by Marty Rafter
into some trouble, and after I got done helping her out, I ended up short on rent”
“I might be able to help you out; I do some work for an apartment company”
“It's not that. She got int’a all kinds of medical bills, then she got hurt, and couldn’t work.”
“Is she ok now?” I ask
“She doin’ all right, but it's hard. She was livin’ with this man out in Las Vegas, and she got pregnant, but she lost the baby”
“I’m sorry to hear that” I say
“I didn’t even know she was pregnant until she called me cryin’. So, I flew out to be wit’ her. And the place she was workin’, she had only been there like two months, so when she had to go to the hospital and everything, she called off. Then, they fired her”
“That’s terrible” I say
“So, I gave her what I had. I’m her mother, no matter how old she gets… that is still my child, and I will do what I can, to help her out”
“Is that when you went to live with your cousin?” I ask
“Yeah, about right after that. It's all right though. She works down here, too. She drives me. I come down here and wait when they keep her late. It will be fine. What is important is my daughter. I just don’t want to see this change her, you know. She was always such a good child.”
“I’m sure it won’t”
“Yeah, but this man that she was with, and they been messing around with drugs and all that” She says
“It seems like that, doesn’t it” I say “that those bad things always nest up right next to what’s good?”
“The devil working harder every day” she says
We sit for a little while longer, and she says “So where’s your friend at?”
“He might be in the library. I don’t know. “
“Why don’t you check?”
“They kicked me out. They said that I am banned from the library forever”
She looked at me and laughed. “You?
“Yep. Banned for life” I say
“What did you do?”
“They said that I was causing a problem because I kept leaving these around” I reach into the bag and pulled out one of the heads, and try to hand it to her. She moved further over on the bench
“Oh. Its cause you crazy” She says
“I’m not crazy”
“Just up and handing somebody some kind of face is crazy” she says as she stands up and picks up her backpack
“No, I made it. It’s my art. I want people to see it”
“You’re an artist?” She asks
“I don’t normally put it that way, but maybe”
She stands and looks at the clay head with her body turned defensively away from me.
“You can have it if you want” I say “I make them to give them away”
She looks at the head warily for a moment, and takes it from me.
“You made this?” She asks
“Yeah. I make a whole bunch of them. I like to give them away. They said that don’t want me doing that in the library anymore, though.”
She looks more closely at the face. “Why?”
“I don’t know. Because of how people can be, I guess. They said it bothers people”
She tries to hand the head back to me.
“No, you keep it” I say. It is a gift.
The woman smiles and reached out and squeezes my wrist “Ok” she says.
After that, I cannot think of anything else to say, so I say goodbye to the woman, and decide to start walking home. Even though I had not slept, I am still not tired. On the way home, I pass the alleyway where I had left the cat food. I check the spot where the food was, and again it is gone. So, I remove the small bag of food from my backpack and begin to pour more out onto the ground. As I do, I hear a disturbance from underneath the dumpster. I stand up and walk over to see if I can find the source of the sound, but I can’t. So then, I look behind the dumpster, and still, I can’t find where the sound is coming from. Then I notice a section of discarded drain pipe behind the next dumpster. In it, I see the unmistakable glow of the eyes of a cat. Very slowly, I crouch down to get a better view, and the cat in the pipe mimics my movements. I can make out its shape, tensing its muscles and hunkering down further against the pipe. I try to make the little hissing noise that people use to call cats, but that seems to scare it a bit, so I stop. Then I take a single step towards the pipe. As I watch, the cat again tenses itself, but it does not move, so I take another step. I repeat the process of stepping and waiting and stepping and waiting over and over again until I am in front of the pipe. Then, I very gently remove my backpack and place it behind the open back end of the pipe to slow the cat’s escape from the other end. We sit together for a minute while the cat measures his distrust of me, and then, he slowly emerges from the darkness. I bring my hand out to touch him, but as I do, I sense an imminent panic in his eyes, and instead decide to stay totally still. The cat moves towards me, and inspects me from a distance. I don’t know a lot about cats, but I can tell that the cat is not fully grown. It is short and skinny and is that sort of modeled brown color that some cats are. I hold out an open palm like you would to a strange dog, but the cat just remains there eyeing me warily. So, I shut my eyes, and exhale slowly through my nose, and then breathe in again at the same pace. I try to clear my mind of the intention of catching the cat, and replace that intention with a sense of welcoming. When I open my eyes again, the cat has moved closer to me. So, I repeat the process again, the slow breathing, the active repression of the natural predatory sensibility that seeps from the pores of men, and when I open my eyes again, the cat has moved a little closer still, but I can tell that if I reach out to touch him, he will run. So, then I concentrate on the cat, and try to will him closer to me, and I try to remain passive as I watch him put his tail high into the air, and walk directly towards me where he crawls into my lap.
