THE CIRCLE  FLY

by

 Rick Mortimer

     My dad didn’t like cops.  So I knew that when Leroy McRobb showed up at the porch door of our farm house wearing his Stetson and his badge, there was going to be some fireworks.

        Leroy wasn’t much of a cop really, just the local excuse for law and order around our neighborhood of quiet farms and orchards. The local women felt better if there was some kind of law around, and somehow Leroy got the job.  Well, I guess they got their wish anyway, ’cause Leroy was some kind of cop.

       But now he was standing on our porch and Dad was looking at him with that look he usually reserved for Hitch, our mule.  Or, sometimes, even  for Grandpa.  But usually he had a little more understanding in his eyes when he looked at Grandpa, because Grandpa had an excuse of sorts for doing the things he did. He’d fallen down the back stairs three years ago, when I was seven, and walloped his head.  My Dad had found him laying in a heap, and, thinking Grandpa had killed himself this time (he was always falling off the steps), dragged him inside to the couch and then went out to the wood shop in back and built the old man a nice pine box to lay him out in.  It was a beauty too, and took a piece of work to build, so when Dad came back in the house and found Grandpa sitting on the couch teasing the cat – well, he  was some ticked off.  I guess Grandpa had only been in a coma or something  ’cause he was now lively as ever.  Only trouble was, although everything about him seemed to work OK, something funny  had happened to his head.  He was never quite the same after that fall, and sometimes he’d even think my mom was my grandmother, who was dead,  and he’d all of a sudden reach out and pinch her behind or jump up, throw his arms around her, and start gumming her neck.  I used to figure Grandpa must be getting pretty lonely, what with grandma being long gone; but I remember the look Dad used to give him as he’d wrestle the old guy back to the couch.  Just like he was looking at Leroy now.