A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me

by Jason Schmidt

  At the exact instant that I let go of his paws, I knew I’d made a horrible mistake. I’d done it too hard. I’d done it too fast. It was a shitty thing to do to a cat in the first place, but as soon as I let go of his paws I realized he was going to go too high, and that his spin was completely uncontrolled. My first thought was to step in and catch him, but I knew that if I tried he’d tear me to pieces with his claws. That shouldn’t have mattered—and if someone had given me a choice, later on, I would have taken the mauling—but it was enough to make me hesitate. So instead I watched, praying he’d just land on his stomach, as he arced eight or nine feet up in the air and came down right on his head.

  I thought the grass might be soft enough to save him. It wasn’t.

  His body flopped onto its side, and he lay there, curled up in a ball for a second, before he started to make a noise—a low, long, throaty yowl. I went over to him and tried to pet him and see if he was okay, and the noise got louder as I got closer. My nerve broke, and I ran inside to get Dad.

  I was crying hysterically when I ran into his room, and it took me a few seconds to be able to make any words at all. And then I started lying. First it was a weird freak accident—Tom jumping out of my arms and landing weirdly. Then it became me dropping him, to see how he landed on his feet. Then me tossing him up in the air. Each story came out once. Dad would be sympathetic. Then I’d tell the next one—closer to the truth. Dad would be less sympathetic. Every time I got a lie out—every time Dad seemed to believe it—I remembered what I’d done. I remembered Tom spinning in the air and hitting the ground—and something drove me another step closer to the truth.

  “I threw him up in the air,” I gasped. “I threw him, and I spun him so he couldn’t land on his feet, and he landed on his head. I did it on purpose. It’s my fault. It’s all my fault.”

  Dad’s face went completely blank.

  “Why would you do that?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Why would you do that?” he screamed.

  “I don’t know,” I whispered.

  Dad looked at the ceiling and took a deep breath. He’d been hugging me a minute before, but now he kind of gently pushed me away and stared at the ceiling.

  “You have to help,” I said.

  “What do you want me to do, Jason? You dropped him on his head.”

  “He’s still alive,” I said.

  “He’s what?”

  “He’s still alive,” I said, pointing, through the wall to the spot in the side yard where I knew Tom was lying.

  Dad walked past me and went outside. When I followed him out he was standing over the cat. Then he knelt down next to the curled-up animal and touched Tom’s soft black fur. Tom howled.

  Dad jumped back, took a few quick steps, and grabbed me by the shoulders.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” he screamed, shaking me back and forth. I didn’t mind. I wanted something worse. “What the fuck is wrong with you? What is wrong in your head that you would do this to a helpless animal?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Dad went over and picked the cat up. Tom howled again and Dad carried him down into the basement.

  “Come here!” he shouted over his shoulder.

  Once we were in the basement he had me make a little bed for Tom in a box, with a blanket. He yelled the instructions at me. I did whatever he told me. Once I’d put the bed together, Dad shouted, “Stay here!” and left the basement.

  I sat there next to Tom for a long time. I wasn’t sure how long it was. After a while I worked up the courage to reach out and touch him. He was still warm and soft. His tail twitched. His eyes opened wide to get a look at me, like he wanted to turn to face me but couldn’t move his head. He made a low noise in his throat. Not quite a yowl. Not quite a growl or a hiss.

  Eventually his body seemed to relax a little. He wasn’t dead. He just unclenched.

  Dad came back in and dropped a plastic container of chicken livers on the floor next to me.

  “You’ll feed him those until he dies,” Dad said. “If he shits or pisses in the box, you’ll clean it up.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Dad left me in the basement.

  * * *

  For the next couple of days, I took care of Tom whenever I wasn’t sleeping or at school. I tried to feed him chicken livers, and I carried his box around with me. One day we had a freak bout of sunny weather and I took him out on the front porch and sat with him for a while in the sun. Dad called me inside for something, and when I came back out on the porch, Tom was gone.

  “He probably went off to die somewhere,” Dad said. “That’s what cats do.”

  “I guess.” I hadn’t seen anything to suggest he could move, let alone crawl off to die somewhere.

