anyway, I would have bought the glass—the museum glass, if it weren’t for Frisky.” He was bellowing as I slipped out the door into the crazy-house street filled with jagged rooflines and lampposts that reached to the sky. The last thing I saw was Frisky, on an upper shelf, licking his belly. I looked at the clock: The Bobcat men would be here in two hours.