The cat is warm, and I remain still for a while breathing and thinking about nothing, and I can feel the cat slowly begin to relax. “Do you want to go inside?” I start to ask him, but I as the words escape my lips, I feel his posture change, so instead, I think of the feeling that accompanies the question, and will that feeling into my hands, and the cat extends his long neck, and puts his head underneath of my chin. So, I lift the cat, and gently set him back onto the ground, and communicate to him to wait. He watches me as I retrieve my bag, and unzip it, and place another head inside of the empty pipe. Then, I sit down again with my backpack on, and communicate my question again, and the cat crawls into my lap, and I pick him up, and we walk together towards my home. But the cat seems uncomfortable in my hands, and he starts to squirm, so I set him down on the ground, and then I kneel and wait. He seems to understand what I am suggesting because then he leaps from the ground onto my backpack, and secures himself a seat at the top of my back. And I know that it all seems absurd, that there would be a cat that would know that it could ride on the back of my backpack. There was a man who came through town on the train a few years ago in the summer, who had five dogs that would follow behind him without leashes. And that man seemed so absurd that the police arrested him, and gave his dogs to the shelter because secretly, we want animals to think of us the way we think of them, as simple and adorable and adaptable and constantly seeking the security only stability can provide. And some of them probably do, and I think this particular cat is of that type.
And so, we walk to my apartment, but when we get there, I can tell that the cat does not want to go in right away. He wants to wait outside, and get a sense of the building, and the neighbors and the neighborhood, and so I sit outside on the steps and we wait. The cat jumps off of my backpack, and sits down next to me on the steps. As we wait, I see Donald walking down the street carrying his museum guard’s jacket, and moving with the little strut that must have been very convincing in his youth, but now looks vaguely like a limp, and when he reaches
us he says,
“Don’t that just figure”
“What?” I say
“You get to keep a cat in here, and I don’t”
“I think they would let you keep a cat.” I say
“Not without paying an extra thirty five bucks a month, they won’t. Here, you probably don’t have to pay anything, and here you’re the one who filled these building up with all these damn kids”
“They’re students. That’s who moved into this neighborhood” I say
“I’ve lived here my whole life. All these students wasn’t around when I was young.”
“Maybe more of them stayed with their parents back then” I say “Plus, you haven’t lived here your whole life. I remember when you moved in”
“Man, I meant the neighborhood. Not this building” Donald says
“I still bet they would let you get a cat.” I say
He reaches his hand out, and the cat immediately extends his head towards Donald’s slim fingers.
“Oh, you friendly, huh?” Says Donald
“Yeah, he is a nice cat, I just found him” I say
“You found him?”
“’I’ve been feeding some strays” I say “and this one was hiding in a piece of old drain pipe. He came right out after I called to him”
“No shit?”
“I bet he would stay with you if you wanted him to.” I say
“I can’t keep no cat in my place” Donald says, as he sat down to pet the cat some more
“I could talk to them about the fee. You’ve lived here a while.