Louis

         "Heh heh heh." Louis always cackled instead of laughing. It got to me, that cackle. Especially toward the end. Louis looked like he should have had a booming laugh - he was a great, big man with a protruding belly - but he would get tickled about something and out would come this incongruent cackle. This time he was looking at Mrs. Fangoli point her finger at the neighbor boy just the way she had pointed it at Louis when he was small. The boy had probably been in her watermelon patch, thinking Mrs. Fangoli was old and couldn't see. Old? Lawks a mercy me, she was old, all right. But she could see better than anybody. Better than anybody in Freesburg anyways.

         So, there sat Louis every day cackling at whatever out of the window. Since he couldn't get out, that's where he would get his entertainment from. Me, I'd be in the corner doing my homework, and Louis would still be gathering material for his stories. He knew stories about everyone in town, even after he couldn't leave the apartment. It drove him crazy though, being cooped up. He had gotten on his motorcycle one day and was driving it down the road looking at Seraphina Jenkins. Not that I blame him. Ooooh weeee, no. I've looked at her a time myself. Louis used to say, "Joey, if I was thirty years younger, that young'un would wear them high heels out just runnin' from me. I could look at that backside all day." He found out he couldn't look and drive at the same time, though. This time it cost him two legs when he ran through the back of old man Johnson's butcher shop and into the meat grinding machine.

         He was lucky, at that, that he only lost his legs - he still had his girlfriend, Sheila.

         "Joey, howya doin' boy!" Sheila would come in smiling - she had to have had teeth sometime in her life, I know she did.

          "Sheila, honey, come here!" Oh good night, he would have to kiss her on her mouth. That used to give me the heebie-jeebies, him kissing her right on that old toothless mouth. Then she would pull her knife out and start to work on the corns on her feet. Oh Lord, that almost sent me over the moon.

         Mrs. Fangoli couldn't stand it for Sheila to come over. She'd be all glaring from her front porch with those googling eyes. They say the only thing you can see from the moon is that wall in China - I disagree. I'll wager you can see those eyes glaring at everybody from the neighborhood boys on up. And talk? That woman knew she was a somebody with something to say.

         "Her old filthy self, marching down here to the good part of town like she is somebody, associating with decent folks. Her daddy's done killed somebody, and the apple don't fall far from the tree, nosir it don't. She better not come outa there and head thisaway, she'll be askin for it . . ." Yakety yakety yak yak yak. What decent folks? Herself, I suppose. And she wore the same old dinky wore-out tennis shoes with holes for the little toes every day.

         So, anyway, Sheila would come in, and I would split. Them two people who were old enough to have seen Noah exit the ark loving up on each other was more than I wanted to think about. Besides, I could sit in the cafe and drink a coke. Seraphina had worked there about two years, and she would give me free refills. She probably saw Sheila coming and learned to expect me. Watching her move around the cafe was a blessing, and it wasn't in disguise either, it was usually in tiny little shorts and skirts. The only reason they let her get away with it was all the business she brought in. Truckers would detour thirty miles - one said he heard about the Chatterbox all the way to the next state.

         Mrs. Frangoli would still be muttering, if you could call it that since everybody could hear it, when Sheila came out of the apartment house a couple of hours later. What did they do all that time, I have no idea, as old as Louis was. There was no way Sheila could help hearing. She would just cut her eyes over, and skedaddle.

         Then Louis got to where he couldn't get his breath. His nose would bleed. Bleed? He would pour blood like Vesuvius had come alive in our living room. The doctor said it couldn't be much longer - as big as Louis was, his heart had got wore out. I had to turn my face to the open window when I heard that.

         Mrs. Fangoli heard everything there was to hear from the doctor - he was her nephew. A decent fellow in spite of that, but she got it out of him about Louis' condition. She couldn't help coming over to commiserate, and give Louis her own peculiar brand of help.

         "All right, young man," (!!! ran through my mind, Louis hadn't been young since the Eisenhower administration) "you've sowed your wild oats your whole life, and now what? You're getting your come-uppance!"

         "Mrs. Fangoli, you are absolutely right," Louis agreed. (!!! again, my brain is a regular fountain of exclamation points.) "Why should a nasty old reprobate like me be permitted to live for one second longer?"

         Mrs. Fangoli's eyes glazed over. She looked from Louis to me, wondering if she were being made fun of. Then she stood suddenly, and quick-marched to the door and flung it open, and prepared to barrel out. And met a human thunderstorm in the form of a toothless woman named Sheila.

         Pouring tears, she ran past Mrs. Fangoli without seeing her. Louis had called her earlier with the doctor's news. Weeping, she couldn't say a word. She just laid her head down on Louis' chest.

         Mrs. Fangoli couldn't resist. Screeching like she had worked on this moment since the day she was born, she lit into Sheila like a tornado. Sheila looked up blankly at the screeching screaming woman in front of her, and calmly pulled out her knife, and without changing expression, prepared to plunge it into Mrs. Fangoli, who immediately knocked the knife out of her hand. And directly into Louis' chest.

* * * *
         The coronor said Louis didn't stand a chance. We buried him out behind the cafe. I like to think that somehow, somewhere, he can still see Seraphina when she comes to work.