One summer a stray cat turned up at our house and had babies. There was a sickly little orange one with a head that wobbled back and forth. When it was just off the titty I showed it to Bicycle Jenny and said, Look at my little kitten, there’s something wrong with its head. She said, Let me take her, see what I can do.

I thought, We’ll never see that kitten again. I kind of forgot about it. I guess I had other cats. I don’t remember worrying about it or wondering. I don’t know how much time went by — maybe a few weeks. But then Bicycle Jenny showed up when I was lying out in the hammock and said, Somebody wants to see you.

I don’t know what she did, I don’t know how she kept her little dogs from killing it, but the cat was fine and its head no longer shook. She didn’t swap kittens — this cat was orange with three distinct white marks. No two cats have the same markings.

A few months later, my sister and I were raking leaves with our mom when an ambulance went by, then cop cars. There wasn’t much traffic on our street and we were nosy — we ran over there. We heard screaming and crying and dogs barking. There was a whole string of emergency personnel. They said she wasn’t taking care of herself. People can’t live like that, they said. It took several large men to get her into the ambulance. The dogs were running everywhere, getting chased with long-handled nets. We were screaming and crying, too.

They hauled her off to a home at Comstock, Iowa. I always wanted to go up to Comstock to see her. She lived at the home a long time. She was close to a hundred years old when she died. I still have the newspaper clipping with her obituary. My mom kept it in a scrapbook. Her name was Marla Weaver. She was originally from Chesterfield, I believe.

Down in her hole in the ground were piles and piles of blankets and sleeping bags for Bicycle Jenny. But those dogs — chihuahuas are little thin-haired things — how’d they not freeze in the winter? I didn’t think nothing of it when I was a kid but I’m thinking of it now — how’d the dogs survive?

If somebody told me this story, I’d definitely say, You’re fucking nuts. Chihuahuas? In a hole? In the wintertime, in a bathtub? In Iowa?

TWO

THE JOCKEY

At school, everyone wondered what you wanted to do when you grew up. I said I wanted to be a jockey, riding racehorses. The teachers were concerned. But jockeys are small, and I was getting tall. People told me, Put books on your head, you won’t grow. So I’d be walking around with books. I stacked the heaviest ones I could find.