The Forgetting Time(77)
“What’s that?”
“I thought I saw something!” He heard the real voices and the high, toy voices crackling from their walkie-talkies.
“Something’s here!”
Not something. He thought. Someone.
He thought he should run. He should be running. The boy had known somehow and he had told them and they had come for him. But he felt his body settling in deeper into the pine needles and the dirt.
He was remembering that day, now. June 14. He realized he had never really left it, he had always been there, in that day, hearing the boy crying out from the bottom of the well.
*
It had started with the cat.
He had been aware of the cat for at least a couple of months, its skinny body and black and white spots as much a part of the scenery as the shitbrown grass or the cornfield behind it or the gray fence that separated their property from the McClures’ and that the cat walked across every day. He watched it without thinking while he got ready for school, the way it walked down their fence one foot carefully after the other like it had a master plan it was following step by step, and he’d envied that mangy cat, that it could go wherever it wanted to go.
Then one day he was standing outside throwing a tennis ball against the shed and the cat was walking by on the fence and it looked at him. He felt it through his whole body, the cat looking right at him. Nobody looked at him like that lately. Not right in the eyes like that. The invisible man, that’s what he felt like sometimes. The high school was three times as big as his middle school had been and nobody paid much attention to freshmen anyway and he had no friends there since they had sold their good house and moved across town to this crappy rental. All his friends were at the other high school. He wasn’t picked on, but he found himself alone in the afternoons more often than not, doing his homework and playing his video games and throwing the ball over and over against the shed.
The next day he went out there to throw the ball again and the cat was there on the fence, and he brought it a bowl of milk and the cat came right over and lapped it up.
So he did it the next day and then the day after that, until the cat showed up when it saw him coming through the back door, like the cat was his. One time he was standing there and it rubbed right by him. He could feel its body pressing against his leg. Its coat was matted and he was nervous about touching it. It might have fleas or something. It was making a little noise. Purring. The feeling went right up his calf through his whole body. It made his whole body hum.
Then that Saturday he woke up late and saw the cat out there and when he poured the milk in the bowl he heard a shout.
“What are you doing?”
He glanced up and saw his dad looking right at him. He was sitting there in the living room, one shoe in his hand, his face red.
Paul was so startled his hand shook and the milk spilled over the side of the bowl and spread across the table, falling off the wood, making a pond on the linoleum.
“I said, what are you doing?”
He looked up. It was the usual scene. His mom was reading on the sofa, his little brother arranging his baseball cards on the floor in front of the TV set, his dad watching the news from his chair—only he wasn’t looking at the news. He was still looking at him.
It was like being in the dark and someone turns on the lights too bright. He watched the milk puddle grow on the floor.
“Cleaning up,” he said.
He got a kitchen cloth and mopped it all up. He hoped his dad would leave him alone again. Paul licked his lips. His dad was still staring at him.
“You’re drinking milk from a bowl now?”
“No.”
“So why are you doing that?”
He looked at his dad’s bare feet, resting on the ottoman. The ugliest feet he’d ever seen, the toes were all swollen from arthritis and having to stand every day in his good shoes. In the old days he used to make coffee for his mom and then leave in the morning whistling while they were eating breakfast, and he’d sleep in on the weekends and maybe watch a game on TV, but these days on Saturdays he was up before the rest of them with his feet up on the ottoman, shining his shoes. Now his dad’s eyes were squinting out at him, two red slits in his heavy gray face, as if it was Paul’s fault that his life had worked out this way and he had to stand there all day trying to sell stereos to people who only wanted speakers for their iPods.
“For the cat.”
“We don’t have a cat,” his dad said.
“There’s a cat out there.”
His dad sat up now in the chair.
“You think it’s your cat? That cat’s got nothing to do with you. That’s not your cat. You think I’m gonna feed you and a cat, too? You can go get a job and pay for the milk yourself. Then you can get a goddamn cat.”
“He’s in school,” his mom said from behind her book on the couch. “That’s his job.”
“Well, he ought to do better then.”
“He’s doing fine.”
He could feel his dad starting up again. He looked at the wall. Lately it didn’t take much to start him up. “How is a C in gym fine? How do you even get a C, if you show up, unless you’re a total wuss?”
His mom glanced up, as if she was annoyed at having to interrupt her reading. She was always reading these true-crime books with terrible photos in the inserts. “It’s only freshman year. Give him a break, Terrance. He’s not like you.”