Away from here

We kept on digging that night, pushed through soil
rich and dark, encountered earthworms as long as
Joe’s middle finger. He had a trowel and I had a
pick-axe, but most of the time we used our hands,
took off our gloves and did the dirty work directly.
Nobody had told the little one about what had really
happened to Tristan. I mean, he knew he was sick and
saw the old cat collapse on the kitchen floor, heard
the pained meow. He saw me cry and hyperventilate and
gather calming forces, but we couldn’t bear to tell
him what was happening, what would happen. He hadn't
known loss and I swore he wouldn't, not until I was
old and sinewy, not until Joe's alcohol-pickled mind
had gone south and his hands were blurry with the
shakes. I had seen enough of loss myself by age
eight, learned early to keep a tenuous hold on other
people. My boy, he could remain untouched.
There wasn’t time or money for the vet, so Joe lifted
up Tristan's lank body, bony at the spine but swollen
around the belly, carried him off into the back yard.
I tossed him a kitchen towel still wet from the dish
rack. The boy, always his father's shadow, made for
the door, but I knelt down and blocked him with a
hug. "Tris needs a little privacy, that's all. It's
like at the doctor's office. Daddy's giving him
medical attention. Why don't we read a book?" We got
through two stories when Joe finally came back in,
eyes red, the towel clinging to his fingers.
"Tristan's ready to see you, kid," Joe told him. I
sent the two of them out there alone.
Joe told me later that Tris hadn't put up a fuss. He
and the kitty had sat together by the corner of
bamboo that Tris loved to hide in, where all you
could see in the thick stalks was a pair of
shimmering green eyes, maybe the hint of white
whiskers. Joe had professed his love while the cat
panted, glassy-eyed. Then, a little business with the
damp towel. Tristan had even rested a paw on Joe's
trembling hand. It was true mercy, over in a few
heart-breaking minutes. Before he came back into the
house, Joe had shaped him into a comfortable round,
pressed his thumb gently against each eye to close
it.
He told the boy that it looked like Tristan was
taking a little rest now, sleeping off his fit. “Give
him a quick pat like a good boy.”
That seemed reckless to me, letting the boy touch
him. Didn't Joe remember the heavy quality of dead
flesh? Once the heart stops, it's like petting wax.
But the boy didn't seem to notice, came in dancing
and told me Tris was better, was sleeping.
That’s how we ended up at Strawberry Creek Park,
looking like grave robbers, sifting through the dirt
in the dark, Tristan in a Teva shoebox tied with
butcher’s twine. Fog had blotted out the moon and the
damp had sunk into my bones, made me drop the
flashlight more than once. Mid-dig, a mama raccoon
and her kits peered at us out from the bushes,
rustled the leaves with interest. Joe tossed a
trowelful of dirt at them. "Git! Git! This isn't a
midnight snack." They shambled off in the direction
of the creek, looking like hunchbacked cats
themselves, all the fur with none of the grace.
A half-hour later, we had a hole two feet deep and
just wide enough to jam the Teva box into. Tristan's
stiffened body shifted as we pushed him into the
hole, hit the sides of the box. I hadn't looked at
him since the collapse, but suddenly I had the urge.
I made Joe cut the twine so that I could shine in the
flashlight and take a final look, could stroke the
tips of his fine orange fur.
The next morning we told the boy that Tristan must
have taken off, shimmied through a hole in the fence,
or through some miracle of will had scaled the
nine-foot planks and taken off for a better place. He
put his little hand in mine and asked, "Is he OK,
mama?" There was only one way to answer it: Tristan
was fine, perfect, whole.
Maybe he’s sitting on a rock by the Bay now, eyeing
the ground squirrels, dipping a paw into the cold
water as he searches for fish. Or he’s stalking a
bird in a field of waving grass, tail quietly
twitching before the final pounce. Tristan is
somewhere out there, away from
here.
This was
from a writing prompt last summer: write about
something you don't want to write about. I didn't
want to write about our cat's
death, at
least not directly, so I wrote this instead. It
seems to fit the theme around here these days. It
was originally three paragraphs with very little
spelled out, but as I expanded it the details it
became more gruesome. Not sure what I think of it,
but here it is.
Thanks to rcb for the advice to slow down. This one's
slower than usual at least!
