Cat At The Wall

by Deborah Ellis

  I could see from the looks on my friends’ faces that they could see what was going on and thought it was hilarious.

  Wheelchair kid started to ask me to get out of the way, but he couldn’t really speak very well, so I decided to continue to pretend he wasn’t there.

  He kept trying to ask me to move, until I turned around and said, “Is there something you want? Speak up!”

  My friends all giggled, although they did it behind books that they held up to their mouths. I was brave enough to laugh openly. I stopped only when I saw from their eyes that something was wrong.

  Ms. Zero, of course, was creeping up on us.

  We wouldn’t have kept Wheelchair Boy trapped for long, but did that matter to Zero? Not a bit. She just jumped to the conclusion that we were doing something wrong. No, that I was doing something wrong.

  I stepped aside and let Chair Boy pass. I didn’t even wait to be told to. I should have got some credit for that.

  “Times two,” she said to me, before starting a conversation with the Chair and continuing down the hallway.

  When I got back to my homeroom, my name was back on the chalkboard, with a times two beside it.

  At the end of the day, I stayed behind after class to write out the copies. I didn’t plan on speaking to Ms. Zero. There was nothing I wanted to say to her. I just wanted to get the punishment done and get away from her.

  “You’ll have to do the work at home,” she said. “I’m leaving now.”

  “I won’t be long,” I said.

  “No, you won’t be,” Ms. Zero said. “You’ll be leaving now, too. I have to lock up the classroom.”

  “I don’t have a copy of the poem at home,” I said.

  “That’s a problem,” she said. “It’s a good thing you have a brain that will assist you in finding a solution.”

  “I’ll take the poster home,” I decided, and moved to take it down from the bulletin board.

  “That stays here,” Ms. Zero said. “It belongs to me.” She held the door open for me and motioned with her head that it was time for me to go through it.

  “How am I supposed to do the detention?”

  Ms. Zero said nothing except, “Have a good evening.” She locked the door behind her and walked away from me down the hall.

  So I didn’t do the detention. I suppose I could have looked it up on the internet but I didn’t think of that until the next morning. It wasn’t my fault. It was hers for not suggesting it. But that didn’t keep her from taking one look at her desk at the beginning of class the next morning, then crossing to the side chalkboard and changing the number two beside my name to a number three.

  I stayed in at lunch time and copied out the stupid poem three times. Ms. Zero was having one of her time-management seminars. All the desks were taken. I had to stand the whole time.

  It was completely, completely wrong. No one should ever be treated like that. She should never have been allowed to be a teacher.

  Eleven

  —

  I was looking forward to a good sleep. I was full of food. I was inside a house and my back was against the door so that nothing could get me by surprise. I was going to have a real, sound sleep for a change, instead of napping with one eye open like I had to when I slept outside.

  The little boy was humming while he made a new house out of the food trays. The humming bugged me but not too much. I could push it into the background and that was fine.

  I was starting to drift off into a lovely sleep when the soldiers started yakking again.

  “What are you doing?” Simcha asked.

  “Shut up,” said Aaron, which made me like him a little bit more.

  “Why are you pointing the telescope up in the air? You looking for terrorists in the sky?”

  “I’m looking at a Turkestan shrike,” Aaron said. “At least I think it is. I’ve never seen one before, and I don’t have my book with me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “My bird identification book. I’m a birder.”

  “A birder?”

  “Israel is a major intercontinental migratory route for birds,” Aaron said. “Five hundred million birds come through here twice a year. Over five hundred different species.”

  “Who cares?”

  “Blast. It flew away.”

  Aaron launched into a long lecture about the importance of birds to the ecosystem, which led to Simcha talking about how surfing made him feel close to nature, and from there they moved on to talking about girls they met on the beach and on bird-watching trips.

  On and on. I opened one eye and used it to glare at them, but they paid no attention.

  Like I’ve said, no one cares about the feelings of cats.

  I already knew much more than I ever wanted to know about birds. They are too fast for me to catch. Whenever I try, they fly out of my reach, perch on a branch and laugh at me.

  Birds got me another detention.

  Before I died, I had to suffer through my sister’s school speech.

  It was this thing that happened every year. All the sixth-grade kids had to give a speech in front of everyone in the school. The best ones got prizes and were entered into the city-wide public-speaking contest sponsored by the Bethlehem Chamber of Commerce.

  When I was in sixth grade, we were supposed to come up with our own topic and let the teacher know weeks in advance. I figured that if I didn’t give her a topic, I wouldn’t have to do the speech. So, no topic.

  It didn’t work. One day, the teacher called my whole crew up to the front of the class, because, of course, none of us had chosen a topic. She had us draw slips of paper from Darren Brown’s smelly baseball hat, then said, “These are your topics.”

  Mine was mineral resources of Appalachia.

  I stood there, staring at it in horror, and immediately tried to swap. All my crew were against me that day. They took one look at my topic, then shoved theirs deep down in their pockets.

