volume one IN THE D U D L E Y C L A R K - Ohio Vine Tours

asement. Ammonia fumes from years and years of cat piss from dozens and
dozens of cats. Animal Control would later report they hauled thirty-seven
cats from the basement, along with the skeletons of at least a hundred more.
Their job—: a light spring cleaning, gift from appreciative kids who
were trying to build a case to have their mother carted off to the Funny Farm
so they could take her house.
Every room was packed shoulder high with cardboard boxes filled
with unopened packages of men’s shirts and pants from Sears and Monkey
Wards. The bedrooms were so solidly packed they had to remove the doors to
get inside. And all the while they worked, their eyes leaking and their heads
hurting—long term exposure to ammonia can lead to pulmonary edema,
chronic eye, nose and throat irritation, brain damage and even death—the
old bat with the smeared lips ranted, TV droning in the background, ranted
on and on about invasion of privacy, and how she was gonna call the cops
because they was stealing her stuff and she didn’t have no children, anyway.
But the worst was yet to come.
J.J. tapped Roy and the Louisiana dude to clean the kitchen.
Maybe Roy had lived on the streets; maybe Roy had lived in run-down,
drug-infested dives; maybe Roy had slept with cockroaches on piss-soaked
beds—but nothing he had ever seen, no place he had ever lived, came close to
being as bad as her kitchen.
The table in the center of the room was piled high with crusty plates and
sticky cups and gooey, lidded pots and a jungle of food-caked silverware.
crunch crunch
So the woman was a little messy; with all the ammonia she was
breathing, that was probably to be expected.
crunch
When they looked down to see what they were stepping on, they
discovered a floor covered with crunchy cat shit. Old, dried crunchy cat shit.
It looked like a gravel quarry, it was so thick. crunch Or like the surface
of the moon. Or a dry riverbed. crunch In some places it was over six
inches deep.
crunch crunch
J.J. handed them a square-nosed shovel and gave them some paper masks
to wear.
If there had been nothing else, it would have been an awful day. But
there was something else, something that made it a horrible day.
There was broccoli.
ROY ROGERS IN THE 21ST CENTURY