Mark Jones

I opened the door in my pajamas, blinking and squinting into the sunlight for a slack second at finding my ex-girlfriend on my threshold. I’d often look out my porch window, see her walking her Pomeranian across the park and say to myself, ‘There goes Connie.’ It wasn’t so much a voided area, as a shrug to the real. “Come in, Connie. Want a cup of coffee?”

I turned my back to her on the porch and as she followed me into the bedroom, I thought of how we hadn’t talked in nine months, her way of showing disappointment that I didn’t allow the relationship to deepen. “No, no, no.” Before I could seat myself on the studio bed, she was at me like a tigress of need. “You gotta help me, Phil—you’re the only one I can turn to.”

I cleared my throat to cover a chuckle at Connie’s overwrought manner. She was alone; it figured that because of the proximity of our apartments, she’d seek me out if she was in trouble. Ah, Connie, the sexual adventure that had turned into a relationship and she had been patient and in love with me for three-and-a-half years. Connie was petite and lithe and perky and with her faceted green eyes that sparkled, she was desired by many men. But it was more than a compatibility problem and the problem was and is entirely mine; in the presence of anyone for an extended period, I become uneasy because I want to be alone and then irritable listening to the petty attachments and fetishes of taste and attitudes, even from the one you’re supposed to love, that are so quotidian as to make me physical ill. How express love? I need and yet I am repelled by the need. I could never be what she wanted, thus her future with me was disappointment and heartbreak.

I watched her scan my eyes like she was trying to see what I was thinking. “I got to get rid of my cats, Phil—take them down to the Humane Society.”

Keith Whitley! The most beloved cat; we agreed on that. I shielded my eyes with the blade of my hand like I was thinking. I sat bowed forward, elbows on knees, nodding patiently, dumbly; I probably looked dazed and stupid like a beaten fighter. But before I could conjure a defense for the cats, Connie screeched: “They’re tearing up everything! Keith Whitley—Keith Whitley clawed holes in all my blankets and Roseanne Cash and Peaches are pissing and crapping all over the apartment!” Her voice cinched up, twisted upon itself until it threatened to strangle her. “Rental property! This has got to stop! It’s been going on for months now and I’m finally tired of it. You don’t know what it’s like, coming home from work every day, your apartment in shambles, having to smell cat urine and cleaning up after them. If I don’t take them to the shelter on my weekend day off, I’m afraid I never will.” Connie’s voice didn’t quaver, but she rushed through her words to their predetermined conclusion.

“So the cats are safe, right?” I knew I was fighting against the strong current of her resistance, but I had to try to save the cats. Yet she came to me because she trusted me. I had to deal with Connie in a calm, cerebral manner.

“Don’t jo-oke!” Her wail like a banshee shriek assailed my ears. “I need you to help me.” She threw her arms down toward the floor like she was depositing her griefs like a load of laundry. “I don’t want to argue. I don’t even need you to agree.” She frowned down at the green scruff of carpet like she was considering and then turned away. “I suppose I could get your next-door-neighbor. He said I could use his animal carrier.” Her voice dropped to a near-whisper. “Mine only holds one.” In the side yard outside my porch window, I heard the hollow thunk of plastic parts hitting the ground as Tyler re-assembled his carrier.

I hitched a shoulder, more experimentally than if I had meant it. “Use him then.”

Connie’s lower lip trembled and her eyes slashed back and forth before they augered mine. “I came to you.”

“Jesus Christ, Connie.” Her mouth sawed back and forth in abortive censure. “You sure you want to do this? At least Keith. It’s Keith!” Her eyes were opaque; her expression didn’t soften. I had almost forgotten how hard-bitten she could be when she wanted.

“If I don’t take them down to the shelter today, they’ll keep tearing up my apartment until I do. Tellya’ what. Since the cats were always your first priority, I’ll give you the litter box and the rest of the food. I’ll even buy the litter for them. But after the food runs out, you’ll have to buy it from then on. Or you can take just Keith.” I thought I detected a note of hope in her voice.

“How can I do that?”

“You still stuffin’ envelopes?”