  About a week later, Calliope and I were playing in the backyard when Tom burst out of the bushes behind the house at a dead run and came to a sudden stop about three feet from us. We stared at him in shock while he looked back and forth between us. Then he let out a loud “Meow!” and fell over onto his side.

  “Holy shit!” Calliope said. “Is he…?”

  Tom looked up. Looked at us. Let out another “Meow!” and jumped to his feet and took off back into the bushes.

  “What the holy hell was that?” Calliope asked.

  I shook my head. I had no idea.

  A few days further on, and Tom started showing up for afternoon feedings. Then he started hanging around on the porch with the other cats. He never was completely normal again. He went everywhere at a run, and when he ran his body tended to elongate, like his hind legs were just a little bit slower than his front legs. When they got too far behind him, his front legs would stop, wait for his hind legs to catch up, and then he’d start running again. He never let me pet his back, but sometimes he’d let me pet his stomach. Other times he’d let me put my hand on his stomach, then he’d close up on me like a trap, digging his claws into my arm and hand. Once he laid open my big toe to the bone. It took months to heal.

  Not that I could blame him. I certainly didn’t have any illusions that it made us even.

  * * *

  About six months after the thing with Tom, one of our other cats, a gray tabby named Kit-Kat, got hit by a car on the busy street out in front of our house. I didn’t see the accident, but when I went out in the side yard I noticed what I thought was a piece of raw meat lying on the lawn. When I got closer I realized it was an embryonic kitten. The furry little body was part of a dried-up trail of blood and tissue that I followed across the yard until I found three more dead kittens—and then Kit-Kat, in the bushes near the back of the yard. She was clearly alive, curled up and licking blood off her fur, but also clearly very badly injured.

  I went inside, and into my dad’s room where he was reading.

  “Kit-Kat got hit by a car,” I said. “I think she was pregnant. There are dead kittens all over the lawn.”

  Dad stared at me for a minute, then he put down his book, got up, and went outside. I was following him out when I saw him coming back toward me. His face was dark purple. He grabbed me by the arm and pulled me toward the little pile of sticks I kept next to the porch. I used them as pretend swords and spears for my make-believe medieval adventures. One of the things in the pile was an old aluminum tent pole. It was part of a larger pole that used to be connected by elastic cords that ran inside the poles. When the elastic broke loose, I’d kept a section to use as a kind of bullwhip. It was an aluminum tube, about eighteen inches long, with eight or nine inches of elastic cord, like bungee cord, hanging out of the end.

  I’d been obsessed with bullwhips since seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark the year before. I especially liked the idea of using a bullwhip to wrap around things, like tree branches and people’s legs, like a sort of prehensile weapon. Once, when we were living on Aloha Street, I’d used a rubber snake to try to catch Thunder’s legs. The movies made it look easy, but I couldn’t get it to work on Thun
der, and Dad came into the living room to find me on my hands and knees, following the dog around, swinging my long rubber snake in big looping arcs to see if I could make it coil around his feet. Thunder, for his part, was hopping over the snake and looking annoyed. Calliope was watching from the couch, offering opinions on my technique.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Dad said, snatching the snake out of my hands. “You think it’s funny to whip the dog? Do you? You think this is funny, motherfucker?”

  I was still trying to figure out why I was in trouble when he hit me with the snake the first time. I yelped and started to get up to run, but he whipped me with it again and I started crawling, trying to get away from him.

  “You think this is funny?” he kept yelling while he chased me with the snake. I felt one stinging blow after another, and then the snake broke apart. Dad picked up the pieces and started whipping me with those. Calliope, sitting on the couch, was laughing too hard to talk.

  “Stop it!” I screamed, curling up in a ball to protect my face.

  “Jesus, Mark!” Calliope finally gasped out. “He wasn’t hurting the dog. He was just trying to catch his feet!”

  Dad was past hearing. He stood over me, breathing hard, and dropped the last two pieces of the shredded snake on top of me while I lay on the ground whimpering.

  “Don’t ever let me see you doing that again,” he growled. “Never again.”

  Now, in the backyard of the Ballard house, he shook the tent pole fragment at me, with its dangling piece of elastic.