Image: Strawberry Creek, by Edwin
Deakin,
from Berkeley Architectural Heritage
Association.
New blood

Nick’s existential angst or blood lust, take your
pick, has taken the form of 2:00 a.m. howling. He’s
the loudest cat I’ve ever known, full of throaty
confidence and the ability to project, the kind of
cat depicted in old-time cartoons, sitting on the
fence yowling as neighbors hurl shoes. He’s an opera
singer belting out a sad little tune, “Let me out!”
or “I must kill!”
It must seem like a cruel joke when we get out the
cat fishing line, the feathers attached to a stick.
As I whip them around the bedroom, the feathers turn
and beat through the air as though they were birds'
wings. Like all cats, Nick has an active imagination
and allows himself to be taken in for a few minutes.
He hustles and jumps, takes a very strong cat arm and
pins the fluorescent feathers to the carpet in one
swipe. The feathers crunch and crumble as Nick snaps
his jaws against them, tries to carry his prize
downstairs.
I am actually tempted to let him out – it feels cruel
to keep him from something he loves and clearly knows
well. My other cats have all been indoor-only from
the beginning so they didn’t know what they were
missing. But I know that it isn’t a safe world out
there and we signed a contract saying that his paws
would never touch dirt or concrete sidewalks again.
Perhaps it’s time to take in a budgie or two, a
little something to make life more interesting for
our 2:00 a.m. howler.
A crumb

But first, a preface to the crumb.
I haven't been here lately. My son is out of school
until after Labor Day and we've had a series of
pet-related good things and bad things. Cat dying:
bad. Adopting a kitten and a new adult cat: good.
Nora the dog passing a pea-sized bladder stone at the
Emergency Vet: bad, though it could have been much
worse. Attempting to dissolve remaining stones
through antibiotics and diet: good, though if it
doesn't work she will still need surgery. Me giving
Nora cranberry extract pills with xylitol in them:
potentially very bad, since xylitol can be fatal
in small doses to dogs. Nora surviving xylitol
exposure unscathed: amazingly, wonderfully good.
In between pet-things and kid-things, I'm still
taking the Round Robin, a writing prompt-based class.
So here is a crumb for those of you who are still
reading this blog, from the prompt
I
remember.
I
remember that her fingers were thickened by
arthritis, were scattered with freckles. Helen’s
nails were coffee-stain yellow, bitten down to the
quick, and she kept fumbling at the wedding ring on
the fine silver chain around her neck.
I looked at her hands because it was easier than
looking into her eyes, or letting my gaze drift to
her useless foot in its bright blue stocking.
Sometimes after a visit I’d look at my own hands and
realize that time is written on our hands the fastest
of all. Already my knuckles are puckering in
idiosyncratic ways and the backs are beginning to
resemble the uneven surface of a barren planet, ropy
with rocky veins and hairline fracture wrinkles.
Helen wasn’t a worker. The hardest work her hands had
seen was the kneading of whole grain bread dough,
maybe a bit of digging in the garden. She’d cracked
open books, propped them up, her thumb and pinky
keeping them open. Me, though, I’d scrapped carcasses
in the field, held up splintery boards with the meat
of one palm while I grasped a hammer in the other.
Some jobs we worked all winter long, if we were lucky
inside, but we weren’t always lucky.
I read a book once about men working on a tower,
applying mortar and making repairs in the ice and
slush of January. They were suspended from ropes
attached to scaffolding, wore gloves with the fingers
cut out as a symbolic act. Their hands were gouged
and scuffed, palms smoothed by rough passes over
granite, life and work written on the
body.
Image: The
kid, pretending to be a cat, because we don't have
any good pictures of our actual cats being actual
cats. Yes, he is holding an egg mold, which is this
fictional cat's weapon of choice. It makes him fly or
it's a bomb or he shoots it or something.
Writing prompt: The visitors
Image from promotional materials for 2005 animated
film, Kontrol
Eskape.
Daniel came with a backpack full of canned cat food
and Max, a fluffy grey tabby artfully splotched with
patches of orange, on a leash. As he kissed my cheek,
his toothbrush nudged me in the chest. It was tucked
into his front shirt pocket alongside a container of
floss and a ballpoint pen. He had a change of clothes
in the car and had packed a tent, too, just in case.
“I don’t know how long I’ll be staying,” was the
first thing out of his mouth. Max, unleashed,
threaded my legs and dashed into the living room.