“More gen-teel than ditch-digging. I’m lucky my rent’s cheap. I can hardly provide for myself, but with even one cat I couldn’t make it.”

Connie shrugged at the comment then stood unmoving as though the gravity of what we were about to do rendered her inert. The far-off look on Connie’s face soon hardened into the lacquer of resolve. “You ready? I’ll go stand out there.” Connie indicated the porch.

I whipped off my pajama bottoms and underwear but dressed slowly. I selected a fresh flannel shirt, buttoned it and smoothed it down the front, though I wasn’t normally one to fuss over my clothes. While I finished dressing, I thought of how it was like Connie to hold out the idea of my taking the cats. She knew I didn’t have the money, thus the offer of buying the litter; but maybe it was her hope that I’d take the cats anyway and deal with the money strain when it arose. Now that I declined, I figured she could be satisfied that all her options were foreclosed and she could do what she had planned to do beforehand without tweaking her conscience. Bath-less under crisp clothes, I felt dirty by circumstances I couldn’t control.

It was a short walk through the gate and down the steps to Connie’s apartment behind the laundrymat. I put the animal carrier in the middle of the floor of the combination living room and

kitchen divided by a dry bar. The Venetian blinds on the front door were down, the louvers closed; the half-closed blinds on the kitchen windows allowed light to skate across the surface of the floor but failed to illuminate the upper reaches of the bar. My eyes were used to the hard brilliance of sunlight; I craned my neck like I was peering underwater. Keith wasn’t at his usual station, on top of the bar looking plump and self-satisfied as he noisily crunched dry food from his bowl. I thought I caught a glimpse of Roseanne Cash as she skittered from underneath an end table, where she had been cowering.

“They already know something’s wrong. I’ll go downstairs and change. Then we’ll go.”

Keith crept up from the basement, stuck his nose in the carrier and sensing that for now the box was safe, walked in and settled at the back. Keith was an ordinary black-and-white tabby, but still a beautiful creature. It was Keith’s unpredictable temperament that captured our affection. If a cat could be said to have a witty personality, it was Keith. In what became a routine, I’d bid Connie goodnight and then watch sitcoms, slouched in a chair. One night, Keith jumped up on my lap, put his chin on the kneecap of my crossed leg and plopped a paw on each side as if he was watching television. Another time while eating at the dry bar, Connie lifted her fork to her mouth and Keith swatted at the fork with a right, then left like he was boxing. That annoyed Connie no end, but even at his most obnoxious, Keith was endearing.

I put my hand in the cage to pet or at least touch Keith. Keith shrugged off my hand, which fell wounded and then he ignored the intrusion until I withdrew.

Time felt slack, tedious in empty waiting. I decided to make a gesture so I could report to Connie that I had at least tried to trap the cats. I dragged the disused AM-FM stereo console away from the front of the bar, slowly scooting the heavy rampart so as not to spook Peaches from his grotto. I poked my head into the darkness of speaker cones and a tangle of wires to discover Peaches wasn’t there. When I shuffled the console back and turned around, Keith was no longer in the carrier.

I moved past the bar and into the kitchen and sunlight. I lit a cigarette, thinking maybe Connie couldn’t find any of the cats and, frustrated by her failed crusade, she could go back to being a nurturer, because that’s what she was. And that’s what frosted me. Connie took the cats from two different people because they were abused and underfed and now she was about to abandon them and duplicate the abuse and worse, use me to help. My dilemma, I decided standing there in the kitchen and lighting another cigarette, was paltry; I’d help Connie.

But if I were contemplating homegrown injustices, I’d have to include my own; because, as I said, she waited patiently and in love with me for three-and-a-half years and I invented every way I could think of, short of infidelity, to get out of the smothering trap that would eventually lead to marriage. I’d manufacture arguments and heat until I was actually angry and stomp off with Connie, her face florid and she in tears pleading, ‘Is that all there is? Is this the end of it?” I’d use that free night to slide into the bar and figure my strategy for getting out of the relationship and later sleep alone in my own apartment. I didn’t allow myself the pleasures of lovemaking, for I’d be cynically laying her while reinforcing the idea of our love (thus all those Nick at Night sitcoms). Was I a cad? Yes, but all I wanted was to get out. But whatever happened to Connie and myself, I always believed the cats’ home was permanent.