  “Is this what you used?” he asked. “You think it’s fun to hurt animals? Huh? What did you do? What the fuck did you do?”

  I stared at him blankly while I caught up with his line of thinking. He was using the same words he’d used before, or I might not have been able to make the connection.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Don’t you lie to me, you little piece of shit,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” I said. “I told you. I told you about Tom. I didn’t…”

  “Where’s the cat?” he said.

  I pointed, and he went over to the bushes where Kit-Kat was lying and looked at her for a minute. He was still holding the tent pole. He came back over a minute later.

  “I didn’t do it,” I said.

  “Fine,” he said, throwing the tent pole on the ground and going inside. I followed him in and saw he was looking for a veterinarian in the yellow pages. He stopped and looked up at me.

  “Get a shovel and go clean that shit off the lawn,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said. I went outside and down to the basement, where we kept our garden tools. I grabbed the shovel and started scooping up dead kittens and carrying them to the garbage cans we kept in the bushes next to the kitchen door. Then I used the hose to wash away the blood. When I was done, I put everything away. I went back to the kitchen door and I could hear Dad on the phone inside, talking to a vet. I noticed the tent pole on the ground next to the porch. I picked it up, broke it over my knee, and threw it in the garbage can with the dead kittens.

  Kit-Kat lived, but that summer Carmella said we were breaking the law by having so many cats and threatened to call Animal Control on us. Dad finally put up a sign by the road, inviting passersby to take as many cats as they wanted. Two weeks later they were all gone, including Tom.

  28

  I had a good fourth grade year at my new school. Or at least it was a much less shitty year than first, second, and third grades had been, which felt like having a good year. So I went back to school for my fifth grade year with high hopes that were promptly dashed. My fourth grade teacher had done me the favor of not giving a shit about me. He barely noticed I was in class. If I messed up or did something against the rules, he punished me. But then he forgot about it.

  My new teacher, Mr. Parsons, made it clear right away that I was going to be a special project of his. He yelled at me in front of the class for slouching, for putting my feet on my desk, for talking to myself; he yelled at me for drawing when he was talking. For laughing. He yelled at me once for loosening my belt. It wasn’t exactly unexpected—four years of public school had taught me never to underestimate the viciousness of underpaid civil servants—but I didn’t have much tolerance for it either. I started skipping school almost immediately.

  Three weeks into the academic year I got a reprieve when the school was reorganized to create a mixed fifth and sixth grade class, with a new teacher named Mr. Fields. Mr. Fields was a comparatively young hippie with a shaggy haircut and an earnest personality. He taught class with puppets he’d made himself, and he was a better-than-fair ventriloquist. I was surprised it worked as well as it did. The class had a higher-than-average proportion of hardcore white trash in it—lots of feathered hair, smoking in the bathrooms, and sweatbands. But when Mr. Fields pulled out his talking worm, we all turned back into regular kids. Even at the time I thought it was remarkable.

  I made a couple of new friends in Mr. Fields’s class. Ryan had moved to Seattle from New York two years before, and had lived down in South Seattle before moving to Ballard and starting at my school. He was a sixth grader with an October birthday, so he was almost two years older than I was. Other than that, he didn’t really stand out. He was of medium height and build—maybe a little on the chunky side—with big features, pale skin, and straight black hair, like I’d expect to see on an Indian or an Asian kid. He was perhaps a little less white trash than the rest of the class, in that he didn’t go in for sports and his hair was impossible to feather, but that was his only notable feature. Then one day I noticed him fiddling with a twenty-sided die. Which meant he played Dungeons & Dragons.

  Gabe, my action-figures acquaintance from fourth grade, had started a D&D group over the summer. Most of the other kids in the group were friends Gabe already had when I met him, so I jumped at the chance to invite Ryan to the group. Look, I wanted to say to them, I can make friends, too! And for about a week, Ryan was the new kid I’d invited to the group. He was “Jason’s friend Ryan.” By the second week, Ryan was telling me he couldn’t hang out because kids in our D&D group who wouldn’t give me the time of day were calling him to do stuff on weekends, so his social calendar was basically full.

