Calico Cats - a short story

I wrote this short story following a dark period in my life. Rereading it after decades of separation from my first wife brought back many brutal and unpleasant memories. Like Mrs. Keller's calico cat, we sometimes become the target of random crazy people swinging hoes. Occasionally, we get lucky and escape.  

CALICO CATS

I should have stayed in bed that morning.  Instead, I was up long before dawn, watching an old black and white on the all-night movie channel.  I never saw the ending. The morning sun was breaking over the eastern horizon when someone began screaming outside my window.  I opened the door in time to see Johnson, my next-door neighbor, beating one of Mrs. Keller's cats with a garden hoe.  Mrs. Keller's frantic screams didn't seem to faze him.  Running out to the street, I jumped between Johnson's home and the old woman's flailing arms.  My eagerness quickly placed me in his line of fire.

     Johnson was a brutish little man.  Thick hair matted his shoulders and stubbled his pasty face with wiry bristles.  A single dark eyebrow left no gap between the bridge of his broken nose, imparting the look of perpetual anger.  Today, his anger was real.  When I stepped in his path, he nailed me with the hoe, continuing to swing it at me until I wrestled him to the sidewalk.  When the police finally arrived, dirt and blood covered Johnson and me.

     Two patrol officers cuffed Johnson and ushered him to their squad car.  One had to restrain old Mrs. Keller from tearing out his eyes with her bare hands.

     "He was suffering," Johnson said.  "I put him out of his misery."

     Johnson was right about the suffering.  He made sure of it.  First, he shot the cat with a pellet gun, then chased her with the hoe when she tried to escape.  Paralyzed and dragging her back legs, the cat was easy prey to Johnson's roundhouse swings.

     When the police pulled away, I grasped Mrs. Keller's shoulders to calm her down. She was having none of it and pulled away, wanting no part of any male, not even one who had tried to help.  It didn't matter.  A crowd had gathered, and someone from the neighborhood led her back home.  Mrs. Keller had fifteen cats.

*     *     *

     I went straight to Fat Ernie's after work.  The bar was always dark, even at five.  "Better for business," Ernie said.  I knew why. It was easier to mask cockroaches crawling up the walls.  Halfway through my second double, Jimmy Reardon tapped my shoulder and sat on the barstool beside me.

     "How you doing?" he said.

     "Low."

     "You look it.  Ernie, bring us another round."

     We were Ernie's only customers.  Looking angry, Ernie placed an extra tumbler and the open whiskey bottle in front of us before returning to whatever he was doing.  Ernie always looked angry.  Jimmy poured a shot from the bottle and downed it in one swallow.  When he slammed the tumbler against the counter, the sharp noise echoed through the empty bar like the crack of a small caliber rifle.  Refilling the tumbler, he sipped more whiskey and called for Ernie to bring us each a beer.

     "You like women?"

     "Course I do," I said.

     "Never seen you with any."

     I drained my shot, chasing it with beer straight from the can.  "Haven't met anyone I like lately."

     When Jimmy snickered, something rumbled deep in his chest, reminding me of a hyena attacking a rotting carcass.  His upper lip even curled up over his front teeth.  Jimmy was twenty pounds overweight and had a bald spot in his stringy brown hair.  But most of the workers at the plant liked him, especially the female workers.

     "What are you now?  Forty, forty-one?" he asked.

     "Close enough."

     "You ever gonna get married?"

     Darkness cloaked the deserted bar as I drained my shot and said, "Tried it once already."

     Jimmy didn't pursue the conversation.  Instead, he said, "Can I stay at your place tonight?  Janie kicked me out."

     I wondered what Jimmy must have done to cause Janie, his wife of twenty years, to kick him out.  He'd had at least one girlfriend the entire time I had known him, and everyone at the plant knew he played around.  Janie knew it and overlooked the fact, or else she was stupid.  Janie was not stupid.

     Motioning Ernie to bring us another beer, I said, "Let's have another drink."

     "Want to know what I did?"  I didn't, though I nodded anyway after downing another shot.  "Janie caught me in bed with Gloria Silverman.  I’d taken her home for a lunch break quickie because I thought Janie was shopping with her mother out of town.  Wouldn't have been so bad except her mother was with her when she caught us."

     I imagined the scene unfolding as Jimmy described it.  Janie's mother taught Sunday school and was the local elementary principal.  Jimmy seemed to enjoy recounting the tale.

     "Big stupid Gloria. She just lay there," he said.  "Didn't even try to cover her tits."

     When I motioned Ernie to bring us two more beers, Jimmy propped his elbows on the counter, for once his deranged grin gone.  "Funny!" he said.  "In twenty years, that's the first time I ever seen Janie cry."

     Ernie continued to chatter as alcohol and my otherwise foggy brain began filtering out his words and locking onto the memory of my failed marriage.

