It was a Sunday so I was looking for cats. I had a system. I’d start in the morning at the center of town by the courthouse square and then work my way out in ever widening circles, cruising through the older sections and making an occasional foray behind a strip mall or into a churchyard. After noon I’d head out to where the new housing developments were making inroads into the farmlands. I’d discovered weeks ago that it was easier to catch the well-fed suburban cats than the street-smart city ones. Suburban cats were friendly and lazy and expected strangers to stop and give them a chin scratch. It usually didn’t take more than a “here kitty, kitty” to grab one. For the less friendly cats, I kept what I might need on the front seat next to me—gloves, a fishing net, some cans of tuna, a can opener, my purse, a tiny bottle of chloroform –and eight cat carriers stacked like a Japanese Yotel in the back seat of my Honda Civic.
It was about one in the afternoon when I got to Hansen Street. Hansen’s a wide four-lane road and the speed limit is 45 mph but when you are looking for cats, the optimal speed limit is closer to 10. It also helps to straddle the lanes so you can see both sides of the road. Which was what I was doing when apparently another car came up behind me rather quickly. I say apparently because my rearview mirror had been rendered useless by the cat carriers, both side view mirrors had been torn off by collisions with mailboxes and fences, and the only cat I had picked up that day, “Snowball” her nametag read, was yowling so loudly and plaintively, I wouldn’t have heard a freight train if it was nosing my bumper. The car passed me crossing the double yellow line. Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed a silver sedan with a man driving, a woman riding shotgun, and two blonde heads barely cresting the bottom edge of the window in the backseat. The car pulled in front of me and those two heads popped up into view, a boy about seven or eight and a pretty little girl, a bit younger than the boy, her hair in ringlets. The boy grinned and waggled his middle finger at me. He then took the finger and jammed it up his nose, pulled it out and showed it to me again. The car seemed to hesitate for a moment as if the vehicle itself felt it necessary that I should fully take in the displayed insult before it zoomed off down the road.
That got my attention. I sped up and followed. The car made a left onto Vanderbilt Place then another left into a cul-de-sac before pulling up into the driveway of a tract home, a monstrous wedge of stucco and concrete that sat like an oversized Monopoly hotel on a too small wedge of Baltic Avenue. I parked outside the cul-de-sac and watched the family alight from the sedan, all four doors bursting open simultaneously like the seedpod on a weed.
The man had on a tie and jacket; the woman wore a dress and heels and was holding a pastel fold of paper that looked like a church program. The boy bolted from the car, up the front step of the house, leapt down again, then raced over to a neighbor’s yard where some yellowish vegetation was struggling to rise out of a sawed-off wine barrel. He ran his hand across the yellow, coming away with a clump in his fist, then sped back to where his little sister stood, punched her in the stomach, and screamed, “Here’s some flowers for you.”
The little girl erupted into tears. The mother bent over the girl; the father turned his face up to the sky. Both parents sagged against each other as if heaving a sigh with their entire bodies before disappearing with their daughter into the house. Nobody even glanced at the boy.
I couldn’t look away from him.
I watched from the Honda as the boy attempted to pull the license plate off his parents’ car then broke branches from a sapling and stuffed them down a storm drain. He charged a flock of sparrows that had landed for a millisecond on someone’s lawn, kicked at a telephone pole until a chunk of wood was gouged out, then threw the chunk as well as a good number of rocks at a street light. Every five or ten minutes, he would turn toward his house and release a bloodcurdling scream as if someone was stabbing him. It seemed that one or both of his parents might care to see if he had been hit by a car or was being murdered but the house remained stoic and closed off. In fact, although there were five or six of those over-sized homes in the cul-de-sac, it was almost as if all of them had barricaded themselves against the boy’s onslaught. Nobody came outside, no window shade was tipped to one side as someone peeked out. The afternoon temperature was warm, with a cool breeze lilting through like music playing, a perfect day for mowing the front lawn or weeding or riding a bike or drawing chalk hopscotch squares on the sidewalk but no one ventured out. The boy’s final act was to tip over a giant blue flowerpot on a neighbor’s porch and roll it down the front steps, breaking it and spilling dirt all over the walkway. That brought out the angry owner of the flowerpot who marched over to the kid’s house. There were doors banged and words exchanged and then the boy, grinning like a lunatic, was chased down, collared by his father after much scuffling, and dragged out of sight.
