DON'T SAY ANYTHING

My wife and I moved into an old mill town inside the city over a decade ago. It was run down and there were a lot of bad things going on despite a lot of good folks living there. One of the bad things that went on was folks didn’t take care of their cats.

First week I was there I saw a big stray hound pick a black kitten up in its mouth and shake it to death. The way dogs do chew toys sometimes. Kitten made the worst sound I’ve ever heard. This kid came running up screaming and hit the hound in the ass with a 2x4 the whole time he was shaking the kitten. Kid was screaming his head off. Just crazy stuff. Cussing. Loud as he could yell, and hitting him all the while.


The hound never stopped. Kitten was dead in seconds. Covered in blood. Looked like oil in its coat. Damn cat was completely mutilated. Hound took off running with the dead kitten in his mouth and the kid threw the 2x4 at it. He looked at me. He was red-faced as hell and crying uncontrollably. I didn’t know what the hell to say, so I didn’t say anything.

This big black man named Willie lives across the street from us. He lives with his girlfriend Medulla. Medulla has a thing for cats. Just loves ‘em. Willie gives her a calico kitten and she names him Egypt. He’s run over by a Southern Bell van within a week. One damn week. I came outside after it happened because I heard Medulla screaming and there was Willie with a pot of water throwing it on the bloodstain. Crazy how big the bloodstain was for such a little kitten. Willie was smiling nervously and saying, “It gone be all right.”


He’d already scraped Egypt up off the street with a shovel and put him in a trash bag. Medulla was going crazy, screaming, shaking her arms in the air. Willie must have felt really bad because he went out that afternoon and got her another kitten. A little white one. Medulla named her Myrrh like in the Bible. Myrrh lasted seven months, and then Medulla backed Willie’s old pickup over her. She didn’t know it until she got back home from the hairdresser and saw her there crumpled in the drive.

My next-door neighbor Elsie takes in a stray. Names her PeeWee. She loves the hell out of that cat. One day PeeWee bites Elsie. Bites the living shit out of her. Elsie tells Marion and he takes it as a sign something’s wrong with the cat. They put PeeWee out and won’t feed her or anything.


In the afternoon PeeWee tries to creep back into the yard and there Marion sits drinking beer and smoking, holding the garden hose. He’d blast PeeWee back with water and the cat would streak across the road and dry itself off and then begin to creep back into the yard. They did this every day for months. Sometime during this exchange PeeWee got clipped by a car. I didn’t see it. Marion may have. If he did he didn’t say anything to me about it.


One night I’m up drinking and watching the baseball game. It’s delayed because it’s raining like hell so I’m drinking an awful lot more than I would be if it was on. I keep hearing this mewing, but it sounds like crying. Like a human baby crying. Go outside and look around and hear the crying and start poking through the hydrangeas  and there’s goddamn PeeWee in the bushes.


It’s raining so hard and heavy the ground’s gotten unstable and I’m sinking up to my ankles in mud. I call to PeeWee and she tries to come toward me and I’m getting soaked. She starts crying again and then I see that her back legs are crushed. She’s got them tucked underneath her and they’re flattened. She’s dragging her hips through the water, and I’m thinking she’s going to drown if I don’t get her.




I go back inside and have a few drinks. PeeWee keeps the crying up. The game has turned into Lethal Weapon II. There’s a crawler on the bottom that says WILL RESUME ATLANTA BRAVES PROGRAMMING AS SOON AS WEATHER PERMITS. I have a few more drinks. Go back outside and try to get PeeWee. Goddamn cat keeps backing up as I try to grab for it. Water up to its whiskers.


I go back in and call Animal Control. They show up an hour and a half later. It’s still raining. PeeWee’s still crying. Lethal Weapon II is almost over. Guy asks where the cat is. He’s got this long steel rod with a claw on the end of it and his partner carries a black wire cage. I now wish to hell I hadn’t called Animal Control. I want to be back inside, drinking, watching the end of Lethal Weapon II. Show them where PeeWee is. Cat’s nearly underwater. Guy grabs PeeWee by the head and shakes her off into the black wire cage.




They both turn around and start towards the truck. PeeWee’s crying in the cage. “What do y’all do with the animals?” I ask them. They look at me and then each other and then back at me. They have no idea what to say so they don’t say anything. They load PeeWee in the truck with a bunch of other crying, barking animals and drive off. I stand there for a while in the rain and that night cannot get to sleep because I hear PeeWee crying in my head no matter how much I drink.