*     *     *

     The occasion was our first dinner guests.  Lingering doubts cloaked and accommodated so long faded as my bride and I watched them depart our little apartment.  When I slipped my arm around her waist, my touch produced an unexpected stiffening in her backbone and ignited the intense green of her eyes.  I'd seen the look before, and maybe it wasn't so surprising, just unwelcome.

     Black hair and deep olive skin framed Joyce's foreboding darkness.  Darkness is well remembered from our wedding night when I had to coax her into confirming our marriage vows.  Now, dim porch light, saturated with crimson, masked her darkness. It couldn't completely hide the approaching storm.

     Joyce wrenched from my grasp, went inside, and slammed the screen door behind her.  My face flushed as I followed her into the kitchen, where corroded fixtures glared down at us, exposing her anger and my inability to cope.  She left little time for me to ponder what secret caused her to react violently to innocuous events.

     Her silence burned away like ignited oxygen, and when she smashed a casserole against the wall, some of it stuck to the yellowed paper.  The rest dropped in meaningful clumps on the white tile floor.  Bits of broken china crunched beneath my shoes as I stepped back to get out of her way, and Joyce's voice now raised an octave above average and accompanied a grimace that covered her face as entirely as a sinister veil.

     "I hate you!" she screamed.  You purposely embarrassed me in front of the Robertson's."

     "That's crazy, and you know it.  The casserole was fine," I said.

     Joyce's angry whisper blared like a foghorn.  "You badgered me into cooking something dry and tasteless.  They hated it, and so did you."

     "It's just your imagination."

     "Then imagine this," she said.

     She grabbed the stack of dirty dishes from the sink.  When she smashed them against the floor, plates exploded, and shards of china ricocheted off walls.  Our last crystal wine glass sailed past my head.  Joyce tore at it with a salad fork when I raised my hand.  She sliced me from shoulder to wrist before I could wrestle it from her grasp.

     "Stop it," I said.  "Are you crazy?"

     Inappropriate words and ill-advised.  Joyce dropped the fork and attacked me with her fists, screaming and pounding my face and head.

     "I'm not crazy, you hear?  Don't ever say that again.  Don't you dare ever say it?"

     Fending away her ineffectual blows, I grabbed her wrists and held on until she wrenched away, angry tears streaming from her red-rimmed eyes.  By now, her voice had become a high-pitched, angry whine, and she leaned back against the wall, glaring at me as if I were an axe murderer.  At least, that is how I felt.

     "Don't touch me," she said.

     "Please calm down," I said, risking scratch marks as I stepped forward, grabbing her shoulders and trying to quiet her rage.

     Wheeling around, she nailed my shin with an angry kick, then raked her fingernails across my face.  Backing quickly away, I touched my cheek, wet from a trickle of blood.  In my heart, I felt she owed me an apology. What raced from my mouth was something different.

     "Sorry about dinner.  Please forgive me."

     My words only amplified her fury.

     "You embarrassed me, and now you think I'm crazy.  You went out of your way to make me look like a fool.  Now I hate you for it!"

     "You're twisting my meaning.  We both know you're not crazy. It was just a figure of speech."

     "Don't lie to me.  I know exactly what you meant," she said, rushing out of the kitchen into the bathroom, slamming the door and locking it with a fatal click.

     Closing my eyes, I poured water from the tap, sprinkling some on my face and forehead before following her to the bathroom.  I got no answer to my worried rap on the door.

     "You all right in there?  Please come out, Joyce.  Can't we settle this without fighting?"

     Glass shattering against bathroom tile was her reply to my pitiful question.

     "Leave me alone.  I hate you."

     Her voice, trembling with emotion, revealed the angry fit had elevated from smoldering conflict into a hot frenzy.  Sensing our argument had suddenly promoted from dissension to siege; I quickly backed away down the hall.  Married less than a fortnight, I could think of nothing else to do.

     "I'll be in the living room," I said.  "I won't bother you anymore.  I promise."

     Joyce opened the door before I reached the end of the hall, slamming it violently against the wall until it rattled on the hinges.  When it stopped vibrating, she stood with tightly folded arms, glaring with wild, accusing eyes that flashed even greener amid hallway gloom.

     "Why did I ever marry you?  I ask myself every day."

     She didn't wait for an answer.  Wheeling around, she put her shoe through the wall, glaring at it as plaster crumbled in an explosive thud.  I could only stare at the hole, wondering which meager monthly requirement we would have to forego to pay for its repair.  I couldn't imagine because, by now, my mind was numb.  As I retreated down the hall, Joyce dogged my steps, confronting me at the bedroom door.

     "Can't we just go to bed," I said.  "This won't seem so bad in the morning?"

