Linda Lawson

            There was a lot more squirrel traffic than usual on the power lines outside my window than usual on Monday morning. Usually I see two or three squirrels during song practice between 6:00 and 7:45 but this time I was seeing sometimes three at a time of both black and grey squirrels, sometimes chasing each other away. It was like they were all busy getting ready for some big event. Maybe they were predicting rain. We’ll see. There were also a lot more seagulls than usual outside doing pigeon work further from the lake and I suspect that also indicates approaching rain.

            I cleaned the kitchen while listening to a live recording of a Beck concert. I guess this was shortly after Prince died. As a tribute he played “Raspberry Beret”. He also covered Michael Jackson’s “Billy Jean”.

            I looked outside just around noon and saw a GFL garbage truck stopped with cops and ambulances around and more and more arriving. It looked like someone had been hit by the truck and was underneath it. It was taking a long time to get the person out because they were waiting for the right kind of equipment to arrive. They put wooden wedge blocks against the tires to keep them from rolling. Traffic was blocked in all four directions with cop cars and then yellow tape. After at least half an hour I saw that the person was out from under the truck and on a stretcher I couldn’t make out whether the victim was a man or a woman because the face was all puffed out and bloody but I noticed the person was conscious. I read later that it was an older woman in a wheelchair that had gotten hit. The garbage truck had to sit there for another hour before it was allowed to drive away.

            I washed a pair of shorts and put them out back to dry and so of course it was going to rain.

            I mixed some tuna with mayonnaise and paprika and ate it with celery sticks for lunch.

            I was working for a farmer mostly mucking out stalls and it seems I was living in a small stall myself. I was looking at another farmer working and commented that the stall he was cleaning was bigger than the bedroom I’d had when I was a kid but he equated it with the small stall in which I had been living on this ranch. He told me that the other hands make jokes about me in my small stall and that some are even carved as graffiti in the wood. I complained about the tea I’d been drinking and he showed a table at one end of the stall that was suddenly more like a kiosk at a country fair and out in the open. He shared with me a special blend of coffee and tea that he’d invented. The tea bags had their own specially designed logo that was some kind of drawing with writing that I couldn’t make out before I woke from my afternoon siesta.

            When I got up I found that the squirrels and maybe the seagulls had been right and there’d been a rainstorm. There was a chance of more even though it was hot again and the sun was shining and so I didn’t take a bike ride. Outside my window there was another ambulance and a guy that looked like he’d fallen and scraped his arm and other parts were being administered to. He looked like he might be drunk but of course there are conditions that produce that effect too. He got into the ambulance without help and they drove away.

            Later that afternoon the air cooled and I had more energy to write.

            I roasted four of the chicken legs I’d bought on Saturday and had one while watching two episodes of Mike Hammer.

            In the first story an old man with only a few months to live hires Hammer to track down a woman that he used to know named Sally because he wants to give her $20,000. He’d tried the hotel that had been her last known address but the clerk gave him the bum’s rush. Hammer goes to the hotel and meets a nasty woman named Bonnie who is the owner and the wife of the clerk, Duke. She brushes Hammer off and he begins to suspect that Bonnie is Sally. Duke also suspects that his wife might be Sally and he plots with his stripper girlfriend Ginger Snap to find out what his wife is hiding so they can blackmail her. Ginger tries to seduce the information out of Hammer but he won’t give. Later back at the hotel as she and Duke are discussing how to get at Bonnie in Ginger’s room, Bonnie is listening in the hall. When Ginger opens the door to leave Bonnie comes in and stabs her to death. Duke puts the body in her closet and Hammer finds it. Duke tells him that Bonnie killed Ginger. Hammer takes the old man to see Sally, he hands her the cheque and walks away. She realizes that she went to all that trouble to kill just to hide her identity from him and all he’d wanted was to giver her $20,000. As the cops are on their way to arrest her she crumples the cheque in anger.

            Sally was played by Doris Dowling, who worked a fair amount in Hollywood in the 1940s but moved to Italy to work in film there. She had some success but came back to the US in the mid 50s where she did a lot of theatre and TV work.

            In the second story Mike Hammer falls in love at first sight with Kathy Dean and she with him. After a quick romance he proposes. All of Mike’s enemies are making book on the wedding not taking place. The day of the wedding Kathy is found dead and Hammer goes on a rampage, almost killing some innocent suspects before he catches the killer.

            Kathy was played by Linda Lawson, whose career spanned 49 years and included music recordings. She was bizarrely crowned Miss Cue by military personnel participating in a nuclear test called Operation Cue at a base in Nevada. The crown was shaped like a mushroom cloud.