Connie emerged from the basement and I announced, “Keith was in the carrier, but I don’t know where he is now.”

“I can’t find Peaches anywhere.” She sounded weary. “Let’s round up the cats and get this over

with.”

I treaded as softly as I could with my clunky boots on the carpeted stairs and walked on my toes on the basement’s linoleum. The stone fireplace at the center of the back wall was surrounded by chairs, boxes and miscellany. I swung my gaze between the legs of a sewing machine table, rattled cardboard to flush Peaches if he was there. I then moved to Connie’s bedroom.

I knew Peaches like to hide under Connie’s antique dresser, but to be thorough, I flipped up the bed coverlet and found the fabric of the bedsprings’ underbelly shredded and hanging down, but no Peaches. I turned around and groped in the space beneath the dresser drawers, my hand curling around a piece of Peaches’ coat. The cat flinched, pulled away. An orange streak shot underneath the bed.

Down on my stomach, I swatted the fabric that obstructed my view, swearing viciously. Surely, the cats’ work too. The hell they don’t deserve this, I thought, making swipes that missed Peaches completely. Peaches hunched tense and motionless under the middle of the bed, his eyes wide as he stared vigilantly at me as if the cat intuited my role in his possible destruction. “C’ mon, kitty, kitty, kitty. C’ mere, Peaches. Awww…I’m not going to hurt you.” I heard the resignation, the straining falseness in my voice.

“Well, crap, this could go on all day.” I made a desperate arc-armed swing as I launched myself form the wall by my feet. Peaches scampered to the other side of the bed, rounded the bed’s foot and scrambled for the door, his feet skidding out from under him in his haste. But still on my knees I was ready for him, lunged, grabbed a kicking leg and clawed my way up to the torso for a body hold. Peaches kicked and wiggled against the cradling restraint of my arms.

Connie had either coaxed or captured Keith Whitley and Roseanne Cash in the interim. They were confined in the cage.

I had barely gotten off the porch with the carrier when the cats started to whine. I got the animal carrier into the back seat and as Connie drove out of Mountain Gulch on the expressway, the cats’ whining turned to strangled yowls, prolonged and plaintive. Roseanne and Peaches let out their howling moans, which sounded more sorrowing and raucous as they neared the shelter. I banged the side of the carrier. “Shut up, goddammit!” Connie set her mouth to the right, then the left but no

reprimand was forthcoming. Keith silently hunkered down, looking out uncomprehending at his fleeting surroundings.

I started when Connie spoke, rupturing the silence I thought we had tacitly agreed on. “Been doing anything different—interesting lately?” The weather was unseasonably warm and clear for November and the roads lightly traveled, but Connie seemed to invest all of her energy to concentrate on the traffic.

I shook my head.

Connie’s face darted to me. “So what are you going to do for the rest of the day?”

“Nothin’. Day’s shot already.” My peripheral vision snagged a hunk of mall. I hadn’t had time to think of the long, empty aftermath, alone in my cottage where I’d fill in the silence with my own thoughts like shoveling dirt into a grave.

“Come on, we haven’t talked in a long time. You’re not going back to work?”

“Don’t think I can.” I pressed my cheek against the chill of the side window as the banal cityscape slid past until we pulled into the driveway of the Humane Society.

The front and back doors of the Humane Society were directly in line and open as though the gloomy interior of the shelter was an intestine in which matter passed through quickly. Inside, I looked for a spot to put down the carrier and found a table opposite the check-in counter, where Connie was filling out forms while a woman asked her questions. I stood next to Connie for a moment until my jumpiness drove me outside.