  “You will be on that stage alone for at least three minutes,” the teacher said. “I suggest you get prepared. It will be a long three minutes if you are standing there with nothing to say.”

  My way of getting prepared was to go to the mall with money from my mother’s wallet to get a new sweater to wear on stage. As for the mineral resources of Appalachia, I just got something off the internet and read it. I didn’t care what I was reading because I knew no one was listening. I got some laughs, though. They were laughing with me at how boring it all was.

  When Polly got to sixth grade, she didn’t choose a topic because the idea of going out in front of everyone and talking filled her with such terror that she just wanted to escape the whole thing. So she was called to the front to choose a topic from the hat.

  She got birds of Pennsylvania.

  Instead of fluffing it off like any normal person would do, she took her little self to the library. She stuck her face in a book. She talked on the phone with someone from the Audubon Society. She even went bird-watching at the Lehigh Gap Nature Center with the Catholic youth group. It was ridiculous.

  Polly worked hard at her speech. She wrote it out on cue cards and she practiced it in her room, over and over. My bedroom was next to hers so I couldn’t escape it. It made me sick the way Mom and Dad applauded when she did her speech for them after supper one night. I got so tired of hearing about the green-winged teal and the snowy plover and the nesting patterns of the pied-billed grebe.

  I made plans for my revenge. My crew were happy to go along.

  Polly had a big navy cardigan of my father’s that she liked to wear. She could hide in it. The sweater hung on her like a potato sack and had deep pockets that she used to carry around paperback books and all kinds of junk. I knew she would keep her little cue cards in one of those pockets.

  My crew and I went up to her when she fi
led into the auditorium with her class. We surrounded her before she could take her seat.

  “Polly, good luck today!” I said, giving my sister a hug. She stood straight and stiff while I hugged her. She could tell it was phony. I didn’t care. While I hugged her, I stole her cue cards out of the cardigan pocket. It was easy. I handed them off to one of my crew. We all wished her good luck and then, smiling sweetly, we went back to our seats.

  Polly sat down a few rows in front of us and off to one side. I can still see the moment when she realized that her cue cards were gone. A fraction of a second later, she realized that I had taken them. She popped up out of her chair, turned around and looked right at me.

  “She even looks like a carp,” I said to my crew, and we all made fish faces at her.

  She sank back into her seat.

  When her turn came, I almost felt sorry for her. She looked so little all alone in the middle of that big stage. She stood at the microphone and didn’t say a word.

  “Go, Fishface!” my crew called out, just as we had planned.

  The sound hit Polly like a fist. I saw her body actually buckle. Kids started to laugh.

  And I truly, honestly, felt bad for a moment. I realized I had gone too far. I even thought of apologizing to her later.

  But then, instead of running off the stage and putting an end to it, she unfolded herself, took a deep breath, and started babbling about the birds.

  “The sun has not yet risen, but the birds are already awake. Their calls fill the air before the noise of the traffic takes over.”

  She spoke loudly, clearly and with such expression that I was drawn into her stupid little speech even though I had heard it five thousand times before.

  She didn’t need her cue cards. She knew her whole speech by heart.

  When she finished, she got huge applause.

  Not from me. I might have, but then she looked at me again. And this look was just rude. Defiant and rude. It was a look that said, “Screw you!”

  Of course she was one of the winners. She went on to win at the ward level. She got beaten at finals, but not by much.

  It got worse. A local furniture store liked her voice and hired her to record some radio commercials for them. And they paid her!

  My detention came right after the speech day assembly. Ms. Zero rattled off the names of my whole gang. We all had to put our names on the board — well, mine was already there. We stayed after school to write out our punishment poems. At first it was fun because we were all there together. But I had four times more work to do than they did, and no one would wait with me while I did it. They were supposed to be my friends, and they just left me.

  The soldiers kept going on and on about birds and the war and the bus stations with the best fast-food places and other things that were not the least bit interesting. Every now and then I heard the sounds of footsteps outside as people passed by. Sometimes I could smell a dog in the streets or one of those horrible cats, but mostly the world outside the house was quiet.

  As the hours went by and the heat rose in the day, the talk slowed down. At some point, it trickled off altogether. The boy even stopped humming.

  Then there was only the sound of the soldiers snoring and a few flies buzzing along a windowpane.

  Everything and everyone else in the world was asleep.

  I joined them.

  Twelve

  —

  I woke up to the sound of gunshots.

  I hate it when that happens.

  If people insist on shooting other people, they should do it quietly so that a cat can have a decent nap.

  At least the shooting was far away and did not go on and on. I could hear the low rumble of the riots off in the distance. It sounded a little like a truck and a little like thunder and a little like the crowd at a baseball game. It faded in and out with the change of the breeze.

  The riots didn’t happen every day. There were often weeks and weeks when things were quiet and I could look for food without worrying about getting shot or breathing in tear gas or getting hit by a rock thrown by some kid with lousy aim or getting tangled up in the feet of a hundred running people.