Later we found a small disc of cat urine on the floor
by the ficus, Max’s lament, his only accident.
I made a crimini mushroom omelet with muenster cheese
and served it with a side of crisp potatoes roasted
with whole shallots and rosemary sprigs. When Dan
emerged from the bathroom, freshly showered, he
opened a bottle of Pinot. We sat in eating in silence
until the second glass, when he rolled up his left
sleeve and showed me the marks, a neat imprint of
fingers wrapped around bicep.
“Eric’s at it again.”
His boyfriend was a brute, a nasty sort who was
attractive if you didn’t know his back story, didn’t
know he was a sweet manipulator that could turn
maniacal. Daniel turned and lifted his shirt,
revealing an archipelago of bruises on his lower
back, a long bloodied scratch across his spine. He
never had a mark above the clavicle or below the
groin: Eric was strictly covert.
“I forgot to take out the recycling.”
Suppressing a sigh, I reached for his hand, tamping
down my guilty urge to blame the victim, give him a
hard time for sticking around with beautiful Eric,
the work acquaintance I’d set him up with. Eric of
the deceivingly kind brown eyes and silken hands, of
the long fingers of bendable steel and the
high-pitched staccato laugh, a machine-gun guffaw
that was as hairtrigger as his rage. I didn’t want to
know about it, didn’t want to provide sympathetic
catharsis.
“I forgot to take out the recycling, so he dragged me
to the bin.”
“I’m so sorry, Daniel.”
A story of kicks by wingtip, recycling carefully
sorted and dutifully delivered to the curb, Daniel’s
attempts to keep his expression flat and his
apologies genuine – Eric wanted simple obedience and
sincere contrition, not a melodramatic man-beating
scene. Last time it was about dry cleaning, though
neither of us can remember whether the issue was
overstarching (Eric has very sensitive skin) or
Daniel’s forgetfulness, the shirts that weren’t
picked up in time for the conference.
“He’s so . . . quiet about it, have I told you that?
He doesn’t yell or scream. But his face is
terrifying, Janine. It looks like it’s going to
collapse on itself. Someday his brow will fold into
his mouth and he will reveal himself to be the alien
I know he is. Max always runs under the guest bed
before anything happens. He’s my early warning
system.”
Daniel took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. I
knew tonight wasn’t going to be the beginning of his
redemption story, just another painful, repetitive
chapter, the time before the revelation. He would be
back there maybe even tonight. The reunions were the
best part of this, weren’t they? Max would stay with
me this time and I would stay out of it.
I leaned
back and grabbed another bottle of wine from the
rack.
What haven't I told you?
I let the
first
U.S. punk compilation slip out of my hands. Album
cover from Rate
Your Music.
Jean of
Jean’s Musings
– a lovely blog that
I recommend highly – has passed a meme my way, a
request to list five things that you might not
know about me. Given how much I’ve revealed here,
that’s a tall order, but I think I can dredge up
some obscure facts.
*I once had a Secret
security
clearance. The think tank I worked for
did a lot of work for the defense department and
the library was responsible for the classified
document collection. Getting the clearance was
nerve-wracking, as was the proximity to potential
national secrets. It was a relief to leave it
behind.
*Although we do have a television, I don't watch it
(this despite the fact that we've had mysterious
cable access in our last two houses).
*Punk music was the soundtrack of my life for a long
time. I knew my now-husband was a good match after we
watched a movie that included the song Viva Las
Vegas. As we were leaving the theater I told him
“Every time I hear that song I …” He finished the
sentence, “think of the Dead
Kennedys version?” That’s right. Ahh,
love.
*I got my license at 25 (or was that 26?), but
I don’t
drive.
You wouldn’t want me to. Trust me.
*Despite a lifelong allergy to cats, I have never
lived without at least one kitty, except for a brief
pet-free period in college and graduate school. They
are worth the asthma, the itchy eyes, the mounds of
tissues.
An extra fact: I’ve got some recipes in the Nov/Dec
issue of Vegetarian
Times,
along with a short profile in the contributers
column. Go to your newsstand or local library and
take a look. I'll be putting up more information
on the Food Writing
section eventually.
If you have your own five facts, I'd love to read
them.
And for your listening pleasure, Viva Las Vegas!