I sat there for another fifteen minutes, dumbfounded, awestruck, and more than a little jealous. Now that, I thought, was someone to be reckoned with.
It had been over an hour since I followed the car home and I had barely noticed the time had passed. Snowball had fallen asleep in her carrier. I needed to head back to my dad’s house and make him a late lunch. Usually, I could pick up three or four cats on a good Sunday but I supposed a one-cat Sunday was better than a no-cat Sunday and I already had twenty or so in the house. I wasn’t really sure of the exact number.
My dad was sitting in his recliner when I got home. He cocked his head to one side and gazed at the corner of the ceiling as I bumped my way through the house to my old bedroom with the cat carrier.
“Is that you, Miriam?” he called, like he always did when I entered the house. My name is Alice. Miriam is my mother’s name.
I didn’t bother to answer him. I took Snowball into the bedroom and closed the door so she could sniff around and get a sense of her new home.
“I think your little kitty got into something while you were out, Miriam,” my dad said as I walked by him to the kitchen.
I could see he had gotten tired of waiting for me to make his lunch and tried to fix himself something. Three cats were batting an empty tuna can around on the linoleum. Two more cats were chowing down on the kibble spilling from a fifty-pound bag that leaned against the back door. My dad had neglected to close the refrigerator and a big grey tom had snagged a bag of lunch meat and was huddled in a corner trying to tear open the package.
Three months ago, my mom had left my dad for her Pilates instructor. She walked out the front door and my dad stared at the spot where he’d last seen her until everything went dark. “Hysterical blindness,” the doctors said. “All in his head. It will pass.” It didn’t pass. After two weeks of my dad nearly burning down the house while trying to make himself something to eat and wandering around the front yard until a kind neighbor led him back inside, it became clear that someone would need to take care of him until his vision returned. That someone would be me.
Right before my mom left, I too had walked out the door with the intention to never return. I had saved up enough money for the first and last month’s rent plus security deposit on an apartment across town. It wasn’t in a great neighborhood. It was small and furnished with the kind of plastic furniture you see at flea markets held at drive-in movie parking lots. But those few weeks that I lived there, I was a real adult. I would come home from my job, lock the deadbolt, lie on the floor, and contemplate my future. I had just turned twenty-one. Grown-up things would be happening to me. I signed up for some dating websites. I was going to meet someone, we’d move in together, get married, start a family. I wanted a lot of kids. I was teetering on the cusp of a new life.
Then my mom fled. Had my parents’ marriage been a happy one? It’s hard to say. I never saw them fight. They had a special, silent way of communicating their disapproval of each other—raising or lowering the thermostat whenever one or the other left the room, reloading the dishwasher the particular way they each preferred right before switching it on, starting a task and leaving it half-done and scattered everywhere.
I knew my dad wasn’t really blind. He knew I wasn’t Miriam. The doctors said I shouldn’t confront or shock him, that I shouldn’t traumatize him further. They said if I did that he might never recover. That’s why the cats. I was desperate. I had been bringing cats into the house, one, two, three at a time. Now, because he was pretending to be blind, he also had to pretend we only had one cat. I figured that at some point we would reach a threshold of cats that could not be ignored and my dad would have to admit that he could see them. Cat hair was amassed in the corners of every room like tumbleweed. There was always some sort of brawl breaking out. The hissing and yowling would drown out the television. Surely my dad could smell the cat boxes that I had positioned in every room. Yet he continued to move through the house with cats swirling around his ankles, his hands held out in front of him like a man trying to wade through a knee-high stream filled with furry salmon.