I stepped out the back door into the courtyard’s dazzling brightness. Pain needled from behind my left eyeball. The cement pathways and the cinder block behind the back cages were blanched with sunlight. At a distance across the grass and on both sides of me, metal bars gleamed with greenness. There were a scattering of dogs in their cages, as silently glum as I was minutes ago beside Connie. Alongside the building on my immediate right was a breezeway ensconced in

shadows; my eyes couldn’t penetrate the darkness to see where the passage led. I stabbed a cigarette in my mouth and thought vaguely of a contraption called a decompression chamber.

Connie joined me on the cement and lit her own cigarette as I contemplated the significance of the mostly empty cages. “What are they doing? Jesus, Connie, all I want to do is get out of here.” Connie gazed and frowned. Too bad. She knew all of my bad moods.

“They’re processing the cats in. The woman’ll call us when she needs us.” Connie’s voice lilted with indifference.

The attendant motioned them inside and then stood aside. A wire cage sat on the floor in front of the carrier’s table. Connie looked at me expectantly and so it fell to me. With slow distaste I opened the door enough to grab Peaches, who clawed and scrabbled at the bottom of the carrier. I knelt to put Peaches in the oblong wire cage barely large enough to hold him. With the top swung half open I hesitated, wanting to touch Peaches one last time. Peaches sprang. I clamped the top down, trapping Peaches’ body between the top and side in mid-leap. I shoved Peaches down and latched the cage.

I went about caging Roseanne like it was routine and then I went for Keith. My stomach felt like it was riding up and down my esophagus, but I went about the business with a dispassionate mindfulness. Keith spat and tried to scratch, but I bore down on Keith’s chunky body until I managed to shut and lock the top. I put my fingers between the wires to say goodbye; Keith abruptly turned his head and hissed like he had suddenly turned feral. I blinked, perplexed. “He’ll be all right.” I tried to keep the warble out of my voice. “He’s just a little upset at his new digs.” Afraid of the answer, I felt compelled to ask the question. “What’ll they do if he keeps behaving like this?”

“If he bites or scratches an employee or if he can’t get along with the other cats, he’ll be euthanized.”

“But he’s…not like that—I-I mean, he’s a real nice cat, helluva personality.”

The attendant retorted as if reciting Humane Society dogma: “If he bites or scratches an employee or can’t get along with—“

“Another time, Phil,” Connie said gently; she studied the floor and shook her head. “Forget it.” Her hand closed on my forearm.

“There is no other time! I can’t forget it. Did you hear what she?..” My jaw worked open and closed, but it was like my throat was clotted and nothing came out.

“Forget it.”

 

We seated ourselves at the middle of the bar among the rambunctious fans who had gathered for the football game. Last afternoon when I finally scaped the key in my cottage door, I felt enervated from the day’s turmoil and told myself I didn’t want to talk to Connie for another nine months. But when she unexpectedly knocked on my door, pleading for me to accompany her down to the bar, I was bemused to see her at first, but then thought going out might be good for both of us. It felt strange being together two days in a row and then in a public and festive place where I felt I couldn’t join in. As we waited for the busy bartender, I couldn’t gauge what would be an advantageous time to say it, so I just said it. “Did you call to see how the cats were?”

“It’s done and over. I don’t want to know. You can go down Monday and rescue them if you want.”

“Thanks, Connie. You going to give me a ride?”

“You already said you don’t have the money for the cats.”

“Two beers,” I said to the bartender and paid for them when the mugs came because I couldn’t and didn’t begrudge Connie the price of any number of beers. But I didn’t turn to Connie for conversation. I stared at my beer mug until all I saw was the square of bar top in front of me because my mind wouldn’t let go and I ran over and over what I had done yesterday.

I was confused because I wanted noble and settled for loyal and expedient. I was confused because I let Connie’s manner made me presume that her decision was unchangeable and I didn’t argue harder for the cats. I was confused because I helped to let the cats die. Whatever I did yesterday, it wasn’t heroic.

After a protracted silence I sensed Connie’s chair was empty and glanced over; no purse or mug. Connie was down at the other end of the bar nested in Greg Zurblocki’s lap, her legs wrapped around his torso, their noses touching. Without disturbing them I wished Connie well, but it still frustrated and bewildered me how she could bury herself. I finished my beer and walked home.

 

The End