  After a nap, I like to have a good stretch, so I did that. Then I went to see if the soldiers were ready to eat again.

  They were still sleeping. So was the kid, but I didn’t care about him. The kid had no food.

  I was ready to eat.

  I hopped up on the legs of one of the soldiers, put my paws on his chest and raised myself up. Then I screeched in his face.

  “Feed me!” I screamed.

  He jumped ten feet. Everyone did. I went flying. I landed okay and there was a nice bit of chaos while everyone woke up and remembered where they were and what they were doing.

  “You were sleeping!” the soldiers accused each other.

  The boy started to cry.

  He could really wail.

  “Shut him up,” one soldier said to the other. “He’ll draw attention to the house.”

  “Leave him alone. Kids cry all the time. There’s nothing unusual about that.”

  I didn’t care one way or another, but the crying and the arguing were bugging me. I like to wake up slowly, on my own time. I do as a cat and I did as a human. When I was alive I always wished my mother would wake me up by bringing me a glass of cold orange juice and quietly pulling back the curtains, easing me into the day.

  “Here’s an alarm clock,” was what Mom said instead.

  It wasn’t fair, but that was my life.

  Clearly, it was going to be up to me to bring some peace and quiet back to the little house, and to get everyone calmed down enough to realize they were hungry.

  I went over to the crying little boy and rubbed up against his legs, purring and nudging his hands with my head, begging him to pet me. He put his arms around me. His sobs eased off, but then he started reciting the stupid punishment poem again.

  The soldiers were happier, but I wasn’t much further ahead.

  A roar rose up from the riots.

  “Hear that?” Simcha asked. “They’re at it again.”

  “Old lady’s moved,” Aaron said, peering through the telescope. “She’s put down her knitting and has left her chair.”

  “I’ll alert the media,” Simcha muttered.

  I went up to the top shelf again to get as far away from all of them as possible. I did some grooming but my head wasn’t really into it.

  “It’s getting late,” Aaron said after a while. “It’s quite late in the afternoon. If this kid has parents who left him to go to work, then they should be coming back soon.”

  “What happens when they do?”

  “We’ll let them in the house and tell them to keep quiet,” Aaron said. “The boy will have his parents back and he won’t be our problem anymore.”

  They were quiet for a while. Then, “This is really boring,” Simcha said.

  “What did you expect?”

  “Taking over someone’s house and using it as a base for spying sounded exciting when they explained it in training.”

  “Some homes have televisions,” Aaron said. “Some of the guys in my old unit said they watched football when they took over a house during the World Cup.”

  “I wish we had a TV,” Simcha said.

  I wished we did, too. I was also bored. I decided to entertain myself by seeing if I could mess with Simcha’s head.

  I sat on the windowsill in front of him and groomed myself for a bit. Then I suddenly froze and stared at a spot on the wall across the room.

  Simcha saw me staring. He turned his head to see what I was looking at. He didn’t see anything and faced front again, trying to be cool. I kept staring at that spot, as intently as I could. I could see that my staring was bugging him. He swiveled his head a few more times before Aaron noticed.

>   “You got a problem with your neck?”

  “That cat is staring at something.”

  “Seriously?”

  Simcha got up to get a closer look at the wall. “What kind of weird bugs do you have here?”

  “I study birds, not bugs,” said Aaron. “Maybe the cat’s staring at a ghost.”

  Simcha looked like he was actually considering this.

  “The cat’s messing with you,” Aaron said. “It’s what cats do.”

  I took advantage of Simcha standing to hop over and make myself comfortable on his chair. When he tried to move me off, I yowled, snapped at him with my sharp teeth and waved my claws in the air.

  I didn’t push my luck, though. I left the chair before he pushed me off.

  Aaron broke out some more rations for everyone, although not for me. I sat by the boy and purred as he fed me bits from his meal. He laughed at the ticklish feeling of me eating out of his hand.

  “I think we should leave after it gets dark,” Aaron said. “Not right away, but later, after midnight. The streets will be quiet and deserted then. We shouldn’t have any problems with the locals.”

  “You’re the boss,” said Simcha.

  “Nothing’s going on here,” Aaron said. “The most interesting thing we’ve seen is that old lady with her knitting needles, and unless she’s knitting bomb-making instructions into her doilies or whatever, then I think we can say there’s nothing going on in this block.”

  “What about the kid?” Simcha asked.

  “We’ll take him with us. If no one shows up for him by the time we are ready to leave, we’ll take him with us.”

  “If the Arabs catch us with one of their kids,” Simcha said, “all of a sudden it will be that the Israeli army is kidnapping Palestinian children.”

  “Maybe it won’t be that bad,” Aaron said. “We’ll just explain ourselves. Most people are reasonable. Our CO can turn the kid over to the Palestinian social services, or to some orphanage or something. They can find out about the parents and we can be done with him.”

  I licked up the remains of everyone’s dinner. It wasn’t as good as being given my own, but it was better than eating garbage.