I shooed the cats out of the kitchen and plunked some leftover Hamburger Helper into the microwave. The little boy from that afternoon kept punching into my thoughts. I bet he would know what to do in this situation. He’d knew how to make my dad pay attention, acknowledge my existence. That boy pushed the envelope, grappled with it, tore it open with his teeth. As an adult, my resources for naughtiness were limited. Still, why couldn’t I be more like that?
At his last visit, one of my dad’s doctors suggested that I should be home with him full-time. He said I could quit my job and the state would pay me to be a caregiver. Here’s the thing–I loved my career. It was a dream job. I was a meter reader for the water department. I spent my days pounding the beat of the city streets in my official orange tee shirt, lifting cement lids, and spying on what people had been doing water-wise. You could tell a lot about people from their water usage. Sometimes the meter would be buried in a backyard and I got to see what was hidden from the rest of the world. Stately homes with acres of weeds and broken-down swing sets. Lonely dogs chained to plastic igloos. Empty swimming pools filled with all manner of things—chicken coops, potted palm trees, a herd of goats. There was no way I was giving that up.
The next morning, a Monday, I grabbed my meter log book and drove the big city truck back to the house on the cul-de-sac to wait for the boy to come out. I didn’t have a plan, per se. I just wanted to see him again, to watch him for a little while, perhaps pick up some pointers. Around 8:30 he appeared with his sister. Before they had even made it ten feet from the house, the boy yanked his sister’s hair then picked up something from the ground and tried to wipe whatever it was onto her shirt. The sister took off running down the street. I followed at a discreet distance, driving slowly with my clipboard held in front of me and my emergency flashers on, pretending to look for an address.
The boy and his sister reached a corner where a small group of children were waiting, I assumed, for the school bus. The other children maintained a distance of a couple yards from my boy. When the bus came, my view was blocked for a moment, but as it passed me where I had pulled along the curb, I could see that my boy had his seatmate in a headlock. I made a U-turn and followed.
Once the bus arrived at the school, I parked the truck under a stand of fir trees at the far end of the playground. The school building itself was set up on a rise and a weedy lawn sloped down to a dusty baseball diamond. I was in the shade along the fence outside right field. I didn’t think I would be noticed. There was nothing less conspicuous than a city vehicle parked on a city street. My orange city t-shirt had the same effect on most people as a priest’s collar. If anyone asked, I’d say I was investigating a leak. While I waited for my boy to appear again, I filled in some reasonable numbers in the logbook for the meters I was supposed to be reading that day. People were like robots. They used mostly the same amount of water every month— extra in the summer for the garden, less in the winter. I recorded an estimate of the average usage and figured I would catch the discrepancy the following month. Or the month after. Do you think people actually look at the numbers on their bill? No one does that.
At ten sharp, the playground filled with kids for recess. It wasn’t hard to spot my boy. Wherever there was a small commotion, he was in the center of it. He flipped a little girl’s skirt over her head, kicked up a tornado of sawdust under the monkey bars, and was in the process of twisting a smaller boy’s arm up into a half nelson when he was grabbed by an exhausted looking male adult on yard duty. My boy did not go quietly back into the school building—he struggled and put up quite a fight but seemed to be enjoying himself. Even from a distance, I could see that he was grinning that same mentally unbalanced grin he had bestowed on me when he gave me the finger from the back seat of his parents’ car. He didn’t come out again for lunch or the afternoon break but I thought I recognized his distinctively shrill screeches over the din of the children who were allowed out. I didn’t have time to stick around and follow him home from school. My logbook had to be turned in before four.
That evening when I got home from work, after my dad asked once again if I was Miriam, I scooped up three cats and dumped them on his lap where he sat in his recliner. Snowball, the newest cat, jumped off immediately but the other two started kneading his chest and knees with their claws. My dad grimaced then reached out with one hand until he touched the closest cat and started stroking it. “Good kitty,” he said to the ceiling.