     "That's it.  Sex is all you ever think about.  Doesn't anything else ever cross your mind?"

     And suddenly, the argument's culmination.  Sex was it, and her anger mirrored like bludgeon wounds from injured eyes burned my exposed soul.  Rage howled from deep within her being, as alive as beasts enraptured by the moon.

     "Sex, sex, sex!" she screamed.  "You can go to hell for all I care."

     "What's wrong with sex?  Your parents have five children," I said as if my feeble defense meant anything.  "They don't think it's a sin."

     "My parents have nothing to do with us."

     Remembering bony white stripes on her backside, I thought otherwise. Still, I was reluctant to fuel our argument by mentioning her fitful relationship with a fiercely religious mother and physically dominant father.  I tried a different tact.

     "Maybe we should just hold each other, Joyce.  I can do without sex."

     Slapping away my extended hand, she said, "I don't want you near me.  You're dirty.  If you loved me, you'd get circumcised like every other man."

     I still feel the warm flush her accusation caused.  Touching my belt, I leaned back against the wall.

     "It wasn't my decision."

     "It is now," she said.  "What kind of man are you?"

     "I'm twenty-three.  Why is it necessary now?" I said, knowing it was much more than my uncircumcised penis that disgusted her.

     "It's necessary if you ever want sex with me again.  If you were a man, you wouldn't worry about pain," she said.  "But you're not a man, are you?  It's unfair for you to touch me with something so dirty."

     "It's not dirty," I said with little conviction.

     "Dirty and ugly, just like you are dirty and ugly.  No one would have ever married you except me.  I only did it because I felt sorry for you.  Now you've ruined my life."

     When I clenched my fist in anger and slammed it into the wall, she screamed, "That's right, wreck the house.  I'll pay for it while you attend your precious classes."

     "Stop it," I said, seeking any excuse to mask the gaping consequence of my defused anger.  "I'll quit college if that's what you want."

     "You would, wouldn't you?  Do you think I like working in that stinking factory to pay the rent?  Why don't you ever think about me and what I want and need?"

     I had no answer or frame of reference to solve our long-term dilemma, though I knew how to end the argument.  A single, garbled word held the solution: Distance.  My confused mind repeated it, reminding me what to do.

     "Go to bed," I said.  "I'll sleep on the couch.  We can talk in the morning."

     "Fine with me.  You can sleep there every night for all I care.  You disgust me," she said, hurrying to our bedroom.

     The bedroom lock clicked, sounding dead and final.  My jaw was sore from grating my teeth. My soul was numb.  When adrenaline finally flushed from my body, leaving it as relaxed as my soul, I returned to the kitchen, swabbed my face with a damp napkin, and poured cold water over my swollen knuckles.  With my mind reeling from the silent aftermath of our argument, I sat at the kitchen table, staring in blessed silence at wads of bloody napkins.

     I could only clean away the glass and ruined casserole before tiptoeing down the hall and listening to Joyce's breathing behind our closed bedroom door.  Like the key to our failing marriage, the door handle responded with locked resistance.  With empty confusion still banging against raw temples, I grabbed an old afghan from the closet and retired to the living room.

     The hard couch wasn't quite long enough for comfort.  That night, it felt more like a funeral slab, its lumps and springs cold as damp earth beneath my back.  Wadding my torn shirt as a pillow and stuffing it beneath my head, I turned off the lights and pulled the afghan around my neck, staring blindly into the darkness long past the broken lamp's last fading flicker.

*    *    *

     Jimmy Reardon jostled my shoulder, rousing me from my alcohol-induced recollection.  Several patrons had joined us at the counter, and now pool balls clacked in the rear as Ernie waited on a table and Mick Jagger's suggestive strains vibrated the flashing jukebox in the corner.  I handed Jimmy the keys to my house.

     "Don't mind if Gloria drops by, do you?" he said as he walked out the door, not waiting for my reply.

I left Fat Ernie's at midnight, staggering home only to find my bedroom door locked and sounds of sex coming from inside.  It didn't matter much as I collapsed on the couch without undressing.

  At three in the morning, I was still awake, pacing the floor, reliving painful images that seemed somehow caught in an endless brain loop.  Two sleeping pills and too many shots of whiskey had failed to anesthetize my Technicolor memories of calico cats racing in terror from the hoe.

 

###

Born near Black Bayou in the little Louisiana town of Vivian, Eric Wilder grew up listening to his grandmother’s tales of politics, corruption, and ghosts that haunt the night. He now lives in Oklahoma, where he continues to pen mysteries and short stories with a southern accent. He authored the French Quarter Mystery Series set in New Orleans, the Paranormal Cowboy Series, and the Oyster Bay Mystery Series. Please check it out on his Amazon author page. You might also like checking out his Facebook page.