There are a lot of neighborhood strays my wife and I feed. We know we shouldn’t, but we do. This one we call Gray gets fed a lot. He even knocks by pulling the screen door back with his paw and letting it bang on the frame. He wants food all the time. One morning Gray doesn’t knock. I go out to look for him and he’s laying under our shed and he looks tired. I pull him out and he hisses at me. He looks dazed, stupid. I figure he’s eaten something he shouldn’t have.




Days go by and Gray doesn’t look better. Actually he looks worse. We even bring him inside and he sleeps in our closet. He doesn’t eat or drink anything. He just lays there and stares. My wife tells me I’m going to have to take him to the vet and I know what that means. We don’t have much money, and I don’t even know what’s wrong with Gray.




The vet tells me they can pump him with fluids and keep an eye on him but it’s going to cost a couple hundred dollars a night for care and board. “I don’t have that kind of money,” I tell the vet. She tells me Gray likely has feline leukemia and isn’t going to get better. She says they will euthanize Gray for free. “What do I have to do?” I ask. She takes me into another room and puts a box of Kleenex in front of me. When she leaves I move the box. “I don’t need this shit,” I say. But then I start crying and I can’t stop. When the nurse comes in to euthanize Gray I am sobbing as she injects him and his eyes regain their live twinkle and then dull and then set empty with death.




She tells me she is sorry for my loss and asks if I want to take the cat home to bury it. I ask her what they do with the cats they euthanize. She doesn’t say anything. “You burn them up, don’t you?” I ask. She just looks at me and doesn’t say anything. 




I stopped feeding the strays after that. I really stopped even going into the backyard. But I had to get a new furnace filter out of the shed one morning so I went back there and there’s a goddamn cat sitting under the shed. Big shaggy son of a bitch. Looking just like Gray did. I don’t say anything to him. I go into the shed and get the filter and close the door and go inside.




Couple nights later I’m sitting on the porch with my wife drinking. She wants me to go get some mosquito repellent so I walk back to the shed. But I can’t get near it. Smell’s so bad it makes me puke. Five beers just pouring out of me. I can’t even breathe it smells so bad.




Next morning I rub a thick wad of Vick’s under my nose and pour a beer and a can of V8 into a glass and drink it down real fast. I have three more of those and a pull of bourbon straight from the bottle. I put latex gloves on and go outside with a trash bag and a flashlight. Flies are everywhere. Son of a bitch is rotting underneath the shed. I see him. Goddamn, he looks awful. I’m gagging and trying to pull the carcass towards me with a broom-handle. Every time I nudge at him a little of the body just falls away. “I don’t need this shit,” I say.




Few weeks later Elsie and Marion take in two strays. They call the big one Mama Cat and little one Baby Cat. Mama Cat ran off because they didn’t get her fixed. One morning I walk over to the store to get some smokes and there’s Mama Cat, blown up with rot on the side of the street. Covered up in flies. I didn’t know what the hell to say to my neighbors, so I didn’t say anything.




Every time I’d see them out on the porch since she went missing, they’d ask me if I’d seen Mama Cat. “No, hadn’t seen her,” I’d say. “Guess she hadn’t come home, huh?” They’d look at me like I was lying. I guess they knew I was. I feel terrible about it.




That July Fourth we have some folks over and are getting pretty drunk and rowdy. Elsie comes up banging on the screen door. She’s screaming, “Somethin’ wrong with Baby Cat. He ain’t right. He ain’t right tall”. I get two beers out of the fridge and tell her I’ll go see about. My wife and her friend sit with Elsie and try to calm her down. It doesn’t work too well. I hear her screaming in my house. Screaming the same shit over and over again.




I walk through Elsie’s door and Marion has the cat on the kitchen table. All the other family members are standing there looking at me. Looking at me like I’m a vet. I set the beers on the table and pick the cat up. It’s dead as hell. Ask Marion what happened. He says he doesn’t know. One minute Baby Cat’s up and playin and the next minute it laying on the ground and ain’t moving. “I think it’s dead,” Marion, I say. I don’t see it breathing. Elsie comes running through the front door screaming, “It ain’t dead. It ain’t dead.” My wife and her friend running behind her, beer sloshing all over the floor.




Marion and Elsie hold a funeral for Baby Cat. There in their backyard. Marion will plant tomatoes in exactly the same spot a year later. As they ripen, big and red, he will set them on my doorstep. A neat line of four or more, big and red. Won’t eat them. Instead they’ll go untouched. Eventually, they’ll all spoil on my windowsill.