I watched that little boy for the entire week. I studied his every move. His range of random acts of disobedience seemed endless. Each evening, I tried a new move on my dad, trying to catch him faking it. On Tuesday, I left some magazines full of shocking celebrity stories sitting on the table right next to him where he’d have to look at them. He stared at the ceiling. Obviously, that was too subtle. On Wednesday, I moved the furniture around in every room. For the next hour, he smacked into chairs blocking doorways. He performed a theatrical pratfall, head first, onto a strategically placed ottoman. On Thursday, I yelled, “Think fast,” and threw the television remote at him and he actually let it hit him in the face without flinching. He was that good.
By Friday, I was getting desperate. I needed to speak to my boy, to get his advice. Perhaps he had some ideas about what I could do to make my dad stop the charade. It was clear that I was not getting anywhere. Here, right within reach, was someone who could help me—a shenanigan wallah, a blackbelt in hooliganism, a malicious mischief mentor.
That morning, I stopped at a convenience store and bought some candy. I bought an assortment, leaving the store with a large plastic bag. If I could lure him close enough, I was going to ask him a couple of questions. I seriously considered using my bottle of chloroform, thinking that I could drag him into the truck and take him home like one of the cats. Set him down in the living room to start working his magic. But doing that seemed a bit over the top. Someone at the school might object to me knocking him out and putting him into the city truck no matter how much of a horror he was.
It wasn’t until the final recess on Friday afternoon that I finally caught his eye. I was sitting in the truck, watching him back a small group of terrified girls into a remote corner of the playground not far from where I was parked. He contemplated his next move. Then as if feeling my presence, he turned and saw me sitting there. It was like an electric shock as our eyes met. The air around me started to hum. I slid down from the truck with my sack of candy, walked over to the fence, and looped my fingers through the chain link. Realizing they were no longer his focus, the girls darted back to the school building. It was just the two of us. Together at last.
My boy sauntered over and stopped at the edge of the circle of shade and fallen pine needles under the trees on the other side of the fence. My heart was pounding so hard I was afraid he could hear it.
“What are you looking at?” he asked, his upper lip curling. This was the closest I had ever been to him. Even with that unpleasant sneer, his face was startlingly sweet—cherubic, innocent, intelligent, and as smooth as if chiseled from stone. He was truly a beautiful child, destined to grow up and become a nightmarish partner to a multitude of unsuspecting women. He couldn’t have been older than eight-years-old but even in this pint-sized version, I could see his terrible potential. I was already half in love with him myself.
I stammered, “You…you want some candy?” My voice was high and wobbly and frightened.
He eyed me then, not suspiciously, but as if sizing me up and determining I was not a threat. He beckoned with two fingers. My plan had been to dole out pieces of the candy in exchange for tidbits of information but I panicked. I flung the sack over the fence where it landed with a crunch of leaves at his feet.
He peered into the bag. A hush fell over everything. Behind me across the street, a row of empty duplexes with windows like eyes witnessed the scene. A warm breeze blew around a little eddy of straw wrappers, loose papers, and leaves up against the chain link fence next to my sneakers. I resisted the urge to fall to my knees, to sit at his feet, as he bestowed his wisdom upon me.
“What do you want?” he asked. I opened my mouth but nothing came out.
“Are you trying to snatch me?” he said. His expression was similar to the way one might contemplate some small and unrecognizable reptile squashed flat on the road. “You can’t snatch me. You’re just a scaredy-cat.”
“No, I…,” I stammered.
He kicked at the bag of candy. “I’m telling. Stranger danger,” he hissed. Then screamed at the top of his lungs, “STRANGER DANGER!”
“No, no, no. I’m not going to hurt you,” I said, nervously glancing up towards the school building. Not one adult on the playground even glanced over in our direction.
“Scaredy cat,” he whispered. He bent over and tipped the bag of candy onto the ground, sticking some in his pockets.