  * * *

  I liked to believe that my relationship with my D&D friends was complicated, but the truth was actually pretty simple. To say I was at the bottom of the totem pole in that crew would have been a flight of self-aggrandizing fancy. The group was small. It was usually me, Gabe, his friends Joey and Patrick, Ryan, and three other kids who came and went depending on their inclinations and the status of their parents’ interstate custody battles: Joel, Nathan, and Ben. What it lacked in size, the group more than made up for with infighting and acrimony.

  Joey and Patrick were the source of most of my problems. They’d been friends with Gabe before I came to Ballard, and they weren’t super happy about Gabe’s decision to include me in their activities. Joey was what we used to call mixed race, meaning some mixture of African American and Caucasian. He lived in the basement of a house with his mom, an overweight blond woman who cooked pasta with red sauce for dinner six nights a week. His dad had been black—still was, for all I knew, but he never visited or came up in conversation. Culturally Joey was as white as the rest of us, and I’d known him for almost a year before I figured out that he considered himself any kind of outsider in ultra-white-bread Ballard.

  Patrick was a skinny kid with light brown hair, weasel-like features, and a personality to match. His claim to fame was that he was descended from a famous pirate—Captain Kidd or Blackbeard or someone—and supposedly had a box of exotic knives and swords, stored at his grandmother’s house in Canada, to be claimed on the occasion of his eighteenth birthday.

  As time passed, Joey and Patrick’s initial dislike for me hardened into something more frightening. They frequently hosted our D&D games because they had extra space in their homes, and once Patrick announced out of the blue that the
only way I’d be allowed to stay for the game was if I paid a toll: I had to let everyone in the group punch me in the stomach, once, as hard as they could. I took the hits, and every kid in the group, including Gabe, gave it their best shot. After that there was blood in the water, and the conflict just intensified.

  Sometimes when I spent the night over at Ryan’s house, he’d lock me out on the porch without my shoes and make me answer trivia questions for an hour before he’d let me back in. Once he’d managed to lock me out in my underwear. Gabe’s mom had finally relented on sending him to day care after school when he started fifth grade, but she’d also set a four-kid limit on the number of guests Gabe could have at their place when she was at work; whenever the limit was exceeded, I was always the one Gabe kicked out. They regularly ditched me on outings—in parks, in downtown Ballard after movies, or on our way to baseball games or events around the neighborhood. And all that was nothing compared to the abuse they heaped on my characters in various role-playing sessions: in our imaginary world of elves and goblins, my fourteenth-level assassin was castrated, immolated, sodomized, eaten alive, shat out, and magically reconstituted to go through the same ordeal all over again.

  I told my dad about it once, only to end up having to talk him out of calling everyone’s parents. I convinced him I’d made it sound worse than it was, and that it was really just a lot of regular teasing. The role-playing stuff particularly bothered him. He said it was borderline sexual abuse. After I talked him down I waited a few weeks, then told him it had gotten better.

  He didn’t seem to understand or care that these people were my best friends—they were the best friends I was capable of making, and the only thing I had to offer them was my desperation.

  * * *

  I made another friend in my fifth grade year, but the time I spent with him felt like some kind of dirty secret. Eddie was one of the sixth graders in Mr. Fields’s class. We met during a vote-stacking campaign to set the class mascot for the fake currency Mr. Fields was giving to us. The idea was that we all had bank accounts; we earned “money” for our accounts by turning in our homework on time and doing extra credit projects. We got to spend the money during auctions for novelty items, like mechanical pencils or Garfield the Cat comic books. But all of it was based on the idea of a classroom currency, and there was a vote to decide whose face should go on the money. Eddie wanted it to be Jim Davis’s iconic Garfield character. I liked that idea better than I liked any of the alternatives, so I helped him consolidate a voting bloc to give us a plurality. We didn’t know any of those terms, we just knew the scam: during the pre-vote caucuses we hustled from table to table telling the most popular kids in each camp how the other groups were working against them. We dragged kids out into the hallway and offered them better seats in the class, or desserts from our lunch trays, if they voted the way we wanted them to. Garfield won by two votes.