“Look,” I said, beseeching. “I’m not a stranger, not really. I’m just like you.”
The boy paused for a moment then stood and threw a Jolly Rancher at my head. It whizzed between the chain links of the fence and flew past my ear.
“You’re not like me,” he said, tossing the peppermint drops and butterscotch discs on the ground. Hard candy, even though individually wrapped, was apparently not a hit with my boy.
I could see I was losing him. “Hey,” I said. “You know, you’re right, I AM a scaredy cat.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said.
“So how do you stop being a scaredy cat?” I tried to keep the hopelessness out of my voice, the sheer terror of failure from leaking out into my words.
“Duh, you just don’t be scared,” he said. He sighed deeply. I was boring him now. But then for one long moment he stared at me, his eyes drilling into mine. There it was again. That hum of recognition. Was this what Bonnie saw when she first gazed into Clyde Barrow’s eyes or when Leopold met Loeb? It felt perfect and connected, like looking down into an abandoned well that you believed was haunted, only to find your own reflection in the water far, far below.
He sighed again, so weary, then he turned and walked away. When he was almost at the school building, he turned to give me a salute with his middle finger. “Loser!” he screamed across the school yard.
He was right. I was a scaredy-cat. I was a loser. I needed to do something drastic. Something dangerous and mean-spirited and evil. So what if my dad got hurt or worse? I had been way too timid, too accommodating. Too nice. The situation called for me to do the most terrible thing a daughter could do to a father.
That night I made my dad spaghetti for dinner—his favorite meal. My mom used to make it specially for him on his birthday and I followed her old recipe. All the while it was simmering, I could sense my dad’s anticipation coming off him in waves. He bumped his way to the dining room table and called to me in the kitchen, “That smells delicious, Miriam.”
My hands shook as I piled the noodles onto a plate and poured the sauce on top. I almost backed down at this point. Was this really something I could do? But then I thought of my boy, the look of disgust on his face when he called me a scaredy cat. I swallowed hard.
With a slotted spoon, I fished a medium-sized piece of kitty crap out of the nearest litter box and placed it carefully on top of the spaghetti. It looked beautiful perched there, the blue kitty litter clinging like mosaic tiles to the turd-shaped meatball. I slid the plate in front of my dad and sat down opposite him. I was going to be a different person when I came out the other side of this.
“Dig in, dad,” I said.
My dad stared at the space over my head. His expression never changed but I saw one corner of his mouth quiver. He tucked his napkin into his shirt and groped with his hand around the plate searching for his fork.
“Go ahead, dad,” I said. “Eat up.”
For one horrible moment, I thought he was going to eat it, that he was truly blind, that I was wrong, wrong, wrong about everything. I almost reached over and snatched the plate away from him but instead, I sat on my hands. Two cats pounded through the room in pursuit of some invisible prey and disappeared again.
My dad picked up his fork and held it above his plate, his eyes darting from one corner of the ceiling to another. Then he lowered the fork to the table.
“I guess I’m not as hungry as I thought I was,” he said.
Game over.
I stood. I’d expected to feel different—happier, more triumphant—but I supposed that would come with time. Now I just felt tired. “I’m moving back to my apartment tonight, dad,” I said. “Do you want me to make you another plate?”
He hesitated for one second, as if he might get a reprieve of some sort. Then he grunted and said, “Yes, that would be nice.” He looked straight at me. “Thank you, Mir….Alice.”
Over the next couple of days, I took the cats back to the neighborhoods I had picked them up from, returning them to their regular lives and families. Three made their way back to my dad’s house and he took them in, happy for the company. I didn’t look for that boy again. Some things are better left alone. I often think of him in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep. I never asked his name. I wonder if I will recognize him after fifteen or twenty years have passed. Maybe he’ll apply for a job with the city. Maybe he’ll post a profile on a dating app. Maybe I’ll click on him. Maybe he’ll click on me. That thought makes me happy. Oh, the things we might accomplish together.